The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  “Not very much” / “You mean Not Very Well”… Clarence Cooper Jr., The Farm (New York: Crown, 1967), 27.

  Name: Robert Burnes… “Report on Non-Medical Addict,” October 24, 1944. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  VI. SURRENDER

  It meant you didn’t have to build the rituals of fellowship from scratch… The feeling of being liberated by the constraints of ritual is nothing singular: it’s part of nearly every religious tradition—but Leon Wieseltier expresses it with particular precision when he describes how the mourning ritual of Kaddish saved him from having to improvise his grief: “I see again that the kaddish is my good fortune. It looks after the externalities, and so it saves me from the task of improvising the rituals of my bereavement, which is a lot to ask.” From Kaddish (New York: Vintage, 2000), 39.

  this was the answer—self-knowledge… All these quotes are from “Bill’s Story,” chapter one of Alcoholics Anonymous, more commonly called the “Big Book.”

  I felt lifted up, as though the great clean wind of a mountain top… Also quoted from “Bill’s Story,” Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill Wilson’s hospital epiphany story bore a strong resemblance to a conversation narrative he’d grown up hearing from his own grandfather, Grandpa Willy: the story of Willy’s liberation from “demon rum,” which happened when he encountered God on the top of Mount Aeolus, in Vermont. This echo doesn’t make the story false, it only testifies to the way we craft our salvation narratives from whatever materials we have at hand—the stories we’ve inherited, the ones we find ourselves needing most. For fuller accounts of Wilson’s grandfather’s conversion story, see Susan Cheever’s My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson—His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous (New York: Washington Square Press, 2005); or Don Lattin, Distilled Spirits: Getting High, Then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

  his autobiography confessed a few more binges after this visit… Bill Wilson always expressed aversion to writing an autobiography, but eventually—in order to preempt inaccuracies in the biographies he sensed would be written—he recorded his life in a series of taped conversations in 1954 that were eventually published in 2000 as Bill W.: My First Forty Years (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2000).

  rather than pinning sobriety on the type of intense spiritual experience that some people might never have… When Wilson experimented with LSD, years later, these experiments were largely driven by the hope that perhaps everyone could have intense spiritual experiences like the one he had at Charles B. Towns Hospital—visionary and overpowering—and that, if they could have these experiences, it might be easier for them to stick with sobriety.

  play the foundations… down… Wilson, Bill W.: My First Forty Years.

  number-one man… This quote from Bill Wilson appears in the 2012 documentary made about his life: Bill W. (dir. Kevin Hanlon). This feature-length documentary about Wilson explores his conflicted feelings about the intense veneration that accompanied his status as AA’s founder. He found himself the “number-one man” in a sphere where he didn’t want his story to be more important than anyone else’s.

  I am like you… I, too, am fallible… Bill Wilson remarks (“Every Reason to Hope”) at closing session, AA Conference, Prince George Hotel, April 27, 1958, Stepping Stones Archives, WGW 103, Bx. 31, F. 6. Access to Stepping Stones Archives and use of excepts from its materials does not imply that the author’s views or conclusions in this publication have been reviewed or are endorsed by Stepping Stones. The conclusions expressed herein, and the research on which they are based, are the sole responsibility of the author. All excerpts in this work from Stepping Stones Archives are used with permission of Stepping Stones—Historic Home of Bill & Lois Wilson, Katonah, NY, 10536, steppingstones.org, (914) 232-4822.

  He wrote a letter to an AA member named Barbara… This letter to Barbara is quoted in the documentary Bill W. Responding to a note in which a woman named Barbara had accused him of “disappointing” her, Wilson explains that an impossible perch had been constructed for him, an “illusory pedestal no fallible man could occupy.” He didn’t want his story to be regarded as sacred artifact.

  I have always been intensely averse… Wilson, Bill W.: My First Forty Years, 2.

  Ed and I just had a good laugh about the Wall Street days… Ibid., 80.

  behaved like a bunch of actors sent out by some Broadway casting agency… Jack Alexander, “Alcoholics Anonymous: Freed Slaves of Drink, Now They Free Others,” Saturday Evening Post, March 1, 1941.

  spends many of her nights sitting on hysterical women drinkers… Ibid.

  For many a day you will be the toast of AA… Bill Wilson to Jack Alexander, January 6, 1941, Alcoholics Anonymous, Digital Archives.

  By the end of 1941, the program had more than 8,000 members… Statistics for 1941 membership from the foreword to the second edition of the Big Book, http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/en_bigbook_forewordsecondedition.pdf.

  Statistics for 2015 from AA General Service Office, http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/smf-53_en.pdf.

  French philosopher Catherine Malabou proposes three different models of recovery, attaching each one to an animal: the phoenix, the spider, and the salamander… Catherine Malabou, “The Phoenix, the Spider, and the Salamander,” Changing Difference, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 74–75.

  covered with marks, nicks, scratches… Ibid., 76–77.

  There is no scar, but there is a difference… Ibid., 82.

  witness authority… Meg Chisolm interview with the author, August 11, 2016.

  You’d be doing heroin, too, Doctor… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.

  contingency management and community reinforcement… In addition to recognizing the effectiveness of twelve-step treatment itself in supporting addiction recovery, The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) recognizes four major types of behavioral treatment that have proven effective: cognitive-behavioral therapy, contingency management, community reinforcement, and motivational enhancement therapy. (Some of these are supplied by twelve-step groups, like community reinforcement and contingency management, though these groups are not the only means by which they can be found or sustained.) One study found that three kinds of therapeutic treatment (cognitive behavior, motivational enhancement, and twelve-step facilitation) achieved roughly equal levels of abstinence after a year, with twelve-step facilitation achieving higher levels of abstinence among patients with low psychiatric severity. See “Matching Alcoholism Treatments to Client Heterogeneity: Project MATCH Posttreatment Drinking Outcome,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 58, no. 1 (January 1997): 7–29.

  people who need to hear themselves confessing… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.

  You’re really smart… Meg Chisolm interview with the author, August 11, 2016.

  mystical blah blah… Jackson qtd. in Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013), 144.

  You S.O.B.! If you don’t think… Ibid., 147.

  solution [is] offered, so to speak, and then taken away, not used… Charles Jackson to Stanley Rinehart, 1943, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  care to learn or hear of the real, the uncomfortable… Jackson, The Lost Weekend, 113.

  I couldn’t get outside myself… Charles Jackson, speech, Cleveland, Ohio, May 7, 1959.

  I tell you, boy, there is much, much more to AA… Charles Jackson to Charles Brackett, September 14, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  But at a Hartford AA chapter… See Bailey, Farther and Wilder, for a fuller account of Jackson’s visit to the Hartford AA meeting (145).

  These people knew about me… Charles Jackson qtd. in ibid., 310.

  I am thinking solely of the responsibility that is yours… C. Dudley Saul qtd. in ibid., 308–9.

  intellectual eq
uals… Charles Jackson qtd. in ibid., 308.

  When he called one AA chapter in Montpelier… Incident described in ibid., 312.

  Through his sponsor, he grew increasingly enamored with a quote from G. K. Chesterton… Chesterton quote (and Jackson’s affection for it) cited in ibid., 337.

  It’s all so easy and natural and no posing or anything… Rhoda Jackson to Frederick Storier Jackson (nicknamed “Boom”), November 24, 1953, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  vegetable health… Charles Jackson, “The Sleeping Brain,” unpublished manuscript, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  Please don’t squirm at this… Charles Jackson to Walter and Merriman Modell, January 9, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  like visiting a birth control clinic… Richard Lamparski qtd. in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 347.

  the members simply wouldn’t let him go… Jackson qtd. in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 339.

  star pupil… new addiction… Ibid., 341, 346.

  My dear Charlie, Thanks for your thoughtfulness… Bill Wilson to Charles Jackson. April 24, 1961, Stepping Stones Foundation Archives. WGW 102.2 Bx. 15, F. 1-9.

  Jackson landed a commission with Life to write a two-part article about AA… See account of Jackson’s Life commission in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 320.

  What luck, I thought… Raymond Carver, “Luck,” All of Us: The Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1998), 5.

  Alcoholics get to a point in the program where they need a spiritual experience… Wilson qtd. in Lattin, Distilled Spirits, 198. For a more complete account of Bill Wilson’s experiments with LSD, see Distilled Spirits. See also Alcoholics Anonymous, ‘Pass It On’: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the AA Message Reached the World (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Service Inc., 1984).

  Describing that first trip to a friend, Wilson compared it to his early visions of AA as a “chain of drunks around the world, all helping each other”… Osmond qtd. in Lattin, Distilled Spirits, 195.

  helped him eliminate many barriers erected by the self, or ego, that stand in the way of one’s direct experiences of the cosmos and of god… Ibid., 206.

  cynical alcoholics… Lattin, Distilled Spirits, from an interview with Will Forthman. No surprise that Bill Wilson’s acid trip echoed the vision he’d had at Towns, where he had been given a hallucinogen called belladonna. Describing the “residue” of his early acid trips, Wilson extolled the virtues of his “heightened” appreciation of “the livingness of all things and a sense of their beauty.” Wilson to Sidney Cohen, Stepping Stones Foundation Archives, qtd. in Distilled Spirits, 198. Wilson didn’t imagine that acid would replace the program’s emphasis on listening and humility. “I consider LSD to be of some value to some people,” he once remarked, “[but it] will never take the place of any of the existing means by which we can reduce the ego, and keep it reduced” (Alcoholics Anonymous, ‘Pass It On,’ 370).

  Most AAs were violently opposed to his experimenting with a mind-altering substance… Alcoholics Anonymous, ‘Pass It On,’ 372.

  spook sessions… Nell Wing qtd. in Lattin, Distilled Spirits, 194.

  One turned up the other day calling himself Boniface… Wilson to Ed Dowling, July 17, 1952, from Bill Wilson and Ed Dowling, The Soul of Sponsorship: The Friendship of Fr. Ed Dowling and Bill Wilson in Letters (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1995).

  first things first… take it easy… Bill Wilson, handwritten notes, Stepping Stones Foundation Archives, Katonah, New York. WGW 101.7, Bx. 7, F. 6.

  Are you going to stop smoking… Bill Wilson, handwritten note, Stepping Stones Foundation Archives, Katonah, New York. WGW 101.7, Bx. 7, F. 6.

  Suggested that at this point “John” speak extemporaneously… General Service Headquarters of AA, “Pattern-Script for Radio and Television,” February 1957, 2. This 1957 “pattern script” was actually an update to an existing “pattern script.” Collection at the Center of Alcohol Studies, Rutgers University.

  when a clinician described the classic addict temperament as stubbornly focused on the present moment… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.

  VII. THIRST

  like hungry men who can talk about nothing but food… William Burroughs, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (New York: Ace Books, 1953), 63.

  There’s just nothing to do, nothing—except talk about junk… Helen MacGill Hughes, ed., The Fantastic Lodge: The Autobiography of a Girl Drug Addict (New York: Fawcett, 1961), 214. The Fantastic Lodge was marketed as a “case study”: the life story of a pseudonymous female heroin addict based on tape-recorded interviews conducted and edited, respectively, by sociologists Howard Becker and Helen MacGill Hughes. It illuminates the particular experience of being a woman suffering from a largely male addiction, and offers a vision of an addict’s story constructed and articulated for sociological (rather than strictly literary) purposes.

  She had come to put great hope in getting this book published… Ibid., 266.

  Cured, prognosis good (3) / Cured, prognosis guarded (27) / Cured, prognosis poor (10)… “The Annual Report, Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1945, U.S. Public Service Hospital, Lexington, Kentucky,” submitted to the Surgeon General by J. D. Reichard, Medical Director USPHS, Medical Officer in Charge—August 11, 1945. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  Everyone’s cute after twelve cocktails… For a fuller account of Trishelle, Steven, and Frank—the one I knew my editor would make me cut—see http://www.mtv.com/news/2339854/real-world-las-vegas-hookups/.

  Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon…The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980), screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson.

  Would he ever have an hour… Stephen King, The Shining (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 25.

  clenched tightly in his lap, working against each other, sweating… Ibid. See references to clenched or sweaty hands on 7, 53, 186, 269, 394.

  If a man reforms… Ibid., 346–47.

  One for every month I’ve been on the wagon… Ibid., 350.

  The floor of the Wagon… Ibid., 354.

  looking at him expectantly, silently… Ibid., 508–9.

  Jack brought the drink to his mouth… Ibid., 509.

  What was he doing in a bar with a drink in his hand?… Ibid., 507.

  It was just before the curtain of Act II… Ibid., 356.

  You had to make him drink the Bad Stuff. That’s the only way you could get him… Ibid., 632.

  almost guiltily, as if he had been drinking secretly… Ibid., 242.

  he gets the same sensation he usually felt… Ibid., 267.

  The party was over… Ibid., 641.

  without even realizing… that I was writing about myself… Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner, 2000), 95. King wrote denial into Jack while he was still deep in denial himself, projecting onto his character not only his addiction but also the delusion of its absence. “He hadn’t believed he was an alcoholic,” King wrote about Jack. He always told himself, “Not me, I can stop anytime” (The Shining, 55).

  I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore… King, On Writing, 98. Even when Stephen King wasn’t fully facing his addiction, he writes, “the deep part of me that knew I was an alcoholic… began to scream for help in the only way it knew how, through my fiction and through my monsters” (96). King has described three of his novels—The Shining, Misery, and Tommyknockers—as attempts to articulate his problem to himself: Tommyknockers was about “alien creatures that got into your head and just started… well, tommyknocking around in there. What you got was energy and a kind of superficial intelligence” (97). It wasn’t a subtle sublimation: Energy + superficial intelligence = cocaine. He wrote the book in 1986, when he wasn’t just metaphorizing coke but madly metabolizing it, “often working until midnight with my heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding” (96). He bled al
l over that story, but it was Misery—the story of a deranged nurse named Annie and her terrorized patient, the writer she holds hostage—that finally got him to quit: “Annie was coke,” he wrote, “Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer” (98).

  The fantasy of every alcoholic…The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, ed. by K. W. M. Fulford et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 872.

  You are walking along a road peacefully… Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 450.

  Rumors spread that she’d died at a sanitarium… Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 437.

  the late Jean Rhys… Hunter Davies, “Rip van Rhys,” Sunday Times, November 6, 1966, 6.

  Will anyone knowing her whereabouts… Selma Vaz Dias, personal advertisement, The New Statesman, November 1949. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  MRS. HAMER AGITATED…Beckenham and Penge Advertiser qtd. in Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 451.

  But who was JEAN RHYS and WHERE WAS SHE?… After receiving Rhys’s reply to her advertisement, Vaz Dias went to visit her “in a daze of excitement.” Rhys answered the door wearing a “long pink housecoat,” and to Vaz Dias she seemed like a woman lost to the world: “I immediately knew that for her there was little distinction between night and day.” Rhys was “parched for a drink” when they met, so Vaz Dias walked “miles in cold stark Beckenham to find a pub, and succeeded after some effort in buying some doubtful sherry.” Selma Vaz Dias, “It’s Easy to Disappear,” manuscript draft, 3. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  Jean’s life… really did seem to be the same few scenes… Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 455.