The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  Near the end of his drinking, Carver hadn’t been anything like the rogue I’d once imagined. He was bloated and overweight. He lived like a hermit, and often called his students to cancel class because he was too sick to teach. When he invited three of them to dinner one night, they ate Hamburger Helper and shared a single fork. When he came back to Iowa City to give a reading before his first book came out, it should have been like the return of a conquering hero—but he was so drunk the audience could barely understand a word he said. This wasn’t reckless debauchery or existential knowledge plucked from the dark maw of some universal psychic void; this was just a human body pushed to the edge of its own poisoning.

  Carver finally stopped drinking on June 2, 1977. “If you want the truth,” he said in one interview, “I’m prouder of that, that I’ve quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life.”

  The stories Carver wrote in early sobriety weren’t just full of the chaos of drinking but also the possibilities of recovery. They were full of guys who’d drunk too much and were trying to patch things up with their wives. Full of gin ghosts and AA commitments. Full of guys learning to fish and to pray; a sober man sneaking out of his house in the middle of the night to kill slugs; a sober man lying about knowing famous astronauts; a drunk man stealing his estranged wife’s holiday pies. One man listens to his wife remembering how he carried her to the bathroom when she was pregnant—“no one else could ever love me in that way, that much,” she says—while he obsesses about the half-pint of whiskey hidden under her couch cushion: “I began to hope she might soon have to get up.”

  These sobriety stories carry the pulse of the booze not just in the obvious places, in the whiskey shots and the morning doses of champagne and the clever one-liners about drinking (“Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it”), but in those quiet moments when characters have fallen away from each other and don’t know how to come together again. These silences are the hollow spaces that booze wants to fill.

  When Carver first saw Lish’s versions, not just whittled but spiritually rearranged, he couldn’t stomach the thought of their publication. At this point, the two men had known each other for nearly a decade. Lish had given Carver his big break when he acquired one of his stories for Esquire in 1971, and he’d been editing him ever since. This time he’d removed more than half his prose, and under the guise of renovating Carver’s style, he smuggled in a different vision of human nature—less prone to care, concern, and empathetic imagination; and more inclined to rupture, resentment, and disconnect. In his 1981 review of the collection, critic Michael Wood lamented the “unkindness and condescension of some of these stories,” the same stories about which Carver had written to Lish: “I don’t want to lose track, lose touch with the little human connections.”

  It’s not clear why Carver allowed his stories to be published with the edits he resisted so vehemently, but it’s quite possible his consent was a product of the same fragility that had made him worry about the edits in the first place: He was eager for the affirmation of a book, hated the idea of disappointing anyone, and wanted to believe in the future of his sober writing. But the book that came into the world wasn’t the same book Carver had written.

  In the story eventually published as “The Bath,” the most famous in the collection—a story Lish cut to less than a third of its original length—a boy named Scotty is struck by a car on the morning of his birthday. While he’s lying in a coma in the hospital, his parents start getting calls from a menacing stranger who turns out to be the baker who made Scotty’s birthday cake, growing increasingly irritated that nobody ever came to pick it up. When the boy’s mother picks up the phone, asking—utterly desperate—if it’s someone calling for news of her son, the baker says: “It is about Scotty. It has to do with Scotty, yes.” In Lish’s version, the story ends on that baker’s yes, his voice over the phone, that closing beat of irony and unwitting brutality. We don’t find out if the boy lives or dies. This version of the story is about senseless tragedy and the human fissures it illuminates; about the ways distance can verge into malice.

  But Carver’s original version, “A Small, Good Thing,” eventually published years later, doesn’t close with the phone call. Scotty’s parents end up visiting the baker in his shop and explaining their loss—in this version, their son has died. After they tell him what happened, the baker feeds them “warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny,” and a loaf of fresh dark bread, telling them about his own weary days: “They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light.” The baker offers the minor solace of tangible pleasure—the kind of “small, good thing” my own days in a hot Iowa kitchen had taught me something about—and this broken bread ultimately catalyzes another type of communion: “They talked on into the early morning, the high pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.”

  Carver’s original ending offers neither utter despair nor unequivocal redemption. It’s more like chiaroscuro, light and dark: The parents are granted temporary respite from their grief, and the baker isn’t entirely defined by callousness. The couple’s son is gone, but the world isn’t an utterly irredeemable and indifferent place. However small its doses, grace comes with stealth and arrives from unexpected corners—incomplete, imperfect, important.

  In the story Lish called “After the Denim,” an elderly sober man finds himself enraged by a young hippie couple he spots cheating at bingo. Underneath this rage, he’s in anguish over the return of his wife’s cancer, and the story ends with his grief expressed as anger—with the man picking up his needlework and “stab[bing] at the eye with a length of blue silk thread.” But the original version of the story, which Carver had called “If It Please You,” ends not with anger—a man stabbing at his needlework, powerless to change fate, furious with those whom fate has treated better—but with the inexplicable alchemy of anger turning into something more forgiving. “He and the hippie were in the same boat,” the old man thinks, and senses “something stir inside him again, but it was not anger this time.” The story closes with this “something” stirring:

  This time he was able to include the girl and the hippie in his prayers. Let them have it, yes, drive vans and be arrogant and laugh and wear rings, even cheat if they wanted. Meanwhile, prayers were needed. They could use them too, even his, especially his, in fact. “If it please you,” he said in the new prayers for all of them, the living and the dead.

  This act of prayer, not simply praying for a stranger but for a stranger he loathes, is actually a specific part of AA teaching: If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or thing that you resent, you will be free.

  Lish’s edits may have been fighting prose Lish understood as sentimental, but if sentimentality indulges in false emotion that turns away from the world (“the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience… his arid heart,” as James Baldwin put it), then Carver never turns away from the complexity of experience. The old man’s prayer is an ending that allows for multiple layers of emotion—grace alongside fury—rather than settling into a simpler and more predictable vein of unmediated disdain. Carver’s solace is vexed and hard-won, but his endings have faith in the communion of dark bread—in small, good things exchanged in the deep night.

  A few years after this fraught round of edits, Carver insisted to Lish that his next story collection couldn’t go through the same process: “Gordon, God’s truth, and I may as well say it out now, I can’t undergo the kind of surgical amputation and transplant that might make them someway fit into the carton so the lid will close. There may have to be limbs and heads of hair sticking out. My heart won’t take it otherwise. It will simply burst, and I mean that.” Carver was willing to risk melodrama (It will simply burst) to stand behind the writing of his recovery—writing that was messier, full of grit and swell,
ragged intimacies and inexplicable attachments. He wanted to stand behind stories that didn’t end on irony, stories awkward and grasping enough to hold the longings of sobriety, with its strange permissions and unexpected bonds.

  That first fall back in New Haven, I started going to a meeting downtown at seven-thirty every morning. Walking on Chapel Street just past seven—during early winter, when it stayed dark late—took me through the quieter city that got swallowed up each morning once the familiar one awoke. Lights flicked into sharp fluorescence at the tire shop; commuter trains deposited plaid-scarfed businessmen on the State Street platform; the dollar store showed a window full of kids’ backpacks and discount rolling suitcases through its chain-metal grating.

  The seven-thirty meeting was held in a stately stone building downtown. About half its crowd had come straight from one of the city’s homeless shelters, which asked clients to leave at seven. Some people came for the meeting, and others came for the coffee—bitter and scalding, served with a handful of creamers on a table in the back—and many probably came for both. It wasn’t always clear what someone had come for, and it was probably rarely only one thing anyway. The meeting was full of old-timers, some sober for decades, who sustained a fierce and opaque ecosystem of ancient feuds and intimacies. An elderly black man named Theo was the unofficial spiritual leader of the group. You could tell he’d been through a lot of shit but wasn’t putting it in your face, and he showed up every morning—just like he’d showed up every morning for decades.

  At that meeting, I was painfully aware of how much I had, and how much I hadn’t lost. I was wary of how anything I shared might come across to others in the room, people who were struggling with so much more: the woman fighting for custody of her kids; the guy who’d been in and out of shelters for almost a year, but had finally gotten a job at a pizza parlor in town. How could comparing my addiction to theirs seem like anything but a misunderstanding of what they’d suffered? I didn’t want to suggest I’ve been through that too, with my very presence—when of course I hadn’t. My story was contoured by desire more than loss.

  But I was surprised by the ways other people sought commonality, and at a certain point I realized I was the one projecting difference by assuming others felt it. Believing in what we shared didn’t have to make me blind to what we didn’t. Resonance wasn’t the same as conflation. It didn’t mean pretending we’d all lived the same thing. It just meant listening. People had gotten punched in the face for different reasons, but drinking had made all our bodies vulnerable. We weren’t there to assume or insist on perfect correspondence; we were there to open ourselves to the possibility of company.

  I liked how often people at that meeting said: “I just can’t get a fucking break.” How often they got angry at other people, at their own lives. One day a man stood up and shouted at another man across the room: “When are you gonna give me back that twenty bucks?” The guy called back: “Why don’t you go suck someone for twenty bucks?” It was liberating to hear voices break from the sacrosanct script of chanting the steps, from the promises or the preamble: “a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem.” And also, honestly, so they could get something straight about money that was owed, or how so-and-so was fucking wrong. People were putting their lives back together after many losses and many relapses. Desire and regret still glowed fiercely in that room, still hot to the touch.

  Infinite Jest is honest about the weirdness of depersonalized goodwill in recovery—what it feels like to be loved indiscriminately, not for your qualities but just stam, “because because.” The book understands the discomfort of hearing the program promise, Let us love you until you learn to love yourself, and the aggressive insistence of being hugged by strangers. After a meeting, one character asks a stranger: “You gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass, or do I gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?”

  Don Gately was unlike any literary hero I’d ever encountered: a sober felon with a big square head, his meaty tattooed hands often carrying the cakes he bakes for other people’s sobriety birthdays. In meetings, he talks about “fucking up in sobriety,” and he gets irritated at sober drunks all the time. When someone complains too much, he uses his pinkie finger to mime the world’s smallest viola playing the theme from The Sorrow and the Pity. Gately’s no saint. That’s why he made salvation seem possible. That’s what I loved about sobriety in the book—it wasn’t stolid, or pedantic; it was palpable and crackling and absurd. It was so brutally alive on every page.

  After Gately protects an asshole rehab resident in a gunfight and ends up getting shot, he spends his hospital days refusing morphine. “No one single instant of it was unendurable,” he thinks. “What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering.” It reminded me of how I’d imagined sobriety: one dull evening after another, a mountain of dried-up tea bags—no single night impossible, their infinite horizon unthinkable. We’re all drama queens, even in our sobriety: My dry nights were gunshot wounds.

  But even when Gately is enduring “emergency-type pain, like scream-and-yank-your-charred-hand-off-the-stove-type pain,” he still spends most of his time—somewhat grudgingly—listening to other people unload their woes: “Gately wanted to tell Tiny Ewell that he could totally fucking I.D. with Ewell’s feelings, and that if he, Tiny, could just hang in and tote that bale and put one little well-shined shoe in front of the other everything would end up all right.” In the hospital, Gately becomes a huge mute confessional booth, like Luther holding court at Seneca, silent and smoking at the kitchen table while everyone else talked.

  Infinite Jest was full of people like me, people who were trying to outsmart recovery but still sought affirmation from its rituals—like one businessman in a Boston AA meeting, who has “the sort of professional background where he’s used to trying to impress gatherings of persons.” Lying in his hospital bed, Gately imagines himself standing “at a lavish Commitment podium, like at an AA convention, off-handedly saying something that got an enormous laugh.” Gately isn’t taking morphine, sure, but he’s also fantasizing about how he’ll tell the story of that heroism in a meeting someday. Gately shared my desperate desire to get the loudest applause, to tell a story that wouldn’t make a man call out “This is boring!” ever again. The book could totally fucking I.D. with the ways my ego intruded on my recovery. It knew the ordinariness of that intrusion. It understood my wariness about recovery culture. It got my embarrassment and my worship. It showed me that my disdain for unoriginal clichés was entirely unoriginal. It gave me hope because its hope was so unvarnished.

  I read Infinite Jest like a desperate old man running his metal detector over the sand, waiting for every ding that signified buried wisdom—even though I worried that Wallace was too smart to be read with this type of greed. I felt indicted by critics like Christian Lorentzen, who wrote disdainfully of “readers who look to novels and novelists for instruction on how to lead their lives,” who were drawn to Wallace’s “bromides about brains beating like hearts, literature as a salve for loneliness, and novels comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, etc.” But I was bromide-dependent. The most important things I’d ever endured or believed probably lived in Lorentzen’s etc., covering their faces in shame. I read Wallace with my psychic highlighter always at the ready. Perhaps that made me simplify him, as I sucked on lozenges of truth—“sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt”—but his novel had gotten me through plenty of moments of just sitting there and, like, hurting. It pursued what Berryman called “wisdom-work.”

  In my PhD program, other grad students talked about their undergraduate students with fond condescension, how they were always looking for the moral of the story, or the lesson to learn. But fuck that easy dismissal. Fuck that charge of reduction, and that snickering at bromides. Because sometimes I jus
t needed to sit there and remember that Infinite Jest said sometimes I just needed to sit there and, like, hurt. Sometimes I needed the single-entendre truth. Sometimes I needed the cherry blossoms, the abundant meat aisle, the cold sunlight, the new life. “Too simple?” Wallace wrote in the margin of one of his self-help books. “Or just that simple?”

  I’d been so afraid of sobriety as a flatline, as Jackson had been afraid of sobriety as a flatline, as Berryman and Stephen King and Denis Johnson and the older waitress sitting at the Tuesday-morning meeting had been afraid of sobriety as a flatline. I’d been afraid that meetings were basically lobotomies served alongside coffee-flavored water and Chips Ahoy!; afraid that even if sobriety could offer stability and sincerity and maybe even salvation, it could never be a story. But Infinite Jest knew better. It wasn’t that the novel’s brilliance had survived the deadening force of sobriety. Its brilliance depended on what sobriety had wrought.

  On his first sobriety birthday, Wallace received a copy of a 1987 play called “Bill W. and Dr. Bob” as a gift from his sponsor. The cover was inscribed “To David, Congratulations on Year 1” and featured an illustration that suggested fellowship: two men in suits, their faces out of frame, one holding a mug of coffee with a wisp of steam curling out of it. Wallace marked only one passage, a piece of dialogue:

  DR. BOB (Inching his chair closer): If I don’t drink, I’m a monster. I need it to function, to be a doctor, husband, father. Without it, I’m so afraid, I can’t function at all. Booze is the glue holding me together, the one thing I can count on.