CJR Daily on a new study, "Depression, Drink and Dissipation", looking at 187 famous journalist-literary figures from history and their carousing self-destructive ways. Question: Did the booze and emotional problems make them good writers/journalists, or were they good writer/journalists in spite of them? (thanks, Kevin!)
Published in the winter 2007 volume of Journalism History, "Depression, Drink and Dissipation" finds that almost half of the best people to ever push a noun against a verb in newsprint were debilitated by depression, serious anxiety, or bipolar disorder; over a third were titanic drunks, pill-poppers, or opium-addicts; nearly a third were serial philanderers, and a sizable bunch were misogynists, man-eaters, or violent bullies. In almost every case, the tendency to booze, carouse, or otherwise self-annihilate developed or seriously deepened during their days in journalism. All this is enough to make Underwood, who left a career covering politics for the Seattle Times to teach at the University of Washington, wonder whether "these behaviors and the choice of journalism and writing as a career are perhaps not unrelated." Well, yeah.
Underwood is vague about the exact nature of that relationship. But the sheer breadth of his evidence supports what pop culture portrays and many of us know: journalists are a hard-living lot. Some of the country's best-known drinking quotes come from the likes of Ben Franklin ("Wine is constant proof that God loves us"), H.L. Mencken ("I've made it a rule to never drink by daylight and never refuse a drink after dark"), and Ambrose Bierce, who rebuffed the pious abstainer as "a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure." ...
wealth of amusing details, hold deeper significance for the news. Should we care about a reporter's personal problems?
Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin answer with a burped, "Hell, yes." For over a decade, the two ex-hard drinkers and legendary newsmen have been saying that print owes its readership woes to a dead corporate air in the newsroom. "Everything's more restrained and we've lost a certain edge," Hamill told the Denver Post in 1995. Meanwhile, Breslin knows what's missing: "It's the drinking." They grouse that today's reporters forgo drinking clubs and bawdy pals in favor of health clubs and quiet homes.
Their remarks call up a romantic image of crapulous newsmen throwing cigarette butts on the floor and writing with wet towels wrapped around their throbbing heads. But let's not forget the consequences. Underwood lists nineteen literary journalists, including Agee, Ring Lardner, and Robert Benchley, who died from drinking. Seven others, among them George Orwell and Mark Twain, killed themselves smoking. William Dean Howells and A.J. Liebling were two of thirteen who ate their way to an early grave. Then there are the suicides: goodbye Gloria Emerson, Ernest Hemingway, and Hunter S. Thompson.
For the pure quality of the product, however, Breslin and Hamill might be onto something. Psychologists have shown that neurotics can make good journalists when they project their inner doubts and dissatisfactions onto the world. This is the energy behind investigative reporting and the source of journalism's vaunted distrust of power, the argument goes. "Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers," Breslin says.