The Road of Excess: a history of writers on drugs by Marcus Boon

Why writers love to live the high life

In the Julian Temple film Pandaemonium, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is shown slipping into an opiated delirium that, although destroying his life, inspires his greatest poetry. The incantatory mysticism of "Kubla Khan" appears to be dictated by the agency of opium. This tired Romantic myth – that living on the edge inspires profound art – is still peddled, and drugs remain one of the quickest ways there.

Drugs are exotic and transgressive. They appear to add to the allure of the writer and the mystique of what is written. Arthur Rimbaud sought a systematic disruption of his senses through the alchemy of "poisons" such as hashish, and Aldous Huxley championed mescaline. Huxley went so far as to claim that art was "only for beginners", like "the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of the actual dinner". Tripping was the true reality.

Jack Kerouac wrote the Benzedrine-fuelled On the Road in less than three weeks, in one unbroken paragraph. After a similar amphetamine writing marathon, he boasted that he was "pale as a sheet".

Marcus Boon, in this rich investigation, argues that the idea of the drug was an inevitable component of the Romantic concept of solitary genius. There may be references to potions in Homer and Shakespeare, but the great granddaddy is Thomas De Quincey, author of the rhapsodic Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The subterranean tradition that grew from him was quick to associate opium with crime, sickness and deviation. Such qualities came to characterise the subversive artist, from Decadents to Beats.

Yet Boon's account complicates things by discriminating between drugs: narcotics, anaesthetics, cannabis, stimulants and psychedelics. He has a fantastic array of material already: Lewis Carroll on narcotics, John Milton on psychedelics and even Julie Burchill on stimulants.

Drugs are linked to literature, he says, because they redefine the relationship of the imaginary to everyday life. This is achieved by metaphorically reorganising the body into a machine for, say, writing (on speed), socialising (on cannabis) or escaping through a moment of transcendence (inhaling laughing gas). Boon proposes that cocaine may be behind Sherlock Holmes's obsession with watertight explanations and his preternatural sensitivity to sign systems.

Drugs certainly have an effect on writing, and Boon is right to recognise the vogue for dream-like stories among cannabis writers. But is the influence good? Boon thinks so, as The Road of Excess concludes with the claim that psychedelic drugs are not simply an influence on literature, but a creative act.

If so, it would be enough to sit around taking drugs and declare: "I've seen the universe and it's wonderful!" – hardly the same as writing a book. Drugs may leave dark or dazzling memories, but the writer must craft these into literature; after three weeks of speed writing, Kerouac took five years to edit On the Road for publication.

The reviewer's book 'The Forger's Shadow' is published by Picador