Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  A rather dire aspect of the controversy, for Jackson, was the book’s salability to the movies: given the success of The Lost Weekend, his second novel was bound to be a hot property in Hollywood—if, that is, it were about almost any other subject. Agent Leland Hayward quietly tossed up his hands when Jackson told him the gist of it, though he thought maybe a Broadway play was possible. Eventually, though, Jackson tried hard to pitch it to the studios (“I have become awfully hard boiled about dough, now that everybody in the world is making piles of money on Lost Weekend except me”), since, after all, no less than Irving “Swifty” Lazar had assured him, only a little facetiously (and without reading the book in question), that he could get “$150,000 just to have them take a look at it.” Sure enough, the summer before publication, word got out that at least three major studios were bidding: “Metro is considering buying The Fall of Valor and advertising it thus,” quipped one columnist: “GABLE’S BACK AND VAN JOHNSON’S GOT HIM.” But it wasn’t MGM that would almost buy the book; despite what The Hollywood Reporter called the “downright lunacy” of even considering such a movie, Jerry Wald of Warner Brothers announced that he’d taken a sixty-day option pending approval by the Production Code of a treatment written by Jackson himself. The “homosexual angle” had been “quietly dropped on the floor,” and hence the proposed movie would be “a serious clinical study of the decay of a modern marriage after ten years.” Joan Crawford, fresh from her Oscar-winning comeback in Mildred Pierce, was quoted as being “crazy” about the story. A few days later, though, Warner Brothers decided to pass without further comment. Jackson, then, would have to be content with book sales alone: almost 75,000 in hardcover and 291,000 in paperback—rather spectacular, if not quite up to his most euphoric dreams.

  As for the pioneering cultural impact: in early 1948, Jackson was pleased to note that the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer’s “fascinating” study, The American People: A Study in National Character, commended The Fall of Valor as the “only book” that dealt “directly” with a theme most Americans viewed with outright “panic”: “It is difficult to exaggerate the prevalence and urgency of this unconscious fear,” Gorer wrote. “It was presumably to dramatize this endless insecurity that Charles Jackson in The Fall of Valor made his unfortunate protagonist a married man of forty [sic] with two children.” Nor was Jackson’s trailblazing in this respect limited to The Fall of Valor, if one considers his candid treatment in “Palm Sunday” and The Lost Weekend (to say nothing of Native Moment, which, if published, would have been an even bigger bombshell in the 1930s). Mindful of his place in this vanguard—soon to be succeeded by Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and many others—Jackson would come to regard his second novel as a “great disappointment,” mainly because of its “lugubrious” punishment of the erring hero: “the problem of homosexuality”—he wrote his daughter Kate in 1964—“needs only a forthright statement of the facts that may be true or dormant in anybody’s life, an intelligent meeting of the minds involved, and an acceptance of the facts and then a fitting of those facts into one’s social world as best & intelligently as one can.” This was pretty much the way Jackson himself had worked things out (unbeknownst to the letter’s recipient), but alas, his second novel would persist only as a cautionary (if compassionate) tale about “the cruel web of homosexuality”—so noted on the cover of a 1955 paperback, which depicts the brawny Cliff ravishing his wife in the surf while Grandin crouches furtively amid the dune grass (“he was a prisoner of his own unnatural yearnings,” read the publisher’s copy, “and he had to have the Marine even if it meant giving up everything he had stood for, worked for, hoped for. It meant all that—and more”).

  Nevertheless, the book did find an admiring audience among a generation of gay men who were glad to read about their dilemma in whatever terms. In 1972, the novelist Richard Amory wrote that The Fall of Valor deserved “a place of utmost honor” in the history of gay fiction: “Jackson captures the national man-worship of the forties with almost heartbreaking clarity. Like Grandin, I too pondered the photographs in LIFE of war-weary combat troops, and remember the one time in 1944, age fifteen, standing in an Arizona cotton field and watching a trainful of swabbies pass by, some of them lounging shirtless on the platforms, and experiencing the first, sweet, painful foreknowledge of my own sexuality.” Among this segment of readers, at least, Jackson was not primarily known as the author of The Lost Weekend. Meeting Bobby Short at the Carlyle in the 1960s, Sarah Jackson mentioned her father. “The Fall of Valor!” the cabaret singer exclaimed.

  IN FEBRUARY 1947, after most of the smoke had cleared, Jackson took a month-long vacation, alone, to Bermuda. He hardly bothered to keep in touch with his family. At one point he gave an informal talk to the AA chapter in St. George’s, and also struck up an acquaintance with James Thurber: “If you see a photograph of Charles Jackson and me,” Thurber wrote a friend, “the glass on his table contains Coca Cola.”

  In fact—as Thurber might have been insinuating—Jackson had fallen off the wagon. As he’d later recall in countless AA talks, it began because of the heat: “I longed for some ice-cold beer. It’s madness, I thought immediately; I’ve not touched alcohol for eleven years” (he had, however, resumed taking Seconal); “I’m not going to start now. And the intellectual part of me replied: ‘Exactly; after eleven years of complete abstinence a glass of beer can’t possibly do you any harm.’ ” Besides, everything had changed: he was a successful author now; he was fulfilled; he could take it or leave it alone. At any rate he was on a long solitary vacation, with plenty of time to recover if things went awry. “What do you know, I’m drinking again,” he freely admitted to Rhoda as they drove back from the airport. He’d only been drinking beer, he told her, and this without any untoward consequences—from now on, then, he’d stick with beer. “Well, Charlie,” she (reportedly) said, “I think that’s great if you can.”

  In The Common Sense of Drinking, Richard Peabody tells of a man who decided to quit drinking until he’d made a million dollars, whereupon he’d resume drinking “in moderation”: “It took him five years—of sobriety—to make the million; then he began his ‘moderate’ drinking. In two or three years he lost all his money, and in another three he died of alcoholism.” For his part Jackson considered writing a novel about a “brilliant actress who finds it easy to reach the pinnacle and just as easy to drink herself out of fame.” He himself, by his own later reckoning, would be hospitalized for alcoholism and/or drug addiction some twenty times in the next seven years.

  1 “My story MONEY did not sell to The New Yorker—God knows why,” he wrote Boom. “The lady was modeled on Ruby Schinasi.”

  2 Jackson liked the title, at the time, because it seemed pithily reminiscent of “WAR AND PEACE, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, etc.” Awkwardly, though, he wasn’t quite sure what the title meant in the context of the original quote—to wit, from Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 5, Scene 3, lines 470–71: “Now, to our perjury to add more terror, / We are again forsworn, in will and error.” At one point he asked Mary McCarthy for her interpretation (“in plain English”).

  3 Which he sometimes spelled “Keene” or “Kane,” making it difficult to positively identify the artist in question.

  4 That fall the Jacksons moved to Sniffen Court, a historical mews of ten carriage houses on East 36th in the Murray Hill area of Manhattan. The children were enrolled at the Dalton School, where, as Jackson was pleased to observe, the student body was forty percent Jewish and ten percent black: “After a week or two,” he said, “[my daughters] did not even notice the difference. They have come to take it for granted, which is as it should be.”

  5 Who knows whether a cover story was actually contemplated, but in any case the photograph never appeared in Life, though it did end up on the jacket of The Sunnier Side four years later. Jackson’s next appearance in Life would be in the March 17, 1947, issue—a (non-cover) story titled “City vs. Country,” in which his rejection of Orford in favor of Man
hattan was explored vis-à-vis critic Granville Hicks’s preference for Grafton, NY (pop. 850). Illuminating the boons of metropolitan life were photographs of the Jacksons “swap[ping] literary gossip” with the Donald Ogden Stewarts at “21,” as well as paying a backstage visit to a bemused-looking Patricia Neal.

  6 As mentioned earlier, Cliff Hauman ultimately uses the tongs to pummel Grandin over the head when the latter makes his fatal pass at the Marine.

  7 Two years before, Spectorsky and his fiancée had gotten married in Orford as guests of the Jacksons—raising a few eyebrows (or so Jackson seemed to hope) since the Spectorskys were Jewish. Spectorsky went on to become literary editor of Playboy, the cultural profile (and circulation) of which he is rightly credited with elevating.

  Intermezzo

  Boom in Malaga

  Frederick “Boom” Jackson would lead a carefree life for the most part—remarkably so for a mid-century gay man from the provinces, and decidedly in contrast to the swooping ups and downs experienced by his more gifted, troubled brother. Both lives, each in its own way, were very interesting. As Charlie wrote in Farther and Wilder (as well as various other unpublished reminiscences), his little brother had been wildly popular throughout Europe—the sort of gilded youth who attracts comely people of all classes:

  He had not been the least bit impressed by his social success in Paris, London, St. Moritz, Davos, Berlin, the Riviera, Rome, Capri; he simply took it all for granted in the most disarming, artless way that only added to the charm he had been so unself-conscious of. Perhaps he was not genuinely loved, but he himself seemed to love everybody; he had, in short, a flair for life, all too rare in those blasé times in Europe between the Wars.

  While in Davos, Boom had fallen in love with a fellow TB patient named Hamlet (no less), who had planned to pursue a Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan, but soon died.1 Boom appears to have picked up the pieces with relative dispatch. At the height of his youthful beauty he was photographed in Paris by Man Ray and George Platt Lynes—the latter famous for his nude portraits of gorgeous young men, many of whom Lynes slept with. Along with his lovers Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott—a ménage that endured for years on two continents—Lynes was at the center of gay expatriate life in Europe, and for a while Boom was evidently part of their circle. Years later, during a 1947 holiday at Somerset Maugham’s villa in Cap Ferrat, Monroe Wheeler wrote nostalgically to Boom: “It is enchanting to be back here on the scene of my misspent youth and find nothing changed; many people I knew then are still here, and the youngsters are more beautiful than ever.… I think of you often very tenderly … and send my love.”

  Like his brother, Boom never returned to Europe after his final season in Davos (1933), though for the rest of his life he affected certain cosmopolitan mannerisms—always using his fork with his left hand, and abbreviating his middle name (Storrier) as “St” (a quirk that complicated his life a bit, as he was initially listed as “St. Jackson” in the phone book). Such refinement stood him in good stead as co-proprietor of Scotland Run Antiques in his adopted town of Malaga, New Jersey; the shop occupied the front of a charming old house (bought for him by Mr. Winthrop), and was named after a stream that ran behind the home of his lover, Dr. Jim Gates, two blocks away on Defiance Road. For three years or so, Boom’s business partner was another Winthrop protégé named Reggie Bacon, a former Shakespearean actor who was best remembered for playing Rosencrantz opposite his twin brother’s Guildenstern. His association with Boom, however, was troubled. Bacon, two years older, fancied himself an expert in antiques, treating Boom as a novice and acting highfalutin in general (he could recite even more Shakespeare than Charlie, and did, to the latter’s chagrin)—this despite humble origins on a farm in Gorham, Maine, to which he happily (for Boom) returned after his cottage in Malaga burned down in 1940. Alas, by then he’d gained the upper hand in Mr. Winthrop’s affections (“You can be sure Reggie loses no time inviting [Winthrop to Maine] on every possible occasion,” Charlie grimly noted), and when the latter died he left $75,000 to Bacon and a measly $3,000 to Boom.

  But again, Boom had a flair, and by then Scotland Run was a going concern. The quaint house on Harding Highway, with its two antique carousel horses out front (stylized versions of which appeared on Boom’s stationery and place mats), became a popular destination in the area, and soon Boom was supplying many of the better dealers in New York. Arguably, though, he was even more acclaimed for his stunningly intricate hand-braided rugs, custom-designed for well-heeled clients at a considerable fee. A nearby manufacturer of wool coats supplied Boom with scraps of fabric in every color, which he hung in his backyard barn and sold to his rug-making students—matronly women, mostly, who (according to a friend) were “just crazy about Boomer” and would have paid for the charm of his company alone.

  Charlie’s attitude was contemptuous. As far as he was concerned, Boom was a peddler of kitschy bric-a-brac (“you may expect [as a gift] some cracked object from the shop,” he wrote his daughter Sarah, “which is unkind of me but you know Boom’s shop”), and toward the end of his life he almost caused a permanent rift when he made a sneering reference to “Boom’s rag rugs.” By then, however—especially when things were going well in his own affairs—Charlie liked to say that he and Boom had little in common anymore. As he pointed out in Farther and Wilder, on the rare occasion that Don Birnam still thought of his little brother, Warwick, he couldn’t help picturing him “sitting in a corner of his living room, listening to a soap opera and sewing with elaborate gestures the carefully chosen, tightly-braided strands of a rug together”:

  And when Don recalled his brother’s gay days of study at the Art Students’ League and the often promising paintings of his early years, he was puzzled and saddened. Somewhere along the line Warwick had given up (Don never knew why); he must secretly have decided that he did not have real talent after all; he refused to compete with others, as if he was loath to be doomed to mediocrity in an art he loved; and at a comparatively early age—thirty at the most—he had retired to a small Delaware village that could hardly be called a village at all, to run an antique business, on the assumption, perhaps, that it was more sensible to be a big fish in a little pond. Life could do awful things to one; and it was sad to think that, after such a promising start, he had wound up nothing more than a small-town queen. But, in spite of a certain bitterness, he was happy. And who could say which of the two had instinctively chosen the righter way? As for Don, he was anything but happy; and he knew it.

  Who indeed could say? One might venture to suggest that Boom’s greatest talent had always been for friendship, and by accepting (quite cheerfully, it seems) his limitations as an artist he had freed himself to enjoy life. Boom had friends all over the world that he happily kept in touch with, and around Malaga he was a beloved figure. “He knew half of South Jersey,” said a neighbor, noting that it was hardly a secret Boom was gay. One reason he’d come to Malaga in the first place was that Don Hastings and Dan Crane, a couple he’d met among the theatre crowd in Brattleboro, had settled a block away on Harding Highway. And then of course there was his lifelong partner, Dr. Gates, who kept an office in nearby Bridgeton and came to Malaga on Wednesdays and weekends, when Boom was apt to have neighbors over for martinis and speak of his “gentleman caller.”

  All his neighbors became dear friends. Across the street were the Peeches: Harry, an insurance underwriter; Grace, his Scottish wife; and their children, Freddy and Barbara. Grace’s broadmindedness was apparent from the beginning, in 1936, when Boom and Charlie had approached Barbara at Malaga Lake and asked her to have lunch with them; the vivacious twelve-year-old went home to ask her mother’s permission, and Grace sized up the two strange men in their touring car and readily agreed—insisting, however, that the girl change out of her bathing suit into a little pink dress with bows on each shoulder, whereupon the brothers realized she was still a child. (At the restaurant, the waitress assumed that bald Charlie was her father.
) From that day on, Charlie and Boom were good friends with all the Peeches,2 and Barbara became especially close to Boom; she took a job at the DuPont plant after high school and spent the rest of her life in the Malaga area. Her one-time babysitter, Bea Smith (who lived three houses away on the lake), also worked at DuPont, and also became one of Boom’s most devoted friends, often doing secretarial work for Charlie.

  “Boom was Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle,” said a friend. “His house was this cozy place with lots of nice things to look at, and he loved to cook for you.” Before dinner, Boom would serve his guests martinis with an appetizer of scallions and salt; almost every night of his adult life, he allowed himself two cocktails, rarely more or less; unlike his brother, he didn’t feel any particular need to drink heavily. (After seeing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he wrote his niece Sarah: “But how terrible, the language was nothing compared to the viciousness and meanness in it.… How can people be so cruel? I think liquor helps, and therefore should be taken moderately.”) Any of the hundreds of friends he wrote letters to, and remembered with presents, were welcome to stay at his house whether he was home or not; he told them where to find the key, and they let themselves in at whatever hour and went to sleep in the downstairs bedroom.

  Every single day Boom wrote a postcard (at least) to his dearest friend in the world, Franny Ferrer, who lived across the country in Pacific Palisades. Boom had met Franny and her husband Mel when the couple were young actors in Brattleboro, and for the rest of his life he’d spend a few weeks out of every year visiting her family (with detours north to see his old pal Bick)—until, in 1953, Franny divorced Mel for the second time and asked Boom to marry her. He was wonderful with her children, and besides they loved each other and had such a good time. Boom, after some reflection, declined: “It would have been a damn bad idea,” said Franny’s daughter Pepa, whose first bath was given to her by Boom. “A lot of fun, but I don’t think so.” And meanwhile he stayed in touch with Mel, too, and became friends with his new wife, Audrey Hepburn.3 Perhaps this had something to do with Boom’s disapproval, in 1956, when Franny married the artist Howard Warshaw; he let his displeasure be known by sending the couple a set of towels monogrammed “F” as a wedding gift. When Warshaw proved a decent husband after all, he and Boom became friends, and Boom continued as a kind of surrogate father to Franny’s children, writing Pepa every day in college and attending her two weddings.