‘Maybe you two, but not the others.’
Severance was not having that, after Letty. ‘We’re all for you,’ he said with hard tenderness, liking her as much as he could, ‘you can’t stalk out on us like this and destroy yourself.’
‘That’s just what I felt like doing.’
‘Exactly. That’s just what I really was afraid of. Do you think I don’t care about you, Luriel?’
‘Well, I don’t care,’ she said roughly, ‘but if you do, I don’t mind staying, I guess. I’d have to put all this stuff away’—she looked helplessly round her.
‘Get Letty to help you,’ he said, standing up with a surge of relief. It had been easy, after all, the work had not been done by him, and he went back to his room and his own work with a better heart.
That night on his bony knees he was visited by a calm joy of prayer, long-lasting: the miracle of me-suicidal three weeks ago to me-now, survivor of renewed access to realities, partly in true touch with myself for the first time in many years, confident (though fear too—of Outside—I won’t go home, whatever they say, with my problem hanging), happy, and useful to my friends these last days, certain to be so in days to come, goodnight, thank You.
MONDAY WENT SWIFTLY BY, punctuated however with new thoughts of an alarming kind which was not to declare itself until the following morning and of which meanwhile the less said the better, Severance only felt rushed from time to time, and menaced. Nobody spoke of his being discharged, and he was as glad not to face the temptation. Stack was confronted for nearly the whole two hours without result. Accused of self-pity, he chimed in heartily, ‘That’s right! Self-pity!’ but did not see either that he ought to cast it off or that it was grounded in measureless resentment, which, further, he could not name. ‘Me? I don’t resent anybody or anything! Not me!’ boiling with it, innocent. Keg wrote on the board a favourite aphorism: ‘We are as sick as we are secret.’ Severance looked at it with grave doubts. Called out of Group to see Dr Gullixson he took up with him the question, from Saturday’s trouble, of his actual superiority in communication. ‘Why should it matter?’ he asked aggrieved.
‘How can you ask?’ said the older man. ‘It’s the one main way in which we know other people and make ourselves known.’
‘Is it unavoidably obvious, except in diction?’ Alan pursued a lost hope of equality, his mind telling him at the same time: phrasing, syntax, pace, rhythm, pauses, his sudden great volume (hated by all, including Ruth, an eccentricity no doubt from lecturing).
‘—everything that aims at persuading or emphasizing or dominating,’ Gullixson was saying. ‘It’s your racket, naturally. Part of how you got where you are.’
‘Wherever I am,’ Alan said unhappily. ‘Then there’s nothing to be done about it. People resent it, or some do.’
‘Their affair. Yes, it’s a permanent real problem, neither alcoholic nor neurotic. You don’t really think we don’t pay for our advantages, do you? But about this roaring of yours: you ought to consider whether it isn’t a means of intimidation, and whether whatever satisfaction it gives you is worth your wife’s discomfort, or indeed anybody’s, since you seem to dislike it yourself. I must say you’ve never roared at me.’
‘It comes out with awful naturalness,’ Severance said grimly. ‘But I may as well change my whole way of life while I’m at it.’
‘Hardly that,’ Gullixson was smiling. ‘Just enough to acquire and equip dryness. Roar away if you like.’
But the scientist roared not all that day, instead he grew increasingly and mysteriously abashed, until after dinner he was scarcely able to speak to his wife and daughter visiting, he heard no lecture and half-slept fitfully after a despairing prayer, still without knowing just what was wrong, until in the darkness of earliest morning he came to suddenly on a forgotten scene. He was in his aunt’s apartment in California twenty years ago. He had come in very late and very drunk, to spend the night as he sometimes on trips did, after a loud party for him following his high-powered evening lecture at UCLA. She had waited up or got up. They were sitting drinking, a nightcap, nightcaps? Had he made a gesture, or said something? He felt so, now stretched in his hospital bed, trembling with horror. Nothing was clear, two lamps shifting, a shadowy alcove, except that he was drunker than she was. Merciful, that. He seemed to feel her put a palm on his forehead, smoothing him back, before he passed out. So nothing had happened, no kiss even? But the terrible design was clear. His mother’s closest sister. It stood before him worse than what he had remembered last year in the second week of treatment at Howarden, and begun his Fifth Step with, walking into the office and saying shamed to Father L, ‘The worst things I have done in my awful life were to make three excellent women utterly miserable with my drinking and bad sex and to seduce once after we both married my dearest girl cousin.’ Darker still.
Inappropriate and paralyzing sexual images danced before his closed eyes in their dozens, or hundreds or thousands. Vulvas, hands on him, mouths, hot breasts, spread bottoms, their clenched feet and scissoring, in cemeteries, parks, cars, sand-dunes, darkness and daylight, floors, beds, beds. Heavy breathing, gropings back. Once without even knowing who it was. Friends’ wives, virgins. Unspeakable. And the myriad unacted. He might not be as bad, Severance thought with clenched teeth, as the poor maniac in Stekel who before speaking to a man had to look fixedly at him and repeat to himself, ‘First I will bite off his nose, then knock in his teeth, then shove his chest,’ while thinking first of his penis, then of his anus; no—but nearly. With disheartening regularity he phantasised on women in any degree attractive, on busses, sidewalks, in crowds, anywhere. His poor thing shrivelled in his groin as he cursed himself. He envied, not for the first time, the great early Alexandrian theologian who taking, ‘If thine eye offend thee,’ literally, castrated himself.
Then a thought if possible more drastic entered his tortured head. Should he report all this in Group? Grievous hours raced toward ten o’clock. But it was taken out of his hands.
Confrontation with Letty began, when he felt his head tilting backward, his mouth opening crookedly, his neck-muscles taut, and a soundless sobbing in his throat begin. He prayed not to be noticed or he prayed to be noticed. At length of course he was, and voices stopped. Finally somebody said, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ and his body arched forward and down and, gasping, fighting tears, with his face just above his knees, he spilled out in spurts of shame his sordid life. It took a long long time.
He sat sunken, amid dead silence.
‘I’m a monster,’ he choked out hoarse.
‘Maybe it’s easier to be a monster,’ he heard Harley say, ‘than a human being.’
Without attempting to understand this, he burst at last into convulsive tears. When he came back under control, Keg said, ‘Don’t you want to try to sit up and look at us,’ and with deep reluctance and a sudden, growing animosity he slowly did. He looked at the faces without looking at the faces. He hated his grievous confession to these remote bastards, and hardened his heart against them. During the prolonged confrontation that followed, he grew more and more morose, only once snapping bitterly, ‘Don’t ask me that question any more, Mary-Jane,’ and once starting to cry again, leaning his head against Hutch’s shoulder on his right—the big man warned in a low voice, ‘Self-pity,’ and with one rare impulse of gratitude he straightened back up. He heard Harley and her read in his tale ‘lonely despair’ and felt none, except of the Group. Harley also said he saw the ‘rage and hatred of women’ that Alan had certainly mentioned with passion at one point in his outburst, as overlying some different emotion. Several people saw fear, and he didn’t understand this either, and detested them. When they finally gave up, he heard as from a great distance Keg’s harsh summary: ‘unable to level with anger, fear, guilt—unable to level.’ Nothing mattered to him, surrounded by enemies. Far from any longer trusting the Group or imagining that he could ever expect any help from it, he felt no concern for anyone in it and wondered wh
at he was doing there, listening now, wounded, stony, to the details of Letty’s relation with her ambivalent mother.
A FAILURE SO ABJECT after the embracement of a risk so great might have been expected to drive a man out of treatment. But Severance had survived something of the sort once before, in the Spring, during his second confrontation, and it did not occur to him to leave hospital. He had developed a little nervous hum, unawares until other patients teased him about it at table one day. Vin noticed it, and—a great natural producer lost to the stage—made him take it out and put it on a chair facing him, and talk to it; and have the hum talk back. Semi-hallucinatory after an hour under high pressure, he conducted a one-man merciless dialogue, with the hum attacking. ‘You’re doomed!’ it roared at him. ‘That’s right!’ he roared back. But later he was unable to describe the hum, and sank into defiant stupor, until at last Vin turned to someone else saying, ‘I’ve seen you take risks in the past, Alan, but today you’re playing it safe.’ Also Severance was tough, a hard-case if quivering veteran of you name it, with nothing to lose.
Also he had picked up something: that concern is not necessary for help, you can be sharply helped by someone who doesn’t give a damn about you or even hates you. Joining perfunctorily, towards the end of the session, in a confrontation of Stack, he had been amazed to find the slit-eyes in the huge face glaring at him and lashing, ‘What about you? You say you’re hard of hearing! But you always come late to lectures and sit at the back! You can’t hear a word!’ His first impulse to deny it failed: it was too true, he had been neglecting, without realizing it, an important part of treatment. ‘God damn it, you’re right, Stack. I’ve been goofing off, there’s no excuse for it. It’ll change,’ and when they were leaving Group in the hall Stack put an arm around his shoulder, ‘Sorry, Alan,’ they agreed to look for each other, go down to lectures together and sit together, without exception. Here was a definite gain. He even felt affection for savage old Stack, for Hutch; remnants of, for Mary-Jane who had come in after lunch with, ‘You make me mad—the great Alan Severance,’ and so on.
Also, he decided, he had as usual set his goal too high. ‘Aim high, then,’ Thoreau might warn, but character-reformation in a month, at fifty-five? Unrealistic expectations, as usual. This was a hospital, the matter was medico-psychological, the purpose simply to safeguard sobriety as a habit, break apart the delusions that allow (enforce?) drinking. He had swallowed the Group-mystique too far for him—not much of a Group-man after all. Rigorous honest private mental work had brought him wherever he was. He saw no reason to give up. When groups, though, of which he felt part in the past had been beleaguered he had sprung into public action—he was no hermit or lighthouse-keeper or prospector (attractive destinies, however) —and this Group utterly was beleaguered. Look at Wilbur. Maybe after his resentment had faded some, some Group-sense might return.
Also there was his problem—not the Jewish aspiration, pursued daily, that didn’t have to be solved here on the Ward, but the missing years and his father. How had he really felt about him, down the deep backward and abysm? He could not remember ever once being punished by him, though Mother’s hairbrush as a paddle was vivid enough and Uncle Jack’s declaring, ‘I’ll never again meet you anywhere,’ when as a boy he was late for an appointment on some corner in New York chilled his blood and still did. Could he recall his father ever even angry? Mother said once he had been rather a cold man—as Thoreau called himself. Am I wrong about the warm close fishing hunting father-son duo I’ve always seemed to remember?
He sat up in his chair and reached for the scratch-pad, jotting:
‘New problem. Did I myself feel any guilt perhaps—long repressed if so, and mere speculation now (defence here)—about Daddy’s death? (I certainly picked up enough of Mother’s self-blame to accuse her once, drunk and raging, of having actually murdered him and staged a suicide.) Lecturer lately on children’s blaming themselves for father drunk (=What did I do to make Daddy angry and get drunk?). BLANK, probably odd. He was drinking heavily, all four of them were in those last weeks, nightmarish quarrels. Gun-death at dawn, like Hemingway’s, imitating his father. Does my fanatical drinking emulate his, and my fanatical smoking (both “manly”)? So possibly it wasn’t rage/self-pity, but guilt, that were simply driven underground for a year (Why? if so) to emerge after all and cripple my prep school years. Then I “solved” the problem all wrong my first week here!?
‘How do I actually now see him: limited, weak, honest (but unfaithful at least twice), prominent only very locally, not a soldier (fake soldier, National Guard)—and do I feel guilty about this rather contemptuous view, in the face of my real love? Queer that that Faulkner story hit me so hard, hit me only, the sole early work of art I remember. Very young hero a British torpedo-boat second officer (my unfailing, planned juniority to somebody), hopeless drunkard between reckless missions, misunderstood by (older) American aviators, thought a sissy (me at St Paul’s, because I wore glasses and didn’t go out for football my first year—have always seen myself ruined there by this, but is it likely? And the bullying? awful, but adequate to explain an almost-four-year ambition-lacuna?)—anyway, braver than them, cooler in crisis, lost at last. What subtle identifications are worth pursuing? How many models can a grown man survive?’
He dropped his pen, confused. The mystery of what I was reading under the covers after lights-out! Tall handsome Daddy, adored and lost so soon!
THEN, after several days of increasingly reconstituted hope and better spirits and listening closely to lectures, in the front seats, next to Stack, a cataclysm occurred in Group. Jeree began talking. The soft, plump, still, amber-haired young woman was talking to Harley in the far corner of the room. Her voice was too low for Severance to hear what she was saying, but presently he saw her huddle up and burst into tears! He felt heavy tension and concern around him. ‘What is it?’ He leaned over to Hutch. ‘She had an abortion eight years ago.’ My god, he yearned toward her. Even her sobbing was scarcely audible. But when she began speaking again, her voice was stronger. She had talked about nothing else, she said, twice weekly to a psychiatrist for two and a half years. It was why she and her husband couldn’t have children. She had finally told him and, a heavy powerful man, coming home every night drunk himself, he beat her every night, calling her ‘whore’ and ‘drunken slob’ and hurling her across their kitchen. Hatred against the brute mounted around the room. Jeree felt none.
‘You don’t hate him,’ Harley said.
‘Oh no. I love him.’
Then it transpired that he was divorcing her, didn’t give her even cigarette-money on the Ward, refused to come and see her, and had told her when she called him yesterday, ‘I can’t wait to be rid of you so I can have a ball every night.’
Severance ground his teeth. Luriel said, ‘Christ.’
Keg got up and placed an empty chair in front of Jeree facing her and stood over it.
‘Your husband is sitting here on the chair. What do you want to do to him?’
‘I want to beg him to take me back.’
‘So he can beat you up again.’
Silence. She stared at the chair.
‘Go ahead, beg him.’
‘I want him to forgive me.’
‘And he will.’
‘Oh no he won’t.’
‘Maybe he will.’
‘No no he never has. I used to get on my knees.’
‘And you love him?’
Her face worked. ‘I don’t know if I do or not.’
‘Sure you do. You want him to take you back and beat you up again every night for the rest of your drinking life.’
‘No!’ she cried suddenly. ‘I hate him!’
A thrill ran through the Group.
‘Here he sits.’ Keg pushed the chair close towards her knees. ‘He called you a whore. Would you like to do something to him?’
‘I’d like to hit him!’
‘Hit the chair. He’s the chair.’
; She hesitated, glaring, crouched forward.
‘Go ahead, hit it.’
Trembling, the girl lifted her right arm and patted her palm down on the chair seat.
‘Harder.’
Pat.
‘Harder! Hit him!’
Pat pat.
Keg sprang around to stand beside her, seized her forearm, and brought her palm down sharply down on the seat. Again.
The girl went wild. Snatching her arm away from Keg’s hands, she slammed it down and slapped the chair until Severance’s palm tingled. Then she rushed forward and grabbed it up, screaming, ‘You lousy bastard! You drunken bum yourself! You bully! You beast!’ and hurling it to the floor again and again, finally standing with clenched fists and contorted face over it, swelling with triumph, amid clapping and cheers. Luriel embraced her, Harley grasped her hand, Severance was beside himself with pride and love.
Jeree dated her beginning of recovery from this outbreak, and a year later in AA one Wednesday night Alan had a full view of the quality of her sobriety: one of her two alcoholic brothers had gone through treatment and rung her up drunk two days after his discharge—‘He just accepted everything,’ she told them, ‘he never surrendered,’ and, ‘He did it for his wife. Anyway, now he knows where it is, if he ever wants to do it for himself.’ For a selfish disease, only selfish initial treatment.
MINI–GROUP was on Fran, whom Alan knew only as a tall handsome ramrod of a girl, late twenties, on pills as well as booze, who was being divorced—‘No feelings about it,’ she had replied to him in lunch-line one day, ‘I couldn’t care less about him.’ She had a shock of brown hair, energetic regular features, prominent eyes. It was her dying alcoholic father she had feelings about: hatred, grief, fear, They drank together in the family kitchen when she visited home. Cronies—‘You know I haven’t got long, Fran, you understand.’ She understood that she was being torn to pieces.
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