Chapter Six
Sweet River
In the 1930s, most doctors believed that alcoholics (“dipsomaniacs”) were hopeless cases. Maybe a handful had the willpower to quit on their own, and as for the rest—“once a drunkard, always a drunkard.” Jackson, however, thought he might get the help he needed from “an exceptionally intuitive man” who could understand how the alcoholic felt inside—from a man, better still, who was himself an alcoholic—and so on November 12, 1936, he met with an intuitive alcoholic named William Wynne Wister.
Bill or “Bud” Wister was an eccentric, gesticulating redhead who practiced (unlicensed) as a “psychotherapist in alcoholism,” and would later boast that he’d cured 294 out of 300 patients—including the author of The Lost Weekend. Born into an affluent family in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia (one of the “Philadelphia Main Line Wisters,” as he liked to say, and nephew of the great Western novelist Owen Wister), Bud would always assert that his plush upbringing was primarily to blame for his disastrous twenty-year drinking career. After graduating from The Hill School in nearby Pottstown and serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Great War, he became a consummate Jazz Age wastrel: racing to speakeasies in his Stutz Blackhawk four-seater, a tipsy flapper at his side, he could always count on his wealthy parents (an overprotective mother in particular) to get him out of jams. Even the private sanatoria they chose for him only pandered to his habit: since doctors figured their patients were hopeless anyway, they fed them one drink an hour to keep them happy, while their families went on shelling out $150 a week.
Wister hit bottom in the fall of 1934, when he woke up in yet another seedy, anonymous, sickishly spinning hotel room, “one hundred per cent licked.” Wondering where else to turn, he remembered a book he’d skimmed several months before (planted at his bedside by the overprotective mother): The Common Sense of Drinking, by Richard Peabody, who, according to the New York directory, was then living on Gramercy Park South. A lay therapist, Peabody would have anticipated the depth of Wister’s misery—as he’d written in his book, “No action may result until some particularly depressing series of events has brought vividly home to [the alcoholic] the futility of trying to continue drinking and the apparent impossibility of giving it up unaided.” Such ideas—and some of the catchier phrases with which he conveyed them—would later be appropriated by Bill Wilson for his “Big Book,” Alcoholics Anonymous, whose famous admonition in favor of total abstinence (“Half measures availed us nothing”) was first expressed by Peabody as “Halfway measures are of no avail,” as was “Once a drunkard, always a drunkard.” (Peabody was fond of italics: “A fairly exhaustive inquiry has elicited no exceptions to this rule,” he said of the second phrase.)
Wister figured that Peabody had also been a drinker, but their affinity went further. Peabody, too, was from an illustrious family, a graduate of Groton School (where his uncle, Dr. Endicott Peabody, was headmaster) and Harvard; moreover he’d served in the Great War as an infantry captain, which left him with a keen sense of how alcoholism was, to some extent, a byproduct of the zeitgeist. “In the twentieth century,” his book begins, “with its high-pressure demands on nervous systems which have not yet become adapted to big business, mass production, telephones, automobile, high economic standards—in fact, bigger, faster, and noisier living conditions—alcohol has come to play an ever-increasing part as a narcotic, rather than a mere social stimulant.” Above all, there was the sheer nihilism of those who’d survived the war’s mechanized carnage, and who thus found it hard to cope with the noisy vacuous boredom of the peacetime world. Apart from drinking, Peabody had but a single passion after the war—chasing fire engines—to which end he’d installed a special alarm in his house, and would hastily don helmet, hip boots, and rubber coat whenever the call came. Finally, after the usual alcoholic mishaps, Peabody had gotten sober with the help of the so-called Emmanuel Movement (though he went on with his fire hobby), whose more practical methods he eventually refined into a program all his own—minus the emphasis on fellowship and spirituality that would later become the bases of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Peabody prided himself on a purely “scientific” approach (“common sense and sound psychological principles”): “He never mentioned the moral aspects of drinking,” Wister observed. “He spoke objectively, as though he were discussing the proper treatment for a broken leg.” The first thing Peabody explained to his new patient was that he could never drink again; also, the patient had to get sober for his own benefit—nobody else was to blame if things went awry. Given the alcoholic’s long habit of petty deceptions, honesty in all things was now key, and hence Peabody (and later AA) would instruct patients to make amends toward people they’d hurt, and notify creditors that they planned to repay them. Perhaps the most essential aspect of the Peabody Method, especially in the early stages of treatment, was keeping a routine: each night, before retiring, the patient was to make a careful schedule accounting for every fugitive minute, if possible, of the following day—shaving, dressing, eating breakfast, looking for a job, reading improving books, and making allowance for a bit of chaste, well-earned diversion in the evening. Such a routine, said Peabody, accomplished “three very important results: (a) The individual is continuously occupied; (b) he is conscious that he is doing something concrete about his problem (in contrast to mere intellectualizing); (c) he trains himself constantly in minor ways to obey his own commands.” The last was crucial to Peabody’s notion of “thought control”: restoring reason to its throne, as it were, and putting one’s emotional self in its place. The latter, of course, wanted to keep drinking—to remember the music and fellowship of the tavern, to feel petulant about old grievances, to succumb to childish nostalgia for a more romantic life. One must learn to detect the siren song of the emotional self in all its insidious variations, and quash it as a matter of reflex.
In April 1936, Peabody declared that Wister no longer needed his services; indeed, he’d been so successful a patient, said Peabody, that he might consider taking up psychotherapy himself—ever vigilant withal, lest he deceive himself about being “irrevocably cured.” Three weeks later the forty-three-year-old Peabody died of a “heart attack,” according to The New York Times (he “attended all large fires in the city and was well known to many Fire Department officials”), and Wister was desolate: “A truly great man had left the scene.” He called Peabody’s widow, who told him that Dick had been feeling run-down lately; he’d been resting at their house in Vermont when a bad cold developed into pneumonia and he died suddenly in his sleep. So Wister reported in a “biographical novel,” The Glass Crutch (1945)—though a friend and colleague of Peabody, Samuel Crocker, claimed that the man had actually died drunk. As Bill Wilson wrote in his copy of The Common Sense of Drinking, “Dr. Peabody was as far as it is known the first authority to state, ‘once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic [sic],’ and he proved it by returning to drinking and by dying of alcoholism—proving to us that the condition is incurable.”
Whatever the case, Wister picked up a fallen standard, renting a studio near his master’s on Gramercy Park and arranging to see patients who’d been “cleared up physically” and referred by doctors. Jackson was among the first,1 and felt immediately at ease with the practical, no-nonsense nature of the Peabody Method. Unlike “the foolish psychiatrist,” Wister never asked him to make promises he couldn’t keep, never reproached or patronized him, and therefore gave him no reason to be anything other than absolutely honest: “We regard each other as two average normal individuals with sufficient intelligence to regulate our lives in orderly and profitable fashion without benefit of Freud,” Jackson wrote in a progress report (prescribed by Peabody) after the first month:
Constantly cropping up now (as they have been for years) are my misdemeanors of the past: times when I made a fool of myself, the night I did this-or-that, the week I disappeared, the grief I caused So-and-so, the damage I did when, etc. etc. etc.—nightmare experiences, all of them, especially when heightened by the light of sober reality. But since I have given up drinking I can look back upon all these unflinchingly now, with the knowledge that I was truly not responsible then. As opposed to this, however, is the real responsibility I have lately acquired, a sound responsibility based on sobriety and my true self.
Another thing Jackson liked about the program was its “sustaining power,” the way it gave him something to think about between sessions—a good thing, because he had a lot of time to think, the more positively the better. For a while Jackson hardly stirred from his dingy little room except to see Wister; the rest of his (carefully scheduled) free time was mostly given over to reading Shakespeare.2 Despite the upbeat tone of his progress report, Jackson’s first months of sobriety were grim: withdrawal had left him enervated and suicidally depressed, and it didn’t help that his days were passed in almost total, shabby solitude. He tried taking a mindless job at an electrical equipment plant (inspired by his time at the jigsaw factory, perhaps), but the eleven-hour workdays were more than his shattered nerves could stand.
At any rate he made it. Eight months after saying goodbye at the Taft Hotel, Charlie announced to Boom, Rhoda, and others that he was through drinking forever. Wister agreed: “I consider that you are cured,” he wrote, warning however that Charlie should be careful about his tendency to procrastinate (“It would be dangerous for you”), and urging him to “develope [sic] the habit of giving out … get your mind off yourself”—even suggesting that he support an orphan (“Perhaps you have one of your own tucked away in NY or Syracuse,” Wister quipped). He concluded as Peabody had taught: “Don’t ever forget one drink could wipe away all you possess so respect it—perhaps fear it as I do.”
Wister was right to fear it. A few years later he moved to Los Angeles in the hope of attracting a wide clientele of film-business alcoholics, until a “big slug psychiatrist” threatened to expose him for practicing without a license. Next he took an engineering job (though he wasn’t an engineer) at Douglas Aircraft, and had a disastrous relapse once he’d been fired—at one point smashing off the neck of a whiskey bottle because his hands were too palsied to unscrew the cap. Returning sober (if not quite chastened) to New York, Wister took a job in advertising and married a long-suffering girlfriend—his second wife—who, he vowed, would be “neither nurse nor servant” but “an equal partner.” And though he’d sworn off psychotherapy, he continued to regard himself as a leading authority on alcoholism. Jackson, for one, found him a little tiresome on the subject: “Oh well, I guess I’ve outgrown Bill Wister,” he wrote a mutual friend in 1943, “and maybe a good thing too. But of course, if I should say such a thing out loud, Bill would be bound to get the idea that I was cocky, over-confident, and in a ‘dangerous state.’ ”
The two fell out for good over a controversy involving their respective novels. Rather unfairly, Jackson accused Wister of undervaluing The Lost Weekend when he first read it: “[It] was simply beyond your comprehension,” he wrote, adding that Wister’s eventual appreciation was prompted by the good reviews. In fact, Wister had found an early portion of the manuscript “splendid”—though he (like many readers) hoped that Birnam would reform in the end—and finally provided a clumsy but glowing blurb: “Mr. Jackson’s unusual ability to vividly portray the gamut of emotions and subsequent behavior so characteristic of the alcohol addict—makes the work a masterpiece.” But soon Jackson heard a rumor that Wister had been working on his own book, with a chapter on Jackson, no less. Ironically it was none other than Roger Straus—later Charlie’s best friend—who played midwife to this curious project, approaching an editor at Collier’s, Jim Bishop, to write Wister’s story.3 “The smiler turned out to be strange,” Bishop remembered of his quasi-affable subject. “He seemed convinced that I was a stenographer, taking down his recollections word by word.” Detecting the man’s “inner irritation,” Bishop asked why he was so determined to write such a painful book in the first place. “That’s easy,” said Wister, explaining that one of his old patients was also writing a potentially groundbreaking work about alcoholism—but happily the man was a procrastinator: “Charlie Jackson is very slow. Besides, he’s writing a novel.… We’re writing the facts.”
Jackson beat him to the punch by more than a year, whereupon someone at Doubleday (Wister’s publisher) saw an opportunity to capitalize on The Lost Weekend, informing the columnists Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen that a book titled The Glass Crutch was forthcoming from “the man who cured Charles Jackson.” Wister (who “had a habit,” said Bishop, “of bandaging his wounds in venomous letters to friends”) heard that Jackson was considering a lawsuit, and hence let him know, among other things, and in somewhat opprobrious terms, that Jackson wasn’t mentioned even once in The Glass Crutch. But actually Charlie had no intention of suing, and had even offered to blurb the book for old times’ sake. “I thought your letter one of the most outrageous I have ever received,” he replied.
You ought to be ashamed of it. I do not know what you are talking about when you talk of me “suing.” … What I do object to more strongly, however, is the ridiculous statement in your letter: “If you are going to pretend you have never been an alcoholic, you are headed for trouble later.” In the first place, I do not think you are a very good one to talk of “trouble later”; and in the second place, you are not showing very much sense in saying I am pretending I have never been an alcoholic. If I had pretended any such thing, would I have been fool enough to write such a book as The Lost Weekend? Really, Bill, use your head.
As it happened, The Glass Crutch would indeed be associated with Jackson in the public mind, though not in the way Wister might have liked. In a gleefully vicious notice for the Times Book Review, Wolcott Gibbs blamed Jackson (“who wrote that excellent book called ‘The Lost Weekend’ ”) for having obliquely inspired—that is, by inaugurating the genre—a ghastly “tract” such as The Glass Crutch, which Gibbs described as the story of a reformed drunk who went on to become “a lay witch-doctor … and one of the great bores of our time.” Nor could Charlie himself resist a bit of ambivalent schadenfreude: “By the way,” he wrote a friend, “did you happen to read that unconsciously screamingly-funny life of William Wynne Wister of the Philadelphia Main-Line Wisters? I was embarrassed for him throughout: [Bishop] couldn’t have played a dirtier trick on poor Bill if he had tried, though god knows he thought he was doing an honest job of hero-worship.”
It was the beginning of a last, brisk decline for the man who cured Charles Jackson. Fed up with his pompous bickering, Wister’s wife and friends left him in toto, and finally he lost his job too. “Alone and lonely,” as Bishop later described him—without, that is, the kind of support system that AA was meant to provide—Wister began drinking again. One day in January 1947, a maid let herself into his Tudor City apartment and found him standing in the living room, unsteadily, strings of blood dangling from his open mouth. Once again he’d smashed off the neck of a whiskey bottle, but this time he’d swallowed some of the broken glass. He bled to death within a few hours (or rather died “after a brief illness,” according to the Times).
As a trial assignment, Wylie asked Jackson to adapt the tale of Jacob and Esau for the CBS radio series Living Stories of the Bible; Jackson delivered the script the next day. “Where have you been!” said Wylie. “You’re a writer!” Just to make sure, he asked for two more Bible stories, and received them within three days. Clearly Jackson had taken to heart Wister’s advice about procrastination, and Wylie hired him as an assistant at $72.50 a week. It was money well spent. Wylie was struck by how “extraordinarily teachable” Jackson proved to be in the new (to him) medium of radio; he mastered it immediately, and was simply an ideal employee besides. “Without any doubt Charles Jackson is the finest writer I have ever had on my staff,” Wylie wrote two years later, when Jackson left CBS. “He is poetic, creative, brilliant, perceptive, and terribly conscientious.” Wylie’s main province was The Columbia Workshop, one of the most acclaimed radio programs of its time, for which it became Jackson’s job to read, edit, and select almost every script, as well as to write continuity and introductions where needed. Some of the most famous broadcasts of the era were produced for the Workshop: Orson Welles adapted Hamlet and Macbeth, and also performed (with Burgess Meredith and a cast of some two hundred extras) in Archibald MacLeish’s The Fall of the City (1937), an allegorical verse play about European fascism, aired from the Seventh Regiment Armory in Manhattan.
Though it wasn’t part of his regular employment, Jackson also managed to sell seven of his own scripts to the Workshop, including a highly regarded adaptation of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” by Stephen Vincent Benét (who also wrote for the program), as well as two originals, Dress Rehearsal and A Letter from Home. The latter was a thirty-minute reworking of his apprentice play, Simple Simon, largely told in flashbacks and vastly improved by compression. In the frame story, a successful screenwriter named after Boom—Fred Storrier—receives a letter from “the girl [he] didn’t marry,” Bettina, who writes to congratulate him on his latest movie, a prison drama. Fred recites the gist of her letter while railing against his own mediocrity: “ ‘Young—intelligent—talented—charming!’—Hm!—‘I picture you in New York—a gay and glamorous life!’ … No, my dear Bettina, decidedly no.” Chided by a blasé, mercenary wife, Fred casts back to his small-town youth, when he was a promising editor at the Courier—and so he might have remained were it not for the selfless Bettina, who, despite her love for him, demanded he get on with his life rather than marry her and languish in Arcadia. (“You wouldn’t like me long if we stayed here … I’d sit at home and get green-eyed because you couldn’t have clothes like—like Archer Brown.…”) “Oh, it’s sad to think of,” Fred sighs to his wife. “I hadn’t a doubt, not the faintest doubt, that I was going to be the great man in modern literature.… [And] now I write movies—at forty thousand a throw.” “So would Shakespeare if he were living now,” his wife sensibly concludes.
Along with Jackson’s other accomplishments, Wylie noted his “extraordinary ability for recognizing talent.” He made a point of reading the slush pile, welcomed visitors who wanted to pitch ideas, and thus personally discovered a number of writers who went on to considerable careers—including Norman Corwin, whose fame rests all but entirely on radio work. Corwin’s reputation was established with his play They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease (1939)—about Mussolini’s brutal bombing campaign against helpless Ethiopians—which was published as a book (his first of many) and dedicated to Jackson. “He had inspired that work,” said Corwin. “Charlie was a great encouragement to me, who was then a novice in all things requiring sophistication on the part of a radio writer.” In fact, Jackson often behaved as if he’d sooner help other writers than himself, though the flip side of such manic generosity was, as Corwin learned, a furious refusal to forgive slights. “Do I know Norman Corwin indeed!” he wrote a friend in 1945, pointing out that he’d been the dedicatee of Corwin’s first book. “But something happened which is too long to go into now, and though we keep up a semblance of mutual admiration, I haven’t much respect for him.” What happened—as Corwin sadly remembered some seventy years later—was that he had buckled to a superior at CBS and cut Jackson’s credit from a script: “I objected, but not strongly enough … and I never met or spoke to Charlie again. It was a dismal ending to a glorious friendship.”
A more enduring friendship was with Nila Mack, a former vaudeville actress who found fame with her children’s radio program Let’s Pretend. Mack doted on Charlie (whom she regarded as “a rare and superior person,” according to the playwright Howard Lindsay), and was perhaps even happier than he when The Lost Weekend made him famous: “To this day,” she wrote him in 1945, “I still have that almost uncontrollable urge, when I see someone reading the book to kiss them first and then tell all about you.” Along with warmhearted, morbidly sensitive natures, the two had alcoholism in common, which naturally led to a few snappish moments. When Jackson suffered a very public relapse in 1951, Mack (“three-sheets to the wind”) gave him a “long tragic scolding” over the phone: “I took the whole thing very nicely for about fifteen minutes,” he wrote Dorothea Straus, “because she was concerned … and said she was right, et cetera, and finally I got tired of it, and simply said, ‘Okay, Nila, you’ve played that scene very well, but long enough—now go on back and have another drink.’ ”
And what about her husband’s sexual nature? Rhoda knew all about it, and seems to have accepted it as yet another facet of his protean personality: “If you should write the story of your life just as it was,” she once told him, “nobody would believe it. You’ve been too many different people.” Charlie, for his part, wanted children and a normal social life—wanted (it bears repeating) “to belong”; as Don puts it in The Lost Weekend, homosexuality “was a blind alley, not shameful but useless, futile, vain, offering no attractions whatever, no hope, nowhere a chance to build.” Cruising, after all, became unseemly (and less fruitful) in middle age, and then there was the decorous, sublimated, crushingly lonely dotage that men such as Winthrop were given to endure. On the other hand, it went without saying that married life could go badly awry when one partner was gay. Tchaikovsky, for one, was married for all of two weeks before he almost succumbed to madness and suicide, and at least one gay friend of the Jackson brothers—a man nicknamed Flew—did, in fact, kill himself as the result of a marriage gone wrong. “The irony of it!” an acquaintance wrote Boom afterward. “Flew told me once that he married as an ‘insurance against a lonely old age.’ It worked, but not quite the way he had figured.” Flew, an English professor in his fifties, had fathered two daughters during a sixteen-year marriage, when his wife suddenly learned the truth and decided (as she wrote at the time) that the situation “was more than [she] could handle.” Flew celebrated a final birthday with Boom in Malaga (“I knew on my birthday I would not be seeing you again,” he wrote in his subsequent thank-you note), then killed himself a few weeks later.
To be sure, Charlie was hardly averse (especially in later years) to complaining about the aridity of his own marriage, cursing “the perversity of the Fates” for having arranged the union of a man “who needs so badly to be loved” and a woman “who is unable to give it.” “MY WIFE IS A GOOD WOMAN,” he wrote with a wobbly hand in his journal (quoting Gauguin); “I WISH SHE WERE DEAD.” But such moods were passing, and most of the time he realized better than anyone that he’d been almost miraculously fortunate. His gay friends were frankly amazed by Rhoda’s forbearance, given that Charlie had assured them that, yes, he told her everything! The writer Ron Sproat—one of Charlie’s protégés in the 1950s—was invited to the Jacksons’ for dinner, and was struck by how pleasantly the evening proceeded: “Since Charlie was gay, I thought it was kind of—I felt strange about the situation. I thought his wife would think I was Charlie’s boy. But if she did, she didn’t show it. She was nothing but nice.” Nice was the tip of a sizable iceberg. As Jackson wrote of the wife of his alter ego Jim Harron in The Outer Edges, “She was the balance wheel: without her he was lost. If he tried to go on alone, there was no telling what would happen to him.”
His old friend Thor Lyngholm, meanwhile, had married a much older woman with money, and the two divided their seven years together between an estate in Bermuda (“with sixteen tenant houses no less,” Charlie noted) and a place in Lynbrook, Long Island. Thor died at age fifty-four on July 1, 1943, the day after Charlie finished The Lost Weekend.
There was no question of selling the story to the mass-market “slick” magazines, but as it happened Charlie was far more attracted to the purely literary prestige of Partisan Review, whose commitment to “Marxism in politics and Modernism in art” might prove the ticket for his indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy in Arcadia, New York. It didn’t hurt that a mutual friend had brought the manuscript to the attention of James T. Farrell, of Studs Lonigan fame, who personally recommended it to the journal’s editors. “We like your story, ‘Palm Sunday,’ very much,” wrote Dwight Macdonald (no less), accepting it for the summer 1939 issue—twenty-five copies of which Jackson purchased (beyond the usual author’s allotment) for general distribution among family, friends, and detractors: “You probably think I’m crazy to order so many,” he wrote, “but after all, it’s Baby’s First Story.” A month later Macdonald informed him that “Palm Sunday” was perhaps their most acclaimed fiction since Delmore Schwartz’s famous debut, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Jackson was ecstatic: not only was he finally launched as a serious writer, but he was also getting invited to a lot of Village parties full of bona fide New York intellectuals such as Macdonald, Schwartz, and the journal’s founding editor, Philip Rahv, who began writing chatty letters to Charlie on all sorts of earnest sociopolitical topics (“Today the whole city is agog with the news of the Nazi-Soviet rapprochement … ”).
The iron was hot, and Jackson promptly wrote another story about a childhood trauma—“Rachel’s Summer,” based on the rumor of Thelma’s pregnancy that had circulated so grievously around the time of her death—and once again Partisan Review snapped it up. When Macdonald proposed to publish it in their winter issue, Jackson argued with admirable chutzpah that his two stories should run in consecutive issues: “If PALM SUNDAY by any chance should cause ‘talk’ or make trouble for the news-dealers … it might be a very good thing to follow it up at once with another story by the same writer but this time a pleasant one [!], ‘normal,’ like RACHEL’S SUMMER, just to show that PR (and its writers) aren’t necessarily limited to this sort of thing.” The editors agreed: “ ‘Rachel’s Summer,’ by C. R. Jackson,” appeared in the fall 1939 issue, and was subsequently listed among the “distinctive” stories of the year in Edward O’Brien’s Best Short Stories volume. Indeed, Jackson would later reflect on his first two published stories with a kind of awe: “If I had it then, why haven’t I got it now?” he wondered in 1951, after a spate of inferior work in the genre (though a year later he would produce “The Boy Who Ran Away,” his third-favorite story thereafter).
Publishers began to inquire whether Jackson was working on a novel. He was and he wasn’t. Certainly he had a very precise idea of the novel he wanted to write, and also he thought he had the confidence, now, to bring it off: a story about an alcoholic written “from the inside,” a riposte to those who thought such a person was “a deliberate troublemaker … having a good time.” At the moment, though, Jackson simply couldn’t afford the luxury of novel-writing: Rhoda and he were trying to have a child, and soon they’d be taking a bigger apartment. For the time being, then, in a burst of inspiration—only a few days after finishing “Rachel’s Summer”—he wrote an outline for his novel on a single sheet of yellow tablet paper that he would later frame and proudly show journalists: “Used it all,” he’d declare. “The whole book is right there.” This is true (give or take the odd detail)—all the more impressively so when one considers he wouldn’t begin the actual writing for another three years. For the outline Jackson listed the five days of The Long Weekend (his working title) in the left margin, next to which the highlights of each day were scribbled in cramped, hurried cursive: “Carnegie Hall recital … sees movie—goes in—finds prison picture … Bellevue ‘He awoke in a world of white’ … nearly kills maid with Romulus and Remus as she brushed out fireplace … ” That done, Jackson wrote a single paragraph of finished prose marking the start of Don’s binge (“When the drink was set before him, he felt better”), which would appear almost word for word on page 11 of the published book. “I knew,” he said, “I could pick it up anytime thereafter.”
The better to accomplish the work that would buy time for a novel, Charlie and Rhoda moved to a larger place on Eighth Street, between Fifth and University, where they converted the dining room into Charlie’s “brown study” (as he would forever call such sanctuaries). There he could keep office hours at a peaceful remove from (increasing) domestic distractions. The little brownstone near Washington Square was almost perfect: their apartment was a second-floor walk-up over a tailor shop (“Is he a good tailor?” Mr. Winthrop inquired); Charlie tastefully appointed the living room with a baby grand piano (he briefly took lessons, but never came close to fulfilling Don Birnam’s Carnegie Hall fantasy), lined the walls with books and his enormous record collection, and hung a few of his own amateur paintings. There were two fireplaces and a small balcony—all for a hundred dollars a month.
Economy and a room of his own were crucial: the previous October (1939) Jackson had been laid off because of budget cutbacks at CBS, and since then he’d been scrambling for freelance work. Much of this was provided by his previous employer, which promptly hired him to write thirteen weekly programs titled What’s Art to Me? (“rather on the dull side”), and gave him sporadic work on shows such as You Decide and A Friend in Deed. Also, in January, Jackson was employed by the Census Bureau at $19.80 per diem to write propaganda broadcasts urging citizens to cooperate with the 1940 census; the work required him to spend weekdays in Washington, and he was glad when the assignment ended in March—or rather, it was good to be home, though naturally money was tighter than ever, especially since his pregnant wife had taken leave from her job at Fortune. At a loss, Charlie decided to borrow a thousand dollars from Mr. Winthrop, though he worried this would strain their newly disinterested friendship. He even consulted Wister, who advised him (per Peabody) to approach the man “in a purely impersonal and strictly business-like way.” Hence Jackson drafted an almost painfully formal letter, listing, at length, his various debts and plans for the future, and concluding with: “I would welcome the opportunity and the test of being able to repay you, for once, as promised, and hope this letter will serve as that promise.” Winthrop gave him the money the next day. Almost two years later, Jackson was able to muster a $500 check, and a few months after that—while dining with Winthrop on February 1, 1943—he announced that he was ready to repay the rest (“a happy moment for me”). Winthrop told him to forget it, and a few days later returned his initial check, uncashed, with a note Charlie would cherish after the man’s death.5
A few months prior to that crucial loan, Winthrop had sent roses and a crib in honor of Sarah Blann Jackson, born on Mother’s Day (May 12), 1940. Charlie had anticipated the baby’s arrival with mixed emotions: what with the turmoil in Europe, he felt a “growing reluctance to bring a child into such a world,” and also worried about his unsettled finances and (worst of all, perhaps) the possibility of her inheriting “certain traits.” That Sunday, while Rhoda endured a long labor, Charlie was an all but speechless wreck: he and Nila Mack passed the time at Schrafft’s, unable to eat, until finally they “drove through lights” to the hospital. “When first I saw her small, awakened face,” he wrote in “A Sestina for Sarah” (published exactly one year later in F.P.A.’s column, The Conning Tower, in the New York Post),
… O, then my anxious prayer turned thankful grace,
And straightway I was happy as today!
Clear was her cry, pink was her little face,
Clear as the morn, pink as the month of May!
At once her heart assumed its rightful place
Within my own—as my fond heart gave way.
The girl would be the love of his life. He spent rapturous hours sitting beside her crib, pondering her tiny foot in the palm of his hand (“It was as perfect as a seashell, but warm, with a little animal life of its own”). Everything about her was “indescribably charming to him”—all the more potently because she was unlike him in every conceivable way save physical (they shared the almond eyes and dark skin of the Jacksons). “Sarah is a square,” he’d say, lovingly evoking her Rhoda-like levelheadedness, the prim way she pursed her lips (“like a baby anus”) when studying a hand of cards, her winsome tendency to transpose consonants so that “cemetery,” say, became “temecery.” Dubbing her “the dimsal girl” (after his favorite of her neologisms, used to describe a dark, cheerless day), he would hide behind the window curtain and watch her “like a love-sick fool” when she left for school each morning—so he remembered in a 1966 poem he wrote for his granddaughter, Sarah’s firstborn:
And I thought then (and told my wife):
No child was ever better armed
To face this less than perfect life
Than she was, calm and unalarmed.
JACKSON APPEARS to have written no fiction in 1941, as he struggled to make ends meet with occasional employment. That year he began teaching two courses on radio writing at NYU, which he mostly enjoyed (“[I] was sorry when the final session came”) despite having to read as many as sixty scripts for his lecture class. Characteristically he took pains to promote the work of his better students, pressing five scripts on an old Columbia Workshop colleague and writing a cogent little pitch for each: “Herman Land is a discovery—depend on it,” he remarked of a student who’d written about a strife-ridden Jewish family in Brooklyn, while another script—an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”—gave him the chance to plug not only his student but also “one of the most misunderstood writers of our generation,” whose nascent revival, eight months after his death, made the script “perfect Workshop material.”
Jackson himself wanted to write a daytime serial, which would give him a steady paycheck and a static cast of characters to work with—preferably an “amusing family situation,” though he was willing to be flexible. With one writer he proposed to collaborate on something called Women in Defense (“Incidentally, doesn’t that strike you as a ribald title?”), which would cater to the growing number of women working in munitions plants; he also tried to interest an executive at New York’s WOR in letting him produce his own showcase series comparable to the Columbia Workshop. But nothing seemed to click, and once war was declared, in December, Jackson went back to writing propaganda (to be aired in Japan) for the government.
His patience was finally rewarded in March 1942—though he was reminded thereby to be careful what you wish for. “In the history of soap opera,” James Thurber wrote in 1948, “only a few writers have seriously tried to improve the quality of daytime serials. One of these was Charles Jackson.” The latter, to his slight chagrin, found he had an actual knack for spinning out schmaltzy story lines ad infinitum, but was so revolted by his specific assignment that he later endeavored to forget everything about it, even the name of his sponsor (Staley cornstarch). The mastermind of this fifteen-minute-a-day soap, Sweet River, was his old friend Max Wylie, who’d taken a job in Chicago with Blackett-Sample-Hummert—as it happened, the country’s top producer of radio material: top, that is, in terms of quantity rather than quality, as the company managed to churn out soaps on behalf of some twenty sponsors (cereal, floor polish, cosmetics, etc.). Known—indeed notorious—for keeping costs down, B-S-H paid writers roughly half of what was customary. Thus Wylie was offering two hundred dollars a week (forty dollars a script), and meanwhile Charlie had eight days to catch a train to Chicago, learn the plot, flesh out the characters, and write a backlog of scripts before Sweet River went on the air.
For the next few months he traveled to Chicago every six weeks and swapped ideas with Wylie, who’d based the town of Sweet River on Delaware, Ohio, where he and his brothers had been raised by a minister. Wylie—a great admirer of “Rachel’s Summer”—thought Jackson was the right man to tease out the following premise: Willa McKay, a schoolteacher, is accused of murder but eventually acquitted, albeit not in the minds of her fellow Sweet River residents; despite this cloud, she catches the eye of a local minister, Bob Tomley, a widower raising two young sons. And so it went for many months—a piquant daily puzzle: how to devise fresh complications for (as Thurber put it) a “mild and prolonged love affair with a schoolteacher whose cheek [Tomley] never petted and whose hand he never held, for ministers and schoolteachers in Soapland are permitted only the faintest intimations of affection.” The challenge, of course, was to invert the usual rules of good writing (telling details, subtle ellipses) via a kind of engaging prolixity. “I kept two people on a raft in the middle of a lake for five weeks once,” Jackson proudly recalled, “just talking to each other!”
He’d begun to reconcile himself to the work when, late that summer, he got a call from Wylie, who’d just quit his job: Charlie had better come quick to Chicago and make a case for staying on as writer for Sweet River, since B-S-H was apt to save money now by hiring someone local. Fortunately the new boss, Alan Wallace, regarded the soap as “the bright spot of his life,” and promptly raised Jackson’s price to fifty dollars a script—on the condition, however, that he keep six weeks ahead on the show, and this without Wylie to help guide the story line. Jackson, as ever, found inspiration “in far away Arcadia”—the hometown, it turned out, of the Reverend Tomley’s mother, even then conspiring to prevent a marriage between her son and “this terrible Willa McKay,” whom she meets in person (amid “many clashes”) during a visit to Sweet River, where she finds a kindred soul in Addie Norris, the gossipy librarian, all of which drives Willa into the arms of Harry Nichols (only temporarily, since Jackson was saving Nichols for Maggie Burgess—“but that’s miles and years away yet, and so is the ultimate marriage of Tomley and Willa”). “I’m getting fonder of ‘Sweet River’ by the minute now that the conflict is honest again and there’s a chance for some good writing once more,” he wrote Wallace that August, remarking three weeks later to a friend, “I am sick unto death of SWEET RIVER … ”
Now more than ever, though, he needed the steady employment, which had finally allowed him to get on with his long-deferred novel about an alcoholic. Pushing forty, and keenly aware of how suddenly one’s luck can change—witness his friend Max, now looking for work in New York (“and drinking too much on the side”)—Jackson was determined to make up for lost time: he gave himself exactly one year to finish the book, beginning on July 1, 1942, and writing every Sunday and all night Thursdays, while teaching at NYU and dictating Sweet River to a public stenographer at the Hotel Albert. The novel’s long first chapter was written in a single feverish week, as he rushed to fill tablet pages before Rhoda came into his study, whereupon (so he claimed later) he’d stuff the pages into a drawer and affect to ruminate over Sweet River. For the chapter’s climactic purse-stealing scene he decided he needed ten pages exactly, numbered the pages, and scribbled until he’d reached the bottom of the tenth. Only then—“drunk with excitement”—did he seek his wife’s blessing. For the sake of posterity, perhaps, he saved her written response: “I think it’s wonderful. As a matter of fact, I found my heart pumping and my breath coming fast as I read it.… It’s grand—and such a change from all your other writing. I almost think it’s your best so far.”
So engrossing were his labors that first week that he’d let Sweet River slip, until Max (still employed at the time, though not for long) gave him a scolding phone call. “When you know why the scripts are late, you’ll be ashamed of yourself,” said Jackson, and hung up on him. A week later a package arrived addressed to “MRS. MAX WYLIE,” who read the chapter and immediately pressed it on her husband. “We both think that this is not only the finest piece of writing that you ever did,” she wrote, echoing Rhoda, “but that it is beautiful writing.… I always knew you had it and this is only the beginning.” Eager now for validation from practically everyone he knew (“like the spoiled child I am I just had to be paid attention to quick”), Jackson distributed copies of the chapter far and wide, gleefully reporting that he’d received “a good dozen letters, a couple of wires, and many phone calls … most all of them enthusiastic, some wildly so.” Philip Rahv wanted to publish an abridged version of the chapter in Partisan Review, though he cautioned Jackson that Don was perhaps a little too narcissistic: “[This] is understood by the author, to be sure, but still some margin of misunderstanding is left.” Betty Huling of The New Republic agreed, advising Jackson—who was unwilling to cut the piece in any case—not to publish it as a short story, since the reader needed to know more about Don in order to sympathize with him: “The terror is there all right, now, but not the pity.”
Jackson tried to press on with the next chapter—more introspective, with precisely the sort of nuanced exposition that might satisfy Rahv and Huling—but was stymied by its somewhat subtler demands; feeling himself sliding into “a horrible depression,” he promptly skipped ahead to chapter five—“The Mouse,” Don’s climactic bout of delirium tremens—and the words began to flow again. He was trembling by the time he finished. “I can see every reviewer in the land,” he wrote a friend, “(whoops, here we go again—just like my hero!) quoting that passage in his review, and then spoiling it all with exalted and destructive comment about its pityandterror [sic: pace Huling].” In the meantime he’d mailed the first chapter to a psychiatrist at Bellevue, Dr. Stephen Sherman, whose permission he sought to visit the alcoholic ward for the sake of verisimilitude, since he remembered “nothing” of his time there as a patient; in his novel, he explained, the protagonist (“a completely narcissistic character”) wakes up there, refuses to submit to a spinal tap, and is given a dose of paraldehyde and sent on his way. Dr. Sherman arranged to meet Jackson at Bellevue the following Saturday, and effusively commended his “extraordinarily revealing study of the real inner life of the alcoholic”:
It should have definite clinical value. It has taught me more about what the alcoholic is really thinking about than most of the material of my patients so far has ever been able to do. I think the character delineation is really very fine, and certain specially interesting aspects—the loneliness, the identification with forlorn genius, the study of the face, the psychic dependency on the brother, the subtle undercurrents of homosexuality, and so on—are all superbly brought out.… I trust that you will not fail to finish the other chapters, and that the work will come to the attention of the psychiatric world at large.
Jackson—writing to the novelist James Gould Cozzens (Rhoda’s colleague at Fortune)—derided the doctor’s prose style and bristled at the idea that his novel should have “clinical [versus artistic] value”: “but of course,” he added, “I ate it up too, read it 20 times in succession, and even took it to bed with me.”
He did, however, have at least one staunch detractor: his mother. The poor woman had been appalled by Charlie’s stories in Partisan Review (“I don’t see anything so wonderful about it, it all happened, all you had to do is write it down”), but that opening chapter of The Long Weekend was almost the death of her. “You said I wouldn’t like what you had written—I didn’t,” she admitted.
I am not a psychiatrist nor am I a literary critic, I’m just an ordinary person who happens to be your mother. I sat down and read your article as soon as it came and I am telling you the truth, I was a complete wreck afterward. For I read those things differently from outsiders for I know it was you and Frederic[k] and Rhoda.… You had terrible experiences but they are over and I wish you could forget them. And Frederic[k]—what he went through and how he always stood by and helped you out of one mess after another, as he stands by all of us. The things he, yes and your friends, who stood by you, have taken from you.…
But the book’s confessional aspect was only the beginning. Don Birnam, considering whether to steal the woman’s purse, idly wonders whether she’s sleeping with her boyfriend (“Was he big?”). “What has that to do with it?” Charlie’s mother indignantly demanded. “Why write that?” And here she’d been telling everyone in Newark about the great book Charlie was working on, but she wouldn’t dream of showing them this. “This is a small town, and my home, and I want them to say and think only the best about all of you.”
When he wasn’t furious over such philistinism, Charlie would (essentially) shrug: “In the long run, of course, nothing matters but the story,” he wrote Mary McCarthy,6 “which is what I’m always telling my poor mother.”
