In his uncompleted, posthumous novel, Recovery, John Berryman creates a remarkable tension between traditional form and experimentation. As in Action Painting, the content and the form of Recovery are united to present and embody the visions and revisions, the versions and reversions of a suicidal alcoholic struggling with his disease. Recovery shows that addition is a major impediment to art, because it infects both language and imagination. In the novel, Alan Severance feels that only the truth can heal, but he discovers that language lends itself less easily to truth, than to wit, metaphor, story, myth, evasion, and delusion. Unlike the poet, the alcoholic confuses the essential differences between language and experience.

In Recovery, Berryman creates an original form that reveals the gradual movement of a mind away from delusion, evasion, and showmanship and toward truth and honesty.

"Recovery" implies a conventional plot or narrative with action rising to a climax. The title implies that Severance will follow "The Twelve Steps" outlined by Alcoholics Anonymous, complete treatment, and change—the climax. Because treatment has twice failed, Berryman supplements this impulse toward change with the possibility that the study and discipline necessary to Judaism will insure a lasting change—the denouement.

Against this possible optimistic story with a traditional form, Berryman plays off a pessimistic story with an experimental form. The pessimistic story shows that the alcoholic can never recover his pre-alcoholic self. He can never again have a casual drink or two. He can only become a more-or-less controlled alcoholic, renewing his struggle each day, each moment, in the face of ever-shifting moods, tempting and threatening situations, emotional crises, and whims….

His keeping and rereading [a] diary lead to the split narration of the novel, in which excerpts from Dr. Severance's Journal are interspersed within the third-person narrative. The first-person journal shows Severance struggling with the duplicity of language….

Berryman and his personae, Henry Pussycat and Alan Severance, drink more and more whenever they create, even though alcohol weakens their stamina and makes them suicidal, i.e., willing to sacrifice themselves for the progress of their art.

Creation necessitates being able to imagine and perhaps to verbalize ideas, solutions, and hypotheses that do not exist, or do not as yet exist, or can never exist in actuality. The language of a metaphor joins ideas, objects, situations, and feelings that may otherwise be experienced as separate.

Alcoholic hallucination involves a parallel separation of language from actuality. But the alcoholic behaves as if saying or thinking something is the same as doing it…. The poet can write about dying and coming back from the dead, as Berryman does in The Dream Songs, 78-91, which are individually titled "Op. posth. nos. 1-14." In contrast to the poet, however, the alcoholic believes he actually possesses any powers he can express in words…. Thus, both the imagination of the poet and the hallucination of the addict manipulate language, but the addict confuses the words with the reality. The poet knows the difference.

Recovery draws on Berryman's experience during his third cure, but it is not simply a diary of that experience. Writing it, Berryman, now dry, has to imagine his way into the mind of a drunk who is still hallucinating. Berryman's dry mind has to bypass the later revisions and perceptions to recreate the early moments of detoxification. The writer must maintain the distinctions among his past pain and longing for death, his present lesser pain and longing, and his powerful, imaginative fabrication of the past pain and longing. The task is original and daring. The challenge may have been overwhelming. Berryman committed suicide without finishing his novel.

Nevertheless, the completed portion of Recovery succeeds because it develops a compelling tension between a traditional plot moving toward a climax and an experimental ebb and flow of ever-renewed struggle. Recovery is important, because fresh, powerful insights about truth, imagination, and language emerge from Berryman's portrait of a suicidal alcoholic.