by Blake Bailey
The boy was reading his favorite book—The Red Feathers (1907), by Theodore Goodrich Roberts, about Indians in Newfoundland—when Miss Merriman told him she’d gotten a telephone call and that Charlie needed to go home right away. Rather ominously, she added that he could keep The Red Feathers for good. Turning onto Prospect Street he was hailed by a neighbor, Win Burgess, an affable man who wrote a gag column for the Newark Courier (sample item: “A minister’s son was run down and killed by an automobile in Brooklyn, the other day. You can get most anything on a minister’s son”). Burgess had tears in his eyes, and the front hall of his house was crowded with weeping neighbors. Sitting at the kitchen table, alone, was Charlie’s older brother, Herb, sobbing so loudly that Charlie felt embarrassed for him. Burgess explained that Richard and Thelma had been hurt in an accident—nobody knew how badly (“the car was completely smashed, they tell me”)—and their mother had gone to Palmyra; Charlie and his brothers, Herb and Fred, would be staying at the Burgesses’ for the time being.
The Jackson family had already been under a strain, since the father had taken a job as paymaster at the T. A. Gillespie Shell Loading Plant in New Jersey, and was now living almost full time in Manhattan. The village buzzed with rumors of divorce, an awful disgrace among nice people. “No, no, there’s nothing wrong—” Win Burgess was saying over the telephone, while urging Charlie’s father to catch a train back to Newark. The latter was not, apparently, deceived. “Mr. Jackson in New York,” read a subheading in the Union-Gazette, which proceeded to relate a strange encounter at Grand Central Terminal between Fred Jackson and the conductor of the Empire State Express: “The conductor began to talk, not knowing Mr. Jackson, and said he had been having a dreadful experience all the way down, as his train had struck at East Palmyra an automobile containing a number of young people, two of whom had been killed outright and the third of whom would probably die. Mr. Jackson informed him that the two that he had killed were his own children and the conductor fairly quailed.” On meeting his family in Newark, Fred Jackson promptly declared that he would sue the New York Central for “a good ten thousand at least,” then began to cry in a way that struck Charlie as “somehow cheap, or at least false.”
This was a retrospective judgment. In later years, Jackson would dismiss his father as a “trivial, vain man” who had no business raising children in the first place. Charlie remembered how his father (“nostrils distended”) would unfailingly pinch the bottoms of Thelma’s friends, or otherwise contrive to grope them, until she stopped bringing them home altogether. When he took the job in New Jersey, and his absences became longer and longer, the vulturous Mrs. Van Benschoten would coax Charlie into her house with a cookie and cross-question him: Why is Mr. Jackson away from home so much? Is he coming home for Thanksgiving? Is he coming for Christmas? Such neighbors were also careful to let the boy know, with a word here and there, that they were hardly alone in suspecting his father of scandalous behavior. But Charlie and his father were a pair: not only did they look the same (in Fred’s childhood photos, he might have passed for his middle son’s twin), but even in later years Charlie would concede, dismally, that his father and he were fundamentally alike. “You even blow your nose like your father!” his mother had accused him, sobbing, during an argument (though her mixed feelings were such that she enjoyed Ronald Colman movies, because the actor reminded her of both Charlie and her errant husband).
The fact was, Fred Jackson had shown a particular interest in the child he most resembled, avidly reading the boy’s poetry and giving him the cardboards from his laundered shirts to draw pictures on. “Papa was proud” of his poems and pictures, the son remembered, and “showed them to the neighbors, complimented me, and himself sent them off to the Children’s Page of the New York Sunday World. … He used to buy fifteen or twenty copies of the Sunday World when one of my poems appeared in it, cut them out, sent them to relatives …” Once his father had gone, however, Charlie lost interest in writing and drawing for a while, and whatever praise he later got was never enough, since the person he most wanted to please had long ceased to pay attention. Perhaps the blackest day of his childhood—among many black days—was the day his mother received a letter from Fred definitely announcing he wasn’t coming home anymore. In The Lost Weekend, Don Birnam remembers how he “had run upstairs then and flung himself down on the bed and cried his eyes out”: “How could your admiring father do that to you, go away and leave you forever, did he really not care for you any more, was it possible? And though he sobbed and sobbed on the bed in shame and anguish, he realized too the awful importance of that letter, and he glanced up into the mirror of the bureau to see what a moment of crisis looked like.”
THAT GHASTLY YEAR—the year of his siblings’ death and his father’s desertion—Charlie had missed eighty days of school, though he was eager to return and be noticed as a tragic hero of sorts. He’d practiced the role with more long looks in the mirror, and besides, he’d gotten used to a certain amount of attention as a little boy who often seemed almost a prodigy, or at any rate eager to please. “At school Jackson stood invariably at the head of his class,” a journalist later wrote, reflecting Jackson’s own wistfulness on the subject. After all, his beloved second-grade teacher, Miss Anna Dalton, had been moved to write a letter on the occasion of his eighth birthday, congratulating Mrs. Jackson for having such a “perfect child,” or almost: on his report card that year he got straight A’s except for a single B in writing, oddly enough.
Since then his grades had steadily declined, perhaps because Miss Dalton was no longer his immediate audience. Instead he ran home (avoiding baseball) and wrote those stories and poems for his father—until, at last, he mostly occupied his solitude with reading about Indians and concocting elaborate fantasies that he would someday, perhaps, commit to paper. The year he turned eleven was consumed by an incipient romance titled “The Story of Strongheart, an Indian Brave,” which he talked (versus wrote) about incessantly; almost every day he’d regale his exasperated mother with another Strongheart yarn, then rush upstairs and write in big, ornate letters on a fresh page of his notebook: “THE STORY OF STRONGHEART, AN INDIAN BRAVE, By Charles Jackson, Aged Eleven (11).” He was so obsessed with the subject that a neighbor, Mrs. Coykendall, warned him that he might turn into an Indian if he kept going on like that. “I am already,” Charlie lied. “My uncle is an Indian.” This became a signature episode of his childhood. From then on, whenever he told a story that seemed the least bit fanciful, his family was apt to remark, “Oh, that’s just another one of your Indian uncles.” (En route to Hollywood aboard the Super Chief in 1944, he spotted an ersatz Indian hawking souvenirs in the club car. “He pretended not to recognize his nephew,” Charlie wrote his brother Fred, “but I knew he knew.”) As he later summarized this epoch, “These, then, were the things which occupied me, not only … after school, but all day long too in the classroom: a never-ending daydream that made me deficient in my studies, a stranger to my classmates, a nuisance to my mother, and forever restless and dissatisfied with myself.”
Things took a turn for the better when Charlie, age twelve, discovered Shakespeare, which would lead, in time, to a voracious idolatry of Whitman, Melville, James, Mann, the great Russians, of Mozart and Beethoven and Mussorgsky, of Courbet and Monet and Goya—a cultivation that was all the richer for being self-imposed. “I’m just a fan,” said Jackson, happily admitting his lack of formal education. “But a fan to my fingertips!” Still, his greatest love would forever be Shakespeare, whose likeness was featured on his bookplate (“EX LIBRIS / C. R. JACKSON”), the better for friends to notice the startling resemblance between Charlie and Bard, what with the noble forehead, long nose, and little mustache. “Can you do this sort of thing at the drop of any reasonably sized hat, Mr. Jackson?” said an astonished Clifton Fadiman—host of the popular radio show Information, Please!—when his guest had demonstrated, yet again, an all but infallible knack for completing any Shakespeare quotation giv
en a key word or two. It became a kind of compulsion, in life as in art. Don Birnam (named for the “Great Birnam Wood” in Macbeth) drowns in the Bard’s poetry almost as much as in drink, musing that any novel he ever managed to write would be “so packed with Shakespeare that it [would look] as if he worked with a concordance in his lap …”
But this was a charming mania in a child, at least to the ladies of the Newark Shakespeare Club, who made a point of taking Charlie along to lectures given by an expert at the annual Chautauqua—a weeklong event that Jackson would (for the most part) remember fondly, as it brought the great world of culture to an otherwise benighted place: concerts, a Broadway show, a Shakespearean comedy by the Ben Greet Players, and lectures by world-renowned luminaries such as William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Mott Osborne, and (as Jackson put it) “whoever it was who was the author of a famous lecture called ‘Acres of Diamonds’ (the diamonds were to be found in our own backyard, of course, if we’d only look).” The young Charlie would have no part of the insipid Children’s Program, even if he hadn’t been taken up by the Shakespeare Club, whose president (Mrs. Coykendall again) hustled him up to the dais when the lecturer had finished and announced that here was a child “who reads Shakespeare like other boys read Tom Swift!” “Indeed,” said the man, and asked Charlie to name his favorite play. “Tempest,” said the latter without thinking, and the expert looked pleased: “Now you’re talking, young man!” As an adult, Jackson was relieved (if a bit puzzled) to learn that there was, in fact, a real consensus as to the supremacy of The Tempest—but on the whole the memory rankled. “I shudder to think what a horrible child I must have been,” he wrote the novelist Mary McCarthy, recounting his Chautauqua triumph thirty years later.
And yet how wonderful, really, that a person of rarefied taste and talent should come from such a backwater, and make his mark on the world. Perhaps it was a triumph of heredity over environment; certainly Jackson himself placed a premium on genetic inheritance, at one point railing against Lytton Strachey for “ruin[ing] the art of biography” with “the fatuous doctrine that details of a man’s ancestry ought not to be mentioned … as if we could fully understand a person without knowing something of those which begot him.”2 What Jackson knew of his own ancestry, however, was not categorically promising. Reflecting on a photograph he’d seen of his father’s family—gathered around the stoop of their little stone house in Lydney, England, circa 1882—he’d noted that they resembled “a band of gypsies,” the children melancholy and slightly soiled (“the little boy who was [my] father looked out from the picture with the grave large eyes that had been the admiration of ladies when [I myself] was a child”). Charlie’s grandfather, George Frederick Jackson, had been a shiftless man who came to America to accept a genteel sinecure as coal inspector for the New York Central, settling his family around North Salem in Westchester County. George’s two brothers, Herbert and Charles, had also moved to New York and become sexton-undertakers at Episcopal churches in Manhattan: the Church of the Ascension and Church of the Incarnation respectively. But such humble stations may have been a matter of predilection rather than class. George Jackson’s maternal uncle was Lord Roberts, an earl, no less, and field marshal during the Boer War. A strain of good breeding was also manifest in the perfect manners of Charlie’s paternal grandmother, Eliza; notwithstanding her appearance on that Lydney stoop and the fact that she drank a small glass of whiskey with every meal, the woman dressed beautifully and, while she didn’t quite approve of her eldest son—Charlie’s raffish father—she nevertheless seemed to believe that he’d married beneath him.
In the late 1960s, Charlie’s sister-in-law Cecilia (a decorous woman known always as Bob, who was married to the eldest Jackson boy, Herb) prepared a genealogy of the family for her grandchildren; one bit of research provided by Charlie’s younger brother, Fred, was their maternal great-grandparents’ wedding certificate, which revealed that Herbert and Mary Jane Nicholes Williams were married in the County of Devon, England, on May 15, 1852—that is, rather abruptly before their son, Herbert Junior, was born. “Must have been a shotgun wedding,” Fred opined in his accompanying letter. “Don’t call attention to it!” As if Bob needed to be told! Earlier she’d learned from another relative that Herbert Junior’s wedding to Charlotte Storrier had also been hastily arranged: “Your Grandfather Herbert Williams [Jr.] was like his father,” the relative (signed “B. W. F.”) wrote Bob. “Your own Grandma [Charlotte] was ‘with child’ all the time—check those birth dates [i.e., of her many children]—and she was pregnate [sic] when she died with advanced TB.” That last child would have been the poor woman’s fifth in less than nine years; along with fecundity, Herbert Junior and his father had a trade, boilermaker, in common; the son practiced in the village of Depew, near Buffalo. Charlie remembered his grandfather as “a big sweaty man even when he was dressed up”; after the death of his wife, Herbert entrusted the care of his children to his five spinster sisters, who lived with their bachelor brother at 414 Courtland Avenue in Syracuse. For the benefit of Bob’s genealogy, Fred described the unmarried siblings as “very religious, frugal people” whose crowded house was “conservatively furnished with all very good things” (Fred was an antiques dealer). Charlie was less charitable in the unfinished novella he later wrote about the “414” ménage: “Next to the mahogany music cabinet was the little square gilt chair that Must Not Be Sat In,” he reminisced, while describing the sisters themselves as pious harridans and the bachelor brother as an “ageless, artless dolt … a Launcelot Gobbo who was an honest man’s son.” These siblings would someday take a dim view of Charlie and Fred’s mother, Sarah, because of her divorce, protesting that no shadow of scandal had previously befallen the family. As Bob remarked in her genealogy, “Charles had said there never was a scandal because they never really lived”—to which Bob demurred (with an almost audible sniff) to the effect that she herself found these people “wonderful”: “They lived simply, and enjoyed the simple pleasures of life.… They obviously found contentment in their lives, and what more can anyone ask of life.” When the residents of 414 died, they left everything to their niece Charlotte, Sarah’s youngest sister, a “prissy and penurious” woman who wore a rimless pince-nez and was (according to her nephew Charlie) unlike Sarah in every way.
As a girl Sarah Williams had returned to her father’s house after he remarried a stern German widow named Mohr, whom Sarah came to despise. What made matters worse was the woman’s cruelty toward Sarah’s youngest brother, Herbert, who proved to be slightly retarded. Far from being treated with special patience, the boy was harried by his stepmother and ignored (at best) by his father, who seemed humiliated by his namesake’s ineptitude.3 Sarah was only fourteen when she ran away to Buffalo, finding occasional work as a nursemaid; four years later, desperate for a home of her own, she coaxed the handsome Frederick George Jackson into marrying her, even though he was already engaged to a girl in Albany. Fred’s parents were displeased by his change of heart, all the more so when their new daughter-in-law disgraced herself (as she liked to tell it) by sliding down the banister chez Jackson. “That American Girl!” sighed her mother-in-law, though of course Sarah was almost as English as she.
The couple lingered in Depew for a few years and lost no time growing a family: on January 20, 1899, almost nine months exactly after the wedding, a son, Herbert, was born; Thelma followed on July 12, 1900, and another girl, Winifred, was born on October 31, 1901, but died a few months later of diphtheria.4 By the time Charles was born, on April 6, 1903, the family was living in Summit, New Jersey, and soon after Fred’s arrival, in 1906, they moved to Newark, where the father had been hired by the Gillespie Company as paymaster for construction on the local section of the Erie Canal. By 1910 the restless man had taken a new job as office manager at the Emmons & Company nursery, and the family had settled at last into a little Queen Anne cottage at 238 Prospect, in the nicer part of town.
AROUND THE TIME OF Charles Reginald Jackso
n’s death, in 1968,5 a Newark Chamber of Commerce leaflet identified him as the “most famous person” to have ever been born in the village, though of course he was born in New Jersey and none of his books was available at the Rew Library to which he’d been so devoted. Still, Jackson would have been touched by the tribute, since his love for the place was as profound as it was tortured. The township of Arcadia was aptly named: quietly nestled in the Finger Lakes region south of Lake Ontario, it was a lovely place to be a romantic little boy obsessed with Indian lore, and Newark itself was a village out of Norman Rockwell. On summer nights the children would gather around the pagoda-roofed bandstand in the park for concerts by the Fire Department Band, scurrying off between numbers to buy ice-cream cones and popcorn from Mr. Espenmiller’s two-wheeled cart, or a soda from the pearl-handled spigots of the Kandy Kitchen on Main Street. The one traffic light blinked officiously at the intersection of Main and Union, and opposite the park was a Victorian mansion where (as Jackson remembered) “the glow of many cigars mov[ed] up and down as the Elks [sat] in their rocking chairs on the porch.” The public life of the village bustled along three downtown blocks (one of Main, two of Union) near the barge canal, where one shopped at the haberdasher, the meat market, the dry-goods and drug store, and was entertained by silent-movie serials (The Perils of Pauline, The Million Dollar Mystery) at the Crescent Theatre, or else big local productions (The Elks Minstrels & Frolic) at the Opera House, which also featured occasional road shows such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though these were not attended by “the better class.”
“Don’t tell me there are no social distinctions or caste system in America!” Jackson wrote a half-century later to his agent and editor. Newark, he claimed, “was more socially conscious of who was who and what their place should be than any member of the Almanac[h] de Gotha.” Physically and otherwise the town was divided by the canal, to the north of which was the poorer section, largely populated by Italians who had helped build the canal a few years before.6 Non-Italians on the south side could join a small country club for $125 a year—later a haven for sturdy burghers such as Charlie’s brother Herb, but generally shunned by what passed for the smart set. The latter lived in a few stately homes along Grant Street, East Avenue, and Maple Avenue, only a few blocks from the Jackson house on modest Prospect Street. His family was “the very middle of the middle class,” Charlie said, “but through a kind of innate ‘taste’ or a leaning toward matters of learning and culture, [they tended] rather toward the more cultivated element than otherwise.”