Drug writing

Perhaps the finest writer ever to use speed systematically, however, was W. H. Auden. He swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty years, from 1938 onward, balancing its effect with the barbiturate Seconal when he wanted to sleep. (He also kept a glass of vodka by the bed, to swig if he woke up during the night.) He took a pragmatic attitude toward amphetamines, regarding them as a „labor-saving device“ in the „mental kitchen,“ with the important proviso that „these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down.“
Auden seems to have been the only unquestionably major writer to use drugs in quite this way, as a direct source of energy for his work. He represents the apotheosis of a utilitarian approach to drugs; and it is therefore logical, if he was going to take drugs, that he would gravitate toward speed, which is the utilitarian drug par excellence. By comparison, alcohol is a very bad working drug for writers. / The New Yorker 6.1.03 über

HIGH STYLE
by JOHN LANCHESTER
Writing under the influence