The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  Before she died in a holding cell, Prisoner 109416 lived as Marcia Powell… See Hari’s Chasing the Scream, 103–15, for his full account of Marcia Powell, who was kept at a facility near Tent City in Arizona. Marcia Powell was serving time for solicitation of prostitution, but the criminalization of her drug problem was part of the shaping condition of her life—both in taking her to sex work, deepening her addiction, making it harder for her to find another life. At nearby Tent City, thousands of other addicts were serving time for drug offenses in similar conditions.

  When I finally visited the Narcotic Farm in 2014—eight decades after it opened… In 1998, the facility had been officially converted to a federal medical center for federal prisoners who needed medical or mental health care.

  Programmable: the troubling descendant of an older faith in the ways an institution could “rearrange” someone… As one newspaper had called the original Narco Farm treatment: “a skillful rearrangement of the intangibles that go to make up human existence.” “Destiny of Man ‘Traded in’ at Kentucky Laboratory,” Chicago Daily News, August 23, 1938.

  like trying to make a bed while you’re still in it… Catherine Lacey qtd. in “Leslie Jamison and Catherine Lacey’s E-mail Conversation about Narcissism, Emotional Writing and Memoir-Novels,” Huffington Post, March 30, 2015.

  drinking in the morning—drinking on the job—These are not the marks of a social drinker… John Berryman, typescript with handwritten additions and edits, undated (1970–71), John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  I have lately given up the words… Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 168–69.

  May I Do My Will Always… Ibid., 156. This slip of the pen confesses everything: the difficulty of giving up the old delusions of creative grandeur as well as willpower itself. As Lowry had it, “The will of man is unconquerable!” In meetings, I’d heard the urban legend of a bar near Hazelden that offered a free drink in exchange for your thirty-day chip, its wall decorated with them, and it wasn’t hard to picture Berryman trading in his own chip, then getting another, then trading that one in, too; his novel openly confessing how cyclical the process of sobriety had become for him.

  I doubt if this will be an acceptable first step… Berryman, handwritten note, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  with the appearance of real interest… Handwritten annotations on typescript unpublished manuscript of Recovery, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  he felt—depressed… felt—nowhere… Berryman, Recovery, 18, 172.

  His letters are very childish… Ibid., 165.

  Dear Dad, I’ve done well in school this quarter… Paul Berryman to John Berryman, undated, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  FOR MY SON: On the eve of my 56th birthday… John Berryman to Paul Berryman, October 24, 1970, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  END OF NOVEL… These notes about possible endings for the book are in Berryman’s archives and reprinted at the end of Recovery itself.

  Just try… Happy a little, grateful prayers… Berryman, handwritten notes in notebook labeled “Recovery,” John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  If I don’t make it this time, I’ll just relax and drink myself to death… Berryman, Recovery, 55.

  It’s enough! I can’t BEAR ANY MORE… Berryman, handwritten note, week of May 20, 1971, qtd. in John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: Methuen & Co., 1984), 397.

  He’d relapsed just days before jumping… after eleven months of sobriety… For more information on Berryman’s last bout of sobriety, and his suicide, see Haffenden as well as Paul Mariani’s Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (London: William Morrow & Co., 1990).

  I can’t bear much more of my hideous life… Jean Rhys to Peggy Kirkaldy, March 21, 1941, Jean Rhys Letters, 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984).

  another I who is everybody… Rhys qtd. in Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 375. The dream of narrative as a vehicle for self-escape hounded Rhys for years—the possibility that writing might offer not just an occasion for empathy but something more like self-transcendence. In a fragment called “The Forlorn Hope,” she describes an ecstatic experience on a bench overlooking the Mediterranean: For a few hours, she felt “merged with other human beings” and got “the feeling that ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘they’ are all the same—technical distinctions not real ones.” She believed literature could sustain this sense of merging more powerfully than daily experience. “Books can do this,” she wrote. “They can abolish one’s individuality, just as they can abolish time or place.” Rhys, handwritten fragment, “The Forlorn Hope,” July 3 (most likely 1925), during a period of time when she was living in a hotel at Theoule. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  Jean could not listen!… Vaz Dias, “It’s Easy to Disappear,” 4. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa. Full quote: “Jean could not listen! How does she manage this complete identification with characters when she gives the impression that she is somewhere else utterly remote, when you are talking to her. She does not seem to connect.”

  I’ve dreamt several times that I was going to have a baby then I woke… Jean Rhys to Diana Athill, March 9, 1966, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  I’ll come armed with a bottle!… Diana Athill to Jean Rhys, March 23, 1966, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  Don’t drink any more… Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 548.

  It grants some diluted version of the relief her nurse’s obeah once offered… Ibid., 554.

  I knew him as a young man. He was gentle, generous, brave… Ibid., 160.

  I am not used to characters taking the bit between their teeth and rushing away… Jean Rhys to Eliot Bliss, July 5, 1959, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  When Rochester tells Antoinette that he was forced as a young man to keep his emotions hidden… Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, in The Complete Novels, 539. This awareness of other people as victims is foreshadowed early in Wide Sargasso Sea, when one of Antoinette’s black servants—a girl named Tia, whom Antoinette had always imagined as oblivious to pain (“sharp stones did not hurt her bare feet, I never saw her cry”)—throws a stone at Antoinette’s face. Instead of retreating into default posture of righteous woundedness, Antoinette feels a strong sense of identification. “We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.” It’s a blinkered comparison—Antoinette conflating her suffering with the plight of an indentured servant whose family has only recently been emancipated from slavery—but it’s also a moment when Antoinette understands that other people suffer too, and that almost every victimizer is also a victim. The agent of destruction is a girl inhabiting a wounded body of her own (41). At the close of the novel, just before burning down Thornfield Hall, Antoinette dreams of looking over the edge of a jungle pool and seeing not her own face but the reflection of Tia: the girl with the jagged stone, both wounded and wounding, the one who made her own pain legible, and somehow transferrable, by hurting someone else. It is directly after she wakes from that dream that Antoinette picks up a candle, determined to make her own pain legible by way of grand destruction (171).

  mad lady, who was as cunning as a witch… Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 455.

  Now at last I know why I was brought here… Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, in The Complete Novels, 171.

  She told a friend that ghost stories and whiskey were the only things that brought her comfort… Rhys to Robert Herbert Ronson, December 10, 1968, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  Her monthly booze bill sometimes rivaled all her other household expenses combined… A number of Rhys’s liquor store receipts and monthly budgets can be found in her archives at the University of Tulsa.

&
nbsp; Avoid argumentative subjects like politics… 12:00. Drink. Only when she asks for it and in a small wine glass… I stay with her then until 7-o-clock… Diana Melly, handwritten notes, unpublished, undated, 1977. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.

  All of writing is a huge lake… Give me another drink, will you, honey?… David Plante, “Jean Rhys: A Remembrance,” Paris Review 76 (Fall 1979).

  It’s not so much to play…James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” Going to Meet the Man (New York: Dial Press, 1965).

  I don’t want you to think it had anything to do with me being a musician… Ibid.

  XIV. HOMECOMING

  I’ve had two different lives… Raymond Carver interview with Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee, Paris Review (Summer 1983). Carver’s comment was an allusion to L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between.

  Eventually we realized that hard work and dreams were not enough… Carver, “Fires,” Collected Stories, ed. William Stull and Maureen Carroll (New York: Library of America, 2009), 740.

  chaotic… without much light showing through… Carver, “Fires.” Collected Stories, 739.

  It sounds like a cigar, but it’s my first electric typewriter… This Carver quote, and the story of his new electric typewriter, are from Carol Sklenicka’s Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (New York: Scribner, 2009), 349.

  I was trying to learn my craft as a writer… Carver, “Author’s Note to ‘Where I’m Calling From,’” Collected Stories, 747.

  I replaced my vision of Drunk Carver, delirious and darkness-facing at the Foxhead, with Sober Carver… It’s true that “Sober Carver” wasn’t always sober. Carver smoked weed during the last decade of his sobriety, and did coke occasionally, and though—in my own life—I wouldn’t consider that “full sobriety,” I’m also not in the business of judging what felt like sobriety to him. Certain parts of Carver’s sobriety felt muddled or messy, as he acknowledged in “Where I’m Calling From”: But there was another part. This was the part of Carver that spent much of that last decade smoking weed; that did coke with McInerney in a Manhattan apartment the same night John Lennon was shot; that went to an ER in Washington for cocaine a few years later; that started eating pot brownies once he’d gotten his first lung tumor removed but whose cancer killed him anyway—all those years of smoking, like Bill Wilson: both men killed by that other addiction after reckoning with the first. See Carol Sklenicka’s Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (New York: Scribner, 2009), 364 and 400, for the incidents with cocaine and other substances during sobriety. See also this interview with Jay McInerney in the Paris Review: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6477/the-art-of-fiction-no-231-jay-mcinerney.

  He lived on Fiddle Faddle… he wanted to return to Zurich as the “Tobler Chocolate Chair in Short Fiction”… These details about Carver’s sobriety, his sweet tooth, and his attempts to navigate the logistics of sober living are taken from Sklenicka’s Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 318, 485, 324, 384, 386.

  It took me at least six months—more—after I stopped drinking… Raymond Carver to Mr. Hallstrom, September 17, 1986, qtd. in Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver, photographs by Bob Adelman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 105–7.

  in a cabin they shared together during that first sober summer… Information on Carver’s early writing in that cabin, and his twentieth wedding anniversary celebration, from Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 312–13.

  “Bad Ray” from the alcoholic past sent dispatches… See ibid., 327.

  Each day without drinking had a glow and a fervor… Gallagher qtd. in ibid., 350.

  I’m not into catch and release… Carver qtd. in ibid., 416.

  considered writers “luminous madmen who drank too much and drove too fast”… Jay McInerney, “Raymond Carver: A Still, Small Voice,” New York Times, August 6, 1989.

  Ray respects his characters… Rich Kelly, Interview with Tess Gallagher, https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/LOA_interview_Gallagher _Stull_Carroll_on_Carver.pdf.

  There but for the grace of God go I… Carver qtd. in Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 383.

  Part of me wanted help. But there was another part… Carver, “Where I’m Calling From,” Collected Stories, 460.

  Keep talking, J.P.… Don’t stop now, J.P.… I would have listened if he’d been going on about how one day he’d decided to start pitching horseshoes… Ibid., 454, 456, 456, 456.

  I have a thing / for this cold swift water… Carver, “Where Water Comes Together with Other Water,” All of Us: The Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1998), 64.

  as clear as glass and as sustaining as oxygen… Tess Gallagher, “Interview,” Collected Stories.

  It pleases me, loving rivers… Carver, “Where Water Comes Together with Other Water,” 64.

  The writer Olivia Laing finds a “boiled down, idiosyncratic version” of the Third Step in this moment… See Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (New York: Picador, 2014), 278–79.

  bond of mutuality… Gallagher, “Introduction,” All of Us: The Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1998), xxvii–xxviii.

  smoke all the cigarettes I want… [eat] jam and fat bacon… Carver, “The Party,” All of Us, 103.

  My boat is being made to order… Carver, “My Boat,” All of Us, 82.

  He nods and grips his shovel… Carver, “Yesterday, Snow,” All of Us, 131–32.

  That life is simply gone now… Raymond Carver interview with Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee, Paris Review (Summer 1983).

  He’d known for a long time / they would die in separate lives… Carver, “The Offending Eel,” All of Us, 272.

  What you’ve really done / and to someone else… Carver, “Alcohol,” All of Us, 10.

  I traveled across the country to find myself at your grave… I come here from Japan to tell you the truth…These notes in the notebook quoted from Jeff Baker’s “Northwest Writers at Work: Tess Gallagher in Raymond Carver Country,” The Oregonian, September 19, 2009.

  Spending is an escape just like alcohol. We are all trying to fill that empty hole…Qtd. in Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring, 296.

  Billy Burroughs Jr.… died of cirrhosis at the age of thirty-three, after even a liver transplant couldn’t keep him from drinking… Three years after his son’s death in 1981, William Burroughs Sr. wrote an afterword to Billy Burroughs Jr.’s pair of novels, Speed and Kentucky Ham. It’s a note full of quiet grief, implicit guilt, and an uneasy sense of resignation: an awareness of their bond alongside an awareness of what it lacked. Burroughs Sr. recounts the time his son was supposed to come join him in London but was arrested for writing a fake prescription; so Burroughs Sr. went to visit in Florida instead, leaving his opium behind because he was afraid of Customs, and spending that whole month in the grip of withdrawal from a habit “not so small” as he’d thought. Father and son lived parallel lives, not simply in their dependence but in the kinds of difficulty their dependence yielded. But these parallels didn’t offer the solace of resonance so much as the compounding of burdens: the burdens of distance, obstruction, and removal. In his afterword, Burroughs Sr. remembers “the time [Billy Jr.] called me long distance from a hospital in Florida after a car accident. I could hear him, but he couldn’t hear me. I kept saying, ‘Where are you, Billy? Where are you?’—strained and off-key, the right thing said at the wrong time, the wrong thing said at the right time, and all too often, the wrongest thing said and done at the wrongest possible time.… I remember listening to him playing his guitar after I had gone to bed in the next room, and again, a feeling of deep sadness.”

  This is no vision of recovery through understanding; no vision of salvation through reciprocal identification; it’s just empathy without purchase or effect. Whether the procedure is personal or not, the plea remains the same: Please don’t fail me. The music of private suffering is audible but perpetually distant. William Burroughs Sr., “The Trees Showed the Shape of the Wind,” in Speed and Ke
ntucky Ham, ed. William Burroughs Jr. (1973; repr., Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1984).

  pretty and hard, like a beautician in a Carver story… William Booth, “Walking the Edge,” Washington Post, September 16, 2007.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Buprenorphine, for example, works as a partial agonist, binding to opiate receptors in a way that blocks other opiates from binding… Lucas Mann, “Trying to Get Right,” Guernica, April 15, 2016.

  Abstinence is just not a model you can force on everybody… Gabor Maté qtd. in Sarah Resnick, “H,” n + 1 24 (Winter 2016).

  If we see people as people, then we’ll treat people as people. Period… Johnny Perez, panel discussion, Vera Institute of Justice, Chicago Ideas, February 23, 2017, https://www.vera.org/research/chicago-ideas-it-doesnt-have-to-be-this-way.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Aharan, C. H. “Problems in Cooperation between AA and Other Treatment Programs.” Speech delivered at the 35th Anniversary International Convention, Miami Beach, 1970. Center of Alcohol Studies Archives, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

  Alcoholics Anonymous. “A.A.: A Uniquely American Phenomenon.” Fortune, February 1951. Center for Alcohol Studies Archives, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

  . Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism. By Bill Wilson, Ed Parkhurst, Sam Shoemaker et al. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services Inc., 1939.

  . The Book That Started It All: The Original Working Manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous. Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2010.