Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  But it was Dorothea who excited his greatest love. Slender, intense, yet oddly dispassionate about people (Charlie’s “violent swings did not disturb me, nor did I feel pity for him”), she had a fondness for Edwardian finery—wide-brimmed hats, veils, and the like—that made her husband’s foppery seem almost modest in comparison, and her passionate knowledge of Proust, Tolstoy, and Mann was nearly the equal of Jackson’s. “Truly, darling Dolly,” he wrote her, “if ever anybody in this world brought out the best in me, it is you.” Sometimes she was “Dolly,” but in letters Charlie was apt to address her as “Madame Straus” (or simply “Madame”), in homage to Proust’s great confidante, Madame Émile Straus, salonnièrre and widow of Bizet. It was the sort of thing she grasped without elaboration, making her the perfect receptacle for Charlie’s unself-conscious (and generally unsober) outpourings about whatever he happened to be reading or rereading (“Levin so often just misses being a boob, don’t you think?”) and, above all, writing: “I am embarked on a world Masterpiece,” he enthused in 1965, when first inspired to write a modern novel entirely in Pushkin sonnets, “humbly grateful for this thing that seems to be passing through me, that I am merely the instrument of … oh, all this sounds so high-flown but it’s true.” It was this aspect of Charlie’s letters and life—the gulf (so vast in his case) between the budding idea and the problematic execution thereof—that Dorothea remembered best: “I do not know what literary rank Charles Jackson will hold in time or whether he will even be remembered,” she wrote, five years after his death. “But of this I am certain: the stirrings of his imagination, whatever their results, were kindred to the masters he loved.”

  And then, of course, again, he was just a splendid companion—a man whose joie de vivre was radiant and transforming. Dorothea remembered one gorgeous spring day she sauntered along Fifth Avenue with Charlie, who was resplendent in a glen plaid suit, straw hat, and bow tie (“like the pinioned wings of a butterfly”). When his well-being was at its utmost, he simply had to buy presents: a rare edition of Tolstoy (lovingly inscribed on the spot) for Dorothea; a heart-shaped paperweight for Roger; an enamel Easter egg for Sarah; a box of paints for Kate; a dress for Rhoda (“who would accuse him, later, with some justice, of insane extravagance”). And finally they sat on the Plaza fountain amid the tulips and lunching office girls. “I did not care that my holiday was unreal too,” Dorothea wrote, “triggered by the weather and the scene, intensified by the alert antennae of the sad-comic little Charlie Chaplin man at my side.”

  AFTER THE RETRENCHMENT PLAN went into effect in the fall of 1948, Jackson lost no time violating his pledge to work exclusively on What Happened. Because he needed money—and because of sheer trepidation toward his masterwork—Jackson instead wrote a long story about the Bloomer family, “Tenting Tonight,” that he’d been contemplating ever since his last story, “A Dream of Horace,” had been published as “Funny Dream” almost four years earlier in The New Yorker. The core of “Tenting Tonight” was to be his childhood trip to the Bloomer’s summer compound near Sodus Point—but, as he readily admitted, the story was really just “an excuse to describe everything I know about the [Bloomer] family,” especially their beautifully appointed (by Newark standards) home on East Avenue: the glass doorknobs, music room, and individual studies for each child, the little delicacies (like powdered sugar) they took for granted. Indeed, he went on at such lavish length that it took almost twenty-five pages to come to the climactic moment, such as it was, when “Clyde Blanchard” (based on Harrison, the Bloomer boy nearest Charlie’s age) tries to serve eggs to his fellow campers: “He called for us to be seated when the cataclysm came.… the pan turned upside down in his hand and the eggs all spilled with a small sickening plop in the sand. Without a word, he gave us one awful look and suddenly burst into tears.” Hardly a “cataclysm,” and the rest of the trip is summarized in rather perfunctory terms until another droll moment at the end, when little Don Birnam disgraces himself by replying “I will if I’m asked” when Mrs. Blanchard expresses the cordial wish that he come again next year.

  Rhoda disliked the story (“she thought it tedious, verbose, very rambling, and ‘talked’ rather than written”), so Charlie was all the more gratified when Baumgarten declared it “charming”: it had “the authentic air of shining wonder that most of us lose at twelve.” Moreover she knew exactly where to send it, since an editor at Good Housekeeping, Margaret Cousins, had written recently to say that her boss, Herb Mayes, was aware that Jackson would soon be publishing a book of stories and would likely have something to submit. Jackson was naturally delighted when the magazine bought “Tenting Tonight” for $2,500, though sobered when he saw what selling to mass-market “slicks” was apt to entail: without a word of warning, Good Housekeeping changed his title to the egregious “Thanks for a Wonderful Time,” and not only made drastic cuts in the text but actually rewrote certain passages! Baumgarten, however, told him not to worry: “Nobody who reads the magazine is likely ever to read your books. When your books come out you will have your stories exactly as you want them.”

  With that in mind, Jackson promptly got to work on another long story about the early years of Don Birnam, “Sophistication,” which recounts his time as a dreamy fifteen-year-old reporter and factotum for the Newark Courier (called the Arcadia Blade in this story and others). At the outset Don idolizes his blandly charming boss, Marvin Tyndall (based on Allyn Gilbert, who’d recently died), and ludicrously romanticizes the man’s affair with another employee, a coarse mustachioed woman named Arlene Arthur (Gilbert’s rumored paramour, Hester Herbert), who dissembles her wantonness with a lot of pious organ-playing at church every Sunday. Don, meanwhile, imagines himself “a kind of other-spirit, an androgynous twin to each,” who abets their affair by coming along for “little office dinners” with the couple in public, and composes poetry comparing their “high adulterous love” to that of Lancelot and Guinevere. By far the best scene in the story was, unfortunately, the very scene that all but guaranteed its rejection by the high-paying slicks—when Tyndall stops his car while driving Don home and delivers a little sermon on the sanctity of marriage (his marriage in particular):

  “… But you know something? Not once in all those fourteen years that I’ve been married to Ruth Whitcomb, not once, mind you, have I ever laid eyes on her naked. Or even so much as caught a glimpse of her bare—well, breasts. And that’s God’s truth so help me.” He sank back, as if exhausted; but the lonely intense eyes still looked challengingly into Don’s. “Now do you believe me, what I said about marriage? That’s what I meant when I said it was holy.…”

  Both were silent. Don thought that he had never felt so alone in someone else’s presence as he now felt sitting side by side with Marvin Tyndall.

  Margaret Cousins rejected the story—Jackson had regretfully declined to cut the “questionable” scene—and saw little hope for it elsewhere, though she found “a lot of truth” in it and deplored the “namby pamby” magazine market. As usual Jackson hoped The New Yorker might take it, and as usual they passed: not only was the magazine rather puritanical in its own right, at least during the Harold Ross era, but also its editors probably found the story too prolix, as once again Jackson had indulged in longueurs of almost Proustian nicety, as if these stories were part of something far larger (as perhaps they were): Jackson “explores a situation more thoroughly and leisurely than he did in his fast-moving novels,” the jacket copy for The Sunnier Side would read. “Thus it might be said that while his novels read like short stories, his short stories, paradoxically, read like novels.” Jackson himself, at any rate, was philosophical about the unsalability of “Sophistication”: The story “has done a good deal for me,” he wrote Baumgarten, “—broken down the mysterious dam that was holding so much back and for so long.” His view of his adolescent self had hitherto been so cynical that he could hardly evoke the youth sympathetically, but here he thought he’d managed it at last, and from now on the reader woul
d follow this Don into “all sorts of trouble.”

  But months passed and nothing else, or very little, came. Stalled on his novel and stymied, too, about how to write short stories that would satisfy his artistic conscience yet also pay the bills, Jackson had begun to lose hope (“Really it seems as though I ought to come to New York and take a job”) when Good Housekeeping forwarded a fan letter from Miss Luceine Heniore, an old Newarkian who now lived on the Upper East Side. “Thank you so very much for writing ‘Thanks for a wonderful time,’ ” the letter began. Heniore was roughly ten years older than Jackson (“I am of the era of Ethel Nicholoy, Bernice Coyne and Eula Burgess”) but remembered him as a boy and had been following his career with great interest: It was a “real pleasure,” therefore, to finally read a Charles Jackson story that was so “clean and delightful”—that his own mother could “show [it] with pride to her friends”! At first, no doubt, Jackson read the letter with rue: having been congratulated for leaving out sex, murder, and any mention of a “personality problem,” he might have found it ironic that at least two of the women Heniore had mentioned as contemporaries—the most popular girls of their time, part of a threesome known as “the great triumvirate”—had actually led sordid lives involving sex and personality problems in spades.

  But then, giddily, he got an idea.

  For the next four days, Jackson rose at three in the morning and worked straight through (well stimulated) until ten at night. The result was a genre-defying work that opened with that fan letter from Miss Heniore, or rather “Miss Dorothy Brenner,”4 and proceeded with an eighty-page response from Charles Jackson—or “Charles Jackson,” a character in his own story, whose older sister Thelma, to take an odd instance, is called by her Birnam name, Rachel. In the course of recollecting the great triumvirate’s various fates—poverty, violent death, nymphomania, and alcoholism—“Charles Jackson” undertakes to explain to “Miss Brenner” why looking on “the sunnier side” is, for a writer, dull, untruthful, and artistically inept (“ ‘Fine feelings are the stuff that bad literature is made of,’ writes André Gide”). Thus, repeatedly, he interrupts the narrative to call attention to his own artifice—the extent to which, even now, he’s manipulating so-called real life to tell a story in the most diverting and believable (and therefore often morbid) way. Or not. What author in his right mind, for example, would advert to the quasi-idyllic nature of his hometown by dubbing it “Arcadia”? How baldly, fatuously obvious! And yet, when life hands you such material on a plate, so to speak, what to do? Oh, and should he really point out that “Fig” Newton married a man who exactly resembled her own doting father? “My God,” Jackson remarks, “by that time the reader is practically writing the story for himself. He has read his Freud and knows exactly what’s coming next.… But the same thing goes for Fig Newton’s very name (‘Fig’ Newton—why I wouldn’t dare!) … ”

  So unorthodox, at the time, was this “strange box of mirrors”—as the scholar Louis Paskoff characterized it, comparing it to the metafictional trickery of Borges and Nabokov (who were followed by Barth, Barthelme, and myriad other American “post-realists” in the 1960s)—that the Times Literary Supplement of London, reviewing The Sunnier Side in 1950, actually presumed to chastise the author for making “the elementary mistake of interrupting his narrative in order to lecture the reader on the art of composition and truthfulness to nature.” Jackson’s publisher, however, “wish[ed] to go on record”—that is, in advertisements and jacket copy—“as claiming that the title story, ‘The Sunnier Side,’ will rapidly become a classic, unique, unlike anything we have ever read.” And so it might have transpired, were it not for the fact that the story (or novella, or essay, or whatever one chooses to call it), for all its innovation and readability, is a little less than first rate. The writing is slapdash in places, and some of the dialogue is painful (“Listen, stupe … We’re not in Arcadia now. You might as well get used to the idea, Eudora’s a nympho and dipso from way back”). Which is to say, once again, that haste and pills had impaired the author’s better judgment—and yet, were it not for haste and pills, it’s doubtful he would have written “The Sunnier Side” (or much else) in the first place.

  Be that as it may, Jackson knew at the time that he’d written something special—“a wonderful short story” that would serve as “a kind of apologia” for his collection, though he and Baumgarten had scant hope of selling it to the slicks; rather it was submitted to Partisan Review, which couldn’t accommodate an eighty-two-page typescript, and then to Saturday Review in hopes that the magazine would devote an entire issue to it, as The New Yorker had done with John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Finally Margaret Cousins was given a look, and Jackson was abidingly “astonished” when she offered five thousand dollars to publish the piece in Cosmopolitan, another magazine edited by her and Mayes, and known (at the time) for more serious fiction than Good Housekeeping. “[‘The Sunnier Side’] says so much about a subject that magazine readers need to hear,” wrote Cousins, who furthermore gave personal reasons for deciding to run the story in all its ungainly length (deleting only some profanity and a reference to masturbation): in the small west Texas town where she’d grown up, Cousins explained, the three most popular girls had been called the Three Graces—Louisa, Savannah, and Floy—and had seemed destined for the charmed lives they’d always known as girls. “I do not know whether it will surprise you when I tell you that Louisa became Louise Lawson, a New York show girl who was murdered in her tub in one of New York’s unsolved crimes,” Cousins wrote Jackson.

  I believe a book named The Canary Murder Case was written about it. Savannah married a man named Custis who became a fantastic millionaire in oil. He kept a mistress for twenty years and immediately after Savannah died in the agonies of cancer, he married this woman who had destroyed Savannah’s home. Floy, who came of a strait-laced household … was not allowed to marry the man she fell in love with, because she “would be lowering” herself. She docilely accepted her mother’s choice, bore five children in rapid succession, threatened her husband with a butcher knife and was carted off to a madhouse, where she still resides.…

  You can understand why THE SUNNIER SIDE struck me between the eyes.

  Seeing that Cousins was indeed invested, Jackson pressed her to publish his enormous story in the March 1950 issue because, for one, he didn’t want to postpone the April publication of his collection, but mainly because Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees was being serialized in Cosmopolitan beginning in February. As Charlie excitedly wrote his agent, “They’re bound to feature him big in the February issue and not so big in the March—maybe even behind me!” And lo, it came to pass: the cover of the March issue gave top billing to THE SUNNIER SIDE by CHARLES JACKSON, followed (in smaller letters) by Hemingway, Faith Baldwin, and other lesser lights. “It’s fun to know that the whole story was written as a reply to my letter (very clever),” wrote a bemused Luceine Heniore on March 26.

  THE SUBTITLE OF The Sunnier Side was Twelve Arcadian Tales, since Jackson’s most recent stories gave him enough to discard earlier work (mostly inferior in any case) that wasn’t set in Arcadia. Carl Brandt applauded his client’s book as “a distinguished job,” and thought it could easily be published as a thematically unified novel, but Jackson himself was opposed to the idea—perhaps because he intended to use much the same material for a bona fide novel, What Happened, and besides he was particularly fond of only four stories: “Rachel’s Summer,” “Palm Sunday, “The Sunnier Side,” and a comic story titled “The Benighted Savage” about a boy caught masturbating by his father.5 That said, he was unequivocally pleased by his new publisher’s packaging of the book: the dust jacket was a handsome robin’s egg blue with pink pigeons, reminiscent of the dyed pigeons released at Fig Newton’s “pink party” in “The Sunnier Side,” in further tribute to which the Strauses launched the book with a “pink party” at their townhouse. According to the Hartford Courant, the guest of honor appeared wearing a light
blue polka-dot tie and pink carnation (“At last report no one saw any big pink elephants on leaving,” the reporter slyly quipped).

  Reviews for The Sunnier Side were so overwhelmingly positive that, a few weeks after publication, The New York Times Book Review quantified the matter for its “In and Out of Books” column: “Only five reviewers out of fifty-seven who spoke up on Charles Jackson’s ‘The Sunnier Side’ didn’t approve. Fourteen gave ground reluctantly and thirty-eight plumped for it.” One of those in the middle category was the Times’s daily reviewer Charles Poore, who found the stories “penetratingly written” but so sordid the volume might have been titled “The Seamier Side.” However—writing for the Sunday Times and Herald Tribune respectively—both Alice Morris and Frederic Morton commended Jackson, in effect, for what Morris called his “simple, unpretentious, almost offhand gift for story-telling,” and Morton went so far as to make a claim for the author’s uniqueness: “It is not possible to squeeze Mr. Jackson’s technique into any one school. First and foremost he is a creator of his own world.” Other reviewers, prompted in part by the book’s jacket copy (“the collection has a unity comparable to WINESBURG, OHIO, of which this is, perhaps, the modern counterpart”), thought Jackson bore quite obvious comparison to Sherwood Anderson, for better and for worse: The Providence Journal thought Jackson wrote “more concisely, flexibly, and surely than Anderson did,” whereas The Boston Globe flatly declared that Jackson (“obvious, slick, commercial”) was “no Sherwood Anderson.”