by Blake Bailey
It would take almost four months to produce a satisfactory version for McCall’s, and it would be hard to say which side found the process more exhausting. “Treat my new baby kindlily,” he’d entreated Manon Tingue, who looked over the twelve-thousand-word typescript and reached for her machete. When Charlie saw the first revision—just over half his original length—he was plunged into “nearly suicidal” despair: “What remains now is just a story of a whore’s climb to a kind of position of wealth and nothing more (no wonder the town hates her, now), with all detail that showed kindness, heart, growth in stature, etc., taken out.” So he wrote Kate in a long, lachrymose letter evoking the veritable Calvary he’d endured for her sake, since—on the very day he’d received his eviscerated “baby”—Sarah Lawrence had demanded he pay his daughter’s tuition, or else. “With this in mind,” he wrote her, “I went up to New York with no fight left in me at all, saw Manon and Carl and Herb Mayes and said take it the way you want it, but pay me quick, and remove my name from the story, for it is mine no longer. This they refused to do. They wanted the name, and said mine was the only fiction writer’s name they ever featured on the cover, and that is true … ”
The next day he wrote Kate again, this time in feverishly good fettle. Her tuition was paid! As for “The Lady Julia,” who cared what those hacks at McCall’s made of it? “All can be restored and even re-written my way, when I re-publish it in my next collection of tales called ARCADIA RE-VISITED, as a companion volume to THE SUNNIER SIDE.” Meanwhile Mayes was dangling an extra boodle for Charlie if he agreed to recast the story in a more redemptive mode. In Charlie’s version, the Danish chemist kept Julia until he died in a factory explosion, whereupon she gave his fortune to the Church and disappeared, leaving a once-scandalized Arcadia to wonder if maybe they’d been hasty in judging her. But Mayes wanted Julia to exert herself in even more good works, wanted her and the chemist to be “quietly married” by a worldly priest, who in turn would preside over her subsequent death in childbirth, marveling at her goodness the while, which is finally celebrated by the whole town at “one of the largest [funerals] Arcadia had ever seen.” And what did Charlie make of such wanton liberties? “I thank you with all my heart,” he wrote Mayes, after considerable smoke had cleared. “I like the story ‘The Lady Julia’ … it is a story now, not just a long character-sketch; and I am grateful to you for your ideas as well as for the most generous and uncalled-for extra money.”
But the long job had taken a toll—not least on Manon Tingue, who’d reacted badly to an addled charm offensive on Charlie’s part. “Manon is under the impression that Charlie is anything but well,” an anonymous Brandt & Brandt employee wrote in a memo, having been summoned by Tingue to discuss the matter over lunch. “Please, a note?” Charlie had written her on August 3, while awaiting further news of “The Lady Julia.” “I pray for the results—any results—even if only money. My God how I need it. And how, too, I need you in my life—though you’ll never believe me.” When this failed to elicit a commensurate emotion, he tried phoning her at home and paving the way with a lot of friendly patter, and finally went over her head altogether and tried to deal exclusively with Mayes. “He can very soon wear out his welcome there,” the memo writer concluded.
1 Such was his consternation—though the two had only been kissing—that he arranged for Sarah to receive counseling from a priest friend in Philadelphia.
2 Sometimes Charlie said it was four ribs removed, sometimes three, and the same vacillation applied to accounts of his surgery at Middlesex Hospital the year before; at any rate he was fairly consistent in claiming to be minus a total of seven ribs, so perhaps suffice to say it was three at one and four at the other (or vice versa).
3 That is, the day before JFK’s assassination in Dallas. Charlie adored the president even more than he’d once adored FDR, writing in one of his many abortive manuscripts from this time, “I came home to a blacker, more sorrowful and sorrowing weekend and weeks than any I had ever spent in the more than forty hospitals or sanatoria in which, for one reason or another—drink, drugs, phthisis [TB]—I had been obliged to ‘serve time.’ … ”
4 From a favorite Shakespeare sonnet (42), and also the title (one may recall) of his never-completed play about a mother who loves her sons too much, with consequences that Freud and Krafft-Ebing might have foreseen.
5 Filmed in August 1964—two months after that second visit to Will Rogers—and released early the following year. As for his latest drug-fueled creative rebirth: surely he was given much the same medication during his previous visit in 1963, though there’s little evidence of his wishing to write as a result. Probably he was too frail then even to consider any kind of sustained labor, whereas in 1964 he was in better physical shape and his medical treatment was less traumatic. In the second case, too, he was likely in the throes of a manic episode.
6 The Windsor Hotel was the unsavory place where the pederastic organist, Bert Quance, washed up during his final days in Newark. In “The Loving Offenders,” Quance’s alter ego has a cameo at the “Royal Hotel”: “Ray Verne had been an accomplished musician in his time; now he smelled all day long of Sneaky Pete. He was a character so far gone in what used to be known as moral turpitude that people at home no longer raised their eyebrows over Ray Verne, what he did, and the seedy company he kept.”
Chapter Nineteen
Homage to Mother Russia
More than Rhoda, more than Will Rogers, the love between Charlie and his daughters had kept him alive in recent years, though it chagrined him deeply that they regarded him as a doting papa first and a writer hardly at all. Back when he’d published five books, Sarah and Kate had been children, and the fact that their father was a “writer” meant little more (as he wrote in “The Sleeping Brain”) “than if I had been a carpenter or a plumber or a postman.” But all the while he’d looked forward to the day when he could share his work with them—even saving magazines for that purpose—and was crestfallen when, if anything, they seemed even more indifferent as young adults. (In fact they found the autobiographical element not only distressing but distracting—“Who was this person, who was that person?” Kate would wonder—and neither Sarah nor Kate finished The Lost Weekend, even, until after their father’s death.) One of the high points of Charlie’s life was the long-awaited night Sarah had phoned him from college to enthuse about “Rachel’s Summer,” though it left him in an awkward spot: If he could write so beautifully then, why wasn’t he writing now?
And more than anything he hankered for Sarah’s love and approval—because he already had them in such abundance, and so was all the more loath to lose them. “Papa loves me more than anything else in the world,” she’d written in a college essay (“My Personality Shaped by Social Interaction / A Life History Paper”).1 “I love him too. Since we have always discussed everything, I feel no matter what happens I can go to my father and talk to him about it.” This was true. Mikey Gilbert, her best friend at Connecticut College, remembered the way Sarah would sit on the floor of the dormitory phone booth at all hours chatting with her father. Such unconditional love brought out the best in both of them. When Sarah remarked in passing that she “loved [him] better” than Mama, he lost no time composing a gentle reprimand: “We may be closer, because we are more able to talk about things, but you deeply, deeply love your mother—I’ve always seen it and always known it, and it is right that you should. Your mother needs your love, and you must always make her feel it.” But then, whatever else Rhoda was, she was not a demonstrative person. Sarah was startled, years later, when she reread her mother’s letters and saw how confiding and affectionate they were—so removed, that is, from the reality of their everyday relationship. Rhoda rarely said “I love you,” and was morally rigorous to a fault. “Work harder!” she’d admonish her daughter, a mediocre student in college, whereas Charlie would blame almost anyone but Sarah for bad grades (“such boring courses!”). And once, when the girl had taken someone else’s En
glish muffin from the communal fridge, and was threatened with possible suspension, Charlie was outraged (“You only took an English muffin!”), threatening to catch the next train to New London and give them all a piece of his mind. “But Sarah,” said her mother, “that wasn’t your English muffin!”
To Charlie, in short, she could do no wrong—and hadn’t, arguably, for years. “My father is an alcoholic,” she’d declared in her “Life History” paper. “Because of Papa’s problem, I am more mature, I think, and understand our family and other people more thoroughly.” As an honor student at Newtown High, Sarah had manifested her maturity in various ways: great popularity (“I made new friends easily”), a dazzling list of extracurricular accomplishments (Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award, the Lions Club’s George Trull Award, the D.A.R.’s Good Citizen Award, many offices in student government), stardom on the varsity softball and basketball teams, and a summer job as director of the local playground that entailed taking care of some fifty boys and girls (“Loving children, I enjoyed my work immensely”). For almost five years, too, she’d had a boyfriend who was also very mature and popular: Sam Curtis, scion of the Curtis Box family, one of the leading families in Newtown. Charlie adored Sam and vice versa (due in part to the former’s enthusiastic influence, Sam majored in English and later moved out West to write poetry), though he forbade the young man to leave his car parked late at night outside their home on Main Street, lest the townsfolk get the wrong idea.
Expectations were naturally high when Sarah won a scholarship to Connecticut College—Rhoda’s alma mater—though Charlie took pains to assure her that they only wanted her to do her best, “and if that isn’t good enough, then we and you have to accept.” As it turned out, alas, it wasn’t good enough, and during her sophomore year, in February 1960, a sympathetic dean named Miss Babbott wrote her parents to that effect. Charlie replied immediately: “We did indeed know about Sarah’s marks: one of the great things about Sarah is that she has always (and promptly) been honest with us … ” He would come to New London right away, he wrote, to discuss the matter with her in person, and perhaps see if he could do a little in his own way to improve things. The visit, for Charlie, was a triumph. As he wrote Miss Babbott afterward, he’d had a marvelous time—meeting her, of course, was a great pleasure, while Sarah and her friends had treated him practically as one of the gang: they’d played a lot of bridge, gone to the movie Brink of Life (“where was certainly struck the ‘grisly’ note you warned me of”), and best of all had long, shoeless “bull-sessions” in the dorm, during which Charlie had frankly canvassed the other girls about his daughter’s academic deficits (consensus: “she didn’t allot her time properly”)—which, however, he was determined to keep in perspective. “I consider myself so lucky to have a child like Sarah,” he concluded for Miss Babbott’s benefit, “whether she fails or succeeds, how can I not believe in God? By all the rules of my erratic past, Sarah should have turned out to be an unhappy mess.”
In the end it was Sarah who decided to give up college as a bad job and learn secretarial work at Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, which would make it easier for the more intellectual Kate to attend college the following year. Sarah and her friend Mikey took an apartment on 20th Street, and a year later Sarah met her future husband, Alexander “Sandy” Piper III, a stockbroker at Paine, Webber, Jackson & Curtis. A twenty-six-year-old divorcé, Piper had dated Mikey a few times when she suggested he take Sarah instead to a basketball game: “They got along much better,” she remembered, “and there was an attraction.” Charlie noticed too, albeit from the bitter distance at which he was kept; in a poem he wrote Sarah on February 14, 1963, he expressed the rather skeptical hope that she accept him as her valentine:
… For today only, mind you—till some fine,
Upright, downright, upstanding, downstanding son
Of a you-know-what, some real cool cookie, one
Who I hope knows good goods when he sees ’em
Takes [you] away.…
Doubtless it galled him that he’d yet to be introduced to the young man—a status quo that was still in place eight months later, though Sarah had thrown her father a bone or two that he (cooped up by then at Will Rogers) had energetically masticated. Since Sarah had mentioned, for instance, Sandy’s reluctance to get married so soon after his divorce, it occurred to Charlie that perhaps the young man was in the midst of psychoanalysis “because of some emotional deficiency or lack”; but what could this be? Given that he didn’t know Sandy yet (as he pointedly reminded Sarah) he could be mistaken, but:
I can’t shake a peculiar nagging hunch I have, somewhere in the background, that Sandy’s problem or the problem is a sexual one … and it has occurred to me, wildly (you know my lurid imagination) that Sandy may be impotent, or afraid of sex, or unable to function as he would like. Mind you, I most certainly don’t mean homo, I mean a man who is basically afraid of elemental woman, and there are lots of them.…2
He’d persuaded Rhoda, too, that there was something a little shady about a guy who was divorced so young and determined to be hush-hush about it; what could it be, if not “un-virility”? “The adjustments of marriage are difficult enough without a mal-adjustment of that order,” wrote Rhoda (perhaps with a certain hard-won wisdom on that point) to her daughter. And meanwhile, along with his other “probing questions,” Charlie wanted to know whether Sarah had ever, well, told Sandy about him?—that he was fun, lovable, easy to get along with (“I hope you have told him these things if, in your belief, they are true”).
As he would painfully learn in the fullness of time, however, it hardly mattered whether she had or not. Sandy was a regular guy, all right, and certainly wanted to make things go with his new father-in-law, but he wasn’t really interested in a deep relationship. He wasn’t a reader, for one thing, and the fact that Sarah’s father was the author of The Lost Weekend was mostly a source of embarrassment. As for Sandy’s parents (the father also of Wall Street), they were very sweet and well-meaning and whatnot, but also quite uninterested in arty stuff and moreover apt to go on about “the Jews” and so forth. As Sarah would later explain, “All the reasons I married Sandy [were] all the reasons Papa didn’t like him. I was not looking to repeat my father with my husband. I was looking for a stable life, I was looking for a steady income, and I thought I’d found that with this man and I thought I was in love with him.”
Fair enough. At any rate she married him on Christmas Day, 1963, at a small service in the Kirkpatrick Chapel at Rutgers, with a reception afterward chez Jackson, where the host confided to the only two non-family guests (both named Mike) that he took a dim view of the bridegroom. The following Valentine’s Day, indeed, his annual poem to his daughter was the most doleful yet:
Oh what to do about a Valentine that has gone astray
Gone and got herself married and all that mushy stuff?
Well you just try to keep on loving her any-way
Chin up & all that, but I tell you, brother, it’s rough.
Rough because like when you’ve just said something witty,
She smiles and looks back at you with a wide vague stare;
And while she is charming as ever and just as pretty,
You know who she’s thinking of and you just aren’t there.…
But naturally he was determined to make the best of things—for Sarah’s sake, of course, and because Sandy posed a special challenge: He was, after all, Tonio’s “simple” and “average” writ large, and Charlie would never cease to pine for acceptance from such people (while perversely baiting them too). “I love that colored photograph on my dresser of smiling you and a smilinger Sandy,” he wrote Sarah from Will Rogers in June 1964. “I look at it often with increasing pleasure and, yes, reassurance. That open, happy, frank, unselfconscious, and generous natural smile of Sandy’s—well, anyone who looks like that can be only good.—Tell him this, unless you think it would embarrass him, but I mean it with my heart.” But Sarah did not tell h
im, to her father’s dismay, nor did he get any response from a book titled Nymphomania (“a subject he should know all about”) that he’d left on Sandy’s pillow after a stay in their apartment, and he might have wondered if his son-in-law had twigged to the implications of Nabokovian poshlust (philistine vulgarity), which Charlie had impishly discussed with him one night.
Things came to a head when Charlie returned from Will Rogers a week or so after writing about the “smilinger Sandy” portrait: soaring with renewed enthusiasm for his novel and life absolutely in general, he looked forward to heading straight to Sarah’s place from his bus—“unless (wild thought) you’d like to drive up and get me?”—and having a lovely dinner with her and Sandy. “He was this charismatic, interested, interesting person who would just take over your life and it was wonderful,” Sarah later remarked (with this occasion in mind) “—and then it just wasn’t wonderful anymore. He didn’t know boundaries.” “Okay, Sarah,” he wrote her from New Brunswick, “suppose you sit down now and write me or ’phone me or at least let me know in some way what the matter is.” Having been given a not-so-subtle bum’s rush after dinner that night, poor Charlie had stopped at a phone booth on his way out of town (“hot and streaming with sweat”) to say goodbye, and had just assayed a little patter of bon mots when Sarah cut him short with, “Sorry, but we’re playing bridge.” Stunned, heartbroken (“my god, you don’t do these things to people”), Charlie wondered if maybe he bored her nowadays, or was it his lack of money, or—or what? “Maybe I am an old poop … But I can do nothing unless I know.”