Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  Rhoda and Boom had worked hard that summer to prepare the place for its master, and on arrival he was enchanted, especially, by his own upstairs bedroom—separate, that is, from Rhoda’s (“but won’t it be wonderful to visit each other back and forth across our little private hall?”), since he planned to use it as a “study-and-retreat-and-bedroom in one.” The high-ceilinged room, as he first found it, was Colonial simplicity itself: the mahogany furniture included a carved four-poster, secretary, highboy, and stately desk placed at a window with a view of Main Street and the verdant hills of Vermont across the river. When Charlie was finished decorating, however, the room bore his own vivacious stamp: his old fondness for all things Indian was reflected in the kachina dolls (bought in Arizona when the Super Chief passed through) arranged here and there, as well as a conspicuous war bonnet on top of the secretary; thirteen Revolutionary flags were hung along the ceiling border, while the patriotic pièce de résistance was splashed over his bed—an eleven-by-seven-foot, thirty-eight-star American flag made out of homespun serge (“the colors more beautiful than you can imagine”). The rest of the wall space—almost every square inch—was covered by signed portraits of Charlie’s Hollywood pals and other personal gods. On the floor was a polar-bear rug. “Rhoda does admit the room at least has ‘personality,’ ” he wrote a friend, “but she shakes her head sadly while saying it.” Perhaps to compensate for the quirkiness of his own sanctuary (“I call it the Museum, or the Lodge Room”), the rest of the house was more or less conservatively adorned with paintings by Frederick Papsdorf, Darrell Austin, Camille Bombois, and Raoul Dufy, most of them raided from the Klaus Perls Gallery in New York.

  The upkeep was considerable, and Charlie employed a married couple and their daughter, the Jobins, to take care of the cooking, cleaning, babysitting, gardening, snow-shoveling, and so on. He also wanted to hire Rhoda’s younger sister, Katharine (“Kay” or “Kitty”), as an occasional secretary—because he needed one, somewhat, but mainly because he was fond of her and sympathized with her predicament: Katharine’s “ne’er-do-well husband” (as Charlie called him, not without cause), Fred Brock, was currently in the Army; before the war he’d gone looking for gold in South America and dabbled in farming, while his formidable mother in Montpelier doled out a prudent allowance. Now that he was gone, Katharine and their five-year-old son had been living in Barre with her parents, and Charlie wanted to bring them to Orford. This would be pleasant for him, too, since he and Katharine had a rapport—so much so, indeed, that a rumor (among others) persisted in Orford that the two were involved. This, for any number of reasons, was unlikely, though Charlie did have a keen appreciation for Katharine’s finer qualities—her sense of humor, for one; a certain well-concealed worldliness—and had playfully flirted with her from the beginning of his courtship with Rhoda. “To Kittuh, written in the poet’s Heart’s Blood,” he’d addressed some verse to her on Valentine’s Day, 1934:

  Sad is my lot, it is you who make it;

  Sorry my plight and frequent my tear;

  Heavy my heart, because you can’t take it,

  Though I’ve offered it often enough, my dear.…

  Mostly he was at pains to mitigate her shyness, her almost morbid insistence (not unlike her sister’s) on plainness both in appearance and manner, which included an “exasperating” tendency to pass the back of her hand under her nose, as if in want of a handkerchief.

  He proved his affection further in 1945, when Fred Brock resumed his life as an unemployed civilian; “at whatever rental or cost they could afford,” Charlie let the family move into his farmhouse and till the vast acreage between his own garden and the graveyard almost half a mile away. Such generosity, to be sure, did not result in any discernible increase of friendliness on Fred’s part—on the contrary, the man was more aloof than ever, seeming to regard fiction-writing as a dubious livelihood at best, at least when compared with his own honest toil. Charlie, meanwhile, bristled at the “almost ostentatious laziness” of his brother-in-law, a handsome man who liked to loiter in the bathroom combing his hair. What made matters worse was Charlie’s guilty animus toward the Brocks’ five-year-old, an irksome “escapist” (thought Charlie), whose vagaries were largely due to the “disinterest of his ne’er-do-well father.”

  With those two exceptions, however, Charlie was devoted to his in-laws—more so, in fact, than to his own family. He thought his melodramatic, self-pitying mother could learn a thing or two from Rhoda’s parents, John and Isabella, a kindly couple who called each other Mr. and Mrs. Booth and never complained about their poverty (they lived on a modest pension, supplemented by occasional checks from Charlie) or anything else for that matter. Charlie liked having them around: John seldom imposed his company, preferring to tend a strawberry patch on the Ridge or paint the lovely countryside, while his wife was so retiring that Charlie teasingly dubbed her the Sword-Swallower (from an old joke: after ten years of marriage, a husband learns that his wife had been a sword-swallower in the circus before they met; “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he demands, and she replies, “Because you never asked”). Her tact was another trait he wished his own mother would emulate: “I read your manuscript and just can’t get over the extent of your vocabulary,” Mrs. Booth had congratulated him on The Lost Weekend. “I am no one to criticise, because I don’t know enough to, so you will just have to be satisfied with my saying that it ought to bring you a nice pot of money.” His main nickname for this endearing creature was Queenie—since her name was Isabella—and so he called her each night after dinner, when the two would retire to the library for a few games of rummy 500, the woman’s only passion apart from her grandchildren.

  Charlie loved the whole idea of being a paterfamilias, and could hardly get over the fact that he’d gone from being a feckless, drunken misfit to the author of a celebrated best-seller and now the proprietor of Six Chimney Farm. “Boom, you can’t realize how much I love this house and living here,” he wrote shortly after moving in. “The night we got home Rhoda and I just walked from room to room and admired, as I do often.” And meantime he dreamed of the day when all the Booths and Jacksons—even (or especially) Herb and Bob and their brood—would gather under his roof and admire the splendor of it all. Such a reunion (never realized in real life) formed the long “Preview” section of his Birnam epic, What Happened—the main point being that, for all his travails, everything had worked out in the end for Don: “He would be host to the gathering, they should come to him and be his guests, and he would not only take care of them all but be able to take care of them all—did it not mean, in effect, that he would be head of the family?” A related point was, of course, that reality never quite measures up, and that such a gathering would invariably prove more of a headache than anything else.

  THE TOWN ITSELF soon began to pall. There was nothing to do but admire the countryside: one had to cross the bridge into Fairlee, Vermont, to buy a newspaper, and most of the natives (retired farmers and the like) didn’t read much anyway—except for “That Dreadful Book” (“probably the one book they have read in ten years”) by their new neighbor, Mr. Jackson. “My, you’re a lot nicer than I thought you’d be,” a member of the local ladies’ club remarked to Rhoda, whose husband was notorious before he’d even arrived. Not only was the word out that his book was true, more or less, but also that the author worked in Hollywood (’nuff said!), and, besides, Orford was just determined not to be impressed by his relative wealth and highbrow ways. “I know you write,” said one of the townsfolk, “but what do you really do?”

  If Jackson had expected to find solidarity or stimulation among his fellow Ridge dwellers—that is, the prosperous residents of the other six Federal-style houses in the group—he was to be sorely disappointed. Two houses to the south were the Warrens, who seemed especially wary of the new arrival. “Why do you suppose Mr. Jackson ever wrote a book like that?” Edward “Ned” Warren asked one of Charlie’s friends—more in sorrow than anger, it seemed. War
ren (Dartmouth ’01) did not keep liquor in his house, and for the most part spent his autumn years clipping coupons and newspaper articles of interest, including several reviews of The Lost Weekend (pressed between the pages of a laconic but persistent diary), once he’d learned who was moving into the old Dana place. Aware of Warren’s reservations where he was concerned, Jackson was startled to learn that the man had actually donated copies of his novel to three local libraries (Orford, Orfordville, and Fairlee), and indeed Warren seemed well-meaning after a fashion. Every morning he’d stroll across the bridge and back, then walk along Main Street greeting passersby and giving nickels to the nine or ten children of the town, before heading home for the noon stock report on the radio while he plied his scissors. “Ned loved everybody,” said his granddaughter, “but he lived in his own little world.” In that world you took an avid interest in your neighbors’ affairs, whether or not your relations were especially friendly: “Mr. Jackson to Hanover,” Warren noted in his diary, two weeks after Jackson had moved in. “Attended movie in the evening called Going My Way.” And four days later: “Invited Mr. Jackson to go with us this AM but he said next time.” So it went for the next few years.

  Even the more enlightened citizens were a little nervous around Charlie, who, early on, had scandalously availed himself of the local beauty parlor to get a manicure, an item that was combined uncomfortably with a rumor that his second novel was about a very taboo subject indeed. For his part Jackson was fond of at least one person on the Ridge, Isabel Doan Dyer (not so much her second husband, Lyman), whose thirty-year-old son, Daniel Doan, was himself an aspiring writer who did his best to give their acclaimed neighbor the benefit of a doubt. One day Jackson announced that he’d been up all night working on his novel and needed some fresh air and exercise, so the two went for a hike in the woods. Coming to a little pond along Jacobs Brook, Jackson suddenly proposed they go for a swim; Doan (“defensive before this impulsiveness”) said the water was too cold, and Jackson tried it with his hand and agreed the idea was foolish. As Doan later admitted, he was worried about more than the water:

  I was aware of the areas of human behavior about which he wrote, but I was withdrawn and provincial, a disapproving spectator. I knew him to be a former alcoholic himself, assumed he had experienced the homosexual tendencies about which he was writing, and I felt something strange and fearful from the inconsistencies of humanity, and an emotion that represented for me a new sort of awareness that no human being was as simple as I had been led to believe.

  As for the other Ridge dwellers: what might have seemed a kind of charming paternalism, or Yankee insularity, was—so Jackson concluded—at bottom bigotry and snobbism. “Mrs. Jackson cleans ice back of house so children could skate,” Warren observed in his diary, with his usual inscrutable literality, though in fact he might have been annoyed or at least perplexed. According to Robert Richmond—a recipient of Warren’s nickels who’d grown up on the other side of Main Street and bootstrapped his way into Dartmouth—“Uncle Ned,” as he liked to be called, had argued in favor of closing Orford High School and thereby lowering property taxes (“Those kids aren’t worth educating”). So it might have rankled when the Jacksons not only arranged for skating on the Ridge, but also cleared the hill behind their house and invited the high school principal to give skiing lessons there to local children, no matter how humble their stations, the better “to encourage [Sarah and Kate] to play with all and sundry.”

  By then Jackson had noticed the “horror” on his neighbors’ faces when he wore a Roosevelt button around town during the fall campaign (“Mr. Roosevelt’s speech last night very poor,” Warren opined in his diary), and was therefore all the more sensitive when the president died the following spring. “I’ve never seen Rhoda so broken up,” he wrote. “My head has hurt and throat ached for days.” On the day in question, however—April 12, 1945—Jackson was greeted on Main Street with: “Have you heard the good news?” So provoked, he made a point of knocking on the Warrens’ door, a visit they never forgot. “He was in a dark suit with a black necktie and a black band on his arm,” said Julia Fifield, Ned Warren’s stepdaughter. “And he looked at mother and said [reproachful voice]: ‘Mrs. Warren, our president has died. Why aren’t you in mourning?’ ” Mrs. Gertrude Warren, a lifelong Republican needless to say, was rather at a loss (“I don’t think there was any further conversation”)—though perhaps it reflects credit on both parties that (according to Ned’s diary) the Warrens and Jacksons subsequently took turns hosting each other for dinner, on May 6 and 20 respectively.

  But there was a knottier problem that was unlikely to be solved by mutual hospitality. “Anti-Semitism is something awful here,” Jackson reported, telling of how their real-estate agent had refused to sell Six Chimney Farm to previous buyers who’d offered cash, because (as the man jovially explained) “they didn’t have the right names.” As for Uncle Ned, he casually used the word “nigger” and would remark with sober consternation that a “white girl” had married a Jew. Jackson, for his children’s sake (“we do not want to make it difficult for them”), was mostly holding his tongue for now—however: “I refuse to take some of the things that have been said by ‘careless people’ in our own living room. If there is anything in modern life that more enrages me than this irrational anti-Semitism, I do not know what it is.”

  JACKSON FELT TERRIBLE PRESSURE to surpass or at least equal the achievement of his first novel; as he’d often stated for the record, he was an author of large ambition (not an expert on alcoholism!) who had no intention of resting on the laurels of a single book. “You’ve got to write not one, not two, not three—you’ve got to do it over and over,” he told PM. At first he’d wanted to follow The Lost Weekend with “the Big Book”—What Happened—of which the former had been “merely a chapter, so to speak”; but the world, he knew, was clamoring for a proper sequel that would explain, specifically, “how you [sic] got out of it,” as his old doctor in Rochester, John Lloyd, put it: “It may fall into the hands of someone whom it would help.” Harshly criticized for the unhappy ending of The Lost Weekend, Jackson had protested that it was not the novelist’s job “to solve psychiatric problems” but only to “state the case,” and anyway how was Don supposed to “cure” himself in five days? The sequel, then, would have to be a far more ambitious book—a gradual “working-out” of Don’s addiction “in a more leisurely and novelistic style”—though not quite itself a novel, not yet, as Jackson held that genre to the sky-high standard of the great Russians. What Happened—now that would be a novel, but first he decided to write this troublesome sequel, The Working Out.

  The more he thought about it, though, the more it seemed that the sequel could wait a while, too. Lest he be branded a confessional author who only writes about alcoholism, he wanted to try a totally different subject—something to do with Vince Kramer, that wounded Marine he’d met in Nantucket: “It will be a story about the reaction of the public to soldiers in wartime,” he wrote Rhoda from Hollywood, “how the proximity of death heightens one’s consciousness of youth.” Casting about for an epigraph, he asked her to retrieve his old JAXON notebook and find a poem he’d transcribed there by “one Karl Somebody Ulrichs”—meaning Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a gay German writer, as translated by J. A. Symonds, a gay English writer. Rhoda dutifully supplied the poem, albeit with a cocked eyebrow perhaps:

  Dearer to me is the lad village-born with sinewy members

  Than the pale face of a fine town-bred effeminate youngling;

  Yea, or a sailor on board: but dear to me down to the heart’s depth,

  Dearest of all are the young, steel-thewed, magnificent soldiers …

  Who with clashing spurs and martial tread when they meet me,

  Know not how goodly they are, the sight of them how overwhelming.

  “Well, the Ulrichs poem didn’t turn out to be much, did it?” wrote Charlie, a tad abashed. “Of all the duds! It’s the kind of thing that makes me creep, now.”
He thought maybe he’d find what he needed in Whitman, but then he remembered something from Housman that seemed nearer his purpose and gave him a title besides:

  The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do:

  My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.

  But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest,

  The brains in my head and the heart in my breast.

  Oh grant me the ease that is granted so free,

  The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,

  That relish their victuals and rest on their bed

  With flint in the bosom and guts in the head.

  Warming to the idea—even becoming rather feverish (“Damn it to hell, why can’t I get myself fired at once!”)—Jackson excitedly described My Two Troubles to his agent, Bernice Baumgarten, and his admiring friend Philip Wylie. Both were guardedly discouraging. Baumgarten warned him that “there is nothing so important for an author’s reputation as his second novel” (as if Jackson didn’t know!), and it was her impression that My Two Troubles would be a risky successor to The Lost Weekend: “I’d rather see a collection of short stories … or perhaps, and why not, nothing at all until you are ready with the second Don Birnam.” As for Wylie, he considered it an even greater imperative for Jackson to complete “the two parts of [his] famous novel about Don Birnam” before anything else, unless he felt certain that My Two Troubles would be a masterpiece. Which, incidentally, Jackson did (“I feel confident that the book will come to be recognized instantly as an American classic”), but The Working Out would have to be even better than that—all the more reason to wait—until finally The Lost Weekend was made to seem “a kind of half-hearted finger-exercise done with the left hand. Which it is.”