Creating Misery

Over the last year, I’ve been reading biographies of writers, people like D.H. Lawrence and e.e. cummings and others. I am struck by their misery, and how well they spread that misery around.

Writers, it appears, are an unhappy breed. We are depressed, we are alcoholic, we are in spiritual torment, we are angry, we are sexually conflicted, we are self-absorbed. We are forever aliens in a world we experience intensely. Even our writing rarely makes us content and often keeps us poor. 

Not long ago, I read a review of a new memoir by the daughter of novelist William Styron (Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner). In Reading My Father, Alexandra Styron apparently examines life growing up with her angry, alcoholic and depressed father. The question at the heart of her reflections, according to reviewer Keith Staskiewicz: Is his art enough of an excuse?

Maybe this is the right question. But, having lived in the skin of a writer for more than 50 years, the true point, I believe, is this: The writer’s art is not the excuse for bad behavior. The writer’s art is the result of the bad behavior, or, more to the point, the misery that is behind the bad behavior.

A writer writes to make sense of acutely felt pain — not just the writer’s, but the world’s. Writers and other artists — musicians, painters, photographers — give expression to the emotions and experiences that make up our humanity. But first they must feel it, and feel it acutely.

Talent is not the writer’s excuse for creating misery. Misery — felt and inflicted — is their excuse for writing. Writers turn misery into a gift. Without them, too many of us might think we were alone in our misery.

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