I came to this book in a rather crabwise fashion. For several years my life was consumed with work on two big literary biographies—Richard Yates and John Cheever—and I’d hoped to write something a little quirkier this time. My first thought was a book along the lines of Strachey’s Portraits in Miniature: in my case, a collection of profiles about promising but forgotten writers. I was piqued by examples of these (Calvin Kentfield, Nathan Asch, Flannery Lewis, to name a few) that I’d encountered in the course of my research on Yates and Cheever, and thought it might be fun to examine why it is, sometimes, that talent is not enough. Some writers burn out, some have bigger demons, and sometimes life just goes ineffably awry. But what, in each case, is the process whereby a good and even prolific writer achieves all but total oblivion?
I considered Charles Jackson for my roster of literary losers, but he didn’t quite fit: after all, he’d been rather famous for a time, and The Lost Weekend would always be famous as a classic movie based on a vastly (and unfairly) lesser-known novel—a novel I happened to love. Ever since college I’d had a much-thumbed copy of the Time Reading Program edition, and while considering my latest project I took a moment to reread that heartening “Editors’ Preface” about how Jackson had become, as of 1963, chairman of the New Brunswick AA. This, I thought, had the makings of a nice redemptive fable. Then I did a Google search and discovered that Jackson had killed himself at the Hotel Chelsea—a mere five years after that vaunted chairmanship!
Until three or four years ago, the online finding aid for the Charles R. Jackson Papers at Dartmouth indicated only two boxes: one containing drafts of The Lost Weekend, the other some three hundred pages of letters from Charlie and Rhoda to Boom. I ordered copies of the latter, which certainly attested to the autobiographical nature of The Lost Weekend. Given that Boom (like the solicitous Wick in the novel) was forever cleaning up after his brother’s messes, their relationship seemed to have become strained in later years, and the letters taper off in the late 1950s—right around the time Jackson stopped drinking and writing fiction. What, I wondered, happened next? How did he go from being a celebrated AA spokesman (a recording of his 1959 talk to the Cleveland AA is available online) to an uncloseted, pill-popping suicide at the Chelsea?
I got in touch with Jackson’s daughters, who remembered very little of their father’s dark side. “People are always saying, ‘Oh my God, your father was Charles Jackson?’ ” Sarah told me. “ ‘Do you have a story!’ Well, in fact, Papa had a story, but he did his best to shield us from his demons and just be a loving father.” Willing to cooperate (albeit not without qualms at first) in a venture that might help restore their father’s literary reputation, both Sarah and Kate submitted to interviews and also sent me every pertinent document they could find, including letters their father had written them during their college years in the late ’50s and early ’60s. And here indeed was a different side of Charles Jackson—the man described by Dorothea Straus as a “warm, proud father [and] companionable husband”—and of course I was more intrigued than ever. Again: what had led this admirable man to the Chelsea and Stanley Zednik (not to mention the 1967 best-seller lists)? When I gave some hint of my puzzlement, Kate Jackson asked if I’d seen her father’s papers at Dartmouth, and I mentioned the one box of letters to Boom. “Oh no,” she said, “there are at least twenty boxes!”—that is, the bulk of her father’s papers, which she and Sarah hadn’t actually relinquished until 2002.
I got in touch with Eric Esau, the superb Dartmouth librarian who’d once alerted me to a crucial, undiscovered cache of letters from the young John Cheever to Reuel Denney. Eric promptly disinterred the twenty boxes of uncatalogued Jackson papers from the library basement—where they might have languished forever—and presently I received a rough inventory of their contents from Kate. Awaiting my perusal, it seemed, were parts of Jackson’s vast unfinished “Birnam saga,” Farther and Wilder, piles of other unpublished manuscripts, diaries, photographs, and hundreds of letters between Jackson and his family, friends, fellow writers, and various movie stars. Given the prospect of mining this mother lode, I tabled my little book of literary profiles and decided to propose a full-length biography of Jackson.
It’s been a delightful project from beginning to end, and for that I have many people to thank—above all (obviously) Jackson’s daughters, Sarah and Kate. No matter how grinding or unseemly my curiosity, they responded with the same judicious courtesy, and often went beyond what even I consider the call of duty. After I’d almost despaired of the Kafkaesque process of prying sixty-year-old medical records out of the former Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover—Charles Jackson’s “favorite little hospital” for drying out—Sarah persevered, until the amazing day when she mailed me the whole fat packet. As for Kate, her early trip to the Rauner library on behalf of this project was indicative: for many months, when I most needed help, she sent me a steady stream of e-mails—stray memories, people to contact, helpful details, and leads of every conceivable kind. And both women fed me lavishly in their homes—Sarah’s on the Upper East Side, Kate’s in western Connecticut—even while I badgered them with my incessant questions. Throughout I was deeply moved, and remain so, by how tenderly they remember their father; he was right to consider himself “anything but a failure” in that particular respect.
I spent a very fruitful afternoon in the front parlor of Herb Jackson’s old house at 241 Prospect Street, Newark, where his grandson Michael Kraham now lives with his family. Michael could hardly have been more friendly and forthcoming—a repository of family lore, as was the house itself: one of Boom’s braided rugs is on the floor, one of his cut-paper lambs (such as Charlie gave Judy Garland for Christmas in 1944) is over the fireplace, and of course in the backyard is the barn where Michael’s grandfather spent much of his adult life as a boozy recluse. I also had a number of delightful conversations with Herb’s oldest daughter, Sally Wilson, who shed priceless light on the peculiar Arcadian ethos that her uncle Charlie evoked in his fiction.
My research would have taken twice as long, and been half as enjoyable, without the help of Eric Esau at Dartmouth. Without going into tedious detail, suffice it to say that most people would have charged a retainer for what he did out of the goodness of his heart. Best of all he became a friend, and the sweetness of his company was the highlight of my trips to New Hampshire—the time we visited Six Chimney Farm, for instance, and were graciously entertained by the present owners, Allen and Bonnie Reid Martin, whom I hope to see again soon. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor John W. Crowley at the University of Alabama, one of the most gracious academics I’ve ever had the pleasure to know: not only did he present me (as a permanent gift!) with his collection of Jackson first editions and paperbacks, but he also wrote me a number of long, helpful e-mails and shared his excellent scholarship (both published and non-) on Jackson’s work. And without the help of Rae Lindsay I could scarcely have written the last chapter of this book, key portions of which are based on an unpublished memoir by her late husband, Alex, which she managed to find in a cobwebby pocket of her attic. Many thanks, too, to Carol Rosenthal of the Newark Public Library, who sent me as much Jacksoniana as she could lay her hands on (her son had portrayed the novelist in the local Cemetery Walk). Carol also arranged for me to be given a guided tour of Newark by the amiable Mary Elizabeth Smith, of the Newark-Arcadia Historical Society, whose knowledge of certain rumors about the Jackson family reminded me yet again that, as Charlie liked to say, “In a small town it’s practically impossible not to know practically everything about practically everybody else.” Julia Fifield—the grande dame of Orford, age 106 and still voting (Republican) as of this writing—would certainly agree, and I thank her for chatting with me and letting me see the marvelous diaries of her stepfather, Ned Warren, who took such a keen interest in the everyday lives of his neighbors (“Jacksons lighted up tonight”).
The following people sent letters, photographs, and/or other helpful material, and in some cases also submitted to interviews: Steven M. L. Aronson, Gloria Ayvazian, Pepa Ferrer Devan, Thillman Fabry, Gregory George, Pat Hammond, Haidee Becker Kenedy, Richard Lamparski, Harold and Elsie Quance, Alexandra Piper Seed, Alice Schwedock Small, Laura Straus, and Principal Kevin Whitaker of Newark High School.
A number of others also granted interviews or else provided written reminiscences: Michael Baden, M.D., David Bain, Stanley Bard, A. Scott Berg, Andrew Besch, Alexandra Mayes Birnbaum, Nancy Bloomer, Robert S. Bloomer, Tom Bloomer, Kerry Boeye, Paul Bogart, Bruce Bohrmann, Ben Bradlee, Carl Brandt, Jr., Philip Brickner, M.D., Bill Brock, John Brock, Ann Montgomery Brower, Brock Brower, Gilbert Burgess, Joseph Caldwell, David Chanler, Gerald Clarke, John Connolly, Norman Corwin, Ann Davis, Seymour Epstein, Gene Farley, Mikey Gilbert, William A. Graham, Ann Green, A. R. Gurney, Geoffrey Hendricks, Stan Herman, Roberta Richmond Jenkins, Stephen Jones, Jeannie McLane Jones, Arthur Laurents, Richard Mallary, Robert Markel, Edward Pomerantz, Elizabeth Reid, Hilda Richmond, Robert Richmond, Ned Rorem, Edwin Safford, Diane Rowand Simons, Ron Sproat, Roger W. Straus III, Barbara Peech Streeter, Grace Streeter, William Toomey, John Weston, Alexandra Whitelock, and Margot Wilkie.
Many librarians and other nice people helped with my research, and I’m afraid this is a very incomplete list: Kathy Kienholz (American Academy of Arts and Letters); Charis Emily Shafer (Butler Library, Columbia); Erika Gorder (Douglass College, Rutgers); Lynn Eaton (Duke University); Rebecca Fawcett (Hood Museum, Dartmouth); Marcel LaFlamme (Independence Community College); Craig S. Simpson (Kent State University); Lia Apodaca (Library of Congress); Mark Genszler and Sally Andrews (Marlboro College); Laura Ruttum (New York Public Library); Laura Dodson and Mary Anne Vandivort (Norfolk Public Library); Sandra Stelts (Penn State Libraries); Charles E. Greene and AnnaLee Pauls (Princeton University Library); Jean Cannon (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center); Nicolette A. Dobrowolski, Kyle C. Harris, and Mary O’Brien (Syracuse University Library); Todd Vradenburg (Will Rogers Institute); Karen Miller and Nancy Wagner (Wilmette Public Library); Nelson Aldrich, Nick Anthonisen, Jerry Rosco, and Ralph Voss.
That a great publisher is still willing to subsidize books about obscure but deserving authors is reassuring to say the least, and my editor at Knopf, Deborah Garrison, is the embodiment of this spirit. Again, too, I thank Deb’s wonderful assistant, Caroline Zancan, who always returns my e-mails with cheerful efficiency. And I would be lost and broke without the services of my lovable, enterprising agent, David McCormick. This book is dedicated to my best friend, Michael Ruhlman, without whom it probably wouldn’t have been written for any number of reasons too complicated to go into; I owe much to this good man, period. And finally, as ever, my usual tearful gratitude to my wife, Mary, and our sweet daughter, Amelia.