When author David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, I was embarrassed to find myself putting my name at the end of a long library waiting list to check out his most famous novel, “Infinite Jest.”
There’s a certain intrigue to reading the work of those artists who are known to be depressed, suicidal, crazy ““ and so many of the best ones seem to be all three. Most especially, a suicide always encourages those of us morbid enough to delve back into the work, looking for signs. Of something. I hardly know what.
I am curious as to what makes tortured writers crazy, and whether it’s the same thing that makes them successful. Michael Largo, an expert on American death, especially that of the rich and famous, has published “The Portable Obituary,” “Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die” and now his most recent book, “Genius and Heroin.”
Son of a New York Police Department narcotics detective, and onetime owner of a restaurant that served the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Keith Richards, Largo has gotten pretty close to that compelling connection between artistic genius and a kind of self-destruction. He chronicles this relationship in “Genius and Heroin” and seems more able than most to answer the big question: Did genius create their torment or was it their anguish that created the genius?
The genius of “Genius and Heroin” varies from Michelangelo to Ernest Hemingway to Tupac ““ and they were each tortured by different things. There’s Honoré de Balzac, a 19th century French playwright and novelist, noted for his addiction to caffeine. He believed he could write best when he woke at midnight and chain-drank black coffee, often working for more than 15 hours straight, a habit that ultimately contributed to his death.
Many believe that poet Emily Dickinson had extreme agoraphobia and an obsession with death. There’s a Russian poet, Sergei Esenin, who made quite a statement by using the jagged edge of his pencil to stab himself in the wrist and use his blood to finish his final poem before death, according to “Genius and Heroin.”
What all these artists seem to have in common is that they live by a different set of rules, with different objectives. As Largo wrote, “The basic instinct of self-preservation became secondary to the desire to produce original works.”
The point of living for them isn’t amassing as many yachts as possible, or even happiness, strange as that may sound to the non-artist. A lasting kind of beauty (say, using your own blood to write a poem) is worth more than a stable life, children or an extra 20 years.
In addition, they’re able to set up shop in uncomfortable places and situations that the rest of us can’t stand for very long. For them, pain, anguish and death can be beautiful, or at least inspirational. As poet Sara Teasdale is quoted somewhat hauntingly, “I found more joy in sorrow than you could find in joy.”
Certainly that is evidence of an unconventional (and slightly creepy) perspective. But is that what made Teasdale’s poetry a success? Largo concludes that for a small number of the artists he chronicles, the alcohol and the drugs and the madness contributed to the greatness of their work.
But for an 80 percent majority, the creative work was negatively affected by their addiction. It should be reassuring for aspiring artists and writers that tragedy or craziness aren’t requirements for creative success. Yet I still wonder, if there were a companion book, “Genius Without Heroin,” would it be quite as thick?
E-mail Bastien at jbastien@media.ucla.edu.