by Blake Bailey
Stimson referred to his friend and law partner as the Exquisite: Winthrop entertained lavishly and often (“the silver of four generations on his table”), though he liked solitude, too, or so his considerable erudition would suggest. Some of this came from his father, Egerton, also a lawyer, whose enormous portrait by Sargent hung over the son’s drawing-room fireplace. A great friend of Edith Wharton,9 Egerton is best remembered as the model for snobbish Sillerton Jackson (an expert on “the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society”) in The Age of Innocence, though Wharton’s memoir, A Backward Glance, gives a more balanced view of the man. Egerton, she wrote, was “easily entangled in worldly trifles” to be sure, but he was also a great reader and art collector, as well as a wise confidant in personal matters: “Sternly exacting toward himself, he was humorously indulgent toward others”—a statement that rather precisely describes his son’s attitude, insofar as it was manifest in his relations with Charles Jackson.
Charlie had been in New York for a month or two when he retrieved Winthrop’s card from The Odyssey and gave him a call at his office. The older man promptly asked him to lunch at the Downtown Club, where the two sat talking about literature. Winthrop seemed “shocked” by the youth’s all but total ignorance of Latin and Greek, and even German and French, while Jackson explained that he had no formal education beyond high school. He did allow, however, that he knew something of Shakespeare, and the two began trying to stump each other (“Tell me, young man, the name of the play in which the following line appears … ”)10—a game they would resume over many postprandial coffees in Winthrop’s townhouse on East 72nd Street, or the mansion at his 450-acre estate on Long Island, Muttontown Meadows, where four men were employed each summer just to clear the riding paths and keep the park free of poison ivy. Charlie’s time in the Bloomer house on East Avenue in Newark could hardly have prepared him for the sheer luxurious eclecticism on display chez Winthrop: the Sèvres decorated porcelain and bronze-doré boudoir clocks, the Louis XV inlaid tulipwood serpentine-front commodes, the Chippendale carved mahogany and parcel-gilded gesso wall mirrors, the Fukien porcelain statuettes of Kuan Yin, the watercolors by Rowlandson, Rackham, Cruikshank, Leech, and the world’s largest collection of original Tenniel illustrations from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. A lot of statuary, too—nude youths mostly (Achilles and Patroclus, frolicking satyrs and putti)—as well as a gallery of Winthrop’s various protégés over the years.
Jackson realized that his own generation was apt to look “with raised eyebrows” on Winthrop’s indulgence toward certain young men, though he insisted that the man’s “key” trait was his innocence. Indeed, the only thing Winthrop was importunate about—vis-à-vis Charlie, at least—was his beloved Plato: “All through the Twenty’s Mr. Winthrop was at me to read Plato,” Jackson wrote his daughter Kate (middle name: Winthrop) in 1964, “it was something I had to read otherwise I would be all but imbalanced, and he even bought me a small set in the Jowett translation—in vain. I didn’t or couldn’t connect; I was not a thinker in those days, I was a feeler, rather, and thus got into a lot of emotional scrapes.… I see now why Mr. Winthrop pressed me so long to read Plato … [he was] trying to help me.” Nor was Winthrop only interested in conveying, say, how an older man’s passion for a promising youth might be transmuted into a higher spiritual force, but also how a wise man faces death, à la Socrates in The Apology (“It is pretty grand in its simplicity,” he wrote Charlie). Jackson, for his part, urged Winthrop to read comparatively racy stuff such as Compton Mackenzie’s Vestal Fire, about a bearded pederast (Count Bob) who moons over his fetching young secretary, Carlo. “It is a curious book isn’t it,” Winthrop calmly responded. “As you say the world has changed.” And meanwhile, too, Charlie introduced his new mentor to Dr. Lyngholm, who endeavored to cure the man’s cold with an osteopathic maneuver that “fairly throttled [him]”: “my cold disappeared,” Winthrop wrote, “but whether it was the black magic or a cough mixture which a milder practitioner gave me I cannot tell.”
CHARLIE HAD BEEN in New York for just over a year when his little brother arrived to study painting at the Art Students League, and the two took an apartment together. Fred Jackson was a lovable young man—sweet, ebullient, possessed of a “truly magical charm,” as Charlie put it—such that even folks in Newark were somewhat willing to overlook what they considered his dubious qualities; as for his fellow art students and employees at Brentano’s (where he worked the evening shift), they adored him, all the more given that he was not only personable but comely. Fred’s artistic talent was slight and rather beside the point; like his brother he’d left Newark to live, and in that capacity he would always shine. Around this time Charlie and Fred became known among friends as Pou (louse) and Boom, respectively; the latter nickname (a nom d’amour, perhaps, whose provenance remains mysterious) would stick for the rest of Fred’s life. Night after night the two cultivated “very artistic bars” in the Village, and for that year’s Art Students League Ball (“a dusk to dawn affair at the old Webster Hall of fond memory”) Boom came attired in nothing but a jockstrap covered with tiny brass bells. Nor was such costume particularly outré in that milieu. Their best friend was a roisterous Stanford graduate with the stately name Haughton College Bickerton (“Bick”), whose home in Sausalito would become a refuge for both brothers (especially Boom, who visited almost yearly). “There’s nobody in the entire US I’d rather see, no, not even C. Chaplin & G. Garbo together, than Bick,” Charlie wrote Boom from Hollywood in 1949, mentioning a couple of roadside signs he was eager to describe for their old friend: “VISIT THE RATTLESNAKE GARDEN PANSY BEDS”; “MOHAWK CABINS: Lunches, Sandwiches, Hot & Cold Water, Truck Drivers.”
Charlie’s life was more strenuous than ever, now that his indefatigable brother was in town. The previous summer he’d worked at a hotel in the Berkshires, where, after a long day of tennis, he developed a sharp pain under his right shoulder that began to worsen the following winter; also he was coughing a lot and felt exhausted all the time. Still, he pushed himself harder than ever: he put in long hours at a Womrath branch bookstore on Broadway, while at night (whatever his other diversions) he steadily worked at his writing. His “Chekhov phase”—or at least that part of it involving Russian (or Russian-like) scenes and characters—was coming to an end; now that he no longer lived in Arcadia, he felt a great compulsion to evoke the place in all its galling beauty and sordid, small-minded humanity.
Three Flowers transplants his spinster great-aunts from Syracuse to the smallest house on Grant Street in Arcadia, where each Sunday they make a dutiful round of their neighbors to discuss the relative coldness of the winter, the prospects for a good corn crop, and “just who really was paying off the mortgage for that widow-woman near Boulder Hill.” Relegated to a cot in the maid’s room is their teenage niece, Evelyn, a spiteful reminder of their dead sister (Evelyn’s mother), whom they never forgave for leaving home to marry a worthless man. One night Evelyn is stricken by a mysterious illness, and it falls to the kindly Dr. Linquist to explain to the sisters that the girl has been binding her stomach to conceal a pregnancy, and will probably give birth to a stillborn child (“and oddly enough it was this fact, of all that he had advanced, which seemed to cheer the sisters”). The novella peters out around page 30, when the sisters take the doctor into their confidence with “passionate outpourings” about their empty, ignorant lives—at which point Jackson switches from dialogue to indirect description, except for the oldest sister’s one-line lament, “Life might of been different for us if—if—if things had been different.” Whatever implausible “outpourings” preceded this pathetic tautology remain a mystery to the reader, and apparently to Jackson, too, who stalled at essentially the same point in the story when he tried to rewrite it as a three-act play.
He also resorted to both genres for his Arcadian bildungsroman, Simple Simon, though the novel (unlike the play) survives only a
s a couple of promising fragments and a few notes in his journal.11 Whereas the play focuses almost entirely on the protagonist’s rut as the local editor of the Arcadia Courier, the novel covers the same character’s earlier years as a sensitive adolescent with no interest in sports or girls12—a time when his only friends were Bettina and the odd discontented matron (“childless married women whose husbands are good providers and who have nothing to do”). One of these is Mrs. Crandall, whose “high sarcastic sense of humor” is endearing at first, but proves mostly a matter of idle, self-indulgent bitterness: “In small towns there are always a few people whose quasi-rebellious spirits find an outlet in ridiculing their village and bemoaning the fact that fate has placed them among such a mess of morons.” While Arcadia is hardly ideal for such would-be intellectuals, Jackson nicely suggests how Mrs. Crandall becomes her own worst enemy (among many). Wasting the better part of her wit on cursing the darkness—especially her well-meaning boob of a husband (a model Arcadian, naturally)—she suffers the inevitable nervous breakdown, which gives her gleeful neighbors an excuse to spread the rumor she’s taking dope. Finally, “recovered,” she’s reduced to a misanthropic shell (“Ligeia in cap and bells”). As for Simple Simon the play, it soon becomes bogged down in dithering conversations about whether or not Freddie will test himself in the wider world, and there is little of the novel’s more nuanced satire. Freddie, in effect, is a preening ninny who lets himself be flattered by rubes on the one hand, and browbeaten by the insufferably high-minded Janet (the Bettina character) on the other. “If Love is a city, then you and I are only living in the suburbs,” the latter declaims at one point. “I once hoped that we could move into the heart of it together.”
In the midst of these labors, Jackson began spitting up blood in the morning—though he was loath to mention it, lest he be returned to Newark. On April 27, 1928, however, he hemorrhaged while attending the theater (“rais[ing] three mouthfuls of blood,” his doctor carefully noted), and was taken to Bellevue. Within a couple of weeks, his tubercular right lung had been collapsed via pneumothorax—an injection of air between the ribs, the common (if questionable) treatment in those preantibiotic days—and he was left with nothing to do but lie there and wait.
At last, in July, he was sent to Devitt’s Camp, a sixty-acre sanatorium in western Pennsylvania (“in the heart of the White Deer Mountains”) started by an idealistic physician named William Devitt, a great believer in fresh air, fresh food, sunbaths, and virtuous living very much in general. It was a spartan life: the 128 patients lived two to a cabin—unheated except for a small potbellied stove—and slept on open-air porches in all weathers. Naturally Jackson considered writing a novel about the experience, to be titled The Dark Confinement, which hardly suggests the more larkish side of things. “Remember the night the three of us killed a couple quarts of wine,” a fellow patient wrote Jackson many years later. “And the bare footprint in the dried puddle of wine on the floor next morning?” Such a telltale spoor would have provoked bitter reproof from Dr. Devitt, though perhaps he was apt to be lenient in Jackson’s case, seeing as how the poor young man had abruptly become bald in just that one year.
Meanwhile he’d given his brother Fred a letter of introduction to Mr. Winthrop, thinking the two might hit it off despite an ostensible lack of common interests, as they did (“and thereby hangs a tale,” Charlie would write, “a tale, indeed, that was to influence our lives for almost the next eighteen years”). During their first lunch together, Winthrop asked the delightful Boom whether he was enjoying his studies at the League, and the youth replied that while life on the whole was certainly agreeable, he’d recently decided he’d rather do something along the lines of design or decoration, ideally under the tutelage of the great (but expensive) Winold Reiss. Mr. Winthrop thought it might be arranged. A few weeks later, alas, Boom was visiting Charlie—for whose benefit he vivaciously demonstrated Angna Enters’s “Field Day” dance, which he’d seen the night before—when he suddenly hemorrhaged. (“I didn’t tell her this last part,” Charlie later reported, having eventually met Miss Enters in Hollywood.) Soon the two brothers were sharing a large room in the basement of the Devitt’s Camp hospital, as their condition was deemed rather grave: “sick as we were,” Charlie noted, “the two of us had the time of our lives.”
WHILE AT DEVITT’S, Boom was visited by a coworker at Brentano’s, Rhoda Booth, a recent graduate of Connecticut College who—ten turbulent years later—would become Mrs. Charles Jackson. Rhoda was a Scot from Barre, Vermont. Her parents, John and Isabella, were born and raised in Aberdeen, and both spoke with thick Scottish burrs; John, a stonecutter and chairman of the Barre school board, doted on his older daughter and saw to it that she got an excellent education. In 1930, after two years at Brentano’s, Rhoda would join the staff of Henry Luce’s new magazine, Fortune, where she worked for such famous writers as Archibald MacLeish (“She was an ideal researcher”) and James Gould Cozzens, a good friend whose wife, Bernice Baumgarten, would become Charlie’s longtime literary agent.
Rhoda, in short, was “a remarkably interesting woman,” as her future husband would be the first to acknowledge—though how these two should come to be married was a puzzle, to put it mildly. As Dorothea Straus observed, they seemed “totally unrelated”: Rhoda “was as monosyllabic and repressed as [Charlie] was voluble and dramatic. She was tall and straight, with wide features, a fair complexion, and smiling blue [hazel] eyes that expressed endurance rather than merriment.” She would have much to endure, and would endure it with a kind of workmanlike stoicism. This, after all, was her style: where her husband was a dandy who favored bow ties and tailored suits, Rhoda wore clothes for comfort (“their children often spoke of a gray-and-white number she was fond of as her ‘Puritan’ dress”) and refused to touch up her colorless hair with even a slight auburn rinse. Their friend Max Wylie considered her “the finest woman [he] ever knew”: calm, scrupulous, eminently sensible and literal-minded—a compendium of things Charlie was not, and thus either the perfect or worst imaginable mate (or something of both). “Had there ever been such a thing [as intimacy] between them, even at the beginning?” Don wonders of his wife, Helen, in Farther and Wilder. “Not, at least, as he understood the word and had experienced the feeling himself, with so many others.” Time and again, for the next forty years, an exalted Charlie would endeavor to share with Rhoda one of his many passions—Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, say, or a passage from Mann—and presently find her snoring or glancing furtively at box scores (she was crazy about baseball), and it would occur to him, again, but with renewed bemusement every time, that “neither one of them, actually, was the kind of person the other even liked.”
Be that as it may, Charlie’s budding friendship with the taciturn but attractive young woman was only one aspect of his relative good fortune. Now that Boom was also at Devitt’s, Mr. Winthrop had begun showering the two with “fantastic gifts”: bed jackets and bathrobes and lap rugs of luxurious camel’s hair, cashmere sweaters and bed socks, two electric heaters, a portable Victrola, calf-bound editions of Shakespeare and Jowett’s Dialogues of Plato, and charge accounts at Brentano’s and the Liberty Music Shop. One weekend Mr. Winthrop came down to see how the boys were getting along, and was “shocked” by what struck him as an almost ghastly squalor: “Why, it’s monstrous! Monstrous!” he muttered, though Boom and Charlie did their best to assure him that they were all but perfectly content. Mr. Winthrop would have none of it, insisting they find a more suitable place immediately.
To be sure, while Boom had much improved, Charlie’s condition continued to deteriorate: over the last few months his weight had dropped from 142 to 125, he was running a constant fever that hovered around 102, and fluid had to be drained from his pleura every day. Thus the brothers returned to Newark on July 1, 1929, and Charlie began seeing a doctor in Rochester, John J. Lloyd, who decided to permanently collapse the patient’s right lung by severing his phrenic nerve. Awaiting the operation at
Rochester General, Charlie wrote a poem suggesting a bleak prognosis:
Come for him in the night,
And take him from his bed …
The snow is as white as white …
The blood is as red as red …
Heap the dirt over his head,
Pack the earth firm and tight …
The snow is as white as white …
And so on, for five lugubrious quatrains. Happily the operation seemed to go well enough, and though he’d been told to expect at least a year of bed rest, Charlie rallied and was up and about in less than two weeks.
One of the nice things about sanatorium life was that Jackson had all the time in the world to read: the Bible (“I kept a notebook on it just as literature”), more Russian novels, and all seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The last became a lifelong favorite, though his most important discovery that summer was Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice he’d skimmed at Kroch’s four years earlier and deemed “highbrow” in a bad way, because of the stilted translation and lack of dialogue. But now, as he convalesced from his phrenectomy—and waited for a place to open up at a sanatorium in New Mexico—Jackson was persuaded to read The Magic Mountain because it was all about his illness: “It is true I learned a good deal about tuberculosis,” he later wrote, “but I learned a great deal more about art, about politics, about science, about psychology, about Europe, and about myself.” Longing to breathe the same rarefied air as Hans Castorp—and perhaps find a humanistic mentor such as Settembrini, to say nothing of the various Dionysians and ideologues that compose the rest of the cast—Charlie decided that he and Boom simply had to go to one of the elegant sanatoria in Davos, Switzerland. (“What!” their German doctor, Hans Staub, would exclaim shortly after their arrival. “You read Der Zauberberg and then come to Davos? Don’t you know that that terrible book—so krankhaft, so morbide—keeps hundreds and thousands of people away from Davos every year? … Crazy Americans!”)
