by Blake Bailey
Returning to his empty apartment, Charlie was beside himself with lonely angst. “Pissed off / bad cold / tears” he scribbled among his notes for that last, long letter to Rhoda, who’d mildly rebuffed him when he called her to arrange a meeting on the pretext of being concerned about “Kate’s friends.” Before proceeding to more pleasant subjects (the Lindsays, the Beatles, his alleged story writing), he began this letter on a note of grievance:
I would be less than honest if I didn’t confess that I was really pissed off by your reaction to the proposition—or my wish, rather—that you come up to New York as soon as you could so that I could talk to you about something very pressing about our Kate (I used “our Kate” advisedly), because I thought, and still think that it was important.… You said, as casually as if it was nothing at all, “What is there to talk about?”—but the fact that I had called you should have told you it was urgent.… You wound up choosing a weekend that was two whole weeks away, as though Kate’s problem, and my concern, were of no moment at all. Indifference of this kind I don’t understand, in a parent who loves his or her offspring.
Quite apart from his usual personal concerns (which may or may not have included “Kate’s friends”), he was especially distraught that day. Robert Kennedy had been shot. Because of this, and because of a bad cold, Charlie could hardly see his breakfast plate at the Riss, and vomited after returning to his room. When he learned that Kennedy had, in fact, died, Charlie phoned the Lindsays and became angry when Alex said he wouldn’t be watching all the funeral proceedings (explaining that he’d been “wrung out” from the ordeal of JFK’s assassination, though Jackson wasn’t mollified). No doubt he also called Stanley that day; as the latter eventually told the Lindsays, Charlie had phoned him in Czechoslovakia at least three times, pleading for him to come home, until finally he agreed to cut his trip short by two weeks. “Stanya’s return,” Charlie noted in his diary for June 18.
A month or so later, perhaps, he paid his final visit to the Strauses, who invited him to their home in Purchase as a respite from the hot weather. Dorothea remembered the evening as a dreary one: “Charlie arrived looking shockingly old and shriveled. One shoulder was lower than the other and his body listed at an acute angle, as though fixed in a lopsided bow to death. Like a child with a new toy he showed me the oxygen unit he had to have with him at all times.” The oxygen unit was indeed recent; he wouldn’t need it for long. As a house present he offered Dorothea a copy of Sgt. Pepper, and they ended up chatting about their grandchildren: “It all had a hollow note.” The next morning was cooler, and Charlie seemed somewhat revived. “Goodbye, Madame,” he called jauntily from the bottom of the stairs, about to return to the city with Roger. “I love you!” She didn’t reply. As she later explained, “I had rebuffed him because I was selfishly intent on the preservation of my own image of Charles Jackson, more important to me than the human being whose insistence at the moment was an intrusion.” In time she would be surprised by the stubbornness of her grief.
Stanley, meanwhile, had been kept on his toes since his return. According to Alex Lindsay, Jackson overdosed at least three times in June and/or July: the first time Stanley got him quickly to Bellevue; the second time Charlie helped the Seconal along by drinking an entire quart of gin in fifteen minutes, but again his friend was too fast for him. By then Stanley might have wondered, though, whether he was doing Jackson any favors. “I have always felt,” Charlie wrote Kate in 1964, “far from [suicide] being an act of weakness or cowardice, it might well be, under certain conditions, not only the most courageous thing a man could do but also, for him, the most intelligent”—and here he paraphrased a quote from Santayana that he’d first transcribed into his JAXON notebook some thirty years before: “Nothing is meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way; and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.”
One night Stanley returned from work and found Charlie sleeping in bed, a note written in red ink on the table beside him:
Monday
July 28th [29th], 1968
To Whom It May Concern,
If I have hurt anyone by this act (and I know I have: my beloved daughters, my dear friend Stanislaus) I beg forgiveness from my heart; but I can’t help it. Life has become too physically painful for me to go on any longer, and I must bow out. There is no other reason.
Charles Jackson9
“So this was the end,” wrote Alex Lindsay. “But not as far as Stanley Zednik, now an expert in drug revival cases, was concerned. In minutes he had an ambulance at the door of the hotel; Charlie was placed in a stretcher and was shortly hospitalized.”
This last attempt left Jackson more enfeebled than ever (“weak, ill and helpless”), and Stanley took a leave of absence from his job to care for him full-time.10 One imagines that poor Charlie did his weary best to persuade his friend to let him go already, and perhaps he finally succeeded in this. According to the police report, Jackson took a fatal overdose of Seconal at 11:10 a.m. on Wednesday, September 18. Stanley told Alex Lindsay that he’d let Charlie out of his sight for all of ten minutes while he took a shower: “When he came out,” Lindsay wrote, “he found Charlie sitting on a couch, his head back, mouth open, unconscious but breathing.” An empty pill bottle lay at his feet; he’d hastily swallowed at least thirty Seconals—reminding one, somewhat, of Don’s dream of deliverance in The Lost Weekend, when his ecstatic brother Wick gets to him before the blond-haired mob, pressing a pill box into his hand: “Unable to bear the sight of Wick’s relief, so soon to break into grief as passionate as his joy, … [he] slammed the pills into his mouth.” Stanley, whose grief would be passionate too, may have performed (at least passively) a similar office: he seems to have told Lindsay that he summoned help immediately, as ever, but according to the hospital report he hadn’t, in fact, called police until “45 min. after p[atien]t had taken unknown quantity of seconal tabs”; when questioned, apparently, he claimed he hadn’t been in the apartment at the time.11 In any case, Jackson didn’t arrive at St. Vincent’s until 12:08 p.m., and by then he’d stopped breathing and the brain damage was almost certainly irrevocable. He never regained consciousness.
His rosy, resilient body, however, refused to die for three days, and might have vegetated indefinitely were it not for a fortunate old wound. At St. Vincent’s he’d begun breathing again on a respirator, and after the barbiturates had been filtered out of his system via hemodialysis—that is, catheters were inserted in his elbows and ankle, and the blood run through a dialysis machine—they flushed out his abdominal cavity, which ultimately detached a scab from the artery at the base of his duodenal ulcer. His blood pressure began to drop around 4:30 a.m. on September 21, and he was pronounced dead at 7:50.
It fell to his son-in-law, Sandy, to identify the remains. Rhoda was at an alcoholism conference in Washington, D.C., manning the Rutgers publications table; when she heard about Charlie’s latest mishap—uncertain how serious it was—she called various people to check on him, and left as speedily as possible. But it was Sandy who happened to be available when Charlie suddenly bled to death. That afternoon he arrived at the hospital and confirmed that the deceased was indeed his father-in-law, whom he’d last seen “a month ago”; somewhat guardedly, perhaps, he allowed that Charlie had been “depressed, at certain times,” but had “no previous history of mental disease” and had “lived a normal social life.”
1 He died in 1998.
2 A couple of Stanley’s household notes survive, both written in the same vein of affectionate reassurance. One reads: “Dear Charles, I left here at 10:35 a.m. and will be back soon I can [sic], / All my love, / Stanley.” Evidently, though, he was not oblivious to his companion’s shortcomings; after Jackson died, Stanley remarked to a mutual friend, “Charles was a very difficult person.”
3 Expressive, perhaps, of his late-life enthusiasm for the Beatles.
4 F. Sco
tt Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait, by Henry Dan Piper, mentioned in Chapter Five.
5 Possibly the closest Jackson ever came to an anti-Semitic slur—this, no doubt, for the benefit of his in-laws, the kind of people who might well have consoled themselves with the fact that Charlie, at least, wasn’t a Jew.
6 “We never called Carole—our dear cleaning lady/baby sitter—‘Holy Love,’ so Alex was obviously joshing Charlie,” Rae Lindsay e-mailed me in 2009. She also pointed out that Carole came once a week to clean or babysit, not cook: “Was Charlie trying to impress Rhoda with our ‘grand’ household?” she (astutely) conjectured. The column Rae ghosted (for Emily Wilkens) was “A New You,” about health and beauty issues. “I’m just a hack,” she remarked to Charlie, who hastened to reassure her: “No no no—you’re not a hack. These are good. You write well, and clearly—don’t ever think of yourself as a hack.” Also, for what it’s worth, Alex was born in Kilmarnock—not Aberdeen (where Rhoda’s parents were born, hence the exclamation point)—and came to the States as a toddler.
7 I am deeply indebted to Rae Lindsay for letting me see her husband’s unpublished twenty-page memoir of his brief friendship with Jackson, which she found among some papers in her attic; as may be clear by now, much of this chapter is derived from that source. Sad to say, Alex Lindsay died of cirrhosis in 1974, only forty-seven years old.
8 A portrait that would have squared awkwardly with the book’s dedication: “To The Beloved Memory / Of My Mother / SARAH WILLIAMS JACKSON.”
9 This note—unmistakably in Jackson’s hand—was found among Alex Lindsay’s papers. Rhoda’s and Boom’s phone numbers are provided at the bottom of the page.
10 “Charles, dear,” read Stanley’s other surviving note, “I went to pick-up my last check and will be back very soon. / All my love, / Stanley.”
11 Roger Straus was then at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and heard (from his wife?) that Stanley had been “working” when Charlie called to say his final goodbye (“He used to play teeter-totter Tessie with death,” Roger remarked on another occasion. “I think it had to do with, do you really love me enough to keep me from dying?”): “This had happened so often before that his friend didn’t quite believe it,” said Roger in 1978, “and didn’t get to him quite fast enough to have him pumped out …” This would seem to reflect the more or less received version of events.
Epilogue
Home for Good
Time’s obituary was especially brusque: “Died. Charles Jackson, 65, melancholy novelist of guilt and frustration; in Manhattan. After striking it rich in 1944 with The Lost Weekend, the story of a classic binge, he had a long dry spell, writing mediocre books about homosexuality and paranoia. His last work was A Second-Hand Life, a novel of nymphomania published in 1967.” Charlie’s shade, one hopes, was consoled somewhat by the longer, more generous assessment in The New York Times, which included nice quotes from Carl Brandt (“[Jackson was] warm and straight … a dedicated amateur student of Shakespeare and Thomas Mann”) and Robert Markel (“[he] felt life as deeply as anyone I’ve known, and this comes out in his work”), who implied that Jackson was hard at work on a new Don Birnam novel, Farther and Wilder, as long as “300 pages” at the time of his death. In his syndicated column, Mel Heimer described Jackson as “one of the nicest and gentlest souls I knew,” a man who devoted himself to “yeoman work for Alcoholics Anonymous,” while the Times of Geneva, New York—just a few miles from Newark—remembered the Finger Lakes author as “a child misunderstood by almost everyone … a boy searching for an answer which could only be found on the printed page.”
Three days after Jackson’s death, a memorial service was held at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection on East 74th, down the block from Sarah’s apartment. The proceedings reflected Rhoda’s prudential if rather austere sensibility: there was no eulogy or reading from her husband’s work; Charlie had been many things to many people, and very few of his friends could have done justice to so protean a figure. Roger Straus was still in Europe at the time, Dorothea was hardly one to speak at funerals, and Max Wylie—who’d known Charlie for three rather tumultuous decades—had only just that morning learned of his wife Lambie’s death, after a long coma, at New York Hospital. He attended Charlie’s memorial all the same. “There was nothing I could do for [Lambie] then, but there was a small bit I might do for Rhoda, Kate, and Sarah,” he wrote in 1973—a kind of belated eulogy that, while touching, might have been a bit too candid for actual obsequies:
[Charlie] stood up for all his friends, till (usually over a trifle) they “crossed” him. He could be pettish, girlish. He could also be manly. And enormously generous and understanding. He helped hundreds of people. He, to me, represented the classic paradox seen so often among gifted people: a steady dedication to his own work, often marred in his human relationships by spurts of the churlish, then as suddenly re-inspirited by adult returns to mature responses.
As for Dorothea, she dourly considered the “dusty red plush” of that “homely” Episcopal church and couldn’t help reflecting how “inappropriate” it was for a romantic like Charlie, who “would have wanted it to be gorgeous and historic.” Bemusing, too, was the sheer diversity of mourners—writers, editors, actors, AA people (“All were chapters in Charles Jackson’s life: long or short, sad or comic, deep or trivial, linked together momentarily by the event of his death”)—among whom the most visibly stricken, by far, was also the most anomalous: Stanley’s “long, wavy blond hair,” wrote Dorothea, “slicked down with water for the occasion, erupted here and there in unruly curls and his prominent cheekbones flamed, as though his shock and grief could not be tamed by the sanctimonious environment of the church.… The tears coursing down his face were as plentiful and unselfconscious as rain.”
A few people gathered afterward at the Pipers’ apartment. Finally, as the family was about to leave for the interment in Newark, Boom stopped on the sidewalk: “Oh my heavens! I forgot Charlie!” He recovered his brother’s ashes from the mantelpiece, and off they went.
IN The Lost Weekend, Don Birnam loses himself in reveries of his Arcadian childhood, and longs desperately “to be home, home at last, home for good … Christ he was going nuts with sentimentality! Self-pity like this would drive him to suicide!” And so, at last, it had come to pass. On Wednesday, September 25, Charlie’s ashes were buried in the East Newark Cemetery next to Thelma and Richard (“a lovely spot,” he’d written in “Rachel’s Summer,” “grown up now with rose bushes and shrubbery”), on the other side of whom was their mother. The rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal, where Charlie had been confirmed as a boy, officiated. Mildly conspicuous in his absence was Charlie’s oldest brother, Herb, who’d also been omitted from the Times obituary. In recent years he and Bob had seemed less impressed than ever by the little fame Charlie had won in the world; to them he was an addict who’d written a few dirty books. As for his suicide, it was “his logical end”—an attitude Don Birnam had grasped only too well: “All were ready with the ‘Too bad but he’s much better off’ or ‘Only wonder is he didn’t do it sooner.’ ” When Herb did get the news, he walked over to the house of their childhood friend Jack Burgess, who was sitting on the porch with his wife: “Well, Charlie’s dead,” Herb announced matter-of-factly. “Overdose.” He knew they’d be interested, if not surprised, and so felt obliged to tell them; his manner was more pensive than callous. He hardly ever spoke of Charlie again. Shortly after his death, in 1979, his grandson Michael Kraham—who inherited the family home at 241 Prospect—had to widen a door in the backyard barn where Herb had spent so much of his adult life; between the partitions of an interior wall, he found hundreds of empty whiskey bottles.
Rhoda had received a sympathy card signed “With loveing affection / Your Friend / Stanley Zednik,” and a few weeks after the funeral Carl Brandt urged her to get in touch so they could “have a talk about Stanley”: “He has been on the phone to me, and he sent me a copy of his letter to you.” The family was f
rankly worried that Stanley might blackmail them, or at least continue to surface in unpleasant ways (“I think there was the wish to bury Stanley with Papa,” said Kate). Finally Rhoda and her daughters agreed to meet him at the Chelsea, where Stanley let it be known that all he wanted was a gold identification bracelet (“Charles Jackson / Six Chimney Farm / Orford, N.H.”) that Charlie had always worn—a sentimental item, alas, much coveted by Kate and Sarah as well. But Rhoda readily agreed to give it to Stanley, and was startled by her daughters’ “brokenhearted and furious” reactions afterward. As for Stanley, he seemed more than appeased by the trinket; at any rate they never heard from him again.
After funeral expenses and various debts were paid, Charlie’s net worth was assessed at $31,263, half of which went to Rhoda and the rest divided equally among Sarah, Kate, and Boom. Carl Brandt, meanwhile, was not sanguine about the literary estate’s earning potential: Macmillan reported that sales of A Second-Hand Life had run their course, and at present there was little interest in reprinting Jackson’s other books. A few months before his death, The Fall of Valor had been optioned to the movies for a paltry $1,500, and the option expired after two more payments of $1,000 apiece. Also, in 1969, Wychwood Productions in London paid a $3,500 option for A Second-Hand Life, which they proposed to rename Winnie and shoot on the cheap in Nova Scotia. But nothing came of that, either. “I can say with some certainty that over the next ten years the estate will earn somewhere between two and five thousand dollars,” Brandt wrote the family’s lawyer. “Whether it will earn anything more is really in the laps of the gods.”