by Blake Bailey
Hence the consolations of art that would stand Jackson in good stead almost to the end, though his own writing would prove a mixed blessing at best. As Dr. Monroe remarks to Phil, with uncanny prescience, “Your writing is going to be damned interesting—twenty years from now, say … ” Almost twenty years exactly after his time at Syracuse, Jackson began writing The Lost Weekend; meanwhile he tried bearing in mind that he was “a plant of slow growth,” as when the Curtis Brown agency rejected (on December 23, 1936) the latest product of his long apprenticeship: “[Native Moment] has received more than the usual attention in this office but we regret to say that we do not feel sufficiently confident of the commercial possibilities to be able to undertake to offer it in the market for you.”
CURTIS BROWN’s careful attention took a long time, and their eventual decision was almost certainly a foregone conclusion. Jackson’s behavior for much of 1936, at any rate, was hardly that of a man with great expectations, literary or otherwise. Later he would remember the eerie sensation of waking up—after weeks of free-fall drinking—in a strange hotel, where he would try to act nonchalant as he rang for a bellhop to bring him the morning paper so he could see what city he was in and what day it was (“if not the week and the month”). In 1942, while researching The Lost Weekend, he asked a doctor at Bellevue if he could tour the alcoholic ward, candidly admitting that he’d been there “twice as a patient, but I remember nothing of it.” Actually he remembered at least two things; as he wrote in his unpublished confession, “The Sleeping Brain,” he’d overheard a doctor explaining to a visitor that delirium tremens was “a disease of the night,” and hence Don Birnam’s reflection: “God what an expression. Beautiful as a line of verse, something to remember and put down sometime—remember in quite a different way and for quite a different reason than he meant to remember paraldehyde.…” The latter item—a foul-tasting but highly effective sedative that was then the staple drug for alcoholics in withdrawal—had struck Jackson as the “discovery of [his] life,” and would someday become known to his daughters as “Papa’s medicine,” the ingestion of which was signaled by a curious odor (“like butter rum Life Savers”) that hung in the air when they’d go to his room to kiss him good night.
The Lost Weekend is set in October 1936, and the bender it describes suggests that Don Birnam is very nearly at the end of his rope—and so with Jackson, who finally stopped drinking in November of that year. One rumor, which lingered for years after the novel was published, was that Jackson had been frightened into sobriety by the murder of his friend Nancy Titterton—that he’d been drunk at the time and could remember nothing when the police questioned him as a suspect: the worst possible consummation, this, of the drunkard’s constant “terror,” as Don Birnam puts it, “of some dreadful deed committed for which, though you were called to account, you could never bear witness.” For what it’s worth, Jackson dismissed the Titterton story as apocryphal: yes, he’d been questioned by police, and had responded with “perfect lucidity”—besides, the murder had occurred on April 10, 1936, some seven months before he’d gotten sober. And yet the episode deserves at least summary elaboration here.
“Did you know that Nancy was with us when we went to the boat to see Thor-and-bride sail?”14 Jackson wrote his mother, ten days after the murder. “It was a very pleasant day we had with her and I’m glad for I shall never forget it, nor how charming she looked and was. Funny, after they moved out of Hell’s Kitchen (10th Ave) last fall and took the apartment in Beeckman [sic] Place, Nancy said, ‘Now at last I can feel safe, living in a decent neighborhood.’ ” Nancy Titterton was, like Jackson, a thirty-three-year-old aspiring novelist; she and her husband, Lewis, who headed the literary rights department at NBC, were part of Charlie and Boom’s arty cocktail set. On April 10, an upholsterer named Theodore Kruger and his young assistant, Johnny Fiorenza, went to the Tittertons’ apartment at 22 Beekman Place to return a couch they’d repaired the day before; the door was ajar, water was running inside, and when they entered they found Nancy’s naked body facedown in the bathtub. Beneath the body was a length of venetian-blind cord that was eventually traced to Kruger’s shop, whereupon Fiorenza confessed to the crime: while picking up the couch the day before, he said, he’d formed the impression that Nancy was attracted to him, so he’d returned early the next morning, alone, and ended up raping and strangling her. In the meantime the case had become one of the biggest murder investigations in New York history. Lewis Titterton had pointed out that his wife was almost morbidly shy, unlikely to admit a total stranger, so the couple’s acquaintances were all exhaustively interviewed; Lewis himself was the main suspect, but police were also considering the possibility that a secret lover had done it. After Fiorenza confessed, Charlie wrote his mother that he was relieved Lewis had been spared “some hideous unknown scandal,” while wondering how Nancy “of all people” should suffer such a fate: “I know of no one among my friends more retiring, more prim, demure, more lacking in obvious sex-appeal, than Nancy was. Except that the week before the murder she’d had her hair bobbed, and it did make a big difference in her appearance.”
Eight years later, while in Hollywood for the first time, Jackson was surprised to find that the most common reason given for his sobriety was his alleged role in the Titterton case—and the following year (1945), sure enough, an item appeared in Irving Hoffman’s Hollywood Reporter column: back in his days as an “incurable inebriate,” Hoffman wrote, Jackson had been questioned by police about “the murder of a model” in his East 55th Street apartment house; it had been “proven that someone in the building was guilty,” but while the other tenants had alibis, Jackson (“just recuperating from a three-day drunk”) remembered nothing and was therefore taken to jail. Six days later, the real murderer was apprehended: “Jackson was dismissed and has never taken a sip of the stuff since that time.” Jackson, who wanted to sue, pointed out that Hoffman had conflated the details of the Titterton case with the murder of a model named Veronica Gedeon, but in any event he’d had “nothing to do” with either crime. Soon a contrite Hoffman issued a retraction: his story had been “absolutely untrue in every aspect.”
Not quite every aspect: as it happened, the Titterton case had caused Jackson a certain amount of vexation and even trauma. Once the crime had been solved, Lewis Titterton sent him a sheepish note: “I have found it hard to write to you after the turmoil into which the police through the necessity of their work cast your and Frederick’s lives.” The fact was, Charlie had been a suspect of sorts, however fleetingly, because of the affectionate way Nancy had inscribed a book she’d given him at that last luncheon in the Lyngholms’ honor (“She was very fond of you,” said Lewis, deploring the coincidence, “and the gift was her way of showing it”); Boom and Rhoda had also been questioned, perhaps by way of exculpating Charlie. His drinking, however, seems to have had little to do with it, though the rumor would prove a hardy part of his alcoholic legend. “It was the week of the Gideon [sic] murder case,” Leonard Lyons wrote in his syndicated column a few days after Charlie’s death, “and Jackson couldn’t remember where he’d been at the time of the murder … ” Afterward Jackson had gone on the wagon, said Lyons, who waggishly added, “[he] fell off only once. He came to on the rim of the Grand Canyon.” The next day Lyons corrected himself: he’d meant, of course, the Titterton case.
Charlie may or may not have been drunk on the day of Nancy’s murder, but certainly he drank a lot afterward. For the rest of April and much of May, he left New York and took a room at the Grove Lawn Inn in Clayton, New Jersey, an area where he and Boom had friends. Until then, Rhoda’s support and encouragement had rarely wavered, but finally she began to lose hope: “For years Charlie was here,” she wrote Boom in late April, “and when Charlie was here I didn’t need anyone else. And when he was away, still there was Charlie and I didn’t think anything about not going out or seeing anyone or meeting new people. And it’s just hung on, although Charlie hasn’t.” In fact, their re
lationship had been strained in recent years, even at the best of times. In The Lost Weekend, Don broods about his weekend dinners “chez Helen”: “so charming and cosy and intime—so God damned intime that you weren’t even left alone long enough to sneak a drink out of the hall-closet where she kept the liquor (and kept it is right).” Scarcely able to go to the bathroom without being furtively watched (“to see if it was the bathroom door you had opened and not the door to the closet next to it”), Don makes excuses to leave as early as possible, the better to bolt around the corner for a drink. As for Charlie’s behavior when drunk, it would be hard to say whom he hurt more; in the novel, the sodden Don insists on reading his favorite writers to Helen, aloud, and then exclaims, “Isn’t it wunderbar?”—which afterward leads to the usual awful chagrin (“for having mutilated the beautiful passage, … for having pretended to accept Helen’s pretense [of enjoyment], and for having used the word wunderbar”). For Rhoda’s twenty-seventh birthday, in 1934, Charlie wrote a little poem that nicely reflected their dynamic:
I would sing you a clever song,
With many a fine word;
And it would be the best song
You ever heard.…
But my song will go unstated
I will never write it, never;
Because you’re irritated
When I have been so clever.
For “clever” one should perhaps read “drunk,” and also bear in mind that the clever Charlie liked to attribute Rhoda’s irritation to her absolute lack of imagination.
Rhoda had come by her stoicism honestly, in every respect: loyal, patient, and considerate by nature, she was descended from a line of women who’d perforce learned that drinking was a “sickness,” as Rhoda’s mother, Isabella, liked to remind her vis-à-vis Charlie. Isabella’s father had drunk away the family money (“they lost everything in Scotland and came here because of it”), and Rhoda also remembered the way her two cousins would come stay with them whenever Uncle Tommy was “off” again. So she understood all too well that Jackson couldn’t help himself, and besides she loved him and really had no choice in the matter. Charlie, in turn, was alternately rueful for letting himself be infantilized by her kindness, and apt to take advantage of it whenever it suited his purpose. As he would often point out as a sober man, alcoholics tend to relish their “nuisance-value” (“in a perverse and childish way, they often enjoy being something of a problem”)—or, as Richard Peabody put it, “prevented by his habit from living a constructive life, [the alcoholic] is unconsciously anxious to make a stir in the world, even though this stir is of a purely destructive nature. Anything is better than oblivion. In fact, he often considers himself a heroic villain or martyr.”
By 1936, however, it appears that shame had gotten the upper hand, and Charlie knew better than to impose on Rhoda when he was drunk. It was simply too galling, later, to remember the uncomplaining way she’d nursed him, all the while refusing his mawkish proposals of marriage even though (as they both knew) she would have liked nothing better—if, that is, he could ever stop drinking, a possibility that seemed increasingly remote. “Boom, think of it,” she wrote that April, “I’m getting to be twenty nine years old. And I’m nowhere at all. Miss Wells in our office got married, to everyone’s surprise.… And it just makes me realize what a dead end I’ve let myself into. I never see people, and I never meet new ones.… Maybe I should join a lonely-hearts or something.” Meanwhile she encouraged Boom to get Charlie into a dry-out sanatorium (“He’ll do nothing himself, won’t even try”), which at least might lead to some menial job “to keep the cure in place”: “Charlie is pitiful,” she concluded, “and when I think of what fun he used to be it makes me sad.”
Boom, for his part, was getting fed up with Charlie, and never mind the wreck he was making of Rhoda’s life. As Don’s brother Wick chides him in The Lost Weekend, “It’s all right for you to ruin your life, that’s up to you … but you have no right to ruin someone else’s.” To underline the point, Boom was about to give up their apartment, and besides, he was simply too frail to get the most out of Manhattan anymore. Since returning from Europe, he’d been spending more and more time in South New Jersey, where he’d fallen in love with a thirty-five-year-old doctor (an osteopath like Thor) named Jim Gates. The lanky, pipe-smoking Gates kept an office in Bridgeton, but also spent part of the week in nearby Malaga—little more than a crossroads by a lake, where he was popular among locals for his kindness and quiet, rather naughty sense of humor. Still, for the sake of appearances (and other good reasons), he and Boom thought it best to live apart, and just recently a charming old house on Malaga’s main highway had become available when its owner, an elderly schoolteacher, had died. The place was perfect for Boom’s purposes: two blocks away from Jim’s house on Defiance Road, and almost equidistant (about forty miles in either direction) from Philadelphia and Atlantic City, where Boom could indulge his still considerable appetite for cosmopolitan diversion. Also, there was room in the front of the house for the antique shop he wanted to open, and a barn out back where he could hang wool for the braided rugs he had started making. Within a few months Boom would move there permanently, and Charlie would be bereft of a caretaker.
For now Charlie lay low in Clayton, about five miles from Malaga, and affected to be serenely unaware that others were considering drastic measures. In his letters, he wrote of possibly visiting the Lyngholms in Bermuda, or just biding his time until June, when he would leave for another summer in Brattleboro. In the meantime he whiled away his days watching movies in Philadelphia (“Gary Cooper [in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town] has never been more charming, and I do like Jean Arthur so much”), getting “terrible” headaches from reading in the sun, and (between the lines) drinking. Later he’d tell of how he almost drowned in Malaga Lake—nearly swept over the dam, drunk, into the churning waters below.
The six months between Jackson’s stay in Clayton and his abrupt sobriety are all but lost to posterity. He did not, it seems, go to a sanatorium; rather he spent another few weeks at the farm in Saugerties, then resumed his duties as stage manager in Brattleboro. Again, the ghastly bender in The Lost Weekend takes place in October 1936, and something of that sort might have happened to Charlie, proving climactic. Suffice it to say, Jackson hit bottom: “I didn’t want to live this way, but I was helpless,” he’d later tell AA gatherings all over the country. “I hated it as much as everyone around me. I knew I was sick and couldn’t get help anywhere.” On the night of November 11—Armistice Day (“I don’t know why I chose that date”)—he and Boom were drinking highballs at the Taft Hotel in New York. “That’s the last drink I’ll ever take,” Charlie decided, then said goodbye to his brother for many months. The next day he moved to a shabby rooming house on the Upper West Side and resolved to stay there, alone, until he was sober for good. “I didn’t tell anybody what I was going to do. I knew better than to say I was through drinking—I’d said this many times. I knew I had to say it to myself, and I did.”
1 “Calvin Coolidge died today,” he obliquely dates (January 5, 1933) one entry.
2 In 1934, the Modern Library published an edition of Gatsby that was already out of print by the time Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, while his other books had all but vanished. “How much will you sell the plates of ‘This Side of Paradise’ for?” Fitzgerald wrote of his once-famous first novel, eight days before his death, in a letter to Max Perkins. “I think it has a chance for a new life.” In 1941, Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published in an omnibus edition edited by Edmund Wilson, who included Gatsby and a selection of Fitzgerald’s short stories. The book was widely and respectfully reviewed, but sold poorly.
3 Graham wrote a more circumspect version of this encounter in her memoir, The Rest of the Story (1964): “[Jackson and I] talked of Scott, but it was a strain for us both.”
4 “Isn’t it too bad Mr. Kember [the Winthrop character] couldn’t have lived to have seen all this,” says Don
Birnam’s mother in Farther and Wilder, “—this beautiful house I mean, Don, and the way you live now. After all, the way he picked you out of the gutter and all … ”
5 Thorborg Ellison (née Brundin in 1886) was a storied bohemian: educated at Barnard, the tall Swede was a staunch turn-of-the-century feminist who advocated total sexual freedom; in her twenties she became friend, mentor, sister-in-law, and possibly lover of Agnes Smedley, a journalist whose support of Red China and five-year tenancy at the Yaddo artist colony led, in 1949, to an infamous Communist witch hunt incited by the manic poet Robert Lowell. Charles Jackson seems to have tried in vain to endear himself to the formidable Smedley. As he later wrote Thorborg, “Agnes may hate my guts and despise the kind of punk she feels me to be and I’ll still say this to my dying day.… ‘Agnes Smedley is a gr-r-r-reat woman!’ ”