Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  BUT IN THE MEANTIME, while waiting for “The Boy Who Ran Away” to appear, Jackson had experienced a “tremendous burst of productivity”—this, once again, as spring got under way—dashing off a slew of mostly forgettable stories and planning a short novel titled Poor Martin Coyle.2 The latter was “a kind of American Madame Bovary,” no less, set in Arcadia (“I have really given it the business,” he wrote Boom: “tried to make it as drab and as lower middleclass as possible, with social climbing all over the place”) and featuring a well-meaning, henpecked husband based on Sven Gundersen. While invoking Flaubert, Jackson insisted his new novel was unambitious—a “pot-boiler” even, for women readers who adored men like his hero (“the very kind of man they wouldn’t put up with in real life for two minutes”). He predicted he could write the whole thing in a single summer.

  Among Jackson’s papers at Dartmouth, the only remnant of Poor Martin Coyle consists of exactly two sentences, written in pencil, as follows: “Martin Coyle had been married long enough to know better; to know, that is, that you simply don’t fall in love with your wife all over again, not after 18 years. But he had, or thought he had, which is the same thing.” On September 11, 1952, he admitted to Baumgarten that he was now “stuck”—too broke to poke away at a novel (even the unambitious kind), and really too depleted and depressed to write even the most dreary, “emminently [sic] saleable” trash, such as a story about Judy Garland he’d been tinkering with, “Rainbows, Bluebirds, Stars,” which turned out to be “absolutely bum”: “My heart just isn’t in these stories; and when I write them with the market in mind, it shows all over the place. You can’t fake it, and I shouldn’t try. Meanwhile—what to do?”

  Things were pretty much at a nadir. For two years the Jacksons had been unable to pay their property tax, while vainly trying to find a buyer for their house, and a tax sale was now slated for the end of the month; local merchants, hitherto solicitous of Rhoda and the girls, seemed on the verge of gathering about their lawn with torches and pitchforks. “Charlie I fear for,” Rhoda wrote Boom on September 3, “he’s under such depression and tension that Anthonisen even said he should go on a long bender just to save himself. That sounds dreadful I know from his doctor—but I really think he’s afraid Charlie will crack under the strain.”

  First he gathered himself for a final gambit: a long, businesslike letter to Roger Straus, who’d been keeping the family afloat with personal loans. “This is a letter to present our financial problems to you, as clearly as we can, in an effort to discover whether Farrar, Straus & Young can help us out,” Jackson wrote, proceeding to list their debts with laudable aplomb, to wit: they owed $14,081 on the house, and had missed their last two mortgage payments; they owed roughly $7,000 for items such as unpaid income tax, coal bills, grocery bills, clothes bills, hospital bills, electric bills, and so forth; Farrar, Straus and Young had loaned Jackson $2,000 (not an advance, since What Happened was off the table), and Roger’s personal loans also came to about $2,000. Along with other odds and ends, Charlie reckoned his total debts at $25,528.51. His tone brightened slightly as he turned to his assets: given that his house was worth about $40,000, furnished, they actually had a net worth of almost $15,000, not to mention such potentially lucrative properties as his two unfinished novels, Uncle Mr. Kember and Poor Martin Coyle, and any number of unsold short stories. Moreover, Roger was, after all, “in the business of publishing authors and [knew] their ups and downs,” and Charlie’s ups had been considerable: from 1944 to 1947 he’d averaged an income of $42,703 a year, though admittedly he’d made about a tenth of that in 1952, so far, and the general trend had been precipitously downward. What he wanted, at any rate, was a loan of $11,500 from Farrar, Straus and Young on the security of a second mortgage: “It will not increase our indebtedness, it will only consolidate it—and vastly relieve the local pressures on me.”

  “Two great minds with a single thought,” Roger jauntily replied. While regretting that a loan of $11,500 was “beyond our reach,” he promised to “brood” a few days and phone that weekend to hash things over. But apparently their discussion was unfruitful, as Charlie took a lethal dose of Seconal (twenty-six tablets) the following Monday, September 15, leaving a farewell note for Rhoda, who rushed him to the hospital, where Dr. Gundersen noted that the patient arrived “groggy” but conscious (“49 year old author here frequently in the past who has various problems that do not require elucidation here”). The next day Charlie was sheepish but not, it seemed, suicidal anymore, and meanwhile his friend Dorothea had sold some of her jewelry to help pay a few of the more pressing local bills. Less than a week later Charlie was home again, tapering off with paraldehyde, and naturally unable to write (albeit sustained somewhat by the prospect of “The Boy Who Ran Away” in the November Harper’s Bazaar). Already they dreaded the coal bills of winter, and were at a loss what to do for Christmas; Rhoda wrote Phyllis McGinley in Larchmont, wondering if she knew anyone who might be interested in buying a second-hand mink for $1,500, less than half what they’d paid for it in 1947 (“I doubt if, in the last two years, it has been worn more than ten times”). And perhaps something of that sort was arranged, since they seemed to have jolly holidays; indeed, at a New Year’s “kids party,” Charlie proved such a “cavorting parent” that his twelve-year-old daughter was a little mortified.

  His high spirits were, alas, short-lived. Almost two weeks later, while visiting the Strauses in New York, Charlie abruptly disappeared. Alarmed, Dorothea phoned Rhoda, who (“sound[ing] cool, experienced, and resigned”) advised her to pack his valise and leave it by the front door: “You shouldn’t have the responsibility for him at a time like this.” Dorothea did as she was told, discovering a cache of Seconal (“looking as innocent and cheerful as a jar of candies”) in one of Charlie’s drawers; deciding she had no right to confiscate his things, she packed it under some shirts and went out for the day. The valise was gone when she returned, but the library door, upstairs, was “ominously shut.” Inside was Charlie, unconscious on the couch; like the needy, spiteful alcoholic Grace Dana in “The Problem Child,” he’d left the now-almost-empty pill jar in plain sight. “It was an ‘opera bouffe,’ ” said Roger in 1976. “He kind of knew he was going to be [saved].” Roger phoned Bellevue after hearing from his frantic wife, and an ambulance was dispatched to take their guest away.

  The next day (Wednesday) he checked on Charlie, who was locked up in the Men’s Violence Ward but otherwise in decent spirits. Aside from the “indescribable” terror of the place—mitigated somewhat by liberal doses of paraldehyde—his main concern was that word would leak to the media again, and he’d be hearing about his latest disgrace on Walter Winchell’s Sunday night broadcast. Certainly the family had been well apprised, and Boom immediately sent money to Rhoda and invited her and the kids to come live with him in Malaga. Rhoda’s sister, Katharine, was moved to write Boom a letter of thanks: “More than anything else I think your loyalty has given [Rhoda] the strength to finally take the step which certainly seems, after these past two years, inevitable. I hope with all my heart that she will go through with it. It’s a pitiful and tragic thing to have seen Charlie disintegrate as if by his own wish.” Rhoda agreed that it was time for a change, though she hated to impose on her kindly brother-in-law, and she couldn’t bring herself (yet) to discuss the matter with the girls. As usual, she felt little other than tender concern for her husband: “Please don’t say Charlie is a bastard and a wastrel and everything else,” she wrote Boom. “He really is sick. His world and our worlds just don’t jibe. If he can recover enough to fit into our world, it will be wonderful for him. For really no one suffers more from it than he does.” Charlie, for his part, experienced “mixed feelings of relief and chagrin” when—after his release that weekend—he wasn’t mentioned in any of the columns.

  Rhoda, unassisted, grimly set about putting their house in order. The antique Sheraton furniture was up for sale, and her appeals to some Hollywood friends had brought in
$250 from the Gershwins and $500 from Brackett. She closed her husband’s checking account, and directed Brandt & Brandt to make all checks payable to her until further notice. Before leaving for New York to see about getting a job with her old employer, Time Inc., she had a frank discussion with Anthonisen, who agreed that her “first concern” should be the welfare of her children and herself; he hoped Charlie wouldn’t have to be institutionalized, but “if he becomes a tramp then that must be done.” As if to dramatize the prospect, Charlie managed to wangle a paraldehyde prescription in his wife’s absence, going on a two-day “binge” with a lot of beer-drinking, too, and meeting her train in a barely controlled stupor. This time Rhoda was seriously vexed. It was “demoralizing,” she wrote, to have “to watch him all the time”—watch him, that is, do nothing at all except read and play solitaire. He hadn’t been able to work for months, and was beginning to wonder whether he’d ever work again.

  In February he became briefly excited about the possibility (Roger’s idea) of writing a syndicated column titled “You Know What?” about whatever happened to capture his promiscuous fancy. In a letter to his poet friend McGinley, he claimed to be putting together a package of twenty sample columns to submit to an agency; so far topics included Shakespeare in Everyday Life (“the way we go around quoting the Bard all day long without realizing it”), Name-Dropping, Anti-Semitism, The Curse We Are to Our Children, and others. Rhoda thought it might help sell the idea if McGinley wrote a few light-hearted verses for the column, and Charlie agreed it wouldn’t hurt to ask (“Look, dear, when you’re on a sinking ship—”). Before the poet could oblige, however—and she had promised to try—Charlie had already become discouraged: “This is to release you, dear—and won’t you be glad!” he wrote a few days later, glumly vowing to “confine [his] daily chatter to Dorothea” and leave McGinley, a working writer, “free.”

  On Charlie’s fiftieth birthday—April 6, 1953—Roger phoned with another idea: He’d seen a piece in Look about a narcotics agent in Houston, Tex Foster, who’d dedicated his life to fighting drugs because his “pa” had been an addict and Tex had suffered as a child, etc. Who better to write his story than Charlie? Roger thought he could do a “quickie” for Ballantine paperbacks, split the proceeds fifty-fifty, then maybe sell it to the movies for big dough! Two days later Tex arrived in Orford to tell his story, but for whatever reason it didn’t pan out. Meanwhile Charlie’s birthday had been “pleasant” if unexciting, said Rhoda, who cooked a canned ham she’d been “hoarding” for the occasion. “Wouldn’t it be awful if I lived to be 100?” Charlie sighed.

  THAT YEAR he experienced his usual springtime “re-birth” (as he put it) in early May—the ninth, to be exact: “the Great Day,” as he excitedly wrote friends. For years he’d been considering a long story, “The Education of Harry Harrison,” about a charming eunuch, and that day it suddenly occurred to him that he had a whole book on his hands—a wonderful book! “The novel is called A SECOND-HAND LIFE,” he wrote McGinley, “the scene is my old Arcadia in the present and also 30 years ago, the two major characters are a woman of fifty who has a tremendous, almost an abnormal capacity for love, and a man who is unable to feel love at all—their lifelong friendship, and eventual desperate union.” The Arcadian nymphomaniac who would serve as a foil to Harry Harrison was loosely based on Virginia “Ginny” Peirson, the disreputable daughter of a Newark bank president; she and Charlie had been childhood friends, and had stayed somewhat in touch over the years.3 The character had also been suggested by the titular heroine of “Janie,” who reads of a convict’s death in the electric chair and elegiacally muses that there will be one less man in the world “to be had, if only once”; Jackson would put a finer point on that passage in A Second-Hand Life, as Winifred mourns the loss of “that which hung concealed behind the folds of the mechanic’s jumper” rather than of the man per se.

  Creative juices fizzing, Jackson quickly produced an outline, character sketches, and the opening scene (“just to ‘set’ it”), then embarked on a spree of story-writing meant to finance the novel. Rising before five each morning and working until lunch, he managed to write seven stories in just over a week—the first of which, “The Education of Wally West,” he promptly sent to Baumgarten with a giddy cover letter: “Well, Madam: after eight months—eight months of hell—I’ve written another story again.” As ever he hoped to crack The New Yorker, but, failing that, he suggested she send it to the munificent Maggie Cousins at Cosmopolitan (“I want $28,000, but will settle for $25,000”). Five more stories followed, feverishly, and finally he spent an entire week dumping a farrago of material into a long story originally (and aptly) titled “A Lazy Day on the Water.” “It is hard to realize in the present age what an important part the Canal once played in the life of Arcadia,” the story begins, “and in the life of all the other towns and small cities strung out through the state from Buffalo to Albany.” The narrator remembers how once, as a boy, he’d hitched a ride as far as Lock 27 in Lyons, six miles away, aboard a canal boat with four raffish passengers: an unmarried couple, Captain Andersen and Mrs. Wacha (who scandalize the boy by ducking below deck for their “nap”), and their respective children, Carrie and Joe. Various sights along the way pique the narrator’s memory, and so provide a pretext for telling about the time, say, when he saw the Cigarette Fiend at the county fair (thus recycling “The Cigarette Fiend,” a story Jackson had written the day before he began this one), or the time a famous aviator landed in Arcadia, and so on. For fifty pages.

  “Do try to do a story that’s a little closer to the commercial thing, won’t you please, Charlie?” begged Carl Brandt, who nonetheless ultimately managed to sell “A Lazy Day on the Water” for $500 to Charm, where it would appear in abridged form two years later as “Still Waters,” illustrated by Ben Shahn. During that whole hectic summer of 1953, however, Charlie’s only sale was “Landscape with Figures”—a racy sketch about a sinister tramp who ogles a girl lying in a daisy field—which went to Esquire for $250. “I’m really working hard—but alas, it seems entirely fruitless,” he wrote his agents on July 2. “Any news?”—then, scribbled meekly in the margin: “You know I’m not nagging, don’t you? I’m just so eager to get back to Second-Hand Life, which was going so well.”

  He was more than discouraged at that point; he was suicidal again, even somewhat in earnest, perhaps. He’d gotten stumbling drunk in front of his children—the first time ever—on the Fourth of July. Each year fireworks were set off from the hill behind Herb Lawrence’s house on the southernmost end of the Ridge; Charlie’s daughters were friends with Herb’s step-daughter, Ann, and that year they were horrified when their father (still dressed in his flamingo-colored shirt) started “careening around” during the festivities. Three days later he took an overdose of Nembutal, and was comatose and bloodied from a fall when Rhoda got him to the hospital. Nigh unsinkable as ever, he was released on July 12 (“Good recovery”), and cautioned to stay on paraldehyde lest he succumb to delirium tremens.

  He got right back to work, though the results were “grim,” as he was the first to admit. The manuscript for “Liebestod” does not survive among his papers—a rare occurrence—though the gist can be gleaned from rejection letters (as well as subsequent events). “LIEBESTOD shook me up rather,” wrote an editor for Women’s Home Companion, “as I’m one for all night record binges.” In a nutshell, the story appears to have been based on the author’s tendency to accompany late-night pill, booze, and/or paraldehyde sessions with music, in this case ending with Wagner’s “Liebestod” and the hero’s suicide. “A music lover reaches his last note. Very satisfying to me,” an Esquire editor wrote in an internal memo, only to be overruled by chief editor Arnold Gingrich (“Let’s pass”). And whereas Charlie himself thought the story “really seem[ed]” suited for The New Yorker (“Of course I have said this a million times before”), he was again mistaken.

  The same day (July 23) that he sent this lugubrious piece to Bau
mgarten, he cheerfully mentioned the arrival that afternoon of Roger and Dorothea and their small son, Roger III, for a weekend visit (“we couldn’t be happier about it”), and that night his daughter Kate saw (or rather heard) him drunk for the second time ever. She was staying in her mother’s room because of the guests, when—very late, after a long disastrous evening—Charlie unsteadily entered and began pleading for his “medicine” (paraldehyde); Rhoda refused; the ten-year-old Kate nervously feigned sleep. As for the Strauses, they had just collapsed in bed when the mournful, soaring strains of “Liebestod” began echoing through- out the house, followed by a knock on the door: “I must talk to you,” said their host. “I am about to kill myself.” Roger vaulted out of bed, but Dorothea stayed put. “For the first time, I had had enough,” she later wrote.

  I did not believe in Charlie’s suicide attempt. And the appropriate background music, in spite of its intrinsic beauty, or perhaps because of it, sounded as tinny and tawdry as a juke box in a penny arcade.… Then there was a knock on the door again, and Charlie stood in my room, swaying and angry. “Why are you the only one not downstairs? Do you want me to kill myself? Is that it?”

  For the rest of the night, until the sun came up, they “begged, scolded, reasoned” while Charlie menacingly waved a pill jar whenever he detected a want of zeal (“What was the good of carrying off such a thing [suicide] if its full effect was to be lost on the one person most interested?—himself,” Don muses in The Lost Weekend). Finally he was coaxed back to bed, sans pills, and the next day—prior to a hasty departure—Dorothea heard faint snoring and peeked inside her friend’s room: “He was lying on his back, clad in pink Dr. Denton pajamas, primly buttoned up the front, with feet, like those worn by children downstairs on Christmas morning to see the tree.”