Farther and Wilder Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 Blake Bailey

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96220-1

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-27358-1

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  A permissions acknowledgments page, which constitutes an extension of this page, follows the index.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bailey, Blake, [date]

  Farther and Wilder : the lost weekends and literary dreams of Charles

  Jackson / by Blake Bailey.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  ISBN 978-0-307-27358-1

  1. Jackson, Charles, 1903–1968. 2. Authors, American—

  Biography. I. Title.

  PS3519.A323Z54 2013

  813.52—dc23

  [B] 2012036685

  Cover photograph of Charles Jackson

  by Peter Martin, New York City, 1944

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  v3.1

  For Michael Ruhlman

  For though the artist may all his life remain closer, not to say truer, to his childhood than the man trained for practical life—although one may say that he, unlike the latter, abides in the dreamy, purely human and playful childlike state—yet his path out of his simple, unaffected beginnings to the undivined later stages of his course is endlessly farther, wilder, more shattering to watch than that of the ordinary citizen. With the latter, too, the fact that he was once a child is not nearly so full of tears.

  —THOMAS MANN, Doctor Faustus

  It was like an affront; I felt a terrible sense of injustice over the way the world uses its artists—and how unimportant the artist has always been considered by society, how troublesome, and how he is popularly deserving of nothing but neglect, and indifference.

  —CHARLES JACKSON (on reading that Mussorgsky, who died young, was “slovenly and drunken and a drug addict”)

  But there are thousands of Charlie Jackson’s stories about his ups and downs with life, and at some point somebody will do rather a good biography of Jackson in my opinion, because he was a very interesting man: he was sweet, he was intelligent, he was kind. I can’t stand drunks—that’s a terrible thing to have to say as a publisher, because I know a lot—but he was a sweet drunk.

  —ROGER STRAUS, Columbia University Oral History

  So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!

  —ROBERT BROWNING, “Andrea del Sarto”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue The Problem Child

  Chapter One Et in Arcadia Ego

  Chapter Two Simple Simon

  Chapter Three Some Secret Sorrow

  Chapter Four Magic Mountain

  Chapter Five A Disease of the Night

  Chapter Six Sweet River

  Chapter Seven The Lost Weekend

  Chapter Eight The MGM Lion

  Chapter Nine Six Chimney Farm

  Chapter Ten Will and Error

  Chapter Eleven The Fall of Valor

  Intermezzo Boom in Malaga

  Chapter Twelve The Outer Edges

  Chapter Thirteen What Happened

  Chapter Fourteen The Outlander

  Chapter Fifteen The Boy Who Ran Away

  Chapter Sixteen A Rain of Snares

  Chapter Seventeen A New Addiction

  Chapter Eighteen A Place in the Country

  Chapter Nineteen Homage to Mother Russia

  Chapter Twenty A Second-Hand Life

  Chapter Twenty-One Sailing Out to Die

  Epilogue Home for Good

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  Other Books by This Author

  Prologue

  The Problem Child

  The Lost Weekend—a novel about five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam—was an improbable success when it was published in 1944. Rejecting the novel, Simon & Schuster had assured its author that it wouldn’t sell in the midst of a world war (“Nobody cares about the individual”); within five years, The Lost Weekend sold almost half a million copies in various editions and was translated into fourteen languages, syndicated by King Features as a comic strip, and added to the prestigious Modern Library. Its critical reception was no less impressive: “Charles Jackson has made the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey,” Philip Wylie wrote in The New York Times. “His character is a masterpiece of psychological precision. His narrative method … transmutes medical case history into art.” The trailer for the classic movie summarized the matter nicely: “Famous critics called it … ‘Powerful …’ ‘Terrifying … ’ ‘Unforgettable … ’ ‘Superb … ’ ‘Brilliant … ’ AND NOW PARAMOUNT DARES TO OPEN … THE STRANGE AND SAVAGE PAGES OF … The Lost Weekend.” Cut to the book’s title page, amid ominous music.

  Director Billy Wilder had bought the novel at a kiosk in Chicago, and by the time his train arrived in Los Angeles he’d read it twice and quite definitely decided to make a movie based on the book, despite its then-controversial subject: an alcoholic, as opposed to a comic drunkard or lush. “Not only did I know it was going to make a good picture,” said Wilder, “I also knew that the guy who was going to play the drunk was going to get the Academy Award.” Hollywood’s A-list actors didn’t agree, and after the part had been turned down by everyone from Cary Grant to Robert Montgomery, it was given to the Welshman Ray Milland, who refused to heed an all but universal warning that he was committing “career suicide.” The day after The Lost Weekend won Oscars for Best Picture, Actor, Director, and Screenplay, writers at Paramount Studios celebrated by dangling bottles out their windows, a tribute to Don Birnam’s preferred method of concealing his liquor.

  Milland, a near teetotaler, had been coached in the ways of drunkenness by the novel’s author—a balding, impeccably groomed middle-aged man whose weird combination of wistfulness and zest put the actor in mind of “a bright, erratic problem child.” At the time Jackson was working at MGM on a screenwriting assignment, and was bemused to find himself the most popular man in Hollywood. Everyone, it seemed, had read his book and experienced an almost seismic shock of recognition: Robert Benchley told Jackson that he’d found the novel so disturbing that, for twenty minutes or so, he’d been unable to take another drink. Surely such a vivid, inward-looking account had to be based on personal experience, and thus (in the words of journalist Lincoln Barnett) “Jackson was eyed somewhat in the manner of a returned war hero … of a man who had been through hellfire and emerged bloodshot but unbowed.” Jackson himself bridled at the assumption. Sober since 1936, he had no intention of going down in history as the author of a single, thinly veiled autobiography about a crypto-homosexual drunk with writerly pretensions. “One third of the history is based on what I have experienced myself,” he told the movie columnist Louella Parsons and others, “about one third on the experiences of a very good friend whose drinking career I followed very closely, and the other third is pure invention.”

  Ten years, four books, and twenty-two hospitalizations later, Jackson was ready to come clean: he was indeed Don Birnam, and only two episodes in The
Lost Weekend were purely fictional (to wit: he never pawned his girlfriend’s leopard coat to get liquor money, nor did he stand up the hostess of his favorite bar because of an alcoholic blackout). To be sure, he could afford to be candid by then; very few people had any idea who Jackson was, and even those happy few tended to muddle the matter. “I have become so used to having people say ‘We loved your movie’ instead of ‘We read your book,’ ” said Jackson, “that now I merely say ‘Thanks.’ ”

  The Lost Weekend, after all, is something of an anomaly: a great novel that also resulted in a great (or near-great) movie—somewhat to the author’s woe, as there are far more moviegoers than readers of serious fiction; the upshot, oddly enough, is that the movie has all but supplanted the novel as a cultural artifact, even as the novel’s impact endures among the literary and medical cognoscenti. Don Birnam remains the definitive portrait of an alcoholic in American literature—a tragicomic combination of Hamlet and Mr. Toad, according to Time, whose publisher reprinted the novel in 1963 as part of its paperback “Reading Program” of contemporary classics. A special introduction was written by Selden D. Bacon, the director of the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies, who observed not only that The Lost Weekend was an impressive work of art, but also that it had “exerted a profound influence on the field with which it deals. Its very title has become a synonym for the condition it describes.” The editors of Time seemed especially pleased to mention that Jackson himself was now chairman of the Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a solemn proselytizer for the Twelve Steps—a man, in short, who had learned the hard way that an alcoholic (“a natural addict”) could not be helped by medicine, psychiatry, or religion: “If he does not find escape or evasion in drink,” the editors remarked, echoing Jackson, “he will turn to some other form of addiction.”

  Jackson, at last, had become the sort of respectable burgher he’d always, albeit paradoxically, resembled. In her 1973 profile, “The Fan,” Dorothea Straus—wife of Jackson’s publisher, Roger—remembered the bow ties and natty pastel shirts Charlie had affected, the little clipped mustache beneath a long elegant nose (“like a sandpiper’s beak”): “His prim appearance contradicted what I knew of him: the drinking, homosexual encounters, and attraction to ‘rough trade.’ Rather, he looked the warm family man he was also, and the small-town citizen of upstate Newark, New York, where he grew up and which, in some sense, he never left.” Certainly Jackson preferred the role of provincial family man (a married father of two daughters) to that of a raffish homosexual, but, truth be known, he was becoming more than a little bored with the sober life. Back in 1948, when his third novel (The Outer Edges) was published, Jackson had claimed to be writing his masterpiece: “a massive Don Birnam saga” that would encompass at least three Proustian volumes and ultimately describe how Birnam defeated his many demons. But the novel hadn’t materialized, nor had any other, and by the early sixties Jackson considered himself washed up. “Malcolm Lowry as novelist was fortunate in his death,” he ruefully noted in the Times Book Review of another alcoholic, one-masterpiece writer. “Once dead, he no longer had to cope with the impossible struggle, but could become, instead, a legend … [one of] the growing glamorous company of Artists Who Died Young.… One can’t help wondering what would have happened to their careers if they had been put to the cruel test, the realistic test, of survival.”

  Jackson’s self-doubt had been certified in 1962, when Roger Straus informed him—during one of their many affable lunches—that Farrar, Straus and Cudahy was dropping him from its list. Straus simply didn’t believe that Charlie had it in him to write novels anymore, and the publisher couldn’t afford another decade of doling out advances and personal loans. Jackson could hardly argue. His last book (Earthly Creatures, a story collection) had been published in 1953—oddly enough, the same year Jackson had joined AA and become one of its most ardent crusaders. Since then he’d (usually) enjoyed a kind of “vegetable health,” as he wrote in an unpublished confession, “The Sleeping Brain”: “Oh, I was well, all right … and was outwardly proud, and very voluble on the subject, of having won my private battle with alcohol and barbiturates.” But once his friend and publisher had lowered the boom, he couldn’t help reflecting that in the decade before 1953—a time of ghastly collapses and domestic tumult—he’d managed to write five books.

  Jackson’s creative rebirth came about in a curious, if not wholly unexpected, manner. A recurrence of tuberculosis had resulted in the removal of his right lung, and while recuperating at Will Rogers Memorial Hospital in Saranac Lake, New York, Jackson was given drugs that not only reduced his pain but restored his ability to write. Rather heroically—or heedlessly, depending on how you look at it—the decrepit Jackson left his devoted wife, Rhoda, and resumed the “impossible struggle” to realize the promise of his vaunted first novel; a return to addiction was, in the end, a price he was more than willing to pay. By 1967 he was back on the Times best-seller list with a novel about a nymphomaniac, A Second-Hand Life, and was eager to resume work on his long-awaited “Birnam saga,” What Happened, the first volume of which was titled Farther and Wilder. According to his editor at Macmillan, Robert Markel, at least three hundred pages of this magnum opus had been completed when, in 1968, Jack- son took a fatal overdose of Seconal at the Hotel Chelsea, where he’d been living with a Czechoslovakian factory worker named Stanley Zednik.

  Chapter One

  Et in Arcadia Ego

  On November 12, 1916, when Charles Jackson was thirteen, his sixteen-year-old sister, Thelma, and four-year-old brother, Richard, were killed during a Sunday drive with friends, when an express train hit their Overland automobile at a pump-station crossing. Next morning The New York Times reported that the two young people in the front seat, Harold Scarth and Gladys Clark, were likely to survive, but that Gladys’s brother Malbie had “probably” suffered fatal injuries. Indeed, the boy’s back had been broken and he’d died “in terrible agony” a few hours after the collision.

  One learned of Malbie’s fate in the much fuller account given five days later in the Union-Gazette, one of two weekly newspapers in the victims’ hometown of Newark, a small village (pop. 6,200) in the township of Arcadia, thirty miles east of Rochester and fifty miles west of Syracuse. “THREE KILLED IN FATAL AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT,” read the redundant headline spanning four front-page columns: “Newark Party of Young People Struck by Sunday Empire State Express—Village in Sadness Over the Calamity—Accident at East Palmyra—The Funerals.” Particular attention was paid to Thelma Jackson, who was not only “one of the most beautiful young ladies in the village,” but “winsome” and “sunny,” too—so much so that her mother had often worried about her parlous attractiveness to men, especially older men such as their next-door neighbor on Prospect Street, a notorious reprobate named Barney. Ever since Thelma was twelve (as Charlie would later recall in semi-fictional form1), the man had made a habit of undressing in front of his window, with the lights on, for the benefit of the pretty girl whose bedroom was opposite his. But Thelma was nothing if not spirited, and when Barney began (on warm summer nights) to wander across the lawn in his BVDs, peeping into windows, Thelma dumped a pail of water on his head from her upstairs window.

  The four-year-old Richard (also described as “winsome” by the Union-Gazette) was devoted to his older sister, and had begun to cry when her friends arrived that Sunday afternoon to take her on a drive to nearby Palmyra. Thelma had a date with Harold, the driver, and Richard would have been a fifth wheel; nevertheless, a few minutes after leaving, Thelma insisted her friends turn the car around to retrieve her little brother. As the Union-Gazette characterized that fateful decision: “In their life, they had spent hours in play and enjoyment and it seemed almost as if Heaven had decreed that in their death they should not be divided.”

  Harold let Gladys drive on the way home, though she was relatively inexperienced. A freight train was standing to the right at East Palmyra Pump Station, obscuring th
e approach of the Empire State Express, and when Gladys pulled onto the tracks the car was struck in the rear. All five passengers were thrown clear and lay scattered about while the train went roaring past. Harold, uninjured save for a few scratches, “proved to be a hero and master of the situation,” as the Union-Gazette reported: “He first picked up Miss Gladys Clark who was not seriously injured, but who was screaming frantically, ‘Where is Jim,’ Jim being a pet family name for Malbie Clark, her brother.” Harold found the others some forty feet away on the Ganargua River bridge: Richard was dead, but Thelma—who’d sat on the near side of the backseat and borne the brunt of the impact—was still breathing, her face bruised on one side; when Harold lifted her, though, he saw she was “terribly mutilated,” her lower trunk crushed.

  Meanwhile her brother Charlie was at the library, where he spent most weekend afternoons while other boys his age were playing baseball near the paper mill or sitting quietly on front porches in their Sunday best. The handsome Rew Memorial Library was cause for considerable civic pride, containing almost twelve thousand volumes and presided over by a trained librarian, the formidable Miss Merriman; ladies gathered downstairs for weekly meetings of the Shakespeare Club, the Coterie Club, and the Browning Club, while Nellie Reamer sat at a corner table, day after day, transcribing every word of the King James Bible. As for Charlie, he especially loved the exotic souvenirs lined up around the top of the bookshelves on the main floor—the fruits of founder Henry C. Rew’s travels all over the world: a grass skirt, an Orinoco witch doctor’s mask, a three-foot totem pole, and (Charlie’s favorite) an alabaster model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Near the exit was a large globe that boys would spin on their way out, pointing their fingers tensely near the surface and telling themselves, “Where the globe stops, the spot where my finger is pointing at—that’s where I’m going to die.” At least once, Charlie had discovered (“to his horror”) that he would die in his own home state.