Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  But his body, which had weathered so much, began to betray him. Three years before, he’d developed a duodenal ulcer that was serious enough for his doctor to advise hospitalization (it would ultimately prove the immediate, merciful cause of his death). In the fall of 1962, though, his main complaint was a recurrence of tuberculosis in his collapsed right lung that threatened to spread to his “good” lung—namely the one that had done the work of assimilating three or four packs of cigarettes a day for the past thirty-five years. That October, at Middlesex Hospital, he underwent emergency surgery to remove the infected lower lobe as well as three (or four) ribs, after which walking became more difficult and lifting almost impossible. He also got hooked on Doriden, which at the time was considered a safe alternative to barbiturates but was in fact every bit as likely to lead to addiction and awful withdrawal symptoms, as Charlie learned when he tried quitting cold turkey in the spring of 1963. Taken to the Carrier Clinic—a psychiatric hospital in Belle Mead, New Jersey—he was heavily sedated in the hope of averting DTs and hence was wont to repeat himself, sweating and shaking, when his daughters visited, though he was competent enough to introduce them to various cronies on the ward, and was discharged in time to address (with Marty Mann) the annual AA banquet in Wilmington.

  By June, alas, he was sicker than ever: “A constant fever,” he wrote Kate, “absolutely no sleep (why I don’t die of sheer exhaustion I’ll never know … because the moment I lie down I can’t breathe, my heart goes into a pounding panic, and I have to sit upright to calm down).” X-rays revealed the worst: what was left of his right lung was now destroyed and the infection had broken through the chest wall and attacked his “good” lung; without drastic surgery he would be dead in about six weeks. More cheerfully, it so happened that his medical expenses would be paid in full by the Will Rogers Memorial Fund, which ran a hospital in the Adirondacks that was free of charge to anyone in show business—old-time vaudevillians, burlesque dancers, TV script editors—who suffered from cardiopulmonary illness. Like every other patient at Will Rogers, Charlie would have a private room in a lovely Tudor mansion that looked like a luxury resort hotel, and yet was a leading research facility with a first-rate staff and state-of-the-art equipment.

  “Long grueling drive to Saranac but we made it,” Charlie scribbled in his appointment diary for July 17, 1963. “I was barely able to walk in. Rhoda did stupendous job of unpacking and settling me in while I was but thoroughly examined by Dr. Ayvazian. Lovely place, nice room and bath. Rhoda left—and it was a most difficult leave-taking for both of us.” After sputum and urine and blood tests and “x-rays, x-rays, x-rays,” doctors were still uncertain how to proceed, and so performed a bronchoscopy that Charlie described as “1 hour and 15 minutes of drowning”; three hours later, though, he was digesting dinner and watching Judgment at Nuremberg. A great sense of peace had begun to descend. “I needed to get away from home and my too dull environment there,” he wrote his agent and editor, “even from my wife—all I needed was a change.” For the time being, at least, he could do almost anything he liked: linger over breakfast (“with much very good coffee”), read every word of the newspaper, walk in the woods, sit on the lawn, and never once feel obliged to seem worthy of his wife’s solicitude. And who needed it, given the “love, affection, and trust” between him and his chest surgeon, Warriner “Woody” Woodruff, as well as the medical director, Fred Ayvazian, a kindly Armenian who wrote mystery novels on the side (Much Ado about Murder, et al.). No wonder some patients were content to stay in Saranac Lake for years on end, though Charlie was determined not to become one of these “beachcombers”: “I want to die, or get well quick and get out of here.”

  The dying part seemed more likely than not. After two weeks, Charlie “learned [his] fate”: a complete pneumonectomy on the right side—a procedure that took a team of three surgeons almost five hours to perform, and left the patient’s right arm, hand, and fingers frozen for weeks. That he was alive at all, indeed, was little short of a miracle; Dr. Woodruff informed him afterward that he, Charlie, was “the only one—yes, the only one—who had survived in his experience, this exact operation,” or rather (as he alternatively related to Dorothea) the only one besides “a man of 42; and he died five days later.” For his family’s benefit he lovingly described the niceties: “Not only did they have to take out the right lung, but also a fistula, an empyema”—an accumulation of pus in the pleural cavity—“four ribs instead of the two that I had supposed, and (this surprised them most of all, though it meant nothing to me), the whole pleura and the lining of the whole chest wall.”2 As for that lining, Dr. Woodruff said it was “like cement” (the cutting of which was “less surgery than manual labor”) because of scar tissue left over from years of pneumothorax punctures. “And think of it,—me sleeping soundly the while.”

  After a painful month of convalescence at the General Hospital, Charlie was moved to a “princely” room on the third floor of the sanatorium, and was soon able to resume little walks and write letters from his Adirondack chair on the lawn. Sometimes the sharp ends of his shorn ribs would give him agonizing tweaks—“those heavy horseshoes hanging inside my chest bang together once in a while or just move a little, and I hold my face still to keep from wincing and my mouth closed to suppress little helpless yips and yelps”—but Charlie was so glad to be alive, in such a gorgeous place, that he bore his misery with a kind of jaunty stoicism. “The movie tonight is ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’—and do you think I’d miss that, after Steve Reeves and all?” he delightedly wrote Sarah, only a few days after his release from the hospital. “Then coming up is ‘Diamond Head’ (more sex we hope) and ‘Dr. No’ and then, after one postponement, ‘Hud.’ ” Among patients and doctors alike, he was a beloved figure—a man for whom “there is no other word than charming,” as a local columnist noted, especially regarding Charlie’s tendency to be warm and “stupefyingly honest” with near-strangers. He made a point of attending Presbyterian services whenever Dr. Ayvazian’s wife, Gloria (“Gloria Mundi” as he called her), sang a choir solo, and made no bones about his lavish admiration for her husband: “Yes, I knew Charles was gay,” she laughed, many years later. “He had a crush on Fred! It was no secret.… He gave us a beautiful antique platter that I still have and that always reminds me of him.” Among the ailing entertainers at Will Rogers, Charlie’s gayness was rather less than shocking, and for his part he made a point of seeking out the more outré patients, such as Zita the stripper (“I’ve hardly ever met anyone more child-like … she’s an absolute darling”), and Don the transvestite showgirl. As Charlie wrote Dr. Ayvazian after leaving Will Rogers:

  I asked Ruth Norman to give [Don] my record player, as I thought once the others got onto the nature of his career, which I had an inkling of very soon and nasty-minded Janet [another patient] got onto at once and made the most of it in dirty cracks to show her “sophistication”—I thought he would begin to feel isolated if not actually ostracised.… He is a remarkably intelligent and nice fellow, and I can only feel sorry for him from the depths of my heart.… A girl is what he wants to be more than anything else in the world.

  By the time Charlie was able to leave—on November 21, 1963, after a four-month stay3—his feelings were profoundly mixed: on the one hand he desperately missed his family and was eager to get on with his work, while on the other (as he’d presently remark in a promotional film starring Charles Jackson), “I felt now as though I were leaving home—I’d come to love the place so much.” Physically he was much diminished. Within a few months he would begin to experience “drawing pains”—so called, by Charlie, to describe the sensation of being literally drawn to one side where most of his ribs were missing, their “bobbed” ends scraping against his right shoulder blade, which (he was told) might also have to be removed—though he was determined not to dwell on that. For now he was alive, and that was enough. “We refuse to let illness get us down,” he proclaimed to a friend, “and as William Faulkner said in
that by-now trite Nobel Prize Speech in Sweden: ‘We shall prevail.’ ”

  Charlie was so inspirational, and lovable, that the Will Rogers Fund implored him to write about his experience for Reader’s Digest, though Charlie’s own “aim” was Life (“I could even say, with all my ups and downs, that my aim has always been life”). On further consideration, though, it was decided that a mere magazine piece wasn’t enough; Charlie himself, in all his plucky Chaplinesque glory, would be preserved for posterity in a nineteen-minute film shown all over the country at movie theaters and professional conferences. “Yes, I am the star,” he proudly informed Dorothea, after an advance screening in New York, “and I speak the part, and I (or my voice) does the over-all narration, and it’s damned good and I’m proud of it for doing so well a job I was utterly unused to and inexperienced in …” Trade journals agreed. A Place in the Country was “one of the best institutional films to date,” and Charlie had quite acquitted himself as the protagonist/narrator: “If his voice is not professional, he more than makes up for it with the evident emotional influence on him made by his sojourn there.”

  Amid occasional speeches by Dr. Ayvazian and other doctors and patients, the film is almost wholly concerned with Jackson’s progress as a kind of tubercular Everyman. “The years of pain finally leave your mind numb,” he narrates, as we follow him in a station wagon to the hospital, which he warily enters wearing a gray suit and straw hat, presently exchanged for a lucky Japanese robe (a gift from Rhoda) prior to his examination by Dr. Ayvazian. “Tomorrow the medical staff decides my case,” he later informs us, his pensive voice contrasted with a jolly gathering of patients in the rec room. “Downstairs a fire is going. People are chatting. Or singing around a piano [“I Left My Heart in San Francisco”] …. Here I am, wishing the hours away. And I don’t know how much time I have left.… Charlie, it may be later than you think!”

  But of course he survives—nay, he’s reborn!—walking around the garden with a look of childlike wonder, cocking his head at birdsong and such. “To the people who gave me my second life,” he concludes, “I thank you all. I was free: Free to live! Free to write again! … Now Rhoda—the children—my other home.” And with that, he adjusts the brim of his hat and breezily relieves the driver of his (presumably empty) suitcase, tossing it into the backseat and embarking toward a future full of promise. It was touching because it was true. Charlie had been given another five years, and when they were over he would ask his mourners to remember him with donations to Will Rogers Memorial Hospital.

  BACK IN SEPTEMBER 1962—shortly before he entered Middlesex Hospital for his lobectomy and, it turned out, a resumption of pill-taking—Charlie had again tried to write a story for McCall’s, since he was “more than hanging on the ropes” financially, what with mounting medical bills and Kate now at Sarah Lawrence. As Charlie freely admitted to the latter, the story in question “[wasn’t] worth telling, and one must pretend it is and work at keeping up the reader’s interest at all cost.” Whether he’d succeeded, according to the editors, was problematic, but such was their regard for the author that they were willing to pay an enormous sum (three thousand dollars) for a forty-page manuscript that they not only drastically shortened but “chewed to bits,” said Rhoda, who intercepted the proofs while Charlie was withdrawing from Doriden at the Carrier Clinic: “I think letting his first MS in many years (and one written largely before this pill stuff started) get slaughtered would throw him way back,” she protested to Brandt. As it happened, though, Charlie seriously objected to only one edit—but that a fatal one, as he saw it.

  “The Loving Offenders”4 is about an otherwise well-behaved girl in Arcadia, Bertha Schroeder, who murders her father, a cuckolded jeweler named Ernie. More than that, the story is an attenuated exercise in nostalgia—“worth telling,” as Jackson would have it, only when he’s evoking the incidental ambience of Main Street, such as Ernie Schroeder’s shop: “On the walls around him were all those striking clocks, which, every hour on the hour and some at the half and quarter as well, would pull themselves together individually and in concert, with ominous, ratchety, interior wheezes for a second or two, and then let go.” When constrained to move the plot along, however, Jackson lapses into cliché with an all but heedless abandon: Bertha’s adulterous mother is “pretty as a flower” but a “darn good scout,” whereas Bertha herself is “hard as nails,” etc. Still, the author had been rather proud of his ambiguous ending (indeed the original title had been “Anybody’s Guess”), when the narrator asks Bertha why she shot her father: “ ‘Well,’ Bertha said, almost with a shrug, ‘he was there, and the gun was there too, and—and that’s all.’ ” But such subtlety didn’t wash with the fiction editor, Manon Tingue, who insisted the heroine expand a bit on her motive, to wit: “ ‘Well, sometimes I thought … that my poor father was a nothing. And if only he had been a something, then maybe this wouldn’t have … ’ ” “I have always marveled at the curious ways of editors,” Jackson wrote Tingue afterward: “They buy a story because they like it—and then they turn it into something else.”

  But once the check arrived—and Charlie was able to pay Kate’s tuition ($1,200), dividing the rest between Middlesex Hospital, Bruno Motors, and Boom—any remaining hard feelings vanished, and he began to rack his brain for more story ideas (“I’m going to get out of debt if it kills me”). That was the summer of 1963, a few weeks before he entered Will Rogers, where his resolve was dissipated amid a leisurely convalescence. “How are things?” his agent inquired that October. “Are you able to work, or do [you] have any interest in working? Is there anything we can do to help?” But Charlie didn’t reply, except to slip into the offices of Brandt & Brandt around Christmas, after which Frieda Lubelle was obliged to circulate a memo to the effect that Charlie owed her, personally, thirty bucks, which should be paid to her directly out of the “first amount of money” he managed to earn.

  “So I was forced to ask myself the question, over and over,” he wrote in “The Sleeping Brain”: “Did I want to prolong my life and keep my health and remain that sad thing, a writer who did not write, one whose reputation was all in the past; or should I say the hell with it and return to my former indulgence in what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the subtler poisons’?—and thus be released from my healthy prison, free once more from fear, able to function as a writer again.” An answer was suggested in June 1964, when he returned to Will Rogers for minor “repairs” (blunting the tips of his shorn ribs), and also to discuss the possibility of removing, later, that bothersome right shoulder blade (“scapulectomy”). This time Charlie was given Darvon for pain and Librium for sleep, but the latter (as usual) had the opposite effect: galvanized, he rented a typewriter and began writing through the night. As he described this breakthrough in A Place in the Country5: “Now I had to write, and the ideas and words came tumbling out! All the words piling up behind my fear marched out across the keys of my typewriter—except for a regular interruption. In my life in hospitals, I’ve taken 100,000 pills … ” Onscreen, a furiously typing Charlie absently waves off a nurse trying to get his attention, then his face lights up as he spies the pill cup in her hand; gulping down its contents with a smile, he resumes work while the camera lingers on the empty pill cup. “Oh, for so long I have had an inexplicable apathy about myself and my work, almost a despair, so that it seems often as if it couldn’t matter less whether I ever finished the book or not,” he wrote “Kate & everybody” in a six-page outpouring on June 10. “Now, mysteriously, I feel an upsurge, here, a renewal of a kind of confidence and belief in self that I have too long been without—and once again, life seems good, worthwhile, and the novel must be finished and find its place with the public.”

  Now he could see all the way through to the end—that balky Part Five, for instance, would consist of interior monologues alternating between Harry and Winifred (“a pure poem of despair”): brilliant!—and meanwhile, too, he’d come up with “a new story natural-born” for McCall’s, “
The Lady Julia.” “I remembered a chamber-maid at home called Julia McIntyre, who worked at the Windsor Hotel (the Royal Hotel in that last McCalls story),” he wrote his family.6

  A tall, handsome, very cultivated Danish chemist visited Newark, to start a new chemical factory, and stayed at the Windsor. Julia was cleaning his room one day (so the story goes) and said to him, wistfully: “Wouldn’t it be a lovely day to go for a ride?” That did it. He took her for a ride, fell truly in love with her, gave up his considerable family back in Copenhagen (just like Gauguin, even to the very city), installed her in an apartment, and then they lived together as man and wife for years.

  And that, indeed, was pretty much the story he proceeded to write—another story “not worth telling,” as he again confessed, though he labored for many weeks to make it otherwise, giving his heroine the kind of twenty-four-karat heart of gold that couldn’t fail to endear her to the average McCall’s reader. Finishing “The Lady Julia” at 2:30 a.m. on July 23 (so noted in his diary), he left the manuscript on the kitchen table for Rhoda and found her note the next day: “Charlie—the story is marvelous! … I’ve always felt your writing was going to grow—it wouldn’t be the brilliant breath-taking assault it used to be, but it would gain in depth and compassion and understanding.… Julia is wonderful.” As Charlie promptly wrote his older daughter, he was now trembling with “fatigue and emotion both,” eager to reread his “marvelous” story but unable to see the pages “for tears yet … ”