by Blake Bailey
What he suspected, though, was that something of the sort had transpired in his own case, and even more so in Fred’s. The latter not only pursued dancing in his early teens, but—at the tender age of eleven, during the war—avidly took up knitting sweaters and mufflers for soldiers via the Red Cross, mortifying his family by taking yarn and needles along to the movies! Charlie himself would always be a lot more furtive. “Do you remember the Presbyterian Church carriage sheds on Vary’s Lane,” a fellow Newarkian, J. R. Elliott, wrote Jackson in 1950. “On week days and nights, these same sheds were the scene of events that would make even a Kinsey researcher blush.” Jackson remembered those sheds, all right, as Elliott would have known if he’d read The Lost Weekend, in which a young Don “has fun” with a schoolmate, Melvin, “in the carriage-sheds back of the Presbyterian Church.” For Melvin this is only so much boyish horseplay, given that he fantasizes about little Gertrude Hort; Don, however, finds himself bewilderingly fixated on the image of Melvin washing his father’s back in the bathtub. Such scenes—so obviously personal—were almost the death of Charlie’s poor mother when she first read the novel in manuscript: “Also something about Homo Sexual,” she wrote, “why mention that? God knows I have had enough of that and half crazy people to last one a life time. And this one’s and that one’s remarks that I have to pretend not to hear.”
Such remarks had first reached her ears, perhaps, a few months after Thelma and Richard’s funeral, at which (according to the Union-Gazette) a local tenor named Herbert Quance had caused “many eyes” to fill with tears when he sang “Asleep in Jesus” and “The Beautiful Isle of Somewhere”; likewise, at the Birnam childrens’ funeral in Farther and Wilder, the latter song is performed by Raoul de la Vergne—called Ray Verne by the townspeople—a character who originally appeared in Jackson’s first published short story in 1939, “Palm Sunday,” about an unnamed narrator who remembers being molested by Verne as a fourteen-year-old boy.11 Bert Quance was thirty-five in 1917, a handsome if rather dumpy man who often came to dinner at the Jackson house, during which he’d sing popular standards (“Pale Hands I Love,” “Woman Is Fickle”) while Sarah Jackson accompanied him on the piano. As a boy, Quance had been considered a prodigy as both an organist and a tenor; locals expected him to star at the Metropolitan Opera someday, but Quance seemed content to go on living with his mother, Esther, and playing piano at the picture show, or being “imported” to play Ralph Rackstraw in the Newark High production of H.M.S. Pinafore—this in addition to his usual duties as organist at St. Mark’s. (“To succeed you’ve got to get out and around,” he’d later sigh, age fifty-five, in a newspaper profile about his promising salad days.)
In “Palm Sunday,” the adult narrator realizes that he was one of many boys molested by the organist, and moreover that the village was quite aware of the situation but loath to speak about it; indeed, the man’s reputation as a musician was more or less unblemished by his tacit notoriety, and his talents were forever in demand.12 “ ‘Pretend it isn’t so,’ ” Jackson once wrote, “which was always Arcadia’s attitude when trouble was brewing.… Which I suppose is a fairly adequate substitute for what Arcadia really thinks it is: tolerance.” In “Palm Sunday,” nobody objects when Ray Verne asks the fourteen-year-old narrator to privately rehearse a song, “The Palms,” that the boy will perform as a solo during the Offertory at his Episcopal church. (“Herbert Quance will sing ‘The Palms’ at both services in St. Mark’s church Sunday,” reads an item from the Union-Gazette.) As they practice alone in the chancel, Verne puts his left arm around the boy’s stomach and continues playing with one hand, then suddenly turns the boy around and undoes his belt buckle. Reflecting on the incident with perfect candor—with, indeed, an emotional precision that must have seemed shocking when the story was first published, but anticipates much of what is currently believed about sexual trauma—the narrator admits that he wasn’t particularly horrified at the time: “I was too scared and excited to do anything about it and anyway it was all over in a minute. My chief reaction was confusion and a consequent resentment, but not against Mr. Verne. It was directed chiefly against myself, was very intense for a little while, and then was easily forgotten.” One more sexual encounter follows, the next day, when Verne coaxes the boy into the steeple of the Methodist church; at one point the organist pauses “in the middle of everything” to remark with a chuckle, “You’re almost as good as your brother.”
According to Jackson’s notes, one section of Farther and Wilder was to be titled “Ray Verne,” and the character also makes cameo appearances in a later story as well as in the novel A Second-Hand Life, where he’s portrayed as a sodden degenerate living out his last days in a seedy hotel on the wrong side of Arcadia.13 “Palm Sunday,” for its part, ends on a heartening note: “Isn’t it funny how far away all that seems,” says the narrator’s grown brother, “how unimportant.” But the torments of Jackson’s adulthood (not to mention his preoccupation with “Ray Verne” as a fictional subject) would suggest lingering ramifications, to put it mildly. Though childhood sexual abuse isn’t always experienced as traumatic at the time (especially when perpetrated, nonviolently, by someone the child likes and trusts), its victims are far more likely to suffer the kind of persistent anxiety that made it so hard for Jackson to resist alcohol and drugs, never mind the underlying sexual guilt that stayed with him to the end; part of him, after all, would always long to be loved by Newark’s better sort. But there was also Charles Jackson the writer, a rather fearless man who knew that his only hope lay in telling the truth, and hence his struggle to purge the ghost of “Ray Verne”: “I had been writing all my life,” he wrote a friend in 1951, “till one night something happened: I had the urge to tell the story of PALM SUNDAY; I knew it couldn’t be sold or published, so I just forgot about all that, and about everything else I knew about writing, and just simply told it in the simplest way possible, putting nothing in that wasn’t true of people—that is, leaving out the ‘telling little touch’ and all those devices of professional short story writing. As a result, the story seems to me now to be full of telling little touches—the kind that ring true.”
1 That is, in his hybrid essay/story “The Sunnier Side,” about which more below. His neighbor Barney’s reputation for lechery is corroborated by a 1949 letter to Jackson from an old hometown acquaintance.
2 This from a journal notebook (marked “JAXON” on its marbled cover) that Jackson kept mostly during the early 1930s, when he was drinking heavily and writing little. The penmanship is shaky in places, and sometimes sprawlingly indecipherable.
3 Herbert was banished as a teenager and became a hobo, occasionally turning up in Newark at his sister Sarah’s house (one of Jackson’s earliest stories, “A Night Visitor,” is about one such episode). According to Charles Jackson’s great-nephew Michael Kraham, the family would usually feed and bathe Herb, then coax him back to the train station with a pack of cigarettes. “Readymades!” he’d say, delighting at the bribe.
4 Charlie gave her name to Winifred Grainger, the good-hearted nymphomaniac heroine of his last novel, A Second-Hand Life.
5 Charlie was named after a paternal great-uncle (one of the two sexton-undertakers) and his uncle Reginald Miles Jackson. His early (and mostly unpublished) fiction was written under the name “C. R. Jackson,” and for a while he toyed with “Charles R. Jackson” before dropping the middle initial altogether.
6 Many of whom seem to have moved on after the canal was put through. At any rate, a pamphlet about Newark that appears to date from the 1930s or ’40s (found among Jackson’s papers) proudly announces, “Newark has no foreign language quarters, her population being loyally American; and eighty-six percent of the inhabitants of Wayne County are native born, and white.”
7 Later known as the Fold-Pak corporation, whose little take-out cartons are familiar to lovers of Chinese food.
8 The Hallagans lived across the street from the Jacksons, at 241 Prospect—a house that was
fittingly occupied, as of 1935, by Charlie’s philistine brother Herb.
9 A character based on the ubiquitous Mrs. Coykendall, as Jackson was happy to explain in letters to former friends and family in Newark.
10 The one in Newark, that is. A letter dated December 9, 1920, survives among the younger Fred Jackson’s papers at Dartmouth, and suggests that his father was perhaps a more interesting, kindly man than Charles was willing to admit. “Note that you are still taking Dancing lessons,” he wrote with evident approval to his (manifestly even then?) gay son. “You must be quite a dancer by now.” The letter is signed, “With love from / Father.”
11 Lest there be any doubt about the real-life model for Ray Verne, Jackson made a vast alphabetical list of practically every person he’d ever known and assigned a fictional name to each—this, no doubt, for the purpose of writing his massive autobiographical saga, What Happened. Under the Q’s one finds: “Bert Quance—RAOUL de la VERGNE (RAY VERNE).”
12 “I never heard the term [pedophile] used back then,” said Bert Quance’s great-nephew, Harold, when asked about Bert’s reputation in Newark. “He was just a ‘three-dollar bill.’ ” Harold’s wife, Elsie, said that other Quance cousins have attested to Bert’s notoriety, but agreed that such matters were “always hushed up.”
13 Quance spent much of his lonely old age (“Nobody invited him anywhere,” said his great-nephew) at the Windsor Hotel in downtown Newark, and died at a Masonic Home in nearby Utica on June 26, 1957, age seventy-five.
Chapter Two
Simple Simon
Charles Jackson remembered his old high school as a three-story, redbrick “firetrap” in the center of town. The principal was a handsome, athletic man in his mid-thirties, Isaac “Ike” Chapell, who flirted openly with upper-class girls and was generally admired by the boys for doing so. The life of the school revolved mostly around the basketball team: Friday night games were attended by practically every (nice) family in Newark, who afterward stuck around en masse for dances that lasted until eleven, where a musical trio (piano, violin, drums) played such hits as “Hindustan” and “Dardanella.”
Jackson did not flourish, academically or otherwise. “You are just the way I was,” he later wrote his daughter Kate: “you get good marks in the subjects in which you are interested, and lousy marks in the subjects in which you are not. Don’t worry about that. I am utterly confident that you will thrive in the field which you eventually choose for yourself.” Certainly he’d found a niche and managed to thrive after a fashion, though in fact his marks—at least by the time he was in high school—were lousy in every subject except English, which interested him just enough to rate the occasional B (but no better, and often worse). During his freshman year he tried to make a splash by entering the Wayne County prize speaking contest, though on the face of it he seemed an unlikely public speaker, what with his high, piping voice, which seemed a perfect match for his diminutive frame. According to the Union-Gazette, a preliminary contest was held at the gymnasium to select one boy and one girl from Newark High, a cut Jackson made by virtue of being the only boy who’d entered. What followed was a “dreadful fiasco,” which he would later describe in three different genres of writing: a short story (“The Last Time”) and television scenario (The Prize Speaking Contest), both featuring Don Birnam, and a novella (Home for Good) about a world-famous author from Arcadia named Mercer Maitland. The details of all three accounts are virtually identical: the protagonist loses the boys’ cup to the contestant from Sodus, but the girl from Arcadia wins, whereupon an assembly is held in her honor; after she says a few words, the principal invites to the dais “that other person” who also brought “honor and credit” to the school—meaning the teacher who coached the two contestants—but the protagonist abruptly stands and begins to give a mawkish little thank-you speech. “He got no further, or, if he did, it was not heard,” Jackson wrote in “The Last Time.” “A roar went up from the assembly. Shrieks and screams of laughter, wave after wave of laughter, deafening, crushing, passed over the room. The windows shook with the sound; the glass panes rattled as if there had been an earthquake.” (“Do you know what?” a teacher comforts the traumatized boy in Home for Good. “I’ll bet you that someday you’ll write about this.”)
To make matters considerably worse, Herb Jackson seemed eager to distance himself from his sissy little brother, and took to calling him Isabelle at school and circulating his poetry (“to general hilarity”) among fellow seniors. More and more, Charlie withdrew. At home he fixed up the attic as his own private study, where began a lifelong tendency to surround himself with portraits of his personal gods—soon to include, in those days, Edgar Allan Poe (whom he hoped to resemble when he grew up), Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O’Neill, and Charlie Chaplin. Weekends, too, were spent alone as a matter of cherished preference, either at the library or on hikes to an old maple sugar camp (Sugar Bush) outside of town, during which he’d pretend to be Father Marquette or one of General Custer’s reconnoitering scouts. Among his family he felt almost a stranger, consoling himself with a fantasy of being a foundling, a prince (“someday the secret would be revealed, he was content to wait”), or at any rate a very great poet, scornful of the “clods” in his midst. “When I’d finish a poem,” he later told Harvey Breit of The New York Times, “I’d look into the mirror to see if I looked different, if my face had changed”—this à la young Don in The Lost Weekend: “Surely there would be some sign, some mark, some tiny line or change denoting a new maturity, perhaps?” If so, his family stubbornly refused to notice. One day, while the rest of them went on a motoring trip, Charlie stayed home and worked on a long narrative poem; when his mother returned, he excitedly demanded she sit down and listen. Rather to his surprise, she sat quietly through the whole thing, staring at his shoes with a rapt expression. “Charles Jackson,” she said, once he finished, “first thing tomorrow morning take those shoes downtown and get them resoled.”
Jackson’s alienation might have been dire indeed, if not for the timely arrival of a soulmate, Marion Fleck, whose family moved to Newark from Taunton, Massachusetts. The girl went by the name Betty, though Charlie liked to call her Bettina or Teens, and in his fiction she usually appears as Bettina Chapin. Jackson wrote an account of their first meeting for Farther and Wilder1: the Chapin family has just arrived in Arcadia, and while their furniture is being carted into the house, Bettina stands on her lawn with a group of curious youngsters and volubly holds forth about how she used to love horseback riding in Massachusetts (“We had our own stables and everything”) while Don silently studies her, observing that her prettiness (“a perfect complexion, and fine, gray-blue, intelligent eyes”) is somewhat diminished by her tall girl’s tendency to hunch her shoulders and plod about with her head down. Suddenly a person approaches on horseback, and—overhearing the whole equestrian spiel—offers Bettina the use of her mount. “Why, I wouldn’t dream of taking your horse,” says the latter, flushing with embarrassment. “Besides, I couldn’t without my—my proper riding habit and all.” The little crowd shares a scornful smile, whereas Don “recognize[s] a kindred spirit.” (“She was a natural actress,” Marion’s son-in-law, Gene Farley, attests. Even as an elderly woman, she used to entertain herself on trains by pretending to be a psychiatrist while chatting up strangers.)
Marion likewise felt deeply estranged from her family. Writing to Jackson on the subject of parents and children, she quoted Arnold: “A God, a God their severance ruled!” Her father, an electrician, was annoyed by his daughter’s love of poetry and overall artiness, while her mother expressed a wifely solidarity by avoiding such subjects altogether for the 104 dull years of her life. Both openly preferred Marion’s little sister, Helen, who grew up to be a perfect wife and mother. Among people her own age, too, Marion was shunned as intellectual (“anathema to social life in Arcadia”). Naturally she and Charlie became inseparable. “She was the companion of his every thought and almost his every act,” Jackson wrote of
the friendship, “far closer to him than his mother or brothers … the real pleasure of any occasion—book, hike, movie, a day in the city—consisted in talking it over with Bettina before and after, but especially after.… Only when considered in its relation to Bettina did anything have any meaning.” At school they passed notes at every opportunity,2 and afterward would sometimes walk around town until late at night, sitting at last in the deserted bandstand and talking about the lovely, non-Arcadian future. Best of all were hikes, now shared, to Sugar Bush Hill, where they’d sit among the “sad-eyed sheep” and read poetry aloud to each other—the inspiration for an elegiac poem, “World Without End,” that Marion would someday write:
