(Pulitzer prize-winning author,
William Styron)
I finished another novel last week. But this means little.
It means I awakened at 6:30 a.m. for two years or so — on holidays, my birthday, every morning but the one my husband and I camped on our honeymoon — went immediately to the computer while my saturated dream state remained, and wrote for an hour and a half before starting my day. It means when I found myself sitting with 450 double-spaced pages of a story that crystallized in surprising ways, I shipped it off to my agent — a New Yorker whom I’ve met only three times — and now I’m waiting for his response. Waiting.
Experience with my first novel taught me that even if someone does pick up your book, some caring editor who shepherds it through the cut-throat global publishing scene and commissions beautiful cover art and publicizes it even though you, its author, are a complete unknown from the Midwest, it doesn’t mean you will become famous or wealthy. It only means there exists this knowledge that such a thing can happen. You can dream up characters and fall in love with them, put them into strange, wonderful, and unlikely situations, draw them out on paper in arbitrary symbols, sending them forth to touch people you’ll never meet. It’s pretty cool.
It’s also hell. Did I mention I’m waiting. . . .? Waiting, waiting. Oh, and waiting. Which is excruciating, by the way. But apparently, this writing life is hard no matter who — or how great — you are.
Recently, when someone close to me was being treated for depression, I re-read William Styron’s memoir Darkness Visible, in an attempt to understand what my friend was going through. The first time I encountered this book, it made an impression on me because it described with such visceral power the dark hole of depression. One almost enters the illness while reading Styron and wonders if, simply by putting the book down, it will be possible to emerge. It’s a terrifying experience, which I had on the second reading as well.
But this time, another thread in the book caught me: Styron’s nearly Gothic description of the relationship between wine, aging, depression and art. This passage, for instance —
The storm which swept me into a hospital in December began as a cloud no bigger than a wine goblet the previous June. And the cloud — the manifest crisis — involved alcohol, a substance I had been abusing for forty years. Like a great many American writers, whose sometimes lethal addiction to alcohol has become so legendary as to provide in itself a stream of studies and books, I used alcohol as the magical conduit to fantasy and euphoria, and to the enhancement of my imagination. There is no need to either rue or apologize for my use of this soothing, often sublime agent, which had contributed greatly to my writing; although I never set down a line while under its influence, I did use it — often in conjunction with music — as a means to let my mind conceive visions that the unaltered, sober brain has no access to. Alcohol was an invaluable senior partner of my intellect, besides being a friend whose ministrations I sought daily — sought also, I now see, as a means to calm the anxiety and incipient dread that I had hidden away for so long somewhere in the dungeons of my spirit.
The trouble was, at the beginning of this particular summer, that I was betrayed. It struck me quite suddenly, almost overnight: I could no longer drink.
That there is a connection between my wine drinking and my writing seemed likely, though it was not until I read Styron’s words that I truly understood what it might be. He goes on, in Darkness Visible, to plot out what happens once he is — for whatever reason — sickened by alcohol. A fog seizes his mind. A malaise settles over his soul. He cannot think, he cannot write. He becomes remote and suicidal. He loses all hope.
I cannot say what the moral of this story might be. Styron recovered from the depression he wrote about so starkly but fell into another, even more profound, later in life and had to be treated with electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). He died of pneumonia, at the age of 81, in November of last year.
“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis,” Styron once said. And he lived it as well.
I take some small comfort in the fact that I’m doing my part. Drinking my wine. Writing my stories. Letting neurosis dance freely across the surface of my sober morning brain. And waiting. . . .
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