Literary Rogues

by Andrew Shaffer

  Next, Hemingway covered World War II as a journalist. He was present at the liberation of Paris and received a Bronze Star for having been “under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions.”

  Despite the professional successes, his personal life was in turmoil. His drinking finally began to catch up with him: he put on a great deal of weight, and was diagnosed with diabetes. Many of his friends passed away during the 1940s, including Fitzgerald in 1940; Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce in 1941; Gertrude Stein in 1946; and Max Perkins, his longtime editor, in 1947.

  Things seemingly turned around in the 1950s with the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, which won him a Pulitzer Prize. But as soon as he returned to form in such a public fashion, death knocked at his door. In 1954, he was involved in two plane crashes over as many days on an African safari. He walked away from the first crash relatively uninjured, but he wasn’t so lucky the next day.

  “His injuries from the second crash included a ruptured liver, spleen and kidney, two cracked vertebrae, paralysis of the sphincter muscle and various third-degree burns,” Dardis wrote. “But worst was the skull fracture incurred while butting his way out of the broken door of the plane after the crash. This was the most serious of all his concussions, and its aftereffects continued for years.” Hemingway stumbled to a nearby bar to recuperate from his injuries.

  Hemingway retired to Cuba, where his drinking continued to cause him health problems. “If you keep on drinking this way you won’t even be able to write your name,” his principal physician, Dr. Herrera Sotolongo, warned him. There was, of course, no way Hemingway was going to give up alcohol. “Drinking was as natural as eating and to me as necessary,” he wrote in A Moveable Feast.

  In 1955, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature for The Old Man and the Sea. He cut off his acceptance speech at two minutes, however, because “I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say, and not speak it.” He was praised as an elder statesman by new talents on the literary scene, such as Norman Mailer, who even urged the Democrats to draft Hemingway for president in 1956.

  The recognition was bittersweet: words became harder and harder for Hemingway in his alcoholic haze. He thought often of putting the pen down for good. “Unlike your baseball player and your prizefighter and your matador, how does a writer retire?” he asked A. E. Hotchner. “No one accepts that his legs are shot or the whiplash gone from his reflexes. Everywhere he goes, he hears the same damn question: What are you working on?”

  What Hemingway was working on, it turned out, was an exit strategy.

  How did Hemingway outlive so many of his contemporaries? As Fitzgerald noted early on in their friendly rivalry, “Ernest is quite as nervously broken down as I am, but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.”

  Hemingway’s megalomania reached a paranoid fever pitch in 1960. “It’s the worst hell. The goddamnedest hell,” Hemingway told Hotchner while they were riding in a friend’s car through Idaho, where he’d moved a year earlier. “They’ve bugged everything. That’s why we’re using Duke’s car. Mine’s bugged. Everything’s bugged. Can’t use the phone. Mail intercepted.”

  He saw FBI agents everywhere. As he and Hotchner drove past a bank after midnight, he asked his friend to pull over to the side of the road. Hemingway pointed at two bank employees working inside the office. “Auditors,” he said. “The FBI’s got them going over my account.” Later during Hotchner’s visit, Hemingway cut a dinner short after allegedly seeing two FBI agents at the bar.

  The paranoia bothered his wife and friends, but what could they do? Hemingway was as productive as ever. He was working on a manuscript that would be published as A Moveable Feast, as well as on a 90,000-plus-word profile of two matadors for Life. However, “he often spoke of destroying himself and would sometimes stand at the gun rack, holding one of the guns, staring out the window,” Hotchner wrote.

  In December 1960, Hemingway underwent eleven electric shock treatments at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. The treatments failed to have any noticeable effect on Hemingway’s visions. “In January he called me,” Hotchner wrote. “His delusions had not changed or diminished. His room was bugged, and the phone was tapped. He suspected that one of the interns was a Fed.” A second round of shock therapy that June similarly had no effect.

  Hemingway eventually believed that Hotchner had “turned” on him and accused his friend of “pumping him” for information to feed to the FBI. “This man, who had stood his ground against charging water buffaloes, who had flown missions over Germany, who had refused to accept the prevailing style of writing but, enduring rejection and poverty, had insisted on writing in his own unique way, this man, my deepest friend, was afraid—afraid that the FBI was after him, that his body was disintegrating, that his friends had turned on him, that living was no longer an option,” Hotchner wrote.

  However, to quote the movie version of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

  Decades later, Hemingway’s friends and family learned that at the heart of Hemingway’s paranoia lay a kernel of truth: “Beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all,” Hotchner wrote. “In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the FBI, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the FBI file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.”

  One of Hemingway’s favorite sayings was, “Man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” But when Hemingway loaded his shotgun for the last time on July 2, 1961, he was both destroyed and defeated. The man who had once said, “I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I won’t kill myself,” had finally reached the end of his line.

  Should blame be laid at the feet of the FBI agents who were indeed monitoring Hemingway’s actions? To find the answer, one need only look at the long list of other suicides in Hemingway’s family: his father, Clarence; his sister, Ursula; his brother, Leicester; and his granddaughter, model Margaux Hemingway.

  Countless writers have been inspired by Hemingway to pick up a pint and a pen at the same time. Horror writer Stephen King rationalized his drinking with what he calls “the Hemingway Defense.” As articulated in King’s memoir, On Writing, the Hemingway defense goes something like this: “As a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can.”

  14

  The Southern Gentleman

  “Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER

  William Faulkner (1897–1962) didn’t need to rationalize his drinking—for the southern gentleman, alcohol was a necessity on par with food and shelter. “Civilization begins with distillation,” he once wrote.

  Though if that’s the case, it could also be argued that civilization ends with distillation. How else to explain a drunk Faulkner wandering nude through the hallways of a New York hotel during one of his many benders? Or, take the anecdote from his visit to a southern writers’ conference at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in October 1931, as relayed by Sherwood Anderson: “Bill Faulkner had arrived and got drunk. From time to time he appeared, got drunk again immediately, and disappeared. He kept asking everyone for drinks. If they didn’t give him any, he drank his own.”

  “I hear that Bill Faulkner was somewhat in absentia in many ways,” Faulkner’s friend,
Stark Young, said after hearing about the conference. “Not a bad move: it will convince most of the authors there that he is all the more of a genius, especially those that live in New York.”

  Faulkner was born William Cuthbert Falkner in Mississippi, where he lived for most of his life. Like most men of the Lost Generation, he entered the military during the First World War, but unlike most of his American compatriots, he enlisted in the British Royal Flying Corps—at just over five feet, six inches tall, he was too short for the U.S. Army.

  Although he trained at RFC bases in Canada and Britain, he didn’t see any action. This didn’t stop him from affecting a limp and making vague references to his plane having been shot down over Europe in later years. After the war he attended the University of Mississippi but dropped out after three semesters.

  Faulkner wrote to his idol, writer Sherwood Anderson, for advice. The two became close friends, even living together at one point in New Orleans. Anderson acted as a mentor to Faulkner and advised him to draw on his personal life for his fiction.

  Thanks to Anderson’s contacts in the publishing industry, Faulkner published his first book, Soldiers’ Pay, in 1925. When the typesetter allegedly misprinted his surname as “Faulkner,” he let the error slide. “Either way suits me,” the easygoing novelist said. He was thereafter known as William Faulkner.

  He visited New York City in the fall of 1931 and stayed at the Algonquin Hotel, where he was introduced to the literati by none other than Dorothy Parker. She was both a fan and a friend, once calling him “the greatest writer we have.” His talent was readily apparent in his bestselling novels, which included The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.

  Humble he was not. “I am the best in America, by God,” he wrote in 1939—and he may have been right. Faulkner dared to compare himself to no less than the Bard. As Faulkner’s daughter, Jill, wrote, “Pappy was getting ready to start on one of these bouts. I went to him and said, ‘Please don’t start drinking.’ And he was already well on his way, and he turned to me and said, ‘You know, no one remembers Shakespeare’s child.’ ”

  “I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach,” Faulkner said. To ensure that he had enough whiskey to meet the demands of his disease, he was forced to buy it in wholesale quantities from bootleggers during Prohibition. Faulkner once drew a bank draft in the amount of $200 from his publisher, Horace Liveright, to cover a whiskey purchase that had gone sour—he had the money to cover a check he wrote for the booze, he claimed, until he lost it gambling.

  Just how much his alcoholism impacted his writing is up for debate. Ernest Hemingway, a contemporary and sometime friend, wrote, “I get sore at Faulkner when he just gets tired or writes with a hangover and just slops. He has that wonderful talent and his not taking care of it to me is like a machine gunner letting his weapon foul up.”

  Like Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner followed the trail of money to Hollywood and began writing for the film industry. While in Hollywood, Faulkner hired a male nurse to accompany him around town and, using a prerationed bottle of bourbon kept in a black medical bag, administer Faulkner enough alcohol to keep him tipsy but not drunk. This system didn’t work out for very long because Faulkner would bully the nurse into giving him more than the allotted dose.

  He never met a liquor he didn’t like. “There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others,” he wrote. Eventually, Faulkner had worked himself up to twenty-three martinis a day, according to French author Monique Salomon. “Never ask me why. I don’t know the answer,” Faulkner said of his drinking. “If I did, I wouldn’t do it.”

  Faulkner’s Hollywood years wouldn’t last forever. One time, he asked director Howard Hawks for permission to write at home. He was having trouble concentrating in the office, he said. Hawks gave him the go-ahead for the day. After Faulkner failed to show up to work for the next several days, Hawks phoned the writer’s hotel. Faulkner had checked out earlier in the week to finish his screenplay—at “home” in Mississippi.

  In 1949, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” For someone who was drunk much of the time, he was uncommonly productive in his later years, writing books, screenplays, and plays for the stage well into his sixties.

  He continued to embarrass himself among his literary colleagues: at a party hosted by fellow southerner Truman Capote, Faulkner asked the host if he could take a bath. When Faulkner wasn’t seen or heard from for forty-five minutes, Capote checked up on him and found the author in tears. Capote sat on the toilet and kept Faulkner company in silence.

  When he wasn’t busy drinking, writing, and crying, Faulkner kept up an active public-appearance schedule. He also taught as a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia for two years beginning in 1958, where he clearly enjoyed interacting with students.

  He was hospitalized for numerous minor health problems, though, and saw his health decline further after he fell off a horse in 1959.

  And another horse in January 1962.

  And again in June 1962.

  It can probably be assumed that he was drunk when the accidents happened, since there were few times in his adult life he was not drunk. Of course, the horses could have just plain had it in for the old man: “I have been on extremely mean and stupid horses that clearly wanted to hurt me,” Hunter S. Thompson once wrote.

  Faulkner refused all pain medication following his last fall, instead killing the pain with alcohol. A few weeks later, on July 5, Faulkner clutched his chest and died of a heart attack. He was sixty-four.

  “The great ones die, die. They die,” poet John Berryman wrote after hearing about Faulkner’s death. “You look up and who’s there?”

  15

  Deaths and Entrances

  “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

  —DYLAN THOMAS

  Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) is forever fixed in the popular imagination as a man on a barstool—or, more accurately, as a man falling off a barstool. “I’ll never forget being taken for the first time to the White Horse Tavern in the Village. Some of the regulars led me to the sacred table where the great Dylan Thomas had his last drink before he passed out and died at age thirty-nine,” journalist Dan Wakefield once reminisced. “I go, Wow! That’s fabulous; that’s what you were to aspire to.”

  Nearly forty years before he met his ignominious end in New York City, Thomas was born in southern Wales to a well-read family. By age four, he could recite Shakespeare. As he recalled years later, “The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant was of very secondary importance.” At sixteen, Thomas left school early to work on the staff of the South Wales Daily Post as a critic.

  In 1933, Thomas wrote an essay entitled “Genius and Madness Akin in the World of Art,” in which he declared that geniuses walk a line that is “difficult to differentiate, with any sureness, between insanity and eccentricity. The borderline of insanity is more difficult to trace than the majority of people, comparatively safe within the barriers of their own common-sensibility, can realize.” What he was saying, between the lines, was that it takes a madman to know a madman.

  Like Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas began publishing as a teenager. His work was published in New English Weekly and The Listener, and, when he was twenty, in his first book of poetry, 18 Poems. He moved from Wales to London, where he surmised he had better chances of achieving literary fame. In spring 1936, Thomas met his future wife, Caitlin Macnamara, at a London pub.

  Within hours of meeting each other, Caitlin was cradling Thomas’s head in her lap, listening to him drunkenly proclaim his love for her. They spent the next five days on a pub crawl, barely eating. Although they parted ways afterward, they met up again later that year and began living together. They marr
ied on July 11, 1937, and made their home in Wales.

  According to Cyril Connolly, a critic who knew Thomas, “He was determined to drink as much as possible. He was obsessed with the idea that a poet should die young and live in such a way as to risk his own destruction.” This didn’t really shock Connolly at the time; despite Thomas’s devil-may-care attitude, this type of binge drinking was pretty typical of other college-age young people. And besides, despite his sporadic benders, Thomas kept to a regular daily schedule. He slept in the mornings, ate lunch (when he could afford it), wrote in the afternoons, and drank in the evenings.

  Unfortunately, Thomas’s next two books, The Map of Love (poetry and short stories) and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (autobiographical essays), were commercial failures—in part because the publishing industry, especially in Europe, was in a terrible slump due to World War II.

  Faced with the prospect of being drafted into Britain’s armed forces, the peacenik Thomas stayed out drinking the night before his conscription tribunal and showed up for his military hearing a physical wreck. Authorities were only too happy to give him a medical exemption from service (officially for “asthma”).

  Thomas and Caitlin had two children and moved around frequently during wartime. They settled in a cottage in New Quay, Wales, in 1944. Life was, if not grand, at least stable ... until an ex-army neighbor shot up the Thomases’ cottage with a machine gun and threatened to blow the family up with a grenade. William Killick, a captain in the British army, had just returned from eighteen months of fighting in World War II and learned that his wife, Vera, had been giving part of his army pay to the pseudo-draft-dodging Thomas as an act of charity. (Thomas could be humble and charming when his ego didn’t get in the way, and his manner was prone to induce sympathy.) After a skirmish between Killick and Thomas at a local pub, the Thomases retreated to their cottage for the night. Then their wall exploded with gunfire, and Killick stormed into the living room and fired a machine gun into the ceiling. The crazed army captain, also holding a grenade, shouted, “You’re nothing but a lot of egoists!” at the Thomases—surely the oddest philosophical threat ever to escape the mouth of a man holding a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other. Killick didn’t pull the pin, and was arrested without casualties. After the Thomases moved, Killick was acquitted of attempted murder.