by Blake Bailey
1 Cannibalized almost word for word into A Second-Hand Life, where he changed the two characters’ names from Bettina Chapin and Don Birnam to Carol Wilson and Harry Harrison. One of the unwritten sections of Farther and Wilder was to be titled “Bettina.”
2 Some of which Jackson saved his entire life. Sample exchange from a note found at Dartmouth:
[HE:] “Would you like to be a boy?”
[SHE:] “Gee, you bet I would. If I were a boy this school wouldn’t have to be so darned unexciting.”
In his most notable Bettina story, “A Red-Letter Day,” Jackson writes of the time a favorite English teacher intercepted one of Don and Bettina’s notes, finally returning it with a lot of blue-penciled marginalia: “unity,” “repetitive,” etc.
3 Toward the end of Marion’s life, in the late 1980s, her family collected her poetry into a bound volume, Mismatched Beads on a Broken String.
4 Witness this (not altogether atypical) item from the nearby Clyde Times on November 16, 1916, found directly beneath an account of the deaths of Thelma and Richard Jackson: “My wife having left my bed and board without just cause or provocation. I hereby caution all persons not to harbor or trust her on my account. WILLIAM UPHAM.”
5 Freddie and Janet, protagonists of Simple Simon the play, are renamed Taddem and Bettina in the novel. A compressed version of the story is told yet again in Jackson’s first original radio script for CBS, A Letter from Home (1939), in which the characters are named Frederick and Bettina.
6 This scene was also cannibalized into A Second-Hand Life—a crucial episode, when Harry Harrison gets his most decisive inkling of eunuch-hood.
7 Presumably Anthony Patch from The Beautiful and Damned, clearly on Jackson’s mind at the time. Anthony’s affair with a Southern girl, Dorothy, is sordid, and leads to his nervous collapse.
8 The young man’s real name, according to Jackson’s vast index for What Happened. The character is called Tracey Burke in both Native Moment and The Lost Weekend.
9 According to Jackson’s letter, Marion was to spend the night of the formal at the Gamma Phi Beta house, as guest of one Mildred Sucker, no less.
10 In his JAXON notebook, Charlie wrote a scene in which Phil discovers the following passage in Moby Dick, which causes him to weep with “a kind of mutual and brotherly misery”: “But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful—nay, shocking—to expose the fall of valor in the soul.… That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone, bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man.” The title of Jackson’s second published novel, The Fall of Valor—about a middle-aged professor’s infatuation with a handsome Marine—was taken from this passage.
11 A final twist of the knife—also suggestted in Farther and Wilder—is Phil’s being forced to confess to his best friend, Johnny, that the accusations are true. The latter, based on Johnny Brust, is named Johnny Carr in Native Moment, whereas Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend drunkenly phones Johnny Barker one night, years later, to ask whether he believed the whole fraternity rumor: “Write me about it sometime,” says Barker (“bored and sleepy”).
12 Characters from The Possessed (Stavrogin), Crime and Punishment (Rodion), and War and Peace (Berg, Pierre).
13 One gathers from Jackson’s 1922 letter to Marion—and even more so from various scenes in Native Moment—that he and Brust enjoyed “bum[ming] around” in dive bars, very like the friends in “The Silk Bandanas.”
Chapter Three
Some Secret Sorrow
The most thrilling sound for Jackson, growing up, was the shriek of train whistles in the night, and finally on January 9, 1925, he boarded a train himself and permanently (more or less) left behind that hated, beloved village where “everybody knew him and had always known him.” Within three months he was able to report that his many friends in Chicago had just given him a “perfectly wonderful” birthday, and moreover he’d gotten a job at Kroch’s—one of the largest bookstores in the world—working in the art department.1 Nothing if not personable (and vulnerable withal), Charlie was taken under the Kroch family’s wing: before long he was calling Adolph, the owner, Papa (“he’s a crotchety old bastard but an interesting and genuinely cultivated man”), and he would always feel tender toward Adolph’s sister-in-law, Lieschen, who became like a mother to him (“I truly love her”). His outward life, at least, was pleasantly regular: he enjoyed his job, and had time and energy left over to work on his fiction (along with occasional freelancing for The Chicagoan,2 a new magazine modeled after The New Yorker); Saturdays he got exercise by playing tennis in Highland Park, and afterward would eat lunch at the Murrain Hotel on the lake.
Nights seemed mostly a matter of making up for lost time—“sampling such Bohemian diversions as he could uncover,” as one journalist wrote. His old Newark friend Jack Burgess put a finer point on it, sixty-five years later, by observing that Charlie had fallen in with a group of “fairies” in Chicago; given that Burgess was able to identify (correctly) his steadiest companion, one assumes that Jackson was a little less inclined to dissemble, at least during these relatively liberated years of his life. Wasn’t that, after all, the main point of escaping to Chicago in the first place? Later, as a family man trying to remain sober and solvent, Jackson would often complain about his inability to “get outside of [him]self”—suggesting (on one level) the entombing self-consciousness of a man who’d grown up a “sissy” in the small-town America of that era. “He cultivated a technique of personality, and it worked,” Jackson wrote of Harry Harrison in A Second-Hand Life. “To all outward appearances it worked; and what else was needed beyond outward appearances? … but he knew—only he knew—that he was a prisoner.” As a connoisseur of Winesburg, Ohio, Jackson also knew that such a prisoner was apt to become warped, a “grotesque,” over time. In his early twenties, he wrote a revealing free-verse piece titled “Devil’s Dialogue,”3 in which a young man is mortified by the knowing smile of “a perfect stranger”:
“… The possible idea I could be
So shallow a mere stranger passing by
Could see in me the thing I most conceal!
—Why it should be, I’d give the world to know!
… Good Lord, I do my damnedest all the time,
And play the part so fully that I almost
Forget entirely my other self … ”
“I understand [the stranger replies],
Although I think you overdo the matter:
Such strict repression isn’t necessary.”
“It isn’t, huh?—that’s all you know about it!—
Try living in a small town for a while!”
“I know; but did you ever stop and think
What’s bound to happen if you will persist
In such subdued restraint, barring all else?
Nature is nature: you can’t change its course.”
“Why no, but you can stifle it.”
“Granted!—
But in the stifling, what else goes with it!—
All force, all power, all personality,
All spirit, fire, ambition—worse, all love!
And what is left?—a dull automaton! …
That’s what you will become, unless you change,
Unless you heed your natural desires.—
You’re still young yet, and so far this repression
Has had no serious damaging results;
But give it time—a few years more!—and see
The wreck of youth that you will have become:
At twenty-five a human mechanism,
Devoid of that ecstatic soul the gods
Bestow alone upon their favorite children.…
I cannot bear to see you made a slave,
Afraid to know or recognize yourself,
Living in fear, your own dread Frankenstein!”
To some extent Jackson would never be free of that fear, though part of him took considerable pains to heed the advice (often invoked) that Henry James allegedly gave the young Rupert Brooke: “Don’t be afraid to be happy.” And then, of course, “nature is nature” whether one fears it or not. As Jackson candidly explained to his daughter’s philosophy professor in 1964, “The slogan to solicit subscriptions [to Life] always said ‘Obey that impulse’—which is the story of my life, ought to be put on my tombstone (‘He obeyed that impulse’) and though at times it’s got me into a hell of a lot of trouble, much of it unprintable, it has at other times brought me a great deal of satisfaction and yes, even reward.”
A story Jackson wrote the year after he left Chicago, “Some Secret Sorrow,” suggests that he managed to find abundant trouble and satisfaction both while in the city, and also gives one a sense of the hazards faced by that generation of gay men, wherever they happened to be. “This strange, beautiful, sordid city,” the narrator, Sid, muses of Chicago. “Had I known of some of the things I was to come up against here … I should never have had the courage to come. The strength to combat life consisted, apparently, in not knowing what was going to happen.”4 The story is mostly composed of a long confession (“I’m continually cutting my own throat by telling too much”) given by Don,5 an artist who senses a kinship with Sid. As a boy, Don was sexually exploited by an older man and his friends, and thereafter went from one disastrous liaison to the next, until at last he “learned to stay more and more by [him]self and became reconciled to the fact that [he] was different from other people, and let it go at that.” Recently, though, he tried to pick up a man in Grant Park, and was almost beaten by an angry mob that gathered when the man began loudly denouncing him. Sid, for his part, reflects that Don seems oddly “a stranger” now that he’s told his story, and later ignores Don’s pathetic attempts to stay in touch. One senses the author divided himself pretty much equally between the two men—gave his desperate need for connection to Don, his wariness to Sid, and something of his self-loathing to both.
But what of the beautiful, satisfying aspects of being in Chicago? Obey that impulse: not for nothing was Jackson forever trying out, as a title, some version of Whitman’s “Native Moments”—a poem that celebrates “life coarse and rank”: “I am for those who believe in loose delights—I share the midnight orgies of young men.” Dorothea Straus wrote of her friend’s taste for “rough trade,” and in his 1953 meditation, “An Afternoon with Boris,” Jackson conceded that his acquaintances would be “aghast” if they knew something of his “compulsive excursions” into “the low and the lawless … even literally the unclean.” But then, he was his father’s son—never mind the priapic Williams side of the family—and such “excursions” provided, besides, a needed respite (“a revival or cleansing of the spirit”) from writerly cerebration. In the opening section of Farther and Wilder, set in the summer of 1947, Don Birnam thanks God he is “finally old enough to know that life’s problems [do] not consist of specialités like alcoholism, syphilis, drugs, promiscuity, and indiscriminate sexual drives toward male and female alike”; but meanwhile (around 1948 and ’49) the author himself was undergoing tests at Mary Hitchcock Hospital in New Hampshire for genital herpes and syphilis, the latter first contracted in the early 1930s (if one believes a discarded passage from The Lost Weekend), when he endured eleven days in a fever cabinet in hope of a cure.
Amid Chicago’s “Bohemian diversions,” then, it was probably a relief to find a kindly older man to spend the better part of one’s time with. Dr. Thorvald Lyngholm, a Danish osteopath, was thirty-six when Jackson met him on September 19, 1925 (a red-letter day duly noted in Jackson’s journal), and would remain at least on the periphery of his life for almost twenty years.6 In Farther and Wilder, Don Birnam names “Thorvald” as one of the few people he’s (almost) been able to love—this apart from the “selfless, pure, undemanding” love he bears his children—and Don of “Some Secret Sorrow” waxes nostalgic about the one time his feelings were requited by another man: “It was as though a veil had been stripped from my eyes and I could now see the whole truth about everything, and beauty where before had been, to me, only existence.” The most sustained tribute to Lyngholm in Jackson’s work is his appearance as an osteopath named Dan Linquist in an unfinished novella written in 1928, Three Flowers, inspired by the author’s maternal great-aunts at 414 Courtland Avenue in Syracuse.7 Dr. Linquist treats these oafish spinsters—terrified by their teenage niece’s pregnancy—with sweet forbearance, and his own “wholesome good-looks” are lovingly evoked: “In repose, his face seemed always as if he were thinking deeply and at the same time scenting the air. When he laughed or smiled, his serious mouth became miraculously boyish and charming, and little lines, of mirth rather than age, appeared below his eyes.… his good Scandinavian head was partly bald, but the hair that remained at the sides and top was fine and silky, of a light sand color.” In Jackson’s play The Loving Offenders—also unfinished (indeed hardly begun)—one of the characters was to be a thirty-five-year-old “doctor friend” who causes a scandal by accompanying the twenty-two-year-old Ralph to his older brother’s wedding.8 As for the actual Thor: five years later, in 1930, a friend in New York wrote as follows to Jackson’s tuberculosis sanatorium in Europe: “[Thor] feels very sad and deserted in your absence. If only he could acquire his vast wealth now I am sure he would fly over to you in a moment.” Thor was trying to supplement his (evidently meager) income as an osteopath by pitching, to libraries, a process for preserving newspapers in cellophane. “So I am not very sanguine at Thor being financially improved within a short time,” Charlie’s friend concluded.
ONE NIGHT THAT FALL (1925), while dining at Henrici’s in the Loop, Jackson spotted his favorite actress (other than Garbo), Pauline Lord, then appearing in They Knew What They Wanted. Jackson “crashed her table” and Lord agreed to let him backstage at her next performance, where she gave him “the thrill of [his] life” by autographing his copy of Anna Christie, whose titular heroine was her greatest role. (In The Lost Weekend, Don Birnam pays punning homage—“lord, what an artist”—to “the greatest woman in the theatre of our time.”) A year later Jackson learned that Lord’s play Sandalwood was about to close in New York, and abruptly quit his job at Kroch’s and moved east in time to catch the last Saturday performance. Soon he was hired at the Doubleday store in Grand Central, and became, at night, “wrapt up in … the Bohemian life of Waverly Place and Sheridan Square.”
He also resumed a curious friendship that had begun three years before, when (in retreat from the Syracuse disaster) he’d taken a summer job as desk clerk at a posh hotel in Eastport, Maine. As he would later tell it in his “memoir in the form of a novel”—alternately titled The Royalist and Uncle Mr. Kember—he was reading one day on a pier at the yacht club when he noticed a distinguished older man reclining in the stern of his sailboat, also reading. “I say, young man,” the latter called, in a suave mid-Atlantic accent, “it seems you’re reading a Modern Library book, too.” As it happened (“a coincidence in a million”) they were both reading The Odyssey; the older man, delighted, took down the boy’s name and address and subsequently mailed him the enormous Medici Society edition of The Odyssey, with twenty gorgeous plates by the English painter William Russell Flint. “This comes to you over the wine-dark sea,” an enclosed card was inscribed, “from Telemachus of many counsels.”
This generous personage was a fifty-nine-year-old bachelor named Bronson Winthrop, a man of impressive wealth and pedigree who would prove the most important elder figure in Charlie’s all but fatherless life. Such a man, indeed, was far more in line with what Charlie would have liked in a forebear: “I’m afraid I don’t know the Vanderbilts,” Winthrop once remarked with a casual whiff of disdain, given that he (tacitly) considered them nouveau riche. He himself was descended from John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Col
ony, though he’d inherited most of his property from his mother’s side of the family, the Manhattan Stuyvesants. Winthrop’s upbringing was almost breathtakingly cosmopolitan: born in Paris, he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, after which he took a two-year Grand Tour to Peking and points beyond. In 1891 he returned to the States and got his law degree at Columbia, joining the illustrious firm of Elihu Root; when the latter left to become Secretary of State in 1905, Winthrop and his best friend, Henry Stimson (Secretary of War in the Taft and FDR cabinets), became nominal heads of the firm. Except for some time off in 1898—when he traveled (with his lifelong valet, William) to Manila as an infantry captain in the Spanish-American War—Winthrop would, for the rest of his life, devotedly ride the train each morning to his office on Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan.