by Blake Bailey
A few months prior to that crucial loan, Winthrop had sent roses and a crib in honor of Sarah Blann Jackson, born on Mother’s Day (May 12), 1940. Charlie had anticipated the baby’s arrival with mixed emotions: what with the turmoil in Europe, he felt a “growing reluctance to bring a child into such a world,” and also worried about his unsettled finances and (worst of all, perhaps) the possibility of her inheriting “certain traits.” That Sunday, while Rhoda endured a long labor, Charlie was an all but speechless wreck: he and Nila Mack passed the time at Schrafft’s, unable to eat, until finally they “drove through lights” to the hospital. “When first I saw her small, awakened face,” he wrote in “A Sestina for Sarah” (published exactly one year later in F.P.A.’s column, The Conning Tower, in the New York Post),
… O, then my anxious prayer turned thankful grace,
And straightway I was happy as today!
Clear was her cry, pink was her little face,
Clear as the morn, pink as the month of May!
At once her heart assumed its rightful place
Within my own—as my fond heart gave way.
The girl would be the love of his life. He spent rapturous hours sitting beside her crib, pondering her tiny foot in the palm of his hand (“It was as perfect as a seashell, but warm, with a little animal life of its own”). Everything about her was “indescribably charming to him”—all the more potently because she was unlike him in every conceivable way save physical (they shared the almond eyes and dark skin of the Jacksons). “Sarah is a square,” he’d say, lovingly evoking her Rhoda-like levelheadedness, the prim way she pursed her lips (“like a baby anus”) when studying a hand of cards, her winsome tendency to transpose consonants so that “cemetery,” say, became “temecery.” Dubbing her “the dimsal girl” (after his favorite of her neologisms, used to describe a dark, cheerless day), he would hide behind the window curtain and watch her “like a love-sick fool” when she left for school each morning—so he remembered in a 1966 poem he wrote for his granddaughter, Sarah’s firstborn:
And I thought then (and told my wife):
No child was ever better armed
To face this less than perfect life
Than she was, calm and unalarmed.
JACKSON APPEARS to have written no fiction in 1941, as he struggled to make ends meet with occasional employment. That year he began teaching two courses on radio writing at NYU, which he mostly enjoyed (“[I] was sorry when the final session came”) despite having to read as many as sixty scripts for his lecture class. Characteristically he took pains to promote the work of his better students, pressing five scripts on an old Columbia Workshop colleague and writing a cogent little pitch for each: “Herman Land is a discovery—depend on it,” he remarked of a student who’d written about a strife-ridden Jewish family in Brooklyn, while another script—an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”—gave him the chance to plug not only his student but also “one of the most misunderstood writers of our generation,” whose nascent revival, eight months after his death, made the script “perfect Workshop material.”
Jackson himself wanted to write a daytime serial, which would give him a steady paycheck and a static cast of characters to work with—preferably an “amusing family situation,” though he was willing to be flexible. With one writer he proposed to collaborate on something called Women in Defense (“Incidentally, doesn’t that strike you as a ribald title?”), which would cater to the growing number of women working in munitions plants; he also tried to interest an executive at New York’s WOR in letting him produce his own showcase series comparable to the Columbia Workshop. But nothing seemed to click, and once war was declared, in December, Jackson went back to writing propaganda (to be aired in Japan) for the government.
His patience was finally rewarded in March 1942—though he was reminded thereby to be careful what you wish for. “In the history of soap opera,” James Thurber wrote in 1948, “only a few writers have seriously tried to improve the quality of daytime serials. One of these was Charles Jackson.” The latter, to his slight chagrin, found he had an actual knack for spinning out schmaltzy story lines ad infinitum, but was so revolted by his specific assignment that he later endeavored to forget everything about it, even the name of his sponsor (Staley cornstarch). The mastermind of this fifteen-minute-a-day soap, Sweet River, was his old friend Max Wylie, who’d taken a job in Chicago with Blackett-Sample-Hummert—as it happened, the country’s top producer of radio material: top, that is, in terms of quantity rather than quality, as the company managed to churn out soaps on behalf of some twenty sponsors (cereal, floor polish, cosmetics, etc.). Known—indeed notorious—for keeping costs down, B-S-H paid writers roughly half of what was customary. Thus Wylie was offering two hundred dollars a week (forty dollars a script), and meanwhile Charlie had eight days to catch a train to Chicago, learn the plot, flesh out the characters, and write a backlog of scripts before Sweet River went on the air.
For the next few months he traveled to Chicago every six weeks and swapped ideas with Wylie, who’d based the town of Sweet River on Delaware, Ohio, where he and his brothers had been raised by a minister. Wylie—a great admirer of “Rachel’s Summer”—thought Jackson was the right man to tease out the following premise: Willa McKay, a schoolteacher, is accused of murder but eventually acquitted, albeit not in the minds of her fellow Sweet River residents; despite this cloud, she catches the eye of a local minister, Bob Tomley, a widower raising two young sons. And so it went for many months—a piquant daily puzzle: how to devise fresh complications for (as Thurber put it) a “mild and prolonged love affair with a schoolteacher whose cheek [Tomley] never petted and whose hand he never held, for ministers and schoolteachers in Soapland are permitted only the faintest intimations of affection.” The challenge, of course, was to invert the usual rules of good writing (telling details, subtle ellipses) via a kind of engaging prolixity. “I kept two people on a raft in the middle of a lake for five weeks once,” Jackson proudly recalled, “just talking to each other!”
He’d begun to reconcile himself to the work when, late that summer, he got a call from Wylie, who’d just quit his job: Charlie had better come quick to Chicago and make a case for staying on as writer for Sweet River, since B-S-H was apt to save money now by hiring someone local. Fortunately the new boss, Alan Wallace, regarded the soap as “the bright spot of his life,” and promptly raised Jackson’s price to fifty dollars a script—on the condition, however, that he keep six weeks ahead on the show, and this without Wylie to help guide the story line. Jackson, as ever, found inspiration “in far away Arcadia”—the hometown, it turned out, of the Reverend Tomley’s mother, even then conspiring to prevent a marriage between her son and “this terrible Willa McKay,” whom she meets in person (amid “many clashes”) during a visit to Sweet River, where she finds a kindred soul in Addie Norris, the gossipy librarian, all of which drives Willa into the arms of Harry Nichols (only temporarily, since Jackson was saving Nichols for Maggie Burgess—“but that’s miles and years away yet, and so is the ultimate marriage of Tomley and Willa”). “I’m getting fonder of ‘Sweet River’ by the minute now that the conflict is honest again and there’s a chance for some good writing once more,” he wrote Wallace that August, remarking three weeks later to a friend, “I am sick unto death of SWEET RIVER … ”
Now more than ever, though, he needed the steady employment, which had finally allowed him to get on with his long-deferred novel about an alcoholic. Pushing forty, and keenly aware of how suddenly one’s luck can change—witness his friend Max, now looking for work in New York (“and drinking too much on the side”)—Jackson was determined to make up for lost time: he gave himself exactly one year to finish the book, beginning on July 1, 1942, and writing every Sunday and all night Thursdays, while teaching at NYU and dictating Sweet River to a public stenographer at the Hotel Albert. The novel’s long first chapter was written in a single feverish week, as he rushed to fill tablet pages before
Rhoda came into his study, whereupon (so he claimed later) he’d stuff the pages into a drawer and affect to ruminate over Sweet River. For the chapter’s climactic purse-stealing scene he decided he needed ten pages exactly, numbered the pages, and scribbled until he’d reached the bottom of the tenth. Only then—“drunk with excitement”—did he seek his wife’s blessing. For the sake of posterity, perhaps, he saved her written response: “I think it’s wonderful. As a matter of fact, I found my heart pumping and my breath coming fast as I read it.… It’s grand—and such a change from all your other writing. I almost think it’s your best so far.”
So engrossing were his labors that first week that he’d let Sweet River slip, until Max (still employed at the time, though not for long) gave him a scolding phone call. “When you know why the scripts are late, you’ll be ashamed of yourself,” said Jackson, and hung up on him. A week later a package arrived addressed to “MRS. MAX WYLIE,” who read the chapter and immediately pressed it on her husband. “We both think that this is not only the finest piece of writing that you ever did,” she wrote, echoing Rhoda, “but that it is beautiful writing.… I always knew you had it and this is only the beginning.” Eager now for validation from practically everyone he knew (“like the spoiled child I am I just had to be paid attention to quick”), Jackson distributed copies of the chapter far and wide, gleefully reporting that he’d received “a good dozen letters, a couple of wires, and many phone calls … most all of them enthusiastic, some wildly so.” Philip Rahv wanted to publish an abridged version of the chapter in Partisan Review, though he cautioned Jackson that Don was perhaps a little too narcissistic: “[This] is understood by the author, to be sure, but still some margin of misunderstanding is left.” Betty Huling of The New Republic agreed, advising Jackson—who was unwilling to cut the piece in any case—not to publish it as a short story, since the reader needed to know more about Don in order to sympathize with him: “The terror is there all right, now, but not the pity.”
Jackson tried to press on with the next chapter—more introspective, with precisely the sort of nuanced exposition that might satisfy Rahv and Huling—but was stymied by its somewhat subtler demands; feeling himself sliding into “a horrible depression,” he promptly skipped ahead to chapter five—“The Mouse,” Don’s climactic bout of delirium tremens—and the words began to flow again. He was trembling by the time he finished. “I can see every reviewer in the land,” he wrote a friend, “(whoops, here we go again—just like my hero!) quoting that passage in his review, and then spoiling it all with exalted and destructive comment about its pityandterror [sic: pace Huling].” In the meantime he’d mailed the first chapter to a psychiatrist at Bellevue, Dr. Stephen Sherman, whose permission he sought to visit the alcoholic ward for the sake of verisimilitude, since he remembered “nothing” of his time there as a patient; in his novel, he explained, the protagonist (“a completely narcissistic character”) wakes up there, refuses to submit to a spinal tap, and is given a dose of paraldehyde and sent on his way. Dr. Sherman arranged to meet Jackson at Bellevue the following Saturday, and effusively commended his “extraordinarily revealing study of the real inner life of the alcoholic”:
It should have definite clinical value. It has taught me more about what the alcoholic is really thinking about than most of the material of my patients so far has ever been able to do. I think the character delineation is really very fine, and certain specially interesting aspects—the loneliness, the identification with forlorn genius, the study of the face, the psychic dependency on the brother, the subtle undercurrents of homosexuality, and so on—are all superbly brought out.… I trust that you will not fail to finish the other chapters, and that the work will come to the attention of the psychiatric world at large.
Jackson—writing to the novelist James Gould Cozzens (Rhoda’s colleague at Fortune)—derided the doctor’s prose style and bristled at the idea that his novel should have “clinical [versus artistic] value”: “but of course,” he added, “I ate it up too, read it 20 times in succession, and even took it to bed with me.”
He did, however, have at least one staunch detractor: his mother. The poor woman had been appalled by Charlie’s stories in Partisan Review (“I don’t see anything so wonderful about it, it all happened, all you had to do is write it down”), but that opening chapter of The Long Weekend was almost the death of her. “You said I wouldn’t like what you had written—I didn’t,” she admitted.
I am not a psychiatrist nor am I a literary critic, I’m just an ordinary person who happens to be your mother. I sat down and read your article as soon as it came and I am telling you the truth, I was a complete wreck afterward. For I read those things differently from outsiders for I know it was you and Frederic[k] and Rhoda.… You had terrible experiences but they are over and I wish you could forget them. And Frederic[k]—what he went through and how he always stood by and helped you out of one mess after another, as he stands by all of us. The things he, yes and your friends, who stood by you, have taken from you.…
But the book’s confessional aspect was only the beginning. Don Birnam, considering whether to steal the woman’s purse, idly wonders whether she’s sleeping with her boyfriend (“Was he big?”). “What has that to do with it?” Charlie’s mother indignantly demanded. “Why write that?” And here she’d been telling everyone in Newark about the great book Charlie was working on, but she wouldn’t dream of showing them this. “This is a small town, and my home, and I want them to say and think only the best about all of you.”
When he wasn’t furious over such philistinism, Charlie would (essentially) shrug: “In the long run, of course, nothing matters but the story,” he wrote Mary McCarthy,6 “which is what I’m always telling my poor mother.”
1 It’s unknown how Jackson first heard about Wister, though one may safely assume that Mr. Winthrop was paying for his treatment. Wister charged between two and ten dollars per daily visit, depending on a patient’s ability to pay—either way, a lot of money in 1936.
2 Quite possibly Peabody would have warned him away from such potentially defeatist literature. In The Common Sense of Drinking, he specifically recommends reading about the lives of successful men: “Napoleon, Lincoln, Lee, Washington, Pasteur, and Disraeli cannot fail to act as an inspiration to a man who is endeavoring to get rid of an undesirable habit. Conversely, literature which deals with the charms of hedonism … should be carefully avoided until the patient is definitely cured.”
3 The Glass Crutch: The Biographical Novel of William Wynne Wister was published as the work of Jim Bishop, who ultimately overcame its stigma by writing popular historical narratives such as The Day Lincoln Was Shot (1955) and The Day Christ Died (1957).
4 Wylie, the younger brother of writer Philip Wylie—whose friendship with Jackson would prove less resilient—had written a forgettable novel, Hindu Heaven (1933), and would write a couple more. Alas, he became best known, in 1963, as the father of Janice Wylie, one of two victims in the famous “Career Girls” murder case. In 1968, Wylie’s wife died of cancer, and his remaining daughter followed five months later (flu). Wylie committed suicide in 1975.
5 Winthrop’s note does not survive among Jackson’s papers, though one may assume he cherished it in view of the following: after Winthrop died, his law firm wrote Jackson a letter noting the unpaid $1,000 loan on their books. Jackson replied to Winthrop’s secretary (“Miss Nelson”) telling the story of the loan, and enclosing (a) the uncashed $500 check that Winthrop had returned to him, and (b) Winthrop’s note, which Jackson asked Miss Nelson to send back to him for sentimental reasons.
6 Jackson did not meet McCarthy until 1945, though he was a great admirer of The Company She Keeps (1942), and had paid subtle homage in The Lost Weekend by monogramming the filched purse “M. Mc.”
Chapter Seven
The Lost Weekend
Jackson’s headlong progress on his novel was derailed in April, when a second daughter, Kate Winthrop, was born three days bef
ore his fortieth birthday. For weeks he was scarcely able to think about the book, and finally rented a friend’s apartment during daytime hours. This daughter, indeed, was something different from the calm paragon that had preceded her. “Only yesterday, it seems you were in your playpen,” Jackson wrote her in 1957, “raising hell there, too. Sarah was content with her playpen for at least six months, as I recall—but not you!” As the infant ran amok, Jackson met his self-imposed deadline with some difficulty, finishing a draft on June 30, 1943.