NYT Bookends: "What’s Become of the So-Called Literary Bad Boy?"

"Who was badder than the housebound, life-abstemious Emily Dickinson, kicking open the doors of perception with every poem?"

It’s the question every writer faces, every morning of his or her life: Am I Malcolm Gladwell today, or am I Arthur Rimbaud? Do I sit down with my pumpkin latte and start Googling, or do I fire a couple of shots into the ceiling and then stick my head in a bucket of absinthe? Which of these two courses will better serve my art, my agent, my agenda? Old hands are ready with the answer: If you want to stick around, kid, if you want to build your oeuvre, you’ve got to be — in the broadest sense — sober. You’ve got to keep it together. There’s no future in going off the rails. “You go in dutifully, slavishly, and you work,” commanded Norman Mailer, his head-buttings long behind him. “This injunction is wholly anti-romantic in spirit.” But his sternness communicates the strain, does it not, the effort required to suppress the other thing: the room-wrecker, the Shelley inside, the wild buddings of Dionysus.

This is where the literary bad boy lives today, at any rate — in the mind of the writer. He is a legend only, a creature of folk memory. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of traditionally chaotic real-life writers out there, right now, staying the course, crashing about and appalling their spouses; I imagine the ratio of Rimbauds to Gladwells has remained pretty much unchanged since the beginning of time. What’s changed, for us, is that the media is no longer interested. This year we also mark the centenaries of Dylan Thomas and John Berryman — two famous wild men, casualties of an era when poets seemed to have the life expectancy, roughly, of nose gunners. Thomas in particular, on his visits to the United States in the early 1950s, was a headline-making literary bad boy: feted and indulged, alcoholically ablaze, a kind of hedonistic scapegoat. And it killed him, of course.

Then came rock ‘n’ roll, youth, pop, big changes in the apparatus of fame. Now the literary bad boys had guitars: Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, John Lennon. They plugged directly into the emergent nervous system of the culture. How was Theodore Roethke going to compete with Jim Morrison? (Poetically, even — I’ll take Morrison chanting “Ride the snake/ To the lake” over Roethke’s “I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.” But that’s a discussion for another day.) There was some overlap: Hunter S. Thompson performed the writer-as-rock-star to great effect, and Mailer himself, in middle age, held his own in what he called “a new electronic landscape of celebrity.” But the mass mind had moved on. READ MORE