Chapter Fourteen
The Outlander
Jackson’s talks at the Marlboro College Fiction Writers’ Conference had gone so well that the college president, Walter Hendricks, invited him to teach a couple of classes during the 1950–51 academic year. Jackson was firm in his conviction that so-called creative writing couldn’t be taught, and besides he thought most college students (especially male) were philistines who considered all talk about art to be “highbrow, therefore balls.” But then, too, he needed money as well as a change of scenery, and Hendricks had become a friend. Besides, Jackson liked the whole ethos of Marlboro, a tiny college occupying a couple of clapboard farm buildings atop Potash Hill in a town near Brattleboro. The program had begun a few years back in Biarritz, France, where classes were held in villas for soldiers who didn’t have enough points to go home. After the war, then, Hendricks turned his Vermont farm into a college for some of these same returning soldiers, flush from the GI Bill, and two years later Marlboro graduated its first class—a single student, Hugh Mulligan, who went on to get advanced degrees from Harvard and Boston University.
For his first semester Jackson spent Monday through Thursday in Marlboro at the Whetstone Inn, commuting from Orford (about ninety miles one way) in a car he’d borrowed from Dorothea Straus. His two courses included a seminar for undergraduates on the modern novel and an adult extension class that he insisted on calling practical—as opposed to creative—writing. “Creative,” he explained, connoted “the very opposite” of what he wanted to achieve, namely “to help writers, amateurs and professional alike, to unlearn the grandiose notion we have all accumulated about the nature of writing”—that it was, in short, a matter of “inspiration” rather than (as Jackson would have it) “impulse”—“and to learn, instead, how best to express … exactly what they mean and no more and no less.” By way of compromise, the course was listed in the catalog as “Practical and Creative Writing,” since students could submit work (essays, reports, poems, stories) arguably belonging to either category.
Jackson seemed to bring his greatest enthusiasm to his literature seminar, for which he composed a vast syllabus listing a kind of long-term reading program in addition to what was strictly required for the course; among the hundred-plus books on the first list were a number of cinderblock opuses of the kind he himself was putatively working on—An American Tragedy, Moby-Dick, Buddenbrooks, Of Time and the River, U.S.A.—as well as six novels by Evelyn Waugh (whose seamless, witty economy he wistfully envied), and, more surprisingly, four by Hemingway, including the latter’s recent, relatively inferior novel, Across the River and into the Trees (perhaps because it gave Charlie a pretext for mentioning that he’d recently appeared alongside same in Cosmopolitan).1 In all modesty, too, Jackson included his own four books: “For the purpose only of pointing out good construction and bad, techniques concealed or faulty, passages of tour-de-force as opposed to the ‘real,’ symbolism obvious or successful, et cetera.” His exams for this class were rather inspired; an essay question, for instance, asked students to choose one quotation from a list and discuss how it related to (a) at least two of the books they’d studied, and (b) their own experiences (“Would you frame it to hang over your writing desk?”).2 He also wanted to know “the sole and primary purpose of all fiction,” warning students not to reply that “it is to instruct or uplift”: “These reasons couldn’t be farther from fiction’s true purpose. If you think otherwise, then we’ve wasted our time.”
One of Jackson’s students, Bruce Bohrmann, remembered the course as one of the best he ever took, and Jackson himself was moved to admit, at the time, that he was hearing a lot of good things about his classes. “I’m glad you find teaching stimulating,” Baumgarten wrote, with a touch of exasperation, “but please get back to your novel. It is of first importance and nothing should keep you from it.”
While struggling with What Happened, Jackson was haunted by the recent suicides of writers Ross Lockridge Jr. and Thomas Heggen, both of whom had become despondent after being unable to repeat the success of their first novels—respectively, Raintree County and Mister Roberts (“The best novel I’ve found in years,” Jackson had said of the latter, when it was first published in 1946; “I’ve read it three times already”). Jackson knew all too well the strain imposed on authors of acclaimed first novels, deeply resenting what he characterized as the American “cult of success”—the way, in his case, certain critics insisted on making gleeful comparisons between The Lost Weekend and his subsequent work, branding him a failure because he hadn’t managed to top himself. “The worst thing that ever happened to me was the success of The Lost Weekend,” he proclaimed at the Marlboro College Fiction Writers’ Conference. “The writer knows his own worth, and to be overevaluated can confuse and destroy him as an artist.”
And yet, for all his seeming humility about being “overevaluated,” Jackson couldn’t resist mentioning What Happened at every opportunity, plainly intoxicated by the self-perpetuated rumor that he was working on a masterpiece that would justify—surpass, abolish—the great expectations created by his first novel. “ ‘The conviction that “such a thing has not been done before” is the indispensable motor of all artists’ industry,’ ” he wrote Baumgarten in early 1949, quoting Mann in connection with his own certainty that he had “never written anything like” What Happened, and “neither has anybody else!” Many years later, Jackson would claim that the novel’s first hundred pages constituted “the best writing [he had] ever written,” but one wonders when exactly he managed to write those pages. After rejecting the Fanny Brice offer in November 1948, Jackson had proceeded to write “Tenting Tonight” and then dabbled with a novella-length piece, “The Visiting Author” or “The Outlander” (more on that in a moment), until February 1949, when Rhoda reported that he was “in a writing lull—that terrible period (for him and for us) of hanging around not knowing what to do with himself. He’s stuck a snag and until he irons it out in his mind he’ll just have to fiddle around like this.” Jackson would later describe this “lull” as a spell of “paralyzing anxiety” toward his novel, during which he distracted himself with long walks around the hill behind his house. Every afternoon he’d sit beside a brook in the woods and brood over his novel, finally returning along a dirt road that descended to the cemetery across an open field from his house—still there, he’d reassure himself (“It had not burned down in my absence”); the precious opening pages of What Happened were safe!
By the summer of 1949—having written “The Benighted Savage” and “Sophistication” in the meantime, but not yet “The Sunnier Side”—Jackson was so fed up with his own dithering and financial woes that he thought surely, at last, he’d have to accept defeat and find a job in New York (“My God I’m even incapable of decisions these days”). By early 1950, however, he claimed to be writing what sounded like the opening passage of What Happened, informing Boom that he was looking out his window at the “snowy landscape” while trying to describe “the very same scene in terms of early August and full summer,” as he does in the initial pages of “Preview” (which wouldn’t be finished for another four years). By June, alas, he was stumped again: “Everything I put down on paper reads to me, an hour later, like sheer crap,” he wrote Baumgarten, whose frequent offers to read the manuscript were always politely refused. Indeed, Jackson admitted that he himself could hardly bear to read the thing anymore, much less write it, though by the end of that year, 1950, he told a reporter for The Dartmouth that he’d written “about 800 pages” and expected the finished novel to be at least twice that long.
But a curious thing, one that bears repeating: as Jackson readily admitted, the long “Arcadian Tales” he’d recently been writing, while also claiming to write What Happened, were composed of “the same material” that “[would] turn up in” his novel (albeit “in a different way”), such that he’d even considered titling the “Arcadia” section of The Sunnier Side—as it was then conceived, before he decided to drop the non-Arcadian stories—“Notes for a Novel.”
In all likelihood, though, he was working on every conceivable thing but his novel—save, perhaps, for occasional pages that failed to measure up to the almost Platonic ideal he’d imagined for his masterpiece. Everything else was so much slumming in comparison, even relatively ambitious work like “The Visiting Author.” Begun in December 1948, this Jamesian story about “the peculiar fish that a writer is” drew on his experiences in Bermuda, when he’d done a certain amount of socializing with pilots at an Army base in St. George’s (so a Visitor’s Pass among his papers would suggest). In the story, one of the pilot’s wives fancies herself a writer, and presses one of her stories on the Jackson-like protagonist, Benton Hargrave, who in turn seduces her. Later, the woman’s husband drunkenly boasts about bombing German civilians, whereupon Hargrave lets him know by innuendo that he’s been cuckolded—partly a matter of indignant reprisal, this, but also fodder for a story Hargrave hopes to write, “which” (so reads the final line, à la “The Sunnier Side”) “like any story worth the telling, would bear little relation to, and be far more interesting than, the dull original.” Whatever “the dull original” consisted of, one wonders how much duller it could have been than “The Outlander” (as the story was ultimately titled), which takes seventy pages to make the feeble point that writers are “freaks” who “will do anything for material,” as Jackson explained to Mary McCarthy, adding that he’d originally wanted Hargrave to sleep with both wife and husband (“I was talked out of it, like a fool”). The final product, anyway, hardly seems worth the fourteen months of intermittent labor he poured into it, while his wife, agent, and others were clamoring for What Happened.
And just as Jackson was finishing “The Outlander” in February 1950, he got started on a short “memoir in the form of a novel” about Bronson Winthrop, alternately titled Uncle Mr. Kember or The Royalist. Jackson thought he could dash the book off with his left hand, and confidently pitched it to Roger Straus for his fall 1950 list: “The book has everything, humor, pathos, real social comment, and I feel very strongly it would have a wide popular sale on the order of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.…” Scribbled in the margin: “Movie and play possibilities—also N.Y. pieces—on account of original characterization.” But after an “excellent beginning” of thirty or so pages, Jackson experienced what was becoming a familiar dilemma: “a kind of block or protest against writing it two ways, one way for the story, another way for its later inclusion in the novel.” Far from making the fall list, Jackson took almost five months just to recognize this impasse, and would never return to the manuscript except in a speculative way.
The following February, 1951—a month after that optimistic New Year’s resolution in the Times about finishing his novel, which of course had followed months of intensive teaching at Marlboro—Jackson wrote a sketch about his time in Zurich with Ralph Eaton, “Old Men and Boys,” which he hoped would be the first in a long salable series about his Switzerland years. With, again, visions of a smash Broadway play resulting from his efforts (“my fondest dream at the moment, one that will keep me solvent for some time to come”), Jackson managed to write four more stories in five days, including one about the Mumm family, “Ping Pong,” which focused on the time Olili’s paddle was smashed because of the swastika inked on its handle. Dubbing the whole series Crazy Americans (“a title that connotes Europeans’ regard of us, and is also a selling title”), Jackson advised Baumgarten to send all five pieces to The New Yorker, which was known for its light-comic serials such as Clarence Day’s Life with Father and Sally Benson’s St. Louis vignettes. A long month later, however, William Maxwell rejected the stories with his usual decorous, nicely considered letter:
In spite of fine moments here and there … the overall effect seems to us of something—of a great deal, actually—held back. I think it is simply the emotional content of the experience that is missing. Mr. Jackson’s admiration for the monumental achievement of Thomas Mann may have tied his hands, so to speak. Remarkable though The Magic Mountain is, it’s only one man’s vision. Mr. Jackson’s Davos completely recaptured would undoubtedly have its own interest and validity. Whether it would be better as a continuous narrative than as short pieces, he alone, of course, can know.
This time, on reflection, Jackson was inclined to agree, and asked Baumgarten to withdraw the stories for good. Maxwell, after all, had picked up on the fact that Jackson had aimed his prose at a middlebrow market, while reserving his real firepower, as ever, for What Happened, where of course the Davos material and so much else were ultimately meant to appear.
And so at last—“desperately in debt”—Jackson began slumming in earnest. “The Problem Child,” he bleakly confessed, was “strictly from hunger”: the story of a middle-aged drinker named Grace Dana, it traced all the author’s favorite truisms about alcoholism. “There was something fine and delicate about her,” the heroine’s boyfriend, Smith Weston, tensely reflects, “an imagination, a vitality, a gift for life, that tragically was all going the wrong direction.… On the other hand, he had enough sense to know that she had to stop drinking for herself first, not for him; otherwise it wouldn’t hold.” The most non-hackneyed part of the story is the end, which—like almost every line of The Lost Weekend—is informed by Jackson’s weird objectivity toward his own narcissism: Grace considers killing herself with pills, the better to teach Smith a lesson, until she realizes she won’t be around to savor his reaction; instead she flushes the pills down the toilet, leaves the empty jar in plain sight, and passes out on the couch to give him a good scare. “No one, of course, has approached his classical treatment of the alcoholic,” wrote a surprisingly dour-sounding Maxwell, “and this story, it seems to me, doesn’t approach it either.” The editors of Women’s Home Companion, however, were only too happy to take a piece about alcoholism from Charles Jackson, paying $2,500 for “Last Laughter,” as the story was retitled when it finally appeared in the June 1952 issue.
That autumn Rhoda remarked to Boom that her morale was “persistently low.” Charlie’s absences during the week, while he taught at Marlboro, only made weekends worse than ever, since he felt all the more constrained to take pills in order to catch up on his writing. In November they decided to sell the house—the Strauses had offered the use of their summer home in Purchase, New York (“they’d do anything for Charlie”)—which at least gave Rhoda the hope of a new beginning, without debts, so that Charlie could get on with his work relatively free of anxiety. “Maybe life will be better,” she wrote. “Anyhow it can’t be worse.”
On that point she was decidedly mistaken. More than three years would pass before the house was finally sold, and meanwhile Charlie’s behavior remained unpredictable at best. In late January 1951, he went to New York for a weeklong vacation with the Strauses, who, as Dorothea remembered, listened to their guest’s “endless talking” about his novel and “watched helplessly” as he went from beer to straight whiskey. Finally, on the day of his departure (he was supposed to be in Marlboro), Jackson was so stupefied that his friends called a doctor—or rather several, since their usual doctor refused to come (“I don’t treat drunks”), and others were equally obdurate. The man who finally appeared (“I can’t stand alcoholics”) carried his bag into the library where Jackson lay on the couch, then emerged “like a startled deer” a moment later: “I’ve given him something,” he said, agreeing to stick around, at a distance, while the Strauses tried to find someone to take Charlie back to Vermont. This proved to be Harl Cook—the raffish stepson of Susan Glaspell, a celebrated writer Jackson had met in Truro five summers ago—who also carried what appeared to be a doctor’s bag as he urged Jackson to his feet. “Charlie looked up at him with obvious relief,” wrote Dorothea, “and there was an expression in his almond-shaped Tartar eyes that reminded me of a young girl about to be whirled away by an attractive, sophisticated dancing partner, admiration mingling with an awakening attraction.” The next morning Cook reported that his bag had contained a bottle of liquor, and once Jackson had taken a nip (“I’m an old hand at managing these types”) he’d slept soundly on the train and arrived in Vermont “none the worse for wear.”
But no. Alerted by Roger, Rhoda had phoned the Whetstone Inn that evening and discovered that her husband was, in fact, still very drunk; asking the management to keep an eye on him, she drove to Marlboro and eventually found him around midnight in Brattleboro, all but incoherent yet determined to catch the 3:00 a.m. train back to New York. After coffee and food at a diner, Rhoda persuaded him to stay in Marlboro, and the next day she drove him home. “We’re in a drying out phase just now,” she wrote Boom afterward, “but I’m afraid he isn’t really drying out. I think he still has pills somewhere and is keeping himself going with them.” But he denied this, and since complete withdrawal was apt to result in a “terrifying depression,” Rhoda agreed to dose him with paraldehyde at night; presently, though, she found “a giant jar of pills” and some loose pills too, and soon he was impelled to return (still “ambulatory,” according to records) to Mary Hitchcock and the kindly Sven Gundersen, who understood his need to indulge in “periodic bursts” of pill-taking for the sake of his writing—or rather, Charlie claimed that the doctor understood it. “Which is what discourages me so,” said Rhoda. “I disbelieve Sven’s statement, if he made it.”
A lull of about seven weeks followed, until the night of March 15, 1951—three days after Maxwell’s mass rejection of the Davos stories—when Jackson had a serious car accident while driving to Marlboro. According to the Brattleboro Reformer, Jackson was heading south along Route 5 in the vicinity of Westminster when he drifted over the center line and plowed his—that is, the Strauses’—sedan head-on into a car driven by one Ida Monte. The fronts of both cars were demolished, but, miraculously, Monte and her passenger, Arthur Karones, suffered only minor injuries, while Jackson seemed to emerge without a scratch. He was, however, vividly intoxicated, and after a night in jail he pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of driving under the influence, for which the judge suspended his license and fined him $75 plus costs ($8.05). Unfortunately the incident was picked up by the AP wire and got a good deal of publicity: “AUTHOR OF LOST WEEKEND LOSES ONE HIMSELF” read the headline in the New York Journal American, while on the other coast Franny Ferrer spotted the news on the front page of the Herald Express. Jackson affected bemusement at all the fuss: “Well good God,” he wrote Dorothea, “where did they ever think that the author of The Lost Weekend got his material?”
But in truth he was quite chastened, and promptly agreed to resume seeing a psychiatrist, Niels Anthonisen, at the Veterans Hospital in White River Junction. At first Jackson saw the man two times a week, but soon they were getting on so well that he increased it to three (which meant Rhoda had to drive one hundred fifty miles a week for this errand alone). Dr. Anthonisen—“Tony” to Jackson—was a small, fiftyish Norwegian with big ears (“he looks like the Seven Dwarfs rolled into one”), who followed the usual Freudian protocol of saying very little, although (unlike Kubie) he did face his patients and seem attentive enough, his head cocked always to one side. Also he was a cultured man who loved Shakespeare and made a point of reading Charlie’s books,3 and when he chose to speak, he did so with spirit and candor. Once, he observed that The Lost Weekend wasn’t quite “terrible enough,” and Jackson huffily replied, “I’m not exactly Dostoyevsky!” “That’s true, you’re not,” said the doctor; then: “Well, why aren’t you?” Another time Charlie was volubly holding forth (“in my usual self-interested fashion”), when he noticed Anthonisen shaking his head. “Mr. Jackson,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody else in my life who needs love as badly as you do.” As Charlie recalled many years later, “I almost burst into tears; I didn’t know it showed that plain; nor did I know it was that true.”
Charlie, in turn, was fascinated by the contrast between his daughters—as he wrote in Farther and Wilder, they “were so completely unlike that one could almost believe they were not only not sisters … but almost from different races.” This, of course, reflected their almost polar-opposite parents, whom they resembled in a curiously inverted way: Sarah was dark and almond-eyed like her father, but loyal, responsible, and literal-minded like her mother; Kate was fair and snub-nosed like her mother, but otherwise resembled her father to a perfectly turbulent tee. “They were like small mirrors of himself,” Jackson wrote, “one external, the other internal; and it was this constant twin-mirror that presented a small conflict in him that he had been unable to resolve.” It irked him, for one thing, that he could hardly dissemble a preference for Sarah, at least when the girls were children. Her obedience and solemn honesty—so unlike himself as a boy—delighted him. One day, in 1948, Sarah came home from school, upset, because some boys had taunted her at recess, yelling “Your father drinks whis-kee, your father drinks whis-kee!” Charlie, a little abashed, asked what she’d said. “Good old loyal Sarah spoke up vehemently in my defense,” he wrote the Gershwins. “ ‘I told them Papa does not,’ she said: ‘he never drinks it at all, he doesn’t like the taste of it … but Mama drinks it all the time.’ ”
As for Kate, she was “brilliantly interesting” but “a pain in the ass to live with”: funny, talkative, precocious, and above all imaginative—an extravagant fabricator, in fact, who stuck to her stories with a kind of bitter determination when, as often happened, her father tried to expose her. This, he knew, was perversity on his part, but he couldn’t help it: “The secret inner mirror was all too clear. She could enrage him in the same way and for the same reasons that his own mother enraged him, precisely because he saw his own failings in them both—outrageously caricatured in his mother, perfectly matched in [Kate].” And yet he felt deeply sorry for her, too, in quite the same way he’d pitied himself as a child; for all her maverick high spirits, Kate was morbidly sensitive, and lonely, and Charlie knew she was bound to have a hard life.
Both daughters adored him, and could talk to him with almost perfect ease. “Make Katie stop teasing me about my pubic hair!” the eleven-year-old Sarah demanded, and her father, intrigued (he “didn’t know she had any”), mildly drew her out until they were having a matter-of-fact discussion about sex: “I found out what Sarah knew and didn’t know, and filled in the gaps,” he wrote Dorothea. Together the girls liked to keep him company on his bed—“because it’s big and wide (and possibly, Dr. Freud, because it’s mine)”—and Charlie bore such lovely moments in mind when, say, he encountered Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams at the ballet one night, having drinks at intermission and discussing their travels in “Africa, Rome, Barcelona, Paris, et cetera.” At length Vidal asked Jackson what he did, and the latter purported to reply, “Why, I’m a bourgeois family man the year-round in a small town in New Hampshire.” Sensing the pair’s condescension, Jackson smugly reflected that a single moment of sweet rapport with his daughters “was worth all their Africas, Romes, Barcelonas, and wherever they might be free to go next.” Not long after, however, he explained to a magazine editor that Henry Price—his alter ego in “The Boy Who Ran Away,” an anxious father like himself—“unconsciously would like to be rid of his daughters, would really like to be free.”
Jackson was thrilled when the story—the only one he’d “ever invented out of whole cloth,” and the first in almost two years he wasn’t ashamed of—promptly sold to Collier’s for $2,500. Sensing he was on a roll, he decided now was the time to tackle a novella he’d been considering for nearly a decade, Home for Good, about a writer who leaps suicidally from a train as it speeds through his hometown. “I should be giving that energy and even ‘material’ to The Novel,” he wrote the Strauses. “What I should be doing, of course, is a story that doesn’t require so much of oneself—but—this is the story that happened to turn up.” He hoped (in vain) to keep it under eighty pages and perhaps sell it to Cosmopolitan for $5,000, as he had “The Sunnier Side”; anyway, if it panned out, he promised “plain sailing on What Happened for months to come.”
The Writer, needless to say, was an intensely romantic figure to Jackson—a role he loved to play, though the actual writing part was problematic—and some of his favorite stories (“Tonio Kröger,” James’s “The Middle Years”) were about writers. Home for Good, then, was to be his statement about the peculiar dilemmas of the American writer, though he’d long hesitated because he didn’t “feel up to it intellectually.” This time, though, he girded himself for the task with even more pills than usual, the better to cope with a breakneck, round-the-clock writing schedule that forced him to get words on paper with the least possible reflection (besides, if it wasn’t great, he could always tell himself he was keeping his best in store for What Happened). The Arcadian protagonist, Mercer Maitland, was essentially Charles Jackson disguised as Sinclair Lewis5; like the latter, Maitland is a murderously prolific author of caustic yet compassionate satires on American life—a parallel Jackson makes explicit when he writes of the hero’s first novel, Emily Sparks, as follows: it “did for (or perhaps to, as many people prefer to think) the American school teacher what Sinclair Lewis later did for the American businessman in Babbitt.” Like Lewis, too, Maitland is an antically boorish drunk (and pill-popper), though it’s often unclear whether his creator is quite aware of his boorishness as such.
Perhaps the best way to describe Home for Good is as the writerly equivalent of Don Birnam’s “favorite daydream” in The Lost Weekend, wherein he imagines himself appearing at Carnegie Hall, blithely performing whatever pieces are thrown at him by a panel of experts. Maitland, in short, is the writer (and human being) Jackson would have dearly loved to be. He even goes so far as to mock his own paltry achievement, implicitly, by way of comparison with Maitland, “a man who knew how to write a true novel, not merely one of those disguised memoirs, a long-drawn-out short story, or a series of tenuous ‘sensitive’ episodes from a remembered childhood that had never really ended, such as so often pass for novels nowadays.” Somewhere in the subtext, however, was the fact that What Happened loomed in the offing, and hence in a lesser way Jackson might redeem himself as Maitland does, late in his career, as critics begin harping on his declining powers, when “suddenly, out of the blackness of defeat, [his novel] Stay, Illusion! burst upon a thunderstruck public.” But wait!—there’s posthumous redemption too: after the four relatively disappointing novels (of twenty-six total) that follow Stay, Illusion!, a final masterpiece is discovered: “Brilliantly it laid its finger on one of our deepest American compulsions—the desperation that drives us to succeed far beyond our powers, to keep up with the Joneses, to work harder and harder for more and more money.… The novel is called, of course, To Try Is To Die.” Not only is Maitland the triumphant author of every book Jackson ever considered writing, but also an “intransigent and incorruptible” artist who appears in Stockholm to refuse—in perfect Swedish—the Nobel Prize: “I decline it in the name of my betters, those great men of literature who, again and again and again, have been overlooked or ignored utterly by the Nobel Committee …” So the speech proceeds, unsparing, awesomely pompous, encompassing Cather, Chekhov, Dreiser, James, “Tolstoy, my God!”—and so on.
But then, quite apart from the question of Maitland’s integrity, the Nobel Prize would only be ashes in his mouth as long as he doesn’t enjoy the approbation of little Arcadia, from which he sprang. Even the signal man who finds his battered corpse opposite the local train station, a dingy chalet, can’t help remembering him as a “figure of fun”; the only soul in town who ever foresaw his great destiny was a beloved fourth-grade teacher, Lucy Espenmiller, whom he cruelly “betrays”—as the town sees it—by using her as the model for the lonely spinster heroine of Emily Sparks. Arcadia does, however, concede Maitland’s international renown just enough to invite him to be guest speaker at the annual joint banquet of the Rotary, Elks, Lions, and Kiwanis Clubs, exploding into applause (“to his uttermost astonishment”) as he rises to speak. Afterward, Maitland greets his old neighbors with great folksy warmth, lest they mistake him as a celebrity (“which he loathed being, above all things”), or, heaven forbid, “a stuffed shirt”: “Why listen here, Alice Shaub! … Of course I remember you and of course I remember Rogers’ store and good God how could I ever forget it? I peddled papers for Rogers’ store …” Here was a man, after all, who would forever mourn the loss of his Arcadia High School class pin (“it had cost a hard-earned four-fifty and it was stamped AHS, ’12”), wishing that the Juan-les-Pins prostitute who’d stolen it had taken his platinum watch instead. And little wonder he eschews requests from the great libraries of Harvard and Yale (“et cetera”) for his vast manuscripts, relinquishing them instead to “little Arcadia Library where he had sat for so many, many hours, so long ago … and from which he had lugged home that ten pound [Shakespeare] Concordance.”
In one respect, then, Home for Good is a rueful billet-doux to the village that had forsaken Charles Jackson (and whose library, indeed, would disdain any trace of his existence). Perhaps he wanted it known in Wayne County that—every time he passed through town aboard the Century a few minutes to midnight—he, like his hero, felt an urge to “dive out into that eternal Arcadian night where [he] belong[ed].” As the unnamed, Nick Carraway–like narrator (“the only friend [Maitland] ever managed to keep”) reflects at the end of this 120-page paean to misunderstood genius, Maitland longed, above all, to be “a regular guy”: “Like all artists he was a lonely man, and he coveted the commonplace; his deepest love and even admiration went out to what Thomas Mann calls ‘the simple, the average, the blue-eyed, and the ordinary.’ ”
Jackson finished a draft in eight days, and saw that it was good. Rhoda, too, waxed enthusiastic, declaring it a “masterpiece” (a bit of rare hyperbole on her part, surely for the sake of her husband’s volatile morale). Exuberantly he wrote his mother that Home for Good would be published as a book in February, appearing in the meantime, he hoped, as a two-part serial in Cosmopolitan; but the big news (“hold your hats”) was that it would be dedicated to her—the first time—and what’s more it was clean (“there isn’t a naughty word in it”). Such were his high spirits that he decided not to be daunted overmuch by the misgivings of his agent Carl Brandt, who gently pointed out that general readers are unlikely to care about the problems of writers, and whereas the novella might find an audience as a book, its prospects for the magazine market were dim. On the same day Jackson wrote that celebratory note to his mother, he angrily reminded Brandt that he was an agent, not an editor: “My business is to write what I have to write and your business is to sell it, if you can.” As for Baumgarten, who’d also been skeptical (“But it’s not a story, Charlie, it’s a biography”)—well, all such sentiments were just “rubbish”: Had they not read “Tonio Kröger”? Cather’s A Lost Lady? And what about Schulberg’s latest, The Disenchanted? “If you didn’t get it, Carl, that’s your funeral, not mine,” he concluded. “I think the story is okay. It will never win for me the Nobel Prize, and maybe some day, if I decided to include it in a collection, I will want to re-do it with a lighter touch.… In any case, I am sending [Farrar, Straus] today the complete second, and I hope final, draft—final, I hope, because I’ve got to get back to WHAT HAPPENED.”
It was Baumgarten who replied to this, noting that Brandt had already left for Europe and a good thing, too, as Charlie’s letter had been uncharacteristically harsh: Carl, she wrote, was very aware of his “pressing financial situation,” and therefore felt obliged to do everything in his power “to see that there are as few failures in the magazine market as possible”; Home for Good was a hard sell because of subject and length, and meanwhile, too, they needed to bring up Charlie’s book sales, and both she and Carl thought it “essential” they follow the story collection with “the big book,” not a novella. Nevertheless—as ever—she would do her best to sell Home for Good to the slicks, sending it to Jackson’s great fan at Cosmopolitan, Maggie Cousins, who read it with “profound interest” but decided to pass for a reason that echoed Carl Brandt: “I wish writers would look into the lives of people in other businesses, with the same care and profundity.”
Charlie, for his part, would let eight weeks pass before rereading Home for Good, which, on (mostly) sober reflection, left him “utterly disgusted” and “depressed”: “It has moments and individual passages of interest,” he wrote Brandt and Baumgarten, “but the whole thing seems to me now a nothing-at-all, rather frenzied besides, careless, angry, and—which is worst of all—smarty-pantsy.” For the time being, then, whatever his harrowing debts, he would put it aside.
By September the financial pressure was “unbearable”: the only money he’d made since spring was eight hundred dollars from the sale of a Darrel Austin painting, “Girl with Black Dog,” and now there was all of thirty-seven dollars in the bank. “Sounds corny but it’s ghastly true,” he reported a month later: “both the children need shoes (they’re still wearing sneaks) and we can’t write out a check for twenty dollars.” Morbidly aware that Rhoda was listening outside his door for the sound of typing, he forced himself to write stories of whatever sort, or at least long, ruminative letters, quitting in the wee hours and reading himself to sleep as the sun came up. “I look like hell and feel like hell but for some reason I survive,” he wrote Dorothea. “Is God keeping me for Higher Things?”
His wife wasn’t the only one wondering about him, for better or worse. “This is a very small town,” observed his neighbor Julia Fifield, “and everybody knows everybody else’s business whether you know they know it or not.” Charlie, to be sure, knew. Mrs. Richmond, the postmistress, lived opposite his house on Main Street and was, he complained, “the nosiest of women”: “I see you revised that story you sent in last week,” she’d greet him, handing over an acknowledgment card from Brandt & Brandt, and meanwhile on her wall was a list of locals owing back taxes, which naturally included Jackson, who also owed a notoriously large and longstanding debt to the grocer, Charlie Clifford, among many others.
The nosy postmistress, oddly enough, had all but adopted Sarah Jackson as a younger sister to her three children, Pete, Roberta, and Bob—three, four, and five years older than Sarah respectively. It wasn’t that Sarah was actively fleeing her family, but simply that there were few young people in Orford, and besides the Richmonds loved having her and seemed to recognize that she might prefer a happier, more stable home. In any case she spent almost every day with the siblings, riding bikes and playing baseball in summer, taking skiing lessons in winter from the high school principal, Elmer “Spike” Fulton, on the hill behind Six Chimney Farm. Charlie welcomed such gatherings in the abstract, but rarely emerged from his room except (briefly) to watch. And then, for all his egalitarianism, he rather deplored how his children were forced to play with a rougher element than one found, say, at the Dalton School (“no nice children’s parties, things like that”), and also, of course, he knew how their parents talked behind his back about his debts and drunkenness, how they pitied his children for having such an errant father, not to mention the bad feeling left over from his Leonard Lyons column. He felt he didn’t belong, in short, and often longed to escape, but was held in thrall—producing more and more wretched fiction in a frantic effort to pay bills—by his family, who ultimately didn’t understand him either. As he’d later remark to Alcoholics Anonymous, what he “remember[ed] most” about these years was “looking forward to night”: “To being alone in my room. When I didn’t have to see anybody. And then at night I remember lying awake in my bed and thinking of my New Hampshire neighbors in their little frame houses.… But I knew how much I envied them, and I envied them because they had love in their lives and I didn’t. And I didn’t seem able to have it.”
During his last years in Orford, however, Jackson did make a somewhat greater effort to be sociable—more for his family’s sake than his own, as he hated being an embarrassment (“Pa-pa, why don’t you go to a job like other fathers?” Kate would complain, sometimes pretending not to know him in public). In the past he’d compensated for his reclusiveness with a great show of affability on the Fourth of July, wearing a flamingo-colored shirt and working a ring-toss booth on Main Street. Within a month after his car wreck, though, he’d gone so far as to join the Orford bowling team, and occasionally hosted poker nights with some of the local gentry. Among the latter was a wealthy retired lawyer named DeWitt “Dee” Mallary, who once made a point of visiting Charlie after he’d returned from the hospital, yet again, having recovered from an overdose motivated in part (as everyone knew) by despair over his many debts. Mallary announced that he was going to help Charlie straighten out his affairs, and proceeded to jot down facts and figures, asking what he owed and what he might reasonably expect to earn, and so on. When the session was over, Mallary stood up and ceremoniously produced a bill from his wallet to help “tide [Charlie] over”: “God help me if it wasn’t a $20 bill—(yes) and I was so embarrassed (embarrassed for him that is) that I found myself thanking him profusely, even abjectly,” Jackson wrote Dorothea; “whereas all the while, if I’d had any guts, I’d have said: ‘For Christ’s sake, Dee, what the hell good do you think twenty dollars will be?’ ” But far from shaming this kindly burgher, Charlie lost no time inscribing a copy of The Sunnier Side to him: “Dear Dee, Never, as long as I live, will I forget your kindness to me this week. It’s nothing for me to be proud of, God knows, but it makes me feel good just to think of it because of your kindness.”
