Recovery (16 page)

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Authors: John Berryman

BOOK: Recovery
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THURSDAY AFTERNOON cannot be declared a glorious time for Severance. Re-reading the 24-Hour Book for the date,
he flooded on his daughter Rachel, ways he had hurt her almost beyond bearing to him. Then he found that at some unnoticed point he had fouled himself behind, and had to change his clothes and shower. Then, scheduled at last for his First Step Confrontation and believe me ready for it, he found himself when Gus called on him—they were meeting downstairs in an unaccustomed room—unaccountably equipped with a sheaf of papers that were not his First Step. Chagrin, suspense, incomprehension, shame, deafness.
He found the right sheets—just two, with a prefatory note—and put them on his bureau by the door and looked at them every time he went in and out for the next twenty hours. But shaken by a dyad with Mary-Jane at two o'clock when both had wept with fear of ‘playing Group' and the self returning and drinking or popping pills, a savage quarter-hour, at the last minute he
wondered.
about the First Step set down with such care and okayed, for the last time, each sheet, Wednesday night. Frantically he searched for the merely circumstantial Step that had satisfied Gus One last Spring, just in case. Nowhere. He grabbed his scratchpad and threw onto it rapidly, with no feeling whatever but haste, what he remembered of it. He only hesitated once, over whether to mention that that lecture in Vermont though unpublished had been quoted a year later in a
Life
editorial somebody showed him (‘A man can live through his whole life in this country at present without ever finding out whether he's a brave man or not') and rushed on without. All the Repeaters had assembled when he got to the lounge. Julitta was not there, only his friends, and Gus.
‘Okay, Alan,' said Gus. ‘If you have it.'
‘I've got two.' He found himself very cool, after all. ‘One satisfies me, but God knows, so I wrote another one.'
‘Go ahead.'
‘There's a covering note,' Severance said, and he read it. ‘“I have lately given up the words ‘sincerely' and ‘honestly,'
as mere con-words designed by my diseased brain to support its lying products. So I won't say this is a sincere attempt—though, friends,
it is
. I haven't knowingly lied, minimized, or omitted.”
‘Here it is. “I
am
powerless over alcohol. That is not only an historical fact, but an account of the present moment, and an absolutely certain prediction—I can no more ever safely drink than I will ever again play a decent game of tennis.
‘“I have
know
this for a long time; but (possibly) I only
felt
it as
fact
last Thursday night, when I wound up, telling Gene Snyder about my six days' drinking two and a half weeks ago, ‘So you see, I can't accept the powerlessness because if it hadn't been for the taxi's accidental route and the mere whim of stopping off for a drink or so, I would have been safe.‘He said: ‘Until next time.' This simple truth came with the force of revelation. It wiped out the final escape clause: I felt
trapped
. Weirdly enough, this came as a great relief, and I have even been feeling rather
free
ever since, in spite of many other troubles. They seem minor. I
have
thought, for the first time, all this two-plus weeks, that Step One was basic and indispensable, only a foundation for sobriety, but that.
‘“With the second half of Step One (which weirdly enough I used to think the
harder
half) I have no problem. Walking down after Vin's Group one noon a few days out of treatment, I remember
wondering
whether I would turn off right to the Library and the bus home
or
continue on down to Cleaver and have a drink or so, and thinking that this was an insane way to conduct one's life, to let one's very existence depend on whim or abstract chance; as if one were not even one's own actor but only a spectator. All right,
now
I would turn straight back to Northeast for help, knowing that I was doomed; in fact I drifted on in a sort of trance from which I came to in front of the Library feeling immense relief at what I thought was my narrow
escape. A few days later, of course, I started drinking. My life is completely unmanageable. The fact that I have a highly developed and strong
will
is absolutely irrelevant.” ' Ignoring a note to himself (analogy of the uselessness of his checkbook on the locked ward at Ansel) he turned to the third sheet, a postscript set down at noon. ‘“My connexion of unmanageability
only
with alcoholism is far too narrow a view as I picked up from Harley
as lately as this morning
(to my mingled dismay and relief). It's the whole story and I know it, as my word ‘actor' back there shows.
I
need a manager, I've hopelessly failed as my own. So:
Third Step
—
to
which in recent days I've given almost as much thought as the First. With
only
the First Step one might not drink but one might
kill
oneself.” '
He stopped, a little tired, sharply disappointed. He knew audiences inside out, and with this one he was nowhere. It was without surprise, but with heavy discouragement, that he heard Gus.
‘We'd better hear the other one,' sounding restless.
He turned to the other one, and began to read it aloud without interest. ‘It's called “Data for Monomania.” '
‘“A life centered around whiskey (gin, ale, vodka, rum, brandy) may have by products but clearly it is
insane.
The first evidence I remember is 1950, when I gave a public lecture drunk; I did not know I was drunk and do not now recall being drunk; I
know
it because somebody wrote down all my replies during the question-period and a friend of his showed them to me years later: they were incredible—irrelevant, violent, long silences, incoherent—' (Severance realized he was gasping, choking, also his vision was blurred with involuntary tears—why, he had no idea, he must be in despair but actually he felt nothing, only the necessity to get on, he forced his voice ahead through the strangling) ‘if my chairman had been up there, I would have been fired immediately. A day or so earlier, I staggered up and down a narrow parapet eight floors
above the street, until the headwaiter threw us out. Three years later my beloved first wife left me after eleven years because of liquor and bad sex. I then drank fifteen hours a day in New York, once
very
seriously planning suicide if by a certain date money had not turned up—it turned up, or I would not be here—jumping off the George Washington Bridge cannot fail. I gave academic lectures so hungover that I was afraid of falling off the platform; once threw a chair down to the floor of the auditorium to emphasize a point. I had a drunken quarrel with my landlord, he called the police and I spent the night in a cell, press and radio picked up the news and I had to resign. Here, the following winter, my chairman told me one day I had telephoned a girl student at midnight threatening to kill her—no recollection, blacked out. I lost when drunk a manuscript containing scandalous facts about well-known friends' (he was sobbing rapidly, voice coming out in hard jerks) ‘—couldn't remember where, retraced steps of night before—anxiety so terrible that finally I went to an analyst. Many injuries drunk, three weeks one mental hospital, half a dozen times another. Four or five incomplete homosexual episodes when drunk. Lost all night once abroad, drunk, walking streets, couldn't remember my address. My second wife left me because of liquor and bad sex, taking our son with her of course—nearly killed me. Hallucination once, DT's once (six hours). I had an involuntary bowel movement in my clothes, in a corridor of a public building; got home unnoticed. Drinking a quart of bourbon a day last Fall. Too ill to give an examination myself; had to cancel a lecture. Ruth in despair. Howarden six weeks, discharged December tenth—only two AA meetings—first drink, New Year's Eve party—moderate drinking several months, began a new book, gradually up to a quart a day. Northeast last Spring—on the second Tuesday, amazingly rescued by a personal God—full belief for the first time since childhood—
loved Vin for it—first convulsion in third week—happy and overconfident in the last of six weeks. See now that though I conned (without meaning to) Gus Larson, an astute man, I
never took the First Step”
(my note here in the margin though says, “Not
sure
about this, maybe I just lost contact with it”), “made no progress except spiritual. In four months never missed AA or Encounter-Group, reporting: five or six slips in eight weeks. Sober almost two months, I suppose out of spite and rage against Dr Rome, then drank six days here and in New York State—new back, blacked out, hiding out forty-eight hours, on the last day (Sunday) planned suicide for next morning when gun-shops opened, in afternoon decided I would have to go home—postponed it with half a dozen drinks downtown, went home, argued with assembled authorities—campus cops, my Dean, Ruth—gave in and was brought here, on a stretcher I'm told. Some management of some life.” '
It had taken a long time. He wept on, looking at nothing, the upper part of his body shaking. At last he managed to get out, ‘I don't know what the hell I was crying about.'
Gus Reimer said something in the silence.
‘Can't hear,' he gasped.
‘Remorse and guilt,' Gus said softly.
He saw it must be so, and felt—nowhere.
 
 
Severance's Journal
 
Mary-Jane again this evening. Talked over this afternoon's incomprehensible performance and also why I have, had
, no
feeling about the pseudo-affairs with Lo and Re when anguish years ago over Vera C—she said we're
always
feeling: I did feel guilt those times but have now masked
it out. Helplessness. How can you manage what you can't recognize. Step Three?
Surprisingly, Rochelle looked in later. Tight ship, married hell. We agreed marriage can be fine
without:
sex, intellect, children, etc. etc.
but
—in that case what? Gus dropped by, we put it up to him as a dry man. He thinks: areas of dependency (mutual) and individual fear. I felt witless to hear that in his opinion I'm going strong.
So much for my opinion about
anything.
 
 
There had been no sign or word of the dreaded end-of-third-week ‘evaluation' and Severance was comforting himself on Saturday, for all his failures, with a remark of Harley's the day before during a nought-to-ten safe-risk rating of Severance towards the end of Group, shifted suddenly into from a long confrontation of Letty in which the scientist had played second violin to Keg's first and Harley's cello. ‘I would have given you seven, I considered seven, instead of five, if you could dump your bad feelings out on the floor in the middle of the Group.' Now nobody in fact had come up to the mark that Severance after a split-second savage struggle had dared to award himself —seven; and this hurt him. On the other hand, there were three sixes and nothing below four. ‘Maybe if I can find' (he wrote in his Journal) ‘and reveal this cluster of unknown horrors, underlying even them in me I will find God,' and he felt okay. So when Ray, the humourless tall cadaverous man in charge of the AA part of Ward W, stopped by him and Ruth talking in the lounge downstairs (Rachel was not allowed upstairs, as too young), and asked Severance aside and said in a low voice, ‘I probably shouldn't tell you this but they may let you go Monday,' Severance was horrified.
Tears of consternation sprang to his eyes: ‘It's not possible!'
‘Yes, Harley told me so himself after the consultation.'
‘What in the name of God will I do?'
‘Just go home. What else?' Then Ray's face changed, as he caught on, and Severance caught on.
‘You mean I'm
not
being thrown out?'
‘No, no, no.' Ray squeezed his shoulder. ‘Take it easy. Of course not. Everybody's delighted. Relax.'
Severance swung round to face mentally in the right direction with difficulty. At last he said, ‘But I haven't taken my Fifth yet?'
‘It's only a rumour, as I said. Anyway, it's good news.'
It was good news.
CONTRACT TWO
 
 
F
OUR A.M. SATURDAY/SUNDAY and busy with his past. They told you to live in the present. But Severance's thinking was purposive. A pretty woman faithful to her husband (except for one unconsummated idyl with an aesthetician from Montana) through eleven years, until she located Severance, had told him when, surprised by her lack of interest in History or Science or Art or Religion or anything else, he had asked her what she did think about, ‘Love.' ‘You mean you and this man?' ‘Among others.' ‘All the time?' he asked incredulously. “All the time.' The scientist shuddered. So much for her four thriving children and sociological hubby. This was before involvement between them developed. He himself thought about
problems
—putting them through sieves, heating and cooling them, relating them or detaching them, disverbalizing them, re-structuring them, hitting them with analogical blind-alleys and mare's-nests, teasing them, pretending they didn't exist, pretending they did exist, conjecturing origins, extrapolating menaces. Why, for instance, for mere instance, was man righthanded? Fetal position, apparently—and go into that. And for how long? Seven of the forty-two baboon skulls certainly, four more probably, had been crushed from the right by the southern ape in misty ancient
Africa. Now then, about southpaws … Dexterous vs sinister. Two of his wives were lefthanded; gentle women. He was exacerbated, at this unpleasing hour, by how little he seemed to remember even of the dozen years
before
the four-year prep school blackout.
But as he began to swing his mind through his childhood, sitting with spread knees under the single lamp in the overheated room in the sleeping Ward—it was arrested by a picture. Herb Poore's long, thin, young face half-convulsed across the table from him one night last summer. The Encounter-Group was about to break up after two hours, the first of which had been devoted to Alan's current slip. Herb had asked diffidently if there was time for ‘a sort of AA story.' Dr Rome leaned forward smiling, everyone was relaxed, Herb had been completely dry ever since treatment a year and a half before, a respected and soft-spoken veteran hero of the Programme, sessions often ended with humour. But Herb had no amusing tale to tell. During the last days of a fortnight's motor-holiday with his family, he had felt pressure mounting. He thought about drinking, drinks, bars, bottles, he accelerated past liquor stores, he over-sweated. He did not tell Ann and waited for it to fade when he got home. It grew worse. Monday he called in to his office sick. He wasn't sick. That afternoon, alone—Ann was out with the children —he churned. He filled with paralyzing fear. He felt he had to do something but he couldn't think what. He was too weak to walk up and down. The idea of calling came to him. He was so agitated he couldn't remember the name of his sponsor. He couldn't remember anything except liquor. But he got over to the telephone and a blind impulse made him look up the number of Alcoholics Anonymous. There were half a dozen. His hands were shaking so badly that it took him three tries, dialing, to get the top one listed. A woman's voice came on. He got out, tom Herb, I'm an alcoholic—' and fainted. When he came
to, she was still on the line, frightened. She told him the address of the 24-hour clubroom nearest his house and he dressed and went there for the rest of the afternoon and was all right and had been all right since. Severance was amazed with admiration, and as they stood for the Serenity Prayer he wondered if he could ever come to value his sobriety that desperately.
Did he now? Did he right now? Metaphysical question, with whiskey inaccessible. But it was either that, or the death of the craving. A sentence had struck him, lately, in one of the letters of Plato's last years. He had studied all the Dialogues through, in chronological order, under a philosopher at Columbia, as an undergraduate, but not the letters, and he suspected that as a young man he would not have valued the sentence. To a friend, commending his programme of conduct, Plato said: ‘Hold fast to the things to which you already hold fast.' So simple. Deep, wise and deep. Maybe, the longer sobriety extended, the dearer it held itself. He gave a long sigh about the disease. As for craving: hard and savagely as he had wanted and ‘needed' drinks down the gluttonous decades, he had never suffered the stomachic frenzy he had just heard of with horror from a new patient. Between drinks at lunch and five o'clock, Drew had sometimes to leave his drawing-board for the washroom with projectile vomiting. No such need pleaded for Severance—though he was no stranger to projectile vomiting during drinking.
With an effort he turned to the problem: his skimpy childhood. But at once without effort memories flooded. Himself as pallbearer for his little-older hero, F. J. Callahan, surreptitiously touching the dead hand in the funeral parlor, running screaming night after night to Mother in the livingroom, crossing the street and then re-crossing it to avoid that fearful building, on his way across town to visit Richard Dutcher, with whom did he masturbate in their hayloft?—the pretty Aunt who partly brought him
up in L.A. with bare arms sunlit knitting, her severity about his collecting all his toys before dinner into his big quilt-covered chest—Daddy marvellous in his Sam Browne belt and saber-himself in a uniform, at three or four, standing on a rock in the yard waving a flag at the crowded streetcar passing—himself beside tall Daddy in a rainy dawn of artillery maneuvers at Fort Sill, shellburst puffs of French 75's on the far hillside through big heavy fieldglasses—shiny wonders and challenges of his first chemistry set—every great glossy new Oz book, every Tarzan from
The Return of to The Jewels of Opar,
Tom Swifts and Don Sturdys galore, the thick red
Three Musketeers
with illustrations by Maurice Leloir (lost in some warehouse), A. Merritt's horrors and Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C41 + with a high black hair-do, greatest scientist on earth, all for her (met the author in New York), wasn't Faulkner's chilling “Turn About” (in the
Post?
—on his delivery route) the first real story he came to?—Thurston the magician in the Tampa Bay Hotel, things disappearing—Easter egg hunts in the broad green grounds there—old
Adventure's
and
Argosy
‘s—doldrums of 'Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase, Awoke one night from a deep dream of a piece'—despised poetry—trapped up a tree with pants ripped in the bottom; waiting for the other kids to go home to lunch—anxiety wobbling snuffing the six high candles at Sunday mass—revelations (forgotten) by a Bad Boy with his little sister on a side-street after dark—the mockingbird he shot by accident and mourned and with his little brother buried in a brown cigar-box behind the garage—bacon and eggs, adult! when it was still dark out, before being taken duck-shooting—climbing bracing inside the outside fire-chute at school deserted in summer and whooshing down—the long long scary glistening slide down into the blue water at Medicine Park, Wheeeee … . … No end to thronging images. No, no. The prep
school oblivion following all that was special. Switching off the light and climbing wearily back into bed, with a silent prayer, he saw the problem as narrowed, separated, identified, real.
When Letty knocked on his door in mid-morning, Alan was sitting in a stupor of impotence over some unimaginable point of entry to his problem and he was glad to see her. They shook hands warmly. Refusing the chair and a cigarette, she plumped herself down in a businesslike way, dressed in the standard women's Ward–outfit, a shapeless black sweater and shapeless slacks, on the edge of his bed and said determinedly, ‘I can't feel anything.'
‘It's a stage of treatment, maybe not a bad one,' Alan encouraged her. ‘I think I'm the same way at the moment, as if I weren't going anywhere—though they tell me I am.'
‘Hm.' She thought, with her large black eyes on him. ‘When I told Dave Harris yesterday, he acted differently from what I expected. He smiled and looked
pleased.
'
‘You see? Suppose the picture is something like this. We have terrible feelings to get rid of. They explode out, drain out, whatever—and can't be replaced right away. The stage has to be set for new feelings. It takes time, Letty.'
‘There's been one big improvement. I don't resent my mother as much as I used to. I always felt she was trying to sit on me—she's taller than I am, like everybody else. Now I don't think that. I remember all kinds of support she gave me. How do you get on with your mother?'
‘Love and hell,' said Severance.
They debated mothers, passing to Letty's attempts to manage her married daughter's life, which she knew was wrong but couldn't seem to do anything about, and Alan's comparatively peaceful, quasi-flirtatious relation in later years with his other mother, the aunt with whom, now widowed, attractive as ever, he sometimes used to stay when he was out on the Coast. ‘With my mother,' he switched back, ‘in spite of all my admiration for her—
she's had a frightful life, eight or nine operations when she was young, both husbands let her down, she's been dying of cancer for ten years and she's unbelievably brave, Letty—not to speak of my gratitude for all her help after my first wife left me—after a few hours with her I'm ready to climb the wall. Moreover I feel she's somehow afraid of
me
, God knows why, and that paralyzes me.'
‘Maybe you bully her without knowing it,' Letty said reluctantly, ‘though it's hard to see. You're very kind to everybody. I like you, Alan. I trust you. I think you're the only one.'
‘You mean in the Group?'
‘I mean in the Group.'
‘You don't trust the Group?' He was surprised.
‘No. Not a bit. Do you?'
‘I feel some doubt,' he admitted, ‘except when I'm in Group. Then I feel perfectly confident. We're bound to be able to help each other.'
‘Well, we can hardly,' she said rising, ‘help Luriel. She's packing to leave.'
‘No!'
‘Oh yes she is. Bags and clothes all over. She's frantic.'
‘I'll talk to her,' he said alarmed, stamping out his cigarette and following Letty to the doorway.
‘You do that. Two of us didn't get anywhere. I know she places some confidence in you, she said so when we were arguing at dinner one night.
I
don't know what's wrong with her.'
Severance paused a little in the corridor, to adjust his thought, before knocking. Nothing could be more serious than this. Patients who walked out didn't have a prayer, neither at Howarden nor here had he heard of anyone just raging out—so few did, anyway-and making it. He decided, without wondering why, on straight AA talk, and marched in like St George on the rail-thin grim-faced
young dragon bent flurried and desperate over the disordered bed loaded with her possessions. She did not look up.
‘Luriel,' he said softly, ‘you know this is crazy.'
‘That's just it,' her voice was bitter and low, ‘I'm crazy and this place is driving me crazy, I've got to get back to a hospital for crazy people and think.' She straightened up and glared at him.
‘But you're an alcoholic, Luriel. Where are you with the First Step?'
‘Oh I know I can't drink.'
‘And how about unmanageability of life? That's what you're showing right now.'
‘I know it. All I can think about is how I hate my husband for what he's done to me, and where I'm going to live. I'm a jungle of problems.'
‘We all are, or we all were. What about the Second Step?'
‘“Restoring us to sanity.” ' She said it like a curse. ‘I don't believe that. One of the things wrong with me is envy of the rest of you recovering. Also I'm taking up bed-space, people are out there waiting for my bed.'
‘You're recovering yourself, Luriel,' Alan said earnestly. ‘Listen to me. Sit down.' He shoved back a suitcase half-full and pushed her narrow shoulders down until she was crouching on the edge of a rumpled blanket. He pulled the chair over. ‘Can you remember what you were like just two weeks ago? You never spoke, you sat at meals like a dummy and wouldn't speak to me. Look at me. Isn't it true, what I'm saying? And lately we've been talking like friends.'
‘I don't know if you're a friend or not. I haven't got any friends. In Group you were just as bad as everybody else about my over-eating.' But she sounded less hostile.
‘Your delusion of over-eating. You finally admitted it was a cop-out. Didn't you?'
‘Yes I did. They made me.'
‘You did it yourself. That's another great improvement —to begin to concentrate on your treatment for alcoholism. But you've got to get rid of thoughts of Outside, your husband and the rest. Your job is just in here. Even your posture has improved recently. Sit up straight now and look at me.'
And the meagre woman did almost straighten, as one by one he recollected and proved her achievements to her. Gradually it seemed to him, urging on her her small, real gains, without exaggerating, without pleading, that he was pleading the universal case of hope for abnormal drinkers, for Hutch, for all despairing and deluded sufferers fighting for their sanity in a world not much less insane itself and similarly half-bent on self-destruction—using only the eloquence of facts he bore her down, till her face softened and once she interrupted, ‘I did, didn't I?' with something like a child's exultation. Her grey eyes were bright.

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