Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  Kate’s growing solidarity with her father—embodied by her relative acceptance of the Stanley situation—flourished all the more, perhaps, because she was shielded from details that might have tested her sympathy far more than Stanley. “The check he sent out to Rhoda was ridiculous and I felt so sorry for her,” Boom wrote Sarah (his confidante) in January 1968, not long after Charlie had received his windfall from the paperback sale of A Second-Hand Life. “I’ll help her follow it up to collect a reasonable amount of what he owes her. Fortunately I had kept a clear account during the last two years—forgetting the big old ORFORD amount …” Toward the end, all sides were bruised. Charlie had any number of reasons (so he fancied) to feel sorry for himself, and was losing touch with reality in any case. After his death, Kate received a note in her father’s handwriting (she thinks Stanley must have sent it) to the effect that Sarah and Rhoda were “terrible people,” that only Kate and Stanley loved him (and vice versa). Horrified, she hid the note in her closet and didn’t mention it for almost forty-two years.

  A MOTIF in articles written about Jackson a year before his death, around the time of A Second-Hand Life, was that he “look[ed] much younger than his 64 years” (Saturday Review), despite his ghastly medical history and the fact that he smoked as much as ever (“ ‘They only took out one lung,’ he quips, puffing on a cigarette”). On the inside, of course, he was a mess. The absence of so many ribs made him list ever more feebly to one side as he walked, and his remaining lung was “about gone,” according to Rhoda (because of emphysema, she thought, not TB), until he could barely muster the steam to walk back and forth to the Riss for meals.

  Somewhat forgivably, perhaps, he’d resumed drinking. “I always keep a few beers in the icebox,” he told a startled guest. “I have two a day. No more, no less.” For a while he might have stuck to that regime, but in due course he advanced to stingers and Tom Collinses, and by the end he was drinking them with breakfast. As for his Seconal habit, a mutual friend wrote that Stanley tried heroically to ration pills and hide the bottles, lest Charlie “eat them like candies until the bottle was empty or he was unconscious, whichever came first.” On January 24, 1968, Boom wrote a despairing letter to Sarah:

  Charlie phoned yesterday—saying he was leaving in the afternoon for St. Croix.… He was all doped up and I even wondered whether he’d make the trip. I advised him going to a hospital instead and he didn’t like it. Said he was sorry he called. Such complete distruction [sic] he’s heading for himself and there’s nothing any one can do about it. I told him his health was entirely in his hands. His health is being ruined and his brain damage is constantly more apparent. We know he’s sick and suffers but he also likes the dope that puts him under and makes him WORSE.

  Whether he made it to St. Croix is unknown, but doubtful; by mid-February he was in Regent Hospital on East 61st, recovering from another overdose. According to his diary, the doctor had “ordered Stan to be sick”—that is, to stay home from his job and help wean his friend off the pills, as he did for almost three weeks (“Stan returns to work,” Charlie noted on March 14).

  A crisis arose in May, when Stanley departed for a long-awaited trip to see his parents in Czechoslovakia for the first time in twenty years. Charlie affected to be happy for him and insisted he go, though in fact he was wretched: by then he could hardly care for himself, and was loath to impose on his exasperated family or, for that matter, whatever friends still lingered on the periphery of his life. Happily there was a third alternative—new friends, or admirers anyway, with whom he’d yet to wear out his welcome: a nice couple named Alex and Rae Lindsay from Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Alex was an adman who’d gotten a sudden, determined urge to reread The Lost Weekend after a two-martini lunch the previous August. He’d loaned and lost his only copy a few years back, and a number of bookstore clerks had assured him that it was long out of print. Recently, though, he’d read an article about the author, who was reported to be living (still!) at the Chelsea. Fortified with gin, Lindsay called the hotel and told Jackson, in effect, that everyone kept saying The Lost Weekend was out of print. “Well,” Jackson replied, coughing, “you can tell them that it’s not only not out of print, but that it never has been out of print. It’s in print in no less than 23 [14] languages!” He advised Lindsay to get in touch with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, then suddenly changed his mind: “If you come down here now,” he said, “I’ll give you a copy.” Lindsay left work then and there. Like Don Birnam he was a frustrated writer whose drinking, over time, had worsened along with his frustration; at the Chelsea he admitted as much to Jackson, who signed one of his “dozen or so copies” as follows: “August 22, 1967. For Alex Lindsay—This old book of mine, with all the good luck in the world. In fact, good luck to us both! Faithfully yours, Charles Jackson.” They shook hands, promising to meet again, though Lindsay thought it unlikely.

  “You’ve never heard of them,” Charlie wrote Rhoda almost ten months later, “but I have a couple of very good friends, a married pair, Alexander Lindsay (40 [41], born in Aberdeen!) and his wife Rae.

  He has a smallish adv. agency, she ghost-writes some woman’s column (I forget the name). They leave [sic] in a lovely house (grounds, large pool), in Englewood Cliffs, just across the Geo. Washington Bridge, and have two children, Maria aged five, and Alex Jr. about a year old. I see them often and enjoy them, and they seem to enjoy me: Alex is a really rabid fan of mine, one of those rare birds who can cite verbatim passages from THE LOST WEEKEND, for instance, that I don’t even remember. As an example, they call their cook “Holy Love,” and when I said is that really her name, Alex said, “You’re slipping, Jackson. That was the name of Helen’s cleaning-woman in Lost Weekend.”6

  Charlie wrote Rhoda that he was about to check himself into High Watch Farm (a Connecticut treatment center based on AA) for the duration of Stanley’s absence, when the Lindsays phoned and invited him to stay at their house as long as he liked. (“Charlie called us a few days” after Stanley left, Alex Lindsay later wrote, “and it became clear how desperate he was, so we invited him to stay with us for an indefinite period.”) “I accepted at once,” said Charlie, adding poignantly (pointedly?): “it was nice to be wanted, and made me feel better just being there.” Jackson had visited the Lindsays a couple of times before, and, as Rae recalled, had been dapper and somewhat vital then; during his final visit, though, he was plainly failing, and didn’t bother to change out of a rather seedy bathrobe for five days. Still, he seemed in good spirits that first night, reading aloud from “Palm Sunday” and even refusing beer (“I just don’t care about it”). “Well, Charlie,” said Alex, around two in the morning, “I guess you can find your way to your room,” indicating a study on the lower floor. As Alex remembered:

  Suddenly he sagged back on the couch and began to look at me with the most terrifying face I had ever seen: his eyes opened wide behind his glasses, his mouth turned down, lower teeth bared, and he began to breathe hard. “Charlie! What’s wrong?!” I moved toward him and he continued to look at me helplessly, unable to speak. Finally he breathed, “Can’t. Can’t go down there. Help me.”

  “What can I do? You want a glass of water?” I thought he was having a heart attack.

  “Can you give me something … some … pills … to help me?”

  As it happened, Alex occasionally took Seconal to help him sleep when his psoriasis was acting up, and his wife gave two to Charlie; then they made up a bed for him on a couch near their bedroom. (“I felt no shame about this at all,” Charlie wrote Rhoda. “It was a state I was in, and I had to accept it, and they did too.”) The next day Alex found Charlie reading (and smoking) contentedly on a daybed in the downstairs study, where he betook himself each morning as soon as it began to turn light outside.

  The highlight of that first night had been Charlie’s discovery of the Beatles—whom he’d hitherto known only as “those maniacs who caused so much screaming on the Ed Sullivan show.” Alex wanted to play their most
recent album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to which Charlie acquiesced at length, a good guest, while certain it would be “dreadful stuff.” Instead he was “stunned,” and eager as ever to share this final passion with his wife:

  The simple little song called She’s Leaving Home shook me through and through with its compassion, its tragedy, its understanding and love: it is as perfect as Madam[e] Bovary, better than one of those good, English movie[s] about middle-class life whose protagonist is usually a starving spinster, and it all takes exactly two minutes. But every one of the songs on Sgt. Pepper album is perfect. Next we played The Magical Mystery Tour, and again I was astonished (I simply hadn’t known they were like this), and finally Revolver. After that I didn’t want to go further: it was all too rich and satisfactory to need more.

  He excitedly phoned Kate in Washington to canvass her thoughts, and every evening when Alex came home from work, he’d find his guest “sitting at the diningroom table carefully reading an album cover while the Beatles pounded away.”7

  IN THAT long letter he wrote Rhoda about his stay at the Lindsays’—dated June 6, 1968, and perhaps the last substantial letter he ever wrote—he mentioned returning to the Chelsea after five days and (“Wonder of wonders”) feeling so vastly improved that he sat right down and wrote a “highly saleable modern story, told mostly in dialogue, [illegible word] dramatic, about divorce—a natural for McCall’s, though they haven’t seen it yet.” This is unlikely; at any rate, nothing of the sort survives. Probably his last attempt at formal composition was a review of some books about the Beatles, for which he managed a disorderly paragraph about the group’s “stunning achievements” and “stupendous international fame” and “developing genius (for ‘genius’ is the word …)”—a spluttering wave of hyperbole that crashes thus:

  … what can one say about this prodigy of creativity without sounding like a gasping, seduced, incoherent teen-ager wetting his or her pants (usually “her”) prior to an agonized mass orgasm of helpless hero-worship in a throbbing, screaming second-balcony? The helplessness I readily admit to when the Beatles perform; at sixty-five I am, thank God, beyond the pants-wetting and at times the other [last five words struck out] ….

  Where does it all come from? These books, good as they are, will not tell you, of course.

  A parenthetical aside about the (similarly) ineffable greatness of Bee- thoven, Mozart, and Mussorgsky is scrawled at the bottom of the page; the rest is silence.

  And what of Farther and Wilder? Attached to the typescript is a note in Jackson’s hand that indicates its approximate status at the time of his death:

  Part I of novel / Called / “What Happened”

  Opening section, part of which is here, runs to 204 pages.

  Then: exactly 50 pages are finished of Second Section called “The Father” (so far) / But it will run to at least 200 or 300 more.

  Then: A section (fraternity story) of Part 3 is finished and runs to 224 pages.

  The “fraternity story” was almost certainly some version of Native Moment, whose surviving typescript is 242 pages long (surely Jackson was planning to revise this apprentice work, though it’s possible he simply transposed the last two digits). According to a table of contents—assuming the novel’s contents were meant to be essentially chronological—the “fraternity story,” here titled “Primavera,” was actually the seventh and last section of Farther and Wilder; “The Father” (about Thelma and Richard’s death, and the father’s subsequent departure) was indeed the second section (after “Preview”), followed by “Arcadia,” “Emily Sparks” (about an influential schoolteacher who appears in various guises throughout Jackson’s early work as well as the unpublished Home for Good), “Ray Verne” (a longer treatment of the molestation story told in “Palm Sunday”), and “Bettina” (about his friendship with Marion Fleck). Nothing of these four middle sections survives, or was likely ever written—rather, the material was recycled again and again in Jackson’s “Arcadian Tales,” published and unpublished, until he must have wondered at the alchemy required to make them shine anew in some other, more quintessential form. Assuming that each section was to be of comparable length—anywhere between 200 and 350 pages—this first volume alone would have run to between 1,500 and 2,000 pages or more. And then, of course, there were other planned volumes of What Happened, doubtless of equal heft, though each volume (as Jackson assured the reader in a prefatory note) would “be complete in itself and [could] be read as a single novel, without relation to its fellows.”

  “Without relation to its fellows”? Not exactly. Take the one section, “Preview,” that Jackson had described so lovingly in a 1948 letter to “Stan, Bernice, and Company” (summarized at the beginning of Chapter Thirteen): this, again, was the only part of the book he seemed to envisage with perfect clarity, and indeed the only part he was able to complete, albeit some six years after that initial pitch. Add the fifty (rougher) pages of “The Father,” and even a refurbished version of Native Moment, and still Jackson had hundreds and hundreds of pages to go on Farther and Wilder alone, never mind the entire colossus that was to be What Happened. Which is to say: as the preamble to a multivolume opus of Proustian magnitude, the 204-page “Preview” section might have served; as a discrete piece of writing, not so much. “The whole effect of this opening section is a rather lazy one,” Jackson admitted in 1948, “a somewhat poetic evocation of middle class family life, which sets the mood for all that is to follow; but it also serves the practical purpose of setting down what the story is to be about. This opening section will be a long piece of ‘fine writing,’ with a strong accent on mood, feeling, atmosphere, et cetera … ” All this is true, though the writing is finer in some places than others. As for the actual substance of “Preview”—a summer day in 1947, when Don Birnam hosts a long-awaited reunion of “his widely scattered family” at his fine New Hampshire home—various characters are introduced, themes are formulated and foreshadowed, but in terms of plot? “Nothing had come of the fabulous day,” Don reflects on page 186. “Nothing had happened.”

  In other words, Jackson had signed a contract with Macmillan for a novel whose only viable section was essentially devoid of plot. And that was perhaps only the beginning of his worries. Rhoda, their daughters, and Rhoda’s parents are all lovingly evoked in this fragment, but not so—decidedly not so—the rest of his family (the family that “he had not only long since grown away from but that he didn’t even belong to any more”): namely, his brother Herb (“Gerald”), and Herb’s wife, Bob (“Teddie”), small-minded clods whose idea of fun is to leave a plastic dog turd on the carpet; his mother, a melodramatic, self-pitying cow8; and even the long-suffering Boom (“Wick”), here traduced (wistfully) as “nothing more than a small-town queen.” And what about the chief aesthetic advantage of the “Preview” section, as Jackson had articulated it twenty years before?—that is, to reassure readers that life had eventually worked out for Don Birnam (circa 1947), the knowledge of which would help them persevere, later, while following the younger Don along the “farther, wilder, more shattering” paths (per the Mann epigraph) that his life as a tormented artist would perforce take him … until this happy ending/beginning, where we find him a well-integrated paterfamilias living in that New Hampshire mansion. “In the purest sense of the words,” Charlie had promised “Stan, Bernice, and Company,” “it is a novel of affirmation and acceptance of life.” So he might have thought (with certain qualms, to be sure) in 1948; but what about twenty years later? Was his life still a “success story” now that he was a decrepit addict at least somewhat estranged from his beloved family, living at the Chelsea with a barely literate factory worker?

  Yes and no. At least it wasn’t New Brunswick, and perhaps he’d actually come to accept (as he’d written in 1948) that “happiness as he [had] expected it to be [was] an illusion.” Then, too, the essential fact remained: He’d managed to produce at least one classic novel and various works of lasting interest, against
staggering odds, whatever the relative sterility of his later years.

  That said, it wasn’t a story he had time enough or energy to write.

  IT WAS Alex Lindsay who noted the “200 pages” of Farther and Wilder resting forlornly on Jackson’s desk (“untouched for God knows how long”), and many years later his wife, Rae, remembered that their guest hadn’t bothered to write a word during his five-day stay, despite an office and typewriter and plenty of quiet. His terrible attacks of dread, she thought, were not so much fear of dying as fear of living—of being a lonely invalid without purpose.

  His last published piece had been a poignant homage to the Chelsea for Holiday magazine. Written in the fall of 1967, it touches on certain romantic aspects of the hotel, as, for instance, its plaque in honor of Dylan Thomas, who was living at the Chelsea when he drank eighteen whiskies at the White Horse Tavern (“I think that’s the record”), collapsed back at the hotel, and later expired at St. Vincent’s Hospital—or, as the plaque more evocatively puts it, “from here sailed out to die”: “The phrase is both madly unrealistic and poetically right,” wrote Jackson, whose own end was presaged therein.

  A few days after his return from the Lindsays’, Jackson paid a final visit to Kate in Washington, where she worked for the Office of Economic Opportunity. Charlie had a “wonderful time,” he wrote, though he might have worried a little about the hard-partying ethos of his daughter’s Great Society colleagues, some of whom had marched on the Pentagon and were apt to smoke pot and whatnot at a party given in Charlie’s honor. But at the time, again, he seemed to enjoy himself: one day he and Kate were taken on a speedboat ride along the Potomac, and Charlie also mentioned visiting, alone, the Iwo Jima Memorial (a well-known cruising spot, his daughter learned). Also, many years later, a friend told Kate that his ex-wife had received calls from Charlie after his trip, during which they mostly discussed suicide.