Chapter Nine
Six Chimney Farm
Seventeen miles north of Hanover, New Hampshire, along the Connecticut River, is “the most beautiful town in America,” according to Washington Irving: Orford. On the east side of its single street, atop a natural twenty-five-foot-high ridge, are seven houses that have been called the finest examples of Federal architecture in the country. The northernmost (and arguably best) of these caught Jackson’s eye as he was driving from Brattleboro in 1935: If he could only have such a house, he thought, it would be the “absolute peak of fulfillment and happiness”—though of course that was an impossible dream for an alcoholic without prospects. Later, though, as a married and sober man, Jackson would insist on stopping the car in Orford each summer en route to Rhoda’s family in Barre, Vermont: “When I’m rich,” he would vow, “it will be mine!”
Six Chimney Farm—“one of the most beautiful houses in New England,” said a 1927 issue of House Beautiful—was built between 1825 and 1829 by a manufacturer of beaver hats, William Howard, on ninety-seven acres of property that included a separate five-room farmhouse and a working dairy farm. The main house was designed by Asher Benjamin, an eminent Boston architect influenced by Bulfinch—though Jackson would always prefer to believe that Bulfinch himself had done it (“He also did the Capitol at Washington!” he excitedly informed Boom), and he dated it at various times to as early as 1788 and rarely later than 1807. More accurately Jackson pointed out that the five-thousand-square-foot house had been completely restored in 1916 by Judge William Dana, who installed modern appliances and plumbing, and added open porches on either side. Each of the five bedrooms had its own fireplace, as did the living room and gorgeous dining room, which featured a built-in Hepplewhite china cupboard and lovely, antique wallpaper of North American scenery (Niagara Falls, West Point, Boston Harbor) first printed in Alsace by Jean Zuber et Cie, and also found in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House.
What would seem an outlandish extravagance—even for a man with so fanciful a view of personal finance—was, objectively at least, a bargain: for thirty thousand dollars he got the two houses, the land, and Judge Dana’s collection of Sheraton furniture. As of 1944 the owner was John Owsley, a former head football coach at Yale who lived most of the year in New Haven; by all accounts a colorful man, he’d evidently wearied of the aesthetic charms of Orford, which (apart from its proximity to Dartmouth) was bereft of cultural diversions. As for Charlie and Rhoda, they’d both grown up in small country towns and thought at the time—for whatever reason—that they wanted their children to do the same. A little surprising is the fact that Jackson had decided to buy the place pre-Hollywood, purely on the basis of his earning potential as a radio writer and first-time novelist: “The possibility of our buying your house hinges on the success of a new book of mine,” he wrote Owsley on October 30, 1943. “I am not financially dependent on the success of my books, but I would have to be assured of a good sale on my new book in order to raise the cash required for a down payment …” He got the good sale, of course, and put down ten thousand dollars; then came the Paramount deal, on the strength of which he jubilantly reported to Nila Mack that the house was now “paid for twice over.” Not so, and the math would become even more creative once taxes, maintenance, and certain appurtenances entered the picture.
Rhoda and Boom had worked hard that summer to prepare the place for its master, and on arrival he was enchanted, especially, by his own upstairs bedroom—separate, that is, from Rhoda’s (“but won’t it be wonderful to visit each other back and forth across our little private hall?”), since he planned to use it as a “study-and-retreat-and-bedroom in one.” The high-ceilinged room, as he first found it, was Colonial simplicity itself: the mahogany furniture included a carved four-poster, secretary, highboy, and stately desk placed at a window with a view of Main Street and the verdant hills of Vermont across the river. When Charlie was finished decorating, however, the room bore his own vivacious stamp: his old fondness for all things Indian was reflected in the kachina dolls (bought in Arizona when the Super Chief passed through) arranged here and there, as well as a conspicuous war bonnet on top of the secretary; thirteen Revolutionary flags were hung along the ceiling border, while the patriotic pièce de résistance was splashed over his bed—an eleven-by-seven-foot, thirty-eight-star American flag made out of homespun serge (“the colors more beautiful than you can imagine”). The rest of the wall space—almost every square inch—was covered by signed portraits of Charlie’s Hollywood pals and other personal gods. On the floor was a polar-bear rug. “Rhoda does admit the room at least has ‘personality,’ ” he wrote a friend, “but she shakes her head sadly while saying it.” Perhaps to compensate for the quirkiness of his own sanctuary (“I call it the Museum, or the Lodge Room”), the rest of the house was more or less conservatively adorned with paintings by Frederick Papsdorf, Darrell Austin, Camille Bombois, and Raoul Dufy, most of them raided from the Klaus Perls Gallery in New York.
The upkeep was considerable, and Charlie employed a married couple and their daughter, the Jobins, to take care of the cooking, cleaning, babysitting, gardening, snow-shoveling, and so on. He also wanted to hire Rhoda’s younger sister, Katharine (“Kay” or “Kitty”), as an occasional secretary—because he needed one, somewhat, but mainly because he was fond of her and sympathized with her predicament: Katharine’s “ne’er-do-well husband” (as Charlie called him, not without cause), Fred Brock, was currently in the Army; before the war he’d gone looking for gold in South America and dabbled in farming, while his formidable mother in Montpelier doled out a prudent allowance. Now that he was gone, Katharine and their five-year-old son had been living in Barre with her parents, and Charlie wanted to bring them to Orford. This would be pleasant for him, too, since he and Katharine had a rapport—so much so, indeed, that a rumor (among others) persisted in Orford that the two were involved. This, for any number of reasons, was unlikely, though Charlie did have a keen appreciation for Katharine’s finer qualities—her sense of humor, for one; a certain well-concealed worldliness—and had playfully flirted with her from the beginning of his courtship with Rhoda. “To Kittuh, written in the poet’s Heart’s Blood,” he’d addressed some verse to her on Valentine’s Day, 1934:
Sad is my lot, it is you who make it;
Sorry my plight and frequent my tear;
Heavy my heart, because you can’t take it,
Though I’ve offered it often enough, my dear.…
Mostly he was at pains to mitigate her shyness, her almost morbid insistence (not unlike her sister’s) on plainness both in appearance and manner, which included an “exasperating” tendency to pass the back of her hand under her nose, as if in want of a handkerchief.
He proved his affection further in 1945, when Fred Brock resumed his life as an unemployed civilian; “at whatever rental or cost they could afford,” Charlie let the family move into his farmhouse and till the vast acreage between his own garden and the graveyard almost half a mile away. Such generosity, to be sure, did not result in any discernible increase of friendliness on Fred’s part—on the contrary, the man was more aloof than ever, seeming to regard fiction-writing as a dubious livelihood at best, at least when compared with his own honest toil. Charlie, meanwhile, bristled at the “almost ostentatious laziness” of his brother-in-law, a handsome man who liked to loiter in the bathroom combing his hair. What made matters worse was Charlie’s guilty animus toward the Brocks’ five-year-old, an irksome “escapist” (thought Charlie), whose vagaries were largely due to the “disinterest of his ne’er-do-well father.”
With those two exceptions, however, Charlie was devoted to his in-laws—more so, in fact, than to his own family. He thought his melodramatic, self-pitying mother could learn a thing or two from Rhoda’s parents, John and Isabella, a kindly couple who called each other Mr. and Mrs. Booth and never complained about their poverty (they lived on a modest pension, supplemented by occasional checks from Charlie) or anything else for that matter. Charlie liked having them around: John seldom imposed his company, preferring to tend a strawberry patch on the Ridge or paint the lovely countryside, while his wife was so retiring that Charlie teasingly dubbed her the Sword-Swallower (from an old joke: after ten years of marriage, a husband learns that his wife had been a sword-swallower in the circus before they met; “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he demands, and she replies, “Because you never asked”). Her tact was another trait he wished his own mother would emulate: “I read your manuscript and just can’t get over the extent of your vocabulary,” Mrs. Booth had congratulated him on The Lost Weekend. “I am no one to criticise, because I don’t know enough to, so you will just have to be satisfied with my saying that it ought to bring you a nice pot of money.” His main nickname for this endearing creature was Queenie—since her name was Isabella—and so he called her each night after dinner, when the two would retire to the library for a few games of rummy 500, the woman’s only passion apart from her grandchildren.
Charlie loved the whole idea of being a paterfamilias, and could hardly get over the fact that he’d gone from being a feckless, drunken misfit to the author of a celebrated best-seller and now the proprietor of Six Chimney Farm. “Boom, you can’t realize how much I love this house and living here,” he wrote shortly after moving in. “The night we got home Rhoda and I just walked from room to room and admired, as I do often.” And meantime he dreamed of the day when all the Booths and Jacksons—even (or especially) Herb and Bob and their brood—would gather under his roof and admire the splendor of it all. Such a reunion (never realized in real life) formed the long “Preview” section of his Birnam epic, What Happened—the main point being that, for all his travails, everything had worked out in the end for Don: “He would be host to the gathering, they should come to him and be his guests, and he would not only take care of them all but be able to take care of them all—did it not mean, in effect, that he would be head of the family?” A related point was, of course, that reality never quite measures up, and that such a gathering would invariably prove more of a headache than anything else.
If Jackson had expected to find solidarity or stimulation among his fellow Ridge dwellers—that is, the prosperous residents of the other six Federal-style houses in the group—he was to be sorely disappointed. Two houses to the south were the Warrens, who seemed especially wary of the new arrival. “Why do you suppose Mr. Jackson ever wrote a book like that?” Edward “Ned” Warren asked one of Charlie’s friends—more in sorrow than anger, it seemed. Warren (Dartmouth ’01) did not keep liquor in his house, and for the most part spent his autumn years clipping coupons and newspaper articles of interest, including several reviews of The Lost Weekend (pressed between the pages of a laconic but persistent diary), once he’d learned who was moving into the old Dana place. Aware of Warren’s reservations where he was concerned, Jackson was startled to learn that the man had actually donated copies of his novel to three local libraries (Orford, Orfordville, and Fairlee), and indeed Warren seemed well-meaning after a fashion. Every morning he’d stroll across the bridge and back, then walk along Main Street greeting passersby and giving nickels to the nine or ten children of the town, before heading home for the noon stock report on the radio while he plied his scissors. “Ned loved everybody,” said his granddaughter, “but he lived in his own little world.” In that world you took an avid interest in your neighbors’ affairs, whether or not your relations were especially friendly: “Mr. Jackson to Hanover,” Warren noted in his diary, two weeks after Jackson had moved in. “Attended movie in the evening called Going My Way.” And four days later: “Invited Mr. Jackson to go with us this AM but he said next time.” So it went for the next few years.
Even the more enlightened citizens were a little nervous around Charlie, who, early on, had scandalously availed himself of the local beauty parlor to get a manicure, an item that was combined uncomfortably with a rumor that his second novel was about a very taboo subject indeed. For his part Jackson was fond of at least one person on the Ridge, Isabel Doan Dyer (not so much her second husband, Lyman), whose thirty-year-old son, Daniel Doan, was himself an aspiring writer who did his best to give their acclaimed neighbor the benefit of a doubt. One day Jackson announced that he’d been up all night working on his novel and needed some fresh air and exercise, so the two went for a hike in the woods. Coming to a little pond along Jacobs Brook, Jackson suddenly proposed they go for a swim; Doan (“defensive before this impulsiveness”) said the water was too cold, and Jackson tried it with his hand and agreed the idea was foolish. As Doan later admitted, he was worried about more than the water:
I was aware of the areas of human behavior about which he wrote, but I was withdrawn and provincial, a disapproving spectator. I knew him to be a former alcoholic himself, assumed he had experienced the homosexual tendencies about which he was writing, and I felt something strange and fearful from the inconsistencies of humanity, and an emotion that represented for me a new sort of awareness that no human being was as simple as I had been led to believe.
As for the other Ridge dwellers: what might have seemed a kind of charming paternalism, or Yankee insularity, was—so Jackson concluded—at bottom bigotry and snobbism. “Mrs. Jackson cleans ice back of house so children could skate,” Warren observed in his diary, with his usual inscrutable literality, though in fact he might have been annoyed or at least perplexed. According to Robert Richmond—a recipient of Warren’s nickels who’d grown up on the other side of Main Street and bootstrapped his way into Dartmouth—“Uncle Ned,” as he liked to be called, had argued in favor of closing Orford High School and thereby lowering property taxes (“Those kids aren’t worth educating”). So it might have rankled when the Jacksons not only arranged for skating on the Ridge, but also cleared the hill behind their house and invited the high school principal to give skiing lessons there to local children, no matter how humble their stations, the better “to encourage [Sarah and Kate] to play with all and sundry.”
By then Jackson had noticed the “horror” on his neighbors’ faces when he wore a Roosevelt button around town during the fall campaign (“Mr. Roosevelt’s speech last night very poor,” Warren opined in his diary), and was therefore all the more sensitive when the president died the following spring. “I’ve never seen Rhoda so broken up,” he wrote. “My head has hurt and throat ached for days.” On the day in question, however—April 12, 1945—Jackson was greeted on Main Street with: “Have you heard the good news?” So provoked, he made a point of knocking on the Warrens’ door, a visit they never forgot. “He was in a dark suit with a black necktie and a black band on his arm,” said Julia Fifield, Ned Warren’s stepdaughter. “And he looked at mother and said [reproachful voice]: ‘Mrs. Warren, our president has died. Why aren’t you in mourning?’ ” Mrs. Gertrude Warren, a lifelong Republican needless to say, was rather at a loss (“I don’t think there was any further conversation”)—though perhaps it reflects credit on both parties that (according to Ned’s diary) the Warrens and Jacksons subsequently took turns hosting each other for dinner, on May 6 and 20 respectively.
But there was a knottier problem that was unlikely to be solved by mutual hospitality. “Anti-Semitism is something awful here,” Jackson reported, telling of how their real-estate agent had refused to sell Six Chimney Farm to previous buyers who’d offered cash, because (as the man jovially explained) “they didn’t have the right names.” As for Uncle Ned, he casually used the word “nigger” and would remark with sober consternation that a “white girl” had married a Jew. Jackson, for his children’s sake (“we do not want to make it difficult for them”), was mostly holding his tongue for now—however: “I refuse to take some of the things that have been said by ‘careless people’ in our own living room. If there is anything in modern life that more enrages me than this irrational anti-Semitism, I do not know what it is.”
The more he thought about it, though, the more it seemed that the sequel could wait a while, too. Lest he be branded a confessional author who only writes about alcoholism, he wanted to try a totally different subject—something to do with Vince Kramer, that wounded Marine he’d met in Nantucket: “It will be a story about the reaction of the public to soldiers in wartime,” he wrote Rhoda from Hollywood, “how the proximity of death heightens one’s consciousness of youth.” Casting about for an epigraph, he asked her to retrieve his old JAXON notebook and find a poem he’d transcribed there by “one Karl Somebody Ulrichs”—meaning Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a gay German writer, as translated by J. A. Symonds, a gay English writer. Rhoda dutifully supplied the poem, albeit with a cocked eyebrow perhaps:
Dearer to me is the lad village-born with sinewy members
Than the pale face of a fine town-bred effeminate youngling;
Yea, or a sailor on board: but dear to me down to the heart’s depth,
Dearest of all are the young, steel-thewed, magnificent soldiers …
Who with clashing spurs and martial tread when they meet me,
Know not how goodly they are, the sight of them how overwhelming.
“Well, the Ulrichs poem didn’t turn out to be much, did it?” wrote Charlie, a tad abashed. “Of all the duds! It’s the kind of thing that makes me creep, now.” He thought maybe he’d find what he needed in Whitman, but then he remembered something from Housman that seemed nearer his purpose and gave him a title besides:
The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do:
My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.
But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest,
The brains in my head and the heart in my breast.
Oh grant me the ease that is granted so free,
The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,
That relish their victuals and rest on their bed
With flint in the bosom and guts in the head.
Warming to the idea—even becoming rather feverish (“Damn it to hell, why can’t I get myself fired at once!”)—Jackson excitedly described My Two Troubles to his agent, Bernice Baumgarten, and his admiring friend Philip Wylie. Both were guardedly discouraging. Baumgarten warned him that “there is nothing so important for an author’s reputation as his second novel” (as if Jackson didn’t know!), and it was her impression that My Two Troubles would be a risky successor to The Lost Weekend: “I’d rather see a collection of short stories … or perhaps, and why not, nothing at all until you are ready with the second Don Birnam.” As for Wylie, he considered it an even greater imperative for Jackson to complete “the two parts of [his] famous novel about Don Birnam” before anything else, unless he felt certain that My Two Troubles would be a masterpiece. Which, incidentally, Jackson did (“I feel confident that the book will come to be recognized instantly as an American classic”), but The Working Out would have to be even better than that—all the more reason to wait—until finally The Lost Weekend was made to seem “a kind of half-hearted finger-exercise done with the left hand. Which it is.”
“I am very sorry but I never discuss a book in progress,” Jackson stiffly replied to a book reviewer in Amarillo who’d wanted to know what he was working on. Toward nosy reviewers in the provinces he was apt to be reticent, perhaps, but a number of friends and colleagues would be barraged with work-in-progress talk during the two years Jackson spent on his vexatious second novel. The process got under way in earnest on May 24, 1944, when—by way of proving to Wylie, Baumgarten, et al., “how completely thought-out” My Two Troubles was—Jackson dictated a twenty-six-page, single-spaced “outline” to his secretary at MGM, “Miss Ross” (whose reaction one is pleased to imagine):
The story will be heavy with lazy summer atmosphere, a holiday mood, a sensual halcyon time-out feeling, idleness, the sun, luxury (in the Shakespearean sense), all as a kind of contrast to the keyed-up tenseness of the war and of people living with the war in their hearts. All the value and beauty of the story will be in the telling, never really in the events of the story; the telling is all. It will be a great opportunity for a kind of poetry in fiction about the troubled heart of man today … his prescience of death; his consciousness of youth all about him leaving—to what; his anxiety and concern because the ideal of today is brutality and destruction; though please believe me, none of this will be defeatist: far from it.… The nearest I can describe it briefly is to say that MY TWO TROUBLES will be an idyll, but tough.
“An idyll, but tough”—fair enough—and gradually Jackson worked his way around to the story itself, the first half of which, at least, was quite similar to that of the finished novel: a fortyish professor, here named David Williams, was to find himself oddly (because he’s “very happily married”) attracted to a Marine named Cliff—a hulking youth “rather like a big puppy,” who “might be a complete bore and headache but for the fact that he is so good natured and natural.” Jackson proposed that their relationship would be (thematically speaking) a matter of contrasting ideals: the professor represents the “life of the mind,” passé in the midst of world war, whereas Cliff (romping about the surf) is the man of action, “the thing required in 1944.” After exploring the dialectic at some length, Jackson arrived (“or jeepers, I’ll never get this outline finished”) at the moment of truth: “What under the sun does Williams really want anyway?”—that is the question, especially when Cliff visits his apartment, post-Nantucket, prior to getting fitted for a new uniform and returning to war. While the two sit there, chatting, something ineffably ghastly hangs in the air … but Williams restrains himself, and the “crisis is passed.” Afterward they walk to the tailor together, so at ease now that Cliff feels free to put his arm (“puppyishly”) around the professor’s shoulders. Thus Williams conquers his weird spell of homosexuality—or hero worship, or what you will—by dint of willpower alone (rather the way Don would bring his addiction to heel in The Working Out).
This long apologia was addressed primarily to Wylie, and copied to Baumgarten, Stanley Rinehart, and Jackson’s young editor, Ted Amussen. All endeavored to let him down gently. Writing his Birnam sequel, Wylie reiterated, “is your first responsibility not just towards alcoholics and not just toward literature, but towards me. This is because I represent both in my own fashion” (“them’s my sentiments also,” chimed the amiable Amussen). Meanwhile Rhoda had also read the outline, and found it “too similar” to Death in Venice—not at all what the author had intended. Casting a cold eye on his handiwork, he wrote Rinehart (copying the others as usual) that whereas Mann’s novella was about “decadence and death,” My Two Troubles would be, ideally, a “not unpleasant story of normal homosexuality, the kind that is a part of all men: sublimated, understood, a natural affinity of man with man, needing no physical expression”; however, the story as it now stood, he realized, was “neither one thing nor the other; and it most certainly must not fall in between.” Here Baumgarten took her turn: such uncertainty only confirmed what she’d already suspected—“There are a great many things to be worked out before you have a book”—but, that said, if he really felt strongly about it, “don’t be swayed by outside opinions, write it.” For a while he vacillated, at one point alerting Louella Parsons that he was going ahead with his new Birnam novel after all (which she promptly announced to the world as It Worked Out); finally, though, in September—during an interview with the Times at his “newly acquired Bulfinch-designed New Hampshire home”—he declared that he’d definitely postponed the sequel in favor of My Two Troubles. “I am a little tired of writing true-confessions,” he explained to a friend.
Indeed, he did not want to be identified with homosexuality, but at the same time he deplored those authors who lean, coyly, “on the Greek ideal” in order to sublimate motives that are (“if examined properly”) “fleshly.” Fortunately a solution seemed to present itself that summer in Hollywood, when Jackson dined with Dr. Sam Hirshfeld (“Vet’s doctor and Zannuck’s [sic] & Mayer’s & Selznick’s”), to whom he’d also sent a copy of that twenty-six-page outline. “We talked solid from 7 pm to 1 am, and I learned more stuff!” he wrote Rhoda.
Sam believes [the novel] has the possibilities of becoming one of the most important single stories of the times, with a real contribution to our understanding, and he told me what the story was about and what it was not. He is wildly enthusiastic about it; wants me to keep it the story of a war-shock in a civilian, with the three stages (or rather four) which are the normal course of all war-shock: fright, panic, disorientation, and resolution.
Thenceforth Jackson took care to describe his book as an “account of a war neurosis in a civilian, and only incidentally the story of a Professor’s infatuation for a Marine.” Elaborating for the benefit of Dr. Anton J. Carlson (his fellow alcoholism pundit), Jackson wrote that “the domination of the uniform over our lives, war-fever, the deaths of so many young men, deranged the liberal but emotional man, sending him off into an unconscious homosexuality or, in some cases, worse.” It was the “worse” part that worried Farrar & Rinehart, and Jackson knew he’d have to bring all his intuitive artistry to bear in “trying to steer a safe and sane course” around the pitfalls of such a nuanced theme. Assaying some “POSSIBLE COPY FOR CATALOGUE OR JACKET BLURB,” Jackson described his book as “a major contribution to the literature and psychology of war,” and barely hinted at anything untoward: “In this, his second novel, Charles Jackson has again demonstrated, with consummate skill, his masterly understanding of the ‘irregularities’ that can beset the civilized man, here the sensitive adult in war time.… the magnificence of the writing is indisputable.” And now that he’d settled the question in a seemly manner (for the time being), Jackson didn’t mind so much discussing his work in progress with appealing strangers—such as one Fritz Requardt, to whom he admitted that his hero’s “ ‘war neurosis’ … settles itself upon a wounded Marine … and takes the form of an infatuation. All most difficult, as you can see.
“So you are a shipyard worker.…”
His main preoccupation was still Judy Garland. He claimed to be nettled by certain indiscreet photos of him and Judy together—in the October Screenland, for instance—and when one of these appeared over the caption “Judy’s new beau,” even the meek Queenie let her displeasure show: “What will people think? Poor Rhoda … ” But Charlie did little to allay speculation. One of his first errands in New Hampshire was to take a “stunning picture” of Garland to a framer in Hanover; in its absence, so he wrote Nathan, he couldn’t relate her inscription because it was too long to remember verbatim. Soon, however, he began to suspect that he’d “kidded himself”: “Like the adorer I was (or perhaps celebrity-chaser, to call it by its right name), I sent her what I thought was a charming present for Christmas, but she [has] not even acknowledged it.” The present was one of Boom’s specialties, a stylized cut-paper lamb, prettily matted and framed, at the bottom of which he’d written, “For Judy, who is one. With love from Charlie.” Bitterly the months passed, until one day in April the local Western Union agent phoned, astonished, to read aloud a telegram from Judy Garland: “CHARLIE DEAR, DUE TO CHANGES OF ADDRESS YOUR SWEET CHRISTMAS PRESENT REACHED ME ONLY TWO DAYS AGO. PERHAPS THE LOST LAMB WILL LEND ITSELF TO AN IDEA FOR A NEW BOOK.…” Jackson put the receiver down (“all tingly in the legs and swimmy in the head”) and promptly wrote Garland an abject apology for any impudent “complaints” he may have made in regard to what he’d rashly suspected was her neglect. Two months later she married Vincente Minnelli, the bisexual director of her latest hit musical, Meet Me in St. Louis (wherein, thought Charlie, “The sins of MGM were never so clearly revealed”). Meeting the couple a week later, Jackson bestowed a magnanimous but measured blessing, admitting afterward his “faint qualms” about the union: “But when I saw you together in New York, saw your interest in each other, felt what was going on across the table from me,—well, I don’t know how else to say it, but I was very happy about the whole thing.”
Despite Orford’s disdain for the fleshpots of Hollywood, a flutter nonetheless passed through the village when Jackson got letters (and the odd telegram) from big stars and any number of lesser lights. The high school principal knocked on his door one day and asked if Mr. [Spencer] Tracy might be persuaded to address the students during his stay at Six Chimney Farm. Jackson blamed such “violent rumors”—of visits from this star and that—on a gossipy local postmistress, though he’d been less than diligent about keeping things under wraps. “Wait till Orford hears of our guests Christmas week!” he enthused to Fabry. “For Katie Hepburn and Spencer Tracey [sic] are to spend a week with us beginning Friday December 29th.” This had been in the works a while, ever since the three friends had parted the previous August with such desperate reluctance—“almost an anxiety to see me,” as Charlie had reported to Rhoda: “[Tracy] has developed a dog-like devotion to me (why, I will never know) and now says he’s going to come east this winter and shovel snow and saw wood for us—and funnily enough he wants to. Can we let him? Would you mind? What will we ever do with him?” Charlie, in turn, had stoked the embers by visiting Hepburn’s family in Hartford (“How nice, how very nice, I thought them”) during his November trip to address the local AA, and later endeavored to be gracious when Hepburn (“too busy a gal”) had to cancel her and Spence’s trip to New Hampshire.
He and Robert Benchley wrote sporadic letters, mostly conferring about their mutual friend Dorothy Parker and her own struggles with alcohol. “I don’t know who I am to be wishing salvation for others,” Benchley wrote Jackson,
but I can’t feel sorry for myself quite yet as I feel so well. I don’t look right, I realize that, and I am more and more liable to horse’s-assery after several drinks, especially Martinis, but I still have a fatuous confidence in my ability to recoup in short order, thanks to a sturdy constitution inherited from my teetotaler mother and my alcoholic father, neither of whom worried much about health (one died at 86 and one at 77). This is the kind of remark that usually preceeds [sic] by a week or so a complete breakdown on the part of the boaster, with his friends saying: “only a week ago he was saying how well he felt.”
Grasping the fact that his mystique among such people was largely due to his role as Alcoholism Guru, Jackson played the card whenever possible. Dorothy Parker, he wrote Benchley, had been avoiding his calls since their meetings at the New Weston in August, and he gravely feared that she’d “gone ‘off’ again and so is dodging [him].” That was mid-October; two weeks later he wrote Fabry that Parker had visited Six Chimney Farm and the two had enjoyed “wonderful talk all day and almost all night.” There was, in fact, no visit,1 though not for lack of trying on Charlie’s part: as he apprised Benchley, he would run Parker to ground whenever he went to New York (“She still keeps on the wagon, [but] I do feel her constant keyed-up state is not ‘normal’ ”), and afterward write her emotional letters (“I’m going to need you in my life”), which she rarely answered. As for Benchley, he made a daily point of appearing on the set of The Lost Weekend at Paramount—“Nat’s Bar,” to be exact,2 where he’d ask the actor Howard Da Silva (Nat) to pour him a shot of bourbon for fifty cents. On November 21, 1945, five days after the movie’s premiere, he died of complications from cirrhosis.
More ambitious was his proposed “free, modernized, American adaptation” of Chekhov’s The Seagull, which in one swoop would reunite him with a number of MGM stars. Jackson envisaged the cast as follows: Judy Garland as Nina, Walter Pidgeon as Trigorin, Robert Walker (or Peter Lawford) as Treplev, Jessica Tandy as Masha, and her husband, Hume Cronyn, as Medvedenko. His greatest coup, however, would be to recruit Garbo herself as Arkadina—to which end he made a special trip to New York in early November, his way paved by the agent Leland Hayward. “You ask about Garbo,” he wrote Baumgarten afterward. “But god, don’t speak of it.” The meeting, alas, had been botched. Jackson had waited for days to be summoned, and finally took an afternoon to see his agent and get a little fresh air. Back at his hotel he found, to his horror, a message: Garbo had phoned (twice)!—or rather “Miss Harriet Brown” at the Ritz Towers had phoned. She had given up an entire hour of her day to meet with Jackson, but now refused to do so unless they were joined by Hayward, who was then on his way back to Hollywood aboard the Century. “There’s no getting around it, she’s a very difficult woman,” Jackson grumbled, “and makes things not only fantastically difficult for everybody else but for herself as well. Why in Christ’s name can’t she relax? Nobody’s going to tear her limb from limb these days.… After all, the gal hasn’t had a picture in nearly three years.”4 In due course Jackson recast Ina Claire (or Greer Garson) as Arkadina, while remaining an unabashed Garbo worshiper, maybe even more so in light of her beguiling elusiveness.
The following summer he took a couple days off from the protracted ordeal of writing his second novel to dictate a seventeen-page treatment of The Seagull, intending to render it more accessible to Philistia by emphasizing the “truly dramatic action” that happens offstage or between the acts in Chekhov. That, anyway, was the idea, though what Jackson managed to get on paper (“somewhat hastily,” he confessed) followed the original almost point by point. The names were Americanized (Irina Arkadina became “Irene Carradine,” etc.) and the setting moved to “a big old-fashioned country-house in Vermont or New Hampshire,” but the Treplev character (“Charles”) still shoots a seagull and offers it to Nina with the dire prediction that he too shall kill himself. He doesn’t, though, and therein lies the crucial difference: “Now I know,” says the failed actress, Nina, at the end of Jackson’s version, “what matters is not fame, not glory, nor money … what matters is how to endure, to work, and have faith.” Whereupon Treplev/Charles—rather than kill himself—agrees: “You’ve found your way. So have I, Nina, but it’s lonely, our way being separate. We’ll go that way together …” Thus the girl’s previous apathy toward the fussy, neurotic Treplev/Charles sparks into ardor, and the two live happily ever after. “I know you will simply fall in love with this wonderful story I have made out of that static action-less play,” Jackson gushed in his cover letter to Hayward, who gamely passed the thing along to MGM. When the studio rejected it, Jackson abruptly dropped the idea, since after all the point had been to cast his old MGM friends.
Another friend from Hollywood was Sally Benson, author of the stories that had inspired Meet Me in St. Louis, and an ecstatic admirer of The Lost Weekend. Benson—no stranger to addiction or mental illness generally—had ordered twenty copies of the novel for friends, and insisted it “belong[ed] to her” as a screenwriter. Shortly after the Paramount sale, Jackson had lunched with Brackett and Wilder to bat ideas around, and Benson had tagged along to the greater benefit of all: “I’ve never been in on such a brilliant and fascinating discussion,” Charlie wrote Rhoda: “a picture was formed and molded and planned right under your eyes.” How pleasant, then, that Benson should follow through with an actual visit to Six Chimney Farm in the fall, proving such an ideal guest (“Such wonderful company … such character and spirit”) that Charlie asked her back for the holidays, and Benson eagerly accepted.
In the meantime she’d agreed to take one of Jackson’s stories to The New Yorker, where she herself had published almost a hundred pieces between 1929 and 1941. “The New Yorker has just bought five [sic] short stories of mine,” Jackson boasted to Fabry, after Benson had persuaded the magazine to take one, “A Dream of Horace,” for $304. Jackson’s four-page story was slight in every way, but then, too, it was precisely the kind of frothy “casual” that editor Harold Ross preferred. The protagonist, Joe Callush, describes to Bobbie, his wife, a dream in which a neighbor they barely know, Horace Goodsell, has died; while waxing sentimental (“[he] thought lovingly of Horace”), Callush learns that the man has, in fact, suffered a fatal heart attack in the night. Crestfallen—not because Horace is dead, but because this fascinating coincidence has occurred on Sunday, when he’s away from the office—Callush proceeds to phone everyone he knows and tell them the story.
The sketch was important to Jackson for a number of reasons: its humor (“a scream, truly hilarious,” he wrote Fabry) would help mitigate his reputation as a “morbid” writer, and besides he badly wanted to appear in The New Yorker in whatever form; also, he’d laced the piece with a number of in-jokes, using actual Newark names (e.g., Bobbie the wife) and mentioning his beloved Judy Garland at one point. But when Jackson received galleys from the magazine, he was horrified. As the editor William Maxwell breezily informed him, “I think Sally [Benson] told you over the phone that she had gone over ‘A Dream of Horace’ with a pair of scissors. Anyway, she did, and [Harold] Ross likes it fine …” A pair of scissors indeed!—the story was nearly unrecognizable: his allusive names had been changed (Callush became Miller; Bobbie became Barbie), and a lot of whimsical descriptive business added (“She picked up a strip of bacon with her fingers and ate it”)—the latter to satisfy Ross’s yen for particularity, perhaps. Worst of all—most gallingly random and silly—was the new title: “Dreams Are Funny”! Jackson, under the circumstances, expressed his pique quite temperately (“‘Dreams Are Funny’ sounds to me like a parody of a New Yorker story”) and offered to return the check, but was somewhat mollified when Maxwell took him to lunch in New York and agreed to change the title—to “Funny Dream.” When the piece ran in the March 17, 1945, issue, Jackson asked Maxwell to mail him a few copies (“I want to send one to Judy”), but added a dour postscript: “I still don’t like the story.”
The aftermath would manifest itself over the course of many years. First of all, Benson was confronted with her presumption when she returned to New Hampshire for the holidays—a showdown for which, apparently, her guns were loaded: “I won’t begin to tell you about my evening with her the other night,” Jackson wrote Ted Amussen on January 2. “I aged ten years in those three hours. And God protect me hereafter from writers: they’re a lousy class of people.” Later that summer he made a point of crossing her name off the invitation list for a big Lost Weekend screening party, and moreover vowed never to submit a story to The New Yorker again. There matters might have rested, were it not for Jackson’s extravagant admiration for The Folded Leaf, Maxwell’s novel about a homoerotic friendship, which Jackson applauded in Chicago Sun Book Week on April 15, 1945: “Katherine Anne Porter, it seems to me, is the one American writer who has no reason to envy William Maxwell his gifts; and offhand the only novel I can think of that is at all comparable to The Folded Leaf is The Apple of the Eye, also a story of adolescence [and also homoerotic], written by Glenway Wescott twenty years ago.” Maxwell loved the review, not least because it made his family in Illinois take him seriously for once, as opposed to being embarrassed by what they’d always assumed were mere memoirs: “Their main reaction to ‘The Folded Leaf,’ ” he wrote Jackson, “before your review, was surprise that I knew such vile language, and had been unhappy in my youth. Now, thanks to you, I am a credit to the family. Sometimes the world’s opinion, operating on middle class minds, is almost terrifying to watch.”
But if Jackson thought his review (“I was frankly log-rolling,” he wrote a friend; “but it’s a good book, isn’t it?”) would ensure future sales to The New Yorker, he would be disappointed again and again—seventeen times in a row, to be exact, during a single interval from 1951 to 1952. Rejecting, for example, a long story (“The Outlander”) about a Jackson-like protagonist in Bermuda, Maxwell invoked Ross’s prohibition against stories about writers (“nobody cares about them except another writer”), whereas Jackson’s portrait of a loose woman, “Janie,” was unsuitable (“Mr. Ross feels”) for a magazine that might be read by a minor. Nothing if not tactful—indeed legendary in that respect—Maxwell usually concluded his letters with the wistful hope that Jackson would reappear in The New Yorker someday. By the summer of 1951, though, Jackson was fed up (“to hell with The New Yorker from now on”), and sternly corrected his friend Dorothea when she ventured to praise the magazine’s fiction: New Yorker stories, he wrote, “are artful, full of evasions and half-truths, and almost always stop where they really should begin.” However, a few months later, Jackson wrote what he considered a masterpiece, “The Boy Who Ran Away,” and abruptly recanted his boycott of the magazine: “it’s one story for a change that Maxwell would love,” he promised Baumgarten. “(In fact it is Maxwell.)” But no: once again Maxwell replied—with his usual dolorous tact—that the story was a little too patly “clinical,” and so on. “I could punch him in the nose,” said Jackson. “My God! He has seen countless stories and has rejected every one except a punk tale I wrote way back in 1945 and that Sally Benson rewrote for them under the sickening title of FUNNY DREAM.…”
