Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  Perhaps; certainly it seems appealing when one considers the sad case of Harry Harrison, who on the outside, at least, is the author (bewigged) to a tee: dapper and “well-manicured,” he affects a “cultivated and calculated outgoingness”—indeed, at age forty-five, is little more than persona, witty and pleasant but incapable of passion. A prosperous bachelor (“an architect of country houses”), Harry glides along the surface of life until his awful, Jamesian epiphany at the funeral of Jack Sanford, which he attends with his old friend Winifred:

  And then it dawned on him, with the force and shock of a physical blow, that nobody—nobody—would ever weep over him like that, mourn his death, or remember him, in spite of everything, with love. For he had never loved anyone in his life, had never been able to give love and thus to receive it, and the ghastly emptiness of all his past years, his arid present, and his even more desolate future, swept over him like a flood.

  Such is the life of a morbidly closeted homosexual, whose anxious, compulsory playacting the author knew well. But Harry is not homosexual, as he expressly and counterintuitively announces toward the end of the novel: “My God, one could say that the miserable tragedy of me is that I didn’t even have enough drive to be a homosexual! No, it’s just that I—I loathe myself, can’t stand myself, can’t, and could never, get outside of myself.” Self-loathing, however, is not a cause but an effect, and Jackson fails to make any persuasive sense of it—having removed homosexuality from the picture, partly because it would suggest at least the ability to love, however repressed, and thus disrupt the novel’s neat, dialectical scheme: “a woman … who has a tremendous, almost an abnormal capacity for love,” as Jackson put it in 1953, “and a man who is unable to feel love at all.” Things become especially muddled when Harry’s formative years are recounted, as Jackson (having but one autobiography to give away—often, here, in the form of old, cannibalized short stories) grafts his own artistic temperament on a character who’d hardly be apt to share it; note the parenthetical contortions that follow (my italics): “He wrote, to his surprise, little poems; painted pictures, picked out tunes on the piano, as if he might someday become (which he knew in his heart of hearts he never would: he knew he just didn’t have it) an artist of sorts.” If he knows, why bother? More convincing is Harry’s memory of visiting a whorehouse with schoolmates at age seventeen—“a disastrous failure,” as he’s the only one who “fail[s] to rise to the occasion and go upstairs like a man”: “Several years later, in college English, while reading Measure for Measure, he came upon a thought that described the thing for him perfectly, as far as he was concerned, and he understood it: ‘Ever till now When men were fond, I smiled and wondered how.’ ” In the end Harry concludes that he must be “androgynous” (but not homosexual!)—whatever that’s supposed to mean in his case.

  More than anything Jackson published, A Second-Hand Life seems the work of a man under the influence of drugs—a man who could not soberly bear the fact that his best work was behind him: who could not, in short, imagine any life but that of a writer (“I was alive again”). Often, for the reader, it’s like being buttonholed by a drunk who fancies himself the most interesting person in the room. Pages of dialogue or description ramble on, hypnotically, as when the author opens Part Three with a whimsical comparison of Geneva, New York, with Geneva, Switzerland, a digression that reads like a recitation from a seed catalogue (“acres and acres of roses, of delicate orchids, of vulnerable short-lived peonies, hairy poppies, hardier but quick-to-fade gladioli, exotic or domestic plants of every description … ”), or when he recycles his 1944 letters written aboard the Super Chief bound for Hollywood, conferring on his heroine (similarly occupied) the curious “patriotism” he’d felt while in awe of the desert scenery—“a kind of chauvinism that reminded her, with shy pride, that this was her country, this was America, there was no place else like it on the whole face of the earth …” On it goes—page after maudlin page of atmosphere—until Winifred arrives in Palm Springs, whereupon it goes on some more: “This beauty of the night and the desert, this unknowing immense unregardful beauty, this impervious imperturbable majestic haunting mystical beauty … ” As a pretext for lyricism, however, flowers and deserts can scarcely vie with “the most beautiful thing in life, the human penis”—or rather, the penis itself is a kind of “large exotic tropical flower opening gradually out and coming into bloom in slow motion—a sight that [Winifred] could have contemplated for hours … ”

  CARL KROCH WAS RIGHT: such a “daring” book (if properly advertised) was bound to sell, as connoisseurs of nymphomania weren’t necessarily great readers of book reviews. A Second-Hand Life debuted at number 8 on the Times best-seller list for September 10, and lingered in the top ten for another two weeks. Far more momentous was the sale of paperback rights to New American Library for $110,000, half of which went to the author. Once the deal was assured in May 1967 (and one hopes this buffered the blows of August somewhat), Carl Brandt promptly sent a check to Stanley Bard at the Chelsea, who for months had been nothing but patient toward the indigent writer in Room 405: “May we add our thanks to those of Mr. Jackson and Macmillan for the courtesy, the kindness, and most of all the faith that you have brought to this situation?” Brandt wrote. “It is a splendid thing in these cynical days to have that kind of belief work out.”

  After years of debt, Charlie was free and clear—even rather rich!—and so, in one sense at least, his heroic perseverance had been rewarded. And he knew exactly what he wanted to do with the money, though he couldn’t do it alone. “One winter afternoon he called me,” Dorothea Straus remembered.

  His voice on the telephone was more husky than ever, interrupted at intervals by choking paroxysms of coughing.… Yet I could detect something of the old Charlie. “I’ve just sold a novel to a paper publishing house.… I know it’s a potboiler but guess what I’m going to do with the money? I have decided to take a trip to Russia!” I was aware that his family should have profited from the proceeds, but the vision of Charlie in the St. Petersburg and Moscow of his dreams—sick and solitary, but joyous and awed—revived my feeling for him. “You come, too,” he was continuing. “Let’s go together.” He never got there.

  1 One hastens to remind the reader that Jackson hardly needed sexual attraction to take an interest in another writer’s career. His other “scholar” at Bread Loaf, Stephen Jones, was decidedly straight, and anyway Jackson made no advances; he did, however, press Jones’s novel Turpin on Macmillan, which published it in 1968. “It was all because of Charlie, going extra steps when he didn’t have to,” said Jones. “God bless him.”

  2 After her husband’s death, Rhoda found pills stashed all over his apartment—behind books and records and the like. She considered reporting at least one doctor for overprescribing, though several were implicated, some of them mentioned by name in Charlie’s “Card of Thanks” for A Second-Hand Life. The latter document—a long, effusive list of acknowledgments to sundry people (“Because, figuratively, it’s been a long time between drinks”)—was struck out by Macmillan as “unprofessional.”

  3 The segment no longer exists in the NBC archives, though the gist of it can be cobbled together based on various letters in Jackson’s papers and my interviews with his daughters.

  4 When John Cheever risked his far greater career by publishing the novel Falconer (1977), about a gay prison romance, Clemons ecstatically declared the book a “masterpiece” and campaigned successfully to put Cheever on the cover of Newsweek, alongside the caption “A Great American Novel: John Cheever’s ‘Falconer.’ ”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sailing Out to Die

  The first mention in Charlie’s diary (“Noon—Stanley”) of his final companion, Stanley Zednik, appears on September 9, 1967, a day before the debut of A Second-Hand Life on the Times best-seller list. Stanley was a forty-year-old Czechoslovakian émigré, besides which little is known1; photographs show a blandly handsome man with a large head and wavy
blond hair. He spoke English with a thick accent. According to Dorothea, “Charlie had picked him up in an all-night diner near the hotel”—doubtless the Riss—somewhat on the strength of his resurgent fame: “To [Stanley],” she wrote, “Charles Jackson was a dazzling celebrity and he the faithful servitor.” We also know that Stanley worked at a factory of some sort (“Scotch tape,” said Dorothea) in Brooklyn, where he lived on Nostrand Avenue near Brooklyn College before moving to the Chelsea.

  Charlie had written Kate, in 1964, that homosexuality entailed “an acceptance of the facts and then a fitting of those facts into one’s social world as best & intelligently as one can,” and thus he endeavored to proceed where Stanley was concerned. Without going into detail, he divulged to friends that he’d “taken a companion,” whom some were invited to meet; he was a little sheepish about the fact that Stanley was rough around the edges, though he seems to have been a decent fellow. As Boom sized up the situation for Sarah’s benefit (“Weekend Chez Boom with Stanley,” Charlie noted in his diary for September 16, 1967): “I rather believe Stanley is thoroughly honest and generous in trying to help Charlie.… Charlie is lucky to have such a devoted attendant and maybe we are too. I don’t know if Stanley understands Charlie’s two addictions thoroughly but I’m sure he doesn’t encourage it. I think Stanley is very dumb (and for me dull) and Charlie is deceiving him. He’ll crush him too.” This, coming from Boom, was uncharacteristically harsh—it was written in January 1968, when Charlie was taking various turns for the worse—though accurate as far as it goes. Stanley’s role, by all accounts, was mostly that of a loving caretaker,2 as opposed to someone who could reciprocate Jackson’s intellectual enthusiasms. Carl Brandt got the impression the two had little to say to each other—this borne out, perhaps, by several leftover pages divided into columns headed “S” and “C,” suggesting they played a lot of rummy 500.

  Whether or not Stanley was an ideal soulmate, he seems to have made Charlie happy much of the time; certainly the latter comported himself like a man who’d “taken a companion.” Brock Brower’s final glimpse of Jackson was during the intermission of a Broadway play in the spring of 1968. The writers had last met at Bread Loaf almost three years before, and already the change in Charlie was that of a chrysalis turned into a butterfly: He wore a long, royal blue coat with wide Edwardian lapels,3 and (while Stanley hovered vaguely in the background) effusively congratulated Brower for his story “Rockabye” in a recent Esquire. “He was delighted with himself,” said Brower, many years later. “I’ve never seen a closet case debouch from under the moths more flamboyantly for his grand finale.” That night Brower pithily reported to his wife: “He’s out!”

  THE ADVENT of Stanley, for the other Jacksons, added a new strain to an already delicate situation. Everyone had been doing their best—Rhoda far from least. The worst of her pique toward Charlie soon passed after he moved to the Chelsea, and she called various friends in New York imploring them to keep an eye on him; also, despite earlier strictures, they did in fact spend Christmas together as a family. Indeed, she’d rather shamed Charlie with her generosity (“I was absolutely stunned by your presents,” he wrote her afterward), giving him two Brooks shirts and a new book that named Jackson as an especially “outspoken and generous” proponent of the Fitzgerald Revival.4 The following summer, too, as he struggled to finish his novel, Rhoda balked at her daughters’ suggestion that she take a long-overdue trip to visit Kate in Arkansas—“I just feel Papa needs the money so badly it’s not right”—but was finally persuaded to go.

  Charlie’s relationship with his Wall Street son-in-law, meanwhile, hadn’t gotten any easier. Sandy’s golf-playing neglect of his wife had always been hard for Charlie to swallow, and one night he was amazed to hear the young man blandly admit that, between marriages, he’d spent almost every night playing pinball in Times Square and “(get this)”—Charlie wrote Rhoda—“attending those appalling double-feature movies which, I’m told, are the sink of the city”: “Frankly,” he concluded, “I pray that they do not have a child.” As for the kind of father Charlie expected such an “adolescent” to be—well, he’d spelled it out, more or less, in the subtle form of a “story idea” that he related to Sandy in a letter (“please show this to Sarah”):

  [It’s] about one of those typical male American types who don’t understand the female sex or indeed anybody else; who needs his wife only as a kind of buffer or shock absorber between him and the social world around him … that is, the amenities are left up to her, while he can go on living strictly for himself, etc.… you know the type, you’ve seen them—completely unimaginative etc etc. He is ten years married, has a child of eight years, then learns that his wife is pregnant again. [To condense a bit: the father does not want another child—can hardly stand the child he has—but finally figures that if one or the other kid dies, at least they’ll have a “spare.”] … The story comes to a dénouement when one day the first child is killed … and they do have one left—which he comes to detest with a passion, not because he misses the dead child at all or even feels bereaved, but because inwardly, unconsciously, without knowing it, he detests himself. The story is called … THE SPARE.

  Whether Sandy was anything but mystified by such elliptical satire is unknown. He was not a communicative man. In any event, Charlie was the opposite of dismayed when his granddaughter, Alexandra (named after her father), was born on October 25, 1966. In a newspaper interview Charlie referred to the girl as his “pride and joy” (“The only thing of importance in my life is my family”), and composed the inevitable poem, “A Salute, A Blessing, and a Kind of Family Inventory for Alexandra,” which lavished compliments on every member of the Jacksons and Pipers (every member: “What better Dad could any baby / Choose for a Pop: she picked a dandy”)—except, of course, himself:

  Which brings us up to Grandpa Jackson,

  Of whom the less that’s said, the better.

  ’Tis true the slob’s an Anglo-Saxon,5

  But he’s not just all wet, he’s wetter.

  Remember, though, while there’s above you,

  A sky at all, he’ll always love you.

  The last two lines were certainly true: as Sarah attests, he was “a doting grandfather” who loved playing with the toddler, however much her parents had begun to distance themselves.

  Sarah was finding it harder and harder to reconcile her Piper life with that of her raffish father. The Chelsea was not her kind of milieu—even before Stanley (who “smelled” to boot) had entered the picture. As a child Sarah had scarcely considered her father a sexual being, and later was ill-prepared when he began dropping some pretty broad hints. “Well I guess I really am getting old”—he wrote her in 1964, while staying at her and Sandy’s place on the Upper East Side—“to spend all of Saturday and all of Sunday sitting alone in your apartment, doing nothing … while all the city throbs with naughty joy without, I gladly accept the fact that my cruising days are over. No more the chase, thank God.” That same summer he also let her know that Memoirs of Hadrian had become his “most necessary book,” and that he “absolutely identif[ied]” with the (gay) hero and “need[ed] him” in his life. As for Kate—whether or not she was quite willing or able, at the time, to process the information—Charlie seemed to take it for granted that she’d figured things out on some level, what with his casual remarks about “fitting” the fact of homosexuality into one’s life, his ruminations about how “crystal-clear” Plato’s message had finally become to him, and so forth. In the summer of 1963, while working for a family on Long Island, Kate had socialized with one of Edie Sedgwick’s unhappy brothers—the gay, alcoholic Francis (“Minty”)—whom Charlie had met in AA. When the young man hanged himself the following year, Charlie wrote a commiserating letter to Kate: “You speak of his problems. Besides alcoholism, I suspect he had sexual problems as well (my god who doesn’t), though I never knew or heard anything definite.”

  Though everyone continued to do their best, it
was Kate whom Charlie settled on—more and more definitely, and rather burdensomely—as a confidante. “Isn’t he cute?” he remarked of Stanley (“as if he were a kind of curio”) in her presence. As she recalled the episode, “It wasn’t just affection, it was more like, ‘This is my little indulgence … ’ ” Their rapport had become crucial to him. “Great week with Kate—a milestone,” he’d scribbled in his diary two years before, in December 1965, when she’d come home for Christmas after four months with VISTA. The “milestone” had come about when Kate confided in him (not Rhoda) that she had a boyfriend in Arkansas, and the following Valentine’s Day he wrote her an allusive poem:

  Every guy has a gal he likes best;

  You alas, darling Kate, were mine.

  The “alas” is not spoken in jest:

  You can’t be my Valentine.

  Another has taken your eye;

  I’m so mad I can hardly speak.

  You may call it love, but I—

  I can only call it damned cheek.

  —FORLORN

  For the family especially, things began to fall apart in earnest after Charlie finished his novel. On Valentine’s Day, 1967 (one year after the “FORLORN” poem), Boom wrote Sarah: “Charlie phones often—in good form—hope he behaves himself for a while.” But the next day Charlie overdosed again, and was taken to Freeport Hospital on Long Island. Sarah was the only one in New York at the time, and it was she who visited Freeport to make sure he was all right; she said nothing, however, to her sister—who’d just moved to Washington, D.C.—since for years she and Rhoda had conspired to “shield” Kate from the worst. “Relationships very strained,” Charlie wrote in his diary on March 12, two weeks after his release from the hospital, when everyone (Boom too) had gathered in New Brunswick during a weekend visit from Kate, who (as Charlie also noted) was the one who volunteered to drive him back to New York that day.