Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  As part of a healthier work regime, he’d rented a pine-paneled office on Main Street opposite the cemetery, and left his house early every morning so that his wife and children could move about freely without bothering him or vice versa. On August 13, two days after his return from Philadelphia, he’d met with his new amanuensis, Pat Hammond (whose father, the local doctor, had an office in the same building), and got to work on the sort of “salable trash” he hoped would pave the way for A Second-Hand Life. “Fascinating to watch his creative mind in action,” Hammond noted in her diary that first day, when Jackson dictated the entirety of “Allergy,” a winsome bit of fluff about a playwright who develops an allergy to his actress-wife’s hair dye (the problem being that she staunchly denies dying her hair). The next day he came up with “The Bard in a Tent,” about the time he wowed the ladies of Arcadia by correctly guessing that The Tempest—according to at least one Chautauqua lecturer—was Shakespeare’s greatest play. “Not bad for a twelve-year-old kid,” he half-heartedly ended the piece, seeming to anticipate the response of magazine editors (“Very nice, but after all only a reminiscence”).

  That pretty much exhausted his enthusiasm for salable trash. Among other, more ambitious projects to which he’d devote himself for the rest of 1953 was “Solitaire,” a long story suggested by his own despondent card-playing that previous winter. Jackson had been contemplating this “marvelous, almost Dostoyevskean idea” for months, and the first pages seemed promising. His protagonist, Killoran, is an advertising executive who has lost his job and can’t find another, so he distracts himself with endless games of solitaire; finally, goaded by his wife, he deigns to make himself “available” again on the job market. The dreariness of Madison Avenue in the Eisenhower era (soon to consume Jackson himself) is nicely evoked, as when Killoran waits for an interview with Sam, a former “friend”:

  From time to time he caught the eye of the immaculate receptionist, who gave him a bright, antiseptic smile. As he was putting out his fourth cigarette in the immense malachite ash tray on the coffee table of glistening straw-blond wood, Sam stepped from the elevator, greeted him effusively, said he’d be with him in two jerks, waggled the tips of his well-manicured fingers at the receptionist, and disappeared down the corridor. Twenty minutes later Killoran was called in.

  Unable to stomach such humiliation, he begins to skip appointments and spend aimless days drifting among the seamier bars of the city, where he won’t be recognized, but finally returns home, for good, to his solitaire. As the story ends—or rather breaks off (on page 25)—Killoran is going quietly insane, pretending and then somewhat believing that he’s playing for a thousand dollars a card—more!—and that his debts will soon be erased.… “I think I covered a little too much ground in it,” Jackson observed of the story, which he never got around to finishing.

  By then, however, he’d been carried away by “An Afternoon with Boris,” an elegant if somewhat static meditation on the symbiosis of flesh and spirit. Jackson loved the idea and worked it out for weeks, zestfully, even though he conceded from the start that such a piece would be “much too cerebral for selling.” “Boris” described a September visit to the studio of his friend Ilse Bischoff, a wealthy illustrator who lived a life of aesthetic, unmarried ease at her country home in Hartland, Vermont. That day Bischoff was drawing Jackson’s portrait while they listened to the entire four-hour recording of Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov, which Charlie had once seen at La Scala “in [his] callower drunkener youth,” loving the spectacle but somewhat missing the point of the music; that day in the studio, though, with few visual distractions to speak of, the music “seemed grander and more beautiful than ever.” Meanwhile a piquant tension was provided by an apparent dalliance between Bischoff’s coarse young servants, which led Jackson to reflect on his own taste for “the low and the lawless … even literally the unclean,” and how that replenishes (rather than blunts) one’s appetite for loftier diversions. Ravished by Mussorgsky’s music, titillated by the servants, Jackson celebrates the sublime mingling of art and eros: “Life beckoned him, in short; he felt it burning inside his body as if he had taken some hot, intoxicating drink—poison or stimulant, it didn’t matter which.”

  Jackson was thrilled with “Boris,” which he considered nothing less than a milestone in his artistic development—a “new level of writing,” as he excitedly wrote Dorothea: “it shows a discipline, craftsmanship, and yes, if you’ll forgive the word so used by myself, an intellectuality that I have never yet achieved.… Really, when I read it over, it surprises the hell out of me—it just isn’t me!” This, he felt certain, would finally silence his critics at The New Yorker, most notably William Maxwell—who, alas, swiftly disabused him of any such idea, citing the prejudice of his (now deceased) boss, Harold Ross, against stories about “the psychology of writers.” Partisan Review and Harper’s Bazaar would eventually follow suit, until in 1962 the story “almost made it” at Playboy, of all places, where Charlie’s old friend Augie Spectorsky reluctantly decided that “this extremely well-written tale … wasn’t quite strong enough plotwise for us at this time.” Back in 1953, at any rate, the fiction market was simply drying up, as more and more middle-class readers turned to television for entertainment, while many of the slicks had either reduced or stopped running fiction altogether—an irreversible trend. At the end of that torturous but productive year, Jackson had sold a single story (for all of $250) and yet remained philosophical to an almost heedless degree: “It isn’t only that the fiction market grows less and less,” he wrote Brackett; “the failure was entirely in me, I think. I didn’t do [the stories] quite wholeheartedly … and I think the reason was partly financial but even more, because my real love is the novel.”

  And so to the novel he returned, albeit not the novel he’d been raving about these many months. “And—hold everything!—I have gone back to WHAT HAPPENED,” he announced that September to the Strauses. Revisiting the opening pages of Farther and Wilder, the first volume of his planned masterwork—wherein Don lies abed on the morning of his much-anticipated family reunion—he’d decided to start all over, rewriting in “sensual, almost ‘tactile’ terms rather than in interior terms of brooding introspection and intellectuality.” (This around the time he was effusively congratulating himself for the “intellectuality” of “An Afternoon with Boris.”) He refused, from now on, to agonize over the “rightness of every single sentence,” as he tended to do in his best work; while reading great, super-prolific authors such as Tolstoy and Mann, it occurred to him again and again that they were simply writing, by God, getting on with it for heaven’s sake, and that’s what he would do! As for A Second-Hand Life, well, he’d recently reread it and found it “ashes in [his] mouth”: “It was loaded with perfect craft; I might even go so far as to say that it was crafty, almost, with the author obviously knowing more than he was telling.… No thank you—I hate such skillful craft—such wiseness. [Farther and Wilder] reads as if the author actually doesn’t know what lies ahead … in short it reads like life, is life on every page.” Thus, by the end of 1953, Charlie had all but entirely reverted to the glorious hyperbole of three years before: What Happened would be his masterpiece! “It has dignity, humor, calm, beauty of form … love, charity”—et cetera. Indeed, his fondest dream was to publish that first volume as early as the fall of 1954.

  Privately, though, he had grave doubts about his whole non-crafty, “life unfolding moment by moment” approach, which occasionally seemed only “careless and rambling.” On January 7, 1954, he was moved to type a few pages of diary, as he’d been reading Hart Crane’s letters and was struck by the young man’s unyielding passion for the mot juste: “I am more and more aware of my total lack of originality,” Charlie reflected, “my unuse of language, and at fifty it seems to be a hopeless proposition to expect any change in this. I can only write the human, meanderingly.” Unsatisfied with mere diary writing (like suicide, it was only worthwhile if one could observe its
effect on others), Charlie transcribed this doleful confession word for word into a letter to Dorothea. Then, lest she lose faith in his work, he hastened to add that his “prosaic” style in Farther and Wilder was mitigated—nay, transformed—by certain deftly placed images hinting at “a higher plane and meaning,” a kind of “poetry at times” … and so on, until he’d whipped himself back into an ecstasy over what amounted to a revolution of his art and self: “It is easily the finest thing I have yet written—no inward preoccupation with self-important ego, no self-evisceration and personal agony—all of it outside of myself—outside!—part of a general, even perhaps universal, experience: life, in short.” And this had a lot to do (“well, everything to do”) with his sobriety, thanks to AA, or so he humbly added in a different letter written that same day.

  WHILE JACKSON plugged away at Farther and Wilder, his finances continued to deteriorate. He’d been allowed to keep his advance for Earthly Creatures, $4,500 (less commission), but all other proceeds had gone toward his yawning debit balance at Farrar, Straus and Young. Time Inc. hadn’t been able to hire Rhoda, and that autumn she accepted a dollar an hour to work on a trial basis for Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. October had proved a particularly cruel month. First, the Internal Revenue Service had confiscated the Jacksons’ bank account ($219.78), then the Motor Vehicles Bureau noticed that Charlie hadn’t paid his auto insurance, and revoked his driver’s license; they’d “watched [him] like a hawk” since his drunken head-on collision in March 1951, and now, ironically, he was unable to drive himself to AA meetings.

  Charlie took it hard. That night—still enthralled by Boris Godunov—he consoled himself by reading about poor Mussorgsky, growing incensed when his eyes fell on the following: “His life was not admirable; he was slovenly and drunken and a drug addict. He died in St. Petersburg on his 42nd birthday.” “It was like an affront,” Charlie wrote Dorothea; “I felt a terrible sense of injustice over the way the world uses its artists—and how unimportant the artist has always been considered by society, how troublesome, and how he is popularly deserving of nothing but neglect, and indifference.” If he ever ran dry as a fiction writer, he’d devote himself to a book that would “ ‘wake up’ the world” to the predicament of great, shabbily treated geniuses like Mussorgsky, whose own wealthy patrons might have prevented his early demise … but no! They could only spare “discreet” little gifts, lest they hurt a drowning man’s pride! Worried, perhaps, that he was overplaying his hand a little, Charlie added, “Liss-en: are you following me still in the impersonal detached way in which I’m writing this? You did say that no subject as subject should be barred between us, and I trust you on that score.” If indeed Dorothea had guessed that she was being twitted, not so obliquely, for her kind but all too occasional sops (as Charlie saw it), she was dead-on. “I dearly love [her],” he wrote in his diary three weeks later, “[but she] knows not what it is to earn a living”; given his ongoing poverty and fading star, he feared they could “no longer meet on equal ground.”

  That December (1953) he’d gone to New York for three days, returning in triumph with an assignment to write a two-part article on AA for Life. “The More Social Disease,” as he proposed to call it, would “shake the complacency of the citizenry from coast to coast,” appearing (he hoped) on the magazine’s cover and perhaps leading to a lucrative new career in journalism. Life had offered him $1,250 on receipt of the manuscript, and another $1,250 if they decided to publish, and meanwhile Roger wanted him to expand the piece into a two-hundred-page book for Ballantine, followed perhaps by a juicy post-publication sale to Reader’s Digest.

  More than a month later—five days past deadline—Jackson wrote his Life editor, William Jay Gold, that he was down to fourteen dollars cash and needed a bit more in the way of an advance. The work had proved tricky. One problem was AA’s policy of anonymity, which prevented his admitting that he was a member; rather he portrayed himself as a curious outsider who’d attended a few open meetings: “In all honesty I cannot say that my interest has been entirely academic, but it is true that I have gone to these meetings largely in the spirit of research.…” Part One, “Personal Background,” was mostly a recapitulation of what was becoming Jackson’s boilerplate AA talk, covering his own history of alcoholism, his long resistance to AA, and finally his conversion at the Saul Clinic. The main problem was Part Two, “Possible Answers,” which focused on the policies, procedures, and philosophy of AA—all vastly misunderstood, as Charlie would have it. His Life editor found this part a letdown, urging the author to “dramatize” more, while also deploring (via marginal admonishment) such gags as this: “An AA in my community wrote to his sister in California that he had become a member of the organization, and she replied, by postcard, ‘I’m so glad to hear that you have joined the A. A. A. and do you wear a uniform?’ ”2 Nonetheless Gold remained hopeful that, with revision, the article might yet prove a boon to humanity—but Charlie had already slung his bolt. “I never did finish it,” he admitted eight months later, once his life had taken a radical new direction.

  BACK IN OCTOBER, Charlie had written his old Hollywood agent, Leland Hayward, that he was “trying [his] damnedest to stay out of TV,” but soon enough he gave in: “For too long, now, I’ve babied myself with the delusion that I was a respectable novelist, too good to go out and make a living in the commercial field. But I’ve done it before and can do it again.” Indeed he’d done it before, long ago as the briskly efficient author of the popular radio serial Sweet River, and quite recently, in 1952, when he’d written an unsold teleplay for The Aldrich Family. Now, returning from New York in December, not only did he have that promising Life article to write, but also “definite commitments on 3 TV shows” for Studio One, as he wrote Bischoff—or rather, “three not quite so definite” (my italics) scripts for Studio One, as he wrote a different friend the following day—and so he’d be coming back to New York on January 18, after he finished the Life piece, to get started with Studio One and perhaps run down a few other assignments as well. Needing a cheap place to stay for six weeks, he took a room on East 66th at the Lotos Club, where Roger was a member and would be “footing the bill as usual,” or so Charlie claimed, though in truth Roger had soberly advised him that he’d be charged at least $4.20 a day.

  Skipping along the path back to solvency, he hoped, Charlie had a rattling good time in New York. He lunched with his old Bermuda pal, James Thurber (“blind as a bat but marvelous as ever”); he attended the National Book Award ceremony at the Commodore Hotel, subsequently lunching with that year’s fiction winner, Saul Bellow (“I like him so much”); he bumped into an old acquaintance, Bette Davis, who remembered “that sweet little man on the couch” she’d met in Nantucket ten years before, and warmly introduced him to her well-mannered daughter, Barbara (“so polite”).3 But the pinnacle of that first superlative week was a performance of Boris Godunov at the Metropolitan Opera, which he attended with the Strauses and Ilse Bischoff, delighted by how well his friends took to each other. As for the show itself, it was “a glory beyond description,” he wrote Rhoda; Dorothea, for her part, would always remember with deep tenderness the man who “could sit on the edge of his chair at a performance of Boris Godunov like a child with all the world’s pageantry spread before him.”

  And why not? The world was his oyster! “The reception around town, in the advertising and TV offices, would surprise you, as it has surprised me,” he wrote Anthonisen. “I get calls and offers by the dozens, merely because it is known in the profession that I at least seem to be on the beam again.” CBS had made a “definite commitment” to hire Charlie to write a couple of radio scripts for Suspense, and possibly come up with a new soap opera too, while his old pal Max Wylie had put him in touch with Bill Moorwood, at Medallion Theatre, who wanted him to write a teleplay “at one thousand per throw”—this, all this, in addition to the “two [sic] scripts for Studio One,” and “out of the blue” Carl Brandt had just called with the ne
ws that he’d sold one of Charlie’s old stories, “A Midsummer Night,” to a magazine called Manhunt for “one thousand bucks” (actually five hundred). And Charlie couldn’t even remember what the story was about!

  When his AA sponsor, Tom McGuire, admitted to being worried about him (“I hope you are not involved in any difficulty in New York”), Charlie was snappish: except for being damnably broke—for now—he was fine. Never better! Along with the many, many money-making opportunities flying at his head from every direction, he was diligently attending AA meetings with Max Wylie at the Lenox Hill chapter, where he spoke on the tenth anniversary of The Lost Weekend. His total rehabilitation as an artist and human being, in fact, had given Roger a marvelous idea for What Happened: “I absolutely and completely agreed with you that that novel couldn’t be written until there was an end,” he’d enthused back in December. “I may be off my rocker, but it seems to me … that really the end of [W]hat [H]appened could be the beginning of A. A.” The final scene, as Roger saw it, would be that first-ever talk Charlie had given to the Barre AA in November, recounting his whole terrible ordeal from beginning to end, the tying together of “two ends of the string” to make a circle.…

  Unfortunately Charlie was not sober, strictly speaking, nor had he been sober for the previous six months. On the contrary: now that he was no longer drinking, he was taking more pills than ever. As he’d later admit to AA (claiming he didn’t realize, at the time, that it was verboten): “I couldn’t meet a friend for lunch, I couldn’t write a line, I couldn’t attend an AA meeting, and most certainly I couldn’t speak at an AA meeting, without the help of these drugs.” Over the holidays he’d paid a visit to Charles and Phyllis (McGinley) Hayden, who’d introduced him to one of their Larchmont neighbors, Dr. Walter Modell, an eminent Cornell University Medical School professor and editor of the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. To this man Charlie eagerly confided his dependency on Seconal and the like, and afterward Modell wrote him a long commiserating letter about the difficulty (the danger even) of weaning oneself from such drugs. Seeing an opportunity—his furtive pill-taking had been “a load on [his] mind”—he showed the letter to Rhoda. “I only succeeded in sort of shifting the load from, say, the cerebellum to the medulla oblongata,” Charlie wrote Modell of the terrible row that ensued. Rhoda had utterly refused to hear reason on the subject, and for a few days Charlie had furiously considered divorce (while hoping his “love for the children” would restrain him): “The more I thrive and the better I do,” he fumed, “the less Rhoda will have to do with me.”