Since this newsletter's existence, I have had to correct people about the name. One person called it "The Strong Bow," and then someone else complimented me on how great they thought "The Long Bow" was. I've also gotten "The Little Bow," "Small Arrow," and, my personal favorite, "The Small Bow," but pronounced "bau" like "take a bow." I initially thought the name was humble and mysterious, and maybe it still is, but it's also confusing and, it turns out, wildly pretentious due to its roots in obscure Greek mythology about a foul-smelling foot. Let me explain.
In 2018, I started deep-diving into sobriety lit, seeking out the stories I wanted to read but didn't find that night. Leslie Jamison's "The Recovering" came out that year, and it arrived at the perfect time, introducing me to a new batch of drunk writers. One that stood out was "The Lost Weekend" by Charles Jackson. I remember the movie, but I never knew it was a book, let alone a semi-autobiographical one. But the story got even darker.
Written in 1944, when Jackson was newly sober, it became a hugely popular bestseller and an even more famous Oscar-winning movie. Jackson found follow-up success hard to come by, though. His subsequent books (none of them bestsellers) would all be written during his relapses, mostly on pills. These are the pills that were supposed to help him write the book that would make everyone forget about "The Lost Weekend," but the pills only brought him more despair.
I found most of this backstory after reading a New York Times book review
of a Charles Jackson biography called "Farther and Wilder." The author of that book isn't important anymore, but the article's author is. Her name is Donna Rifkind. I fell in love with her writing instantly. Here's a section from her review:
"[W]hat kept Jackson from the glory he craved? From the deck of authors' bedevilments he drew some formidable cards, including tuberculosis, painfully suppressed homosexuality, drug addiction and the alcoholism that became his brand-name affliction. All his business decisions, and many of his artistic ones, were a series of increasingly grim miscalculations. His character was marked by a rash improvidence that led his family, and later his biographer, to guess that he might have been bipolar.
Yet all of these factors fueled his writing as much as they impeded it. Moreover, in counterbalance to his private torments, Jackson was publicly the kindest and most congenial of men. An anxious-to-please husband and father as well as an immensely popular guy, he charmed all sorts of people, from the adoring audiences he addressed at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings around the country to the likes of Judy Garland, Charlie Chaplin, his idol Thomas Mann and a smattering of Partisan Review intellectuals.
Then came his fine novel "The Lost Weekend," the autobiographical tale of a five-day drinking binge that would turn out to be the only book Jackson wrote while sober. More novels and stories followed, along with grandiose plans for a multipart epic whose first volume was to be called "Farther and Wilder," but none of these later efforts fulfilled his initial promise. For all his ambition he remained a one-book man, a literary almost-hero who bore too great a wound and too small a bow.”
That one little phrase – "too great a wound and too small a bow" – perfectly encapsulated how I felt that Christmas Eve and how I'd felt many days afterward. I couldn't shake the beauty of that phrase. It held such an intense, eye-opening power over me. So when the opportunity to start a new recovery site came along — one billed initially as a watchdog news organization covering all topics related to the opioid crisis—I thought I had an excellent name picked out: Jesus Needle. I even bought the domain name for it.
But I also bought another one, just in case: The Small Bow. I liked that one better, even if it didn't make sense.
*****
I'd hesitated to reach out to Donna Rifkind to tell her about what I'd named the site (and now this newsletter), mostly because I feared she'd be offended. But she'd written hundreds of thousands of words, and this review was from 2013, so I'm sure she didn't remember it, let alone one little line. A few weeks ago, I finally got up the nerve to send her an email to thank her for the inspiration, and I asked her if there was any way she remembered where "too small a bow" came from. She wrote back a day later:
Dear AJ, thanks so much for sending this extraordinary note. You just never know what effect your words will have, whether in writing or in life.
I do remember that line in my review of the Charles Jackson biography. It's a reference to Edmund Wilson, who published a book of essays called "The Wound and the Bow," which examined the lives and works of a half dozen or so writers. The book's last essay, also called "The Wound and the Bow," talked about the Trojan War hero Philoctetes, who had been given a bow with magic powers but also suffered from a wound in his foot so foul that his fellow warriors abandoned him on a remote island. Wilson used the story of Philoctetes to suggest that, for writers and artists but also maybe for all of us, genius and disability can be inextricably bound up together, that sometimes one must find a way to live with both the wound and the bow.
I'm delighted and flattered that you were struck enough by my words to use them for your website, which looks truly wonderful and which I can only imagine has been a powerful resource for people who need it. This world is so weird and bewildering but these rays of connection make it seem, in rare moments, like an exalted place.
Thanks again for writing. I wish you all good things.
Best, Donna
*****
I bought an old edition on eBay, and, well, it's not for me. It's a very dull book. It has chapter titles like "The Kipling That Nobody Read" and "Justice to Edith Wharton," which sound like dissertations and ones I'd never read unless someone threatened to throw acid into my eyes. I barely skimmed any of the chapters but went right to the one titled "Philocletes: The Wound and the Bow."
At times, I made appreciative noises while reading, as if I'd had a breakthrough about why this book led me to where I am now, but I was kidding myself. My soul did not quake, not one bit.
Isn't that amazing, though? This book, one I will one million percent never read, inspired The Small Bow and has undeniably changed my life. And, based one many emails I’ve received since its existence, it’s helped many people find some comfort in the darker corners of their own recovery. But this isn’t just a place for alcoholics or addicts, for
The world is an exalted place sometimes.
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