Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  At any rate Phil breaks down and confesses, whereupon it’s revealed to him that Tracey had shown his letter, while it was briefly in his possession, to Phil’s most rabid accuser (Jackson later told his editor at Macmillan, Robert Markel, that the letter had been read aloud to the entire fraternity). He is then kicked out of Kappa U, effective immediately, with the one consolation that the reason for his departure will remain a secret: “We don’t want a scandal going the rounds of the campus about Kappa U any more than you do.”11 All but dead of humiliation, Phil decides to lie low until June in the rooming house where he’d lived the previous semester, explaining to his family that he needs a quiet place to study (“He knew they would not believe it; but he knew, too, that they would not question”).

  Jackson was deeply scarred by the experience, whatever its particulars. One more dread, of many, was that he would someday meet a former member of Psi U who knew the ghastly facts. In The Lost Weekend, Don finds himself chatting with a total stranger who claims to have been in the same pledge class—impossible, Don thinks, until it transpires that the man hadn’t actually joined until May (“They kicked a guy out just before Easter Week and made a place for me”): “Out of the past, across miles and years, the accusing finger of the Senior Council pointed at him over the bar.” In The Common Sense of Drinking—later a kind of Bible for Jackson—Richard Peabody noted how alcoholics are haunted by a sense of inferiority caused by “shocks, humiliations, accidents, failures … and the doing of some act which, even if unknown to the outside world, degrades the individual in his own eyes.” For Jackson such shocks would mass into an almost inescapable cloud of guilt, all the more horrible for being hard, ultimately, to define.

  THERE WAS SOME COMFORT in returning to a town where the worst was already known about him, more or less. Folks in Newark murmured that Charlie had been “busted out of Syracuse,” but for the most part they kept their speculation to themselves, and Allyn Gilbert was just happy to have such a hardworking editor back on the Courier masthead. Jackson embraced the relative security of small-town life with what seemed a kind of chastened zeal. One of the most anticipated events of the year was the Elks’ Minstrels & Frolic, and Jackson not only hyped it in the newspaper (it “is to the local theatregoer what the Ziegfield [sic] Follies is to the Manhattan fan”), but played an unusual role in that autumn’s production: “From the standpoint of talent and humor,” the Courier reported, “Charles Jackson as ‘The Rose of Washington Square,’ certainly draws honorable, if not first, mention. In a most difficult female impersonation, this young star … brought down the house in his almost professional interpretation of the part of a blaze Greenwich Village queen.” That Jackson himself almost certainly wrote this glowing notice leaves one musing over whatever level of irony (if any) was intended: what curious form of celebrity had he come to covet in that quiet hamlet?

  His friend Marion, anyway, was not amused, and in fact seemed to view her friend’s downfall as something akin to tragedy. In The Lost Weekend, Don cannot think of his old friend Dorothy (the Marion character) except with shame—not simply because he’d “allowed her to love him as he had not loved her … but because he had allowed her to believe in him.” Certainly Marion’s disillusionment is borne out by a poem she wrote that year (1923), “La Voyage de la Jeunesse,” in which “Philemon” sails in quest of the “nameless thing his heart desired,” and returns, utterly defeated, “to the home of his youth”:

  He stood no more with his face to the breeze,

  Forever behind him were uncharted seas.

  His ship came a-limping with tattered black sails,

  Her once polished body scarred by mad gales.

  Alas, there’s nothing worth wanting!

  Wept Philemon.

  “She is never to escape this attachment,” Jackson prophesied as early as the late 1920s, when he wrote of their friendship in Simple Simon; “her whole life is to be dominated by this spiritual (if not romantic) union.” If indeed she never escaped, it wasn’t for lack of trying. She later told her daughter that she’d decided against marrying Jackson because he was homosexual, though it’s doubtful he ever asked her; meanwhile, around the time of his ignominious return from Syracuse, she’d already met her future husband in Rochester. “Bumpy” was the son and namesake of the city’s most celebrated woodcarver, Thillman Fabry, whose work included the grand staircase at the George Eastman House and decorative wall elements in the Eastman School of Music. Young Bumpy had little talent in that direction, though he obediently quit school in eighth grade to work in his father’s business. As for Marion, she worshiped the artistic father and found warm acceptance from his wife and nine children—a family where she actually seemed to belong—though she had misgivings, still, about giving up her soulmate, whatever his proclivities otherwise. Another poem she wrote that year, “Medieval Argument,” describes a dream in which a battle is waged between “mind and soul”:

     … My soul did weep

  That parting from my first love I must bear.

  My mind rejoiced to see that this affair

  Was nearly ended, bidding my soul peep

  Into the future and panacea find

  For present woe.…

  When I awoke and still I sadly sighed,

  Since dreams wear motley and consciousness is blind

  And ten to one that roseate future lied!

  Perhaps, though by all accounts she made the best of it. Three years after she married Bumpy, her father-in-law died and his business failed amid the Depression and Bumpy’s incompetence. For a few years the couple made ends meet by selling flowers (since they lived opposite a cemetery) and redwood lawn ornaments that Bumpy would cut—late at night, after a long day pumping gas—and Marion would paint as flamingos, fairies, and the like. At last Bumpy was able to buy his own service station, where he employed their oldest son, Chap, as a mechanic. To the end, sporadically, Marion and Charlie stayed in touch. When she received his wedding announcement in 1938, she wrote a little wistfully that she pictured the couple “as leading a very gay and glamorous life,” what with Charlie’s work at CBS and Rhoda’s at Fortune. A year later she listened to Jackson’s radio play A Letter from Home, about a rich hack of a screenwriter who repines over his lost Bettina, the hometown girl who believed in his talent, whereas his levelheaded wife is only too tolerant of his lucrative mediocrity. (“I like [the wife] so much better than Bettina,” Marion wrote the author; “she has her feet planted firmly on the ground.”) Also, when Jackson became famous as the author of The Lost Weekend, Marion generously acknowledged the publicity photo he’d mailed her (sans comment): “It’s a wonderful picture. You look so—well, integrated is the best I can do. There is no trace of the old diffidence.” Sheepishly Jackson replied that he didn’t deserve such a nice letter, and tried to compensate for past neglect, perhaps, by pointing out “how beautifully you write, dear Teena, and what a lovely mind you have … ”

  In any event, whatever the ups and downs of marriage to Bumpy, Marion did her best to live a cultured, examined life. In middle age she took up painting, and was soon exhibiting her work (portraits of grandchildren, black protesters in Selma) at various local venues. For forty years she met with the Women’s Reading Group of Rochester, consuming almost a book a day until, at age eighty-two, a stroke made reading impossible. At night sometimes, sitting in her own living room, she’d plaintively announce that she wanted to go home. “We’re here,” her gathered family would say. “Look, your paintings are on the wall!” But Marion would insist, until finally they’d have to put her in the car and drive her around the block a few times. One of her last poems (pre-stroke) was titled “Solitary Confinement,” about her failure to grasp “the dreadful facts of life” when young:

  … I did

  not know that a pattern forms before we are

  aware of it, and that what we think we make

  becomes a rigid prison making us. In

  ignorance and innocence I built my o
wn

  confines, and by the time I was old enough to

  know what I had done, there was no longer

  time to undo it.

  AFTER THE MARCH 13, 1924, issue, Charles Jackson’s name disappeared from the Courier masthead for a couple of months. In the meantime, owner Allyn Gilbert announced that the paper was passing into “abler hands” while he pursued a “new ambition” (unspecified) in St. Petersburg, Florida. The new owner, A. Eugene Bolles, had recently moved his family to Newark from Montclair, New Jersey; for the past seven years he’d worked for Doubleday, Page & Company, as publisher of World’s Work and other magazines, and now sought a quieter life. With nineteen employees of the Newark and Palmyra Courier, Bolles attended a farewell party for Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert at the Gardenier Hotel, where Charlie read a Lewis Carroll pastiche he’d composed for the occasion:

  … The time has come, the walrus said,

  To talk of many things;

  Of Florida, St. Petersburg,

  And cabbages and kings …

  Two weeks after Bolles took over, Jackson returned as Local Editor, while at the same time (not incidentally?) dating Bolles’s daughter, Cecilia, who was about as different from Marion Fleck as it was possible to be. Young Freddie of Simple Simon (the play) is about to give up his job as Local Editor and seek his fortune in Chicago, but is cajoled into staying by the genial and rather sinister publisher, Gordon, whose penetration of human nature is put to “perverted” uses (“He appreciates Freddie’s superiority of intelligence, but is careful to keep this knowledge from him, while at the same time taking advantage of it”). Whether Charlie was likewise planning to leave town that spring—as he presently would in any case—is hard to say; ditto the part that Bolles’s daughter played in the bargain. In Home for Good, Mercer Maitland defers his brilliant career as a novelist by remaining editor of the Arcadia Blade and making a miserable ten-year marriage with the publisher’s daughter, Ann “Bobbie” Holt, described as “a wife and hausfrau in the making, and a mother natural-born … no means the ideal mate for Mercer Maitland.” As for Cecilia “Bob” Bolles, she’d soon prove a more nearly ideal mate for Charlie’s brother Herb—an onerous job, to be sure, but one she’d manage to juggle with those of serial motherhood, “Miss Goody” columnist for her father’s paper (recipes and such), as well as, eventually, Arcadia’s town historian.

  As for Jackson, it’s possible that his momentous discovery (“From [age] twenty on, or thereabout”) of the great Russian novelists was what saved him, in part, from a life of dreadful Babbittry; he would suggest as much, forty years later, in his “Homage to Mother Russia,” Rufus “Bud” Boyd, a novel conceived in Pushkin sonnets:

  … Then, when I first was introduced to

  Stavrogin, Rodion, Berg, Pierre,12

  A strange new world I was not used to

  (And yet I was!—I had been there!)

  Opened, and all at once reduced to

  Embarrassing mediocrity

  My other books, my former reading;

  I found new selves in each succeeding

  Novel or tale:—identity!

  And, thanks to [Constance] Garnett’s heavy labors,

  I knew the people in each tome

  Far better than I knew my neighbors,

  And found, in Czarist Russia, home.

  That symbolic homecoming coincided (in 1924) with his first grown-up attempt to write a short story, “The Silk Bandanas,” whose connection to his later work was largely thematic: that is, it has to do with the ambivalent alienation of the Tonio-like artist from the common herd—two types (artist and herd) embodied here by a couple of college friends who like to go slumming in a “rummy chop-suey restaurant,” the Tuxedo, while waggishly wearing silk bandanas around their necks. One friend is a shallow wisenheimer based on Johnny Brust,13 whereas the other is a doting portrait of the author as an exquisitely sensitive young man:

  Poetically beautiful, he had the forehead of a thinker, the eyes of a dreamer, and the nose and mouth of a sensualist; and his highly-coloured olive complexion and shining black, rather long hair, completed the picture of sensitive, almost tragic, good-looks.… For the most part he seemed continually wrapt [sic] in dreams, but when he did relapse into play, his face shone with a child-like radiance and animation that was positively heart-breaking in its innocence.

  This naïf becomes smitten with a languid slattern named Marjie, who ultimately absconds with his bandana to devastating (and obscurely metaphorical) effect. “Horrific (and lousy)” Jackson declared the story a few years later, though he kept a copy among his papers as a kind of memento or bogey perhaps (and then, too, he simply hated disposing of his own work).

  Once “The Silk Bandanas” was out of his system—a first attempt to describe, in acceptable form, the betrayal of his innocence at Syracuse—Jackson entered what he would someday call his “youthful Chekhov period.” Among other stories, all unpublished, he wrote about an old married couple who run an unsuccessful hotel in the mountains and remain strangers to each other (“A Manuscript from the Country”); he wrote about hungry peasant children who give their last crumbs of bread to some lovely swans lighting briefly on a village lake (“The Swan Lake”); he wrote about a father and son, Russian immigrants from Illinois, who are visiting family in St. Petersburg when the war breaks out (“Troika”). The narrator’s epiphany in “Troika” might suffice as a kind of blanket moral for these gray tales: “For the first time I realized how alone in life I was, and my being with my father only intensified my loneliness, because he was alone too.” By far the most successful effort from this phase of his long apprenticeship, “A Pair of Shoes,” pays little or no homage to Chekhov or Mother Russia, though it does give a foreglimpse of what Jackson would be writing in another decade or so. Set in a small Indiana town a mile south of Lake Michigan (“a quiescent sea of molten glass in the intense midsummer heat”), the story is about the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl by a gang of a railroad workers. The girl’s boyfriend comes from the beach looking for her, and hears her screaming; then, after the rapists depart, he spies her lying naked and unconscious in a boxcar. Later, the boy himself emerges from the boxcar—where (implicitly) he’s raped her too—and trips over the girl’s discarded shoe: “He recoiled as if stung.… Then, after peering about to make sure that he was alone, he picked up the shoe by its little strap and flung it far away over the prairie, in the dark.” The idea of human depravity, then and later, served to steer Jackson away from the banal and derivative. The problem, of course, was that such stories were mostly unsalable.

  BY THE TIME HE’d come to inhabit the “strange new world” of Russian literature, Jackson had spent more than five years writing hundreds of items like these: “Charles Bloomer is back from a fishing trip to the Adirondacks with a fine catch of fish and several new fish stories”; “Miss Frances Gaffney of Rochester, who has been in Newark the past few days visiting Miss Lucienne Bechard, the French teacher, returned to Rochester, Monday afternoon.…” And so on. Eugene Bolles tried to sweeten the deal by giving Jackson his own column, “Callow Comments,” where he could indulge his creativity over the coy byline “A Calla Ham,” though Jackson’s inaugural effort on May 15, 1924, hinted broadly at his real identity: “Behold the return of the native!” he announced, noting that he’d recently succumbed to “the comic urge for higher learning,” but since then had “passed through all the wild stages of adolescence … and now emerges into the sober philosophy of the fading youth who has finally reached the twenty-first milestone, only to find all wars fought, all gods dead, all horses collared”—this a mocking nod to Fitzgerald, yet again, whose cynicism he now professed to find “obnoxious.” It was a point of view that Calla Ham, jolliest of philistines, would sustain nicely over the months to come. “The Leather Tanners’ Convention advocates walking as a health-builder,” the “colyumnist” typically quipped. “Yes, there’s nothing like walking to put you on your feet again!”

  No wonder Calla Ham�
�s alter ego was bitter. “Myself: the relic of early fame,” Freddie laments toward the end of Simple Simon, denouncing himself as “one of these ‘only’ persons”: “I’m local editor of The Arcadia Courier, and I’m only twenty! … I wrote poems when I was ‘only ten’—I wrote a novel when I was ‘only sixteen’—Well, what good did it ever do me?” Fiercely he swears to leave town the very next day—right after his final performance as “Simple Simon” in the Elks’ Minstrels & Frolic—though one is left with the definite impression that Freddie will remain in Arcadia to his dying day. As for Jackson: by the end of 1924 he’d had enough of Calla Ham, nor would he be reprising his Elks role as “The Rose of Washington Square.” Along with the great Russian novels, he’d recently discovered The Mysterious Stranger, by Mark Twain, and now saw fit to share this “little-known book” with readers of “Callow Comments” (getting “into serious trouble thereby,” as he later wrote Dorothea Straus): Twain “reveals himself as a person under no illusions or delusions whatever,” wrote Calla Ham, “but who regards this whole thing, life … as plain and simple and laughable as it is intolerable and cruel and bitter.” By way of illustration, Jackson—in a startling volte-face from his previous disavowal of Fitzgeraldian cynicism—approvingly quoted a passage in which Twain’s title character (Satan) delivers a bracing peroration in favor of atheism: “Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God … who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself … ”

  So ended Jackson’s career as local editor of the Newark Courier. A month later he’d leave for Chicago, where he could “live and work in the same atmosphere” as idols such as Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Edgar Lee Masters—an atmosphere more free than Arcadia’s, let alone the town’s microcosm at 238 Prospect, where the head of the house, Herb, took a dimmer-than-ever view of his little brother, who spent his Courier wages on highbrow stuff like books and plays in Rochester, while Herb was stuck with the family bills! The tension would linger after Charlie’s departure, though Herb gained an ally when he married Bob in 1927—this at a time when both younger brothers were gadding about (very disreputably, Bob thought) in New York and, later, Switzerland. “Charlie and Fred would blow in now and then,” said Herb’s daughter Sally, “and grandmother [Sarah] would just lay out the red carpet. The Prodigal Sons.” Meanwhile, five days a week for the next thirty-five years, Herb would support his growing brood as assistant superintendent at the box factory. As for Bob, she kept her little resentments to herself, for the most part, though she did find sly ways of getting her own back. “Hey! What do you think of this letter!!” Charlie wrote Fred in 1940, forwarding Bob’s latest. “There’s a surprise toward the end,” he added, referring to a note “written” by Bob’s one-year-old son, Duncan, thus: “Thank you so much for my he-man suit. You know I have never worn a dress. Believe me I’m no pansy.”