The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  If there was one book that everyone worshipped at Iowa, poet oracles and prose architects alike, it was Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. This collection of stories was our Bible of beauty and damage, a hallucinated vision of how and where we lived, full of farmhouse parties and hungover mornings, blue skies bright enough to make your eyeballs ache. Half the book took place in Iowa City bars. Crazy things happened at the corner of Burlington and Gilbert, where we now had a Kum & Go gas station. The story “Emergency” took its title from the big sign on Mercy Hospital: glowing red letters against brick that I associated with walking home drunk on winter nights, numb to the chill. In the world of Johnson’s stories, you leaned close to sip your liquor “like a hummingbird over a blossom.” There was a farmhouse where people smoked pharmaceutical opium and said things like, “McInnes isn’t feeling too good today. I just shot him.”

  In Jesus’ Son, even the cornfields mattered. They surrounded our town like an ocean, green and bristling in summer, high enough for mazes in September, then ravaged into dry husks for the remainder of autumn—dreary ranks of desiccated, skeletal brown stalks. It was like Johnson was drunk-dialing us from the end of time to tell us what they meant, these sweeping fields whose edges were beyond our sight. One of his characters looks at the giant screen of a drive-in cinema and mistakes it for a sacred vision: “The sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity.” Johnson had mistaken the ordinary Iowa around us for something sacred, and drugs and booze had helped him do it.

  When Johnson arrived in Iowa City as a college freshman in the fall of 1967, he wrote his parents to say he’d accidentally purchased baby blankets he’d mistaken for towels at the Goodwill—but he was glad to find a collection of “personality-ridden ties.” He complained about a guy who played the banjo loudly outside his dorm-room door. By November, he’d done his first stint at the county jail. While he was locked up, his friends sent him a drugstore greeting card covered with cartoon people whose droopy faces were distraught: “PLEASE COME BACK!!! We all miss you very much and besides…” The interior added: “The coast is clear!” His friend Peg wrote: “Boy, I tried all day to get you out of jail, but they wouldn’t do it. Your court costs are paid so you can leave Thursday night.” Peg was getting by okay—“Right now I’m at a truck stop on I-80 having a coke”—but she wanted him to know: “We’re all anxiously awaiting your triumphant return.”

  By the time Johnson was nineteen, he’d published his first book of poetry, and by the time he was twenty-one, he’d been put in a psych ward for alcohol-related psychosis. I’d heard that Jesus’ Son was just a bunch of memories he’d stuffed into a drawer and then sold to a publisher, years later, to pay off the IRS.

  I liked to read one of his closing paragraphs aloud in my Iowa bedroom: “I kissed her fully, my mouth on her open mouth, and we met inside. It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.” He was insisting that a single stupid kiss could matter, that one swooning-drunk moment could matter, that even the most ordinary things could matter—the walk down the hall, the opened door, even the stranger without a name. They all added up to something. What that something was, who knew? But we could sense its ragged edges.

  There was something beautiful and necessary about the role of pain in Johnson’s stories. Truth lurked past the edges of destruction and sorrow. Something got made, like a jewel or a hatched bird, when people hurt. When a woman was told that her husband had died, behind a hospital door that let out a single bar of bright light, as if “diamonds were being incinerated in there,” she “shrieked” as the narrator “imagined an eagle would shriek,” and he wasn’t horrified but entranced. “It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it!” he said. “I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.” My undergraduate students thought it was cruel, the narrator’s hunt for pain, but I thought, I get it. I would have clawed under the hospital door looking for those diamonds, too, for the great heat and shriek of their destruction.

  At the end of that story, the narrator addressed us directly from the page: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” But I wasn’t seeking his help so much as his glorious vision of what it meant to be broken. His characters played the part of prophet drunks, our Virgils to their hell. “Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank,” his narrator tells us. “We had that helpless, destined feeling.” His stories insisted that everything around us mattered: the dream and clove-smoke and sharp cold of this place. It was there, he wrote. It was.

  I wanted to think of my early months with Daniel in terms of their magic, but in truth they were also saturated with anxiety. For me, so many of our carefree adventures—the sudden trip to New Orleans, the graveyard sex—were striated by doubt, hardly free at all. They were more like attempts to prove, to him and to myself, that whatever was happening between us was happening on a grand scale. Our stumbling drunken run through the French Quarter played in my mind like an art-house film: wrought-iron balconies, pastel shotgun apartments.

  I didn’t just need Daniel to want me; I needed him to want everything with me. Anything less seemed like rejection. For him, I imagine this was somewhat exhausting. I had no stomach for that murky state that came between being strangers and being passionately committed for the rest of our lives—in other words, dating. I needed it all, right away: More. Again. Forever. I can remember Daniel telling me once: “I like you, but I’m not sure I’d want to marry you,” though I’ve conveniently repressed whatever I said to make him say that, probably something like: “Don’t you want to marry me?!” If he didn’t, after a month, I was ready to read it as my own failure. Drinking with Daniel wasn’t just about delivering myself into the wild hands of his recklessness, it was about surviving his uncertainty. I read this uncertainty as a metaphysical conundrum, a referendum on the possibilities of intimacy, when in fact it was just honesty. It was the honesty of a twenty-six-year-old poet living above a falafel shop.

  As we were stumbling home from a barbecue one night, silly in the darkness, he stopped me in the middle of the sidewalk. When he told me, “Back there, I was in love with every fucking word coming out of your mouth,” it came as the confirmation of a hunch. I’d always suspected love came as a reward for saying the right things.

  Daniel had an ex-girlfriend who’d had cervical cancer. He’d given her HPV and felt responsible for her illness. Even though she was healthy again, and they weren’t together anymore, he was still preoccupied by the specter of their relationship, and by his culpability in her sickness. I didn’t worry about her coming out of remission, and didn’t even worry about getting HPV myself; I only worried I would never mean as much to him as she had.

  One weekend we all went camping out at Lake Macbride, me and Daniel and his crew of older poet friends. It was early spring. The air smelled like wet dirt. Everything was raw from just-melted snow. I was scared of saying the wrong thing but also scared of saying nothing at all. How much more could I say about the truck stop? What else did I have? I sucked down beer after beer and hardly touched my hamburger. I remember being nervous and then I remember nothing. I woke up in a tent the next morning and Daniel told me they’d gotten worried. The night before, I’d wandered off into the woods and hadn’t come back. He’d thought I was peeing but then I still hadn’t come back. He went looking and eventually found me hunched at the base of a tree. What was I doing there? he wondered. We wondered together.

  I was starting to learn the social etiquette of the postblackout processing session, letting someone tell me what I’d done and then helping him figure out why I might have done it. I did WHAT? I’d ask. Why would I do THAT? I pictured myself stumbling through the trees, a weird survival impulse at work, my body fleeing my own tyrannical desire to impress. My drunk self was like an embarrassing cousin I was responsible for—a houseguest in
the woods who was undeniably my fault, though I couldn’t remember inviting her.

  In 1967, Life magazine published an eight-page profile of John Berryman titled “Whisky and Ink, Whisky and Ink.” It featured photos of the bearded genius-poet befriending entire Dublin pubs, holding forth over a flock of foam-lipped empty pints, carrying the burden of his wisdom and the antidote of his whiskey. “Whisky and ink,” it began. “These are the fluids John Berryman needs. He needs them to survive and describe the thing that sets him apart from other men and even from other poets: his uncommonly, almost maddeningly penetrating awareness of the fact of human mortality.”

  It wasn’t quite the white logic, but it was close. Whiskey didn’t grant Berryman his vision, but it helped him endure it. The profile still sketched that shimmering link between drinking and darkness, between drinking and knowing. It also included a full-page Heineken ad.

  Berryman’s most famous poems, The Dream Songs, conjure a landscape full of booze and tortured knowledge. “I am, outside,” his speaker announces. “Incredible panic rules.… Drinks are boiling. Iced / drinks are boiling.” Even the iced drinks are boiling. It has come to that. Berryman’s persona, Henry, often speaks with a drunk voice sweating heavy on the page, asking himself some questions: “Are you radioactive, pal?—Pal, radioactive.—Has you got the night sweats & the day sweats, pal?—Pal, I do.” The Dream Songs breathe a weird new form of oxygen. “Hey, out there!—assistant professors, full, / associates,—instructors—others—any,” Henry announces, “I have a sing to shay.” I have a sing to shay. His drunk voice performs its intoxication to the point of absurdity, suggesting that creation has to happen beyond the borderlines of comfort. One of Berryman’s friends once told him that he lived like he’d spent his “whole fucking life out in the weather without any protection… eyes ragged from what they have seen & try to look away from.”

  Berryman arrived for his own stint in Iowa City at the age of forty, with plenty of baggage back in New York: a recent separation from his first wife, a girlfriend getting an abortion, an overdue bill to his analyst. “At present, the figure is mountainous, which discourages you from starting,” this analyst wrote to him. “But please start.”

  The day Berryman showed up in Iowa, he fell down a flight of stairs and broke his wrist. He developed a reputation for praising Whitman’s long lines in bar booths, and drunk-dialing his students in the middle of the night. “Mr. Berryman often called me,” Bette Schissel recalled, “usually in a deeply agitated state… often incoherent and rambling… seeking reassurance that he had been ‘outstanding’ or ‘brilliant’ at his morning lecture.” He was a fragile oracle. Of Henry, he wrote:

  Hunger was constitutional with him,

  wine, cigarettes, liquor, need need need

  Until he went to pieces.

  The pieces sat up & wrote.

  Hunger ran in the family. Berryman’s mother wrote to him about craving her own mother’s affection: “I, who longed for her love and have love-groped my way through life for the need of it.” Berryman’s own need broke him into pieces, but the pieces got the writing done. “I have the authority of suffering; extraordinary suffering, I think,” Berryman insisted, and he identified with the drunk tormented geniuses who had come before him: Hart Crane, Edgar Allan Poe, Dylan Thomas. He compared himself to Baudelaire: “in violent temper & razor sensibility to disgrace,” in his “savage self-contempt which is brother to mine.” The dead were always breathing down his neck. His father committed suicide when he was eleven.

  Part of Berryman was attached to his own trauma and its residue. He even wrote to his unpaid analyst confessing anxiety about the risk of impeding his creativity by resolving his emotional problems. He compared his case to Rilke’s. “I would not worry,” his analyst replied, “about an analogy to Rilke, and a possible damage to your creative skills. These are not in your case so intertwined with your emotional problems that the solution of one must lead to the destruction of the other.”

  For many years, this was Berryman’s operative logic: Pain promised inspiration, and booze promised relief, a way to endure the authority of suffering. Berryman’s friend Saul Bellow echoed the notion that Berryman’s drinking allowed him to withstand his own dark wisdom: “Inspiration contained a death threat [and] Drink was a stabilizer. It somewhat reduced the fatal intensity.” But if Berryman believed this—that drink helped him survive the fatal intensity of his own poetic vision—he couldn’t deny that it left other intensities in its wake. He got fired from his teaching job at Iowa after going to jail on charges of public intoxication and disturbing the peace.

  When I encountered the legend of Berryman, I found an appealing air of complicatedness in his affairs, the sweet boozy whiff of tangle and rupture. “With your work,” a friend wrote to him, “I often have the feeling that yr poems are the light we see now from a star that is already ashes.”

  What role could sobriety possibly play in that glorious arc of blaze and rot?

  In The Dream Songs, I saw proof of a tormented consciousness, and proof that you could write from torment. I saw what Berryman’s pieces sat up and wrote: “Something can (has) been said for sobriety / but very little.”

  In Iowa, I spent my days reading dead drunk poets and my nights trying to sleep with live ones. I love-groped my way through the future canon. I was drawn to the same unhinged sparks of luminous chaos that had animated the old legends. I idolized the iconic drunk writers because I understood their drinking as proof of extreme interior weather: volatile and authentic. If you needed to drink that much, you had to hurt, and drinking and writing were two different responses to that same molten pain. You could numb it, or else grant it a voice.

  My ability to find drunken dysfunction appealing—to fetishize its relationship to genius—was a privilege of having never really suffered. My fascination owed a debt to what Susan Sontag calls the “nihilistic and sentimental idea of ‘the interesting.’” In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag describes the nineteenth-century idea that if you were ill, you were also “more conscious, more complex psychologically.” Illness became an “interior décor of the body,” while health was considered “banal, even vulgar.” Sontag was writing about tuberculosis, but there was a durable logic connecting suffering with sensitivity, with rarefied perspective, with being interesting. In the early days of my drinking—in the shadows of all those legendary Iowa drinkers, and in the longer shadows of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, Poe and Baudelaire, Burroughs and his junkies, De Quincey and his opium, a canon whose boundaries I hadn’t yet come to see as deeply limited—addiction seemed generative. It seemed very much like interior décor, an accessory that spoke to inner depths.

  When my drinking passed a certain threshold—a threshold I imagined as an existential tunnel, hidden under the fifth or sixth drink—it plunged me into darkness that seemed like honesty. It was as if the bright surfaces of the world were all false, and the desperate drunk space underground was where the truth lived. Novelist Patricia Highsmith’s argument that drinking helped the artist “see the truth, the simplicity, and the primitive emotions once more” reimagined Jack London’s white logic as a visible core, something vital that remained once booze had stripped away the trivial distractions of everything else. It was another layer in the complicated, circular relationship I was constructing between drinking and making: Booze helped you see, and then it helped you survive the sight. The appeal wasn’t just about intoxication—as a portal, or a bandage—but about the alluring relationship between creativity and addiction itself: its state of thrall, its signature extremity. The person who found himself in that state of thrall was someone who felt things more acutely than ordinary men, who shared his living quarters with darkness, and then eventually the drama of enthrallment became—itself—something worth writing about.

  But why was it always him? The Old Drunk Legends were all men. It was like they’d built their own tombs from one another’s myths, in a testosterone-steeped lineage of inflated
egos and glorified dysfunction: Carver loved London’s white logic; Cheever imagined himself dying like Berryman; Berryman imagined himself following in the lurching footsteps of Poe, Crane, Baudelaire. Denis Johnson said he read only one book the whole time he was a student at Iowa, and it was Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. It was Lowry’s hero, the Consul, who put it bluntly: “A woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard’s life.”

  Maybe Elizabeth Bishop learned something about the perils and complications of a drunkard’s life during her three-day binges, or her decades of Antabuse. Maybe she knew something about them by the time she died of a cerebral aneurysm, in 1979, when the alcohol-thinned blood vessels of her brain finally burst. “I will not drink,” she wrote to her doctor in 1950. “I’ll go insane if I keep it up.” And then, two decades later: “Please just don’t… scold me for any past lapses, please…I feel I can’t bear to be made to feel guilty one more time about the drinking.”

  Maybe Jane Bowles understood something about the complications of a drunkard’s life when she stripped naked at Guitta’s, her favorite bar in Tangier, or when she kept drinking in the aftermath of her giant cerebral hemorrhage at forty. Maybe Marguerite Duras understood something about these complications after liters of cheap Bordeaux, or after the brutal disintoxication treatments that left her almost dead. Maybe she understood something about the shame of being a woman who understood something about drinking. “When a woman drinks,” she wrote, “it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child.”

  Female drunks rarely got to strike the same rogue silhouettes as male ones. When they were drunk, they were like animals or children: dumbstruck, helpless, ashamed. Their drinking was less like the necessary antidote to their own staggering wisdom—catalyst or salve for these Virgils to the fallen world—and more like self-indulgence or melodrama, hysteria, a gratuitous affliction. Women might know something about the complications of a drunkard’s life, but their drinking would never be important, as Lowry put it, not like a man’s. If they weren’t drinking like children, they were drinking instead of caring for their children. A woman escaping into drink was usually a woman failing to fulfill her duties to home and family. Describing the “traditional beliefs” that inflect how male and female drinking have been understood differently, one clinical textbook puts it like this: “Intoxication in a woman was thought to signal a failure of control over her family relationships.”