The dope on prolific writers
I was visiting the Berkshires earlier this summer when Simon Winchester's name came up. Winchester has a house out there, and his local acolytes sing his praises. This is, after all, a man not much older than myself who has written more than a dozen well-reviewed books, at least one of which -- "The Professor and the Madman" -- was what we lucre-crazed scribblers would call a runaway bestseller. My friends and I marveled: How does he do it? And then it hit me: literary doping.
Why didn't I realize this earlier? It explains everything. How can, say, Christopher Buckley, who is my age and attended the same sort of white-glove finishing schools that I did, have so outstripped me? He has written 11 books, innumerable humor articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He edits a magazine, Forbes/FYI, and, for all I know, he's a regular on one of those prestigious TV shows I never watch because all the panelists are younger and more successful than I am.
Put another way: Has Stephen King submitted to a blood test lately?
I should have known that the BALCO steroid scandal -- to say nothing of the Olympic-record 23 doper athletes snared at Athens -- reached further than a few musclebound jocks. It's hit the New York Times bestseller list! Sure, everyone knows that Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones are great athletes, but let's face it: Without performance enhancers, he's just a bicycle messenger who happens to be dating Sheryl Crow, and she's a Bond girl holdover from the "Thunderball" era.
There is, of course, the old-fashioned explanation for why the Buckleys, the Winchesters, and the John Updikes of the world make the rest of us look like clock-watching quill-pushers: hard work. But I have dismissed the possibility that these writers might have studied harder in school, read more books, or spent more hours at the desk than a grasshopper such as I. Or that they are simply more gifted than I am. They must be on something.
Treating himself to a rare moment away from the literary grindstone, Updike, progenitor of (gasp) 63 published works, according to the Writer's Directory, confirms that he has been ingesting performance enhancers for years. "I used to dope myself with cigars and coffee," he says, "though during the past couple of decades I had to switch to Lipton tea and Paul Newman's pretzels. It's not quite the same jolt, and I'm not sure if my performance hasn't fallen off, but those have been my addictions."
I reached Buckley on the phone just as he was about to inhale.
"Right now I'm taking Thackeray, a great performance enhancer. I've been taking Balzac for some years, although you do have to be wary of the French products -- they can be very exotic. And you want to be careful with the generic Canadian performance enhancers, like Robertson Davies. You just don't know where they've been."
Buckley worries that, somewhere, someone is more prolific than he. He even knows who that someone is: David Brooks, New York Times columnist, book writer, magazine contributor, and PBS talking head. "He's in every issue of The Atlantic Monthly, then he's on the TV show, and he gives speeches on the side," says Buckley, sounding overmatched. "I'd like to know what he's on."
Returning my call from a taxicab -- "I'm just finishing off a piece right here," he jokes -- Brooks is a tad sensitive about his Stakhanovite literary output. "I'm slightly embarrassed," he admits. "It suggests a high level of hackdom." So what is he taking? "Nothing chemical, it's mostly psychological," he explains. "I would explain my high productivity by my desperate loneliness and my pathetic sadness that causes me work to extreme lengths to fill the hollow void that is my life."
So there's the formula: tea and sociopathy. Plus a dash of Thackeray, a zest of Balzac -- he of the quote, "You must write one page each day" -- Newman's Own Organic Pretzels, and perhaps Robertson Davies's perfect novel "Fifth Business." If you and I start taking what they take, I think we'll see results in 30 days or less.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
