by Blake Bailey
Amid the euphoria of new friendship, Jackson stopped in Boston on his way home and ordered a couple of books he thought McCarthy might like (Shakespeare’s Comedy; Tolstoy and His Wife), writing her a note on Ritz-Carlton letterhead: “I liked you so much.” McCarthy, in turn, was also giving a lot of thought to her new friend, whose visit had caused a “sensation” and seemed to lend itself to the subject of a “witty novelette”: “A satire, it was to be,” she remembered at a distance of almost thirty-five years, “on the literary life and the thirst for fame, just as dangerous to self-respect as the thirst for alcohol.” The “Chaplinesque hero” would be none other than Charles Jackson, whose permission she decorously sought in advance: “You and your visit here would provide a marvelous focus for a study of literary types and literary errors.… The whole thing is full of Aristotelian unity, but if you have qualms, I will abandon it.” McCarthy had parsed her customer well, though, and was already hard at work on The Lost Week, convinced it would “make [her] fortune.” Meanwhile her endearingly self-involved subject was little other than thrilled; true, the woman “wouldn’t leave [him] a shred,” but what an opportunity to see himself as one of the most astute (and caustic) satirist-critics of her time saw him! “My life is in your hands,” he promptly replied, assuring her that he’d only be hurt if the story “turns out to be lousy,” and expressing but a single caveat: “Please let my sex-life alone.”
In the present case, however, McCarthy wasn’t interested in people’s sex lives; this was a story entirely occupied with the literary aspect of things, and her most immediate challenge was coming up with fictional names for a large cast of real-life writers: James Theobald (Nathan), William De Los Rios (Dos Passos), David MacGregor (Dwight Macdonald), and Frani Farrar (herself). Jackson endeavored to be helpful by suggesting that she refer to The Lost Weekend, in her book, by its original title, Present Fears. But McCarthy had that part covered, and as her story opens we find the dapper, mustachioed Herbert Harper—author of A Short One If You Don’t Mind—waiting with his stoical wife at the Nottingham (that is, Truro) bus stop for their host to come collect them. He is, as usual, pondering the fate of his second novel, which he has just withdrawn from his publisher (again)—in an agony of doubt whether he can repeat the success of his confessional first novel. A prescient but rather pitiless narrator thinks not:
… for such successes can never be duplicated. The mood of self-revelation comes but once to an author; it cannot be revived but only counterfeited. In fear and trembling, he lays his whole soul on the table, risking universal condemnation, for the sake of some higher forgiveness—“Love me,” he cries, “as I am.” It is this sense of risk, this mixture of temerity and terror, that authenticates his story; but once he has won the gamble, been accepted, admired, forgiven, his confessions, if he persists in them, will become spurious, since he is sure in advance of absolution. Moreover, his private life is no longer private; it is a museum through which he himself has shown visitors, and if he continues to live in it, it is only as a custodian or janitor.… If he is to go on with his career, it must be on a different basis; he himself must disappear from his work, or appear in it disjointed, as it were, one part of him being given to one character, one to another, one part to the style, so that the work of art is an assemblage of disjuncta [sic] membra poetae. Yet often, as in Herbert Harper’s case, he has given himself away with such rashness that he has very little left of himself with which to equip his characters; the autobiographical novelist is notoriously improvident. Furthermore, in the autobiographical novelist, the interest in the world, either of reality or of forms, is much weaker than the interest in the self. Once he is deprived of his main topic, he has very little left to say and very little interest in saying. He will observe this slackening of excitement and attribute it to a diminution of creative powers, while in reality he has become a creator, an artist, by sheer accident—the need for self-revelation has precipitated him into a career for which he has not the metier.
Harper is “half-articulately conscious” of his dilemma, and while he wants desperately to succeed, he’s loath to do so by way of shoddy work. An essentially honest man, he’s more than willing to discuss the matter openly (indeed exhaustively) with friends old and new, though he also enjoys—via “a voluminous correspondence”—touching on the cheerier aspects of his fame:
To the superficial, this preoccupation with himself … this reversal of the principles of Dale Carnegie, might seem a poor basis for friendship. In reality, it was not. His colleagues received his letters with a certain amount of astonishment, but they were not chilled by them. How could they be? They were the letters a man writes to his mother.… Our mothers, our sisters, and our uncles are never convinced by our successes—that is why they demand of us the corroboration of facts and figures, why our letters home are naively full of the celebrities we have met, the cars we have bought, the restaurants we have lunched at, and why these letters, no matter how carefully documented, have a faint air of fraudulence, the contagion of disbelief having spread from the recipient to the sender. It makes no difference how many trophies we send home, how many medals, Japanese coins, press clippings, publicity photographs, menus, autographs, cheques—it is all in vain. Our relations know better, we are transparent to them; at the bottom of the fishbowl of our achievements they see us sitting, very small, the ordinary, nugatory person whom they have always known.… [Harper’s] profound disbelief in his success took the sting out of the subject for his colleagues. It was impossible to envy a man who envied himself.
One wonders what Jackson would have made of these observations, but alas, his intense curiosity was never to be gratified. “Dear Minx,” he wrote McCarthy a month later. “Have you finished it? Are you happy with the result? Where will it be published? When am I to see it? Don’t you know I can’t wait? Etcetera.” But the witty novelette had already been put aside. Working in the dreary town of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, McCarthy had typed away at a brisk pace for a few days, until she began to notice the story becoming “very very John Marquand”; her vivisection of Harper appeared in the lively early pages, but she found her will weakening as she moved on to the literati of “lotus-land” per se (“they will name their station wagon ‘Hemlock Grange’ ”), and the manuscript expired after fifty pages or so. She packed it into her suitcase, departed Nova Scotia, and entombed it among her papers without a further look.
THAT SUMMER, as Jackson staggered to the end of another draft of his novel (which Farrar & Rinehart were now announcing for November), he vowed not to “touch so much as a comma of it” once the damn thing was done again. But the truth remained: it still wasn’t right. To account for Grandin’s ultimate triumph over instinct (and to emphasize that the instinct in question was not exactly homosexual in nature, but rather a morbid infatuation with “the uniform”), Jackson had written an ending whereby the coquettish Cliff tries on Grandin’s tweed topcoat when the latter is out of the room, then hastily wriggles out of same—undersized and absurd-looking on him—before Grandin can see him at such a disadvantage … but too late: Grandin returns to the room, and the scales fall from his eyes. The dashing Marine, when out of uniform, is just a dopey overstuffed lug that the judicious professor can take or leave alone.5 But the ending was unsound, even nonsensical, and the main reason was right there in the text: “Does the war cause the deterioration,” the author had written at one point, “or does it merely bring to the surface a disorder long dormant, long pressing, long dangerous?—We are what we are, under any conditions, and moments of crisis or strain make acute or intensify the conflicts in men’s natures present from the beginning.” In other words, it was finally time to put aside the whole “war neurosis” theme and admit that he was writing a novel about a middle-aged man who discovers he has homosexual tendencies.
Nudging him toward this epiphany was Donald Ogden Stewart,6 another good friend from Hollywood who’d met with Jackson that summer in Boston, where the two had put their heads together
for some six hours at the Fox Club. Why, Stewart wondered, would a seemingly naïve young Marine exploit the professor’s interest in him? And why, afterward, would Grandin be so blithely inclined to go back to his wife as if nothing had ever happened? What, really, was the meaning of that story? Jackson found he “was not able to answer” such questions, whereupon Stewart steered him gently toward the light. “So help me God I finally know what my story is about and what it should tell,” Jackson excitedly wrote in a nine-page letter-cum-outline to Amussen, Baumgarten, Wylie, and various others:
It is primarily a story of marriage.… The story of a hitherto happily married man and normal man, a useful citizen in society, a gentleman and a good man, suddenly discovering at the age of forty-some that he has strong homosexual leanings, is a very big story indeed. I don’t mean to sound pompous about it, but the story has implications as big as the Greek dramas, in which the fine hero has a strain or flaw or sin which must be brought to the surface, faced, and accounted for, for good or bad.
Stewart thought the story could still have a happy ending, but Jackson was now carried away by the idea of Grandin as a tragic hero à la the Greeks, and of course such heroes had “to pay the very utmost for the flaw or stain that was beyond their control.” A tragic hero also had to be big (“big enough for Spencer to play in,” he coaxingly wrote Hepburn a few days later), and thus Grandin would be all the nobler in this latest version of his novel, soon to be retitled Will and Error, which (he wrote Boom) would have “as bloody a finish as you ever read in your life.” Many years later, reckoning the wrong turnings in his career, Jackson would claim that he’d ended his second novel in a hackneyed way—that is, by “punishing” his hero for the “sin” of homosexuality—“because Farrar & Rinehart wouldn’t accept my more intelligent, much more honest version—and to get it published at all, I had to accept the compromise …” But in fact Farrar & Rinehart were happy to settle for his penultimate version (in which Grandin decides the Marine is merely ridiculous), and urged him to publish already and get on with another book.
Baumgarten, too, was getting more and more exasperated with Charlie’s dithering, and scolded him for constantly pressing his work on others (“She thinks that I only get confused by submitting my work to several different and often contradictory opinions”); that said, she agreed with Farrar & Rinehart that his latest draft was an improvement, and yes, the outline of further changes looked fine, too. Perhaps such encouragement was wholly sincere, but to say otherwise, of course, was to risk further bombardment. As for Amussen, he was especially enthusiastic—“100%” in favor: “I don’t think it would turn your head or frighten you if I told you quite simply that it could be a classic.” Exultant, Jackson promptly related the young man’s endorsement to others, and boldly predicted that his second novel would be “so far superior to The Lost Weekend that no one will be able to see that the two different writers of those two different books are, or were, one and the same man.” Which would prove at least half true.
Critiques from Amussen et al. had been waiting for Jackson when he returned from Truro on July 10, though he was a little surprised not to find a letter from Philip Wylie among them. “I am, as you know, not just one of your greatest and most sympathetic admirers, but also, Cookie, one of your most articulate,” Wylie had once written Jackson, who still treasured his career-making rave of The Lost Weekend in the Times (“the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey”). Still, the man was a little on the mercurial side, and Jackson might have worried that he’d overshot the mark by assuring Wylie, a year earlier, that My Two Troubles would be “an American classic.” Meanwhile, too, he’d had the temerity to dismiss Wylie’s fourteenth novel, Night Unto Night, as virtually unreadable, frankly admitting to the author that he’d abandoned it on page 115: Wylie’s “penchant for using difficult words,” he wrote, made the “fantastically-involved style” of the late-manner Henry James, say, seem like “simplicity itself.” Wylie, in reply, had affected serene magnanimity. True, he rebuked Jackson for objecting to his “two-dollar words” (“Nuts to you and your fine Anglo-Saxon dingbats”), offering a precise inversion of Jackson’s own aesthetic formula: “I have always taken the view that what [my italics] the true artist is considering is of zero importance, but how [ditto] he expresses it is … the guarantor of his success.” For this reason, wrote Wylie, it had been “a kind of hooey” on his part to discourage Jackson from writing My Two Troubles instead of his Birnam sequel, since whatever Jackson saw fit to write would be estimable: “In other words,” he concluded, “a state of fascination in your work and progress now exists in me. And I want you to stop being concerned with my soul, so that your two troubles won’t become three troubles.” Humbled, Jackson had offered this latest draft of his second novel (plus that nine-page outline) in a spirit of abject gratitude, calling Wylie his “literary conscience” while continuing to believe, more or less privately, that Night Unto Night was terrible.
Wylie’s letter arrived, at last, a week after Truro, and its tone of exquisite archness must have caused Jackson’s brow to furrow. “Dear Charlie, old kid,” he began, breezily commending “every syllable” of the revisions proposed in Jackson’s outline, especially his plan to flesh out the wife, Ethel Grandin, and dispense with the whole “war neurosis” business: “Bravo, I say.” From there, however, the letter took a darkly insinuating turn:
Your story as it stands has a quality of inference that is as if too subtle, too brilliant. John’s character—for instance. To use language deliberately contrived to suggest his mediocrity of emotional estate is dazzling in a way. In theory. The iteration on every page of what might be called mannered cliche—(romantic schoolgirl, aristocratic nostrils, etc, etc) …
Yet—too ingenious.… For, any slightest similar error of the author will inevitably cause the reader to believe that John’s errors [are] not carefully deliberate, but a lapsis mentis of the writer.…
By this same token, your superlatively caustic manhandling of language—your phrase awkwardness—your use of borderline bilge- like phrase … is too devious a method of composition for even high- intelligence readership, I fear. Even such readers will hardly realize and appreciate what you have done. “He wrote the Lost Weekend,” they will say—“now—why does that tremendous prose take on this sudden, tripey complexion?” …
In other words: since it went without saying that the author of The Lost Weekend could not unwittingly write so badly, why then it had to be some Modernist point of craft—masterly in a way, but perhaps a bit much? That, anyway, was Wylie’s modest opinion. As for Charlie’s question about whether the ending should be happy or tragic (“in the classical sense”)—well, the latter idea was a little puzzling: “To me, the problem is not one susceptible of tragical conclusions.… [Homosexuality] is no sin, no matter for any but morbid atonement, and no intrinsic crime—such as, say, self-murder, which was Don Birnam’s crime.”
“The Wylie letter still baffles me,” Jackson wrote Amussen almost a month later. “In fact it’s beginning to make me mad.… Maybe, as you say, the guy is just plain crazy, and doesn’t see what I see in it; but if the veiled insults are intended, then to hell with Phil Wylie forever after.” And the more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that Wylie was elaborately twitting him, and this was an outrage on any number of levels. As he wrote Wylie’s employer, Stanley Rinehart: “Why didn’t he have enough guts and/or sense to come right out and say he thought my story stank, as I did about NIGHT UNTO NIGHT? … I have no respect for him whatever—certainly not for his intelligence or integrity.”
But then, he had no way of knowing just how earnestly Wylie had grappled with his own bewilderment. The high irony of his letter was, in fact, a style he attained only after attempting two previous letters (at least) that took as gutsy an approach as Jackson could possibly have wished for.7 The first, dated July 12, begged Jackson to set his novel (“a mess”) aside: “You don’t have to produce a
book a year, or every five years, or every ten.” As for what exactly was wrong with it … where to begin? The writing was no good, for one thing, and in this letter, too, Wylie tried in all seriousness to give his friend the benefit of a doubt: “You have endeavored to set a style of English prose commensurate with the mental process of your protagonist,” he wrote, as if it had to be a deliberate effect on Jackson’s part, as if that were the only conceivable reason for such offenses against “grammar, rhetoric, usage, good sentence structure, and general literary taste.” Gaining steam, Wylie began to forget his manners and grow belligerent in spite of himself, as if he were reciting an indictment against a hero who’d grievously betrayed the commonweal. Far from being “a great, tragic figure,” he wrote, Grandin was “a dull little man with the big-head” (whose wife, incidentally, was “a jerk”)—and speaking of “tragic” figures, the proposed ending was simply laughable: “A punishment for the sin, as you put it several times. Now, nobody with sense enough to read your books is going to think homosexuality of any sort is a sin—especially a sin of that magnitude.… [Grandin’s] crime is infantilism, no crime; his real sin is extravagant egoism.” And whereas The Lost Weekend had rendered Don’s pathology from the inside, so that any reader could identify with it, what was even a sophisticated reader supposed to make of Grandin’s weird homoerotic fetishes (“Caps, uniforms, bathrobes, bottles of suntan oil”)? Presented with pokerfaced objectivity, as if one should merely accept such phenomena as typical, they gave the reader “the feeling that he is catching onto more of Charlie Jackson than Charlie Jackson has caught onto himself …” And finally—lest the author seek refuge in the good opinion of other, less exacting admirers—Wylie skewered the usual suspects one by one: Donald Ogden Stewart was “feeble,” the author of “hack movies”; Baumgarten was “a very bad judge of writing”; Amussen was “juvenile.” And so on.