RECOVERY: A Novel.

First UK edition, first printing. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by Janet Halverson. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Complete with the bright, clean dustwrapper, rubbed to the upper spine tip and corners, the former with a few small closed tears and some associated creasing (neatly reinforced from the rear with a small piece of tape). There are few marks and scuffs to the rear panel. Price-clipped and repriced by the publisher (£3.50 net Faber sticker to the clipped flap). An attractive copy.

Berryman began writing his only novel in 1970 and had completed all but the final section of the first draft before his death by suicide in January 1972. A thinly veiled fictional account of his time spent on an alcoholics' ward in 1970, 'Recovery', as the late Kevin Jackson wrote in 'The Independent' (19 January, 1994), "is a dazzling fragment, every bit as rich and macaberesquely comic as anything in Berryman's better known poems. While its structure is simple – in therapy, its autobiographical hero [Dr. Alan Severance] is remorselessly stripped of the delusions which foster his drinking – its pages teem with asides on everything from immunology to Courbet, from Plato's letters to the wisdom of Polonius's homilies. Those brain cells which Berryman had not napalmed with booze were steeped in wide, thorough learning." The volume includes a moving preface by Berryman's friend, Saul Bellow (worth the price of the book alone). The British first edition, published in an edition of 3000 copies in November 1973, followed the US edition issued the previous May. (Stefanik A 24.1.b).