A grave curiosity: Author continues death theme

On a glorious fall afternoon, author Michael Logan stalks through a graveyard. The author of “Final Exits” and other death-drenched books is looking for Margaret Mitchell’s plot in Oakland Cemetery, and when he finds it, he whips out his cellphone and starts taking photos of the headstone.

“My father was a homicide and narcotics detective in New York City,” he says. “He would take me on tours of the city and he’d point out the Empire State Building and say it’s 1,200 feet tall and there were 61 people who jumped off it. He’d always add some death fact. That was the only thing I listened to. I realized there were so many ways to die.”

Joey Ivansco / jivansco@ajc.com

Michael Logan, author of “Genius and Heroin,” at Oakland Cemetery. The book looks through the wretched self destructiveness and early deaths of all sorts of artists, from Poe to Kurt Cobain.

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Later, he realized there were so many ways to write about death. Largo started with murder mysteries but now has become the Capote of kaput with the trilogy “Final Exits,” “The Portable Obituary” and his latest book, “Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages.”

“Genius” is an encyclopedic listing of artists of all stripes throughout history, all of whom either lived with addictions or obsessions, died spectacularly, or, frequently, both. From contemporaries (Kurt Cobain) to ancients (Petronius), Logan lifts the shroud on a screwed-up Who’s Who of juiceheads and junkies, the obsessed and the depressed and a few who just got in the way of the wrong bullet.

A native New Yorker and former Miamian, Largo recently moved to a house near Lake Lanier. His trip to Mitchell’s grave was his first to Atlanta’s most storied cemetery, and he followed it up with lunch across the street at the aptly named restaurant Six Feet Under.

His friends, he says, worry about him a bit: Where is your mind? they ask. He tells them, “The Dalai Lama says if you don’t study death, you’re not going to be able to appreciate life.

“It’s an endlessly interesting topic,” he adds. “With so much material.”

For every one of the “usual suspects” in the book, like Keith Moon of the Who or Ernest Hemingway, there’s a surprise, like Marjorie Rawlings, author of that middle-school classic “The Yearling,” who liked to drink bourbon by grabbing the bottle around the neck.

“Genius and Heroin” stretches its definitions to try to get as many interesting people inside the covers as possible.

“I tried to make ‘heroin’ synonymous with anything that is over the line,” he explains, “and ‘genius’ means anything brilliant or original.”

And as a title, it will probably sell better than “Genius and Chardonnay.”

Largo doesn’t draw many conclusions in the book about the long-debated connection between mind-altering substances and great art. He does say his research shows that many artists can function through great self-destruction up until about age 50, but returns start diminishing rapidly from then on.

Although he was originally interested in how alcoholics manage to write coherent novels while drunk, Logan’s research led him further afield into different approaches to art.

“The nuts and bolts of how they did it is part of a biography that is not often looked at,” he says.

“Like Michelangelo — there’s no record that he drank or anything. But he had what we would now say was obsessive compulsion. One of the fears he had was of water. You look at how the Sistine Chapel was painted, 69 feet above the floor, he didn’t come down [for long periods]. He figured he was safer there ‘cause there was no water. No other artist would have been able to pull that off, ‘cause he didn’t have that obsession.

“The only conclusion I made is that although they created great art, the price was their own life, their own happiness.”