by Blake Bailey
Though Jackson was hardly more “concise” than Anderson—at least in his ruminative short fiction—his best work justifies the comparison, and indeed The Sunnier Side was conceived in some ways as a deliberate homage. Like Winesburg, Ohio, Jackson’s book follows the progress of a particular character, keenly self-conscious, who observes, judges, and is victimized by the repressive hypocrisy of small-town America. In both cases, too, there’s a kind of tortured ambivalence—nostalgia for the pastoral loveliness of the hero’s native land, the place where he was young, and sympathy for its more “grotesque” inhabitants, stunted by a paranoic, insular society. Both books follow the same pattern of initiation, and certain stories and characters are inevitably similar. The young teacher in Anderson’s “Hands” can’t help caressing his pupils’ hair and shoulders in a fluttery, tentative way, until he’s run out of town by neighbors who assume the worst (knowing their own impulses all too well); the rough equivalent among Jackson’s stories, “Palm Sunday,” involves a more predatory teacher, whose less ambiguous violation of the village children results in a different but no less plausible response—that is, his neighbors know and yet pretend not to know, since such matters can’t be acknowledged among “nice” people. Meanwhile Don Birnam and Winesburg’s George Willard grow increasingly aware of these uncomfortable realities—the penultimate stories in both books (almost surely by design on Jackson’s part) are titled “Sophistication”—until they decide to leave their hometowns for good. Aptly, the final story in The Sunnier Side is “Rachel’s Summer,” which ends with the adult Don returning to Arcadia to visit his mother and learning, for the first time, the rumor of Rachel’s pregnancy that had compounded the tragedy of her early death and cast a further pall over his mother’s life:
I got up and walked to the window. I didn’t trust myself to speak, and I knew I would have to wait quite a while. I looked out the window at the street—this street I had played in, it seemed, all my life—and across the way was the house that always resounded to the thumping of a player piano, and next to it was the O’Connells’ house, and next to that was Mrs. Kirtle’s neat little home, kept neat and trim and painted for her by the son who now lived in New York, the same as I did. What drew us back to this town, anyway, and why did we ever come home?
Thus Don is, at last, disabused of any lingering nostalgia for the place. We leave him standing at the window gazing at the street where he grew up—the same street and yet so unlike the one in “A Band Concert,” the second story in the book (after the prefatory “apologia” of “The Sunnier Side”): on that street, as a child, Don had watched the Dettersons’ hired girl, Angela, return to her employer in disgrace, having been seduced (implicitly) by an Italian on the canal bank. “I guess Angela has had her fling,” Mr. Detterson sardonically remarks, and the innocent Don, overhearing, imagines “a lovely picture of Angela leaning over the balustrade of a balcony, flushed and happy, tossing flowers to a throng of admirers below.”
Such a deft patterning of narrative point of view—from innocence to experience, and in the best stories (such as “Palm Sunday,” in which the adult narrator considers his adolescent self) a nuanced mingling of both—enhances the book’s unity of effect, as Poe would have it, so that one can safely say The Sunnier Side is greater than the sum of its parts. Jackson himself thought so: despite his downright aversion to certain stories (“One or two I actually cannot bear to re-read”), the book itself remained “the one [he was] fondest of,” as opposed to his best; as he inscribed one copy to friends, “I put love in it.”
A FEW WEEKS before publication of The Sunnier Side, the Newark Courier alerted its readers that Jackson’s book was “definitely” about Newark and seemed intended more as an exposé than a serious work of fiction: “There seems to be little plot to the narrative, in truth it seems to be more of a diary that the author might have kept in his boyhood days.” Jackson, naturally, would have demurred (the writer “must essentially draw from life as he sees it, lives it, overhears it, or steals it,” he’d noted in the title story, “and the truer the writer, perhaps, the bigger the blackguard”), though certainly he didn’t expect his former neighbors to pardon him on aesthetic grounds; indeed, he’d made a point of visiting Newark the previous autumn “while [he still could],” as he wrote the Strauses, “that is, before the book comes out.”
Trouble had been brewing ever since the appearance of “Tenting Tonight,” though it might have been worse: originally Charlie had changed the name “Bloomer” to “Harrison,” before realizing that he’d “unconsciously” used the name of his old playmate Harrison Bloomer, who now owned the box factory where Herb Jackson was assistant superintendent. Charlie was careful, then, to rename the family “Blanchard” in the story, since he “thought it best to ‘protect’ [his] brother to this extent; though he’ll be sore as hell at the story, and so will Harrison and all the Bloomers.” He was right, of course, though “sore” was a reductive term for what Herb was; he was also mortified, incredulous, etc. “Look, Charlie,” he protested: “I still live here! I know these people! They know me!” But it was no good, and for Charlie’s part there was no point explaining the Artist’s Prerogative and so forth. Besides, in various ways, it had always been thus: in 1930, when Charlie had first returned to Newark from Europe, he wore a Basque beret he’d been wearing abroad for a year, until Herb took him aside and begged him to desist: “For my sake if not your own. Please. What will people think?”
After The Sunnier Side, Herb pretty much gave up. “For Christ’s sake, here’s another one!” he’d cry, whenever his brother’s stories appeared, whereupon he’d retire to his backyard barn and lie low, drinking and brooding. Indeed, more and more Herb sought refuge in the barn—for any number of reasons—refusing to travel or even go to parties. “It was his safe place,” said his oldest daughter, Sally, who remembered many curious things about their lives in Newark. Since Herb stayed in the barn, his cronies would come to him: every Saturday night they’d gather around a potbellied stove and get drunk, while Herb’s wife, Bob, brought them Boston baked beans and sticky buns. Every now and then a friend would totter into the house to use the bathroom, and Sally’s older brother would make her hide. Years later she went to a psychiatrist—“I was so afraid of men”—who helped her remember things she’d “blanked out” about her youth: those friends of her father, for instance, who used to drunkenly ask where she was, or a foul-smelling dentist who held her down and groped her breasts when she was thirteen. At the time Bob refused to believe it (“Oh Sal, not dear Dr.——”), though at length she grudgingly agreed to accompany the girl to her next appointment. “If your mother ever saw life as it really was,” an old family physician once said to Sally, “she’d be destroyed.”
Herb, in turn, seemed to err on the side of caution, and to this end he endeavored to know as much as possible about his neighbors (“He was the kind of guy who’d call you up and tell you if your attic light is on,” said Gilbert Burgess, the son of Charlie’s childhood friend Jack). If Sally mentioned a boy she liked, her father would promptly veto any prospect of dating him, because—as he happened to know—the boy’s cousin (or whatever) had done this or that. And while Herb made a point of passing out lollipops to the children of the neighborhood, he had little in the way of lollipops for his own family. Sally was a particular target: though she made straight A’s in school, played every sport, and took care of her younger siblings (with little help from her father, who spent almost all nonworking hours in the barn), Herb seemed constantly in a rage at her, drunkenly “grounding” her again and again whenever she got “fresh.” And Sally—as her mother often assured her—was his favorite. Her younger sister, Martha, later told her son that she’d been “scared to death” of her angry, agoraphobic father, and implored him not to make the same mistake with his children.
“I couldn’t wait to get out [of Newark],” said Sally. “I hated the fact that everybody knew every move I was making. What they didn’t hear, they t
hought they knew, and they’d spread it around anyway.” She found escape in marriage, moving to nearby Rochester, which was far enough away to discourage her father (“He’d walk in, look around, and say ‘Time to go home’ ”). More congenial by far were visits to her kindly uncle Boom in Malaga, where she’d made a point of taking her fiancé for a weekend shortly before the marriage, having “wonderful times” and finding little amiss in Boom’s friendship with the courtly local doctor. “Do you know your fiancé’s gay?” Boom puckishly remarked to Sally at her wedding. “He’s so polite!” “Takes one to know one,” a family member glossed, and Sally, thoroughly puzzled, mentioned as much to her parents. “Don’t listen to them!” they insisted, appalled, meaning any of them.
Whatever the truth of the matter—she and her husband got along fine—a day came when Sally’s grown-up son, Bill, summoned her to Syracuse and took her for a walk: “I think I’m gay,” he announced, and his mother blurted (“without even thinking”), “If you think I’m going to love you any less, you’re crazy.” Bill became a protocol manager for drug research studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s AIDS service, as well as an HIV case manager at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. When his partner was dying of AIDS, he asked his mother to come along for hospital visits (“I learned so much about compassion from my son”), and soon after, when Bill himself was dying, his mother stayed by his bed and finally made the decision to take him off life support.
Still, in some ways, she remained her parents’ daughter. A born-again Christian, Sally doesn’t keep any of Uncle Charlie’s books in her house. “To me, he wrote about the seamier side,” she said, unwittingly echoing one of his critics. “I remember thinking [of his characters]: those people never wanted people to know what they were thinking, and I didn’t want to know these things either.”
1 “Who was Charles Jackson?” his best friend Dorothea Straus wrote in 1973. “Less than ever was I able to answer that question.… it seemed that several human beings emerged under one name.”
2 Jackson had originally proposed to set the preamble in 1943, shortly after Don first becomes famous as author of Present Fears, “a serious but popular play … which has had a striking success on Broadway and in the movies.” When Jackson finally wrote the bulk of “Preview,” however (c. 1953–54), he decided to set it rather in 1947, the better to account for Don’s already rather jaded attitude toward his own success.
3 Originally Jackson had planned to include in his first story collection a lot of unpublished early material—written before The Lost Weekend had made him famous—but the scheme changed somewhat, as we shall see, once he began to write other “Arcadian Tales,” beginning with the story “Tenting Tonight” in December 1948.
4 In the story Jackson transcribed this letter almost word for word, tweaking the prose here and there and adding a few lines to emphasize his theme and give the piece its title: “It’s nice to know that you can write about the sunnier side of life, life as it is & should be,” he added to Miss Heniore’s first paragraph, and then to her fourth, “Still it sometimes does seem a pity that a man with your gifts should dwell so much on the morbid & sordid, neglecting the sunnier side aforementioned & the wholesome.” Also, of course, he changed the names of “the great triumvirate” to Faith Goldsmith (actually a surrogate for Edith Warren—of the notorious Warren murders in Newark—not the Ethel Nicholoy mentioned by Heniore), Eudora Detterson, and Harriet “Fig” Newton respectively, and moved the sender’s address from East 73rd to 72nd Street.
5 Another tough sell to the magazines, needless to say, though it finally appeared in the September 1956 Gent.
Chapter Fourteen
The Outlander
Jackson’s talks at the Marlboro College Fiction Writers’ Conference had gone so well that the college president, Walter Hendricks, invited him to teach a couple of classes during the 1950–51 academic year. Jackson was firm in his conviction that so-called creative writing couldn’t be taught, and besides he thought most college students (especially male) were philistines who considered all talk about art to be “highbrow, therefore balls.” But then, too, he needed money as well as a change of scenery, and Hendricks had become a friend. Besides, Jackson liked the whole ethos of Marlboro, a tiny college occupying a couple of clapboard farm buildings atop Potash Hill in a town near Brattleboro. The program had begun a few years back in Biarritz, France, where classes were held in villas for soldiers who didn’t have enough points to go home. After the war, then, Hendricks turned his Vermont farm into a college for some of these same returning soldiers, flush from the GI Bill, and two years later Marlboro graduated its first class—a single student, Hugh Mulligan, who went on to get advanced degrees from Harvard and Boston University.
For his first semester Jackson spent Monday through Thursday in Marlboro at the Whetstone Inn, commuting from Orford (about ninety miles one way) in a car he’d borrowed from Dorothea Straus. His two courses included a seminar for undergraduates on the modern novel and an adult extension class that he insisted on calling practical—as opposed to creative—writing. “Creative,” he explained, connoted “the very opposite” of what he wanted to achieve, namely “to help writers, amateurs and professional alike, to unlearn the grandiose notion we have all accumulated about the nature of writing”—that it was, in short, a matter of “inspiration” rather than (as Jackson would have it) “impulse”—“and to learn, instead, how best to express … exactly what they mean and no more and no less.” By way of compromise, the course was listed in the catalog as “Practical and Creative Writing,” since students could submit work (essays, reports, poems, stories) arguably belonging to either category.
Jackson seemed to bring his greatest enthusiasm to his literature seminar, for which he composed a vast syllabus listing a kind of long-term reading program in addition to what was strictly required for the course; among the hundred-plus books on the first list were a number of cinderblock opuses of the kind he himself was putatively working on—An American Tragedy, Moby-Dick, Buddenbrooks, Of Time and the River, U.S.A.—as well as six novels by Evelyn Waugh (whose seamless, witty economy he wistfully envied), and, more surprisingly, four by Hemingway, including the latter’s recent, relatively inferior novel, Across the River and into the Trees (perhaps because it gave Charlie a pretext for mentioning that he’d recently appeared alongside same in Cosmopolitan).1 In all modesty, too, Jackson included his own four books: “For the purpose only of pointing out good construction and bad, techniques concealed or faulty, passages of tour-de-force as opposed to the ‘real,’ symbolism obvious or successful, et cetera.” His exams for this class were rather inspired; an essay question, for instance, asked students to choose one quotation from a list and discuss how it related to (a) at least two of the books they’d studied, and (b) their own experiences (“Would you frame it to hang over your writing desk?”).2 He also wanted to know “the sole and primary purpose of all fiction,” warning students not to reply that “it is to instruct or uplift”: “These reasons couldn’t be farther from fiction’s true purpose. If you think otherwise, then we’ve wasted our time.”
One of Jackson’s students, Bruce Bohrmann, remembered the course as one of the best he ever took, and Jackson himself was moved to admit, at the time, that he was hearing a lot of good things about his classes. “I’m glad you find teaching stimulating,” Baumgarten wrote, with a touch of exasperation, “but please get back to your novel. It is of first importance and nothing should keep you from it.”
JACKSON SEEMED to concede that he was being distracted from a higher calling. His New Year’s resolution for 1951, as reported in the Times Book Review, was to finish his “new long novel,” What Happened, and thus he cut back to a single weekly lecture at Marlboro for the second semester, spending all but Friday and Saturday at his desk in Orford. “I’m shooting the works in this one,” he remarked to Harvey Breit of the Times, describing his novel’s subject as the “hazards of success.”
While
struggling with What Happened, Jackson was haunted by the recent suicides of writers Ross Lockridge Jr. and Thomas Heggen, both of whom had become despondent after being unable to repeat the success of their first novels—respectively, Raintree County and Mister Roberts (“The best novel I’ve found in years,” Jackson had said of the latter, when it was first published in 1946; “I’ve read it three times already”). Jackson knew all too well the strain imposed on authors of acclaimed first novels, deeply resenting what he characterized as the American “cult of success”—the way, in his case, certain critics insisted on making gleeful comparisons between The Lost Weekend and his subsequent work, branding him a failure because he hadn’t managed to top himself. “The worst thing that ever happened to me was the success of The Lost Weekend,” he proclaimed at the Marlboro College Fiction Writers’ Conference. “The writer knows his own worth, and to be overevaluated can confuse and destroy him as an artist.”
And yet, for all his seeming humility about being “overevaluated,” Jackson couldn’t resist mentioning What Happened at every opportunity, plainly intoxicated by the self-perpetuated rumor that he was working on a masterpiece that would justify—surpass, abolish—the great expectations created by his first novel. “ ‘The conviction that “such a thing has not been done before” is the indispensable motor of all artists’ industry,’ ” he wrote Baumgarten in early 1949, quoting Mann in connection with his own certainty that he had “never written anything like” What Happened, and “neither has anybody else!” Many years later, Jackson would claim that the novel’s first hundred pages constituted “the best writing [he had] ever written,” but one wonders when exactly he managed to write those pages. After rejecting the Fanny Brice offer in November 1948, Jackson had proceeded to write “Tenting Tonight” and then dabbled with a novella-length piece, “The Visiting Author” or “The Outlander” (more on that in a moment), until February 1949, when Rhoda reported that he was “in a writing lull—that terrible period (for him and for us) of hanging around not knowing what to do with himself. He’s stuck a snag and until he irons it out in his mind he’ll just have to fiddle around like this.” Jackson would later describe this “lull” as a spell of “paralyzing anxiety” toward his novel, during which he distracted himself with long walks around the hill behind his house. Every afternoon he’d sit beside a brook in the woods and brood over his novel, finally returning along a dirt road that descended to the cemetery across an open field from his house—still there, he’d reassure himself (“It had not burned down in my absence”); the precious opening pages of What Happened were safe!
