Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  As for his brother Herb and sister-in-law Bob—well, they tried to seem gracious. Bob wrote that most of their neighbors had found the subject pretty “terrible,” but they couldn’t put the book down and of course the writing was lovely (“That’s what appealed to me—also the hero was such a gentleman in such amazing circumstances like the fall downstairs!”). Still, Bob was constrained to admit that the basic effect was one of “heartache,” and Herb somewhat agreed: “Certainly you—or Don—went through some terrible times and knowing you are on the wagon now—and so happy with your family—and very successful—makes it stand out.” For the most part, though, Herb was proud to be “known as the brother of the leading author.” He’d cut out the novel’s full-page ad from The New York Times and tacked it up in the barn where he entertained cronies; maybe Charlie could visit and do a book signing there? This was extravagant coming from Herb—and never to be repeated—but Charlie had expected roses, and nothing but, and was especially disgruntled with Bob: “She seemed pleased to be telling me only how terrible people thought the book was,” he wrote Boom; “and though she may mean ‘terrible’ in the sense that Uncle Winnie uses it, still we feel she might have done better.”

  “Oh that terrible book,” said Mr. Winthrop, who previously had been “horror-hushed” by “Palm Sunday,” though he’d kept his copy of Partisan Review—Charlie’s first published story, after all—on the library table ever after. But when he persisted in calling The Lost Weekend “terrible,” Jackson protested: “It’s not ‘terrible,’ it’s good!” “Well,” said Winthrop, “Macbeth is a terrible play, isn’t it?” In fact the man was thrilled, all the more because he knew the terrible real-life story: “You’ve staged such a wonderful come back and it makes me very happy,” he’d written after reading the typescript, signing himself with “much love.” When it was officially accepted by Farrar & Rinehart, Winthrop took the author to dinner at the St. Regis, and later gave him a lavish party (“the happiest evening of my life,” Jackson remembered) on publication day.

  By then poor Winthrop was failing, which broke Charlie’s heart in more ways than one. During the last few years, in particular, the two had become very close—according to Jackson’s fictionalized “memoir,” he was one of “two or three persons at most to whom [Winthrop] chose to talk, at length and in detail, of his youth and his past.” This, of course, was bound to touch on the most vital of their mutual interests, which also related to Winthrop’s “dread of losing his faculties.” Indeed, the most painful aspect of his decline, for Jackson, was the spectacle of this distinguished, punctilious man descending, Aschenbach-like, into senile displays of lechery—as when he ogled a youth one day at the Plaza, to the disdainful amusement of other diners. As Jackson wrote in Uncle Mr. Kember, “I wanted to get up and say boldly, ‘Look here, you! Do you know who this man is? … He’s the finest, the kindest, the most decent man I’ve ever known, that’s who!’ ” Happily the end was swiftly approaching, and soon Winthrop was asking Charlie to take one of his belongings as a memento; the latter figured he’d taken enough already, and chose only a silver-plated, bayonet-shaped letter opener that he kept the rest of his life. “Not for anything would I part with it,” he wrote—“not for my car, my books and pictures, nor even, I sometimes think, my fine house in New Hampshire.”

  He was in Hollywood when Winthrop died on July 14, 1944, at age eighty. “Oh dear,” he wrote Rhoda, “I hate to think it’s finished and that he’s gone.… I loved him very much, as you know, and I’m so glad we named our Katie for him.” Along with the letter opener, he always kept a small gold-framed photograph of Winthrop on his writing desk (between Garbo and his children)—a reminder of the man who’d never lost faith in him, and who’d lived just long enough to see his faith rewarded. Curiously, his death on Bastille Day had coincided with a far happier occasion (“oddly significant, no?”): the final episode of Sweet River, whose audience had drifted away once Jackson quit the show in March, his future secured by a famous novel and the inevitable (in those days) Hollywood contract. Winthrop’s departure notwithstanding, it seemed as if Charlie’s life could hardly be sweeter: “This was something I’d always looked forward to, I’d always wanted, it was what I thought I’d been living for,” he would one day tell Alcoholics Anonymous. “I didn’t dream what it was going to mean to me in the way of disaster. For unstable characters, like myself, success can be as difficult and dangerous as failure.”

  1 The future producer and screenwriter (with Billy Wilder) of The Lost Weekend, and Charlie’s lifelong friend thereafter. Brackett’s varied career included writing popular novels and short fiction for “slicks” such as Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s.

  2 Jackson changed the nurse’s name to Bim in puckish tribute to Bronson Winthrop’s godson and namesake, Bronson Winthrop “Bim” Chanler, the son of their mutual friend Stuyvesant Chanler.

  3 Jackson didn’t think much of Seabrook either, irrespective of the latter’s weird vitriol. “Willie Tells All [in Asylum], all right—and tells you nothing,” he’d written in 1942. “He gives you only the external spectacle.”

  4 The passage in question occurs after Don’s return from Bellevue; still bitter about Bim’s animadversions, he muses, “Nobody was quicker with the word ‘queen’ … than the queen himself—like the Jew who cringes under the term ‘kike’ but uses it twice as much as anybody else; like the Negro so quick on the trigger with the word ‘nigger’ … ”

  5 In 1947, Hamilton dedicated Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters thus: “To ELLING AANNESTAD / ‘A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities.’ ”

  6 The italicized lines are from Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 3, lines 40–46.

  7 There was no edition of The Lost Weekend in either Greece or Finland, according to a 1967 letter from Brandt & Brandt listing the various translations.

  Chapter Eight

  The MGM Lion

  Jackson had said that he wanted to raise awareness about alcoholism, though he would always be ambivalent about this aspect of his fame—which, to put it mildly, tended to overshadow his literary achievement. Walter Winchell hailed The Lost Weekend as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of alcoholism, and for his part Jackson professed to be unsurprised by the book’s popularity—there were, after all, a lot of alcoholics in the world, whether or not people saw fit to talk about them: “Almost everybody has somebody in their family who’s a drunk but who’s worth worrying about,” he said. In the past, however, such people had been pariahs merely—bums, losers, jokes—and nobody wanted to identify with that, no matter how much they drank. “Since the publication of Charles Jackson’s somber novel about an alcoholic,” Life reported in 1946, “an unprecedented amount of attention has been paid to the drinking of alcohol and the problems arising therefrom.” As a direct result—so the magazine applauded—the “complicated disease of alcoholic addiction” was now widely regarded as a medical rather than a moral issue.

  Jackson’s life, meanwhile, was “turned completely upside down”: rarely averse to publicity, he didn’t mind so much the constant requests for interviews and public appearances, but the letters and late-night phone calls from drunk and disturbed people, who desperately wanted to know his “secret,” were another matter. That he was Don Birnam, to them, simply went without saying: “Now, that day you carried the typewriter up Third Avenue—” a person would begin, and Jackson became more and more belligerent in his objections. “It was Don Birnam!” he’d retort—so many times that he almost believed it, backing away from earlier, more candid statements in the press (“I used to drink like a lot of other people and now I don’t drink at all like a lot of other people”) in favor of his elegant “one third” formula (i.e., Don was one third himself, one third an alcoholic friend, one third “pure invention”), and finally flat denial: “I wish,” he remarked to one reporter in late 1945, “that you’d say too how sick I am of being asked if The Lost Weekend is autobiographical. It isn’t.”

  No matte
r. His readers kept calling, and especially writing (“I have yet to receive a fan letter from a reader who is not primarily a crack-pot,” Jackson observed to his sister-in-law)—often in a palsied hand that expressed, touchingly, an almost childlike faith that the novelist was ready to help, whether by sending his book “C. O. D.” or offering a saving and highly personalized piece of advice. In most cases (“ANSWERED”) their faith was not misplaced: “I do not see how you can go on letting him make such a monkey of you, if I may put it so crudely,” Jackson sternly admonished one woman (“I’m one of the ‘Helens’ … ”). “[Jones] only thinks to telephone you when he is drunk, and then, I am sure, does it partly out of a compulsion to make himself important.… For your own sake, you should pull yourself out of this and forget it.” At the same time Jackson couldn’t resist showing some of the choicer epistolary specimens to his publisher, who hit on the idea of quoting them in a full-page ad for the Times Book Review on the first anniversary of publication. There was, for instance, a letter from Mrs. G. F. Lyle, whose husband had read The Lost Weekend and recognized himself “in black and white as the scoundrel” he was: He “said that if every woman and man, young or old could have a copy of your book, that it would do more for humanity than all the sermons in the world.” Jackson’s “reluctance” over the printing of such testimonials was duly noted in the Times (his “great sense of responsibility for people’s confidences”), and hence his relief when Mrs. Lyle, at least, wrote to say she hadn’t minded: “It was a dirty trick to play on you, I felt,” he wrote back. “Now your new letter makes everything all right.” To a friend, however, he admitted that the Times ad had left him “shrieking with laughter”: “If there is anybody on the Atlantic seaboard with whom people’s confidences are not safe, it’s ME!”

  The novel’s efficacy as a temperance tract was belied by an exclusive interview Jackson gave to The Beverage Times (“The Weekly Trade Newspaper of the Beer, Wine and Liquor Industries”), in which he permanently alienated organizations such as the WCTU by declaring himself staunchly opposed to prohibition in any form. Pointing out that Don Birnam had gotten his start during the Prohibition Era, Jackson said he would never have published his book if he thought it might be used as “dry” propaganda: “Others shouldn’t be deprived of the privilege of drinking alcoholic beverages simply because a few neurotics can’t handle such drinks. I think drinking is one of the real social pleasures for those who can handle it. It is a pleasure and a social asset.” That said, Jackson was wary of becoming a spokesman for any side of the argument. A few months later, Stanley Barr of Allied Liquor Industries made a special trip to New Hampshire (where Jackson had since moved) in hopes of persuading him to address their convention at the Waldorf and repeat his opposition to prohibition. “I’m a novelist, not a public speaker,” Jackson replied, wryly offering to make such a statement in exchange for two thousand dollars or two Darrel Austin paintings worth the same amount. “You’re asking $1,995 too much,” said Barr, who would later mount a campaign to prevent the movie release of The Lost Weekend.

  Jackson’s relationship with Alcoholics Anonymous was problematic. By the time he learned of the organization, in 1940, he’d been sober for almost four years and had little reason to expect a relapse; privately he believed that AA was for “simple souls” and “weaklings” who needed mutual comfort and a lot of “mystical blah-blah.” The American Medical Association agreed, more or less, dismissing Alcoholics Anonymous (the book) as “a curious combination of organizing propaganda and religious exhortation” that had “no scientific merit or interest.” But doctors themselves, again, had little idea what to do about drunkards, continuing to treat (with a singular lack of success) underlying causes, while scarcely conceiving of alcoholism as a primary, independent disease. It was on this pragmatic level—find a remedy first, then worry (if at all) about etiology—that AA and Jackson were at least somewhat in accord: “To hell with causes,” says Don Birnam, who realizes he’s reached the point where “one drink was too many and a hundred not enough”—this a conscious homage to AA, as Jackson conceded.1 Little surprise then that the organization assumed he’d be an ally. “Every member should read” The Lost Weekend, wrote an old acquaintance, Carlton Hoste (later president of the Newark Rotary Club), who identified himself to Jackson as the only AA member in their hometown. Stanley Rinehart, meanwhile, had pressed the novel on founder Bill Wilson, who approved providing free copies to new recruits.

  This seemed to mitigate Jackson’s reservations somewhat, though he remained skeptical. AA’s emphasis on the spiritual was bad enough, but he also believed that it failed to offer “any real substitute” for drinking: whereas he had his writing and various other inner resources, AA could only provide (apart from the bogus spirituality) a kind of banal fellowship; the average Joe, thought Jackson, was likely to relapse once he figured “he was more interesting as a ‘problem’ than he ever was as a useful citizen.” At any rate he simply couldn’t abide the “Rotarianism” of such gatherings. “I am a writer first of all, and a non-drinker second,” he wrote the Hartford AA chapter, whose invitation to speak he’d reluctantly accepted at his publisher’s behest. “I am not interested in reform of any kind, so please don’t look for me to give an inspirational talk or any kind of harangue on the evils of drink.” Once he arrived, though, and was greeted by no fewer than six hundred receptive people, Jackson couldn’t help trying to ingratiate himself. AA, he said, just might prove a good thing for Don Birnam—a solitary drinker who needs fellowship from people who don’t consider addiction a stigma, and who can help him overcome the shame of his past while making him see, too, that he must never drink again … all the reasons, in short, why any drinker might benefit from such a program, and why Jackson himself would someday become one of its foremost advocates. As for Rotarianism: “Just a word now about Charles Jackson, the man,” reported a writer for the AA Grapevine. “I expected to meet someone a little on the aloof side—someone above the usual level, where of course Jackson has a right to be. But Charlie won’t let you look up to him. When he’s talking to you or listening to you he makes you feel that you matter to him. Friendly, modest, sincere, unspoiled. That’s Charlie Jackson.” Scratch a superbly aloof artist and find a small-town boy who wants nothing better than to be well liked by “the happy, lovely, and commonplace.” “Strike me dead if this sounds corny,” Jackson wrote Dorothy Parker (pointedly) after his Hartford appearance, “but I don’t think I ever met a happier bunch of people in my life.”

  And still he protested that he was a writer, by God, not an authority on alcoholism (“I’m awfully tired of all this identification with drinking!”), and still he accepted invitations to speak publicly on the issue. And it rankled, to say the least, when others seemed as doubtful as he about his credentials—when, for example, a prominent scientist, Dr. Anton J. Carlson, all but refused to acknowledge him during a panel discussion on behalf of the Washingtonian Hospital in Boston. “Dr. Gorrell and—and that fellow there,” Carlson said, repeatedly, in a “casual and careless fashion” meant to “belittle” Jackson, or so he indignantly wrote the man afterward. Why, the many letters he’d received about his novel—Jackson would have Carlson know—had been “in almost every case” from “distinguished men in your profession as well as men of letters” (no mention of crackpots) who felt indebted to the author for teaching them something new about human nature:

  If the book is good enough to be the only work of fiction on the Required Reading list of the Yale Clinic, to cite only one example, then I think it is good enough for you; and I further think that as a scientist, you should acquaint yourself with what it has to say.… the intuitive artist—the artist who knows more than he knows, is of inestimable value to the progress of mankind, no less than the scientist.

  Very true, no doubt, though one has to wonder whether Jackson’s public engagement with the subject was entirely disinterested. Rather it seemed compounded of roughly one third earnest desire to be of use, one
third longing for the limelight, and one third need of cash. When he saw the hit Broadway play Harvey (about the amiable tippler Elwood P. Dowd and his eponymous rabbit friend), Jackson claimed to be shocked, shocked by the audience’s unseemly mirth when, say, Dowd retrieves a hidden bottle of whiskey from behind a book in his sister’s living room.2 “I wanted to stand up,” Jackson subsequently wrote for Cosmopolitan, “turn around and cry out: ‘What in God’s name are you laughing at—what the hell’s funny about it?’ ” Alcoholism, after all, was no laughing matter, and Jackson was quite willing to say so even at the risk of seeming (as he grimly admitted) “a stuffed shirt”—at any rate he was willing to say so for a price: “I’m god damned sick of the subject of alcoholism,” he wrote his agent, not for the first time. “I’m a writer first of all, et cetera, but if I can get $1500 out of a good strong provocative or even controversial piece on the alcoholic in our society … why not?”