Writers Behaving Badly

Thirteen masters of the sentence who could not master themselves: killers, thieves, traitors, con men, and one poet-warlord who annexed a city. It has to be seen to be believed.

We have twice before opened the police blotter of the republic of letters, and twice the vein has proven richer on the second dig. Here is the third excavation, and the rule holds: the imagination that can build a cathedral of prose can just as fluently build an alibi, a pyramid scheme, a treason broadcast, or a private army. These thirteen are all new names — no repeat offenders from our earlier volumes — and they are arranged chronologically, so the reader may observe that five centuries of civilization improved the printing, the libel laws, and the police response times, and left the author himself exactly where Villon found him: one bad night away from the gallows. The style was sublime. The conduct has to be seen to be believed.

The Gallows Ballad, First Person — François Villon, 1455–1463

The finest French poet of his century killed a priest in a Paris street brawl in 1455 — a quarrel over a woman, a dagger, and a fatal stone — and was pardoned on grounds of self-defense. Restored to society, he promptly helped burgle the College of Navarre of five hundred gold crowns. Arrested again in 1462 after another brawl, he was sentenced to be hanged, and while awaiting the rope wrote the Ballade des pendus, the greatest poem ever composed from death row — imagining his own corpse swinging with his fellows, rain-washed and pecked by crows. The Parlement commuted the sentence to ten years' banishment from Paris. He walked out of the city in January 1463 and out of recorded history in the same step. No one knows where or when he died; the poems know everything else.

The verdict: Literature's oldest standing demonstration that the muse does not check references. He wrote his own eulogy from the condemned cell, beat the rope, and vanished — the only clean getaway in this entire collection.

The Round Table, Drafted in a Cell — Sir Thomas Malory, 1450–1470

The Morte d'Arthur — chivalry's great charter of honor, courtesy, and knightly virtue — was written in prison by a Warwickshire knight whose charge sheet included ambushing the Duke of Buckingham with intent to murder, extorting money with menaces, stealing livestock, sacking an abbey, and twice escaping custody, on one occasion by swimming the moat at Coleshill by night. He was never convicted of the worst charges — fifteenth-century justice being as political as its literature — but he spent the better part of a decade in and out of Newgate and other prisons, and it was there, 'knight prisoner,' that he compiled the noblest book of the English Middle Ages, closing with a request that readers pray for his deliverance.

The verdict: The book that taught English gentlemen their honor was written by a man the courts of two kings declined to leave at large. Camelot, like most utopias, was drafted by someone with a good view of a wall.

The Upstart Crow's First Review — Robert Greene, 1592

Greene lived the full Elizabethan literary catastrophe: university wit, pamphleteer, abandoner of wife and child once her dowry was drunk through, companion of the London underworld whose 'coney-catching' scams he documented in bestselling exposés researched, contemporaries noted, from the practitioner's side of the table. He died in 1592 at about thirty-four — by the standard account, of a surfeit of pickled herring and Rhenish wine — lodging with a shoemaker's wife, in debt to everyone. From that deathbed he fired literature's most famous piece of professional jealousy: a pamphlet warning fellow playwrights against an 'upstart crow, beautified with our feathers' — the first printed notice of William Shakespeare, issued as a defamation.

The verdict: He invented the tell-all exposé, the celebrity feud, and dying young in scandal — the complete modern literary career, four centuries early and without the royalties. Shakespeare's first review was a hit piece; the reviewer died before the reply.

The Biographer's Friend — Richard Savage, 1727–1743

Savage built his identity on the claim — unproven, lucrative, and pressed with menaces — that he was the abandoned bastard of the Countess of Macclesfield, whom he harried in print and in person for years. In 1727 he killed a gentleman named James Sinclair in a Charing Cross tavern brawl and was convicted of murder; a royal pardon followed, procured by fashionable friends. He then perfected the art of living on subscriptions: admirers settled pensions on him, and he spent each one insulting the donors until it stopped, sliding from drawing rooms to sponging-houses with total consistency. He died in a Bristol debtors' prison in 1743. His friend Samuel Johnson — young, poor, and half in love with the wreckage — wrote his life, and made the ruin immortal.

The verdict: A convicted murderer who monetized a mother he could not prove and friendships he could not keep, and whose greatest work was getting written about. Every literary generation has one; his was simply the first with a great biographer on retainer.

The Escape Artist of Venice — Giacomo Casanova, 1755–1785

The Venetian Inquisitors jailed Casanova in 1755 under the prison roof of the Doge's Palace — the Leads — for affront to religion and common decency, a charge his memoirs spend twelve volumes corroborating. Fifteen months later he went through the roof with an iron spike and a monk for an accomplice, the most celebrated prison escape of the century, and dined out on the story across every court in Europe. He needed the material: his portable professions included faro dealing, a state lottery scheme sold to the French crown, and — most profitably — the decades-long occult fleecing of the Marquise d'Urfé, an immensely rich widow whom he persuaded that his cabalistic offices could arrange her rebirth as her own son. He died a librarian in Bohemia, writing it all down without apology.

The verdict: The memoirs run five thousand pages and the honest ones are the best reading. He conned a marquise out of a fortune by promising her immortality — then achieved it himself, by confessing everything in prose too good to prosecute.

The Embezzler of Austin — O. Henry, 1896–1901

William Sydney Porter, teller at the First National Bank of Austin, was indicted in 1896 for embezzling roughly a thousand dollars. Summoned to trial, he changed trains at Houston and kept going — to New Orleans and on to Honduras, where he coined the phrase 'banana republic' while waiting out the extradition treaty that Honduras conveniently lacked. Word that his wife was dying of tuberculosis brought him home to face the jury; he was convicted and served three years in the Ohio Penitentiary, where the prison pharmacy gave him night shifts and quiet, and the quiet gave American literature its most famous twist endings, published under a name invented to hide a felon: O. Henry. He emerged to fame, spent it on drink, and died broke in 1910.

The verdict: The gentlest criminal in the collection and the only one improved by incarceration: the bank lost a thousand dollars and gained nothing; the cell block lost a pharmacist and produced an author. The twist ending was autobiographical technique.

The Poet Who Annexed a City — Gabriele D'Annunzio, 1919–1921

Italy's most famous living poet — decadent novelist, aviator, war hero, serial debtor and seducer — concluded in 1919 that the Paris peace conference had insulted Italy by denying it the Adriatic port of Fiume. His remedy was not an editorial. In September he marched on the city at the head of some two thousand mutinous troops, took it without a shot, and ruled it for fifteen months as the Comandante of an operatic city-state with its own constitution — music declared a fundamental principle of the state — daily balcony orations, black-shirted arditi, the straight-arm salute, and a corsair economy of requisitioned ships. The Italian navy finally shelled him out during Christmas week 1920. Mussolini, watching, took the entire aesthetic and left the poetry.

The verdict: The only author in history whose midlife crisis required a naval bombardment to conclude. He wrote the twentieth century's most consequential bad book, and it was a government.

The Nobel in the Post — Knut Hamsun, 1940–1952

Norway's greatest novelist, the 1920 Nobel laureate whose Hunger and Growth of the Soil remade European prose, spent the Second World War as his occupied country's most famous collaborator: editorials urging Norwegians to lay down arms, an audience with Hitler in 1943 that went so badly the Führer took days to calm down — Hamsun harangued him about the Reich Commissar — and, most notoriously, his Nobel medal posted to Joseph Goebbels as a gift of esteem. Days after Hitler's death he published a respectful obituary calling him a warrior for mankind. Postwar Norway, unable to bear hanging its literary father, committed the eighty-six-year-old to psychiatric observation, declared his faculties 'permanently impaired,' and settled for ruinous financial damages. He answered with a final book, On Overgrown Paths, lucid enough to refute the diagnosis on every page.

The verdict: The judiciary called him senile because the alternative — that the author of the national soul meant every word — was unbearable. His last book proved the court wrong and himself guilty, which is the most Hamsun ending available.

The Broadcasts — Ezra Pound, 1941–1958

The century's most influential poetic talent-scout — midwife to Eliot, Joyce, and Frost — spent the war years delivering paid broadcasts on Radio Rome: rambling, antisemitic harangues against Roosevelt, the banks, and usury, transmitted to the very troops whose country had produced him. Indicted for treason in 1943, he was captured in 1945 and caged — literally, in a steel pen at Pisa, where he wrote the Pisan Cantos. Found unfit to stand trial, he was committed to St. Elizabeths asylum in Washington for twelve years, holding court for pilgrims as if the ward were a salon. In 1949 the Bollingen Prize — administered by the Library of Congress — went to the Pisan Cantos, detonating the great and unresolved argument over whether the art launders the man. Released in 1958, he sailed for Italy and gave the press the fascist salute on arrival.

The verdict: The best editor in the language could not edit himself. America's compromise — too mad to hang, too good to burn — satisfied nobody and preserved everything: the treason on the transcripts, the genius on the page, and the question permanently open.

The Thief Petitioned Out of Prison — Jean Genet, 1930s–1949

Abandoned at birth, reform school by fifteen, deserter from the Foreign Legion, and thereafter a working thief and occasional prostitute across half the borders of Europe, Genet assembled one of the most authentic criminal résumés in literature — ten-odd convictions in France for theft, false papers, and vagabondage — and wrote his first masterpieces in prison on the brown paper the state issued for making bags. When a further conviction in 1948 threatened, by the arithmetic of recidivism, to put him away for a very long stretch, Sartre, Cocteau, and half the French intellectual establishment petitioned the President of the Republic, and the sentence was remitted for good. The state thus ratified a proposition most societies decline to test: that sufficient genius is a defense to larceny.

The verdict: France pardoned the thief to keep the prose, openly trading justice for literature at a posted exchange rate. Genet, to his credit, never pretended the goods were not stolen — the books or anything else.

The William Tell Act — William S. Burroughs, 1951

In a Mexico City apartment in September 1951, at the end of a long afternoon of drinks, William Burroughs told his common-law wife Joan Vollmer that it was time for their William Tell act — they had no William Tell act — and she balanced a highball glass on her head. He fired a .380 from across the room and struck her in the forehead; she died within hours, twenty-eight years old. His Mexican lawyer arranged bail and coached the ballistics; when the lawyer himself fled the country over an unrelated shooting, Burroughs skipped, and a Mexican court convicted him of homicide in absentia: two years, suspended. He served thirteen days. Years later he wrote that he would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, which put him in contact with 'the Ugly Spirit' and left him no way out but to write.

The verdict: The one entry no irony survives. He shot his wife dead showing off, did thirteen days, and billed the killing as his artistic origin — posterity's ugliest proof that the ledger of genius is settled in someone else's blood.

Eighteen Straight Whiskies — Dylan Thomas, 1945–1953

The finest lyric instrument of his generation ran on other people's money and other people's patience. Thomas borrowed from every friend, patron, and BBC producer within reach, apologized in prose so beautiful the loans continued, missed engagements, emptied hosts' liquor cabinets, and pawned what was portable — conduct so systematic his benefactors organized funds to keep him alive, which he drank. The American reading tours that made him famous killed him: feted like a rock star two generations early, he collapsed at the Chelsea Hotel in November 1953 after announcing — by legend from his own lips — 'I've had eighteen straight whiskies; I think that's the record.' The post-mortem arithmetic was disputed, the trajectory was not. He was thirty-nine, and owed money on every continent that had hosted him.

The verdict: The begging letters were minor masterpieces and the friends kept them, which tells you the scam's quality: his creditors came out ahead on the prose alone. He is the only man in this collection who died of hospitality.

The Second Act of Norman Mailer — Norman Mailer, 1960–1981

At a Manhattan party in November 1960 — launching his campaign for mayor of New York — Mailer, deep in drink, stabbed his second wife Adele Morales twice with a penknife, puncturing her pericardium and nearly killing her. She survived, declined to press the matter, and he took a suspended sentence after a stint of psychiatric observation; the mayoral campaign resumed, unembarrassed, a decade later. Then, in 1981, came the collection's darkest encore: Mailer had championed the parole of Jack Henry Abbott, a convict whose prison letters he judged a major literary voice, writing to the board that 'culture is worth a little risk.' Six weeks after release, Abbott stabbed a twenty-two-year-old waiter, Richard Adan, to death outside a Manhattan café. Mailer, at the ensuing trial, said he was willing to gamble with certain elements of society to save this man's talent.

The verdict: He stabbed his wife and lost nothing; he sponsored a killer on aesthetic grounds and someone else's son paid the account. 'Culture is worth a little risk' — the risk, on inspection, was always assigned to somebody outside the culture.

The moral, if the collection has one, is that writing well and behaving well draw on entirely different muscles, and the man who exercises the first all day can let the second atrophy to nothing. Posterity keeps only the pages, which is why these names arrive to us haloed; the contemporaries who lent them money, married them, or stood within arm's reach in a tavern kept the other ledger, and it did not balance. Read them all. Bail out none of them.