Bottle-Scarred

By Jane Howard

RECOVERY by JOHN BERRYMAN 254 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$6.95.

The celebrated brain of Alan Severance, M.D., Litt.D., has been damaged and is in mortal danger. Severance drinks. He drinks the same way he teaches, writes, lectures and experiments, which is to say monumentally.

Restraint is beyond him. The volume of his voice is a full roar; the volume of his drinking--on which he has believed "my science and art depended" --has borne him repeatedly to the edge of doom. As a last hope, he finds himself in Ward W of a midwestern hospital's treatment center, vowing to "get out of the whisky business altogether."

Ward W's regimen is rather like a crash course at Esalen. Privacy, leading as it can to evasions and delusions, is not esteemed. Public confessions are required. Severance admits to "23 years of alcoholic chaos, lost wives, public disgrace," indignities unspeakable, yet spoken. When his fellow patients unravel their histories, Severance listens intently. Few in Ward W can share anything like the scope and depth of his interests, but he must make his peace with them before he can return to his pregnant wife and small daughter.

Recovery, given these elements, could have been a tensely structured autobiographical novel, and probably would have been, had not Berryman jumped to his death last year. He was an author of protean energies, focused on but not limited to poetry. He was himself very nearly as renowned as "Alan Severance, the nationally famous drinker," whom LIFE magazine photographs "holding forth to rapt pals in an Irish pub." Severance's polar positions are rebellion and awe. "Both seemed built in, he was ready to defend both to the death. You had to have both. He saw damned little of either in most Americans at the moment: just cop-out or sheephood, not independence or emulation. Hyperdemocracy, the sovereignty of the unqualified individual, added into a mass."

Although such perceptions can dazzle, the poles of this novel are fuzzily drawn. Yet whatever Recovery is not, it remains a compelling, scarcely disguised self-portrait of a resplendent mind. It is worthwhile alone for its insights into the alcoholic and suicidal character. As Berryman's friend Saul Bellow observes in an astutely touching foreword to the book, what the poet "needed for his art ... he drew out of his vital organs, out of his very skin. At last there was no more. Reinforcements failed to arrive." *Jane Howard

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