Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages

565 Pages·2008·9.79 MB·English

by  Michael Largo

GENIUS
AND
HEROIN
The Illustrated Catalogue Of Creativity, Obsession,
And Reckless Abandon Through The Ages
M L
ICHAEL ARGO

For Susy
Ces serments, ces parfums, ces baisers infinis
Contents
INTRODUCTION
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
V
W
Z
APPENDIX
SOURCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
ALSO BY MICHAEL LARGO
PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS
PRAISE FOR MICHAEL LARGO
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
From the dawn of civilization there has always been a fine line between
creativity and self-destruction. An inherent compulsiveness is often
required in art to master a level of original thought and superlative skill.
It requires everything, some believe, even one’s own life. Genius and
Heroin chronicles the lives of the famously talented in all fields,
including writers, artists, musicians, actors, politicians, military leaders,
sports figures, and even scientists, who entwined their genius with one
of many paths toward self-ruin.
For many, their greatness and their pain are inseparable. The price for
genius and the pursuit of creativity at all costs were steep, even if it
resulted with a statue in the town square, a book on the bestseller list, or
a picture hanging in a museum. Whether their downfalls were from
opiates, pills, alcohol, absinthe, or the slow-motion suicide of obsession,
Genius and Heroin examines how the notoriously creative lived and died.
I was fascinated with the age-old question, did genius create their
torment, or was it their anguish that created their genius? When Samuel
Johnson observed, “A man of genius is seldom ruined but by himself,”
he had no idea of the variety of ways this could be achieved.
The means by which artists, writers, and other innovative minds
liberated their creative powers, even when they knew it would cause
their death, presents an interesting correlation to the type of work they
created. The alcoholic produces work differently than the heroin addict,
or the speed freak, or the artist plagued by an idea or obsession,
although all are equally doomed. There is also a connection between the
style of art produced and how they died. There’s a distinction in putting
a noose around the neck, a bullet in the brain, or one’s head in a gas
oven, as opposed to eating or drinking oneself to death or overdosing on
drugs. Although the result is the same, we search for a reason to make
sense of such endeavors. I’ve concluded that, of the five hundred artists
examined in Genius and Heroin, for nearly 80 percent, alcohol and drug
abuse were ultimately detrimental to their creative output, especially if
they lived past the age of fifty, even if many of their best works were
produced in the height of their addictions. For a few, less than 10
percent, their only remembered works of creativity were produced as a
direct result of some form of drug or alcohol use. For the remaining
figures, it had neither benefit nor any other effect on their work—other
than that it killed them. By examining some of the more lurid details, we
can see a surprising link between creativity and self-destruction. It is also
a culturally acceptable spectator sport to learn who’s who in the creative
arena and how they lost their battle to keep feeding their muse.
For the artists and ingenious personalities portrayed in this book, the
passion to pursue a creative endeavor required their adaptation to a
different set of rules. The basic instinct of self-preservation became
secondary to the desire to produce original works. This seems an
unexplained glitch but was nevertheless part of the human psyche from
the earliest attempts at art.
What drives creativity at the cost of self is a question science has yet
to answer. Today, it’s vogue to view it as a mental illness. Just as
bloodletting was once a cure prescribed to alleviate the excessive desires
of “mad artists,” today mental disorders are the assigned diagnoses to
explain a creative anomaly. Vincent Van Gogh, for example, persisted at
painting without accolades or financial gain for more than fifteen years,
and for this unexplainable passion, no less than thirty different medical
conditions have been named to account for his genius. Was it genius, or
was some form of mental illness the reason Van Gogh could do nothing
else but paint? Is it drugs, drink, and obsession that creative minds use
to alleviate their condition, and are they the only means to allow genius
to bloom unencumbered? Now, the genius of ruin is cut into jigsaw
pieces and fit the portrait of the artist as a young bipolar. To disagree
with the validity of this synopsis in this age of prescribable disorders
would be like dropping a match at the foot of the stake at which one is
to be burned, much as it was in an earlier age to question the science of
bloodletting. Nevertheless, as psychologist Dr. Stephen Ilardi noted, “If
throughout the course of human evolution people were as vulnerable to
depressive illness as the twenty-first century Americans, we would have
long since gone extinct as a species.”
Of course, it would be unwise to discount scientific advancements
made in understanding the brain, or refute a medical opinion of mental
illness diagnosed for anyone. However, the artist as self-sacrifice to his
art is a powerful magnet. To the immortal mindset and inherent
invincibility of youth, the image of a ruined life as a price to create
immortal work seems an easy enough ticket to purchase. For example,
no matter what school of literature one admires, it seems striking that
many of the great writers were entangled with some form of obsession
and devastation. The fact that five of the seven American Nobel
Laureates in Literature were alcoholic becomes hard to ignore for a
young writer who sets out to create work equally memorable. Poets such
as Keats, Byron, and Shelley made their young deaths part of the
poignancy of the work, as it is for the twentieth century icons Plath,
Woolf, Sexton, and Berryman. How would Sylvia Plath’s line “The blood
jet is poetry and there is no stopping it” read today if she hadn’t
committed suicide and were alive, seen endorsing a product, say, a
medicine for diabetes—or depression? Ernest Hemingway, likewise,
clung to alcohol as a once reliable formula to kick his muse into action,
persisting to the bitter end. Of craft and how to find inspiration, he
talked of the “clean, well-lighted” place needed to keep away despair,
though many chose the thin ledge, the dank basement, the rooftop in the
rain, or under sweaty sheets instead of the sunny studio facing the sea as
the place to produce their masterpieces. And even when they had the
plush pad, they brought their obsessed self with them. It’s only natural
to search for reasons, medical or otherwise, to explain self-d estruction
and wonder: besides the art, what in life ultimately cast the creative
person over the edge—was it a broken shoelace or an atom bomb? In
Genius and Heroin we get to see the details behind their fall.
Many creative people throughout history explained the indefinable
rationale behind inspiration not as a mental illness, rather as a muse or
entity invading from some outside source, whether demon or angel.
What is considered genius is a matter of perception. In Roman times,
everyone was thought to have one. The etymology of genius traces it to a
Latin word that explained how a person came to an original or