Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  But considerations of theme, plot, and character are somewhat conjectural, since the only part of this “Ardent Salute to THE POET and Homage TO MOTHER RUSSIA” that survives in polished (and polished and polished) form is its eighteen-stanza “Dedication,” for which Jackson followed the prosody of the single seventeen-line dedicatory stanza in Onegin, with its alternating masculine and feminine rhymes in iambic tetrameter. “Too mindful of our Russian treasure / Almost to pick up pen at all,” he begins.

  Only too grateful for the pleasure

  Ivan [Turgenev] and Lev [Tolstoy], Modeste [Mussorgsky] and Paul [?],

  Anton [Chekhov]—and I (O, don’t exclude me!)—

  Have found, and cherished, in your [Pushkin’s] verse;

  Yet dare I, though your gift elude me,

  Adopt your style, for bad or worse.…

  Perhaps the most amusing part, for Charlie, was mimicking the witty (“imagine me being witty”), intrusive Pushkinian narrator, the better to indulge in a lot of rueful humility:

  Yet oft have I—(You too?)—been lost in

  Old and new admiration of

  Bob Lowell, Waugh, Proust, Keats, Jane Austen,

  When suddenly my requited love

  Turns to despair, sans provocation.

  I cry within me: What’s the use?

  For us admirers, adoration

  Can be a form of self-abuse.

  Idolatry becomes castration

  Of all our urges to create.…

  So—some try drugs and some try slaking

  Their thwarted aims with rye or beer;

  Those who can do a little faking

  Try parody; as I do here.…

  So it went for the 306 lines of his “Dedication.” Once he came to the main narrative, Jackson switched to the conventional fourteen-line Onegin stanza with its complex rhyme scheme (AbAbCCddEffEgg), and opened, quite in the spirit of Pushkin, with a gentle satire on mid-century exurbia:

  The brash transistor now enlivens

  The silent lovers’ rustic lay;

  For hundreds pastured in the drive-ins

  The night is big with Doris Day.

  Try “clover-leaf,” that rural image:

  It only means a traffic scrimmage.…

  Four stanzas continue in this vein, until the flustered narrator reproaches himself for his incessant stalling and promises, at long last, to get on with the story proper:

  Enough! Enough! You get the picture …

  I’ve overdone it once again

  With easy ridicule and stricture,

  For which, forgive; and I’ll explain:

  I feel impelled to hurry! hurry!

  I’m overcome with fret and worry

  To set it down in any state

  Before it is too late, too late …

  Thus, while evoking the image of a dying writer rushing to realize, roughly, his final opus, Jackson was actually retyping over and over (with, occasionally, a word or two changed from the previous draft) his twenty-three or so finished stanzas—as if his main purpose, once inspiration had waned, was to give his wife the impression (not for the first time) that he was working on something behind his closed door. Many copies of these stanzas, and only these stanzas, survive.

  Ultimately it was the story itself that stumped or at least scared Charlie, who wrote a monitory note on an index card and perhaps tacked it over his desk (along with the Onegin rhyme scheme): “I must remember that leaning on the Pushkin story, calling to mind its protagonists, using its forms … cannot do what the story itself fails to do. Must have its own life first of all.” And so he circled round and round that “Dedication”—with its easier theme of self-abasement—and even considered writing an additional prefatory verse about his “horror” of being a “bore” (“Dear reader, whose historic service / Is patience … ”). At any rate, the actual tale of Rufus “Bud” Boyd seems never to have advanced (except in notes) beyond the following couplet: “Amid these scenes [Doris Day, etc.], with little talk, / Rufus and Mary walk and walk.”

  In another poem, written to Rhoda on their twenty-seventh anniversary (March 4, 1965), Charlie announced, “ ‘RUFUS (BUD) BOYD, / A Novel in Verse,’ is put aside. / I’ve got to be busy or employed / With something that will bread provide.” Which is not to say he didn’t keep talking and talking about it, reading his witty “Dedication” aloud to guests, and possibly he never quite despaired of completing the other 235 stanzas of the story proper someday.5

  AROUND THIS TIME, Charlie claimed to have kicked pills again—and therefore, again, to have lost the will to write. Not writing meant sitting idle in New Brunswick, though his Rutgers job had brought him in touch with the local literati, and that summer (1965) he was invited to teach at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. The director was John Ciardi (founder of the Rutgers writing program), who might have deemed Charlie to be just the ticket for the many women of a certain age who liked to attend the conference; they would know The Lost Weekend, of course, and feel inspired by the way its author, a charming contemporary, was still plugging away after a fashion.

  But Charlie was at a very low ebb in his affairs, and on the bus to Vermont he felt “sick at heart”—a “fraud,” a “has-been” who scarcely belonged among real writers and certainly had little to say to prospective students, all of whom would take a dim view of his imposture. Wanly unpacking his bag, Charlie was visited by “a kind fellow-author, a woman of national reputation,” who noticed his discomfiture and asked whether he might like a few sleeping pills.6 Seeing the poor man perk up, she gave him a dozen pills in a little white envelope, which she hoped would help “see [him] through for a few days.” “Talk about the Windfall Department,” Charlie recalled in “The Sleeping Brain.”

  It saw me through, all right.… I found myself looking forward to the morning, to teaching, to talking about fiction and the novel, to meeting with the students. And to put it bluntly and, I hope, modestly (for actually I had little to do with it), the next morning I was better than good: my self-distaste gone, I enjoyed the occasion mightily, and felt in the stream of things again. It went on like that for the whole two weeks; I was renewed, and felt at the top of my form.

  What Charlie was like “at the top of [his] form,” to other eyes, is worth considering. Certainly it was memorable for those who attended the conference. Stephen Jones—one of that year’s designated “scholars,” whose novel Jackson critiqued—remembered being impressed and a little worried by the man’s extreme animation: “Everybody looked at him like he’s Don Birnam. ‘You all right, Charlie?’ Like he’s a ticking time bomb.” Faculty members were expected to give evening lectures, and Charlie was preceded by such eminences as Dudley Fitts and Richard Ellmann, to say nothing of the flamboyant William (The Ugly American) Lederer, stabbing the air with his corncob pipe (“talking about the time he taught Hemingway how to write for a case of brandy in China,” as Jones characterized it). When it came time for Charlie to speak, Jones saw him drifting into a corner and downing a little airline-size bottle of liquor (his dozen pills long gone), before extolling the various books he loved and entreating his audience to read, read, read! “People at Middlebury [are] buying the Lost Weekend like mad,” Rhoda reported to Kate “—bought out all Farrar Straus stock. And one student toured all the Vermont bookstores (a 150 mile trip) to come back with a copy of each of Papa’s books for signatures.”

  And it wasn’t just pills and liquor: Charlie was in love! “Things got a bit sticky between us,” said John Weston, the other scholar assigned to Jackson. The two had first encountered each other at adjacent urinals. “I have two addictions,” Charlie proclaimed, wild-eyed: “I am an alcoholic and a homosexual!” Weston got the distinct impression he was saying that to everyone (“as if he was trying to make a statement”), though it soon became clear that Weston was the particular object of Charlie’s regard. A then-closeted (and married) high school teacher who’d published an apprentice novel, Weston never forgot the
exquisite care Jackson took with the manuscript of his second novel, The Telling, which they discussed one night in Charlie’s room until four in the morning. The latter lingered over every page, helpful if increasingly distrait, then abruptly lifted Weston’s shirt and began kissing his chest. Rather like Ron Sproat before him, Weston tried to fend off his mentor (“a very nice man”) as politely as possible, stressing the fact of his (Weston’s) wife and quasi-straightness in general. But Charlie pleaded, and finally became petulant: All he wanted was to fellate the young man; was that so much to ask? (“I felt bad later,” Weston reflected. “You know, I could have given that guy a little happiness for 15 minutes.”) But apparently there were no hard feelings: “For John, a souvenir of that deeply rewarding time (for me) when we were friends and colleagues at Bread Loaf,” Charlie inscribed The Lost Weekend, and for a year or so he wrote “melodic love letters” that Weston was at pains to hide from his wife in Tucson, though the marriage died a little later of natural causes.

  Other attendees didn’t receive quite the same passionate attention, though Jackson clearly endeavored to be frank but tactful. Miss Olive Schneider of Berea, Ohio—a soon-to-be-retired nurse—was so dismayed by her “one precious hour” with Jackson that she recounted it in narrative form and mailed him the result. Reminding him that she was one of six nurses sent to Bread Loaf because of a writing contest sponsored by the American Journal of Nursing, Miss Schneider described the way he seemed to rush through their conference, deploring her bad grammar (“You have split infinitives”) and labored prose before allowing that her last story (of four) was perhaps the best. By then Schneider had tears in her eyes. As she recalled the scene:

  “I am very embarrassed,” I said.

  “I had tears in my eyes yesterday,” [said Jackson]. “One of the staff said something very unkind to me. It hurt me so terribly that I couldn’t eat my lunch. We shouldn’t quarrel like that.”

  I was distressed that anyone would hurt this personable and kind man. “I think you do not know how much affection we all have for you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he answered feelingly. “I’m very happy here, happier than I have been for three years. But when I called my wife and told her so, I hurt her feelings.… I spent eight hours with one man trying to help him with his novel. It was so good and so bad.”

  I wonder if I felt envy for the chap who got eight hours of this busy man’s time, and my manuscripts were discussed with finality in less than an hour.…

  In the end Jackson asked to see her best story again, and the next day (the last of the conference) he pronounced it “excellent” and gave her pointers on how to get it published.

  He returned to New Brunswick in triumph, lugging a suitcase full of books “inscribed with praise and gratitude,” as Rhoda noted, “from about everyone there … ” Writing a friend two weeks later, Charlie exulted, “If anybody got anything out of Breadloaf, it was me!” While chatting so much about craft, he’d realized anew how wise he was on the subject, suddenly quite sure (once again) what to do with A Second-Hand Life. And yes, on rereading his novel he saw what a marvel of “concentration, originality, and form” it was, a message he took to New York a few days later—very persuasively, it seems. “Macmillan expects it to be the big fall novel of 1966,” he wrote Kate, “a foregone conclusion for Book of the month, etc., and a landslide success.… But I don’t want that—not ever again. Don’t want even to hear about it, as it does things to you. All I must do is think of the work itself and bring it off to my satisfaction—and not Liz Taylor’s and M-G-M’s.” He had big, big plans. As soon as he polished off A Second-Hand Life, he’d return to Rufus “Bud” Boyd, then the long-fallow Royalist (about Bronson Winthrop), and finally he’d be ready to tackle his masterpiece again: What Happened.

  Telling Rhoda as much when he got back from New York, he also mentioned the means (medicinal) by which this grand scheme would perforce be achieved. In that case—she replied, in effect—he would have to write his novel(s) elsewhere. At first Charlie balked: moving out would be too upsetting at the moment; he had to get on with his work, etc. But Rhoda was adamant (“You wanted it then,” he reminded her afterward, “not only that very week but that very day”), and finally Charlie had to explain things to his agent and publisher.

  And lo, it came to pass that Brandt & Brandt reserved Room 405 at the Hotel Chelsea (“on the same floor with Arthur Miller incidentally, and Tennessee just below”), while Macmillan agreed to subsidize him until February 1. Writing to inform Kate—who’d joined VISTA after graduation, and had just gone to Alabama for training—Charlie described the arrangement as a “temporary separation”: “The whole thing has been discussed between us most amicably and without rancor, and it will only come to good. Mama wants to be alone, and she should be; I need the kind of moral support I get from my professional friends—I’ll be seeing the Strauses, among others, and maybe twice a week my AA friends at Lenox Hill.”

  Charlie moved to the Chelsea on September 17, then a few days later returned to New Brunswick in Robert Markel’s Volvo station wagon to spirit away his favorite books, photographs, and objets—this while Rhoda was absent: “For I am unsure of your present emotional state,” he wrote her later that evening, “so apt to fluctuate.” He was happy to report that his first few days in New York had been bliss, and conceded that a “permanent separation” might be in order after all. Still, he worried about how she would “get along alone,” and meanwhile hoped they could at least be civil—indeed, he agreed with Sarah that they should “go right on ‘as if everything were the same,’ ” visiting their daughters together, celebrating Christmas, and so on. The next day Rhoda wrote, with a kind of controlled heat, to disabuse Sarah of that idea and certain others:

  We’ve all been brain-washed.… Papa had convinced us all that I had nothing in my life that he didn’t give me—that all interests, all activity, all relationships, stemmed from him and that without him I’d have nothing. That was true, in a way, because he so completely dominates everyone in his relationships. If you meet his interests and his varying enthusiasms all is well. And everything I might have had in my life was plowed under to conform to his interests, or even, demands. As a result, over the years I have become more and more pallid as a person—anything that was me was scorned unless it fitted the area of his interests. This carried over into my relationships with other people—which put me forward in their eyes as a very poor shadow of this stronger personality.

  You worry that I’ll withdraw from life as a result of the separation. I’ve withdrawn for years—and now I feel free. I won’t have this censure weighing down on me, burying me.…

  Papa seems to feel that you plan to invite us together on occasion to dinner, or a party or Christmas or something.… Perhaps at some far future date it might be possible. But not now, or even soon. I suspect, I must say, that this idea is his—not yours.

  At least she and Charlie agreed that everything had worked out for the best—indeed, it would be hard to say who was the more convincing on that point. “As for my morale and spirits,” Charlie wrote a friend, “—terriff!”

  1 With the same bland frankness, she’d made the following comparison between herself and Kate: “Almost exact opposites, we have many differences in opinion and outlook. Enjoying good music and good art, she is a very interesting person and has an active and alive mind. I am just average.” Sarah got an A— for this essay, which her father read with tears in his eyes: “You are the greatest pride and satisfaction in my life,” he wrote her afterward.

  2 As Sarah has pointed out, her father’s speculation about Sandy’s alleged sexual “problem” was entirely unfounded.

  3 The letter—to “Dear Rob-bair” (Charlie’s pet name for Markel)—was found among Boom’s papers at Dartmouth, and also contains a lot of effusive assurances about the progress of A Second-Hand Life and various other projects. I read the letter over the phone to Markel, who assured me (with some regret) that he never receive
d a copy.

  4 Writing several years later, Dorothea here recalls reading a part of Rufus “Bud” Boyd that almost certainly was never written, even in notes. No doubt Charlie related aspects of his story to her in person—including, perhaps, a plan to use himself as the model for his heroine’s aged husband.

  5 Jackson had planned for the novel to be made up of six parts of forty stanzas each. In 1986 the Anglo-Indian novelist and poet Vikram Seth unwittingly picked up this fallen standard, producing his delightful novel The Golden Gate, written in 590 Onegin stanzas and somewhat inspired by the post-Arndt translation of Charles Johnston.

  6 This “Angel of Mercy” (as Charlie described her) was almost certainly Nancy Hale (1908–88), a novelist who’d been a regular at Bread Loaf for many years. Ann Brower, whose husband, Brock, was also on the faculty in 1965, remembers Hale slipping her a valium after she’d received stressful news from home.

  Chapter Twenty

  A Second-Hand Life

  Charlie loved his little apartment at the Chelsea, and visitors always noticed the pride with which he showed it off. He had his own bath and kitchenette, and the sitting room was dominated by a gorgeous fireplace with a Carrara mantelpiece flanked by twisting Byzantine columns (rather like Rufus’s muscled arms) and surmounted by a lovely, hazy mirror that went all the way up to a high ceiling. On subsequent trips to New Brunswick, he and the loyal Markel had lugged away the rest of his effects: an easy chair and ornate floor lamp (a gift from Ruby Schinasi); a typing table, chair, and file cabinet; his favorite records and music-room secretary; reproductions by Gauguin, Klee, Shahn, and some “charming odd water-color experiments” by Kate he’d recently had framed; and naturally his polar-bear rug, Staffordshire Shakespeare, and suckling Romulus and Remus that had figured so happily in The Lost Weekend—all of it, as ever, arranged just so: “neat as a pin,” observed one journalist, “his books standing in serried ranks on the shelves, his paintings hung at precisely the right level, and not a speck of dust visible anywhere.”