The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  No one knew this better than Jean Rhys. Rhys was drinking hard in Paris when her infant son was hospitalized with pneumonia. She’d arrived in early autumn of 1919, six months pregnant, and spent her first afternoon drinking wine and eating ravioli at a sidewalk café. “I’ve escaped,” she wrote of that first day. “A door has opened and let me out into the sun.”

  Even though they were young and poor, Rhys and her husband—Jean Lenglet, a Belgian expatriate who worked as a journalist and spy—lived happily in a cheap hotel room near the Gare du Nord, where he made them cups of chocolate over their flamme bleue each morning, and they drank wine on the wrought-iron balcony each night. “Paris tells you to forget, forget, let yourself go,” Rhys wrote; but years later, she worried she had let herself go too fully: “I was never a good mother.” She let her baby, William Owen, sleep in a little basket near the balcony door, and at three weeks old, he fell ill. “This damned baby, poor thing, has gone a strange colour,” she remembered thinking, “and I don’t know what to do, I’m no good at this.”

  William was taken to the Hospice des Enfants Assistés, and a few nights later, when the hospital said he had a severe case of pneumonia, Rhys grew anxious because he had not been christened. Her husband brought her the only thing he knew could calm her down: two bottles of champagne. “By the time the first bottle was finished,” she remembered, “we were all laughing.” The next morning, the hospital called to say her son had died at seven-thirty the previous evening. “He was dying,” she wrote later, “or was already dead, while we were drinking.”

  Jean Rhys wrote about drinking with the futile precision of someone who had never escaped its thrall. She wrote four novels dissecting the emotional dynamics of her own drinking, but kept drinking herself into oblivion anyway—a lifelong kamikaze dive. All the self-awareness in the world couldn’t keep her sober. “I know about myself,” one of her heroines says to a lover. “You’ve told me so often.”

  The recurring heroine of Rhys’s novels is a drunk woman making a spectacle of her weeping, and her work confronts this woman not just as a mess but as an unappealing mess, an eyesore, always clutching at the pity of others—also their love, and their wallets—and degraded by her constant clutching.

  Rhys’s heroines shuttle between dingy hotel rooms and disappointing love affairs. They drink at Parisian street cafés and in train-station hotel rooms choked with smoke. When they think about love, they imagine a wound, bleeding slowly. They look at flowers on the wallpaper of their cheap flats and see crawling spiders. They “struggle with life,” one critic observed, “the way a sleeper struggles with a tangled blanket.” Their lives look a lot like Rhys’s: itinerant, moving between various European capitals, often in love, often drunk, often broke. Her heroines’ drinking is never done. It’s always another brandy, another Pernod, another scotch and soda, another bottle of wine. Their public sadness is part of their crime, and booze is their accomplice. Other characters ask them, Do you want a coffee? Do you want a hot chocolate? And it’s like a recurring joke, always with the same punch line: No, I’d like a drink.

  Across the course of Rhys’s first three novels, drinking is a shape-shifter. It sheds its various costumes of pleasure and exposes itself as an attempt to flee the same sadness it always ends up deepening instead. For one of Rhys’s heroines, early in her drinking, wine suffuses an ordinary city view with meaning: “It was astonishing how significant, coherent, and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach.” Wine turns the “sullen” Seine outside shuttered windows into an expansive ocean. “When you were drunk,” she thinks, “you could imagine that it was the sea.” But drinking eventually becomes something more desperate. “I must get drunk tonight,” another one of Rhys’s heroines decides, after her lover sends her away. “I must get so drunk that I can’t walk, so drunk that I can’t see.”

  By Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys’s fourth novel, her heroine, Sasha, has arrived at “the bright idea of drinking myself to death.” Even the prose signals her erosion, dissolving into ellipses and drifting into the white spaces of unremembered blackout. Sasha has come to Paris after trying—and failing—to kill herself in London. She gets a cheap hotel room on a dead-end street and spends her days sleeping, taking pills to sleep more, and wandering a city that reminds her, in every café, at every corner, of a youth that didn’t keep its promises: the marriage that ended, the baby boy who died. The novel is honest about the price of drinking—how small it makes the world, how much it saps the spirit—as well as its logistics: the ease of getting drunk on an empty stomach, the nostalgia for early days of lower tolerance.

  “Sometimes I’m just as unhappy as you are,” another woman tells Sasha. “But that’s not to say that I let everybody see it.” A bartender stops serving her. “You said that if you drink too much you cry,” her lover tells her. “And I have a horror of people who cry when they’re drunk.” Sasha deforms the icon of the Drunk Genius: the poet with his ink and whiskey, turning intoxication to lyric. Sasha’s pieces can’t sit up and write. When she gets expressive, her expression is shameful, something others ask her to hide: the embarrassment of drunken tears, not the brilliance of song. If the mythic male drunk manages a thrilling abandon—the reckless, self-destructive pursuit of truth—his female counterpart is more often understood as guilty of abandonment, the crime of failing at care. Her drinking has violated the central commandment of her gender, Thou shalt care for others, and revealed itself as an intrinsically selfish abnegation of that duty. Her self-pity compounds the crime by directing her concern away from an implicit other—real or imagined, child or spouse—and funneling that concern back toward herself.

  Rhys once wrote that she learned early that “it was bad policy to say that you were lonely or unhappy,” and Sasha is an explosion of bad policy. Her consciousness runs on an engine of wearisome hydraulics, bringing in the booze and pumping it out as tears. Sasha is a grotesque version of what Rhys always feared she would become: a pariah who drove everyone away by showing the intensity of her unhappiness. “I could deny myself,” she once wrote in her diary. “Then I could make them love me and be kind to me… That has been the struggle.”

  For Sasha, that struggle—to dissemble, to pretend—is done. She cries wherever she pleases. She cries at cafés, at bars, at home. She cries at work. She cries in a fitting room. She cries on the street. She cries near the river, drinks until the river becomes an ocean, and then cries some more. “Now I have had enough to drink,” she thinks each night, “now the moment of tears is very near.”

  —

  II —

  ABANDON

  I learned about the efficiency of drinking on an empty stomach by starting to drink when I wasn’t eating enough. This was during my freshman year of college. I had made one good friend—Abby from Indiana, who had grown up evangelical and would become one of the great friends of my life—but if we weren’t together, I was alone. My roommate had an unnervingly attractive boyfriend she had met on a pre-orientation camping trip. It seemed like everyone had met her boyfriend on a pre-orientation camping trip. When I looked in the mirror, I saw someone tall and ungainly, with a large nose and pleading eyes, a frizzy triangle of thick brown hair. Most evenings I walked into Harvard’s version of a freshman dining hall—the cavernous interior of an old Gothic church, its long tables surveyed by callous stone gargoyles—petrified by the prospect of finding someone to sit with. It wasn’t that I assumed no one else felt this way; it was that I didn’t even bother to think about it. My loneliness was a full-time job.

  I called my mom from pay phones so my roommate wouldn’t see me crying. Scheduling phone dates with my high school friends grew embarrassing because of the asymmetry in our lives, their busy schedules and my constant availability: That time would ALSO work for me! I was told my ex-boyfriend had hooked up with his college’s mascot, a giant tree.

  I wasn’t at ease—at school, in the dorms, among others—and starving myself was a way of a
cting as if I weren’t fully there, as if my life were on pause and I would hit the Play button again once I was happy. I looked up at lit windows and was convinced that other people were happy behind the buttery glow of their glass. I lost five pounds, then ten, then fifteen. I kept a calorie notebook in my desk drawer where I tallied everything I ate, and a scale in my closet with bright red numbers on its screen. I lived by those red numbers, whatever they told me. If I had a setback, the same weight too many days in a row, then the next day began grimly, with a trek through the cold to the law school gym, where the One-Ls pounded their feet across their treadmill belts with a robotic fortitude I knew I could only impersonate. Another girl on my hall, who also had an eating disorder, always drank cups of hot water at meals. I started doing that, too. I looked unwell.

  One night I took a jar of peanut butter down to the dumpsters in the basement of my dorm because I was afraid I might eat the whole thing in one sitting, and I knew that if I threw it away in my room I could just fish it out of the garbage can. Down in the basement, before I tossed it, I scooped out some peanut butter with my fingers and ate it in gobs. Then I threw the jar away. Then I went back to the elevator. Then I returned to the dumpster, found the jar, twisted it open, and stuck my fingers in again. That was the truth of me: not the skinny girl who never ate but that girl with dirty fingers, leaning into the trash.

  I started going to meetings at the college literary magazine, the Advocate, which had its own wooden clubhouse on South Street, and even its own motto—Dulce est periculum, “Danger is sweet”—as well as its own crest: a Pegasus flying toward God knows what kind of trouble. Flying toward it since 1866, we were told. The magazine threw legendary parties and held notorious initiations. I heard that one girl had been forced to suck tampons soaked in Bloody Marys. But it wasn’t easy to join. I had to spend several months comping, which was the Harvard way of saying “wanting something.” In this case, it meant a tryout process that involved writing two essays, giving one presentation, and showing up to twice-weekly meetings of the fiction board, where we discussed stories that had been submitted to our wooden mailbox in the library. About twenty-five people were comping the fiction board, and we were told maybe five would be selected. We sat in the Sanctum, otherwise known as the second floor, which had perpetually sticky hardwood and a cluster of ratty velvet couches with stuffing and springs thrusting up through rips in their fabric. There was a bar in one corner stocked with lukewarm gin. Before I spoke, I ran every possible comment through a wash cycle in my mind—scrubbing its fabric and wringing it dry, getting rid of its dirt—trying to make it good enough to say aloud.

  The other compers must have been terrified too, but I couldn’t see it—not back then. I could only see them as silhouettes through lit windows, anonymous bodies onto which I projected happiness and social ease, all the things I lacked. It was selfishness disguised as self-deprecation, claiming all the loneliness in the world for myself, a stingy refusal to share the state of insecurity with others.

  When I got onto the Advocate fiction board in October, I was thrilled. After initiation, I imagined, I would be able to stride under the dining hall gargoyles without fear, toward friends: tray held aloft, bearing something besides cups of hot water. The theme of my initiation was World Wrestling Federation. I dutifully showed up in Spandex, and got taken immediately to the basement—where one of my wrists was handcuffed to another initiate’s, who was also handcuffed to a clanging metal pipe. I was handed a screwdriver, my first.

  The next thing I knew, I was waking up in my dorm room, twelve hours later, with a note from one of the editors on the whiteboard—Hope you’re okay—and my roommate telling me that her photogenic boyfriend had stayed up the whole night checking my pulse to make sure I wasn’t dead.

  All this was news to me. It was also news to me that you could lose a night entirely. The last thing I could remember was the first screwdriver: the tang of cheap vodka and citrus. I had shards of memory from that night, a man’s body next to mine on a couch, but couldn’t fit these shards together. I thought I’d been roofied. I spent months telling people I’d been roofied. Then someone told me about blackouts.

  A year later, I was telling a friend all about how I hadn’t vomited since I was nine years old, and she told me I’d vomited all over the inside of her car the night I’d been initiated. I made a joke, uneasily, and apologized, profusely. I would make the same jokes with Daniel years later, with the same uneasy laughter, about my night in the woods with his poet friends, peeing on a tree, disappearing into the night: I did what? Why would I do that? I pictured my body during blackouts like the body of a stranger—clad in Spandex, eager to belong—chugging her vodka, sucking it down, throwing it up again.

  I lost twenty-five pounds that first semester. I started getting light-headed. It was proof of something—of what, I wasn’t sure. I worked for an immigration lawyer in Boston, doing research to help her clients’ asylum cases. Had they suffered enough human rights abuses to meet the criteria necessary for political asylum? I took a second job, transcribing interviews with HIV-positive mothers. My own pain seemed embarrassingly trivial, self-constructed and sought.

  To get to the lawyer’s office each afternoon, I walked across a broad concrete plaza in downtown Boston, near North Station, and I remember those walks during the numb heart of January: my frozen fingers and the chill inside, my body—at that point—skeletal. One day I got so dizzy in the hard winter sun that I sat down on the chilled concrete, in the middle of everyone, so that I wouldn’t faint. Businessmen walked around me in their striped suits. My tailbone ached. I was already five minutes late to work on our Eritrea case. It was an indulgence, this weakness. I knew that.

  It seemed shameful that my sadness had no extraordinary source—just the common loneliness of leaving home. So I found a more extreme costume for it: the not-eating. This was the thing that was wrong. But at heart, I sensed I was more like a binge eater than an anorexic—that my restrictive eating was just an elaborate front. In addition to my calorie-counting notebook, I kept another journal, full of fantasy meals I copied from restaurant menus: pumpkin-ricotta ravioli; vanilla-bean cheesecake with raspberry-mango coulis; goat cheese and Swiss chard tartlets. This journal was the truth of me: I wanted to spend every single moment of my life eating everything. The journal that recorded what I actually ate was just a mask—the impossible person I wanted to be, someone who didn’t need anything at all.

  I had two longings and one was fighting the other,” Rhys once wrote in her journal. “I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.” She believed that she was destined for sadness, and destined to spend her life being told to make her sadness less visible. She called her unfinished memoir Smile, Please, a command she’d been given as a child, posing for a photographer. It was the constant pressure she’d felt from the world: Hide your unseemly angst. As a little girl, she once smashed a doll’s face with a stone because her younger sister had gotten the doll she wanted: “I searched for a big stone, brought it down with all my force on her face and heard the smashing sound with delight.” Then she wept for the doll, buried her, and put flowers on her grave.

  Rhys grew up on Dominica, in the West Indies, with wreaths of frangipani in her hair. “I wanted to identify myself with it,” she wrote of her native island, “to lose myself in it.… But it turned its head away, indifferent, and that broke my heart.” As an old woman, she could still remember “the sound of cocktail-making, the swizzle-stick and the clinking of crushed ice against the glass,” like a regular pulse in the twilight. The frangipani branches bled white, not red. Everything was hot. At their family home, a ramshackle old estate, Rhys’s grandmother sat with a green parrot on her shoulder while her mother stirred guava jam in a coal pot and read The Sorrows of Satan. The story was simple, its ending predestined: Satan wanted grace, but it was never meant for him. Rhys grew up dogged by a sense of doom. Hanging above the family silver, there was a picture of Mary, Queen of Scots, be
ing led to her execution. Rhys’s writing could never fully reckon with the suffering closer at hand, and larger than herself: the long shadow of slavery, and her family’s participation in that legacy. Her own pain was too cloistering.

  When she was twelve, a friend of the family reached his hand up Rhys’s skirt. His name was Mr. Howard. “Would you like to belong to me?” he asked. She said she didn’t know. He said: “I’d seldom allow you to wear clothes at all.”

  Years later, she wrote: “It was then that it began.”

  What was it? On one level, it was the story he began to tell her: “The serial story to which I listened for was it weeks or months—One day he would abduct me and I’d belong to him.” In these stories, Mr. Howard described the house where they would live, how they would stand on their veranda and watch the bats fly at sunset while the moon rose over the water. On another level, it was the sense of being cursed, of being written into a story Rhys couldn’t control.

  In later years, whenever she looked back, Rhys could find relief from this story only by getting drunk or by writing stories of her own, stories that tried to make some sense of the sadness that consumed her. “I’ve made a complete wreck of myself,” she wrote after one binge. “Or rather I’ve certainly put the finishing touch to the wreck—And do you know where I was sure I’d find myself? In Mr. Howard’s house.”