We cannot understand all-too-many subjects of biographies without comprehending alcoholism. The stories of Jim Jones (Jonestown, Guyana), John Huston, Van Gogh, “Sybil,” Hemmingway and Spencer Tracy.
Viewing the subjects of biographies through the lens of alcoholism
I’ve long maintained that fundamental changes to personality resulting from alcoholism are so all-encompassing we cannot understand an alcoholic’s life without an appreciation for “euphoric recall,” whereby the addict views everything he says or does through self-favoring lenses, and its inevitable result, an inordinately large sense of self-importance. This egomania is fueled by wielding power, taking three main forms: abuse of others, a willingness to take extraordinary risks and overachievement. These behaviors of alcoholics are completely different from those that occur if addiction is never triggered. Further, behaviors committed by any particular early stage alcoholic are dramatically different from those committed later in life, as the addict spirals into the latter stages of addiction. Biographers, please take note.
Admittedly, this can confuse the observer, who may be a biographer. After all, most people don’t expect to see overachievement by someone who physically, emotionally or financially abuses others. Moreover, when reckless risks don’t pan out, the results manifest as impaired judgment rather than overachievement. Instead of success, we may witness failure, which tends to deflate that inflated ego and, without abstinence, leads more quickly to obvious late-stage alcoholism. As a result, alcoholism not only takes countless forms, but even many forms in the same person, depending on the addict’s current circumstances, environment and where he is in the progression of his disease.
Understanding an alcoholic is impossible without comprehending distortions of perceptions, the resulting egomania and behavioral changes relating to the stage of addiction. The early stage may be characterized by extraordinary overachievement, seeming success in one’s personal and business life and complete functionality. As the addiction takes hold and success turns to occasional failures, the alcoholic may become far less functional and more often appear (and actually be) “drunk,” he may begin to lose jobs or spouses and eventually lose friends and standing in his community. This trajectory can take decades, which makes it impossible for the uninitiated to make sense of an addict’s life. I have long maintained that without understanding alcoholism and identifying it, biographers, as well as journalists and historians, can’t really comprehend their subjects’ lives, as well as the current events and history for which addicts are so often responsible. Unfortunately, almost none grasp the fundamental ideas—the distorted perceptions, god-like sense of self and need to inflate the ego at the expense of others—of alcoholism.
Six recent reviews of biographies (all from The Wall Street Journal) are typical in their failure to recognize their subjects’ underlying behaviors as rooted in alcoholism and, hence, truly comprehend their lives. Either alcoholism wasn’t mentioned at all, or was but only as of peripheral interest or in helping to explain a continuation (but not instigator) of murky behaviors. Incredibly, alcohol or other-drug addiction wasn’t mentioned at all in the review of a new biography, A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception and Survival at Jonestown by Julia Scheeres, which suggests it wasn’t mentioned in the book either. Yet the review (“The Horror, The Horror,” The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2011) chronicles the life of by far the most sadistic addict among the six reviewed here. Jim Jones convinced 900 men, women and children into committing “Kool-Aid suicide” (really Flavor Aid with cyanide) in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. While a reviewer may omit a biographer’s identification of alcoholism, the author herself (if she has any clue as to the nature of the disease) shouldn’t make the same omission when being interviewed. Yet, in a recent radio interview, Scheeres failed to mention Jones’ proven addiction to alcohol and amphetamines, which is by magnitudes the best explanation for his megalomania and unparalleled ability to sell such an absurd and deadly idea. Amazing, too, the reviewer wrote, “While we may never understand exactly why so many people agreed to die, we can be sure that drugs, isolation and Jones’ depravity all played a part….[and that] Temple leaders ordered vast quantities of tranquilizers and Thorazine, ‘liquid cosh,’ in order to drug the members.” So we are told that his victims were drugged, but not him, even though anyone responsible for drugging someone else (a felonious, not to mention abominable behavior) is almost assuredly an addict himself. Only by understanding addiction and identifying the perpetrator of the horrific acts can we make sense of such tragedy, which Ms. Scheeres either didn’t uncover (even if obvious from Jones’ history) or at best seemed so unimportant to her it would go unmentioned in both a review of her book and a radio interview.
In a review of John Huston: Courage and Art by Jeffrey Meyers (“The Man Who Would be King,” The Wall Street Journal, October 15-16, 2011), Richard Schickel discusses the author’s description of director John Huston as “always charming and insouciant” yet “a bad and elusive father, a terrible husband to five wives and a largely absentee lover of literally hundreds of mistresses.” Huston’s sadistic streak extended from his professional to his personal life and “he was not very nice, the occasional grandiose gesture aside.” Incredibly, his alcoholism isn’t even mentioned in the review and, by extension, possibly not in the book either. If it is, it’s obviously not discussed as an explanation for his behaviors—every one of which mentioned here is not only consistent with but best explained by alcoholism, with any other explanations not even distant seconds.
In a review of Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith (“A Stranger to Himself,” The Wall Street Journal, October 15-16, 2011), reviewer Jonathan Lopez says the authors described Vincent Van Gogh as “a strange boy,” which suggested to the reviewer that a purported mental illness may already have been present. However, while Lopez at least mentions the heavy drinking, he gets cause and effect backward, writing: as his “behavior grew erratic…he drank heavily, sought out low company and had a protracted romantic entanglement with a prostitute.” This is very different from writing (as I would), “As his alcoholism took hold, he continued to drink heavily and his behavior grew increasingly erratic. He sought low company, including a prostitute with whom he had a protracted romantic entanglement,” which makes much more sense of Van Gogh’s volatile behaviors. His alcoholism-impaired judgment and alcoholism-fueled need to inflate his ego are the best explanations not only for his contentiousness, dangerous confrontations, reliance on his brother for support, disorderly habits, self-mutilation, institutionalization and ultimate untimely death, whether by suicide or “misadventure,” but also his extraordinary accomplishments. At least a review of the same book in The Economist does better: the second paragraph begins: “The book describes a lonely, bad-tempered alcoholic….”
Carol Tavris in reviewing Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan (“Multiple Personality Deception,” The Wall Street Journal, October 29-30, 2011) also gets a bit closer to the mark in stating that Sybil’s (whose real name was Shirley Mason) psychiatrist, Cornelia “Connie” Wilbur, “turned [Sybil] into an addict, giving her nearly a dozen drugs, including barbiturates, tranquilizers and anti-psychotics.” Yet Sybil was already suffering from various physical and emotional ailments long before she began treatment with Connie, suggesting that Sybil was already an addict or suffered severe trauma due to being raised by one. Either reason could explain Sybil’s need to please Connie, including her subsequent cooperation in agreeing to help Connie commission a New York magazine writer, Flora Rheta Schreiber, to write and publish a book on Sybil’s made-up multiple personalities (Sybil: the Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities, first published in 1973). Tavris writes, “The disorder…results from suggestion, sometimes bordering on intimidation, by clinicians.” While intimidation suggests to the addictionologist that Connie’s behaviors might best be explained by addiction, the idea isn’t broached.
As an aside, Tavris explains that after the Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) bubble burst in 1995 due to malpractice suits, including one by several patients who sued a St. Paul psychiatrist alleging the use of “punitive methods” to induce their so-called “multiple personalities,” “Psychological researchers went on to scientifically discredit virtually all the assumptions underlying MPD.” I read Sybil way back in the 1970’s and thought it was fallacious. I was unaware that MPD was more recently so thoroughly debunked, perhaps because those responsible for the DSM (the psychologists’ manual of personality disorders) renamed the supposed disorder as “dissociative identity disorder,” and continue to insist it exists. While it may occur in real life on exceedingly rare occasions without benefit of alcoholism, it’s almost always yet another alcoholically-induced fabrication.
Reviewer Allan Massie praised biographer Paul Hendrickson (“The Slow Crack-Up,” The Wall Street Journal, September 24-25, 2011) for knowing as much about Ernest Hemingway as anyone ever, having studied him for 30 or 40 years via “all” the other biographies, countless articles, library archives, his children and many others who knew him. The main question raised in Hemingway’s Boat, “what went wrong with Hemingway?” is answered with full knowledge of Hemingway’s well-known alcoholism, but according to Hendrickson his troubles “went deeper.” This is a classic example of a biographer who fails to comprehend early-stage alcoholism, when the alcoholic may be incredibly productive and completely functional. Hendrickson insists that Hemingway’s artistic decline and ultimate despair cannot be explained by any one thing; “that matter is too complicated. There are no simple explanations,” accepting only that “his dependence on alcohol is obviously another explanation of his decline.” While there are never simple explanations for the particular path that alcoholism takes, there is a simple explanation for the thread of craziness, successes and failures woven through the life of every alcoholic: alcoholic egomania in the early years and, should he live long enough, the brain’s failure to produce neurotransmitters on its own in later years, when the addict is unable to function without the sauce. This accounts for his early success, the company he kept, the sudden change from middle age to old-looking, how he could be kind and generous but also often fully capable of “appalling behavior” (including “shocking brutality, vulgarity and stupidity”), as well as his final artistic decline and despair. This did not likely result from an exhaustion of material as Hendrickson suggests; but rather an almost predictable result of late-stage alcoholism, when many authors develop “writer’s block.”
Reviewer Jeanine Basinger (“Hollywood’s Favorite Actor,” The Wall Street Journal, October 29-30, 2011) doesn’t shy away from repeating author James Curtis’s acknowledgement in Spencer Tracy: A Biography that Tracy was “throughout most of his life…an alcoholic.” Spencer Tracy “disappeared on lengthy binges, sometimes trashing hotel rooms,” and when on a double-date that he and Loretta Young had with Josie and John Wayne was “well blasted before dinner” and was carried to his hotel room by Wayne. During one week in 1945, Tracy “ran amok” in New York and was ultimately admitted to Doctors’ Hospital. Yet, both Basinger and Curtis still miss the progenitor of it all, despite Curtis’s recognition that Tracy’s drinking did not stem from his supposed guilt over his son’s deafness, as is apparently commonly believed by other biographers. Basinger writes, “The truth is no one today can really know what made Tracy so angry, so guilty, so unhappy—and so drunk—for so much of his life. Mr. Curtis sketches Tracy’s human flaws with clarity and tact. He doesn’t try to explain what he can’t explain.” Of course, we know better: alcoholism explains Tracy’s binges and charm, his running amok and achievements, his ill health (and consequential early demise) and his charisma. It explains Spencer Tracy.
Most biographers, journalists, public policy analysts and historians, fail utterly to make sense of alcoholic subjects of their biographies and a human history filled with events created or deeply affected by alcoholics and the manifestations of their disease. Being unaware of euphoric recall and figuring out the connection to egomania, which manifests in the abuse of others, reckless risk-taking, a “God” complex, overachievement and a sense of invincibility, it is impossible to make rhyme or reason out of behaviors that otherwise fly in the face of logic. It will be a very different world when those who chronicle the perpetrators of such behaviors, current events and history “get it.” When that era arrives, biographies, news and histories will be re-written in ways that will make the original versions almost unrecognizable.