by Blake Bailey
They share the joys, they share the ills,
And quite agree on sleeping pills.…
Thus, to be fair to job and jobber,
To even up the complex score
(Through use of drugs you may deplore),
It is the work of Sharl [Charles] and Robber [Robert]
In sooth, we could not well unsnarl
Which part was Robber, which was Sharl.
But still Jackson hesitated: Was the novel worth risking his life for? According to “The Sleeping Brain,” he discussed the problem with a doctor “very knowledgeable in this field” (Modell in Larchmont?), but over the course of four hour-long sessions he “got nowhere”—in other words, the doctor refused to tell him what he wanted to hear. “During our final session,” Jackson wrote, “I remember how coldly he said: ‘Go ahead, if you like; you’re on your own. But I’ll make you a bet. If you return to barbiturates, you’ll never finish the novel at all, Macmillan will be stood up, and you’ll be through. No other publisher will ever take you on again.’ ” By then it was August, his novel was “reced[ing] further and further,” and Charlie had pretty much decided that “health was killing [him] as much as the pills ever would.” Fate, as he perceived it, gave him the final nudge. On August 20 (“a Black Day or a Red-Letter Day, depending on one’s viewpoint”) he arrived at Boom’s seaside cottage for a weekend visit, and noticed that Jim Gates had left his medicine bag in the guest room: “I didn’t scruple or hesitate for a moment. I admit this quite without self-blame; because it was, in a sense, not my doing at all—and here was the answer.” He filched a bottle of Nembutal and returned to New York the next day. A Second-Hand Life was finished within a month.
JACKSON WAS ILL-ADVISED to rest on his laurels. As soon as word got out that he’d delivered the manuscript, Farrar, Straus and Giroux pounced with a “friendly ‘alert,’ ” reminding Carl Brandt of his client’s indebtedness to the firm. At first Jackson tried to interest “Karlkin” in pitching Rufus “Bud” Boyd as his next project: quoting “the rhapsodic Bob Markel,” he described his poem as a work of “Mozartian delight,” and insisted that the eighteen-stanza “Dedication” (enclosed) be sent forthwith to The New Yorker, as Roger Straus had assured him the editors would “publish it as a great coup” (despite their almost systematic rejection of Jackson’s work over the previous twenty-one years). As for the poem’s main narrative, Charlie enclosed “only four stanzas” (i.e., all that existed) just to give his agent “some idea of its tone,” while promising to regale him in person with the rest of the story (“you can’t beat it”). Asked forty-three years later what became of Rufus “Bud” Boyd, Brandt replied, “I’m sure I did something simply because one would have to, under those circumstances, and I also think I managed to blot it from my memory as quickly as possible.”
In time Charlie was forced to accept that his only marketable product was his long-awaited “Birnam saga,” What Happened, and so on March 16, 1967, he signed a Macmillan contract for its first volume, Farther and Wilder, that provided a $2,500 advance up front, another $3,000 in six monthly installments of $500 (“each to be paid on evidence of satisfactory progress”), and a final $2,000 due on delivery in August. Charlie’s signature on the contract looks distinctly shaky, though he endeavored to seem upbeat in the press: “Jackson has regained his old vitality as a novelist,” one journalist wrote, “and is far advanced into a long and ambitious novel which he believes to be the best he has ever written.… Four hundred pages are done and the flow is gratifyingly steady.” As a friend recalled, the manuscript (somewhat less than four hundred pages) was conspicuously stacked beside his portable typewriter, where it remained in dusty, yellowing abeyance. Meanwhile Kate had taken a job in New York that autumn (1966), and remembered her father as “very despondent” during her six months in town: she and Sarah took turns calling him on alternate days (“just to see if he was alive or alert”), and both made a point of regularly meeting him for lunch, during which he’d often sit in mute, teary-eyed despair.
But at least he had the publication of A Second-Hand Life to look forward to—his first novel in nineteen years! And so far he had reason to be optimistic: Boom, his most devoted fan, was unstinting in his praise (“It’s so moving,” he wrote Sarah), and most of the people who’d received advance copies—that is, practically everyone Charlie had ever known, including childhood friends in Newark and even some of their progeny—went out of their way to be as generous as possible. Dr. Fredric Wertham was almost as feverish in his praise as he’d been twenty years earlier with The Fall of Valor: “I have always regarded Charles Jackson as one of our most authentic writers,” he wrote for Macmillan’s publicity department. “A Second-Hand Life confirms this.… It is something new, a book one has to read if one wants to see some of the unfamiliar aspects of the temper of our times.” Even some of the most formidable literary critics in America seemed eager to reassure Charlie, whose struggles over the years were well known. An old Partisan Review acquaintance, F. W. “Fred” Dupee, commended the author’s “Awful Daring, as well as [his] patience and skill,” mentioning that Truman Capote had also seemed to like the book. And Lionel Trilling—no less—had inferred from the little bit he’d found time to read (“Diana will follow”) that Charlie had “lost none of that most important of the novelistic charms, a passionate concern with character and the intricate texture of life.”
Those who didn’t know the author personally, however, tended to be more circumspect. Mindful of Charlie’s financial straits, Brandt had lost no time pressing the galleys on Hollywood agent H. N. Swanson, pointing out that a really game actress “could have a good deal of fun with this.” But Swanson didn’t see it: “I doubt very much if Charles Jackson’s Second Hand Life will ever sell to pictures,” he bluntly replied, noting the “grim” story and “unrelieved” heroine; indeed, he wondered if the novel was “good enough to spend money to have it copied,” but agreed to put some feelers out. Brandt forged ahead: an executive at Paramount had told him that actress Patricia Neal might be up for a challenge, so he tracked her down to the Waldorf and rushed the galleys over (“Having spent seven years on it with the author I have no perspective, and consequently I am curious about your personal reaction beyond the purely professional”). For Charlie’s part, he thought “a logical choice” to play Winifred was the young actress Elizabeth Hartman, whose debut performance as a blind girl in A Patch of Blue (1965), with Sidney Poitier, had earned her an Oscar nomination. Perhaps the fragile Hartman had struck him as a kindred spirit; in any case her career was already somewhat hindered by depression, and twenty years later she’d leap to her death from a fifth-floor window.
Whatever the prospects of A Second-Hand Life in Hollywood, Macmillan was making “a very big noise” about it (as Brandt wrote Swanson), confident that the comeback of a once-celebrated author, and never mind his piquant theme, would result in “A MACMILLAN money-maker,” as a full-page ad touted in the April 17, 1967, issue of Publishers Weekly, featuring a sinister-looking Jackson on the cover. “Nineteen years is a very long time to wait for a new novel,” blurbed Carl A. Kroch, president of Kroch’s and Brentano’s (and son of Adolph, Charlie’s old employer), “but when that novel is as dazzling and—frankly—as daring as Charles Jackson’s A Second-Hand Life the waiting is worth it. That one man should be able to expose and explore the compulsions of a male alcoholic and the appetites of a sex-obsessed woman, and do both with such power, is remarkable. This one will sell.”
Two days before the publication date (August 10, 1967), Charlie was interviewed by Barbara Walters on the Today show,3 for which he seems to have chatted guardedly about the nature of his heroine’s pathology (“I think she is a nympho, Charlie, and I don’t accept your definition of the word,” William Inge wrote after the show, advising his friend that nymphomania was a matter of “gland disturbance”), and to have gotten bogged down in an explanation of his long silence as a writer, attributing it to lung problems. A more candid acc
ount was offered to Francis Brown, editor of the Times Book Review, for whom Charlie agreed to produce “a piece on Writer’s Block … sometime close to publication”: namely, “The Sleeping Brain.” Reviewing Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry in 1965, Jackson had rather primly deplored the myth of the “tormented” writer (“Are we really that tormented?”) as little more than a pretext for self-destructive behavior. In the present piece, however, he not only reversed himself on that point, but repudiated for all time his longing to be one of Whitman’s “divine average,” to be accepted by what Mann had called “the happy, the blue-eyed, and the ordinary.” Confessing that his work was almost wholly dependent on a “compulsive addiction to alcohol and/or drugs,” Jackson wrote: “Perhaps it is tasteless on my part (but I most earnestly protest it is not a kind of special pleading, an asking for special favors or allowances) when I insist that writers are different, else they would not be writers in the first place, able to do what they cannot help doing and often don’t even understand, no matter what the cost.” His final verdict? It was worth it.
In due course, this apologia for substance abuse in the service of art—“an extraordinary personal statement,” as Carl Brandt called it in his cover letter—would be rejected by Playboy, Life, Harper’s, Esquire, and many others. As for the Times Book Review, Francis Brown had wondered if Jackson would be willing to “recast” the piece in light of his novel’s critical reception, which perhaps resulted in Jackson’s adding a single, unrepentant line: “Now, whether the new novel justifies all this is beside the point,” he wrote: “I was alive again.”
He was alive, though most critics agreed his novel was no crowning achievement, no vindication of his refusal to join “the growing glamorous company of Artists Who Died Young,” as he’d written in regard to his legendary, irksomely prestigious contemporary and fellow alcoholic, Malcolm Lowry. “ ‘A Second-Hand Life’ seems old and tired,” Webster Schott observed in the Sunday Times on August 13, citing flaws that “gape like bottomless fissures”; the next day the newspaper published an even more scalding indictment by Thomas Lask, who called the book a “tasteless extravaganza in sexual promiscuity.” And lest readers be enticed by what seemed, if nothing else, a pretty racy read, Lask was careful to disabuse them: Jackson “has made the whole subject [nymphomania] as tedious as the talk about the weather on a round-the-world cruise. Page after page is filled with dialogue obviously written to mark time, as heavy as lead and twice as inert.” Newsweek agreed, finding an “oddly genteel clinicism” in even the most lyrically risqué passages, and reminding readers that A Second-Hand Life had been conceived, after all, in the midst of a more innocent decade (“poor, superserious Winnie seems like the slightly irrelevant older sister to the freewheeling females of our time”). All this and more—much more—during that first week of publication. “Charlie’s morale is damn near non-existent,” his agent noted on August 14, while still hoping for better press in the provinces. There was, in fact, something of this (“a searching study,” said the Bergen Record), though hardly enough to cushion a sneering coup de grâce delivered two weeks later by (of course) The New Yorker, whose “Briefly Noted” critic took a dim view of Jackson’s “obvious determination to see this thing through to the end at all costs. All the cost is to the reader.”
To his credit, Jackson didn’t take it altogether lying down. “Nobody can be ‘wronger’ than one’s well-meaning friends,” he’d cautioned twenty-four years earlier, referring to the almost universal praise from advance readers of The Lost Weekend—a notion he put aside after being pilloried for A Second-Hand Life. Marked in Charlie’s hand as a possible “Adv[ertisement] for MacMillan,” “CAN A WRITER TRUST HIS FRIENDS?” was a long list of blurbs compiled from all the kindly letters written by, say, eminent critics such as Irving Howe (“very venturesome”), his Bread Loaf protégé John Weston (“we knew you would do it”), and the wife of Rhoda’s obstetrician, Midy McLane (“astonishing”). There was also Fred Dupee’s letter, though Charlie saw fit to omit the man’s observation that his two protagonists, Harry and Winifred, were not so much plausible characters as “agents of your inspired nostalgia and auto-eroticism,” a point more decorously made by his old friend Marion “Bettina” Fabry, who described the two as “different aspects of the same person”—that is, Charlie himself.
Charlie, not incidentally, was bent on denying any such connection. Composing his own PR copy in the third person, he reiterated his line about “writ[ing] from intuition only”—not experience, and not clinical know-how either, as he was “untrained” in psychology and had no college degree: “What [Jackson] produces comes out of his unconscious [last four words struck out: “off the top of his head” inserted] almost without premeditated thought.” This from a writer who’d confessed, time and again, that almost every word of The Lost Weekend was true, who’d prepared the following personal statement for the Institute of Arts and Letters in 1959: “As a writer I have always had one hard and fast rule: Don’t write about anything you don’t know anything about.… Which is why I write so much about myself: what is true of me will be more or less true of the reader, for no one is unique.” As Mary McCarthy had foreseen in 1945, however—via her fictional portrait of Jackson (as “Herbert Harper” in The Lost Week)—he’d already “given himself away” to such an “improvident” degree in his first and (by far) best novel, that he had little left over, and what remained would have to be parceled in bits and pieces to various characters (“an assemblage of disjuncta [sic] membra poetae”). Previously he’d written an apprentice work of gay initiation, Native Moment, followed a decade later by The Fall of Valor—pioneering but dull, as he tried to write “objectively” and was loath to reveal too much of himself in the latently gay Grandin, given what he’d already hinted on that point in The Lost Weekend. And after that? As McCarthy predicted, he found himself with “very little left to say and very little interest in saying,” though he’d always be powerfully nostalgic about his Arcadian childhood, and so a portion of good work remained.
He had written, then—and quite courageously for the times—about homosexuality, though he hadn’t really examined the erotic aspects, the underside of his dapper, affable persona, the “compulsive excursions” into “the low and the lawless” to which he’d alluded in “An Afternoon with Boris,” the “life coarse and rank” celebrated by his beloved Whitman. This, in part, was to be the burden of What Happened, and hence his agonies in bringing it off (aside from its impossibly ambitious scope); the prospect of writing about such matters with perfect frankness was, in the end, paralyzing, and so Jackson fell silent—as did a number of gay writers who, in effect, ran out of material, having gone as far as they could acceptably go: one thinks of E. M. Forster, whose last novel was finished forty-six years before his death in 1970, whereupon his only gay-themed work, Maurice (begun in 1913), was published at last; or Glenway Wescott, who petered out with Apartment in Athens, followed by a forty-two-year retirement; or even (a decidedly minor but telling instance) Walter Clemons, who published a well-received story collection in 1959 before giving up fiction entirely, lest (as he later admitted) he reveal too much and risk his career as an editor and book critic.4 But of course there was another way—the way of Proust, Tennessee Williams, and Inge, to name a few, who dissembled their erotic longings in heterosexual form. No wonder Jackson was (periodically) so elated by the possibilities of A Second-Hand Life: not only could he finally “give free rein to his obsessive fantasies” (as a French critic, Georges-Michel Sarotte, surmised of the author) in the person of a nymphomaniac heroine, but also posit an existential opposite, Harry Harrison—the kind of “dull automaton” that Jackson had feared becoming if he “stifle[d]” his nature. As he’d written four decades before in “The Devil’s Dialogue”:
“… You’re still young yet, and so far this repression
Has had no serious damaging results;
But give it time—a few years more!—and see
The wreck of y
outh that you will have become …
Devoid of that ecstatic soul the gods
Bestow alone upon their favorite children.…
I cannot bear to see you made a slave,
Afraid to know or recognize yourself,
Living in fear, your own dread Frankenstein!”
Above all, perhaps, he could make the point that sexual proclivities have little to do with moral character one way or the other. Winifred’s pursuit of “the human penis” is both a matter of appetite and an aspect of her “invincibly innocent” nature: though she wants nothing better than “to make one man happy,” she refuses to indulge in the “hateful” hypocrisy of “play[ing] hard to get,” even though it means forfeiting the love of her life, Jack Sanford, who exploits her sexually before marrying a more “respectable” woman. In a better world it would not be so, though Jackson seems typically ambivalent about things. On the one hand, Winifred is the “soul of courage—and yes, of honor; true honor,” and her stoical acceptance of a bad reputation is understood to be so much noble self-sacrifice. Besides, Winifred knows better than most that “sex [has] nothing to do with love,” having been deflowered by a local roué (not unlike her creator) at the tender age of eleven. On the other hand, wallowing in a “morass of compulsive meaningless sexuality” seems hardly desirable either. How compulsive and meaningless? Very: Winifred prefers summer to winter for the novel reason that it’s easier to descry a man’s penis through light fabric, and she becomes sad when she reads of a convict’s execution because it means one less penis to be had (“if only once”). And what of the occupational hazards? At one point an aging Winifred is followed beyond the railroad tracks by a rough-looking stranger, who apparently knows of her infamy (“Hi, Winnie”): he puts his hands around her neck and considers strangling her, then merely rips off her blouse and ravishes her at length “in the cindery turfy grass.” Later Winifred will reflect on the encounter with “a kind of fright” and realize it’s time to mend her ways; in the moment, though, when most animals are triste, she lies in the man’s arms and thinks: “This was the sort of experience that could and should happen all the time, whenever you felt like it, no questions asked, no accounting to anybody: you see somebody you know or want, and why shouldn’t you have him or have each other?”