Free Recovery by John Berryman Page A

Encounter-Group therapy). Dr Marc Rome’s latest guess was that half the graduates would make it—that is, never drink again; half the remainder would drink off and on, and the final quarter would die. Severance was suspicious of these figures, being hypnotized of course like everybody else in the country since General Washington by statistics, but capable of moments of lucidity and resistance. Some in-State patients had visitors, in their rooms or out in the crabgrass hospital grounds, boasting of their progress, pleading, joking, begging forgiveness, manipulating, rejecting, threatening to take off. At four-thirty Mary-Jane was reading Chapter V of the Big Book for the seventeenth time (she kept track, having gone back to pills after eighteen months clean and dry), bald Wilbur now sixty-three who had lived with his parents hating them since his first wife left him was arguing with his intoxicated father on the only ward telephone, Jeree was sitting on her bed screwing up her courage to go down to the Snack Room and get coffee, Letty was resenting her daughter’s not having called and her husband’s having called, Severance was writing obsessedly in his Journal.
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    â€˜St Paul’s.
    â€˜Fear. Weak, it never occurred to me to go out for football. Fatal “sissy.” Bullied by Bone II and Frischer. First evening
Assembly, name called: rose against the wall, expecting congratulations on my job (swept hall in New Building)—called down for dustpile put there unjustly after I’d finished. Have I ever recovered? Love (fear) of Fr Kemmis—long English walks—Mrs Dulon’s teas. Awe of the Old Man. Cameron mocking my “de prus en prus” and throwing erasers; rumor he fathered Effie’s baby—her husband’s first day in Latin III, “My name is Robert Denzil Hagster-Collins and I am here to teach Latin”—we roared—day we locked him in the classroom closet where we had a gramophone playing. Joe Laker the paddling Prefect. Mr Woodward’s story about Bill the S.A. savage and the poison berries—unknown death—later used, cooked, as therapeutic—man’s giant step; “sun-worshipping,” crawling on bloody knees with books open down the board-walk, across flagstones, around flagpole, and back. Finishing black coffee (sweet) after the masters left the lounge after lunch. Butts in icehouse. Reading after lights-out in slanted eaves-closet and under covers with flashlight. (Reading what? ) Erection over Cornelia the matron in Latin II, suddenly called on, had to stand in aisle half-crouched. My jokes in the infirmary I didn’t understand (Boom-Du Rail-on, Boom-But Rail-er). Respect for John Ward. Wittenberg a friend? “Assume the attitude,” Moose-jaw used to say when we lined up in his room for paddling after lights-out. Sneakin Jesus the mathematics master coming up the stairs in the dark. Bobo (Effie’s Bobo—we held each other by the legs one afternoon out the windows in the dorm to look into their bathroom upside down) waving his arms gently to get us down from the window-seats—“Don’t take off, Bobo”—flit idea. Sucked off Dopey Compson in the tool-shed one winter afternoon, he made me do it, largest pecker in school, once he had an erection in the showers and we came from everywhere to wonder. Suicide-attempt lay down across the rails, train coming, hauled off.

    â€˜Scarcely anything else.
    â€˜I do not remember one book read in those four years except that Latin grammar, though hundreds up till then (14) and most of all the many thousands since (not all). A fraction of zeal in physics.
    â€˜Weird. Look into it into it, intuit into it, weird.
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    â€˜Ruth last night: “Your model was your very powerful mother … you have many feminine qualities (as I have masculine qualities—my father was my model)—I love them in you.” 1000 quarrels with