Funny Bone: Famous Writers & Their Drinks!

Why we writers must have our vices as well as our voices.

(Blythe Walcott for HERZ)

Imagine the great Ernest Hemingway with his scotch and soda. Or William Faulkner cracking a raw egg into his vodka and coffee. Carson McCullers nursing hot tea and sherry. Dorothy Parker sneaking sips of scotch from a bottle of fingernail polish and Truman Capote enjoying his double martinis in the bath tub as acclaimed Harlem icon James Baldwin famously lamented to Barbara Walters, “I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t drink. It’s affectionately called in Paris…the writer’s blood.”

It’s become almost a cliche when depicting famous writers — the drink in hand. And of course there was a time (the twentieth century) when alcohol was the ‘safest’ vice for a writer to partake in (as opposed to say morphine, heroine, cocaine or paid lovers who brought pesky viruses). For writers of the twentieth century— getting drunk was it!

So many of the most famous writers of the last century died of alcoholism. Shortly before he died, Truman Capote took Baldwin’s “we call it the writer’s blood in Paris” and snapped, “Well in New York — we call it the Writer’s Piss!”

But is it still that way in the twenty-first century? Or have medical marijuana and Yoga taken over the mantle?

Elaine Madison (Staff writer at HERZ) surmises: “More than anything — a writer needs to have the mind loose and lubricated. We need to be as free as possible to relate what’s on our minds, in our gut, to the world. But without losing control or focus. Today, a lot of us get high on pot. And that works for some. It erases the inhibitions. But drinking does that a little bit better in my opinion.”

“For me….Yoga,” says another colleague, Stephanie Simonovitch. “After I do a good full hour of stretching and re-balancing my body and my mind, I’m totally opened up and ready to write. Yoga gives me such a rush of enthusiasm and imagination. Yoga makes me write a hundred times better than I otherwise would.”

“A hot cup of coffee — or a cup of hot cocoa,” says dullard Hennessy Collins (just kidding Hen!).

One of my earliest creative writing coaches (we’ll call him Mr. Rhineking here) is braver. He says straight out, “I like a good fat blunt. I like it to be late at night. I like a glass of ice water and cool mints next to my iMac. And I like very soft symphony music playing very, very low — almost inaudible but just enough to act as my score. That’s how I like to write.”

Lois Hunt says, “I like both. A glass of vodka and a little weed sucked from a pipe every so often after that. I come from a deeply Conservative Republican family and it calms me down enough to stop being shocked and frightened over whatever I’m writing. It allows me to be fearless just long enough to write my novel — which is about being from a deeply Conservative Republican family and what all it took to survive that.”

Me myself (it’s Blythe Walcott) — I have some very odd habits when writing. For instance I like to be butt naked in front of my computer with green tea and vodka at my right and a thin white rolled blunt to my left (which is perfectly legal here in California). And that’s only occasionally — I don’t get high every single time that I write. But I do sometimes, especially if I’m writing something difficult or emotionally taxing, and it’s usually with both vodka and pot.

Before penning this article, I never once thought about how I write. But now that I think about it — I can’t do #2 in the bathroom unless I’m butt naked as well. Isn’t that weird? (I’m laughing as I write this, so feel free to laugh at me. I’m a fool for telling on myself).

I think overall writers drink less in this new century. But we still drink. We still feel that need to escape into the other-worlds and characters we’re writing about. And the drinks help us to do that. But we have much more knowledge about the dangers — more data — than writers had in the previous century. So perhaps that’s why so many modern writers are also health nuts, bottled water experts, yoga practitioners, Starbucks critics and medical marijuana patients. Every voice has a vice it uses for crutches.