Book reviews give clues to alcoholism in their subjects: writer Roald Dahl, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, stock trader Jesse Livermore and Chinese Mao-supporting writer Lu Xun
Biographers and Reviewers Often Miss Possible Alcoholism: Author Roald Dahl, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Stock Trader Jesse Livermore and Chinese Writer Lu Xun
There are many descriptive words and behaviors suggesting alcoholism in the subjects discussed by journalists, historians, biographers and book reviewers. “Partier” is an obvious one; “charismatic” less so, but usually every bit as telling. Occasionally the subject is described as having been “reduced to drinking himself to death,” as reviewer Magette Wade in Barron’s described Frank O’Connor while his wife Ayn Rand carried on with her far younger lover Nathaniel Branden, but such clarity in a review usually occurs only in cases of late-stage addiction. Every so often what is to us obvious is disclosed near the end of a review, as Michael J. Ybarra did in a recent Wall Street Journal article about the work and museum of Zhou Shuren, who devoted his life to bringing a communist revolution to China under the pen name Lu Xun.
Lu, who dropped out of medical school after two years because he felt literature was the way to change the spirit of his fellow Chinese, has long been considered China’s first modern author. A surprising number of writers have been alcoholics, probably because, as hypothesized in the winter 2007-2008 edition of Wealth Creation Strategies in a piece entitled, “How do Alcoholics Get Away with Financially Abusing Others?” damage to the rational brain centers allows the part of the brain that controls emotions, which is undamaged by alcoholism, to more readily connect with others. This allows alcoholics to express extremes of fear, hatred, sorrow, passion and love that make for great and emotionally-satisfying writing. Devoting one’s life to a cause and being a great and influential writer would hardly seem like clues to alcoholism to non-addictionologists. Neither would an act of treason committed while studying in Japan on a government scholarship: Lu shaved off his ponytail, which all Chinese men wore as a symbol of submission to the emperor. Yet, in the second-to-last paragraph of the article, Ybarra touches on a possible explanation for the life of Lu Xun when, in describing the Lu Xun Museum in Shanghai, he laments that several aspects of Lu’s life go un-mentioned at the museum: “Lu’s drinking, his marital problems and his disagreements with Communist orthodoxy.” Had Ybarra understood the disease, he might have identified Lu as an alcoholic (“drinking” is rarely mentioned in historical figures unless the “drinking” was a problem) or included the fact that Lu’s father died of alcoholism, which might have caused Lu to react and compensate in ways that often mimic alcoholism.
We aren’t as lucky when reading Victor Niederhoffer’s review of the classic Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Annotated Edition, by Edwin Lefevre, with extensive annotations by investment advisor Jon Markman and a foreword by hedge-fund manager Paul Tudor Jones. While Reminiscences, told in the first person, is a fictionalized autobiography of the legendary trader Jesse Livermore, Markman, in his annotations, fills in the details of Livermore’s real life. From 1910 to 1920, despite extraordinary abilities and insights (an appendix contains 100 key tenets to Livermore’s trading method which, when used properly, professional traders say can be extremely profitable) Livermore repeatedly went bust due to excessive leverage. Despite having built a $100 million fortune by 1929, he went bankrupt for “at least the fourth time” in 1934. The $2 million in excess debt he owed at the time included “promised payments” to a dancer “for keeping him ‘cheered and amused,’ and a liability for breach of promise to a former secretary.” Niederhoffer, who himself has made mistakes that cost him his fortune at least twice, explains that Livermore “did not seem to learn from his mistakes” and repeatedly overspent, used too much leverage and generated way too much in the way of commissions relative to the risks he took. He went bust for the last of at least six times in 1940 at age 63, when he committed suicide. Niederhoffer—and Lefevre before him—could easily have begun the story of Jesse Livermore by saying, “Let me tell you about the life of a trader whose alcoholism impelled him to develop trading methods that led to great wealth, yet who repeatedly displayed impaired judgment in ways that cost him his fortune many times over. Because of egomania rooted in alcoholism, Livermore built great wealth. Because of a sense of invincibility rooted in alcoholism, Jesse Livermore took unwarranted risks and lived an extremely volatile life.” Yet, alcoholism—the behavioral clues to which are far more numerous than in the description of Lu Xun—while never mentioned as likely or even a possibility, is clearly the best explanation for the path his life took.
A review of Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl, by Donald Sturrock, in The Economist, is another example that includes numerous behavioral clues to alcoholism, as well as many euphemisms for the problem without naming or even considering the possibility. The biography, while sympathetic to Dahl, is “also attentive to his many flaws,” which is code for possible alcoholism. His macabre tales won critical acclaim; the greatest horror story writers arguably were two alcoholics, Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King. Sturrock described Dahl as a “grandiose, mercurial, capricious” man who in many ways remained childlike, all classic descriptors of alcoholics. Despite an editor’s admonition that he shouldn’t ignore “the rules that govern the world of children’s books” when writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl continued to flout most such rules. The reviewer (The Economist articles are all written by unnamed staff) connected the dots between Dahl’s dismissal of what adults thought about his books and the fact that over the years he fell out with many of his closest friends, and even that Dahl could be “a bully,” but didn’t suggest the most likely underlying reason for his flaws, grandiosity and capriciousness, a “rules don’t apply to me attitude,” bullying and the gradual loss of many friends: alcoholism. It’s unlikely the biographer did, either, even if he remembered watching him “opening several of the hundreds of cases of 1982 Bordeaux…that were piled up everywhere in his cellar. The wines were not supposed to be ready to drink until the 1990s, but he paid no attention. ‘Bugger that,’ he declared. ‘If they’re going to be good in the 1990s, they’ll be good now.’”
The last in this review of reviews is on one of the great business success stories of all time: the founders of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. The title itself, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, includes a combination of descriptors that often end up being clues to hidden alcoholism: extraordinary success and betrayal. Saverin’s equity stake was “diluted for reasons that he strongly objects to” and the two founders had a “falling out.” A “fraternity-house atmosphere” governed the start-up’s early days, which included drinking contests in competitions designed by Zuckerberg to recruit new programmers. This is the sort of description that should make the antennae of any addictionologist rise, even if so far we lack absolute proof that addiction explains the early success of Mark Zuckerberg. Since the natural history of alcoholism takes decades to play out, we will know only in the fullness of time—and then only if we are either lucky enough to have a biographer who understands the role that alcoholism often plays in creating a subject worth writing about, or unlucky enough to watch an alcoholic tragedy unfold.