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| Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, rugged individualist. |
Perhaps I
should retitle this one, Where have all the infamous writers gone? You know,
the bad boys, the drinkers, the snorters, the sniffers, the carousers, the sex
fiends, and the brawlers? What happened to the trashed hotel rooms, the crashed
cars and motorbikes, the bullfights, the boxing matches, the stabbed wives, the
critics with the black eyes, the thousand pound marlin bleeding all over the
dock, the overdrawn bank accounts, the unpaid tabs at the Gramercy Park Hotel
bar (before it became a namby pamby Ian Schrager millennial hangout), the jail
and prison sentences, the drunk appearances on the day-time talk shows, the
drunken college speeches, the plane flights to war zones and shit-holes, the
guns, the knives, the bombs, the divorces, the affairs, the suicides?
What
happened to the writers who actually live the lives they write about? So many
questions, and so few answers.
But there
was a time when we read novels about wars written by men and women who went to
them, and we never had any doubt about the author’s authenticity. Or the spy
novels that took place in the most exotic locals like the South of France,
Rome, and Venice. We never doubted that the author spent a great deal of time
in those places, losing plenty of money, drinking many martini’s (shaken not
stirred) and breaking many hearts along the way. We read about cross country
motorcycle trips and about hobos riding the rails during the Great Depression,
and we felt secure that the author telling the story was coming at you from
real experience. We read about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and we wondered
how it felt for the author to drive a red convertible at breakneck speed along
a desert road under the influence of LSD, and a deadly soup of other illicit
chemicals.
I’ve always
romanticized the writers of old and the writing life. The men and women who
lived large, who made the world their playground. Writers who absorbed
experiences (good, bad, and sometimes lethal) like a sponge and who were able
to write about them with such authority and palpable veracity, that in some
cases, they became more famous than their words.
Hemingway
comes to mind, of course. The bullfights, the hunting, the fishing, the
brawling, the boozing, the wives, the wars. He was inspired by Teddy Roosevelt,
himself an adventurer, a hunter, and a prolific writer (someone once wrote that
all the Presidency gave him was a severe case of cabin fever). Later would come
Norman Mailer, the fighter, the drinker, and the talk show insulter-in-chief,
the movie maker, the man who married six times, and the one man I know of who jogged with Muhammad Ali in
Africa, lions growling in the near distance. There was Jack Kerouac who most
definitely went On the Road, and who can forget the first sentence of Dr.
Hunter S. Thompson’s immortal work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “We were
somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take
hold.” Now that’s the life. That’s what it means to be a writer.
Both authors
looked up to Hemingway as their hero. You see a pattern emerging here.
Fitzgerald killed himself trying to keep up with the Jones’s and the gin.
Capote nearly killed himself while writing and researching In Cold Blood, and
McGaune can still out fly fish us all.
These were
larger than life characters that stoked our imaginations and in many cases,
were the reason we decided to become writers ourselves. I knew from the first
day I sat inside an office crunching numbers at my first and only day job, that
it wasn’t for me. I yearned for something more, something exciting and as far
away from the suburb as I could get. That meant being a writer.
So back to
my original question. Where have all the famous writers gone? Maybe they don’t exist
anymore in this new age of indie publishing, when pretty much anyone who wants
to at least attempt becoming an author can do so. Maybe the democratization of
writing has diluted the experience. Or maybe search engines like Google have
replaced the need for on-site research. Sure, there are still small wars to go
to, but that privilege is usually reserved for the big time television
broadcasters who couldn’t write a decent line of fiction if a gun was pointed
at their skulls (there are the freelance risk takers…the brave men and women
who enter these zones for little or no pay and the hope of maybe publishing a
story of two for actual money, but we rarely hear of them).
For certain,
writing has become a pursuit that’s born and bred of MFA programs and the writing
professors who inhabit them like sniveling, scaly skinned gargoyles. They live cloistered lives inside campus walls,
and they know nothing of real life. They will never write anything interesting
because they’ve never done anything interesting, and God knows how much uninteresting material they are forced to read day in and day out.
Maybe
diversity and political correctness has destroyed the famous writer. Now we
publish in part based on the color of one’s skin, or one’s religion and/or
non-religion, or gender. Now there are certain words we cannot use, and there
are certain ways we cannot write about the opposite sex for fear of insulting
someone or other. It’s like the Fascists have indeed won the war. I choose not
to subscribe to the #metoo mentality of the modern world, even if it costs me a
fan or two. It’s censorship, pure and simple, and it is wrong. It is very bad for writing and writers.
Bring me
back to a time when a writer lived life on his own terms and did so flamboyantly
and large as hell. A time when you used your fists if you didn’t like what
somebody wrote or said about you. A time when skin color or sexual orientation
weren’t a prerequisite for publication and/or a reading spot at the local writer’s
conference.
A time when
much talent trumped everything, along with a hell of a lot of rugged individualism.
