Where Sci-Fi/Fantasy Authors Do Their Work
Where I Write is a photogallery of science fiction and fantasy authors in their workspaces. The photo above is of Piers Anthony, author of the Xanth series. Photographer Kyle Cassidy plans to create a book filled with such images.
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Four Writers and Their Strange Obsessions
Honore de Balzac – Caffeine
There are some of us – myself included – who consider themselves addicted to caffeine. I get headaches if I don’t have a Diet Coke or coffee early enough in the day, and I definitely get cranky. But that’s nothing compared to Honore de Balzac. The famous French author would drink up to fifty cups of coffee every single day. And not stuff watered down with milk and sugar and the like – nope, Balzac liked thick, black, Turkish coffee. If it was unavailable in liquid form, or if he didn’t want to wait for it, he simply popped a handful of beans into his mouth and chewed (yuck). It may have kept him up all hours so he could write fantastic and prolific works of literature, but it didn’t do him any favors in the health department: he suffered from stomach cramps, high blood pressure and an enlarged heart. Some reports say it was the coffee that killed him – ulcers ate completely through his stomach and he died from a combination of that and caffeine poisoning. Others say it merely contributed to his already not-health-conscious lifestyle: in addition to the coffee, he ate vast quantities of food and had quite the waistline. Either way, he died at the early age of 51 on August 18, 1850.
Charles Dickens – Morgues
Charles Dickens could not get enough of body bags and toe tags. “I am dragged by invisible force to the morgue,” he even admitted. He loved to go down to the city morgue and would just hang out there for days on end, watching new dead bodies come in and observing the people there working on them. He referred to the whole ordeal as “the attraction of repulsion.” I feel like there’s a joke in here somewhere about not being caught dead in a morgue, but I’ll go ahead and leave that one alone. Dickens also liked to check out famous murder scenes and try to analyze exactly what happened. Maybe he was just ahead of his time? I’m thinking a new TV series might be in order – CSI: Charles Dickens. I’d totally watch that.
James Joyce – Farts
I’ve written about his addictions before, but I’m strangely fascinated with his fascination. Although they didn’t really diagnose sex addiction at the time, I bet if James Joyce was around today he would be classified as one. He wrote hundreds of letters to his lover, Nora (who later became his wife), and spared no expense in the detail of what he wanted the two of them to do when they were together again. But oddly, he seemed to be most obsessed with her farts. It’s a repeated theme in his letters – here’s one example: “I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have.”
Ummm. Yeah.
Vachel Lindsay – Germs and Cleanliness
Poet Vachel Lindsay grew up listening to his physician dad extol the virtues of avoiding germs and disease by staying clean. Unfortunately, toward the end of his life, the idea started to consume him entirely. He thought his wife was trying to kill him by sleeping with other men and then purposely spreading venereal disease to him, and believed germs were almost certainly the cause of his writer’s block. On December 5, 1931, Lindsay rearranged the furniture in the living room after his wife went to bed. He sat in the middle of all of his accolades – newspaper clippings, awards and certificates – and gulped down a mug of Lysol. He ran through the house screaming, “I got them before they got me! Let them try to explain this, if they can.”
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Writers Who Suffered From the Sylvia Plath Effect
I’m in a book club (we’re looking for a quirky-yet-clever name for ourselves if anyone has any suggestions) and last week we discussed The Bell Jar. It’s one of those books we all felt we should have read at some point during our high school careers and never did, so it was long overdue. In my research about the similarities between the book’s main character and the book’s author I came across something called Sylvia Plath effect.
It’s a relatively new theory in the world of psychology – in 2001, James Kaufman conducted a study that showed creative writers, especially female poets, are more susceptible to mental illness than other types of professions.
Being a female writer (not a poet, though), I was understandably interested in this theory. There really is a disproportionate amount of writers who have committed suicide over the years, so to brighten your day I thought I’d look at a few of them here.
Sylvia Plath
It makes sense to start with the theory’s namesake, I think. For those of you who haven’t read The Bell Jar, it’s a thinly disguised autobiography about one girl’s spiral into depression including suicide attempts, hospital stays and shock treatment therapy.
The bell jar is used as a metaphor for the feeling the main character has when she’s going through her depression – she feels like she’s trapped under a bell jar, stifled and numb. Sylvia predicted her own future when she wrote from the perspective of her protagonist – “How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”
Despite marriage, children, a successful career as a poet and a promising one as a novelist, Sylvia’s own bell jar did descend again. On February 11, 1963, she killed herself by putting her head in the oven with the gas on. (Photo from A.J. Marik via Find a Grave)
Virginia Woolf
Poor Virginia Woolf seemed doomed from the start. She suffered a nervous breakdown when her mother died when Virginia was just 13. Her father died just nine years later, causing another breakdown which resulted in a brief period of institutionalization. She and her sister were subjected to sexual abuse by their half brothers, which certainly did not help her state of mind.
On March 28, 1941, Virginia decided she had had enough, loaded up her pockets with heavy rocks and walked into the River Ouse near her home. Judging by her symptoms and behavior, modern-day doctors think she probably suffered from bipolar disorder.
Sara Teasdale
Sara Teasdale was a talented poet, which, according to James Kaufman, put her at a serious disadvantage when it came to battling depression. In 1918, she won the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize, which was the precursor to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Toward the end of the 1920s, though, things headed downhill for Sara. The Great Depression hit the same year she decided to divorce her husband.
Plagued by financial problems, her close friend and former suitor Vachel Lindsay killed himself by drinking Lysol in 1931. Vachel was a poet, so you could say his suicide contributes to Kaufman’s theory that creative writers are more susceptible to mental illness.
In 1933, Sara reunited with Vachel when she took an overdose of sleeping pills in her apartment in New York City, drew herself a warm bath and never got out of it. (Photo from quebecoise via Find a Grave)
Anne Sexton
Anne was never shy about admitting to her mental health problems and openly talked about her lifelong battle with bipolar disorder. She was somewhat of an instant success in her poetic career – after attending a workshop taught by poet John Holmes, she immediately had poems published in The New Yorker, Harper’s and the Saturday Review. By attending workshops and adopting a writing mentor, Anne became friends with poets such as Maxine Kumin, W.D. Snodgrass and none other than Sylvia Plath. She was such close friends with Sylvia, in fact, that she wrote a poem entitled Sylvia’s Death about, well, Sylvia’s death. She outlived Sylvia by 11 years, though – on October 4, 1974, Anne had lunch with Maxine, returned home and killed herself by sitting in her garage with the door down and the gas running.
Sarah Kane
Kaufman’s theory holds up even with contemporary writers. Sarah Kane was a playwright and screenwriter who suffered from severe depression. She was voluntarily admitted twice to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in London. She channeled her depression into plays which were performed by the Royal Court. Critics weren’t too impressed when the plays debuted which may have lead to her suicide in 1999. After an overdose of prescription medication landed her in King’s College Hospital but failed to kill her, she ended up hanging herself in a hospital bathroom. (Photo from IainFisher.com)
So, that was morbid. But it does provide some supporting evidence for Kaufman’s Sylvia Plath effect. What do you think? Does the Sylvia Plath effect make sense? The other side of the coin is that there are a number of suicides with any occupation and these are just more public given the public nature of the work.
I’m not really sure which side I believe, but I am a little bit relieved to know I have no talent for poetry whatsoever.
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