‘You all know who I am,’ Nela said calmly, smoothing her uniform. ‘My subject in this part of the treatment-programme is Responsibility. You are all suffering from the lack of self-confidence which is common to this illness; from feelings of inferiority (“someone else,” you think, “could do it better”—whatever it may be); from self-consciousness (this is paralyzing in some of you); from fear of rejection—often so powerful that it leads to consideration of suicide, a plan which if adopted will leave you really invulnerable, quite safe at last. Your confidence in yourself has got to be restored, little by little. We can help you, but we cannot be responsible for you. The first person we must be responsible to is ourselves.’ Severance, who had been rejecting every item as he wrote it down, sat mentally up to the note of an old accusation. He had heard this before, when he could not get out of it.
From Vin. The whole elaborate situation flooded back. A young writer had telephoned from a distant State one Sunday morning and kept him on the phone for half an hour with an insufferable amalgam of hero-worship and megalomania—Severance had been patient, and patient, and tried to get him off the line, and tried, finally said, ‘No, I’m afraid I’m going to hang up now, goodbye,’ and did so, and thought no more of the matter (but somebody had told him later that he had seen him looking like a thundercloud, so abstracted that Severance did not recognize him or speak) until that evening when suddenly for no reason he burst into flame against that young man, he tore his wife to pieces during her visit, sat cursing through some female ex-drunk’s AA talk (‘I fell down the stairs and hit my head on a marble table-top, I took the First Step’)—screw all these humorless bastards sitting around congratulating themselves on being sober, what’s so wonderful about being sober? Great Christ, most of the world is sober, and look at it! He was still raging when after a sleepless night he took up the matter in Group next day. Vin accused him of ‘insincerity.’ Severance was baffled and furious: ‘I did not say a damned word to him that was insincere.’ ‘You should have told him where you stood, and hung up.’ ‘Well, I had to spare his feelings, for God’s sake, you don’t know what young writers are like.’ ‘What do his feelings matter?’ said Vin. ‘It was your feelings that should have mattered to you. You were irresponsible.’ ‘Irresponsible?’ cried Severance. ‘Yes. To yourself. You did not accept responsibility for yourself.’ After infinite negotiation and resistance he finally saw this, and it so changed his behaviour that when, after he got out of treatment, the same damned young man—and other readers—rang up from California and then Massachusetts, he cut him off short. Now as he sat half-listening to Nela (‘When we are tired or hungry, we do irresponsible things’) he made the connexion with his submission over leaving the ward to go give his lecture on the Fourth Gospel. His responsibility was not to his students but to himself. Well, well. At last. By God’s grace he had done the right thing without even knowing why. There was hope for everybody. He said a silent prayer for all the patients including himself. Teach me to give in.
‘ … Then: the other people in this treatment center; then everyone in Extended Care—our elderly people, upstairs—and in the whole hospital. Only then our beloved ones outside, and those suffering everywhere—for your beloved ones are suffering with you—in the war in Vietnam, in Biafra all this time, everyone everywhere.
‘Now for your particular ward-responsibilities …’ My job! he thought with a qualm. In ten whole days I haven’t done a damned thing about it. I don’t even know exactly what it is or how to go about it. I’m listed as ‘supplies for the Snack Room.’ Where are they anyway? Things seem to be getting along all right without me. But he determined to get hold of Rose right after lunch and find out.
‘Well, Alan,’ Dr Gus Riemer was asking buoyantly, ‘what do you think made you take your first drink after your second tour of treatment?’ Dr Riemer, replacing Gus One in charge of the new-formed Repeaters’ First Step Prep, with Julitta sitting stiffly in, was a big radiant young Negro-surgeon in white buckskin shoes. After booming out with satisfaction and joy his own fearful history (‘Oh, after a few months I thought I’d just have a little wine with dinner, nothing wrong with that—maybe pop some pills before an operation—quite okay—and pretty soon I was back on the hard stuff and brainsick with amphetamines and lying my rich ass off not only to Rhoda and my trusting colleagues but myself. Oh, I “could handle it” all right!’) he had been going round the Group with this $64 question, friendly to Jeree (‘I see you’re still in hopeless withdrawal, dear’—news to Severance) and Mary-Jane, formidable to Wilbur and Letty and Stack. Severance had overlapped him in the Spring and admired him all Summer in Dr Rome’s Encounter-Group, where he dubbed him Augustus the Chemical Adventurer, but he experienced now a thrill of anxiety. Still, he was ready for him.
‘I’ve given it a bundle of thought. I told Louise last week I didn’t know, and that was honest, but now I’ve cleared up some and I see it was obsession with a woman. I half fell in love with her in treatment last Spring—it was terrible—I felt ghastly about it—we only embraced and touched each other, and kissed once in the corridor late one night—but I didn’t know what was going to happen when we got out of hospital. I did not call her up but I sweated. I felt unspeakably guilty too, toward Ruth. Finally about two-thirty one afternoon I had to get out of the house to think about her, really think about her, and try to decide what to do, maybe write her a letter. I’m a good letter-writer, I often find out what I think during the letter. Anyway, for some reason I waited until Ruth had gone out, perhaps at three?—why I waited I don’t know, I could have gone out for a walk any time, but I did, then I took a bus to Elmwood just to think, and that was it. What permitted it, so far as I can see, was omnipotence, the feeling that I could get away with it, besides I didn’t plan to do anything—and self-pity, because I had been so damned righteous about my really almost unbearable desire, plus guilt about the desire itself.’
He stopped, satisfied. He had levelled with them, by God. But Gus was shaking his head at him, saying softly, ‘Deluded,’ and Julitta was beginning something off to his right. He turned toward her, hurt. Her voice was high and controlled.
‘The only word I can find in my vocabulary, which is pathetic compared with yours, word adequate to this marvellous and airy intellectual construction, is: HORSESHIT!’ Severance almost reeled back in his chair. ‘We’re not here to discuss your sex life or your psychologizing, but your drinking.’
Then Gus was asking, ‘What about feelings?’ and uttering, ‘You’re computerized,’ and, ‘Why do you drink?’ and Severance was speechless and finally the focus shifted to Hutch, his old friend from Vin’s Group who had come back into treatment, to Severance’s amazement (‘I started drinking the day after I got out’), just the night before.
Severance’s Journal
Humbled (I hope) and shook.
This morning I felt fine, confronted Les with his, ‘If there’s anything left over from here, it’ll be taken care of in my Friday Encounter-Group,’ said to me on the way over to lecture Sunday night—he denied it, Harley and Keg at him arguing, defending (major threat to sobriety: quarrels with wife)—I joined in too much, too confidently, and shouted as usual (Mary-Jane vs me, dyad after lunch about it and my flirting joke rejected by her last night at Dr Rome’s lecture). Now I see—correctly—myself as a patient again, ill, deluded, and whether I’ve made any progress at all I don’t know.
Why do I drink:
Defiance (=Fuck you. I can handle it.
Grandiosity (Insecure)
Self-destructive =I am just as great, bec.
Delusion: ‘I need it’ as desperate, as (etc)
+ Calm down excitement (after lecture, lab, good news)
Dulling pain (loneliness, self-pity, bad news)
To animate boredom—but is this really so? ? Screw this usual idea, in my case
(I feel as if scales were falling from my eyes. Surely this can’t all be wrong?)
Hysterical laughter at din
ner, after Gus and Julitta. A defence (Arita said just now at midnight) against fear of what Gus read: but not only better than rage and defiance (which Ruth said she would absolutely at all points previously have from me expected) but okay
=harmless to myself and others
—even useful, as amusing (without laughing we wd all go mad on this ward, no wonder I am so goddamn popular, the W Clown # 1)
New idea abt 1st Step. I think: we are in no condition to make a serious step now: just give a version of present view: then two others:
1. after 1 month
2. after 3 months
From Severance’s Journal
2nd Mon., 8 a.m.
Have I been wrong all these years and it was not Daddy’s death that blocked my development for so long? Could this have been mere separation from Mother?? (cf. my agony those Fall weeks at school in Chickasha—and the unbelievably mawkish and cozy tone of my letters to her even as long afterward as Edinburgh. Perh. of even the emptiness of my Canadian sep. fr. her.)
Because
(I forget the Missouri visit, the trip north from Florida—exc. seeing him on the street in Wash., summer in Gloucester and 89 Bedford—typing lessons)
the following year, in Hyde Park, was the happiest and most active of my life up to that time!!? Close friend (first, after Billy Ross and Richard Dutcher): Archie Lamont. Valerie Paquit. William and Eleanor Garden. Pet of Mrs Danahey (Engl), Miss Steele (math), even liked Shop (made footstool for Uncle Jack—damn bad job too). Did the hydrogen job on my own, the seventh way. Wrote the Venus ‘novel.’ Prizes, the bit.
What happened the summer then? Move to East Egg? Teddy Armstrong was after the 2nd Form wasn’t she? Yes, bec. I had a list of bks to read (obviously fr St Paul’s)—which I took out of the library and Bill read.
DID I IN FACT TAKE HIS DEATH IN STRIDE (it all bulges that way) and succumb over a year later to something else? or is so delayed a reaction possible. Bet it is.
(Check! Dr G: It’s rare but I’ve
seen cases, two longer still)
So maybe my long self-pity has been based on an error, and there has been no (hero-)villain ruling my life, but ONLY an unspeakably powerful possessive adoring MOTHER, whose life at 75 is still centered wholly on me. And my (‘omnipotent’) feeling that I can get away with anything—e.g., slips!—has been based on the knowledge that she will always forgive me, always come to the rescue (Fall ‘53). And my vanity based on her uncritical passionate admiration (letter ten days ago on my lectures twenty years ago!)—rendering me invulnerable (‘indifferent’ —a fact, too) to all criticism, and impatient with anything short of total prostration before the products of my genius (though: much reality too, as my ironic view of the hyperbole slithering around in recent years, Time, Yale, London, Madrid, wherever).
My debts to her immeasurable: ambition, stamina, resourcefulness, taste (in a small Missouri town, Faulkner’s first novels, how in God’s name did she get them, Steinbeck’s), faith (not so clear that), originality, her sacrifices for my schooling and 1938-9, blind confidence in me.
But she helped destroy my father and R; affairs w JA, JL, G—others? (>my promiscuity?); horribly weakened my brother; would never, and still hasn’t let go of me in any degree—e.g., interminable letters, clips, incessant battering harangue.
SEDUCTIVE—‘beautiful,’ forcible but v. feminine (S’s amazement), vanity (yet), self-pity (+ great courage, indomitable), frustrated despite her immense successes.
Good Lord I can’t make head or tail of anything theres the bell
If life on the ward became really existential only from ten to noon five days a week, and in Mini-group three days, still high moments were possible during Eye-stare and even animal/vegetable/mineral on Saturday morning, while flamboyance featured the Reverend Hill Manson every Thursday evening and the chilling intellectual height of the week was Dr Marc Rome’s Wednesday evening performance, or demonstration rather. Severance had heard many famous lecturers, knew himself not in the category, but neither Harold Nicolson in England nor Reinhold Niebuhr in this country seemed to him Rome’s peer, the first deficient in sheer pressure and Dr Niebuhr unstable in his exordia, striding about flapping his arms and gibbering until he steadied, whereas Dr Rome began high with relentless control which he then, and menacingly, though with what Severance had to admit was actual charm, even increased until the subject was wiped out. He was flawless, non-rhetorical, only the terrible facts spoke. This week it was the Digestive Tract—the ulceration and/or hemorrhage of the mucus membrane lining it from the mouth to the rectum.
Dr Rome was a little under average height, dark-blond hair immaculate, faultless grooming altogether, though often a sweater under his tweed jacket, nothing medical about him, large gentle eyes, a no-nonsense nose and chin, manner very very calm as he drew fearful diagrams on the blackboard and supplied them with horrifying statistics. His bulky attractive wife, dry three years, was in the row ahead of Severance’s, to his right.
‘ … heavy vomiting of blood in an hour or so: acute hemorrhagic alcoholic gastritis. Forty to fifty percent die, of shock. Ulcers, same mortality rate, depending on age, length of condition, etc … . The alcoholic reacts to stress very badly, besides having more stress … . Cirrhosis of the liver accounts for one-seventh of all deaths from all causes in the United States. In San Francisco, for some reason, it is highest of all.’ Severance knew he had no significant liver damage. Amazing. It was nearly all functional —Ruth often had to tie his shoe-laces before she rushed him off to lecture, wondering whether he would be able to negotiate the two flights of stairs—except the brain damage. He couldn’t feel that himself—some cloudiness maybe—but Dr Rome’s even more spectacular lecture on the CNS (next week) left no room for speculation. ‘It has seven hundred known functions, mostly vital, including detoxification: the liver is the body’s only way of getting rid of alcohol. Under damage to it tolerance decreases. One drink will have the effect of ten formerly … . eighty-five to ninety percent of all you patients have fatty infibulation of the liver—a rare but bona fide cause of death.’ Preliminary to the scarred-down, small, hard liver of the sinister slides in one morning lecture. Severance shuddered. Then Dr Rome went into pancreatitis.
He had cut his toenails that morning after showering (softened the things, a little). This always made him feel old—made of horn—‘cut’? hacked at, rather, slabs off. The right big toe was worse than the left big toe. He mentioned these facts of life to the poet as they sat morose in the Snack Room later that evening. ‘Your time will come, Bucko.’
‘They say we have weak wills. Do you know about the two drunks who went to the film of The Lost Weekend. Came staggering out. “My God I’ll never take another drink,” said the first. “My God I’ll never go to another movie.” How’s that for commitment? one-track all-powerful, same energy do the Critique of Practical Reason. Protecting his habit. Plink.’
‘What do you do for a living, Jasper?’
The poet considered, smiling in his beard. Attractive son-of-a-bitch. Doesn’t look his forty-is-it. Very bad reputation, women, so Ruth had said. ‘Well, I sell, you know. My books sell. Christ, my last royalty cheque from New York was nearly eight thousand. I nearly fainted. Also I give readings. Teach around the place.’
‘What place?’
‘U.S. How do you make out? I expect you’re fat.’
‘I support a good many people,’ Severance said awkwardly, very nervous about being, indeed, ‘fat.’ Sounded awful. Was awful. ‘Good many books in print still but only the Harvey sold really well, and my last book.’
What was he doing in a literary conversation. Give it ten minutes.
‘I bought it one time,’ Jasper confided, ‘secondhand paperback. Hope you’re not miffed. Haven’t read it yet. I stock-in biographies for my old age. Some title: The Secret’s t Man of Blood, eh? Scientist deep in medieval Scots gore worked up for James First. What turned you on to the guy?’
‘Not the circulation-o
f-the-blood business, though I was angry about a great man almost utterly neglected. I got interested in his later work, on generation. Related to my own work then, now, all the time, on cancer-growth. Besides, there hadn’t been a biography for fifty years. Flood now, since mine. France mostly, California, Germany.’
‘You opened the field. I do too. Make things possible for other people. Screw my own stuff.’
Severance was moved. It was how he felt too, but he never thought of artists that way. He looked at the poet with brandnew almost loving eyes, very touched. ‘My wife used to read me some of The Screams when it came out. She keeps up. Three four years ago?’
‘Six. Plink. Turn you on? Or off?’
‘Frankly—’
‘Don’t tell me anything frankly, you lab-hound.’ The poet was grinning however. ‘Just report gently your wonder consternation rapture grief exaltation and crucifixion.’
Severance really laughed. He did not mind being had by a pro. ‘How about the Harrowing and the Resurrection?’
‘Settle for those. Tell me, were you interested, at all, in that very weird stuff?’ He looked as if he cared.
‘Yes. Not as much as Ruth, but I read some myself afterward. You sound better aloud. Good deal of authentic mania there, black and blue wit, pain—the fellow going on to fresh defeats, flappable, flappable. Surviving however. I bought a lot of the little I could understand. Do you write when you’re drunk?’
‘Not necessarily. You know, I prefer your capsule to most of my American reviews of that book. Not all, but you heard my little man. I’m touched, Alan.’
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