The Romantic Myth of the Tortured Alcoholic Artist

Popular cultural tropes that associate creativity with drug and alcohol use give everyone an excuse for bad behaviour

As only a semi-reformed alcoholic, I have no right to be too preachy when it comes to matters of the bottle. To friends, acquaintances, and family who drink problematically and have yet to acknowledge it, my approach has simply been to offer up my own experience with the demon drink as a case study and hope that they may see some parallels. 

The furthest I have pushed my message of abstinence/limited drinking in a real life, interpersonal setting, is when I asked a family member who has an alcohol problem whether he’d ever considered giving it up. His response was enough to tell me it was a dead-end, and I dropped the issue and haven’t raised it again since.  

He told me “Not on your life – it’s part of my identity as an artist.”  

I am not in the business of telling anyone how to live their life, but I am well enough versed in the subject of alcohol and its effect on the brain to have arrived at some fundamental truths. One of these concerns the romantic notion of the tortured alcoholic artist which I have found behaves culturally as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card for creatives who are a little too fond of the bottle. 

Pick your stereotype, real or fictional – Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, or my own personal favourite Don Draper. Despite the irrefutable evidence that these famous addicts, and many like them, as well as the scores of unknown creatives represented by Mad Men’s Draper, do indeed produce impressive bodies of work, the idea that alcohol or drug use in and of itself adds meaning and depth to a person or their work is a fallacy.  

There are of course exceptions to the rule. The Hunter S Thompson character in the 1980 film Where the Buffalo Roam even says, when asked by a college student whether drugs and alcohol would make him better writer, “I hate to advocate drugs or liquor, violence, insanity to anyone. But in my case it's worked.” 

It’s true – there are enigmatic creatives like Thompson, or Kurt Cobain, who do perhaps achieve some elevated form of expression through the derangement of their senses, but this is not the case for most people, and I would also retort in the case of Cobain or Thompson or any such character – What more could they have achieved if they’d been sober?  

As is often the case in life – cause and effect here has been confused. The popular idea is that creative types are creative because they use alcohol and drugs. In reality, it is usually the case that creative types use alcohol and drugs because they are creative. 

In other words – the creative condition is an affliction of sorts, and a painful one at times, that is often correlated with anxiety, depression, degrees of Asperger’s, or even more serious conditions such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Creatives often struggle inwardly – they are sensitive to a wide range of stimuli, particularly that of other humans, and their minds are often full. Such people tend naturally toward drugs and alcohol because these substances can provide an escape. 

It is a mistake and indeed an insult to attribute the talents of a creative to their alcohol abuse or their drug dependency. This myth also does the user themself no favours and leads to the kind of statement that I heard from my family member when I raised the prospect of abstinence.  

“It’s part of my identity” … I believe this is one of the saddest things anyone has ever said to me. And yet, while I can fault the reasoning, I cannot blame the speaker of these words, for I myself used to believe the very same thing. 

Such thinking is attractive to an addict. It is indeed a get-out-of-jail-free card in the mind of the drunk artist or the stoned songster. It is also a monumental self-deception. I can only speak for myself, and what I’m about to say could be criticised as a generalisation, or even projection, but there is plenty of anecdotal comment from veteran creatives around the world that suggests the romantic ideal of the wasted prodigy is largely a myth and that for most writers, musicians, painters et al, even if a startling opus has at some point been achieved through the use of  drugs and alcohol, this methodology is not sustainable, and usually ends up being more of a hindrance to one’s creativity than a catalyst.  

In my own experience this has certainly been the case. In my twenties I wrote, recorded, and produced a few albums of music over a three- or four-year period. Most of this time I was drinking heavily and using drugs. I was also unemployed. I did find the boozing and drugs added a certain flavour and intensity to my work at the time – but it’s perhaps not surprising the music and lyrics were mostly very dark and cynical. All in all, I was reasonably productive during this period. Compare it to the last eighteen months however, which I’ve spent largely sober and during which I’ve not only established this blog and a corresponding podcast, but also completed 145,000 words of my first novel and lost about 10kg through a steady diet and exercise regime – all while holding down a full-time job. 

The difference in productivity is marked. But I’m not sure I could have matched even the marginal output of my musical days in the last few years had I still been drinking at the level I was then. It is quite easy to regularly debase oneself in one’s twenties – the hangovers simply aren’t that bad, and the body and mind bounce back much more nimbly than they do in one’s thirties or forties.  

But as we age, the ability to stay up all night partying and then achieve anything of any value the following day (or even for the following few days) is seriously depleted – and the curve is directly proportionate to age. Each year that passes, the hangovers get worse. That’s just a fact most of us have to accept. Not only have I deduced this through two decades of experimentation, but I see it clearly in the experience of friends and colleagues. I’m sure there’s probably some good science to back this up too.  

It is also true that the longer we use drugs and alcohol, the more we need to consume to get the same high. In this respect the widely held axiom of Alcoholics Anonymous is accurate – that it is a progressive disease, meaning that it gets worse and worse until finally it consumes its victim. 

My ex-boss, a veteran adman who was drinking nine bottles of wine a day at his peak and is now eight years sober once visited me in hospital after I landed myself there having consumed large amounts of gin and Valium, and he told me “There are only three places this road ends: Prison, institutionalisation (the funny farm), or the grave.” 

I didn’t really believe him at the time – I guess I thought I could be the genius who somehow managed to incorporate unbridled debauchery into a wholesome and fulfilled life.  

It’s five years later and I’ve since done a great deal of reflection and changed my relationship with alcohol, and I believe him now.  

Perhaps this axiom doesn’t hold true for the big-time playboys of the world – those with enough money and support strata to weather the storm of serious drug and alcohol abuse – it makes sense. Indeed, I can imagine it being very easy as a billionaire with no daily commitments to go on a month-long vodka and cocaine bender and then check into a cushy $5,000 per day rehab facility when I’d had enough. I’m sure many of the world’s super rich follow that exact playbook. Well, good for them. But the fact is most of us don’t even come within a whiff of this kind of lifestyle, and if we misuse drugs and alcohol regularly enough, then eventually they will get the better of us. 

And this doesn’t just apply to voracious users like me, nor only to creative types. It is a lesson for all who flirt with the bottle or the bag. I have in fact recently begun looking on my own frenetic drug and alcohol use as a blessing – for the sheer magnitude of my problem alerted me to the fact while I was still relatively young that I had to take action. Many are not so lucky – if I may use that word in this context, perverse as it may be. Many suffer quietly, a few drinks here, a few drinks there. A bag of coke here, an ecstasy tab there. A bottle of wine after work each night and a bit more on the weekend surely isn’t a problem, right?  

I don’t know… you tell me. For I see such people around me. I study them (for, as a fellow who is resolved to mind his own business, this is all I can do). And I watch them slowly gaining weight, becoming more lethargic, losing interest, losing hope, settling for vacuous mediocrity, getting older. And in many ways, I think this slow decline can be worse. 

Alcohol and drugs do not make us better. They are fun because they remove us from ourselves and allow us the release of acting like a clown for a few hours. But the problem is, this clown act can become a sad comedy that plays itself out in perpetuity.  

No one is better when drunk or high – invariably we all become lesser versions of ourselves. It’s true that some can drink in strict moderation and the worst side effect they are likely to manifest is a slightly raised voice. But I’ve seen enough to know that most people who use alcohol and drugs, use them to excess and will at some point experience moderate to severe negative consequences.  

A truism that has always stuck with me, spoken by the late ‘Uncle Howie’, crackhead uncle of New York rappers Necro and Ill Bill, goes: “I had better times when I was sober, but I had more exciting times when I was using.” 

This is what it boils down to. We are more excited when we are high and drunk. We are not better. Our neurochemistry plays tricks on us, and the hormones that wash around our systems when we’re using convey feelings of wellbeing and profundity. They can even enhance and perpetuate the creative process for a time, which adds weight to the stereotype of the drunk, tortured artist. 

But I believe this trope is largely a creation of Hollywood, and perhaps indeed of the drunk artist himself. It is a fabricated justification for bad behaviour, and for being less than we could otherwise be.  

And if we go one step further and permit ourselves to view the tortured artist as a symbol of the human spirit, as is so often suggested in films, music, and novels, then does not this trope provide all people the get-out-of-jail free card they need to justify their own self-destructive behaviour? For which person has never intensely identified with the wailing of their most beloved singer when in the depths of a booze binge? Or imagined themselves in the role of a favourite actor when doing a line of coke? 

The drunken artist trope is not only a fundamental fallacy for those of us engaged in creative pursuits, it functions also as an enabling device for regular people who’ve never written so much as a haiku or strummed a G chord. 

It behoves us all to be weary of these cultural stereotypes – for while they are enticing to the chaotic half of our spirit, like the substances they cynically advocate for, they are not in fact magic, but poison. 

It must as always be noted that I say all this as a guy who still enjoys getting blotto. I am not above the trappings of intoxication. But I have long since abandoned the idea that the state of inebriation is anything profound or uplifting, much less something that serves my creative endeavours.  

Let us be honest about what alcohol and most other drugs are and then use them with an appropriate degree of awareness, caution, and restraint. Let us not lie to ourselves and one another and pretend that these things make us better. Let us not intoxicate ourselves further with romantic imaginings that reinforce the behaviour and conceal from us the truth that as a rule, these pills, powders and potions turn us into preposterous vaudevillians. Let us acknowledge that they are fun, and exciting, and allow ourselves our indulgences. But let that be then end of it, lest it actually does become part of our identity.