by Blake Bailey
Charlie and Boom had probably become involved in the summer theater through their friendship with Becker, then the center of an arty social circle that seems to have been largely composed of gay and bisexual men.9 Indeed, Becker was remarkably versatile in every respect: his gallery in New York was among the first to bring Picasso’s work to the United States, and meanwhile he also took an abiding interest in certain social causes. From a well-to-do family in Chicago, he returned to his hometown after graduating from Harvard in the early 1920s and found hardscrabble employment at the Institute for Juvenile Research and the Illinois State Penitentiary. But his most concerted efforts would always be on behalf of African Americans; he later served on the Council Against Intolerance in America, for which he wrote The Negro in American Life (1944), and the following year he co-authored one of the first children’s books featuring a black heroine, Melindy’s Medal. As for his various artistic interests, they had a way of ending badly—his gallery had failed by the time he started the summer theater, which he seemed to hope would serve somewhat as a vehicle for his own talents, but it was not to be: “I began as leading man in Oliver Oliver and I have been demoted with honors,” he wrote a friend. “My ambition is to have a non-speaking ‘walk-on’ but no such luck yet.” His writing career, ultimately, would fare little better.
A few months prior to that first season in Brattleboro, Becker had put Jackson in touch with an old Harvard classmate, Paul Spofford,10 who’d received his medical degree from the University of Vienna, where he’d studied under some of Freud’s disciples and heard a number of the great man’s lectures firsthand. Alas, his only enduring fame would prove ignominious (if happily anonymous)—that is, as “the foolish psychiatrist” in The Lost Weekend. Back in 1935, however, Jackson had enlisted Spofford to help him return to moderate drinking via psychoanalysis. The doctor agreed it was possible, and Mr. Winthrop was evidently willing to pay his rather exorbitant fee.
But Spofford wasn’t a psychiatrist at all, foolish or otherwise; he was, in fact, licensed in New York as a general practitioner. His son remembers that Spofford liked to discuss psychiatric case histories, and indeed his second wife (whom he’d met in Vienna) was herself a psychiatrist; moreover he took an interest in the drinking problems of artistic people he’d met through Becker and another mutual friend from Harvard, the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby. The latter referred Willem de Kooning to Spofford, who was happy to help the great abstract expressionist recover from a string of benders in the mid-1930s, for which de Kooning (not yet famous) paid him with a few paintings.11 Spofford’s son doesn’t recall his father ever presuming to practice actual psychoanalysis, and suggested that his treatment of de Kooning, for instance, was strictly physical: “He was a big believer in exercise and healthy diet,” said the son, “which was ironic, because he smoked cigarettes pretty heavily all his life.” Nevertheless it does appear to be the case that Spofford pursued a lucrative sideline in psychoanalysis; after all, Freud’s ideas were only just gaining currency in the States, and perhaps Spofford figured he was better qualified than most to apply them, having heard the man speak with his own ears. Louise Rosskam remembered that her husband, Edwin, a writer and noted photographer, had also sought help from Spofford—qua psychiatrist—who advised the man to conquer his depression by getting on with his writing.
He gave the same advice to Jackson, more or less, who later mentioned their sessions in a piece he wrote for Life magazine:
At considerable expense I went, in my early thirties, to a psychiatrist. After many weeks and much outlay of money he told me that my problem was psychological merely; that I was frustrated, hadn’t “realized” myself, and that as soon as I began to make some headway as a writer and to achieve the recognition that I seemed to crave, my alcoholic difficulties would clear up and I would be able to drink again like a normal drinker. This made sense to me, probably because I wanted it to.
Spofford was hardly alone in thinking alcoholics could become “normal” drinkers. Though it has since been established that alcoholism is a virtually incurable condition that can only be “arrested” by way of total abstinence, it was widely believed among Freudians in the 1930s (at the Menninger Clinic, for example) that one could relearn moderate drinking if one’s neurotic conflicts were resolved. And besides, for a while anyway, Charlie enjoyed his morning sessions with Spofford. He’d always liked making new friends—a new audience, that is, for the fascinating story of his life, though it also followed that certain friendships tended to pall once the story was told (“He could almost gauge the length of such a relationship by how much or how little he had revealed of his past”). And then—as he would complain in a letter he wrote for a subsequent (non-Freudian) therapist—Jackson became contemptuous of the glib way Spofford attached “fancy psycho-analytical labels” to highly specific complaints, with little of the deeper human insight that the patient himself brought to the study of Charles Jackson. Nor did he really believe, at bottom, that he’d ever be able to drink normally, and thus “began to doubt the superiority of [Spofford’s] judgment, began to hold out on him and fool him.”
Once he discovered that Jackson was, indeed, drinking quite a lot again, Spofford tried various novel approaches toward containing the problem. In The Lost Weekend, “the foolish psychiatrist” gives Don an envelope of sodium amytal tablets to help calm his nerves and wean him off alcohol, whereupon Don takes the whole packet at once and (as he’d halfway intended) almost kills himself. Finally—the better to shame his patient into cooperation, perhaps—the psychiatrist writes up, for Don’s signature, a little document that reads in part:
I hereby acknowledge that I am a pretty good guy when I am sober but that when I am tight I am not responsible for what I do or say.… In order therefore not to become a nuisance when I am tight I should like to make the following agreement.
If I feel the urge to drink, and am able to control this urge enough to go home and in the presence of my brother or doctor drink 6 bottles of beer, I agree that I shall then remain in my house two days. If … I am not able to control myself in this manner and I feel myself forced to drink whiskey or more than two beers without consulting my doctor, I agree that I must spend seven days the first time this experience happens, 8 days the second time, nine days the 3rd time, etc. in my house.… except for two hours from 10:45 to 12:45 during which time I shall visit my doctor and get fresh air.…
I wish this agreement to hold until I and my doctor decide it should be dissolved.
Jackson refused to sign the agreement (“Childish he was, but not that childish—nor so foolish as the foolish psychiatrist”), which survives among his papers word for word as it appears in The Lost Weekend.12 Two and a half years later, sober and gainfully employed, Jackson considered returning the paper to Spofford with a twitting little note: “Dear [Paul]—Look what I found ‘among my souvenirs.’ … Anyway I’m proud of myself that I refused to sign it, because I knew, even then, that it would never do any good.” Instead he terminated therapy on the spot.
Then and now, psychoanalysts (manqué and otherwise) have rarely gotten good results with alcoholics. Though it may be correct to assume that compulsive drinking is symptomatic of an underlying neurosis, the symptom meanwhile evolves into a separate and no less pressing problem—chemical dependency—which in turn may be exacerbated by the analyst’s efforts to address the neurosis. Saint-Exupéry’s tippler in The Little Prince—who drinks because he is ashamed, and is ashamed because he drinks—is a nice illustration of the conundrum, one that Jackson struggled with in life and art. “He knew what no one else knew, no one he had ever met yet,” Jackson wrote in a discarded passage from The Lost Weekend: “His ‘disease’ [i.e., alcoholism] was not disease, or at least not the principal thing from which he suffered.” This was meant to reflect the Freudian notion of an underlying neurosis, though perhaps it pointed too directly at what Freud himself considered almost a constant among alcoholics: repressed homosexuality. According to Freud,
male homosexuals drink because of their failed relations with women, and because it provides an excuse to seek the company of men. Don Birnam, for his part, implicitly blames his drinking on the more fearful “disease” of homosexuality, though at other times it’s precisely the other way around: “What Bim”—the male nurse at Bellevue—“did not see was that the alcoholic is not himself, able to choose his own path, and therefore the kinship he seemed to reveal”—i.e., their common homosexuality—“was incidental, accidental, transitory at best.” Thus Don is homosexual because he drinks, and drinks because he is homosexual.
While it wouldn’t do for Jackson to mention as much for the benefit of Life readers in 1954, homosexuality—along with his frustration as a writer—was most assuredly ventilated in his sessions with Spofford, who likely counseled acceptance. Freud himself (though a later generation of disciples would take a decidedly different line) was almost nothing but tolerant on the subject, once writing to the distraught mother of a gay son: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function.” Radiantly enlightened for the times, Freud was doubtful that homosexuality was something that could (or need) be “cured,” though he wrote the mother that he might be able to “bring [her son] harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency” if indeed the young man was unhappy—that is, Freud would try to help him come to terms with his nature. As for Dr. Spofford, he was often fiercely indignant about the way homosexuals were treated in twentieth-century America, as he had every reason to be. His lifelong friend Edwin Denby had left Harvard his sophomore year because of homophobic harassment, and Spofford agreed to leave with him; together the friends took a steamer to England, and later—after an interval of “study” in Greenwich Village—Denby decided to accompany Spofford to Vienna. Still haunted by the ostracism he’d suffered at Harvard, and afraid he had no future in mainstream society, Denby was suicidal by the time he finally knocked on Freud’s door and was referred to a colleague, Dr. Paul Federn, whose patient he became for many years. One assumes the relationship was fruitful. Returning to the States, Denby began writing a column for Modern Music magazine, and a few years later Virgil Thomson recruited him for the New York Herald-Tribune, where he became one of the most influential dance critics of his time, as well as an estimable poet.
He also became more openly gay, as Spofford’s son remembers, though one can only speculate about Spofford himself: in the penultimate draft of The Lost Weekend, Jackson deleted a reference to the foolish psychiatrist’s “homosexual lover,” and was all the more vexed, therefore, when John Becker accused him of being “ungenerous” in his portrayal of Spofford. Jackson’s reply may well be the most uncharitable letter he ever wrote, suggesting perhaps that he was still feeling ill-used by these two (or at least Becker) nine years later:
By my lack of generosity, I suppose you mean the way I handled “the foolish psychiatrist.” It was absolutely in keeping with the character of Don Birnam in the state he was in, to treat the psychiatrist in just that way and no other, and to call him “foolish”—which, to the knowing reader, is a commentary more on the protagonist than on the doctor. If you think it was ungenerous, you should have seen the original version, from which I later deleted many many facts (and I mean facts) because they might possibly hurt [Paul Spofford], though of course the general reader would never know who the character was based on.…
Or, if you want to feel that you are right and think that I am “generous” and “ungenerous” to my friends as characters, wait until you read the next book. Perhaps someone will then rise in defense of you as you do now in defense of [Paul], because of my portrayal of an ineffectual, aging dilettante whose motives in desiring to help the colored race it would not need a psychiatrist to define. Still, this will hardly apply to you, because by the time the book comes out you will probably be trying to run an art gallery, or summer theater, or write somebody else’s children’s book, or study criminology, or learn to be an actor …—You see? You say I’m ungenerous, so I will be.
Nor did he leave it at that. Five years later, in “The Sunnier Side”—his long meditation on the parlous relationship between life and art—Jackson mentioned an aggrieved reader of The Lost Weekend who protested his characterization of “the foolish psychiatrist” as follows: “ ‘I am literally appalled at your cavalier treatment of Dr. Becker [sic] …’ ”
Dr. Spofford’s son was nine years old when The Lost Weekend was released as a movie, and he remembers his father mentioning the man who’d written the novel it was based on. Whether he was rueful is hard to say, though his son feels certain that Spofford would have agreed, later, that as a thirty-four-year-old “psychiatrist” who’d just completed his residency, he’d been foolish indeed on the subject of alcoholics; in any case he learned the hard way that they’re unlikely to revert to moderate drinking. Spofford himself “became a heavy alcoholic for many years,” his son pointed out, until finally he got sober with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. He died in 1983, within a few months of his friend Denby’s suicide.
AROUND THE TIME he broke with Spofford, in April 1935, Jackson resumed writing fiction after an almost two-year lull. He had reached a point of desperation whereby he was willing to write about a seminal trauma—the “fraternity nightmare” at Syracuse—despite the taboo nature of the subject. In a 1943 letter to his agent, Bernice Baumgarten, he remarked of a subplot in the soon-to-be-completed Lost Weekend, “I could write a book in itself about the fraternity”—eliding the fact that he’d already written such a book. If Native Moment had found a publisher (and it seems to have come rather close), it would have been a work of pioneering frankness in American fiction.
Primavera, the original title of Native Moment, suggests the Arcadian ambience of “State University,” where carefree freshmen gad about the streets in pajamas to celebrate football victories, where they rise to the chimes of the Fine Arts tower, evoked with arch lyricism reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise: the chimes “served the double purpose of summoning the student to his eight o’clock class and smiting his impressionable breast with a sonorous reminder of the dignity and prestige … of his Alma Mater.” Into this pastoral comes Phil Williams, an ingénu who can’t bring himself to grasp why the company of the “handsome but rather dissipated” Tracey Burke makes him so happy: “It was something like being on a hill at home, in his childhood—something, but not quite like it.… On the hill at home, all had been plain and clear.” Groping for ways to express his adoration, Phil treats the older boy with a kind of doting, maidenly servitude, loaning him all the money he can spare (and some he can’t), and each night stealing downstairs in the fraternity house to cover him, passed out on the couch, with his own sheepskin jacket. “There lies Tracey, like a beautiful warrior in vinous sleep,” he writes Bettina, “with, more often than not, a bottle of gin beside him.” That even Bettina should find this a bit much (“you sound like a mother”) suggests the breadth of Phil’s confusion before his own nature, as he wrestles with the difference between that “hill at home” and whatever compels him to tell Tracey, bemusedly, “I’m very fond of you”—the same phrase that, ten years later, would cause another beloved object, Cliff Hauman, to pummel the hapless John Grandin with a pair of fire tongs in The Fall of Valor.
But Hauman is a relatively innocent cretin, horrified by his own latent homosexuality, whereas Tracey Burke—well, Jackson was unsure what to make of him. “He’s not our kind and doesn’t belong here,” Johnny Carr warns Phil. “He’s corrupt and he corrupts.” Certainly his eventual seduction and betrayal of Phil would bear this out, but then a certain ambivalence is suggested in a passage elsewhere that seems almost to celebrate, or at least exonerate, Burke as a “man of appetites”: he “was the complete male of whom Phil was always to stand in awe … untouched by worry or woe, cruel only in being true to himself, and chiefly concerned—and rightly—
with his body, his belly, and his bed.” And rightly: such an idea was likely derived from Santayana’s The Last Puritan, which Jackson discovered in early 1936 while revising Native Moment. In a letter to Boom, he enthused that the novel’s author was “the most civilised man” he knew (“so wise, so witty, so good-humoured about life, and so right”), and that Boom was apt to “fall in love with” one character in particular—the sexually ambiguous Jim Darnley (expelled from the Navy for “immorality” with sailors): “He is Tracey Burke without viciousness, a healthy animal, the paragon of what man is intended no doubt to be, unruffled, untroubled by the problems of the age.…” Darnley and Tracey Burke (who, it seems, was rendered a bit less vicious in revision) were creatures that Jackson could only contemplate, wistfully, through the bars of his own cage; whatever his abstract hopes to the contrary, and whatever his actual behavior, he would remain stubbornly troubled by the problems of his age.
Such anyway was the divided mind that could admire The Last Puritan on the one hand, and yet go on longing for acceptance from “the blond and blue-eyed, the fair and living, the happy, lovely, and commonplace,” as Mann would have it. That Phil Williams might be exiled forever from that happy fraternity—both Kappa U and the blue-eyed world at large—is so dreadful a prospect that he searches the mirror for some sign of his own sexual corruption, a little surprised to find his face “as young and clear as ever—the tilted quizzical eyebrow, the clear eyes and forehead, the adolescent mouth—absurdly young.” And how does such a vulnerable youth find his way in the world? The novel’s last pages—composed mostly of a long and rather ponderous colloquy between Phil and his revered English teacher, Ralph Monroe (named in honor of Jackson’s dead mentor Ralph Monroe Eaton)—remind one that Jackson was even then casting about for reasons not to drink himself to death. “Things are as bad as you think they are,” says Dr. Monroe, “or you wouldn’t be thinking it. But man grows richer by his fate, they say, even if it kills him, and still greater when he endures it.” Along with a mulish refusal to give up, then (“You’ll get used to it”), the way one endures would seem to be twofold: “The only thing that matters,” Monroe continues (laying a hesitant hand on Phil’s knee), “is to look about, to see whom it is you love, and to love him [my italics] … ” Jackson would be long overdue in following that advice in earnest, though another course is suggested by a scene in The Lost Weekend—when Don flees the Kappa U house for the last time and finds himself standing, dazedly, in front of a bookshop with Fitzgerald’s new (as of 1922) Tales of the Jazz Age in the window; the book is open to the story “May Day,” the first two pages of which are so wonderful that Don, reading them, all but forgets his recent disgrace.13