I introduce myself and he invites me into his office. The walls are covered with his kids’ crayon drawings. The office is small (less than fifty square feet), unfurnished except for a computer desk and two chairs. Frey seats himself at his desk; I take one of the other chairs, which is uncomfortably low to the ground. “Not quite what you were expecting?” he asks.
“Not quite,” I say. “I thought you’d be ... taller.”
As we chat over the course of the afternoon, Frey repeatedly stops to read me the latest James Frey gossip. “Did you read the Esquire piece on me a few months ago?” he asks, searching for the bookmarked webpage on his MacBook. “They understand what I’m trying to do in Europe,” he says as he pulls up a Guardian article.
When we meet, Frey is on the eve of publication of his latest novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, a “sequel” to the New Testament that resurrects Christ as an alcoholic Brooklynite. “Apparently James Frey has a tiny man in his head, like some kind of internalized boss, who barks, ‘You haven’t enraged anyone lately!’ and starts cracking the whip whenever things slow down,” critic Laura Miller wrote, noting that revisionist tellings of Jesus Christ’s life are nothing new. Among the many “radical” retellings of Christ’s story she cited: The Gospel According to the Son by that other literary bad boy, Norman Mailer.
The Final Testament had a limited print release in the United States, by Frey’s own design. He chose to skip traditional publishing houses and self-release it through an art dealer. “I always wanted to be the outlaw,” he told the Guardian on the eve of the book’s release. “When I got sent to rehab I refused to adhere by the rules. I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me.”
European publishers, by contrast, understand that Frey doesn’t always play by the rules. “They won’t blink in the face of controversy and don’t run away from it. In America that’s not always the case. I think big commercial publishers in the United States don’t want to deal with controversy or firestorm or trouble,” he says. The reader response can best be summarized by this anonymous Internet comment: “Oh, what a naughty, naughty boy he is. He should be roundly spanked, and told to act his age.”
Addressing the controversy that has followed him his entire career, Frey said in 2009, “I’m fine with my life. Wouldn’t change a fucking thing. The goal has always been to write books that have enough power to continue to be read long after I’m gone, to become part of history in some way.”
Frey’s advice for today’s writers? “Be willing to misbehave. Take and receive shots. Cause problems and polarize opinion,” he tells me, indicating that he believes being a literary rogue is less about self-destructive behaviors than about a willingness to stake out contrarian opinions. “Writers today are polite and meek and scared of bad publicity. Unless that changes, they will fade away.”
Postscript:
Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?
“Today’s writers seem a more cautious lot, less interested in some macho image and less admiring of Hemingway and his giant fish than their elders,” feminist author Anne Roiphe wrote in 2011, contrasting the modern era with the 1950s. If she’s right, it’s not just writers who have changed—it’s Western culture. We’ve become more sensitive and less brazenly self-destructive. “Rehab” and “recovery” are no longer dirty words.
While these are all positive changes, it seems we can’t stop ourselves from romanticizing the past. Who doesn’t want to return to a time when we could drink, smoke, and have sex with impunity? “The ‘good old times,’” Lord Byron once remarked wistfully. “All times when old are good.”
As we’ve seen in Literary Rogues, the good old times were rarely as great up close as from a distance. It’s far more romantic to imagine Dylan Thomas pounding back his eighteenth consecutive shot of whiskey and keeling over on his barstool than it is to hear about him clinging to this world, brain-dead and on an oxygen machine for close to a week. Truman Capote’s and Hunter S. Thompson’s drug abuse was a riot—until it wasn’t. “My addictions and problems were not cool or fun or glamorous in any way whatsoever,” James Frey once wrote. As the saying goes, it’s all fun and games until someone chokes on the business end of a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Up close, wayward authors appear more human, less remarkable. There’s nothing special about being addicted to opium or taking a shit on a porch that made these wayward writers somehow more notable than their sane and sober colleagues. Take a look at any list of the top hundred novels of all time, and you’ll see plenty of quiet, sober names mixed in with the Fitzgeralds, Faulkners, and Hemingways. No, it ultimately wasn’t because of their shocking behavior that they left behind anything of value—it was in spite of it. They should have been nothing more than cannon fodder. Somehow, even total failures at the game of life like John Berryman have achieved immortality by virtue of their pens.
It’s easy to burn your lips on a crack pipe or ball your way through a Parisian whorehouse in the 1890s. Attempting to create something of value in a world that tells you at every turn to shut up and color inside the lines, that conformity leads to success? That’s real rebellion. Writing may be a more acceptable occupation than it was two hundred years ago, but don’t let that fool you: there are still a million things your family would rather see you do than pursue a career in literature. Hell, there are a million things society would rather have you do. In a way, all authors are literary rogues.
But, to paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates, nobody tells anecdotes about the quiet people who just do their work. As memoirists have known for years, the more fucked-up your life, the more compelling your life story. So if you’re a writer and want to be included in Literary Rogues 2, I recommend picking up an opium pipe, loading your gun, and getting to work...
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my editors, Maya Ziv and Stephanie Meyers, and the entire crew at Harper Perennial (Cal Morgan, Erica Barmash, Gregory Henry, Julie Hersh, Fritz Metsch, Amy Baker, et al.). Without you, there would be no book.
Thank you to my agent, Brandi Bowles, and her colleagues at Foundry Literary + Media.
Thank you to all of the bookstores, libraries, writer’s conferences, and burlesque theaters that hosted me on my Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love book tour, including: BookCourt, Greenlight, and Word in Brooklyn; the Naked Girls Reading crew worldwide, including Michelle L’amour, Franky Vivid, Naked Girls Reading Chicago, Naked Girls Reading NYC, and the Boston Baby Dolls; Lady Jane’s Salon at Madame X in Manhattan; RT Booklovers Convention; the Book Blogger Convention; RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia; BookExpo America; and the Metro Library Network’s Out Loud Author Series in Iowa.
Thank you to my parents for their support over the years. My mother: “What’s your book about?” Me: “Writers who drink and generally misbehave.” Her: “So it’s about you?”
Thank you to my beta readers (listed by Twitter handles): @tiffanyreisz, @wellreadwife, @mrstomsauter, @j_hussein, @henningland, @hockeyvamp, @carathebruce, @edieharris, @cortney_writes, @write_by_night, @alyslinn, @juniperjenny, @annabelleblume, @karenbbooth, @muchadoabout77, and @fishwithsticks.
Thank you to the following writers who discussed Literary Rogues with me in some form or another: James Frey, Elizabeth Wurtzel, J. Michael Lennon, Eric Olsen, Glenn Schaeffer, Joe Haldeman, Daniel Friedman, Sean Ferrell, Benjamin Hale, Alexander Chee, and Marvin Bell.
Thank you to T. C. Boyle. While I was finishing the book, I ran into T. C. Boyle in Iowa City during the 75th Writer’s Workshop reunion. He’s intelligent, charming, eccentric, and a little bit goofy—in other words, a lot like a T. C. Boyle novel. After I told him about Literary Rogues, he rattled off the passage from his short story “Greasy Lake” that now appears as the book’s epigraph. Entirely from memory.
Thank you to David McClay, senior curator of the John Murray Archive a
t the National Library of Scotland, and Virginia Murray, for assisting me in tracking down the lost pubic hair of Lady Caroline Lamb. Alas, it was a fool’s quest...
And, last but not least, thank you to everyone who has followed my ramblings in past books, on Twitter, and elsewhere.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
These are some of the more accessible books and documentaries that I consulted during my research that may be of interest to the reader. Further sources can be found in the endnotes.
Ackroyd, Peter. Poe: A Life Cut Short. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2009.
Adams, Jad. Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000.
Bailey, Blake. Cheever: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2009.
Baker, Phil. The Book of Absinthe: A Cultural History. New York: Grove Press, 2003.
Beckerman, Marty. The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within, Just Like Papa! New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012.
Boon, Marcus. The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Brinnin, John Malcom. Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1955.
Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Judith S. Baughman. Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994.
Dardis, Tom. The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989.
Davenport-Hines, Richard. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
Davison, Peter. The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
Day, Barry. Dorothy Parker: In Her Own Words. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004.
Denham, Alice. Sleeping With Bad Boys. Las Vegas, NV: Book Republic Press, 2006.
Eisler, Benita. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
Ellis, Bret Easton. Less Than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.
Epstein, Daniel Mark. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Holt, 2002.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. On Booze. New York: Picador USA, 2011.
Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Random House, 2003.
George-Warren, Holly. The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture. New York: Hyperion, 2000.
Hay, Daisy. Young Romantics. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Hemmings, F. W. J. Baudelaire the Damned. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982.
Hotchner, A. E., ed. The Good Life According to Hemingway. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Jack, Belinda. George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Lever, Maurice. Sade: A Biography. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg. DVD. Directed by Jerry Aronson. New Yorker Films, 1997.
Mariani, Paul L. Dream Song: Life of John Berryman. New York: William Morrow, 1990.
McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
McKenna, Neil. The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2001.
Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.
Morrison, Robert. The English Opium-Eater. New York: Pegasus Books, 2010.
New York in the 50s. DVD. Directed by Betsy Blankenbaker. First Run Features, 2001.
Olsen, Eric, and Glenn Schaeffer. We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011.
Plant, Sadie. Writing on Drugs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Plimpton, George. Truman Capote. New York: Anchor Books, 1997.
Robb, Graham. Balzac: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
. Rimbaud: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
Rollyson, Carl. The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography. New York: Paragon House, 1991.
Sandars, Mary F. Honoré de Balzac: His Life and Writings. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1904.
Sisman, Adam. The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. New York: Viking, 2007.
Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. New York: Scribner, 2009.
Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1919.
This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis. VHS. Directed by Gerald Fox. First Run Features, 2000.
Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson. Edited by Jann Wenner. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011.
Wakefield, Dan. New York in the 50s. New York: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992.
Wall, Geoffrey. Flaubert: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Wasson, Ben. Count No ’Count: Flashbacks to Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983.
Wenner, Jann S., and Corey Seymour. Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.
Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Picador, 1968.
Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Bitch. New York: Doubleday, 1998.
. More, Now, Again. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
. Prozac Nation. New York: Riverhead, 1994.
INDEX
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.
absinthe, 83–84, 89–94, 96, 100, 104, 132
“Addict, The” (Sexton), 174
Advice to Opium Eaters, 26–27
alcohol, 104, 111, 154, 211–12
absinthe, 83–84, 89–94, 96, 100, 104, 132
Baudelaire and, 71, 75–76
Berryman and, 171, 172, 175, 176–77, 178
Burns and, 18
Capote and, 197
Carver and, 211
Cheever and, 209, 211
Dowson and, 91–94, 100
Ellis and, 221
Faulkner and, 139–43
Fitzgerald and, 110–13, 116
Frey and, 232, 235–37
Hemingway and, 129–30, 132, 134–35, 137–38
Kerouac and, 159, 161, 162
King and, 138
Mailer and, 188, 189
Millay and, 125–27
Parker and, 118–20, 123, 125, 127–28
Poe and, 48, 49, 51–52, 54, 55
Prohibition and, 104–5, 141
Sexton and, 174
Thomas and, 145–51, 172
Thompson and, 201, 204
Verlaine and, 83–85, 89, 90
Alcott, Louisa May, 27
Algonquin Round Table, 118, 122, 124, 128
Allan, John, 49, 51
Allen, Woody, 178
America, 47–48, 148–49
American Psycho (Ellis), 218–20
American Revolution, 32
amphetamines, 158–60, 164
Anderson, Elizabeth, 104
Anderson, Sherwood, 104, 109, 131, 134
Faulkner and, 139, 140
Annie Hall, 178
Answered Prayers (Capote), 196
Aria da Capo (Millay), 122
art for art’s sake, 83, 95
As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 141
/> atheism, 38, 42
Atlantic Monthly, The, 161, 199
Austen, Jane, xv
Balzac, Honoré de, 57, 58–63, 76, 92, 157
Sand and, 66–67
Barrère, Camille, 85
Battle of Waterloo, 57
Baudelaire, Charles, 57, 60, 69–79, 83, 92, 93, 125, 167, 204, 212
on Poe, 48, 55
Bearde, Chris, 197
Beat Generation, 154–57, 160, 167, 181, 184, 185, 196, 224
Beaton, Cecil, 193
Beauvoir, Simone de, 11, 154
Bell Jar, The (Plath), 177
Belushi, John, 203
Benchley, Robert, 118, 119, 128
Benzedrine, 158–60, 215
Bergen, Candice, 194
Berryman, John, 143, 152, 171–79, 209, 244
Berryman, Kate, 175
Bibi-la-Purée, 90
“Big Blonde” (Parker), 118
Big Sur (Kerouac), 160
Bingham, Rob, 226–28
Bitch (Wurtzel), 226, 227, 228
Blake, William, 182
Blessington, Lady, 33, 44
Boissard, François, 60
Boissevain, Eugen Jan, 125
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 12
Boon, Marcus, 234
Boston Globe, 179
Bower, Brock, 155
Boyd, Thomas Alexander, 109
Boyle, T. C., 209
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Capote), 192, 195
Bright Lights, Big City (McInerney), 214–17, 221, 239
Bright Shiny Morning (Frey), 238
Brinkley, Douglas, 200
Brinnin, John Malcom, 149, 150
Brontë, Branwell, 27
Brontë, Charlotte, 66
Bruce, Tammy, 220
Buffett, Jimmy, 203–4
Bukowski, Charles, 232
bullfighting, 131, 132
bullshit, 132, 234
Burns, Robert, 18, 25
Burroughs, William S., xiii, 156, 157, 160, 163–65, 167–69, 196, 202, 207–8
Byron, Allegra, 40
Literary Rogues Page 20
