TY - JOUR
AU - Travis,, Trysh
AB - To the extent that it is remembered now, James Frey’s 2003 addiction-and-recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces is noted chiefly as a succès de scandale. Young badass-drunkard-crackhead Frey refused to toe the twelve-step recovery line while a patient at the renowned Hazelden clinic. Instead of admitting he was powerless over alcohol like a good boy, he alternated between clenching his teeth against demon rum and breathing deeply while listening to jazz. Then he put the whole brutal experience on paper. Little Pieces was selected by the Oprah Book Club and sold a bazillion copies; it seemed a breath of fresh air disrupting what had become, by the end of the 1990s, a stale parade of midlist recovery narratives. Then it was revealed—oops—that things didn’t quite go down like that. Frey never did jail time for drunk and disorderly, as he alleged; he never got a root canal without Novocaine; and if he ever had a junkie girlfriend, she never committed suicide as he said. He drank and drugged too much, stole money from his parents, spent a few hours in jail before they bailed him out, and went to rehab. The part about not liking it, though, that was true. But “between the idea / And the reality,” as the poet said, “Falls the shadow” (Eliot 80). And this shadow happened to be so dark that both Frey and his publisher, power broker Nan Talese, were hauled back on Oprah to be dressed down by her in front of the cameras. In retrospect, the incident stands out as an early highlight of the so-called truthiness era within which we now helplessly reside. But just because Frey’s book is more interesting as a cultural rather than a literary artifact doesn’t make it valueless to the student of literature. While at Hazelden, the narrator of Little Pieces astutely critiques the literature of recovery, working off the texts supplied by the treatment center. He excoriates the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book” (the term AA folks use for the eponymous handbook of their fellowship) and a shelf of Hazelden-published workbooks intended to help readers cultivate their lives of sobriety, and in doing so offers a concise and powerful statement of why many intellectuals, progressives, and other high-culture modernist types are suspicious of twelve-step recovery. Recovery literature is “weak, hollow, and empty,” in Frey’s words, nothing but “simple words and . . . pictures . . . of empty outlines of figures and places” (78, 199). Put simply: its aesthetics suck. Frey is not the only person to have found twelve-step recovery’s earnest, sentimental, and repetitive style offensive. It grates on most folks for whom irony, complexity, and innovation are not merely aesthetic choices, or even aspects of personal style, but ways of making sense of the world. Yet recovery is a long, lonely, and perilous journey, made safer and more bearable by the presence of companions in struggle—hence the importance twelve-step culture has historically placed on reading.1 What, then, to read, if you are too sophisticated for the Big Book but in need of bibliotherapy? Neil Steinberg and Sara Bader propose that you turn to their volume Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery (2016), a compendium of inspirational quotations arranged in sections that speak to the various stages of recovery—denying you have a problem, acknowledging you have a problem, being appalled to find yourself at your first twelve-step meeting, getting a sponsor, and so on. Each opens with a short introduction, presumably by Steinberg, a journalist and recovering alcoholic whose memoir Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life appeared in 2008. (We can assume that Bader, a researcher and, per Wreck’s back jacket, “quote collector,” with no public ties to recovery, did much of the legwork on the pages that follow.) The brief excerpts run the gamut from Samuel Pepys and Samuel Johnson (both on the difficulties of maintaining abstinence) to David Foster Wallace and Jim Jarmusch (on the self-sabotaging mind games of early sobriety). These literary takes on addiction and recovery are interspersed with ideas from biomedical researchers like Carl Hart (Columbia, Psychology) and Walter Ling (UCLA, Psychiatry). Appearing throughout are insights that address not addiction per se, but the intensity and complexity of ending it, including, occasionally, the challenge of dealing with recovery’s seeming banality. Narrating his serial relapses in Drunkard, Steinberg had noted how the annoying, cliché-ridden language of sobriety impeded his taking AA seriously, dropping quips like “I read the Big Book and want to drink just to distance myself from this stuff” (178). Accordingly, the introduction to Wreck’s “Nothing to Lose: Early Recovery” section admits with chagrin that rehab teaches “life survival skills in its own clunky, earnest, and too-direct way with its cheesy videos and hackneyed tracts,” then encourages the reader to be patient with its rhetoric (62). One excerpt late in the volume, from undertaker poet Thomas Lynch’s essay “The Way We Are,” explicitly attacks the simplicity and repetition of recovery sloganeering: “I am a goddam published poet . . . and I’ve got to listen to rhymes like these? ‘Walk the Walk and Talk the Talk.’ . . . What’s a guy who’s read Dante and Pushkin need” with such vacuity? Lynch fulminates (114). But the qualities of earnestness, simplicity, and repetition—so abhorrent to refined sensibilities—are necessary, Steinberg and Bader explain. Recovery discourse needs to be earnest because substance abuse suborns deception. And its insights need to be simple so they can be repeated. Repeatability is important because, like truth-telling, repetition—no matter how artless the words—is a cognitive tool for distressed people trying to redirect their focus away from getting high and towards something else. “A central skill in recovery [is] the ability to hunker down, to endure,” notes the introduction to Wreck’s section on “The Importance of Time” (80). The volume’s primary aim is to offer its audience some things to hold on to during those moments of endurance. When you are trying to stay sober, such simple tools help you “focus not on what you’ve lost but on what you’ve gained.” One hash mark in your wins column, Steinberg and Bader suggest, could be “the pleasures of some of the writers you’ve met here” (204). In a more measured and constructive fashion than A Million Little Pieces, then, Out of the Wreck I Rise seeks to take the place of one of those dreadful day-readers Frey encountered at Hazelden—compilations of SNL-style “deep thoughts” with cringe-making titles like The Way Out and Time for a Change. Reading it alongside Drunkard, it’s possible to see Wreck as Steinberg’s deliberate attempt to address the lack he felt as a person who wanted sobriety, but for whom language and narrative mattered enough that he could not see moving forward with only twelve-step bromides like “Easy Does It” and “It Works If You Work It” to sustain him. But if it aims to serve a niche market of smart, cultured, edgy-but-still-serious-about-sobriety substance abusers—Wreck can also repay the attention of anyone who cares for metalevel or professional reasons about addiction, recovery, and the role that writing and reading play in both. To everyone else, however, it is probably insufferably dull. The same cannot be said of Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (2018), an ambitious investigation of recovery’s bad aesthetics that blends literary history and personal narrative to illuminating ends. Like Frey, Jamison developed a drinking problem in college and entered recovery in her mid-twenties. But while Frey fancied himself a literary prodigy, Jamison seems really to have been one. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she wrote for the Harvard Advocate, the nation’s oldest college lit mag, then went straight to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for an MFA. After writing her first novel, The Gin Closet (2010), she began work on a PhD in English at Yale—somehow all while drinking herself blind night after night. “You could be a civilian, a nobody, and grind away at a job and drink tea,” Steinberg explains in Drunkard, “or you could be glittering and special and an artist and drink alcohol [like] F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Thurber, Mike Royko and Hunter S. Thompson” (159). Jamison departed from the same mythos, in which substance abuse both feeds and exemplifies the writer’s tortured genius. “Addiction stories run on the fuel of darkness—the hypnotic spiral of an ongoing, deepening crisis,” she explains early in The Recovering, while “recovery is often seen as the narrative slack, the dull terrain of wellness, a tedious addendum to the riveting blaze” (10). Frey was a victim of this truism; once Steinberg recognized it, he sought to avoid it. Neither man questioned its hegemony or sought to contest it, however. But Jamison has both the tools to do so and the will to use them: the analytical skills of a literary historian, and a searching, almost painfully self-conscious curiosity about the ways in which her own substance abuse and recovery history evolved in tension with her sense of herself not only as a writer but also as a white, middle-class, heterosexual woman. The literary historical and personal threads of The Recovering twine together, never losing their distinctiveness, always informing each other in rich and surprising ways. The result is a book that sheds light not only on our assumptions about the aesthetics of substance abuse and recovery—their history, their blind spots, their too-often-ignored racial and gendered dynamics—but also on the ways in which contemporary female intellectual and creative sensibilities are formed in a furious dialogue with both masculinist and feminist ideals of autonomy and invulnerability. In the literary historical thread of The Recovering, Jamison remixes the dissertation she wrote at Yale, analyzing a wide range of authors who struggled—often spectacularly and unsuccessfully—with alcohol. Jean Rhys, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, and Charles Jackson (whose 1944 novel The Lost Weekend was the basis of the Oscar-winning film of the same name) are her principal touchstones, but a dozen other authors make important appearances too. Her project here is more biographical than literary, more interested in how these authors thought about the relationships between their writing and their alcohol and other drug use than in how that use played out in their textual creations. What Jamison’s archival work reveals is the painful degree to which many of them labored within the same set of assumptions as she had about the relative values of alcoholic intensity and sober insipidity. Jackson is her touchstone here—the man who wrote a great book about being drunk, then got sober and hoped to write a great book about being sober, spent years trying to figure out how to narrate such a book, then finally committed suicide. Jamison’s fear, of course, is that she will end up like Jackson. Her first novel, The Gin Closet, did not make quite the same splash as Lost Weekend, but it set a high bar: finalist for the Los Angeles Times book award, one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s best books of the year. Like Jackson, when she quit drinking, her second novel had been going nowhere for some time, and her early sobriety was highly imperfect. At Yale, unsurprisingly, her interest in troubling the received wisdom of inebriation aesthetics received little support. One of the most incisive moments in The Recovering narrates a dissertation prospectus meeting where a Diet Coke–drinking Jamison announces, for the first tentative time, her interest in “making the unsexy case for the relationship between sobriety and creativity.” Though she has self-consciously applied a bright red lipstick to signal her personal distance from such a square worldview, it’s to no avail. “‘But what about the relationship between addiction and creativity?’ one professor asked. . . . ‘The generative aspects of obsession . . . now that’s interesting to me’” (424). Fortunately, Jamison persevered against this ivory tower cluelessness. She extracts a detailed and harrowing picture of alcohol’s implacable grip on the imagination—at some level, really, on cognition itself—from the lives of Berryman and Rhys. Her thoughtful readings of their works and archives are complemented by briefer examinations of Billie Holiday, George Cain, Stephen King, and Marguerite Duras. The latter speaks for pretty much all of the authors The Recovering surveys when she notes that “‘drunkenness doesn’t create anything . . . The illusion’s perfect: you’re sure what you’re saying has never been said before. But alcohol can’t produce anything that lasts. It’s just wind’” (qtd. in Jamison 306). Through her readings of diaries, letters, and interviews, Jamison makes it clear: it takes an insulated (or maybe just insensitive) observer indeed to sustain the fantasy that hardcore substance abuse has a lot of “generative aspects.” Profound as this insight may seem to kneejerk fetishists of the transgressive, it is not entirely new. John Crowley made similar arguments while Jamison was still in elementary school in The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction (1994), an underappreciated book to which she rightly acknowledges her debts. What is new is Jamison’s use of Wallace and Carver—the successful recovering addicts—to begin to map a recovery aesthetic sufficiently rich and distinctive to hold its own against the James Freys of this world. In Wallace’s and Carver’s writings on addiction and sobriety and, more important, in the arc of their creative lives after they enter recovery, Jamison finds an antidote to the “deluded fantasies of meaningful wreckage” that constitute literary common sense and thus shaped her early understanding of herself as a writer (401). Wallace’s intimate connections to recovery were clear to any reader of Infinite Jest (1996) who also knew the twelve-step world, but remained obscure to most critics until 2012, when D. T. Max’s posthumous biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story broke Wallace’s anonymity. In Infinite Jest, and then in Wallace’s papers, Jamison finds a mind similar to her own, an edgy post-postmodern self that uses intellect to mask vulnerability, and ostensible originality to dodge hard human truths. Wallace came to recovery after having established himself as a literary and intellectual enfant terrible, a master not only of language games but of higher mathematics, able and willing to use both to dazzle and subdue his competition. But recovery, Jamison argues, shifted his “whole notion of what writing could do, what purpose it might serve.” Instead of showing off, the sober Wallace wanted “to dramatize the saving alchemy of community, the transformative force of outward-facing attention, the possibilities of simplicity as an alternative to the clever alibis of complexity” (349). Carver, similarly, wanted the work he did after he joined AA to show not just “the chaos of drinking but also the possibilities of recovery” (Jamison 355). He depicted those possibilities as what he called “‘little human connections’” linking the characters in What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981), his first sober book (Carver to Lish, qtd. in Jamison 355). Many—most—of them were removed by his editor, Gordon Lish, so that the published book ultimately depicted a “human nature less prone to care, concern, and empathetic imagination, and more inclined to rupture, resentment, and disconnect” than sober Carver had wanted. Reading around and through Lish’s butchery, Jamison sees these and other Carver stories as “full of gin ghosts and AA commitments . . . guys learning to fish and to pray . . . characters [that] have fallen away from each other and don’t know how to come together again” but try, despite long odds, to do so (355). This is recovery writing as a matter not merely of plot, but also of the thematics of connection, of faith, and even of joy—all the things Carver, like Wallace, had found in sobriety. Jamison argues that the two men took what they had learned about themselves in AA and translated it into a new approach to fiction, one that drew from recovery’s humility, and from faith in the power of identification. Infinite Jest “believes in the sincere wisdom an ironist might scoff at,” and approaches AA’s “bromides [not] as revelations, but [as] the possibility of common ground” (349). Recovery commonality was salvific for Carver as well, and he “treated his characters as he treated his fellows at an AA meeting—with curiosity and compassion, without condescension . . . because he thought of them as simply ordinary” (437). Such a saving interest in the ordinary is actually fairly hard to come by, and most of the writers in The Recovering, at the end of the day, serve as cautionary tales. But in Carver and Wallace, Jamison finds models she can work with. And in many ways this is the most interesting strand of her book: the story of Jamison’s journey to sober personhood and, with it, authorship. At one level, this is the stuff of the standard bildungsroman, the immature artist working out a sustaining (and sustainable) vision of herself and her work. But Jamison’s ability to narrate the gendered dimensions of this generic problem elevates the telling. Much of what makes The Recovering’s personal narrative thread so interesting is her exploration of how her straight-white-privileged-young-woman-writer identity arises out of an intricate play of shame and empowerment. Beginning as a shy teenager, she linked her identity as “writer” to drinking, cutting, and food restriction. All were bids for attention she desperately wanted but that, in her competitive upper-middle-class neoliberal culture, was “something I had to earn, not something I could take for granted.” As a result, she observes, “I had to seduce at all moments” (78). Alcohol helped remedy the “chronic shyness [that] felt like constant failure” in a world that demanded what some feminist critics call “effortless perfection”—the performance of a high-achieving, sexually confident, and above all unforced and genuine female self (Jamison 13; Duke University Women’s Initiative). Seduction—attracting the reader’s attention and/or the male gaze—could be achieved through the correct performance of that self and, like Frey, Steinberg, and at least one member of the Yale English department, Jamison came to “idoliz[e] the iconic drunk writers because I understood their drinking as proof of extreme interior weather: volatile and authentic” (29). Her successful self needed to function in, on the one hand, the world of literature that Mark McGurl has named “the program era” (and Jamison neatly captures how institutionalized literary education focuses on avoiding cliché and capturing particularity even as, in general, “making it new” has itself become something of a cliché-generator). On the other hand, it had to move through, well, the world: the social spaces in which a chronically self-conscious self generates narrative in order to connect to other people. Jamison’s attempt to figure out a way to be a sober writer is, therefore, intimately connected to her attempt to figure out how to be a decent adult in her romantic relationships with men. In this respect, it differs markedly from the accounts Frey and Steinberg (to name just a few) give of their recovery. Unsurprisingly, while straight white men may acknowledge, either tacitly or explicitly, that their sense of themselves as writers is formed in relationship to historical tradition, they typically treat their gendered and sexed identities as natural, beyond interrogation. Thus, while The Recovering makes a significant contribution to literary history and criticism, a broader readership may find more compelling Jamison’s honest account of the kinds of schizophrenia she manifests as she attempts the successful performance of elite white so-called postfeminist womanhood—a high-wire act that entails achieving not merely personal autonomy, but also (and never in conflict with) emotionally intense and sexually satisfying romantic partnerships. Said schizoid contortions include (but are not limited to) conforming to a traditional beauty standard while also critiquing its constructedness; succeeding in the male-dominated public sphere without threatening your male partner; and acknowledging your authentic vulnerability but never allowing it to undermine your control of your destiny. Literary training may have offered Jamison a set of performance metrics for rating her writerly originality and authenticity, but they merely reinforced what she had already learned from the culture at large about how to be successfully involved with men. “Selfhood was a deck of superlatives I kept reshuffling,” she muses, as she cheats on one boyfriend and picks up another. “I didn’t want just part of someone, I wanted all of him. I wasn’t just bad, I was the lowest. I had the most fickle heart.” Her pride in her ability to attract men mingles with shame at her competitiveness and, even worse, her sense of needing a boyfriend: feminism was supposed to have mooted these traditionally feminine behaviors; what was wrong with her? Fortunately, having intense feelings, contradictory or no, indicates success both as a woman and as an author—indeed, Jamison notes, her clashing emotions “capitalized my ordinary life and granted it the shrill inflection of high drama” (142). Life as art, and vice versa. In a brief aside on Frey, Jamison confesses that she has long sympathized with the impulses behind A Million Little Pieces. “I’ve often had it myself: this hunger for a story larger than my own, with taller buildings and sharper knives” (312). . . .The Recovering makes a significant contribution to literary history and criticism, [but] a broader readership may find more compelling Jamison’s honest account of the kinds of schizophrenia she manifests as she attempts the successful performance of elite white so-called postfeminist womanhood. . . . Jamison’s use of the word “hunger” to describe who and what she has wanted to be—has been taught to be—is telling. Though she mentions her food issues early on in The Recovering, that concern drops out after a bit, and one gets the sense that those problems just faded away. Recovery from disordered eating is notoriously more difficult than recovery from substance abuse, and Jamison experiences the compulsion to successful selfhood as elementally as “hunger.” Since she cannot deal with it through abstinence, her only avenue is the more complex practice Steinberg called “enduring” (80). In those glacial moments, she realizes—and begins to try to revise—the ubiquitous lessons she has internalized not merely about the writer’s craft, but also about the techniques of self-management one uses to become a desirable heterosexual woman within the contemporary professional middle class. Such unlearning requires active, searching work and an ability to tolerate a colossal sense of psychic risk; twelve-step culture supports Jamison in both regards. It is hard labor indeed to abandon the image of the successful, high-status modern self and embrace instead the nebulous quality Wallace described as “‘the happiness of being among people. Just a person among people’” (qtd. in Jamison 349). As is so often the case, what is hard for men is doubly so for women. “Giving up on singularity,” Jamison explains, is not just about changing her ideas about authorship, but “like giving up on the edges of my own body” (312–13). The personal is the literary and, by extension, the political. What a canon—or a culture—that rests on a premise other than “singularity” would look like, The Recovering can only gesture toward. But that gesture, as Leslie Jamison makes it, is filled with promise. Footnotes 1 Trysh Travis, The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (2009), pp. 107–110. Works Cited Duke University Women’s Initiative Steering Committee . Women’s Initiative Report . Duke Publications Group , 2003 . Eliot T. S. “The Hollow Men.” Selected Poems , Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich , 1964 , pp. 77 – 80 . Frey James. A Million Little Pieces . Simon and Schuster , 2003 . Jamison Leslie. The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath . Little, Brown , 2018 . McGurl Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing . Harvard UP , 2011 . Steinberg Neil. Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life . U of Chicago P , 2008 . Steinberg Neil , Bader Sara . Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery . U of Chicago P , 2016 . © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Our Drinking Problem: Recovery and Bad Aesthetics
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajy047
DA - 2019-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/our-drinking-problem-recovery-and-bad-aesthetics-Wr2RaxTrRt
SP - 151
VL - 31
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -