Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  Mr. Winthrop only wanted what was best for them, and readily agreed to foot the bill. Newark, meanwhile, was in an uproar. Poor Herb was besieged with questions about Charlie and Fred’s mysterious benefactor, whom Bob delicately characterized as “a kind friend” for public consumption. Among family she was a good deal more acerbic, darkly insinuating that an old reprobate had “taken a shine” to her disreputable brothers-in-law.

  1 In a 1940 letter to a prospective employer, Jackson claimed to have been “in charge of the French department” at Kroch’s, though his wife, Rhoda, later specified the art book department (“the initial source of his great knowledge of painting … every experience added to his education”). Rhoda, I think, is right—not only because she’s the more reliable of the two, but also because Jackson’s French was spotty at best, and the salesclerks at Kroch’s were supposed to be experts in their particular departments.

  2 Or so he claimed in that same 1940 letter mentioned in the previous footnote. The most complete archive of The Chicagoan is at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, though it’s missing a few early issues. Jackson’s byline was not found among the available holdings.

  3 Written under a pen name, C. J. Storrier, and found among his papers. Storrier was his maternal grandmother’s maiden name, and his brother Fred’s middle name; Jackson often used it in his early fiction, typically to name characters based on himself and members of his family.

  4 The sentence provides a piquant context for Jackson’s favorite title, What Happened, which is first mentioned in his notes (circa the early 1930s) as a possible title for his never-written “Chicago novel.”

  5 No last name, and in most respects the character’s personal history does not suggest Don Birnam.

  6 Jack Burgess, for one, remembered meeting Dr. Lyngholm for the first time a few years later in New York, at the Russian Bear Restaurant.

  7 In Jackson’s name index for What Happened (probably compiled in the late 1940s), Thor Lyngholm’s fictional name is also given as “Linquist,” though Jackson changed the first name from Dan to Bue. Farther and Wilder includes a number of real names (e.g., “Thorvald”) that doubtless would have been changed in revision.

  8 One suspects that some such “scandal” actually occurred at Herb and Bob’s wedding in 1927; one way or the other, the family in Newark certainly knew of Thor’s existence. Herb’s oldest son and namesake—born the following year, 1928, and always known as Hup—referred to Thor by name in a letter he wrote shortly after his uncle Charlie’s death in 1968.

  9 Jackson once asked Bronson Winthrop what Mrs. Wharton was like, recording their exchange in his notes: “ ‘Very interesting, I suppose, though I’m afraid a little odd.’ ‘How “odd”?’ ‘Well, in my day, ladies didn’t write novels’—much as we would say, ‘In my day ladies didn’t become garage mechanics.’ ”

  10 Winthrop’s knowledge of the Bard was exhaustive, though Jackson remembered stumping him with the question “Was Lady Macbeth a mother?” When the man seemed flummoxed, Jackson pointed out that Lady Macbeth says, “I have given suck, and know. How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me … ” Winthrop slapped his thigh and started to repeat the quote—stopping short of the word “suck,” which apparently embarrassed him.

  11 “So far as I remember,” Rhoda Jackson wrote after her husband’s death, “the MSS of SIMPLE SIMON [the novel] was lost, years before. (That loss may have caused his later habit of taking three of four carbons of everything he wrote.)” Again, a couple of fragments did survive—perhaps twenty-five pages in all—that are almost certainly from this novel, or so Jackson’s notes suggest.

  12 Though, as mentioned earlier, the character is named Taddem in the novel and Freddie in the play.

  Chapter Four

  Magic Mountain

  Before sailing aboard the Rochambeau on October 10, 1929, the brothers were met at their hotel by Mr. Winthrop, who solemnly presented them each with a letter of credit for 2,000 dollars, as well as 500 dollars in travelers’ checks (“for emergencies or spending money till you get to the bank in Davos”). It was a festive nine-day crossing: Charlie and Fred shared a big double cabin, and joked with their fellow passengers that the old boat—creaking and groaning in the warm but windy weather—would crack up on this, its final voyage. From Le Havre they took a train to Paris, stopping overnight at the Palais d’Orsai and going to a “wonderful” nightclub where the orchestra played American tunes such as “St. Louis Blues”; then on to Zurich, where the next morning Charlie stepped out on his balcony at the Hotel Baur au Lac and watched the Jungfrau shimmer awesomely into view as the mist lifted over the lake. Wayne County seemed a rather dreary pastoral in comparison. At Landquart they ascended five thousand feet into the Grisons aboard a narrow-gauge train, excitedly running from one side of their first-class compartment to the other as peak after peak materialized beside them. When at last they disembarked in Davos-Platz, the snow was falling slow and thick through the twilit air; hardly any wind ever blew at the bottom of that mountainous bowl where the health resort was situated.

  For the next few days they saw the sights, such as they were—the largest skating rink in Europe (its waiters gliding about with cocktails aloft on little trays), the nude Spengler in the Public Gardens—and arranged for lodging and medical care. They chose the best suite at the second-best hotel, Kurgarten-Carlton, where for fifty Swiss francs a day or about ten dollars (“Of course we were being had, like the Americans we were”) they got two top-floor rooms, a bath, and a spacious balcony with two liegerstuhls and fur sleeping bags for their afternoon “cure” naps; the rate also included a stern, loving maid named Lena and three meals a day. After unpacking and arranging their effects, they toured a half-dozen sanatoria before settling on the Schweizerhof, a modern white building in the center of town with a big garden and sun terraces overhung with protective blue glass. Afterward they were having tea in the Kurgarten lounge when an Englishman struck up a conversation, inquiring what a couple of Yanks were doing there in the midst of the stock market crash (“I’m told that financiers are popping out of Wall Street windows like so many champagne corks”). The brothers hadn’t heard a thing about it, and the impression it made now was muted at best; suddenly their new life seemed stranger than ever: “Davos was a world to itself, an isolated world, a world apart … ”

  They worried the winter would be a dull one—apart from the obligatory afternoon nap, what to do but write letters and read? They were soon disabused. At four o’clock the town came alive: “Sleighs flew back and forth in the street with bells jangling,” Jackson wrote, “carrying passengers, very likely, to assignations; skiers appeared by the dozens; the rinks filled up and the bands played … the sidewalk cafés were crowded till sundown and the bars filled up.… It was as though the raison d’être of Davos was not disease at all but rather winter-sports and the gay hotel life.” Seventeen-year-old Sonja Henie, fresh from winning her first gold medal at the 1928 Olympics, practiced daily at the Davos rink, and one day taught Charlie how to do the “spread eagle” (arms extended, heels apart and pointing toward each other); thus the two were photographed by the rink’s roving photographer.1

  For patients, however, the main diversions of Davos were dancing, drinking, and sex, or some combination of the three, seeing as how life was short but one’s leisure in the meantime was long. Indeed, as Jackson noted, doctors made a point of recommending a certain amount of sexual exertion, since it kept the patient’s mind off morbid thoughts and was simply good physical medicine besides: “In tuberculosis one’s body burns faster; all one does during the cure is to lie around and store up energy, which must be expended somehow—and, after all, what else is there to do in Davos? … what happened here did not matter to the outside world and even, in a sense, had not happened at all.” In The Lost Weekend, Don reminisces about his Davos affair with a Norwegian woman, Anna, a character based on a fellow resident of the Kurgarten, Marion “Tom” Holzapfel; with her sister
, Dorothy, she invited Charlie and Boom to a concert their first week in town, after which the four became almost inseparable. “You and Dorothy were (if I may put it in such a high-flown fashion) one of the finest ‘chapters’ of my life,” Charlie wrote Tom in 1945, referring to her rather substantial role in his first novel. In Farther and Wilder, too, he would remember the quiet excitement of the Davos cocktail hour, as the four sat in the Kurhaus sipping gin-vermouths and making plans: “Beyond the wide windows, the stark snowy slopes and mountains were fading from their evening pink to dusk; coucheurs drove their closed, box-like sleighs up and down the main street, the little candles already lighted within … ” Such plans included a certain amount of hell-raising in St. Moritz, where Charlie and Tom were “always being arrested,” as he recalled, and no wonder: their escapades included stealing a sleigh, going down the bob run after dark, and refusing to pay an enormous taxi fare incurred during a night of drunken meanderings. Also, Don Birnam remembers (in The Lost Weekend) “the nightmare time at five in the morning” when he exploded a helium balloon with his cigarette and almost burned down the Suvretta hotel, the flame igniting some streamers and “touch[ing] off the whole room with a sudden hellish roar till the place was all one instant flame—which immediately, miraculously, went out (sparing not only him, that time, but the several hundred … who slept in the rooms above).”

  Tom was a boon companion, then, but whether she was Charlie’s main love interest is problematic. As he later pointed out, the “characteristic assumption” around Davos (“but never with a moral judgment, never a raised eyebrow”) was that he and Boom were something more than brothers. One day they went to get their picture taken at a studio, and Charlie noticed the photographer’s wry little smile as he posed them in double profile: bald Charlie and the boyishly gorgeous Boom. “Somehow you haven’t been able to make us look like brothers in any way,” Charlie complained afterward, poring over proofs. The man was taken aback; obviously he’d assumed the two were amants, the younger kept by the elder. And what was the truth of it? A love poem Charlie wrote around this time might have been merely playful:

  TO MY VALENTINE

  (P. S.—There couldn’t be 2)

  I don’t send my heart, I don’t want to, much;

  For my poor heart has been knocked rather goofy

  By phthisis [i.e., tuberculosis] and pneumo and needles and such,

  Injected by Doctors Staub, Lloyd and Lafloofie.…

  But I still have my pencil, if not my brains,

  And looking below I see there’s still room

  To indite in few syllables all that remains

  To be said on the subject today:

  J’adore Boom.

  Davos, again, was another world, and these were unusual circumstances. As for whatever abided between the two in later years: at least one person, who knew them both very well, remembered a kind of allusive, ribald “fencing” that “created an awkward thing in the room,” but was never quite definitive one way or the other.

  Another reason Charlie might have clung all the more closely to his brother was that, despite surface merriment, he never quite felt at home. In due course—and somewhat at the time—he would consider writing a great novel about the Davos years (“Europe in decay”) from the perspective of an American provincial who felt “like a child at a party [he] hadn’t been invited to.” Sitting in the Kurgarten dining room, he’d survey the cast of this future opus: the Dutch prime minister’s son, jauntily sipping white wine while seated, then walking with a painful limp because of his missing ribs; the promiscuous, absinthe-drinking princess from Berlin; and best of all, to Charlie, a family of strapping blond aristocrats on the far side of the room, “voluble and festive” like the Rostovs in War and Peace. These were the Mumms: the father, Peter, was grandson of the Champagne magnate G. H. Mumm, but had lost most of his fortune in the Great War, while the improvident mother, Olga, was daughter of Karl de Struve, Russian ambassador to the United States. Olga would “discover” Charlie during his second season in Davos (“doubtless she had learned that I was an American, and that, of course, meant money”), and was soon regaling him with some of the best dirty stories he’d ever heard, or with memories of the real-life models for Proust’s masterpiece. Charlie also befriended her children, bobsledding with the brothers, Brat and Kiki, down the four-mile run from the Schatzalp, or having his portrait painted by Elena, who charged him a hundred francs for the privilege (scribbling the price shyly on a scrap of paper before leaving the room). But Charlie was closest to the youngest, little Olga (“Olili”), with whom he had a standing Ping-Pong date in the Kurgarten rec room each day at five. Out of admiration for the Empress of Russia (whose emblem it was), Olili had inked a little swastika on the handle of her racket, and was shocked when somebody left it outside her door, broken in two, with a note: “We don’t want any of this around here.” Nobody knew what it was all about. “Isn’t it dreadful to think of us all being so ignorantly gay and carefree in Davos?” Charlie later wrote Tom Holzapfel. “Who could have foreseen at that time how horribly Europe would change in ten short years, and what would happen to so many of the people we were so fond of there.” By then (1945) Charlie had run into Elena Mumm Thornton in New York, where she worked as an editor at Town & Country; the rest of her family, she grimly reported, had become “ardent supporters of Hitler”: Olili was a leader in the Mädchen branch of the Hitler Youth, while both brothers had been killed in battle, fighting for the Nazis.2

  BY APRIL the season was over in Davos, and Jackson was feeling better (oddly enough). Dr. Staub advised him to take a long vacation in Italy—to soak up the sun and enjoy himself. Getting off the train in Rome, he promptly bought a heavy bronze statuette of Romulus and Remus that he would keep the rest of his life,3 then proceeded down the coast to Capri, where he spent the better part of three months at the Hotel Quisisana. Perhaps the highlight of these travels was a stop in Paris, where he visited his favorite new Davos friend, the Baroness von Reutter—or, as she insisted he call her, Cousin Edith. The heiress of a wealthy Chicago family that had fallen on hard times, Edith lived modestly in Paris at the Oxford & Cambridge Hotel with her husband, Hans, a penurious Austrian baron. Still, the two managed to spend a couple of months each season in Davos, where she endeared herself to Jackson with her flair for misusing words like gemütlich and soignée, with her fond memories of dancing in New York to “Walt Whitman’s Orchestra,” and above all with her love of practical jokes (sending a mound of birdshot disguised as caviar to the Countess von Gerlach’s table). Fifteen years later—while attending the premiere of Since You Went Away in the company of Gregory Peck and Leland Hayward—Jackson would run into the former Patricia Monteagle (by then Mrs. Richard Smart); the two “fell on each other’s necks,” he wrote, as they remembered the marvelous time they’d had that long-ago summer, dancing at Armenonville in the Bois de Boulogne with Cousins Edith and Hans.

  Jackson’s girlfriend Tom was also in Paris, where they’d agreed to meet for a final five-day fling before sailing back to the States together aboard the Bremen. As he later claimed, it was during that raucous crossing that he began to realize he had a drinking problem. Each morning he and Tom would walk around the deck with their fellow revelers, desperately hungover, and Jackson was always a little startled—and contemptuous—when the others would object to having a morning pick-me-up: “I can’t look at another drink!” they’d groan, in effect, while Jackson himself was dying for one. Later he’d discover that Richard Peabody actually defined drunkards as people who want a drink the next morning: “They say it makes them feel as if they were coming back to life, as if they were no longer going crazy, and so forth.” But why the compulsion to be always drunk in the first place (especially in social situations)? Why the question of “going crazy”? While dancing with Anna at Armenonville, Don Birnam’s heart sinks when she suddenly turns serious and announces she has a question to ask once they’re alone: “‘Why do you only come to bed with me whe
n you are drunk?’ He roared with delight. He knew damned well she had reason to ask; but in his relief that it had been no worse he was able to laugh as if it were terribly funny and he almost shouted ‘Because I’m always drunk!’ ”

  Certainly aboard the Bremen that seems to have been the case. The rest of his life he would particularly remember one night (and there would be many like it) when he broke away from Tom, staggering, and clambered up on a slippery railing, threatening to jump into the boiling wake; wisely, perhaps, the woman walked away, and Jackson was left teetering there until a sudden gust of wind filled his camel’s-hair coat and flung him back to the deck (“It was just one of those moments,” he wrote Tom, “and God, for no known reason, steps in and protects the drunk from himself”). Waiting on the pier in New York—a vision of safe harbor—was Rhoda, to whom Jackson introduced his Norwegian friend, and later, by chance, the three met again at the theater. By then Tom had gotten the picture, though apparently felt no hard feelings: “You are like a plant of slow growth,” she wrote him, “but the flower will be beautiful.”

  BEFORE RETURNING to Davos on October 1, 1930, Jackson was told by Dr. Lloyd in Rochester that his condition was “excellent” except for some slight rales, or rattles, on his right side after coughing. Mr. Winthrop, however, thought his young friend looked “desperately overtired” when he left him on the deck of the Lafayette, and urged him to be “sensible just once” and take care of himself. Jackson did not follow the advice. Comforting himself with drink on the ship—none too festively this time—he fell asleep while smoking and awoke to find the eiderdown smoldering away on top of him; he flung it into the shower just before the gaping hole burned through to his chest. “Tired and ill” by the time he got to Davos, he found the place almost deserted that early in the season. Even Boom was gone, as Dr. Staub had given him belated leave to take an Italian tour, and perhaps return to the States for a month or two if he felt up to it.