by Blake Bailey
After years of quaint decline, the hotel was becoming hip again—“making the scene like a grandmother in a miniskirt,” as the Times put it. Andy Warhol was even then shooting Chelsea Girls, and Charlie was somewhat in awe of it all. When the Strauses came for a visit, he giddily pointed out the doors of the more famous tenants: Tennessee and Arthur and Virgil (Thomson), of course, on whom he wouldn’t dream of intruding, though he did visit the eccentric composer George Kleinsinger, and found himself ducking amongst trees and fluttering parakeets, fleeing altogether when he went to the bathroom and found a python in the tub! But mostly he was content to keep to himself. He was “living on a shoestring” until February, and besides he relished the maverick ethos. “CHARLES JACKSON: DO NOT DISTURB” read the sign on his door—incongruously enough, given the convivial fellow who resided therein. Typing in the wee hours, Charlie phoned the night clerk to in- quire whether anyone had complained (“Lissen,” the man replied, “this is the Chelsea”), and soon he was chatting up the staff in earnest. Stanley Bard, the manager, remembered how Charlie would often stop in his office just to say hello, and when the latter was ill or recovering from misadventures, Bard and others would make a point of checking on him. What Charlie appreciated best of all was a collective benignity on the subject of money: New York had declared the Chelsea a permanent landmark, and so the staff weren’t quite as obliged to harass tenants—certainly not lovable artists like Charlie—over unpaid bills. “To the entire staff of New York’s wonderful old Hotel Chelsea,” he wrote in his “Card of Thanks” for A Second-Hand Life, “where this novel was largely written, while they put up with my self-indulgences, stalling, temperament, odd hours, and whistling in the dark.”
Though Charlie was apt to pull the occasional all-nighter, most days followed an orderly pattern. Rising at six and putting on jacket and tie (he’d almost sooner be seen naked on the sidewalks than tieless), he’d stroll around the corner to the Riss Diner on Eighth Avenue, a noisy Greek place where the employees would cry out “Hello, Charlie!”—as would the newsie on 23rd Street where he stopped to buy his Times, as would various hookers slogging home after a long night. (Kate remembered eating at the Riss with her father and being introduced to one of his friends, a junky prostitute about her own age: “Salt of the earth; he loved her.”) Back at the Chelsea he’d work until one, skip lunch (an economy), nap in the afternoon, then revise the day’s output and return to the Riss for dinner.
This spartan routine seems to have taken shape over time. His appointment diary indicates an active social life during those first weeks, much of it AA-related, as he endeavored to reorient himself in the city. Around Thanksgiving (for want of other plans?) he consented to a busy AA junket in Detroit, addressing an audience of 1,200 and doing a fair amount of media too. “Funny, when you go out of town, you’re treated like a movie star,” he wrote Rhoda: “autographs, signing books, phone calls, and pictures all over the papers: like the old days, but quite meaningless.” Be that as it may, the trip (probably his last for AA) exhausted him, and for weeks he was groggy with flu. When in better fettle, and desirous of company beyond the Riss and Chelsea, he’d travel some thirty blocks uptown to the Taft, where he’d had his “last drink” with Boom on Armistice Day, 1936. Nowadays he’d chat up strangers at the bar or mingle among the tables, hoping for a chance to reveal his identity; in most cases he’d either get a blank look or (if they’d seen the movie) “a derisive denial,” as he told a friend. Returning late one night, he was struck by a little epiphany; as he scrawled on the back of an envelope (postmarked October 12, 1966) to an AA friend, Joe Besch: “A couple of weeks ago, as I came in at my usual hour of around 3 o’clock in the morning, I suddenly realized, with a start, something that had not occurred to me until then: that, for the past year, I had been living, and am still living, what can only be called a double life. Let me explain:”—but the note ended there.
What Jackson meant by a “double life” is an open question: there was his drug use in the midst of continued (but less and less frequent) AA activity, and of course there was his gay life, which was more pronounced than ever—bravely so: the Chelsea was its own world, to be sure, but Stonewall was still in the future. In 1966, Time concluded a feature story with what doubtless struck its editors as a handsome assertion: Homosexuality “deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as a minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.” Less and less did Charlie seem to agree. Various friends spotted him, during the Chelsea era, milling about with obviously gay acquaintances, while seeming also, quite vividly, to lift the scrim on his own gay persona. When Weston’s The Telling was published by David McKay in 1966, Charlie marched into the office of its editor, Eleanor Rawson, and insisted he be invited to the book party, where Weston was “on pins and needles” lest his flirtatious mentor say something indiscreet: “He was in love with me, and it blinded him to decorum.”1 It did not blind him, however, to what he considered the novel’s flaws, as he hooted at all the provocative “crotch-grabbing” that never comes to the point (“I don’t like all this fancy dancing around the subject!”); similarly, his old AA friend Ned Rorem got the impression that Charlie had refused to give a blurb for his Paris Diary because he’d found the book “coy” in its revelations of gay life.
More than ever he seemed to prefer the company of gay men—the more open, the better. On January 27, 1966, he celebrated the twenty-second anniversary of The Lost Weekend by attending the ballet and having dinner with a young fashion designer, Stan Herman, and his partner, Gene Horowitz, a teacher who was about to publish his first novel, Home Is Where You Start From. Charlie had admired the book, phoning Francis Brown of the Times and getting permission to write a generous yet measured review (“Neither a strikingly original nor even a very ‘modern’ work … [but] a remarkable achievement on other and more lasting counts: it deals directly, successfully, objectively but full-heartedly with family life”). Charlie seemed to enjoy the couple’s easy affection for each other, and reciprocated with a lot of bitchy, “hissing” humor (said Herman) that he might otherwise have taken pains to mitigate. And one wonders, too, how his meetings played out with a rough-hewn sailor named Peter Arthurs, who went on to write a notorious memoir of his friendship with the hard-drinking Irish author Brendan Behan. Arthur C. Clarke, of Space Odyssey fame, remembered how the sailor had introduced him to Jackson, Arthur Miller, and Norman Mailer, while incessantly telling stories about his homosexual romps with Behan (“I’d say that there bees some quare aul goings-on out there on them ships at sea,” the latter purportedly remarked, just prior to a frenzied grab at Peter Arthurs’s penis); finally Clarke urged his sailor friend to commit these chestnuts to paper, in the hope that it would help “keep Peter away from the gargle.” Presumably Jackson made the same suggestion during his late-night meetings with Arthurs (noted in his diary), though he’d be long dead by the time his interest bore fruit, in 1981, when With Brendan Behan included an acknowledgment of Arthurs’s “writing godfathers”: Clarke, Mailer, Miller, and Jackson.
A little parade of unknown men marches through the pages of Charlie’s final diaries, though individual names rarely appear more than once or twice. On December 2, 1965, he received an “11 o’clock call from Mike (Room 621) who stayed several hrs. Very nice person!”; on March 5, 1966, “Nick” was expected “sometime during the day” (“if he doesn’t forget”); and a man named Carlos scribbled (a childish cursive) into the space allotted for March 28, “I will be missing your’s [sic] companiship [sic] for ever. Your: Carlos”—but the next day Jackson wrote (in his steadier hand), “Carlos called.” Later that year and briefly into the next, he saw a lot of a “dear Norwegian friend” named Wintrup, for whose benefit he copied out and underlined a long passage from one of his favorite novels, Marguerite Yourcena
r’s Memoirs of Hadrian, in which the emperor writes about his young lover, Antinous, by way of reply to “the moralists” who consider “the pleasures of love among the enjoyments termed gross”:
But when these contacts persist and multiply about one unique being, to the point of embracing him entirely, when each fraction of a body becomes laden for us with meaning as overpowering as that of the face itself, when this one creature haunts us like music and torments us like a problem (instead of inspiring in us, at most, mere irritation, amusement, or boredom), when he passes from the periphery of our universe to its center, and finally becomes for us more indispensable than our own selves, then that astonishing [prodigy] takes place wherein I see much more an invasion of [the] flesh by the spirit than a simple play of the body alone.
AS FOR HIS PROGRESS on A Second-Hand Life, Charlie exuded confidence—for a while. Carl Brandt was spreading the word (“It’s hard to believe, but … ”) that his legendarily dilatory client had moved to New York and was, by God, finishing his novel at last. Robert Markel, for his part, was taking no chances. When Charlie complained that he couldn’t find a couple of old short stories that he wanted to incorporate into the book, his editor was only too happy “to play hooky” and drive him back to New Brunswick so he could spend the afternoon scouring his files. When Charlie claimed to be delayed by the bodily pain of having to sit at his typewriter for hours on end, Markel invited him to talk into a recording device and send the tapes to Macmillan for typing. When the tapes arrived sporadically if at all, Markel sent his secretary to the Chelsea to take dictation. “To Alice Schwedock,” Charlie wrote in his “Card of Thanks,” “who, after her own full day at her regular job, helped me secretarily till many midnights.” Schwedock was all of twenty-one, fresh out of college, and didn’t question the strange arrangement or the fact that she wasn’t getting paid for it; after walking on winter nights from Macmillan at Fifth Avenue and 12th, she’d be greeted by a bathrobed Charlie—“very kind and solicitous”—who would chat briefly and then dictate while some Beethoven played on his old 78 records. There were good nights and bad. Charlie knew he was being prodded, and was careful to have some kind of work ready for the young woman to type, though he was often disappointed by the results (e.g., “a long dialogue scene,” he wrote Rhoda, that was “just rambling”). Mindful, however, of Miss Schwedock’s wage slavery on his behalf, he gave her a framed Haitian pastel at the end of their labors.
“I’m very proud of myself,” he’d written Kate on November 30, “very sure of the book, very certain that I have not only a totally original but even a quite radical novel in the works. People may not like it, but goddammit they’ll read it. And I like it, which is all that matters.” He did worry a little, though, about what the general reader would make of his heroine’s tireless pursuit of “the most beautiful thing in life, the human penis.” Surely they’d wonder how he knew of such things—in which case they’d simply have to take his word for it that he’d “intuit[ed] them”: “God,” he reassured his daughter, “if I had ever experienced some of the things I’ve been writing about, I’d long since have been found dead—in some alley, say, or sordid hall bedroom of a tenth-rate hotel.” Nor was he willing to compromise his vision by indulging in the kind of coyness he’d scorned in Rorem and Weston. When his editor—whose tastes ran to the conservative—wanted to remove an especially lurid passage, in fact the author’s favorite, wherein Winifred peels away a policeman’s trousers to reveal “the tawny penis smooth and firm as a small column of marble that had been warmed by the sun,” Charlie was outraged, and at length the passage was allowed to stand (as it were). But then, it was all relative. Miss Schwedock wasn’t at all shocked by Charlie’s work—indeed found the naughty parts “a bit dated,” and perhaps that was a red flag of sorts. Within five days, anyway, of that ebullient letter to Kate about his “totally original” and “quite radical” novel, he wrote a far more tempered assessment to his estranged wife: “A terrible life, this. One day, or three days, I’m lifted up by the ‘brilliance’ of what I have done, and then I go into a four or five day depression over what I know is its pedestrian mediocrity.… Much of the novel I simply despair of, because other parts are so good, of such intense interest. But I don’t think I’ve got it any more, and I mean it quite realistically. Now don’t cheer me up: I know when it is bad, and a lot of it is that.”
Whatever his mood on a given day, he had little alternative (other than death) to finishing the book. A month before his February deadline, he was almost out of Macmillan money, and Markel had taken a hard(ish) line against dispensing more. On January 7, Charlie wrote Rhoda of subsisting on graham crackers and milk, and two weeks later he scribbled a note (evidently unsent) in green marker on a piece of ragged brown paper: “Dear Mrs. Harvey [an AA friend?]: I have reached the bottom of the Macmillan money bags and need some more subsidy, for the final six or eight weeks. Thank you from my heart for letting me impose on you.” And yet he seemed able to afford Seconal and/or Nembutal in rather large quantities. Stan Herman remembered a lot of “intoxicated” behavior on Charlie’s part—either “very prissy and silly” or “morose”—and periodically he’d overdose and have to go to the emergency room. Markel sent his personal physician to check on Jackson at St. Vincent’s Hospital that autumn, and it was Markel whom Charlie most inveigled into abetting his habit. “Nothing all day—sleep and awful depression,” he’d noted in his diary on December 3 (the day before his despondent letter to Rhoda: “A terrible life, this”), and six days later he wrote: “To N[ew] B[runswick] with Bob. Prescription.” Markel remembers the episode well. Once again Charlie had wanted to retrieve “something” from the house on Somerset, and when they started back to New York he casually asked the man to stop at a pharmacy near Rutgers. “I got the impression he’d failed to score in New York,” said Markel, “and needed to go back to New Jersey to get [more pills].”2
By spring, his novel still unfinished, Charlie was living off handouts from Rhoda and Boom. At the beginning of April he mailed his brother a chunk of Xeroxed manuscript as proof of progress, and was (according to his diary) about to leave for an AA dinner in Washington, when he “unwittingly … stepped up the [drug] intake” and suffered an almost fatal overdose, coming to at Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island. A few days later Boom sent a calming note to Sarah, along with a check:
You must have paid Charlie’s hospital bill and if and when you go to the Chelsea you’ll certainly be confronted by more. No reason for you to do it and this is to help. I’d send it to Charlie—as Rhoda and I have lately—but if he’s not responsible and uses it for the Wrong thing it’s best I send it to you—until he’s able to take care of himself—which he should be soon.…
If you have time get Charlie pyjamas or whatever. He’ll be better off as soon as he gets back in his AA group.
But in fact he was almost through with AA. The Washington trip was among the last references in his diary, and it was Markel’s impression that he’d stopped going to meetings.
Indeed, he hardly left the Chelsea for some four months after returning from Central Islip. Frightened by the mishap, he was determined to finish his novel sober—but found himself unable to write a word, or even approach the typewriter. “I did acrostics by the hour,” he recalled in “The Sleeping Brain”; “I read Lolita and Hadrian’s Memoirs and Tender Is the Night over and over again, though I knew them almost by heart.… I sat in a big chair and stared across my living room at the typewriter in the corner; and day after day I told myself: ‘Now look, Charlie; all you’ve got to do is to get up out of this chair and go over and sit down at that typewriter.’ But it had actually become, by now, a physical inability to make such a move.” When he took up the matter with his friends, agent, and editor, he claimed that “their answers, even though they knew the hazards, were remarkably similar: ‘No problem. You’re a writer. It may be the price you have to pay. If you need pills to enable you to work, okay, take them. It’s as simple as
that.’ ”
His editor remembered it as a lot less simple. On the day (“one of the worst in my life”) that Charlie mentioned his dilemma, Markel was angry at first (“he was terrifically manipulative like all drug users”), since essentially the matter had been laid in his lap, thus: If Markel told him not to take pills, well, he wouldn’t—but neither would he finish the novel to which both men had committed so much time, effort, and (in Markel’s case) money. What he needed was the man’s permission to resume taking pills. “I didn’t display the anger I felt,” said Markel. “I tried to stay calm as possible because I didn’t want to bruise him.… I was powerless to prevent it. He would have said it was my fault he wasn’t writing. ‘Charles, you have to decide for yourself,’ I said. ‘It’s your decision, not mine.’ ” Jackson took that as a yes, and thereafter regarded Markel as all the more complicit—a “literary obstetrician” (as Markel put it) whose partnership he commended for posterity in a stanza meant for Rufus “Bud” Boyd:
The writer never works alone:
His editor, if the truth were known …
