How Alcohol Ruined Gatsby
Did alcohol ruin F. Scott Fitzgerald and his peers? And has the fact that writers don't booze as much these days produced better books than Fitzgerald's 1922 masterpiece The Great Gatsby, now a major motion picture?
I would argue that the answer to both questions is yes. The Great Gatsby the film has already produced several think pieces about how Fitzgerald's gilded age mirrors our own (for my money the best was Nick Gillespie in Reason). But as interesting as the large socio-cultural questions is the role alcohol played for writers like Fitzgerald. Several years ago I came across a tightly argued book that examines the question: The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, by Tom Dardis.
The Thirsty Muse is fascinating because Dardis is both a wonderfully lucid stylist and a man with a nose for facts. This is the first sentence of the book: "Of the seven native-born Americans who were awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, five were alcoholic." The five were Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. Of course, as Dardis notes, the list of other alcoholic American writers who did not win the Nobel is long: John Cheever, Truman Capote, James Agee, Dashiell Hammett, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Hart Crane, and, of course, Fitzgerald.
In The Thirsty Muse, Dardis profiles four writers: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and O'Neill. His premise is that alcoholism caused a decline in the work of all of these artists except for O'Neil, who stopped drinking when he was 38. Dardis argues that Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner had all completed their best work by around the age of 40.
He is particularly brutal on Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: "It is a self-conscious work brimming over with Christ and crucifixion symbols; it is fatally marred by its whimsical, folksy talk about the Indians of Cleveland and the great DiMaggio." O'Neil, on the other hand, produced The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night only after he had been sober for several years.
Alcoholism may also account for the main dramatic thrust of The Great Gatsby. In his landmark book Under the Influence, alcoholism expert James Milam argues that alcoholics often can't properly process grief and trauma, not because they are overly sentimental, but because their soggy brains prevent flushing bad memories. While it is certainly true that a bad experience, such as a broken heart, can be intense and make us do crazy things, for the alcoholic it's nearly impossible to recover.
Enter F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jay Gatsby.
In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is obsessed with his love Daisy years after their love affair during the Great War. He dedicates himself to amassing a fortune and then builds a mansion near her and her husband, Tom Buchanan.
In modern novels, from The Corrections to The Interestings, characters have low self-esteem and suffer maladies like obsessive-compulsive disorder, free-floating anxiety and rage at their parents. They don't tend to pine over a lost love for years on end or have crack-ups.
As The Thirsty Muse reveals, Fitzgerald was always looking for "bluer skies somewhere." This is the voice of the whiny adolescent. If alcoholism makes it difficult to process difficult memories and experiences, it also arrests development.
With celebrity rehab, Dr. Phil, and New York banning Big Gulps, America has become far more sober than in Fitzgerald's time. These days our hot messes are celebrities, not writers. Our last genuine madman drunk was probably Hunter S. Thompson.
Thompson's career is additional proof of Dardis's thesis. Thompson started strong, ascended to brilliance, then became dull and repetitive, the soused uncle in the corner babbling about Nixon decades after the fact. For honest fans of his work, it became apparent in the 1980s that Thompson had flamed out.
But perhaps I'm being too hard -- on Thomson and the other dipsomaniacs. It's hard enough to write a novel, never mind a great or even immortal one. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will be read a hundred years from now and beyond.
Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, which to me still shimmers like gold. Faulkner had an incredible run -- as Dardis puts it, "Between 1928 and 1941he wrote ten novels that make him arguably the leading American novelist of this century, an amazing burst of creation that is unparalleled in American writing." And Fitzgerald, of course, gave us The Great Gatsby, which is still paying off.
