Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Read

The abominable private conduct of literature's and art's great names — the murderers, deadbeats, eccentrics, and wits whose genius excused, in their own minds, absolutely everything.

Genius is not a character reference. The men and women who produced the supreme achievements of the Western imagination were, with dispiriting frequency, also liars, brawlers, deadbeats, egomaniacs, and in several documented cases outright murderers — and they tended to regard their gifts as a standing license for all of it. This edition is offered in a slightly warmer spirit than our usual contempt: with a raconteur's delight. The behavior is indefensible. It is also magnificent in its awfulness, and someone has to write it down. The blade is reserved, as ever, for the vanity that mistook talent for permission.

The Bear of Trinity College — Lord Byron

Informed that Trinity College, Cambridge forbade students from keeping a dog, the young Byron noted that the regulations said nothing whatever about bears — and duly installed a tame one in his rooms, walked it about the grounds, and proposed, with a straight face, that it be considered for a college fellowship. In later life, prowling Venice, he kept a private menagerie and a tally of conquests he cheerfully numbered in the hundreds.

The verdict: A man who reads a rulebook looking only for the word that isn't in it has already told you, completely, how he intends to spend his life.

Dead Over the Bill — Christopher Marlowe, 1593

The most dangerous playwright of the Elizabethan age — spy, accused atheist, brawler, the one rival the young Shakespeare had reason to fear — died in a Deptford lodging house with a dagger driven in above the eye, ostensibly in a sudden quarrel over who would settle the day's bill. His three companions were all men of the shadow-world of Elizabethan intelligence, and the killing has smelled of state business ever since.

The verdict: He wrote of men who sold their souls for power and forbidden knowledge, and then died, allegedly, in a squabble over a lunch tab — a final act too on-the-nose for even Marlowe to have dared to stage.

The Murderer Who Painted Saints — Caravaggio, 1606

The man who painted some of the most luminous sacred images in all of Christendom was, off the canvas, an armed and habitual menace who finally killed one Ranuccio Tomassoni in a Roman street fight. The Pope's reply was a death sentence so absolute that any citizen at all was entitled to collect his head, and Caravaggio spent his remaining years producing masterpieces on the run, one step ahead of his own bounty.

The verdict: He could render the very face of divine mercy as no one before or since, an ability that did precisely nothing to install a trace of it in himself.

The Memoir as Confession and Brag — Benvenuto Cellini, 16th c.

Cellini, goldsmith and sculptor to popes and kings, wrote one of the great autobiographies of the Renaissance — and spent a generous portion of it boasting of the men he had killed: a rival goldsmith, his own brother's killer, and (he claimed) the enemy commander he personally shot dead at the Sack of Rome. By his own gleeful telling, a Pope reassured him that men of his genius were simply not bound by the ordinary law.

The verdict: Most murderers have at least the decency to deny it. Cellini wrote his down, numbered them, and seems chiefly worried that posterity might not be adequately impressed.

The Childcare Theories of Mr. Rousseau — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau wrote Émile, the single most influential treatise on the tender education and rearing of children the West has produced. He also fathered five children with his mistress and deposited every one of them, at birth, at the Paris foundling hospital — an institution of catastrophic mortality — from which he never troubled to retrieve a single one.

The verdict: He gave the world its handbook on raising children by first clearing his own calendar of the actual specimens, which is, at the very least, a formidable act of time management.

“Ignorance, Madam, Pure Ignorance” — Samuel Johnson

The author of the first great dictionary of English — a man who compulsively touched every post he passed, hoarded dried orange peel for reasons he declined to explain, and twitched with tics that bewildered his age — was asked by a lady how he had come to define a certain word so completely wrongly. He did not bluster, and he did not excuse. “Ignorance, Madam,” he replied. “Pure ignorance.”

The verdict: The compulsions made him strange; the answer made him immortal. It is the rarest wit there is — the kind a man aims, without a flinch, directly at himself.

The Slow Poison — Voltaire

Voltaire was said to drink something on the order of forty cups of coffee a day, and when an anxious friend warned him the habit was a slow poison certain to be the death of him, he is reported to have agreed entirely: it must indeed be slow, for he had been drinking it for some sixty-five years and was not dead yet. He went on to outlive most of the doctors who fretted over him.

The verdict: He converted even his own vices into epigrams — the one program of self-improvement truly available to a wit, which is not to quit the habit but to decisively win the argument about it.

A Duel With the Wallpaper — Oscar Wilde

Arriving at New York customs and asked whether he had anything to declare, Wilde is said to have answered that he had nothing to declare but his genius. He kept the register to the very end: dying in a shabby Paris room, as the story is fondly told, he surveyed the hideous decor and announced that he and his wallpaper were now engaged in a duel to the death — one or the other of them would have to go.

The verdict: To meet poverty, exile, and death with a joke about interior decorating is either the shallowest thing imaginable or the deepest, and Wilde spent an entire life proving it was somehow both at once.

The Statues of the Louvre — Hemingway & Fitzgerald

By Hemingway's own published account, a distraught F. Scott Fitzgerald confided that Zelda had pronounced him anatomically inadequate to the lifelong task of pleasing a woman. Hemingway conducted a brief clinical inspection, pronounced his friend entirely normal, and — when Fitzgerald remained unpersuaded — marched him across to the Louvre to study the proportions of the classical statues, for reassurance and a sense of perspective.

The verdict: It remains the tenderest scene in all of literary masculinity: one titan of American letters escorting another past the marble gods, to prove to him that the cosmos had not, in fact, shortchanged him.

Three Hundred Snails to Dinner — Patricia Highsmith

The novelist who gave the world its most charming psychopath kept, in life, a colony of some three hundred pet snails, to whom she was devoted. She is said to have carried a selection of them to dinner parties in her handbag, and once across a national border concealed beneath her clothing, preferring their company — by a wide and freely admitted margin — to that of any human being.

The verdict: She loved her snails because they were quiet, self-contained, and made no demands whatsoever — which is to say she had located, at last, the only dinner guests a true misanthrope can abide.

Draw what comfort you can from the gallery. The people who wrote the books that civilize us and painted the images that exalt us were, off the page and away from the easel, frequently insufferable, occasionally homicidal, and reliably convinced that genius is a permission slip valid in all jurisdictions. The work is immortal; the conduct was a disgrace; and the two of them shared, the entire time, a single body. It is, in the end, the most consoling lesson literature offers the rest of us — that the gift and the character are kept in entirely separate accounts, and that no quantity of the former has ever once been observed to fund the latter.