Romantic Despair

We have inherited far too many romantic accounts of the anguished or suicidal writer alone in her room with a typewriter and too many bottles of booze. Some (the older among us) will remember the film in which Lillian Hellman (played by Jane Fonda) smokes, drinks, and throws her typewriter out of the window, or the poems in which Dorothy Parker focuses her acerbic wit on the plight of the tormented writer; others may have seen a brochure for an artists' colony, with its glossy photograph of the writer sitting amidst his balled-up papers, the half-empty bottle of Scotch on the floor beside the desk, despair permeating his room. Continuing this tradition, we contemporary writers often turn our own trials and errors, our own addictive escape mechanisms, our own self-destructive ways of dealing with rejection letters, into dramatic or funny stories, thus adding to the literature and mythology of romantic despair. I like my gin and tonic; I'm moderately knowledgeable about my local pinot grigios...well, I won't pursue this list of confessions except to say I'm no puritan. But despair is not romantic. In fact, on this fortieth birthday of the venerable Arvon, I declare angst to be utterly boring and a cliché to boot. Despair within reason, and for limited periods of time, if you must, but don’t elevate your trials and tribulations to epic proportions! Even as you stutter and wheeze your way across the page, cast your mind back to the moments of writerly joy with which you ...continue