by Blake Bailey
But critics were more apt to complain about Jackson’s characterization of the murderer, Aaron Adams, whose callous brutality seemed too awful to be true. Mel Heimer, a journalist who’d covered the Haight case, remarked that such criticism made him “shake [his] head sadly, because he was real, just the way Jackson drew him …” Adams embodies the banality of evil, years before the phrase was coined. Gratified by all the attention he’s getting, the childlike murderer recounts his crime “with intelligence and evident enjoyment”:
“I strangled one of them with a handkerchief and the other one with my belt. I had fun with them for awhile, and then just kept driving around. Jeepers, I must have traveled a couple hundred miles, today.…”
“Did you do it after they were dead, or before?”
“Do what?”
“Molest them.”
“Oh, before. What do you think?”
Just as an alcoholic is in the grip of forces beyond his control, Jackson suggests that a psychopath like Adams is another kind of Everyman, unbridled by such an elusive and perhaps imaginary concept as “free will”: “His fate cried out; he had gone as relentlessly and surely to his fulfillment as if others had driven him to it. The moment arrived, and he, not the children, was the unwitting, the unwilling victim.” The second part of this formulation is a bit much—it’s hard to see how the children are less victims than the murderer—but to a disturbing degree Jackson does succeed in humanizing Adams as “a young primitive, happy to be alive,” who indulges his viciousness simply because it’s his nature, his “fate,” to do so. And such nature does not entertain remorse, but rather longs for ever greater stimulation: “I’d like to have a big four-engine bomber,” Adams says at the end, “ … a great big one … and fly high over a big city.…”
A longing for excitement is another thing Adams has in common with the rest of humanity (“It was only a question of degree,” as Grandin mused in a different but not unrelated context)—indeed, his rampage is explained in part by a desire to re-create the thrill he’d felt one “famous night last winter when his parents’ house had been destroyed by fire and his mother burned alive.” Among the postwar middle class, meanwhile, is an all but rabid need to be entertained with accounts of sex and violence, the better to compensate for the bleak, repressive boredom of a society where material comfort is the highest good. Jackson is especially mindful of the plight of suburban matrons such as Harron’s wife, Ruth, and the Bovaryesque Fan French: Ruth’s “deepest interest”—essentially the only one permitted her—is her husband, whereas “his interests were scattered and diverse, absorbed equally in his home and his wife and his child, his work, his hobbies, his outside pleasures, and other people”; as for Fan French’s husband—a smugly prosperous oaf—he likes to point out that he’d never hire a chauffeur because driving him to the train station “gave Fan something to do.” Desperate not to seem as otiose as she feels, Fan becomes morbidly aware of her housemaids, Hazel and Edith, and wracks her brain for ways to seem occupied when one of them enters a room; otherwise her inner life is dominated by fantasies afforded by a suave radio personality, Curley Kendrick, whose four o’clock program is the high point of her day. To be sure, Fan doesn’t ultimately resort to murder by way of transcending the emptiness of her life, but she does end up sleeping with Kendrick, whose real-life loutishness leads to a wan epiphany: “There didn’t seem to be anything left but to settle down to the life of another Westchester wife and accept that fact. Try and stay busy when Hazel and Edith were in the room, drive Del to the station and be sure he was on time for his train, wait for the new magazines to come. A hell of a life but that’s what it was.”
Fan French’s story is one of several recurring threads in the novel that have only a slight connection to the main narrative (Fan’s car is forced off the road by the murderer at one point). That Jackson found his themes a little too capacious for his own good is suggested by his last-minute idea to include one more discrete vignette (as Chapter Sixty-one, which would have followed Fan’s shabby tryst with Kendrick) about a genteel nymphomaniac named Jane Sommeier. This further illustration of boredom and anomie would eventually be turned into a short story (“Janie”) and later cannibalized into A Second-Hand Life, but was deemed a little too random even for so fragmented a work as The Outer Edges. Not that the episodic narrative is always a liability: jumping from scene to scene makes for a lively reading experience, and was probably a nice relief for the author, too, as he declined to fret overmuch about fine points of architecture or character development. But sometimes his facility seems slipshod to a fault: dialogue would never be Jackson’s forte, and his promiscuous use of words like “jeepers” and “cripes” (“Why jeepers, what in cripes was he waiting for?”) fails to evoke his murderer’s psyche in any very nuanced way, and again he resorts to dismal clichés (Harron’s mistress sends “hot shivers of excitement up his spine”), all of which serve as reminders that the novel was dictated to a secretary, hastily, with the movies in mind.
For all that, though, The Outer Edges showed signs of growing virtuosity. No less a novelist than Angus Wilson, reviewing the British edition for The Listener, thought Jackson was the man to write a definitive satire “upon the sad, sophisticated, sex-ridden never-grown-ups that appear to form the business community of the rich American suburbs.” At the very least, one had to wonder what Jackson might achieve if he ever buckled down, took his time, and really focused his talent (soberly?) on the right material.
WHEN MGM PASSED on its option, and book sales began to slump, Jackson was forced to take another Hollywood screenwriting job beginning in July 1948. The project began, at least, auspiciously: for two thousand dollars a week he was hired to write a screenplay titled The Third Secret for Lewis Milestone, who in 1930 had directed one of Jackson’s favorite movies, All Quiet on the Western Front. Indeed, theirs was something of a mutual admiration society. Not only had Milestone (“Milly”) read Jackson’s novels, but he adored “Palm Sunday” and “Rachel’s Summer” too—or so it seemed one night in Chasen’s, when Jackson observed the volatile Bessarabian “[holding] an audience of about ten spellbound” with detailed accounts of both stories. Jackson had also managed to endear himself during his first Hollywood summer in 1944, when he’d been pressed against a wall by Milestone’s wife and regaled for some two hours about one nugatory topic after another; whenever Jackson endeavored to reply, she’d stare at him blankly and resume her spiel. “Only after a long time did I get it,” Jackson wrote: “she is stone deaf, must do all the talking because.”
That summer Rhoda finally went out to the Coast to see what it was all about, reporting to Baumgarten that her trip had been “fun, if a little wearing.” Probably more than a little wearing. A few days after her return, on August 1, Charlie received a bill for three hundred dollars from one Gabriel Segall, a psychiatrist, whose nurse Julie had written a chirpy note addressed to “General Jackson,” congratulating him on his “strong and courageous battle”: “May I add, General, that your adjuncts are right proud of you and also of any part they may have played in assisting you to reach this victory. Perhaps we are a good team!” The battle in question had been the beginning of what appeared to be a psychotic break on Jackson’s part, doubtless exacerbated by pills and alcohol; since a quick recovery was imperative—before, that is, word spread that Charles Jackson was off the rails again—he’d engaged a private hospital room, where he was intensively treated by Dr. Segall and his staff. As he would recount the episode in Farther and Wilder, his nurse had sat by the bed “pretending to read a detective story” while the terrified, sweat-drenched patient watched a sinister woman peeking at him from behind a canvas screen—a “vicious vigil” that finally caused him to shoot up in bed, “like a trap unsprung,” and complain that he must be “losing [his] mind,” because he saw a woman who wasn’t there. The nurse assured him that he wasn’t losing his mind—because, after all, he knew she wasn’t there.
The fact is, for most of Jack
son’s adult life—more and more as he got older—he displayed all the classic symptoms of bipolar disorder, or manic depression, as it was then known. “But it was humiliating, dumbfounding, and defeating,” he wrote in Farther and Wilder, “that these conflicting extremes of well-being and despair, achievement and collapse, could run together side by side in the same life—an ironic and deadly paradox, like fatal poison and healing antidote indiscriminately mixed in the same vessel.” In The Lost Weekend, too, Don Birnam reflects on his “pattern” of “peaks and depths,” while Jackson himself often observed that his favorite contemporary poet was the manic-depressive Robert Lowell: “[His] poems, which I love, couldn’t be more personal & intimate unless they began, each one, ‘Dear Charlie.…’ ” In those days, symptoms of bipolar disorder were usually viewed from a psychodynamic perspective—as being largely the result of unconscious conflicts, in other words, rather than a chemical imbalance that required a more biomedical approach. Once the disease became better understood, after Jackson’s death, his family realized he’d almost certainly been bipolar to some degree. This would help explain the “boyish ebullience,” the bursts of frantic creativity, coupled with long spells of utter apathy and self-loathing (“Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small,” Lowell had written in one of Jackson’s favorite poems), to say nothing of the self-medicating substance abuse, wild spending sprees, grandiosity, and occasionally voracious libido.
That summer in Hollywood, Jackson reconciled with his former friend Sally Benson (the writer who, a few years back, had butchered his only New Yorker story), when the two spent a long evening confiding their very similar problems: Benson, too, had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse related to an ungovernably erratic temperament. “She is about mid-way between Judy Garland and me (if you know what I mean),” Charlie wrote Rhoda (who did). Garland, too, was given to wild extremes of “euphoria and suffering,” as Jackson put it in Farther and Wilder, where Garland appears as “Maxine.” During his previous trip to Hollywood the year before (May 1947), Jackson had visited the soundstage where Garland was shooting a scene for The Pirate—a wrenching experience he recalled in his novel. Garland (“primed with dexedrine”) was on the verge of a breakdown, and Louis Mayer had hired a psychiatrist to mind her on the set; “her brown calf’s eyes had struck to [Don’s] heart,” Jackson wrote of Maxine, “but, for his own salvation, he had rigorously rejected her at the same instant.” Jackson—trying to stave off hysteria himself—knew only too well what was coming, and sure enough Garland soon succumbed to an uncontrollable screaming fit at the Gershwins’; finally, just before The Pirate finished shooting, she slit her wrists when she caught Vincente Minnelli in bed with another man. A year later she was still fragile, and Jackson was neither surprised nor (very) disappointed when she cancelled their only dinner engagement, explaining that her two-year-old, Liza, had measles.4
Jackson liked to say that the only “great originals” ever to come out of Hollywood were Chaplin, Garbo, and Garland, and during that 1948 visit he had much better luck with the first two. He’d met Chaplin the year before, and during a dinner at the Ferrers he was delighted when Chaplin greeted him warmly and chided him for not being in touch, inviting him to a lavish party two weeks later. Thus Jackson was sitting near Chaplin’s pool, chatting with the actress Constance Collier, when he almost fell over “dead of shock”: Garbo had just walked by! Jackson couldn’t bring himself to approach the beloved apparition, until Chaplin himself insisted he come along and be introduced. “Well, she couldn’t have been nicer,” he wrote Rhoda. “It’s futile to try to tell you how stunning she is—in every way: voice, looks, eyes, speech, manner, charm, and, surprisingly, real humor and wit. She talked to me again and again during the afternoon, and seemed to know that I had long admired her and thus she was specially nice to me, as if giving something of herself.” Her pettish refusal to meet him four years before (as “Miss Harriet Brown,” re his abortive Seagull) apparently didn’t come up. “Between Chaplin and Garbo, it was Quite A Day,” he happily concluded of the two idols whose framed, inscribed portraits (“From Charlie to Charlie” in Chaplin’s case) he would avidly flaunt to the end.
Suffice it to say, Lewis Milestone would not appear in this pantheon. For the first few weeks, Jackson’s relations with “Milly” were so serene that his only complaint was having “to eat strange foods like shashlik.” By the end of August, the honeymoon was almost over. For a long week the two had holed up in Milestone’s beach house in Ventura County, bickering over the script; the director, said Jackson, was “all childish stormy ego, which is okay so long as it is yessed, but bad when disagreed with.” Still, he felt confident that his finished product was good enough to mollify even Milestone—but he was mistaken. The director, he decided, was “nothing less than a pig—wants much too much, and I told him I would never work for him again (nor would any other writer I could get to and warn) if he paid me ten thousand a week.” Milestone had demanded he remain in Hollywood an extra week (at least) to work on revisions, but Jackson arranged to depart in keeping with his original contract, quite certain his script would “be entirely re-written and ruined” whether he stayed or not.
A copy of Jackson’s script remains among his papers—a curious artifact. “There is the secret you dare tell only your best friend,” reads a portentous “FOREWORD” that was to scroll among the opening credits. “There is the secret you dare tell only yourself. There is the secret you dare not even tell yourself. This story is about the third of these secrets.” The man with a secret is Frank Ransome, an editor at a sophisticated magazine (“like the old VANITY FAIR”) who begins to notice he’s being followed by a mysterious person in a white suit and mourning band. This proves to be Harry Layne, an old friend whom Ransome hasn’t seen in nine years—ever since he broke off an affair with Layne’s wife, Irene, who has recently died. Now alcoholic and distraught, Layne is living in a seedy New York hotel with his traumatized eight-year-old daughter, Frances, whom he torments by threatening to hang himself whenever she cries. The titular “secret” is that Ransome himself is Frances’s father, an inkling of which causes a guilty pain in his liver. Layne explains that Irene used to get the same pain, and nurses Ransome with compresses and hot tea until a bizarre climax, when the ailing Ransome wakes up just in time to stop Layne from murdering him with a razor. Two years later (dénouement), Ransome and Frances—now legally father and daughter—encounter Layne with a shrewish new wife at a train station, whereupon the henpecked lunatic ducks into the club car, while Frances and Ransome indulge in a bit of undismayed, Dickensian laughter: The End. The movie, never made, was Jackson’s last attempt to write for the big screen.
AFTER HE’D FINISHED The Fall of Valor, Jackson had been eager to get started on his Proustian saga, What Happened. By then his magnum opus—“which will earn me (I truly know) an international prestige”—had begun “plaguing [him] day and night,” but at the time he simply couldn’t afford to take a three-year (at least) break from more lucrative, less demanding projects. By 1948, however, Jackson could hardly wait to get on with it, realizing that another hastily written failure like The Outer Edges might damage his reputation beyond repair, and besides he felt certain that he was at the height of his powers—indeed, that it was now or never.
But alas, Jackson had a big nut—the mansion in New Hampshire, the townhouse on the Upper East Side, children in private school, a lavish fondness for pretty things—and his financial situation seemed almost immune to improvement. That summer in Hollywood, then, he’d found himself sorely tempted on meeting the great Fanny Brice, who was shopping around for a biographer to tell her story on a more or less fifty-fifty financial basis. “When I meet the guy I’ll know him,” she said, whereupon Jackson tried to look “keen as all hell” and ask “Just the Right Leading Questions” as to how Brice had gone from a ragamuffin singing for pennies to an internationally acclaimed star. “Anyway,” he wooed her afterward, “whether we like it or not, Fanny dear, we’re
hooked. I won’t be able to get you out of my system until I try to explore and capture on paper that personality that is yours and those tremendous gifts that are yours.”
Brice’s agent, Abe Lastfogel, drew up the papers, and Leonard Lyons announced to the world that the famous comedienne had finally found her “ideal” biographer: “Jackson was about to start his new novel, but found the Brice offer irresistible. It was a package-deal, covering magazine serialization, book publications, movie sale and the screenplay—which would net him more than $200,000.” Jackson wrote Brice that she would likely consider it “so much bull-shit” (a rare bit of profanity on his part, the better to seem a fellow rough-diamond type) if he claimed that his “chief interest” in such a project was “the story of Fanny Brice and to hell with the money, but the fact is that this wild-sounding statement isn’t far from the truth”; to the Gershwins, however, he admitted that his interest was pretty much equally divided between the two, Brice and money. In fact he was utterly miserable: he’d already interrupted What Happened to work on the Milestone script, and now he was proposing himself as a show-business biographer. Hardly the sort of thing Proust would do.
