The Trip to Echo Spring (26 page)

It wasn't an easy process, undoing the habits of two decades, never mind the terrors that underlay them. On 1 December, a counsellor jotted down his impressions of Berryman.

Pt. admits that he is an alcoholic . . . Indication of depression, anxiety, immaturity, lack of insight, high aesthetic interests, feelings of alienation, & dependency . . . Admitted he is full of fear.

Released, he stayed sober twelve days, then drank again. At the same time there was a spell of euphoric work: new lyrics, another shot at the Shakespeare biography. In a letter to William Meredith he sounded manic:

I am having the best winter within memory – mostly very hard every day at Shakespeare scholarship & criticism, but also a new poem called ‘Washington in Love', which advances spasmodically . . . my two slight interesting seminars at the University, one in
Hamlet
, the other on the American character, and reading Trollope's magnificent
Last Chronicle,
and
Genesis
daily, and Vaillant's
The Aztecs
in preparation for 3 weeks or a month in Mexico next summer.

Then, on 26 February 1970, he was taken back to hospital, his shins black with bruises, unable to walk or stand. He returned four times in the next six weeks, each time staying just long enough to detoxify before going back out to drink.

On 2 May he was rushed to the Intensive Alcohol Treatment Center at St. Mary's Hospital in Minneapolis, for his second stab at treatment. Here he took the First Step, in which an alcoholic admits they're powerless over alcohol and that their life has become unmanageable. Trying to get to grips with the enormous, terrifying implications of this sentence, Berryman wrote down and later read out to his treatment group this high-speed, seemingly no-holds-barred autobiography of his drinking self.

Social drinking until 1947 during a long & terrible love affair, my first infidelity to my wife after 5 years of marriage. My mistress drank heavily & I drank w. her. Guilt, murderous & suicidal. Hallucinations one day walking home. Heard voices. 7 years of psychoanalysis & group therapy in N.Y. Walked up & down drunk on a foot-wide parapet 8 stories high. Passes at women drunk, often successful. Wife left me after 11 yrs of marriage bec. of drinking. Despair, heavy drinking alone, jobless, penniless, in N.Y. Lost when blacked-out the most important professional letter I have ever received. Seduced students drunk. Made homosexual advances drunk, 4 or 5 times. Antabuse once for a few days, agony on floor after a beer. Quarrel w. landlord drunk at midnight over the key to my apartment, he called police, spent the night in jail, news somehow reached press & radio, forced to resign. Two months
of intense self-analysis-dream-interpretations etc. Remarried. My chairman told me I had called up a student drunk at midnight & threatened to kill her. Wife left me bec. of drinking. Gave a public lecture drunk. Drunk in Calcutta, wandered streets lost all night, unable to remember my address. Married present wife 8 yrs ago. Many barbiturates & tranquilizers off & on over last 10 yrs. Many hospitalizations. Many alibis for drinking, lying abt. it. Severe memory-loss, memory distortions. DT's once in Abbott, lasted hours. Quart of whiskey a day for months in Dublin working hard on a long poem. Dry 4 months 2 years ago. Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Wet bed drunk in a London hotel, manager furious, had to pay for a new mattress, $100. Lectured too weak to stand, had to sit. Lectured badly prepared. Too ill to give an examination, colleague gave it. Too ill to lecture one day. Literary work stalled for months. Quart of whiskey a day for months. Wife desperate, threatened to leave unless I stopped. Two doctors drove me to Hazelden last November, 1 week intensive care unit, 5 wks treatment. AA 3 times, bored, made no friends. First drink at Newlbars' party. Two months light drinking, hard biographical work. Suddenly began new poems 9 weeks ago, heavier & heavier drinking more & more, up to a quart a day. Defecated uncontrollably in university corridor, got home unnoticed. Book finished in outburst of five weeks, most intense work in my whole life exc. maybe first two weeks of 1953. My wife said St Mary's or else. Came here.

It didn't help. On 12 June he was discharged uncured. On 18 June he wrote another disturbingly glib letter to Meredith: ‘I'm just out of
6 wks in hospital (alcoholism as usual) & my doctors say it will be a year before I'm all right. I've added 17 poems, some of them very important, to
Love & Fame'.

The same day he started drinking again in a bar in St. Paul, though despite repeated lapses he kept going to AA. At the beginning of October he gave a reading, and then flew back to Minneapolis from New York. He rang Kate from the airport, telling her he was on his way home. Then he disappeared for two days, reeling in on Sunday shabby, wrecked and wretched. He remembered the phone call, remembered stopping at a bar for a nightcap. After that nothing, all data wiped. Confronted by his wife and friends in his own living room, he agreed to go back to St. Mary's and try, for the third time, to get dry.

All this awful history pours, barely altered, into
Recovery
. For years, in the Dream Songs, Berryman had been using Henry House to process and reconfigure various items from his own past, central among them the suicide of his father. Now he takes up a new mask, thinner and more transparent. Alan Severance is a public intellectual, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Professor of Immunology – ‘twice-invited guest on the Dick Cavett Show (stoned once, and a riot)'. Their jobs diverge, as do some details about an aunt. Otherwise almost everything about Severance, from his messy room, hacking cough and roaring voice to his grandiosity, brilliance, kindness, arrogance, injuries and multiple delusions, is drawn from the real, well-weathered experience of Berryman himself.

It opens with a prelude. Alan is drunk. Lots of light, some inexplicable darkness. Ah, he's in his own entry-hall, familiar figures hard by. His wife is holding out a glass – not, he thinks to himself, nearly big enough. Also standing: two policemen and his Dean. His wife says, cold-eyed: ‘This is the last drink you will ever take.'
Screw that,
he thinks, registering also the ‘unnerving and apocalyptic' sense that this time it might be true.

The next thing he knows he's back on Ward W, a stand-in for Berryman's ward at St. Mary's. Third chance: deep in withdrawal, toxic with it, though as far as he's concerned his mind is clear as mountain air. He knows
exactly
what went wrong, or thinks he does. An error in the First Step, made in his last pass through recovery. He grins at himself in the mirror, staggers out to the Snack Room to meet his fellow sufferers. For the next God knows how many weeks he'll have access to nothing more potent than coffee, Eskimo Pies and cigarettes. Instead, he'll submit to the gruelling daily rounds of lectures, group therapy, dyads, counselling, private study and prayer.

In a letter to his friend Saul Bellow, written as the book bloomed swiftly, thrillingly, in his mind, Berryman wrote that it would contain: ‘Encyclopedic data, almost as heavy as Melville's about whaling.' It's true.
Recovery
is like a crash course in the Minnesota Model, like being locked up in the ward of a treatment centre. It's saturated with the smells of recovery – cigarettes and coffee, mostly – and with its unique speech: a language created explicitly for mastery over this most slippery of diseases.

Reading it, I'd built up a rough glossary of alcoholic terms, some familiar, some new to me.
Denial:
the keynote of the alcoholic personality. The refusal to admit there's a problem. The willingness to say
anything to ensure that drinking can continue.
Levelling
: the practice of challenging another addict's delusion.
Slips
: drinks taken after recovery.
Minimising:
a species of denial. The pervasive alcoholic tendency to pretend their drinking, their disasters, are ordinary, unexceptional, barely worth the effort of examination.
Sincere delusions
: delusions the alcoholic genuinely believes.
Regrouping
: the resumption of defences after a period of honesty and openness.
Seeking people
: a corrective to the alcoholic tendency to isolation, ‘self-imposed solitary-confinement', self-pity, the belief that one is exceptional and suffers more than others. Indeed, the whole group structure of AA is designed to challenge this by making addicts confront the overwhelming similarities between their stories.
Projection
: reading into another person the feelings you deny in yourself.
Dry drunk
: not drinking, but not committed to changing the personality structures of alcoholism; getting by on will power alone. A very perilous position.
Playing Group:
another species of denial, in which the addict parrots the tenets of AA without having really accepted them or opened up.

For Alan Severance, the process is excruciating as well as exhilarating: tacking in a high wind, recovering his own spirit. He makes friends, submits to criticism, scrapes away at the encrusted layers of his own delusions. Sometimes it seems never-ending, the ability of his disease to defend itself. Still, he has hope. He decides on an impulse to become a Jew, spending hours in fervent study. He talks too much in Group, annoying everybody. Another patient describes him as a ‘sick old
lion
during a game of Animal-Vegetable-Mineral, and then they all jump in, telling him he's pompous, arrogant, disgusting. It's true; he often backs up his statements by commenting, preeningly, on his fame and sexual allure. The confrontation hurts. But he recovers, sees the help
in it, shoulders on. Another day the counsellors tear into him, wringing out the confession that it's two, maybe three years since he's seen his son. They want him to understand that it's not just the drinking; that everything about his life is out of joint. ‘This was hard, very hard. He couldn't think, just felt.'

Alan Severance isn't the most sympathetic of characters. In fact, I often had a strong urge to smack him round the head. He's grotesquely convinced of the magnificence of his illness, the extraordinary integrity of his brain – or, in other moods, the breathtaking worthlessness of his existence. ‘Maybe it's easier to be a monster,' one of the counsellors says, ‘than a human being.' And later: ‘Alcoholics are rigid, childish, intolerant, programmatic. They
have
to live furtive lives. Your only chance is to come out in the open.'

Sometimes he does, and it's these moments – when he humanises, levels, lets down his guard – that give
Recovery
its extraordinary power. What's more, as Alan's treatment proceeds, it becomes increasingly apparent that he's not alone. The ward is full of people engaged in a Herculean battle with their own minds. Wilbur with his bullying parents. Jasper the poet. Pitiful Sherry, who Alan takes under his wing. It's captivating, watching this group of ordinary Americans attempting to change, to free themselves from addiction. And then, all of a sudden, on page 224 the book stops dead. There are a few pages of scratchy notes, but to all intents and purposes Berryman's
Recovery
is abandoned.

At Chicago I got on the Empire Builder to Seattle. Two days to go. I counted through the states ahead. Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota,
North Dakota, Idaho and Washington. Later that night we'd pass through St. Paul, Berryman's city and also Fitzgerald's. At the end of
The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald gave Nick his own memories of travelling home from school. Gatsby has just died, and after the miserable funeral in the rain Nick gets to thinking about catching the winter train from Chicago to St. Paul as a boy. He remembers the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations, the murky yellow cars, and then he says to himself: ‘That's my Middle West. Not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark.'

This time, at long last, I had a cabin: a tiny, pleasingly dinky room with two big blue chairs that slid together to make a bed. There were lots of Amish on the train, the women bonneted, the men in black hats, with great Berrymanish beards. At dinner that night I sat with a couple from Montana and a Michigan geologist who worked on the oil wells in South Dakota. He was morbidly obese, with a pallid face, his eyes sunk far down into mounds of doughy flesh. He drank two Pepsis while we waited for our food and showed me his wedding ring, a circlet of Celtic knots, adding regretfully, ‘but I can't sleep in it at night'. We talked about Ireland for a long time, over grilled steaks in mushroom sauce. At La Crosse I looked up and saw an elderly black man on the platform selling red roses from a bucket. Just after I went back to my cabin we crossed the Mississippi and its floodplain, trundling eight feet above the bilgy water. God knows how wide it was. A mile, inset with islands? More?