by Blake Bailey
Rhoda, at last, had reached the end of her vertiginous tether. “I’m leaving today,” she announced, “and I’m taking the children with me. I’ve left a check for you on your desk, and we’re going. We have to go.” For the benefit of Alcoholics Anonymous, Charlie would relive the events of that “terrible day” again and again and again: “It was a beautiful morning and I will never forget, as long as I live, the sight of the children carrying out to the car armloads of books, and then they were gone. And I was relieved.” It was horrible, yes, and soon he’d be desperately depressed … but he would think about it tomorrow. For now he was free! “I went to my desk and there was a check for $250. Well, this was great: there would be no policemen around in the form of my wife.… I could do just as I pleased and have a whale of a time.”
That night Charlie drank and drank, listened to music as loud as he liked, and almost went mad with loneliness. For a few days he badgered Rhoda with phone calls (“We promised the children summer camp! You have to bring them back!”), and finally took a taxi to Hanover, boarded a plane to Boston, then to New York, then to Philadelphia, where he took another cab some fifty miles to Malaga. Kate was playing in her uncle’s yard with some neighborhood kids when the cab drove up and disgorged its drunken passenger; Kate, embarrassed, skittered off in the opposite direction. Rhoda refused to speak to her husband; she gathered the girls and promptly left the house. It occurred to Charlie that he could make a better case for himself once he was sober again, so he decided to go home and check himself into Hitchcock (“put paraldehyde on my chart, and sober up the easy way”). As Boom was driving him back to the airport, though, a flicker of lucidity asserted itself: “I was not responsible,” he remembered. “I might be dead that night.” He asked his brother if he knew of a hospital in Philadelphia where he could dry out, and Boom drove him to the house of a doctor in New Castle, Delaware, Tom McGuire, who came out to the curb and peered at Charlie inside the car. “You need a shave,” he said. “What I need,” said Charlie, “is a drink.” McGuire directed him to a bar at the corner, where Charlie ordered a double scotch and a glass of beer; he quickly chugged the scotch, then innocently nursed the beer before heading back to McGuire’s house. “You’re in luck,” the man said. He’d managed to get him the last available bed in the Saul Clinic at St. Luke’s in Philadelphia: “It’s not the Ritz-Carlton; it’s pretty rough, but they’ll take care of you.” Charlie, with owlish dignity, declared that he wanted a place where he would be amongst “intellectual equals.” McGuire laughed: “What are you talking about? I’m a better man than you are now.” Charlie asked how he figured that. “Because I’m sober and you’re drunk.”
The Saul Clinic was founded by C. Dudley Saul in 1946, two years after Saul had written a personal letter to Charles Jackson, urging him to write about the rehabilitation of Don Birnam: “I am neither a ‘foolish’ nor wise psychiatrist. I am thinking solely of the responsibility that is yours and the great good that you can do; as every alcoholic, his friends, and his family await the sequel to ‘The Lost Weekend.’ ” And now, nine years later, here was the author in person, far from rehabilitated and taking a very dim view of Dr. Saul’s “dirty” clinic, where they refused to give him medication of any kind (he’d carelessly mentioned his pill habit to Dr. McGuire). In the throes of withdrawal that night, as he felt his mind giving way, Charlie was struck by an awful thought: “This is your natural home. This is where you belong.” He totted up eighteen hospitalizations in the past six years; that would seem to suggest a pattern.
On the third day he met with the medical director, Martin D. Kissen, a kindly man who believed in the crucial importance of gaining an alcoholic’s trust. “Well, Charlie,” he said to his celebrated patient, “what are we going to do about it?” Jackson, in an agony of trembling embarrassment, said it was hopeless: He’d been sober for eleven years; he’d written the definitive novel about alcoholism; he’d been psychoanalyzed by “one of the big men in New York” … and nothing had worked. “I know everything there is to know about the alcoholic but the answer,” he said, “and there isn’t any such thing. I’m just through!” Kissen asked if he’d ever tried AA, and Jackson was contemptuous. As he’d later recall in his standard AA talk:
I said, “Now really, doctor, don’t give me that. You’re a medical man, a man of science. You know better.… They say the Lord’s Prayer at their meetings; this I couldn’t possibly do. They’re always talking about the spiritual; I haven’t got an ounce of the spiritual in my makeup.”
He said, “You love your children, don’t you?”
And I said, “Yes.”
He said, “You believe in doing what’s right when you can, don’t you?”
And I said, “Yes.”
And he said, “Isn’t that spiritual? It’s not material.”
Still skeptical—but eager as ever to please—Charlie agreed to attend a meeting the next day at the hospital. Shuffling along in “paper slippers” and a terry-cloth robe, he sat down “with the other bums” and waited, tightly folding his arms to express a seemly intransigence and control his shakes. Then a shock: the first speaker was Dr. Tom McGuire, the very man who’d sent him there. He was a member of AA. Had Charlie gone five hundred miles out of his way to find this man by accident? What’s more, everything he said made perfect sense, and he seemed so happy! Indeed, Charlie felt a “major bond” with everyone there, though he could hardly remember a thing they’d said afterward. “These people knew about me … these people had been where I had been and had something I didn’t have,” he said. “And I wanted it.”
1 In the final typescript, Jackson crossed out the last sentence and wrote: “For the book, so personal and painful, was proving too much for me.”
2 Of the nine or ten stories Jackson wrote that spring and summer (1952), the best was “Parting at Morning”—a fictionalized rendering of his difficult relationship with his mother—which was sold to Today’s Woman for $1,500 and published, to the author’s chagrin, as “A Mother’s Day Story.” This, along with an unsold curio titled “The Sleeper Awakened,” were the only stories from these months that would be included in his next (and final) collection, Earthly Creatures, though two uncollected pieces were also sold to Esquire for a relatively negligible sum ($250 each), “The Old War” and “Millstones.”
3 In the 1920s, Jackson had written a short apprentice novel about the Peirsons, Family Portrait—or perhaps “memoir” is more apt, since he didn’t bother to change real-life names, and even included cameo appearances by mutual friends such as Marion Fleck. The Virginia of Family Portrait is high-spirited and mischievous, but hardly the ravenous trollop of A Second-Hand Life. Indeed, one scene in the earlier novel suggests that Peirson was little more than a flirt, at least while in the first bloom of youth: at age thirteen, during World War I, Virginia borrows her older sister’s shirtwaist and skirt, rouges her cheeks, and goes for a nocturnal stroll along the canal, where a soldier tries to kiss her. When she bursts into tears and admits her age, the doughboy gives her a brotherly lecture and sends her home.
Chapter Sixteen
A Rain of Snares
Jackson was released a couple of days after his meeting with Dr. Kissen, though he decided to stay in the area and attend AA meetings with his new friend and sponsor, Tom McGuire. He also continued to consult with Kissen, who insisted they include Rhoda, to her considerable gratification. “I’ve always felt the need for a three-sided conference,” she wrote Boom afterward. “Which is a technique where analysis or psychiatry or whatever fails and will continue to fail by the very nature of the science: i.e., psychiatry attempts to fit the person into his environment and adjust to it. And it continues to be a very lonely way.” After a week or so Charlie was ready to go home, and for the first time ever he stayed under the speed limit the whole way, and was even willing to stop for a leisurely meal at “Horrid Johnson’s” (as his daughters called it) or just to admire the view. At least one AA slogan seemed to have taken hold:
“Easy does it.”
Word, as usual, traveled fast in Orford. Pat Hammond, a young woman who’d agreed to take dictation from Jackson, wrote in her diary that the job appeared to be scratched: “Charlie’s wife left him, he went to pieces—is now in alky ward at a Phila. Hospital.” Then, on August 11: “C. Jackson returneth.” The locals were all agog, needless to say, even more so given that a sodden Charlie had done a certain amount of stumbling about town in his family’s absence, enlisting the sympathy of the new minister, no less, who subsequently made a point of avoiding Rhoda at the post office. “I’m sure he believed whatever Charlie had to say to him,” she wrote. “Of course the town has had a field day of rumor and report and guesses and speculation.” Unlike the “very young” and “simple” minister, however, most of their neighbors had nothing but scorn for the incorrigible dipso in their midst. (“All town down on him,” noted Hammond.)
But now, at least, he knew where to go for support. His sister-in-law gave him the name of an AA member in Montpelier, Fred Laird, and when Charlie phoned for information, the man asked if he wanted to address their chapter; no, said Charlie, he just wanted to attend an open meeting with his wife. In that case, said Laird, would he mind picking up a backslider named Stan Weeden, who ran a store across the river in Fairlee? (“Charlie stopped in to see [Weeden] yesterday,” Rhoda recorded, “and found him in a most variable state.”) Jackson was thus reminded that AA offered him more than merely a place to go at night—something to do instead of sitting in his room wrestling (or not) with temptation; here, rather, were people to call when he was in trouble, people who made a point of helping each other. During his previous years of putative sobriety, he’d found comfort in the idea that he was unique (“I was the whole cheese!”), but ultimately the prospect of a long, lonely, increasingly problematic future without even the hope of an occasional bender had become intolerable. In AA, though, he was asked only to be sober for 24 hours (“One day at a time”), and when the next day came, there were always others around to remind him, yet again, what lay in store if he resumed drinking.
But then, he’d always admired the practical side of AA, and more than ever he wondered why he should go on seeing a psychiatrist. Regaling Dr. Anthonisen with his adventures in Philadelphia, he kept pressing the point: if AA was something that worked, well then why spend time and money trying to find out why he was an alcoholic? Too late! He was an alcoholic, and he’d still be one with or without the answers. Anthonisen laughed, and finally admitted that he himself had been a sponsor for the AA group in Hanover for many years; “flabbergasted,” Jackson asked why he’d never mentioned it, and the man replied that he simply didn’t think it would work in Charlie’s case—most AA members were, after all, pretty dull. Jackson could hardly deny it. The Montpelier group, in particular, had consisted of “the average, the blue-eyed, and the ordinary” in spades (“quarrymen and truck drivers and so on,” according to Rhoda), and afterward Charlie couldn’t resist telling the Strauses about the speaker who quoted “that great American poet Edgar A. Guest.” But of course it was also true that Charlie coveted the love of such people intensely, and with renascent humility was willing to overlook what he’d hitherto considered their “Rotarianism.” As he would presently confess for a Life article, “In my loneliness and, if you will, desperate need to be accepted again, I saw that the friendliness was well-meant, honest, utterly genuine.” Part of Charlie liked nothing better than to rub elbows with “the gang” during a post-meeting coffee klatch, savoring his regular-guy persona all the more because of his certainty that others recognized him as the (lovably humble) author of The Lost Weekend. It was a role he could play, conceivably, for the rest of his life. “He really is so different sometimes, that I pinch myself,” Rhoda wrote at the end of August. “He really is trying to change his attitude and point of view. And he really, for the first time in years, thinks of me as a person instead of just someone to do the work and take out gripes on.”
After a few weeks, he decided to stick with the slightly less proletarian chapter in Barre, where he attended closed (members only) meetings on Tuesday and open meetings, with Rhoda, on Saturday. The seventy-mile round-trip was a chilly, winding drive, but Charlie was “having the time of [his] life” and wouldn’t dream of missing a meeting. Such was his zeal that he was soon named chairman, and also asked to give his first talk on the four-month anniversary of his sobriety, November 28. Meanwhile, for Thanksgiving dinner, he and Rhoda invited a Barre alcoholic “with the elegant name of Gerard MacCarthy,” whose wife had recently divorced him and gained full custody of their children, refusing to allow the wretch visiting privileges of any kind. Jackson wondered what kept the man going; to him, such a life was hardly worth living. (“Luckily he doesn’t think deeply enough to know this, so he just goes on.”)
Charlie himself was determined to be a better, more attentive father—by far the most rewarding way of “getting out of [him]self”—and to this end he formed a club called the Big Three that met Mondays at four in the library. With Kate presiding (Sarah was Treasurer and Charlie Secretary), the three discussed whatever was on their minds: books, music, what they wanted to be when they grew up, and Charlie’s alcoholism, which he candidly explained was a problem he’d had for most of his adult life that was now being helped via AA. On the last subject he was careful to stress that his daughters needn’t be scared of alcohol; unless they were alcoholics like him, they’d probably find it an asset. As a sober man, too, it occurred to him that he should pay more attention to his insecure younger daughter, and so proposed a collaboration on a children’s book, Dr. Happenstance—“by Charles Jackson (age 50), illustrated by Kate Jackson (age 10)”—about an eccentric doctor who lets children indulge their “bad” habits until they get tired of them and revert to more “normal” behavior.1 “I can’t tell you how much good it is doing [Kate] to be ‘working’ on something with Papa,” he wrote Dorothea. “She is all sweetness and light—so much so, in fact, that I am mistrustful, it is so unlike the usual slam-bang showy-off noisy Kate who has to demand attention every single minute—and why not. With so much talent, it’s got to be used somehow, even if she had to ram it down our throats 24 hours a day.” But naturally he understood the girl—his virtual double—all too well, even offering to drown her (“for your own sake”) if she turned out to be a genius.
JACKSON’S SECOND STORY COLLECTION, Earthly Creatures, was published in September, and he wanted it known that he didn’t think very highly of the book; indeed, the only two stories he was “satisfied with” were “The Boy Who Ran Away” and “The Break”—or so he announced in a prefatory “Note to the Reader,” which he’d written that awful July and hoped to publish on the front page of the Times Book Review (“one of his alcoholic pipe-dreams,” as Rhoda later discovered). The other nine stories included “A Sunday Drive,” first written in 1939; “Money,” a comic sketch about his well-heeled ex-friend Ruby Schinasi; “Old Men and Boys,” from his ill-fated sequence of Switzerland stories; and the interminable “Outlander”—all of which he offered to the reader in a spirit of almost abject apology, “fully (perhaps I should say ‘bitterly’) conscious of the knowledge that they are somewhat less than the ideal in a form I love.”
Critics—mindful, perhaps, of Jackson’s recent travails—were mostly generous. By a stroke of very good fortune, Earthly Creatures was reviewed at length in the Sunday Times by his old Hollywood friend Budd Schulberg, whose glowing remarks seemed all but exclusively concerned with the better stories: “In their compassionate but merciless self-examination,” he wrote, “their almost unbearable integrity, their penetrating (unarty) artfulness, they force the reader back upon himself, make him reflect upon his own motivations, his own worth.” William Peden, in the Saturday Review, commended the author’s willingness to address large themes (“man’s loneliness, his capacity for self-destruction”), while quietly noting that “his treatment … doesn’t always measure up to the demands of his subject matter.” Th
e New Yorker, however, was more unsparing than ever, disposing of Earthly Creatures with a few derisive lines in “Briefly Noted” (“The reader sees the point [of each story] well ahead of time and is left tapping his foot, waiting for the moment of revelation”).
Still, Jackson’s main reasons for publishing such an uneven book—namely, to make money and remind the world of his existence—were more than vindicated. Through a new marketing arrangement between Ballantine and Farrar, Straus and Young, the book was simultaneously published in a hardbound edition for $1.50 and a paperback for 35 cents, and the latter, at least, sold remarkably well (about eighty-five thousand copies). For the most part, too, Charlie was bucked by the moral support he received in the media, including an October mention in Harvey Breit’s Times Book Review column: “We have never seen Mr. Jackson better,” Breit wrote of a recent meeting with the troubled author; “he was trim and severe looking, very calm, precise in his speech, and what we mean is simply that Mr Jackson gave us the sense that he had been working hard and well.” Breit’s remarks, said Charlie, could hardly have been “between-the-linesier,” but of course he appreciated the thought and agreed that he was, for a fact, “in fine shape”: He had “a swell book to write,” after all—A Second-Hand Life—and all he needed to bring it off was time (fourteen years, as it happened) and money.