by Blake Bailey
Aside from the occasional calamity, the outward reality of a drunk’s life is nothing if not tedious—and besides, one drinks to escape reality, and in that regard Jackson lived a rich and varied life: he was a virtuoso pianist, a brilliant literature professor, a Shakespearean actor of unrivaled subtlety, and yes, a great novelist, except when his “sober ego” would pounce—as it always did—and punish him for his ridiculous self-deceptions. Don Birnam curses his “mocking habit” of “expos[ing] his own fancies just as they reached their climax … It made him a kind of dual personality, at once superior and inferior to himself”—or, as the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, described himself, he was “an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.” While drunk and grandiose, the alcoholic engages in behavior that causes bottomless chagrin later, such as when Don, sober, suddenly remembers trying to charm (that is, borrow money from) the neighborhood laundress with a bravura display of her native tongue: “Talking German to Mrs. Wertheim—aaah! … One more person to shun in the street, one more shop to go by with face averted, one more bête noire added to the neighborhood collection of persons he must not see again.” Thus the vicious circle of alcoholism, as petty (and not-so-petty) embarrassments accumulate into a mass of amorphous shame that can only be escaped with more alcohol.
Eventually one begins to hide from the world’s judgments, nurse one’s dreams in private, drown the sober ego all the more. Become, in short, a loner. Alcoholics “are self-important,” Jackson would write with splendid objectivity in 1954, “introspective (or maybe just self-infatuated) to the point where they have come to inhabit an insular world of their own; and, as such, they are unable to subscribe to or believe in anything outside of themselves or greater than themselves.” This process was especially insidious in the case of Jackson, who from earliest childhood had been in the habit of consoling himself, when rebuffed by the world, with reminders of his own superiority (“Clods!”), meanwhile lying low or else playing the role of a regular guy, in public, which required constant metacognitive vigilance. And now, alcoholic, he found himself all but trapped in an insular, self-consoling world (“I can’t get outside of myself”), unable to bear the company of others, except when drunk, in which case others were less inclined to bear him. And given that alcoholics invariably find ways to exonerate themselves, they tend to blame others for failed relations, until at last they’re left superbly alone: in remote bars, in locked hotel rooms, residing withal in daydreams and memories (“the only paradise from which we are never thrown out”).
Apart from reading, Jackson’s favorite way of enjoying his abundant solitude was listening to music—his only real hobby, as he was fond of saying. He’d discovered this passion as a boy, listening to Caruso on his mother’s Red Seal records, and later availing himself of the vaster library chez Bloomer. As a solvent adult, Jackson would line his walls with an enormous record collection, including all of Mozart and Beethoven in particular; he could scarcely believe these two had been “earthbound mortals” like himself, and of course he longed to be the ultimate medium of their genius—hence Don Birnam’s “favorite daydream”: “He came out on the stage of Carnegie Hall, smiled, bowed, sat down at the piano, and awaited the assignment.” Dressed in comfortable street clothes rather than the usual white tie and boiled shirt, the debonair Birnam has agreed to be challenged by a panel of music critics, who have racked their brains to produce a list of pieces that Don must play on the spot from memory before a packed audience. “Köchel Verzeichnis 331,” he calmly emends, when a critic asks him to play Mozart’s Sonata Number 12, in F Major. “A dream indeed,” the tipsy Don concludes. “Comic, to be sure; ridiculous, childish; but—most musical, most melancholy … ”
A somewhat less comic fantasy had to do with Jackson’s favorite contemporary author, whose nine books he’d had expensively bound in morocco and would keep among his dwindling effects unto that last spartan apartment at the Hotel Chelsea. “He took down The Great Gatsby and ran his finger over the fine green binding,” he wrote of Don’s riveting lecture before a room of rapt, phantom students.
“There’s no such thing,” he said aloud, “as a flawless novel. But if there is, this is it.” He nodded. The class looked and listened in complete attention, and one or two made notes.… “People will be going back to Fitzgerald one day as they now go back to Henry James.… Apart from his other gifts, Scott Fitzgerald has the one thing that a novelist needs: a truly seeing eye.… The fellow is still under forty. The great novels will yet come from his pen. And when they do, we shall have as true a picture of the temper and spirit of our time as any age of literature can boast in the past.”
The Lost Weekend is set in 1936, and Fitzgerald had been dead for almost two years when Jackson began writing it in 1942. Thus, on one hand, Jackson retrospectively invoked the author as a cautionary figure, whereas in 1936 he’d actively worried about his hero’s well-known alcoholism and wondered whether his latest novel, Tender Is the Night, would also prove to be his last. Indeed, to Jackson’s self-referential mind, the book seemed to mirror both Fitzgerald’s deterioration and his own, and to some extent The Lost Weekend was conceived in homage to that flawed, brilliant novel in particular. When Tender was published, in 1934, Jackson stayed up all night reading it (“It’s fatal to open the book at any page, any paragraph; for I must sit down then and there and read the rest of it right through”), and afterward managed to run the author to ground, by telephone, in the little town of Tuxedo: “Why don’t you write me a letter about it?” said a weary Fitzgerald. “I think you’re a little tight now.” In 1964 Jackson mentioned that phone call in a letter he wrote his family from Will Rogers Hospital in Saranac Lake, where he’d bumped into a former Princeton classmate of Fitzgerald; the man had mentioned (among other things) that Fitzgerald had once been beaten by police in Rome, just like the drunken Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night, which left Jackson admiring his favorite author all the more for making “beautiful and heart-breaking” art out of such material: “I do not for a second, of course, mean to ‘excuse’ Fitzgerald for any of this mess,” he added for his family’s benefit: “I only mean that he knew it was awful too, knew how much more awful than anybody else, and made a most moving scene out of his own agony, as writers worth their salt always do.”
Fitzgerald’s work was almost entirely out of print when The Lost Weekend was published in 1944—even Gatsby seemed well on its way to being forgotten—and Jackson had meant to be “deliberately prophetic” in calling attention to a writer he considered the foremost chronicler of “the temper and spirit of our time.”2 More than twenty years later he finally received credit, in writing, for having played a key role in the so-called Fitzgerald Revival: “Indeed, no author has been more outspoken or more generous than Jackson in his admiration of Fitzgerald’s work,” wrote Henry Dan Piper in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (1965), which Rhoda gave Charlie for Christmas that year. Meanwhile a number of Fitzgerald’s old friends and admirers had also taken notice of Don Birnam’s discerning idolatry, and made a point of getting in touch with his creator. While in Hollywood in 1944, Jackson got a call from a thirty-year-old novelist and Navy lieutenant, Budd Schulberg, who was drinking with his father (B.P., former head of Paramount Studios) at Romanoff’s, and wondered if Jackson would join them. Both father and son had “gone crazy about” The Lost Weekend, and now Budd regaled its author with the tale of his chaotic collaboration with Fitzgerald on the movie Winter Carnival (1939). (Five years later, Schulberg spent a weekend at Jackson’s house in Orford—seventeen miles north of Dartmouth College, Schulberg’s alma mater, where Winter Carnival was filmed—and showed him his work in progress, The Disenchanted, about an alcoholic novelist based on Fitzgerald. Jackson found the manuscript “truly wonderful,” and insisted that Schulberg not delete his hero’s dying line—“Take it from me, baby, in America nothing fails like success”—a sentiment that had begun to resonate with Jackson.) That same summer in Hollywood (1944), Jackson w
as also summoned by the English gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, a total stranger who (as only a handful of people knew at the time) had been Fitzgerald’s mistress in his final years: “Well, we met—” Jackson wrote a friend afterward, “a three hour lunch at the Beverly Wilshire—and she poured it all out, poor girl: what he was like in bed, how big, how many times, and you’d be surprised.”3
When Henry Dan Piper wrote of Jackson’s outspoken generosity in Fitzgerald’s behalf, he wasn’t only referring to The Lost Weekend; for the rest of his life, Jackson would never miss a chance to promote the man’s reputation in whatever way he could. In 1945, he hectored his friend Bennett Cerf to publish a selection of Fitzgerald’s short stories (offering himself as editor), as well as to reinstate Gatsby in the Modern Library. Also, when Arthur Mizener’s pioneering biography The Far Side of Paradise was published, in 1951, Jackson appeared at Columbia with Mizener and Lionel Trilling to discuss Fitzgerald’s essential place in American literature. Along with worshiping the work itself, Jackson could hardly have related more keenly to what Trilling characterized as Fitzgerald’s “exemplary role”: He “lacked prudence, as his heroes did, lacked that blind instinct for self-protection which the writer needs in double measure. But that is all he lacked—and it is the generous fault, even the heroic fault.” Above all there was Trilling’s observation that Fitzgerald had “put himself … in the line of greatness [and] judged himself in a large way.” That was true of Jackson, too, for better and (decidedly) for worse.
JACKSON SPENT the summer of 1933 in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, and then remained for a number of “nightmare weeks” into the fall; as he later wrote Harry Kemp—the town’s most notable vagabond poet, with whom he’d tippled that bygone summer—the whole ordeal was described “on pages 204–5–6” of The Lost Weekend: the first time Don Birnam seriously considers suicide. The episode had begun as a lavish holiday, and was doubtless another instance whereby he’d exhausted Mr. Winthrop’s patience, or at least whatever resources had been available to him. As he wrote of Birnam, “He had carried on wastefully, wantonly, with all kinds of people, for weeks, throwing money away, drinking up more money in a weekend than the Portuguese [fishermen] made in seven days of hard work.” The local fishermen would exact a terrible revenge, and they seem to have been provoked by something more than simple prodigality on Jackson’s part. At any rate, he awoke one morning in September to find himself penniless and deserted—the town all but shuttered for the season—and perhaps too sheepish or exhausted to beg Mr. Winthrop, or anyone else, for further help. With no money for food or even drink, he sank into the blackest depression of his life, hardly able to leave the little shack he’d rented (but could no longer pay for) “at the tip end of Whoopee Wharf,” where every night he was systematically terrorized by the “drunk and predatory” Portuguese:
Out of an absolutely silent night … they would come thundering along the wharf at two in the morning shouting his name, demanding money, demanding to be let in, yelling for booty, clothing, drink, his very person. They would pound on the flimsy walls and curse him with laughter, calling him names he didn’t dare listen to or think of the meaning of. He would lie breathless in the dark, knowing only too well what they would do to him if they got him (he covered his ears as they shouted insanely: “Donnie boy! Come out and get your breakfast!”) He was the more terrified because he knew he had brought this on himself, it was a kind of grotesque retribution, he and he alone was solely responsible for their wrath.
Whatever Jackson had done to warrant such abuse, such “hatred and contempt,” apparently left him so ashamed and hopeless one morning that he wrote “three notes, exactly alike,” and began to draw “hair-like lines of red” across his wrists with a Bavarian hunting knife. As would often happen, though, he decided to give himself a bit more time—maybe things would look up in a day or two, as they generally did. On September 18, his friend Thor (who’d been visiting family that summer in Copenhagen) arrived in Boston aboard the Minnequa, and four days later Boom returned from France aboard the Deutschland. Quite likely both had been summoned (given their almost simultaneous arrival) by a distressed Mr. Winthrop.4
At whoever’s behest Charlie lived for several months afterward at Apple Ridge Farm in Saugerties, between Poughkeepsie and Albany on the Hudson, where he used to spend childhood summers with Grandmother Jackson. A child again in certain respects, he was vigilantly watched by the farm’s caretakers, Basil and Thorborg Ellison.5 “Remember the episode of the key to the applejack closet?” he wrote Thorborg in 1943, a few weeks after his novel had been accepted for publication. “If you don’t, buy The Lost Weekend and read all about it!” Probably Thorborg didn’t need to be reminded. The closet in question had been in the bedroom she shared with her husband, and contained several kegs of apple brandy; naturally the door was locked at all times and the keys kept on the caretakers’ persons. Each morning, however, while the Ellisons were elsewhere, Jackson would tiptoe into their bedroom and try the door, and once or twice he’d found it unlocked and managed to siphon off several pints and hide them around his room. After an Easter visit with Boom in New York, he returned to the farm and noticed a new tension between the couple: Thorborg had lost her key, and Jackson soon discovered it in the pocket of his camel’s-hair bed jacket, which the woman had evidently worn in his absence. Oddly enough, he couldn’t bring himself to use it—to take “such an easy advantage”—though he persevered along more challenging lines, once propping a ladder against the little closet window. On the morning of his final departure in June, Jackson presented the astonished couple with the missing key and told them of his curious scruples.
Perhaps encouraged by such episodes—and given that Charlie’s intervals of sobriety did seem to be lengthening somewhat—Boom agreed to share an apartment at 311 East 55th Street, and was even willing to let Charlie, as the older brother, have the only bedroom.6 In every other respect Boom was now his brother’s keeper, dispensing a modest allowance (fifty cents a day for cigarettes; the rest as needed) out of the Winthrop money. For a while Charlie was simply grateful to have a roof over his head, and determined to prove himself worthy of greater trust; presently, though, he rebelled against the arrangement (“Driblets handed out to him as if he were a child”) with an addict’s petulance and cunning. “Send me some money at once,” he demanded of Boom while visiting mutual friends in New Jersey. “I have not one cent, and can’t imagine how you could leave me in such a position.” In another note—Boom was about to join him on vacation—Charlie casually mentioned that he’d just redeemed his typewriter from a pawnshop on Third Avenue, just north of 57th, but couldn’t also carry the gramophone, which he directed his brother to retrieve (pawn ticket enclosed) on his way out of town. By then Charlie was spending more and more time at a neighborhood bar,7 pawning his typewriter as often as possible, along with the posher items of his European wardrobe. And yes, one desperate day—just like Don in the novel (a scene “written directly out of my own experience”)—he staggered all the way up to 120th Street, typewriter in hand, fruitlessly searching for an open pawnshop on Yom Kippur.
But for three summers, at least, beginning in 1935, the brothers left New York for the comparative idyll of Brattleboro, Vermont, where Charlie endeavored to meet his responsibilities as stage manager and publicity man for a new summer theater started by an art dealer, writer, and would-be actor named John Becker. Becker was friends with the playwright Paul Osborn, who had a vacation home nearby, and that first summer the company gave a production of his Oliver, Oliver, which had flopped on Broadway (eleven performances) the previous season8; during the second summer (1936), they staged the debut of Osborn’s Tomorrow’s Monday, attracting a respectful notice from The New York Times, which applauded a “thoroughly competent cast” including Charles Lindbergh’s sister-in-law Constance Morrow, who performed under the name Constance Reeve. Her sister Margot would later describe the Brattleboro group as close-knit and mostly temperate, given their quite e
arnest ambition to establish a reputable summer theater; she further recalled that Charlie discharged his duties with only the odd lapse (invited back three years in a row, after all) and that he and Boom were well liked among an eminently likable group. The plays were staged in a converted coach house on the Jacob Estey estate, where the theater company lived in servants’ quarters on the top floors of a Victorian mansion—a ménage that included the eighteen-year-old newlyweds Mel and Franny Ferrer, who became lifelong friends of the Jackson brothers. Mel went on to relative fame as an actor and husband of Audrey Hepburn; as for Franny—his first and third wife, a great beauty in her own right—she in time would be nothing less than the (platonic) love of Boom’s life.
