The doping scandal in literature

Reading between the lines, being scared of what I see

Late last Sunday, still some distance from the bottom of a stack of books I was reviewing, I had to take another break. Maybe it was the fee I’d relented to (10p a page, or one Freddo in the old currency), maybe it was the writing. It’s not like it was uniform across the books, yet each in its own way, and to no purpose I could gather, lacked:

that elusive but essential something, that sense of music, of voice, of phrase-by-phrase unexpectedness, of constantly returned attentiveness, which makes some texts wine and whose absence leaves the rest watery.¹

Instead the writing read not far off what you’d get in an email. Speaking of, I went to idly check mine. Go fish, I got my wish: one had arrived at this newsletter’s address.

Admittedly it looked like spam. But what had me about to junk it was the same thing that stayed my mouse: the all-caps subject header.

My first mistake was in assuming ‘FOR RODCHENKOV’ meant the email was for the attention of someone called Rodchenkov, and/or the sender thought someone by that name wrote for Artless. Reading their salutation, I was both vindicated and taken aback.

It was from one of my subscribers. Being reminded of the existence of such is, for us non-celeb Substackers, like floating adrift in deep space then noticing one star at least is a flashlight. But the subscriber began their email, “Dear Mr. Less, If you only KNEW!” This was, if not heartening, at least worth reading on for.

“Artie, the more I read you palpating artworks the more I smell on every post the piss-mark of the Russian Formalists. It’s been seventy-five years since the tide turned against them.” The last sentence was hyperlinked to a piece on Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee, and its decree against ‘elitist’ opera The Great Friendship. (An opera, elite?) “Or, if you tend towards Trotsky, well he dispatched the formalists too.” (The last clause also hyperlinked to what I assume should’ve been the book Literature and Revolution but was actually a Hay festival panel by the same name.) “See it’s how you platform reactionaries and hypocrites that’s most rankling. Don’t you know your formalist small-shot Viktor Shklovski harboured such enemies of my state as the Mandelstams in his apartment, and then when he got a nice new one off that very state he prayed to God there wouldn’t be another revolution to take it off him? The man accused his own dog of being an informer! I know you like palpating comedy as well but, no, he wasn’t making a joke.

“And while you Westerners idolise and idealise your culture, you cultivate traitors in ours! Getting stool canaries to sing, like Rodchenkov.”

I clicked the name to look it up and so learnt about Grigory Rodchenkov, one-time director of Russia’s anti-doping labs turned fugitive whistleblower on state-sanctioned doping. The ‘FOR’ in the subject header—my correspondent meant it in the sense of payback.

“The told-you-so smugness about him, and yet I’ve never read any of you admit your own addled heritage. If you believe sports are doped, Art, wait till you hear about books. Can’t you see how long it’s gone on for, how it’s still going on, how many of your literary elite take eloquence-enhancing drugs? And if you only knew of what kind…”

I emailed back my corespondent, who claimed they held a doctorate in European literature, henceforth ‘the doctor’. The doctor told me they’d pieced together their potted history from reading between the lines - “see, I know comedy too” - of writers’ diaries and correspondence.

“You don’t even have to sidle into the prefix ‘crypto’ to find at the start of your history Caedmon with his Dream of the Rood. An illiterate herdsman just up and versifies about his crucified lord? Goes without saying this vision was a trip. And but the way in the poem that the cross is a tree that is Jesus who is the cross: such woah far out morphings couldn’t be more mushroom-flavoured.”

Once I’d shifted us to a chat window, the doctor challenged me on the idea that literature would’ve “just cut itself off from its Roods. And I’m not even talking about the obvious doper descendants like De Quincey and his Confessions of a Smack-snacker. Would Jane Austen be so neurotically attuned to the minutiae of social interaction if she wasn’t mashed on hashish? Or take Nietzsche”

I played along. “Lemme guess. Cokehead”

“WRONG. Not coke. Booze of course. The manic episodes, the sentimental jags (hugging that horse), those abrupt urgent desires to go for a walk. And braggadocio that hangs-over into bitterness, from Why I Write Such Excellent Books to Why I Sleep Alone

“Melville, though, he did write his Dick on coke. Picked up on his sea voyages. White whale, etc, thar she Blow. But also Ahab’s monomania, the insensate hard-on of his so-called wooden leg, all that naval heteroflexbility in close settings, which anyone who’s been around coked-up bankers getting touchie-feelie is sure to recognise. Then a few years ago in your own press there was this:

“What’s that other than a coded reveal, a tribute to the powders that powered your 20th century modernism? Or do you think Jung just gave Joyce advice”

“And then so by the time of the Beats they didn’t have to write in code any more”

“Idiot. The Beats were sober satirists, their books attempted correctives to try shame their doped-up peers via ever more ridiculous, obvious parodies. Prose that got Poe’s-Lawed in the end”

In retaliation I half-humoured, half-mocked the doctor. “And maybe ‘burning the candle at both ends’ is what you call a T-shaped joint. Saying a piece of writing smells of the ‘lamp’ means the lighter under the spoon. Granta’s ‘40 under 40’ really refers to the number of pills a writer can bosh in the span of a single weekend”

The doctor didn’t seem to be humouring me back. “Yes doping’s still rife, especially around prize-time”

“Come on they’re just literary prizes. Just books. Why would anyone care to?”

“It’s ‘just running’! It’s ‘just kicking a ball’, why would anyone care! People here have died over adulterated piss”

“OK fine so then contemporary authors. Lit prizes, competitiveness, careerism. Those MFAs. I guess they’re all doping on Ritalin? Benzedrine at most”

“doctor is typing…” blinked in the chat window then disappeared, reappeared and kept blinking, till finally there came: “Far from it”

“Testosterone then? HGH, like athletes”

“…”

“What, caffeine??”

“Don’t be so gauche”

The doctor went back to a blinking ellipsis. Many internet-minutes passed, even longer in real minutes. At last I received not “…” but “Dots”

“?”

“Street-name, dots, polka dots. Full-stops, as in: they make you. If DMT is the ‘Spirit Molecule’ then 5-MeO-DMT is the ‘God Molecule’. And if 5-MeO-DMT the ‘God Molecule’ then its satanic twin is DPT. But what’s DPT against DOT?

“DOT is like LSD but less sentimental, like licking toads but less wholesome, like ketamine but less people-person. Calling DOT psychotropic is like saying crack is a pick-me-up. A certain famous atheist experimenting with DOT became convinced the Bible was totally true but was about the future. One poor sap from my hometown was left by DOT in a constant state of jerking and spinning, like a dog chasing its tail: his trip had ‘taught’ him all human skin is an ancient alien symbiont enveloping our actual bodies. Everyone at a retreat in Peru taking DOT ‘as medicine’ vanished but not before managing to scorch a ‘Croatoan’ into the Atacama Desert that can be seen from space. While another dot-head I was in touch with got sent by his daily regimen to the four corners of the Earth—not an archaism or metaphor, but the physical truth. The first he couldn’t approach further since he felt himself being whittled down by the tapering of the x y z dimensions. At the second, he saw the x y z axes extend past their junction and back out, into a mirror world, “for whom our world is the site of their silliest thought experiments.” He said the Roman mariner Pytheas had preceded him to the third corner, as reported by Polybius circa 140 BC: a region “in which there was no longer any proper land nor sea nor air, but a sort of mixture of all three of the consistency of a jellyfish in which one can neither walk nor sail, holding everything together, so to speak.” Before the dot-head stopped returning my messages he wrote of the fourth corner:

The land has long since gone flat, and is chalky brown, littered with rocks, where first it’d been big and rolling. The further I go the more the walls close in and the sky slopes down, till they all meet in the form of my bedroom. This is what there is at the end of the world: a small room, with a bed that looks carved out of the same chalky rock, a desk with a lamp (its red the only colour) and outside these rocky brown dogs that skip their paws in the air quietly as they run from me. Here I’ll stay, forever.

And that’s the stuff all your contemporary authors are doping with.”

“So presumably when they come down off DOT they must come out with terrifying books. You know like write backwards in fluent hieroglyph—with their weak hand. Or via automatic-writing scrawl out some Necrognomicon-like text. Have you seen them? Do you have access to this shadow oeuvre?”

“You do. We all do. Don’t you get it? After DOT your contemporary authors write those books you get in your bookshops.”

I felt suddenly indexed: You Are Here, a huge chilly finger pointing at my own little corner of the world. What did it mean that after a DOT-trip you got what was stacked on my desk, which stack I now warily eyed? That it’d been extruded from the minds of bombed-out, million-mile-staring authors with a total lack of affect? That these sort of books were the roar on the other side of silence?

It’s as if the acid-spiked victims of MK-Ultra mimed at their jailers for pen and paper then coolly wrote out 500 hours of easy-listening muzak. As if the recently ego-dead - lotusly levitating, eyes glowing black - went on to create Modern Family. I couldn’t read contemporary books with the snobbery or scoffing of my sour-graped peers, only in cornered terror. Before I knew it the chat had quit, and there were no further emails. What’d be the point? At least on this one reader the doctor had wreaked revenge.

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1. Updike - I’ve lost the reference. Odd Jobs I think.