Chapter Twenty
A Second-Hand Life
Charlie loved his little apartment at the Chelsea, and visitors always noticed the pride with which he showed it off. He had his own bath and kitchenette, and the sitting room was dominated by a gorgeous fireplace with a Carrara mantelpiece flanked by twisting Byzantine columns (rather like Rufus’s muscled arms) and surmounted by a lovely, hazy mirror that went all the way up to a high ceiling. On subsequent trips to New Brunswick, he and the loyal Markel had lugged away the rest of his effects: an easy chair and ornate floor lamp (a gift from Ruby Schinasi); a typing table, chair, and file cabinet; his favorite records and music-room secretary; reproductions by Gauguin, Klee, Shahn, and some “charming odd water-color experiments” by Kate he’d recently had framed; and naturally his polar-bear rug, Staffordshire Shakespeare, and suckling Romulus and Remus that had figured so happily in The Lost Weekend—all of it, as ever, arranged just so: “neat as a pin,” observed one journalist, “his books standing in serried ranks on the shelves, his paintings hung at precisely the right level, and not a speck of dust visible anywhere.”
After years of quaint decline, the hotel was becoming hip again—“making the scene like a grandmother in a miniskirt,” as the Times put it. Andy Warhol was even then shooting Chelsea Girls, and Charlie was somewhat in awe of it all. When the Strauses came for a visit, he giddily pointed out the doors of the more famous tenants: Tennessee and Arthur and Virgil (Thomson), of course, on whom he wouldn’t dream of intruding, though he did visit the eccentric composer George Kleinsinger, and found himself ducking amongst trees and fluttering parakeets, fleeing altogether when he went to the bathroom and found a python in the tub! But mostly he was content to keep to himself. He was “living on a shoestring” until February, and besides he relished the maverick ethos. “CHARLES JACKSON: DO NOT DISTURB” read the sign on his door—incongruously enough, given the convivial fellow who resided therein. Typing in the wee hours, Charlie phoned the night clerk to in- quire whether anyone had complained (“Lissen,” the man replied, “this is the Chelsea”), and soon he was chatting up the staff in earnest. Stanley Bard, the manager, remembered how Charlie would often stop in his office just to say hello, and when the latter was ill or recovering from misadventures, Bard and others would make a point of checking on him. What Charlie appreciated best of all was a collective benignity on the subject of money: New York had declared the Chelsea a permanent landmark, and so the staff weren’t quite as obliged to harass tenants—certainly not lovable artists like Charlie—over unpaid bills. “To the entire staff of New York’s wonderful old Hotel Chelsea,” he wrote in his “Card of Thanks” for A Second-Hand Life, “where this novel was largely written, while they put up with my self-indulgences, stalling, temperament, odd hours, and whistling in the dark.”
Though Charlie was apt to pull the occasional all-nighter, most days followed an orderly pattern. Rising at six and putting on jacket and tie (he’d almost sooner be seen naked on the sidewalks than tieless), he’d stroll around the corner to the Riss Diner on Eighth Avenue, a noisy Greek place where the employees would cry out “Hello, Charlie!”—as would the newsie on 23rd Street where he stopped to buy his Times, as would various hookers slogging home after a long night. (Kate remembered eating at the Riss with her father and being introduced to one of his friends, a junky prostitute about her own age: “Salt of the earth; he loved her.”) Back at the Chelsea he’d work until one, skip lunch (an economy), nap in the afternoon, then revise the day’s output and return to the Riss for dinner.
This spartan routine seems to have taken shape over time. His appointment diary indicates an active social life during those first weeks, much of it AA-related, as he endeavored to reorient himself in the city. Around Thanksgiving (for want of other plans?) he consented to a busy AA junket in Detroit, addressing an audience of 1,200 and doing a fair amount of media too. “Funny, when you go out of town, you’re treated like a movie star,” he wrote Rhoda: “autographs, signing books, phone calls, and pictures all over the papers: like the old days, but quite meaningless.” Be that as it may, the trip (probably his last for AA) exhausted him, and for weeks he was groggy with flu. When in better fettle, and desirous of company beyond the Riss and Chelsea, he’d travel some thirty blocks uptown to the Taft, where he’d had his “last drink” with Boom on Armistice Day, 1936. Nowadays he’d chat up strangers at the bar or mingle among the tables, hoping for a chance to reveal his identity; in most cases he’d either get a blank look or (if they’d seen the movie) “a derisive denial,” as he told a friend. Returning late one night, he was struck by a little epiphany; as he scrawled on the back of an envelope (postmarked October 12, 1966) to an AA friend, Joe Besch: “A couple of weeks ago, as I came in at my usual hour of around 3 o’clock in the morning, I suddenly realized, with a start, something that had not occurred to me until then: that, for the past year, I had been living, and am still living, what can only be called a double life. Let me explain:”—but the note ended there.
What Jackson meant by a “double life” is an open question: there was his drug use in the midst of continued (but less and less frequent) AA activity, and of course there was his gay life, which was more pronounced than ever—bravely so: the Chelsea was its own world, to be sure, but Stonewall was still in the future. In 1966, Time concluded a feature story with what doubtless struck its editors as a handsome assertion: Homosexuality “deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as a minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.” Less and less did Charlie seem to agree. Various friends spotted him, during the Chelsea era, milling about with obviously gay acquaintances, while seeming also, quite vividly, to lift the scrim on his own gay persona. When Weston’s The Telling was published by David McKay in 1966, Charlie marched into the office of its editor, Eleanor Rawson, and insisted he be invited to the book party, where Weston was “on pins and needles” lest his flirtatious mentor say something indiscreet: “He was in love with me, and it blinded him to decorum.”1 It did not blind him, however, to what he considered the novel’s flaws, as he hooted at all the provocative “crotch-grabbing” that never comes to the point (“I don’t like all this fancy dancing around the subject!”); similarly, his old AA friend Ned Rorem got the impression that Charlie had refused to give a blurb for his Paris Diary because he’d found the book “coy” in its revelations of gay life.
More than ever he seemed to prefer the company of gay men—the more open, the better. On January 27, 1966, he celebrated the twenty-second anniversary of The Lost Weekend by attending the ballet and having dinner with a young fashion designer, Stan Herman, and his partner, Gene Horowitz, a teacher who was about to publish his first novel, Home Is Where You Start From. Charlie had admired the book, phoning Francis Brown of the Times and getting permission to write a generous yet measured review (“Neither a strikingly original nor even a very ‘modern’ work … [but] a remarkable achievement on other and more lasting counts: it deals directly, successfully, objectively but full-heartedly with family life”). Charlie seemed to enjoy the couple’s easy affection for each other, and reciprocated with a lot of bitchy, “hissing” humor (said Herman) that he might otherwise have taken pains to mitigate. And one wonders, too, how his meetings played out with a rough-hewn sailor named Peter Arthurs, who went on to write a notorious memoir of his friendship with the hard-drinking Irish author Brendan Behan. Arthur C. Clarke, of Space Odyssey fame, remembered how the sailor had introduced him to Jackson, Arthur Miller, and Norman Mailer, while incessantly telling stories about his homosexual romps with Behan (“I’d say that there bees some quare aul goings-on out there on them ships at sea,” the latter purportedly remarked, just prior to a frenzied grab at Peter Arthurs’s penis); finally Clarke urged his sailor friend to commit these chestnuts to paper, in the hope that it would help “keep Peter away from the gargle.” Presumably Jackson made the same suggestion during his late-night meetings with Arthurs (noted in his diary), though he’d be long dead by the time his interest bore fruit, in 1981, when With Brendan Behan included an acknowledgment of Arthurs’s “writing godfathers”: Clarke, Mailer, Miller, and Jackson.
A little parade of unknown men marches through the pages of Charlie’s final diaries, though individual names rarely appear more than once or twice. On December 2, 1965, he received an “11 o’clock call from Mike (Room 621) who stayed several hrs. Very nice person!”; on March 5, 1966, “Nick” was expected “sometime during the day” (“if he doesn’t forget”); and a man named Carlos scribbled (a childish cursive) into the space allotted for March 28, “I will be missing your’s [sic] companiship [sic] for ever. Your: Carlos”—but the next day Jackson wrote (in his steadier hand), “Carlos called.” Later that year and briefly into the next, he saw a lot of a “dear Norwegian friend” named Wintrup, for whose benefit he copied out and underlined a long passage from one of his favorite novels, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, in which the emperor writes about his young lover, Antinous, by way of reply to “the moralists” who consider “the pleasures of love among the enjoyments termed gross”:
But when these contacts persist and multiply about one unique being, to the point of embracing him entirely, when each fraction of a body becomes laden for us with meaning as overpowering as that of the face itself, when this one creature haunts us like music and torments us like a problem (instead of inspiring in us, at most, mere irritation, amusement, or boredom), when he passes from the periphery of our universe to its center, and finally becomes for us more indispensable than our own selves, then that astonishing [prodigy] takes place wherein I see much more an invasion of [the] flesh by the spirit than a simple play of the body alone.
AS FOR HIS PROGRESS on A Second-Hand Life, Charlie exuded confidence—for a while. Carl Brandt was spreading the word (“It’s hard to believe, but … ”) that his legendarily dilatory client had moved to New York and was, by God, finishing his novel at last. Robert Markel, for his part, was taking no chances. When Charlie complained that he couldn’t find a couple of old short stories that he wanted to incorporate into the book, his editor was only too happy “to play hooky” and drive him back to New Brunswick so he could spend the afternoon scouring his files. When Charlie claimed to be delayed by the bodily pain of having to sit at his typewriter for hours on end, Markel invited him to talk into a recording device and send the tapes to Macmillan for typing. When the tapes arrived sporadically if at all, Markel sent his secretary to the Chelsea to take dictation. “To Alice Schwedock,” Charlie wrote in his “Card of Thanks,” “who, after her own full day at her regular job, helped me secretarily till many midnights.” Schwedock was all of twenty-one, fresh out of college, and didn’t question the strange arrangement or the fact that she wasn’t getting paid for it; after walking on winter nights from Macmillan at Fifth Avenue and 12th, she’d be greeted by a bathrobed Charlie—“very kind and solicitous”—who would chat briefly and then dictate while some Beethoven played on his old 78 records. There were good nights and bad. Charlie knew he was being prodded, and was careful to have some kind of work ready for the young woman to type, though he was often disappointed by the results (e.g., “a long dialogue scene,” he wrote Rhoda, that was “just rambling”). Mindful, however, of Miss Schwedock’s wage slavery on his behalf, he gave her a framed Haitian pastel at the end of their labors.
“I’m very proud of myself,” he’d written Kate on November 30, “very sure of the book, very certain that I have not only a totally original but even a quite radical novel in the works. People may not like it, but goddammit they’ll read it. And I like it, which is all that matters.” He did worry a little, though, about what the general reader would make of his heroine’s tireless pursuit of “the most beautiful thing in life, the human penis.” Surely they’d wonder how he knew of such things—in which case they’d simply have to take his word for it that he’d “intuit[ed] them”: “God,” he reassured his daughter, “if I had ever experienced some of the things I’ve been writing about, I’d long since have been found dead—in some alley, say, or sordid hall bedroom of a tenth-rate hotel.” Nor was he willing to compromise his vision by indulging in the kind of coyness he’d scorned in Rorem and Weston. When his editor—whose tastes ran to the conservative—wanted to remove an especially lurid passage, in fact the author’s favorite, wherein Winifred peels away a policeman’s trousers to reveal “the tawny penis smooth and firm as a small column of marble that had been warmed by the sun,” Charlie was outraged, and at length the passage was allowed to stand (as it were). But then, it was all relative. Miss Schwedock wasn’t at all shocked by Charlie’s work—indeed found the naughty parts “a bit dated,” and perhaps that was a red flag of sorts. Within five days, anyway, of that ebullient letter to Kate about his “totally original” and “quite radical” novel, he wrote a far more tempered assessment to his estranged wife: “A terrible life, this. One day, or three days, I’m lifted up by the ‘brilliance’ of what I have done, and then I go into a four or five day depression over what I know is its pedestrian mediocrity.… Much of the novel I simply despair of, because other parts are so good, of such intense interest. But I don’t think I’ve got it any more, and I mean it quite realistically. Now don’t cheer me up: I know when it is bad, and a lot of it is that.”
Whatever his mood on a given day, he had little alternative (other than death) to finishing the book. A month before his February deadline, he was almost out of Macmillan money, and Markel had taken a hard(ish) line against dispensing more. On January 7, Charlie wrote Rhoda of subsisting on graham crackers and milk, and two weeks later he scribbled a note (evidently unsent) in green marker on a piece of ragged brown paper: “Dear Mrs. Harvey [an AA friend?]: I have reached the bottom of the Macmillan money bags and need some more subsidy, for the final six or eight weeks. Thank you from my heart for letting me impose on you.” And yet he seemed able to afford Seconal and/or Nembutal in rather large quantities. Stan Herman remembered a lot of “intoxicated” behavior on Charlie’s part—either “very prissy and silly” or “morose”—and periodically he’d overdose and have to go to the emergency room. Markel sent his personal physician to check on Jackson at St. Vincent’s Hospital that autumn, and it was Markel whom Charlie most inveigled into abetting his habit. “Nothing all day—sleep and awful depression,” he’d noted in his diary on December 3 (the day before his despondent letter to Rhoda: “A terrible life, this”), and six days later he wrote: “To N[ew] B[runswick] with Bob. Prescription.” Markel remembers the episode well. Once again Charlie had wanted to retrieve “something” from the house on Somerset, and when they started back to New York he casually asked the man to stop at a pharmacy near Rutgers. “I got the impression he’d failed to score in New York,” said Markel, “and needed to go back to New Jersey to get [more pills].”2
By spring, his novel still unfinished, Charlie was living off handouts from Rhoda and Boom. At the beginning of April he mailed his brother a chunk of Xeroxed manuscript as proof of progress, and was (according to his diary) about to leave for an AA dinner in Washington, when he “unwittingly … stepped up the [drug] intake” and suffered an almost fatal overdose, coming to at Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island. A few days later Boom sent a calming note to Sarah, along with a check:
You must have paid Charlie’s hospital bill and if and when you go to the Chelsea you’ll certainly be confronted by more. No reason for you to do it and this is to help. I’d send it to Charlie—as Rhoda and I have lately—but if he’s not responsible and uses it for the Wrong thing it’s best I send it to you—until he’s able to take care of himself—which he should be soon.…
If you have time get Charlie pyjamas or whatever. He’ll be better off as soon as he gets back in his AA group.
But in fact he was almost through with AA. The Washington trip was among the last references in his diary, and it was Markel’s impression that he’d stopped going to meetings.
Indeed, he hardly left the Chelsea for some four months after returning from Central Islip. Frightened by the mishap, he was determined to finish his novel sober—but found himself unable to write a word, or even approach the typewriter. “I did acrostics by the hour,” he recalled in “The Sleeping Brain”; “I read Lolita and Hadrian’s Memoirs and Tender Is the Night over and over again, though I knew them almost by heart.… I sat in a big chair and stared across my living room at the typewriter in the corner; and day after day I told myself: ‘Now look, Charlie; all you’ve got to do is to get up out of this chair and go over and sit down at that typewriter.’ But it had actually become, by now, a physical inability to make such a move.” When he took up the matter with his friends, agent, and editor, he claimed that “their answers, even though they knew the hazards, were remarkably similar: ‘No problem. You’re a writer. It may be the price you have to pay. If you need pills to enable you to work, okay, take them. It’s as simple as that.’ ”
His editor remembered it as a lot less simple. On the day (“one of the worst in my life”) that Charlie mentioned his dilemma, Markel was angry at first (“he was terrifically manipulative like all drug users”), since essentially the matter had been laid in his lap, thus: If Markel told him not to take pills, well, he wouldn’t—but neither would he finish the novel to which both men had committed so much time, effort, and (in Markel’s case) money. What he needed was the man’s permission to resume taking pills. “I didn’t display the anger I felt,” said Markel. “I tried to stay calm as possible because I didn’t want to bruise him.… I was powerless to prevent it. He would have said it was my fault he wasn’t writing. ‘Charles, you have to decide for yourself,’ I said. ‘It’s your decision, not mine.’ ” Jackson took that as a yes, and thereafter regarded Markel as all the more complicit—a “literary obstetrician” (as Markel put it) whose partnership he commended for posterity in a stanza meant for Rufus “Bud” Boyd:
The writer never works alone:
His editor, if the truth were known …
They share the joys, they share the ills,
And quite agree on sleeping pills.…
Thus, to be fair to job and jobber,
To even up the complex score
(Through use of drugs you may deplore),
It is the work of Sharl [Charles] and Robber [Robert]
In sooth, we could not well unsnarl
Which part was Robber, which was Sharl.
But still Jackson hesitated: Was the novel worth risking his life for? According to “The Sleeping Brain,” he discussed the problem with a doctor “very knowledgeable in this field” (Modell in Larchmont?), but over the course of four hour-long sessions he “got nowhere”—in other words, the doctor refused to tell him what he wanted to hear. “During our final session,” Jackson wrote, “I remember how coldly he said: ‘Go ahead, if you like; you’re on your own. But I’ll make you a bet. If you return to barbiturates, you’ll never finish the novel at all, Macmillan will be stood up, and you’ll be through. No other publisher will ever take you on again.’ ” By then it was August, his novel was “reced[ing] further and further,” and Charlie had pretty much decided that “health was killing [him] as much as the pills ever would.” Fate, as he perceived it, gave him the final nudge. On August 20 (“a Black Day or a Red-Letter Day, depending on one’s viewpoint”) he arrived at Boom’s seaside cottage for a weekend visit, and noticed that Jim Gates had left his medicine bag in the guest room: “I didn’t scruple or hesitate for a moment. I admit this quite without self-blame; because it was, in a sense, not my doing at all—and here was the answer.” He filched a bottle of Nembutal and returned to New York the next day. A Second-Hand Life was finished within a month.
In time Charlie was forced to accept that his only marketable product was his long-awaited “Birnam saga,” What Happened, and so on March 16, 1967, he signed a Macmillan contract for its first volume, Farther and Wilder, that provided a $2,500 advance up front, another $3,000 in six monthly installments of $500 (“each to be paid on evidence of satisfactory progress”), and a final $2,000 due on delivery in August. Charlie’s signature on the contract looks distinctly shaky, though he endeavored to seem upbeat in the press: “Jackson has regained his old vitality as a novelist,” one journalist wrote, “and is far advanced into a long and ambitious novel which he believes to be the best he has ever written.… Four hundred pages are done and the flow is gratifyingly steady.” As a friend recalled, the manuscript (somewhat less than four hundred pages) was conspicuously stacked beside his portable typewriter, where it remained in dusty, yellowing abeyance. Meanwhile Kate had taken a job in New York that autumn (1966), and remembered her father as “very despondent” during her six months in town: she and Sarah took turns calling him on alternate days (“just to see if he was alive or alert”), and both made a point of regularly meeting him for lunch, during which he’d often sit in mute, teary-eyed despair.
But at least he had the publication of A Second-Hand Life to look forward to—his first novel in nineteen years! And so far he had reason to be optimistic: Boom, his most devoted fan, was unstinting in his praise (“It’s so moving,” he wrote Sarah), and most of the people who’d received advance copies—that is, practically everyone Charlie had ever known, including childhood friends in Newark and even some of their progeny—went out of their way to be as generous as possible. Dr. Fredric Wertham was almost as feverish in his praise as he’d been twenty years earlier with The Fall of Valor: “I have always regarded Charles Jackson as one of our most authentic writers,” he wrote for Macmillan’s publicity department. “A Second-Hand Life confirms this.… It is something new, a book one has to read if one wants to see some of the unfamiliar aspects of the temper of our times.” Even some of the most formidable literary critics in America seemed eager to reassure Charlie, whose struggles over the years were well known. An old Partisan Review acquaintance, F. W. “Fred” Dupee, commended the author’s “Awful Daring, as well as [his] patience and skill,” mentioning that Truman Capote had also seemed to like the book. And Lionel Trilling—no less—had inferred from the little bit he’d found time to read (“Diana will follow”) that Charlie had “lost none of that most important of the novelistic charms, a passionate concern with character and the intricate texture of life.”
Those who didn’t know the author personally, however, tended to be more circumspect. Mindful of Charlie’s financial straits, Brandt had lost no time pressing the galleys on Hollywood agent H. N. Swanson, pointing out that a really game actress “could have a good deal of fun with this.” But Swanson didn’t see it: “I doubt very much if Charles Jackson’s Second Hand Life will ever sell to pictures,” he bluntly replied, noting the “grim” story and “unrelieved” heroine; indeed, he wondered if the novel was “good enough to spend money to have it copied,” but agreed to put some feelers out. Brandt forged ahead: an executive at Paramount had told him that actress Patricia Neal might be up for a challenge, so he tracked her down to the Waldorf and rushed the galleys over (“Having spent seven years on it with the author I have no perspective, and consequently I am curious about your personal reaction beyond the purely professional”). For Charlie’s part, he thought “a logical choice” to play Winifred was the young actress Elizabeth Hartman, whose debut performance as a blind girl in A Patch of Blue (1965), with Sidney Poitier, had earned her an Oscar nomination. Perhaps the fragile Hartman had struck him as a kindred spirit; in any case her career was already somewhat hindered by depression, and twenty years later she’d leap to her death from a fifth-floor window.
Whatever the prospects of A Second-Hand Life in Hollywood, Macmillan was making “a very big noise” about it (as Brandt wrote Swanson), confident that the comeback of a once-celebrated author, and never mind his piquant theme, would result in “A MACMILLAN money-maker,” as a full-page ad touted in the April 17, 1967, issue of Publishers Weekly, featuring a sinister-looking Jackson on the cover. “Nineteen years is a very long time to wait for a new novel,” blurbed Carl A. Kroch, president of Kroch’s and Brentano’s (and son of Adolph, Charlie’s old employer), “but when that novel is as dazzling and—frankly—as daring as Charles Jackson’s A Second-Hand Life the waiting is worth it. That one man should be able to expose and explore the compulsions of a male alcoholic and the appetites of a sex-obsessed woman, and do both with such power, is remarkable. This one will sell.”
Two days before the publication date (August 10, 1967), Charlie was interviewed by Barbara Walters on the Today show,3 for which he seems to have chatted guardedly about the nature of his heroine’s pathology (“I think she is a nympho, Charlie, and I don’t accept your definition of the word,” William Inge wrote after the show, advising his friend that nymphomania was a matter of “gland disturbance”), and to have gotten bogged down in an explanation of his long silence as a writer, attributing it to lung problems. A more candid account was offered to Francis Brown, editor of the Times Book Review, for whom Charlie agreed to produce “a piece on Writer’s Block … sometime close to publication”: namely, “The Sleeping Brain.” Reviewing Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry in 1965, Jackson had rather primly deplored the myth of the “tormented” writer (“Are we really that tormented?”) as little more than a pretext for self-destructive behavior. In the present piece, however, he not only reversed himself on that point, but repudiated for all time his longing to be one of Whitman’s “divine average,” to be accepted by what Mann had called “the happy, the blue-eyed, and the ordinary.” Confessing that his work was almost wholly dependent on a “compulsive addiction to alcohol and/or drugs,” Jackson wrote: “Perhaps it is tasteless on my part (but I most earnestly protest it is not a kind of special pleading, an asking for special favors or allowances) when I insist that writers are different, else they would not be writers in the first place, able to do what they cannot help doing and often don’t even understand, no matter what the cost.” His final verdict? It was worth it.
In due course, this apologia for substance abuse in the service of art—“an extraordinary personal statement,” as Carl Brandt called it in his cover letter—would be rejected by Playboy, Life, Harper’s, Esquire, and many others. As for the Times Book Review, Francis Brown had wondered if Jackson would be willing to “recast” the piece in light of his novel’s critical reception, which perhaps resulted in Jackson’s adding a single, unrepentant line: “Now, whether the new novel justifies all this is beside the point,” he wrote: “I was alive again.”
He was alive, though most critics agreed his novel was no crowning achievement, no vindication of his refusal to join “the growing glamorous company of Artists Who Died Young,” as he’d written in regard to his legendary, irksomely prestigious contemporary and fellow alcoholic, Malcolm Lowry. “ ‘A Second-Hand Life’ seems old and tired,” Webster Schott observed in the Sunday Times on August 13, citing flaws that “gape like bottomless fissures”; the next day the newspaper published an even more scalding indictment by Thomas Lask, who called the book a “tasteless extravaganza in sexual promiscuity.” And lest readers be enticed by what seemed, if nothing else, a pretty racy read, Lask was careful to disabuse them: Jackson “has made the whole subject [nymphomania] as tedious as the talk about the weather on a round-the-world cruise. Page after page is filled with dialogue obviously written to mark time, as heavy as lead and twice as inert.” Newsweek agreed, finding an “oddly genteel clinicism” in even the most lyrically risqué passages, and reminding readers that A Second-Hand Life had been conceived, after all, in the midst of a more innocent decade (“poor, superserious Winnie seems like the slightly irrelevant older sister to the freewheeling females of our time”). All this and more—much more—during that first week of publication. “Charlie’s morale is damn near non-existent,” his agent noted on August 14, while still hoping for better press in the provinces. There was, in fact, something of this (“a searching study,” said the Bergen Record), though hardly enough to cushion a sneering coup de grâce delivered two weeks later by (of course) The New Yorker, whose “Briefly Noted” critic took a dim view of Jackson’s “obvious determination to see this thing through to the end at all costs. All the cost is to the reader.”
To his credit, Jackson didn’t take it altogether lying down. “Nobody can be ‘wronger’ than one’s well-meaning friends,” he’d cautioned twenty-four years earlier, referring to the almost universal praise from advance readers of The Lost Weekend—a notion he put aside after being pilloried for A Second-Hand Life. Marked in Charlie’s hand as a possible “Adv[ertisement] for MacMillan,” “CAN A WRITER TRUST HIS FRIENDS?” was a long list of blurbs compiled from all the kindly letters written by, say, eminent critics such as Irving Howe (“very venturesome”), his Bread Loaf protégé John Weston (“we knew you would do it”), and the wife of Rhoda’s obstetrician, Midy McLane (“astonishing”). There was also Fred Dupee’s letter, though Charlie saw fit to omit the man’s observation that his two protagonists, Harry and Winifred, were not so much plausible characters as “agents of your inspired nostalgia and auto-eroticism,” a point more decorously made by his old friend Marion “Bettina” Fabry, who described the two as “different aspects of the same person”—that is, Charlie himself.
Charlie, not incidentally, was bent on denying any such connection. Composing his own PR copy in the third person, he reiterated his line about “writ[ing] from intuition only”—not experience, and not clinical know-how either, as he was “untrained” in psychology and had no college degree: “What [Jackson] produces comes out of his unconscious [last four words struck out: “off the top of his head” inserted] almost without premeditated thought.” This from a writer who’d confessed, time and again, that almost every word of The Lost Weekend was true, who’d prepared the following personal statement for the Institute of Arts and Letters in 1959: “As a writer I have always had one hard and fast rule: Don’t write about anything you don’t know anything about.… Which is why I write so much about myself: what is true of me will be more or less true of the reader, for no one is unique.” As Mary McCarthy had foreseen in 1945, however—via her fictional portrait of Jackson (as “Herbert Harper” in The Lost Week)—he’d already “given himself away” to such an “improvident” degree in his first and (by far) best novel, that he had little left over, and what remained would have to be parceled in bits and pieces to various characters (“an assemblage of disjuncta [sic] membra poetae”). Previously he’d written an apprentice work of gay initiation, Native Moment, followed a decade later by The Fall of Valor—pioneering but dull, as he tried to write “objectively” and was loath to reveal too much of himself in the latently gay Grandin, given what he’d already hinted on that point in The Lost Weekend. And after that? As McCarthy predicted, he found himself with “very little left to say and very little interest in saying,” though he’d always be powerfully nostalgic about his Arcadian childhood, and so a portion of good work remained.
He had written, then—and quite courageously for the times—about homosexuality, though he hadn’t really examined the erotic aspects, the underside of his dapper, affable persona, the “compulsive excursions” into “the low and the lawless” to which he’d alluded in “An Afternoon with Boris,” the “life coarse and rank” celebrated by his beloved Whitman. This, in part, was to be the burden of What Happened, and hence his agonies in bringing it off (aside from its impossibly ambitious scope); the prospect of writing about such matters with perfect frankness was, in the end, paralyzing, and so Jackson fell silent—as did a number of gay writers who, in effect, ran out of material, having gone as far as they could acceptably go: one thinks of E. M. Forster, whose last novel was finished forty-six years before his death in 1970, whereupon his only gay-themed work, Maurice (begun in 1913), was published at last; or Glenway Wescott, who petered out with Apartment in Athens, followed by a forty-two-year retirement; or even (a decidedly minor but telling instance) Walter Clemons, who published a well-received story collection in 1959 before giving up fiction entirely, lest (as he later admitted) he reveal too much and risk his career as an editor and book critic.4 But of course there was another way—the way of Proust, Tennessee Williams, and Inge, to name a few, who dissembled their erotic longings in heterosexual form. No wonder Jackson was (periodically) so elated by the possibilities of A Second-Hand Life: not only could he finally “give free rein to his obsessive fantasies” (as a French critic, Georges-Michel Sarotte, surmised of the author) in the person of a nymphomaniac heroine, but also posit an existential opposite, Harry Harrison—the kind of “dull automaton” that Jackson had feared becoming if he “stifle[d]” his nature. As he’d written four decades before in “The Devil’s Dialogue”:
“… You’re still young yet, and so far this repression
Has had no serious damaging results;
But give it time—a few years more!—and see
The wreck of youth that you will have become …
Devoid of that ecstatic soul the gods
Bestow alone upon their favorite children.…
I cannot bear to see you made a slave,
Afraid to know or recognize yourself,
Living in fear, your own dread Frankenstein!”
Above all, perhaps, he could make the point that sexual proclivities have little to do with moral character one way or the other. Winifred’s pursuit of “the human penis” is both a matter of appetite and an aspect of her “invincibly innocent” nature: though she wants nothing better than “to make one man happy,” she refuses to indulge in the “hateful” hypocrisy of “play[ing] hard to get,” even though it means forfeiting the love of her life, Jack Sanford, who exploits her sexually before marrying a more “respectable” woman. In a better world it would not be so, though Jackson seems typically ambivalent about things. On the one hand, Winifred is the “soul of courage—and yes, of honor; true honor,” and her stoical acceptance of a bad reputation is understood to be so much noble self-sacrifice. Besides, Winifred knows better than most that “sex [has] nothing to do with love,” having been deflowered by a local roué (not unlike her creator) at the tender age of eleven. On the other hand, wallowing in a “morass of compulsive meaningless sexuality” seems hardly desirable either. How compulsive and meaningless? Very: Winifred prefers summer to winter for the novel reason that it’s easier to descry a man’s penis through light fabric, and she becomes sad when she reads of a convict’s execution because it means one less penis to be had (“if only once”). And what of the occupational hazards? At one point an aging Winifred is followed beyond the railroad tracks by a rough-looking stranger, who apparently knows of her infamy (“Hi, Winnie”): he puts his hands around her neck and considers strangling her, then merely rips off her blouse and ravishes her at length “in the cindery turfy grass.” Later Winifred will reflect on the encounter with “a kind of fright” and realize it’s time to mend her ways; in the moment, though, when most animals are triste, she lies in the man’s arms and thinks: “This was the sort of experience that could and should happen all the time, whenever you felt like it, no questions asked, no accounting to anybody: you see somebody you know or want, and why shouldn’t you have him or have each other?”
Perhaps; certainly it seems appealing when one considers the sad case of Harry Harrison, who on the outside, at least, is the author (bewigged) to a tee: dapper and “well-manicured,” he affects a “cultivated and calculated outgoingness”—indeed, at age forty-five, is little more than persona, witty and pleasant but incapable of passion. A prosperous bachelor (“an architect of country houses”), Harry glides along the surface of life until his awful, Jamesian epiphany at the funeral of Jack Sanford, which he attends with his old friend Winifred:
And then it dawned on him, with the force and shock of a physical blow, that nobody—nobody—would ever weep over him like that, mourn his death, or remember him, in spite of everything, with love. For he had never loved anyone in his life, had never been able to give love and thus to receive it, and the ghastly emptiness of all his past years, his arid present, and his even more desolate future, swept over him like a flood.
Such is the life of a morbidly closeted homosexual, whose anxious, compulsory playacting the author knew well. But Harry is not homosexual, as he expressly and counterintuitively announces toward the end of the novel: “My God, one could say that the miserable tragedy of me is that I didn’t even have enough drive to be a homosexual! No, it’s just that I—I loathe myself, can’t stand myself, can’t, and could never, get outside of myself.” Self-loathing, however, is not a cause but an effect, and Jackson fails to make any persuasive sense of it—having removed homosexuality from the picture, partly because it would suggest at least the ability to love, however repressed, and thus disrupt the novel’s neat, dialectical scheme: “a woman … who has a tremendous, almost an abnormal capacity for love,” as Jackson put it in 1953, “and a man who is unable to feel love at all.” Things become especially muddled when Harry’s formative years are recounted, as Jackson (having but one autobiography to give away—often, here, in the form of old, cannibalized short stories) grafts his own artistic temperament on a character who’d hardly be apt to share it; note the parenthetical contortions that follow (my italics): “He wrote, to his surprise, little poems; painted pictures, picked out tunes on the piano, as if he might someday become (which he knew in his heart of hearts he never would: he knew he just didn’t have it) an artist of sorts.” If he knows, why bother? More convincing is Harry’s memory of visiting a whorehouse with schoolmates at age seventeen—“a disastrous failure,” as he’s the only one who “fail[s] to rise to the occasion and go upstairs like a man”: “Several years later, in college English, while reading Measure for Measure, he came upon a thought that described the thing for him perfectly, as far as he was concerned, and he understood it: ‘Ever till now When men were fond, I smiled and wondered how.’ ” In the end Harry concludes that he must be “androgynous” (but not homosexual!)—whatever that’s supposed to mean in his case.
More than anything Jackson published, A Second-Hand Life seems the work of a man under the influence of drugs—a man who could not soberly bear the fact that his best work was behind him: who could not, in short, imagine any life but that of a writer (“I was alive again”). Often, for the reader, it’s like being buttonholed by a drunk who fancies himself the most interesting person in the room. Pages of dialogue or description ramble on, hypnotically, as when the author opens Part Three with a whimsical comparison of Geneva, New York, with Geneva, Switzerland, a digression that reads like a recitation from a seed catalogue (“acres and acres of roses, of delicate orchids, of vulnerable short-lived peonies, hairy poppies, hardier but quick-to-fade gladioli, exotic or domestic plants of every description … ”), or when he recycles his 1944 letters written aboard the Super Chief bound for Hollywood, conferring on his heroine (similarly occupied) the curious “patriotism” he’d felt while in awe of the desert scenery—“a kind of chauvinism that reminded her, with shy pride, that this was her country, this was America, there was no place else like it on the whole face of the earth …” On it goes—page after maudlin page of atmosphere—until Winifred arrives in Palm Springs, whereupon it goes on some more: “This beauty of the night and the desert, this unknowing immense unregardful beauty, this impervious imperturbable majestic haunting mystical beauty … ” As a pretext for lyricism, however, flowers and deserts can scarcely vie with “the most beautiful thing in life, the human penis”—or rather, the penis itself is a kind of “large exotic tropical flower opening gradually out and coming into bloom in slow motion—a sight that [Winifred] could have contemplated for hours … ”
After years of debt, Charlie was free and clear—even rather rich!—and so, in one sense at least, his heroic perseverance had been rewarded. And he knew exactly what he wanted to do with the money, though he couldn’t do it alone. “One winter afternoon he called me,” Dorothea Straus remembered.
His voice on the telephone was more husky than ever, interrupted at intervals by choking paroxysms of coughing.… Yet I could detect something of the old Charlie. “I’ve just sold a novel to a paper publishing house.… I know it’s a potboiler but guess what I’m going to do with the money? I have decided to take a trip to Russia!” I was aware that his family should have profited from the proceeds, but the vision of Charlie in the St. Petersburg and Moscow of his dreams—sick and solitary, but joyous and awed—revived my feeling for him. “You come, too,” he was continuing. “Let’s go together.” He never got there.
