The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  I could deny myself… Then I could make them love me and be kind to me… Jean Rhys, Black Exercise Book, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  Now I have had enough to drink… Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels, 393.

  II. ABANDON

  I had two longings and one was fighting the other… Jean Rhys, Green Exercise Book, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  I searched for a big stone… Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 31. All details of Rhys’s Dominica days come from her unfinished memoir, unless otherwise noted as coming from Carole Angier’s Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown, 1991).

  I wanted to identify myself with it…Smile Please, 66.

  the sound of cocktail-making… Ibid., 17.

  Hanging above the family silver… Rhys, Smile Please, 17

  Rhys’s writing could never fully reckon with the suffering closer at hand, and larger than herself: the long shadow of slavery… Rhys’s family had owned and run the Geneva plantation (acquired by her great-grandfather, James Potter Lockhart, in 1824; his ledgers record that he owned twelve hundred acres and 258 slaves) until it was destroyed in the so-called Census Riots (also called La Guerre Negre, which followed Emancipation in 1844). See Lillian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009), 12.

  When she was twelve… Rhys’s age when she was abused by Mr. Howard varies in different versions of the story that she wrote down (from twelve to fourteen). See Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (27) for a fuller account, as well as Rhys’s Black Exercise Book.

  Would you like to belong to me?… Rhys, Black Exercise Book, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  It was then that it began… Rhys, Black Exercise Book, 64, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  I’ve made a complete wreck of myself… Ibid., 72.

  I wish I could get it clearer this pain that has gone through all my life… Ibid.

  You’ve no idea darling… Ibid.

  she kept the receipt from his burial for the rest of her life… Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 113.

  You’re much too early… Ibid., 235. See Angier for a fuller account of Rhys’s relationship with her daughter Maryvonne.

  My mother tries to be an artist… Ibid., 285.

  As legend had it, he’d painted the mouth of a cave onto a wall in the emperor’s palace… For a fuller version of the legend of the Wu Tao-tzu legend, see Herbert Allen Giles’s Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1918), 47–48.

  I’m finding out what a useful thing drink is… Ibid., 74.

  Kitten… you make my heart ache sometimes… Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith’s letters qtd. in ibid., 68.

  And then it became part of me… Rhys, Smile Please, 97.

  The whole earth had become inhospitable to her… Francis Wyndham qtd. in Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 71.

  You see I like emotion… Jean Rhys to Peggy Kirkaldy, July 3, 1946, in Jean Rhys Letters, 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), 45.

  “Why We Drink”… Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 53.

  On an extended canvas… one becomes more than ever conscious… Review from The New Statesman qtd. in ibid., 234.

  the subject of her first manuscript, Voyage in the Dark…Voyage in the Dark was the first novel Rhys wrote, though it was not the first novel she published. It was drafted in 1911–1913 but published in 1934, after both Quartet and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. See Lillian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour.

  I’m not miserable… Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 68.

  Oh no… not a party exactly… Rhys, Smile Please, 101.

  III. BLAME

  Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison… Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 206–7. For statistics on the number of alcohol-related driving fatalities per year, see the CDC report at https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety /impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html. The report states that “10,265 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes” in 2015, as opposed to just under 7,000 cocaine-related deaths. (See National Institute on Drug Abuse, https://www .drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates.)

  who is viewed as disposable—someone to be purged from the body politic… Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 206.

  the drug-scare narrative… See Drew Humphries’s fuller and astute discussion of the phenomenon of the “Drug Scare Narrative” in Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs, and the Media (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999).

  the most malignant, addictive drug known to mankind… Physician Michael Abrams qtd. in Dirk Johnson, “Good People Go Bad in Iowa, and a Drug Is Being Blamed,” New York Times, February 22, 1996.

  But by the time a 2005 Newsweek cover story called meth… Jacob Sullum, “Hyperbole Hurts: The Surprising Truth about Methamphetamine,” Forbes, February 20, 2014, referring to “The Meth Epidemic—Inside America’s New Drug Crisis,” Newsweek, July 31, 2005.

  not particularly exciting nonaddiction story that never gets told… Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society (New York: Harper, 2013), 122, 19, 188–91. Statistics demonstrate that most people who use drugs don’t become addicts. Even with heroin, the drug (apart from tobacco) with the highest “capture rate,” only 13 percent of users develop an addiction. Other studies put the number a bit higher, reporting that heroin’s “capture rate” is around 23 percent; that is, around 23 percent of those who use will become dependent, which still means that the majority do not. See this report from the UK National Addiction Centre, http://www.nta.nhs.uk/uploads/dangerousnessofdrugsdh_4086293.pdf.

  Anslinger effectively channeled the punitive impulse that had fueled Prohibition… Doris Marie Provine called prohibition and drug criminalization “sister movements.” Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 89.

  But during the decades that followed, the American legal system would polarize alcohol and drug addictions into separate categories in the public imagination: the former a disease, the latter a crime… One of the most common questions I received while working on this book—and before that, while I was working on this book as a dissertation—was whether I was writing about alcoholism or drug addiction, as if it was somehow strange to think about them together. In truth, I think it’s more strange to think of them apart—or at least, to draw a dividing line between alcohol and everything else. It’s only the legal system and the popular imagination that have categorized nicotine and alcohol on one side of a categorical divide, and “illicit” drugs on the other. Physiologically, it’s an arbitrary border. Not because there aren’t differences between substances—the kinds of dependence they produce, and how likely they are to produce it—but because every substance works differently, and alcohol is just one substance among many. In The Science of Addiction: From Neurobiology to Treatment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), Carlton Erickson recommends more specific language around addiction—specifically, recommends replacing the catch-all term of “addiction” with more specific categories of “abuse” (using with negative consequences) and “chemical dependence” (unable to stop without help) and offers a chart of “dependence liability” (25–26) that ranks heroin highest, then cocaine, then nicotine—with alcohol close behind. The British medical journal The Lancet released a chart that attempted to measure the respective “dependence potentials” of a variety of substances—calculated from the amount of pleasure they offer, their potential to create physical dependence, and their potential to create psychological dependence—and ranked them in the following order: heroin, cocaine, tobacco, barbiturates, alcohol, benzodiazepines, amphetamine, cannabis, ecstasy. (David
Nutt et al., “Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse,” The Lancet 369, no. 9566 [2007]: 1047–53.) But all this research suggests a new paradigm that replaces binary categories (cigarettes and alcohol on one side, “illicit” drugs on the other) with a way of seeing that understands each substance as its own particular confluence of probabilities and effects.

  Before the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914… The next two decades witnessed a sea change in the way Americans thought about drugs and the figure of the addict, and how the American legal system treated them. More comprehensive criminalization measures followed in the wake of the regulatory Harrison Act: the Jones-Miller Act of 1922, the Anti-Heroin Act of 1924, and the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act of 1934.

  psychopaths… created by infectious contact with persons already drug-conditioned… Harry Anslinger and William Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953), 223.

  loathsome and contagious diseases… Anslinger qtd. in Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 14, citing Larry Sloman, Reefer Madness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 36. Even though alcohol has been our go-to “legal” drug, alcoholism has inspired its own fraught history of cognitive dissonance. Officially categorized as a disease in 1956 by the American Medical Association—four years before E. Morton Jellinek, a Yale physiology professor, released his seminal study The Disease Concept of Alcoholism—alcoholism was also deemed “willful misconduct” by a 1988 Supreme Court Decision (Traynor v. Turnage) that held a pair of alcoholic veterans legally accountable for their alcoholism. The veterans’ petition for an extension of the ten-year time limit on their G.I. Bill benefits, on the grounds that they had been disabled by alcoholism during that decade, was denied. For more on Traynor v. Turnage, see Durwood Ruegger, “Primary Alcoholism Due to ‘Willful Misconduct’: Supreme Court Upholds VA Regulation,” Journal of Health and Human Resources Administration 13, no. 1 (Summer 1990): 112–23. In George Cain’s 1970 novel, Blueschild Baby (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), about a black heroin addict in Harlem in the 1960s, heroin and alcohol are paralleled in terms of physical dependence. Alcoholics are described as “[w]inos shivering in a doorway beg[ging] the needed pennies for their medicine” and the narrator says, “There is no longer anything dramatic or pleasurable about junk, it is only medicine, a restorative to enable me to function” (19, 5).

  wearing shiny suits and ties printed with Chinese pagodas… Julia Blackburn, With Billie: A New Look at the Unforgettable Lady Day (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 53.

  more than one administrator worried that it would be mistaken for a facility that actually grew opium… “U.S. Not Raising Drugs at Its Narcotic Farm,” New York Herald, January 24, 1934. RG 511—Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, National Institute of Mental Health, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  roughly two-thirds of the fifteen hundred “patients” at Lexington were prisoners… Nancy D. Campbell, J. P. Olsen, and Luke Walden, The Narcotic Farm (New York: Abrams, 2010), 62.

  By the time the Narco Farm opened, in 1935… The Narco Farm was opened twenty years after the Harrison Act of 1914 ushered in an era of escalating federal anti-narcotic legislation, but twenty years before the harsh punitive measures Anslinger would eventually promote with the Boggs Act (passed by Congress in 1951), and the Daniel Act of 1956, also known as the Narcotic Control Act of 1956.

  I feel that these people are in the same category as lepers… Anonymous Los Angeles Police Department officer qtd. in Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, 272.

  He spent the rest of the thirties creating a reason for his agency to matter by drumming up public anxiety about drugs… Hari, Chasing the Scream, 12–13.

  he gave the House Committee on Appropriations a speech about “colored students” partying with white coeds “and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy”… Ibid., 15, 17.

  the majority of drug users have always been white… John Helmer and Thomas Vietorisz, Drug Use, the Labor Market and Class Conflict (Washington: Drug Abuse Council, 1974), unpaged.

  NEGRO COCAINE “FIENDS” NEW SOUTHERN MENACE… The article written by Edward Huntington Williams, M.D., appeared in the New York Times, February 8, 1914. See fuller accounts of paranoid racist portraits of the black cocaine addict in Doris Provine, Unequal Under Law, 76–78. One account projected almost superhuman powers onto the African-American drug addict (“You could fill him with bullets and he still wouldn’t fall…”). See also Hari, Chasing the Scream, 26.

  most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain…Literary Digest (1914), 687. Qtd. in Provine, Unequal Under Law, 76–77.

  at the bottom of something… James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” Going to Meet the Man (New York: Dial Press, 1965).

  the first book to treat with authority the horrifying national problem of drug addiction… not to satisfy a desire for morbid sensationalism… Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, flap copy.

  guide and implement the national desire… Ibid.

  to buy wine and reefers… Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, 22–25.

  while under marihuana intoxication… Ibid., 296.

  normal people… usual emotional plane… Ibid., 251, 249–50.

  the face of “evil” is always the face of total need… William Burroughs, Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness (1960), reprinted in Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1962).

  His concept of illness was selective and self-serving… Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, 223, 226.

  Live things, frogs and insects kick in the liquid coming out… Cain, Blueschild Baby, 148.

  A doctor won’t help… Ibid., 149.

  He’s a sick man. You’re a doctor… Ibid., 150.

  denied the privilege of freely yielding… Margo Jefferson, Negroland (New York: Pantheon, 2015), 171. Understanding the public narratives that permitted my private suffering was another moment of waking from what Ta-Nehisi Coates has called “The Dream,” the white American aspirational fantasy that depends on the ongoing injustices of systemic racism to sustain its thrall. The different narratives that attach to various substances—often racially coded—are yet another iteration of the Dream. In Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), Coates writes about witnessing the Dreamers in action on West Broadway, in lower Manhattan, where “white people spilled out of wine bars with sloshing glasses and without police” (89).

  In 1944, a novel came along that rejected the white logic entirely… John Crowley’s critical account of alcoholism in American literature, The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), was essential in offering me a context for understanding the significance of Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944)—particularly its account of how Jackson broke from an American literary tradition that conflated alcoholism and metaphysical profundity.

  the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey… Philip Wylie, “Review of The Lost Weekend,” by Charles Jackson, New York Times Book Review, January 30, 1944.

  should have definite clinical value… Dr. Sherman qtd. in Blake Bailey’s definitive biography of Jackson, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013).

  If he were able to write fast enough… Jackson, The Lost Weekend, 16–17.

  “Don Birnam: A Hero Without a Novel” or “I Don’t Know Why I’m Telling You All This”… Ibid., 46.

  Who would ever want to read a novel about a punk and a drunk… Ibid.

  Melodrama! In all his life… Ibid., 237.

  It wasn’t even decently dramatic… Ibid., 216.

  They say you’re arrested for crime, narcotics, prostitution, robbery, murder… Cain, Blueschild Baby, 56.

  Did we know we were lyin
g about the drugs?… John Ehrlichman interview with Dan Baum, “Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs,” Harper’s, April 2016. Ehrlichman’s family has denied the posthumous account of his comments. In a statement issued to CNN, his children said, “The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him. We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond.” But journalist Dan Baum recorded the comment during an interview for his 1996 book Smoke and Mirrors and likens Ehrlichman’s account to the stories of traumatized war veterans, recounting events years after the fact: “I think Ehrlichman was waiting for someone to come and ask him,” Baum told CNN. “I think he felt bad about it. I think he had a lot to feel bad about.” See: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html.

  haunted huddle… nodding, stinking, burning, high… gaunt and hollow… skin strapped tight around the skull… there’s not enough junk in the world to quench his need… Cain, Blueschild Baby, 114–15.

  Drug use was actually declining in 1982… See Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 49.

  the addict violator… Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, 297.

  ideological fig leaf… Reinarman and Levine qtd. in Provine, Unequal Under Law, 105.

  The argument began, police say… Jacob Lamar, “The House Is On Fire,” Time, August 4, 1986.

  Crack it up, crack it up… Ibid.

  imagining crack as a predatory “epidemic” spread by black addicts who were morally responsible for what they carried… In 1990, the Ku Klux Klan declared that it would “join the battle against illegal drugs” by acting as “the eyes and ears of the police.” “Ku Klux Klan Says It Will Fight Drugs,” Toledo Journal, January 3–9, 1990. Cited in Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 55.