Literary Rogues Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Tiffany, my favorite vice

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Author’s Disclaimer

  Author’s Disclaimer Disclaimer

  Epigraph

  Preface

  1. The Vice Lord: Sade

  2. The Opium Addict: Coleridge

  3. The Pope of Dope: De Quincey

  4. The Apostle of Affliction: Byron

  5. The Romantics: The Shelleys

  6. American Gothic: Poe

  7. The Realists: Balzac, Flaubert, and Sand

  8. The Fleshly School: Baudelaire

  9. The French Decadents: Rimbaud and Verlaine

  10. The English Decadents: Wilde and Dowson

  11. The Lost Generation: The Fitzgeralds

  12. Flapper Verse: Parker and Millay

  13. Bullfighting and Bullshit: Hemingway

  14. The Southern Gentleman: Faulkner

  15. Deaths and Entrances: Thomas

  16. The Beat Generation: Kerouac and Ginsberg

  17. Junky: Burroughs

  18. Dead Poets Society: Berryman and Sexton

  19. The Merry Pranksters: Kesey

  20. The New Journalists: Mailer and Capote

  21. Freak Power: Thompson

  22. The Workshop: Cheever and Carver

  23. The Toxic Twins: McInerney and Ellis

  24. Prozac Nation: Wurtzel

  25. The Bad Boy of American Letters: Frey

  Postscript: Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Copyright

  Back Ad

  About the Publisher

  Endnotes

  AUTHOR’S DISCLAIMER

  The writers featured in Literary Rogues are professionals. Do not attempt to indulge in any of the vices on display within these pages without first consulting either a physician or a lawyer. Probably both, just to be safe.

  AUTHOR’S DISCLAIMER DISCLAIMER

  Ignore the author’s disclaimer. I’ve tried out every vice in this book and seem to have turned out all right. I’m not broke, strung out on drugs, and living under a bridge. As of this writing. Subject to change.

  EPIGRAPH

  “There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. . . . [We] struck elaborate poses to show that we didn’t give a shit about anything.”

  T. C. BOYLE, “GREASY LAKE”

  PREFACE

  “As a young child, I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous.” These are the words of William S. Burroughs, but they could have been spoken by countless other authors over the years. In fact, I suffered from the same delusion when I was twelve—until one Sunday afternoon when my parents dropped me off at a sketchy, two-star hotel.

  “Comic Convention. Today. $1. Grand Ballroom,” read the sign in the lobby. Once I found the ballroom, I handed a crumpled dollar bill to the woman working the door. My hand trembled with excitement. I was moments away from breathing the same air as Marvel Comics writer Frank Castle (not his real name), the advertised “guest of honor.” As I stepped through the ballroom door, I tried to imagine what would happen once I was face-to-face with the author of such superheroes as the ass-kicking, cigar-chomping Wolverine. The possibilities were limitless, but they all ended with Castle offering me a job writing The X-Men.

  After my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, I surveyed the room. It was an endless sea of comic books, piled on tables and packed in boxes underneath. To my immediate left, I found what I was looking for atop a card table: a folded sheet of paper with the guest of honor’s name. A squat, potbellied man in a faded Batman T-shirt sat slumped behind the table, nursing a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. This obviously had to be the writer’s bodyguard.

  “Excuse me, when will Mr. Castle be here?” I asked him.

  The man chuckled. “He’s here right now,” he said. After an awkward pause in which it became clear I didn’t understand, he added, “I’m Frank Castle.”

  “Oh.” I made no effort to disguise my disappointment. While I wasn’t expecting Castle to be injecting heroin into his eyeballs while getting blown by groupies, I was wholly unprepared to discover that the man behind the curtain was so ... ordinary. Were all authors such unremarkable creatures?

  Backing away from the table, I quickly made up my mind to pick a different career.

  I stumbled across Less Than Zero in a used paperback bookstore when I was fifteen. (For those of you who don’t know what bookstores are, ask your parents.) I tore through it in one evening, and then started rereading it. Less Than Zero was the literary equivalent of a Guns N’ Roses album—all sex, drugs, and bad attitude. And from what I subsequently read in magazines, its author, Bret Easton Ellis, lived by the adage “Write what you know.” Ellis was, in a word, cool.

  Before long, I was drinking, smoking, and having sex (or at least trying to). My grades were slipping, too—not just because I was stoned most of the time, but also because I was spending more time reading books I wanted to read than the ones being assigned in class. Jack Kerouac was cool; Charles Dickens wasn’t. Hunter S. Thompson was cool; Jane Austen wasn’t. Cool writers were easy to spot: all you had to do was look for the cigarettes dangling precariously from their lips and the whiskey bottles next to their typewriters.

  It wasn’t until I went to college that I realized how outdated the tortured-artist caricature in my head was. Kerouac was considered something of a joke by my professors and classmates; Ellis was regarded as a prima donna who valued shock over craft. Passing out drunk while filling the bathtub and accidentally flooding your hotel room like F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t cool—it was pathetic and sad. Drinking wine out of a human skull like Lord Byron? That was something only halfwits like Beavis and Butt-Head would find amusing.

  Nowadays, unrepentant boozers in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker are conspicuously absent from bestseller lists, where the courteous and sober rule the day. “Writers used to be cool,” James Frey tells me. “Now they’re just sort of wimps.”

  Well, fuck. Whatever happened to the literary bad boys and girls of yesteryear?

  In Literary Rogues, I turn back the clock to visit the writers who were as likely to appear in gossip rags as they were to be on bestseller lists. They wrote generation-defining classics such as The Great Gatsby and On the Road, earning them coveted spots in the literary hall of fame. They also lived like rock stars ages before Keith Richards smoked his first cigarette. From shooting smack to shooting other people, wayward authors have done it all—and lived long enough to write about it, in most cases. Their antics are sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling. But, like their work, always fascinating and impossible to look away from.

  Pour yourself a drink. The party is about to begin...

  Andrew Shaffer

  Lexington, Kentucky

  August 2012

  1

  The Vice Lord

  “In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.”

  —THE MARQUIS DE SADE

  By the time the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) was born in Paris, exactly three hundred years had passed since Johannes Gutenberg revolutionized the world by designing the first European printing press using movable type. Prior to Gutenberg’s invention, books had been painstakingly copied by hand—a copy of the Holy Bible, for instance, could take a monastery scribe a year or more to produce—and thus books were primarily of a religious and educational nature, intended for the clergy and the upper classes. Adoption of G
utenberg’s printing methods was swift, expanding readership to all walks of life. While nearly 200 million copies of books were printed by the end of the sixteenth century, government regulation and church censorship continued to restrict the diversity of the marketplace; early bestseller lists were dominated by the Holy Bible and religious books by authors such as the Catholic priest Erasmus.

  Fighting the free flow of information was an exhausting battle, however, and officials eventually began to ease restrictions. During the eighteenth century, the variety of reading material available exploded, and new forms such as novels and journalism emerged. The real promise of the Gutenberg revolution was finally coming to fruition. Nothing, however, could have prepared readers for what the Marquis de Sade was about to unleash upon them. As French philosopher Albert Camus wrote, “Contemporary history and tragedy really begin with him.”

  When he was four years old, the Marquis de Sade (born Donatien Alphonse François) found himself exiled for the first time. He had attacked a playmate in a dispute over a toy, raining down blows upon the older boy’s head until they were separated. The child was a royal prince, and although aristocratic blood flowed through Sade’s veins, assaulting a member of the ruling family was an inexcusable gaffe.

  His father, the Comte de Sade, was a French diplomat who had already disgraced the family name with his own quarrelsome misconduct. Sensing that the apple had not fallen far from the tree, the comte sent Sade away to live with his paternal grandmother to avoid any further embarrassment to the family name. The comte’s mother pampered her grandson, so the child was soon shuffled into the care of his forty-year-old uncle, the Abbé de Sade.

  A cleric and scholar, the abbé appeared at first glance to be just what the young boy needed to be brought into line. Appearances were deceiving. As it turns out, the abbé was either the coolest or the creepiest uncle in history. He lived somewhat unconventionally for a cleric, with two mistresses (a mother-daughter pair) under his roof. He frequented prostitutes, meticulously curated an extensive pornography collection, and palled around with the French philosopher Voltaire.

  For the next five years, the young marquis explored the subterranean depths of his uncle’s castle, where shackles hung from dungeon walls. Sade also had unlimited access to the abbé’s impressive library (sample titles: History of the Flagellants, The Nun in the Nightdress, John the Fucker Debauched). When Sade returned to Paris at the age of ten, the young lad may very well have carried a virtual catalog of wicked acts with him in his head.

  In autumn 1750, Sade began attending the Collège Louis-le-Grand, a Jesuit grammar school where the faculty were known to whip and sodomize students with impunity. Sade attended school for only a few years, but it was long enough for him to pick up more wicked knowledge for his arsenal.

  Sade left school at the age of fourteen for the military. Despite seeing action during the Seven Years’ War, Sade was dismissed in a massive troop reduction following the war’s end in February 1763. He was now a twenty-two-year-old living on his own in Paris. With money to burn, Sade went wild with abandon in the Parisian theaters and brothels, much to his father’s dismay.

  The Marquis de Sade’s behavior should not have come as a surprise to the comte: the boy was only following in his old man’s footsteps. “Forgive my mischief,” Sade wrote in a letter. “I am taking up the family spirit, and if I have anything to reproach myself for, it is to have had the misfortune of being born into it. I should think myself almost virtuous if by the grace of God I were to take up only a portion of the family’s evils.”

  A family friend, Madame de Raimond, cautioned the comte not to stress over the lad’s behavior. “Sometimes we must sin in order to find our way back to virtue,” she wrote. “The age of passion is terrible to get through. I am very pleased that he does not suffer from the passion of gambling.” Little did she know that Sade was already an avid gambler. Ironically, gambling was the least destructive of his vices.

  Meanwhile, Sade’s father had been searching for a wife for the marquis. The appropriate candidate would come from a wealthy family who would complement the noble lineage of the Sades. After several false positives, the comte identified a suitable daughter-in-law: Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, the progeny of a wealthy judge.

  The young marquis, however, had plans of his own. After falling in and out of love with several different women, he set his sights on marrying Mademoiselle Laure-Victoire de Lauris, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old courtesan. He told his father about his plans, including the salacious detail that he was being treated for a venereal disease. The comte ordered his son to forget about Lauris and return to their family estate as soon as he had a clean bill of health. “M. de Sade’s escapades might still put an end to [the marriage with Renée-Pélagie]. I won’t be sure of anything until I see them at the altar,” the Comte wrote.

  On May 1, 1763, the Sade and Montreuil families met in Versailles. The king even made an appearance, lending his royal signature to the marriage contract. Everyone was there. Except ... wait. Where was the groom?

  Sade had never left Paris. After breaking up with Lauris, he was now trying to reconcile with her. Since the missing groom was also treating his venereal disease, the comte told the Montreuils a version of the truth: Sade was sick. Rumors flew, however, and Montreuil’s family learned the truth about the groom’s absence. Madame la Présidente, the powerful matriarch of the Montreuil family, took the news in stride: things would change after the wedding, she reasoned. As long as Sade showed up for the actual ceremony on May 15, she wouldn’t worry.

  After his reunion with Lauris failed, Sade finally accepted his fate. He had been spending money quite flagrantly, and the wedding was his best opportunity to keep living the life he was accustomed to—he literally could not afford to go against his father’s wishes. Sade arrived in Avignon just in time to sign the marriage contract and stand on the altar for the religious ceremony. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

  Madame la Présidente was sufficiently impressed with Sade’s conduct in person, and wrote to the abbé, “Your nephew could not be more charming or desirable as a son-in-law, with that genial intelligence of his and that tone of good education that your care seems to have instilled in him.” The abbé no doubt smirked at the implication he had instilled any sense of discipline in his nephew.

  The Montreuil family agreed to provide the newlyweds with accommodations and a handsome yearly stipend, and Sade grudgingly settled into the Montreuil Paris home following the wedding. For the man who called wedlock “the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation,” marriage was a fate worse than death. The newlywed marquis bought as much freedom as he could afford, renting separate residences in Paris, Arcueil, and Versailles for the sole purpose of continuing his extracurricular sexual activities.

  That October, Sade’s carefully compartmentalized lives nearly collided when he was arrested by authorities for “mistreating” a prostitute. Sade had forced the woman to drink his semen in a chalice, asked her to denounce God, and then threatened to shoot her—with two pistols, no less. Next, he masturbated with an ivory crucifix and read blasphemous poetry to her (either his own or from an unknown book). It was a performance art piece for the ages.

  Sade was imprisoned for fifteen days while investigators contemplated what to do with him. Based on interviews with other prostitutes, authorities determined that the incident was not an isolated one. They recommended severe punishment for the miscreant.

  The Comte de Sade petitioned the king for a pardon, which was granted (much to the chagrin of local authorities). La Présidente learned of the ordeal, but kept her daughter in the dark as Renée-Pélagie was already three months pregnant with Sade’s child.

  Fortunately for the marquis, life soon returned to normal. Although his wife’s first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, she gave birth to two sons and one daughter (“dreadful brats”) between 1767 and 1771. Sade continued to
visit prostitutes to satisfy his darker desires, but undoubtedly inflicted some measure of abuse upon his wife. At some point, Renée-Pélagie learned of her husband’s indiscretions but said nothing.

  Sade’s father passed away in 1767, and was thereby saved from watching his son desecrate the family name any further. He died not a moment too soon, because the Marquis de Sade was once again arrested on charges of “mistreating” a prostitute following an incident on Easter Sunday in 1768. This time, Sade was exiled from Paris; had it not been for his mother-in-law’s behind-the-scenes intervention on his behalf, he might very well have been executed. A prominent bookseller of the day wrote that it was “one more example that in our century even the most abominable crimes meet with impunity so long as those who commit them are fortunate enough to be noble, wealthy, or well-connected.”

  The marquis moved his base of operations to the Sade family castle in the French countryside. Allegations of sexual abuse, kidnapping, and poisoning of prostitutes followed him. Alongside these antics, he had an ongoing affair with his wife’s sister, Anne-Prospère de Montreuil. His wife was rather blasé about her husband’s behavior. She was devoutly religious and took her sworn duty to stand by her man seriously, even if her husband was a staunch atheist and serial philanderer.

  In June 1772, Sade left for Marseilles for a few days to obtain a loan for an expensive, summer-long play festival he was in the midst of staging at his Lacoste estate. While they were in the city, Sade and his loyal manservant, Latour, decided to pick up some local prostitutes for entertainment. When procuring the women for his master, Latour told them the marquis would ask them to eat anise candies “to make them fart and take the wind in his mouth.” While this certainly wasn’t a typical request, it seemed like an easy way to make money. Five prostitutes agreed to join them for their festivities.