Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  As for Kate, she was “brilliantly interesting” but “a pain in the ass to live with”: funny, talkative, precocious, and above all imaginative—an extravagant fabricator, in fact, who stuck to her stories with a kind of bitter determination when, as often happened, her father tried to expose her. This, he knew, was perversity on his part, but he couldn’t help it: “The secret inner mirror was all too clear. She could enrage him in the same way and for the same reasons that his own mother enraged him, precisely because he saw his own failings in them both—outrageously caricatured in his mother, perfectly matched in [Kate].” And yet he felt deeply sorry for her, too, in quite the same way he’d pitied himself as a child; for all her maverick high spirits, Kate was morbidly sensitive, and lonely, and Charlie knew she was bound to have a hard life.

  Both daughters adored him, and could talk to him with almost perfect ease. “Make Katie stop teasing me about my pubic hair!” the eleven-year-old Sarah demanded, and her father, intrigued (he “didn’t know she had any”), mildly drew her out until they were having a matter-of-fact discussion about sex: “I found out what Sarah knew and didn’t know, and filled in the gaps,” he wrote Dorothea. Together the girls liked to keep him company on his bed—“because it’s big and wide (and possibly, Dr. Freud, because it’s mine)”—and Charlie bore such lovely moments in mind when, say, he encountered Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams at the ballet one night, having drinks at intermission and discussing their travels in “Africa, Rome, Barcelona, Paris, et cetera.” At length Vidal asked Jackson what he did, and the latter purported to reply, “Why, I’m a bourgeois family man the year-round in a small town in New Hampshire.” Sensing the pair’s condescension, Jackson smugly reflected that a single moment of sweet rapport with his daughters “was worth all their Africas, Romes, Barcelonas, and wherever they might be free to go next.” Not long after, however, he explained to a magazine editor that Henry Price—his alter ego in “The Boy Who Ran Away,” an anxious father like himself—“unconsciously would like to be rid of his daughters, would really like to be free.”

  TWO MONTHS AFTER his car wreck, Jackson experienced a sudden renewal of energy that seemed to visit him almost yearly in spring.4 Right away he got to work on what would become one of his best stories, “The Break,” about a dramatic day in the life of twelve-year-old Don Birnam, who learns that six convicts have escaped from Auburn Prison, only forty miles from Arcadia. The first half of the story is a nostalgic evocation of the hikes Jackson took as a boy, past the asylum for “feeble-minded” women (who used to shout wild obscenities as he passed) and along the train tracks to the old maple sugar camp (Sugar Bush) outside of town. But when he reached the crucial part of his plot—Don encounters one of the escaped convicts in a culvert under the tracks—he was briefly stumped. The problem, he wrote Baumgarten, was that the main episode had no basis in real life: “And I find it increasingly hard to write make-believe. But then I’ve always found it hard to do that; and in that sense, perhaps I am not a real writer.” Aglow with seasonal euphoria, though, Jackson pressed ahead via his sure grasp of the boy he was—a born fabulist whose “chance to be a hero” would likely summon his most resourceful self: swearing “on his honor as a Boy Scout,” Don assures the desperate convict that he (Don) can stop a train long enough for the man to hop a freight car to Lake Ontario, but then betrays him to the engineer, Mr. Colvin, who alerts the police. Don feels a fleeting shame, and kindred alienation, when he sees the convict taken away at the station (“his small eyes staring straight ahead in lonely hatred”), but then remembers he’s a hero, after all, and begins “to look forward to the papers.”

  Jackson was thrilled when the story—the only one he’d “ever invented out of whole cloth,” and the first in almost two years he wasn’t ashamed of—promptly sold to Collier’s for $2,500. Sensing he was on a roll, he decided now was the time to tackle a novella he’d been considering for nearly a decade, Home for Good, about a writer who leaps suicidally from a train as it speeds through his hometown. “I should be giving that energy and even ‘material’ to The Novel,” he wrote the Strauses. “What I should be doing, of course, is a story that doesn’t require so much of oneself—but—this is the story that happened to turn up.” He hoped (in vain) to keep it under eighty pages and perhaps sell it to Cosmopolitan for $5,000, as he had “The Sunnier Side”; anyway, if it panned out, he promised “plain sailing on What Happened for months to come.”

  The Writer, needless to say, was an intensely romantic figure to Jackson—a role he loved to play, though the actual writing part was problematic—and some of his favorite stories (“Tonio Kröger,” James’s “The Middle Years”) were about writers. Home for Good, then, was to be his statement about the peculiar dilemmas of the American writer, though he’d long hesitated because he didn’t “feel up to it intellectually.” This time, though, he girded himself for the task with even more pills than usual, the better to cope with a breakneck, round-the-clock writing schedule that forced him to get words on paper with the least possible reflection (besides, if it wasn’t great, he could always tell himself he was keeping his best in store for What Happened). The Arcadian protagonist, Mercer Maitland, was essentially Charles Jackson disguised as Sinclair Lewis5; like the latter, Maitland is a murderously prolific author of caustic yet compassionate satires on American life—a parallel Jackson makes explicit when he writes of the hero’s first novel, Emily Sparks, as follows: it “did for (or perhaps to, as many people prefer to think) the American school teacher what Sinclair Lewis later did for the American businessman in Babbitt.” Like Lewis, too, Maitland is an antically boorish drunk (and pill-popper), though it’s often unclear whether his creator is quite aware of his boorishness as such.

  Perhaps the best way to describe Home for Good is as the writerly equivalent of Don Birnam’s “favorite daydream” in The Lost Weekend, wherein he imagines himself appearing at Carnegie Hall, blithely performing whatever pieces are thrown at him by a panel of experts. Maitland, in short, is the writer (and human being) Jackson would have dearly loved to be. He even goes so far as to mock his own paltry achievement, implicitly, by way of comparison with Maitland, “a man who knew how to write a true novel, not merely one of those disguised memoirs, a long-drawn-out short story, or a series of tenuous ‘sensitive’ episodes from a remembered childhood that had never really ended, such as so often pass for novels nowadays.” Somewhere in the subtext, however, was the fact that What Happened loomed in the offing, and hence in a lesser way Jackson might redeem himself as Maitland does, late in his career, as critics begin harping on his declining powers, when “suddenly, out of the blackness of defeat, [his novel] Stay, Illusion! burst upon a thunderstruck public.” But wait!—there’s posthumous redemption too: after the four relatively disappointing novels (of twenty-six total) that follow Stay, Illusion!, a final masterpiece is discovered: “Brilliantly it laid its finger on one of our deepest American compulsions—the desperation that drives us to succeed far beyond our powers, to keep up with the Joneses, to work harder and harder for more and more money.… The novel is called, of course, To Try Is To Die.” Not only is Maitland the triumphant author of every book Jackson ever considered writing, but also an “intransigent and incorruptible” artist who appears in Stockholm to refuse—in perfect Swedish—the Nobel Prize: “I decline it in the name of my betters, those great men of literature who, again and again and again, have been overlooked or ignored utterly by the Nobel Committee …” So the speech proceeds, unsparing, awesomely pompous, encompassing Cather, Chekhov, Dreiser, James, “Tolstoy, my God!”—and so on.

  But then, quite apart from the question of Maitland’s integrity, the Nobel Prize would only be ashes in his mouth as long as he doesn’t enjoy the approbation of little Arcadia, from which he sprang. Even the signal man who finds his battered corpse opposite the local train station, a dingy chalet, can’t help remembering him as a “figure of fun”; the only soul in town who ever foresaw his great destiny was a beloved four
th-grade teacher, Lucy Espenmiller, whom he cruelly “betrays”—as the town sees it—by using her as the model for the lonely spinster heroine of Emily Sparks. Arcadia does, however, concede Maitland’s international renown just enough to invite him to be guest speaker at the annual joint banquet of the Rotary, Elks, Lions, and Kiwanis Clubs, exploding into applause (“to his uttermost astonishment”) as he rises to speak. Afterward, Maitland greets his old neighbors with great folksy warmth, lest they mistake him as a celebrity (“which he loathed being, above all things”), or, heaven forbid, “a stuffed shirt”: “Why listen here, Alice Shaub! … Of course I remember you and of course I remember Rogers’ store and good God how could I ever forget it? I peddled papers for Rogers’ store …” Here was a man, after all, who would forever mourn the loss of his Arcadia High School class pin (“it had cost a hard-earned four-fifty and it was stamped AHS, ’12”), wishing that the Juan-les-Pins prostitute who’d stolen it had taken his platinum watch instead. And little wonder he eschews requests from the great libraries of Harvard and Yale (“et cetera”) for his vast manuscripts, relinquishing them instead to “little Arcadia Library where he had sat for so many, many hours, so long ago … and from which he had lugged home that ten pound [Shakespeare] Concordance.”

  In one respect, then, Home for Good is a rueful billet-doux to the village that had forsaken Charles Jackson (and whose library, indeed, would disdain any trace of his existence). Perhaps he wanted it known in Wayne County that—every time he passed through town aboard the Century a few minutes to midnight—he, like his hero, felt an urge to “dive out into that eternal Arcadian night where [he] belong[ed].” As the unnamed, Nick Carraway–like narrator (“the only friend [Maitland] ever managed to keep”) reflects at the end of this 120-page paean to misunderstood genius, Maitland longed, above all, to be “a regular guy”: “Like all artists he was a lonely man, and he coveted the commonplace; his deepest love and even admiration went out to what Thomas Mann calls ‘the simple, the average, the blue-eyed, and the ordinary.’ ”

  Jackson finished a draft in eight days, and saw that it was good. Rhoda, too, waxed enthusiastic, declaring it a “masterpiece” (a bit of rare hyperbole on her part, surely for the sake of her husband’s volatile morale). Exuberantly he wrote his mother that Home for Good would be published as a book in February, appearing in the meantime, he hoped, as a two-part serial in Cosmopolitan; but the big news (“hold your hats”) was that it would be dedicated to her—the first time—and what’s more it was clean (“there isn’t a naughty word in it”). Such were his high spirits that he decided not to be daunted overmuch by the misgivings of his agent Carl Brandt, who gently pointed out that general readers are unlikely to care about the problems of writers, and whereas the novella might find an audience as a book, its prospects for the magazine market were dim. On the same day Jackson wrote that celebratory note to his mother, he angrily reminded Brandt that he was an agent, not an editor: “My business is to write what I have to write and your business is to sell it, if you can.” As for Baumgarten, who’d also been skeptical (“But it’s not a story, Charlie, it’s a biography”)—well, all such sentiments were just “rubbish”: Had they not read “Tonio Kröger”? Cather’s A Lost Lady? And what about Schulberg’s latest, The Disenchanted? “If you didn’t get it, Carl, that’s your funeral, not mine,” he concluded. “I think the story is okay. It will never win for me the Nobel Prize, and maybe some day, if I decided to include it in a collection, I will want to re-do it with a lighter touch.… In any case, I am sending [Farrar, Straus] today the complete second, and I hope final, draft—final, I hope, because I’ve got to get back to WHAT HAPPENED.”

  It was Baumgarten who replied to this, noting that Brandt had already left for Europe and a good thing, too, as Charlie’s letter had been uncharacteristically harsh: Carl, she wrote, was very aware of his “pressing financial situation,” and therefore felt obliged to do everything in his power “to see that there are as few failures in the magazine market as possible”; Home for Good was a hard sell because of subject and length, and meanwhile, too, they needed to bring up Charlie’s book sales, and both she and Carl thought it “essential” they follow the story collection with “the big book,” not a novella. Nevertheless—as ever—she would do her best to sell Home for Good to the slicks, sending it to Jackson’s great fan at Cosmopolitan, Maggie Cousins, who read it with “profound interest” but decided to pass for a reason that echoed Carl Brandt: “I wish writers would look into the lives of people in other businesses, with the same care and profundity.”

  Charlie, for his part, would let eight weeks pass before rereading Home for Good, which, on (mostly) sober reflection, left him “utterly disgusted” and “depressed”: “It has moments and individual passages of interest,” he wrote Brandt and Baumgarten, “but the whole thing seems to me now a nothing-at-all, rather frenzied besides, careless, angry, and—which is worst of all—smarty-pantsy.” For the time being, then, whatever his harrowing debts, he would put it aside.

  FOR THE REST of that summer (1951) Jackson wrote stories at a desperate pace, producing slipshod work that was weirdly, almost wantonly inappropriate for the commercial market. “I wish Mr. Jackson would get back in the popular groove and do something printable,” wrote Kathryn Bourne of Cosmopolitan, returning “Death in Concord,” about an art curator named Miles Holden who abandons a “brilliant career” at age forty-four to live in his Bulfinch mansion with a twenty-two-year-old “protégé” and a crabby, homophobic mother who mocks them both. While being interviewed by the narrator—a journalist who hopes to write a “substantial article” for The Atlantic or Harper’s—Holden gets drunker and more indiscreet (while Jackson’s thirty-nine-page manuscript becomes more and more riddled with typos, as if the author were keeping up with his hero), regaling his guest with tales of the various scandals that led to his early retirement. Finally it transpires he’s being blackmailed by a man he tried to pick up in Boston Common, and in the end Holden hangs himself, spitefully, in his mother’s lavender dress! (“It was a clear case of suicide,” the narrator muses, “but it was also murder.”) “Janie” was another story from that summer—a slightly expanded version of the vignette about a nymphomaniac Jackson had hoped to include in The Outer Edges and would later incorporate into A Second-Hand Life: like Winifred Grainger in the latter, Janie Debbins Safford Larkin Driscoll Sommeier (a name reflecting her many marriages) gets plenty of sex with “bell-hops, valets, waiters, elevator operators” and the like, but still can’t “get enough different kinds of men.” “Whee! No!” wrote an editor at Redbook, amazedly rejecting it. “Our audience would be shocked clear out of its habit of buying Redbook.”

  By September the financial pressure was “unbearable”: the only money he’d made since spring was eight hundred dollars from the sale of a Darrel Austin painting, “Girl with Black Dog,” and now there was all of thirty-seven dollars in the bank. “Sounds corny but it’s ghastly true,” he reported a month later: “both the children need shoes (they’re still wearing sneaks) and we can’t write out a check for twenty dollars.” Morbidly aware that Rhoda was listening outside his door for the sound of typing, he forced himself to write stories of whatever sort, or at least long, ruminative letters, quitting in the wee hours and reading himself to sleep as the sun came up. “I look like hell and feel like hell but for some reason I survive,” he wrote Dorothea. “Is God keeping me for Higher Things?”

  His wife wasn’t the only one wondering about him, for better or worse. “This is a very small town,” observed his neighbor Julia Fifield, “and everybody knows everybody else’s business whether you know they know it or not.” Charlie, to be sure, knew. Mrs. Richmond, the postmistress, lived opposite his house on Main Street and was, he complained, “the nosiest of women”: “I see you revised that story you sent in last week,” she’d greet him, handing over an acknowledgment card from Brandt & Brandt, and meanwhile on her wall was a list of locals owing back taxes, which naturally
included Jackson, who also owed a notoriously large and longstanding debt to the grocer, Charlie Clifford, among many others.

  The nosy postmistress, oddly enough, had all but adopted Sarah Jackson as a younger sister to her three children, Pete, Roberta, and Bob—three, four, and five years older than Sarah respectively. It wasn’t that Sarah was actively fleeing her family, but simply that there were few young people in Orford, and besides the Richmonds loved having her and seemed to recognize that she might prefer a happier, more stable home. In any case she spent almost every day with the siblings, riding bikes and playing baseball in summer, taking skiing lessons in winter from the high school principal, Elmer “Spike” Fulton, on the hill behind Six Chimney Farm. Charlie welcomed such gatherings in the abstract, but rarely emerged from his room except (briefly) to watch. And then, for all his egalitarianism, he rather deplored how his children were forced to play with a rougher element than one found, say, at the Dalton School (“no nice children’s parties, things like that”), and also, of course, he knew how their parents talked behind his back about his debts and drunkenness, how they pitied his children for having such an errant father, not to mention the bad feeling left over from his Leonard Lyons column. He felt he didn’t belong, in short, and often longed to escape, but was held in thrall—producing more and more wretched fiction in a frantic effort to pay bills—by his family, who ultimately didn’t understand him either. As he’d later remark to Alcoholics Anonymous, what he “remember[ed] most” about these years was “looking forward to night”: “To being alone in my room. When I didn’t have to see anybody. And then at night I remember lying awake in my bed and thinking of my New Hampshire neighbors in their little frame houses.… But I knew how much I envied them, and I envied them because they had love in their lives and I didn’t. And I didn’t seem able to have it.”