The Origins of the Tortured Writer

Thoughts on a theory of great works and their makers.

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This is a guest post by Michael Mohr.

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There’s something deliciously, sensuously, disastrously fatal about being a writer. Not literally fatal, in most cases—although many a writer has indeed fallen on his suicidal sword a la Hemingway, David Foster Wallace, etc—but metaphorically, figuratively, shall we say spiritually.

In some ways I think being a writer is akin to having a disease. Perhaps similar in some ways to alcoholism, if you believe that is a disease. Being a good and serious (quality) writer, one who is dedicated to the craft almost without their conscious permission, involves having certain character traits and characterological issues.

For example: hyper-sensitivity, high self-awareness, deep psychological wounding, emotional neediness, incredible ambition, strong innate talent, a drive for an interesting life, a tendency towards egocentrism and sometimes narcissism, a certain kind of self-absorption, and a particular type of social x-ray vision, meaning a sort of anthropological interest in people, conversations, human frailty, complexity, and understanding why people do the things they do. A serious, quality writer also seems to be more or less obsessed with observation, especially of oneself and of others in and outside of your orbit. You see people, places and things differently than the average person.

I am not claiming that all quality writers have all of these traits: That would be both extreme and far too Manichean and binary. In the same way I would never argue that “all” sober alcoholics or active alcoholics are all exactly the same. However, given history, and given my own personal experience and the words of former authors (and in-depth biographies which I have read) over the decades and centuries, it seems pretty obvious that generally speaking most quality serious writers have many if not all of these categorical traits.

There’s a funny debate in the culture now—the “Discourse” as people call it—about these two competing ideas. There’s the Old School View of the romantic alcoholic tortured artist (Bukowski, Kerouac, Miller) and the New School View (writers are normal people like everyone else and they can be healthy, rational, well-adjusted, normal members of society). The idea has been to shift away from the “toxic” and unhealthy notion of The Tortured Artist (think Van Gogh as a cliché) in exchange for being a normal, happy member of society. Elizabeth Gilbert perhaps ignited if not started this New Age trend in her 2015 book, Big Magic.

But I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding going on here.

The New Age arguers seem to believe that the 20th century (and many 21st century) authors were somehow faking it all, that the whole thing was an act, theater, performance art, just for show. Hemingway didn’t blow his brains out because he was severely alcoholic and depressed; he did it to cement his dark, romantic legacy. John Cheever drank himself to death (alongside his cancer) as a final curtain call to literary posterity. David Foster Wallace hung himself in 2008 not due to any serious clinical depression but in order to leave his lasting mark on literature.

So the solution, these people seem to suggest, is to simply model more healthy, normal, happy, adjusted behavior. To wit: We should annihilate the Tortured Artist Myth and change the image of The American Writer.

But this argument misses the forest for the obvious trees.

Hemingway was severely depressed and he very much was a terrible alcoholic. Ditto F. Scott Fitzgerald, another famous contemporary author of Papa’s day who also died of alcoholism. Cheever had cancer which was worsened by severe alcoholism. David Foster Wallace, as detailed in the 2008 biography—Every Love Story is a Ghost Story—did in fact deal with serious depression and had been suicidal before. He also had a severe drinking problem (as did Stephen King and many other authors in modern times).

These writers weren’t faking it. This wasn’t for show. These are real human beings dealing with real human issues.

It’s actually quite ironic and odd, even satirical, isn’t it? The New Age people are the same people who are big into honoring people’s mental illness claims. They’re the people who denounce the Baby Boomers and older generations who repressed all their emotions and never talked about what was really going on. They constantly encourage us to feel our feelings and to discuss them safely and openly.

And yet…it’s these same people who are, in affect, now saying, But you can ignore these cases of famous authors being depressed and drinking themselves to death, that’s just Toxic Masculinity in its worst form.

What?

Talk about cultural gaslighting!

By saying this I am not encouraging The Tortured Artist Myth. I don’t think writers “should” or “must” be this way. I wish many hadn’t been or weren’t! But most of them are. This is not a denial but rather a toast to truth and reality. I love reality because it doesn’t take sides or pick teams. Are there differences between biological men and women? Yes. The differences lie in the chromosomes. That is reality, a scientific and medical truth which is, for all rational people anyway, undisputed.

This same thinking needs to be applied to artists and writers.

Think about what it takes to be an artist or writer. You can’t have a quality writer—at least not of literary fiction, a.k.a. literature—who lacks self-awareness and emotional depth, who is shallow and superficial, who is average and “normal” and happy.

How would someone of that characterological makeup create deep, nuanced, tortured, complex characters on the page which readers demand? They couldn’t! At least not such novels with depth and the universal search for meaning, the journey of trying to understand the human condition using written language. Sure, maybe Lee Child or James Patterson could avoid these traits, but let’s be honest. They’re not trying to do what Hemingway, Faulkner, or Baldwin was doing.

In the same way that long-distance runners possess certain inherent talents and psychological tendencies—say, Olympic runners—these traits I have mentioned several times also, in general, more or less, seem to be present with writers. If you removed the vision and depth and intensity and neediness and existential dread andself-awareness from such a writer, it would be like breaking the runner’s legs. They can no longer compete. Runners need psychological traits and a drive for hard physical and emotional work. It’s the same for any group: People who do well and rise up in the military; extreme surfers; pro football players; NASCAR drivers; and writers.

Obviously—this should be obvious, anyway—I don’t want any writer or any human being in general to be angry, sad, unhappy, or certainly suicidal. And I don’t want writers to “act” a certain way, hard stop. Everyone should always be themselves. I know I am. And I don’t encourage drinking, drugs, or taking dangerous risks in life. If you’re a writer and you’re feeling suicidal or you’re just struggling, I absolutely suggest you get help, either with therapy or a psychiatrist or AA or some kind of group or individual which can hopefully help. Perhaps you need meds.

There is one aspect where the New School lands a valid critique. It’s true that writers, especially younger writers, will sort of play a role unconsciously in order to act out some sort of version of a writer they admire. Many American men—myself 100% included—have done this in youth with authors like Bukowski, Kerouac, Denis Johnson, Henry Miller, etc., but most outgrow it. Besides, it’s one thing to mimic a dead author’s past in your own way, but it’s another thing to actually drop out of society, attempt actual suicide or drink yourself to the point of homelessness or death.

I don’t deny that culture has a role. Clearly it does, as the above paragraph demonstrates. And it does seem to perhaps be more of an American-centered and 20th-century-originated phenomenon in some ways. It also seems to be not exclusively (but primarily) a male phenomenon. Woolf, Plath, and many others followed the same grim route.

But again, myths and legends and cultural influences aside, when you drill down to the hard central core of the discussion here, I still don’t think that what you find as the truly motivating factor for this authorial melancholy is cultural influence, mimicry, and unconscious performance. The primary cause, rather, is the psychological reality that most writers most of the time have most of the traits I have been discoursing on. And that, of course, is what is generally “required” of the majority of good, quality writers. Without at least some of those traits as a writer you almost certainly will not create.

And so, in conclusion, I suppose my grand point is this: Let writers be what they are: semi-tortured, intelligent, deep, self-aware, emotionally-developed, sensitive human souls who are doomed, in some ways, to roam this earth recording the way things are, seeing the things most other people don’t see, hearing what they don’t hear, understanding the true complexities of life, and trying their best to put that down onto the page.

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