by Blake Bailey
Nevertheless Jackson had resigned himself to another nine months (at least) of very exacting hack work, when Rhoda—at two in the morning, the night before he left for New York to close the Brice deal—came into his room and begged him not to do it. Yes, they were deeply in debt, and nobody knew it better than she; but What Happened was the novel Charlie was born to write, and “nothing should come in its way”: “We would retrench in every way,” he wrote the Gershwins; “she would get rid of all help, run this big house and do the cooking and housecleaning herself … so long as I stuck to my novel. She believes in me as a writer and believes I have an important future (and I don’t think I’ve ever had a finer compliment in my life, for, as I say, the real burden of the family and house fell on her).” Within a few days Jackson had cleared the decks: for three years (or more) there would be no lavish trips, no Hollywood jobs, no freelancing (if he could help it)—nothing but work on What Happened.
In 1951 Fanny Brice died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and two years later Norman Katkov published a biography, The Fabulous Fanny, that Brice’s family disliked. Katkov (who in any case hadn’t negotiated a cut of the movie sale, as Jackson had) was therefore not involved when a production of Funny Girl—based on Brice’s life, and produced by her son-in-law, Ray Stark—ran for 1,348 performances on Broadway, launching the career of Barbra Streisand and later becoming the top-grossing movie of 1968. Katkov, meanwhile, had tried his hand at live TV, and one day was pitching a story to some admen at J. Walter Thompson—producer of Kraft Television Theatre—when a “short little guy, very gentlemanly, very diffident” entered the room: Charles Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend. “I felt really sorry for him,” Katkov remembered.
1 Farrar, Straus and Cudahy published a 1961 reprint of Kubie’s Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process. As of 1947, Straus had yet to become Jackson’s own publisher and best (male) friend.
2 Emended from the more common Harris, perhaps in fear of a veritable horde of Jim Harrises coming out of the woodwork to protest their association with a fictional adulterer.
3 Rinehart tried placing this long and quite literate piece, “The Lost Novelist,” in various magazines, to no avail; it was finally published as a separate promotional brochure.
4 Many have concluded that Garland was bipolar, including her biographer Gerald Clarke. As for her friendship with Jackson, the two rarely met after 1947. Jackson took his family to the New York premiere of A Star Is Born in the fall of 1954, and several years later his daughter Sarah introduced herself to Garland after a concert. “This is the ‘dimsal girl’!” the latter announced, remembering Charlie’s nickname for Sarah.
Chapter Thirteen
What Happened
It’s hard to overstate Jackson’s expectations for What Happened. In early 1945 he’d written Baumgarten that he was tempted to “chuck everything”—both The Fall of Valor and his Lost Weekend sequel, The Working Out—in favor of this “Major Work,” which he felt certain had “greater possibilities than any other American novel I can think of. Big words, these; but it’s true.” Three years later he wrote Baumgarten again—in a similar if somewhat more rueful vein—dismissing everything he’d published to that point in view of the awesome possibilities of What Happened, which would be the “first real novel” he’d ever written: The Lost Weekend was “a character sketch merely”; The Fall of Valor was a kind of prose play in three acts; The Outer Edges was “a series of character sketches collected together under one theme.” But if he could pull off this colossal, multivolume masterpiece, his “ultimate wordage” would likely rival that of Tolstoy.
As Jackson never tired of explaining, his novel’s title described the foremost function of an author (“If a man could ever set down exactly what happened—about anything—he’d be the finest writer in the world”), and also related to certain implications of its proposed epigraph, from the Irish novelist and poet James Stephens: “ ‘The music of what happens,’ said great Fionn, ‘—that is the finest music in the world.’ He loved ‘what happened,’ and would not evade it by the swerve of a hair.” Our hero, then—Don Birnam, or Jackson himself (who flatly described What Happened as “True Confessions”)—is the kind of fatalistic, “unguarded” fellow who “compulsively let himself in for anything.” Such a ravenous appetite for experience is largely due to his protean nature, and hence the novel would trace the progress of “many different characters at different stages of development”—that is, the progress of one many-sided character, Don Birnam, whose alcoholism (“how [he] got that way and how he un-got that way”) would prove a small part of the whole story, a single facet of the paradoxes that would be reconciled over the course of three or four volumes. Jackson would thus respond to the artistic challenge posed by Rhoda’s observation that “nobody would believe” the actual story of his life: “You’ve been too many different people.”1
In a long letter explaining the project to “Stan [Rinehart], Bernice, and Company,” Jackson took a cue from his favorite near-contemporary, Fitzgerald, and explicitly put himself “in the line of greatness”: like the most important novels of “our generation”—Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, the Joseph books of Mann—What Happened would open with a lengthy preamble meant to “serve as a kind of musical theme,” setting the mood for the story to follow. Proust had an “Overture,” Mann had a “Prelude,” whereas Jackson’s more modern book (“modern in the extreme”) would open with a “Preview”: a detailed account of one day in Don Birnam’s middle years—namely, a summer day in 1947, shortly after Don has returned from Hollywood to his fine New England home.2 Despite any number of harrowing setbacks in his life, Don is now prosperous and at least ostensibly content; indeed, that day in 1947 will mark an occasion he “has been looking forward to for as long as he can remember”: a family reunion that will take place under his own commodious roof, in the course of which all the various events, characters, and themes of What Happened will be touched on in passing. Finally, as the day winds down—after some two hundred pages of ambivalent (at best) interaction with his wife, children, mother, brothers, nieces, nephews, and others—Don sits holding his beloved older daughter and brooding in front of a fire: “He is happy; indeed he has everything to be happy for; but happiness as he has expected it to be is an illusion.” Wondering whether the “meaning of life” (no less) will ever be revealed to him, Don suddenly experiences an epiphany or “visitation” (“as if God suddenly tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘The moment is now’ ”): “What life means, it means all the time, if only you have sense enough to be aware of it.”
So ends the preamble, whereupon Book One of the first volume, Farther and Wilder, would begin in Don’s childhood, with the violent death of his sister and brother, and from there the novel would follow “all the apparently contradictory ramifications of [Don’s] growth, up to the very day that we have just seen in PREVIEW, and then on again for some years after that.” Jackson concluded this prospectus to “Stan, Bernice, and Company” with a further rationale for that long preamble (the one section he seemed to envisage with almost perfect clarity):
One of the great advantages of PREVIEW is that, in seeing how the hero “turns out,” so to speak, we will read through anything, really anything (and there is going to be some pretty rough stuff), confident that, however tough the going, it comes out all right in the end. Though almost all the early sections seem fatally against even the remotest possibility of such a conclusion, the novel turns out to be, after all, a prodigious “success story,” to put it in trite terms. But in the purest sense of the words, it is a novel of affirmation and acceptance of life.
AS PART of the “retrenchment” that would give Charlie the security to work on his novel for three years, the Jacksons arranged for a bank loan of $10,700 (this in addition to the $32,500 he’d already earned [and spent] in 1948), and resolved to remain in Orford that winter rather than pay for another posh Manhattan townhouse (especially since they still owed rent for the place on East
65th). The only further income due was $4,000 from Milestone, payable in June 1949 at the latest, or earlier if The Third Secret went into production. Rhoda asked Baumgarten to negotiate a $5,000 advance on What Happened to cover their immediate debts (“not long-term debt at all—just accumulated bills, long-standing doctors’ bills, coal for the winter etc.”), and meanwhile they also tried to sell most of their paintings as well as Charlie’s collection of custom-bound first editions, including twenty-four volumes of Melville, twenty-seven of Hardy, the complete New York Edition of Henry James, and so on. Somehow they had to figure out how to live on roughly $1,000 a month—$500 for the mortgage and bank notes, $500 for living expenses—but it wouldn’t be easy after “spending so riotously for these years,” Charlie admitted. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to think that we’ve passed the lowest point in our lives and that from now on everything gets better?” Rhoda wrote Boom that September.
But the lowest point lay well in the future. Two months later, in November, Rhoda’s father suffered a fatal lung hemorrhage in front of the Greenmount Candy Shoppe in downtown Barre, where he’d gone to follow the Truman-Dewey election returns. He died penniless, having lost his house some years before. Charlie, who “adored” both parents-in-law, naturally paid for the funeral and insisted that the widow, Queenie, come live with them. Within a few months their financial situation was already dire: in May, Charlie borrowed another $1,000 on the condition that he repay it the following month, once the Milestone money came through; but Milestone (traveling in France at the time) claimed he was broke and could only afford $1,500 as a final settlement. “My errors of three and two years ago have certainly caught up with me,” Charlie reflected in July, having just reported a bank balance of exactly $46. “What I wouldn’t give to be able to go back to 1944 and start over.”
Much of his bitterness was directed against his publisher, who, he thought, had made a colossal botch of The Outer Edges. Ted Amussen once remarked that his main job as Jackson’s editor was “to keep him bucked up” when he lapsed into his periodic funks, and certainly Jackson had come to expect a lot in that regard after the whole Fall of Valor ordeal. “I’m quite sore about their silence,” he wrote a friend, when nobody at Rinehart got right back to him about his latest title idea (The Self-Condemned) for his third novel; he proposed to write them a “stinging note the gist of which will be: ‘If it doesn’t make any difference to you, okay, I’ll move on to somewhere else.’ ” Less petulant were his objections to a number of unauthorized changes in his text, presented as a fait accompli once the book had gone into production. Jackson enumerated these in a long indignant memo, and was especially incensed over a sentence they’d seen fit to cut toward the end of the book—to wit, when Ruth Harron contemplates losing her husband and being left with only a daughter to care for: “A child is no fulfillment to a mature man or woman.” Jackson had been especially pleased with this key psychological point—a “fundamental difference” between Jim and Ruth Harron—and could not forgive its peremptory deletion: “In all my experience (radio writing, movies, books) I have never known or heard of such a thing happening—not, in fact, since school days when your teacher took the liberty of blue-penciling one of your grammar-school compositions.”
But it was, of course, the financial side of things that rankled most. Both Charlie and Rhoda believed that the publisher had “just allowed [The Outer Edges] to die,” though Stanley Rinehart showed facts and figures to Baumgarten that “undoubtedly” proved he’d spent more on promotion than sales warranted, and was even then throwing bad money after good (“There is more advertising to come”). But Jackson was not appeased. As far as he was concerned, Rinehart had never taken proper advantage of the better reviews, and given the relative success—financial and critical—of his first two novels, this was nothing less than a matter of “criminal negligence”: “The very thought of Rinehart sickens me at this point … from the beginning, Rinehart has never had a proper appreciation of what they have in me.” It came as no surprise, then, when Baumgarten wrote the publisher on November 19, 1948, asking that Jackson be released from their option on his next novel. Rinehart’s response was gracious but pointed. He reminded Baumgarten that she, too, had expressed misgivings about following The Fall of Valor with the murder story, and regretted that “Charlie’s very considerable financial problems have taken precedence over his freedom as a writer”: “I hope you will tell Charlie that our faith in his ability as one of America’s foremost creative writers is unshaken, and that we are only too sorry that he should lay on us the sole responsibility for his last book.”
Meanwhile Jackson had decided to return to his first publisher, John Farrar, who for his part would always be proud of the fact that he’d “battled for [The Lost Weekend] and insisted on its publication”—indeed, the novel had been the next-to-last book he’d added to the Farrar & Rinehart list before leaving in 1944 to do war work in Africa. On his return the following year, Farrar had joined with the young Roger Straus, Jr., to form Farrar, Straus & Company, which would struggle along with a modest list until 1950, when Gayelord Hauser’s Look Younger, Live Longer ensured the firm’s prosperity with its wildly popular advice about the virtues of low toilet seats, yogurt, and blackstrap molasses. What was important to Jackson at the time, however, was that Farrar had almost unparalleled faith in him as a writer. “You have so fine a chance to be one of our American novelists who can sustain and maintain a great talent,” the publisher had written him on March 1, 1946. “Whether you go on being a free and amazingly acute writer of fiction, or fall into the welter of what I have found to be the publishing and writing scene, and some of its tendencies, on my return to it, I wouldn’t know. Forgive me for this avuncular frankness.” But Jackson didn’t mind his frankness at all—on the contrary: such a goad to high seriousness was precisely what he wanted after going (as he saw it) somewhat astray in recent years, and never mind “the practically unheard-of royalty rate of 20%” that Farrar was offering by way of compensation for the firm’s rather modest advances. Jackson’s contract stipulated a story collection to be published in 1950 that would “keep [his] name alive” until What Happened began to appear (or so was the hope) in 1952.3
Everything would have been just about perfect, if not for the fact that John Farrar was, alas, a dreadful bore. His visit to Six Chimney Farm, in April 1949, had left Jackson more than a little rattled: “By Saturday noon I thought I’d go nuts (some day I’ll write a character sketch of him and call it BUT WHAT I STARTED OUT TO SAY WAS), I found I had nothing to discuss with him at all …” Four months later, however—and not a moment too soon—Jackson finally met Farrar’s partner, Roger Straus, when they attended the Marlboro College Fiction Writers’ Conference that summer. Having spent the previous night chez Farrar in Lyndonville, Vermont, Jackson might have seemed pensive that day, or so he struck Straus’s wife on her first-ever glimpse of the “small and plump” man in his “neat buttercup-yellow” Brooks shirt: “In spite of his meticulous grooming, he had the vulnerable, wistful air of a Charlie Chaplin Tramp.”
Whatever else the Strauses were, they were not boring, and both had storied pasts. The thirty-two-year-old Roger came from two of the most prominent Jewish families in America: his mother was a Guggenheim, while the Strauses had founded Macy’s Department Store and Roger’s paternal grandfather, Oscar, had been the country’s first Jewish cabinet member (Secretary of Commerce and Labor in Theodore Roosevelt’s administration). At age twenty-one Roger had married an intellectual childhood friend, Dorothea Leibmann (whose grandfather had owned the Rheingold brewery), and the two pursued a literary life as a matter of temperament—they were both well-read, charming eccentrics who enjoyed the company of writers. The couple’s charm, in fact, was hardly incidental to their success, given that Roger considered himself a gentleman publisher to whom money was, well, secondary; as he liked to say, he’d always wanted to be “a proper, important, medium-sized literary publisher,” and in that respect he would suc
ceed brilliantly. “If you’re an author and have an editor who’s interested in your work,” said his son, Roger III, “you think, My God, I’ve died and gone to Heaven. But to have a publisher who’s interested in your work—and a publisher who also owns the goddam place—that’s an aphrodisiac the like of which authors don’t come by very often.”
To Charles Jackson it was nothing less than a dream come true: a golden couple, rich and witty and sophisticated, who became (as Dorothea put it) “members ex-officio of his family” and published his work to boot! “I’d be so happy,” he wrote Dorothea, a few months after that first meeting in Marlboro, “if now, right this minute, the Strauses could come in, sit down, and I could enjoy with you the kind of feast of good talk that we have had before, though, as I say, I have never yet had enough. There’s only one thing to do about it: we all just have to manage, somehow, to get ourselves shipwrecked on a desert island together.” Charlie, at his best, was scintillating company—“puckish, penetrating, opinionated, full of insight, and rich in reference,” as Max Wylie described him—and the Strauses were his ideal interlocutors, cultured and not a little naughty. Roger, also a dandy (a great wearer of cravats and lilac socks), was legendary for his salty, flirtatious gossip (“Listen, Baby … ”), and neither of the Strauses was much inclined to look askance at Charlie’s excesses. Their townhouse on East 70th became almost a personal pied-à-terre for Jackson, where he could let himself go and to hell with consequences; one of Roger III’s earliest memories is the time he walked in on Jackson, vomiting into his toilet. Indeed, for the Strauses’ benefit, Charlie was even willing to parade his dark side at home in Orford, a performance foreshadowed on their arrival by an “unshaven, wild-eyed” appearance (“the family man had gone under”), though generally deferred until his children were safely in bed. “He was never loud,” Dorothea remembered, “but curiously menacing and willfully self-destructive. The alcoholic and homosexual at these times strutted exhibitionistically before the footlights, the husband, father, and friend having made an exit, seemingly never to reappear.” But reappear he/they almost always did—“rested and rosy,” in fact, and ready for a picnic or some other wholesome family fun. As for his homosexual persona: with the Strauses, at least, he was quite unabashed about it, even a little shameless. “I’m willing to share a bath with someone,” he wrote Roger, when the latter offered him a room at the Lotos Club. “If the other occupant is tall dark and handsome, I’ll be big about it and share more than that.”