Drink and Drugs News DDN September 2018_V2 | Page 17

Reviews
book ‘The
Recovering’
prompts
Mark Reid to
explore the
relationship
between writers
and their
addiction
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Hollywood ‘happy’ ending finds a sudden belief that the
love of a girlfriend, and a desire to write about his bad
experiences, could stop a drunk from drinking. As Wilder
put it: ‘If he can lick his illness long enough to put some
words on paper, there must be hope.’
Women writers who drink, argues Jamison, do not fit
into the male club. Jean Rhys ‘deforms the icon of the
drunk genius’ in Good Morning, Midnight. Desperate
female characters who stand accused of abandoning their
gender roles as carers for others, ‘take cheap rooms in
dead-end streets’. They cry their tears of self-pity in public.
Long after Rhys went missing presumed dead (from drink),
she resurfaced in her mid-seventies with Wide Sargasso
Sea – a classic work, irrespective of her alcoholism.
Raymond Carver was bounced into a vigorous lifestyle
by recovery, and his writing was resuscitated. He said his
later poetry was ‘tied up with feelings of self-worth, since I
quit drinking’ (There were battles, though, with his editor
who wanted to keep things bleak, and pruned Carver’s
words by almost half).
Jamison is inspired by ‘Carver, pounding at his
typewriter at home, and facing the wind in his sailboat,
catching big fish under bigger skies’.
‘I have a thing / for this
cold swift water
just looking at it makes my
blood run/
and my skin tingle’.
Carver found himself ‘loving
everything that increases me’. And
many in recovery will identify with
losing (and finding) themselves in
the power and beauty of nature; in
Carver’s ‘open spaces’. The great
outdoors contrast with the
claustrophobic demands of drinking,
in sordid places or isolation. Jamison
describes alcoholism as ‘making the
world small, the narrowing “this,
only this”.’
So, there can be uplift in writing from recovery – a lens
of creativity alcohol insidiously suggests, but cannot
provide. One note of caution to Carver’s optimism. Proof of
Leslie Jamison’s talent as an essayist comes in a brilliant
piece on the ex-drinker writer Stephen King – his
monstrous dry-drunk, in The Shining endlessly writes ‘all
work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. The character
may be abstinent, but he’s not happy and can’t express
himself. He concocts a binge and an axe-wielding
rampage.
If you are keeping a recovery journal, try to enjoy it.
The Recovering – Intoxication and its Aftermath,
by Leslie Jamison; published in April 2018 by Granta,
ISBN 9780316259613.
September 2018 | drinkanddrugsnews | 17
Image:
Leslie Jamison’s
his is a thorough evaluation of alcohol addiction
and recovering, and their relation to writers.
Jamison is an American academic who is in
recovery. She did much of her drinking in Iowa City,
where it seemed alcohol could be a creative muse; a ‘proof of
wisdom’. Authors, including John Berryman and Raymond
Carver, appeared to have built a literary tradition which
amalgamated alcoholism and profundity. For a while, Jamison
drank to this lineage which went back to Jack London and his
1913 novel John Barleycorn. London saw a ‘white light’ in
alcohol granting access to truths.
A 1967 edition of Life magazine glorified the poet,
Berryman, who wrote The Dream Songs. The piece began:
‘Whisky and ink. These are the fluids he needs to describe his
penetrating awareness of the fact of human mortality’. (In the
end, he committed suicide by jumping off a river bridge.)
For now, Life put Berryman on a pedestal: ‘Apart from a
compulsion to take home a bottle of whiskey every night, he
has a true intellectual’s indifference to material things.’ With
his analyst (to whom he owed money) the poet worried that
solving his emotional issues would curb his imagination.
Away from the hype, Berryman was a standard issue drunk,
typified by low self-esteem: he rang his students in the
middle of the night, worse for wear, to
check he’d been ‘brilliant’ in his lecture
the morning before.
The narrative that alcohol lets
writers see the otherwise invisible was
knocked down in 1944 with Charles
Jackson’s The Lost Weekend. The plot is
summed up by Jamison: ‘a guy named
Don Birnam gets drunk. Don isn’t
broken by the fallen world, or the
horrors of war, or the cruelties of love.
There’s no emotional suspense, his
drinking was nothing’.
Among the protagonist’s prospective
titles for the book he, in turn, is trying to
write, is ‘I don’t know why I’m telling
you this’. The Lost Weekend is the dull
truth about drinking. Jackson went on
to have many more lost weekends
himself, realising that writing a
bestselling book was a way of being his
‘own hero’: ‘too self-absorbed, too self-
infatuated… I drank’.
His on-off relationship with Alcoholics Anonymous is a
very clear example of how a writer can get confused in
recovery. Sometimes he liked AA’s call to humility, ordinariness
and getting outside himself. He also felt AA would ‘flatten
him out’ in years of ‘empty wellbeing and blank sobriety’.
When Life magazine looked to profile Jackson, they loved the
road to ruin part, but the solution bit was too tepid. The
pieces didn’t run.
Billy Wilder’s 1945 film version of The Lost Weekend won
four Oscars, including Best Screenplay. Critics hailed its
portrayal of alcoholism as ‘uncompromising’. In fact, the film
did compromise the ending of the novel, which pointed to the
main character drinking himself to death. (Jackson himself
committed suicide from an overdose of barbiturates.) The