by Blake Bailey
Enter Jackson’s twenty-nine-year-old editor, Ted Amussen, who revered the author of The Lost Weekend and was willing to endure almost any inconvenience on his behalf. Jackson had been “sunk” after finishing a draft in late January, so Amussen made a special trip to Six Chimney Farm and spent the weekend reviewing “every single syllable” of the manuscript, pointing out “sticky passages” and explaining exactly how the last four sections (of ten) needed to be reworked. Afterward Jackson felt “restore[d],” if all the more “heartbroken” that Amussen would soon be leaving for the Navy. As he admitted to Stanley Rinehart (who, he thought, undervalued Amussen because of his relative inexperience and touching stammer), Jackson was following the young editor’s advice so closely that the novel “will be little short of a collaboration: the credit should read, in all honesty, ‘By Charles Jackson and Theodore Amussen.’ ”
Meanwhile he couldn’t resist canvassing the views of various other friends and colleagues, though he deplored his “inability as a writer to stand on [his] own legs”; but then, it was quite in his nature to assume that others were every bit as interested in his problems (especially creative) as he was. In any case he sent copies of the manuscript to Baumgarten (“If you have any ideas, I need them bad”), Rinehart, Boom, Rahv, and his “severest critic,” Elling Aannestad, who did not disappoint in terms of severity. As Jackson dolefully reported to his agent, “Elling was simply unable to discuss the story at all because, he said, he found it dull, banal, untrue, and I don’t know what all.” Reeling from the critique, Jackson had proceeded to an appointment at Schrafft’s with Rahv, who (as he promptly informed Aannestad) seemed “mightily impressed.” True, the man had a few qualms, but these were minor points of technique: in describing a day at the beach, for instance, Jackson “must learn to skip”—that is, he needn’t inform the reader “how they got there and they got back, with whom, how long, et cetera.” Also, Grandin was perhaps a bit too grand, as in flat, nondescript; he would be more sympathetic, Rahv thought, if the author “put more of [him]self” into the character. That said, the story had plenty of potential, and Cliff the Marine was nothing less than a triumph (“one of the most interesting characters [Rahv had] ever read in his life”).
But mere potential wasn’t good enough, and so in February—after Farrar & Rinehart had announced a May publication date, allotted paper for a first printing of fifty thousand, and taken orders from bookstores all over the country—Jackson withdrew the manuscript. For the next two months or so, he told friends, he would be pruning “all the passages that do the readers’ thinking and feeling for him, … all the explanation, over-elaboration, emotion, rhapsodies, et cetera.” He worried, too, that he wasn’t doing justice to the whole “war neurosis” angle: if Grandin was entirely beguiled by “the uniform”—as he should be (versus, that is, being “homosexual to start with”)—then it was wrong for him to be smitten with Cliff right away, instead of “slowly and gradually,” only after he’s learned of the youth’s ordeal in the South Pacific. But really, the more Jackson thought about it, the more he wondered whether he had the “intellectual equipment” to bring off such a Jamesian novel of ideas—never mind the most ticklish turn of the screw: namely that Cliff proved, in the present version, something other than the naïf he pretended to be; rather it transpired that he (“out of vanity”) had led poor Grandin on to some extent. “[Anyone] who dares to write anything less than heroically about a Marine today is sticking his neck out,” Jackson wrote, fretful after viewing footage of Iwo Jima in Hanover.
The better to shift the emphasis somewhat, he decided to amplify the conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Grandin, so the husband’s infatuation with Cliff would seem to result as much from “the ‘fatigue’ of marriage that sets in in the Forties” as it did from “war neurosis” or the wiles of an insecure young Marine. “I need a rest badly,” he wrote Boom in May; “and the book is so damned good now, and so right, that I almost don’t care when I finish it.” The hopeful mood lasted another two or three weeks, until—as he approached the novel’s end once more—Jackson began to lose confidence, and finally could hardly work at all.
IN THE EARLY DAYS Jackson wrote all his serious fiction in longhand, revising carefully before typing up a clean copy for still further revision. The older he got, though, the more he was convinced that what a writer said was far more important than how: “The books of Dreiser and [James T.] Farrell were clumsy and terribly written,” he noted, “but the authors had something to say and it makes the books last.” Since Hollywood, anyway, he’d simply been too busy to fuss overmuch with mere prose style; by dictating his work he could get the words on paper and go over them later if necessary. In Orford then—what with novel-writing, screen treatments, freelance pieces, and a florid correspondence with “agents, publishers, Metro, etc.”—he often required a secretary three hours a day, five days a week, and would eventually become so facile at thinking on his feet that he’d hardly bother to revise at all: “He pretty much knew what he wanted to say,” said Pat Hammond, a secretary who helped with Jackson’s prolific story output in the early 1950s. “I remember making very few changes.”
Which is not to say he was getting lazy—far from it: he was “working harder and harder,” as he wrote friends in late 1944, a time when he rarely bothered to leave his room except to take meals in his pajamas and dressing gown. Rhoda, often lonely and bored in Orford, nevertheless guarded her husband’s privacy with the utmost vigilance: “Papa is working,” she’d shush the children, who hardly needed to be reminded. As the months went by, and his second novel waxed more and more recalcitrant, Jackson’s industry began to seem pathological—working as he did from the crack of dawn until two or three in the morning sometimes, bolting the odd meal at his desk. “I don’t sleep at all,” he wrote the Cronyns: “I take pills instead; and pills too instead of meals; as for the other functions, well.—”
Strangely enough, his pills of choice tended to be barbiturates, especially Seconal (“reds”), which for some reason had a tonic effect—so noted by a bemused attendant at Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover: “This drug [Seconal], taken to promote sleep, actually seems to have a stimulating influence” on Jackson. Or rather, his body became stimulated while his brain was “[put] to sleep,” as a “very didactic doctor” once lectured Jackson, who nodded with pleasant recognition. As he would later write in “The Sleeping Brain”:
Fully conscious, alert, “healthy,” critical, even super-critical because afraid, one is stumped, blocked, paralyzed as a writer. But with the assistance of the often damaging medicines of which the didactic doctor warned [me], inhibitions go, fear and anxieties go, confidence returns, the unconscious is released and takes over, and intuitions you didn’t even know you knew, well upward without check of a mind on guard. So, at least, it has been for me; so it has been for many others. What is not produced out of the unconscious is not worth writing.
To be sure, Jackson was nothing if not insecure as a writer: he never quite got over the idea that he was only Charlie Jackson, after all—a misfit from the sticks—who somehow, miraculously, had won the overwhelming esteem of the world. How to do it again? How to do it now that a “man-eating public or publisher was looking over [his] shoulder”? Now that he was proprietor of Six Chimney Farm, with an extended family to support? His wife, for one, understood the pressure all too well, but deplored his means of coping with it and shrewdly assessed the results. As she wrote Boom, “He can’t deny that he has done his best writing, most of it, in a period of sobriety—i.e., Lost Weekend, Palm Sunday, Rachel’s Summer. He doesn’t see that pills change his sense of values and that his writing, under pills, hasn’t the same fundamental honesty.”
And what about the effect on his health? It wasn’t simply a matter of barbiturate abuse, but various collateral issues as well: that is, while taking pills and skipping sleep, the once-tubercular Jackson was also smoking four packs of cigarettes a day and getting “no physical exercise,” according to his
doctor’s notes at Mary Hitchcock, which soon became his “favorite little hospital” and no wonder. Beginning with his first weeklong visit in March 1945—because of “overwork,” he wrote Herb (“because of intermittent dependence, in last year, on Seconal,” wrote his doctor)—he was treated with ideal leniency. “I prescribed my own treatment,” Jackson recalled in 1959, for the benefit of AA: “put paraldehyde on my chart, and sober[ed] up the easy way.” The man who presided over what added up to twenty-some hospitalizations was Dr. Sven Gundersen, an eminent respiratory specialist who was also consulted in the care of such personages as Robert Frost. “On a scale of one to ten”—the man was eulogized after a long and useful life—“his gentleness and moral conscience were ten-plus.” Jackson would not have disagreed, and the two became fast friends. Aside from Gundersen’s (very) gentle admonitions with respect to Charlie’s health, the two shared a love of music and literature: Gundersen was a fine amateur violinist, and occasionally the first audience for Charlie’s stories, some of them very long, another role to which he brought his vaunted patience and tact.
It was no coincidence that Jackson’s first hospitalization in Hanover followed hard on the discovery that he was facing dire financial difficulties. “I don’t complain, ever, about income taxes,” he’d told PM in early 1944, while noting that January was a bad time for a best-seller to be published, since most of the royalties accrue in a single calendar year; still, as an ardent New Dealer, Jackson was proud to support the president’s social programs. The fiscal year of 1944, however, would prove too much of a good thing: on total earnings of $47,700, Jackson owed a total of $23,000 in federal income tax; by the end of the year he’d managed to pay only $7,000, and was left with less than $3,000 in the bank. Bitterly he realized that almost his entire second payment from Paramount ($17,500)—due in January 1945—would have to be turned over to the government, rather than applied (as he’d hoped) to the mortgage on Six Chimney Farm, which, he quipped, would now have to be burned down for insurance.
“I haven’t a nickle [sic] coming in and won’t have till next summer, and I’m distraught as it is, wondering what under the sun I’m going to do about the December 15th tax,” he lamented to Brackett in November 1944, while inquiring (in the same letter) whether Wilder would be willing to sell him a Bombois painting for a thousand dollars. “Charlie was a very high liver,” Roger Straus reminisced. “Whether he was drunk or sober he was a high liver, and he liked certain things that cost a lot of money.” Paintings, antiques, rare books, bespoke clothing, jewelry … Jackson loved all things fine and beautiful, and rarely bothered to ask the price when some such item caught his eye, like a gold cigarette case at Tiffany’s (six hundred dollars) he fancied in passing. But stern times called for stern measures, and after that winter (“the coal bill has been truly frightful”) he resolved to sell a beloved grandfather clock and Sheraton sofa, while returning two paintings to Klaus Perls, whom he owed almost three thousand dollars. “Poor Rhoda”—he wrote the artist William L’Engle, whose painting of baseball players he coveted—“dies a thousand deaths when I receive a communication from Perls; and if she knew that at this very moment I was writing you about those god damned baseball players, she would dash up to the attic and hang herself in despair.” A month later Rhoda informed him that they had exactly twenty-seven dollars in the bank, and Charlie presented their predicament to Baumgarten—“God knows I’m not doing it (I never even leave my room, not even to buy a soda)”—asking her advice on how to cover their quarterly income tax as well as an imminent trip to New York. Meanwhile he trusted in the success of The Lost Weekend (movie) to get his novel selling again.
JACKSON ACCEPTED an invitation to spend a week in early July 1945 at the Nathans’ charming house (the Parsonage) in Truro on Cape Cod. “If I had any guts or character I would have said no, I have to stick to my knitting here,” he wrote the Minnellis; “but dammit I want a week on the Cape, I need to get away for a complete rest and spell of relaxation (whether or not such a thing can be found in the Nathan menage remains to be seen) and it is two years since Rhoda and I had a holiday together.” Besides, Robert Nathan really had become a dear, dear friend: prior to meeting Jackson in person he’d written an ecstatic blurb for The Lost Weekend (“superb … wonderfully sustained”), and so in Hollywood he took special pains to make the author feel at home; in fact, nobody had been kinder, as Jackson was the first to admit, though he couldn’t help noticing that Nathan was “a little on the gloomy side” (especially after Jackson’s social success began to outstrip his own), and as for Nathan’s writing: “I love Bob dearly, but he is without doubt one of the worst writers the world has ever produced.”
Jackson’s fame was such that tout Truro was in a fabulous dither over his visit. Nathan had been boasting about his celebrated guest for weeks, at one point letting slip to a fellow resident, Mary McCarthy, that he and his wife were throwing two parties in Jackson’s honor—one “for the really interesting people” (locals such as John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, and Susan Glaspell), and a more democratic gathering “for the rest.” McCarthy observed that she herself had been invited to the latter, wryly describing the whole imbroglio in a letter to her soon-to-be third husband, Bowden Broadwater:
Mr. Jackson does not like to meet more than seven or eight people at a time (he masochistically counts the drinks, I suppose, and higher multiplication or simple accumulation of envy unsettles him). So they are having two parties for him. Mrs. Nathan, through lack of information, invited me to the inferior, non-intellectual one, and now Mr. Nathan is scrambling and desperately trying to repair the mistake and has finally floundered into asking me to both, but I will accept Mrs. Nathan’s category.
As it happened, Jackson found the trip to be “quite a whirl,” and certainly enjoyed being fawned over by so many writers and painters who were positively eager to discuss the niceties of his second novel, perhaps because it took their minds off their own careers. Indeed, thought Jackson, Truro was “a kind of lotus-land where people talk all day about what they’re going to do and are jealous of each other”—or, as McCarthy would put it in the abortive novel she was about to undertake, “The salient feature of this community of writers and artists was that most of the writers did not write and most of the painters did not paint.”
That, of course, had never been Robert Nathan’s problem; on the contrary, the man wrote incessantly, though Jackson found that his output did little to improve his mood. “Bob will only be happiest when he is lying in his coffin,” Jackson wrote Brackett on returning to Orford, “preferably with a sourpuss undertaker standing by reading aloud from an inane book called THE BISHOP’S WIFE or THE WOODCUTTER’S HOUSE or THE ENCHANTED VOYAGE”—all by Nathan—“or any one of those anemic fantasies (take your choice).” Nathan had made the mistake of showing Jackson his latest, Bridgit, about an angel who helps a down-at-the-heels pianist write a great symphony, thereby freeing him from a degrading gig in a honky-tonk while helping to care, too, for his tubercular wife. In its present form Bridgit was a screenplay for MGM, though Nathan (who “can never let bad enough alone”) also planned to publish a book version.4 During his final morning in Truro, Jackson spent three “pretty grim” hours unfurling his frank opinion of Bridgit, while pointing out that he himself was about to begin a third draft of his novel and would gladly continue his toil rather than let inferior work see the light of day. “I seem, to myself, a very old man compared to you,” the demoralized Nathan wrote him afterward; “old in effort, old in sadness, and in disappointments. To write a book three times over—to be so sure of it, and of yourself—it’s all beyond me now, though I might have, once. Good luck to you. We loved having you both.” The friendship did not long survive Jackson’s visit.
Happily a more promising attachment had been formed with Mary McCarthy, who’d recently left her second husband, Edmund Wilson, and rented a cottage in Truro for the summer. Jackson was a little terrified of McCarthy, what with her daunting intellectualism; he
was well aware that she and the whole Partisan Review crowd had come to regard him, at best, as the lucky author of a middlebrow, non-engagé novel, whatever friendly feelings they reserved for him otherwise. And yet he couldn’t help admiring McCarthy’s own fiction (despite its lack of “a warm human something”) and sensed that she, too, aspired to a more general readership among “business men and Scarsdale matrons who had never heard of Kafka”—as she herself put it in her roman à clef about that week in Truro, wherein she analyzed Jackson’s hope for their friendship: “For Herbert Harper [Jackson] this woman whom he had never seen figured as a potential sister, wise and kind, a High Church nun full of sweet severity, a worldly recluse from the world. He expected from her indulgence, guidance, plain song on the victrola, and high-minded conversation, clarity and mild reproof.” All of which he got in spades, to his almost giddy delight: the “high point of the week” were his talks with McCarthy, he wrote friends, though she made him “feel like a babe mentally.” At one point, Jackson—negotiating the shoals of a conversation with both her and the art critic Clement Greenberg—ventured to suggest that Jean Stafford was a good writer: “Mary and Clem all but tore me to shreds,” he said, with a kind of chastened awe, more or less convinced that, in retrospect, he’d erred in his opinion of Stafford.