It has always been a hazard for me to speak at an AA meeting… I think I got tired of being my own hero… I’ve written a book that’s been called the definitive portrait of the alcoholic… Charles Jackson, speech, Alcoholics Anonymous, Cleveland, Ohio, 1959.
The myths of Iowa City drinking ran like subterranean rivers beneath the drinking we were doing.… For more on John Cheever in Iowa, see Blake Bailey’s biography Cheever: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2009). For more on Ray Carver in Iowa, see Carol Sklenicka’s biography Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (New York: Scribner, 2009); and for a vivid and incisive account of their friendship, see also Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (New York: Picador, 2014). For more on Berryman in Iowa, see John Haffenden’s biography The Life of John Berryman (London: Methuen & Co., 1984).
just a poor mortal human… Denis Johnson, “Where the Failed Gods Are Drinking,” The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995).
When Cheever showed up to teach in Iowa, he was grateful for the glen… For more on Carver and Cheever’s friendship, see Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 253, 258. For Yates and Dubus, see Blake Bailey’s biography of Yates, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (New York: Picador, 2003).
He and I did nothing but drink… Carver, qtd. in Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 253.
blue mice and pink elephants… the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic… Jack London, John Barleycorn (New York: The Century Company, 1913), 7–8.
bitten numbly by numb maggots… sees through all illusions… God is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke… Ibid., 14. In certain versions, the text is quoted as “Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke” (for example, a serialized version of London’s novel in the Saturday Evening Post 185, no. 7, March 15, 1913).
cosmic sadness… Ibid., 309.
so bad it was like somebody was sticking wires… Raymond Carver, “Vitamins,” Collected Stories, ed. William Stull and Maureen Carroll (New York: Library of America, 2009), 427.
You can’t tell a bunch of writers not to smoke… Now we are going to tell each other our life stories… Carver, qtd. in Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 270.
Ray was our designated Dylan Thomas, I think—our contact with the courage… Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 265.
It was really difficult even to look at him, the booze and the cigarettes were so much there… Ibid., 269.
Of course there’s a mythology… Raymond Carver interview, Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee, Paris Review (Summer 1983).
invisible forces… Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 269. See Sklenicka for a fuller account of Carver’s attachment to John Barleycorn.
like a hummingbird over a blossom… Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (New York: Picador, 2009), 53.
McInnes isn’t feeling too good today… Ibid., 37.
The sky was torn away… Ibid., 66.
When Johnson arrived in Iowa City as a college freshman in the fall of 1967… These details about Johnson’s freshman year are from a letter he wrote to his parents, Vera Childress and Alfred Johnson, September 20, 1967, Denis Johnson Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Boy, I tried all day to get you out of jail… Peg [last name unknown.] Greeting card to Denis Johnson, November 1967, Denis Johnson Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
I kissed her fully… Johnson, Jesus’ Son, 93.
diamonds were being incinerated in there… Ibid., 9.
And you, you ridiculous people… Ibid., 10.
Because we all believed we were tragic… Ibid., 32.
Whisky and ink… These are the fluids John Berryman needs… Jane Howard, “Whisky and Ink, Whisky and Ink,” Life Magazine, July 21, 1967, 68.
I am, outside… John Berryman, “Dream Song 46,” The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).
Are you radioactive, pal?… John Berryman, “Dream Song 51,” The Dream Songs.
Hey, out there!—assistant professors, full, / associates,—instructors—others… John Berryman, “Dream Song 35,” The Dream Songs.
whole fucking life out in the weather… Deneen Peckinpah to John Berryman, July 8, 1970, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
At present, the figure is mountainous… James Shea to John Berryman, September 1954, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
The day Berryman showed up in Iowa, he fell down a flight of stairs… See Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, 225.
Mr. Berryman often called me… Bette Schissel, qtd. in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 283.
Hunger was constitutional with him… John Berryman, “Dream Song 311,” The Dream Songs.
I, who longed for her love… Jill Berryman to John Berryman, qtd. in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 9.
I have the authority of suffering… Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 149.
in violent temper & razor sensibility… Ibid., 154–55.
I would not worry… about an analogy to Rilke… James Shea to John Berryman, January 19, 1954, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
Inspiration contained a death threat… Saul Bellow, “Introduction,” John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), xii.
With your work… I often have the feeling that yr poems are the light… Deneen Peckinpah to John Berryman, July 8, 1970, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
Something can (has) been said for sobriety… John Berryman, “Dream Song 57,” The Dream Songs.
nihilistic and sentimental idea of ‘the interesting’… Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978; repr., New York: Picador, 2001), 31, 26, 28.
see the truth, the simplicity, and the primitive emotions once more… Patricia Highsmith qtd. in Olivia Laing, “‘Every hour a glass of wine’—The Female Writers Who Drank,” The Guardian, June 13, 2014.
A woman could not know the perils… Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945), 108.
I will not drink… Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 210–11.
Please just don’t… scold me… Ibid., 600.
Maybe Jane Bowles understood something… Negar Azimi, “The Madness of Queen Jane,” The New Yorker, June 12, 2014.
Maybe Marguerite Duras understood something… These pieces of Duras’s story are from Edmund White’s “In Love with Duras,” New York Review of Books, June 26, 2008. As White writes, “Then [Duras and her companion Yann Andréa] would start uncorking cheap Bordeaux and she’d drink two glasses, vomit, then continue on till she’d drunk as many as nine liters and would pass out.” Nine liters translates to twelve bottles, and is well over the amount generally considered lethal, so it’s most likely that White is offering a tall-tale version of Duras and her drinking—but regardless, she was drinking enough to incapacitate herself daily.
When a woman drinks… Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (London: William Collins Sons, 1990), 17.
Intoxication in a woman was thought to signal a failure of control… Sherry H. Stewart, Dubravka Gavric, and Pamela Collins, “Women, Girls, and Alcohol,” Women and Addiction: A Comprehensive Handbook (New York: The Guilford Press, 2009), 342.
I’ve escaped… A door has opened and let me out into the sun… Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 142.
Even though they were young and poor… Details about Rhys’s life in Paris in late 1919 from Carole Angier’s Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 107–13.
Paris tells you to forget, forget, let yourself go… Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 91.
I was never a good mother… Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 113.
This damned baby, poor thing, has gone a strange colour… Qtd. in ibid., 112.
He was dying… Jean Rhys, Smile Please, 119.
I know about myself… Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985). Qtd. in Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 378.
struggle with life… the way a sleeper struggles… Mary Cantwell, “Conversation with Jean Rhys, ‘the Best Living English Novelist,’” Mademoiselle, October 1974.
It was astonishing how significant… Jean Rhys, Quartet, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 130.
When you were drunk… you could imagine that it was the sea… Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in The Complete Novels, 241.
I must get drunk tonight… Rhys, Quartet, in The Complete Novels, 217.
the bright idea of drinking myself to death… Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels, 369.
Sometimes I’m just as unhappy as you are… Ibid., 347.
You said that if you drink too much you cry… Ibid., 449.
It was bad policy to say that you were lonely… Rhys, Smile Please, 94.
I could deny myself… Then I could make them love me and be kind to me… Jean Rhys, Black Exercise Book, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
Now I have had enough to drink… Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels, 393.
I had two longings and one was fighting the other… Jean Rhys, Green Exercise Book, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
I searched for a big stone… Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 31. All details of Rhys’s Dominica days come from her unfinished memoir, unless otherwise noted as coming from Carole Angier’s Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown, 1991).
I wanted to identify myself with it…Smile Please, 66.
the sound of cocktail-making… Ibid., 17.
Hanging above the family silver… Rhys, Smile Please, 17
Rhys’s writing could never fully reckon with the suffering closer at hand, and larger than herself: the long shadow of slavery… Rhys’s family had owned and run the Geneva plantation (acquired by her great-grandfather, James Potter Lockhart, in 1824; his ledgers record that he owned twelve hundred acres and 258 slaves) until it was destroyed in the so-called Census Riots (also called La Guerre Negre, which followed Emancipation in 1844). See Lillian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009), 12.
When she was twelve… Rhys’s age when she was abused by Mr. Howard varies in different versions of the story that she wrote down (from twelve to fourteen). See Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (27) for a fuller account, as well as Rhys’s Black Exercise Book.
Would you like to belong to me?… Rhys, Black Exercise Book, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
It was then that it began… Rhys, Black Exercise Book, 64, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
I’ve made a complete wreck of myself… Ibid., 72.
I wish I could get it clearer this pain that has gone through all my life… Ibid.
You’ve no idea darling… Ibid.
she kept the receipt from his burial for the rest of her life… Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 113.
You’re much too early… Ibid., 235. See Angier for a fuller account of Rhys’s relationship with her daughter Maryvonne.
My mother tries to be an artist… Ibid., 285.
As legend had it, he’d painted the mouth of a cave onto a wall in the emperor’s palace… For a fuller version of the legend of the Wu Tao-tzu legend, see Herbert Allen Giles’s Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1918), 47–48.
I’m finding out what a useful thing drink is… Ibid., 74.
Kitten… you make my heart ache sometimes… Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith’s letters qtd. in ibid., 68.
And then it became part of me… Rhys, Smile Please, 97.
The whole earth had become inhospitable to her… Francis Wyndham qtd. in Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 71.
You see I like emotion… Jean Rhys to Peggy Kirkaldy, July 3, 1946, in Jean Rhys Letters, 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), 45.
“Why We Drink”… Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 53.
On an extended canvas… one becomes more than ever conscious… Review from The New Statesman qtd. in ibid., 234.
the subject of her first manuscript, Voyage in the Dark…Voyage in the Dark was the first novel Rhys wrote, though it was not the first novel she published. It was drafted in 1911–1913 but published in 1934, after both Quartet and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. See Lillian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour.
I’m not miserable… Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 68.
Oh no… not a party exactly… Rhys, Smile Please, 101.
Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison… Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 206–7. For statistics on the number of alcohol-related driving fatalities per year, see the CDC report at https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety /impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html. The report states that “10,265 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes” in 2015, as opposed to just under 7,000 cocaine-related deaths. (See National Institute on Drug Abuse, https://www .drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates.)
who is viewed as disposable—someone to be purged from the body politic… Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 206.
the drug-scare narrative… See Drew Humphries’s fuller and astute discussion of the phenomenon of the “Drug Scare Narrative” in Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs, and the Media (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999).
the most malignant, addictive drug known to mankind… Physician Michael Abrams qtd. in Dirk Johnson, “Good People Go Bad in Iowa, and a Drug Is Being Blamed,” New York Times, February 22, 1996.
But by the time a 2005 Newsweek cover story called meth… Jacob Sullum, “Hyperbole Hurts: The Surprising Truth about Methamphetamine,” Forbes, February 20, 2014, referring to “The Meth Epidemic—Inside America’s New Drug Crisis,” Newsweek, July 31, 2005.
not particularly exciting nonaddiction story that never gets told… Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society (New York: Harper, 2013), 122, 19, 188–91. Statistics demonstrate that most people who use drugs don’t become addicts. Even with heroin, the drug (apart from tobacco) with the highest “capture rate,” only 13 percent of users develop an addiction. Other studies put the number a bit higher, reporting that heroin’s “capture rate” is around 23 percent; that is, around 23 percent of those who use will become dependent, which still means that the majority do not. See this report from the UK National Addiction Centre, http://www.nta.nhs.uk/uploads/dangerousnessofdrugsdh_4086293.pdf.
Anslinger effectively channeled the punitive impulse that had fueled Prohibition… Doris Marie Provine called prohibition and drug criminalization “sister movements.” Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 89.
But during the decades that followed, the American legal system would polarize alcohol and drug addictions into separate categories in the public imagination: the former a disease, the latter a crime… One of the most common questions I received while working on this book—and before that, while I was working on this book as a dissertation—was whether I was writing about alcoholism or drug addiction, as if it was somehow strange to think about them together. In truth, I think it’s more strange to think of them apart—or at least, to draw a dividing line between alcohol and everything else. It’s only the legal system and the popular imagination that have categorized nicotine and alcohol on one side of a categorical divide, and “illicit” drugs on the other. Physiologically, it’s an arbitrary border. Not because there aren’t differences between substances—the kinds of dependence they produce, and how likely they are to produce it—but because every substance works differently, and alcohol is just one substance among many. In The Science of Addiction: From Neurobiology to Treatment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), Carlton Erickson recommends more specific language around addiction—specifically, recommends replacing the catch-all term of “addiction” with more specific categories of “abuse” (using with negative consequences) and “chemical dependence” (unable to stop without help) and offers a chart of “dependence liability” (25–26) that ranks heroin highest, then cocaine, then nicotine—with alcohol close behind. The British medical journal The Lancet released a chart that attempted to measure the respective “dependence potentials” of a variety of substances—calculated from the amount of pleasure they offer, their potential to create physical dependence, and their potential to create psychological dependence—and ranked them in the following order: heroin, cocaine, tobacco, barbiturates, alcohol, benzodiazepines, amphetamine, cannabis, ecstasy. (David Nutt et al., “Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse,” The Lancet 369, no. 9566 [2007]: 1047–53.) But all this research suggests a new paradigm that replaces binary categories (cigarettes and alcohol on one side, “illicit” drugs on the other) with a way of seeing that understands each substance as its own particular confluence of probabilities and effects.
Before the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914… The next two decades witnessed a sea change in the way Americans thought about drugs and the figure of the addict, and how the American legal system treated them. More comprehensive criminalization measures followed in the wake of the regulatory Harrison Act: the Jones-Miller Act of 1922, the Anti-Heroin Act of 1924, and the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act of 1934.
psychopaths… created by infectious contact with persons already drug-conditioned… Harry Anslinger and William Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953), 223.
loathsome and contagious diseases… Anslinger qtd. in Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 14, citing Larry Sloman, Reefer Madness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 36. Even though alcohol has been our go-to “legal” drug, alcoholism has inspired its own fraught history of cognitive dissonance. Officially categorized as a disease in 1956 by the American Medical Association—four years before E. Morton Jellinek, a Yale physiology professor, released his seminal study The Disease Concept of Alcoholism—alcoholism was also deemed “willful misconduct” by a 1988 Supreme Court Decision (Traynor v. Turnage) that held a pair of alcoholic veterans legally accountable for their alcoholism. The veterans’ petition for an extension of the ten-year time limit on their G.I. Bill benefits, on the grounds that they had been disabled by alcoholism during that decade, was denied. For more on Traynor v. Turnage, see Durwood Ruegger, “Primary Alcoholism Due to ‘Willful Misconduct’: Supreme Court Upholds VA Regulation,” Journal of Health and Human Resources Administration 13, no. 1 (Summer 1990): 112–23. In George Cain’s 1970 novel, Blueschild Baby (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), about a black heroin addict in Harlem in the 1960s, heroin and alcohol are paralleled in terms of physical dependence. Alcoholics are described as “[w]inos shivering in a doorway beg[ging] the needed pennies for their medicine” and the narrator says, “There is no longer anything dramatic or pleasurable about junk, it is only medicine, a restorative to enable me to function” (19, 5).
wearing shiny suits and ties printed with Chinese pagodas… Julia Blackburn, With Billie: A New Look at the Unforgettable Lady Day (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 53.
more than one administrator worried that it would be mistaken for a facility that actually grew opium… “U.S. Not Raising Drugs at Its Narcotic Farm,” New York Herald, January 24, 1934. RG 511—Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, National Institute of Mental Health, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
roughly two-thirds of the fifteen hundred “patients” at Lexington were prisoners… Nancy D. Campbell, J. P. Olsen, and Luke Walden, The Narcotic Farm (New York: Abrams, 2010), 62.
By the time the Narco Farm opened, in 1935… The Narco Farm was opened twenty years after the Harrison Act of 1914 ushered in an era of escalating federal anti-narcotic legislation, but twenty years before the harsh punitive measures Anslinger would eventually promote with the Boggs Act (passed by Congress in 1951), and the Daniel Act of 1956, also known as the Narcotic Control Act of 1956.
I feel that these people are in the same category as lepers… Anonymous Los Angeles Police Department officer qtd. in Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, 272.
He spent the rest of the thirties creating a reason for his agency to matter by drumming up public anxiety about drugs… Hari, Chasing the Scream, 12–13.
he gave the House Committee on Appropriations a speech about “colored students” partying with white coeds “and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy”… Ibid., 15, 17.
the majority of drug users have always been white… John Helmer and Thomas Vietorisz, Drug Use, the Labor Market and Class Conflict (Washington: Drug Abuse Council, 1974), unpaged.
NEGRO COCAINE “FIENDS” NEW SOUTHERN MENACE… The article written by Edward Huntington Williams, M.D., appeared in the New York Times, February 8, 1914. See fuller accounts of paranoid racist portraits of the black cocaine addict in Doris Provine, Unequal Under Law, 76–78. One account projected almost superhuman powers onto the African-American drug addict (“You could fill him with bullets and he still wouldn’t fall…”). See also Hari, Chasing the Scream, 26.
most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain…Literary Digest (1914), 687. Qtd. in Provine, Unequal Under Law, 76–77.
at the bottom of something… James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” Going to Meet the Man (New York: Dial Press, 1965).
the first book to treat with authority the horrifying national problem of drug addiction… not to satisfy a desire for morbid sensationalism… Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, flap copy.
guide and implement the national desire… Ibid.
to buy wine and reefers… Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, 22–25.
while under marihuana intoxication… Ibid., 296.
normal people… usual emotional plane… Ibid., 251, 249–50.
the face of “evil” is always the face of total need… William Burroughs, Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness (1960), reprinted in Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1962).
His concept of illness was selective and self-serving… Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, 223, 226.
Live things, frogs and insects kick in the liquid coming out… Cain, Blueschild Baby, 148.
A doctor won’t help… Ibid., 149.
He’s a sick man. You’re a doctor… Ibid., 150.
denied the privilege of freely yielding… Margo Jefferson, Negroland (New York: Pantheon, 2015), 171. Understanding the public narratives that permitted my private suffering was another moment of waking from what Ta-Nehisi Coates has called “The Dream,” the white American aspirational fantasy that depends on the ongoing injustices of systemic racism to sustain its thrall. The different narratives that attach to various substances—often racially coded—are yet another iteration of the Dream. In Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), Coates writes about witnessing the Dreamers in action on West Broadway, in lower Manhattan, where “white people spilled out of wine bars with sloshing glasses and without police” (89).
In 1944, a novel came along that rejected the white logic entirely… John Crowley’s critical account of alcoholism in American literature, The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), was essential in offering me a context for understanding the significance of Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944)—particularly its account of how Jackson broke from an American literary tradition that conflated alcoholism and metaphysical profundity.
the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey… Philip Wylie, “Review of The Lost Weekend,” by Charles Jackson, New York Times Book Review, January 30, 1944.
should have definite clinical value… Dr. Sherman qtd. in Blake Bailey’s definitive biography of Jackson, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013).
If he were able to write fast enough… Jackson, The Lost Weekend, 16–17.
“Don Birnam: A Hero Without a Novel” or “I Don’t Know Why I’m Telling You All This”… Ibid., 46.
Who would ever want to read a novel about a punk and a drunk… Ibid.
Melodrama! In all his life… Ibid., 237.
It wasn’t even decently dramatic… Ibid., 216.
They say you’re arrested for crime, narcotics, prostitution, robbery, murder… Cain, Blueschild Baby, 56.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs?… John Ehrlichman interview with Dan Baum, “Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs,” Harper’s, April 2016. Ehrlichman’s family has denied the posthumous account of his comments. In a statement issued to CNN, his children said, “The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him. We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond.” But journalist Dan Baum recorded the comment during an interview for his 1996 book Smoke and Mirrors and likens Ehrlichman’s account to the stories of traumatized war veterans, recounting events years after the fact: “I think Ehrlichman was waiting for someone to come and ask him,” Baum told CNN. “I think he felt bad about it. I think he had a lot to feel bad about.” See: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html.
haunted huddle… nodding, stinking, burning, high… gaunt and hollow… skin strapped tight around the skull… there’s not enough junk in the world to quench his need… Cain, Blueschild Baby, 114–15.
Drug use was actually declining in 1982… See Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 49.
the addict violator… Anslinger and Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics, 297.
ideological fig leaf… Reinarman and Levine qtd. in Provine, Unequal Under Law, 105.
The argument began, police say… Jacob Lamar, “The House Is On Fire,” Time, August 4, 1986.
Crack it up, crack it up… Ibid.
imagining crack as a predatory “epidemic” spread by black addicts who were morally responsible for what they carried… In 1990, the Ku Klux Klan declared that it would “join the battle against illegal drugs” by acting as “the eyes and ears of the police.” “Ku Klux Klan Says It Will Fight Drugs,” Toledo Journal, January 3–9, 1990. Cited in Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 55.
Crack was the hottest combat reporting story… Robert Stutman qtd. in Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 52.
They were allowed to confiscate the cash, cars, and homes of everyone arrested in drug busts… See Alexander’s The New Jim Crow for a more comprehensive account of the militarization of local police forces during the War on Drugs. Police departments got to keep the spoils from their drug busts, Alexander writes, not only by confiscating drugs but also by taking “the cash, cars, and homes of people suspected of drug use or sales.” The cultural narratives that legitimated these confiscations found their authority in a much deeper narrative about addiction and guilt: the belief that addicts were guilty, and deserved to have their possessions taken from them (79).
equivalent to crack… Qtd. in Provine, Unequal Under Law, 112. As early as 1991, a report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that most judges found mandatory minimums “manifestly unjust.” See Eric E. Sterling, “Drug Laws and Snitching: A Primer,” Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer/.
One San Francisco judge wept on the bench… See Provine, Unequal Under Law, 10.
Between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated drug offenders increased from just over 40,000to almost 490,000, and the majority of those incarcerated were people of color… The number of people in prisons and jails for drug offenses was 40,900 in 1980, and 488,400 in 2014. These statistics are taken from The Sentencing Project’s report “Trends in U.S. Corrections,” last updated December 2015, drawn from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Prisoners are classified according to the offense for which they are serving the longest sentence, so these prisoners are either serving only a sentence for drugs, or else for drugs and another crime—so long as the drug-related crime is the one for which they are serving the longest sentence. Many other people convicted of drug offenses are currently incarcerated, but are not listed as such as long as it’s another conviction for which they are serving the longest sentence.
Whether the War on Drugs is the primary driver of American mass incarceration has been the subject of recent debates. Michelle Alexander laid out the argument bluntly in The New Jim Crow: “Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs” (60). It’s important to make some distinctions here: this doesn’t mean that the majority of incarcerated people in America are “nonviolent drug offenders”—a phrase that has become a comfortable compound subject in the mainstream liberal critique of mass incarceration in America, especially since Alexander’s book. But in his recent book Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration, and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017), David Pfaff argues that the narrative of the War on Drugs as the primary driver of mass incarceration in America misunderstands the problem—that it’s really the discretion of prosecutors (taking more cases to court) that has driven up incarceration rates—and that even if we freed all nonviolent drug offenders from prison, it would only make a dent in the problem of mass incarceration: America would still incarcerate more people, per capita, than any other country in the world. But it’s also true that while nonviolent drug offenders make up only a fifth of the incarcerated population, a large number of those offenders incarcerated for violent offenses owe their incarceration to the War on Drugs—which creates the conditions under which the drug trade has become and remains so violent. All that said, it’s important to recognize the War on Drugs and its racialized punitive project as one part of a much broader systemic injustice, rather than the entirety of the problem.
For hard data on these questions, see annual reports from the U.S. Department of Justice, for example, “Prisoners in 2015,” https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p15.pdf. Additional resources include Jennifer Broxmeyer, “Prisoners of Their Own War: Can Policymakers Look Beyond the ‘War on Drugs’ to Drug Treatment Courts?” Yale Law Journal 118 (2008–9). For a fuller account of the War on Drugs and its legacy of incarceration, see also Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King, The Sentencing Project, a 25-Year Quagmire: The War on Drugs and Its Impact on American Society 2 (2007), available at http://www.sentencingproject.org/Admin%5CDocuments%5Cpublications%5Cdp _25yearquagmire.pdf. See also Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 6, 20. More than 31 million people have been arrested for drug offenses since the War on Drugs began.
A 1993 study found that only 19 percent of drug dealers were African American, but they made up 64 percent of arrests… Hari, Chasing the Scream, 93.
By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise… Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 49.
The drug problem reflects bad decisions by individuals with free wills… George H. W. Bush, “National Drug Control Strategy,” 1992, qtd. in Jennifer Broxmeyer, “Prisoners of Their Own War: Can Policymakers Look Beyond the ‘War on Drugs’ to Drug Treatment Courts?” Yale Law Journal, June 30, 2008.
Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me… Betty Watson Burston, Dionne Jones, and Pat Robertson-Saunders, “Drug Use and African Americans: Myth Versus Reality,” Journal of Alcohol and Drug Abuse 40 (Winter 1995): 19, qtd. in Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 106.
I enjoy it much more, because I don’t go to bars… Berryman qtd. in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 287.
A fellow patient at the sanitarium… The memory of Jackson’s footprint in wine is from Bailey, Farther and Wilder.
Jackson first stopped drinking at the age of thirty-three, using something called the Peabody Method… The Peabody Method was based on Richard Peabody’s The Common Sense of Drinking (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931). I have drawn my account of Jackson’s time using the Peabody Method from the longer account in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 103–4.
It was an approach grounded in pragmatism… See Peabody’s The Common Sense of Drinking.
We regulate our lives in orderly and profitable fashion… Jackson to Bud Wister, December 19, 1936, Charles Jackson Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.
Why don’t you write me a letter about it?… Jackson, The Lost Weekend, 149–50. While Jackson himself was also an avid Fitzgerald fan, he didn’t have the same respect for other scribes of alcoholism. In an undated letter to Robert Nathan, in the Jackson archives at Dartmouth, Jackson wrote that he couldn’t find the “pathos of The Sun Also Rises…it’s bathetic, merely.” He thought alcoholism deserved to be represented as something more than tragic farce.
the books begun and dropped… Jackson, The Lost Weekend, 17.
It had long since ceased to matter Why… Ibid., 221–22.
I am not saying that the critics could have cured Berryman of his disease… Lewis Hyde, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” American Poetry Review, October 1975; repr. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1986.
It is my thesis here… that [a] war, between alcohol and Berryman’s creative powers… Ibid., 17.
an alcoholic poet on his pity pot… Ibid., 14.
We can hear the booze talking… Ibid., 17.
It would not have been easy… Ibid., 18.
he confesses that for two years he worked as an orderly… Ibid., 2.
luminous self-destruction… Elizabeth Hardwick, “Billie Holiday,” New York Review of Books, March 4, 1976.
very attractive customer… George White qtd. in Blackburn’s With Billie, 219.
I got a habit and I know it’s no good… Holiday interview with Eugene Callender qtd. in Hari’s Chasing the Scream, 21.
shyness so vast… John Chilton qtd. in Blackburn’s With Billie, 63. Blackburn’s book is a tremendous compilation of oral histories about Holiday’s life and career. The context of Blackburn’s book is an interestingly haunted one: Its oral histories were assembled from taped interviews left by Linda Kuehl, the biographer who committed suicide before she could finish her biography of Holiday.
She was told nobody could sing the word “hunger” like she sang it… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, with William Dufty (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 195.
She sang the clubs on West Fifty-second… These details from Blackburn, With Billie, 94.
sheer enormity of her vices… For the grand destruction one must be worthy… Hardwick, “Billie Holiday.”
Anslinger assigned several agents to Holiday’s case during the late 1940s, and they busted her on multiple occasions, including the 1947 conviction that sent her to Alderson Federal Prison Camp, in West Virginia, for almost a year… Johann Hari offers an excellent account of Anslinger’s fixation with Holiday in his 2015 Chasing the Scream, and Julia Blackburn gives the perspectives of the two agents assigned to her case, Jimmy Fletcher and George White, in With Billie. For my account of the legal dimensions of Holiday’s addiction, her persecution at the hands of the law, and the racial inflections of this persecution, I have drawn from Holiday’s own autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, as well as Hari’s history and Blackburn’s assembled testimonies. In Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday describes the media attention surrounding her drug busts, including one January 1949 headline that made her particularly indignant because it seemed to be gloating in her perpetual trouble with the law: “Billie Holiday Arrested on Narcotics Charges.”
At Alderson, Holiday got Christmas cards… These details from Holiday’s time at Alderson are from Lady Sings the Blues.
When you form some sort of friendship with anybody… Jimmy Fletcher, qtd. in Blackburn, With Billie, 215.
in July 1986, ABC News introduced the American public to Jane… Information about ABC report (July 11, 1986) and NBC report (October 24 and 25, 1988) from Drew Humphries’s Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs, and the Media, 29–30.
As criminologist Drew Humphries argues, the media effectively created the “crack mother”… In her urgent and revelatory survey of the “crack mother” phenomenon, Crack Mothers, criminologist Drew Humphries surveys news programs that covered women and cocaine between 1983 and 1994—84 in total, largely drawn from ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news—with a swell during the peak of the crack panic in 1989 (19–20).
although the majority of pregnant addicts were white… Ibid., 128.
the public outrage around crack mothers effectively redirected public notions of addiction away from disease and back to vice… One of the central ironies of America’s brief and passionate obsession with the figure of the “crack mother”—an obsession driven by pity for her misconstrued child and contempt for her misconstrued villainy—was that it somehow turned an essentially vulnerable group of women into a powerful public scapegoat. As Humphries puts it: “How… did an unusually powerless group of women emerge as a threatening symbol of disorder? The unenviable enemy in the domestic war on drugs?” (15).
Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose early reports on the effects of cocaine in utero had fueled the press frenzy… In a 1992 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Chasnoff presented a follow-up study that disproved media conclusions based on his prior work. He publicly chastised the “rush to judgment” on the part of the press, based on his preliminary research, and said he had “never seen a ‘crack kid’” and doubted he ever would. See Humphries, Crack Mothers, 62; and Ira Chasnoff, “Missing Pieces of the Puzzle,” Neurotoxicology and Teratology 15 (1993): 287–88, qtd. in Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine, Crack in the Rear-View Mirror: Deconstructing Drug War Mythology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Based on sensational extrapolations of early scientific findings, the media had predicted that the surging population of “crack babies” would become a doomed underclass: a vast fleet of struggling preemies and little “possessed” Arthurs. The July 30, 1989, column in the Washington Post by the singularly horrific Charles Krauthammer offered an infamous version of the doomsday prophecy: “The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.” Krauthammer pronounced their futures “closed to them from day one. Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority. At best, a menial life of severe deprivation.” He wondered if “the dead babies may be the lucky ones.” It’s now medical consensus that “crack babies” weren’t doomed at all, and that the whole notion of a “crack baby” was impossible to isolate anyway. These babies had been influenced by such an array of intertwined variables—not only other drugs but also environmental factors like poverty, violence, short-term foster placements, and homelessness—that it was impossible to identify what damage crack itself had done (Humphries, Crack Mothers, 62.)
If you give drugs to your child because you can’t help it… Qtd. in ibid., 2.
Instead of showing shame, Tracy was defiant… Ibid., 52.
when white pregnant drug addicts were covered in the media… Ibid.
Now they weren’t just part of the “undeserving” poor, welfare junkies who were corroding the civic body… It was stereotypes like the crack mother that fueled the New Right’s campaign to diminish social services in the late 1980s. See Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
Unlike most addicts, they entered the criminal justice system through the hospital… Humphries, Crack Mothers, 6.
Prosecutors twisted familiar laws in new ways… See full description of Melanie Green and Jennifer Johnson’s cases in ibid., 72–73 and 75–79. Jennifer Johnson’s conviction was eventually overturned.
I had concerns about an unborn helpless child to be… Judge Peter Wolf, qtd. in ibid., 35. Now that it’s medical consensus that “crack babies” weren’t doomed at all, or if they were doomed, they were doomed by the social conditions that their government wasn’t doing enough to address, it seems apparent that this “concern” for unborn children should have been translating into expanded social services rather than the vilification of crack mothers themselves.
If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 212–13.
Holiday’s coauthor, journalist William Dufty, thought addiction would be a good “gimmick”… I’ve drawn this from John Szwed’s account of the publication history of Lady Sings the Blues in his biography Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (New York: Viking, 2015), 20. Even though Lady Sings the Blues warned against the dangers of addiction, its sales also ended up financially supporting Holiday’s habit. The idea to publish an autobiography was certainly driven by financial necessity: Holiday owed money to the IRS and couldn’t play most nightclubs in New York because her felony conviction meant she’d lost her cabaret license. She was looking for positive publicity that might help her get it back. But the same drug record that had taken away Holiday’s cabaret card also made it possible for her to earn money by selling her “sensational” story to glossy magazines, in articles called “How I Blew a Million Dollars,” “Can a Dope Addict Come Back,” and (trumpeting the tinny optimism she would ultimately disavow) a piece called “I’m Cured for Good.” One issue of Tan magazine featured a cover photo of Holiday in an emerald gown with white gardenias on her breast and her two white Chihuahuas in her arms. Account of the financial imperatives behind the autobiography’s publication is from Szwed, Billie Holiday, 12. “How I Blew a Million Dollars” ran in Our World, March 1953; “Can a Dope Addict Come Back” ran in Tan, February 1953; and “I’m Cured for Good” ran in Ebony, in July 1949.
I’ve been on and I’ve been off… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 218.
No Guts Holiday… Hari, Chasing the Scream, 23.
A habit is no damn private hell… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 218.
Dope never helped anybody sing better… Ibid., 214.
Carl… don’t you ever use this shit!… Carl Drinkard qtd. in Blackburn, With Billie, 230.
I want you to know you stand convicted as a wrongdoer… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 151.
Would he treat a diabetic like a criminal?… Ibid., 153.
She was born just a month after the Harrison Act came into effect… The Harrison Act was passed in December 1914 and became effective in March 1915. Holiday was born in April 1915.
for the sake of young kids whose whole life will be ruined…Lady Sings the Blues, 212.
William Burroughs’s Junkie, subtitled Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, was published in 1953… same year as Anslinger’s Traffic in Narcotics, and three years before the Narcotic Control Act. Part of a “Two Books in One” package from Ace Books, Junkie was sold for thirty-five cents and bound with Narcotic Agent, a memoir by a former undercover agent named Maurice Helbrant. In a picaresque of stings and busts and deceptions, Helbrant tells his story as an opposite narrative: the pursuit of the unredeemed junkie. But it emerges as a parallel tale instead, another account of addiction—a parade of vignettes in which a maniacal crusader is camped out with whiskey bottles in seedy motel rooms. Helbrant is obsessed with heroin: how to use it, how to fake using it, how to spot someone who is using it. His fixation on punishing the obsession of the addict became an obsession all its own. The moral indignation becomes another kind of drug, the crusade another kind of bender.
Given cooperation… William Burroughs, Junkie, 99.
an addict with “no pleading need to quit”… Hardwick, “Billie Holiday.”
With cold anger… Ibid.
Why do they keep putting her on stage? Surely they know she has a problem… Both newscasters qtd. in Amy (dir. Asif Kapadia, 2015).
the surplus of mystical properties… Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will,” Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 132.
Ever to confess you’re bored… John Berryman, “Dream Song 14,” The Dream Songs.
narrowing of repertoire… Meg Chisolm interview with the author, August 11, 2016.
through the turnstile… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.
the unmistakable feeling of coming home… Ibid.
Scientists describe addiction as a dysregulation… For a fuller account of the scientific mechanisms underlying addiction, see Carlton Erickson’s The Science of Addiction: From Neurobiology to Treatment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). In chapter 3 Erickson outlines the basic mechanisms of chemical dependence, while in chapters 5, 6, and 7 he reviews the specific mechanisms of various substances.
pathological usurpation… Ibid., 64.
FACTUAL GAIN AND LOSS CHART ON UN-CONTROLLED DRINKING… Factual Gain and Loss Chart on Un-Controlled Drinking, Archives at the Center for Alcohol Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
spiraling distress/addiction cycle… G. F. Koob and M. Le Moal, “Drug Abuse: Hedonic Homeostatic Dysregulation,” Science 278 (1997): 52–58.
the chart explaining the spiraling distress/addiction cycle looks like a tornado… Erickson, The Science of Addiction, 59.
When I look back at a night with a stranger in Nicaragua, I can say the GABA receptors in my neurons were activated by the rum in my veins… For a summary of several accounts of the mechanisms of alcohol on neurotransmitter systems, see Erickson, The Science of Addiction, 69. See also Neurochem Int. 37, no. 4 (October 2000): 369–76. “Alcohol enhances characteristic releases of dopamine and serotonin in the central nucleus of the amygdala.” Yoshimoto et al. “Alcohol and Neurotransmitter Interactions.” C. Fernando Valenzuela. NIAAA, http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh21-2/144.pdf.
When I’m drunk it’s all right… Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 262.
We’re all dependent people… John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 154.
densely affected by alcoholism… NIAA, “Collaborative Studies on Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) Study,” https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/research/major-initiatives/collaborative-studies-genetics-alcoholism-coga-study.
In so much of your writing… there are so many hooks to hang the pain on, but no explanation of where the poison coat came from… David Gorin, manuscript notes. August 2016.
The sky was bright red; everything was red… Elizabeth Bishop, “A Drunkard,” Georgia Review (1992). The fire that Bishop remembers witnessing was the Great Salem Fire of 1914. See Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Art of Losing,’” The New Yorker, March 6, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/elizabeth-bishops-art-of-losing.
half-hearted disclaimer… Brett C. Millier, “The Prodigal: Elizabeth Bishop and Alcohol,” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 54–76.
Why do you drink?… (Don’t really answer)… John Berryman, handwritten note, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
I told him I drank a lot… Marguerite Duras, “The Voice in Navire Night,” Practicalities (London: William Collins Sons, 1990).
The question of why stopped mattering… Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), 221–22.
In Junkie, Burroughs anticipates the questions… William Burroughs, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (New York: Ace Books, 1953), 5.
bottle as breast…Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.
WHETHER WICKEDNESS WAS SOLUBLE IN ART… John Berryman, from a prefatory sonnet he wrote in 1966, qtd. in John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: Methuen & Co., 1984), 183.
You licking your own old hurt… What the world to Henry… John Berryman, “Dream Song 74,” The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).
I am the little man who smokes & smokes… John Berryman, “Dream Song 22,” The Dream Songs.
in the mood / to be a tulip… John Berryman, “Dream Song 92” (“Room 231: the forth week”), The Dream Songs.
all regret, swallowing his own vomit… John Berryman, “Dream Song 310,” The Dream Songs.
the anger of anyone who has been close to an active alcoholic and gotten hurt… Lewis Hyde, “Berryman Revisited,” in Recovering Berryman, ed. Richard Kelly and Alan Lathrop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
Diet: poor…John Berryman, handwritten note, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
half crabbed, half generous… Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945), 43.
Who’s been putting pineapple juice in my pineapple juice… Anecdote cited in John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 107.
the fire of the tequila run down his spine… Lowry, Under the Volcano, 278.
his greatest weakness… into his greatest strength… Malcolm Lowry, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 41.
when Jackson published The Lost Weekend, in 1944, Lowry was devastated and indignant… For a wonderfully astute account of the Lowry-Jackson rivalry, see John Crowley’s The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
swift leathery perfumed alcoholic dusk… Lowry, Under the Volcano, 55.
were taking an eternal sacrament… Ibid., 50.
Do you realize that while you’re battling against death… Ibid., 281.
The will of man is unconquerable… Ibid., 118.
suddenly overwhelmed by sentiment… Ibid., 168.
cantina in the early morning… How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty… Ibid., 62–63.
Ah none but he knew how beautiful… Ibid., 115.
a great book about missing grandeur… Michael Wood, “The Passionate Egoist,” New York Review of Books, April 17, 2008.
Vague images of grief and tragedy… Lowry, Under the Volcano, 111.
Success may be the worst possible thing… Malcolm Lowry letter qtd. in D. T. Max, “Day of the Dead.” The New Yorker, December 17, 2007.
He is the original Consul in the book… Dawn Powell qtd. in D. T. Max, “Day of the Dead.”
His delirium tremens got so bad… Ibid.
A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing… Lowry, Under the Volcano, 232.
He had lost the sun… Ibid., 264.
creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs… Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2008), 1–2.
They have much in common with the society that ostracizes them… Ibid.
From the late sixties to the late eighties, the scientific studies that got the most press… John P. Morgan and Lynn Zimmer, “The Social Pharmacology of Smokeable Cocaine: Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be,” in Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, ed. Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 36.
the definition of a drug was any substance… Ibid.
“Cocaine Rat” was the title of a 1988 PSA video… Partnership for a Drug-Free America, “Cocaine Rat,” 1988. The pellets in the video are also misleading: most rats were surgically outfitted with a “permanent injection apparatus” in their backs. They were literally built for addiction, as well as being trapped in conditions that primed them for it.
In the early eighties, these scientists designed “Rat Park”… Bruce Alexander, “Addiction: The View from Rat Park,” 2010. The original results from Rat Park were published in B. K. Alexander et al., “Effect of Early and Later Colony Housing on Oral Ingestion of Morphine in Rats,” Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior 15, no. 4 (1981): 571–76. Carl Hart also gives an account of the “Rat Park” experiment in High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society (New York: Harper, 2013).
The results from the original Rat Park experiment have also been replicated. See S. Schenk et al., Neuroscience Letters 81 (1987): 227–31; and M. Solinas et al., Neuropsychopharmacology 34 (2009): 1102–11. For a graphic account of Rat Park, see Stuart McMillen’s “Rat Park.”
What was it that did in reality make me an opium eater?… Thomas De Quincey, “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” London Magazine, 1821.
the interior jigsaw’s missing piece… David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), 350.
The Collaborative Studies on Genetics of Alcoholism is an ongoing research project… The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines the mission and method of COGA as follows: “To learn more about how our genes affect vulnerability to alcoholism, NIAAA has funded the Collaborative Studies on Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) since 1989. Our goal is to identify the specific genes that can influence a person’s likelihood of developing alcoholism. COGA investigators have collected data on more than 2,255 extended families in which many members are affected by alcoholism. The researchers collected extensive clinical, neuropsychological, electrophysiological, biochemical, and genetic data on the more than 17,702 individuals who are represented in the database. The researchers also have established a repository of cell lines from these individuals to serve as a permanent source of DNA for genetic studies” (https://www.niaaa.nih .gov/research/major-initiatives/collaborative-studies-genetics-alcoholism-coga-study). More information about COGA, along with a fuller account of its findings, can be found in Laura Jean Bierut et al., “Defining Alcohol-Related Phenotypes in Humans: The Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism,” National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, June 2003, https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh26-3/208-213.html.
What contributes to being at greater risk for alcoholism? Traits associated with physiology (metabolism and organ sensitivity), with psychopharmacology (structures of reward and aversion in the brain), with personality (impulsivity and sensation-seeking), and with psychopathology (depression and anxiety). Carol A. Prescott, “What Twin Studies Teach Us about the Causes of Alcoholism,” paper for Samuel B. Guze Symposium on Alcoholism, Washington University School of Medicine, 2004, http://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/guzepresentation2004/4. The “alcohol dependence” phenotype was measured according to DSM and WHO classifications.
The evidence supporting a genetic basis for alcoholism is pretty much indisputable… One study examining alcohol abuse in twins showed a 76% concordance rate in monozygotic twins, and a 61% concordance rate in dizygotic twins. For more information, see Roy Pickens et al., “Heterogeneity in the Inheritance of Alcoholism: A Study of Male and Female Twins,” Archives of General Psychiatry 48, no. 1 (1981): 19–28. See also Erickson, The Science of Addiction: From Neurobiology to Treatment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 84–85.
For shame is its own veil… Denis Johnson, “Where the Failed Gods Are Drinking,” The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995).
The novel takes place in Manhattan during the summer of the 1967 Newark riots, evoking New York as an orchestra of noise and need and possibility… Cain summons the glamour and grit of Harlem at once, the “big shiny cars caught in neon sparkle like jewels” and the way these cars look “dull with dew and exhaustion in the morning,” as he watches from a diner at dawn, drinking coffee, and watching the fluorescence bring out the wrinkles of hungover revelers. When he visits the West Side housing projects where he was born, he describes Lincoln Center (“marble bathroom, carpeted halls, chandeliers”), which is right across the street but a world away—“I ain’t never been anywhere like that,” one woman explains, “wouldn’t know how to act, got nobody to go with.” One of the defining features of Cain’s experience has been feeling like a mascot of upward mobility—a carrier of collective dreams, and an ambassador between worlds: “Did not think of myself as black or white,” he says, “but marginal man, existing somewhere in time and space on the edge of both.” He feels anger at having been expected to carry this burden of upward mobility in the first place, and shame about the ways he has failed. George Cain, Blueschild Baby (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), 50, 69, 115, 177.
a strange moon hung in the sky… calm, terribly sudden and infinite… Ibid., 197–99.
a character who is smart and full of yearning, but often acts aggressively, even callously… The character of George Cain is adamantly—purposefully— objectionable. Much of his aggression directs itself at white characters, and the novel refuses to apologize for it or condemn it—it simply dramatizes this aggression, and never forgets its context. Cain forces himself on a white teenage girl, neglects his daughter’s (white) mother, and fantasizes about killing a white man. Instead of papering over his character’s anger in deference to respectability politics, Cain allows this anger to live on the page, alongside depictions of all the social realities that lie beneath it.
bones scraping against one another inside… Ibid., 200.
to live life unhindered… Ibid., 7.
nodding junkies… victims of the Newark rebellion… no longer [as] the chosen driven to destruction by their awareness and frustration, but only lost victims, too weak to fight… Ibid., 129.
I knew better… Quotes from Jo Lynne Pool and almost all of the biographical information about George Cain in this section, from the interview conducted on March 30, 2016.
he had the makings of a book… Jo Lynne Pool interview with the author, March 30, 2016. Cain also had the makings of a book jacket bio. The first edition from McGraw-Hill is careful to disclaim its author’s bio as one Cain himself wrote. “The author writes: ‘George Cain was born Scorpio, 1943, in Harlem Hospital, New York City. Attended public and private schools in the city, and entered Iona College on scholarship. Left in his junior year to travel, spending time in California, Mexico, Texas, and prisons.’”
the most important work of fiction by an Afro-American… Addison Gayle Jr., review of Blueschild Baby, by George Cain, New York Times, January 17, 1971, 3.
George Cain, former addict, emerges phoenix-like… Ibid.
A few days after getting his first royalty check, he ran into one of his friend’s little brothers on the street and took him to a record store nearby… Rasheed Ali, “Tribute to a ‘Ghetto Genius,’” The Black American Muslim, http://www.theblackamericanmuslim.com/george-cain/.
What were you like when you were doing well?… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.
Drugs dashed these hopes… William Grimes, “George Cain, Writer of ‘Blueschild Baby,’ Dies at 66,” New York Times, October 29, 2010.
The book was subtitled A Love Story…Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story (New York: The Dial Press, 1996).
Last year our drunken quarrels had no explanation… Robert Lowell, “Summer Tides,” New Selected Poems, ed. Katie Peterson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2017.
Dear Sir: This is a funny letter… Ervin Cornell letter to the US Bureau of Narcotics, June 26, 1939. RG 511—Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, National Institute of Mental Health, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
nearly three thousand people showed up each year requesting entry… Nancy D. Campbell, J. P. Olsen, and Luke Walden, The Narcotic Farm (New York: Abrams, 2010), 63.
If theres any way in the world to be cured I wont to try it… J. S. Northcutt to Federal Bureau of Narcotics, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
I have been smoking marijuana cigarettes for six years… Milton Moses to Federal Bureau of Narcotics, May 8, 1938, RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
Dear Sir, I would like very much… Paul Youngman to Federal Bureau of Narcotics, December 1, 1945. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
PLEASE SEND APPLICATION FORMS… Chester Socar telegraph to “Bureau of Narcotics,” September 6, 1941. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
The press called the Narco Farm a “New Deal for Addicts”… Campbell et al., The Narcotic Farm, 12.
a Lexington newspaper ran a contest to get suggestions from local residents… Ibid., 36–37.
In truth, the prison-hospital-Big-Shot-Dream-Castle was still figuring out what it was… In addition to “rehabilitating” addicts—or ostensibly in service of the rehabilitation of addicts everywhere—the Narco Farm also used its residents as test subjects in a series of ongoing experiments (ostensibly in service of the rehabilitation of addicts everywhere). Many of these experiments were questioned by ethical boards decades later, during the 1950s. The Narco Farm’s Addiction Research Center was conducting groundbreaking but deeply controversial experiments into the mechanisms of withdrawal and the possibilities of a non-addictive opiate painkiller, and was one of the first places that ever tested methadone treatments. For more information, see Campbell et al., The Narcotic Farm.
courteous treatment that we discovered at the farm… Ibid., 83. The other details of life at Lexington in this paragraph are also taken from this history, including the particulars of labor and recreation: tomatoes and dentistry and dairy farming.
a magician named Lippincott performed at the Narco Farm… “Magician to Appear at Hospital Tonight,” Lexington Leader, November 15, 1948. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
In 1937, the hospital logged 4,473 collective patient hours of horseshoe tossing and 8,842 hours of bowling… Campbell et al., The Narcotic Farm, 142.
banana-smoking epidemic… William Burroughs Jr., Kentucky Ham (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 100.
So many musicians… at Lexington… Campbell et al., The Narcotic Farm, 152.
The treatment is, for the most part, a skillful rearrangement… Robert Casey, “Destiny of Man ‘Traded In’ at Kentucky Laboratory,” Chicago Daily News, August 23, 1938. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland. A front-page story in the Atlanta Georgian ran under a cartoon showing a long line of addicts marching toward the soaring towers of the Narco Farm with a blinding sun captioned as “Public Enlightenment.” The story’s message was earnest: Every state should have a Narco Farm because it was a necessary humanitarian reform. But the Narco Farm was uneasily perched between grand rhetoric and de facto punishment, and much of its rhetoric of rehabilitation rang hollow in practice. Many addicts had come to their addictions to escape the trap of their lives, then found themselves trapped again, inside the habit itself, and so they’d sought the promised liberty of another containment—the Narco Farm itself.
“Not very much” / “You mean Not Very Well”… Clarence Cooper Jr., The Farm (New York: Crown, 1967), 27.
Name: Robert Burnes… “Report on Non-Medical Addict,” October 24, 1944. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
It meant you didn’t have to build the rituals of fellowship from scratch… The feeling of being liberated by the constraints of ritual is nothing singular: it’s part of nearly every religious tradition—but Leon Wieseltier expresses it with particular precision when he describes how the mourning ritual of Kaddish saved him from having to improvise his grief: “I see again that the kaddish is my good fortune. It looks after the externalities, and so it saves me from the task of improvising the rituals of my bereavement, which is a lot to ask.” From Kaddish (New York: Vintage, 2000), 39.
this was the answer—self-knowledge… All these quotes are from “Bill’s Story,” chapter one of Alcoholics Anonymous, more commonly called the “Big Book.”
I felt lifted up, as though the great clean wind of a mountain top… Also quoted from “Bill’s Story,” Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill Wilson’s hospital epiphany story bore a strong resemblance to a conversation narrative he’d grown up hearing from his own grandfather, Grandpa Willy: the story of Willy’s liberation from “demon rum,” which happened when he encountered God on the top of Mount Aeolus, in Vermont. This echo doesn’t make the story false, it only testifies to the way we craft our salvation narratives from whatever materials we have at hand—the stories we’ve inherited, the ones we find ourselves needing most. For fuller accounts of Wilson’s grandfather’s conversion story, see Susan Cheever’s My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson—His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous (New York: Washington Square Press, 2005); or Don Lattin, Distilled Spirits: Getting High, Then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
his autobiography confessed a few more binges after this visit… Bill Wilson always expressed aversion to writing an autobiography, but eventually—in order to preempt inaccuracies in the biographies he sensed would be written—he recorded his life in a series of taped conversations in 1954 that were eventually published in 2000 as Bill W.: My First Forty Years (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2000).
rather than pinning sobriety on the type of intense spiritual experience that some people might never have… When Wilson experimented with LSD, years later, these experiments were largely driven by the hope that perhaps everyone could have intense spiritual experiences like the one he had at Charles B. Towns Hospital—visionary and overpowering—and that, if they could have these experiences, it might be easier for them to stick with sobriety.
play the foundations… down… Wilson, Bill W.: My First Forty Years.
number-one man… This quote from Bill Wilson appears in the 2012 documentary made about his life: Bill W. (dir. Kevin Hanlon). This feature-length documentary about Wilson explores his conflicted feelings about the intense veneration that accompanied his status as AA’s founder. He found himself the “number-one man” in a sphere where he didn’t want his story to be more important than anyone else’s.
I am like you… I, too, am fallible… Bill Wilson remarks (“Every Reason to Hope”) at closing session, AA Conference, Prince George Hotel, April 27, 1958, Stepping Stones Archives, WGW 103, Bx. 31, F. 6. Access to Stepping Stones Archives and use of excepts from its materials does not imply that the author’s views or conclusions in this publication have been reviewed or are endorsed by Stepping Stones. The conclusions expressed herein, and the research on which they are based, are the sole responsibility of the author. All excerpts in this work from Stepping Stones Archives are used with permission of Stepping Stones—Historic Home of Bill & Lois Wilson, Katonah, NY, 10536, steppingstones.org, (914) 232-4822.
He wrote a letter to an AA member named Barbara… This letter to Barbara is quoted in the documentary Bill W. Responding to a note in which a woman named Barbara had accused him of “disappointing” her, Wilson explains that an impossible perch had been constructed for him, an “illusory pedestal no fallible man could occupy.” He didn’t want his story to be regarded as sacred artifact.
I have always been intensely averse… Wilson, Bill W.: My First Forty Years, 2.
Ed and I just had a good laugh about the Wall Street days… Ibid., 80.
behaved like a bunch of actors sent out by some Broadway casting agency… Jack Alexander, “Alcoholics Anonymous: Freed Slaves of Drink, Now They Free Others,” Saturday Evening Post, March 1, 1941.
spends many of her nights sitting on hysterical women drinkers… Ibid.
For many a day you will be the toast of AA… Bill Wilson to Jack Alexander, January 6, 1941, Alcoholics Anonymous, Digital Archives.
By the end of 1941, the program had more than 8,000 members… Statistics for 1941 membership from the foreword to the second edition of the Big Book, http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/en_bigbook_forewordsecondedition.pdf.
Statistics for 2015 from AA General Service Office, http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/smf-53_en.pdf.
French philosopher Catherine Malabou proposes three different models of recovery, attaching each one to an animal: the phoenix, the spider, and the salamander… Catherine Malabou, “The Phoenix, the Spider, and the Salamander,” Changing Difference, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 74–75.
covered with marks, nicks, scratches… Ibid., 76–77.
There is no scar, but there is a difference… Ibid., 82.
witness authority… Meg Chisolm interview with the author, August 11, 2016.
You’d be doing heroin, too, Doctor… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.
contingency management and community reinforcement… In addition to recognizing the effectiveness of twelve-step treatment itself in supporting addiction recovery, The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) recognizes four major types of behavioral treatment that have proven effective: cognitive-behavioral therapy, contingency management, community reinforcement, and motivational enhancement therapy. (Some of these are supplied by twelve-step groups, like community reinforcement and contingency management, though these groups are not the only means by which they can be found or sustained.) One study found that three kinds of therapeutic treatment (cognitive behavior, motivational enhancement, and twelve-step facilitation) achieved roughly equal levels of abstinence after a year, with twelve-step facilitation achieving higher levels of abstinence among patients with low psychiatric severity. See “Matching Alcoholism Treatments to Client Heterogeneity: Project MATCH Posttreatment Drinking Outcome,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 58, no. 1 (January 1997): 7–29.
people who need to hear themselves confessing… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.
You’re really smart… Meg Chisolm interview with the author, August 11, 2016.
mystical blah blah… Jackson qtd. in Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013), 144.
You S.O.B.! If you don’t think… Ibid., 147.
solution [is] offered, so to speak, and then taken away, not used… Charles Jackson to Stanley Rinehart, 1943, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
care to learn or hear of the real, the uncomfortable… Jackson, The Lost Weekend, 113.
I couldn’t get outside myself… Charles Jackson, speech, Cleveland, Ohio, May 7, 1959.
I tell you, boy, there is much, much more to AA… Charles Jackson to Charles Brackett, September 14, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
But at a Hartford AA chapter… See Bailey, Farther and Wilder, for a fuller account of Jackson’s visit to the Hartford AA meeting (145).
These people knew about me… Charles Jackson qtd. in ibid., 310.
I am thinking solely of the responsibility that is yours… C. Dudley Saul qtd. in ibid., 308–9.
intellectual equals… Charles Jackson qtd. in ibid., 308.
When he called one AA chapter in Montpelier… Incident described in ibid., 312.
Through his sponsor, he grew increasingly enamored with a quote from G. K. Chesterton… Chesterton quote (and Jackson’s affection for it) cited in ibid., 337.
It’s all so easy and natural and no posing or anything… Rhoda Jackson to Frederick Storier Jackson (nicknamed “Boom”), November 24, 1953, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
vegetable health… Charles Jackson, “The Sleeping Brain,” unpublished manuscript, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
Please don’t squirm at this… Charles Jackson to Walter and Merriman Modell, January 9, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
like visiting a birth control clinic… Richard Lamparski qtd. in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 347.
the members simply wouldn’t let him go… Jackson qtd. in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 339.
star pupil… new addiction… Ibid., 341, 346.
My dear Charlie, Thanks for your thoughtfulness… Bill Wilson to Charles Jackson. April 24, 1961, Stepping Stones Foundation Archives. WGW 102.2 Bx. 15, F. 1-9.
Jackson landed a commission with Life to write a two-part article about AA… See account of Jackson’s Life commission in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 320.
What luck, I thought… Raymond Carver, “Luck,” All of Us: The Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1998), 5.
Alcoholics get to a point in the program where they need a spiritual experience… Wilson qtd. in Lattin, Distilled Spirits, 198. For a more complete account of Bill Wilson’s experiments with LSD, see Distilled Spirits. See also Alcoholics Anonymous, ‘Pass It On’: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the AA Message Reached the World (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Service Inc., 1984).
Describing that first trip to a friend, Wilson compared it to his early visions of AA as a “chain of drunks around the world, all helping each other”… Osmond qtd. in Lattin, Distilled Spirits, 195.
helped him eliminate many barriers erected by the self, or ego, that stand in the way of one’s direct experiences of the cosmos and of god… Ibid., 206.
cynical alcoholics… Lattin, Distilled Spirits, from an interview with Will Forthman. No surprise that Bill Wilson’s acid trip echoed the vision he’d had at Towns, where he had been given a hallucinogen called belladonna. Describing the “residue” of his early acid trips, Wilson extolled the virtues of his “heightened” appreciation of “the livingness of all things and a sense of their beauty.” Wilson to Sidney Cohen, Stepping Stones Foundation Archives, qtd. in Distilled Spirits, 198. Wilson didn’t imagine that acid would replace the program’s emphasis on listening and humility. “I consider LSD to be of some value to some people,” he once remarked, “[but it] will never take the place of any of the existing means by which we can reduce the ego, and keep it reduced” (Alcoholics Anonymous, ‘Pass It On,’ 370).
Most AAs were violently opposed to his experimenting with a mind-altering substance… Alcoholics Anonymous, ‘Pass It On,’ 372.
spook sessions… Nell Wing qtd. in Lattin, Distilled Spirits, 194.
One turned up the other day calling himself Boniface… Wilson to Ed Dowling, July 17, 1952, from Bill Wilson and Ed Dowling, The Soul of Sponsorship: The Friendship of Fr. Ed Dowling and Bill Wilson in Letters (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1995).
first things first… take it easy… Bill Wilson, handwritten notes, Stepping Stones Foundation Archives, Katonah, New York. WGW 101.7, Bx. 7, F. 6.
Are you going to stop smoking… Bill Wilson, handwritten note, Stepping Stones Foundation Archives, Katonah, New York. WGW 101.7, Bx. 7, F. 6.
Suggested that at this point “John” speak extemporaneously… General Service Headquarters of AA, “Pattern-Script for Radio and Television,” February 1957, 2. This 1957 “pattern script” was actually an update to an existing “pattern script.” Collection at the Center of Alcohol Studies, Rutgers University.
when a clinician described the classic addict temperament as stubbornly focused on the present moment… Adam Kaplin interview with the author, October 13, 2016.
like hungry men who can talk about nothing but food… William Burroughs, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (New York: Ace Books, 1953), 63.
There’s just nothing to do, nothing—except talk about junk… Helen MacGill Hughes, ed., The Fantastic Lodge: The Autobiography of a Girl Drug Addict (New York: Fawcett, 1961), 214. The Fantastic Lodge was marketed as a “case study”: the life story of a pseudonymous female heroin addict based on tape-recorded interviews conducted and edited, respectively, by sociologists Howard Becker and Helen MacGill Hughes. It illuminates the particular experience of being a woman suffering from a largely male addiction, and offers a vision of an addict’s story constructed and articulated for sociological (rather than strictly literary) purposes.
She had come to put great hope in getting this book published… Ibid., 266.
Cured, prognosis good (3) / Cured, prognosis guarded (27) / Cured, prognosis poor (10)… “The Annual Report, Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1945, U.S. Public Service Hospital, Lexington, Kentucky,” submitted to the Surgeon General by J. D. Reichard, Medical Director USPHS, Medical Officer in Charge—August 11, 1945. RG 511, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.
Everyone’s cute after twelve cocktails… For a fuller account of Trishelle, Steven, and Frank—the one I knew my editor would make me cut—see http://www.mtv.com/news/2339854/real-world-las-vegas-hookups/.
Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon…The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980), screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson.
Would he ever have an hour… Stephen King, The Shining (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 25.
clenched tightly in his lap, working against each other, sweating… Ibid. See references to clenched or sweaty hands on 7, 53, 186, 269, 394.
If a man reforms… Ibid., 346–47.
One for every month I’ve been on the wagon… Ibid., 350.
The floor of the Wagon… Ibid., 354.
looking at him expectantly, silently… Ibid., 508–9.
Jack brought the drink to his mouth… Ibid., 509.
What was he doing in a bar with a drink in his hand?… Ibid., 507.
It was just before the curtain of Act II… Ibid., 356.
You had to make him drink the Bad Stuff. That’s the only way you could get him… Ibid., 632.
almost guiltily, as if he had been drinking secretly… Ibid., 242.
he gets the same sensation he usually felt… Ibid., 267.
The party was over… Ibid., 641.
without even realizing… that I was writing about myself… Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner, 2000), 95. King wrote denial into Jack while he was still deep in denial himself, projecting onto his character not only his addiction but also the delusion of its absence. “He hadn’t believed he was an alcoholic,” King wrote about Jack. He always told himself, “Not me, I can stop anytime” (The Shining, 55).
I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore… King, On Writing, 98. Even when Stephen King wasn’t fully facing his addiction, he writes, “the deep part of me that knew I was an alcoholic… began to scream for help in the only way it knew how, through my fiction and through my monsters” (96). King has described three of his novels—The Shining, Misery, and Tommyknockers—as attempts to articulate his problem to himself: Tommyknockers was about “alien creatures that got into your head and just started… well, tommyknocking around in there. What you got was energy and a kind of superficial intelligence” (97). It wasn’t a subtle sublimation: Energy + superficial intelligence = cocaine. He wrote the book in 1986, when he wasn’t just metaphorizing coke but madly metabolizing it, “often working until midnight with my heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding” (96). He bled all over that story, but it was Misery—the story of a deranged nurse named Annie and her terrorized patient, the writer she holds hostage—that finally got him to quit: “Annie was coke,” he wrote, “Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer” (98).
The fantasy of every alcoholic…The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, ed. by K. W. M. Fulford et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 872.
You are walking along a road peacefully… Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 450.
Rumors spread that she’d died at a sanitarium… Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 437.
the late Jean Rhys… Hunter Davies, “Rip van Rhys,” Sunday Times, November 6, 1966, 6.
Will anyone knowing her whereabouts… Selma Vaz Dias, personal advertisement, The New Statesman, November 1949. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
MRS. HAMER AGITATED…Beckenham and Penge Advertiser qtd. in Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 451.
But who was JEAN RHYS and WHERE WAS SHE?… After receiving Rhys’s reply to her advertisement, Vaz Dias went to visit her “in a daze of excitement.” Rhys answered the door wearing a “long pink housecoat,” and to Vaz Dias she seemed like a woman lost to the world: “I immediately knew that for her there was little distinction between night and day.” Rhys was “parched for a drink” when they met, so Vaz Dias walked “miles in cold stark Beckenham to find a pub, and succeeded after some effort in buying some doubtful sherry.” Selma Vaz Dias, “It’s Easy to Disappear,” manuscript draft, 3. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
Jean’s life… really did seem to be the same few scenes… Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 455.
Magna est veritas et praevalet…Truth is great and it prevails… Ibid., 362.
NO teas—NO water—NO lavatory… Jean Rhys, qtd. in ibid., 475. It was while living in Cheriton Fitzpaine, in need of money, that Rhys made an ill-advised deal with Vaz Dias: Rhys signed away half the profits to any adaptation of her work, a mistake she would later call “The Adventure of the Drunken Signature.” See a fuller account of this “adventure” in Angier’s biography, which is the source for much of the information in this book about Rhys’s life in Cheriton Fitzpaine.
I’m struggling with a new thing… Rhys to Eliot Bliss, June 28, 1957, Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
I am drunk every morning, almost, at Yaddo… Patricia Highsmith qtd. in Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 255.
there were four things [he] did every day… Lee Stringer, Grand Central Winter (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998), 17.
in the pipe… Ibid., 111.
yeasty anticipation… caramel-and-ammonia smoke… yellow-orange glow [that] blossoms, wavers, recedes… Ibid., 220.
clinging to the idea of finishing… Ibid., 247.
As soon as I am not able to be personal… Charles Jackson to Mary McCarthy, November 24, 1953, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
consolation, repose, beauty, or energy… beauty delusively attributed to the magical element… Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will,” Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993), 132.
My God I’ll never take another drink… John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 83.
a killer and a fighter… Qtd. in Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 442.
going over and over miseries of one sort and another… Diana Melly qtd. in ibid., 649.
has proved herself to be enamoured of gloom… Rebecca West, “The Pursuit of Misery in Some of the New Novels,” The Daily Telegraph, January 30, 1931. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
“Fated to Be Sad”… Hannah Carer, “Fated to Be Sad: Jean Rhys Talks to Hannah Carter,” Guardian, August 8, 1968, 5.
pre-destined role, the role of victim… Rhys qtd. in Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 588.
End of moan in minor… Jean Rhys to Peggy Kirkaldy, July 8, 1948, Jean Rhys Letters, 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), 47. “The nuns used to say that there were only two sins, Presumption and Despair,” Rhys wrote in an undated handwritten fragment. “I don’t know which mine is” (Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa).
Everyone saw the characters in her books as victims… Jean Rhys, interview. “Every Day Is a New Day,” Radio Times, November 21, 1974, 6. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
I’m a person at a masked ball without a mask… Mary Cantwell, “Conversation with Jean Rhys, ‘the Best Living English Novelist,’” Mademoiselle, October 1974, 170. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
I am not an ardent Women’s Libber… Rhys qtd. in Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 631.
I see an angry woman who had good reason to be angry… Lillian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009), 308.
tortured and tormented mask… Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 369–70. Rhys was constantly dissecting self-pity by pulling apart the threads of its alibis and its promises, punishing herself with the hair shirts of her unflattering literary avatars. One of her male characters, regarding one of her heroines, thinks: “Surely even she must see that she was trying to make a tragedy out of a situation that was fundamentally comical” (Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in The Complete Novels, 251). This boomerang perspective allows Rhys to do so much more than simply inhabit a state of self-pity: She conjures how it must look from the outside, and how absurd it must seem. In Voyage in the Dark, she conjures Anna’s vulnerability in precise and unsettling terms: “I was so nervous about how I looked that three-quarters of me was in a prison,” Anna thinks, “wandering round and round in a circle.” A woman “three-quarters” in prison is far more specific—and much more interesting—than a woman simply imprisoned. A woman “three-quarters” in prison is also hovering outside herself, her remaining quarter measuring the terms and severity of her incarceration—poking fun at what it means to parse the difference between two-thirds and three-fourths jailed (Voyage in the Dark, in The Complete Novels, 47).
a tall hat with a green feather… Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels, 370.
fall into the hands of someone whom it would help… John Lloyd qtd. in Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013), 168.
to solve psychiatric problems… Charles Jackson qtd. in May R. Marion, “CJ Speaks at Hartford AA,” AA Grapevine, January 1945. Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 168.
What do you know, I’m drinking again… Charles Jackson to Rhoda Jackson, qtd. in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 226.
Nothing could make me take another drink… Charles Jackson, in a 1948 promotional brochure released by Rinehart and Company, called The Lost Novelist, qtd. in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 238.
AUTHOR OF LOST WEEKEND LOSES ONE HIMSELF… Ibid., 283. The results of Jackson’s head-on car crash were surprisingly minor. As Bailey reports, the passengers of the other car suffered only minor injuries, and Jackson himself emerged seemingly unharmed.
I realized yesterday… how he managed to stop drinking… Rhoda Jackson to Frederick Storrier Jackson, July 3, 1947, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
No telling what might happen next time but why worry about that?… Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), 244.
Chas. & Billy based their movie version far less on the book… Charles Jackson to Robert Nathan, February 19, 1945, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
You watch, baby… See accounts of Billie Holiday’s death in John Szwed, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (New York: Viking, 2015); and Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). See also the obituary in the New York Times: “Billie Holiday Dies Here at 44; Jazz Singer Had Wide Influence,” July 18, 1959.
an open wound… vocal cords flayed… Michael Brooks qtd. in Szwed, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, 194.
Now I’m going to eat breakfast!… Qtd. in Julia Blackburn, With Billie: A New Look at the Unforgettable Lady Day (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 171.
I had seen pictures of her ten years before… Ellis qtd. in ibid., 269.
other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses… Studs Terkel qtd. in Szwed, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, 105.
She tried to breast-feed her godson from breasts that didn’t have milk… Much of this information is drawn from Szwed, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, 44–45.
Everyone and I stopped breathing… Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died,” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Why do you deserve another chance… This exchange is excerpted from a transcription of a drug-court trial included in an ethnographic account of drug courts. Stacy Lee Burns and Mark Peyrot, “Tough Love: Nurturing and Coercing Responsibility and Recovery in California Drug Courts,” Social Problems 50, no. 3 (August 2003): 433.
The first drug court was established in Miami in 1989, and by June 2015 there were more than 3,142 operating in the United States (National Institute of Justice, “Drug Courts,” http://www.nij.gov/topics/courts/drug-courts/pages/welcome .aspx). New York, Maryland, Kansas, and Washington were some of the first states to pass legislation like California’s Proposition 36 (2000), which essentially made drug courts the mandatory default for all low-level offenders. Scott Ehlers and Jason Ziedenberg, “Proposition 36: Five Years Later,” Justice Policy Institute (April 2006).
As sociologists Burns and Peyrot put it, drug court is about “demonstrating the recovering self” (“Tough Love,” 430)—the new self that is strong enough to resist addiction. Defendants are required to follow an individualized treatment plan mandated by a drug court judge. These plans typically include AA/NA meetings, counseling sessions, vocational training, in- or out-patient rehab, and urine tests. There is often a graduation ceremony at the end of the program, complete with applause and chocolate cake, cap and gown, and T-shirts that say “Refuse to Abuse” or “Hooked on Recovery” (433).
tongue lashings…“I’m tired of your excuses!”…“I’m through with you!”… Terance D. Miethe, Hong Lu, and Erin Reese, “Reintegrative Shaming and Recidivism Risks in Drug Court: Explanations for Some Unexpected Findings,” Crime and Delinquency 46 (2000): 522, 536–37. Drug courts depend on a theory of “reintegrative shaming,” the idea that being publicly shamed can bring an offender back into the folds of the community. Reintegrative shaming is predicated on the idea that the shame is directed away from the person and toward the act itself, though drug courts in practice often dissolve this distinction.
salvageable… irremediably deficient… Burns and Peyrot, “Tough Love,” 428–29.
There isn’t a soul on this earth who can say for sure that their fight with dope is over until they’re dead… Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 220.
Yes, Nic relapsed… David Sheff, “Afterword,” Beautiful Boy (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 323–24.
stopping-drinking and… enormous interest in AA… a lot to do with this new attitude… Charles Jackson to Walter and Merriman Modell, January 9, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
At that point, Jackson was working on the book he imagined would become his magnum opus: an epic novel called What Happened…What Happened wasn’t meant to be explicitly about recovery, and in this way it was distinct from The Working Out, Jackson’s hypothetical sequel to The Lost Weekend, committed to how Don “got out of it.” But for a time Jackson wrote the early pages of What Happened under the influence, as it were, of the recovery ethos he’d found in AA.
novel of affirmation and acceptance of life… Charles Jackson to Stanley Rinehart et al., February 27, 1948, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
would be host to the gathering… Charles Jackson to Stanley Rinehart, March 8, 1945, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
working on every conceivable thing… Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013), 346.
it’s far & away the best thing I’ve done, simpler, more honest… Charles Jackson to Walter and Merriman Modell, January 9, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
I can put it best by saying the story happens… Charles Jackson to Roger Straus, December 30, 1953, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
It is really wonderful, simple, plain, human, life itself—nothing in the dazzling intellectual class… Charles Jackson to Roger Straus, January 8, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
can do just about what it pleases…I please to make it plain, like everyday people… Ibid.
life unfolding moment by moment… careless and rambling… total lack of originality… Charles Jackson to Dorothea Straus, qtd. in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, 318.
all of it outside of myself—outside!… Charles Jackson to “Angel,” January 8, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
loyalty to my wife, helped at times by extreme drunkenness… “Bill’s Story,” Alcoholics Anonymous, 3.
What has bothered me most about myself all my life?… John Berryman, “Fourth Step Inventory Guide,” undated, c. 1970–71, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
inviting the prisoners to have dinner at his house… See John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (London: Methuen & Co., 1984), 408.
Hurts oneself. Always for the unchangeable…John Berryman, handwritten note, undated, c. 1970–71, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
the so-called Minnesota Model… The “Minnesota Model,” what we now think of as “rehab,” was developed in the mid-fifties at a place called Willmar State Hospital, an “inebriate asylum” in Willmar, Minnesota, which had been practicing custodial care for late-stage alcoholics for decades. (It was originally called the Willmar Hospital Farm for Inebriates when it opened in 1912.) Their more holistic program model, officially launched in 1954, was based on AA principles but designed for residential patients, and it believed in the possibility of recovery: They unlocked the doors to the inebriate ward, started giving lectures to the patients, and hired sober alcoholic counselors to work with them. Creating positions officially designated for alcoholic counselors met with resistance from many corners. Governor Clyde Elmer Anderson was “laughed at” when he first advocated for the position of an “alcoholic counselor” in the civil service system, and AA members were worried about members getting paid for the “twelve-step” work that was a crucial part of their program. But Willmar had a close and collaborative relationship with AA, and with another treatment facility nearby: a farmhouse called Hazelden that would eventually become one of the most famous rehabs in America. Hazelden started small in 1949 (only two years after Holiday was incarcerated for her addiction) with just four patients in residence at a time. On its first Christmas, there were only two patients; one cooked Christmas dinner for the other. The only medication they handed out was a placebo pill given to newcomers who said they didn’t feel good, but they did start handing out personalized coffee cups to every resident. The Minnesota Model of treatment, which rose from these early facilities, focused on community bonding and shifted attention away from a psychoanalytic approach to alcoholism (finding its cause), instead stressing the idea that structured daily living practices could produce sobriety. The Minnesota Model expanded rapidly over the sixties, seventies, and eighties (someone described Hazelden in 1968, with 1,420 patients, as “Grand Central Station at Rush Hour”) and eventually it came to be known simply as “rehab.” (Its origins in Minnesota were also part of how the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes earned its other nickname, the “Land of Ten Thousand Treatment Centers.”) Information on the development of the Minnesota Model and the early days of Hazelden comes from William White’s Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America (Bloomington, IL: Chestnut Health Systems, 1998).
Wife left me after 11 yrs of marriage bec. of drinking… John Berryman, handwritten note, 1970, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
a list of his “Responsibilities”… John Berryman, handwritten fourth step, November 8 (1970 or 1971), John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
When Berryman started to consider writing a novel about recovery… The shift in genre (from poetry to novel) was also significant for Berryman. The form of the novel allowed for narrative progression, or its explicit disruption or repudiation, rather than lyric moments existing in temporal isolation. The shift from one genre to another also facilitated other structural shifts: away from experiments in voice and image and toward a psychological portrait rendered through scenic interactions.
useful 12th step work… John Berryman, handwritten note, undated, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
He thought of calling the novel Korsakov’s Syndrome on the Grave but found he preferred I Am an Alcoholic…Give half my royalties to—who? Not AA—they won’t take it… Ibid.
This summary & deluded account of the beginning of my recovery… John Berryman, typewritten draft fragment of Recovery, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
The Post-Novel: Fiction as Wisdom-Work… Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 396. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano was on Berryman’s syllabus.
Good, evil, love, hate, life, death, beauty, ugliness… All quotations from “The Trial of Jean Rhys” are from an unpublished handwritten notebook entry that can be found in the 1952 diary known as the “Ropemakers’ Diary,” so-called because Rhys kept it while staying at an inn called the Ropemakers Arms in 1951–52. Jean Rhys Archive, University of Tulsa.
I do not know others. I see them as trees walking… In this moment in “The Trial of Jean Rhys,” Rhys is most likely alluding to the Gospel of Mark, verses 22–25, when a blind man is brought to Jesus to be healed. The first time Jesus heals him, the man’s sight is only partially restored. He looks up and says, “I see men, for I see them like trees, walking around.” Then Jesus lays his hands on the blind man again, and his sight is fully restored: he “began to see everything clearly.” It’s a vexed moment of flawed and partial salvation (the man’s sight is not fully restored the first time around), and Rhys’s invocation is a painful one: she does not seem to be imagining this fullness of vision as possible for herself.
If I can do this book, it won’t matter so much will it?…Rhys’s hunger for redemption—the idea that writing well enough could help her “earn death”—evokes the ghost of her mother, stirring guava jam in the pot and reading The Sorrows of Satan, the story of Satan’s desire for a redemption he couldn’t ever achieve. If Rhys was going to fail at loving others, she wanted to redeem her failures by writing them brilliantly.
powerful argument against biography itself… A. Alvarez, “Down and Out in Paris and London,” New York Review of Books, October 10, 1991.
Write 8 or 9–1 pm in study… John Berryman, handwritten note, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
We worked like I never did at Lexington… William Burroughs Jr. Kentucky Ham (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 155.
You know what work does?… Ibid., 174.
It’s purely a clinical study… it’s only a small part of yours… achieving something that was unique… Lowry, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 24–25. For my discussion of Lowry’s anxieties about publishing Under the Volcano after it had already been “scooped” by Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, I drew on John Crowley’s The White Logic and its wonderful account of the rivalry between Jackson and Lowry. In Lowry’s unpublished novel Dark as the Grave, Sigbjørn’s disappointment is sharpened by his sense that his alcoholism was the thing that would finally let him break “new ground,” that it would finally release him from the “suspicion that he would never write anything original.” Like Rhys, he’d hoped that his work would be the thing that redeemed his ruined life: If I can do this book, it won’t matter so much, will it?
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.
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).
You’re special—it’s OK… Wallace letter to Evan Wright, qtd. in D. T. Max, “D.F.W.’s Favorite Grammarian,” The New Yorker, December 11, 2013, 285.
Her name is Gwen, and she’s an alcoholic… This section based on interviews conducted with Gwen, January 22, 2015, telephone, and March 10, 2015, in person.
His name is Marcus, and he’s an alcoholic and an addict… Material in this section drawn from interviews with Marcus conducted July 28, 2015, telephone, and November 3, 2015, in person.
How did you negotiate that anger?… National Public Radio, “Program Targets Rehab Help for Federal Inmates,” Morning Edition, September 27, 2006.
Her name is Shirley, and she’s an alcoholic… Material in this section drawn from interviews conducted March 6, 2015, telephone; March 20, 2015, telephone; and August 10, 11, 12, in person.
Remember that we deal with alcohol—cunning, baffling, powerful!…Alcoholics Anonymous, 58.
What you really want is to stay just who you are and not drink… John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 141.
stunted and complexly deformed… David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), 744.
grudging move toward maybe acknowledging… Ibid., 350.
Serious AAs look like these weird combinations… Ibid., 357.
humble, kind, helpful, tactful… Ibid. An addict in Infinite Jest named Poor Tony rides the Gray Line in the thick of withdrawal, shitting himself as invisible ants crawl up and down his arms. He wears red high-heels and old eyeliner, weeping in shame, with ghost ants catching his tears. At the top of that page, I wrote: The humane quality of this novel is that it makes us bear witness to utter degradation. It’s as if the form of the book itself makes us sit still and listen during some of the most difficult shares at a meeting.
to lay responsibility for themselves… Wallace, Infinite Jest, 863.
It’s a rough crowd… Wallace qtd. in D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (New York: Viking, 2012), 139.
They listened because, in the last analysis… Wallace, “An Ex-Resident’s Story,” http://www.granadahouse.org/people/letters_from_our_alum.html.
literary opportunity… Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 140.
“Heard in Meetings”… David Foster Wallace, handwritten note, David Foster Wallace Papers, University of Texas at Austin.
single-entendre writing, writing that meant what it said… Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 158.
Recovery shifted Wallace’s whole notion of what writing could do, what purpose it might serve… For an astute discussion of the relationship between Wallace’s creativity and his life in recovery, see also critic Elaine Blair, “A New Brilliant Start,” New York Review of Books, December 6, 2012.
An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church… Wallace, Infinite Jest, 369.
I don’t want to sound melodramatic here… Qtd. in “Note on the Texts,” Collected Stories, ed. William Stull and Maureen Carroll (New York: Library of America, 2009), 993. Perhaps it was the aversion to melodrama that came across so forcefully in Lish’s edits that made Carver self-conscious about becoming too “melodramatic” in his resistance to them.
I’m serious, [they’re] intimately hooked up… Qtd. in “Note on the Texts,” 995.
bleakness… “Note on the Texts,” 991. As Stull and Carroll note of Lish’s edits, “As [Lish] later said, what struck him in Carver’s writing was ‘a peculiar bleakness.’ To foreground that bleakness, he cut the stories radically, reducing plot, character development, and figurative language to a minimum.”
he also pushed back against what he understood as the lurking threat of sentimentality… In “The Carver Chronicles,” the first journalistic account of Lish’s substantial editorial role in shaping Carver’s early work, D. T. Max made use of Carver’s archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. This article made the extent of the editorial changes public before the original versions were reprinted in full in the 2009 Collected Stories. Max describes Lish pushing back against “creeping sentimentality.” “The Carver Chronicles,” New York Times Magazine, August 9, 1998.
I remember Ray’s bafflement at one particular suggestion… Tess Gallagher, “Interview,” in Collected Stories, ed. William Stull and Maureen Carroll (New York: Library of America, 2009).
called his students to cancel class because he was too sick to teach… Details about Carver’s teaching near the end of his drinking from Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (New York: Scribner, 2009), 256 and 259.
When he came back to Iowa City to give a reading before his first book came out… Ibid. The workshop director had to get on stage and tell him to stop, saying maybe he could come back again and read when he was sober. Certain dreams were coming true for Carver, but he was barely around to appreciate them. His body had shown up, but the rest of him couldn’t—and his body wouldn’t last much longer anyway. Ibid.
If you want the truth, I’m prouder of that… Raymond Carver, interview by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee, “The Art of Fiction No. 76,” Paris Review 88 (Summer 1983).
no one else could ever love me in that way, that much… Carver, “Where Is Everyone?” Collected Stories, 765.
Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it… Carver, “Gazebo,” Collected Stories, 237.
When Carver first saw Lish’s versions, not just whittled but spiritually rearranged, he couldn’t stomach the thought of their publication… “My very sanity is on the line here,” he wrote to Lish. “All this is complicatedly, and maybe not so complicatedly, tied up with my feelings of worth and self-esteem since I quit drinking.” Carver to Gordon Lish, qtd. in “Note on the Texts,” Collected Stories, 993–94.
unkindness and condescension of some of these stories… Michael Wood, “Stories Full of Edges and Silences,” New York Times Book Review, April 26, 1981.
I don’t want to lose track, lose touch with the little human connections… Carver to Gordon Lish, qtd. in Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 362.
It’s not clear why Carver allowed his stories to be published with the edits… The notes in the Library of America edition of Carver’s Collected Stories narrate the fraught editorial process that resulted in the published version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, including the letters Carver wrote to Lish, but the decisive phone call isn’t transcribed. When Lish described the process decades later in a Paris Review interview with critic Christian Lorentzen, he put it like this: “For all those years, Carver could not have been more enthusiastic, nor more complicit—or complacent.” Though Carver’s letters suggest more friction in the process, Lish certainly believes he deserves the credit for the amount of attention Carver’s work has received: “Had I not revised Carver, would he be paid the attention given him? Baloney!” (“The Art of Editing, No. 2,” Paris Review, Winter 2015).
“It is about Scotty. It has to do with Scotty, yes”… Carver, “The Bath.” Collected Stories, 251. The story describes its characters communicating in minimal ways, with “the barest information, nothing that was not necessary.”
warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny… They listened to him… Carver, “A Small, Good Thing,” Collected Stories, 830.
stab[bing] at the eye with a length of blue silk thread… Carver, “After the Denim,” Collected Stories, 272.
He and the hippie were in the same boat… [he felt] something stir inside him again, but it was not anger this time… Carver, “If It Please You,” Collected Stories, 860, 863.
This time he was able to include the girl and the hippie in his prayers… Ibid., 863. This closing prayer is expansive in its reach, evoking not only “all of them” but also the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”: snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. Joyce’s story is also about a man coming to terms with his marriage, and with the ways in which his marriage is haunted by mortality—not only his wife’s impending mortality, and his own, but also the death of her first love, Michael, and the presence of his abiding ghost.
If you have a resentment you want to be free of… “Freedom From Bondage,” Alcoholics Anonymous, 552.
the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience… his arid heart… James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 14.
Gordon, God’s truth, and I may as well say it out now… Carver to Gordon Lish, qtd. in “Note on the Texts,” 984.
You gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass… Wallace, Infinite Jest, 506.
fucking up in sobriety… Ibid., 444.
He uses his pinkie finger to mime the world’s smallest viola… Ibid., 835. The wraith is the ghost of James Incandenza, the filmmaker whose cartridge animates the entire novel, and whose suicide casts a long shadow over it.
No one single instant of it was unendurable… Ibid., 860.
Gately wanted to tell Tiny Ewell that he could totally fucking I.D.… Ibid., 815–16.
Gately becomes a huge mute confessional booth… Gately is described in this capacity in ibid., 831.
the sort of professional background where he’s used to trying to impress… Ibid., 367.
at a lavish Commitment podium, like at an AA convention… Ibid., 858.
readers who look to novels and novelists for instruction on how to lead their lives… Christian Lorentzen, “The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace,” Vulture, June 30, 2015.
sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt…Wallace, Infinite Jest, 203.
Too simple?… Or just that simple?… Wallace, marginalia written in his copy of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, qtd. in Maria Bustillo’s “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” The Awl, April 5, 2011.
DR. BOB (Inching his chair closer): If I don’t drink, I’m a monster… Samuel Shem and Janet Surrey, Bill W and Dr. Bob (New York: Samuel French Inc., 1987). Play first staged at New Repertory Theater, Newton, Massachusetts. David Foster Wallace Papers, University of Texas at Austin.
Hello, my name is Gabor, and I am a compulsive classical music shopper… Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2008), 110.
Describing the thousands of dollars he has compulsively spent on classical music… In addition to Maté’s account of his classical music addiction (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts), see also his interview with Jeff Kaliss, “Losing Yourself in the Music: Confessions of a Classical Music Shopper,” San Francisco Classical Voice, January 29, 2013.
the frantic self-soothing of overeaters or shopaholics… Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, 2. See also the interview on Maté’s website, http://drgabormate .com/topic/addiction/.
Addiction attribution… Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will,” Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 132.
When the American Psychiatric Association released the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders… “Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders,” in American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
many scientists were afraid that its broadened criteria… For example, see the public statement about the DSM-5 by Thomas Inse that was released by the National Institute of Mental Health, http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/trans forming-diagnosis.shtml. See also: Christopher Lane, “The NIMH Withdraws Support for DSM-5,” Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-nimh-withdraws-support-dsm-5; commentary on the DSM-5 from Stuart Gitlow, president of the ASAM (American Society for Addiction Medicine), http://www.drugfree.org/news-service/commentary-dsm-5-new -addiction-terminology-same-disease/; Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe: The Making of the DSM-5 and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2013); and the interview with Greenberg, “The Real Problems with Psychiatry,” The Atlantic, May, 2, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the -real-problems-with-psychiatry/275371/.
It is not till many fixes pass that your desire is need… It was what I’d been born for, waiting for all my life… George Cain, Blueschild Baby (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), 199.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live… Joan Didion, “The White Album,” The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).
But one of the Seneca counselors, Madeline, said that Shirley needed to put her sobriety before everything else—kids, marriage, career… After the first time she spoke to Shirley on the phone, Madeline told Shirley to call her whenever she felt like taking a drink. If they could talk for ten minutes, Madeline promised, they could outlast the urge. Once, when Shirley called, Madeline said, “You know, Nixon’s not such a bad egg,” knowing it would get Shirley talking—and it worked, spurring Shirley into a half-hour rant. That got them past the ten-minute mark and then some.
When Shirley showed up at Seneca, in 1973, she was its 269th guest… This material about Shirley’s stay at Seneca drawn from interviews with the author, as well as her pseudonymous Baltimore Sun piece: Barbara Lenmark, “An Alcoholic Housewife: What Happened to Her in 28 Days,” Baltimore Sun, November 18, 1973.
It was absolutely honest, syllable for syllable… Charles Jackson to Warren Ambrose, March 1, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
I keep dreaming of what a good and happy marriage… Rhoda Jackson to Frederick Jackson, 1951, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.
early AA newsletters listed loner meetings…The Group Secretary’s Handbook and Directory (New York: The Alcoholic Foundation, 1953). Center of Alcohol Studies, Rutgers University.
We always say it’s not a successful tour… Annah Perch qtd. in Lisa W. Foderaro, “Alcoholics Anonymous Founder’s House Is a Self-Help Landmark,” New York Times, July 6, 2007.
no time did I ever find a place… Marginal notes, “The Rolling Stone,” Alcoholics Anonymous original manuscript. Stepping Stones Foundation Archives.
flatten[ed] him out… for the mindless… Jackson, “The Sleeping Brain,” qtd. in Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013), 349.
apathy, spiritlessness, blank sobriety, and a vegetable health… Jackson qtd. in ibid., 348.
Should I say the hell with it and return to my former indulgence… Ibid., 360.
that he must tell an unqualified success story or not speak… C. H. Aharan, “Problems in Cooperation between AA and Other Treatment Programs,” speech delivered at the 35th Anniversary International Convention, Miami Beach, 1970, 9. Center of Alcohol Studies Archives, Rutgers University.
“The Hunter in the Forest”… All the quotations from “The Hunter in the Forest” are from a handwritten version of the story at the end of Berryman’s “Recovery” notebook. John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.
choke a bit on the rock mythology… Steve Kandell, “Amy Winehouse: Rock Myth, Hard Reality,” Spin, July 25, 2011. Kandell has also been part of this mythology, of course, which was part of what he was acknowledging—he’d written a cover story about Winehouse for Spin in 2007, at the height of her fame.
If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, with William Dufty (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 212–3.
This is so boring without drugs…Amy (dir. Asif Kapadia, 2015).
She had the complete gift… Tony Bennett, qtd. in ibid.
around collapsible tables looking very much like people stuck in a swamp… Denis Johnson, “Beverly Home,” Jesus’ Son (New York: Picador, 2009), 126.
All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them… Ibid., 133.
I had sobered up just in time to have a nervous breakdown… Johnson, “Beverly Home,” unpublished draft, Denis Johnson Papers, University of Texas at Austin.
Johnson first tried to dry out in 1978 in his parents’ home in Tucson… Jesse McKinley, “A Prodigal Son Turned Novelist Turns Playwright,” New York Times, June 16, 2002.
I was addicted to everything… Now I just drink a lot of coffee… Johnson qtd. in David Amsden, “Denis Johnson’s Second Stage,” New York Magazine, June 17, 2002.
concerned about getting sober… typical of people who feel artistic… Ibid.
Approval was something I craved more than drugs or alcohol… Johnson, “Beverly Home,” unpublished draft, Denis Johnson Papers, Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
I want to thank you for your unfailing support and friendship… Unknown author to Denis Johnson, 1996, Denis Johnson Papers, Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
We are the chain gang, the only female chain gang… See Hari, Chasing the Scream (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 104.
If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted… Maté qtd. in ibid., 166.
dealing with addiction by chaining, by humiliating… Goulão qtd. in ibid., 237.
Tent City was the brainchild of one of his protégés, Joe Arpaio… Tent City finally announced its closure in April 2017, and the process of closing the facility was due to be completed by the end of that year. See Fernanda Santos, “Outdoor Jail, a Vestige of Joe Arpaio’s Tenure, Is Closing,” New York Times, April 4, 2017.
You got a good guy there… Arpaio qtd. in Hari, Chasing the Scream, 105.
These people are in the same category as lepers… Anonymous Los Angeles Police Department officer, qtd. in Harry Anslinger and William Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953), 272.
In 2009, at a prison twenty-two miles west of Tent City, one prisoner—Number 109416—was literally cooked alive in a cage in the middle of the desert… For Marcia Powell’s death, see Hari’s Chasing the Scream; also Stephen Lemons, “Marcia Powell’s Death Unavenged: County Attorney Passes on Prosecuting Prison Staff,” Phoenix New Times, September 1, 2010, in which Donna Hamm (from an advocacy group called Middle Ground Prison Reform) notes that Powell’s eyes “were as dry as parchment.”
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.
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.
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 Kentucky 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.
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.