The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

One of Berryman’s friends once told him that he lived like he’d spent his “whole fucking life out in the weather without any protection… eyes ragged from what they have seen & try to look away from.”

“With your work,” a friend wrote to him, “I often have the feeling that yr poems are the light we see now from a star that is already ashes.”

It was another layer in the complicated, circular relationship I was constructing between drinking and making: Booze helped you see, and then it helped you survive the sight. The appeal wasn’t just about intoxication—as a portal, or a bandage—but about the alluring relationship between creativity and addiction itself: its state of thrall, its signature extremity. The person who found himself in that state of thrall was someone who felt things more acutely than ordinary men, who shared his living quarters with darkness,

and then eventually the drama of enthrallment became—itself—something worth writing about.

Hardwick marveled at the “sheer enormity of her vices,” admiring the powerful alchemy by which Holiday was able to transform them into her

extraordinary art. It was as if Holiday had risen to the occasion of her own pain. “For the grand destruction one must be worthy,” Hardwick wrote, in awe of Holiday’s

“ruthless talent and the opulent ...

The theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that addiction isn’t about the substance so much as “the surplus of mystical properties” the addict projects onto it. Granting the substance the ability to provide “consolation, repose, beauty, or energy,” she writes, can “operate only corrosively on the self thus self-construed as lack.” The more you start to need a thing, whether it’s a man or a bottle of wine, the more you are unwittingly—reflexively, implicitly—convincing yourself you’re not enough without it.

When George sees a crowd of “nodding junkies” on the street, listening to a man who is calling for support for “victims of the Newark rebellion,” he sees them “no longer [as] the chosen driven to destruction by their awareness and frustration, but only lost victims, too weak to fight.”

After years, Cain found them and came out to visit. But he didn’t like it out there. “He said the sky was too open,” Pool told me. “He felt like God could see him.” When she spoke to me about

She wasn’t bitter about their marriage. She’d just done what she had to do. “I’m not upset,” she told me. “I just needed to make sure we survived George.”

Name: Robert Burnes Place of Birth: Hallettsville, Texas. Personal Description: Age 47, Build slender. Green eyes, neat dresser. Means of livelihood: Salesman.

Reason for addiction: To avoid monotony of living.

tongue: Feelings aren’t facts. Sometimes the solution has nothing to do with

the problem.

He never wanted his own story to become more important than the stories of others, even though the fact remained: His sobriety was the original legend.

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it. You would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”

Dave taught me a quote from Gertrude Stein—“Dirt is clean when there is a volume”—

Wilson’s spook sessions and his acid trips and his nicotine addiction aren’t the parts of his story that sit most comfortably inside his legend, but for me they don’t undermine the story of his sobriety, they humanize it. They speak to the raggedness of his recovery, or anyone’s—the ways it might always yearn for something more. You are destined for

Years later, when a clinician described the classic addict temperament as stubbornly focused on the present moment,

He eventually finds himself facing Lloyd at the bar, asking for twenty martinis: “One for every month I’ve been on the wagon and one to grow on.” Jack

Bud Wister, the counselor who had coached Jackson through the Peabody Method a decade earlier, died during a bender that same year, after swallowing broken glass from a whiskey bottle whose neck he’d smashed, drunk.

Your disease is always waiting for you outside. It’s out there doing push-ups. I

Years later, recovery turned this notion upside down—it made me start to believe that I could do things until I believed in them, that intentionality was just as authentic as unwilled desire. Action could coax belief rather than testifying to it. “I used to think you had to believe to pray,” David Foster Wallace once heard at a meeting. “Now I know I had it ass-backwards.”

Whenever someone shared, you had to look at her—so that if she ever locked eyes with you, you could give what she was saying a place to land.

erasures.

I knew a man in meetings who spoke almost entirely in clichés, like a patchwork quilt of phrases sewn together in jagged veers of thought. We had to quit playing God… every recovery began with one sober hour… every day is a gift, that’s why we call it the present… sobriety delivers everything alcohol promised… the elevator is broken, use the steps… God will never give you more than you can handle.

The sheer fact of putting your body in a room—a hundred rooms, a thousand times—and listening hard, or hard enough, can neurally reconfigure what addiction has unraveled.

He kept a list called “Heard in Meetings” that still remains in his archives, written on ordinary yellow lined paper: “The happiness of being among people. Just a person among people.” “They say it’s good for the soul, but I don’t feel nothing inside you could call a soul.” “I shit myself every day for years.” “I came in to save my ass and found my soul was attached.” “‘No’ is also an answer to my prayers, as well.” “It hurts.”

I didn’t think I was living Susan’s story—the story of sobriety as rupture—but I was oddly compelled by it: the idea that happiness might look like the end of love, rather than its repair.

Jackson decided he believed in the Faustian bargain after all, believed in the choice between sobriety and genius. “Should I say the hell with it and return to my former indulgence,” he wondered, “and thus be freed from my healthy prison, free once more from fear, able to function as a writer again?” After years of Möbius-strip sobriety—in and out, on and off—Jackson finally committed suicide by overdosing on Seconal in 1968.

Fear is an evil and corroding thread—

It seems there are two kinds of American writers. Those who drink, and those who used to.