The Harder They Fall

by Gary Stromberg

  My problem was I genuinely believed from the time I was a teenager until going on five years ago that I couldn’t write without drinking and without drugs. I was really fortunate. Some people come out of that and they really can’t write. I have friends who got sober and they couldn’t write for a year. Then they did. Poets I was around as a young child—Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, et cetera—were big unregenerate drinkers, a very bad example. But right away, as soon as I got serious about the fellowship of the recovery program, not only did I start to write again but I wrote ten times more than I’d ever written, and it was better. It resulted in the last five years in The Beforelife, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, and my new book. So in five years I wrote three books and they’re my best. I would have written something without sobriety, but it would have been the old stuff. Or I wouldn’t be alive. Or I’d be permanently deranged. None of this progress toward a more human and light-seeking poetry would have happened. I’m a person who can definitely say that I would have nothing of worth. It’s not like I have to go to meetings of my program. I love going. It took four years to make these bonds with people here, who are now closer to me than anyone in my family ever was, yet often I don’t even know them personally. It really does work, and I consider myself an example of someone for whom it does work.

  I now understand that whatever gift I may possess does not have anything to do with drugs—that it is here in me already, and only needs health and a sense of well-being in order to flourish.

  Those poets who drank still continued to function but then they died earlier than they might have, and often their writing became progressively an illustration of a sick mind at work. You can do it. Robert Lowell is the perfect example: a manic-depressive who was an alcoholic. The biographies make a big deal about his madness without mention of his drinking. I know he was a serious classic alcoholic. I know people who’ve been to parties with him who would watch him when he was manic, self-medicating. He would be drinking what appeared to be tall glasses of water one after the other. Then they would get close to him and see these were tall twelve- or sixteen-ounce glasses of vodka or gin, which he was drinking as if he were a thirsty person drinking a glass of water on a hot day, one after the other, with no apparent effect on him. Enough alcohol to kill a normal person quickly. He would be so manic that it would medicate him, very temporarily, against the more florid symptoms of mania, then—like gasoline thrown on fire—make them even worse, until he started expounding on Hitler’s virtues and so forth. And I saw my father do it. He would drink and drink and drink, and he would become more lucid. And then he would become psychotic, hallucinate, and cry.

  But up to the point you can learn how to function. There are many high-functioning alcoholics and drug addicts. But you are never yourself if you are drunk or high, and these men were never themselves. Many writers drink quite heavily at times but aren’t alcoholics. I don’t believe Theodore Roethke was an alcoholic, for example, despite his bravado on the subject. Drinking contributed to his premature death, but he was a manic-depressive. Ginsberg was not a drug addict either. He could use drugs. Then one day he went, “I don’t need this anymore,” and he didn’t have to do it, although he still did a little. This is a totally different thing from addiction. I know people who can drink heavily who don’t have a personality change, who can stop at a certain point and don’t have blackouts. An alcoholic has a personality change, blacks out, and does awful things he would never do as his real self. Somebody like Lowell never got to be his real self. Although he produced a beautiful, incredible body of work, we can only imagine what it would have been like had he received the benefit of recovery. Same thing with Faulkner, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, any number of prominent American writers. They wrote these magnificent bodies of work, but what might they have done if they had got into recovery? They might have become Shakespeare. They had genius to be as great as anyone who ever lived, and in some ways still were, but you mourn what they might have been. Everyone insists, “Oh, they needed to drink.” People don’t understand if they think that. They suppose it’s a Dylan Thomas drama—that the writers needed to be like that, and that this made them writers. No! It’s always the case that they wrote in spite of tremendous suffering from a fatal disease. Then they died. Dylan Thomas died when he was thirty-nine, and Hemingway blew his brains out. They still produced a body of work, they functioned, but they can only have been terribly miserable.

  The disease of alcoholism affects what you write, moreover. I believe John Berryman realized when he did get into recovering that his best work, The Dream Songs, had become like a textbook of what it’s like to be an alcoholic. He didn’t know it while he was composing. You’re two people when you’re an alcoholic, two distinct personalities, and since Berryman was always drunk, he was that personality and wrote that book. That same book, when Berryman looked at it with sober eyes, appalled him. It wasn’t the work he thought he had written, and I think that contributed to his suicide. He was sober for eleven months when he committed suicide, and at the autopsy, there were no drugs and he had no alcohol in his system. He was pretty broken down, but I think he fell into a suicidal despair. My theory, which I’ve heard other people say who knew him, is that he realized that the greatest work he would ever do in his life was a description merely of what it’s like to be insane. He might have dealt with that and thought, “Okay, this can be used in that manner. This is what it’s like for a brilliant genius to express what it’s like to be insane.” But I think it must have depressed him so much that he wasn’t able to get beyond eleven months of recovery. Berryman killed himself before getting even a year. If he’d waited three years, I think he would have gotten through, because I see people all the time who take three years to come out of withdrawal and depression. Others are like me. I tend to be a pink-cloud person. In two weeks it’s like, “I’m back.” My family, we just physically rebound. I don’t know what we’re made of, but I see people all the time it takes them two or three years to like being sober. If Berryman had been able to go through that, he would have been okay.

  All those years I never wavered from being a poet. Secretly in my heart of hearts, I’ve not ever believed I’m a particularly gifted or brilliant person. However, I am an extremely persistent person, and from the time I wrote my first poem at fourteen, I made a completely conscious decision that I would be a poet or I would die. And it pretty much looked like I was going to die! Over all those years, I suffered tremendously when I couldn’t write. The final illness involved the fact that I’d lost the ability to write for two years. That meant, if I could not write, the only alternative was suicide, and fortunately I didn’t succeed. That was the point I reached, getting cut off from poetry, and for me that meant death—life was unendurable.

  Even when I was drinking, there were intervals when I’d become sober, and then you start to become more yourself, feel better. Soon as you really feel better, if you’re lucky like me, you want to celebrate, so you get drunk again. I had no program to stay sober, though I tried many times. I knew I was an alcoholic and would drink and use drugs, and when I would get really sick, I would stop for a couple of months and often be able to write during those sober intervals. But I would invariably return to it, didn’t have a way to live without it. Something would happen and I’d go back. Anything could make me go back. Or I would simply feel better and decide I wanted to get high again. I reached a point where I was prepared to surrender to my powerlessness over drugs and face the fact that, in spite of my desire to stop, my own willpower was clearly not going to make me do that. It wasn’t the maturity of years, because I’m not a mature person now! My wife, Elizabeth, is professionally mature, but I say the two of us are like Hansel and Gretel in the woods. I’m a very adolescent sort of person still. It’s said you sort of remain at the age when you started drinking. In my case that’s literally true. It’s getting better. I’m starting to do things where I give an incredibly good impression of being an
adult, like going down and teaching in Arkansas, or attending the presentation of the Pulitzer Prize. I don’t think anyone could tell that I was really seventeen years old and utterly terrified.

  Gradually I’ve been able to significantly contribute to Elizabeth’s and my life. The prize opened up financial opportunities that were unimaginable to me, so we’re able to move up a little bit more than where we were. Moving a couple of streets away to our house with a red door is moving way up from where we were, living in one room at the beginning of our marriage. It took until now to get for us what most people I know would consider a somewhat normal existence. But without a recovery program, none of this would have happened and I would have died by now. Hopefully. Or if I hadn’t died, it would have been worse. I would still be in a psychotic depression. I lived in a terror and anxiety that was so severe that it never let up, even in the deepest sleep. It never let up even for a second, and my heart was damaged. (In prolonged anxiety states, cortisol is released which is useful over a short run because it gives you energy to either flee or deal with whatever is making you anxious. If it goes on for years without interruption, it physically harms you.) I had no hope of ever emerging from that state, which is indescribable. I would get up, look out the window, and think, “I’m insane. I always worried that I would go insane, and now I did and am forever.” And I was in hell!

  Addicts have a seductive and almost psychopathic ability to use other human beings when it comes to seeing that their own needs are met. In active addiction, one is not much bothered by conscience, one does what one has to do to get what one needs with disregard for the consequences to others. Most addicts are incredibly cunning and resourceful when it comes to survival. They get sick, then they get better, and sick and better. But this was it. I got sick and I couldn’t come out of it.

  The process of recovery is partly a gradual building up of the ability to face life difficulties with confidence, perseverance, a sense of having the right to exist. Now I find myself doing things that are so far beyond what I ever imagined I’d be able to do. Socially, and in terms of working and being in the real world. It’s like being able to fly or walk on water or something—miraculous. We get to experience miracles. Sometimes people say that they are almost grateful that they’re in recovery because they’re alcoholics, because they get to know what it feels like to have been resurrected. I don’t feel that way, yet to me the resurrection is not like a figure of speech, it’s literal. A lot of times acquaintances now don’t believe that I was sick. I can only tell them to ask Beth, or ask people who knew me six years ago, who go, “Oh yeah, Franz is not the same person.” I was a totally terrified, broken, nonfunctional person in the mental health system. I was one of the people that I encounter when I work in mental health clinics, and which my brother still is.

  My brother is five years younger. His diagnosis is more like schizophrenia, a good deal more serious than manic depression. He’s deteriorating and also continuing to use crack and other drugs, and he’s going to die, I think. Every day I expect to hear that he’s died. This past year he made a particularly gruesome suicide attempt. I was in Arkansas and I’m calling to California where he lives, to the emergency rooms, trying to find out where he is. This is like business as usual in my family. It happens every few months. If I hadn’t escaped from there, from my family, and gone to Oberlin College, where I started to get better for a while … if I’d stayed in California in the orbit of my family, I’d be exactly like him. I don’t have the slightest doubt about it. Just one of those people so deep in affliction that you look at them and just know that, short of some real miracle, they’re not going to come out. They’re going to die like that.

  [Franz’s in-laws drop by, and Beth Wright gives her mother a bouquet of spring flowers to thank her for helping locate the new home. Franz has a photograph of it displayed on a bookshelf—a plain old place in the same working-class neighborhood of this in-lying Boston suburb. When Franz looks at the photo his eyes light up, and the poet makes me see the dream house he sees.]

  Here’s a picture of our new house. I always wanted to live with a red door, and it’s got a red door. It’s five times bigger. When we moved here, we thought that this was the Taj Mahal. We were living in one room in the South End. It was a pretty room with a kitchen. Here, if we talk in a normal voice level, we can hear each other. But in a larger space, we’ll try the same thing and it won’t do. The house is in a much nicer neighborhood. It’s sunny compared with here. So close that I can still walk everywhere that I go.

  Here’s a picture of me in Arkansas. There’s my cross right behind me. I didn’t realize it was there. I’m thinking of putting that on a cover of a book that they’re reprinting. If it were Knopf, they could say you can’t have the dark glasses, but this is, like, Carnegie Mellon University. I’ll say, “Too bad, I’m going to have the dark glasses.”

  I feel that learning to have normal interchange has been a great accomplishment. I often find the most basic level of human intercourse to be the most baffling and difficult, though I am getting better at that. I didn’t suspect initially that my poetry could function on a level that is nonliterary. Oftentimes people think of contemporary poetry as some higher mathematics that you need training to read. There is poetry like that, which can be appreciated only by people with a great deal of knowledge and sophistication in the art. I was always interested in keeping the poems where they worked on a literal and easygoing level, as well as a more sophisticated level. Sometimes I felt I wasn’t writing real poetry—“This is too simpleminded!” But then sometimes I have the experience of showing work, or someone’s catching me by the sleeve and saying, “This is beyond me.” To me, my poetry seems like something anyone can read. At its best, a poem works at both the levels of language and meaning you can grasp.

  It is said that the great T’ang Dynasty Chinese poet Li Po used to try his new poems out on the old woman who laundered his clothes, and that if she wasn’t delighted by them, he would throw them out. I can understand this impulse. I like that idea, though sometimes you stray into ideas without realizing it where you’re writing at a level a little beyond it. I want both things to happen—to have a connection with the subconscious where the words well up from some deeper place, but at the same time, to be expressed with precision and elegance. Writing about Wallace Stevens, my teacher David Young said, “The arbitrary posing successfully as the inevitable.” Sometimes you do have to find that point where you know that this is going to be puzzling to a reader, and yet it looks and feels right. I like poetry that I find unparaphrasable, I do. My favorite of those poems I write are those that are very simple and clear, but sometimes I have to be enigmatic and not care whether anybody gets it or not, but you get it and feel somehow somebody else will. In Keats’ phrase, this is the “negative capability”: the ability not to become frustrated because you cannot give something you read a literal paraphrase. To accept the fact that poetry can rise to the condition of music. When people take poetry to the extreme of the lyrical absolute, and it’s only music and doesn’t have any sense. That’s Mallarmé, for instance. And that is very tempting, to dwell in the sheer beauty and music of language.

  When I write now, I feel like someone who came back from the dead. A person who has the same name. I also feel as though that person was already there before I started to drink. I’m now that person I was in my teens before I started drinking. I was totally straight, I was a very good student, I was an athlete. I was in track and ran long distance. I did drugs a little bit, but it still seemed social.

  When I got to college, there was nothing social about it. In my teens, for three years, I practiced Zen Buddhism at a monastery in Berkeley with a South Korean Zen master. I sat and did it. It wasn’t theoretical. I did the sitting and meditation. That was me and it didn’t stop being me, but it got all buried over by the other stuff. And that’s a wonderful gift, too, how that person never went away. Many times I thought that that person was dead and gone forever. It
is not. As long as you’re alive, those parts of your identity go underground. They become dormant, they atrophy, but they don’t die. They cannot die! They’re indestructible! But you have to make a choice to orient yourself in a certain way that allows them to manifest again, to come back to life. That’s not easy. There are many, many days when you want to get high, and you want a drink. What you do instead is you call someone that you trust, you go to a meeting, you pray. You do all those things that you learned how to do and get through that period. It’s like this bad dream that you had, and you’re awake again.

  But people relapse, sometimes after years, and they may die, or come right back, and often that less time in recovery is even stronger because of their renewed enthusiasm, the awe and wonder they have at being sane and alive and being able to be with other people. Although, the people with decades of sobriety are like gods. You look up and revere them. You have absolute respect for them and feel, “I could never do that, but maybe if I live long enough, I could, one day at a time.” They feel that reverence too. If you tell them that, they go, “Yeah, that’s how I felt. But I could also drink again, same as anyone else.” And one day at a time they got to that point, but they didn’t arrive there in a week. They arrived there in twenty years, but it only works today. And that is the principle that all spiritual life is based on: to live in the present. If you live in the present, you can be happy. You don’t need to get high because you’re already happy.

  That’s the other insight I had. From working with addicts this is what I’ve observed: They do not take drugs to get high, they take drugs to feel happy and to be like everybody else. It’s literally physically true, because anyone who’s taken drugs knows that it works for a little while. Then you take drugs in order to feel the way you’d feel if you weren’t taking drugs, because the tolerance builds up. It takes more and more to get high, and then you overdose and die. Beth has asked me what it’s like to be an addict. I said, “Well, you have a really fucking good time for about two weeks, and then all of a sudden you’re using drugs to feel just the way you would feel if you weren’t using drugs. That’s what an addict is, you know.”