Born losers (4)

"You should protect yourself from success." One of musician Billy Childish's principles seems to be directed especially at James Leo HerlihyThe film adaptation of his best novel, Midnight Cowboy (1960), gave him money, fame, and a personal fulfillment that, paradoxically, would destroy him as an author.

Born into working-class Detroit, Herlihy was a born writer. "As soon as I discovered words," he said, "I knew I wanted to write." In 1958, he had his first success with the premiere of the play Blue Denim. A year later, he published his first novel, All Fall Down, a claustrophobic family drama featuring a hated teenager and an overprotective mother (a thematic obsession he would never abandon).

And Then Came Midnight Cowboy (the film bomb). The resulting influx and notoriety soon took their toll. "Something disturbing is happening in my life…," he wrote, "I've become much more famous than I'd like to be." Literary doubts began to manifest: "After this book I'll be free from the horrors of narrative." He was referring to The season of the witch (1971), a road movie horrible hippie tone that not even the fans liked hardcore (I know what I'm talking about).

Herlihy, fed up with exile self-imposed of writers, he began to do normal-person things: he participated in pro-gay campaigns, socialized intensely (Tennessee Williams and Christopher Isherwood were regular guests at his home), tended his garden, cooked, drank Italian wine, and fornicated. He sounds happy enough, except that a writer must always be uncomfortable in his own skin. By the time Herlihy realized "the absence of the muse," as Eddie Campbell would say, it was too late. By the late 1980s, the artist was a full-time depressed man, as writers who don't write inevitably are. On October 21, 1993, at the age of sixty-six, he committed suicide with an overdose of pills in Los Angeles.

Perhaps things would have turned out differently if the novelist had remembered that fifth-century hermit, Black Moses, who replied to a doubting monk: "Go. Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything." The destiny of a writer is, like that of a monk, to remain in a cell. And, there, to write book after book. To stop doing so, to leave the cell, as Herlihy did, is the same as voluntarily entering death.

And yet, Midnight Cowboy It remains, sixty years after its publication, one of the great novels of the 20th century, and Joe Buck one of its most unforgettable characters. Everyone should know them.

Kiko Amat