Piss Artists

In a short essay on Louis Armstrong, Clive James provides the following footnote on Bix Beiderbecke:

“Beiderbecke put as much energy into self-destruction as into creation. His father didn’t want him to play jazz. Trying to prove to his father that his music could get him somewhere, the prodigal son sent home copies of all his records. His father never listened to them. You could call that a psychological obstacle: but there were no other obstacles that began to compare with what Armstrong had to put up with every day. The main reason Beiderbecke could not stop drinking was that he was an alcoholic. His short adult life was a long suicide.”

“But,” the footnote continues, “the cautionary tale had an awkward corollary: his underlying melancholy got into his tone, and helped to make it unmistakable … Even his upbeat solos were saturated with prescient grief, and the slow numbers remind you of Ford Madox Ford’s catch line for The Good Soldier: this is the saddest story ever told.”

Is there the awkward corollary of a link between alcoholism and creativity?

Over half of the American Nobel laureates of literature were alcoholic. So what? This proves nothing more than the fact that over half of the American Nobel laureates of literature were alcoholic.

For Blake, “The road of excess leads to the place of wisdom." Plato was more specific: “It is of no purpose for the sober man to knock at the door of the Muses." These are comfortable thoughts for the alcoholic artist, especially the artist who has chosen art specifically for the fringe benefit of alcoholism.

The only fair assessment is an impossible one: whether this or that writer or musician or painter compares favorably with the artist they did not become.

That said, several of the classic “proofs” are not very convincing. Hemingway got round to breakfasting on tea and gin and filled the day with absinthe, whisky, vodka, wine (and hypertension, kidney and liver disease, edema of the ankles, high blood urea, mild diabetes, impotence), but he also got round to some pretty lousy work. He was dead at sixty-two. Lowry wrote between the poles of two obsessions, literature and alcohol, but he wrote one of those books about an alcoholic trying to write a book, which doesn’t mean that the grander theme alluded him as much as it did Geoffrey Firmin but at least suggests it. He was dead at forty-eight. Drink and immense distraction forced Carver to work in miniature, and while he immaculately crafted characters caught up in the symptoms and disease of alcohol, he would have preferred a kinder muse. (No other word will do./For that’s what it was. Gravy./Gravy, these past ten years./Alive, sober, working, loving, and being loved by a good woman …) Dead at fifty.