Getting Better

Roger Owen

Addiction Units for the treatment of Altogether I spent two periods of about alcohol abuse are not always situated in mental ten weeks each in St. Bernard’s the first late in hospitals. The one at which I found myself was 1972, and the last in the spring of 1974. Like at St. Bernard’s simply because space many of the patients in the Addictive Unit, I had happened to be available there when the Unit a poor understanding of why I was there. Many was set-up. Once a famous lunatic asylum (as it of us were in thrall to various consolatory, and was called when it was built a hundred years often elaborate fictions, less hurtful to our selfago), the hospital stands on the Uxbridge Road, esteem than the truth. The first aim of the place just beyond Habwell in West London. It has a was to prise open our minds to the reality of our long boundary wall, and a formidable gatehouse, situation. For example, I believed (the first time through which you can see its dominating round, anyway) that my presence in such a Victorian chapel; in appearance an altogether place was not, or not entirely of my own making, dispiriting place, quite unlike the kind of but had somehow been contrived by my wife, in discreetly anonymous clinic I had hoped for collusion with the Medical Officer of the BBC when the painful subject of treatment had been (my employers) – a lady I judged to be prone to raised. But, in spite of this, and in spite of the officiousness and melodrama. Of course, I knew locked wards and padded cells which were still I had a “drinking problem,” but believed I could humiliatingly visible, I now look back on it with cope with it myself, if people would behave a gratitude, indeed as an alma mater, because it little more feelingly, and discuss the matter in a was in these surroundings that I began my less exaggerated way. Such delusions are recovery from alcoholism. Now, many years tediously common. I describe them now to show later, I want to write about how it worked. where I started from, how impervious I was to There may be room for argument about the unpalatable truth. Among alcoholics this whether alcoholism is classified as an authentic common human tendency has become deeply mental illness, though in practice uncontrolled entrenched, in some cases intractably so. drinking (the older term “dipsomania” is apt) is Equally typical were the other problems I demented enough. In time I came to see this had created for myself, and which now rose to truth embodied in the bricks and mortar of the assail me. I had been in the hospital for a few hospital’s dark buildings. One room in the Unit, I days, and was by then detoxified though still remember, overlooked the small exercise area intellectually befuddled, when my wife came to of a locked ward, where two or three long-stay tell me that our marriage was over. I was patients could be seen perambulating its shocked, itself an inappropriate emotion, since boundaries in silence, or sometimes ineptly in the circumstances her action was scuffling with each other. At first to find oneself unsurprising. My mood for some time afterwards lumped together with the insane was dismaying, was compounded of despair and indignation, a but this dismay was to become a part of the combination which served further to obscure process I had to go through: which I found from me the salient truth about the reason why I myself positively wishing to go through. The was where I was. Determined to do what I could distress of the sad figures I looked on down to change her decision, I flung myself into the there was neither self-induced nor capable of treatment, going conscientiously through the improvement. My own could be transformed by forms and procedures which the culture of the a single act of self-interest. All I had to do was Unit seemed to require. Once I even steeled stop drinking. myself to declare my alcoholism publicly at one These perceptions, including the last of the compulsory meetings of Alcoholics obviously transparent one, were arrived at with Anonymous. In so far as this act demanded the difficulty, as through a maze. overcoming of strong feelings of repugnance, it

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took some “will power,” that concept beloved of indeed a sanctuary and a refuge. Unbelievably, moralists. After ten weeks, I left the hospital with it seemed to me, my job at the BBC was still a declaration of good intention, and with the being kept for me, so I had much to pray for. consent – granted with some diffidence – of the The place was unchanged, except for medical staff. I meant well, but secretly hoped, some spring flowers in the gardens. The same and no doubt it showed, that my display of West-Indian Staff Nurse admitted me, shaking courage, iron resolution, etc., would be his head and tut-tutting softly, without censure. rewarded, and that after further sterling behavior There were a few men hanging around the quiet in the outside world, I would be returned, ward – some in the classic categories with which expiated, in a matter of months to my home and I was already acquainted: a blazered publican family. now far from the roar of the saloon bar; a grimfaced general practitioner in a suit. I was The next six months were difficult, comforted by the sight of another returnee from though less so than those that were to follow. I my earlier term there. So the scene was found somewhere to live, and crept reassuring; the only change was in me. From shamefacedly back to my work as a television the beginning, that second time, I coddled and producer. Divorce proceedings, with their protected a small flame of optimism, without accompanying squalor, were now under way. daring either to mention it, or even to dwell on it Deprived of the company I had found in pubs, I for long in my thoughts. The proposition that I was lonely, and attended A.A. meetings rarely – was an alcoholic seemed no longer malign, but which was a mistake. I took my children for liberating. In the language of Alcoholics lunches in town, and remained sober; bitterly Anonymous, I had already, without realizing it, and resentfully so. The happy denouement I had taken the first “step”; I had accepted that my life hoped for receded. was unmanageable, that the label fitted. I was So, after lengthy forethought and even neither eager nor reluctant now to admit this in planning (I abandoned the Antabuse tablets the conventional manner, should the occasion which make alcohol unacceptable), I got drunk. arise; no act of will power would be demanded, if There was no demonic craving about it: physical it did. Let it be. dependency had long gone. Again, something That this should have been my state of very like “will power” was demanded, and mind might seem obvious enough, given my bleakly exercised. My action was a gesture of recent behavior. But to look at the matter in such defiance – made in retreat – to an terms is to underestimate the tenacity and unaccommodating world. durability of the delusions commonly held in the Unit. People were there, in situations as crystal The decline that followed went according clear in their implications as my own, who had to the book. Perhaps it was given an additional not taken that “step”; or rather, since it felt to me push by the Manichean style treatment I had like a gift, on whom it had not been bestowed. already undergone. Whatever the truth of that, I Even if they grudgingly conceded that they were was soon caught up in a drearily familiar circle. alcoholics, they had no sense of the utility of that Drink both assuaged and fed my feelings of description, of the possibilities it opened up. unworthiness. I knew with absolute clarity the And so for me, now at the right starting harm I was doing; but now that I was dependent place, or even halfway down the course, the again, could do little about it. I pictured myself as routines and procedures of the treatment began Macbeth, the victim of similar equivocations, all over again. A minimum of medication – a few conscience-stricken but unregenerate: a pills to cope with malnourishment, and a few comparison which, with some allowances for its more to quell the shakes – and afterwards the self-dramatizing qualities, still retains a meaning familiar round of meetings, compulsory for me. Indifferent to the consequences, or attendance at A.A. one evening a week, the perhaps in some way embracing them, I barely Friday night “social” with the ladies (about a attempted to conceal my drinking, and in due dozen of them and thirty of us), and, after a time, course found myself back in the asylum, now the week-end leaves. In some respects it was

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pleasant. Companionship and routine make a British Railway steward who stole the miniatures good mix, especially for those who have denied for all-night sessions in some secret den at themselves both. Among all this there was very Euston Station; the dentist who drank away the little one-to-one therapy, no lying on couches, no shakes each morning before tackling the first long colloquies with psychiatrists. The one patient; the quiet string-player who did the same doctor on duty was sometimes invisible for days before rehearsals. There were Irishmen from the on end, and the consultant psychiatrist came building trade; a well-known union official, a about once a week. Indian businessman; even an air- traffic Sometimes a patient at his own request controller. And through all the tales there ran the (I never saw it happen to a woman) was given thread of moral and social disaster, lost jobs, aversion therapy. Barrack-room wit (Don’t be rent arrears, disturbed children, brushes with the vague, ask for Haig”) was prompted by the sight law, drunken driving, accidents, bounced of a drinks trolley, its bottles and glasses cheques, fiddles, tax evasion, domestic turmoil, gleaming and clinking down the corridor to a illness, litigation, theft, divorce… room where someone was being induced to Sometimes in these stories we would vomit on drinking it – a cruelly encapsulated see our own pain and listen to our own fears or replay of much previous experience. But this catch with a tremor of recognition some practice was not common, and indeed struck me unnerving familiar trick which somehow as an aberration, even a betrayal of the Unit’s contrived to shift the responsibility for it all on to real nature. And even the other bits of applied others: most frequently, our wives. The intention science – the blood tests, urine samples, checks was that we should serve each other as mirrors for liver damage, and so on – important though in which we might discern the general nature of they were, I felt to be peripheral. We were our condition, the shape of the wood itself rather assured that alcoholism was an “illness,” but in than the impenetrable local thickets in which we practice that metaphor was not sustained. It was were separately impaled. For me this indeed did clear that the battle with this “disease” was not begin to happen, and I found myself scrutinizing to be won with the techniques of medical my own chance remarks, attempting to discover science, but in a moral and spiritual domain, one their covert intent. Altogether it amounted to, a in which the conditioned reflex hardly belonged. kind of elementary education in ordinary, secular morality. We were to be given the opportunity to choose. To this end, we were exposed to a kind But there were other things which went of crash course in alcoholism, its psychological on in St. Bernard’s which reached well beyond roots, and its human consequences. this, to the plane of the properly “religious.” The Furthermore, we were to provide this for recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous is ourselves, by a process of learning by discovery. structured in a series of “steps,” beginning with A great deal of talk at St. Bernard’s at meal- the neophyte’s acceptance of his alcoholism and times, doing the washing-up, at A.A., in and out moving onwards from there to (second step) a of meetings, was of course about booze and its belief that a “power greater than ourselves could associated problems. It made up in its entirety a restore us to sanity” or (fourth step) to “a lurid and overwhelming panorama of the fearless and searching moral inventory,” and Drinking Classes at work in British society. We thence, through modes of thinking which imply learned about the habits and properties of park- the need for acts of amendment or atonement, bench meths drinkers, and of the s u b t e r f u g to a state of mind in which serving others, other e s We heard from those who had nosed their alcoholics for example, has become important. way to jobs in the industry – the night-worker This disciplined progression away from the self who drank himself to stupefaction in a brewery; is, I suppose, similar to those in other manuals the barman who set himself up with half-a-bottle of the religious life, like, the Spiritual Exercises of vodka before beginning his working and of St. Ignatius. drinking day. There was a pathetic clergyman; a An A.A. meeting itself, many of which I ship’s purser who fell victim to the Duty Free; a attended at the hospital, and a few afterwards, is

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evangelical in character. It begins and ends with slogans – all this was not to the taste of the the A.A. prayer: “God grant me the serenity to worldlings among us. accept the things I cannot change. Courage to During my second spell in the hospital I change the things I can. And the wisdom to allowed myself none of this, without ever feeling know the difference.” After the prayer a speaker, a sense of fellowship with the A.A. meeting. as part of a ” step ” in his own recovery, Apart from my time at St. Bernard’s it has not addresses the meeting. This testimony takes a played a part in my recovery, though for many it confessional form, and includes an account of is indispensable. It is as if I stand on the first the speaker’s former debasement, describes the “step” of its scheme: fortunately, the allprocess of recovery, and ends with some words important one. But I did, and do, perceive that about the contentment, and sometimes even the organization to be wholly benign, and rich in material benefits, which are his lot. There is no experience; therefore any disdain I might have preaching, but within a short space of time we felt for its methods now seems to me are exposed to an often vivid account of impertinent. Even that second time, I remember suffering, followed by a revelation of what – if we toying with the idea of setting up a BBC branch choose wisely – can be ours. For old hands the of A.A.: a more intellectually congenial, purpose is reinforcement: for those still in Brompton Oratory version, as it were. The whole trouble, conversion. All very reminiscent, I point of A.A. – the recognition of what is common thought, of the Welsh Nonconformist prayer- about alcoholism, and its anyway profoundly meetings of my own childhood, especially in the equalizing nature – had at that late stage still way other speakers, some quite venerable in the eluded me. length and dignity of their sobriety, rise like But there it was, at the very center of the elders of the chapel to lend their weight to what Unit’s life, its purposes endorsed by has been said. A good meeting ends in a spirit psychiatrists. It was, I felt, as if the Gospel Hall of warmth and fellowship, handshakes all round. had been given the imprimatur of the Royal The weekly A.A. meeting was seen as Society. Nor was A.A. the only element of the an event of real importance in the life of the Unit, religious informing our routine. Many of our but it differed from other such meetings in one meetings, I recall, were chaired by a selfimportant way. It was conducted and attended effacing but austere Anglican clergy, and, whose by a group of Old Boys, so to speak, and we, the interests I assumed to be in our moral and current generation of inmates, sat at the back as spiritual condition. He too never preached, but observers. Voluntary patients or not, we felt we he gazed around us impassively on these were there under duress, pressed men, and as occasions, as though contemplating some such we were sometimes resentful, and hence particularly lucid paradigm of the fallen human critical of what went on, given to dissecting the condition. I remember too once overhearing the inadequacies of the speakers with a sharpness eminent psychiatrist who had established the to which we were hardly entitled. Unit, saying to a patient as we walked out of a We watched the procedures as meeting: “Miracles can happen -let’s hope they outsiders, chipping in occasionally with remarks do,” and he added the words “But of course you from our own, unreformed, world. Much of what will have to work for them.” Faith and Works. we said was tangential or crass. We quibbled, unbelievably, about minor points of fact (bus There are other forms of psychotherapy routes; prices), or tiny inconsistencies in the similarly committed to the digging -out of truths, stories we heard. Sometimes we were but none I know in which this pursuit is argumentative. “Why do we have to be characterized in such traditionally religious anonymous, if it’s a disease?” I remember terms. There are now professionals in Britain asking. “you don’t keep tonsillitis quiet.” We and elsewhere who act on principles less joked like schoolboys, sotto voce. The charged with spirituality. They are skeptical evangelical flavour of the meeting, its touches of about some of the methods used at St. naivety, the Reader’s Digest style of some of its Bernard’s and similar places, and even dissent controversially from the insistence in all cases

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on total abstemiousness. Thus they deny a suggestion that these deplorable characteristics central article of the A.A. faith: “Once an are somehow the marks of a predisposing alcoholic, always an alcoholic.” They offer “alcoholic personality,” rather than acquired by instead a system of out-patient counselling the practice of drinking. At the time, though, I did which is often directed to more limited goals and not inquire too curiously into all this, forgoing the which, the evidence suggests, is more effective pleasures of speculation. Some of us, so and much cheaper than three months in a inclined, browsed in the professional literature, traditional addiction unit. but it seemed to me prudent not to follow that I feel no sense of having missed out, track. and can only record that in my own case, and at I felt this especially because those who the time, alcoholism felt like a state of moral and did sometimes found texts which, at a pinch, spiritual failure; that the help given to me was, bore the interpretation that there were solutions though not what I expected, experienced as less absolute than total abstinence: a view fitting; that it was couched in the right terms, and totally at variance with what we were being told, was matched, I suspect in a significant way, to and one on which they pounced with ominous my own temperament and background. The relish. Knowledge in itself was of little use. I condition of alcoholism is part culturally defined, remembered once meeting a journalist in a and it seems reasonable that its treatment West-End drinking club, who had in his pocket a should find expression in those cultural forms battered and heavily annotated copy of a which make sense to those who suffer from it. Pelican book on alcoholism, his study of which bore no visible results. I remembered again an The secular doctrines which we were oft- repeated remark of my mother’s: “You may also invited to discover can be summarized. be educated, but you don’t know how to live.” Its Alcoholics were prone to self-deception, to an Welsh intensity had amused me, but the inability to locate the source of their troubles in judgment now seemed the plain truth. So, if themselves, attributing then instead to others: there were contrarieties, omissions and puzzles frigid wives, unfeeling husbands, impossible in what I was hearing, they too, I felt, could be parents. They were over- dependent, and had left simply to be. difficulty in their relationships. They were given Such were my thoughts and feelings to self-pity, and to anger, which last they often after or three weeks of that second term. I repressed (though they were often violent). They wanted to stop drinking, and, being on the lookwere immature, even infantile, and therefore out for whatever meanings the place offered, egotistical. They were fearful of rebuff, self- found sermons in its stones and moral where protecting, and therefore reluctant to grasp they had not been planted. I was, like a tennis nettles. Above all, they lacked self-knowledge, player, trying not to try, letting the processes of and were, as a result, manipulative and the treatment do their work in me. In a way, I dishonest. It was implied, I think, that these was already “better” – the substance of what the characteristics were, if not inherent, at least Unit taught I had already grasped intellectually antecedent – the cause of the patient’s drinking, that first time, and my collapse into drunkenness though now writ large by its practice. Some form after that had, I guessed, been a necessary of moral reconstruction was called for. experience, a fixing of it in my mind. From now Anyone who has known a very heavy on it was a matter of letting the new cargo I had drinker will recognize this description, and it taken on board settle down, yare and secure. gives a fair account of much of my own Two other experiences – both in a way literary behavior. It takes no account – or for a practical were to be of help in this respect. purposes chooses to ignore – certain other No one was officially discharged from profound influences. (Our Unit, for example, was the hospital until they had written their “life well provided with Celts, but the only Jew I met story,” a 20- or 30 – minute piece touching on was the consultant psychiatrist.) It also their childhood and family background, their describes many people who are not addicts, and current hopes and feelings, and their drinking it seems to me to be on shaky ground in its history. Every week two or three people

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rendered these accounts of themselves publicly some overwrought contrivance, which was at a full meeting of the group. These occasions designed, they implied, to promote an image of were a kind of passing – out ceremony, moments myself as fearlessly unconventional, unique, of truth, and were conducted with appropriate different, and special. seriousness. Again, the stories left us with powerful images. I still retain the picture we were Some time in the middle of my second given of the owner of a fish-and- chip shop – term, I found myself reading rather than listening fearful, drunk, sweating and accident prone – to another moving and disturbing story. It was shoveling out the orders between backstairs Recovery, John Berryman’s thinly fictionalized swigs on his vodka bottle. The surface details of account of his own experience in an alcoholic this image bear no relation to anything in my treatment centre in the United States. I have own experience, and yet it has since had for me never read a book which addressed itself so an unforgettable relevance. But the important directly to my own immediate and vital interests, thing about the life stories lay in the general and which dealt, often with great insight, with the impression they made, in their style and tone. very experience I was undergoing while reading What was the nature of the feelings implied in it. The book had come out in England a year or the language used? Were those feelings two earlier, not long after Berryman’s suicide. authentic, or ones to which the narrator was I was already an admirer of Berryman’s entitled? These were the kinds of questions we poetry, and for obvious reasons was interested pursued in our discussions, in which terms like when the novel came my way. The place “phony” or “bullshit” or even “immature” were Berryman describes in it was more American in used. If the A.A. meetings took me back to the style than ours, with its touches of fashionable Chapel, these put me in mind of another setting psychodrama and its even greater elevation of in which the Puritan spirit had moved – the A.A. into near-sacred status. But all the same it seminars in practical criticism I had attended was grippingly recognizable. I knew, of course, while studying English Literature at Cambridge, that Berryman had killed himself, and that the some twenty years earlier. book’s title had been over-optimistic. I read it The stories demonstrated once again then in a state of some anxiety and fear, how problematical were some of the claims once scanning the text for clues and signposts which made about the links between literature and life. would help me on my way; almost as a kind of Honesty, maturity, and so on were not notably cautionary tale. I have not read the book since, present in the life stories of people with literary but the effect it made is easy to recall. Much of leanings. I remember, for example, a journalist the writing struck me as marvelously vivid, who began his with, roughly, the following particularly the portraits Berryman gives of the words: other patients, all seen in a commanding yet “My earliest memories are of Mother screaming compassionate glance of the poet’s eye. I was at Father; and of Adolf Hitler shouting on the impressed, too, by Berryman’s interest and radio.” curiosity in them all, and by the energetic and egalitarian zest with which this distinguished And I remember too the look of despair man threw himself into their lives. And most of on the face of the consultant psychiatrist as he all I noticed his grave preoccupation with listened to this. My own effort, that first time religion. My own inner life at the time seemed certainly, was poor. It was, I recall, indefatigably lacking in depth and quality; my relationships and bewilderingly complicated, ranging over with my fellow patients, in comparison, cool. And such diverse themes as breast-feeding; the yet this good man, dismayingly, had failed. What hypocrisies of Welsh nonconformity; the chances had I? deracinating effects of upward social mobility He had put himself unreservedly into the and its associated guilts…and more in this vein. hands of “a power greater than himself.” He had It is possible that I touched on some genuine “leveled” at many meetings. But he had not problems, but I somehow missed the point, and been restored to sanity. Perhaps, it occurred to the effect of all this on my audience was that of me, with some heterodoxy, he had tried too

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hard. I began to find in the book a struggling and snooker ladder). At work in the Unit was a tortured element, a kind of holy ambition, as if profoundly sane impulse towards social order, Berryman were aspiring to a condition of with its safe and predictable rhythms, and to find sainthood, and not simply to giving up alcohol. this primal virtue in this, of all places, and in The religious parts began to seem not grave but myself, added further to my sense of freedom pumped up, and his spiritual wrestling seemed and power. too evidently perceived as of cosmic And that really is all. I returned to my significance. work, this time wholly indifferent to the I concluded this self-serving reading by occasional stare. I have had not the slightest deciding that there had been something deeply trouble with alcohol since, neither drinking nor mistaken in his choosing so quickly to turn his being, tempted to do so, and abstinence has experience into “copy,” indeed into Art, as become as habitual as drunkenness once was. though that exalted status would be a guarantee No tablets and no “will-power” have been called of its reality, when in truth the effect was to for. For a short time I went to a few A.A. diminish it. My judgments, like all of their kind, meetings, more to pay my respects to St. were “impure,” perhaps abnormally contamin- Bernard’s than to seek support. For a year or ated by the urgencies of my own situation; two I had dreams about being drunk, but these certainly they served their immediate and too have long gone. I feel no aversion to the utilitarian purpose. I took what I could get, and presence of alcohol, and provide it for friends, from Berryman I learned that I was under no and though occasionally the whiff of a good obligation to join a humility race or competition, bottle of wine produces a momentary feeling of and that I had to cut my coat according to my regret, the sensation has never seemed to bring cloth, and see what happened. me near any danger point. The idea of controlled Things did happen, After a few weeks at drinking, with its meticulous monitoring of intake St. Bernard’s, the joke went, you felt so good levels, has no attractions; it seems to be more that you needed a drink to celebrate. My own trouble than it could possibly be worth. I try to health returned as though indeed borne on avoid smugness, and my tolerance for drunks is some warm fluid which was finding its own way still fairly high. Anything less would be through my body, carrying with it messages of unacceptable for someone with my record; and reassurance, inexplicable feelings of well-being. even when frozen by boredom I am grateful to I lay in bed at night, contentedly alert to these them for reminding me of how terrible I must pleasing sensations. They came not only from have been. One minor problem is fighting off the good physical health I was now enjoying insistent hosts who don’t know me – it involves again, but from the sense, already there, of either lying or dramatic self-exposure. having accomplished something. And they took a further charge from the closeness of the lives The success rate in the treatment of being lived around me, from those dark shapes alcoholism is not impressive; and much cheaper beneath the blankets whose emotions were so methods than those that benefited me are being similar to my own, and whose thoughts I felt I developed. No one in these times is likely to could almost hear. In the mornings when we got wish to subsidize places like St. Bernard’s for up I was struck and moved by the normalcy of their intrinsic value. So my experience will our lives: by the way, for example, we laid perhaps become increasingly less common, like claims to dignity and respect through finding that of having had a classical education. In a pleasure in the performance of small duties sense, I was privileged. (making the tea; fetching the papers; running the

Source: Encounter, Sept./Oct., 1987.

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