by Blake Bailey
The best part was that all of Newark was listening—far more impressed by Charlie as a radio savant than as a writer of whatever sort. “I feel all puffed up this morning just to say I know Charlie Jackson,” a neighbor (“Irene”) wired his mother on January 8, whereas his prissy aunt Charlotte sent her own telegram to the NBC studios “care of Radio City.” “I got sixty eight letters,” Charlie informed his brother Herb, whose own letter (reporting the respectful critiques of R. A. S. Bloomer and other worthies) had “overjoyed” him most of all: “The reactions of the home folks honestly mean more to me than the congratulatory wires from my Hollywood and New York friends or from personages in the business, who send these things as a matter of course without really giving a sh–, well, a damn.” Orford, too, was listening, or at least Charlie’s neighbor, Mr. Warren, who noted in his diary, “Mr. Jackson was good it was much Shakespeare.” Indeed, it occurred to Charlie that radio was a faster—and much easier—route to fame than mere fiction-writing (“authors being somewhat less than dirt”), and he cultivated the medium as often as possible. He claimed to despise one show, however, as a matter of principal—The Author Meets the Critics—since he believed a writer “should never be called on to speak for his book,” and besides he felt as though he’d emerged “the worse for wear” after defending The Lost Weekend vis-à-vis psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg (“that charlatan”). But his next appearance on the show was apparently more pleasurable, as he would return a third time on account of the same book (a record), and later he expressly requested at least two appearances for his second novel: once on publication, then a month or two later, “after the talk has got started.”
LIBERATED FROM his elaborate “war neurosis” theme, Jackson was gleefully convinced that he’d nailed his novel at last. With almost lunatic aplomb he cast about for superlatives, predicting that Will and Error2 would be “one of the most distinguished books of 1946”—nay, that it would lend “more prestige to Rinehart & Co. [as the firm was now called] than any other single book you have ever published,” and ultimately be considered “the best novel published in America in many years.” “To hell with The Lost Weekend,” he wrote, again and again (as if sparring with a phantom Philip Wylie): it was a trifle, a “sketch” merely, whereas Will and Error was downright “Greek in it’s [sic] bigness.” Gratified by his client’s renewed confidence, Carl Brandt agreed that the book would probably be “a triumph,” whereupon Jackson chided the man’s timidity: “Brother, you don’t know the half of it. 600,000 book buyers will buy that book the moment it’s banned in Boston, which of course will be publication date.”
With this windfall in mind—along with the fact that his first novel was (or so Publishers Weekly reported) selling 1,500 copies a week because of the movie publicity—Jackson no longer felt obliged to economize. In the fall of 1945, he paid five hundred dollars for a long-coveted “Keane” painting3 from Klaus Perls, and meant to buy more—a lot more: “If you think I’m worth any dough,” he blithely wrote the dealer, “that is if you don’t mind my owing you twenty or thirty thousand instead of 3 (or is it 4?), will you send me the yellow Vedovelli with the childess [sic] blazing sun? … What is the best figure you can give me for the two Jean Yves? I want them.” “Stan, I need money like the devil,” he wrote his publisher one week later. Though Rinehart & Company had just loaned him five thousand dollars to pay his income tax, Jackson wanted another fifteen thousand dollars for reasons he explained with winsome candor: he still owed John Owsley fifteen thousand dollars for Six Chimney Farm, and wanted to pay off at least ten thousand dollars of it; as for the five-thousand-dollar balance, well, it was “to ‘play with,’ so to speak.” That same day—January 27, 1946—he wrote Boom as follows: “What a truly good soul you are. Thank you so very much for offering to cash one of your bonds so I could pay Bea” (a secretary and friend) “you do have a real appreciation of the fact that, though I seem to be getting all kinds of kudos these days, I’m actually making no cash at all.”
But apparently Rinehart & Company didn’t come through, and the following month Jackson arranged for a fifteen-thousand-dollar mortgage on the house, which he was able to reduce to ten thousand dollars (putting aside five thousand dollars for income tax) when Paramount paid him a bonus of ten thousand dollars “in view of [his] unusually fine and extensive cooperation in the promotion, exploitation and technical consultation in behalf of The Lost Weekend.” Alas, this wasn’t enough to satisfy his debt to Perls, and Jackson endeavored to make amends: “If you are still interested in the large Keane painting and want to buy it,” he wrote Billy Wilder, “would you be able to do it now, by sending your check for $1,000 directly to Klause [sic] for me. This is $250.00 less than I had originally wanted for it [and $500 more than he’d paid for it], but that’s because I love you.”
To be sure, Jackson was going through some complicated emotional weather, given his constant all-nighters working on his novel, to say nothing of the international acclaim for The Lost Weekend (movie) and renewed scrutiny of the book on which it was based—the grinding, incessant pressure to equal that success or at least not disgrace himself. And then, even at the best of times, Jackson’s “fluctuations between elation and despair [were] violent,” as Lincoln Barnett would point out in his long profile of the author. At any rate, once he’d completed his third overhaul of what would finally be titled The Fall of Valor, Jackson was so exhausted and bewildered that he didn’t know whether the book was good or bad and didn’t much care: “All I want to do now is to forget it,” he wrote Boom. Indeed, much of his recent euphoria (and strange behavior generally) had been chemically induced, and once the novel was off his hands, even Jackson had to admit he was badly addicted to Seconal again. On March 3, 1946—two days after mailing his manuscript to Rinehart & Company—he gave himself over to Dr. Gundersen’s care.
Recently, too, he’d consulted with the eminent German psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who at the time was about to begin a crusade against comic books that would result in his controversial study Seduction of the Innocent (1954), followed by a congressional inquiry that would lead to the infamous Comics Code with which Wertham was forever identified. The man was, in fact, a rather progressive and erudite scholar whose argument against comics was more nuanced than most care to remember. Whether or not one agreed that Batman and Robin’s domestic arrangement was pederastic in nature (and likely to be emulated as such by young readers), Wertham’s concerns about the violence, racism, misogyny, and overall crudity of the genre, as it then existed, were hardly without merit. Be that as it may, Jackson was mostly attracted to the psychiatrist because of his efforts to found the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic in Harlem, where black patients could receive (at a fee of twenty-five cents for those able to pay) the kind of help that would give them, as Wertham put it, “the will to survive in a hostile world.”
Wertham was appalled by Jackson’s deterioration when the two had met in New York around the time of that first Information, Please! broadcast, and insisted he hospitalize himself as soon as he finished his novel. “I take a rather serious view of Mr. Jackson’s condition,” Wertham subsequently wrote Gundersen. “I think it is necessary to break him of his addiction.… It is fortunate that he is willing to do so. I explained to him that such a long addiction must inevitably have some physical results and that these should be fully straightened out in a hospital.” Wertham prescribed a withdrawal period of “at least a month—preferable [sic] even longer,” though Jackson’s time at Mary Hitchcock would, as it happened, last only two weeks and be interrupted at least twice. “Patient admitted in a greatly fatigued and nervous state,” Gundersen had noted that first day, when Jackson began his usual treatment of paraldehyde in cracked ice. Though he’d readily admitted to others that he was “practically in a state of collapse” (“Mr. Jackson in Mary Hitchcock for a rest,” Mr. Warren scribbled in his diary), he blamed his debility entirely on overwork and urged his friends to be discreet: “You know how people are if the au
thor of The Lost Weekend gets sick,” he wrote Brackett and Wilder, “what they say, I mean.” And he had good reason to worry about gossip, since The Lost Weekend was opening in Hanover one week after he’d entered the local hospital (“Nobody ever perpetrated worse timing in their life”), and he knew his fellow Orfordians would come to the movie in force. Attending with the Gundersens, Jackson would later claim that his neighbors had pointedly avoided him in the lobby afterward, though at least one of them was quite impressed: “Lost Weekend crowded,” Mr. Warren recorded that night. “Well and fine. Powerful show.”
After Ray Milland won the Oscar on March 7 (“I’m surprised they just handed it to him,” quipped Bob Hope, the emcee; “I thought they’d hide it in a chandelier!”), he agreed to appear jointly with Jackson as guests on Information, Please! for the Monday, March 18, broadcast. This time things didn’t go so well for the weary novelist-cum-Shakespeare maven. “Anybody else in these United States could have wired and said he was too ill to come,” Jackson wrote with perhaps understandable self-pity, “but not me: I can’t afford to be sick or even let it be known that I’ve been in the hospital.” Jackson, “unstrung,” came to New York with Gundersen’s blessing and did his best, though he seemed flustered and even a little frightened at times—as when Fadiman asked panelists to give a Shakespearean hero’s first line in a play when prompted with the same character’s final line:
FADIMAN: “The rest is silence.”
JACKSON [After a long pause]: Oh dear—I’m sorry I took this … it’s, uh, “And flights of angels … ”
FADIMAN: But isn’t that the end of the quote?
JACKSON: Oh, the first speech? [Stammers a little; John Kieran says, “It’s Horatio.”] No, it’s Hamlet speaking. His first speech is, um, to his mother … very sarcastic line … I can’t remember it.…
FADIMAN: It begins with “A little”; will that help you?
JACKSON: “A little less than kin, and more than kind.”
FADIMAN: “A little more than kin, and less than kind.”
That, alas, was pretty much Jackson’s best moment, after which he mostly kept silent. Milland, meanwhile, was red hot, as if he were the more bookish of the two, almost running an entire category about literary works with a hunting theme (“The Most Dangerous Game,” Rogue Male, etc.), while the demoralized Charlie even saw fit to pass on an easy one about a favorite novel of his, The Ambassadors. (“Mr. Jackson on radio,” wrote Mr. Warren. “Not as good as last time.”)
The next day he visited Dr. Wertham, who now advised a convalescence of at least two months in the country, away from work and family, after which it would be time to address the psychological aspects of his addiction. “I have briefly spoken to Mrs. Jackson over the telephone about this,” Wertham wrote Gundersen on March 20. “What I am concerned about is that if he should start this addiction again, the next time his withdrawal symptoms may become even more pronounced and possibly more serious than they were this time.” Jackson agreed to a one-month vacation with the Gershwins in Beverly Hills, but only after he’d spent another week in Orford poring over the edited typescript of his novel. On March 28, he returned to New York to catch the Century, and promptly collapsed in his hotel. His brother was summoned from South Jersey to get his affairs in order—a job that took Boom at least two days (“Who packed the bags, did the running around, stayed overnight with Charlie, did all the dirty jobs,” Rhoda gratefully wrote)—finally escorting him to Staten Island, at Wertham’s behest, where he was kept “incommunicado” at a local hospital.
But Charlie was nothing if not resilient, and within ten days Wertham was letting him venture into Manhattan, alone, for lunches with Rinehart and Amussen; the doctor even began to think he was well enough to go home by the end of April or earlier. For the patient’s family this was a mixed blessing, at best. “The dreadful thing is that I have no feeling of missing Charlie at all,” Rhoda wrote Boom on April 10.
Nor have the kids. He has been such an irritant and problem for so long it seems much more like home with him away. And I don’t even feel like writing him.…
If I go on feeling this way, I shall write Wertham about it. If he’s building Charlie up to a resumption of what he (Wertham) thinks existed before, it isn’t fair. Because I can’t face the same Charlie we’ve had for the last year or so, even without any pill problem.…
Charlie phoned tonight and it only depressed me more. If only he hadn’t picked today when I was feeling so hopeless about us! For while he sounded fine and top-of-the-world so I really needn’t have worried, it only made me think “God damn it, can he only think of himself always.” If only he’d say once that he was sorry for what he put the kids and me through, maybe I’d feel better. And what he’d put everyone else through. But it’s only his concern—he suffered, he’ll never put himself through it again.… And he’s loving the treatment—he’s the lead horse again; everyone has to think about him.
WELCOME OR NOT, Jackson was back in Orford a few days later, eager to get on with his work. Wertham, too, felt “optimistic about the whole situation,” though he and the patient agreed that another winter in Orford was (as Jackson put it) “out, impossible, verboten …” The sleepy hamlet, off-season, was hardly congenial for a recovering drug addict with gregarious tendencies, but there were other problems as well. Perhaps the last straw was a rumor that the black novelist Richard Wright—a mutual friend of Jackson and Wertham—had moved his family to France after being refused a house in the area. Jackson was furious; as he wrote Wertham, he’d have relished the chance to entertain the Wrights in his own home, or, better still, at the Hanover Inn for the benefit of his benighted neighbors. But then, he had to admit that Wright was “better off” in France: “He would be most unhappy in this community; God knows we have suffered because of local attitudes, and been regarded as ‘peculiar’ as well—think what Dick would have been up against, especially with a white wife and child, and even more especially because he is well-to-do and not in the economic class that people around here believe negroes should be in.” Jackson had been (mostly) biting his tongue in Orford, until one night at Six Chimney Farm with the Warrens and poet Phyllis McGinley, an old friend, who was visiting with her husband, Charles Hayden. The main topic, it seems, was either the welfare state or domestic labor (“Had grand discussion on social help,” Warren wrote; “Mr. and Mrs. Hayden Catholics”), and Jackson, after hearing his neighbor blandly drop the epithet “nigger” for the umpteenth time, finally protested: “This is neither Munich nor the Deep South, and the word is ‘Negro.’ ” “Oh really?” said Mr. Warren, who was from Boston. “Well, I say nigger.”
Nor was Jackson’s quirky liberalism the only problem. He was, after all, the author of “That Dreadful Book,” and given the movie’s notoriety he was regarded with ever more dire suspicion. A minister in Fairlee, Vermont, directly across the river, inveighed from the pulpit against both movie and Jackson, to whom he wrote a personal letter: “I pray that God Almighty will lead you back to the ways of clean living.” Such a stern remonstrance was not only due to Jackson’s writing a best-seller that reputedly (the minister hadn’t sullied his mind by reading it) celebrated “debauchery,” but also to his peculiar personal habits—which, to this day, are still bruited about Orford. “He was up very, very late, and according to what he said he was doing, he was writing,” said Mr. Warren’s stepdaughter, Julia Fifield.
And you know Orford was a very, very caring town, and there was a lady who lived right opposite his house—Mrs. Prescott by name, she was a widow. About four o’clock [a.m.] she got up and found the Jackson house well-lighted, and she called up and asked if there was trouble and if there was anything anybody could do. Mr. Jackson took a terrible—he was incensed by that call! And very shortly after that, he announced that he was going to take his family back to New York and he was going to have an apartment where he could go out and take his milk bottles in his pajamas if he wanted to and nobody would care!
This is tru
e. As Life magazine reported a few months later, Jackson “moved back to the city with his family chiefly because he likes the anonymity of city life and hates the small town’s ‘prying, malicious gossip.’ ” Jackson also remarked on the radio that such gossip, in his case, mostly revolved around “what time [his] light went out last night,” until he’d gotten the distinct impression they were “waiting up or watching” (“I think there was a lot of speculation that he didn’t go to bed because he was too well loaded,” Mrs. Fifield pointed out).
Before leaving Orford (though he planned to keep the house for summer use), Jackson couldn’t resist a parting shot, a cannonade, in the form of a guest column for the nationally syndicated Leonard Lyons, who’d invited friends to fill in while he traveled in Europe. “NOTED AUTHOR DELIVERS SOME CAUSTIC COMMENTS ON HIS WEALTHY NEIGHBORS,” read the August 1, 1946, headline in the Manchester Union Leader. “I had always heard that New England was the epitome of the American spirit, and believed,” Jackson wrote for Lyons. “Brother, it’s a myth.” The beauty of his house and the town itself, he continued, had been spoiled for him by the iteration of words such as “Jew” and “nigger” and the kind of talk generally that “would be regarded as reactionary” in Franco’s Spain or Peron’s Argentina. “So, Leonard,” he concluded, after giving various examples of this, “we are moving back to New York—if we can find an apartment.”4
The next day the Union Leader sent a reporter, John Pillsbury, to Orford, to investigate what threatened to become a “New England-wide controversy.” The main targets of Jackson’s column had been his wealthy neighbors on the Ridge, most of whom professed startled resentment (thinking it odd indeed that Jackson “should come here from New York and Hollywood to pose in New Hampshire as the ‘Puritan in Babylon’ ”), whereas other, humbler townsfolk were simply “confused”: “Mr. Jackson is well-liked here,” Pillsbury wrote: “He and his wife and two young daughters are well-known and accepted as kindly and friendly people.” The better to refute the notion that New England, and Orford in particular, had failed to live up to the “American Spirit,” residents proposed holding a forum and inviting Jackson to speak.
