by Blake Bailey
Perhaps the most cultivated family of all, and certainly one of the richest, was the R. A. S. Bloomers on the corner of East Avenue and Grant; somewhat due to his endearing precocity and nice manners, Charlie became almost a de facto member of the household. In those days Newark was a prosperous village, and the biggest of its half-dozen or so factories was the paper mill owned by the Bloomer Brothers box company, manufacturer of cardboard ice-cream pails and the like.7 For the rest of his life (often to his detriment) Charlie would indulge a love of opulence, which arguably began in the richly appointed interiors of the Bloomer house. The father, Robert Anson Sherman (“Uncle Sherm” to Charlie), had studied engineering in Germany, and until the war, at least, made a point of emulating the Kaiser: he wore a Germanic mustache, trimmed and waxed, smoked a big Bavarian pipe, and drank beer made in his own cellar; also in the German style, he was strict with his children, insisting that they retire every day at four o’clock to their respective study rooms for an hour of reading (“I nearly always managed to be in on this,” Jackson recalled), and formally shaking hands with each of them at bedtime. One of Charlie’s fondest memories was the summer he and Jack Burgess (his neighbor Win’s nephew) were invited to spend three luxurious weeks with the Bloomers at Sodus Point, on Lake Ontario, twenty miles north of Newark. The Bloomer compound (Neosho) was located on a long isthmus called Charles Point, where the children spent their mornings swimming in the bay, until a servant took them in the family boat (Wawanesa) to the point for ice cream. Not long after that idyllic summer, the last Bloomer boy went away to prep school, and for years Charlie was mortified by the memory of how he’d asked their mother (“Aunt Kate”) to “sell” him the books that he and her children had enjoyed so much during reading hours past (The Black Arrow, The Mysterious Island, et al.). She gave him the books for free—as he’d hoped—and evidently didn’t hold the request against him. “He was a dear little boy, Rhoda,” the woman wrote Jackson’s wife in 1940, when their first daughter, Sarah, was born. Mrs. Bloomer remembered Charlie’s touching piety in her Sunday school class, and urged his wife to teach Sarah the Lord’s Prayer “with a hope that World Christianity will come to keep for her a better way of life than that which prevails now in Europe.”
He was a dear little boy … part of Jackson wanted nothing better than to be pious, well-mannered, and beloved by proper people like the Bloomers. He would forever be squeamish about using profanity, and bemused that he could ever have become an alcoholic, given that nice people in Newark didn’t drink. Don Birnam remembers the fortitude it had taken, as a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout, to enter a downtown saloon where nice people didn’t go—but he went, because he was distributing posters for the Liberty Loan and it was the patriotic, the nice thing to do (and because other scouts “would marvel at his courage and tell all the others”). “Tonio! spiritual brother!” Don reflects, invoking Mann’s artist-hero Tonio Kröger, whose “deepest and secretest love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the fair and living, the happy, lovely, and commonplace.” How Jackson longed to be one of them, always desperate for the approval of those who were most likely to snub him—boys who were good at sports, or even, years later, a prim young secretary who came to his gorgeous mansion in New Hampshire to take dictation, radiating disapproval the while. “Mr. Jackson,” she asked, after an awkward lull, “how did you happen to become a writer?” Eager to win the girl over, Jackson explained that he’d never wanted to be anything else; why, as a little boy, he used to go straight home after school and write stories while the other boys played baseball. “You must have been whacky!” sneered the girl, as Jackson sadly recalled: “She was so right. Judgments I’ve had to take all my life: along with the collapses, it is one of the prices we have to pay.”
And what did all the happy, lovely, commonplace people of Newark make of Charles Jackson? “He was always viewed as kind of flaky,” said Tom Bloomer (R.A.S.’s grandson), who explained that such a “conservative community” was apt to look down on (in effect) a sissy who wanted to write. Most of the Bloomers were broadminded enough to overlook Charlie’s peculiarities, but Tom’s mother was a Hallagan, a staunch Methodist family who was far more representative of the Newark middle class.8 These people, said Tom Bloomer, “would just look at Charlie aghast.” Which did not, however, deter him from seeking their love—on the contrary: “This afternoon I went up to your house and your Mother gave me your address,” he wrote young Walter Hallagan during the war, when the latter was serving in France; after a wooing, newsy letter full of bluff good humor, the fifteen-year-old Charlie signed himself, “Your friend, Charles R. Jackson / B.V.D., P.D.Q. + R.S.V.P.” (“The tragedy of homosexuals,” he would later say, “is that we love straight men.”)
When Jackson returned to Newark over the years, he was always happy to grant interviews to the local newspaper, in the course of which he’d reaffirm how very attached he felt to the place that had raised him. He said this because it was true, and because he never quite despaired of winning the village over; even at the height of his fame, few things thrilled him more than fan letters from home, to which he always replied with the most abject humility. At the same time he was also delighted by outrage, and was careful to remind his old friends and neighbors (via those interviews) that “he constantly creates with this local area in mind.”
But of course they knew that already. Almost twenty-five years after Jackson’s death, a local high school student named Kerry Boeye thought to write a scholarship essay about Jackson, and was startled to find that the local library didn’t even have a copy of The Lost Weekend! The town historian gravely explained: Jackson’s work, he said, had many roman à clef elements about various Newarkians—some of them still alive as of 1992—and hence Boeye was well advised not to “pursue identifications” too avidly. For the most part Boeye did as he was told, and also took a properly deploring tone in the essay that followed (he wanted the scholarship, after all), explaining why Jackson would forever be a prophet without honor in his own land: “I am sure people still took exception to being called adulterers, perverts, or something equally sordid.” But whatever glee Jackson felt about his own notoriety was usually dissembled with a Chaplinesque poker face: He was a writer, he’d say with a shrug, and a writer uses the material he’s been given; and really (as one of his heroes, Sherwood Anderson, would attest), what’s better than being raised in a small town? “In a small town it’s practically impossible not to know practically everything about practically everybody else.…”
In 1950, when Jackson published his first story collection, The Sunnier Side: Twelve Arcadian Tales, the Newark Courier warned its readers that Jackson (the newspaper’s former editor) had written about people who were easily identified by anyone who’d lived in Newark from 1907 to 1923, particularly the three women featured in the title story, a curious mixture of essay and fiction. The piece had been inspired by a fan letter Jackson had received from one Luceine Heniore, who’d known the author as a boy and had written to congratulate him on a story he’d recently published in Good Housekeeping (about that idyllic summer at the Bloomer compound on Charles Point): “It is a real pleasure,” she wrote, a little chidingly, “to run across such a clean and delightful short story—no sex, no murder and no personality problem [i.e., like Jackson’s usual fiction] … ” By way of rebuttal Jackson wrote “The Sunnier Side,” which considered the fates of three popular girls (“the great triumvirate”) from Arcadia: Eudora Detterson, Faith Goldsmith, and Harriet “Fig” Newton, who obviously—despite Jackson’s use of “fictitious names” and “mixed up” facts, as the Courier noted—were based on Bernice Coyne, Edith Warren, and Eula Burgess (Win’s daughter). Suffice it to say, their lives had gone badly despite auspicious beginnings (“I did, indeed, thank my lucky stars that you didn’t know me better,” Miss Heniore subsequently wrote Jackson). Edith Warren, for example, had been valedictorian at Newark High and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith, before coming home to marry her high school sweetheart,
Frank, a wealthy businessman who was the first president of the Newark Rotary Club, second president of the Chamber of Commerce, and so on. The Warrens became known as “the first family of Newark.” Later, alas, rumors of Frank’s philandering resulted in Edith’s abrupt resignation from her various clubs, and finally on the morning of March 28, 1928, three shots were fired inside the Warren house, which was then engulfed in flames: Frank and Edith, burned beyond recognition, had been shot dead; ditto their thirteen-year-old son. Police determined that the murderer must have been one of the family members, though it was impossible to say which. In any event, Jackson’s point in writing about the Warren case was that even the most golden people of Arcadia led far from perfect lives.
THE FUNERAL OF THELMA AND RICHARD WAS one of the largest ever held in the village, and certainly one of the saddest. The casket was entirely open to reveal Thelma lying slightly on her side, little Richard’s head resting on her right arm, one of his hands clasping hers. Mourners were greeted at the door by the father and his two younger sons, Charlie and Fred, before they proceeded one by one past the coffin for a final look. The Union-Gazette closed its long, somber account on a lyrical note: “It seems as if the very flower of our young boyhood, of our young womanhood and of our childhood had suddenly been plucked from our village in order that they might, if possible, adorn the very throne of heaven.”
In the story he would eventually write about his sister’s death, “Rachel’s Summer,” Jackson described an obtuse form of condolence on the part of a neighbor, Mrs. Kirtle9: “Think how good it was of God,” the woman says to the grieving mother, “to keep Rachel home with you all summer. You must comfort yourself with that.” The mother’s response is snappish, given that her daughter had not been kept there by God—as the shrewish Mrs. Kirtle well knows—but rather for a reason that made her last summer on earth a miserable ordeal. “God in His infinite wisdom,” Mrs. Kirtle and the villagers murmur, since it’s rumored that Rachel was pregnant, and had died before the disgrace became obvious. Rachel, for her part, had protested her innocence, pointing out to her mother that she’d recently refrained from swimming with friends because she was menstruating. Still, to prevent the rumor from thriving in her absence (she usually spent summers at her grandmother’s farm in the Catskills), her mother had kept Rachel home that summer and she’d died before she could absolve herself. A spirited, pretty girl who always refused to act shocked when boys whistled at her, Rachel is an ideal scapegoat for all the other maidens of Arcadia who might bring shame upon their families. “Thus, periodically,” Jackson wrote, “as if by some mystic council, a girl was chosen for the sacrifice, and the pressure of parental anxiety was relieved in the neighborhood for another season or two. What could have been more natural than to choose Rachel, the gayest, the most promising, the loveliest of them all?”
In its most essential aspect, the story was true: Charles Jackson’s niece Sally remembers the eureka moment when she found letters, as a teenager, alluding to the rumor that Thelma had been pregnant when she died. “I’m not Thelma,” she said to her father, Herb, who’d always been bizarrely repressive toward his oldest daughter; as Sally recalled, the man looked stricken and turned away. “He couldn’t trust me,” she said, “and I think it broke his heart that he couldn’t trust his sister.” As for Thelma’s mother, though she tried all her life to dismiss the rumor, she couldn’t help seeking reassurance, again and again, that it wasn’t true. “For that’s what Arcadia can do to you,” the narrator of “Rachel’s Summer” concludes: “make you doubt when you know otherwise.… To me the tragic thing was that, knowing, Mother still had to ask. The damage of more than thirty years was complete.”
PHOTOGRAPHS OF FRED JACKSON, with his youngest son, Richard—evidently three or four at the time—suggest that the man had continued to come home until the boy’s death, but as Bob Jackson noted in her genealogy, Fred “never got over the children’s accident” and might have decided at that point to make a clean break. By then his wife had learned the truth about Fred’s other life in New York, having received a letter from the man’s landlady to the effect that he was living in sin with a sixteen-year-old Irish girl named Kathleen (“Kitty”), who’d already borne him a child: another Fred, no less. “But Fred dear, certainly you must understand by now that we can’t go on like this,” Don Birnam’s mother remonstrates with her husband after their children’s funeral, in Farther and Wilder. She even offers to bring up the other child as her own (though naturally the entire village will know the truth), but the man says he can’t bear to come home anymore now that little Richard is dead: “It would be too much.”
In fact the matter remained unresolved for some time. The following two summers (1917 and 1918) Fred Jackson arranged for his oldest son, Herb, to work at the munitions plant in South Amboy where Fred was paymaster. “Herbert and his father had great times together,” Bob Jackson wrote, “and he never guessed that anything was amiss between his father and a young Irish girl.” The job enabled Herb to pay his tuition at the University of Rochester, and that second summer the whole family spent a month in Perth Amboy (where Fred putatively lived at the Officers’ Club), then stayed on in New York until early September. Less than a month later—on Fred’s day off, as it happened—the T. A. Gillespie Shell Loading Plant, the largest munitions factory in the world, exploded, killing almost a hundred people and resulting in the evacuation of three cities. “Dad was there all the time,” Charlie wrote a friend, “carrying dead and injured away, but he was not hurt. During that time mother was nearly frantic.”
Be that as it may, the marriage presently ended for good: Sarah Jackson was persuaded by her rector at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church that she should get a divorce—“the mistake of her life,” she always thought—and Herb dropped out of college and found work at the Bloomer Brothers paper mill. For a couple of years, at least, the father continued to write his youngest surviving son,10 but Herb bitterly resented the stigma of heading a fatherless family, and would have nothing more to do with the man. As for Charlie, he preserved his father’s address (“2318 Loring Place, Bronx NY”) in a memo book he kept as an adult, and wrote in Farther and Wilder of a final visit that the twenty-six-year-old Don makes to his father’s apartment: the latter, abashed, cautions Don not to let his and Kitty’s children know that he is their half brother, then repeatedly calls him “Sonny” in their presence. Don leaves the meeting feeling “depressed” yet oddly “shriven,” too, quite certain he and his father will never meet again. On July 31, 1952, however, Jackson was driving with his daughters when it occurred to him that it was his father’s seventy-fifth birthday; he mentioned as much to the girls, who asked if he’d sent a card or present. “Well, you see, I never knew my father very well,” he explained, whereupon his nine-year-old daughter, Kate, shot back, “You certainly knew him long enough for his wife to be your mother” (a “truly Shakespearian” line, Jackson reflected). Less than a month later he learned of his father’s death in Washington, D.C., and went down for the funeral. “I wouldn’t have dreamed that it would have affected me at all,” he wrote his brother Fred afterward. “But the sight of Pop stirred up childhood memories long since forgotten—and I’m the sentimental sloppy type, as you know.”
GIVEN THAT CHARLES JACKSON blamed his mother for both his alcoholism and his homosexuality, the two were bound to have a somewhat difficult relationship. When Charlie was a boy, though, they were quite close—perhaps too close, as the prevailing wisdom had it. Richard Peabody, whose teachings helped Jackson get sober in 1936, characterized alcoholism as “a disease of emotional immaturity” caused by overprotective parents (especially mothers), a theory Jackson himself wholeheartedly endorsed. As he spelled it out in a 1946 Cosmopolitan article, “It is my belief that alcoholism is largely the fault of parents who overindulge or overprotect their children to the point where they (the children, grown older but still childish) cannot face reality and seek ‘escape’ in drink.”
And who—by
these rather dubious lights—was a more textbook case than he? After his father’s departure, his mother became “a creature of sighs and bewilderment,” quite unlike the banister-riding hoyden of twenty years before; her great solace was her two little boys, Charlie and Fred, on whom she lavished an all but suffocating affection. (In psychoanalytical terms, Herb escaped their fate by dint of the fatherly attention he’d received in his formative years; then, too, it probably helped just being Herb—a man who was hard to dote on, even for so susceptible a mother.) In The Lost Weekend, Don Birnam is forever casting back to childhood—a time when he was loved and promising and (relatively) happy, despite his untimely loss of a proper male role model—all too aware, meanwhile, of his own case of arrested development: “He could never get used to the fact that he was a grown up, in years at least, living in an adult world. When the barber said, ‘Razor all right, Sir?’ he had to think a minute. What was it men said when asked about the razor? And when he said it (‘Razor’s fine, fine’ or whatever it was) he felt a fraud.” And so, too, with homosexuality, considered almost a concomitant of alcoholism in the Freudian ethos of the time; both had a similar etiology, after all. To dramatize the matter, Jackson later conceived an autobiographical play, The Loving Offenders, that would serve as “an Ibsenesque study, with more than an occasional nod to Freud and the merest genuflection to Krafft-Ebing,” as he wrote his friend Howard Lindsay (of the famous Lindsay and Crouse playwriting team). The cast would consist of a middle-aged mother, abandoned by her husband, who therefore “has shifted all her emotional weight on her two younger sons,” Ralph and David, whereas the oldest boy, George, has escaped her fatal influence and is soon to be married. Ralph, however, causes a scandal by attending the wedding in the company of a special “friend”—a charming, slightly older doctor—and, as the play ends, the youngest brother, David, is heard to remark wistfully that he too hopes to have such a friend when he grows up. “The point of the play,” Jackson explained to the doubtful Lindsay, “is that too much mother-love, the smothering kind, makes for homosexuality—if anything does (and I’m aware that nobody really knows).”