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Literary criticism.

IT HAS OFTEN occurred to me what a bad lot so many writers have been: spongers, liars, defaulters, thieves, betrayers, turncoats, murderers, wife-beaters, child-abandoners, drunks, druggies, skirt-chasers and lunatics by the score. I have the feeling that this tradition is dying out here in Blighty. I’ve met a few writers and poets who were bores, serial adulterers and all-round egotists, but none has come close to the heights (or depths) of our ancestors.

The mediaeval French poet, Villon, for instance, killed a priest in a pub brawl (makes you wonder what kind of chap the priest was, frequenting an ale-house) and was basically a member of a criminal gang called la Coquille. Shakespeare’s mate, Ben Jonson, killed a player from a rival theatre company in a duel, and managed to escape punishment by pleading benefit of clergy.

One of the Elizabethan period’s greatest poets, Edmund Spenser, disliked the Irish so much he suggested genocide as a means of sorting them out. Shelley was a beast to the ladies but also borrowed money he never paid back and we all know about Byron, the original “mad, bad and dangerous to know” cad of Romantic legend.

Ezra Pound was an out-and-out radio Fascist, and so spent time in a cage and a mental hospital. Eliot was pretty extreme; he was happy to write antisemitic stuff and dumped his first (mad) wife as soon as he could. Wyndham Lewis, another modernist, was also an ultra-right wing antisemite. And, like Lewis, Henry Williamson, author of the once famous Tarka the Otter books, was a Hitler fan. The French author, Celine, was a notorious far-right-wing antisemite.

George Bernard Shaw got away with advocating eugenics and the gassing of the inferior, and excusing the mass murder of millions by the Bolsheviks. I believe he was quoting his soulmate, Robespierre, when he said something about needing to break a few eggs to make an omelette. An uneatable omelette, as it turned out. He was acceptable because everyone forgot that before the Second World War nearly every intellectual loved Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini in about equal measure and agreed with Margaret Sanger when she claimed engineering the New Man through eugenics was a Good Thing.

Then you get writers who were just crazy, alcoholic or drug-addled, or all three. The list of these is like the list of the First World War dead so I’ll just mention a handful.

Notorious druggies include Coleridge and De Quincey, both of whom were prolific, the latter’s collected works amounting to some 40 volumes. De Quincey not only consumed a vast amount of opium during his adult life, but also the equivalent of a bottle of whisky a day, since he took opium in the form of laudanum, ie diluted in alcohol. Again, how he got to the age of 73 before checking out is a mystery. Maybe it’s because he used to do a lot of walking – usually to escape people to whom he owed money.

AMERICAN AUTHORS LED the world with boozers such as Poe, Tennessee Williams , Fitzgerald, Hemingway and my favourite, James Thurber. Thurber was physically half-blind as well as blind drunk a lot of the time. It’s a wonder he could even find his typewriter let alone hit the right keys in the right order. Poor old Richard Brautigan, like Hemingway (and gonzo journo Hunter S Thompson) succumbed to the depression of booze and blew his brains out. Guy Debord, founder of the Situationists, drank so much he eventually shot himself in the head. What a spectacle that must have been.

James Joyce liked a large tipple, as did that other genius of modern Irish fiction, Flann O’Brien. In fact, O’Brien’s book, The Hard Life, contains the finest end to a novel in the whole of the world ever:

The slam of the door told me he was gone. In a daze I lifted my own glass and without knowing what I was doing did exactly what the brother did, drained the glass in one vast swallow. Then I walked quickly but did not run to the lavatory. There, everything inside me came up in a tidal surge of vomit.

O’Brien may have just imagined what that was like, but I prefer to believe it was something he’d experienced himself. Given that he was Irish and a writer, I’d do a Dostoevsky (epilepsy and gambling addiction) and slap a few roubles on it.

And let us not forget the great Dylan Thomas in his anniversary year; a man who would steal your shirts, ties and trousers, and, if you were unlucky, sponge off you while seeing to your wife.

The moral of all this is – there is none. The relationship between the writer and what he or she writes is complicated and rarely direct. Being a writer doesn’t make you a good person. Being a good person does not make you a good writer. Neither does being a bad one.

Writers like Dylan Thomas are probably not much fun to be around, what with the shirt-stealing and the wife-chasing, but they make for damn entertaining gossip. And you can make films about them when they’re dead. I can’t see that happening to any of my contemporaries.

Michael Blackburn.

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