by Blake Bailey
“I am very sorry but I never discuss a book in progress,” Jackson stiffly replied to a book reviewer in Amarillo who’d wanted to know what he was working on. Toward nosy reviewers in the provinces he was apt to be reticent, perhaps, but a number of friends and colleagues would be barraged with work-in-progress talk during the two years Jackson spent on his vexatious second novel. The process got under way in earnest on May 24, 1944, when—by way of proving to Wylie, Baumgarten, et al., “how completely thought-out” My Two Troubles was—Jackson dictated a twenty-six-page, single-spaced “outline” to his secretary at MGM, “Miss Ross” (whose reaction one is pleased to imagine):
The story will be heavy with lazy summer atmosphere, a holiday mood, a sensual halcyon time-out feeling, idleness, the sun, luxury (in the Shakespearean sense), all as a kind of contrast to the keyed-up tenseness of the war and of people living with the war in their hearts. All the value and beauty of the story will be in the telling, never really in the events of the story; the telling is all. It will be a great opportunity for a kind of poetry in fiction about the troubled heart of man today … his prescience of death; his consciousness of youth all about him leaving—to what; his anxiety and concern because the ideal of today is brutality and destruction; though please believe me, none of this will be defeatist: far from it.… The nearest I can describe it briefly is to say that MY TWO TROUBLES will be an idyll, but tough.
“An idyll, but tough”—fair enough—and gradually Jackson worked his way around to the story itself, the first half of which, at least, was quite similar to that of the finished novel: a fortyish professor, here named David Williams, was to find himself oddly (because he’s “very happily married”) attracted to a Marine named Cliff—a hulking youth “rather like a big puppy,” who “might be a complete bore and headache but for the fact that he is so good natured and natural.” Jackson proposed that their relationship would be (thematically speaking) a matter of contrasting ideals: the professor represents the “life of the mind,” passé in the midst of world war, whereas Cliff (romping about the surf) is the man of action, “the thing required in 1944.” After exploring the dialectic at some length, Jackson arrived (“or jeepers, I’ll never get this outline finished”) at the moment of truth: “What under the sun does Williams really want anyway?”—that is the question, especially when Cliff visits his apartment, post-Nantucket, prior to getting fitted for a new uniform and returning to war. While the two sit there, chatting, something ineffably ghastly hangs in the air … but Williams restrains himself, and the “crisis is passed.” Afterward they walk to the tailor together, so at ease now that Cliff feels free to put his arm (“puppyishly”) around the professor’s shoulders. Thus Williams conquers his weird spell of homosexuality—or hero worship, or what you will—by dint of willpower alone (rather the way Don would bring his addiction to heel in The Working Out).
This long apologia was addressed primarily to Wylie, and copied to Baumgarten, Stanley Rinehart, and Jackson’s young editor, Ted Amussen. All endeavored to let him down gently. Writing his Birnam sequel, Wylie reiterated, “is your first responsibility not just towards alcoholics and not just toward literature, but towards me. This is because I represent both in my own fashion” (“them’s my sentiments also,” chimed the amiable Amussen). Meanwhile Rhoda had also read the outline, and found it “too similar” to Death in Venice—not at all what the author had intended. Casting a cold eye on his handiwork, he wrote Rinehart (copying the others as usual) that whereas Mann’s novella was about “decadence and death,” My Two Troubles would be, ideally, a “not unpleasant story of normal homosexuality, the kind that is a part of all men: sublimated, understood, a natural affinity of man with man, needing no physical expression”; however, the story as it now stood, he realized, was “neither one thing nor the other; and it most certainly must not fall in between.” Here Baumgarten took her turn: such uncertainty only confirmed what she’d already suspected—“There are a great many things to be worked out before you have a book”—but, that said, if he really felt strongly about it, “don’t be swayed by outside opinions, write it.” For a while he vacillated, at one point alerting Louella Parsons that he was going ahead with his new Birnam novel after all (which she promptly announced to the world as It Worked Out); finally, though, in September—during an interview with the Times at his “newly acquired Bulfinch-designed New Hampshire home”—he declared that he’d definitely postponed the sequel in favor of My Two Troubles. “I am a little tired of writing true-confessions,” he explained to a friend.
Indeed, he did not want to be identified with homosexuality, but at the same time he deplored those authors who lean, coyly, “on the Greek ideal” in order to sublimate motives that are (“if examined properly”) “fleshly.” Fortunately a solution seemed to present itself that summer in Hollywood, when Jackson dined with Dr. Sam Hirshfeld (“Vet’s doctor and Zannuck’s [sic] & Mayer’s & Selznick’s”), to whom he’d also sent a copy of that twenty-six-page outline. “We talked solid from 7 pm to 1 am, and I learned more stuff!” he wrote Rhoda.
Sam believes [the novel] has the possibilities of becoming one of the most important single stories of the times, with a real contribution to our understanding, and he told me what the story was about and what it was not. He is wildly enthusiastic about it; wants me to keep it the story of a war-shock in a civilian, with the three stages (or rather four) which are the normal course of all war-shock: fright, panic, disorientation, and resolution.
Thenceforth Jackson took care to describe his book as an “account of a war neurosis in a civilian, and only incidentally the story of a Professor’s infatuation for a Marine.” Elaborating for the benefit of Dr. Anton J. Carlson (his fellow alcoholism pundit), Jackson wrote that “the domination of the uniform over our lives, war-fever, the deaths of so many young men, deranged the liberal but emotional man, sending him off into an unconscious homosexuality or, in some cases, worse.” It was the “worse” part that worried Farrar & Rinehart, and Jackson knew he’d have to bring all his intuitive artistry to bear in “trying to steer a safe and sane course” around the pitfalls of such a nuanced theme. Assaying some “POSSIBLE COPY FOR CATALOGUE OR JACKET BLURB,” Jackson described his book as “a major contribution to the literature and psychology of war,” and barely hinted at anything untoward: “In this, his second novel, Charles Jackson has again demonstrated, with consummate skill, his masterly understanding of the ‘irregularities’ that can beset the civilized man, here the sensitive adult in war time.… the magnificence of the writing is indisputable.” And now that he’d settled the question in a seemly manner (for the time being), Jackson didn’t mind so much discussing his work in progress with appealing strangers—such as one Fritz Requardt, to whom he admitted that his hero’s “ ‘war neurosis’ … settles itself upon a wounded Marine … and takes the form of an infatuation. All most difficult, as you can see.
“So you are a shipyard worker.…”
TOWARD THE END of his time at MGM, Jackson had affected to be thoroughly jaded on the subject of Hollywood—“a delusion and a snore,” he remarked to Robert Nathan, while assuring Rhoda that (“to [his] eternal credit”) he could “take celebrities or leave them alone.” Amid the vast silence of New Hampshire, though, he confessed to “a kind of home-sickness for the place,” and was almost giddy about sharing his triumphs with old friends such as Marion Fabry: “Remember how we used to read him many years ago?” he wrote of Robert Nathan, now one of his greatest pals, not to mention Judy Garland, “whom I really loved (and in fact fell in love with), and Greer Garson who is a hell-raiser and not at all the Noble Woman MGM would have you think …” The list, of course, went on, and meanwhile Jackson couldn’t help wondering whether all these golden people—whose benevolent faces beamed all around him in his bedroom—missed him back. According to Gregory Peck, they did: “You have left a good many friends, not to say fans, behind you in Hollywood,” the actor wrote. “Mrs. Peck and I would like to be included on
that list.” Whereupon Jackson made room for another photograph (“I like to show off to my New Hampshire neighbors that I am just-like-that with the Hollywood great”), asking Peck to sign himself “To Charlie, with mad love.” The breakfast table had become a place of solemn quiet, as Jackson pored over Hollywood Reporter and the like (“I subscribe to ’em all”), looking for his name and often finding it. As for his social life, it was now almost entirely conducted in the privacy of his room, late at night, in epistolary form.
His main preoccupation was still Judy Garland. He claimed to be nettled by certain indiscreet photos of him and Judy together—in the October Screenland, for instance—and when one of these appeared over the caption “Judy’s new beau,” even the meek Queenie let her displeasure show: “What will people think? Poor Rhoda … ” But Charlie did little to allay speculation. One of his first errands in New Hampshire was to take a “stunning picture” of Garland to a framer in Hanover; in its absence, so he wrote Nathan, he couldn’t relate her inscription because it was too long to remember verbatim. Soon, however, he began to suspect that he’d “kidded himself”: “Like the adorer I was (or perhaps celebrity-chaser, to call it by its right name), I sent her what I thought was a charming present for Christmas, but she [has] not even acknowledged it.” The present was one of Boom’s specialties, a stylized cut-paper lamb, prettily matted and framed, at the bottom of which he’d written, “For Judy, who is one. With love from Charlie.” Bitterly the months passed, until one day in April the local Western Union agent phoned, astonished, to read aloud a telegram from Judy Garland: “CHARLIE DEAR, DUE TO CHANGES OF ADDRESS YOUR SWEET CHRISTMAS PRESENT REACHED ME ONLY TWO DAYS AGO. PERHAPS THE LOST LAMB WILL LEND ITSELF TO AN IDEA FOR A NEW BOOK.…” Jackson put the receiver down (“all tingly in the legs and swimmy in the head”) and promptly wrote Garland an abject apology for any impudent “complaints” he may have made in regard to what he’d rashly suspected was her neglect. Two months later she married Vincente Minnelli, the bisexual director of her latest hit musical, Meet Me in St. Louis (wherein, thought Charlie, “The sins of MGM were never so clearly revealed”). Meeting the couple a week later, Jackson bestowed a magnanimous but measured blessing, admitting afterward his “faint qualms” about the union: “But when I saw you together in New York, saw your interest in each other, felt what was going on across the table from me,—well, I don’t know how else to say it, but I was very happy about the whole thing.”
Despite Orford’s disdain for the fleshpots of Hollywood, a flutter nonetheless passed through the village when Jackson got letters (and the odd telegram) from big stars and any number of lesser lights. The high school principal knocked on his door one day and asked if Mr. [Spencer] Tracy might be persuaded to address the students during his stay at Six Chimney Farm. Jackson blamed such “violent rumors”—of visits from this star and that—on a gossipy local postmistress, though he’d been less than diligent about keeping things under wraps. “Wait till Orford hears of our guests Christmas week!” he enthused to Fabry. “For Katie Hepburn and Spencer Tracey [sic] are to spend a week with us beginning Friday December 29th.” This had been in the works a while, ever since the three friends had parted the previous August with such desperate reluctance—“almost an anxiety to see me,” as Charlie had reported to Rhoda: “[Tracy] has developed a dog-like devotion to me (why, I will never know) and now says he’s going to come east this winter and shovel snow and saw wood for us—and funnily enough he wants to. Can we let him? Would you mind? What will we ever do with him?” Charlie, in turn, had stoked the embers by visiting Hepburn’s family in Hartford (“How nice, how very nice, I thought them”) during his November trip to address the local AA, and later endeavored to be gracious when Hepburn (“too busy a gal”) had to cancel her and Spence’s trip to New Hampshire.
He and Robert Benchley wrote sporadic letters, mostly conferring about their mutual friend Dorothy Parker and her own struggles with alcohol. “I don’t know who I am to be wishing salvation for others,” Benchley wrote Jackson,
but I can’t feel sorry for myself quite yet as I feel so well. I don’t look right, I realize that, and I am more and more liable to horse’s-assery after several drinks, especially Martinis, but I still have a fatuous confidence in my ability to recoup in short order, thanks to a sturdy constitution inherited from my teetotaler mother and my alcoholic father, neither of whom worried much about health (one died at 86 and one at 77). This is the kind of remark that usually preceeds [sic] by a week or so a complete breakdown on the part of the boaster, with his friends saying: “only a week ago he was saying how well he felt.”
Grasping the fact that his mystique among such people was largely due to his role as Alcoholism Guru, Jackson played the card whenever possible. Dorothy Parker, he wrote Benchley, had been avoiding his calls since their meetings at the New Weston in August, and he gravely feared that she’d “gone ‘off’ again and so is dodging [him].” That was mid-October; two weeks later he wrote Fabry that Parker had visited Six Chimney Farm and the two had enjoyed “wonderful talk all day and almost all night.” There was, in fact, no visit,1 though not for lack of trying on Charlie’s part: as he apprised Benchley, he would run Parker to ground whenever he went to New York (“She still keeps on the wagon, [but] I do feel her constant keyed-up state is not ‘normal’ ”), and afterward write her emotional letters (“I’m going to need you in my life”), which she rarely answered. As for Benchley, he made a daily point of appearing on the set of The Lost Weekend at Paramount—“Nat’s Bar,” to be exact,2 where he’d ask the actor Howard Da Silva (Nat) to pour him a shot of bourbon for fifty cents. On November 21, 1945, five days after the movie’s premiere, he died of complications from cirrhosis.
ONE WAY of keeping in touch with show-business friends—and also bringing in “badly needed cash”—was to write screen treatments for them to star in. Within the schedule he had set himself of completing My Two Troubles by November of 1944 and The Working Out by the following April (May at the latest), Jackson also planned to dash off a three-part Collier’s serial that he could later adapt as a Hepburn and Tracy vehicle titled Little Mother, about a radio actress who neglects her real-life responsibilities as a wife and mother while acting bumptiously “noble” on others’ behalf à la her soap-opera role. “Sweet Kate, bonnie Kate (and I believe He goes on: ‘The prettiest Kate in Christendom’),”3 Charlie wrote Hepburn, chatting about one thing and another until (“incidentally”) he pitched his “simply wonderful idea”: “The acting possibilities in it for you would be tremendous, and it would take the most subtle understanding and fine balance between comedy and pathos … ” But nothing came of it, either as a Collier’s serial or as a Tracy and Hepburn vehicle.
More ambitious was his proposed “free, modernized, American adaptation” of Chekhov’s The Seagull, which in one swoop would reunite him with a number of MGM stars. Jackson envisaged the cast as follows: Judy Garland as Nina, Walter Pidgeon as Trigorin, Robert Walker (or Peter Lawford) as Treplev, Jessica Tandy as Masha, and her husband, Hume Cronyn, as Medvedenko. His greatest coup, however, would be to recruit Garbo herself as Arkadina—to which end he made a special trip to New York in early November, his way paved by the agent Leland Hayward. “You ask about Garbo,” he wrote Baumgarten afterward. “But god, don’t speak of it.” The meeting, alas, had been botched. Jackson had waited for days to be summoned, and finally took an afternoon to see his agent and get a little fresh air. Back at his hotel he found, to his horror, a message: Garbo had phoned (twice)!—or rather “Miss Harriet Brown” at the Ritz Towers had phoned. She had given up an entire hour of her day to meet with Jackson, but now refused to do so unless they were joined by Hayward, who was then on his way back to Hollywood aboard the Century. “There’s no getting around it, she’s a very difficult woman,” Jackson grumbled, “and makes things not only fantastically difficult for everybody else but for herself as well. Why in Christ’s name can’t she relax? Nobody’s going to tear her limb from l
imb these days.… After all, the gal hasn’t had a picture in nearly three years.”4 In due course Jackson recast Ina Claire (or Greer Garson) as Arkadina, while remaining an unabashed Garbo worshiper, maybe even more so in light of her beguiling elusiveness.
The following summer he took a couple days off from the protracted ordeal of writing his second novel to dictate a seventeen-page treatment of The Seagull, intending to render it more accessible to Philistia by emphasizing the “truly dramatic action” that happens offstage or between the acts in Chekhov. That, anyway, was the idea, though what Jackson managed to get on paper (“somewhat hastily,” he confessed) followed the original almost point by point. The names were Americanized (Irina Arkadina became “Irene Carradine,” etc.) and the setting moved to “a big old-fashioned country-house in Vermont or New Hampshire,” but the Treplev character (“Charles”) still shoots a seagull and offers it to Nina with the dire prediction that he too shall kill himself. He doesn’t, though, and therein lies the crucial difference: “Now I know,” says the failed actress, Nina, at the end of Jackson’s version, “what matters is not fame, not glory, nor money … what matters is how to endure, to work, and have faith.” Whereupon Treplev/Charles—rather than kill himself—agrees: “You’ve found your way. So have I, Nina, but it’s lonely, our way being separate. We’ll go that way together …” Thus the girl’s previous apathy toward the fussy, neurotic Treplev/Charles sparks into ardor, and the two live happily ever after. “I know you will simply fall in love with this wonderful story I have made out of that static action-less play,” Jackson gushed in his cover letter to Hayward, who gamely passed the thing along to MGM. When the studio rejected it, Jackson abruptly dropped the idea, since after all the point had been to cast his old MGM friends.
