Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery
256
Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery
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Overview
Addiction is easy to fall into and hard to escape. It destroys the lives of individuals, and has a devastating cost to society. The National Institute of Health estimates seventeen million adults in the United States are alcoholics or have a serious problem with alcohol. At the same time, the country is seeing entire communities brought to their knees because of opioid additions. These scourges affect not only those who drink or use drugs but also their families and friends, who witness the horror of addiction. With Out of the Wreck I Rise, Neil Steinberg and Sara Bader have created a resource like no other—one that harnesses the power of literature, poetry, and creativity to illuminate what alcoholism and addiction are all about, while forging change, deepening understanding, and even saving lives.
Structured to follow the arduous steps to sobriety, the book marshals the wisdom of centuries and explores essential topics, including the importance of time, navigating family and friends, relapse, and what Raymond Carver calls “gravy,” the reward that is recovery. Each chapter begins with advice and commentary followed by a wealth of quotes to inspire and heal. The result is a mosaic of observations and encouragement that draws on writers and artists spanning thousands of years—from Seneca to David Foster Wallace, William Shakespeare to Patti Smith. The ruminations of notorious drinkers like John Cheever, Charles Bukowski, and Ernest Hemingway shed light on the difficult process of becoming sober and remind the reader that while the literary alcoholic is often romanticized, recovery is the true path of the hero.
Along with traditional routes to recovery—Alcoholics Anonymous, out-patient therapy, and intensive rehabilitation programs—this literary companion offers valuable support and inspiration to anyone seeking to fight their addiction or to a struggling loved one.
Featuring Charles Bukowski, John Cheever, Dante, Ricky Gervais, Ernest Hemingway, Billie Holiday, Anne Lamott, John Lennon, Haruki Murakami, Anaïs Nin, Mary Oliver, Samuel Pepys, Rainer Maria Rilke, J. K. Rowling, Patti Smith, Kurt Vonnegut, and many more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226140278 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/11/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 720 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Out of the Wreck I Rise
A Literary Companion to Recovery
By Neil Steinberg, Sara Bader
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 Neil Steinberg and Sara BaderAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-14027-8
CHAPTER 1
The Best of Life
The Good Times Sour
Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication:
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Everywhere you go; everywhere you look. The focus of every meal and celebration. A bar on each corner. Medicine cabinets crammed with drugs. You never realize how pervasive intoxicants are until you try to stop. The cruise line advertisement shows a tiny ship sailing across the surface of a martini — as if drink were the voyage, the destination, the ocean itself. As if you can't drink at home.
Eventually you might realize that it isn't the world so much as you. That you have become one of those who, as Thoreau wrote, "mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere." Your mind has slipped into this rut and is mired in obsession. Now you have to find a way out.
When first facing recovery, you want desperately to run back to your old world — so familiar and comforting, the path ahead steep and uncertain. To reassure yourself that it's still there. You're still you. That strange new life, featuring some strange new you, can start tomorrow.
And while that's a bad idea — you'll only end up, a day or a week or a year later, right back where you are now, or worse — it's helpful to pause and look at it for a moment, realize that it was both great and not at all great. Is this the most important thing in your life? It's become that, true, but is this really how you want your story to end? A vital skill in recovery is the ability to think about the what-comes-next part, "consequences," as we tell children. Look at it all. Not just the joy of the first drink but the jolt of the tenth — the hangover after the party, your shame, the hopes of everybody you love dashed.
Even Byron, that romantic idol, fond of wine, debauchery, and revolution, followed his lines about the necessity of drunkenness with the inevitable result. The poem continues:
But to return — get very drunk; and when
You wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.
Ring for your valet — bid him quickly bring
Some hock and soda-water
Hock is German white wine. Hock and soda water being the early nineteenth-century version of a wine spritzer. Not the most romantic beverage; then again, the glittering image always has something spattered on it if you look closely. Byron sees clearly enough to capture the whole cycle in a dozen lines: the joy of life shifts to the joy of repairing the damage. Indulgence moves seamlessly from an opportunity to an anticipation to an obligation. At first you use it to feel wonderful, then you use it to feel normal. First you want to, then you have to. You don't even realize what is happening — take comfort in that, in the understanding that this problem is, at least in this sense, not your fault. Nobody wants to become an alcoholic. "You don't decide to be an addict," William S. Burroughs writes in Junky. "One morning you wake up sick and you're an addict." It happens when the pleasure you clutch at clutches you and won't let go. Which is one way of thinking about the recovery process: not so much about you letting go of something — were it that easy — but about finding a way to make something let go of you. Because the two are intertwined, and while you were grabbing at your substance, your substance was grabbing you.
"It was not always with me," begins Rainer Maria Rilke's "Song of the Drunkard." "It would come and go."
I wanted to hold it. The wine held it for me.
What it was, I no longer know.
But I was the one being held, held this way and that,
until I could do nothing else.
I, fool.
Now I am trapped in his game....
Many are trapped. Are they fools? They are ordinarily intelligent people who in this regard don't know any better, who insist they choose to live in bondage. They are not ready. They can't do it, or, rather, believe they can't. But you are ready. You can do something else. At least you hope you can, or suspect you can, which is enough. You already are doing something just by reading this. Don't torture yourself with regret about giving up your addiction forever. You are trying something new, for a day, a week, a year. How many years have you already spent in your old life? Why not try something different and go to a new place? Just for a while. Maybe you will like it there. Take one step, even if it seems impossible, by looking at what you had, what you loved, what it became, and then say goodbye to it, for now or forever.
* * *
All ways led to the saloon.
Jack London, John Barleycorn
* * *
At a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome: and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are ... there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
Samuel Johnson, quoted in The Life of Samuel Johnson
* * *
Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.
Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
* * *
A martini makes an ordinary glass shine like a diamond at a coronation, makes an iron bed in Mexico seem like the feather bed of a sultan, a hotel room like the terminus and climax of all voyages, the pinnacle of contentment, the place of repose in an altitude hungered for by all the restless ones.
Anaïs Nin, diary entry, summer 1953
* * *
What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
* * *
all the best of life ...
then daydreaming to drink at six,
waiting for the iced fire,
even the feel of the frosted glass,
like waiting for a girl ...
if you had waited.
Robert Lowell, "For John Berryman"
* * *
On a busy night familiar greetings would ring out from old friends when de Kooning entered the bar. "Hiya, fellas," de Kooning would say. "Hiya, fellas." ... From the crowd, Elaine, smoking and chatting, would toss him a wave. Rauschenberg would smile. Frank O'Hara and Mercedes Matter would make room for him at the bar.
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning
* * *
In places where drinks are served, you drink. As soon as my glass is empty, the waiter comes over to inquire; if I don't empty it fast enough, he prowls around me, looking at me reproachfully.
Simone de Beauvoir, diary entry, January 28, 1947
* * *
Most of those at the Algonquin roundtable drank their lunch. I thought of drinking the way I now think of gas you put in the car. You get to a place where it is available, you pour it into the opening intended for it, and your car will go for miles until it needs more. I thought of gas not as a diminishing commodity, not as the oil companies' exclusive hold on our economy, or the environment's flirtation with destruction. I thought of it as the substance that makes the automobile move: so I thought scotch and soda, its beautiful amber color, its place in a glass sliding down the bar toward some eager hand, was just the normal way of things, the lubricant of art, its mundane grain-brewed muse.
Anne Roiphe, Art and Madness
* * *
RICHARD:
Give me a bowl of wine.
I have not that alacrity of spirit
Nor cheer of mind that I was wont to have.
Set it down.
William Shakespeare, Richard III
* * *
... if the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.
Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother Theo, July 22, 1888
* * *
Only a drink makes me feel alive at all.
Eugene O'Neill, letter to his wife, February 1920
* * *
I can't seem to get used to myself. I don't even know if I am me. Then as soon as I take a drink, the lead slips away and I recognize myself, I become me again.
Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros
* * *
Now he was feeling just swell. This was the way to be. Relaxed and calm and warm inside, warm toward all the world. Thoroughly at home and at ease in yourself. What a boon liquor could be when you used it right. He was being the very soul of propriety; temperate, controlled, very gentlemanlike in fact. The drinks were hardly affecting him at all. He could even speed things up a little. Might as well get some lift out of the afternoon, specially when you'd had such a slow start. He told Sam to pour him another.
Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend
* * *
You can show me no man who knows how he began to crave that which he craves. He has not been led to that pass by forethought; he has been driven to it by impulse. Fortune attacks us as often as we attack Fortune. It is disgraceful, instead of proceeding ahead, to be carried along, and then suddenly, amid the whirlpool of events, to ask in a dazed way: "How did I get into this condition?"
Seneca, Epistle 37
* * *
Voluntarily or involuntarily, of choice or of necessity, most moderns lead a nerve-racking life, and are continually too tired to be capable of enjoyment without the help of alcohol.
Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
* * *
Well, my self-consciousness was such that I simply had to take that drink. So I took it, and another one, and then, lo, the miracle! That strange barrier that had existed between me and all men and women seemed to instantly go down. I felt that I belonged where I was, belonged to life; I belonged to the universe; I was a part of things at last. Oh, the magic of those first three or four drinks! I became the life of the party. I actually could please the guests; I could talk freely, volubly; I could talk well.
Bill Wilson, Bill W. and Mr. Wilson
* * *
Shooting was thrilling. As the experienced cats explained, shooting is more efficient than snorting. Because it goes straight to your bloodstream, you need less to get high. And then there's the cotton, the sifter, the spoon, the cooking, the needle, the penetration. The self-infliction. The ritual.
Etta James, Rage to Survive
* * *
We have faith in poison.
We will give our lives completely, every day.
Arthur Rimbaud, "Drunken Morning"
* * *
So I go and get another beer. The supply is already running out. I only had five cans. It is a hot night. Where will I be when the dark falls and the dragons come and there is no more beer?
Thomas Merton, journal entry, June 23, 1966
* * *
Though I never took a drink before or during the show, I was prone to excesses. What I would do is drink after a performance. A couple of drinks in the dressing room and then I'd go out and have a couple more and then go home. I never thought it would catch up to me. I thought it was social drinking: "Oh, I had two or three drinks." Three drinks were actually nine drinks. I made all kinds of excuses. "So I drink, so what? What's a couple of drinks?" Before I knew it, it was a bottle a night.
Sid Caesar, Caesar's Hours
* * *
I found the tide of wine and wassail fast gaining on the dry land of sober judgment.
Washington Irving, The Keeping of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall
* * *
I leave my typewriter at quarter after ten and wander down stairs to the pantry where the bottles are. I do not touch the bottles. I do not even look at the bottles and I congratulate myself fatuously on my will-power. At eleven I make another trip to the pantry and congratulate myself once more but at twelve when the bull-horn blows I fly down the stairs and pour out a scoop. The same thing happens in the afternoon. I take long walks, split wood, paint trim and shovel snow and while I exclaim loudly over the beauty of the winter light there lurks at the back of my mind the image of a bottle of sour-mash. It seems to be, most of the time, an equal struggle.
John Cheever, letter to Josephine Herbst, May 1968
* * *
When I got back to Los Angeles I found a cheap hotel just off Hoover Street and stayed in bed and drank. I drank for some time, three or four days. I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
* * *
Lately I've been
running by day,
drinking by night,
as though first to build
a man and then destroy
him — this for
three months, and
I don't find it foolish
— a man almost 50
who still knows so
little of why he's
alive and would turn
away from answers,
turn to the blankness
that follows my nights
or the pounding of
the breath, the sweat
oiling every part
of me, running
even from my hair.
Philip Levine, "Words"
* * *
How on earth do I know what I'm going to do, except that it's fairly plain that I will go on drinking and drinking and drinking, and having a good time in bed whenever I can and hitting the keys of my new "Olympia" typewriter — a good one — Ah, well. Goodnight.
Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, April 1, 1957
* * *
It's not the folly of foolishness that's shameful;
The shame is not knowing when folly's time is over.
Horace, "To the Manager of His Farm"
CHAPTER 2I Don't Want to Do That
The End of the Party
I'll just stop in, he thought, and see if there are any messages; I'll see if there have been any phone calls. He hadn't been back to the hotel, after all, for — let's see — for almost five hours; just wandering around. There might be some messages. I'll just stop in, he thought, and see; and maybe I'll have one brandy. I don't want to sit there in the lobby again and drink brandy; I don't want to do that.
James Thurber, "One Is a Wanderer"
James Thurber is remembered for his classic tale of timid male fantasy, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," as well as for his fond recollections of early twentieth-century Columbus, Ohio, and his looping, distinctive cartoons that Dorothy Parker compared to unbaked cookies.
But all wasn't nostalgia and beloved dogs. Occasionally he'd write a bleak, not-at-all-funny story such as "One Is a Wanderer," about a man walking around New York City on a slushy February day, lonely and killing time. He ends up — as he always does — back in the lobby of his hotel, drinking brandy. "I think maybe I'll call the Bradleys," he muses, standing up, realizing only then how much he's drunk: "And don't, he said to himself, standing still a moment, don't tell me you're not cockeyed now, because you are cockeyed now, just as you said you wouldn't be when you got up this morning and had orange juice and coffee and determined to get some work done, a whole lot of work done; just as you said you wouldn't be but you knew you would be, all right."
That is the core, the famous denial that lies at the heart of addiction. You realize there is a problem and you pretend you don't.
"That's the way alcoholism works," Caroline Knapp writes in Drinking. "You know and you don't know. Or, more accurately, you know and the part of you that wants no part of this knowledge immediately slips into gear, sliding the fear into a new category. You wake up in the morning and — presto! — it's reclassified: a little problem with drinking, something you'll take care of when you're less depressed."
You wander as if you didn't know where you're going to end up, as if it were random and a surprise. Drug addicts go to see friends who happen to be dealers. Drunks go to plays and dinners, parties and weddings, doing their best to overlook that the pressing question — where's the bar? — is the same wherever they go.
Some never get beyond denial. Jack London knew he had a drinking problem — he wrote a memoir about it, John Barleycorn, frankly detailing an adult life that eventually bordered on near-continual inebriation: "I achieved a condition in which my body was never free from alcohol. Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol. If I traveled to out-of-the-way places, I declined to run the risk of finding them dry. I took a quart, or several quarts, along in my grip. In the past I had been amazed by other men guilty of this practice. Now I did it myself unblushingly. ... There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Out of the Wreck I Rise by Neil Steinberg, Sara Bader. Copyright © 2016 Neil Steinberg and Sara Bader. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Why Put It Off?1 The Best of Life: The Good Times Sour
2 I Don’t Want to Do That: The End of the Party
3 The Direction You Least Trust: Making the Leap
4 Nothing to Lose: Early Recovery
5 Wait, for Now: The Importance of Time
6 Somewhere to Go: Alcoholics Anonymous
7 Shakespeare’s Child: Family and Friends
8 Upon Breach of My Late Vows: Relapse
9 Gravy: On Life Anew
Acknowledgments
Source Notes
Permissions
Index of Authors