The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  For a long time, I’d thought of my drinking as the opposite of anorexia, as abandon rather than restriction. But I was beginning to see—during my days of attempted moderation—that my relationship with drinking was a direct extension of those restrictive days. Starving myself meant resisting an endless longing, and drinking meant submitting to it. But both times it was the obsession that shamed me, the sense of being consumed by a desire that was so limited in its object. When I restricted my eating, I was ashamed that there was nothing I wanted more than to eat—endlessly, recklessly—and when I drank, I was ashamed that there was nothing I wanted more than to drink. Trying to control my drinking only illuminated how deep that wanting went, like tossing a stone down a well and never hearing it hit bottom.

  During one of her binges, Jean Rhys threw a brick through a neighbor’s window. In her own defense, Rhys later said the woman’s dog, “a killer and a fighter,” had attacked her cat. The world Rhys lived in, or the world as Rhys lived in it, was always out to get her. One friend compared her self-pity to a gramophone needle stuck in a groove, “going over and over miseries of one sort and another.” In a 1931 review subtitled “The Pursuit of Misery in Some of the New Novels,” Rebecca West wrote that Rhys “has proved herself to be enamoured of gloom to an incredible degree.” A profile of Rhys in the Guardian appeared under the title “Fated to Be Sad.”

  But Rhys didn’t think of her work as particularly sad. She just thought it was the truth. She resented that interviewers always pushed her into a “pre-destined role, the role of victim.” She’d often had enough of herself. She signed a woeful letter to one of her best friends “End of moan in minor.” Everyone saw the characters in her books as victims, she told one interviewer, “and I don’t like that. Everyone’s a victim in a way, aren’t they?” To Rhys it seemed more like she was the only one willing to speak plainly: “I’m a person at a masked ball without a mask, the only one without a mask.”

  Eventually, she put out a “Declaration of Rights” against her interviewers:

  I am not an ardent Women’s Libber

  Or a Victim (eternally)

  Or a darned Fool.

  Rhys never wanted to be a victim (eternally). I love that parenthetical: She still wanted to reserve the right to be a victim sometimes.

  Rhys’s first biographer, Carole Angier, called her one of the century’s greatest self-pity artists, but her second biographer leapt to her defense: “I do not see self-pity in Rhys’s work or her life,” wrote Lilian Pizzichini. “I see an angry woman who had good reason to be angry, and whose vision was bleak.” But defending Rhys by saying her work and life held no self-pity is like defending a spider by claiming it never hurt a fly. The spider’s grace comes from how it kills the fly, with its intricate web, and Rhys’s grace came not from her refusal of self-pity but from her merciless portraits of its grip—always full of invention, never cluttered by apology.

  Rhys was constantly dissecting self-pity by pulling apart the threads of its alibis. Her female characters were her hair shirts: through them, Rhys could pity herself, scold herself, humiliate herself, and martyr herself. She was still the little girl who’d smashed the face of her doll, then mourned it. Her self-pity wasn’t a needle stuck in a single gramophone groove, because the song was always changing. One of her characters imagines her own face as a “tortured and tormented mask” that she can take off any time she likes, or wear under a “tall hat with a green feather.” This isn’t self-pity served straight up but with a twist, with a green feather perched over its unsightly features.

  Defending Rhys’s work by insisting it holds no self-pity already accepts the premise that self-pity must be entirely repressed—another version of Lewis Hyde’s claim that The Dream Songs spent too much time on an alcoholic’s pity pot. But both Rhys and Berryman refuse to ignore the pity pot, in its ugliness and shame, as part of pain itself.

  Starting to drink again wasn’t responsible for my self-pity—I’d managed to pity myself in sobriety as well—but booze certainly ignited it, and at a party that fall, it burst fully into flame. This was just before the start of our second year in Iowa. I’d been sitting on the kitchen stairs, with my crutches leaning against the steps beside me, talking to a poet who was looking at me funny.

  “Which eye do you want me to look into when I’m talking to you?” he asked.

  “What?” I said. He was drunk and I was drunk, but still.

  He launched into a whole story about how he used to live in Boston and there was a guy he knew there with a wandering eye—how everyone had just pretended it wasn’t there, his wandering eye, which only made the whole thing worse, and this guy didn’t want to do that with me.

  “But I don’t have a wandering eye,” I said.

  He said, quite kindly: “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  I grabbed my crutches and crutched my way across the room to Dave, pulling him into the bathroom. “Tell me the truth!” I said. “Do I have a wandering eye? Have I always?” I felt betrayed. I fixed my gaze on him. “Is my eye wandering right now?” Then I called my mom from the porch, drunk and crying. “You have to tell me!” I said. “Have you been lying to me my whole life?”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. And then, after a beat: “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  Although I didn’t actually have a wandering eye, I became convinced I could actually feel my eyeball rolling around in my head, as if that’s what a wandering eye would feel like. Maybe my eye wandered only when I got drunk enough, like a terrible poker tell. For days, I obsessed over it—this secret the whole world had been keeping from me.

  I hated seeing people from meetings around town. But it was a small town, so it happened all the time. I did surgical strikes on the booze aisle of the Hy-Vee, in and out, so that nobody from meetings could pass by and catch me standing there: an abject failure, just doing some research. That’s what people in recovery called it when you started drinking again. At the Java House one night, I saw a guy from meetings doing step work with his sponsee. Or rather, he spotted me. “How are you?” he asked, and I blushed instinctively, hearing, Has your drinking gotten bad again?

  “I’m so great!” I said, then realized my voice was too loud—so made it softer, sincere. “I’m just really, really great.”

  After The Lost Weekend became a bestseller, everyone wanted Charles Jackson to write a sequel, a novel that would explain how Don “got out of it.” As Jackson’s former doctor put it, this sequel might “fall into the hands of someone whom it would help.” Jackson tentatively titled this sequel The Working Out, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about it. As he told an AA group, years later, he didn’t think literature was meant “to solve psychiatric problems.”

  Also, there was the fact that Jackson hadn’t entirely gotten “out of it” himself. He started taking pills a few years after The Lost Weekend was published, and then relapsed on booze in 1947, when he finally surrendered to the craving for an ice-cold beer while on vacation in the Bahamas. “What do you know,” he told his wife, Rhoda, “I’m drinking again.” Bud Wister, the counselor who had coached Jackson through the Peabody Method a decade earlier, died during a bender that same year, after swallowing broken glass from a whiskey bottle whose neck he’d smashed, drunk.

  As the famously sober author of a wildly successful book about alcoholism, Jackson was under pressure to keep up appearances. “Nothing could make me take another drink,” he wrote a year after his relapse, in a 1948 promotional brochure put out by his publishing house. “My house could burn down, my capacities could fail, my wife and children could be killed, and I still would not drink.” But the truth came out anyway. AUTHOR OF LOST WEEKEND LOSES ONE HIMSELF ran one headline, after Jackson, driving drunk, drifted across a lane divider and crashed into another car head-on.

  In certain ways, the success of Jackson’s novel about alcoholism had made it more difficult to maintain his sobriety. After his 1947 relapse, Rhoda wrote in desperation to Jackson’s
brother, Boom: “I realized yesterday… how he managed to stop drinking. He held on to the fact that he was a great writer and he’d show everybody. When he got fame, that thing that sustained him all the time was gone—and he has nothing yet to replace it.” Of course, The Lost Weekend hadn’t exactly promised a happy ending. At the close of the book, Don pours himself a drink and crawls into bed: “No telling what might happen next time but why worry about that?”

  Jackson was so committed to ending Don’s story without any guarantee of salvation that he fought vehemently against the closing shot of the movie version—Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning 1945 adaptation—which shows a sober Ray Milland stubbing out his cigarette in a tumbler of whiskey, finis to that, and sitting down at a typewriter to begin composing the story we’ve just watched. Despite all the film’s awards—it won an Academy Award for best picture, Milland won for best actor, Wilder won for best director, and he and Charles Brackett won for their adapted screenplay—Jackson was outraged by what they’d changed: “Chas. & Billy based their movie version far less on the book than on what they happened to know about me personally,” he wrote to a friend, “and it’s false & untrue at that, for the implication is that I overcame my drink-problem by writing a book about it & thus getting it out of my system.” Jackson didn’t just hate the fact of this happy ending, but the means of it. He hated that the movie peddled false faith in the idea of narrative as salvation.

  That fall, four months after I started drinking again, I drove to another writing residency, this one in Wyoming. My relief at drinking far from home was almost ecstatic. Near the Badlands and their striated towers of rock, I found paradise: a tiny roadside motel, the neon VACANCY glowing, with nothing for miles but the only thing I needed, a small bar across the street. The bartender filled my tumblers with double shots, unprompted, in a glowing, cozy room with faux-log-plank rafters, and I knew no one, and only had to stumble across the street onto scratchy sheets; no apologies necessary.

  In Wyoming, I drank with the artists in their studios—stumbled home across the cow fields one night and tripped face-first onto the metal bars of a cattle grid—and I drank with the writers at a place called the Mint Bar full of cattle-branded cedar shingles, marked by a glowing neon cowboy astride a bucking neon horse, where no one had ever heard me say, I’m an alcoholic.

  On the drive back home through South Dakota, I was looking forward to one last anonymous night of drinking freely before I got back home to Dave; to stopping at the same motel and going to the same bar across the street, with its leather seats and green lamps, its wooden counters smooth as maple syrup. But I couldn’t find the right exit, and eventually ended up at a Super 8 in Chamberlain, where the rooms faced the parking lot and I didn’t feel like walking to the single bar I’d seen a mile down the road. So I drove to a gas station and bought two six-packs of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, perhaps because it was the thing I’d be most ashamed to drink with anyone I knew.

  The woman at the register eyed my two six-packs. “I can’t drink this stuff,” she said. “Makes me fucking sick.”

  “My friends like it,” I said, shrugging.

  Something about the exchange peeled the skin off my evening and exposed the venture as pathetic. Why was I so hell-bent on drinking hard lemonade alone in a shitty motel in South Dakota? I brought the six-packs into my room but they regarded me accusingly, a sign of failure. I took the six-packs back to the trunk of my car, just to prove to myself that I didn’t have to drink them, I didn’t have to drink anything.

  I sat in my motel room for about five minutes before I went back out to the car, grabbed the six-packs from the trunk and carried them halfway to the door, thought This is crazy, why can’t I just decide? and then turned around and put them back in the trunk. Then I decided that if I was this obsessed, I should just go ahead and drink them, so I popped the trunk, brought the six-packs inside, turned on the motel TV, pulled the chain lock, and carried myself into the sweet, nauseating gauze of a hard-lemonade drunk.

  That fall, I put an incredible amount of effort into talking to my therapist about everything but drinking. I told her stories about my fights with Dave but carefully talked around the booze, a tumor I’d excised. I was also starting to cut myself again, like the holes you cut in the crust of a pie to let out the steam as it bakes. One day Dave caught sight of the cuts on my ankles and asked if I wanted to talk about it. I said I didn’t.

  The pages of my diary were filling up with drunken scrawls: I believe there are things in me that are beautiful. When is enough? Then farther down, the writing bigger and messier: I know I’ve drunk a bottle and a half of wine an…, the n trailing off. Another night: I just want—I don’t know… and I didn’t.

  When I finally told my therapist about the drinking, it was because I was tired of running laps around it. “It gets so bad when I’m drunk,” I told her, and started crying, and couldn’t stop. I was already thinking about how our conversation was going to pollute my drinking that night, like a piece of hair stuck in the back of my throat.

  I asked her what she saw when she looked at me.

  “Shame,” she said. “There is no other word for what I see on your face.”

  By the time Billie Holiday finally collapsed, she was forty-four and past the point of curing. This was the summer of 1959. Weakened by years of heroin abuse, and suffering acutely from cirrhosis of the liver, she was emaciated and covered with old track marks. Her legs were pocked with ulcers from injections. After getting checked into Metropolitan Hospital in New York, she told a friend, “You watch, baby. They are going to arrest me in this damn bed.” And they did. Narcotics agents found (or planted) a tinfoil pouch of heroin in her hospital room, and handcuffed her to the bed. There were two policemen stationed by the door. Her mug shot and fingerprints were taken in that room at Metropolitan.

  During the preceding years, Holiday’s last few albums had met with mixed reactions. Some fans thought her late voice was a betrayal of its former glory: “an open wound… vocal cords flayed,” husky from years of smoking and self-abuse. Others found this voice raw and moving, a distillation of her essence all along—the purest form of her. But almost everyone heard, in this late voice, a ledger of her trauma, an audible record of everything she’d endured and done to herself. While recording her last album, Lady in Satin, she drank gin from a water pitcher. Before one recording session, she pulled out a pint and said: “Now I’m going to eat breakfast!”

  Ray Ellis, who did her musical arrangements near the end of her life, was disappointed when they first met:

  I had seen pictures of her ten years before and she was a beautiful woman. When I met her she was a repulsive woman.… She looked a little shabby, a little dirty… I was taken aback because I had this mental thing, like she turns you on and you can go to bed with her. But I didn’t think I could have gone to bed with her at that stage for anything.

  She was supposed to be beautiful and damaged, but instead—for Ellis—her damage had ruined her beauty. Her self-destruction was no longer luminous. When Studs Terkel saw her at a South Side Chicago club in 1956, he noticed “other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses,” and insisted: “Something was still there, something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be.”

  But the “self” Holiday revealed in her songs, the hurt and wounded self that people heard when they listened to her, the self they wanted to hear and in some part constructed for themselves—that self was only part of her. There were other parts, too. She’d always wanted a family, had fantasized about buying a farm in the country and taking in orphans. She tried to breast-feed her godson from breasts that didn’t have milk, and tried to adopt a child in Boston. But the judge wouldn’t allow her, because of her drug record. Pregnant as a teenager, she had spent eighteen hours in a mustard bath to try to end the pregnancy, because her mother didn’t want her to have a baby before she was married, but she later told a frien
d: “The only thing I ever wanted is that baby.”

  While she lay handcuffed to her hospital bed, protesters outside Metropolitan held up signs: LET LADY LIVE. And on the July day she died, six weeks after she was admitted, Frank O’Hara wrote, “Everyone and I stopped breathing.”

  A year after my first AA meeting, I found myself drunk in a bathroom stall in Mexicali, snorting coke off the flat top of the toilet-paper dispenser. This was at a literary conference where I’d done some of my freest drinking in months—sitting on metal bleachers in the twilight, passing a flask back and forth with my new friend the Peruvian Novelist, dancing until three in the morning at a blacktop playground disco with a guy spinning records by the swings. At one point I thought: If I’d stayed sober, I would have a year right now.

  Back home, Dave and I threw a party we called Octopotluck. It was October. It was a potluck. We were serving octopus. We bought it frozen in a big block of ice and handed out little paper cups, like shots, full of sautéed tentacles. We cooked it in Hell, as we’d learned in Italy, back at the beginning. In the two years since, we’d put so many kinds of fish in Hell: Tilapia in Hell, Flounder in Hell, Orange Roughy in Hell. If it was white and boneless, we’d probably put it in Hell. If Dave had proposed that first summer, I would have said yes. But Octopotluck was proof of the fallen world. Now our kitchen was full of the other girls he was flirting with, drinking gin out of my special teacups. “Those teacups are special to me,” I muttered to no one. Drunk, I started hunting for the old hurts with the heat-seeking missile of my fearful heart: Dave ignoring me, Dave and other women, Dave versus the hypothetical, impossible man who could plug whatever leak had sprung inside me. My heart skittered with accusations: You cultivate your students’ adoration. You cultivate their flirtation. You love that your enjambment lecture helps them understand their relationships with their fathers. I never ate any octopus.