by Blake Bailey
It was a time both beautiful and sad
(The young need sorrow as they need to breathe)
When we first heard the trumpets of our world
On that far hilltop where we went to read.
I loved it best those gray chill Autumn days
The sun was absent. Then the jeweled words
of Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth, Swinburne, Blake,
like radiant motes from some imagined sun,
Made iridescent the pale quiet air.…
When it was time to leave, reluctantly
We turned our faces townward, shivering
And tired now, for light and warmth were left
Behind. Oh, we well knew what was awaiting us;
Reproachful eyes, recriminations shrill,
The sad bewilderment of those who loved
But never understood us.…
Like dim wraiths, we moved
Through our slow separate hours, only alive,
When, books beneath our arms, we started forth
To keep our tryst with beauty and with truth.3
Beauty and Truth were bywords, as both considered themselves Platonists and their attachment chaste—though on double dates they “conscientiously petted” for the sake of appearance. In “A Red-Letter Day,” Don is startled when a mutual friend remarks that Bettina is, in fact, madly in love with him. The next day he mentions as much in one of his notes to her: “I told [the friend] it was time she grew up,” he writes. “Anyway it’s too silly to talk about it.”
DURING HIS SOPHOMORE YEAR, Jackson was hired to work after school and on Saturdays at the Newark Courier. For ten dollars a week he typed up obituaries and wedding announcements from notes taken over the phone, and also confected long, flattering pieces about local events such as bake sales held by the Eastern Star—always careful to list as many names as possible, along with their respective titles (Worthy Matron, Star Point)—and front-page items about new businesses in town, the better to pique public interest and attract larger advertisements from the merchants in question. Jackson also had his own column, “School Notes,” in which he reported on “interesting additions” to the community gymnasium (“A couple of large mattresses for tumbling”), or that Miss Elizabeth Loomis had now “returned to her duties as teacher in the East Newark school” after a two-week absence due to her mother’s death.
Jackson loved the job, not least because it gave him a haven of perfect privacy—a “second home,” even—especially at night or on Sundays when he had the office to himself. Alone, he could put aside the puff pieces, jocular filler, and often curious personals,4 and (while looking busy in the storefront window on Main Street) work on his own poetry, some of which was even published in the Courier if it struck a properly whimsical or solemn note—or both, as in the case of “Elegy Written in Newark Churchyard,” whose parodic opening quatrain reads:
The six-ten trolley speaks the close of day,
The factories disgorge their multitude,
The merchant homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves me in a contemplative mood.
From there the poem becomes a maudlin lament about the loss of religious faith in an age of Progress (quite unlike what Jackson would write in his last notorious piece for the Courier), and beseeches the reader to return to the church and “gain true spirit happiness at last.” Such sentiments were perhaps influenced by the newspaper’s owner and publisher, Allyn T. Gilbert, who took pains to discourage Charlie’s poetry as “high-brow”; otherwise the man was properly grateful for the boy’s willingness to write almost every word of the newspaper, while a woman named Hester Herbert handled the books, read proof, and ran down advertisements. “I was always very fond of Allyn,” Jackson wrote a fellow Newarkian after Gilbert’s death in 1947, “[though we] had our serious differences at the Courier. …” Apart from the question of poetry, Jackson was disconcerted by the man’s constant off-color raillery (Gilbert was apt to notice, for instance, the figure of Justice’s “big buzooms” on a poster decrying “hun atrocities” in Belgium), so at odds with his piety at other times, and never mind the rumor that he was conducting a shabby affair with Miss Herbert—one reason, among many, that Charlie’s mother didn’t like the boy hanging around the Courier office, especially after hours.
Before long, however, he’d do everything but sleep there. On June 7, 1921, the commencement exercises for Jackson’s class at Newark High were held at the Park Presbyterian Church, where the Honorable Charles G. Gordon of Pennsylvania exhorted graduates “to keep themselves clean, honest, honorable, true, square, conscientious, but, above all, honest,” and the renowned local tenor Herbert Quance sang “Pale Hands I Love” to the usual ovation. After that, Jackson became a full-time Courier employee, appearing on the masthead as “Local Editor,” which meant that he now washed windows and swept out the office in addition to his previous duties. “A Progressive Newspaper in a Progressive Town” was the Courier’s slogan, without any apparent levity, and for a while Jackson seemed to relish his newfound civic importance: he declared the Firemen’s Picnic a “Howling Success” on the front page; he warned citizens against jaywalking downtown; he endorsed the new “Crook Picture” at the movie theater (commending its happy ending: “The girl, reformed, wins the hand of the district attorney”); and, in general, he ensured a certain social transparency with frequent bulletins on the everyday doings of his friends and neighbors (and family: “Frederick Jackson has been visiting Richard Comstock on Crescent Beach, Sodus Bay”).
Meanwhile his friend Marion reminded him of their common resolve to escape Arcadia and realize their dreams in the wider world. Jackson’s first unpublished novel, Simple Simon—initially written as a three-act play with the same title—as well as a radio script and various Don and Bettina stories (published and not) all concern the central dilemma of an idealistic girl trying to chide a gifted young man out of his small-town complacency.5 “You don’t want to stay here and be a big fish in a little pond,” she says, again and again; “fish don’t grow in a little pond!” The young man—all but seduced by an insidious sense of self-importance as editor of the local newspaper—concedes her point, and sees too that the “secret of [her] attraction” for him is that she makes him believe in himself.
By the fall of 1922, Jackson had raised enough money to send himself to Syracuse University, whereas Marion had finished her first year at the University of Rochester. In “A Red-Letter Day,” Don and Bettina celebrate their imminent liberation with a long, festive day in Rochester (an hour’s trolley ride from Arcadia), where they see a movie and a play, eat a good lunch and dinner, and linger at a bookstore on Spring Street, where the proprietor—a funny old man with a goatee and pince-nez—takes a shine to the couple, giving Bettina a tinted print of Botticelli’s Primavera and Don a copper medallion with Beethoven’s profile. Hating the “dull thought of home,” the two prolong their adventure with drinks at a speakeasy and thus miss the last trolley back, spending the night at Bettina’s brother’s house in East Rochester. Don is about to retire, when Bettina calls him into her room and asks him to hold her; stiffly Don obliges, though he’s suddenly “overcome with a feeling of oppression that amounted almost to a smothering sensation”: “He was never to know, later or ever, how long they lay together like that, she under the blankets, he outside, yet clasped together. But it was a stranger he held, and he was a stranger lying there, no one known to her at all.”6 Desperate to get away, Don rushes out to fetch a cigarette, and when he returns the door is locked against him. The next morning a miserable silence prevails between the two, until finally they get off the trolley in Arcadia and begin walking up Main Street, whereupon Bettina puts Don at ease somewhat by remarking that she wishes he were her son (“I’d love to bring you up”). But apparently her most memorable valediction—precisely recycled in everything from Simple Simon to The Lost Weekend to A Second-Hand Life—was this: “I honestly think you’re going to amount to something rather wonderf
ul … even though I’m not sure of my own place in the picture.”
THE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Charles Jackson who arrived at Syracuse University on September 20, 1922, had come a long way from the touchy loner of five years before. His precocious success at the Courier—combined with Marion’s almost unconditional esteem—had given him a lighthearted confidence “with just a shade of swaggering,” as he later put it. At Syracuse he registered for six courses in the College of Business Administration, including economics, stenography, and journalism (probably his intended major). Not that he was particularly interested in academics: “It was the ‘experience’ of the thing that he wanted,” he wrote in Native Moment, an unpublished novel (completed in 1935) about that disastrous year; “but what experience he expected to get out of it, he could not have said.”
Right away he found success on the monthly literary magazine, The Phoenix, where he was asked to join the editorial staff after contributing work in various genres. His growth as a poet may be measured by a willingness to mock his own derivations. “Where have I been today?” asks the eponymous “Wind” of Jackson’s first submission. “Through forests vast and deep / Down canyons bottomless; / Climbed precipices steep … ” His fondness for Thomas Gray was more openly acknowledged in a subsequent poem, “The Rubaiyat of Why-I-Am,” to say nothing of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Shelley, who, the narrator admits, have long ago written what he himself would like to write:
But just because another got there first,
And wrote the lines I’ve not as yet rehearsed,
I must, though I am equally as great,
Resign myself to Destiny, accursed.
Other work for the magazine included an homage to Fitzgerald (Scott, not Edward), “The Beautiful and Slammed,” described on the contributors’ page as “a change in the regular Phoenix diet.” A “racy narration” about an amorous couple in a canoe, Freddie and a flapper named Pete (“the vogue for masculine nick-names had caused her to discard her too uncolorful ‘Mary’ ”), its two pages of banter end suddenly, and racily, when the canoe gives a “violent roll” that results in “the inevitable”: “But it wasn’t the canoe tipping over.” Finally, too, Jackson styled himself as an archly pedantic theater critic, once more alluding to the Rubáiyát in his review of the Syracuse dramatic season, “A Book of Curses Underneath the Bough”: “If there is anything that makes our blood literally boil,” he began, “it is to hear someone say, ‘One ought to go to the theatre to be amused; there is enough sadness and trouble in life without having to see it reproduced on the stage.’ … To believe in the theatre as a place merely to be amused is like trying to ‘kid’ yourself that the world is a Pollyanna paradise, and that we are all little glad-children.”
Perhaps his greatest coup that first semester—so he thought at the time—was pledging Psi Upsilon, the fourth-oldest fraternity on campus, whose distinguished national alumni included Cornelius Vanderbilt and two United States presidents (Arthur and Taft). The fraternity had seemed to augur well from the start: the first night of rush, Jackson had entered the Psi U house and noticed that a young man playing the piano was none other than Wilkie Smith, whom he’d known as a little boy in Newark, just before the Jackson family moved into Wilkie’s house at 238 Prospect! “And here he is,” Charlie wrote Marion, “a member of the same fraternity to which I am pledged! Can you beat it?!!?!!?!!?!!” Pledging had helped repair his relations with Marion, too, since he’d noticed how others in the house tended to display conspicuous photos of their sweethearts (“It had never occurred to him before to ask for [Bettina’s] picture,” he wrote in Native Moment, “but now he wanted it very much”), and besides he needed a date to the Psi U formal in early December. “Gee, I’m thrilled to tears!” Marion wrote her best friend, Betty Colclough, on getting the news. “I’m paralyzed now for fear something will happen so I can’t go (or else Charlie will change his mind).” Certainly he’d seemed rather cool to her those first weeks at Syracuse: when Marion, in a letter, had “casually mentioned” that his old friend Jack Burgess had taken her to see Oliver Twist, Charlie had replied with a kind of debonair relief, pointing out that their “love”—“get that!” Marion indignantly glossed for Colclough’s benefit—seemed headed for “the same glorious finale … as Anthony and his Southern Girl7 (and several other Literary Characters whom I [Marion] don’t remember just now).” But fate seemed to be working in Marion’s favor. In that same letter asking her to the Psi U formal, Charlie had mentioned a bizarre coincidence whereby his best friend in the pledge class, Johnny Brust, had showed him photos one night of “the two Betties, [Brust’s] little mountain maids”—that is, Marion and Betty Colclough, who had worked with Brust at the same resort hotel that summer! “Picture if you can the scene that followed my telling him that ‘Betty’ was the ‘Marion’ I had been raving to him about for so long,” Jackson wrote. “It was a debauch of risibility.”
Truth be known, Charlie’s eye had wandered well away from Marion, and now “continually rested, with keen enjoyment” on a handsome older pledge named Parton Keyes.8 As Jackson wrote in The Lost Weekend, “All the woeful errors of childhood and adolescence came to their crashing climax … in the passionate hero-worship of an upperclassman during his very first month at college, a worship that led, like a fatal infatuation, to scandal and public disgrace.…” Were it not for Keyes, Charlie might have been a model pledge: he was always careful to doff his freshman cap in the presence of a member, to appear at dinner with his pledge pin in his lapel, and even to resist the temptation of befriending a Negro in his English class (“he thought of his fraternity and decided it would not do”). But apparently Keyes exerted a heady pull: his fictional counterpart, Tracey Burke, is portrayed in Native Moment as a dashing ne’er-do-well who has pledged “Kappa U” every autumn for the past five years, until he’s invariably expelled by the dean for failing to pay tuition or attend class. Still, the twenty-six-year-old is allowed to linger around the fraternity because of his roguish charm: “He borrowed money without embarrassment, and the smile with which he said ‘Thanks’ was a tacit, even humorous, acknowledgment that he had no intention of paying it back.”
In The Lost Weekend, the “fraternity nightmare” is based on a misunderstanding—little more than a matter of “hero-worship”—but the Tracey Burke of Native Moment is subtly vicious, contriving to exploit protagonist Phil Williams’s essential innocence and susceptibility. At one point he tells Phil about his brothel-hopping in France, and lets drop, “Then there’s a couple of houses with guys in ’em, but Toulon’s more the place for that.” When Phil seems puzzled, Burke laughs and says, “Well, you’ll learn.” The lesson in question takes place the night of the fraternity formal, after Phil has left his date, Bettina, at a sorority house in the company of a hometown girlfriend.9 Returning to the Kappa U house, Phil finds Tracey asleep in his (Phil’s) bed, reeking of liquor; careful not to wake him, Phil squeezes under the blankets and is, to put it mildly, surprised when Tracey begins “pressing against him with slow rude pressure,” while whispering an awful command into his ear:
[Phil] lay rigid in that embrace, faint with excitement, but his fright weakened him, he trembled, he closed his eyes. A sweet terror plunged down through his breast again and again, a terror and yearning that left him helpless. He could not think; he knew only one thing: at this moment he loved Tracey Burke (the affectionate rude-pressing arm smothered the violent beating of his heart) and he would do what was demanded of him … no one existed for him in the wide world but Tracey here in the night, he could not help himself now.…
The arm about him tightened and relaxed, tightened and relaxed, the whispered words came again. The arm tightened, another reached under his head, it encircled his shoulders and held him tight. Then it pressed down, urging him, persuading him, slowly, with firm insistent strength, beneath the blankets.…
Phil gets his first hint of the ordeal ahead when Tracey rolls away from him afterward—“as if from a total strange
r”—and goes back to sleep without so much as a good night. Racked with remorse and foreboding, he tries to mollify Tracey with a desperate letter (“I beg you to forgive it, and forget it, as I have tried to forgive it”), but soon learns that committing his deed to paper is a very bad idea. “Have you always conducted yourself like a gentleman in this house?” a member of the Senior Council demands, shortly after Phil returns for the spring semester. Sickeningly it dawns on him that Tracey has nothing to lose by admitting the incident—indeed, is probably “amused by his conquest”: “Phil had been the active one, the one who had done what had been done and committed the unspeakable act which was more damnable in the eyes of the fraternity than any other in the whole catalogue of crime—the loathsome, the despicable act, the thing that grown-up men, even boys, simply did not do, or think of, joke about, or even mention.” For a while Phil tries to play dumb—given that he’d made Tracey return his apologetic letter almost immediately, he figures it’s a matter of his word (that of a model pledge) against the disreputable Burke’s—but the third-degree sessions in the Senior Study only become more brutal and insistent. In Farther and Wilder, Don remembers being “on trial before the Senior Council in the Kappa U house,” during which he’s threatened with imprisonment and worse: “Do you know what we used to do with guys like you in the Navy when we caught them doing what you’ve done?” one interrogator snarls. “We used to take them to the stern of the ship during the middle of the night and throw them over, and nobody ever saw or heard of them again!” Finally, in Native Moment, Phil disintegrates under the pressure—despising himself not only for the “crime” he’s committed, but also for the “shameless lies” he’s forced to tell in his own defense, in one case claiming as an (ineffectual) alibi that he’d slept with Bettina the night of the formal. And meanwhile, worst of all, is “the obsession that there was something wrong with him, he was incomplete, abnormal, an outcast, and had no place among other people.”10