The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  In life, Berryman was frustrated by his relapses, but kept trying to surrender again anyway. On a slip labeled “1st Step, Sat night,” he wrote:

  I doubt if this will be an acceptable first step; and I don’t care. I doubt if any man can actually “take” the 1st step; maybe some can, but I know I tried hard and failed. Last spring I wrote… a comprehensive account of 23 years of alcoholic chaos, lost wives, public disgrace, a lost job, injuries + hospitalization, a blacked out call to a girl student threatening to kill her; involuntary defecation in a public place, DTs, convulsions once, etc, and it was completely sincere… and a month later I had a slip, 4 or 5 over the next two months, two months sobriety, five days drinking, and here I am again—in spite of dead seriousness, never missing either an AA meeting or St. Mary’s encounter group, and all sorts of other help, including daily prayer + the 24-hr-book. So screw that first step. This is only a short true account of my present thinking on the subject.

  But even as he said screw that, he turned the paper over and scribbled a message to himself on the back: “As you comb yr hair + beard in the morning, say to the mirror: ‘Berryman… God is interested in you, and conscious of yr struggle + yr services. Good luck.’” He kept trying to redirect himself from crisis to purpose: yr struggle + yr services. His inventories kept circling back to the same futilities and frustrations: Do I feel I’m unstoppable? (Y) Do I ever “go on the wagon” to prove I can quit? (Y) He didn’t even mark Y or N for Do I ever get drunk?—as if it were a question too obvious to bear answering. His whole life had already answered it.

  If the novel was an attempt to write himself into recovery, Berryman’s handwritten edits on the early draft betray his unresolved questions. One rehab patient looking at Severance “with real interest” became “with the appearance of real interest.” Another handwritten insertion insists that each rehab patient returns to “his own world” after reciting the Serenity Prayer in unison. At one point, Severance knows “he felt—depressed.” But he can’t even connect to what makes him cry. “I don’t know what the hell I was crying about,” he says. He “felt—nowhere.” Disappointment lurks on the other side of each dash, after the held breath of each pause.

  In a group-therapy session near the end of the novel, Severance confesses that he has a son from whom he has been estranged for years. He’s not even precisely sure of his age. (“Thirteen. I think.”) As Severance acknowledges “miserably,” he doesn’t know his son well, though he’s not yet ready to take full responsibility for it. “His letters are very childish,” Severance complains. “I can’t find out anything about him.”

  Berryman had an estranged son of his own, and his archives hold letters that express—as clearly as anything—the unspoken white margins of distance between them:

  Dear Dad,

  I’ve done well in school this quarter with a 91% average. I have enclosed a copy of my report card. I hope you like it.

  I’ve been accepted at South Kent School. This has been the only acceptance I’ve received so far so I don’t know if I’ll be going there.

  Say hello to Kate and Martha for me.

  Much love,

  Paul Berryman.

  His letters are very childish. I can’t find out anything about him. A few weeks later, Paul Berryman sent a copy of his acceptance letter from Phillips Academy—with that full name in his signature, again, as if writing to a stranger. At that point, it had been several years since he and his father had seen each other.

  But Berryman wanted to share the fruits of his recovery with Paul; he wanted recovery to be something that brought them closer together. Just before his birthday one year, Berryman wrote his son a letter:

  FOR MY SON: On the eve of my 56th birthday, after struggles, I think I have learned this: To give an honest (sincere) account of anything is the second hardest task man can set himself.… The only harder task, in my opinion at the moment, is to try to love and know the Lord, in impenetrable silence.

  It’s hardly surprising that Berryman’s letter to his estranged son is all about longing for a stronger sense of connection to an estranged God, another absent father turned divine. It’s also unsurprising that it’s all about Berryman and his own quest. Recovery can make you self-absorbed, even as you’re trying to learn otherwise—trying to reach out to neglected children, or wounded spouses, or an impenetrable God.

  By fall 1971, Berryman had given up on Recovery entirely. He left the novel unfinished, and it wasn’t published until after his death. He only left yellow notecards suggesting the possible endings he’d imagined. “END OF NOVEL,” he wrote on one. “TURN THIS CARD OVER.” On the back, he wrote: “He might, certainly, at any time drink again. But it didn’t seem likely. He felt—calm.” There it was again, that dash.

  Berryman was trying to imagine an ongoing state of serenity, but he could summon it only in abstract terms. On a separate notecard he wrote an alternative “LAST PAGE OF BOOK”: “On Pike’s Peak, coming down. He was perfectly ready. No regrets. He was happier than he had ever been in his life before. Lucky, and he didn’t deserve it. He was very, very lucky. Bless everybody. He felt—fine.”

  Berryman was clutching at the possibility of stability beyond the dash: He felt—calm. He felt—fine. But it’s hard to trust these feelings, not only because they exist on notecards that never got used, but also because they are haunted by the dashes that came before them in the book: He felt—depressed. He felt—nowhere.

  Berryman kept his Recovery notebook even after he gave up on the novel, but his final entries, from December 1971, are full of despair. “Just try,” he told himself. “Happy a little, grateful prayers.” It got bad anyway: “terrible continual thoughts of suicide—cowardly, cruel, wicked—beating them off. Don’t believe gun or knife; won’t.”

  In the unfinished novel, Severance begins his final stretch of sobriety by saying: “If I don’t make it this time, I’ll just relax and drink myself to death.” In a motel room in Hartford, Berryman wrote: “It’s enough! I can’t BEAR ANY MORE / Let this be it. I’ve had it. I can’t wait.”

  On January 8, 1972, Berryman jumped off the Washington Avenue Bridge at the University of Minnesota, where he’d taught for almost twenty years, and landed on the riverbank below, dead on impact. He’d relapsed just days before jumping—after eleven months of sobriety, his longest stretch.

  I can’t bear much more of my hideous life,” Jean Rhys once wrote to a friend. “It revolts me quite simply.” No surprise, then, that Rhys found herself wanting to write away from the “I” of personal experience, the shame of thinly veiled autobiography, and into “another I who is everybody.” Like Jackson, she wanted to get outside herself. This was harder when other people were around. “Jean could not listen!” said Selma Vaz Dias. “She does not seem to connect.”

  It was fiction where Rhys grew closest to the consciousness of others, where she wanted to dissolve the barriers between “I” and “everybody,” and Wide Sargasso Sea—her fifth novel, the one that made her famous—was her fullest expression of this desire. Rhys’s first four novels had been rooted in the landscapes of her own life, dingy hotel rooms and bleak boardinghouses in Paris and London, but this last one found her core wounds, alienation and abandonment, in the imagined life of someone else: Mr. Rochester’s first wife from Jane Eyre, the madwoman in the attic. Rhys reimagined this opaque character as Antoinette, a woman exiled from her country and spurned by a man: a life rediscovered in the wreckage, a character reclaimed from mad villainy. (No resemblance to Rhys at all.)

  It took Rhys nearly twenty years to write the novel—two decades full of poverty, binge drinking, itinerant living, and trying (often failing) to care for her increasingly ill husband, Max. She burned one draft of the novel to a crisp in her kitchen grate during a bout of drunken fury. Once she had finally completed the manuscript, she wrote to her editor, Diana Athill: “I’ve dreamt several times that I was going to have a baby then I woke—with relief. Finally I dreamt that I was looking at
the baby in the cradle—such a pussy weak thing. So the book must be finished.” As it happened, Max died just as she was finishing it. Athill wrote to say she’d visit as soon as she could: “I’ll come armed with a bottle!”

  The “pussy weak” story of Wide Sargasso Sea explores the unhappy marriage of Antoinette, a Dominican girl raised on a crumbling plantation, to a British second son seeking an inheritance: the young man who would become Brontë’s Mr. Rochester. Wide Sargasso Sea grants a full consciousness to Antoinette—the character who appears only as a dangerous madwoman in Brontë’s masterpiece—and dramatizes her destruction at the hands of a husband who doesn’t love her, but brings her to England anyway and shuts her in his attic. Rhys conjures their heartache of a honeymoon as days of dislocation and estrangement spent at a crumbling old island estate: rain puddles in the red earth, steam rising off the greenery, firelight flickering across the veranda, moths dying in the candle flames. The ripe land is cruel. It deepens the sting of the couple’s distance with its beauty. If the mind can make a hell of heaven, then a loveless honeymoon can make it even worse.

  Antoinette tries everything she can to make her husband love her more, but he can’t fathom the abandonments that have whittled her need for love to such a sharp blade. After Antoinette fails at using the obeah magic of her childhood nurse to secure his affection—a pile of chicken feathers in the corner, some doctored wine—she takes refuge in the rum in the veranda sideboard.

  “Don’t drink any more,” her husband tells her.

  “What right have you to tell me what I’m to do?” she replies, and keeps drinking. The rum, we understand, is little more than a poor substitute for an older magic. It grants some diluted version of the relief her nurse’s obeah once offered. Her core desire is for love. Booze is just meager consolation, a sham form of sustenance.

  In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys found two vessels for empathy. She recovered the character of Mrs. Rochester, but she also imagined the psyche of the man who spurned her. The novel doesn’t wonder only what it was like to be a woman imprisoned, but what it was like to be the man who’d imprisoned her. The middle section of the novel is told from Rochester’s perspective, and its third portion allows his childhood governess, Mrs. Eff, to speak on his behalf: “I knew him as a young man. He was gentle, generous, brave.” Mrs. Eff’s insistence that it would be a mistake to see Rochester simply as a devil echoes Rhys’s self-critiques in her imagined trial. I do not know others, she had confessed. I see them as trees walking.

  By granting Rochester a voice in the novel, Rhys allows him to emerge as something more than just another glimpsed tree, something more than a hook upon which she could once again hang her poison coat. Rochester is a symbol of abandonment turned human again: multiple and contradictory. “I am not used to characters taking the bit between their teeth and rushing away,” Rhys had written to a friend as she was writing Wide Sargasso Sea. In Rochester, she imagined a man who looked like a devil but had once been a boy; and through him, she began to imagine the possibility of a “gentle, generous” boy in every man who’d ever looked like a devil to her. When Rochester tells Antoinette that he was forced as a young man to keep his emotions hidden, Antoinette begins to understand that almost every villain has also been a victim.

  If the novel reimagines villainy as the fruition of victimhood, then its ending reframes an act of destruction—Antoinette burning down Rochester’s manor—as an expression of pain. In Jane Eyre, the fire is opaque and wholly threatening, the revenge of a “mad lady, who was as cunning as a witch.” But Rhys gives the “mad lady” an intricate psychology, and exposes pain at the root of what seems like senseless self-destruction, or blind malice. The fire becomes an articulate conflagration. It resurrects the manuscript from ashes in the grate, where Rhys drunkenly burned it. “Now at last I know why I was brought here,” Antoinette says, when she picks up the candle. “And what I have to do.”

  For the last thirteen years of her life, between the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea and her death in 1979, at the age of eighty-eight, Rhys lived in a Devon village called Cheriton Fitzpaine, in a block of cottages called Landboat Bungalows. She was landlocked and thirsty. It was stunning that she drank as much as she drank and lived as long as she did. She told a friend that ghost stories and whiskey were the only things that brought her comfort, but technically that wasn’t true. Her bills from the liquor store JT Davies and Sons show that in addition to whiskey (Jameson Black Barrel and Teacher’s), Rhys was drinking plenty of Gordon’s Gin, Smirnoff, Martini Bianco, and Beaujolais. Her monthly booze bill sometimes rivaled all her other household expenses combined.

  By the end of her life, Rhys was unable to live without assistance. In a red composition book bound with twine, her friend Diana Melly wrote a list of instructions for her various caregivers:

  Avoid argumentative subjects like politics

  Never discourage her from things she wants to do with her looks etc (i.e. like buy a red wig)

  Don’t discuss age and related subjects like grandmothers

  Try and change the subject when things get emotional but do it slowly

  Most of Melly’s instructions, however, had to do with managing Rhys’s daily drinking:

  12:00. Drink. Only when she asks for it and in a small wine glass. Lots of ice, little gin, and fill with martini [vermouth]. It’s always the same drink—morning and evening. Don’t offer another drink unless she asks for it. (EVER)

  1:00. Lunch. Pudding. (Nearly always there is an ice cream in the deep freeze.) Wine—if possible not more than two glasses. Only if she asks.

  Melly crossed out those words as if admitting that any attempt to curtail might be futile. Elsewhere, she says: “NEVER drink anything different like whiskey in front of her or she will want it too.” If Rhys demanded it, Melly suggested “tiny ones with masses of ice.” Rhys almost always wanted them at twilight. “I stay with her then until 7-o-clock,” Melly wrote, “as it is the time when she is most likely to get sad.” Melly understood her friend’s sadness as a type of clockwork, arriving with the dusk. It called for a drink, but what it really wanted was company. The drinking was past argument. It was less like a disease to be cured and more like a creature in the room, a wild animal that could be cajoled—with open ears, careful tongue, masses of ice—into a less ferocious version of itself.

  But Rhys was wise to these tricks. During a visit with her friend David Plante, near the end of her life, she complained that other people were always filling her drinks with too much ice. “All of writing is a huge lake,” she explained to him, her metaphors getting more fluid as she got drunker. “There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys.” As Plante rose to leave, she asked, “Give me another drink, will you, honey? And put only one cube in it.”

  During that purgatory spring—after Dave and I had broken up, and then started seeing each other again—I asked him if he wanted to come hear me tell my story at a meeting. He seemed pleased and said yes. So on a chilled night in March, I picked him up in my tiny black Toyota, heat blasting as he came down to the lobby of his building (still strange to say that, his) in a plaid scarf and dark peacoat.

  When I thanked him for coming, he looked me straight in the eye and told me it meant a lot to him that I’d asked.

  We drove to a church at the edge of town, halfway to the Dairy Queen in Hamden, a black steeple against the sky, with only its basement glowing underneath, as if a little bit of yolky light had spilled under the church and gathered into a puddle. This was the Morse code signal for a meeting: dark church, lit basement. It was strange to bring Dave into that basement, where I’d cried about the end of our relationship. It made me feel like a fraud, or a fool. But he sat comfortably—near the back, with his messenger bag leaning against the metal legs of his folding chair. Seeing him alongside people I knew from recovery was like a dream in which all the corners of your life collide: There’s your grandma clinking Coronas wit
h the fencer you used to make out with junior year. Now Dave was chatting with a middle-aged woman sitting in the row behind him, laughing about something. And when I told the room, partway through my story, “Drinking made me selfish,” I was really telling him.

  We both knew it was more complicated than that, anyway. My selfishness was preexisting condition as well as consequence, and who isn’t selfish, anyway? Maybe telling myself—or the room, or Dave—that drinking made me selfish was just a pragmatic way of holding myself accountable: You’ve got no excuse to be selfish now.

  On one of the first warm days of spring, we took a boat ride through the Thimble Islands, off the Connecticut coast—salt wind off the Sound, both our mouths full of my flapping hair, cobalt water sparkling with hard flashes of sunlight like scattered glass. I imagined a possible future for us on every island, where our children could read in their lawn chairs, demanding pancakes. Dave had once written in a poem, the same one that had me drinking alone behind our house:

  and now you’re gone—

  with wet hair and all our unborn children.