THE WRITER AS HIS OWN CHARACTER
In “The Long Goodbye” by Raymond Chandler, one of the primary characters is Roger Wade, an alcoholic writer of trashy novels who has loftier ambitions.
In “Under the Volcano”, Malcolm Lowry’s tale details the last day in the life of an alcoholic British consul who is undergoing a spiritual crisis.
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and The Sea” tells the story of an aging fisherman’s long struggle to catch a giant marlin.
I’ve often wondered how deeply writers imbue themselves into their work. It might be a conscious effort or the result of emotional distress breaking down any barriers and allowing that particular inner self to come through clearer than any other time. Chandler, himself an alcoholic, wrote during his wife’s final illness. The despair he suffered personally comes through clearly in his most literary work. Lowry, also an alcoholic, was often drunk and out of control while living in Mexico as his first marriage was breaking up. Hemingway was also going through the breakdown of a marriage and suffered mental health issues as well as alcoholism.
These works resonate deeply. They are emotional in the sense that they exude a deep sense of humanity and resonate within the reader in a more than ephemeral way. Whatever you might read about the creation of these works, we will never be certain of the true intentions of these writers.
For my own part, the creation of Harold Bergman in The Day of Calamity, Volume 1 of The Wichita Chronicles, came about because I wanted a mouthpiece for my own moral and spiritual sensibilities. While we share the same initials and birthday, there are sufficient differences between us that no one will mistake a barely thirty-year-old war veteran with a sixty-something suburban homeowner.
Yet, I have become attuned to Harold’s dilemmas and can speak to them on a deeper level. A certain distrust of the very wealthy who seem detached from communal good. A healthy respect for his religious upbringing that doesn’t prevent questioning of the way the world is at the moment. A desire for stability in the midst of seeming impermanence. All of this, of course, incorporated into a hardboiled historical crime fiction.
I suppose extreme duress can bring out a quality in one’s writing that takes it to another level. After all, Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize ostensibly for that work. “The Long Goodbye” is considered by some to be Chandler’s best. This does not mean writers should place themselves within a horrific set of circumstances, suffer for their art, so to speak. Rather it is interesting to come across these examples and realize the dark cloud of personal life did not impede the work.
As with other restrictions and limitations that life invariably contains, it is simply important to recognize the creative process has, to some degree, recuperative properties. Even when I am not suffering, finishing a session of writing is like coming out of a spa.
