The Boozy Muse
Creativity on Tap
SHEILA REGAN
On the terrestrial globe there is an uncounted, unnamed multitude, whose suffering would not be sufficiently allayed by sleep alone. For them wine composes its songs and poems.
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “ON WINE AND HASHISH”
FROM THOMAS DE QUINCEY’s seductive descriptions of his visions under the influence of laudanum in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to Hunter S. Thompson’s coke-addled gonzo journalism, the body of literary writing fueled by legal and illegal substances is rich.
The substance-influenced canon, if we can call it that, includes quite a bit of writing about drugs themselves—trips, binges, and highs are described with technicolored prose, often written while the documenter was still in the throes of the drug, or at least right afterward. Think of “Kubla Khan,” composed entirely (Coleridge claimed) in an opium dream.
But there are also examples where drugs seep into the writing, even when the writer is aiming at something else. In the 1959 existential play The Condemned of Altona, Jean-Paul Sartre uses the metaphor of crabs to describe Nazism. In 1971, he revealed in an interview that the crabs were also inspired by a hallucination he had been experiencing ever since tripping on mescaline with Simone de Beauvoir in 1929.
Meanwhile, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Barrett Browning—not to mention William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jack Kerouac (basically all the Beats), and so many more—were users of one kind or another, and whether that was beneficial to their writing or detrimental is perhaps up for debate.
In the twenty-first century, it’s easier than ever to experiment with how mind-altering substances can shape, spur, and color our writing. It’s no surprise that contemporary writers still explore ways in which using drugs and alcohol can alter their writing for the better. At the risk of minimizing the potential dangers—and to be sure, there are dangers—I’m interested in the how of using substances for writing, rather than the s ors.
