Recovery

by John Berryman

  ‘It’s true what you say, pal.’ Severance relaxed, dismissing images of female torsos dismembered and strewn. ‘Besides, they’ve put me in Mini-group, which they didn’t do before and I could never find out heads or tails of about. Maybe that’s something.’

  ‘All roads lead to Rome, as us Romans say.’ He patted Alan’s shoulder. ‘In the hands of the great God.’

  2

  ALL DAY he had been up and down, and up, and down up. Right now he felt gorgeous; but he wished he could level off—say on the ‘Grehant plateau’ of stabilized high alcohol content, not that he wanted a drink. It was odd that in treatment you never did (exception made for late Sunday afternoons at Howarden after the adrenalin visits of Ruth and the baby, and even then only in the first two, as far as he could remember). He felt good, except for her not coming during the visiting hour just ended, or calling, or even answering. After waiting until nine o’clock, he had called: busy signal. Busy four times. Now she can’t be out without a babysitter there. If the phone was off the hook, she was refusing even to listen to him. He could kill her. What conceivable—Could she be unaware that she was menacing his morale at the very outset, when every resource, all aplomb, might be called on at any second? ‘I see a seething pot.’ Renounce. Renounce old Hah, the deity of unbounded time, master of blackouts. Re-enter Christian time, twenty-four hours, Sufficient unto. The cagey Founders. Dr Bob dry into his casket, half a million prides mourning. Look up his life some time, there must be stuff.

  How do you feel, they ask you, until you bite. I feel as follows: Casing the joint. Courbet arrived in Paris, twenty-one, cased the joint. First he decided to ignore and overcome the domestic opposition, which he identified as Delacroix, Ingres, Manet. Then he spat on the Italians, at that point top dog in Paris. He appreciated the Spanish (Velasquez) and the neglected Dutch (van Ostrade, Rembrandt). Not bad. Then he announced his programme, wagging a little beard: ‘The only thing to do is to go off like a bomb across all the subdivisions.’ Grandiose (a favourite put-down around here)? Not exactly. Painted his first great picture two years later, then vaulted into the Salon—‘Self-portrait with the Black Dog.’ Loved that dog.

  Who did he love? Keen on Charley resolute as himself, a clown like himself. He had been playing the day over, seeking illumination, brooding, and little in it accounted for his strong hope except Charley, hardly older than himself. Middle-aged, physically poor, but strong in brain, indomitable, wipe out the opposition, create as he did in the lab with ballpoint and paper, create sobriety. Almost by himself. Group was a drag.

  Now something frightful happened with Dr Severance. He sat erect up on the comfortless hospital chair, nape tingling. He heard himself looking down at the middle of the floor saying ‘sober for months’ after Howarden, and he shuddered.

  It wasn’t so.

  Not only was it not so but he had been forced to learn that it was not so, and now he had ‘forgotten’ again. He was sincerely lost, relapsed back over ground gained long ago, months ago. He had given the same account of his first slip after Howarden when he came into Northeast in the Spring, and happened to mention it to his wife that evening. ‘But Alan,’ she said, ‘that isn’t so, dear. You had your first drink at the New Year’s Eve party at the Browns.’ ‘The hell I did, I don’t even remember any party at the Browns.’ ‘But there was, and you did. Then you had your second drink a week later at the Klosters—when you took it, I went upstairs to the bathroom and cried.’ My God, he remembered the Klosters. He could see himself standing in their thronged gameroom with a highball in his hand. Then he had others. So she must be right about the Browns too, and instead of being sober for months and only starting again under work-pressure he had started drinking exactly three weeks after discharge, with no connexion with anything but whim, blind will, loss of contact with the First Step. This was not memory-loss, there was some damage of course to his celebrated memory but not much: this was delusion. And now it had taken over, again. One might shroud one’s head. Forever. He felt—depressed.

  II

  THE FIRST STEP (I-IV)

  Here are the steps we took, which we suggested as a program of recovery:

  1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—

  that our lives had become unmanageable.

  ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS (1939, 1955)

  3

  Alan Severance Begins Journal XIX

  Shook, but recovering. I feel less defeated than last night. It is true I am nowhere near where I thought I was. Too bad. But at least I know it. Until that date business recurred to me I didn’t even know it and didn’t have a prayer. In fact it was good. The delusion cleared up this time all by itself, without proof-force from outside, and in just a few hours. That is positively hopeful, my friend. However: It was only by deliberately reviewing the empty day that I came on the symptom. I’ve got to keep in touch with myself, as closely as possible every second. I’m bound to come on more distortion, anywhere. So I’ve got to keep notes. Disagreeable prospect, when I need all my time for Step One, and besides look at my record of Journal-keeping—are there eighteen volumes so far, kept spasmodically for no reason I could ever make out and never looked back at (as I vaguely at the times intended)? Nevertheless! it’s necessary, it’s part of treatment, I have nothing to lose but a few minutes a day, the hell with it, let’s go. And do read back over, say the weekend. Bet I pick up stuff & poke my head out of.

  Bet, sister. And you know what, Louise, you were right already. I admit it. So much for the value of that judgment of mine. Maybe I’m in fact incapable of undeluded judgment at this time. Ah, unattractive reading. But I’ve got to know the worst.

  Let’s just see what this famous but it seems unreliable memory is up to, on a neutral subject. Biology 4, thirty-six years ago. Third floor of Fayerweather. Room John Jay sixth, where the empty bottle hurled from the terrace below through his open window met his skull entering the room at midnight from the corridor turning the light on and knocked him out—Crandall found him, four stitches, went wild with rage to the Dean, who investigated. Room impersonal as this one, good for study, wouldn’t care for it now, need attractions around not distracting. Okay.

  ‘Recognition of “Self.” Research in immunology has implications of far more importance than simply the development of new and better vaccines for protection against disease—important as that is. The whole question of how the body recognizes some substances as “self” and others as “not self,” which has a vital bearing on the problem of transplanting tissues and organs from one individual to another—’

  Lefthand page, two-thirds of the way through the book. I can see it. If five words are wrong, I’ll tear the page out & eat it, when I get home, if I get home, if I go home, goddamn Ruth. Not such a neutral subject, though, after all: my baby! Both ways. Science, Recovery. The point is to learn to recognize whiskey as not my ‘self’—alien, in fact, to be rejected by the desire-center in the forebrain. Job no easier than—just the same as—cancer cure. My terrible silence all these years about that. Cancer is a tissue. The Serenity Prayer. So far it’s been okay. Nobody else has noticed it lying there for all the world to see, just below the surface, if you know it’s there and that the tools exist, and are ruthless enough. So far.

  4

  DR SEVERANCE’S CONSCIOUSNESS, during this initial period of his third treatment for chronic alcoholism, was both intermittent and double. Now and then he would catch himself as it were and come to; he recognized that, and he attributed his absent-mindedness to his absolute and overriding (and wise and noble) obsession with the First Step. He ate walked slept (not much) talked listened laughed, he ‘admitted,’ as usual. But really he was working on the First Step—that is to say, hallucinating. Dr Severance was in withdrawal. In a way he knew this—how could he not know it, with his experience? But when he heard Father Moen on Tuesday say, ‘Tolerance to the drug finally becomes so low that a few hours’ hard drinking may be fatal,’ he did not apply this fact—well-known t
o him of course—to himself, and it would be the better part of a year before he would stop saying to himself and to others, ‘I only drank six days,’ substituting instead, ‘At the end of the six days I was still alive.’

  He seemed to himself acutely aware of everything. True, the lectures were boring—as he put it to Julitta when he happened to sit next to her at one evening lecture, ‘I personally hear things the first time and I have a memory like a steel trap—except of course for alcoholic distortion and brain damage,’ he added hurriedly. But he recognized with intensity that anything (anything else, that is) might contribute to his recovery: a hint even, overheard, from another patient or a nurse or an orderly even, and he went around in perpetual Alert, despite his obsession. Others might be mentally loafing, not Alan Severance The Nationally Famous Drinker (Life magazine had actually devoted a good deal of space in a long article about him some years back to his drinking, and among the pictures was a series of him holding forth to rapt pals in an Irish pub) About To Become—and remain, remain—Dry As A Bone.

  What did particularly arrest and hold his attention was Mini-group, which responded three mornings a week for an hour and a half to the hypnotic voice and diffident pounding inavoidable insights of Dr Linc Haller. Linc was as long and bony and slangy, relaxed and even droll, unhurried say, as his great namesake, whom he did not otherwise resemble—imposing a certain jauntiness of style, from his large round steel-rimmed spectacles to his elegant dark-brown glossy strap-boots (features, both of them, despised by Severance, but as Marlene Dietrich’s Alphabet said, appointing Ernest Hemingway to ‘A is for Arrogance,’ ‘On some people it looks good’). He was unpredictable, Severance decided after the first session. There was no levelling or confronting. Noone spoke except whoever Linc was working on, and Severance could not see the point of having others—eight or nine patients, a nurse or so—present at all. Session began with a brief explanation, about the tape-recorder ‘to be heard only by us in this room and then erased—Okay?’ and Contracts: ‘You decide’ (he said to Severance across the room, as a new patient, Linc was very personal, very private and eye-seeking his communications) ‘after a few days of listening, what bothers you most about yourself, what most completely feels not-okay, and you tell me, and then sometime we’ll work on it together—Okay?’

  ‘All clear,’ said Severance. ‘Can I propose a Contract now?’

  Linc drooped his eyelids a little and did not say anything. Severance was to grow used to this patience, but this first time he felt it, with surprise, as pressure, as criticism even. ‘Sure,’ said Linc finally and grinned, like a long, lounging, very adult fifty-year-old child of six or seven, younger than Rachel even.

  ‘Well, it’s this. I don’t seem to be too goddamned happy about my goddamned reputation, “celebrity” it’s called. Either I take it too high, which is ridiculous, it amounts to nothing whatever, or I am actually ashamed of it. I even feel it’s right to feel ashamed of it, since other people a hell of a lot more worthy than I am have no reputation whatever. The same goes for money—I have a great deal at present, and some of my friends don’t, and I sweat. But mostly it’s “fame.” I can’t get used to it, and I know there must be something wrong about this, because frankly it’s not my fault, I didn’t ask for it, I have never “operated” for one second in that direction, and in some ways I didn’t even expect it, during my lifetime. Also Arita said to me last night, the fat night-nurse, that she was “uncomfortable” with my word “ashamed” and she’s a sensible girl, I knew her very well last Spring in treatment. She says, “Learn to live with it.” That sounds sensible, but just try it. I arrive in a strange city, even abroad, and there’s a reporter and a photographer, God knows how, get used to that. On the other hand, there’s nothing accidental about it. My gifts are unusual, I take no credit for them, but I ought to be able to take credit for the hardest and most self-sacrificing kind of lifelong work, and certain other qualities too—“daring” is one of my critics’ favourite words, and there’s something in it, and especially and above all perseverance: when the first volume of my most important work so far appeared, many predicted that I could not continue it and others predicted I could not bring it to a close. I did both—took me thirteen years, drinking like a madman too, some of the time. So why should I skulk around like a sneak-thief or a corporate people-robber who knows he is. What about that?’ Severance was out of breath with excitement.

  ‘You sound as if you were asking for advice,’ Linc said thoughtfully with some irony perhaps. ‘I don’t give advice, I fulfil Contracts—which may or may not work. You’ve already had what sounds like good advice from your friend Arita, and it doesn’t seem to do you any good. You hurt. Maybe what she meant was, “Try to learn to live with your reputation.” I am against the idea: trying. You either do something or you don’t.’ (Obscurely, in what perspective he could hardly have described, Severance felt sorry to hear Linc proclaim this. It had an authoritative ring that was both attractive and discouraging.) ‘Give it less thought, anyway, and we’ll get around to you. There’s no hurry of course. If you have a dream, you might let us hear it. Mabel, have you been thinking about your Contract? Are you ready to make one?’

  Mabel had not been thinking about her Contract, and he went on to George, a white-faced bald young man sitting flaccidly with his plump bare arms dangling between his knees. He asked questions, switching on the recorder, and George with great reluctance, discounting and apologizing for every admission he made of what was obviously a considerable success in life, responded. At one point Linc broke off to say, ‘I’ll give the new people some data about the framework within which we operate in TA.’ Uncoiling to a great dapper height he crossed the room to the blackboard.

  Circling a ‘P’ with an ‘A’ under it and a ‘C’ under that, for the three persons in everybody’s personality, Parent, Adult, Child, he said ‘Injunctions’ for P and wrote the verb ‘should’ by it, then ‘I will’ after A, adding ‘acts,’ and finally ‘want’ after C. Severance, who had been a rigid Freudian for thirty years, with heavy admixture however from Reich’s early work, owing to his seven-year analysis, and immense extension of dream-interpretation owing to a self-analysis several years after that, liked this scheme, at first blush, better than Freud’s; the indebtedness was almost complete but not quite: metaphor made a difference, as in Sullivan’s explanation of how the universe must be both unbounded and finite. Then Linc went into what he called ‘Witch-Messages’—‘Don’t be,’ from the Father, ‘Don’t be you,’ from the Mother. Severance bought this too. Yes indeed. He felt illuminated. Then he heard what interested him even more and would dominate for a long time to come his never-ceasing quotidian explanation to himself of everything that he was doing and everything that happened to him.

  The human need for Recognition, Linc said to them: Strokes—the patting and stroking and cuddling of a baby, without which—some babies don’t live. Clinical data on orphans institutionalized and with fosters. Same situation at the end of life. Man retires at sixty-five and goes to Florida to live it up with leisure, hardearned leisure and shuffleboard—no salary cheques, no praise, no requests, no challenges, no triumphs—all that came to an end with the testimonial dinner (200 plus-strokes, obviating the need for any more ever) and the gold watch—no anxiety even, only no plus-strokes: dead in a year. (One of Severance’s older friends, long ago, had made it in six months.) So a lacuna of plus-strokes menaced biology itself. On the other hand, too many plus-strokes menaced sanity (Fame, thought Dr Severance): a swelled head and delusions. Requisite: a minimum. Optimum: a good many—because the usual environment was full of minus-strokes—poor pay or unemployment, nagging wife, Sophia Loren abroad somewhere unavailable, the kids’ lousy education, banal and useless or destructive work (two friends at General making anti-personnel explosives), no mail, hippies running riot, you name it. The worst minus-strokes were those you gave yourself all the time; in the case of the alcoholic, Disgust and Rejection internalized as
Shame and Guilt. I can’t win. Everybody hates me, I’m no good, I’ll never get back on the boat, might as well drink myself to death, poor fellow, never had a chance or if so, blew it, see you Downstairs, so long everybody, death of the nearest animal, meant no harm, just worthless—Okay?

  Severance embraced it hook line and sinker.

  What was a plus-stroke to one man (a fan letter say) was a minus-stroke to another (lui-même, mostly). Some needed more plus-strokes than others. He himself was an Eagle-brand baby—mother couldn’t nurse—insatiable greed for reassurance. He had to give himself plus-strokes when too few came in from outside. And minus-strokes? Earlier on the way down to breakfast he had waved a real smile to the nurse’s aide on the station, a new girl, ‘Good morning, Miss!’ A look of stone, mouth shut. Well! as he turned down the stairs he swung into play the oldest scientific award in the country, the stupid Pulitzer, a Congressional grant with its citation, two honorary degrees, and the ‘Severance enclave in Jerusalem’ some author there had written to him existed wanting him to come and talk to them. One minus-stroke (to him 56), 87 plus-strokes; barely even, but he got his appetite back and the images of slain nurse’s aides strewn around receded. As Mr Frost had admitted to him—slyly, complicity-bit—across the dinner-table once, after some outrageous demand or other on his secretary’s grown children serving them, ‘I require special treatment.’ He wasn’t that bad, but it might be coming.