The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  This was manna to me: the idea that Carver’s creativity had struggled against the chaos of his drinking years. I replaced my vision of Drunk Carver, delirious and darkness-facing at the Foxhead, with Sober Carver, pounding his typewriter at home and facing the wind in his sailboat, in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, catching big fish under bigger skies.

  Sober Carver was a far cry from the drunk rogues of the white logic. He lived on Fiddle Faddle, a kind of candy-coated popcorn. At a teaching job in Vermont, he stole brownies and doughnuts from the cafeteria and stashed them in the desk drawers of his twin-bed dorm room. When he got flown to Zurich for a speaking gig, he sent back postcards saying he was “mainlining” chocolate and wanted to return to Zurich as the “Tobler Chocolate Chair in Short Fiction.” Carver wasn’t alone: In Infinite Jest, Wallace describes the “pastry-dependence” of sobriety, and I pictured my own early days as a towering stack of pink bakery boxes—full of blueberry muffins and smeared petits fours that never tasted like vodka, no matter how many I ate.

  Sober Carver wanted sugar and affirmation. When his first collection came out, he carried around all the positive reviews in a briefcase and pulled them out to read aloud to friends. He also crafted bits of his own sober legend. Eight years into his sobriety, he wrote to a man who’d just quit drinking:

  It took me at least six months—more—after I stopped drinking before I could attempt to do any more than write a few letters. Mainly I was so grateful to have my health back, and my life back, that it didn’t really matter to me in one large way if I ever wrote anything again, or not… I tell you, and it’s true, I wasn’t worrying about it. I was just very happy, very happy to be alive.

  But the Carver of 1986 may have misrepresented the Carver of 1978. Maryann insisted that he started trying to write almost immediately after he stopped drinking, in a cabin they shared together during that first sober summer, where they celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary with apple juice, smoked salmon, and fresh oysters. In his letter, Carver was pushing back against one myth (you had to surrender your creativity in sobriety) with another (getting sober meant you wouldn’t care about your creativity anymore), presenting his life in ways he thought might be useful to a newly sober man.

  If good fiction brings “the news from one world to another,” as Carver once said, then his stories brought the news of what it had been like to get drunk and what it was like afterward. As his biographer Carol Sklenicka put it, “Bad Ray” from the alcoholic past sent dispatches that were diligently transcribed by “Good Ray” in the sober present. There was nothing dull or passionless about this transcription. “Each day without drinking had a glow and a fervor,” Gallagher wrote. “The leopard of his imagination pulled down the feathers and blooded flesh of stories.” Sober Carver’s writing was virile and bold. He wrote poems like he caught fish. “I’m not into catch and release,” he said. “I just start clubbing them into submission when I get them near my boat.” The part of the Pacific coast that Carver called home was salt-charged and sea-swollen, its rivers cold and clear and surging. He was waking up at five each day to write, replacing chaotic fury with discipline. Jay McInerney, a friend and student, had always considered writers “luminous madmen who drank too much and drove too fast and scattered brilliant pages along their doomed trajectories.” But Carver showed him “you had to survive, find some quiet, and work hard every day.”

  Carver treated his characters as he treated his fellows at an AA meeting—with curiosity and compassion, without condescension. “Ray respects his characters,” Gallagher wrote, “even when they can’t respect themselves,” an echo of one AA slogan: Let us love you until you can learn to love yourself. Carver was surprised when reviewers remarked about how pathetic his characters were, because he thought of them as simply ordinary. He was saved from condescension by a sense of interchangeability. When a drunk ran in front of his car once, he said: “There but for the grace of God go I.”

  “Where I’m Calling From,” one of his most famous stories, is set at Frank Martin’s, a fictional “drying-out” place based on Duffy’s, the Calistoga rehab where Carver himself had gone. The story evokes the dazed disorientation of early rehab—cigarettes smoked on the front porch, horror stories over eggs and toast—along with the ragged desperation that made it necessary: an exploded marriage, and then a car ride to detox with a new girlfriend, a bucket of fried chicken, and an open bottle of champagne. “Part of me wanted help,” the narrator says. “But there was another part.”

  At rehab, the narrator finds solace in listening to a chimney sweeper named J.P. “Keep talking, J.P.” he says. “Don’t stop now, J.P.” The narrator loves J.P.’s story, which ends up taking up more space on the page than his own, because, as he explains: “It’s taking me away from my own situation.” J.P.’s story didn’t have to be interesting—“I would have listened if he’d been going on about how one day he’d decided to start pitching horseshoes”—it just had to belong to someone else.

  The poetry Carver wrote during his final decade—those years on the Olympic Peninsula, fishing and writing—is electrified by gratitude and open-nerved beholding. “I have a thing / for this cold swift water,” he wrote. “Just looking at it makes my blood run / and my skin tingle.” The physical world isn’t just pretty; it’s a rush along his skin and in his blood. Gallagher called his poetry “as clear as glass and as sustaining as oxygen.”

  When he wrote about the water, his voice was always thankful. “It pleases me, loving rivers… Loving them all the way back / To their source. / Loving everything that increases me.” The writer Olivia Laing finds a “boiled-down, idiosyncratic version” of the Third Step in this moment: Made a decision to turn our lives over to the care of God as we understood God. For Carver, loving rivers back to their source was a way of surrendering himself to something larger than he could properly understand—the palpable splendor and awe of the world itself. And I loved Carver back to his sources as well, reaching for the myths of sobriety once I got sober, just as I’d reached for the myths of drinking when I drank. I turned Sober Carver into another Higher Power, with surging rivers for veins, casting lines to hook the blooded flesh of his stories. But ultimately his work moved me largely because it had little time for myths. It preferred oxygen.

  Gallagher says that Carver’s sober poetry forges a “bond of mutuality” with the reader by creating a “circuitry of strong emotional moments in which we join the events at a place beyond invitation.” The truest thing I can say of Carver’s sober poetry is that I’ve joined it there: A house where no one / was home, no one coming back, / and all I could drink. Those lines resonated so much they felt like a meeting, as if I were sitting on a folding chair in some church basement—listening to Carver’s voice deliver the news that it might be possible, someday, to want more than that.

  In Carver’s poems, sobriety isn’t pious or humorless. It’s wry and playful and it’s often hungry. Sobriety means staring at the vast Pacific and eating buttery popcorn. Loving everything that increases me. Carver is increased by popcorn—also by the heavy sea churning, and the distant fireflies of strangers’ homes lit up against the night. He insists he’ll “smoke all the cigarettes I want, / where I want. Make biscuits and eat them / with jam and fat bacon.” His sobriety is no Boy Scout. It wants to loaf around and smoke all day and hang out with its posse. “My boat is being made to order,” Carver writes. “It’s going to have plenty of room on it for all my friends.” His boat will have fried chicken and piles of fruit. “No one will be denied anything.”

  Carver’s sobriety isn’t ascetic, it’s just trying to imagine desire in new terms: a yacht of bounty, biscuits with jam and bacon. His speakers acknowledge temptation without lapsing into bitterness. One dreams about raising a bottle of whiskey to his lips, but then wakes up the next morning to see an old man shoveling snow, a reminder of daily persistence: “He nods and grips his shovel. / Goes on, yes. Goes on.” That yes. As if Carver is talking to someone, or to him
self—saying, This is how the world continues. If you talk to enough recovering alcoholics in cold climates, I can promise you will hear someone compare his sobriety to shoveling snow.

  Of his drinking past, Carver once said: “That life is simply gone now, and I can’t regret its passing.” But it haunted his poems, that other life with the first woman he loved—the one with whom he wasn’t sharing his sober years. “He’d known for a long time / they would die in separate lives and far from each other,” he wrote, “despite oaths exchanged when they were young.” Inside his second life, far from Maryann, Carver was still writing poems about his regret: “A problem with alcohol, always alcohol… What you’ve really done / and to someone else, the one / you meant to love from the start.”

  During the months after Dave and I broke up for good, New Haven had three huge blizzards. There were stretches of days when I didn’t see anyone. One afternoon I tried to dig out my car, to free it before the plows arrived and blocked it in. (If you talk to enough recovering alcoholics in cold climates… ) A couple were digging out beside me and by the time they were done with their car, I was done with one tire. The guy helped me dig out the other three. “You look like Amy Adams,” he said, and his girlfriend said, “Not really.” I’d never heard of Amy Adams, but I went home and Googled her face and ate an entire box of Swedish Fish and didn’t talk to another person for three days. I wrote in my journal: My soul is an endless mouth.

  That spring, I started volunteering at a writing group at the Connecticut Mental Health Center, a massive outpatient facility near the hospital. There were about five or six of us each week, gathered around a small table in a room that always smelled like clean gauzy bandages and wet clay. It was full of little plastic watercolor trays and stiff spiky brushes in plastic cups; it did double duty for art therapy. The group already had a leader, a paid staff member, and though I’d been enthusiastically welcomed as someone who could help facilitate, in practice I was more like just another participant, trying to find a good metaphor for my depression.

  One week a man imagined what he would do with his last day of sight, and his piece included looking at a traffic jam: scuffed metal hubcaps and pissed-off New Englanders leaning on their horns. It seemed weirdly accurate, that you’d want to hold on to even the ugly stuff. Another week, a woman wrote a fairy tale about a butterfly looking for a queen bee. At the end, it turned out the queen had been looking for her. This was an old and good fantasy: the possibility that what you thought was beyond your grasp had actually been seeking you the whole time.

  In the bitter middle of February, a university flew me out to Las Vegas to give a reading. No one had ever flown me anywhere to give a reading. Afterward we went out to the Strip, and sat in a bar that was supposed to look like the inside of a chandelier. I drank a mocktail with salt around the rim and felt entirely, exquisitely alive. Past midnight, one of my hosts asked if there was anything else I wanted to do, and I told him I wanted to buy a onesie for my friend’s new baby—ideally something incredibly tacky. “Shouldn’t be too hard,” he said, and we drove to the biggest souvenir shop in town. Closed. We drove to the convenience stores near the wedding chapels. Closed. “This isn’t done,” the man said. We kept looking.

  I loved him for that, for saying our night wasn’t over. For me, it meant nights weren’t over. He showed me the sharks in the aquarium at the Golden Nugget, gliding serenely around the glass tube of a waterslide. We eventually found my onesie on Fremont Street, under a giant dome of plasma screens, in a shop full of witty shot glasses. This was sobriety: three in the morning in Vegas, shopping for someone else’s baby.

  I went to meetings everywhere. I went to a meeting at the Riviera, at the north end of the Strip, spilling coffee onto the frayed carpet. I went to a meeting at a monastery in California—on a porch above a murmuring creek, our faces lit by oil lamps—led by a monk in robes. I went to meetings at a café in Los Angeles, full of recycled velour movie seats and women with birdlike faces and huge sunglasses who surprised me, time and again, with the earnest effort in their voices: My name is… My name is…I could sense their faith like a creature breathing—calling the names, one by one.

  I officiated a friend’s wedding and gulped ice water at the reception. Dave’s ghost was everywhere: eating pea-shoot risotto, talking to the woman behind the bar. I was even nostalgic for the things I hadn’t been able to stand. I left early and stopped at a gas station on the Merritt Parkway, smoked a cigarette outside the convenience store while rain came down in the dark. You can reclaim some things once you’re ready; they’ve been waiting for you patiently. But some things are just lost for good.

  That spring, I met Monica for fruit salad and coffee once a week. Part of our sponsoring relationship involved going over her answers to the same twelve-step worksheets I’d filled out with my own sponsor. Did you ever get drunk even when you swore you wouldn’t? I told her about drinking with a Holter monitor dangling around my neck, wires hooked up to my pulse and cords hanging down my shirt, passing out drunk and waking up the next morning with a small metal box grinding into my ribs. She smiled and said I didn’t look like the kind of person who’d drink with a little metal box around my neck, and I said: “Wouldn’t you?”

  Maybe she could have been anyone, and I could have been anyone; maybe those coffee dates only meant something because we wanted them to. But her trust, her belief that talking to me might help her get better, meant everything to me. What does that mean, everything? It means I was drawing on every part of my life that had come before, every blindfolded night and sour-mouthed morning. And it means that every moment of the rest of my sober life has held those ordinary coffee dates, that cut fruit under chilly spring sunlight. It was a life I would have dreaded, our lines of bubble letters carefully scripted across worksheets, our days full of iced tea and everything we were afraid of. This wasn’t about epiphanies of the lightning-strike variety. This was more like What was your answer for 12A?

  One evening, when Monica was driving me to a meeting, I saw a photo of her mother—who’d died when she was young—tucked under the passenger-side visor of her sensible midsize sedan. It took my breath away, imagining what had been waiting for Monica in every bottle of wine. We went to meetings at a senior center in East Haven with notes on the jigsaws: Do not work on puzzles! Not fair to day patients. I’d heard about the sober glow, the gradual radiance that came from being at ease in your own skin. I’d never seen it in myself, but I could see it in Monica. I would arrive at meetings to find her listening to the story of someone’s day, or bringing him a cookie.

  Berryman’s Recovery knew how good it felt to feel so much for someone else. It was more than altruism. It felt righteous. That didn’t make it false.

  When I moved away from New Haven, Monica moved into my apartment, the first place I’d ever lived on my own without booze—where I’d watched the highway on crystalline early mornings, where the winter sun laid hot stripes across my knees while I whispered prayers to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in. My sobriety lived there alone for a while, and then it lived there with hers.

  On a bright November day, a year after I’d left New Haven, I drove out to Port Angeles from Seattle. I wanted to see the land where Carver had spent his second life—the years he didn’t think he’d get—to find the rivers he had been increased by and the land where he was buried, in a cemetery high above the Strait of Juan de Fuca, overlooking the regal, bracing beauty of the Pacific. I wanted to see the poem fragment carved on his headstone like a catechism: And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so… And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth. I knew there was a notebook tucked in a black metal box beside his grave, and I wanted to see it, too—full of handwritten messages left by people who’d made the pilgrimage, people who’d been inspired by his work: sober people and relapsed people and still-drinking people who wanted to be not-drinking people; and maybe some people who had a nonalcoholic relationship
to Carver, just like it was apparently possible to have a nonalcoholic relationship to booze itself.

  In other accounts of visiting his grave, I’d seen quotes from the notebook: R.C.—I traveled across the country to find myself at your grave… I come here from Japan to tell you the truth… Spending is an escape just like alcohol. We are all trying to fill that empty hole. I imagined the notebook as the holy grail of my quest to make sobriety the best story of all: a swelling crescendo, the crowd-sourced “Amen.” Thank God you wrote from sobriety, RC! Here’s what it meant to us.

  The Olympic Peninsula stunned me, all shimmering blue water at the Agate Pass and jagged white-capped mountains, layered spruces and lavender fields. It was easy to see how this land could make the high ritual cadences of a second life seem apt, as true as goose bumps on your arm in the generous fall light. It seemed saturated by sobriety, abundant and alive. I rolled down the windows and drove between forests of dappled evergreens, past the sun-sluiced water of a sudden cove and an old railway car turned into an ice cream shop; past brown hills shaggy from logging and pocked with apologies: FORESTERS PLANT SEEDS, said staggered signs, FOR THE FORESTS TO BE. At every vista I was struck by the expansive, anonymous beauty of it all, a beauty that didn’t care if you found it beautiful or not, that just unfurled across the miles.