High Style: Writing Under The Influence

By John Lanchester
Source: New Yorker Magazine

When Oscar Wilde said that J. M. W. Turner had invented sunsets, he was joking, but he wasn't only joking. He meant that Turner had made the sunset into a subject of art, and therefore people were now looking at, talking about, and thinking about sunsets in a new way; thanks to Turner, all of us now see sunsets differently. In the parlance of contemporary critical theory-often a barbaric dialect, but sometimes a useful one-Turner invented the "discourse" of sunsets. It is in this sense that Marcus Boon, in his theory-afflicted but nonetheless lively study "The Road of Excess" (Harvard; $29.95), says that Thomas De Quincey, with the 1821 publication of "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," "invented the concept of recreational drug use."

More precisely, De Quincey invented the discourse of recreational drug use: the whole way of thinking about drug-taking as a hobby and an escape into what Baudelaire, writing about drugs in 1858, was to call our "artificial paradises." What's nice about that phrase of Baudelaire's is the way it packs three ideas into two words: that drugs are "paradise," i.e., they make you feel good; but that the paradise is fake; and that, in any case, paradise was a place we were expelled from. Drugs can be fun, but they ruin people's lives. This we know.
The hundred and eighty years since De Quincey's invention have seen a great expansion in the pharmacopoeia, especially since 1862, when the drug company Merck began to produce cocaine. (One of its great early advocates was an ambitious young Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud, who claimed, among other things, that "repeated doses of coca produce no compulsive desire to use the stimulant further; on the contrary one feels a certain unmotivated aversion to the substance." Yeah, right.) Diamorphine, also known as heroin, was first synthesized for commercial use in 1897. The men who discovered it, Felix Hoffman and Arthur Eichengrun, had also, a couple of weeks earlier, invented aspirin; for some years, heroin could be bought over the counter and aspirin required a prescription. Professional ironists love drug history.

Then we had barbiturates, beginning with Veronal, in 1903, and amphetamines, which Smith, Kline first put on the market under the trade name Benzedrine, in 1932. Cannabis became increasingly popular after Prohibition began, in 1919; the first attempt to ban peyote came in 1921 (this being an important benchmark of a drug's popularity); Albert Hoffman's account of LSD came out in 1947; PCP, or "angel dust," went on the market as an anesthetic under the trade name Sernyl in 1959; amyl nitrite became popular during the nineteen-sixties. MDMA, also known as Ecstasy, began to be used in the seventies. More recently, drugs such as GHB (a synthetic version of gamma-hydroxybutyrate, a chemical that occurs naturally in the brain) and ketamine (a derivative of PCP used as an animal anesthetic) have enjoyed vogues. Boon tells us that ketamine, a popular drug in the world of raves and electronic dance music, "synergizes with the sonic battery of the disco sound system to produce 'K-holes,' sudden black-outs of consciousness on the dance floor." A drug that gives you a good time in the form of amnesia . . . Gosh, what entertainment. And this is to consider only the drugs whose use is illegal, and not the tranquillizers and antidepressants that are daily being prescribed and taken in enormous quantities: Valium and Prozac, Xanax and Seroxat, Ativan and Librium, and all the rest.

There is no question that the modern era has been a heroic period for the invention and ingestion of pharmaceuticals. And writers have taken all these drugs, often in heroic quantities. So where are the literary results? "Psychedelic" means "mind-manifesting." Where, then, are the manifestations? Where are the bodies of work that have come to us as a result of this explosive expansion of the pharmacopoeia, this unprecedented transformation of possibilities for tinkering with the mind's chemistry? Have drugs helped anyone to write anything that would have seemed surprising and new to the Prophet Ezekiel or William Blake?

Consider the following passage, from Jean-Paul Sartre's 1960 existentialist blockbuster "The Critique of Dialectical Reason":

But it should be noted that this regulatory totalisation realises my immanence in the group in the quasi-transcendence of the totalising third party; for the latter, as the creator of objectives or organiser of means, stands in a tense and contradictory relation of transcendence-immanence, so that my integration, though real in the here and now which define me, remains somewhere incomplete, in the here and now which characterise the regulatory third party. We see here the re-emergence of an element of alterity proper to the statute of the group, but which here is still formal: the third party is certainly the same, the praxis is certainly common everywhere; but a shifting dislocation makes it totalising when I am the totalised means of the group, and conversely.

There are a number of valid responses to these arguments. One might be: They sure don't make public intellectuals like they used to. Another might be: I'm not sure Sartre's arguments constitute more than a footnote to his work in "L'être et le Néant." A third might be: What was he on?

It's a good question. When he wrote the "Critique," Sartre, a lifelong caffeine fiend and serious drinker, was also frying his brains on corydrane, a form of amphetamine mixed with, of all things, aspirin. The philosopher was using corydrane on a daily basis, first to cut through the fug of the barbiturates he was taking to help him sleep-and he was having trouble sleeping not least because of all the corydrane he was putting away-but also to keep him at his desk, churning out the "Critique." "To put it briefly," he told Simone de Beauvoir some time later, "in philosophy, writing consisted of analysing my ideas; and a tube of corydrane meant 'these ideas will be analysed in the next two days.' " Or, as the Ramones used to put it, Gabba Gabba Hey.

We hear a lot these days about drug abuse, but there is also such a thing as drug use-a utilitarian attitude to our body chemistry in which drugs are simply aids to productivity. That's how Sartre treated them, and Marcus Boon argues that "several of Sartre's works show the influence of speed," including "The Idiot of the Family," his incomplete and close to definitively unreadable five-volume study of Flaubert, and "Saint Genet," which, Boon relates, "began as a 50-page preface to Genet's writings, and ended up an 800-page book." Sartre was therefore a recognizable type of speed freak, the type dedicated to obsessive, unfinishable, and, to the neutral observer, pointless toil-the sort who, several hours after taking the drug, can usually be found sitting on the floor, grinding his teeth and alphabetizing his CDs by the name of the sound engineer.

Sartre is probably a bad advertisement for the effect of amphetamines as an aid to composition, but he is by no means the only example of a writer who used speed to help him work. For sheer quantity, Boon notes, it is hard to beat Philip K. Dick, who from 1963 to 1964, under the influence of the methamphetamine Semoxydrine, wrote "eleven science fiction novels, along with a number of essays, short stories, and plot treatments in an amphetamine-fuelled frenzy that accompanied or precipitated the end of one of his marriages." (That "accompanied or precipitated" nicely captures how little fun it must have been to be Mrs. Dick.) If Philip K. Dick does not entirely convince on grounds of literary merit-and the books in question aren't quite his best material-then how about Graham Greene, who was pounding Benzedrine when he wrote his 1939 travel book about Mexico, "The Lawless Roads," and the novel that came out of his Mexican travels, "The Power and the Glory"? (The paranoid and menacing atmosphere of that superb novel, which describes a whiskey priest being hunted by Communist revolutionaries, surely owes something to Greene's pill-chugging.)

Perhaps the finest writer ever to use speed systematically, however, was W. H. Auden. He swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty years, from 1938 onward, balancing its effect with the barbiturate Seconal when he wanted to sleep. (He also kept a glass of vodka by the bed, to swig if he woke up during the night.) He took a pragmatic attitude toward amphetamines, regarding them as a "labor-saving device" in the "mental kitchen," with the important proviso that "these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down."

Auden seems to have been the only unquestionably major writer to use drugs in quite this way, as a direct source of energy for his work. He represents the apotheosis of a utilitarian approach to drugs; and it is therefore logical, if he was going to take drugs, that he would gravitate toward speed, which is the utilitarian drug par excellence. By comparison, alcohol is a very bad working drug for writers. It is more or less impossible to write when drunk, which is just as well, given how much and how many writers drink; imagine the amount of booze they would put away if it actually helped.

The case of amphetamines is atypical, however, because most of the time writers take drugs not because they want to work but because they want to get high, or they want to unwind, or they want to, in Rimbaud's phrase, "systematically derange" all their senses. If they seem to take more of them than other people, it is perhaps because writers-since not many of them write for more than a few hours a day-tend to have quite a lot of spare time in which to be stoned and, just as important, hungover. It is also because some writers think that drugs will help them get ideas for later use. Whether these turn out to be good ideas or not is a trickier question. To look at this kind of drug use, and its literary consequences, we have to go back to the man who started all the trouble: Thomas De Quincey.

Born in Manchester in 1785, De Quincey was a brilliant student and career no-goodnick who dropped first out of Manchester Grammar School and then out of Worcester College, Oxford; it took him ten years to drift into journalism, and the series of articles that was to become the "Confessions." He was thirty-six. He knew he was special, but he hadn't done much to prove it except take large amounts of opium: up to three hundred and twenty grains a day, which his biographer, Grevel Lindop, calls a "heavy but not exceptional oral dose." (He took it in the form of laudanum, dissolved in alcohol, as people tended to in the nineteenth century.) In a sense, his opium-eating was his claim to distinction, which is among the things that make the "Confessions" such an uneasy piece of writing. Here is one of De Quincey's stoned reveries:

I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

Wow! Yuck! Or at least that's how we're supposed to react. Like a freak-show barker, De Quincey stresses that we are sure to be appalled by the sights we are about to witness. The "Confessions" dwells on the horrors of opium in a way that seems close to boasting. Its author has gone places, seen things we wouldn't dare to; so the book pretends to be a warning, while also acting as something of an Advertisement for Myself. It gestures toward the squares who will be disgusted and repelled ("Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice," De Quincey tells us, at the start of his account), while also indicating to the hepcats that he's actually someone pretty special. He is inducted into a secret: "This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium, of which church I acknowledge myself to be the only member." The hint of blasphemy is there to horrify some and to bring a knowing smile to others.

This double shuffle has been common to most drug writing ever since. On the one hand, the writers stress the horror of dope. On the other, they take pleasure in their own willingness to transgress, and their readers are usually taken as being complicit-cool enough to be with the writer, on the inside. There's an us and a them. It makes drug writing, which on one level purports to celebrate the fact that we are all chemically similar under the skin, one of the more snobbish kinds of literature, since it depends on the idea that, if everybody got it, it would have no point.

Most of the key texts of drug writing adopt this mixture of warning and boasting. They put you off even as they are pretending to put you on, and vice versa. This is not to say that they are bad books, although quite a few of them, including the "Confessions," have a status as classics that is not quite justified. William Burroughs's "Junkie," for instance, was first published, pseudonymously, in a 1953 pulp double edition with "Narcotic Agent," by Maurice Helbrant (tag line: "Gripping True Adventures of a T-Man's War Against the Dope Menace"). The horrify-the-squares tone of "Junkie" is closer to that of anti-dope trash than its admirers might like to admit:

Doolie, sick, was an unnerving sight. The envelope of personality was gone, dissolved by his junk-hungry cells. Viscera and cells, galvanized into a loathsome insect-like activity, seemed on the point of breaking through the surface. His face was blurred, unrecognizable, at the same time shrunken and tumescent.

Burroughs is trying to seem deliberately matter-of-fact while not stray- ing far from the Wow! Yuck! that De Quincey sought to evoke. But, then, both De Quincey and Burroughs were addicted to opiates, and perhaps there is something about taking these drugs which makes the consumer want to relate the experience of this affectless state, this zonked anomie. (It is present in other writing about this sort of addiction, such as that of Ann Marlowe in "How to Stop Time": "Making love on dope was like changing a tire under water.") It's also worth pointing out that neither Burroughs nor De Quincey was quite coming clean: both of them made out that they were writing after they had kicked their addiction, which was not true in either case. Burroughs was still on methadone at the time of his death, in 1997. A man in that position might well pretend to be feeling a little bit cooler than he actually was-especially in a situation where pretending to be cool was a big part of the whole enterprise.

Drug writing has always been on its firmest ground when it has a sense of humor. Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" could never be accused of failing to horrify the squares, but at least it makes you laugh while doing so, and it also has one of the great opening sentences in American literature, the psychedelic generation's equivalent of "Call me Ishmael": "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." The comedy of "Fear and Loathing" is a comedy of excess and distortion, in which Thompson's idea of a good time is careering around Las Vegas with a projectile-vomiting three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney-or is that his idea of a bad time? Both the humor and the distortion owe something to the fact that the drugs of choice in this case are psychedelics, principally LSD. Junkies don't have much sense of humor, but trippers do, at least some of the time; the fact that they aren't addicted presumably helps. It is a comedy carried over into more recent writing about drugs, such as the work of Irvine Welsh and Will Self. There is, always, that us-and-them snobbery, but there is the occasional joke, too. One of the best gags is in Alan Hollinghurst's novel "The Spell," which turns on the effect Ecstasy has on a buttoned-up central character, the gay, shy thirty-six-year-old diplomat Alex:

"I find I've overcome a lot of crusty old prejudices," Alex summed up. "Until last week, I was appalled by the idea of drugs, as you know I thought pop music was witless rubbish, I really couldn't be doing with the noise and trash of the gay scene, I hated chewing-gum and trainers and baseball caps with writing on, in fact any clothes with writing on the outside. And now I think they're all absolutely marvellous."

Notice that even here the comedy is about snobbery-about the difference between getting it and not getting it, and also, at a deeper level, about whether "it" is worth getting.

When you take a broad overview of what has been written about drugs, you can't resist the conclusion that it doesn't add up to much. "Artificial Paradises" and "Bright Lights, Big City," "Naked Lunch" and "The Basketball Diaries," "The Doors of Perception" and "Trainspotting": it's not a bad list-all these books are worth reading-but no one could pretend that drugs have given us anything resembling a canon of major writing. Not much of the news it has brought us is truly new. (I would sneak in an exemption to this general rule for Denis Johnson's astonishing "Jesus' Son.") At the end of "The Road of Excess," Boon imagines that somewhere a young person in a bedroom is writing a book called "The K Hole." That young ketamine fiend may have trouble remembering what he or she wrote-but this, too, like so much else about drug writing, is nothing new. In 1819, when Sir Walter Scott read the proofs of "The Bride of Lammermoor," which he had written while taking laudanum, "he claimed that he did not recognise a single character, incident or conversation found in the book."

This is not to say that our decades-long recreational-drug binge has had no effect on the arts. It might not have had much effect on literature, but there is one art form that has been shaped from top to bottom by drugs, and that would not exist in anything like its current form without them: music. The effect of drugs and the culture of drugs permeate the story of popular music. This is perhaps clearest in the case of jazz. The story of dope-fiend writers is interesting, but the history of dope-fiend jazz musicians is the history of jazz: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Billie Holiday were all on heroin, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie smoked marijuana, and this is only the A-list. It is probably no accident that the jazz musicians' drugs of choice have tended to affect the perception of time and tempo. Jazz fans often claim to be able to tell the difference between a record made on marijuana and one made on heroin-indeed, I was once told that if I ever wanted to know what taking heroin felt like all I had to do was listen to Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue." Amphetamines and hallucinogens have been central to the history of rock and pop music, and as for dance music-well, you don't have to be a frequent traveller to the K-hole to know that the music doesn't really make sense without the pills to help you experience it. When we are drawing up a list of what drugs have done for us, or to us, popular music in all its forms is the biggest single entry on the credit side of the ledger. Unless, of course, you don't like it, in which case you truly have good reason for wishing Thomas De Quincey had never been born.

Source: New Yorker Magazine (NY)
Author: John Lanchester
Published: January 6, 2003
Copyright: 2002 The Conde Nast Publications Inc.
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