Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  It soon became apparent, however, that the novelist’s disgruntlement was mainly directed at a single man: Mr. Edward W. Warren, his neighbor to the south. While perhaps not the most racially sensitive person in town, Warren was nonetheless regarded as a pillar of the community—chairman of the local Red Cross! Known for handing out nickels to poor children! Asked for his reaction, Warren was ever the gentleman, noting only that Jackson’s column had impugned graduates of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale (“Cultivated [these Ivy Leaguers] may be,” Jackson had written; “but they have no real culture whatever”), and therefore Warren himself felt “proud again” to be a Dartmouth man. In his diary, however—perhaps the one instance of this over a shelf of volumes containing naught but the most measured, prosaic observations—Warren’s benignity wavered a little: “Orford all excited about Mr. Jackson’s article in Manchester Union,” he wrote. “He is a very foolish man.”

  One can only imagine Warren’s chagrin as the tide turned somewhat against him. “Orford needs a jolting,” applauded one resident, and meanwhile Warren’s old campus newspaper, The Dartmouth, sent a reporter upriver to “test the validity of Mr. Jackson’s allegations,” finding that the local citizenry was, in fact, for the most part, politically “reactionary”: “They hated Roosevelt and did not regret his death … [and] they definitely consider the Negroes and Jews inferior races.” One of the Ridge dwellers (unidentified) confided to the newspaper that Mr. Jackson was considered “maladjusted,” a charge Jackson was glad to address: “I am maladjusted in the sense that I don’t fit into their type of environment which is represented by bigotry and intolerance. I consider this type of maladjustment a compliment.” As for Ned Warren, he would write fewer and fewer diary entries about his cranky neighbor—whose animus had probably left him more bewildered than anything—on whom he yet kept a weather eye (“Jacksons lighted up tonight”), and even listed The Fall of Valor among books he’d read that autumn, perhaps with a sense of appalled vindication.

  JACKSON WAS UNDERSTANDABLY nervous as publication approached. Though he wanted his new novel to take readers’ minds off alcoholism where he was concerned, he wasn’t altogether sure he preferred being associated with homosexuality (“and so help me,” he wrote Mary McCarthy, “but the third novel is about syphilis”). Still, he hoped reviewers would choose to describe it as a “novel of marriage”—which would hardly explain why it was expected to “cause as much tongue-wagging as Lost Weekend,” or so Bennett Cerf speculated in his Saturday Review column: “It is the story of an unsuccessful marriage—with homosexuality the real root of the trouble.” Given such a provocative root, Cerf thought Jackson’s work would once again be discussed by psychiatrists as much as literary critics, and among the former was Fredric Wertham, who’d offered to review the book for The New Republic. “Empty ninety percent of this year’s novels from your shelf to make room for The Fall of Valor!” he feverishly proclaimed. “The other ten percent may remain to serve as acolytes to this slim volume”; so compelling was the book, said Wertham, that he found himself turning pages “so quickly as to constitute a form of brisk finger exercise.” Jackson, though flattered, begged his friend to tone it down a little, lest their personal (never mind clinical) relationship become known or at least surmised. Some of the more breathless hyperbole was therefore excised from the published review, wherein Wertham contented himself with comparing Jackson favorably to Thomas Mann: “There is a healthier and fresher breeze in Nantucket than in Venice.”

  Little wonder the author had great expectations. “I’m afraid this letter is going to sound pretty egotistic,” he wrote Boom a month before publication; “it’ll be all about ME.” Enclosed was a typescript of Wertham’s over-the-top first draft (tentatively titled “Tragedy of Deviation from the Norm”), as well as the July 27 issue of Publishers Weekly, which featured The Fall of Valor on its cover. And that wasn’t nearly the half of it: “Other big news is that LIFE is doing a 10,000 word story about me (one of their ‘Profiles’), with pictures, about the 2nd week of October, just in time to cash in on the nationwide reviews.… The photo of me standing against the garden wall, looking very Nobel Prize and tragic, has been selected tentatively (now hold your breath) for the cover of the magazine.”5 Meanwhile letters from advance readers were ecstatic (“Boom, they would bring tears to your eyes”), including a lapidary endorsement from Charlie’s idol, Thomas Mann, who envisaged “another sensational hit” for his friend:

  It is a courageous, ruthlessly probing book, uncovering without a trace of speculative frivolity the difficulties, embarrassments and fears of marital and sexual life in general, and far from denying the knowledge we have attained of the so-called perversions and aberrations in this sphere, namely above all the homosexual component, a phenomenon which, as Goethe says, is in nature, although it seems to be directed against nature.…

  With some of its more labyrinthine clauses trimmed, Mann’s letter would be a mainstay of Rinehart’s promotional campaign (“A letter from THOMAS MANN to Charles Jackson,” a full-page ad was headed)—a useful rebuke to critics who insisted on wielding Death in Venice as a cudgel against what was (usually) considered its lesser American counterpart.

  Another full-page ad, two months after publication, quoted critics both for and against the book, while suggesting that those in the latter camp were motivated, lamentably, by an aversion to homosexuality per se: “For Charles Jackson has put his finger on truth; and because there are many things in marriage that cannot be explained on a ‘normal’ and superficial plane, this truth comes frighteningly close to the experience of everyone.” Whether a bad marriage or homosexuality or both were being touted as so “frighteningly” universal is hard to say, but with only a few exceptions (“Subject, and especially bluntness of presentation, limit library use,” warned Library Journal), most critics made a point of arguing the book’s merits on aesthetic rather than moral grounds. Charles Poore’s early review in the daily Times found the novel too “contrived” to succeed as “a study in abnormal psychology”: Grandin’s fate is a foregone conclusion, said Poore, citing the fire tongs that are planted so portentously in the opening pages (a residual point of craft from Jackson’s radio days that Wertham, for one, found ingenious: “His sense of theatre is displayed in the beautifuly [sic] tying together of the incidents of the fire-tongs at both the beginning and the end of the story”).6 Also, it may as well be noted that at least two other major reviews, along with Wertham’s, were written by friends of the author—Clifton Fadiman’s in the Herald Tribune (“Mr. Jackson tells his story swiftly, clearly, humanely”) and A. C. Spectorsky’s in the Chicago Sun (“one of the best books I’ve ever read, [and] one of the least sensational”).7 Also of interest was Harrison Smith’s glowing but squeamish piece in the Saturday Review, piquantly titled “The Seed of Evil”: in its treatment of such an “ugly theme,” Smith wrote, the novel represented “a milestone in our literary progress, and we can only hope that few writers less gifted than Mr. Jackson will dare to approach it.”

  One may recall Jackson’s dismissive attitude (for Aannestad’s benefit) toward all the “extravagant praise” for The Lost Weekend, though he did attend to the “sober long criticism” of Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker and Robert Gorham Davis in Partisan Review; indeed, despite Wilson’s mixed review, Jackson had written the man a letter commending him as “the most informative and also the most entertaining [critic] to be found anywhere today.” It’s unlikely this sweetened Wilson’s judgment toward The Fall of Valor, though he evidently took pains to be sympathetic insofar as he could. Calling it “less effective” than The Lost Weekend, he yet conceded the challenge of writing about homosexuality in a way that would not prove “hopelessly repulsive” to the general reader—which might explain, Wilson thought, the novel’s implausible protagonist, who has somehow “arrived at the age of forty-four with no inkling of his sexual proclivities.” And Wilson did find the book worthy in one respect: Jackson “has made homosexuality middle-cl
ass and thereby removed it from the privileged level on which Gide and Proust had set it.” As for Robert Gorham Davis, he had a much larger forum this time—The New York Times Book Review—for which he took an even dimmer view of The Fall of Valor than its predecessor. John Grandin, he wrote, was “a dreadful ninny,” what with his rhapsodic comparisons of the loutish Cliff to Achilles, Lancelot, and so forth; such a “boyish outlook” was unlikely to shed light on a theme that had already been “treated by experts” (Gide, Proust, et al.): “Such an expert, in the precise sense of the word, Mr. Jackson quite obviously is not—happily for himself, and unhappily for ‘The Fall of Valor.’ ”

  That Davis could, with such calm assurance, conclude that Jackson himself was no “expert” would attest, it seems, to Jackson’s success in conceiving his hero along purely objective lines—or, depending on how you look at it, in rendering Grandin so naïvely high-minded that he scarcely relates to the human race, much less to his creator (though certainly there are more than a few traces of Jackson in the character). Like Aschenbach at the outset of Death in Venice, Grandin is portrayed as having strenuously cultivated the Apollonian throughout his adult life, cloistering himself in his study night after night (to his wife’s dismay) in order to finish his magnum opus, suggestively titled The Tragic Ideal. Such austerity is partly due to an intrinsic nobility of soul, but also Grandin buries himself in work to elude a mysterious dread—a sense that he is somehow guilty and will shortly lose everything: “But what he would lose, or why, was the mystery.” One clue is the “stern disapproval” he “surprise[s] in himself” while watching—obliquely, from the shadows of his empty classroom—the young men playing tennis outside his window, their arms and legs thrusting about “like pistons or driving rods.” And why (“of all the volumes in his library”) should he choose Housman for his journey to Nantucket? The worldly reader cocks a knowing brow, but Grandin remains in the dark.

  He’s also a great fan of Whitman, naturally, and Ethel Grandin is reminded of “Drum-Taps” (one of her husband’s favorite poems) when she finds a photograph of a sleeping Marine under his desk blotter. The poignancy of this comely young man, his doom foreshadowed in deathly sleep, harks back to Jackson’s “war neurosis” theme—an obsession with “the uniform” that in early versions of the novel was supposed to derange Grandin into temporary homosexuality, but here becomes a kind of safe, sentimental exercise, since Grandin can gaze upon a dead or sleeping soldier with relative impunity. Thus, amid the enervating luxury of Nantucket, Grandin lapses into maudlin reveries of Cliff Hauman “in battle dress, gaitered, helmeted, strapped about with cartridge belts, a tommy gun grasped in his outstretched hand, lying (as he here lay) on a beach, but sprawled face down, with the first small waves of the incoming tide washing gently around him …” Wishing he could die instead, Grandin regresses into the hero worship of childhood, when he looked up to older, more athletic schoolmates—this the kind of “boyish outlook” that so exasperated Robert Gorham Davis, but was, after all, in accord with certain Freudian notions about the infantile nature of homosexual attraction (which also explains Grandin’s frisson whenever Cliff calls him Johnnie).

  Grandin romanticizes the loutish Marine, though this is never played for laughs—there are no laughs in this book—but rather reflects the older man’s need to find something ennobling in his obsession. Prepared to believe that Cliff’s “innocent language” is the result of a “mind so clean it could almost seem inane,” Grandin is bitterly disappointed to overhear a bit of coarse, cruel banter between Cliff and their friend Bill Howard: “I want you to lay off that pretty boy over there, the fag,” Cliff says of the effeminate Arne Eklund. “You can’t have him—he’s mine!” As it happens, Cliff is afflicted by the same tortured latency as Grandin, though his motives for ventilating the matter (so far as he understands it) are unclear. What abides in the finished novel is a blurred composite of the earlier, more guileful Cliff who toys with Grandin out of vague, egotistic perversity, and the childlike Cliff who seems to flirt almost unwittingly, perhaps in hope that Grandin will provide fatherly insight into their mutual predicament. In any event he titillates Grandin with tales of threesomes with his buddy Walt (“He loved it and so did I, but it was never any good, I don’t care how hot she was, unless Walt was there too”), and confides about an all-too-helpful English professor, Scott, whose advances he once had to spurn (though he adds seductively, for Grandin’s benefit, “Of course I was a lot younger then”).

  But when the question comes to a point (so to speak), both men respond in extreme ways: Cliff will assault the valor-ruined Grandin at the end of the book (gratuitously, given his mild rebuff of the earlier professor—“Uh-uh, Scotty, none of that!”—but in keeping with the de rigueur “tragic” ending), and even the decorous Grandin “pull[s] violently away” when Cliff tries innocently (in quotes?) to put suntan oil on his back. Later, Grandin’s discovery of that same suntan-oil bottle on the dark, foggy beach will lead to an erection (“he felt a slow rude pressure growing in his loins”) and thus a ghastly epiphany, as he finds himself imagining Cliff’s “broad fingers” on his back. Weighing the implications, Grandin remembers a fellow who was once “caught screwing a pig,” and formulates a triangular hierarchy of human sexuality, at the apex of which is a monogamous heterosexual such as Bill Howard (“the world’s favored”):

  It was only a question of degree, upward from the professor who screwed the pig … to the teacher or philanthropist or minister or banker beaten up by a sailor in a water-front dive … to the brilliant dancer or artist whose neurosis was the very foundation of his art, to the scoutmaster or headmaster in a boys’ school whose sublimated passion for boys in knee pants fitted him so completely for his tasks, to John Grandin himself, and to the well-adjusted happy Bill Howard, and from there, downward, it was only a matter of degree again, to the husband who must be at his wife day and night … to the so-called sex maniac whose lust for girl children culminated in murder and mutilation. All were pitiable, helpless, or tragic—except Bill Howard, who was just lucky.

  “Tragedy of Deviation from the Norm” indeed: that homosexuality might itself be considered “normal” was hardly an idea whose time had come for Jackson or his generation at large. And lest the moderately deviated Grandin seem too repugnant, readers are given a flaming caricature, Arne Eklund—“a well-known decorator” whose 4-F status is dissembled by his being “sole support” for a doting mother—whom everyone can safely hate. “Isn’t it tragic?” says Eklund, leering over a photograph of a dead Navy flier. “So young, and so attractive.” Grandin—indignant at this parody of his own fetishizing—wants “savagely” to denounce the “yellow-haired” queen: “Look here, Eklund,” he forbears to exclaim, “if people dislike you and your kind, it’s your own damned fault!”

  But even a stereotype like Eklund is no more flat a character than Grandin, Cliff, or the rest of the cardboard cast—all serve their mechanical purpose, all are conceived for the sake of a very general reader. Jackson had occasionally persuaded himself that The Fall of Valor was an “advance” on his first novel for the same reason that it is, by comparison, such a bewildering failure: whereas Don Birnam is evoked from the inside of his singular, Mr. Toad–like mind—that is, Jackson’s mind—The Fall of Valor is “objective,” and therefore banal. Startled by such a rain of clichés, by the “borderline bilge-like phrase” on page after page, Philip Wylie urged the author to rewrite “subjectively”: “In your Lost Weekend style you have the better instrument, I think.” But no; Grandin had to be a proper tragic hero, a great man brought low by his “flaw,” and such men apparently express lust—unlike Don Birnam (“Was he big?”)—in terms of the classical: Cliff’s physique “was heroic: Hercules, Hector, a younger Odysseus, seen as they were never seen in the storybooks, and made modern by the startling whiteness of the hips above and below the tan,” Grandin muses, grandly, and a few pages later he further eulogizes the youth’s “heroic physique, as though he were some gi
ant figure out of mythology come down to show these mortals what a Homeric god looked like.” Nor can such a theme be treated lightly, with any leavening humor, though one irresistibly wonders what Wodehouse, for instance, would have made of Grandin’s epiphanic tumescence on the beach (“Oh, I say—!”).

  Many readers were well disposed toward Jackson for wrestling with such a dicey subject, and doing so with his heart decidedly in the right place; still, the more disinterested among them were apt to echo Edward Weeks of The Atlantic, who regretfully concluded that The Fall of Valor was “a dull story, about dull people, dully written. The theme, and I suspect we shall meet it more frequently, need not be narrowed down to the triangle of an anemic, dry-as-dust professor, his starved and expostulating wife, and a handsome, dumb baboon.”

  WHATEVER ITS SHORTCOMINGS, The Fall of Valor was a bold book that few mainstream novelists would have gotten away with publishing—indeed, the prestige Jackson had earned as author of an acclaimed best-seller about alcoholism was precisely the sort of thing needed to broach this other, far riskier taboo. And yet pitfalls remained. An elderly gentleman in Boston named John Grandin was livid over the coincidence, and Jackson’s royalty account was charged $150 to settle attorneys’ fees in a threatened lawsuit. And once again there were censorship problems in England, where publishers remained skittish over the scandal caused by Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County. Jackson’s initial British publisher for The Fall of Valor had been Sampson Low, whose editor not only proposed myriad cuts in the text but personally composed a number of “bridge passages” (written in what he deemed “the style and spirit of the book”) to bandage the more gaping holes. Jackson, “outraged,” changed publishers to Robert Hale, whose more reasonable tweaks addressed, for example, Grandin’s morbid arousal on the beach, which became “a slow tumid emotion” that obliges him to roll over on his back.