by Blake Bailey
“AND THEN BEGAN [in 1937] quite a wonderful period for me,” Jackson would preface this part of his AA talk. With sobriety came a newfound confidence, “paradoxically” fortified (so he noted at the time) by a world that remembered his past all too well: “the skepticism I meet on all sides urges me to prove myself twice over.” The first order of business was finding work—no easy feat, given that he hadn’t held a nonmenial job in almost ten years. For the benefit of prospective employers, Jackson attributed the gap to his long spell of tuberculosis, doubling the time he’d spent in sanatoria—that is, claiming two years at Devitt’s and four at the Schweizerhof, and thus accounting for all but four years of leisure. Beyond that, he affected a kind of nervous swagger that was found endearing by at least one man: Max Wylie, a script editor at CBS, and one of Jackson’s best friends beginning in July 1937, when Jackson walked into his office “trembling like a whippet,” as Jackson later put it.4 Asked if he’d published anything yet, Jackson replied, “No, but I should have been published by now. I write well, I think.” By way of evidence he provided a copy of Native Moment, which the broad-minded Wylie read that night with measured enthusiasm: “It was not a good novel,” he remembered. “But it had some great pages.”
As a trial assignment, Wylie asked Jackson to adapt the tale of Jacob and Esau for the CBS radio series Living Stories of the Bible; Jackson delivered the script the next day. “Where have you been!” said Wylie. “You’re a writer!” Just to make sure, he asked for two more Bible stories, and received them within three days. Clearly Jackson had taken to heart Wister’s advice about procrastination, and Wylie hired him as an assistant at $72.50 a week. It was money well spent. Wylie was struck by how “extraordinarily teachable” Jackson proved to be in the new (to him) medium of radio; he mastered it immediately, and was simply an ideal employee besides. “Without any doubt Charles Jackson is the finest writer I have ever had on my staff,” Wylie wrote two years later, when Jackson left CBS. “He is poetic, creative, brilliant, perceptive, and terribly conscientious.” Wylie’s main province was The Columbia Workshop, one of the most acclaimed radio programs of its time, for which it became Jackson’s job to read, edit, and select almost every script, as well as to write continuity and introductions where needed. Some of the most famous broadcasts of the era were produced for the Workshop: Orson Welles adapted Hamlet and Macbeth, and also performed (with Burgess Meredith and a cast of some two hundred extras) in Archibald MacLeish’s The Fall of the City (1937), an allegorical verse play about European fascism, aired from the Seventh Regiment Armory in Manhattan.
Though it wasn’t part of his regular employment, Jackson also managed to sell seven of his own scripts to the Workshop, including a highly regarded adaptation of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” by Stephen Vincent Benét (who also wrote for the program), as well as two originals, Dress Rehearsal and A Letter from Home. The latter was a thirty-minute reworking of his apprentice play, Simple Simon, largely told in flashbacks and vastly improved by compression. In the frame story, a successful screenwriter named after Boom—Fred Storrier—receives a letter from “the girl [he] didn’t marry,” Bettina, who writes to congratulate him on his latest movie, a prison drama. Fred recites the gist of her letter while railing against his own mediocrity: “ ‘Young—intelligent—talented—charming!’—Hm!—‘I picture you in New York—a gay and glamorous life!’ … No, my dear Bettina, decidedly no.” Chided by a blasé, mercenary wife, Fred casts back to his small-town youth, when he was a promising editor at the Courier—and so he might have remained were it not for the selfless Bettina, who, despite her love for him, demanded he get on with his life rather than marry her and languish in Arcadia. (“You wouldn’t like me long if we stayed here … I’d sit at home and get green-eyed because you couldn’t have clothes like—like Archer Brown.…”) “Oh, it’s sad to think of,” Fred sighs to his wife. “I hadn’t a doubt, not the faintest doubt, that I was going to be the great man in modern literature.… [And] now I write movies—at forty thousand a throw.” “So would Shakespeare if he were living now,” his wife sensibly concludes.
Along with Jackson’s other accomplishments, Wylie noted his “extraordinary ability for recognizing talent.” He made a point of reading the slush pile, welcomed visitors who wanted to pitch ideas, and thus personally discovered a number of writers who went on to considerable careers—including Norman Corwin, whose fame rests all but entirely on radio work. Corwin’s reputation was established with his play They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease (1939)—about Mussolini’s brutal bombing campaign against helpless Ethiopians—which was published as a book (his first of many) and dedicated to Jackson. “He had inspired that work,” said Corwin. “Charlie was a great encouragement to me, who was then a novice in all things requiring sophistication on the part of a radio writer.” In fact, Jackson often behaved as if he’d sooner help other writers than himself, though the flip side of such manic generosity was, as Corwin learned, a furious refusal to forgive slights. “Do I know Norman Corwin indeed!” he wrote a friend in 1945, pointing out that he’d been the dedicatee of Corwin’s first book. “But something happened which is too long to go into now, and though we keep up a semblance of mutual admiration, I haven’t much respect for him.” What happened—as Corwin sadly remembered some seventy years later—was that he had buckled to a superior at CBS and cut Jackson’s credit from a script: “I objected, but not strongly enough … and I never met or spoke to Charlie again. It was a dismal ending to a glorious friendship.”
A more enduring friendship was with Nila Mack, a former vaudeville actress who found fame with her children’s radio program Let’s Pretend. Mack doted on Charlie (whom she regarded as “a rare and superior person,” according to the playwright Howard Lindsay), and was perhaps even happier than he when The Lost Weekend made him famous: “To this day,” she wrote him in 1945, “I still have that almost uncontrollable urge, when I see someone reading the book to kiss them first and then tell all about you.” Along with warmhearted, morbidly sensitive natures, the two had alcoholism in common, which naturally led to a few snappish moments. When Jackson suffered a very public relapse in 1951, Mack (“three-sheets to the wind”) gave him a “long tragic scolding” over the phone: “I took the whole thing very nicely for about fifteen minutes,” he wrote Dorothea Straus, “because she was concerned … and said she was right, et cetera, and finally I got tired of it, and simply said, ‘Okay, Nila, you’ve played that scene very well, but long enough—now go on back and have another drink.’ ”
CHARLIE’S SUCCESS at CBS helped convince Rhoda that his sobriety was permanent, and on March 4, 1938, they were married in Brooklyn by the former rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Newark, Rush Sloane. After a honeymoon in Boston, the couple took an apartment in the Village at 156 Waverly Place. “In the early years we … read the same things, heard music together, went to the theatre, shared much—oh, much,” Charlie wrote his daughter Sarah in 1964, when he and Rhoda were sharing little more than living space. For a long time, though, he was extravagantly proud of his wife’s character and competence (“she is one of FORTUNE magazine’s ablest women”), and eager to show his devotion. Once, in 1942, he was emboldened to write directly to FDR—both he and Rhoda were avid New Dealers, despite coming from Republican families—and implore the man (unsuccessfully) to autograph a portrait as a Christmas gift to his wife. “A mother’s prayers have been answered,” Father Sloane remarked at the wedding, and certainly Charlie would have agreed that Rhoda deserved most of the credit for his relative well-being. At the same time he could be a trifle mordant when considering the matter privately: Yes, she was the “perfect-wife,” all right, for the same reasons that made her nigh insufferable. As he wrote in Farther and Wilder, “ ‘No imagination,’ [Don] sometimes said [of Helen], to justify his impatience or frustration—knowing as he said it, that his own susceptible, restless, hyperactive imagination was his curse fully as much as his blessing, the source of
such recurrent impulses and enthusiasms, turmoils, gifts, explosive pressures, rewards and actual woe in any given year as would not come her way in a lifetime.” As for Rhoda, she would only become more reserved, more literal-minded, by way of a corrective to her husband’s “impulses and enthusiasms,” which she learned to dread; as she wrote Boom, with weary insight, in 1947, “it’s the same excitement that comes with addiction.”
And what about her husband’s sexual nature? Rhoda knew all about it, and seems to have accepted it as yet another facet of his protean personality: “If you should write the story of your life just as it was,” she once told him, “nobody would believe it. You’ve been too many different people.” Charlie, for his part, wanted children and a normal social life—wanted (it bears repeating) “to belong”; as Don puts it in The Lost Weekend, homosexuality “was a blind alley, not shameful but useless, futile, vain, offering no attractions whatever, no hope, nowhere a chance to build.” Cruising, after all, became unseemly (and less fruitful) in middle age, and then there was the decorous, sublimated, crushingly lonely dotage that men such as Winthrop were given to endure. On the other hand, it went without saying that married life could go badly awry when one partner was gay. Tchaikovsky, for one, was married for all of two weeks before he almost succumbed to madness and suicide, and at least one gay friend of the Jackson brothers—a man nicknamed Flew—did, in fact, kill himself as the result of a marriage gone wrong. “The irony of it!” an acquaintance wrote Boom afterward. “Flew told me once that he married as an ‘insurance against a lonely old age.’ It worked, but not quite the way he had figured.” Flew, an English professor in his fifties, had fathered two daughters during a sixteen-year marriage, when his wife suddenly learned the truth and decided (as she wrote at the time) that the situation “was more than [she] could handle.” Flew celebrated a final birthday with Boom in Malaga (“I knew on my birthday I would not be seeing you again,” he wrote in his subsequent thank-you note), then killed himself a few weeks later.
To be sure, Charlie was hardly averse (especially in later years) to complaining about the aridity of his own marriage, cursing “the perversity of the Fates” for having arranged the union of a man “who needs so badly to be loved” and a woman “who is unable to give it.” “MY WIFE IS A GOOD WOMAN,” he wrote with a wobbly hand in his journal (quoting Gauguin); “I WISH SHE WERE DEAD.” But such moods were passing, and most of the time he realized better than anyone that he’d been almost miraculously fortunate. His gay friends were frankly amazed by Rhoda’s forbearance, given that Charlie had assured them that, yes, he told her everything! The writer Ron Sproat—one of Charlie’s protégés in the 1950s—was invited to the Jacksons’ for dinner, and was struck by how pleasantly the evening proceeded: “Since Charlie was gay, I thought it was kind of—I felt strange about the situation. I thought his wife would think I was Charlie’s boy. But if she did, she didn’t show it. She was nothing but nice.” Nice was the tip of a sizable iceberg. As Jackson wrote of the wife of his alter ego Jim Harron in The Outer Edges, “She was the balance wheel: without her he was lost. If he tried to go on alone, there was no telling what would happen to him.”
His old friend Thor Lyngholm, meanwhile, had married a much older woman with money, and the two divided their seven years together between an estate in Bermuda (“with sixteen tenant houses no less,” Charlie noted) and a place in Lynbrook, Long Island. Thor died at age fifty-four on July 1, 1943, the day after Charlie finished The Lost Weekend.
IN EARLY 1939, while still at CBS, Jackson resumed writing fiction on weekends, and one day he pursued a donnée that had occurred to him during a recent stay in Malaga. Harry and Grace Peech lived across Harding Highway from Boom, and on Palm Sunday Harry had invited the brothers into his basement to admire a sailboat that his teenage son, Freddy, had built all by himself. While the proud father boasted, Charlie couldn’t help reflecting about how different the boy’s life was from his own fatherless adolescence; then, from upstairs, he heard a hymn on the radio, “The Palms,” and was powerfully reminded of his encounter with Quance, the predatory organist, more than twenty years before. Back in New York he wrote “Palm Sunday” in rapid longhand, then read it over and thought, “My god, you can’t say that!”—while realizing, too, that it was easily the best thing he’d ever written; besides, if it was true of him … “He saw himself as an American everyman,” Mary McCarthy would write of a character based on Jackson. “He felt that if he could tell the whole truth about himself, he would tell the whole truth about any ordinary American. This, in fact, he conceived to be his duty as a writer.”
There was no question of selling the story to the mass-market “slick” magazines, but as it happened Charlie was far more attracted to the purely literary prestige of Partisan Review, whose commitment to “Marxism in politics and Modernism in art” might prove the ticket for his indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy in Arcadia, New York. It didn’t hurt that a mutual friend had brought the manuscript to the attention of James T. Farrell, of Studs Lonigan fame, who personally recommended it to the journal’s editors. “We like your story, ‘Palm Sunday,’ very much,” wrote Dwight Macdonald (no less), accepting it for the summer 1939 issue—twenty-five copies of which Jackson purchased (beyond the usual author’s allotment) for general distribution among family, friends, and detractors: “You probably think I’m crazy to order so many,” he wrote, “but after all, it’s Baby’s First Story.” A month later Macdonald informed him that “Palm Sunday” was perhaps their most acclaimed fiction since Delmore Schwartz’s famous debut, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Jackson was ecstatic: not only was he finally launched as a serious writer, but he was also getting invited to a lot of Village parties full of bona fide New York intellectuals such as Macdonald, Schwartz, and the journal’s founding editor, Philip Rahv, who began writing chatty letters to Charlie on all sorts of earnest sociopolitical topics (“Today the whole city is agog with the news of the Nazi-Soviet rapprochement … ”).
The iron was hot, and Jackson promptly wrote another story about a childhood trauma—“Rachel’s Summer,” based on the rumor of Thelma’s pregnancy that had circulated so grievously around the time of her death—and once again Partisan Review snapped it up. When Macdonald proposed to publish it in their winter issue, Jackson argued with admirable chutzpah that his two stories should run in consecutive issues: “If PALM SUNDAY by any chance should cause ‘talk’ or make trouble for the news-dealers … it might be a very good thing to follow it up at once with another story by the same writer but this time a pleasant one [!], ‘normal,’ like RACHEL’S SUMMER, just to show that PR (and its writers) aren’t necessarily limited to this sort of thing.” The editors agreed: “ ‘Rachel’s Summer,’ by C. R. Jackson,” appeared in the fall 1939 issue, and was subsequently listed among the “distinctive” stories of the year in Edward O’Brien’s Best Short Stories volume. Indeed, Jackson would later reflect on his first two published stories with a kind of awe: “If I had it then, why haven’t I got it now?” he wondered in 1951, after a spate of inferior work in the genre (though a year later he would produce “The Boy Who Ran Away,” his third-favorite story thereafter).
Publishers began to inquire whether Jackson was working on a novel. He was and he wasn’t. Certainly he had a very precise idea of the novel he wanted to write, and also he thought he had the confidence, now, to bring it off: a story about an alcoholic written “from the inside,” a riposte to those who thought such a person was “a deliberate troublemaker … having a good time.” At the moment, though, Jackson simply couldn’t afford the luxury of novel-writing: Rhoda and he were trying to have a child, and soon they’d be taking a bigger apartment. For the time being, then, in a burst of inspiration—only a few days after finishing “Rachel’s Summer”—he wrote an outline for his novel on a single sheet of yellow tablet paper that he would later frame and proudly show journalists: “Used it all,” he’d declare. “The whole book is right there.” This is true (give or ta
ke the odd detail)—all the more impressively so when one considers he wouldn’t begin the actual writing for another three years. For the outline Jackson listed the five days of The Long Weekend (his working title) in the left margin, next to which the highlights of each day were scribbled in cramped, hurried cursive: “Carnegie Hall recital … sees movie—goes in—finds prison picture … Bellevue ‘He awoke in a world of white’ … nearly kills maid with Romulus and Remus as she brushed out fireplace … ” That done, Jackson wrote a single paragraph of finished prose marking the start of Don’s binge (“When the drink was set before him, he felt better”), which would appear almost word for word on page 11 of the published book. “I knew,” he said, “I could pick it up anytime thereafter.”
The better to accomplish the work that would buy time for a novel, Charlie and Rhoda moved to a larger place on Eighth Street, between Fifth and University, where they converted the dining room into Charlie’s “brown study” (as he would forever call such sanctuaries). There he could keep office hours at a peaceful remove from (increasing) domestic distractions. The little brownstone near Washington Square was almost perfect: their apartment was a second-floor walk-up over a tailor shop (“Is he a good tailor?” Mr. Winthrop inquired); Charlie tastefully appointed the living room with a baby grand piano (he briefly took lessons, but never came close to fulfilling Don Birnam’s Carnegie Hall fantasy), lined the walls with books and his enormous record collection, and hung a few of his own amateur paintings. There were two fireplaces and a small balcony—all for a hundred dollars a month.
Economy and a room of his own were crucial: the previous October (1939) Jackson had been laid off because of budget cutbacks at CBS, and since then he’d been scrambling for freelance work. Much of this was provided by his previous employer, which promptly hired him to write thirteen weekly programs titled What’s Art to Me? (“rather on the dull side”), and gave him sporadic work on shows such as You Decide and A Friend in Deed. Also, in January, Jackson was employed by the Census Bureau at $19.80 per diem to write propaganda broadcasts urging citizens to cooperate with the 1940 census; the work required him to spend weekdays in Washington, and he was glad when the assignment ended in March—or rather, it was good to be home, though naturally money was tighter than ever, especially since his pregnant wife had taken leave from her job at Fortune. At a loss, Charlie decided to borrow a thousand dollars from Mr. Winthrop, though he worried this would strain their newly disinterested friendship. He even consulted Wister, who advised him (per Peabody) to approach the man “in a purely impersonal and strictly business-like way.” Hence Jackson drafted an almost painfully formal letter, listing, at length, his various debts and plans for the future, and concluding with: “I would welcome the opportunity and the test of being able to repay you, for once, as promised, and hope this letter will serve as that promise.” Winthrop gave him the money the next day. Almost two years later, Jackson was able to muster a $500 check, and a few months after that—while dining with Winthrop on February 1, 1943—he announced that he was ready to repay the rest (“a happy moment for me”). Winthrop told him to forget it, and a few days later returned his initial check, uncashed, with a note Charlie would cherish after the man’s death.5