by Blake Bailey
During his last years in Orford, however, Jackson did make a somewhat greater effort to be sociable—more for his family’s sake than his own, as he hated being an embarrassment (“Pa-pa, why don’t you go to a job like other fathers?” Kate would complain, sometimes pretending not to know him in public). In the past he’d compensated for his reclusiveness with a great show of affability on the Fourth of July, wearing a flamingo-colored shirt and working a ring-toss booth on Main Street. Within a month after his car wreck, though, he’d gone so far as to join the Orford bowling team, and occasionally hosted poker nights with some of the local gentry. Among the latter was a wealthy retired lawyer named DeWitt “Dee” Mallary, who once made a point of visiting Charlie after he’d returned from the hospital, yet again, having recovered from an overdose motivated in part (as everyone knew) by despair over his many debts. Mallary announced that he was going to help Charlie straighten out his affairs, and proceeded to jot down facts and figures, asking what he owed and what he might reasonably expect to earn, and so on. When the session was over, Mallary stood up and ceremoniously produced a bill from his wallet to help “tide [Charlie] over”: “God help me if it wasn’t a $20 bill—(yes) and I was so embarrassed (embarrassed for him that is) that I found myself thanking him profusely, even abjectly,” Jackson wrote Dorothea; “whereas all the while, if I’d had any guts, I’d have said: ‘For Christ’s sake, Dee, what the hell good do you think twenty dollars will be?’ ” But far from shaming this kindly burgher, Charlie lost no time inscribing a copy of The Sunnier Side to him: “Dear Dee, Never, as long as I live, will I forget your kindness to me this week. It’s nothing for me to be proud of, God knows, but it makes me feel good just to think of it because of your kindness.”
1 Jackson’s attitude toward Hemingway was complicated. An unpublished twenty-page memoir of Jackson by a late-life friend, Alex Lindsay, records his reaction to a remark Hemingway allegedly made in a letter to Charles Scribner (which I’ve been unable to trace): “In Charles Jackson’s first book we learned that he can’t drink; now in his second we learn that he can’t fuck, either.” According to Lindsay, Scribner “mischievously” showed this to Jackson, who at first was furious but later amused. When he learned of Hemingway’s suicide in 1961 (so he told Lindsay), he reread “Up in Michigan” with tears in his eyes.
2 One of these quotations, from Sherwood Anderson, suggested an aspect of what Jackson was hoping to achieve in What Happened: “A man keeps thinking of his own life as a loose flowing thing. There are no plot stories in life.… Do we not live in a great, loose land, of many States, and yet all these states do make something, a land, a country. A new looseness—human lives flowing past each other—this is a form that our younger writers might be thinking of.”
3 In 1965 Anthonisen would publish a lively paper in the journal American Imago, asserting that Hamlet’s ghost “represents Shakespeare’s most important contribution to the understanding of ‘madness’ and the ‘supernatural’ in his time … ” Anthonisen notes that Hamlet’s first glimpse of the ghost is shared by Horatio and others, but when the ghost reappears in the closet scene, Hamlet alone can see him; thus Gertrude thinks her son is mad, whereas the ghost suggests to Hamlet that the queen herself is going mad: “Shakespeare, with uncanny insight and skill makes use of a well known and typical psychiatric reaction: that of projection.”
4 Up to twenty percent of bipolar patients experience predictable seasonal changes in mood, with mania likely to occur in spring and summer months; psychiatrists often refer to “the manic month of May.”
5 Rather thinly disguised in most cases: in the typescript, Maitland is initially described as “short” (like Jackson) but the word is struck out and “too tall” (like Lewis) scribbled in its place. “The now-dead protagonist you will have no trouble identifying,” Jackson wrote an editor in 1966 (even then hoping to sell the book), “though much of it (indeed most of it) is me more than it is him.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Boy Who Ran Away
The more Jackson became blocked on What Happened, the more he liked expounding on how great it would be—a tendency Baumgarten had warned him about in 1948, after he’d been talking the poor woman’s ear off on the subject for almost five years. “I think you should get started on it,” she said. “You can keep a book too long, you know—so long that it remains only an idea and will never be a book.” Charlie replied that the book was still forming, he hated to rush it, though perhaps she was right and he was as ready as he’d ever be … and three years later, he was readier still: “What is the sense of writing at all unless you have something new, original, or fresh to say, a real contribution?” he wrote Dorothea on January 2, 1951.
I long to be at my book—to be engaged, wholeheartedly, with something worthy of my talent. I have a very big book … and it is downright criminal for me to be writing—or spending my time trying to bring off—merely saleable stories for lady-readers in the mags. I am simply unable to tell you, in even the remotest degree, how that book consumes my attention and thoughts during almost every single waking moment. I live with it, I eat it, I sleep it, I dream it …
Anything but write it, and in the meantime he was haunted by a premonition that he would die soon—“be killed in an accident” (as he nearly was two months later)—“and (God help me) my fear is not at all about what will happen to the children and how will they get along, but that I will have left What Happened unfinished.”
And while he ingeniously contrived to avoid work on his novel, his optimism remained perennial as the grass: If only he could sell this story—and maybe one or two others—why then finally he could afford to get back to What Happened, which, he informed Dorothea that summer, he’d perforce neglected now for some “five months.” If anything, indeed, the manuscript had decreased in that time: as he wrote Lillian Hellman in May, he’d just discovered that the gorgeous “Preview” section he’d been so proud of (“it was one of the finest pieces of writing I’d ever read, knew it was going to be famous, etc.”) was, alas, terribly overwritten. “Far from being disappointed,” he added, with typical stalwart buoyancy, “I felt nothing but a wonderful feeling of ‘health’—I set to and cut the hell out of it, cut all the fancy work, left in nothing but simplicity, so that now (I think—though I may change again next month) it reads like something that hasn’t even been written, so to speak.”
In August, the Strauses took Charlie and his family to Nantucket for a month, and on his return he allowed himself to reread Home for Good and whatever there was of What Happened. His response was curiously schizophrenic, resulting in a frenzied letter to Dorothea, in which almost every square millimeter of a margin-less page was crammed with single-spaced typing. The badness of Home for Good had been plainly demoralizing; Charlie felt as if he were in a forlorn, losing competition with his earlier self: How was it, he wondered, that he could ever have written stories as good as “Rachel’s Summer” and “Palm Sunday”? But then—hastening to reassure his admiring friend (and himself)—he gushed over the incomparable greatness of What Happened, which was “so full of interest, and so provocative (and evocative of life, life every second), that I am dumfounded that I could ever have done it and not at all doubtful that I can do it again.” He had, in fact, “nothing but a passion to go on with it,” but within a day or two he admitted to Baumgarten and Brandt that he’d reached a state of almost total paralysis: “The awful dilemma I’m in (though I sometimes wonder if I’m using it as an excuse, too) is that I cannot turn out really good, finished, and thoroughly brought off short stories because my chief interest lies in the waiting novel, and I cannot write the novel with a free mind because I have to write short stories in order to get from month to month.”
As it happened, he was on “the verge of a breakdown,” as Rhoda confided to Boom: “We’re in a worse mess than ever. I’m trying to get a job. I wanted a divorce (which brought everything to a crisis of course) …. We’re miles in debt—and nothing ahead but
bills. I’m afraid right now he’s in no shape to do any work—fearfully depressed. I still believe that my life would be easier and better if we were apart. But the thought of not having the kids means death to him.” Always mindful of Charlie’s welfare, whatever the state of their marriage, she begged Boom to write his brother a nice letter (“He needs love and help so badly”). Presumably Boom obliged, as usual, though Charlie’s funk was such that he took almost two months to reply, during which matters had clearly deteriorated: “I sleep not at all, I enjoy myself not at all, I have lost 15 pounds since early summer, but somehow I survive.” The novel, needless to say, was going badly, and he was beginning to wonder whether it was “one of these books that can’t be written.” Finally—a little over a week later, in early November 1951—he was returning from one of his aimless walks when he came to the cemetery and saw that his house and What Happened (such as it was) were still there: “God,” he found himself thinking, “if they had only burned up, I would be free.” As he later wrote in “The Sleeping Brain”: “From that moment I knew that the book, or at least my earlier profound absorption in it, my total commitment, my love-affair, were gone for good—unconsciously it was what I wanted all along. I was free; and dead.”1
FOR A FEW WEEKS Charlie was in a state of perfectly lucid despair, mourning his lost novel—his very future, all hope of enduring fame. “I know at last that I am not up to it,” he wrote Dorothea. “I am a sick man right now … I’ve got to accept it.” The next day he emended himself on that point: he was not at all “sick,” and therein lay the problem; because he was aware of his folly, because he was unable to work, he was in perfect health. “It is humiliating, but a fact, that, with me, health does not seem to go with productivity … I suppose that’s because of the long habit of depending on stimulus for release of work.” With Dr. Anthonisen’s help, though, he hoped to overcome his block in a sober way.
And so he would—overcome his block—though whether it signaled a return to health, so to speak, is hard to say. In any case it appeared to be true that his obsession with What Happened had increasingly prevented him from writing first-rate stories, given the inhibitive notion that his vitality and best material should be reserved almost entirely for his masterpiece. Once he let it go, the wheels began turning again. One day in January he was struck by what he immediately grasped was the “best story idea [he’d] ever had,” whereupon he spent a long day pacing the floor of his room, patiently, “getting closer and closer,” as he wrote Dorothea: “It is astonishing, the more I keep adding to it and inventing, the more it falls absolutely correctly into place—as though the missing accurate pieces were just waiting for me to find them.” Within a couple of weeks—taking his time—he’d crafted a long story that was very nearly commensurate with those first ecstatic stirrings. “It’s great to be alive again!” he wrote Boom and others.
The title, “The Boy Who Ran Away,” refers both to the protagonist, Henry Price, and his sister-in-law Betty’s son, Danny, an effeminate boy whom Price despises in spite of himself. A successful but almost pathologically self-absorbed advertising man, Price has fled the city, with his wife and two daughters, to live in a tiny New Hampshire village, the better to ensure a solitude devoted to quirky, somewhat juvenile habits and hobbies. One of these involves collecting models of old-time vehicles, and as the story begins he has just received a “magnificent toy” from his older daughter for Christmas: a beautifully detailed model of a 1909 Stanley Steamer automobile. Price’s almost unseemly attachment to such toys—in lieu of socializing with his “awful” neighbors, or, for that matter, paying much attention to his family—is one reason his stoical wife, Janet, is constantly reminding him that he’s “acting like a ten-year-old” and, indeed, that their relationship is “scarcely different” from the one between Betty and her difficult ten-year-old, Danny. Price bridles at the comparison and yet validates it, again and again, in one case childishly repeating the phrase “Because I want to” when he decides he’d rather stay home than attend their neighbors’ New Year’s Eve party—the exact phrase Danny uses at a key point earlier in the story. Meanwhile Price longs to escape again—to escape in actual fact, and not simply into the fantasy world of his toys (which includes the very emblem of his escapism, a covered wagon “open at each end so that one could look inside to what was surely the most snug, the coziest tent in the world, and a traveling tent at that”).
What Price wants to escape, above all, is himself: the weak, awkward, tormented “sissy” he was—and (despite a plausible veneer) still is—the boy for whom his nephew serves as the mirror image: “[Danny] had cultivated a deliberate heavy stomp as if to give his inadequate body a kind of manliness that he sensed, in his precocious little heart, he did not really possess; when he walked, he held his chin in the air defiantly, his bony shoulders ludicrously high, and swung his arms widely as if marching to a band … He lived in a dream world where nobody could get at him.” Because Danny’s family rents a farmhouse on Price’s property, and because his wife and her sister are close, Price cannot escape the boy’s presence—as though he were being haunted by the ghost of his own childhood—and the more he identifies with him, the more he hates him: “All his experience and sympathy urged him to help Danny.… His instinct, on the other hand, his deepest inner emotions, and his painful memories, made him recoil from the boy in contempt.”
Price greedily seizes a pretext for venting his hatred when the boy accidentally breaks his precious Stanley Steamer toy, then tries to run away when Price calls him on the carpet. “Because I wanted to,” the boy murmurs, when Price “savagely” demands an explanation. “I’ll tell you why you ran away,” says Price. “Because you’re a coward. Isn’t that true? You’re a coward!” The more shameful his own behavior, the more Price lashes out at others, pettishly sending his children to bed and refusing to take his wife to the New Year’s Eve party. Alone at last, he proceeds to get drunk, and drunkenly arrives at a bleak, bleak epiphany:
A thought struck him like a shock: there is probably nothing in life more unbearable than to hate oneself, to not be able to stand oneself.…
He drank.—How does one ever get outside of oneself? How is it possible, when one loathes oneself so much.… What does one do about it? Can one become somebody else? Another person? A new man, say? The answer was a dreadful No, No, and again No! …
He was his own devil, his own black beast; and no quantity of drink, no staggering sum of money, no amount of parties, no dear friends, no charming children, no adoring but all-too-suffering wife, could ever expunge the beast and the devil and the falsely nice guy that he really was all the time, underneath, inside.… He hated himself with an active hatred that was almost too much for a single human body to contain without running amok, and he did not think he could contain that hatred for another hour.
Rather than kill himself, Price becomes all the more resigned to his estrangement from the world, and more certain, too, that he will “never, never, never forgive” the boy who has brought him to such depths.
Having accomplished this scathing, exhaustive self-indictment, Jackson was gleeful, though he knew the sixty-five-page manuscript would be almost impossible to sell in its present form. Collier’s offered the usual $2,500, but only if Jackson agreed to cut the story almost in half and write a happier ending that involved some kind of reconciliation between Price and his nephew. Jackson refused. He was ready to relinquish the thing to Partisan Review for a pittance, when the fiction editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Alice Morris—who’d admiringly reviewed The Sunnier Side for the Sunday Times—offered $500 and proposed to cut only ten pages or so (“a grueling task, tempered by love”). Again Jackson refused, arguing point by point against even the most picayune edits—everything was there for a reason—and concluding with a heartfelt defense of his best work: “Once in a blue moon a good story is given to you to write, or rather, passes through you, for you are in reality only the grateful instrument … and when it does happen, my God, y
ou want to do everything you can to protect that rare moment, which after all was like a gift out of the blue.” Unless Harper’s Bazaar was willing to run the story exactly as written, Charlie would regretfully have to return the check.
The story was accepted for the November 1952 issue, and (Jackson claimed) would be the longest ever printed in the magazine. Given his string of failure in recent years, Charlie’s hopes for “The Boy Who Ran Away” were almost desperately high; he begged Carl Brandt to pass along any “talk” he heard about the story, which he predicted, in exalted moments, would become a much-anthologized classic. For now, however, it was just another story in the slicks, quickly forgotten as Charlie had also rather feared (“God knows who reads the Bazaar, for fiction I mean”)—though, for what it was worth, his old friend Marion Fabry found it “marvelous,” and even Mary McCarthy saw fit to write a note of encouragement tempered with sternness. Beginning with the backhanded compliment that the story had all the “best qualities” of Jackson’s early work (“an uncomfortable honesty and directness”), McCarthy was obliged to point out that Henry Price’s hatred for the boy, and hence himself, was “too crude and patterned”: “Nobody is capable of self-hatred of such really heroic proportions; much as we think we dislike ourselves, we are too self-loving, biologically, not to feel a little tendresse for people we think are embryo ‘we’s.’ ” Cowed as ever by McCarthy’s grinding intellectualism, Charlie decided she was “right on all counts,” and thereafter downgraded “The Boy Who Ran Away” as being “a little too agonized—too subjective about my own personal self-distaste.”
