Word: warded
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ALAN SEVERANCE, whose name, through some pedantic trickery of language means "Harmony Interbreaker," is the protagonist/antagonist. He embodies Berryman's own tremendous ego and frightful delusions. Outwardly self-contained, he helps the hopeless alcoholics in his ward by dominating group therapy and confronting their inadequacies. But he rarely reaches into himself; he is blind to his own shortcomings. He is something of a Cain-figure, lost in a psychological maze of anger and nurtured rejection. Severance, a Pulitzer Prize winning scientist, art critic, and pop intellectual, feels that his status as a celebrity is the source of his troubles. Here...
...twelve steps are here, although some recovered notes printed in the back of the book indicated that Berryman had planned two more sections. Of what is written, Alan Severance remains the key figure. Other characters are roughly sketched. A series of epiphanies of the more dramatic moments on the ward, of the personal breakthroughs and all too frequent relapses, lend a sense of the real powerlessness of the alcoholic...
...Ziegler was frequently uninformed, he was often well rehearsed (see box following page). But Dean's testimony also suggests that Ziegler's out ward shows of arrogance sometimes masked simple ignorance of the truth...
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...