by Blake Bailey
Another friend from Hollywood was Sally Benson, author of the stories that had inspired Meet Me in St. Louis, and an ecstatic admirer of The Lost Weekend. Benson—no stranger to addiction or mental illness generally—had ordered twenty copies of the novel for friends, and insisted it “belong[ed] to her” as a screenwriter. Shortly after the Paramount sale, Jackson had lunched with Brackett and Wilder to bat ideas around, and Benson had tagged along to the greater benefit of all: “I’ve never been in on such a brilliant and fascinating discussion,” Charlie wrote Rhoda: “a picture was formed and molded and planned right under your eyes.” How pleasant, then, that Benson should follow through with an actual visit to Six Chimney Farm in the fall, proving such an ideal guest (“Such wonderful company … such character and spirit”) that Charlie asked her back for the holidays, and Benson eagerly accepted.
In the meantime she’d agreed to take one of Jackson’s stories to The New Yorker, where she herself had published almost a hundred pieces between 1929 and 1941. “The New Yorker has just bought five [sic] short stories of mine,” Jackson boasted to Fabry, after Benson had persuaded the magazine to take one, “A Dream of Horace,” for $304. Jackson’s four-page story was slight in every way, but then, too, it was precisely the kind of frothy “casual” that editor Harold Ross preferred. The protagonist, Joe Callush, describes to Bobbie, his wife, a dream in which a neighbor they barely know, Horace Goodsell, has died; while waxing sentimental (“[he] thought lovingly of Horace”), Callush learns that the man has, in fact, suffered a fatal heart attack in the night. Crestfallen—not because Horace is dead, but because this fascinating coincidence has occurred on Sunday, when he’s away from the office—Callush proceeds to phone everyone he knows and tell them the story.
The sketch was important to Jackson for a number of reasons: its humor (“a scream, truly hilarious,” he wrote Fabry) would help mitigate his reputation as a “morbid” writer, and besides he badly wanted to appear in The New Yorker in whatever form; also, he’d laced the piece with a number of in-jokes, using actual Newark names (e.g., Bobbie the wife) and mentioning his beloved Judy Garland at one point. But when Jackson received galleys from the magazine, he was horrified. As the editor William Maxwell breezily informed him, “I think Sally [Benson] told you over the phone that she had gone over ‘A Dream of Horace’ with a pair of scissors. Anyway, she did, and [Harold] Ross likes it fine …” A pair of scissors indeed!—the story was nearly unrecognizable: his allusive names had been changed (Callush became Miller; Bobbie became Barbie), and a lot of whimsical descriptive business added (“She picked up a strip of bacon with her fingers and ate it”)—the latter to satisfy Ross’s yen for particularity, perhaps. Worst of all—most gallingly random and silly—was the new title: “Dreams Are Funny”! Jackson, under the circumstances, expressed his pique quite temperately (“‘Dreams Are Funny’ sounds to me like a parody of a New Yorker story”) and offered to return the check, but was somewhat mollified when Maxwell took him to lunch in New York and agreed to change the title—to “Funny Dream.” When the piece ran in the March 17, 1945, issue, Jackson asked Maxwell to mail him a few copies (“I want to send one to Judy”), but added a dour postscript: “I still don’t like the story.”
The aftermath would manifest itself over the course of many years. First of all, Benson was confronted with her presumption when she returned to New Hampshire for the holidays—a showdown for which, apparently, her guns were loaded: “I won’t begin to tell you about my evening with her the other night,” Jackson wrote Ted Amussen on January 2. “I aged ten years in those three hours. And God protect me hereafter from writers: they’re a lousy class of people.” Later that summer he made a point of crossing her name off the invitation list for a big Lost Weekend screening party, and moreover vowed never to submit a story to The New Yorker again. There matters might have rested, were it not for Jackson’s extravagant admiration for The Folded Leaf, Maxwell’s novel about a homoerotic friendship, which Jackson applauded in Chicago Sun Book Week on April 15, 1945: “Katherine Anne Porter, it seems to me, is the one American writer who has no reason to envy William Maxwell his gifts; and offhand the only novel I can think of that is at all comparable to The Folded Leaf is The Apple of the Eye, also a story of adolescence [and also homoerotic], written by Glenway Wescott twenty years ago.” Maxwell loved the review, not least because it made his family in Illinois take him seriously for once, as opposed to being embarrassed by what they’d always assumed were mere memoirs: “Their main reaction to ‘The Folded Leaf,’ ” he wrote Jackson, “before your review, was surprise that I knew such vile language, and had been unhappy in my youth. Now, thanks to you, I am a credit to the family. Sometimes the world’s opinion, operating on middle class minds, is almost terrifying to watch.”
But if Jackson thought his review (“I was frankly log-rolling,” he wrote a friend; “but it’s a good book, isn’t it?”) would ensure future sales to The New Yorker, he would be disappointed again and again—seventeen times in a row, to be exact, during a single interval from 1951 to 1952. Rejecting, for example, a long story (“The Outlander”) about a Jackson-like protagonist in Bermuda, Maxwell invoked Ross’s prohibition against stories about writers (“nobody cares about them except another writer”), whereas Jackson’s portrait of a loose woman, “Janie,” was unsuitable (“Mr. Ross feels”) for a magazine that might be read by a minor. Nothing if not tactful—indeed legendary in that respect—Maxwell usually concluded his letters with the wistful hope that Jackson would reappear in The New Yorker someday. By the summer of 1951, though, Jackson was fed up (“to hell with The New Yorker from now on”), and sternly corrected his friend Dorothea when she ventured to praise the magazine’s fiction: New Yorker stories, he wrote, “are artful, full of evasions and half-truths, and almost always stop where they really should begin.” However, a few months later, Jackson wrote what he considered a masterpiece, “The Boy Who Ran Away,” and abruptly recanted his boycott of the magazine: “it’s one story for a change that Maxwell would love,” he promised Baumgarten. “(In fact it is Maxwell.)” But no: once again Maxwell replied—with his usual dolorous tact—that the story was a little too patly “clinical,” and so on. “I could punch him in the nose,” said Jackson. “My God! He has seen countless stories and has rejected every one except a punk tale I wrote way back in 1945 and that Sally Benson rewrote for them under the sickening title of FUNNY DREAM.…”
1 Like many writers—not to mention addicts—Charlie was hardly averse to stretching the truth now and then, especially for the benefit of awed fellow Newarkians such as Fabry (herself something of a fabulist, one may recall). Partly this was due to an insatiable need for admiration and love—but also, perhaps, it was a generous impulse: a way of sharing glamour with old friends whose own lives were relatively humdrum.
2 An almost exact replica of P. J. Clarke’s on East 55th in New York. Wilder had tried shooting in the actual Clarke’s, but there was too much noise from the Third Avenue El.
3 From The Taming of the Shrew, Act 2, Scene 1, lines 180–81.
4 Her most recent had been Two-Faced Woman (1941), which turned out to be her last movie.
Chapter Ten
Will and Error
By the time Ray Milland was offered the part of Don Birnam, he’d been a contract player at Paramount for a decade—generally considered a competent light comedian for supporting roles, the main exception being his star turn opposite Ginger Rogers in Brackett and Wilder’s The Major and the Minor (1942). Wilder knew how desperate the actor was to be tested, even at the expense of forfeiting a glamorous image, and gave him a copy of Jackson’s novel. “I took it to bed with me that night,” Milland recalled, “but after a dozen pages I fell asleep.” Waking in the wee hours, he forged ahead, though he found the subject repellent: he himself “could not abide” drunks, and hardly ever took a drink himself. At age thirty-nine, though, it was now or never, and Milland threw himself into preparing for the role: before production beg
an, in October 1944, he cultivated a seedy gauntness by subsisting on dry toast, coffee, grapefruit juice, and boiled eggs; he also insisted on spending a night, incognito, in the alcoholic ward at Bellevue. Dozing off in his hospital pajamas, Milland was jarred awake by a door banging open nearby, as two attendants wrestled a violent, wailing patient into a bed that the patient thought was on fire. The others protested the disturbance “in the foulest language imaginable”: “Suddenly the room was bedlam. I knew I was looking into the deepest pit.” But anyway it was a change.
The first sequence to be shot was Don’s awful slog along the pawnshops of Third Avenue,1 which Wilder had decided to shoot on location rather than try to re-create that particular jumble of scenery—including the El and its jagged shadows—on a Paramount soundstage. Lest a crowd of pedestrians interfere, cameras were concealed inside delivery trucks and empty storefronts, and for sixteen mornings a disheveled, unshaven Milland waited in a cab for his cue to shamble along for another block or two while the cameras furtively rolled. (Once, he was recognized by a motorist who happened to know someone at Paramount: “I just want to tell you,” the man reported, “that I saw your friend Ray Milland dead drunk on Third Avenue. If I were you I’d try to get hold of him and straighten him out.”) For the first ten days of shooting, Jackson was put up at the Sherry-Netherland and invited to do a walk-on as a Third Avenue passerby—indeed, he’d “figure[d] rather prominently” in the scene, or so he wrote Robert Nathan (“the Hitchcock signature, so to speak”). Milland, stumbling along with his typewriter, had seemed startled at Jackson’s approach: “Hello, Charlie,” he muttered. For that reason, perhaps, the footage wasn’t used; at any rate Jackson doesn’t appear in the finished movie.
A few weeks later, Brackett sent him the bulk of their screenplay, and Jackson was ecstatic: “FOR COMMENT SEE CELIA’S SPEECH AS YOU LIKE IT LINE 194 ACT THREE SCENE TWO,” he wired back, indicating the following passage: “O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hoping!” Jackson was especially impressed by the seamless way one scene flowed into the next, the tension always rising, and he even conceded that the characterizations—“except Don’s”—were “far better than they were in the book.” More than ever he felt cooped up at Six Chimney Farm; how desperately he wanted to be part of such an exciting project!
They hadn’t, however, shown him the last pages yet, and naturally he was curious to see what they would make of his unhappy ending. “To please the Hays office,” Louella Parsons had predicted, “Wilder and Brackett will probably have to reform their hero.” Given Jackson’s plans for writing an upbeat Seagull, he couldn’t have expected perfect fidelity to his novel, and meanwhile Brackett and Wilder kept telling him they simply hadn’t written the ending yet—they were “trusting to luck” that inspiration would strike “when they got to it.” Finally (a week after shooting was wrapped up over Christmas), they sent Jackson the final pages. “Talk about neat, pat, cheap endings,” he wrote a friend; “but also talk about betrayal.” As written, the movie now ended with Helen’s talking Don out of suicide by getting him to believe in himself as a writer again; thus, as Wick returns to the apartment (“Quiet, Wick, we are working. Just fix us some breakfast”), Don is pounding away at his much-pawned typewriter, his long-deferred novel in the works at last! “Now, naturally I resent this conclusion because of the personal complications,” Jackson remonstrated with Brackett and Wilder. “It implies that Don Birnam was Charles Jackson (implies hell, says so, in practically so many words) and this is the way I ‘worked it out.’ ” But worst of all was the fact “that a very distinguished movie” was now rendered—in one vulgar stroke—utterly “make believe” and ordinary. So Jackson declared in his first, relatively measured letter; when an inscrutable silence ensued, he wrote again six days later:
Since the night I first read your final scene, I have been getting madder by the minute … you are basing your movie far less on the book than you are on what you happen to know about my private life. I should have suspected something like this all along. The tip-off should have been when I first learned you were making Helen an employee of Time Magazine.2 The final scene, as you sent it to me, with the hero working out his problem by writing a book (the implication being, of course, that the novel is the very movie we are seeing and the book we have read) is an out-and-out Judas kiss. Can you think how difficult it will be for me, for instance, to sit in the local movie house and see that film on the screen among my neighbors?
And still the two screenwriters laid low, evidently more concerned about the Hays Office censors than Jackson’s reputation among his neighbors. “I am beginning to loathe and detest all that Hollywood represents,” he wrote Nathan. “The moral of all this is that, once Hollywood gets your best friends, you can’t trust ’em: Hollywood comes first every time; you don’t count a-tall!”
Two months later, though, in March—after a preview in San Francisco that seemed to go well in every respect but one—Brackett phoned: “Charlie, I’ve got a fine present for you: we’re throwing out that ending.… Any ideas?” Jackson was invited to Hollywood for a week or two, expenses paid, but decided he couldn’t be interrupted in the midst of his maddening novel; still, he was “flattered enormously that they, so expert and so professional, should have had to come to [him] for help,” and promised to think it over. Almost three weeks passed before inspiration struck, whereupon he wired Brackett that he’d just written a four-and-a-half-page final scene that was “wonderful.” Certainly it was more ambiguous: as in the finished movie, Helen urges Don to distinguish between “Don the drunk and Don the writer”; one may be “dead already,” but the other (“The one I love. The one Wick loves”) is worth saving. “Promises [to stop drinking] are easy,” says Don. “Words, words, words … I’d feel like a heel promising you—” “Promise yourself!” says Helen. At last she seems to prevail by force of reason alone (no festive novel-writing follows): Don surrenders his gun, and Helen leaves to take it back to the pawnshop and recover her leopard coat. Left alone with a “nearly full whiskey bottle,” Don (“After visible struggle”) drops it out the window. And hence the final shot, which Jackson was especially proud of (“it lifts the whole story out of the personal … and passes it over to us”):
He looks a couple of inches to the left of the camera; and finally, as his face clears entirely and becomes confident and calm (but with complete reserve: nothing corny here), we see him looking directly into the camera—directly at us. It is an indication he is facing the world … and it puts it up to us to believe in him. He is looking at us, clear-eyed, calm, the slight breeze blowing his hair, as—FADE OUT …
Three months later, Jackson received the final version—slightly different from Brackett and Wilder’s earlier attempt, but still suggesting that Don will cure himself by writing a novel titled The Bottle.3 By then Jackson was resigned, more or less, though he would “derive a small (but very small) satisfaction” from an advance review in Variety, which mildly faulted the ending of what was otherwise hailed as an “outstanding achievement.”
JACKSON’S SECOND NOVEL was proving quite a bit more problematic than he’d expected. His first few months of work had gone swimmingly—particularly the long opening section about the inner life of his hero, John Grandin, as the character was now more evocatively called. Jackson was also enthusiastic about his new title, The Middle Mist, from Rupert Brooke: “ … there are wanderers in the middle mist / Who cry for shadows, clutch, and cannot tell / Whether they love at all, or, loving, whom …” His enthusiasm waned, however, when Marion Fabry informed him that a recent novel about lesbians (“merely coincidence?”) had the same title; Jackson decided he couldn’t afford that kind of “lavender taint.” Indeed, he liked the name Grandin not only for its connotation of grandeur, but also because it seemed “masculine”—even more so when he dropped the “John” and just wrote “Grandin” (“You’d be surprised what a difference it makes”). He expecte
d to send a finished manuscript to Farrar & Rinehart by December 15, 1944—only a little past his original deadline—and was quite convinced he had a masterpiece on his hands: “I read it over and think, ‘my god, I’ve simply got to write that guy a fan letter, American literature owes a debt of gratitude to an author like that who et cetera.’ ”
Within a month his confidence had evaporated. It occurred to him that the middle part of the novel (“when the story begins to be ‘dramatized’ ”) wasn’t nearly as good as the first; writing conventional, cause-and-effect, nonintrospective narrative was proving damnably difficult. “The story kills me to write it,” he confessed to Philip Rahv: “I’ve never done anything that takes so much out of me; and during the past month it’s gotten me down so that I’ve become neurotic as hell, nervous, depressed, and even at times have thought the only solution is suicide.” What made matters worse (and the middle section even more insoluble) was that, truth be known, he had little idea where he was going; his original ending now struck him as both uneventful and inexplicable, but on the other hand he couldn’t just kill off his hero, say, as Mann did in Death in Venice: “Ashenback [sic] simply dies (almost arbitrarily) just as the story begins to demand that he ‘do something about it,’ ” Jackson pointed out. “But my John Grandin has to work out his dilemma, to our satisfaction and his, and he’s got to be either the better or the worse for the experience.” Jackson still preferred that he be the better for it, but worried that the reader would be fed up with the whole infatuation by the time Grandin resolved it one way or the other.
