No wonder the buggers drank.
It’s a fairly widely-held view that creativity, alcoholism and depression are common bedfellows, no doubt with uncommonly hairy side-effects. Figuring out which begets the other is like crossing the road with a drunk chicken and a suicidal egg, but suffice to say a lot of writers, artists, musicians and composers have been creatively and articulately off their collective tits.
Generally not dancers so much though, due to their propensity to fall off the stage.
It can be argued that drinking gets the creative juices flowing, or helps people deal with failure, or perhaps it’s just the finest way a self-employed creator, stuck at home in a studio on a rainy day, temporarily without inspiration or the motivation to clean up a bit instead, can procrastinate the day away. Certainly beats ironing or picking weevils out of the flour.
A number of noted and accomplished creative people have been spectacular drinkers, and we can realistically thank fermented and distilled liquids for their excellent output, and also perhaps curse the same fluids for taking them from us too soon.
In almost every example, though, you can be sure that having a drink with these magnificent bastards would definitely be something to write home about. Comparatively badly.
Ernest Hemingway
If anyone deserved a bloody drink, it was Ernest bloody Hemingway. His mother used to dress him in girl’s clothes, which in Hemingway’s world at the time was a lot more fraught and stressful than in ours, now. He was a journalist before becoming a novelist, and everyone knows how journalists can put it away. Those two things are enough to make most people, at the very least, find an excuse for a bit of a tipple, but Ernest was only just getting started. By the time he was 50, he’d been an ambulance driver in Italy, bombed (the traditional way, with a bomb) in Paris, collected body parts from a recently-exploded factory in Milan, wounded his legs on the front line and his arm in a car accident, and took the news that his father had shot himself rather badly. He’d been engaged five times, married four, and divorced three. And you know how you’ve never been in any plane crashes? Two. Hemingway was in TWO plane crashes. Anyone who denies this man an entire bottle of whiskey and a straw is a brute. On the plus side, though, his first journalism teacher was called Fannie Biggs, which is surely something to celebrate, perhaps with a toast. To Fannie!
Favourite drink: Ice-cold, bone-dry martini.
Died of: A self-inflicted gunshot wound after a bit of probably-hemochromatosis-induced depression. The drinking probably didn’t help.
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an admirable and magnificent bitch, and the term is used with the greatest respect. Few people have been quite so eloquently bitchy, even on Twitter, which is weird. Starting from an early age when she referred to her stepmother as ‘the housekeeper’, Dorothy lived her life in a way that makes me want to buy her a drink myself, if only to learn from her. Anyone who can become famous and earn a living from dropping witty truth-bombs and going to the same place for lunch every day gets my card behind the bar. She was a wise-cracking woman with a really natty bob in a man’s world. Generally rubbish at relationships but excellent at poems and short stories, she grew up in New York with a thing for a drink, a thing for the Algonquin Hotel, a thing for helping to start The New Yorker, and a thing for extreme left-wing politics, the latter of which got her quite closely looked at by the FBI during the McCarthy era. And although both very famous people were quite fond of a drop, given the choice between Parker and McCarthy I’d buy Dorothy two drinks and stick Joseph in the nose with a knitting needle.
Favourite drink: Martini. This bit was really supposed to have a bit more variety, but it turns out you can’t beat a martini. I love these guys.
Died of: Heart attack. No doubt, had she lived through it, she might have said something like “Who even knew I had one?”
Toulouse-Lautrec
Not overly blessed in the legs-and-genitals department, once barmen actually noticed that Henri was waiting to be served (his hat barely cleared the bar), Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec threw absinthe back like a proper, normal-sized man. He was also pretty fond of tall drinks, which is ironic. Henri had the legs of a nine-year old, the face of a dropped meat pie, the teeth of a Stonehenge revival festival and by all reports the penis of a Nevada mustang. He painted in the same way he drank and socialised — around creative folk and women, in bars, at crotch-level. Of possibly more interest than his art, though, are stories of some of his eccentricities. He loved cooking, and invented a recipe each for heron and squirrel. He once took a cormorant to a pub. He was mates with Oscar Wilde. He kept booze inside a hollowed-out cane. He invented a cocktail called ‘The Earthquake’, which was a mixture of cognac and absinthe. And there you go, I’ve made it to the end of this bit without using the word ‘legless’.
Damn.
Favourite drink: Absinthe, American cocktails, and just making shit up
Died of: Alcoholism and syphilis. Had kind of a chicken-or-the-egg thing going there.
Modest Mussorgsky
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky actually knew little about modesty, particularly in the areas of composing things that get turned into Disney animations years later, and growing a bitchin’ beard. Of course, being Russian, he was born with a booze-flavoured spoon in his mouth, so yay, drinking, but when his mother died in his late twenties, he took to dipsomania like a duck to vodka. I don’t know about you, but I love hearing about anyone prior to 1890 who was crap at their day job, bitched about by their homies, and known by nickname at their local, and Mr Mussorgsky was all of those things, save for the possible lie about a nickname. Unfortunately his decline was quite steep, and a portrait late in his life shows a luminous, pocked nose, breast-stroking eyes and hair not often inconvenienced by the irritating attentions of a comb. In fact, after a bunch of his friends died, and he fell into abject poverty, and he barely stumbled past his fortieth birthday, the only thing left to thank Mussorgsky for is the massive, soul-destroying downer he presents us with on considering his life story. And Pictures At An Exhibition, I guess. WHATEVER, MODEST.
Favourite drink: Probably vodka. I’m guessing and going with stereotype, but probably vodka.
Died of: Drinking, seizures, drinking, drinking, and having crucial beard skills.
Billie Holiday
It should be reasonably telling that ‘Lady Sings The Blues’ is almost impossible to sing well when sober. Her sliding moan was constructed on a solid base of booze and opiates. Holiday was not named after her childhood, which was itinerant, of sketchy parenting, and splattered unfairly with reform schools, rape, prostitution and arrest. The lilting, exquisitely sad tone of her singing voice is the sweetest thing to come out of such a background, and the dependence on booze and smack by far the worst. Almost every story about Ms Holiday’s life generates a deliciously sad combination of quirky wistfulness and gut-twisting sadness. She was arrested for narcotics possession, given leniency because she was so dehydrated, and spent some time in a prison camp nicknamed ‘Camp Cupcake’. She once passed out from accidentally attaching gardenias to her head with a hatpin. Her 1947 narcotics conviction saw her ‘Cabaret Card’ — a card given to nightclub workers that were of good, sober character, enabling them to work — revoked, severely limiting her income. Police were stationed at the door of her hospital room for a month and a half until she died, due to one of many possession charges. Her dog, who greeted her upon her return from incarceration by knocking her over and licking her face off, was called ‘Mister’. Possibly the best dog name ever. Props, Lady Day.
Favourite drink: Top And Bottom — gin with port. And. Y’know. Heroin.
Died of: Cirrhosis of the liver, and most likely being awesome with gardenias in her hair.
There’s nothing funny or smart about drinking, and clearly tragedy follows hooch around like pebbly bottle-corner lees and bad tattoos. But a Western culture without drinking is half a culture, and creativity without glass-clinking influence is possible, but nowhere near as dramatic or heart-thuddingly poignant.
We love creative people for being so fucked up that they can’t control their brushstrokes, their vocal trills or their lumbering, midnight metaphors. But we hate them because they make dousing our organs with glorious, flammable nectars seem like a cool thing to do, and we hang out with the wrong people, kiss the wrong people, forget to call the right people and just not be able to get the goddamn key in the goddamn lock.
Cheers, you excellent buggers. Screw you.
