by Blake Bailey
But Boom would remain in Europe a long time. The next month he suffered a relapse in Venice, and was barely alive when he and Charlie were reunited at the Schweizerhof. Hemorrhaging now from his “good” lung, Boom was forced to lie with an ice pack on his chest in all but total silence, not even allowed to laugh, lest he waste precious breath; the next step, if matters worsened, was the dreaded thoracoplasty—the surgical removal of ribs to collapse a severely diseased lung. “It is most distressing,” Winthrop wrote Charlie, “and rather a sad homecoming for you.… Of course Fred is a bit apt to make light of things, especially in his own care; so do please give me the right dope—the low down as my tough friends say.” Boom was, for a fact, managing rather miraculously to make light of things—“it was his nature,” as Charlie would write, “and I believe that is how or why he recovered.” Before long all the nobs of Davos were paying court to the charming invalid—the Duchess of Alba, the Countess von Gerlach, the wealthy Trads from Tehran—listening to his Victrola and admiring the cheerful Dufy prints on the walls of his lovely room overlooking the gardens and ski slopes beyond.
As Mr. Winthrop pointed out, it was Charlie who needed cheering up more than Fred, and indeed the former seemed to be going through an existential crisis of sorts, albeit in good company: Ralph Monroe Eaton was a Harvard philosophy professor who, following a nervous breakdown, had taken a sabbatical to be psychoanalyzed by Jung in Zurich; he and Jackson had met in Italy the previous spring (Eaton had introduced Charlie, in Rome, to George Santayana, Eaton’s former teacher), and that second season they shuttled between Davos and Zurich as often as possible. Eaton was a fascinating figure: then in his late thirties, he was a great friend and protégé of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and had himself published one book, Symbolism and Truth, and was in the process of completing another, General Logic, that would remain in print for almost thirty years. Jackson described him as “rugged, athletic, look[ing] like those early photos of Hemingway (the ski cap and black-mustache ones),” but he was evidently fragile on the inside: recently divorced (his estranged wife had taken their child and moved to California), he’d gotten involved in a chaotic affair with a charismatic Harvard psychologist, Christiana Morgan—“the veiled woman in Jung’s circle,” as her biographer put it—who was then helping her sometime lover, Henry A. Murray, develop the Thematic Apperception Test. Morgan was witness to Eaton’s unraveling: gentle at first, he grew more and more erratic as his drinking worsened, insisting on absolute fidelity and threatening suicide when Morgan refused. Finally he tried to get himself run over on a turnpike near the Parker River on Plum Island, whereupon Morgan and Murray persuaded him to see Jung in Zurich.
By the time Jackson knew him, Eaton seemed more or less on an even keel, and they had wonderful times together. One day the two were drinking in Davos—shortly after they’d attended a production of Madama Butterfly in Zurich—and Eaton put his brandy aside, sat down at a piano, and proceeded to play the opera’s score from start to finish: “A thrilling afternoon,” wrote Jackson, who hadn’t even known Eaton could play. When in Zurich, they made a point of being at the Dolder Grand Hotel, above the city, every Saturday evening at seven when all the church bells would ring until they “blended into one prodigious note.” The effect was all the more enchanting, perhaps, given that the friends were rarely if ever sober.4 Once again, but at the Dolder this time, Jackson passed out with a cigarette in his mouth and woke up to find his bed in flames. As for his friend: “Alcohol had a place in Eaton’s difficulties,” Henry Murray’s biographer noted; “so did an uncertain sexual identity.”
Whatever his problems otherwise, Eaton was above all a mentor to Charlie—his own Settembrini—and perhaps inevitably he, like Winthrop, tried to interest the young man in Plato, to little avail (“there was a barrier of ignorance, or maybe self-interest, that intruded and kept me ever from [Plato’s] meaning and beauty”), while Jackson, for his part, appears to have helped the man feel a little happier for a time. While correcting proofs for General Logic, Eaton wrote Charlie a desolate letter complaining of the “fatigue” he felt toward his work nowadays; the “passion for coldness” required for such “quibbles and intricacies of thought” was, he’d decided, “a horrible atmosphere to live in”:
My life as a pedagogue is ended. I have been in confinement like you; confinement to order, convention, precision—not daring to live or feel in unconventional and irrational forms, except furtively. I think everything is produced out of the irrational, growth, creation, is irrational. If I could only have a year to write—to say what I think, and to feel, to carve out a new and beautiful book, not for money but for the thing itself. It would be worth making any sacrifice for. The alternative is the conventional pedagogue’s life I have been leading; I dread going back to that—because I begin to feel free of it; and you have helped to give me that freedom.
Perhaps with Eaton’s predicament in mind—and wishing to find a better atmosphere for his own calling, from which he’d strayed too long—Jackson was contemplating a year in Russia, and wondered if Mr. Winthrop would be willing to stake him. “I should think that life in Russia in 1931 would be hard indeed,” the latter replied with patient understatement; nevertheless he’d discussed the matter with their mutual friend Thor,5 and both agreed a Russian sojourn might be a good thing if Charlie used the interval for “earnest hard work and study.” As for the oats he insisted on sowing in the meantime, well, Winthrop was loath to reproach him (“It is best to get them out of your system”), though he begged him not to “do anything foolish or extravagant” since these were hard times and, besides, Charlie had to consider his health.
Jackson responded by going on his most colossal bender yet, burning through the rest of his money with a two-month, hundred-dollar-a-day trip to Juan-les-Pins on the Riviera. In later years the thought of that place—with its plush nightclubs and beaches and dazzling cerulean sea—would make him smile; at the time he was probably more ambivalent. Don Birnam casts back to the “agonizing mornings at the bank” in Juan-les-Pins when, palsied with hangover, he’d sit outside breathing deeply of the salty air while trying to steady his hand enough to sign a letter of credit under the teller’s impassive gaze. “I am afraid that what you have often told me is true,” Winthrop wrote him afterward, with an unwonted note of asperity, “that when you get some money you do not spend it wisely. So I have arranged with Thor to send him a remittance, and he will do what is right. Until you get some work to do, I don’t want you to be adrift for I don’t know what you’d do—so Thor has promised to do what is necessary to give you board and lodging. I hate to write all this. I do wish you would pull yourself together. You really must try my dear Charlie.” Duly chastened, Jackson dropped all thought of Russia (hardly an option, in any event, given the new arrangement with Thor), informing Mr. Winthrop that he’d decided to come straight home and get on with his writing, whereby he hoped to win back some of his benefactor’s good opinion. The kindly man was mollified: “Everything has been worth while my dear Charlie if only you are well and strong again and able to make good as I always knew and now know you will. But don’t talk nonsense about my faith in you being shaken.”
JACKSON RETURNED to New York in May, taking a room at the Hotel Earle on Washington Square. For a while he tried hard to stick to his promise to write steadily and stay somewhat sober: he was approaching thirty, after all, and was still unpublished at a time when most of his friends, in the midst of the Depression, at least had jobs of some sort. Rhoda would later remember that he’d worked “feverishly” that first year back from Europe; whatever his relative gifts, Jackson had realized by then that writing did not come easily to him, and yet he couldn’t imagine doing anything else. At the time he was cultivating a kind of brutal cynicism, hoping to title his first story collection Without or With, from Byron: “Without, or with, offense to friends or foes, / I sketch your world exactly as it goes.” One of his more ambitious efforts was a long story titled “Death
on the Rocks,” a somber meditation on the centrality of passion. Martha and Lydia are old friends who share a summer cabin near Seneca Falls (about twenty miles southeast of Arcadia), and as the story opens they await the arrival of Martha’s husband, Smith, and his friend Pete. Lydia has lost the love of her life, Roger, three years before, and since then has dissembled her despair with a façade of vivid eccentricity; Martha, meanwhile, concedes that she has little in common with Smith except for a sexual attraction so powerful that she wonders whether she could live without it. After many pages of ruminative dialogue in this vein, the men arrive and the four spend a night of heavy drinking and more talking; indeed, nothing much happens until the last ten pages (of forty-four), when Smith falls to his death while climbing rocks beneath a waterfall, whereupon the author waxes lyrical: “Smith lay below, fresh and beautiful as the body of Hector favored by the gods even in his high doom of death.… Gone from her now, he poured forth his blood in a libation to death.” On the last page Martha stands at the brink of a ravine, pondering suicide, while her friend Lydia realizes it’s a moot point: “Though [Martha] might go on in physical life, she would be dead as [Lydia] was dead.”
“A Summer Passion” treats the same theme with a good deal more sentimentality, suggesting that Jackson realized his morbidity was doing him no favors in the fiction market. Philip McKenna is a doting older brother to his seven-year-old sister, Mary, “an ideal playmate” who assures him that he is “the onliest person in the world that I will ever ever love.” However, after a “grand romp” of a summer with the girl, Philip is about to marry the sophisticated Christabel and begin work as an English instructor in distant Albany. Little Mary despises her brother’s fiancée, who treats the girl with gauche condescension (“It’s very pretty,” she says of Mary’s dress, “but isn’t it a little too old for you?”) and is a rival besides, and Philip is forced to choose between the two. Naturally he chooses passion, with all its “danger and adoration and treachery,” assuring himself that his little sister, without his love, will yet remain “uninjured, whole.” Thus he bids farewell to the sleeping child (“God bless you, Mary dear”) and leaves to take up his life, while the reader is left wondering why sexual love and sibling love should be considered mutually exclusive.
Perhaps the author figured a change of venue would help, and anyway both Thor and Ralph Eaton were now living in Boston, where Jackson moved that winter and took a job as a feeder in a jigsaw factory.6 Eaton had recently returned from Zurich, and was planning to teach one more year at Harvard and then practice psychoanalysis in New York. Jackson had found his friend in “wonderful shape”; however, in her biography of Christiana Morgan, Claire Douglas paints a far more lurid picture:
Just when Eaton needed a tight rein on his growing hysteria, Jung, perceiving the richness of Eaton’s unconscious, carried him off into archetypal realms that, alas, further unbalanced the young man. Eaton started to become delusional. He didn’t remain in Zurich long enough for Jung to rectify his mistake, but panicked and fled. Jung wrote forebodingly to [Henry] Murray: “He seems to be promising. If only America doesn’t swallow him up and grind him to dust.”
If America did, in fact, swallow Eaton up in some way, Jackson saw only vague hints of it; during their final meeting Eaton struck him as being in “perfect health.”7 But in Christiana Morgan’s view, the man was so incoherent with drink and mania that she feared for his safety and her own. On April 12, 1932, Eaton became dizzy while teaching a class at Radcliffe, and dismissed his students. At the insistence of Morgan and Henry Murray, he spent the night in a hospital but slipped away the next morning; Murray rounded up some colleagues and went looking for him, and finally they found his body in some woods near West Concord, where Eaton had cut his throat. Two days later he was eulogized in the Harvard Crimson: “It is our misfortune that frequently, in a world so lonely as ours can be, it is not possible for the questing mind of the teacher to draw peaceful satisfaction from the art of teaching.”
Jackson’s own ideas about Eaton’s death had only a little to do with pedagogic disenchantment or, for that matter, oppressive archetypes and the like. “This seems to me—this kind of thing, that is, seems to me the real American tragedy,” he wrote Boom in 1953, after one of Boom’s acquaintances had killed himself (and three weeks before Charlie himself would threaten suicide): “the man of fine mind and decent tastes whose deepest basic instincts cause him to go against the social grain whether he likes it or not.… It is the story of Ralph Eaton all over again, and thousands and thousands of other far-better-than-average men.” After a fashion, then, perhaps America had swallowed Eaton up, rather as Jung had feared. What is certain is that he yearned for a more passionate life—“to express all that you see in me,” he wrote Charlie, and referred to Whitman’s longing to leave behind the “charts and diagrams” of the “learn’d astronomer” and simply gaze at the stars amid “the mystical moist night-air,” a sentiment echoed in a poem Eaton had written shortly before his death, which Charlie transcribed in his journal:
From the hot hell of life, gazing at the cold eternal stars—
To speak what there is to speak—
Of love, tender, springing green in the soul and turning to desolate withered grass;
Of effort given in vain, work ending in death;
Of the passage of all things into nothingness—and the prayers of saints and religious men;
Of philosophical systems, buttresses of man’s hopes against the unknown;
Of the mystery of the universe, revealed on a summer’s day when the sea is blue and the sands are white;
The universe—the earth—taking me to its bosom, caressing me, holding me,
Because I shall die and descend into it again;
I—a part of the earth, a blessed animal, loving like an animal, dying like an animal.
1 Jackson’s daughter Sarah remembered being mortified, as a girl, when her father ostentatiously demonstrated his prowess for the yokels of Orford, New Hampshire—an episode he recounted in Farther and Wilder: “On an impulse he indulged in one of his pet tricks … the so-called spread eagle. Jean [the Sarah character] turned red as a beet and averted her face, while he sailed by.”
2 So Elena might have thought in the spring of 1945—or so Jackson wrote, at any rate—whereas Brat was actually in a POW camp in France not far from where American soldiers were ransacking the Mumm Champagne estate in Rheims. He survived the war and would soon have a testy relationship with Elena’s second husband, the critic Edmund Wilson. As for Olili, she went on to manage the racing stables of Whitney heiress Dorothy Paget.
3 He gave it to Don Birnam’s girlfriend in The Lost Weekend. Don considers using it to brain the maid, Holy Love, who stands between him and a locked liquor cabinet.
4 A curious souvenir among Jackson’s papers is an astoundingly large bar tab from the Dolder—a very selective accounting of which includes the following: “4 Whisky … 4 Gin Vermouth … 5 Manhattan … 2 Kümmel … 5 Brandy Soda … 5 Gin Vermouth … 3 Manhattan … 5 Manhattan”—and so on, for some four pages. The grand total was 578 francs, or well over a hundred 1931 dollars.
5 In the typescript of The Royalist, Jackson reproduces several of Winthrop’s letters almost verbatim—with, however, one consistent alteration: every time “Thor” is mentioned in the originals, Jackson substitutes “Rhoda” or some equivalent. Thus, in the letter referenced above, Winthrop writes: “Before he left to go back to Boston I talked it all over with Thor,” whereas the same line in The Royalist reads, “I took the liberty of telephoning your girl … ”
6 Whether Winthrop had cut him off for the time being or else stipulated gainful employment of whatever sort (“I don’t want you to be adrift”) is unknown; possibly Jackson hoped such work would leave his mind free for creative flights à la Spinoza’s lens-grinding.
7 This from Charlie’s 1945 letter to Tom Holzapfel, wherein he claimed to have spent an afternoon with Eaton the very day before his death—
unlikely, as Eaton’s final days were apparently chaotic. Suffice it to say, in any case, that Jackson had seen him shortly before his death and found little amiss.
Chapter Five
A Disease of the Night
Along with his other sorrows, Jackson had begun to accept (or recognize) the possibility that he might not make it as a writer, and this was simply crushing. Charlie “liked the whole idea of being a writer,” said Roger Straus, his friend and publisher, who knew better than most the extent to which Jackson had pinned his hopes, his entire identity almost, on literary fame. It had sustained him ever since his lonely childhood in Newark, and the thought of his old friends and neighbors deriding him now as a failure (and worse) was haunting to say the least—and yet: wasn’t some such reckoning more common than not? As Don Birnam reflects, “He was only one of several million persons of his generation who had grown up and, somewhere around thirty, made the upsetting discovery that life wasn’t going to pan out the way you’d always expected it would; and why this realization should have thrown him and not them—or not too many of them—was something he couldn’t fathom.”
While he was drinking, though, he could go on dreaming, and besides it was almost as habitual (and necessary) as breathing by then. After the first drink of the morning there was little question of getting any serious work done anyway, so why not stay drunk and contemplate the masterpieces he would write later? Morbidly self-conscious at the best of times (solipsistic when drunk), Jackson thought his own antics might ultimately seem funny or interesting—that is, until he tried recording them in his journal for future use. “Confirmed drunk—(myself)—,” he wrote, “after pouring many drinks, drinking them, and then seeing his glass empty: ‘My Gawd! Have I got to pour another?!!’ ” So much for wit; elsewhere in the same pages is a bemused, not to say apathetic, diary of a few days circa late 19321 under the heading “IN A GLASS” (the title he’d eventually give to Don’s never-written novel in The Lost Weekend): “Up early and T. arrived at ten and phoned Al for 2 pints of gin, one of which we consumed right off. At noon we started on the second. B. Woodman arrived at 4 with pt. of alcohol. Later B. and I out to his wops [sic] for another pt., then to the Broken Dish for drinks. Then to A. R.’s more drinks. Crazy night. Too much drinking.” There was also the time he let a cabbie keep his coat in exchange for a $4.55 fare, or sat reading two hundred pages of The Moon and Sixpence in a stupor and was “struck by the extraordinary number of times [Maugham] used ‘I do not know why’ in the narrative.” “In a Glass” soon peters out, and no wonder.
