by Blake Bailey
Sarah, it bears repeating, was the love of his life, and he couldn’t stand the thought of losing her. A month later he wrote a contrite letter admitting that he’d “resented Sandy because perhaps I was overfond of you,” and vowed to do his utmost to remedy things. It was true he’d been bothered, in the past, by Sandy’s tendency to leave her alone so much (weekends especially), but during a recent stay at their apartment he’d had a chat with the young man that helped shed some light. Waiting up until his son-in-law came home, around midnight, Charlie had remarked that he looked “like a million dollars,” whereupon Sandy (“gay, pleasant, relaxed”) mentioned a lively day on the golf course and said, “I have to be active”—explaining the sedentary rigors of Wall Street and so on. Charlie encouraged his daughter to pass this anecdote along to her husband—what with all it implied of fatherly acceptance and the like—but then caught himself, remembering (as Sarah was wont to point out) that Sandy just didn’t care. “Well there, my friend, is a normal young man,” he concluded. “I wish I didn’t care what people thought of me.” And still he worked harder than ever to woo the young man, calling him “Alexander the Great” and expressing a wish to be buried in the dressing gown Sandy had given him. And meantime, privately, he considered writing a new story titled, simply, “Loneliness”: “A father trying to let go of his daughter trying not to call her—trying not to be like his own possessive mother who had driven him away.”
In the same letter where he’d recounted that breezy midnight chat with his son-in-law, Charlie had written Sarah, “Funny, the mutations of life—and thank God for them! Kate, of all the people I know, has become, in effect, my alter ego: I am able to think with her, talk to her, write her as I write nobody else—on an objective, impersonal, almost disinterested level most unusual between a father and a daughter—not possessive, as I think I always used to be with you.” Such effortless rapport had not come easily. “Kate must hurt someone, or she is not happy,” he’d written Sarah six years before, when Kate was fifteen, “and her particular object of aggression since you went to college is me.” During, say, a TV show that her father had scripted, Kate would make a point of reading throughout the broadcast, with maybe a bored glance or two at the screen, then leave without a word once it was over. Or if her overworked mother worried aloud that she’d be unable to attend the National Honor Society awards day—and Papa, of course, would be in New York—Kate would snap, “You went to Sarah’s!” Suffice it to say, then, that her father’s excessive doting on his firstborn had not gone unnoticed, and indeed Kate would struggle for years with a sense of being unloved—a problem she came by honestly. “And what about some mail sometime?” her needy father hectored her, typically, in 1962. “Are you just going to go on forever taking, and not giving?”
But then, too, they had their better traits in common, as Charlie discovered more and more now that Kate had gone off to college. “We must go see the Courbets—the great landscapes and thrilling awful seascapes,” he wrote, one of his daily postcards to the girl during her freshman year at Sarah Lawrence (“Sadie Larry,” said Charlie), usually featuring a favorite painting with some exuberant gloss on same. Kate was a true protégé: ripe for the sort of inspiration he could provide, and yet quite the captain of her own soul—her assertiveness becoming less an irritant as she got older (“you are liker Elizabeth [Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice] than any other female I ever knew”), at least in comparison with her sister’s placid embrace of the bourgeois Pipers. The same year he wrote of Sarah’s “downstanding son / Of a you-know-what” for Valentine’s Day, he composed this bit of winsome doggerel for Kate:
Katie is the girl for me.
She is my af-fin-i-ty.
And I am hers—how else explain
The fun, ideas, and sometimes pain
That we upon each other shower?
So be it. If it’s in my power,
No other dame would I prefer
Excepting only, only her.…
One of the highlights of 1963, for Charlie, had been Father’s Day at “Sadie Larry” (“Be apprised that I have signed up for everthing [sic] …. Looking forward—et comment!”), and a year later he promptly alerted Sarah when her little sister was elected president of the senior class. “You are my only perfect correspondent,” he wrote the latter, though their correspondence was more than a trifle one-sided. Since, again, he hardly saw the point of diaries, and rarely wrote Dorothea anymore, Charlie’s younger daughter had become, by default, the sounding board for his long ruminations on, say, the wrong-turnings of his career, his disenchantment with AA, various veiled and not-so-veiled hints about his sexuality (“I picked up The SYMPOSIUM and my god suddenly it was crystal-clear … ”). The more he wrote her, though, the more he longed for her actual presence—the way they could “talk and talk forever” about anything, whereas Rhoda was “a non-discusser,” and really what was there left to say?
The answer was very, very little. “We are seldom alone together, hardly ever talk,” Charlie wrote Sarah, shortly after his return from Will Rogers in 1964. “Mama is home at 5, then there’s news from 6:30 to 7:30 and often from 7:30 till 8 something else, so that I have to get in what I have to say, if anything important, between commercials, then at 8:30 Mama is off to bed.” In the early days they’d had the girls around to distract them, then for years Charlie had stayed in New York during the week, leaving his family to fend for themselves except for “that ratrace of meeting the train” on Friday, as Rhoda put it, “and getting dinner afterward,” since Charlie could hardly boil an egg and was liable to starve if left unfed. Nowadays, à deux, both he and Rhoda were mindful of a certain fraught quality to their discourse; as he wrote in “Jim’s Night Life” (a fragment inspired, he freely admitted, by his own marital plight), some of their dicier talking-points included “money, sex, the children, the past, the future,” and hence conversation tended to proceed as follows:
SHE: I saw Mrs. Meyer in the Supermarket.
HE: Oh? …
Or.
SHE: We’re having frankfurters and beans tonight. How many franks will you want?
HE: Oh, two will be enough, thank you.…
Then an hour of TV and so to bed—their respective beds, rather: Charlie, for his part, “came alive” during these late hours, rehearsing all the bitter things he’d left unsaid while docilely eating his hot dogs (“He should have risen up a dozen times and pasted her one”).
One of the reasons he “came alive” was because he was taking drugs again, and in the absence of much writing he felt a kind of thwarted gregariousness, when high, that fueled his anger toward his taciturn wife—anger that was already rampant, given her long-suffering opposition to “the subtler poisons,” which of course was the main topic they elided lest a hideous row ensue. The three scribbled pages of “Jim’s Night Life,” not coincidentally, were dated “Feb. 21st 1963”—about a week before Charlie consented to the ordeal of withdrawing from Doriden at the Carrier Clinic—and now, in August 1964, he braced himself for a showdown of sorts at Boom’s seaside cottage in Strathmere, where he and Rhoda were to spend ten days alone together. “Sounds awful to say,” he wrote Kate a week before they left, “but it will be a kind of test for us both, a good test, for we need to get together without the disturbing distractions of The Rutgers Alcohol Studies thing, often my AA, very often my writing”—the last of which (at least since Will Rogers II) involved pill-taking. “Now my sole aim is to slide down these last ten years or so of our lives as gracefully as possible,” he wrote Sarah a day later. “If we find a real communion together … then great: much will have been accomplished, to augur well for the fast diminishing future. If we don’t, well, then we’ll have to face that too.” Meanwhile he was hedging his bets: his local doctor was out of town, so he fired a letter to Dr. Ayvazian (“Fritzalie”) on August 4, asking him to expedite prescriptions for Darvon and Librium.
The Strathmere trip was a bust, needless to say, at least in terms of the marriage.
Shortly after their return, on August 16, Charlie complained to Sarah about the “loneliness and silence of home,” and two days later Rhoda gave him something else to be lonely about, returning to Malaga (and thence again to Strathmere, which Charlie dearly loved) for the Labor Day weekend. By herself. “My wife, I am sad to say, is a very sick woman,” he wrote the next day to his Macmillan editor, Robert Markel, though on reflection he mailed the letter to Boom instead (“Knew you would be interested in this”), the better for his brother to grasp what kind of viper he was nourishing in his bosom.3
I really only realized it this past week, how deeply disturbed and sick she is: and it gets worse the more I get better.… We have one car, I can’t walk much more than two blocks, certainly can’t carry things (I mean like bags of groceries, etc) and yesterday morning—Friday, Rhoda suddenly announced that she was taking off in the car and didn’t know when she would be back. I asked, “Do you mean Tuesday, after Labor Day?” and she said she didn’t know when she would be back. I stood there silent, determined to let her go without further question, because maybe she needs just that, and just before she left she said: “There’s no coffee in the house, no bread, no milk, no Tab (that soft drink I drink) etc.” I said, “That’s all right, I can manage, I’ll get them somehow,” and she looked at me, there was a smile that still makes me shudder to think of because it wasn’t malicious or sarcastic, it was horridly mirthful, and said, “Martyr”—and was gone. Well, I went out while it was still cool enough and though our neighborhood is somewhat up and down hill, I did manage—and came home to at least four days—and maybe more—of utter relief and peace.
Indeed he decided he could use a lot more “loneliness and silence,” sweetly suggesting to Sarah that she invite her mother to New York for a few days (“Mama has lots of time coming to her”).
WHATEVER THE UPS AND DOWNS of his marriage, Charlie was desperate for human contact. One day in August he’d gone to the Rutgers library and struck up a long chat with “one of the gals in the Info Department,” who asked him what he did for a living. He told her (“the dreadful secret came out”), and the next day the woman’s husband—Joseph Czapp, director of continuing education—gave him a call: Would Charlie be interested in teaching an evening extension class at the women’s college? “I am enormously flattered at my age to receive such an offer,” he promptly wrote a Sarah Lawrence professor he’d met during a recent visit, “because Kate, who loves me dearly, thinks at the same time (like all daughters) that her father doesn’t know nothing.” For the two-hour weekly lecture course, he would receive two hundred dollars a semester.
Charlie threw himself into the preparation, composing a syllabus that began with a long, cajoling “Note to the Students Intending to Enroll in ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE Starting September 23rd and Taught by CHARLES JACKSON.” Charlie had parsed his potential customers—wistful housewives and retirees—and was agonizingly chary of scaring them off with highbrow talk: “We want to read the books for their own sake and enjoy them because after all they were written in the first place to be enjoyed rather than studied …” And if you don’t like a novel on the syllabus? Don’t read it! Charlie had provided a list of alternative titles by the same author in every case but three: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Portrait of a Lady, because of their intense “reader-interest” and “identification values”; in fact he all but promised his prospective students that they wouldn’t be able to put those novels down or their money back! “Far from being a cold, academic lecturer,” he further assured them, “I am a frankly confessed and in some cases starry-eyed fan (there is no better word to describe it) …” To prove it, he would take a special approach to Crime and Punishment during their first session, regaling them with Raskolnikov’s murder of the pawnbroker as told in Charlie’s own words, as if from personal experience, followed by a reading of “The Sunnier Side” that would help them all reflect on why good literature often seems “truer” than real life. “I’m always curious about people,” he concluded, “and I’m looking forward to meeting and knowing you.”
Charlie had a wonderful time, attracting one of the biggest enrollments at the Extension Center. He loved revisiting old favorites like Handful of Dust, Death in Venice, Dubliners, et al., and preparing his lectures was a delightful pretext for avoiding work on his novel. He urged family and friends to attend his classes: Rhoda was coming for Pride and Prejudice, and he particularly wanted Sarah to bring Sandy for dinner on November 18, since they could all go to his class on Anna Karenina afterward (perhaps he was planning a few subtle hints about Sandy’s resemblance to Karenin). During that first semester he appeared in New Jersey’s Star-Ledger newspaper twice: one photograph showed him “in lively discussion” with two of his students, Mrs. Freda Sinnickson and Miss Suzanne Walker, while another—the raffiné author at his desk—accompanied a long feature article (“RUTGERS UNVEILS NOTED ‘LOST’ WRITER”) by a rather tactless woman named Doris E. Brown. “Even most of his neighbors haven’t known that the amiable, mild-mannered, little baldhead with the owlish spectacles … is the author of one of the most important books written in the past quarter century.” Charlie was so thrilled by the publicity that he hardly minded the “little baldhead” crack, or even Miss Brown’s reference to his “slightly prissy manner.” (“You should have seen her!” he wrote Kate. “A dyke, yet. All butch and a yard wide.”) Suddenly he was in demand: the Rotary Club invited him to appear at one of their lunches, and the celebrated poet John Ciardi shoved him in front of the crowd at an LBJ rally: “Me a political speaker!” Charlie marveled. “It wowed your mother.”
Even his work was taking off again, after a long autumnal rut during which he’d often reflected on his own futility—especially in comparison with innovative young turks like Bruce Jay Friedman (“they’ve got us old-timers beat a mile”), whose paranoiac black humor he depressively admired. Why bother? Nowadays he was little better than a McCall’s hack. Feeling especially sorry for himself one night, he quoted a pertinent aphorism from Logan Pearsall Smith: “The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work on the proceeds, is the most familiar of all the devil’s traps for the artist.” “Artist!” Rhoda scoffed. “You’ve been using that excuse for 30 years!” All the keener a bodkin for being true.
The latest thunderbolt came from Pushkin, whose vast accomplishment despite an early death made Charlie even more ashamed of his lassitude. For years he’d put off reading Eugene Onegin because he didn’t believe poetry could be translated, but finally he broke down and bought a paperback of Walter Arndt’s rhyming translation, famously derided by Nabokov, whose four-volume literal work was too expensive. Charlie was transported, despite Nabokov’s taunts: “Oh heavens, give yourself the treat of your life,” he wrote his fellow Russophile, Dorothea, praising Arndt and excitedly apprising his friend of the “World Masterpiece” he’d been inspired to write. On January 22, 1965, while he and Rhoda were on a bus to New York—en route to the preview of A Place in the Country—he was struck by “an idea out of the blue” and knew at once that his other projects (“the unfinished story Carl & Herb Mayes are palping for, so too for God knows how long the three-fourths done Second Hand Life”) were “shot to hell.” Instead he had to write a novel in Pushkin sonnets that would be a pastiche of Onegin and yet utterly different and new (as he scribbled in his notes, “The novel’s a dead form, / They’ve all been written— / No place for it to go. / Well then let’s go backward”). “It’s a piece of work,” he wrote Dorothea, “where style counts almost first, where words have to be exact, precise, unique, each one made for that spot or sense alone; where rhythm counts; and oh, wit (imagine me being witty—but there it is!); and with style and brilliance of les mots justes, if emotional content isn’t there, or character insight, or evocative description, then all the rest is for naught.”
For emotional content he relied, in part, on his adoration of his older daughter, whose aid he enlisted in suggesting a name for his eponymo
us hero (“I want it to be very American and plain, Whitman’s idea of ‘the divine average’ ”): Rufus “Bud” Boyd. And Sarah it was who served as the model for his Tatyana-like heroine, Mary—a naïf who grows up with Rufus in latter-day Fairfield, Connecticut, and one day declares her love in a letter posted by her devoted old nurse (based on Rhoda). Rufus, bound for the Ivy League, rejects her as a remnant of his provincial past. After traveling the world for some years, however, he comes to appreciate the prize he so blithely cast aside, and returns to find her a beautiful, fully blossomed young woman—married, alas, to a much older man. “In place of the valorous general” (in Onegin), Dorothea remembered of the latter, “there was substituted the mere suggestion of a human being. But in this blurred presentation, I was able to discern a familiar silhouette; short, plump, bald, Chaplinesque … ”4
As for his repressed, “very Yankee” hero, Rufus, Charlie had a definite physical model in mind (though he denied any other similarity): Sarah’s likable ex-boyfriend, Sam Curtis, whom he’d evidently found very handsome. Rufus was to appear first in his swimsuit, “like Adam on the primal day / … fresh from clay. / With breasts like flattened saddle bags / Muscled arms like twisted thick Byzantine columns”—etc. So fulsome was he on the subject that he took care to prepare a little apologia in his notes (later to be turned into verse): “For this is beauty, hardened reader, and you might as well get used to it, because there’s going to be much more—it is the thing about Bud Boyd and about the only thing—so do not flinch from my description—the idea that a man would describe another man’s beauty—why not? Where would we be without those Greeks who so loved the male human body that they gave us masterpiece upon masterpiece—each one … more dazzling and even ‘upsetting’ than the other …” Indeed, one of his aims, it seems, was to demystify homosexuality in the frankest terms yet, as Rufus faces the vagaries of his own nature amid the worldly temptations of Europe. “What does it matter how, as you young Americans say, you get your kicks, so long as you get them,” a French lieutenant (in Jackson’s notes) propositions the lad. “Two men old enough to know what they are doing, what they want … But you don’t want; or don’t know that you want or do.—So. Tant pis.”