Amy Winehouse’s death was no Romantic tragedy

Much has been written about the number of musicians – including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Brian Jones – who died aged 27, but it is nonsense. Half a dozen deaths amongst celebrities over the best part of five decades could be found for almost any age and statistic. What is depressingly evident is that it is far too young.

What these people had in common was not just age at death or fame, but addiction. The difference between their behaviour and chances of dying and those of many other young drug users is mainly that they had the money and opportunity to pursue destructive behaviour to excess.

Some have suggested that Winehouse’s sad story suggests she should have had more support. I doubt that; she did, in fact, go in and out of rehab, and her family and friends often spoke of their concern for her. The received wisdom amongst those who treat addiction is that little can be done until the person concerned actually decides to seek help, which, even if not a hard and fast rule, is certainly psychologically probable.

Winehouse’s story differs from that of others struggling with addiction or damaging behaviour because she was regarded as an artist. For the last two centuries, Western civilisation has maintained a dangerous, wrong-headed, Romantic notion of artists – whether musicians, writers, painters or actors – which holds that they are special people somehow both more susceptible to excess and self-destruction and exempt from the censure which it would attract if it were the behaviour of, say, your plumber or accountant.

Opera singers are expected to treat people like dirt, writers are obliged to be alcoholics and painters to be promiscuous, and we complain if rock stars do not throw televisions out of hotel windows, as if vandalism were the hallmark of authenticity and talent. At root, of course, if bad behaviour is primarily a moral issue, artists have no more excuse for it than anyone else and if, as the addiction specialists prefer, it is a disease, one ought to expect no more incidence of it amongst artists than in the general population.

Yet it is not quite as straightforward as that, because the business of being an artist is rather an unusual one. Fewer people can compose good symphonies or poems than can become good call centre workers – no, that’s a bad example, they are rare individuals indeed – let’s say, bank clerks. Artists of all sorts spend a lot of time with their own thoughts, which inclines them towards selfishness, and usually see the world differently from the rest of us, which often makes them interested in different ways of perceiving reality (for which drink and drugs are readily available tools).

None of this ought to be an excuse and, indeed, some artists have vigorously opposed the Romantic image of the tortured creative soul. TS Eliot (who actually was a bank clerk for a while) lived up to Gustave Flaubert’s injunction: “Live like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your work.” So too did the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. The imagist poet William Carlos Williams was a paediatrician, while the modernist composer Charles Ives ran a fairly large insurance company, where he invented the standard principles of estate planning and dealing with inheritance tax. GK Chesterton summed up this approach when he robustly declared: “Artistic temperament is for amateurs.”

But far more persistent is the Romantic view, which had its origin in some daft ideas picked up by Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the University of Jena in the early 19th Century, and John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley as its foremost exemplars. Those poets can easily be seen as the rock stars of their day. Their behaviour was highly transgressive by the standards of the day, particularly in relation to sex and drugs, and they all (except Coleridge) died young.

The emphasis which the Romantics placed upon individual sensibility marked what Tom Stoppard was later to describe as “the decline from thinking to feeling”. And in any case, it was a lie. It is now widely accepted that Coleridge’s claim that he composed his great poem Kubla Khan under the influence of opium, and that he was interrupted by a man from Porlock while writing it down, is fantasy.

But the insistence on the centrality of the individual artist’s aesthetic response, rather than on the traditions and techniques of the form, led inexorably to the position of conceptualists such as Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein, in which the artist’s sincerity of intent is the only real measure of quality. The trouble with this high-minded view of aesthetics is that artists are encouraged to think that normal rules of behaviour do not apply to them. And the general public not only don’t object to this; they positively insist upon it.

In the public imagination, Vincent Van Gogh’s genius is established because of his mental instability. The truth is that we would have had more of Van Gogh’s paintings, and Mark Rothko’s, had they not killed themselves. The same is true for Ernest Hemingway’s novels and Sylvia Plath’s poems.

Lucian Freud, who also died last week, though at 88, satisfied these stereotypes, with dozens of children and an enthusiasm for heavy drinking and gambling. But his most notable characteristic was that he painted most of every day and every evening. He never let being an artist get in the way of turning out the art.

No talent is required to fall to pieces, and we should not encourage or expect it in the talented. The sadness for Amy Winehouse’s fans is that they would have had much more of her work had it not been for her addictions. More important, and much sadder, is the fact that her family and friends would still have the person they loved.