Declan Lynch

On addiciton

The weakness of the artist for the drink and the drugs and the gambling is a thing of legend, but also of fact. The creative person does tend to be vulnerable to the lure of addiction, but there is an upside

— if there are indeed 50 ways to leave your lover, the artist is more likely than most to find at least one of them.

And it will happen for roughly the same reasons that the trouble started in the first place — things like a powerful sense of curiosity; a need to experience different states of being; a desire to rip it all up, and to start again. Things of the imagination.

In this country in particular, we have accepted that the writer or the musician is so open to the attractions of the wild side of life, we have encouraged it, seeing it as a kind of a certificate of authenticity.

Brendan Behan most notably represented this school of thought, which placed the writer in a maelstrom of alcoholic and creative chaos, of good work and good times in equal measure.

There are these great photographs of Behan with the painter Lucian Freud, taken outside the Mansion House in Dublin in 1952. And while Behan would already have started out on the road to the alcoholism that killed him at 41, it is probably not as well known that Freud, if anything, was a more pathologically addicted individual

— gambling it was with Freud, backing horses with such reckless unconcern for the consequences, it seemed he could only contemplate a day at the races if it involved some potentially life-destroying proposition.

To be putting it all on the line, to be risking everything on the 3.30 at Doncaster, made Freud feel completely alive, in a way that drinking and carousing made Behan feel alive — much more alive, eventually, than sitting down at a table and trying to write could ever make him feel.

Indeed, it was Behan who cut to the heart of his own tragedy when he described himself as “a drinker with a writing problem” — at least, according to legend, that’s what he said. At a certain point in such lives, everything seems to be “according to legend”.

But in this case, I believe it is fact that Behan knew he had once been a writer who drank, until, at some indefinable point, he became just a drinker who wrote. And, eventually, just a drinker.

Which is clearly most unfortunate, and yet there is something in us which loves our self-destructive artists much more than the ones who lead a suburban kind of life, honouring their contracts to produce a new book every two years; nice people on the whole, but you know... not very interesting. Not Behan or Myles or Kavanagh.

In this there is almost an echo of the old Humphrey Bogart line, that you never trust a man who doesn’t drink. There is this demand on the artist to go to extremes. To be very brilliant, and very crazy.

And if it could be done for any length of time, then surely a lot more people would be doing it. Alas, it can’t really be done for any length of time, but still, we cherish that delusion.

When I was drinking, in some part of my head I thought I was one of those writers who drank — except one day I noticed that these books I was supposed to be writing did not, in fact, exist.

I had written no books at all. No novels. Or no plays. Or no poems — though in truth, that was a very good thing not to have done. No books, at any rate; none at all. And then, one day much later, when I had stopped drinking, I noticed that I had written about 10 books. In fact, at that stage, I couldn’t recall exactly how many I’d written. So let’s look at those numbers again: on the drink, no books. Off the drink, about 10 books. Off is better.

“To be risking everything on the 3.30 at Doncaster made Freud feel completely alive”