The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

Magna est veritas et praevalet…Truth is great and it prevails… Ibid., 362.

  NO teas—NO water—NO lavatory… Jean Rhys, qtd. in ibid., 475. It was while living in Cheriton Fitzpaine, in need of money, that Rhys made an ill-advised deal with Vaz Dias: Rhys signed away half the profits to any adaptation of her work, a mistake she would later call “The Adventure of the Drunken Signature.” See a fuller account of this “adventure” in Angier’s biography, which is the source for much of the information in this book about Rhys’s life in Cheriton Fitzpaine.

  I’m struggling with a new thing… Rhys to Eliot Bliss, June 28, 1957, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  I am drunk every morning, almost, at Yaddo… Patricia Highsmith qtd. in Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 255.

  VIII. RETURN

  there were four things [he] did every day… Lee Stringer, Grand Central Winter (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998), 17.

  in the pipe… Ibid., 111.

  yeasty anticipation… caramel-and-ammonia smoke… yellow-orange glow [that] blossoms, wavers, recedes… Ibid., 220.

  clinging to the idea of finishing… Ibid., 247.

  As soon as I am not able to be personal… Charles Jackson to Mary McCarthy, November 24, 1953, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  consolation, repose, beauty, or energy… beauty delusively attributed to the magical element… Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will,” Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993), 132.

  My God I’ll never take another drink… John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 83.

  a killer and a fighter… Qtd. in Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 442.

  going over and over miseries of one sort and another… Diana Melly qtd. in ibid., 649.

  has proved herself to be enamoured of gloom… Rebecca West, “The Pursuit of Misery in Some of the New Novels,” The Daily Telegraph, January 30, 1931. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  “Fated to Be Sad”… Hannah Carer, “Fated to Be Sad: Jean Rhys Talks to Hannah Carter,” Guardian, August 8, 1968, 5.

  pre-destined role, the role of victim… Rhys qtd. in Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 588.

  End of moan in minor… Jean Rhys to Peggy Kirkaldy, July 8, 1948, Jean Rhys Letters, 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), 47. “The nuns used to say that there were only two sins, Presumption and Despair,” Rhys wrote in an undated handwritten fragment. “I don’t know which mine is” (Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa).

  Everyone saw the characters in her books as victims… Jean Rhys, interview. “Every Day Is a New Day,” Radio Times, November 21, 1974, 6. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  I’m a person at a masked ball without a mask… Mary Cantwell, “Conversation with Jean Rhys, ‘the Best Living English Novelist,’” Mademoiselle, October 1974, 170. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  I am not an ardent Women’s Libber… Rhys qtd. in Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 631.

  I see an angry woman who had good reason to be angry… Lillian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009), 308.

  tortured and tormented mask… Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 369–70. Rhys was constantly dissecting self-pity by pulling apart the threads of its alibis and its promises, punishing herself with the hair shirts of her unflattering literary avatars. One of her male characters, regarding one of her heroines, thinks: “Surely even she must see that she was trying to make a tragedy out of a situation that was fundamentally comical” (Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in The Complete Novels, 251). This boomerang perspective allows Rhys to do so much more than simply inhabit a state of self-pity: She conjures how it must look from the outside, and how absurd it must seem. In Voyage in the Dark, she conjures Anna’s vulnerability in precise and unsettling terms: “I was so nervous about how I looked that three-quarters of me was in a prison,” Anna thinks, “wandering round and round in a circle.” A woman “three-quarters” in prison is far more specific—and much more interesting—than a woman simply imprisoned. A woman “three-quarters” in prison is also hovering outside herself, her remaining quarter measuring the terms and severity of her incarceration—poking fun at what it means to parse the difference between two-thirds and three-fourths jailed (Voyage in the Dark, in The Complete Novels, 47).

  a tall hat with a green feather… Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels, 370.

  fall into the hands of someone whom it would help… John Lloyd qtd. in Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013), 168.

  to solve psychiatric problems… Charles Jackson qtd. in May R. Marion, “CJ Speaks at Hartford AA,” AA Grapevine, January 1945. Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 168.

  What do you know, I’m drinking again… Charles Jackson to Rhoda Jackson, qtd. in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 226.

  Nothing could make me take another drink… Charles Jackson, in a 1948 promotional brochure released by Rinehart and Company, called The Lost Novelist, qtd. in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 238.

  AUTHOR OF LOST WEEKEND LOSES ONE HIMSELF… Ibid., 283. The results of Jackson’s head-on car crash were surprisingly minor. As Bailey reports, the passengers of the other car suffered only minor injuries, and Jackson himself emerged seemingly unharmed.

  I realized yesterday… how he managed to stop drinking… Rhoda Jackson to Frederick Storrier Jackson, July 3, 1947, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  No telling what might happen next time but why worry about that?… Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), 244.

  Chas. & Billy based their movie version far less on the book… Charles Jackson to Robert Nathan, February 19, 1945, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  You watch, baby… See accounts of Billie Holiday’s death in John Szwed, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (New York: Viking, 2015); and Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). See also the obituary in the New York Times: “Billie Holiday Dies Here at 44; Jazz Singer Had Wide Influence,” July 18, 1959.

  an open wound… vocal cords flayed… Michael Brooks qtd. in Szwed, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, 194.

  Now I’m going to eat breakfast!… Qtd. in Julia Blackburn, With Billie: A New Look at the Unforgettable Lady Day (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 171.

  I had seen pictures of her ten years before… Ellis qtd. in ibid., 269.

  other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses… Studs Terkel qtd. in Szwed, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, 105.

  She tried to breast-feed her godson from breasts that didn’t have milk… Much of this information is drawn from Szwed, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, 44–45.

  Everyone and I stopped breathing… Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died,” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

  IX. CONFESSION

  Why do you deserve another chance… This exchange is excerpted from a transcription of a drug-court trial included in an ethnographic account of drug courts. Stacy Lee Burns and Mark Peyrot, “Tough Love: Nurturing and Coercing Responsibility and Recovery in California Drug Courts,” Social Problems 50, no. 3 (August 2003): 433.

  The first drug court was established in Miami in 1989, and by June 2015 there were more than 3,142 operating in the United States (National Institute of Justice, “Drug Courts,” http://www.nij.gov/topics/courts/drug-courts/pages/welcome .aspx). New York, Maryland, Kansas, and Washington were some of the first states to pass legislation like California’s Proposition 36 (2000), which essentially made drug courts the mandatory default for all low-level offenders. Scott Ehlers and Jason Ziede
nberg, “Proposition 36: Five Years Later,” Justice Policy Institute (April 2006).

  As sociologists Burns and Peyrot put it, drug court is about “demonstrating the recovering self” (“Tough Love,” 430)—the new self that is strong enough to resist addiction. Defendants are required to follow an individualized treatment plan mandated by a drug court judge. These plans typically include AA/NA meetings, counseling sessions, vocational training, in- or out-patient rehab, and urine tests. There is often a graduation ceremony at the end of the program, complete with applause and chocolate cake, cap and gown, and T-shirts that say “Refuse to Abuse” or “Hooked on Recovery” (433).

  tongue lashings…“I’m tired of your excuses!”…“I’m through with you!”… Terance D. Miethe, Hong Lu, and Erin Reese, “Reintegrative Shaming and Recidivism Risks in Drug Court: Explanations for Some Unexpected Findings,” Crime and Delinquency 46 (2000): 522, 536–37. Drug courts depend on a theory of “reintegrative shaming,” the idea that being publicly shamed can bring an offender back into the folds of the community. Reintegrative shaming is predicated on the idea that the shame is directed away from the person and toward the act itself, though drug courts in practice often dissolve this distinction.

  salvageable… irremediably deficient… Burns and Peyrot, “Tough Love,” 428–29.

  There isn’t a soul on this earth who can say for sure that their fight with dope is over until they’re dead… Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 220.

  Yes, Nic relapsed… David Sheff, “Afterword,” Beautiful Boy (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 323–24.

  stopping-drinking and… enormous interest in AA… a lot to do with this new attitude… Charles Jackson to Walter and Merriman Modell, January 9, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  At that point, Jackson was working on the book he imagined would become his magnum opus: an epic novel called What Happened…What Happened wasn’t meant to be explicitly about recovery, and in this way it was distinct from The Working Out, Jackson’s hypothetical sequel to The Lost Weekend, committed to how Don “got out of it.” But for a time Jackson wrote the early pages of What Happened under the influence, as it were, of the recovery ethos he’d found in AA.

  novel of affirmation and acceptance of life… Charles Jackson to Stanley Rinehart et al., February 27, 1948, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  would be host to the gathering… Charles Jackson to Stanley Rinehart, March 8, 1945, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  working on every conceivable thing… Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013), 346.

  it’s far & away the best thing I’ve done, simpler, more honest… Charles Jackson to Walter and Merriman Modell, January 9, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  I can put it best by saying the story happens… Charles Jackson to Roger Straus, December 30, 1953, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  It is really wonderful, simple, plain, human, life itself—nothing in the dazzling intellectual class… Charles Jackson to Roger Straus, January 8, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  can do just about what it pleases…I please to make it plain, like everyday people… Ibid.

  life unfolding moment by moment… careless and rambling… total lack of originality… Charles Jackson to Dorothea Straus, qtd. in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 318.

  all of it outside of myself—outside!… Charles Jackson to “Angel,” January 8, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  loyalty to my wife, helped at times by extreme drunkenness… “Bill’s Story,” Alcoholics Anonymous, 3.

  What has bothered me most about myself all my life?… John Berryman, “Fourth Step Inventory Guide,” undated, c. 1970–71, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  inviting the prisoners to have dinner at his house… See John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: Methuen & Co., 1984), 408.

  Hurts oneself. Always for the unchangeable…John Berryman, handwritten note, undated, c. 1970–71, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  the so-called Minnesota Model… The “Minnesota Model,” what we now think of as “rehab,” was developed in the mid-fifties at a place called Willmar State Hospital, an “inebriate asylum” in Willmar, Minnesota, which had been practicing custodial care for late-stage alcoholics for decades. (It was originally called the Willmar Hospital Farm for Inebriates when it opened in 1912.) Their more holistic program model, officially launched in 1954, was based on AA principles but designed for residential patients, and it believed in the possibility of recovery: They unlocked the doors to the inebriate ward, started giving lectures to the patients, and hired sober alcoholic counselors to work with them. Creating positions officially designated for alcoholic counselors met with resistance from many corners. Governor Clyde Elmer Anderson was “laughed at” when he first advocated for the position of an “alcoholic counselor” in the civil service system, and AA members were worried about members getting paid for the “twelve-step” work that was a crucial part of their program. But Willmar had a close and collaborative relationship with AA, and with another treatment facility nearby: a farmhouse called Hazelden that would eventually become one of the most famous rehabs in America. Hazelden started small in 1949 (only two years after Holiday was incarcerated for her addiction) with just four patients in residence at a time. On its first Christmas, there were only two patients; one cooked Christmas dinner for the other. The only medication they handed out was a placebo pill given to newcomers who said they didn’t feel good, but they did start handing out personalized coffee cups to every resident. The Minnesota Model of treatment, which rose from these early facilities, focused on community bonding and shifted attention away from a psychoanalytic approach to alcoholism (finding its cause), instead stressing the idea that structured daily living practices could produce sobriety. The Minnesota Model expanded rapidly over the sixties, seventies, and eighties (someone described Hazelden in 1968, with 1,420 patients, as “Grand Central Station at Rush Hour”) and eventually it came to be known simply as “rehab.” (Its origins in Minnesota were also part of how the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes earned its other nickname, the “Land of Ten Thousand Treatment Centers.”) Information on the development of the Minnesota Model and the early days of Hazelden comes from William White’s Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America (Bloomington, IL: Chestnut Health Systems, 1998).

  Wife left me after 11 yrs of marriage bec. of drinking… John Berryman, handwritten note, 1970, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  a list of his “Responsibilities”… John Berryman, handwritten fourth step, November 8 (1970 or 1971), John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  When Berryman started to consider writing a novel about recovery… The shift in genre (from poetry to novel) was also significant for Berryman. The form of the novel allowed for narrative progression, or its explicit disruption or repudiation, rather than lyric moments existing in temporal isolation. The shift from one genre to another also facilitated other structural shifts: away from experiments in voice and image and toward a psychological portrait rendered through scenic interactions.

  useful 12th step work… John Berryman, handwritten note, undated, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  He thought of calling the novel Korsakov’s Syndrome on the Grave but found he preferred I Am an Alcoholic…Give half my royalties to—who? Not AA—they won’t take it… Ibid.

  This summary & deluded account of the beginning of my recovery… John Berryman, typewritten draft fragment of Recovery, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  The Post-Novel: Fiction as Wisdom-Work… Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 396. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano was on Berryman’s syllabus.

  Good, evil, love, hate, life, death, beauty, ugliness… All quotations from “The Trial
of Jean Rhys” are from an unpublished handwritten notebook entry that can be found in the 1952 diary known as the “Ropemakers’ Diary,” so-called because Rhys kept it while staying at an inn called the Ropemakers Arms in 1951–52. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  I do not know others. I see them as trees walking… In this moment in “The Trial of Jean Rhys,” Rhys is most likely alluding to the Gospel of Mark, verses 22–25, when a blind man is brought to Jesus to be healed. The first time Jesus heals him, the man’s sight is only partially restored. He looks up and says, “I see men, for I see them like trees, walking around.” Then Jesus lays his hands on the blind man again, and his sight is fully restored: he “began to see everything clearly.” It’s a vexed moment of flawed and partial salvation (the man’s sight is not fully restored the first time around), and Rhys’s invocation is a painful one: she does not seem to be imagining this fullness of vision as possible for herself.

  If I can do this book, it won’t matter so much will it?…Rhys’s hunger for redemption—the idea that writing well enough could help her “earn death”—evokes the ghost of her mother, stirring guava jam in the pot and reading The Sorrows of Satan, the story of Satan’s desire for a redemption he couldn’t ever achieve. If Rhys was going to fail at loving others, she wanted to redeem her failures by writing them brilliantly.

  powerful argument against biography itself… A. Alvarez, “Down and Out in Paris and London,” New York Review of Books, October 10, 1991.

  Write 8 or 9–1 pm in study… John Berryman, handwritten note, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  We worked like I never did at Lexington… William Burroughs Jr. Kentucky Ham (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 155.

  You know what work does?… Ibid., 174.

  X. HUMBLING

  It’s purely a clinical study… it’s only a small part of yours… achieving something that was unique… Lowry, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 24–25. For my discussion of Lowry’s anxieties about publishing Under the Volcano after it had already been “scooped” by Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, I drew on John Crowley’s The White Logic and its wonderful account of the rivalry between Jackson and Lowry. In Lowry’s unpublished novel Dark as the Grave, Sigbjørn’s disappointment is sharpened by his sense that his alcoholism was the thing that would finally let him break “new ground,” that it would finally release him from the “suspicion that he would never write anything original.” Like Rhys, he’d hoped that his work would be the thing that redeemed his ruined life: If I can do this book, it won’t matter so much, will it?