by Blake Bailey
But the gods had ended their sport with Charles Jackson, at least for the time being. For a year or two after his death, Rhoda was emboldened to hope that her husband’s unpublished and even unfinished work—various short stories, fragments of Rufus “Bud” Boyd and Farther and Wilder—might interest a publisher. “Charlie’s work was too good to die out,” she wrote Roger Straus, who thought it possible that Markel at Macmillan might be willing to take a chance, but no. Nor could Roger find a single paperback house interested in reprinting the other books, all but one of which (The Outer Edges!) were out of print as of 1970. Indeed, hardly a ripple of anything resembling a Jackson Revival appeared until five years after his death, when The Serif (“Quarterly of the Kent State University Libraries”) published a handsome tribute issue with a portrait of the soigné author on its cover. Contents included “An Afternoon with Boris,” memoirs by Dorothea Straus and Max Wylie, a bibliography by Shirley Leonard, and a critical essay by Louis Paskoff. Foremost among the happy few who noticed this issue was, of course, Rhoda, who wished above all that “Charlie could have seen it”: “No-one would have re-read it more times than he would,” she wrote the journal’s editor, Alex Gildzen, “(although I may be a competitor, for it invokes so many emotions and memories that have slowly melted over the years). I hope the issue will serve to excite a new interest in Charlie’s writing. It deserves it so.”
To be sure, Jackson would have been crushed by his later obscurity. The fickleness of fame! Once, he’d had a special credit card at “21,” hobnobbed with all sorts of celebrities (witness his Sardi’s-like collection of fondly inscribed glossies); The Lost Weekend had been called a “masterpiece” in the Times, sold almost a million copies in the United States alone, added a phrase to the language, affected the perception of alcoholism the world over, and resulted in a classic movie that all but swept the Oscars … and yet: three months before his death (according to Alex Lindsay), Charlie could not find his name on a list of “300 American Authors,” and now, forty-four years later, he still hasn’t been included among the six-hundred-plus monographs in the exhaustive Twayne’s United States Author Series.
Ah, but among other fiction writers—especially writers who drink—his achievement is well known. In 1988, Barry Hannah praised The Lost Weekend as “a miracle, handed down to Mr. Jackson by a higher power,” and a decade later the novel was canonized by the supreme authority in such matters, Kingsley Amis: “Marvelous and horrifying … the best fictional account of alcoholism I have read.” That same year, when the Modern Library announced its one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, Howard Kupferberg suggested in Parade magazine that the jury would have done better to include The Lost Weekend (“a sensitive novel about a middle-class alcoholic that translates the whole problem of addiction into human terms”).1 And Jackson lays further claim to posterity as author of perhaps the first serious American novel whose foremost subject is homosexuality, The Fall of Valor, which may yet become a mainstay of academic “queer studies” programs. Jack Kisling, writing in the Denver Post about the 1986 Arbor House reprint, addressed the novel’s more abiding aspects: “Although it is far less shocking today than it was initially, it raises questions about dead marriages and subtle emotional forces that are as devastating now as they were in the days when homosexuality was horrible and hush-hush.” Fair enough, and one hopes that any rediscovery of The Fall of Valor will also lead readers to an even earlier (and better) treatment of the theme, “Palm Sunday,” and thence to the singular collection in which that story appeared, The Sunnier Side.2
A remarkable life’s work, all in all, even if only one book can arguably be called great—and not simply a great novel about addiction, but a great novel period, featuring one of the most fascinating characters in American literature, Don Birnam, who happens to be an alcoholic.
DURING HIS LIFE, Charlie never returned to Newark after his mother’s death in January 1962; Boom, however, went as often as possible, taking a steady interest in his various nieces and nephews and godchildren, and even staying on civil terms with Herb and Bob. When he was diagnosed with liver cancer in the spring of 1971, he paid a last visit home before entering the hospital in Bridgeton, where Jim Gates had his practice. His old friend Barbara Peech was among the few people allowed to see him—she had to pretend to be a cousin—but Boom was “skeletal” by then and didn’t want his friends to remember him that way in any case. He died on June 20 (“A brother, Herbert, survives,” noted the Times), and his ashes were buried with Charlie and the others at East Newark Cemetery, where a headstone had long been waiting for him.
Rhoda retired from the Center of Alcohol Studies in 1972, and was determined to leave New Brunswick as soon as she got “Charlie’s papers in shape,” or so she wrote Carl Brandt.3 A kind of prudent neutrality, however, prevented her from leaving until 1989, at the age of eighty-two, when she finally plumped for Washington, D.C., over Manhattan—where Sarah lived—because it was greener and quieter. Also, besides Kate, she had a cousin in Washington, Alex Reid (the son of her mother’s younger sister), with whom she was close. Together the two would pile into Reid’s Porsche and go for long drives around the countryside, or else Rhoda would ride city buses all day, exploring. She had a nice tenth-floor apartment at 4000 Massachusetts Avenue—full of her husband’s first editions and various objets—and was happy and vigorous until her death in 1993. In later years she forgave Charlie everything, and made a point of reminding others that his more difficult traits were subsidiary to a basic nobility. He hated self-pity, for instance, which had consumed his mother and irksomely persisted in himself—though he strove against it, consciously, as a matter of principle. “What he was really saying,” Rhoda explained to Sarah, “was that it is for each of us to see our lives clearly, to realize that we have it in ourselves to make our lives. And that if, in self-pity, we start blaming others, or refuse to accept our own responsibilities for living, we destroy ourselves.” Toward the end of Rhoda’s life, Sarah asked her (“[our] only personal conversation”) whether she had any regrets; far from citing her chaotic, improbable marriage as such, Rhoda insisted that Charlie had been—for her and Boom both—the best thing that ever happened to them. “[She said] how lucky they were to have known and loved this man—after all the hell they had gone through!” Sarah marveled many years later. “The hospitalizations, the books about family and themselves, the homosex—” She broke off. “Everything!” To which her sister added, “She always said nothing but things like, ‘He was a good man. He had a lot of pain, but he was such a nice man.’ ”
Sarah and Sandy had another child together, Ross, before separating in 1977; they were finally divorced in 1981. Soon after her father’s death Sarah became depressed, and began to see a psychiatrist, with whom she still checks in from time to time (when Boom died, for example); mostly, though, her later life has been serene. The qualities her father cherished in her—decency, modesty, conscientiousness—have stood her in good stead over the years. She was pleasantly surprised, at her fortieth high school reunion, when a number of people went out of their way to approach her and say how important her kindness, as a girl, had been to them. Such empathy has been part of her working life, too, as vice president of client services at a consulting firm in New York. “We all have our strengths,” she said recently. “And I think probably I picked that up through Papa. I’m not a special person; I’m just nice, ordinary.”
Kate’s life has been (as her father so often predicted) more turbulent. “I take my duties rather seriously about Kate,” said her godfather, Roger Straus, in 1976—a time when the young woman was having, as he noted, “certain problems.” Over the years she’d sometimes visit the house in Purchase (“She stayed in touch with the Strauses,” said Sarah; “I was the ‘boring’ one”); Roger made a point of sending her FSG books he thought she might like, and Dorothea enjoyed reading Kate’s letters, since they reminded her of Charlie. Indeed, so much of Kate’s life, good and bad, se
ems a direct legacy of her father. She took his death very hard: around the time of his steep, final decline, she’d gone to Alaska (he’d given her five hundred dollars for the trip), and afterward she agonized over the possibility that he’d felt “abandoned” toward the end. But then, even before his death, she herself had been unhappy and drinking too much; at one point she called her father to ask “whether you could tell if you were going crazy or would you really just snap?” Very like her father, she felt all but hopelessly unloved (“Mr. Jackson, I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody else in my life who needs love as badly as you do”). Once, she weepily confessed as much to her mother, who rushed into her bedroom and retrieved a photo of her holding Kate as a baby: “Kate, look at this,” she said: “Is this not love?” “Mama,” Kate replied, “I’m twenty-nine! This was when I was six months!”
By then Kate was “wretched” in “every category” of life: unemployed, broke, depressed, in bad health. Finally Rhoda insisted she come home with her to New Brunswick, where she tried rationing her daughter to two drinks before dinner. After two whopping gin and tonics, Kate would anxiously wait and wait for her mother to retire for the night—but Rhoda would not retire, and thus Kate finally realized she needed help. One morning she phoned one of Charlie’s old AA friends, who advised her to go to High Watch Farm in Connecticut. She ended up staying three months; her last drink was on May 13, 1972. And since? For the most part Kate has attained a kind of steady contentment that eluded her father. In 1993 she reconnected with a childhood friend from her Newtown days, John Hallock, and the two eventually married. A piquant coincidence: John’s father was a graphic designer whose work included—a few years before any Hallocks had met any Jacksons—the original jacket art for The Outer Edges, a Miro-esque arrangement of interconnecting lines.
It might have served better as the jacket art for What Happened, given the author’s thematic concern with the curious serendipity of life amid seeming chaos—chaos that might be revealed as crystalline order, if seen from a great height … though it’s our common lot to stay grounded and hope for the best. “This is a note in case anything goes wrong,” Charlie had written Rhoda, Sarah, and Kate on September 29, 1962, just prior to his lobectomy and rib resection at Middlesex Hospital.
I want you all to know, and remember, that not only have I always loved you, but that I always will love you, wherever I am or you are.…
In many ways my life has been a failure. I never husbanded my luck, I didn’t guard and protect my talent, I let things slide, I hadn’t the least thought ever of discipline or self-preservation; but that was because I was ill in another way, alcoholically, and so many years not myself. But in one way, and I think the only important way, I have been anything but a failure, and that is in you two children, my dear Sarah and Kate. There is no man I know luckier than I am in my children, and believe me, this is a great thing to have got out of life, and I guess, really, the only worthwhile thing, the only thing that counts. My gratitude to you both for this, and to your Mother, and all my love, always and always.
Papa
1 And let us not forget that The Lost Weekend was briefly a title in the Modern Library—until, that is, a spurned Bennett Cerf removed it in favor of Little Women (see Chapter Seven). As for Jackson’s 1998 Parade apologist, Howard Kupferberg, he’d first championed Jackson’s novel (“by turns horrifying and curiously moving”) fifty-four years earlier!—in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review on January 30, 1944.
2 An edition of which was published in 1995 by Syracuse University Press. John Crowley, the editor, saw fit to omit “The Sisters” and “In the Chair,” while adding a later Arcadian Tale, “The Break.” Though not set in Arcadia, “The Boy Who Ran Away” would also be a welcome addition to any future selection of Jackson’s stories.
3 Rhoda managed to collect and catalogue, after a fashion, most of her husband’s papers, but never reached a final decision about what to do with them. For years there were two boxes of “Charles R. Jackson” papers at Dartmouth: one contained the working and final drafts of The Lost Weekend, which Charlie had long ago (1949) presented to the library in a handsome leather case embossed with a blue liquor bottle and the formula for alcohol (“CH3 * CH2 * OH”); the other box contained Charlie’s and Rhoda’s letters to Boom, which had been sold along with the latter’s other papers by one Eleanor Bacon of Elmer, New Jersey (who was “very pleasantly surprised” by the sale price), in 1983. Finally, in 2002, Charlie’s daughters sold to Dartmouth the remaining twenty boxes of his papers, which included copies of practically every letter he ever wrote as an adult. As he explained to Bubbles Schinasi in 1945, “Vain creature that I am (but not really vain: I only do it so I won’t repeat myself in my next) I always keep carbons of my letters.” One suspects, too, that he hoped a biographer would come along someday.
Acknowledgments
I came to this book in a rather crabwise fashion. For several years my life was consumed with work on two big literary biographies—Richard Yates and John Cheever—and I’d hoped to write something a little quirkier this time. My first thought was a book along the lines of Strachey’s Portraits in Miniature: in my case, a collection of profiles about promising but forgotten writers. I was piqued by examples of these (Calvin Kentfield, Nathan Asch, Flannery Lewis, to name a few) that I’d encountered in the course of my research on Yates and Cheever, and thought it might be fun to examine why it is, sometimes, that talent is not enough. Some writers burn out, some have bigger demons, and sometimes life just goes ineffably awry. But what, in each case, is the process whereby a good and even prolific writer achieves all but total oblivion?
I considered Charles Jackson for my roster of literary losers, but he didn’t quite fit: after all, he’d been rather famous for a time, and The Lost Weekend would always be famous as a classic movie based on a vastly (and unfairly) lesser-known novel—a novel I happened to love. Ever since college I’d had a much-thumbed copy of the Time Reading Program edition, and while considering my latest project I took a moment to reread that heartening “Editors’ Preface” about how Jackson had become, as of 1963, chairman of the New Brunswick AA. This, I thought, had the makings of a nice redemptive fable. Then I did a Google search and discovered that Jackson had killed himself at the Hotel Chelsea—a mere five years after that vaunted chairmanship!
Until three or four years ago, the online finding aid for the Charles R. Jackson Papers at Dartmouth indicated only two boxes: one containing drafts of The Lost Weekend, the other some three hundred pages of letters from Charlie and Rhoda to Boom. I ordered copies of the latter, which certainly attested to the autobiographical nature of The Lost Weekend. Given that Boom (like the solicitous Wick in the novel) was forever cleaning up after his brother’s messes, their relationship seemed to have become strained in later years, and the letters taper off in the late 1950s—right around the time Jackson stopped drinking and writing fiction. What, I wondered, happened next? How did he go from being a celebrated AA spokesman (a recording of his 1959 talk to the Cleveland AA is available online) to an uncloseted, pill-popping suicide at the Chelsea?
I got in touch with Jackson’s daughters, who remembered very little of their father’s dark side. “People are always saying, ‘Oh my God, your father was Charles Jackson?’ ” Sarah told me. “ ‘Do you have a story!’ Well, in fact, Papa had a story, but he did his best to shield us from his demons and just be a loving father.” Willing to cooperate (albeit not without qualms at first) in a venture that might help restore their father’s literary reputation, both Sarah and Kate submitted to interviews and also sent me every pertinent document they could find, including letters their father had written them during their college years in the late ’50s and early ’60s. And here indeed was a different side of Charles Jackson—the man described by Dorothea Straus as a “warm, proud father [and] companionable husband”—and of course I was more intrigued than ever. Again: what had led this admirable man to the Chelsea and Stanley Zednik (not
to mention the 1967 best-seller lists)? When I gave some hint of my puzzlement, Kate Jackson asked if I’d seen her father’s papers at Dartmouth, and I mentioned the one box of letters to Boom. “Oh no,” she said, “there are at least twenty boxes!”—that is, the bulk of her father’s papers, which she and Sarah hadn’t actually relinquished until 2002.
I got in touch with Eric Esau, the superb Dartmouth librarian who’d once alerted me to a crucial, undiscovered cache of letters from the young John Cheever to Reuel Denney. Eric promptly disinterred the twenty boxes of uncatalogued Jackson papers from the library basement—where they might have languished forever—and presently I received a rough inventory of their contents from Kate. Awaiting my perusal, it seemed, were parts of Jackson’s vast unfinished “Birnam saga,” Farther and Wilder, piles of other unpublished manuscripts, diaries, photographs, and hundreds of letters between Jackson and his family, friends, fellow writers, and various movie stars. Given the prospect of mining this mother lode, I tabled my little book of literary profiles and decided to propose a full-length biography of Jackson.
It’s been a delightful project from beginning to end, and for that I have many people to thank—above all (obviously) Jackson’s daughters, Sarah and Kate. No matter how grinding or unseemly my curiosity, they responded with the same judicious courtesy, and often went beyond what even I consider the call of duty. After I’d almost despaired of the Kafkaesque process of prying sixty-year-old medical records out of the former Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover—Charles Jackson’s “favorite little hospital” for drying out—Sarah persevered, until the amazing day when she mailed me the whole fat packet. As for Kate, her early trip to the Rauner library on behalf of this project was indicative: for many months, when I most needed help, she sent me a steady stream of e-mails—stray memories, people to contact, helpful details, and leads of every conceivable kind. And both women fed me lavishly in their homes—Sarah’s on the Upper East Side, Kate’s in western Connecticut—even while I badgered them with my incessant questions. Throughout I was deeply moved, and remain so, by how tenderly they remember their father; he was right to consider himself “anything but a failure” in that particular respect.