The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  When I was a child, one of my favorite chapter books was about a group of cousins who discover an enchanted tree. Every time they climb it, they find a different land waiting for them at the top: The Land of Goodies, the Land of Birthdays, the Land of Take-What-You-Want and Do-As-You-Please. Now I’d ridden the train-station escalator up to a strange new land.

  It seemed destined: Dave and I had met all those years ago, as teenagers, and now we were together. We announced the size of our feelings however we could. We stood alone on a Connecticut beach, kelp-strewn and shadowed by jagged rocks, and took a picture of ourselves kissing in the cold salt wind. My scarf looked lifted by a ghost. We posed in front of the Origami Holiday Tree at the Museum of Natural History and Dave texted a photo to his mom. “Just what every Jewish mother wants,” he told me. “Her firstborn in front of a giant Christmas tree with his new shiksa girlfriend.”

  There was a problem with our giddiness, though, a niggling loose tooth: Dave didn’t like to get drunk. He drank, sure. He’d even gone to weekend bartender school, where he’d been timed on his Hairy Navels and his Harvey Wallbangers. But he drank the way people were supposed to drink, or the way I’d heard people sometimes drank. He had a beer, singular, with a friend. Or he tried a new cocktail for the taste. He wasn’t expecting to get drunk every night. Even if I’d known in the abstract that some people drank like that, being close to it was endlessly confusing. Didn’t he like being drunk? If so, why didn’t he want to get drunk every single night? Being drunk seemed the only logical conclusion of drinking.

  I wasn’t using the word “alcoholic” with other people, wasn’t describing myself or my drinking that way, but those were the years when I started writing it in my diary, secretly, often during blackouts, syntax out the window: Is this what an alcoholic? The messy scrawl of that drunk writing looked prophetic and absurd at once, as Lowry described it: “half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken,” with lower-case ts “like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word.” It was as if a child just learning how to write had crawled inside my diary and called me by my name.

  One night I went to Dave’s apartment and sat in his living room for twenty minutes while he puttered in his kitchen making me a Cosmopolitan. I thought, Can’t I have a drink while I wait for my drink? He’d set out a tray spread with pomegranate seeds and a delicate creamy hunk of Taleggio cheese, single jewels of fruit glistening in the candlelight and olives slick against my fingers. This was food for another type of person. I wanted to turn the plastic spigot on some box wine and eat six lemon bars and a slice of cake.

  Dave’s drinking set up a shimmering reality alongside mine: a way of being that was less fully saturated by need. His way of drinking was elegant and restrained; it plucked single pomegranate seeds. Take it or leave it is what they would call it—years later—in recovery. While I wanted to get drunk and dissolve into the evening, every evening, he honestly didn’t care if we drank or not. His moderation switched on certain calculations inside of me that hadn’t been happening before, that certainly hadn’t happened with Peter. I started to keep track of how many times I’d suggested we find a bar, how many times I’d suggested a second round, how many times I’d suggested we stop at the wine store on the way home. Sometimes I drank a few glasses of wine before we met up, to give myself a head start, and on those nights, when I got to his place, I turned my face to let him kiss me on the cheek so he wouldn’t smell it on my breath.

  In the middle of December, after our graduate-student stipends had been deposited into our bank accounts, we drove up to Stonington, the coastal town where James Merrill—a poet Dave admired—had conducted Ouija board sessions to contact the spirit realm. We stayed at a bed-and-breakfast just a few blocks from the sea and used our own Ouija board on a rug by the fireplace. We filled our claw-foot tub with so much bubble bath that glistening foam flooded the bathroom floor like a snowdrift. We were excessive, and proud of our excess. When we went downstairs and saw the inn had laid out evening wine and cheese, I was relieved that the booze hadn’t been my idea. Now I could enjoy it without having to show how much I’d wanted it. They filled our big wineglasses all the way to the top.

  Years later, I heard an apocryphal anecdote about the comedian W. C. Fields, an anecdote Berryman had loved, about how Fields always requested a pitcher of martinis on the set of his movies, and called the pitcher his “pineapple juice.” One day a clueless assistant actually filled the pitcher with pineapple juice and Fields exploded: “Who’s been putting pineapple juice in my pineapple juice?” Just by drinking normally, Dave was exposing my drinking as something else.

  At a party, Dave could go to the kitchen intending to grab another beer and I’d find him an hour later still chatting in the living room. He’d never made it to the fridge. He’d run into so many people on the way! If I headed to the kitchen for a drink, I’d end a hundred conversations if necessary. But Dave could leave a glass of wine half full in front of him for hours, and he was someone who’d probably see it that way: half full. Half full, half empty, whatever. I couldn’t understand why you’d ever drink half of anything.

  When I think of those early days with Dave, I think of a song he always used to play in his white clapboard apartment on Cottage Street, how it boomed and vibrated, surging with synth and the sound of clapping hands: There isn’t much I feel I need, a solid soul and the blood I bleed. One night we danced on the bar at a dive downtown—jukebox crooning, stepping between foam-lipped glasses; another night we smoked pot and stayed naked for twelve hours straight. The next morning he told me, “I feel like I cheated on you with the person you were last night,” or I told him that. Certain joint-custody phrases lived between us for years. His mind was the mind I wanted filtering my world.

  The first time we had to be apart, just for a week, we set up profiles on JDate and used them to communicate to each other in secret code. My Ideal Relationship: Green eggs and ham, maybe a séance, he wrote. I am looking for a woman who shows me her scars like so many city monuments. My Perfect First Date: Animals Behaving Badly, all night long.

  That fall, Dave applied to poetry MFA programs. He was tired of training to be a scholar. He wanted to write poems and he wanted a new town. He’d been in New Haven too long: at that point, almost eight years. One of the programs he’d applied to—the one he was most excited about—was the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Though I’d never imagined moving back, it seemed reckless and wonderful to picture us moving back together, dropping everything to start a new life. I’d just sold my novel, and gravity seemed to be bending its rules. My agent gave me the news while I stood in Dave’s kitchen, running my fingers along bottles of specialty liquor that were mostly full because they weren’t getting ruthlessly guzzled. It was surreal, an impossible thing—to think that the world wanted the novel that had begun during those lonely days when my grandmother was dying.

  Dave and I started talking about moving for a year to Nicaragua, if he didn’t get into Iowa, so he could write poems and I could write a novel about the Sandinista revolution. When I’d taught down in Nicaragua, an old woman on Calle Calzada had told me about the early years of the Sandinistas, looking me straight in the eyes, her hands folded across checkered oilcloth. The idea of writing something far away from my own life appealed to me—writing about people who’d committed their lives to something much bigger than private emotion or personal happiness, the driving forces I seemed to obey so absolutely.

  It didn’t take long for Peter to find out about me and Dave; it happened at a party at the old corset factory by the railroad tracks, a huge industrial building that had been converted into loft apartments. Peter cornered me in a doorway and asked if it was true what he’d heard, had I been seeing Dave? I nodded yes, and tried to explain—but he wasn’t interested, and what was there to explain? It was ordinary and painful. It was also shamefully gratifying, sensing the pain I’d caused him. For me, that hurt was a measure of his desire.

  That
night in bed Dave told me he actually had no memory of me from that time we’d met in high school. He’d been playing guitar in the lobby, and I’d been—as I’d always feared—completely invisible. Or that was what I told myself: a story about lurking in the shadows then, to justify why I needed so much affirmation now.

  That Thanksgiving, I went to a cabin by a lake with my brother and sister-in-law. It surprised me to realize that one of my first thoughts about the trip was one of anticipation: It would be nice to drink without Dave. Without my quite realizing it, every feeling about another person was also becoming a feeling about drinking.

  At the lake, we stocked up on supplies for whiskey sours, and I started making them at noon. The first drink gathered all the threads of the day so nicely: the wind on the lake, rippling the water; red leaves gathered like snowdrifts outside; the sense of chill out there, somewhere else; the booze going down like candy. In Under the Volcano, the Consul senses “the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree,” and then, “miraculously, blossoms.” The whiskey lit me up. This new thing with Dave glowed inside me, a talisman.

  The glow dimmed as the night progressed. I drank whiskey sours until I was yellow-tongued and sticky-mouthed, checking my phone constantly to see if Dave had texted. When he didn’t, I read it as verdict: He mattered more to me than I mattered to him, or at least he needed me less. My stomach ached and sloshed. The sugar of the whiskey sours was like a layer of algae inside me. When I was good and drunk, I lay back in bed and closed my eyes against the spins, curling into my guilt about cheating on Peter, which was dark and familiar. I got fetal inside it.

  My life played as ticker-tape allegory against the back of my eyelids: I was GUILTY but I was also FALLING IN LOVE and all my feelings were THE BIGGEST FEELINGS and they existed in CAPITAL LETTERS. The cheating had been WRONG but this new man was AMAZING and our new thing was HUGE and I was the WORST person but also the BEST person, because this new love was ENDLESS, even if the wages of LOVE had been SIN, and the wages of SIN should be MISERY. Everything was the best or the worst. Selfhood was a deck of superlatives I kept reshuffling. I didn’t want just part of someone, I wanted all of him. I wasn’t just bad, I was the lowest. I had the most fickle heart. I was the whiskey-sour scum of the earth. Some part of me actually enjoyed the guilt, which capitalized my ordinary life and granted it the shrill inflection of high drama. If wickedness was soluble in art, I needed wickedness.

  In recovery, years later, when someone described self-loathing as the flip side of narcissism, I almost laughed out loud at the stark truth of what she’d said. This black-and-white thinking, this all-or-nothing, it was cut from the same cloth. Being just a man among men, or a woman among women, with nothing extraordinary about your flaws or your mistakes—that was the hardest thing to accept.

  A month after Peter and I broke up, a friend of mine told me she’d spent the night with him. She was sheepish about it. (You should be! I thought, from my precarious moral high ground.) She also told me he wasn’t doing well. When he was with her, he’d had a black eye from falling down drunk the night before. I got that. It made a lot more sense than taking half an hour to make a cocktail.

  Malcolm Lowry understood the siren call of superlatives, and Under the Volcano exposes its antihero, the Consul, as a man dependent on the twin gods of booze and melodrama. Lowry himself was rabidly committed to the idea of writing not just a novel about alcoholism, but the Best Novel Ever Written About Alcoholism. He believed his drinking could be redeemed only if it was transfigured into epic, writ large across a sweeping dramatic canvas. That was the hope he pinned on Under the Volcano: that it would redeem the wreckage of his life. As he described it later, he wanted to turn “his greatest weakness… into his greatest strength.”

  Everything was outsized—his motivations, his ambitions, his dysfunction, his plot—and when Jackson published The Lost Weekend, in 1944, Lowry was devastated and indignant. He had been working on Under the Volcano for almost a decade, sustained by the idea that he would write the first truly groundbreaking account of alcoholism; and he was heartbroken by the fact that Jackson had beaten him to the punch, not to mention the fact that Jackson’s novel had achieved such instant success, hitting bestseller lists immediately. Lowry judged Jackson’s book for its absent layers of Higher Meaning—deeming its vision of boozing (tedious) an insult to his vision of boozing (tragic)—but this snobbery was cold comfort: Jackson had still belittled his masterpiece by making it unoriginal. Lowry wanted a monopoly on tragedy, even though his novel exposed the foolishness of a drunkard’s need to do just that.

  Published in 1947, Under the Volcano takes place on the Day of the Dead, as the Consul drinks himself into the “swift leathery perfumed alcoholic dusk” of a fictional Mexican town called Quauhnahuac. (Based on Cuernavaca, where Lowry himself had lived, and gotten grotesquely, ongoingly drunk.) The Consul has been left by his wife, Yvonne, and has spent the past year longing for her return. But once Yvonne arrives, all the Consul can talk about is the bender he went on in Oaxaca after she went away. He has been hoping that her return can save him from himself, but it only ends the illusion that he could be saved by anything at all.

  The novel’s plot, despite its fever-dream pulse, is surprisingly faithful to the smallness of a drunk’s life: We see the Consul trying not to drink, sipping a strychnine concoction from a doctor, hunting for his hidden booze, trying to fuck his wife, failing to fuck his wife, trying not to drink, drinking anyway, passing out. Rather than offering some sentimental vision of whatever homes we make in the darkness, Under the Volcano illuminates these delusions from the inside. The novel does offer the drunkard as martyr and symbol, his booze a dark communion—the Consul drinks as if he “were taking an eternal sacrament,” and laments a world “that trampled down the truth and drunkards alike!”—but the Consul’s melodrama invariably gets exposed and chastised. As another character puts it: “Do you realize that while you’re battling against death, or whatever you imagine you’re doing, while what is mystical in you is being released, or whatever it is you imagine is being released, while you’re enjoying all this, do you realize what extraordinary allowances are being made for you by the world which has to cope with you?”

  When other characters chastise the Consul, it’s also Lowry chastising himself for the extraordinary allowances made on his behalf. The book reads like a drunkard’s grandiosity punctured by an author who wants to exorcise the fantasies fueling his own drinking. The Consul’s drunk body constantly interrupts his lyrical indulgences: “The will of man is unconquerable,” he explains, then falls asleep. He is “suddenly overwhelmed by sentiment, as at the same time by a violent attack of hiccups.” Drinking is a thwarted flight into transcendence; like a dog chained to a post, barking at the sky.

  When the Consul delivers a rhapsodic monologue about the enchanted splendor of a “cantina in the early morning,” Yvonne interrupts to ask if their gardener has left for good. The garden is a mess. The Consul remains undeterred. He has nothing but love songs for the ragged divinity of barfly living: “How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o’clock in the morning?” One senses that—to the Consul—the woman playing dominoes at the bar is still beautiful at eight in the morning, and nine in the morning, and ten at night. One senses that the Consul wants to believe he is the only one who can see it: “Ah none but he knew how beautiful it all was, the sunlight, sunlight, sunlight flooding the bar of El Puerto del Sol, flooding the watercress and oranges.” The “Ah” becomes a recurring textual street sign: Beware melodrama ahead. But the Consul’s insistence on the singularity of his own drunk vision is perpetually undermined by the sleeve-tugging queries of the practical world: the messy garden, an attack of hiccups.

  The Consul’s tragedy isn’t the tragedy of Higher Meaning, it’s the tragedy of absent meaning—the fact that his suffering might not mean anything at all. Critic Mich
ael Wood calls it “a great book about missing grandeur, about the specialized tragedy that lies in the unavailability of the tragedy you want.” The Consul is constantly imagining the epic stories that might include him: “Vague images of grief and tragedy flicked in his mind. Somewhere a butterfly was flying out to sea: lost.”

  Lost! One imagines the newspaper headlines playing like ticker tape inside the Consul’s tipsy sense of history: SMALL ORANGE BUTTERFLY NOT SURE WHICH WAY IS NORTH; MAN GETS DRUNK AND FINDS EVERYTHING PROFOUND.

  Under the Volcano ultimately granted Lowry a certain literary pedestal, garnering lasting acclaim that Jackson never received, but Lowry’s drinking only got worse after the novel made him famous. “Success may be the worst possible thing that could happen to any serious author,” he wrote to his mother-in-law. He was a wreck when he came to New York to celebrate his reviews. “He is the original Consul in the book,” observed someone who saw him on that trip, “a curious kind of person—handsome, vigorous, drunk—with an aura of genius about him and a personal electricity almost dangerous, demon-possessed.” His delirium tremens got so bad he couldn’t hold a pencil. Lowry’s intelligence could see the drinking from every angle, but he couldn’t find a way out of it.