by Blake Bailey
By the summer of 1949—having written “The Benighted Savage” and “Sophistication” in the meantime, but not yet “The Sunnier Side”—Jackson was so fed up with his own dithering and financial woes that he thought surely, at last, he’d have to accept defeat and find a job in New York (“My God I’m even incapable of decisions these days”). By early 1950, however, he claimed to be writing what sounded like the opening passage of What Happened, informing Boom that he was looking out his window at the “snowy landscape” while trying to describe “the very same scene in terms of early August and full summer,” as he does in the initial pages of “Preview” (which wouldn’t be finished for another four years). By June, alas, he was stumped again: “Everything I put down on paper reads to me, an hour later, like sheer crap,” he wrote Baumgarten, whose frequent offers to read the manuscript were always politely refused. Indeed, Jackson admitted that he himself could hardly bear to read the thing anymore, much less write it, though by the end of that year, 1950, he told a reporter for The Dartmouth that he’d written “about 800 pages” and expected the finished novel to be at least twice that long.
But a curious thing, one that bears repeating: as Jackson readily admitted, the long “Arcadian Tales” he’d recently been writing, while also claiming to write What Happened, were composed of “the same material” that “[would] turn up in” his novel (albeit “in a different way”), such that he’d even considered titling the “Arcadia” section of The Sunnier Side—as it was then conceived, before he decided to drop the non-Arcadian stories—“Notes for a Novel.”
In all likelihood, though, he was working on every conceivable thing but his novel—save, perhaps, for occasional pages that failed to measure up to the almost Platonic ideal he’d imagined for his masterpiece. Everything else was so much slumming in comparison, even relatively ambitious work like “The Visiting Author.” Begun in December 1948, this Jamesian story about “the peculiar fish that a writer is” drew on his experiences in Bermuda, when he’d done a certain amount of socializing with pilots at an Army base in St. George’s (so a Visitor’s Pass among his papers would suggest). In the story, one of the pilot’s wives fancies herself a writer, and presses one of her stories on the Jackson-like protagonist, Benton Hargrave, who in turn seduces her. Later, the woman’s husband drunkenly boasts about bombing German civilians, whereupon Hargrave lets him know by innuendo that he’s been cuckolded—partly a matter of indignant reprisal, this, but also fodder for a story Hargrave hopes to write, “which” (so reads the final line, à la “The Sunnier Side”) “like any story worth the telling, would bear little relation to, and be far more interesting than, the dull original.” Whatever “the dull original” consisted of, one wonders how much duller it could have been than “The Outlander” (as the story was ultimately titled), which takes seventy pages to make the feeble point that writers are “freaks” who “will do anything for material,” as Jackson explained to Mary McCarthy, adding that he’d originally wanted Hargrave to sleep with both wife and husband (“I was talked out of it, like a fool”). The final product, anyway, hardly seems worth the fourteen months of intermittent labor he poured into it, while his wife, agent, and others were clamoring for What Happened.
And just as Jackson was finishing “The Outlander” in February 1950, he got started on a short “memoir in the form of a novel” about Bronson Winthrop, alternately titled Uncle Mr. Kember or The Royalist. Jackson thought he could dash the book off with his left hand, and confidently pitched it to Roger Straus for his fall 1950 list: “The book has everything, humor, pathos, real social comment, and I feel very strongly it would have a wide popular sale on the order of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.…” Scribbled in the margin: “Movie and play possibilities—also N.Y. pieces—on account of original characterization.” But after an “excellent beginning” of thirty or so pages, Jackson experienced what was becoming a familiar dilemma: “a kind of block or protest against writing it two ways, one way for the story, another way for its later inclusion in the novel.” Far from making the fall list, Jackson took almost five months just to recognize this impasse, and would never return to the manuscript except in a speculative way.
The following February, 1951—a month after that optimistic New Year’s resolution in the Times about finishing his novel, which of course had followed months of intensive teaching at Marlboro—Jackson wrote a sketch about his time in Zurich with Ralph Eaton, “Old Men and Boys,” which he hoped would be the first in a long salable series about his Switzerland years. With, again, visions of a smash Broadway play resulting from his efforts (“my fondest dream at the moment, one that will keep me solvent for some time to come”), Jackson managed to write four more stories in five days, including one about the Mumm family, “Ping Pong,” which focused on the time Olili’s paddle was smashed because of the swastika inked on its handle. Dubbing the whole series Crazy Americans (“a title that connotes Europeans’ regard of us, and is also a selling title”), Jackson advised Baumgarten to send all five pieces to The New Yorker, which was known for its light-comic serials such as Clarence Day’s Life with Father and Sally Benson’s St. Louis vignettes. A long month later, however, William Maxwell rejected the stories with his usual decorous, nicely considered letter:
In spite of fine moments here and there … the overall effect seems to us of something—of a great deal, actually—held back. I think it is simply the emotional content of the experience that is missing. Mr. Jackson’s admiration for the monumental achievement of Thomas Mann may have tied his hands, so to speak. Remarkable though The Magic Mountain is, it’s only one man’s vision. Mr. Jackson’s Davos completely recaptured would undoubtedly have its own interest and validity. Whether it would be better as a continuous narrative than as short pieces, he alone, of course, can know.
This time, on reflection, Jackson was inclined to agree, and asked Baumgarten to withdraw the stories for good. Maxwell, after all, had picked up on the fact that Jackson had aimed his prose at a middlebrow market, while reserving his real firepower, as ever, for What Happened, where of course the Davos material and so much else were ultimately meant to appear.
And so at last—“desperately in debt”—Jackson began slumming in earnest. “The Problem Child,” he bleakly confessed, was “strictly from hunger”: the story of a middle-aged drinker named Grace Dana, it traced all the author’s favorite truisms about alcoholism. “There was something fine and delicate about her,” the heroine’s boyfriend, Smith Weston, tensely reflects, “an imagination, a vitality, a gift for life, that tragically was all going the wrong direction.… On the other hand, he had enough sense to know that she had to stop drinking for herself first, not for him; otherwise it wouldn’t hold.” The most non-hackneyed part of the story is the end, which—like almost every line of The Lost Weekend—is informed by Jackson’s weird objectivity toward his own narcissism: Grace considers killing herself with pills, the better to teach Smith a lesson, until she realizes she won’t be around to savor his reaction; instead she flushes the pills down the toilet, leaves the empty jar in plain sight, and passes out on the couch to give him a good scare. “No one, of course, has approached his classical treatment of the alcoholic,” wrote a surprisingly dour-sounding Maxwell, “and this story, it seems to me, doesn’t approach it either.” The editors of Women’s Home Companion, however, were only too happy to take a piece about alcoholism from Charles Jackson, paying $2,500 for “Last Laughter,” as the story was retitled when it finally appeared in the June 1952 issue.
JACKSON’S UPS AND DOWNS were taking a toll. On April 14, 1950—the day after publication of The Sunnier Side—Earl Wilson included the following item in his syndicated “On Broadway” column: “Charles Jackson, author of ‘The Lost Weekend,’ whose going on the wagon was famous, now takes a drink or three … ” This came to the notice of Jackson’s prissy aunt Charlotte, who fired off a note to Boom: “That is bad, Frederick … If Rhoda was smart—she would not have cocktails herself or serve it. It would be
too bad for her and their daughters if he slipped back.” Probably word had leaked about Jackson’s latest hospitalization, two weeks before, at Mary Hitchcock—a messy business, according to records. On admission he groggily insisted his wife not be contacted, and later that night was found lying on the floor after what appeared to be a half-hearted suicide attempt: “He had a bottle of yellow capsules,” noted a nurse. “Stated he had taken capsules.” The next day, dressed and packed and stoned on pills, Jackson announced he was going home, whereupon Dr. Gundersen was gotten on the phone to talk him back into bed; nine days later he lay there still, in a state of sweat-drenched withdrawal (“diaphoresis”).
That autumn Rhoda remarked to Boom that her morale was “persistently low.” Charlie’s absences during the week, while he taught at Marlboro, only made weekends worse than ever, since he felt all the more constrained to take pills in order to catch up on his writing. In November they decided to sell the house—the Strauses had offered the use of their summer home in Purchase, New York (“they’d do anything for Charlie”)—which at least gave Rhoda the hope of a new beginning, without debts, so that Charlie could get on with his work relatively free of anxiety. “Maybe life will be better,” she wrote. “Anyhow it can’t be worse.”
On that point she was decidedly mistaken. More than three years would pass before the house was finally sold, and meanwhile Charlie’s behavior remained unpredictable at best. In late January 1951, he went to New York for a weeklong vacation with the Strauses, who, as Dorothea remembered, listened to their guest’s “endless talking” about his novel and “watched helplessly” as he went from beer to straight whiskey. Finally, on the day of his departure (he was supposed to be in Marlboro), Jackson was so stupefied that his friends called a doctor—or rather several, since their usual doctor refused to come (“I don’t treat drunks”), and others were equally obdurate. The man who finally appeared (“I can’t stand alcoholics”) carried his bag into the library where Jackson lay on the couch, then emerged “like a startled deer” a moment later: “I’ve given him something,” he said, agreeing to stick around, at a distance, while the Strauses tried to find someone to take Charlie back to Vermont. This proved to be Harl Cook—the raffish stepson of Susan Glaspell, a celebrated writer Jackson had met in Truro five summers ago—who also carried what appeared to be a doctor’s bag as he urged Jackson to his feet. “Charlie looked up at him with obvious relief,” wrote Dorothea, “and there was an expression in his almond-shaped Tartar eyes that reminded me of a young girl about to be whirled away by an attractive, sophisticated dancing partner, admiration mingling with an awakening attraction.” The next morning Cook reported that his bag had contained a bottle of liquor, and once Jackson had taken a nip (“I’m an old hand at managing these types”) he’d slept soundly on the train and arrived in Vermont “none the worse for wear.”
But no. Alerted by Roger, Rhoda had phoned the Whetstone Inn that evening and discovered that her husband was, in fact, still very drunk; asking the management to keep an eye on him, she drove to Marlboro and eventually found him around midnight in Brattleboro, all but incoherent yet determined to catch the 3:00 a.m. train back to New York. After coffee and food at a diner, Rhoda persuaded him to stay in Marlboro, and the next day she drove him home. “We’re in a drying out phase just now,” she wrote Boom afterward, “but I’m afraid he isn’t really drying out. I think he still has pills somewhere and is keeping himself going with them.” But he denied this, and since complete withdrawal was apt to result in a “terrifying depression,” Rhoda agreed to dose him with paraldehyde at night; presently, though, she found “a giant jar of pills” and some loose pills too, and soon he was impelled to return (still “ambulatory,” according to records) to Mary Hitchcock and the kindly Sven Gundersen, who understood his need to indulge in “periodic bursts” of pill-taking for the sake of his writing—or rather, Charlie claimed that the doctor understood it. “Which is what discourages me so,” said Rhoda. “I disbelieve Sven’s statement, if he made it.”
A lull of about seven weeks followed, until the night of March 15, 1951—three days after Maxwell’s mass rejection of the Davos stories—when Jackson had a serious car accident while driving to Marlboro. According to the Brattleboro Reformer, Jackson was heading south along Route 5 in the vicinity of Westminster when he drifted over the center line and plowed his—that is, the Strauses’—sedan head-on into a car driven by one Ida Monte. The fronts of both cars were demolished, but, miraculously, Monte and her passenger, Arthur Karones, suffered only minor injuries, while Jackson seemed to emerge without a scratch. He was, however, vividly intoxicated, and after a night in jail he pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of driving under the influence, for which the judge suspended his license and fined him $75 plus costs ($8.05). Unfortunately the incident was picked up by the AP wire and got a good deal of publicity: “AUTHOR OF LOST WEEKEND LOSES ONE HIMSELF” read the headline in the New York Journal American, while on the other coast Franny Ferrer spotted the news on the front page of the Herald Express. Jackson affected bemusement at all the fuss: “Well good God,” he wrote Dorothea, “where did they ever think that the author of The Lost Weekend got his material?”
But in truth he was quite chastened, and promptly agreed to resume seeing a psychiatrist, Niels Anthonisen, at the Veterans Hospital in White River Junction. At first Jackson saw the man two times a week, but soon they were getting on so well that he increased it to three (which meant Rhoda had to drive one hundred fifty miles a week for this errand alone). Dr. Anthonisen—“Tony” to Jackson—was a small, fiftyish Norwegian with big ears (“he looks like the Seven Dwarfs rolled into one”), who followed the usual Freudian protocol of saying very little, although (unlike Kubie) he did face his patients and seem attentive enough, his head cocked always to one side. Also he was a cultured man who loved Shakespeare and made a point of reading Charlie’s books,3 and when he chose to speak, he did so with spirit and candor. Once, he observed that The Lost Weekend wasn’t quite “terrible enough,” and Jackson huffily replied, “I’m not exactly Dostoyevsky!” “That’s true, you’re not,” said the doctor; then: “Well, why aren’t you?” Another time Charlie was volubly holding forth (“in my usual self-interested fashion”), when he noticed Anthonisen shaking his head. “Mr. Jackson,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody else in my life who needs love as badly as you do.” As Charlie recalled many years later, “I almost burst into tears; I didn’t know it showed that plain; nor did I know it was that true.”
ONE OF THE WORST aspects of Jackson’s drunk-driving imbroglio was the way certain neighbors seemed deliberately to make pointed remarks around his children. “Jesus, what a cruel community!” he wrote Dorothea. “But it’s amazing, and gratifying, how little it has bothered Sarah and Kate—in fact not at all. It’s wonderful what they can take—and I do think it is because they know they are so much loved at home. They asked me about it, I told them, they assimilated, and that’s all there is to it.” His daughters would not have disagreed. After Charlie’s death, Dorothea kept in touch with her goddaughter, Kate, and was bemused by how “unshared” their memories were of “Papa,” the different man Kate had known. As a father, that is, Jackson was all but unfailingly wise and kind and doting (“he always knew how to handle things”), careful not to expose his children to the mawkish, grandiose addict, much less the homosexual; indeed, his ability to compartmentalize these personae—under a single roof, yet—was simply astounding. As far as his daughters were concerned, the only real oddness was that he did spend a lot of time in his room, while the life of the house went on around him … quietly: “Papa’s working” or “Papa’s sleeping” were constant refrains, along with (after a night when loud music had rumbled behind his door) “Papa doesn’t feel well.” Then, too, he tended to drink a beer while playing cards with their grandmother, and sometimes there was a curious medicinal odor (“like butter rum Life Savers”) when they went in to kiss him good night.
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p; Charlie, in turn, was fascinated by the contrast between his daughters—as he wrote in Farther and Wilder, they “were so completely unlike that one could almost believe they were not only not sisters … but almost from different races.” This, of course, reflected their almost polar-opposite parents, whom they resembled in a curiously inverted way: Sarah was dark and almond-eyed like her father, but loyal, responsible, and literal-minded like her mother; Kate was fair and snub-nosed like her mother, but otherwise resembled her father to a perfectly turbulent tee. “They were like small mirrors of himself,” Jackson wrote, “one external, the other internal; and it was this constant twin-mirror that presented a small conflict in him that he had been unable to resolve.” It irked him, for one thing, that he could hardly dissemble a preference for Sarah, at least when the girls were children. Her obedience and solemn honesty—so unlike himself as a boy—delighted him. One day, in 1948, Sarah came home from school, upset, because some boys had taunted her at recess, yelling “Your father drinks whis-kee, your father drinks whis-kee!” Charlie, a little abashed, asked what she’d said. “Good old loyal Sarah spoke up vehemently in my defense,” he wrote the Gershwins. “ ‘I told them Papa does not,’ she said: ‘he never drinks it at all, he doesn’t like the taste of it … but Mama drinks it all the time.’ ”