by Blake Bailey
MORE THAN EVER he was kept afloat by an obsessive devotion to AA—his “new addiction,” as he liked to tell members all over the country, recounting his latest conversion (circa June 1957) after the Bellevue psychologist had advised him to find a “kindly psychiatrist”: “Certainly he was discounting AA entirely, and I thought: ‘When I leave here, I must go back to AA and really see what it is, really give yourself up to it, really listen, stop talking, stop performing, stop patronizing the groups with your sympathy and see what it is that these people have.”
As Richard Lamparski pointed out, Alcoholics Anonymous was definitely a “misnomer” in Jackson’s case; attending a meeting with the author of The Lost Weekend was, he said, “like visiting a birth control clinic in the company of Margaret Sanger.” When Lamparski went along for one of Charlie’s talks, he recorded how the novelist was besieged by admirers who said that his book (“or seeing Ray Milland portray him [sic] on the screen”) had saved their lives by sending them into the program. Nor did Charlie let any of it give him the big head. Like a combination of missionary and Fuller Brush salesman, he’d show off “the program” to whosoever expressed even the most fugitive curiosity, coaxing them one and all to meetings—coworkers at Winsor, the housekeeper at the Dakota (a Mrs. Young), various luminaries from stage and screen,5 and his own fifteen-year-old daughter, Kate, who professed to love AA because “it [made her] like people,” as she told her father after a meeting at Lenox Hill (“Which is really one of the great dividends of the Group,” he wrote Sarah afterward, “and I’m glad she felt it”). Within a month of his being named chairman of that chapter in December 1958 (an honor, wrote Sarah, that “affected Papa and all of us greatly”), attendance had almost doubled, and his friend Max Wylie had more than forgiven Charlie his past lapses.
At AA’s expense he flew all over the country to address “distant isolated groups,” as he put it, though often his famous name packed ballrooms with hundreds of eager alcoholics who’d come to hear “our American De Quincey” tell his story—this illustrious writer who’d lectured at Dartmouth, Columbia, NYU, and “four or five different 57th Street saloons,” as he was introduced to a big laugh. During a four-month interval in 1959 he spoke in Cleveland, Dallas (“1600 people,” he jotted in his diary), Lewisburg, Worthington, Spirit Lake, and Sing Sing. Nor was he cowed by provincial squeamishness when it came to mentioning pills—a pioneer speaker in that respect (“some of you may object to having this kind of thing discussed … ”)—a subject he was determined to broach after breaking his addiction in 1957. But then, his gratitude was vast, and he felt that nothing less than (almost) perfect candor would do; AA, after all, had succeeded where love, literature, psychiatry, and Catholicism had failed:
In AA I realize that I have finally gotten outside of myself and belong with people. It’s a marvelous reward. And I think now, with what I know about AA now, it’s hard for me to understand how I could have resisted for so long. Even when I was in AA, on other props and crutches, like the pills, I wondered what was I afraid of? Why couldn’t I let go of those things? I know what I was afraid of. I was afraid of facing myself, as I really was. Well, now I’m not afraid. How can I be, with two or three thousand friends who have been through this with me?
An aspect of facing himself meant facing his “own humdrum mediocrity,” as he admitted to a bemused Dorothea, who under some duress had gone to the odd meeting and wondered what had become of the wistful, brilliant outsider she’d met a decade ago at Marlboro College: “I was forced to recognize a being I had not met before,” she later wrote, “the small-towner at home on the back porch gossiping about the neighbors.” Charlie was getting dull, all right, and knew it better than anybody—but the “rarefied heights” of great art were not for him. Rather he played bridge with the neighbors, a little annoyed by his wife’s timid bidding, wishing his older daughter would come back from college so he could at least have a decent partner (“Don’t expect to do anything when you’re home,” Rhoda alerted her, “but play fourth hand with him somewhere”).
“They were years of a kind of grey, bleak, empty well-being,” Jackson would reflect of this epoch: “apathy, spiritlessness, blank sobriety, and a vegetable health.” At the time, though, he knew that a return to really ambitious writing—to any kind of ambition at all, apart from his great AA popularity—would mean a return to drink and drugs. Death, in short. And meanwhile his literary reputation, such as it was, had become little more than a tagline—“author of The Lost Weekend”—while his other books were reprinted, if at all, as a kind of genteel pornography: “Naked village …, ” read the cover copy for The Sisters (alongside a garish painting of a clinching couple and a haggard, gray-haired deviant), as the 1958 Zenith Books paperback edition of The Sunnier Side had been retitled.
Nice simple home folks, you think. Pleasant, gentle upstate New Yorkers. Only one day you look around and everything is different.
You’ve seen the two girls sunning themselves on the dock before. But for the first time you notice whom they’re watching. They’re watching you. And there’s a hunger in their eyes as they lie there, bare-legged in the sun …
There’s a church in town, and a nimble-fingered deacon plays the organ there. Men and boys visit him. You’ve heard odd stories about these men and boys, and now your friend tries to make you one of them …
A part of Jackson the writer remained obstinately alive withal, and that part never entirely forgave AA for “flatten[ing] [him] out” in these years. The program, he wrote Kate in 1964, worked best “for the mindless”: “the others, the gifted ones or the thinkers or the minds of a different quality, all of them, after a period of some years of sobriety, go peculiar—run off to monasterys [sic], get married or divorced when they shouldn’t, turn queer or something, take to drugs …” Or (after a fashion) all of the above, though in 1964 this hadn’t quite transpired yet; for the moment Jackson was just thinking out loud, for his daughter’s benefit, wondering whether inebriation was perhaps “a necessary part” of certain people’s lives: “How can we expect them to be ‘normal’ when such a strong influence or trait is taken away? I don’t know, I’m merely asking rhetorically.”
1 A more innocent time. In 1975, McGinley commemorated her seventieth birthday with a typical bit of verse: “Seventy is wormwood, / Seventy is gall. / But it’s better to be seventy / Than not alive at all.”
2 A. R. Gurney, of course, went on to become one of our most distinguished playwrights, while Sproat had an interesting career in television—mainly as creator of Barnabas Collins, the ambivalent vampire-protagonist of the horror soap Dark Shadows.
3 Gurney would have learned the truth anyway: a few months later, he posted bail when Sproat was arrested for “disturbing the peace” in a car near the Yale campus, and—the implications notwithstanding (“In the fifties you could know and not know simultaneously”)—he asked Sproat to be an usher at his wedding the following summer.
An interesting postscript to the Jackson-Sproat friendship: for his thesis at Yale, Sproat wrote a one-act adaptation of “Rachel’s Summer,” fleshing out the characters by basing them on people he knew. A production was staged at Yale, to which Charlie brought his family, though he disliked the play and said so (“That isn’t my mother”). Later, when it was bought for TV’s United States Steel Hour—starring Martha Scott as the mother and Patty (“Bad Seed”) McCormack as Rachel—Jackson made a point of “charg[ing] a lot of money for the rights,” as Sproat remembered.
4 The Center of Alcohol Studies evolved at Yale during the 1930s and 1940s, shortly before Jackson’s novel was published, and both were influential in rousing the American Medical Association to recognize alcoholism as a treatable illness—a policy officially adopted in the 1950s.
5 Art Carney, for instance. The two became AA friends in the late 1950s, and in 1966 Charlie couldn’t resist sharing the inside dope that Carney would be leaving the stage version of The Odd Couple because of an alcoholic relapse.
A Place in the Country
While keeping himself on such a tediously even keel, Jackson was sometimes reminded that he’d once made quite an impact on American culture. On March 3, 1959, his old acquaintance Glenway Wescott, then president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, informed him that he would receive a $1,500 grant in literature at the award ceremonial in May, where his fellow honorees would include the likes of Truman Capote, Leon Edel, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. “I am overwhelmed—deeply moved, in fact,” Jackson wrote Wescott, beseeching the Institute secretary to let him exceed the ten-person guest limit by two (“You can’t think how much I am looking forward to receiving this honor”). Thus his wife, daughters, Boom, the Strauses, and various others were on hand to hear Charlie commended with a lofty citation written by his friend McGinley: “To Charles Jackson … whose muscular and masculine prose writing [has] extended the borders of artistic perception, and whose most celebrated novel, The Lost Weekend, is already a part of America’s literary experience.”
The following year Farrar, Straus and Cudahy acquired a paperback company, Noonday Press, whose inaugural line featured a new edition of The Lost Weekend with a panegyrical preface by John Farrar (“a masterpiece of fiction technique, of emotional power and, most important, of that particular variety of compassion for character and control of violent and special material that marked the great Russians and a few others”). And that wasn’t all: sensing the possibility of a bona fide Jackson Revival—not to say some return on his considerable investment—Roger had arranged for Charlie to meet with Robert Giroux, editor-in-chief since 1955, to see if anything could be done about Jackson’s work-in- progress, A Second-Hand Life. Stirred by the sudden interest, as well as the prospect of long-term unemployment, Charlie sent an outline of the novel to his old movie agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, in hope of getting “some advance loot from Hollywood” that would see him through completion; this failing, his devoted family rallied to keep him afloat. Not only was Rhoda working full-time at the Center of Alcohol Studies, but Sarah quit college that summer (1960) and took a job in New York (at Farrar, Straus and Cudahy), while Kate worked part-time too.
Not for nothing, though, had the novel languished these many years, and finally its author appealed to an old friend with a vaunted narrative gift, Charles Brackett. The problem, Jackson explained, was not his nymphomaniac heroine, Winifred, but rather the bland Harry Harrison, whose epiphany he envisaged as being similar to that of John Marcher in James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”—that is, “his sudden awful realization that nothing ever is going to happen to him.” But how to dramatize Harry’s acedia? And how to account, plausibly, for his being a kind of emotional “eunuch” (as opposed to, say, a repressed homosexual)? “I could have him playing ‘safe’ by always going around with married women or with divorced Catholic women … ” Brackett’s response, if any, is unknown.
Meanwhile an old benefactor, Herb Mayes—the magazine editor who, ten years before, paid five thousand dollars for “The Sunnier Side”—had taken over as editorial director of McCall’s, and the promise of such a lucrative market was the carrot Charlie needed to finish his first story in six years. “One o’Clock in the Morning” was based on an episode from the summer of 1954, when the family had stayed in Malaga with Boom; one night the fourteen-year-old Sarah had broken curfew to canoodle at the lake with an older boy, until her frantic father had interrupted the tryst with a knock on the car window.1 In the story, the father’s search around the lake entails mortifying encounters with a state trooper as well as the father of his daughter’s girlfriend, whom he wakes up to interrogate, and in the end he’s forced to recognize that his daughter doesn’t, after all, tell him everything. Mayes liked the basic idea, but asked for two more pages “to establish the fact that both characters are expecting too much of good nature, that they are both a little in the wrong,” which Jackson obediently supplied. “The trouble with you, Daddy, is you’re jealous,” says the otherwise contrite daughter. “You just don’t want me to grow up.” The father manfully sees the truth in this, and henceforth vows to let go of the girl to some seemly degree.
Whatever satisfaction Jackson took in writing this trifle (which he’d originally submitted without a title) was dampened, perhaps, by the pandering involved; at any rate his creative impulse went promptly back into hibernation. “I now, like you, am convinced that you have a powerful and significant novel and one which will touch the hidden core of loneliness in many people,” Carl Brandt, Jr. (the son of his former agent, who’d died of emphysema in 1957), had written him on October 24, 1960, after reading his client’s outline for A Second-Hand Life. Then, three weeks later: “What’s going on? How is the book coming, and when do we see you?” But Charlie didn’t reply, and a few months later Rhoda mentioned a recent “overdose episode” in a letter to Sarah, who was now old enough (twenty-one) to know about such things.
ROGER STRAUS was legendary for his patience toward writers on his list, blithely letting deadlines pass as long as he felt reasonably certain that someday the wait would prove worthwhile. But even he had a limit, as the epic vagaries of Charles Jackson would eventually bear out. By 1960, as Roger noted, his friend had “red ink on the books to the tune of $9,398.94,” which didn’t include personal loans in the neighborhood of $2,700 (“or at least that is the total of the traceable sums in my file”), though almost to the end he continued to encourage Charlie and help him make ends meet. However, there simply wasn’t as much to talk about now that Charlie only made “an occasional, embarrassed, dutiful allusion” to his stalled novel(s), as he would admit five years later in “The Sleeping Brain,” where he nonetheless also claimed that his meetings with Roger had remained as frequent and affable as ever. His letters tell a different story: “Wanna take any bets on my lunch date with Roger tomorrow?” he wrote Sarah in 1961. “It’s still on but momentarily I expect a cancellation.”
Which should not have surprised him: during the hectic working day, at least, Roger was a man who liked to mix the “gossip, shop talk, good food and fun” that was all Charlie had to offer anymore with a little business; in any case the day came, at last, when there was a little business to discuss. By 1962—nine years after the author’s first ecstatic inklings—A Second-Hand Life consisted of two completed parts (out of a planned five) and an outline, which Roger had read with grave misgiving, and over lunch one day at the Brussels he said as much, adding (so he recalled in 1978), “But you know, Charlie, I could be absolutely wrong, and there may well be a publisher who’ll take it.” Jackson would remember the moment—“the stunning crisis”—somewhat differently: “After an hour or so of the usual gay small-talk,” he wrote in “The Sleeping Brain,” “my publisher, my friend, suddenly said: ‘You know? I don’t believe in writer’s blocks. I don’t believe there is such a thing: it’s a delusion or an excuse on the part of the writer who doesn’t want to work.’ ” Whatever his exact words—and Straus was legendary for his candor, too—the gist of it, as far as Charlie was concerned, was You’re Through: “It was a dreadful black hour and black day in my life.… I had to face the fact that my career, such as it was, was over … and I’d better forget it and do something else (at the age of 58).”
But Charlie endured. Soon he was back in the office of Brandt & Brandt, telling the whole sad story to his new agent, Carl Junior (Bernice Baumgarten had left the company after Carl Senior’s death). “I think he was feeling doomed,” the younger Brandt recalled. “He thought the world was giving up on him … but [he was] fighting it all the way.” After the two made an unsuccessful pitch for A Second-Hand Life to Putnam’s (in part, no doubt, because the firm had recently published the first American edition of Lolita), Jackson and Brandt approached a new editor at Macmillan, Robert Markel, who happened to be the son of Frieda Lubelle, the treasurer at Brandt & Brandt for almost half a century and a great friend (and soft touch) to Charlie for many years. Markel was trying to buil
d a list, and saw the chance to do something decent for a once-lauded author besides. Within a month of that bombshell at the Brussels, then, Charlie was back in business: Macmillan paid him $5,000 on signing, with another $2,500 due when (if) he delivered the manuscript.
But there was still, as Rhoda wrote Brandt, “the ramifications of the Straus situation”: “I do get a little angry when I think that they’re bleeding him for 50% of any money received until his advance from them is paid off.” Or so she thought—Roger’s actual terms were somewhat more flexible and forbearing. Charlie was allowed to keep his $5,000 Macmillan advance, in hopes that this would bestir him to finish, at long last, his novel, after which the entire balance of $2,500 would be remitted to Farrar, Straus and Cudahy along with any other earnings until his debt was satisfied. In the meantime, though, Roger wangled him another $2,500 advance, free and clear, arranging for the Time Reading Program to bring out a 1963 reprint of The Lost Weekend; that summer, too, Roger mailed (Special Delivery) two crisp ten-dollar bills in response to Charlie’s phone call (collect) from a tuberculosis sanatorium in Saranac Lake, where he was badly in need of pocket money. “I wrote Roger a long chatty letter then, like the old days,” Charlie reported to Kate, “and a similar, gayer one to Dorothea in Purchase in answer to a charming letter from her.”
THE JACKSONS moved three times in three years after leaving the place on Main Street in 1959: first they rented a house on Boggs Hill Road in Newtown, then took an apartment above the barn on the same property, before spending a few months on Codfish Hill Road in Bethel, and finally (in the spring of 1962) settling in New Brunswick, New Jersey, because the Center of Alcohol Studies had moved to Rutgers. That September Charlie gave up his little apartment at the Dakota—a blow—and resigned himself to living seven days a week in the shadow of New Brunswick’s Magyar Reformed Church on Somerset Street. “I determined to myself that I was going to like it if it killed me,” he wrote Sarah, and to that end he appointed, exquisitely as ever, a room of his own at the back of their “cheap but absolutely charming” shotgun apartment on the second floor of a beige-brick house, whence he’d emerge most afternoons and walk a few blocks downtown to Newberry’s five and dime, say, where he liked to buy pencils and playing cards and chat with folks as he’d done in Newark long ago. Thus, for a time, he was passably content.
