Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  McGuire had asked him to speak at a big AA banquet on February 13 at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware, and while Charlie professed to be very nervous about such large-scale exposure—especially given his recent laryngitis after reading “a good hundred pages” of Farther and Wilder aloud to the Haydens and Modells in Larchmont—he was nonetheless “looking forward to being able to do something, in a very small way, for [McGuire].” Truth be known, AA had been more fun than ever since Charlie had become one of its most sought-after speakers; indeed, the week of that Wilmington banquet, he’d given no fewer than six talks. Members responded so emotionally to the author of The Lost Weekend—such a kindly, courteous fellow in person!—that he had to take a lot of pills to get through it, and felt alternately exalted and guilty when people accosted him with fervid congratulations. In Wilmington, anyway, Charlie was a hit, though afterward he sheepishly revealed to Boom and their Malaga friend Barbara Peech—both were in the audience, along with the Strauses—that he had capsules in his pocket.

  The next day he made the same confession to Dr. McGuire, a zealous Catholic and stolid purist when it came to both Church and AA doctrine. McGuire’s response was, if anything, worse than Rhoda’s. He said that he’d rather have seen Charlie “fall flat on [his] face” at the banquet than get through it on pills, and refused even to glance at Dr. Modell’s letter about the difficulties of drug addiction. Charlie was deeply shaken by what seemed the end of a promising friendship, though on calmer reflection he realized that he and McGuire had little in common. “How are the mighty fallen and the something-something-something, or however the hell it goes,” he wrote “Uncle Tom” a few days later, deploring the man’s “closed-mind [sic] attitude” to the more tolerant, enlightened viewpoint embodied by Modell’s letter: “You have your Church, your Virgin, your images and idols and such, which you accept without question (and quite rightly, for you) and which apparently give you something that I do not have at all.… But by the same token, you should not question my doubts in these matters.” With a touch of seemly deprecation (“God help them”), he mentioned that his talk that night at the Lenox Hill chapter in New York would be attended by Marty Mann and her partner, Priscilla Peck, who’d visited him in Orford a few months back; next to Bill Wilson himself, Mann was easily the most illustrious figure in AA—the first woman to stay sober in the program, and founder of the National Council on Alcoholism. Another speaker that night was an old CBS colleague, Harry Frazee, and both would be introduced by their mutual friend Max Wylie.

  The morning after his Lenox Hill appearance, Charlie woke up in the detox ward at Knickerbocker Hospital in Harlem (where, by an interesting coincidence, he’d paid an ambassadorial visit three weeks before). He’d had his first (alcoholic) slip as a member of AA. “I can never speak again!” he wanly declared to a new Lenox Hill friend, Dick Anderson, who’d come to sit at his bedside. “There’s something about getting up in front of an audience that brings out the worst in me. I’m performing. I must never do it again!” “Charlie, you must do it,” said Anderson, reassuring him with a folksy anecdote that Charlie would henceforth incorporate into his talks: A group of priests had a small AA chapter on the Hudson, and one priest was “on the circuit” like Charlie—much in demand as a speaker—until word got back to him that his celebrity was going to his head. “Father,” he said to his superior, “do you think I should hide my light under a bushel?” “No, my son,” the wise old priest replied, “but you shouldn’t forget whose light it is!”

  Once he got out of the hospital, Charlie phoned his friend Max and explained what had happened; he also mentioned the pills. To his bewilderment (“I am still confused by Max’s reaction … ”), Wylie denounced him for speaking at AA meetings under false pretenses, and moreover pointed out that his “first slip” was nothing of the kind, since essentially he’d been slipping the whole time. Poor Charlie was utterly deflated. Before leaving town he had lunch with Harry Frazee—who incidentally had been far more sympathetic than Max, Tom, or Rhoda—and admitted that his many alleged assignments from Studio One, Medallion Theatre, CBS, and so forth, had all come to naught: “Television, for some reason, intimidates the hell out of me,” he wrote Frazee afterward; “I just can’t deliver in that field; I am completed blocked when I try it.” Indeed, the only thing he had to show for the whole six-week odyssey in New York was a bill from the Lotos Club for $345.69, which Roger regretfully submitted a week later, remarking that it almost entirely wiped out the $450 (after commission) Charlie had received from Manhunt.

  RHODA’S ATTITUDE may be imagined. “But why did you drink at all?” she asked, during a somber chat at the kitchen table, once the children had gone to bed after giddily welcoming their father home and asking him a lot of questions about his trip (they “even asked about the hospital”). When Rhoda first learned that he’d leapt off the wagon again, she’d hastily written Baumgarten begging her not to give him any money: “I realize he’ll be broke when he gets out of the hospital. But I’m broke too, with all the house bills to pay.” And with this latest thirteenth chime of the clock echoing in her head, she also asked the agent to supply a complete list of checks that had been disbursed to Charlie that year. And now here the miscreant sat, all the more shaky and depressed for having taken only a couple of pills that night (“I’ve cut way down to almost nothing”). As for Rhoda’s question about his slip, well, alcoholics have an impulse to drink—he replied, in effect—and he’d obeyed that impulse. At any rate she forgave him, and with typical punctilio dashed off a letter to Baumgarten calling off the audit (“I felt dishonest doing it behind Charlie’s back … ”).

  A bleaker ordeal awaited Charlie the next night, when he attended his first closed meeting with the Barre AA since his lapse. “Wanted the pickup of a pill,” he noted, “but somehow didn’t take it.” The reception was chilly. The “gang” made it immediately clear that Charlie would have to resign from the steering committee, and afterward, as transportation was being arranged for a meeting in Bethel, the mayor’s wife (“our one ‘lady’ member, holier-than-thou”) pointedly announced: “I volunteer my car—on one condition. And that is, no slippees riding with me!”

  Charlie felt more isolated than ever, longing for his more worldly friends (people like Harry Frazee and Dick Anderson, that is, not the censorious Max Wylie) at Lenox Hill AA chapter. If only he could afford it, he’d hole up at a cheap hotel and attend meetings seven nights a week. Meanwhile his new chums tried to comfort him from afar: Anderson, himself a former pill user, wrote that he’d only begun to understand and respect himself once the “frights and fears” of addiction had ceased, and urged Charlie to keep fighting, while an affable adman at the Biow Company, Warren Ambrose, cheered him on with advice that might have seemed Rotarian once, but now was balm to his aching soul:

  Would I help more if I said, “For God’s sake Charlie, stop kickin’ the hell out of my ‘fellow-man Jackson’! Let him up! Let him breathe and live and be happy! He’s suffered enough! …”

  In other words, Charlie—no pills … no drinks … today!

  We love you, boy!

  Life might have seemed pretty hopeless were it not for the fact that they’d finally, finally managed to sell the house in Orford. “It was like living on a sinking ship,” Charlie wrote the Gershwins; with the proceeds, however, they were able to leave town with all bills paid, and Boom was delighted to put them up as long as they liked at his and Jim’s houses in Malaga. They ended up staying the entire summer, during which Charlie was able to commute to New York, see his friends in Lenox Hill, and even pick up some nonimaginary TV work. As for Rhoda, she girded herself with the usual Zeno-like patience, while hoping against hope that the end of the Orford era just might prove a “turning point” of sorts: “Not that I’m girlish enough to think all troubles are over … But I do feel that I’m getting a little more independent in my reaction to them, and maybe I can tackle them a little less emotionally when they come up.”

&nbs
p; By the fall it seemed (not for the first time, to be sure) as though life were starting over. Through an AA friend they found a charming two-story house in Sandy Hook, Connecticut—a village in Newtown, about sixty miles from Manhattan—that had once belonged to Thurber. For $150 a month they got three bedrooms and an ideal writing studio for Charlie in the rear, with bunk beds, a fireplace, his own bathroom, and a picture window framing a pasture with grazing cows. As ever Charlie adorned the walls with his “Lar[e]s and Penates” (Garbo, Mann, Chaplin, Fitzgerald, et al.), and settled down into what he hoped would prove his productive middle years. Nor was he the bitter recluse he’d been in Orford. Not only was there a swell AA chapter at the local Trinity Episcopal Church, but the town was a veritable colony of suburban artists, including Charlie’s old playwright friend from his Brattleboro days, Paul Osborn, and also the director “Gadge” Kazan, the actor “Freddy” March (Jackson’s first choice, eight years before, to play Grandin in the abortive Fall of Valor movie), and Arthur Miller (later his neighbor at the Hotel Chelsea). Every Sunday there were hilarious softball games at the Bradley Smiths’ (he a Life photographer, she a former Art Students Leaguer like Boom), and Charlie was even offered the second lead in a community theater production of Bell, Book and Candle.

  Once the smoke had cleared, and the last glossy photo was hung, Charlie soberly assessed his future: all fiction writing, including Farther and Wilder (so he wrote friends), would simply have to wait until he’d gotten a few more TV assignments to ease the financial strain. That was in September. Then, suddenly, two months later, he sent a feverish five-page letter to the Strauses (and a carbon to Baumgarten) about a new acquaintance of his—called Reuben for the purpose of his letter as well as the story he proposed to write—who had recently “unburden[ed] himself” about his incredible, tragic past, a story “of almost stunning and legendary grandeur” whose implications Reuben himself “didn’t begin even faintly to understand,” but which had rocked Charlie to his core. Once his initial, extreme discomfiture had passed, though, he realized (“dog of a writer that I am”) that he had “a powerful responsibility” to tell Reuben’s story in the form of a novel—a great novel!—which must remain a secret, for now, between the four of them: “The reasons are two: in the first place, Rhoda would be plunged into despair at the very thought of my writing another novel (at a time like this, when we are so badly in need of money, and I should be earning a living in TV); and second, Rhoda knows ‘Reuben’ but knows nothing whatever of his story.”

  As for that story, it followed the “classic pattern” of “one of the great, universally-appealing Greek myths”—though Charlie was vague to the point of coyness as to which (baldly obvious) myth—and would be titled A Rain of Snares after one of the Psalms: “Upon the wicked He shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest … ”4 Reuben grows up in the home of a cruel father and stepmother, his natural mother having run away when he was a toddler; soon Reuben himself flees and joins the Navy, where he cultivates a curious predilection for “motherly whores.” In due course he returns home and “unwittingly kills his father” (Charlie admitted he hadn’t really “worked out” that part of the plot), and then a few years later he meets an attractive older woman who proves to be his own long-lost mother; so “overjoyed” are both that they cannot restrain themselves from “a passionate, lost, headlong love-relationship” that (Charlie hoped) would instill in even his most puritan readers a sense “of the inexhaustible variety and mystery of a life which might, but for God’s grace, have been our own.”

  “In other words,” he summed up, “I am finally beginning to feel alive again, that I may still have a place or may yet regain one, and there is much work ahead and good work to be done.” A Rain of Snares was only the beginning. He saw it as a short novel (“say 250 pages at the most”) that could easily be published by 1955, after which his books would appear once a year, at least, as follows:

  … the collection of short stories called A MATTER OF LINES in 1956; A SECOND-HAND LIFE in 1957; the second collection BENEATH THE WAVE in 1958 (the title derives from Millay’s “I do believe the most of me / Floats under water; and men see / Above the wave a jagged small / Mountain of ice, and that is all. / Only the depths of other peaks / May know my substance when it speaks, / And steadfast through the grinding jam / Remain aware of what I am. / Myself, I think, shall never know / How far beneath the wave I go … ”). Then, at last (by which time I will know and understand it), in 1959, the big book WHAT HAPPENED, the first part of which you know, called FARTHER AND WILDER—and which, if you like can be published separately.…5

  Only a few paragraphs survive of A Rain of Snares, and these are almost certainly the only ones Jackson wrote. The opening passage was rewritten at least ten times. “One no longer meets, in the modern age, a man who strikes one as a tragic hero,” the simplest version begins.

  Our mediocre society, our classless culture, levels all men. There are no kings left; no more personages outstanding in a lonely nobility all the more pronounced, apparently, because of the fatal flaw that runs hand in hand with greatness … above all, no more great sinners who, it is said, are closer to God and the more beloved of God because of the blackness of their sins … all the blacker, the more dreadful and anomalous, because of their stature. Or, to put it another way, only black for very reason of that stature.…

  The passage is retyped again and again, essentially unchanged except for a slight convolution of wording each time that makes it subtly worse, as if the author were taking a simple (too simple) idea and trying to torture it into something profound: “modern age” becomes “these standardized times”; “tragic hero” becomes “epic hero” becomes “hero in the epic sense,” and so forth. Jackson also managed to write an ending of sorts—a few lines scribbled on tablet paper—which, he hoped, would make the reader realize, abruptly, by a kind of ironical sleight of hand, that the “wickedness” underlying the story has been thus perceived as a matter of convention merely, and may not “hold water at all” … so he told the Strauses. At any rate, it reads as follows:

  And so I left him there on the wide seabeach, under the revolving skies, a man condemned, like Dogberry’s Borachio, to everlasting redemption.

  He was a man inexorably (?) chained to his destiny; struggle though he might and did—fall, rise, fall, to rise and struggle again—he was wedded forever.

  From now on the reader is on his own … but, whatever his reaction, to learn something, I hope, of the inexhaustible variety and mystery of a life which might, but for God’s grace, have been one’s own.

  These breathtakingly awful fragments were probably Jackson’s last attempt at fiction for at least five years. A month after his frenzied pitch for A Rain of Snares, Baumgarten mildly inquired whether she might expect the rest of his “outline” as promised, but nothing materialized until almost a year later, on September 26, 1955, when Charlie suddenly announced (on J. Walter Thompson letterhead) that he had “Very Important Things to discuss—mostly a book,” for which he hoped to get an advance and pay some of his more pressing bills.

  Then, as a writer, he fell off the map for the rest of the decade.

  1 Jackson had planned seven chapters, each devoted to a particular child and “problem” (e.g., reading past bedtime or not taking one’s bath). In the partial first chapter that survives (“ROUGHAGE”), a mother named Mrs. Wilkins complains that her son won’t eat his spinach, whereupon the doctor gives her some pills and asks to see the boy alone. The doctor’s chat with Mrs. Wilkins goes on for six typed pages—much revised—and that’s all there is of Dr. Happenstance.

  2 A ghastly joke, granted, but Gold was a tough audience at the best of times. “This gets preachy” he scribbled, referring to a rather prescient remark on Charlie’s part: “I foresee the day, in a future by no means remote, when the two or three cocktails for lunch, the several highballs in the evening, and the heavy weekend drinking that has become standard in much of our society, par
ticularly among the professional class in their suburban homes, will be abandoned altogether by intelligent men and women, who want more out of life than hangovers.”

  3 The latter, as B. D. Hyman, would go on to write the scabrous memoir My Mother’s Keeper.

  4 As with his previous five books, Jackson also envisaged a Shakespeare quotation for the title page—in this case, a couplet from Measure for Measure: “Well, heaven forgive him! and forgive us all! / Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall … ” The same quote would be used as the epigraph for A Second-Hand Life, suggesting a similar concern with the ambiguity of certain received ideas about virtue and vice.

  5 Beneath the Wave was originally the title of the last volume (of three or four, depending on whether Jackson was planning a trilogy or tetralogy at the moment) of What Happened, which in his notes he renamed The Future Found—this an inverted homage to Proust’s final title, The Past Recaptured (Le temps retrouvé). The second volume of What Happened was usually titled I, Too, Was There.