In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock. Orson Welles, The Third Man

Last week, Paul Gascoigne was sectioned under the Mental Health Act as a danger to himself or to others. This prompted a great wailing from the sports-writing fraternity. This in turn prompted an intriguing piece on the comment pages of this newspaper on Monday from Melanie Reid. She said that Gascoigne was not so much a fallen hero as a sad drunk.

This week, I attended a funeral of a lady who was kind and caring and decent and God-fearing. One tiny example: in her seventies, she cycled about town to visit and help a number of old people, most of them younger than she was. The Methodist church was filled with friends and relations, and we sang out the hymns with fully appropriate enthusiasm. A good life.

Gascoigne has not led a good life. It is not over yet, though he seems to be doing as much as he can to hasten the end. He was good at football; hopeless at anything else. Reid said that women “don't perceive Gazza as a shattered genius at all, but as an alcoholic predictably ruined by his own addiction”. With devilish insight, she interprets much of the tendency to forgive or ignore Gascoigne's alcoholism as a - very male - eagerness to ignore, excuse or justify one's own drinking. (Has she been secretly observing some of the more extended dinners favoured by the sports-writing profession?)

I am, then, very much in agreement. Gascoigne is, indeed, a sad drunk. He has left all kinds of damage, destruction and mayhem in his wake. No sane person can say that this is all right because he was good at football. There were elements of genius about Gascoigne in his pomp, but Sheryl, his ex-wife, and many others, will dissent from the notion that genius forgives all.

Let us turn to a couple of other sad drunks. James Joyce and Vincent van Gogh were out-of-control drinkers for much of their lives. Joyce was particularly fond of white wine; he called his favourite “arch-duchess's urine”. Van Gogh preferred absinthe, a drink that Joyce referred to as “the green fairy”.

Nora Barnacle ran away with Joyce and had a deeply trying time of it, alone with young children in poverty in a country in which she was at first unable to speak a word of the language, while Joyce borrowed more and more money and drank the lot. There were other, deeper tensions between them later.

Joyce was not as hopeless as Gascoigne, but his area of genius enabled him to produce work up to his death. Nora never cared for his writing, never read much of it, and wished he'd become a professional singer. She is one of literature's many martyrs: the fact that she lives on as Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle is no consolation for the troubles that Joyce brought her.

Van Gogh was probably even more hopeless than Gascoigne. The people he shared his life with found him impossible, even his beloved brother, Theo. He lived for a while with an alcoholic prostitute called Sien, whom he later abandoned; he lived with the painter, Paul Gauguin, an arrangement that ended in the unfortunate incident of the razor and the ear.

Question: are you entitled to a life of irresponsibility, self-indulgence, excess, neglect, exploitation and selfishness if you produce works of genius? Does it matter who gets hurt, if what you produce is good? Can you treat wives, lovers, children, relations and benefactors as badly as you like if your work is good enough? Is it OK for a genius to be an addict, but not a lesser performer? No. Obviously, inescapably no.

There is another point. Is it all right to consider Gascoigne's oeuvre along with those of Joyce and Van Gogh? Van Gogh and Joyce are two of the greatest artists of all time: Gascoigne, even at his best, was a comparatively minor performer even in his own genre.

A more relevant point is whether we can consider football alongside painting and literature. I think, at least to some extent, we can. It is awkward to do so, but let's try: because at the 1990 World Cup, in the brief few weeks when Gascoigne was probably the best player on the planet, he gave us a series of performances of vividness and meaning and joy and they genuinely enriched our lives.

Football is an ephemeral thing, of course, no sooner done than gone. Football matters a lot to some people; it matters less to others, most notably women. Gascoigne's genius appeals to stupid people as well as to clever people: that is not usually true of Joyce's work. Gascoigne's work is “only” sport, “only” football, and plenty of people have contempt for it.

But Gascoigne's work mattered to me. His performances of glorious cheek, of stupendous belief, of boundless optimism, of impossible vision, of irrepressible appetite added up to a thing worth having. He worked on the far edge of sanity: his precarious balance, somehow miraculously maintained, was what gave his work such an edge.

That does not justify his addiction, nor the bad things that he has done in his life. But can I put my hand on my heart and say that I would willingly be deprived of the joy I found in Gascoigne's work if it meant that he were able to live a good and happy life? I find that a very hard question to answer.

But when it comes to Van Gogh and Joyce, I don't find the question hard at all. If all the suffering endured by and caused by those two could be wiped out at a stroke, at the expense of Ulysses and the paintings from Arles, I couldn't help myself. No! I need those paintings, I need that big bloody book, because my life would be massively the poorer without them. And probably this is morally wrong; it is certainly inconsistent. But the reaction is too deep to control. Something beyond analysis, beyond morality, tells me that those books are worth any amount of suffering, provided it is somebody else's suffering.

That is the same response that many people have had to Gascoigne's life and work, and it is equally valid, equally invalid. Gascoigne, Joyce, Van Gogh: all three would have led better lives, happier lives, kinder lives, without their self-willed burden of addiction. Whether addiction was necessary for the creation of their works is something I can't begin to know.

Addiction is not something you can excuse or justify, either by means of argument or by offering works of genius. But that doesn't mean that Gazza failed to bring a certain amount of joy and beauty into the world, or that Joyce and Van Gogh didn't do an infinite amount more than that.

“Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.”