by Blake Bailey
THINGS BECAME unequivocally better that fall, when the Jacksons moved to a luxurious townhouse at 140 East 65th Street. New York, for Charlie, was conducive to work: he got into a healthier schedule, for one thing, since he wasn’t as tempted to stay up all night writing (or trying to); rather he quit around six o’clock and went out with charming, like-minded friends. Penitent about his bad behavior that summer, he was trying to be a better companion to Rhoda, who in turn was tactful when she suspected, from time to time, that he was still taking pills. “Only when his speech thickens can I really tell,” she wrote Boom. “But he is working so well, and it’s so important for him to, that I try to quell the uneasiness I feel.” The important part was that he did seem the old Charlie again, more or less, and Rhoda was determined to be supportive.
Most heartening of all was his decision to seek extensive psychoanalysis. The catalyst had been a last, embarrassing pill jag that August: Rhoda had gone to Maine with her sister and their children, and when she phoned home she “discovered [Charlie] was off again.” A doctor had interceded, and for many weeks afterward the despondent Charlie had been “lost”—“play[ing] solitaire for hours on end”—until finally he was forced to admit he could no longer stay sober without professional help.
He chose one of the most eminent psychiatrists in the country, Lawrence S. Kubie, president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, whose clients included (or would include) Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and the actor Clifton Webb, all of whom were conflicted over their homosexuality. Kubie was particularly interested in creative people—though some said it was celebrity that interested him foremost (“he was what was called even then a ‘star fucker,’ ” said playwright Arthur Laurents)—and perhaps because of his experience with such people he’d been asked, in 1942, to draft a paragraph titled “Sexual Perversions” that was added to the Army mobilization regulations: “Persons habitually or occasionally engaged in homosexual or other perverse sexual practices,” Kubie wrote, were “unsuitable for military service.” And how did one identify a homosexual? Kubie listed three of the most salient traits: “feminine bodily characteristics,” “effeminacy in dress and manner,” and “a patulous rectum.”
Homosexuality, in fact, seemed to fascinate Kubie almost as much as creativity per se, and he’d been a great admirer of The Fall of Valor. “I respect the book completely,” he wrote the novelist Laura Z. Hobson (Gentleman’s Agreement, et al.), a former lover who’d probably recommended his services to Jackson. Kubie’s main qualm with Valor had to do with Jackson’s handling of Ethel Grandin, whose bitterness on learning of her husband’s proclivities had not, Kubie thought, been explicated in properly clinical terms. As he wrote Hobson:
Blame it rather on the ancient and primitive and universal envy of the phallus. Her anger says, “How dare he, even if only in fantasy or impulse, share with another man that which they both already have, and which he merely loans to me so rarely and so briefly?” This is the inevitable source of her unforgiving hate; because for Grandin to turn to another man would seem to her to prove the truth of what she had always believed and dreaded anyhow, namely that men are whole and beautiful, and that women (and more particularly herself) are mutilated and repulsive.
But again, Kubie deemed the book basically sound, and couldn’t help wondering (“as I do so often”) whether it would benefit a “first-rate creative writer” such as Jackson, who surmised so much by intuition alone, to learn “more precise and more technical knowledge of human psychology.” Be that as it may, Kubie did find the novel’s ending misguided, since he thought Grandin had already gained the “insight” that would “free him emotionally toward Ethel”—in other words, that his homosexuality had effectively been cured—when he made that implausible pass at Cliff: “I suspect that something in Jackson made him punish Grandin in this fashion.”
On that last point, at least, he was on to something, as he would learn firsthand when Jackson began appearing six days a week at his office near the Metropolitan Museum. Later Jackson would bitterly claim that Kubie had charged him an exorbitant fee (“$40 a throw”), but at the time Kubie allegedly told his friend and eventual publisher, Roger Straus,1 that he was treating Jackson for free. As Straus remembered in 1978:
I said, “Larry, how come you are doing it free?” He said, “You know, I don’t like to do this because it’s just a question of policy, and I like Charlie,”—everybody loved Charlie, he was very popular—“But he is such a prototypical person, he has this terrible problem about his homosexuality, and it makes him juvenile, and in order to sort of keep himself going he goes into pills, he goes into alcohol, and it’s just a terrible adolescent thing that he has.”
One wonders whether “juvenile” is the right word for a married father of two who feels anxious and even suicidal about an orientation that was perceived by the greater part of society—abetted in no small part by the psychoanalytic establishment—as a sickness and a crime. In 1948, it was none other than Kubie who most notably rose to his colleagues’ defense when Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which found that the psychoanalytic view of homosexuality as “abnormal” was not supported by evidence suggesting that it was, in fact, a quite prevalent practice: “A choice of a partner in a sexual relation becomes more significant only because society demands that there be a particular choice in this matter,” Kinsey wrote, “and does not so often dictate one’s choice of food and of clothing.” Kubie—perceived as a relative moderate in such matters—replied that the actual position among most psychoanalysts was that homosexuality could be viewed “as either normal or neurotic or … a mixture of both,” but that certainly it was Kubie’s view that neurosis was more likely to be found among homosexuals than not. Time magazine, with no little glee, subsequently announced that Kubie had “unraveled the Kinsey report,” and quoted him in somewhat franker terms on the subject: “The implication that because homosexuality is prevalent we must accept is as ‘normal,’ or as a happy and healthy way of life,” said Kubie, “is wholly unwarranted.” An understandable position, given that much of Kubie’s own practice was devoted to “curing” or at least mitigating homosexuality.
The gist of what Kubie told Jackson, as the latter would recall seven years later, was as follows: “That I had a deep psychological aversion to ‘success,’ that I suffered from a compulsion to toss it all overboard, and that I had not really wanted it in the first place.” This was in keeping with the common neo-Freudian idea of homosexuals as “psychic masochists”—espoused most notoriously by Edmund Bergler, the highly esteemed author of a 1956 manifesto, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (a strictly rhetorical title). According to Bergler and most of his colleagues, the male homosexual remained unconsciously angry at his mother for not giving him enough breast milk, and since he could not punish her (and risk even further neglect) he became his own worst enemy—mostly by denying himself the love of women, but also by sabotaging his life in various other ways. Bergler ended his book on a strident but oddly optimistic note, pointing out (in italics) that this loathsome “disease” was, after all, treatable:
The only effective way of fighting and counteracting homosexuality would be the wide dissemination of the knowledge that there is nothing glamorous about suffering from the disease known as homosexuality, that the disease can be cured, and that this apparently sexual disorder is invariably coupled with severe unconscious self-damage that will inevitably show up outside the sexual sphere as well, because it embraces the entire personality.
But stridency, vis-à-vis Jackson at least, wasn’t the problem with Kubie. Though he could be quite confrontational when the situation warranted it—the psychoanalyst, he wrote, “must be merciless in forcing a patient to face his neurosis,” which might explain why he saw fit to scream at Tennessee Williams in imitation of the playwright’s father—toward Jackson he assumed a more conventional “tabula rasa” approach, sitting behind the patient in almost total silence. As Jackson wrote Dor
othea Straus in 1951, “I never knew if he were doing a cross-word puzzle while I rambled on, if he had gone to sleep, or even if he had left the room.” Soon enough Jackson decided, in effect, that he could listen to himself talk for free, and terminated therapy. Kubie, however, endeavored to stay in touch. In 1953 he expressed an interest in chatting about Charlie with their mutual friend Dorothea (“give Kubie a wide berth,” Jackson warned her), and occasionally he commented on Jackson’s work: “This is the kind of thing that we psychologists hope literature will do,” he wrote of “The Boy Who Ran Away,” what with its satisfying implications of homosexual masochism and immaturity.
JACKSON WOULD later consider his third novel, The Outer Edges, another relative failure, frankly admitting that he was “over-drugged” when he wrote it. But then, he was serving two masters—Mammon (that is, MGM) and his own artistic conscience—and under the circumstances he was even more blocked than usual. Once he resumed taking drugs, though, the novel proceeded very breezily indeed: after scrapping a number of false starts, he began the final version on October 10, 1947, and finished exactly two months later. All that remained was the vexing question of a catchy title (one “that would suit both the movies and Rinehart”), and among the many he considered were The Lost Generation, Rendezvous with Murder, This Is Murder, I’ll Pray for You, Pray for Me, I’ll Shed No Tears, No Tears to Shed, and In Every Man. Flummoxed, he sent the manuscript to his friend Dorothy Parker, who was known to have a knack for such things. “I’ve got it!” she announced over the phone: “Crime and Punishment, Junior.”
Given his relative haste and method of composition, Jackson worried that his latest novel was somewhat less than first-rate, though his publisher and even Rhoda claimed to like it, as did many of the myriad friends to whom he naturally sent advance copies. Charles Brackett, who’d been less than enthusiastic about The Fall of Valor (“I think you listened to too many people”), found The Outer Edges “an advance” and noted that its hero, Jim Harron,2 was “self-portraiture at its best.” Fredric Wertham was also warmly complimentary as ever, applauding the author for showing “greater understanding and insight than did the psychiatrists who handled the [Haight] case.” Rinehart & Company was going to considerable lengths to promote the novel, commissioning a profile of Jackson by Lincoln Barnett,3 an author and Life editor who perhaps had something to do with an article that appeared in the magazine a week before The Outer Edges was published: “Authors’ Ordeal,” about Jackson’s appearance (with Cleveland Amory and three others) at an event sponsored by the Richmond Junior League. Jackson, looking polite but rather pained, was featured in an inset column titled “How to Question an Author”:
“How does it feel to be famous?” (Sir, won’t you have a drink?) …
“What’s your new book about?” (You really pick some odd subjects—well, I mean alcoholism and homosexuals, you know.)
“Why did you become a writer?” (Did you just start writing the story of your own life?)
This, according to Life, was the “most grueling and most embarrassing experience” that an author is forced to endure, and Jackson “was the favorite target of inquisitors at Richmond.”
Meanwhile MGM decided to drop its option: “It was an interesting idea, and Jackson has carried it out,” their reader commented, adding however that the narrative was too “disjointed” for effective dramatization. Billy Wilder had also been “very much interested,” according to the Times, and his friendship with Jackson pretty much ended when he decided to pass. That left producer and director Robert Rossen, who bought the rights for the “announced” price of fifty thousand dollars—that is to say, considerably less: since he wanted to pay a sizable fee under the table to blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (one of the “Hollywood Ten”), Rossen could only afford five thousand dollars up front for Jackson, with thirty thousand dollars payable once production began. The following summer (1949) Columbia announced it was ready to start shooting The Outer Edges in November (“I couldn’t be happier about it,” said Jackson, more strapped for cash than ever), but Rossen apparently decided not to follow All the King’s Men with a movie about a child murderer.
Hopes for the book, anyway, had been high. An early “Forecast for Buyers” in Publishers Weekly was nothing but upbeat, given the “big ad campaign” planned by Rinehart for this “effective and skillful novel,” as well as the impressive sales of Jackson’s previous efforts—which, as it happened, would decidedly not prove the case this time around: within two months, sales of The Outer Edges had petered out just shy of the twenty thousand mark. Baumgarten blamed it on a “very bad book year,” since after all the novel had been mostly well received, at least at the outset. Nash K. Burger, in the Times Book Review of May 27, 1948, called it a “fast-moving, many-sided narrative,” and while he thought Jackson hadn’t treated his theme “as extensively or profoundly as he might have,” the novel “could hardly be improved on” within its limited scope. Three days later, in the daily Times, William DuBois gushed without reservation (or nuance) that Jackson had “rung another bull’s-eye” that was bound to “hold a wide public spellbound”: “[He] belongs among the truly creative writers of his time—among the novelists capable of dissecting our present-day jitter-and-fritter down to its benzedrine-ridden heart.” Similarly, in the Saturday Review, Lee Rogow applauded the book as “craftsmanlike, tough, exciting … a considerable growth in the author’s interests, and in his talent.”
Sterling North’s early demurral in the New York Post was, alas, more indicative of things to come: Jackson’s “theory that all men are potentially criminals,” North wrote, not only helped explain the vast circulation of the “ ‘yellow’ press” as well as “brutal and vicious” comic books, but also “the success of Mr. Jackson’s novels.” A week later Lewis Gannett essentially agreed in the New York Herald Tribune, calling The Outer Edges “a tabloid blow-up, in the form of a novel,” whereupon the graver weekly magazines tended to follow suit in more elaborate, punitive terms. That a murderer is not dissimilar to the general run of mankind, wrote J. M. Lalley in The New Yorker, was a “rather shallow” point of view on Jackson’s part, albeit symptomatic “of the new literary puritanism, with its insistence on the total depravity of human nature and its doctrine that grace consists in recognizing the inherent evil in oneself.” And doubtless Jackson winced at John Woodburn’s judgment, in The New Republic, that he had “whipped out a quickie while his publisher breathed down his neck,” and never mind a late, perfunctory slur in Time (“The Lost Effort”) that The Outer Edges was a “chapter from Freud-made-easy.”
The latter judgments are too harsh. Certainly whole libraries of sociocultural texts could be devoted to Jackson’s main themes, and hence such a brief, impressionistic novel is bound to seem shallow at points. Simply as a piece of craftsmanship, though, The Outer Edges is in fact (as per Brackett and others) an “advance” on Jackson’s earlier work—certainly not superior in a larger sense to The Lost Weekend, but arguably more successful in terms of a tight, conventional narrative, and far more engaging than the dreary Fall of Valor. “I find that the faster I write this one, the better,” Jackson remarked to Baumgarten, sensing that the intellectual demands of his book were potentially overwhelming, and that he was better off sticking as closely as possible to the basic mechanics of plot.
The primary thematic questions may be boiled down as follows: Why are we so fascinated by acts of gruesome perversity, as sensationalized by the modern American media? What is it about humanity, and our society in particular, that makes us so susceptible? As Jackson would have it, there is more than a touch of guilt in our titillation—a sense of vicarious urgency bubbling up from the murky unconscious, and thus the novel’s epigraph from Plutarch: “Geographers crowd into the outer edges of their maps the parts of the world which they know nothing about, adding a note, ‘What lies beyond is sandy desert full of wild beasts,’ or ‘blind marsh,’ or ‘Scythian cold,’ or ‘frozen sea.’ ” Such “universal gu
ilt” is shared by the protagonist, Jim Harron, “an ordinary fellow” who makes good money as public relations director for a major airline. Lest Harron seem ordinary to the point of Grandin-like dullness, though, the author touches him up with chiaroscuro borrowed from his own personality: an “irrepressible boyish ebullience” that can change in a moment to petulance, an essential “gayety and kindness” that is matched or surpassed by an “inaccessible, resisting, foreign” darkness. Harron—a doting father and husband, who usually feels only minor qualms about keeping a mistress (though he sometimes suspects “depths of viciousness” in himself)—is tipped into a panic of self-loathing by the widely publicized rape and murder of two little girls, until he finds himself identifying with both the victims’ father, Aylmer Smith, and their murderer, Aaron Adams: “Was it possible to suffer bereavement of children he had never known? Was it possible for a man to feel guilty of a crime he did not commit?” Unfortunately for the novel, one is inclined to answer no—or rather not as bereaved and guilty as Harron, who ultimately seeks out Aylmer Smith and offers money in restitution for his own far-fetched sense of kinship with the murderer. “If his trip to see the father of the victims has any drama it escaped me as it will thousands,” wrote MGM’s reader, echoing Baumgarten’s perplexity on the same point. Which is to say, heterosexual adultery was a weak objective-correlative for the more criminal (circa 1948) homosexual kind that haunted the author, and even then the connection with homicidal pedophilia was tenuous at best.
