Literary Rogues
Authors: Andrew Shaffer
DEDICATIONFor Tiffany, my favorite vice
Author's Disclaimer Disclaimer
2. The Opium Addict: Coleridge
3. The Pope of Dope: De Quincey
4. The Apostle of Affliction: Byron
5. The Romantics: The Shelleys
7. The Realists: Balzac, Flaubert, and Sand
8. The Fleshly School: Baudelaire
9. The French Decadents: Rimbaud and Verlaine
10. The English Decadents: Wilde and Dowson
11. The Lost Generation: The Fitzgeralds
12. Flapper Verse: Parker and Millay
13. Bullfighting and Bullshit: Hemingway
14. The Southern Gentleman: Faulkner
15. Deaths and Entrances: Thomas
16. The Beat Generation: Kerouac and Ginsberg
18. Dead Poets Society: Berryman and Sexton
19. The Merry Pranksters: Kesey
20. The New Journalists: Mailer and Capote
22. The Workshop: Cheever and Carver
23. The Toxic Twins: McInerney and Ellis
25. The Bad Boy of American Letters: Frey
Postscript: Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?
The writers featured in
Literary Rogues
are professionals. Do not attempt to indulge in any of the vices on display within these pages without first consulting either a physician or a lawyer. Probably both, just to be safe.
Ignore the author's disclaimer. I've tried out every vice in this book and seem to have turned out all right. I'm not broke, strung out on drugs, and living under a bridge. As of this writing. Subject to change.
“There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. . . . [We] struck elaborate poses to show that we didn't give a shit about anything.”
T. C. BOYLE
, “
GREASY LAKE
”
“A
s a young child
, I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous.” These are the words of William S. Burroughs, but they could have been spoken by countless other authors over the years. In fact, I suffered from the same delusion when I was twelveâuntil one Sunday afternoon when my parents dropped me off at a sketchy, two-star hotel.
“Comic Convention. Today. $1. Grand Ballroom,” read the sign in the lobby. Once I found the ballroom, I handed a crumpled dollar bill to the woman working the door. My hand trembled with excitement. I was moments away from breathing the same air as Marvel Comics writer
Frank Castle (not his real name)
, the advertised “guest of honor.” As I stepped through the ballroom door, I tried to imagine what would happen once I was face-to-face with the author of such superheroes as the ass-kicking, cigar-chomping Wolverine. The possibilities were limitless, but they all ended with Castle offering me a job writing
The X-Men
.
After my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, I surveyed the room. It was an endless sea of comic books, piled on tables and packed in boxes underneath. To my immediate left, I found what I was looking for atop a card table: a folded sheet of paper with the guest of honor's name. A squat, potbellied man in a faded Batman T-shirt sat slumped behind the table, nursing a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew.
This obviously had to be the writer's bodyguard
.
“Excuse me, when will Mr. Castle be here?” I asked him.
The man chuckled. “He's here right now,” he said. After an awkward pause in which it became clear I didn't understand, he added, “I'm Frank Castle.”
“Oh.” I made no effort to disguise my disappointment. While I wasn't expecting Castle to be injecting heroin into his eyeballs while getting blown by groupies, I was wholly unprepared to discover that the man behind the curtain was so ... ordinary.
Were all authors such unremarkable creatures?
Backing away from the table, I quickly made up my mind to pick a different career.
I stumbled across
Less Than Zero
in a used paperback bookstore when I was fifteen. (For those of you who don't know what bookstores are, ask your parents.) I tore through it in one evening, and then started rereading it.
Less Than Zero
was the literary equivalent of a Guns N' Roses albumâall sex, drugs, and bad attitude. And from what I subsequently read in magazines, its author, Bret Easton Ellis, lived by the adage “Write what you know.” Ellis was, in a word,
cool
.
Before long, I was drinking, smoking, and having sex (or at least trying to). My grades were slipping, tooânot just because I was stoned most of the time, but also because I was spending more time reading books I wanted to read than the ones being assigned in class. Jack Kerouac was cool; Charles Dickens wasn't. Hunter S. Thompson was cool; Jane Austen wasn't. Cool writers were easy to spot: all you had to do was look for the cigarettes dangling precariously from their lips and the whiskey bottles next to their typewriters.
It wasn't until I went to college that I realized how outdated the tortured-artist caricature in my head was. Kerouac was considered something of a joke by my professors and classmates; Ellis was regarded as a prima donna who valued shock over craft. Passing out drunk while filling the bathtub and accidentally flooding your hotel room like F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn't coolâit was pathetic and sad. Drinking wine out of a human skull like Lord Byron? That was something only halfwits like Beavis and Butt-Head would find amusing.
Nowadays, unrepentant boozers in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker are conspicuously absent from bestseller lists, where the courteous and sober rule the day.
“Writers used to be cool,”
James Frey tells me. “Now they're just sort of wimps.”
Well, fuck. Whatever happened to the literary bad boys and girls of yesteryear?
In
Literary Rogues
, I turn back the clock to visit the writers who were as likely to appear in gossip rags as they were to be on bestseller lists. They wrote generation-defining classics such as
The Great Gatsby
and
On the Road
, earning them coveted spots in the literary hall of fame. They also lived like rock stars ages before Keith Richards smoked his first cigarette. From shooting smack to shooting other people, wayward authors have done it allâand lived long enough to write about it, in most cases. Their antics are sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling. But, like their work, always fascinating and impossible to look away from.