The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  a long regurgitation [that] can only be recommended as an anthology held together by earnestness… Jacques Barzun, Harper’s Magazine, “Moralists for Your Muddles,” April 1947.

  PS: Anthology held together by earnestness—brrrrrr!… Malcolm Lowry to Harper’s Magazine, May 6, 1947. Lowry struggles with how to end the letter, and thinks better of dismissing Barzun completely: “So if, instead of ending this letter ‘may Christ send you sorrow and a serious illness,’ I were to end it by saying instead that I would be tremendously grateful if one day you would throw your gown out of the window and address some remarks in this direction upon the reading of history, and even in regard to the question of writing and the world in general, I hope you won’t take it amiss.”

  The complete letter is available at http://harpers.org/blog/2008/08/may -christ-send-you-sorrow-and-a-serious-illness/.

  What would have happened to Danny’s troubled father… Stephen King, Doctor Sleep (New York: Gallery Books, 2013), 529.

  The women in the doorway had gone back to the kitchen… Ibid., 517.

  I want a poem I can grow old in… Eavan Boland, “A Woman Painted on a Leaf,” In a Time of Violence: Poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69.

  I can only write the human, meanderingly… Jackson letter to Dorothea Straus, qtd. in Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013), 319.

  What life means, it came to him… Ibid. The whole passage is even more “meandering” and redundant in its entirety: “What life means, it came to him (or he seemed to overhear it), it means all the time, not just at isolated dramatic moments that never happened. If life means anything at all, it means whatever it means every hour, every minute, through any episode big or small, if only one has the awareness to sense it… Some day, perhaps, existence might gather itself and reveal its full meaning to him in the kind of moment he had, till now, been romantically expecting… but he doubted it. For now he knew (he had just been told so) that what life means it means now, this instant, and yesterday, and tomorrow, and ten years ago, and twenty years hence—each step, the dramatic and the humdrum alike—every fleeting second of the way…” Unpublished manuscript, 204, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  with scarcely any “plot” but much character… Jackson to Walter and Merriman Modell, January 9, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  what he called the “alcoholocaust” of his life… D. T. Max, “Day of the Dead.” The New Yorker, December 17, 2007.

  just about as tedious as anything I’d ever read… Albert Erskine to biographer Gordon Bowker, qtd. in ibid.

  Rambling… Seems like a dissertation on alcohol. Nothing useful here… Margerie Lowry qtd. in ibid.

  He had the impulse to pull the car over… Jackson, Farther and Wilder. Unpublished manuscript, 36, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  I used to think you had to believe to pray. Now I know I had it ass-backwards… David Foster Wallace, handwritten notes, undated, David Foster Wallace Papers, University of Texas at Austin.

  was most of all impressed by the sense that, in spite of the hero’s utter self-absorption… Charles Jackson to Warren Ambrose, March 1, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  So long as I considered myself as merely the medium… John Berryman, handwritten note, August 1971, qtd. in John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: Methuen & Co., 1984), 414. The relationship between addiction and creativity was under discussion in many spheres. In the 1970 Playboy roundtable discussion mentioned in an earlier note, literary critic Leslie Fiedler insisted that “literature has always been drug-ridden,” and “many American writers always thought of alcohol as representing or even being their muse.” But it was Burroughs himself, the great heroin sage, who disagreed: “It has been my impression that any sedative drug that decreases awareness—the narcotics, barbiturates, excessive alcohol and so forth—also decreases the author’s ability to create.” “Playboy Panel: The Drug Revolution,” Playboy 17, no. 2 (February 1970), 53–74.

  Are we really all that tormented?… Charles Jackson, “We Were Led to Hope for More,” review of Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, ed. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry, New York Times, December 12, 1965.

  if by some supreme effort, some mystical or psychological shifting-of-gears… Ibid. Although Jackson’s review lamented Lowry’s “hyper preoccupation with self,” it eventually became—by acrobatic critical contortions, and seemingly without a trace of self-awareness—almost entirely about Jackson himself. “I must perforce inject a strictly personal note, it cannot be avoided,” he wrote, and this “personal note” consumed most of the rest of the review, offering an account of Lowry’s fears that The Lost Weekend had preempted his own alcoholic epic. It was an ouroboros of authorial egos: Jackson obsessing about Lowry obsessing about Jackson.

  Instead of drinking coffee when I woke up… Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (London: William Collins Sons, 1990), 130.

  Drunkenness doesn’t create anything… Ibid., 17.

  three brutal “disintoxication” treatments… See Edmund White, “In Love with Duras,” New York Review of Books, June 26, 2008.

  exactly ten thousand tortoises… The sound of singing, solo and in chorus… Duras, Practicalities, 137–38.

  take up, outside your blocked selves, some small thing… Berryman, “Death Ballad,” Love and Fame (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). See Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (363) for more information about Berryman’s relationship to Tyson and Jo.

  To listen…1 / 500,000th… Berryman, handwritten marginalia, AA Grapevine 28, no. 4 (September 1971). John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  My groups… Berryman, handwritten note, March 25, 1971, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  Towers above the trees across the river reminded him… Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 63.

  His own hope was to forget about himself… Ibid., 148.

  You don’t remember a time when you didn’t have it?… Ibid., 208. Severance’s expertise in immunology gives Berryman a new way to consider the relationship between the self and everything outside it. As Severance frames it, immunology is committed to the “question of how the body recognizes some substances as ‘self’ and others as ‘not self.’” And in his journal, Severance applies this to sobriety: “The point is to learn to recognize whiskey as not my ‘self’—alien, in fact” (22). Whiskey was the wrong kind of not-self, what Sedgwick might call the “external supplement,” but recovery offers a better kind of not-self in its place: the selves of everyone else. After learning about a young woman’s abortion, Severance “yearned toward her,” and when she finally articulates the anger she’s kept bottled up for years, he is “beside himself with pride and love” (193–94). The idea of being beside himself is key: he is somehow liberated, like Bill Wilson channeling spirits, or Charles Jackson getting outside himself.

  In hospitals he found his society. About these passioning countrymen he did not need to be ironical… Bellow continues: “Here his heart was open, submitting democratically and eagerly to the criticisms of truckers, graceful under the correction of plumbers and mentally disturbed housewives.” Bellow’s tone betrays both awe and amusement, offering a bit of irony to compensate for all the “ironical” reactions that Berryman’s open heart rejected. Bellow implies that for Berryman rehab implied a kind of class humbling: truckers and plumbers become the professor’s tutors. Saul Bellow, “Foreword,” Recovery, by John Berryman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), xi.

  Cheers from everybody, general exultation… Berryman, Recovery, 31.

  There was more, but Severance… Ibid., 30. It’s also possible that Severance’s empathy for a man seeking his dead father’s approval was also, at least in part, about himself, as Berryman had lost his own father when he was young.

  his rich, practiced, lecturer’s voice… Ibid.
, 12.

  he couldn’t ever be wholehearted about belonging with the rest of us… Betty Peddie qtd. in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 374.

  just another addiction memoir… Some examples of the “just another addiction memoir” phenomenon: Matt Medley, “Interview with Bill Clegg,” The National Post, July 9, 2010; Nan Talese talking about James Frey’s memoir in Pauline Millard, “James Frey Chronicles His Former Addiction,” Associated Press, May 8, 2003; Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, blurb for Drunk Mom (2014), by Jowita Bydlowska. The Hampton Sheet lists Joshua Lyon’s Pillhead as its Best-After-the-Afterparty-Read: “Five pages into Pillhead, and you’ll stop accusing Lyon of writing just another addiction memoir” (July/August 2009).

  Frey’s editor, Nan Talese, said she’d almost passed on his manuscript because—as one account put it—it seemed like (yes) “just another addiction memoir”… Pauline Millard, “James Frey Chronicles His Former Addiction,” Associated Press, May 8, 2003.

  A social worker who’d recommended the book to her clients… Evgenia Peretz, “James Frey’s ‘Morning After,’” Vanity Fair, April 28, 2008. Random House offered a refund to any reader who sent back page 163 (Motoko Rich, “James Frey and His Publisher Settle Suit over Lies,” New York Times, September 7, 2006).

  Frey’s distortions became a stand-in for the “truthiness” of his times… In a New York Times op-ed, Maureen Dowd connected Frey’s distortions to deceptions on the national scale: “It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, into W.’s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying and conning” (“Oprah’s Bunk Club,” New York Times, January 28, 2006). Journalist and former addict—and future author of his own addiction memoir—David Carr wrote another New York Times article called “How Oprahness Trumped Truthiness” (January 30, 2006). Calvin Trillin even published a poem in The Nation called “I Dreamt That George W. Bush Adopted James Frey’s 3-Step Program—Denial, Larry King, and Oprah—to Get to the Truth about the War in Iraq” (February 2, 2006).

  My mistake was writing about the person… “Frey’s Note to the Reader” appeared in the February 1, 2006, New York Times, and was subsequently included in reprints of A Million Little Pieces.

  Exceptional case, my ass!… Helen MacGill Hughes, ed., The Fantastic Lodge: The Autobiography of a Girl Drug Addict (New York: Fawcett, 1961), 224.

  The man pulling radishes / pointed my way / with a radish… Kobayashi Issa, “The Man Pulling Radishes,” eighteenth-century poem.

  Half measures will avail you nothing…The Book That Started It All: The Original Working Manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2010).

  Do You Think You’re Different?… Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, “Do You Think You’re Different?” (1976). Center of Alcohol Studies, Rutgers University, 19

  What’s the first memory you have of drinking?… Karen Casey. My Story to Yours: A Guided Memoir for Writing Your Recovery Journey (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2011), 60, 115.

  You might have some fond memories of the drinking days… Ibid., 60.

  Do you believe in destiny?… Ibid., 127.

  Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?… David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 358.

  XI. CHORUS

  We started with all volunteer help in a little ramshackle hostel… E-mail to the author from “Sawyer,” January 11, 2015. The history of Seneca House has been compiled from interviews with Sawyer (January 21, 2015, telephone, and July 31, 2015, in person) and a document sent by Sawyer (January 20, 2015) as well as interviews with “Gwen” (January 22, 2015, telephone, and March 10, 2015, in person); “Marcus” (July 28, 2015, telephone, and November 3, 2015, in person); “Shirley” (March 6, 2015, telephone, March 20, 2015, telephone, and August 10, 11, 12, 2015, in person); and “Raquel” (December 4, 2015). All of their names have been changed to protect their anonymity. I also used extensive replies from Shirley to questions I sent by e-mail (March 5, 15, and 20, 2015).

  Hmmm… it would be a tougher sell here… Charlie Homans e-mail to the author, January 30, 2015.

  It is really wonderful, simple, plain, human, life itself… Charles Jackson to Roger Straus, January 8, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  His name is Sawyer, and he’s an alcoholic… The material about Sawyer’s life was gathered during interviews conducted on January 21, 2015 (telephone) and July 31, 2015 (in person).

  When it first opened, Seneca charged six hundred dollars for a twenty-eight-day stay… Early history of Seneca from conversations with Sawyer (January 21, 2015, telephone, and July 31, 2015, in person); conversations with Gwen (January 22, 2015, telephone, and March 10, 2015, in person); conversations with Shirley (March 6 and 20, 2015, telephone, and August 10, 11, 12, 2015, in person); written document from Sawyer, January 20, 2015; and pseudonymous article by Shirley.

  We all have to be on the vomit line… From an article that Shirley wrote, under another pseudonym, about her experience at Seneca House: Barbara Lenmark, “An Alcoholic Housewife: What Happened to Her in 28 Days,” Baltimore Sun, November 18, 1973.

  This was 1971, the same year Bill Wilson died and Nixon launched his War on Drugs… Nixon called for $155 million to fight the war on drugs, but his administration also spent more money on treatment than law enforcement, the first and only administration to do so. His successor, Gerald Ford, cut treatment funding and made it fifty-fifty. After he left office, Ford’s wife went public with her own addiction and started the Betty Ford Clinic, which became one of the most famous treatment centers in the country. Reagan cut funding even further, dismantling the program for heroin addicts. We’re paying for these choices now—America’s punitive relationship to addiction, and its inadequate relationship to treatment—with the worst opiate epidemic our country has ever seen. Nixon put two-thirds of his drug war funding into cutting off demand (treatment), and one-third into cutting off supply (law enforcement). For Nixon and his war on drugs: Emily Dufton, “The War on Drugs: How President Nixon Tied Addiction to Crime,” The Atlantic, March 26, 2012; and Richard Nixon’s “Special Message to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control,” delivered on June 17, 1971, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3048.

  In his “Special Message,” Nixon divided the field into bad guys and their marks: “I will ask for additional funds to increase our enforcement efforts to further tighten the noose around the necks of drug peddlers, and thereby loosen the noose around the necks of drug users.” The $155 million and $105 million amounts are also quoted in that speech.

  WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND IT IS US… Lenmark, “An Alcoholic Housewife.”

  You don’t ever go into a convenience store… Sawyer interview with the author, January 21, 2015.

  Seneca residents were often assigned contracts… Information on Seneca House contracts from interviews with Gwen (January 22, 2015, telephone, and March 10, 2015, in person) and photocopies of Seneca House programming, provided courtesy of Gwen.

  Once you are Real you can’t be ugly… Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1987).

  Lips Lackowitz—sober front man of the band Tough Luck… “Obituary: Mark Hurwitz, Blues Musician,” Washington Post, August 4, 2002. From interview with Gwen, March 10, 2015.

  AA skeptics often assume that its members insist on it as the only answer… Examples of this skepticism, and in particular the claim that AA members promote it as the only solution, include Lance Dodes and Zachary Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014); and Gabrielle Glaser, “The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous,” The Atlantic, April 2015.

  There are a hundred ways to skin a cat… Greg Hobelmann interview with the author, August 30, 2016.

  Many addiction researchers predict that we’ll eventually be able to track the
impact of meetings on the brain itself… See Carlton Erickson, The Science of Addiction: From Neurobiology to Treatment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 155.

  knocking on the door of the mechanism… You can give someone as much methadone as you want… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.

  the thirst of the self to feel that it is part of something larger… An animal who has found salt in the forest… Lewis Hyde, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” American Poetry Review, October 1975. Rpt. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1986, 3.

  The Big Book of AA was initially called The Way Out…The founders of AA decided to change the title of the Big Book to Alcoholics Anonymous once they realized that too many other books were already called The Way Out, which is one of the recurring lessons of sobriety anyway: Whatever you want to say, it’s probably already been said.

  Feel myself outside myself as we follow the music… Cain, Blueschild Baby (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970),133.

  naked and defenseless… another device to get outside yourself… Ibid., 135.

  infatuation with the storeroom of his own mind… All stream of consciousness writing… Alfred Kazin, “The Wild Boys,” New York Times Book Review, December 12, 1971.

  having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love… Larry McCaffery, “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993).