D. T. MAX
Blake started off working on Richard Yates, who has had this intense, small readership. He’s a writer’s writer. Then he moved on to John Cheever, a mid-century American fictional icon. So I presume he, like all the rest of us mere mortals, was looking around for another project, and came upon Charles Jackson. At first I thought he’d come upon Shirley Jackson, but it was Charles. Why?
BLAKE BAILEY
Why Charlie Jackson?
D. T. MAX
Yes, make your case for him.
BLAKE BAILEY
I have long been a great admirer of his novel The Lost Weekend. I read it first in college, and I’ve read it five or six times since then. The great portrait of an alcoholic in American literature remains, and perhaps will forever remain, Don Birnam. He was aptly characterized, in one of the reviews at the time, as a mixture of Hamlet and Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows.
I was completely fried after writing those two cinder-block literary biographies [Yates and Cheever]. I wanted to do something more modest. I thought about doing this sort of Lytton Strachey-esque Portraits in Miniature about failed, forgotten writers, because I kept tripping across them in my research on Cheever and Yates.
D. T. MAX
Who were some of them?
BLAKE BAILEY
Flannery Lewis, Calvin Kentfield, Nathan Asch …
D. T. MAX
When you said “Flannery” I was with you, but then you said “Lewis,” and I was like, no.
BLAKE BAILEY
Like I threw you this big curveball, right? Well, these three writers were considered real up-and-comers in their day. Flannery Lewis published something like three novels in three years. He peed in the fountain at Yaddo and was thrown out personally by Elizabeth Ames. They were all wild and prolific guys. Talented guys. But now you can hardly Google them. They are gone. It’s like they never existed. And I thought this was fascinating.
Why do some people make it? There’s this oral biography of Hemingway, The True Gen, and Nathan Asch, who died all the way back in 1964, was interviewed. He knew Hemingway. They were both in Paris in the twenties. And he spoke ruefully about him, sort of, “I was talented, and Hemingway was talented. But he made it, and I didn’t.” He talked about how Hemingway, the young Hemingway, would walk down the street in the Montparnasse, and he shed light as he passed by, like Richard Cory, I guess, in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem. He was so charismatic. He was so charming. He had that smile, you know. And so everyone reads Hemingway. Nathan Asch was sort of this little nebbish guy, and he’s nowhere.
D. T. MAX
That’s what got you started?
BLAKE BAILEY
I was interested in that idea, so I thought, who remembers Charles Jackson? And he had written this wonderful novel, a classic in its time. I went back to my dog-eared copy of The Lost Weekend. I had the 1963 version, the Time Reading Program reprint, and I read what the editors of Time had written in the preface. It said something like, “Charles Jackson is now chairman of the New Brunswick, New Jersey, AA chapter, and he’s sober, and he’s the doting father of two daughters,” and so on. That sounded like a nice sort of redemptive fable story.
D. T. MAX
That’s what you were looking for?
BLAKE BAILEY
Right after, I Googled him and found out he had died of an overdose at the Chelsea Hotel in 1968, and was living with a Czechoslovakian laborer named Stanley Zednik. What had happened to the family man? What about the sobriety? I thought there was a story there.
I got in touch with the daughters, who were guarded, but very kind, and courteous, and helpful. They directed me to Dartmouth College, where there were like twenty boxes of Jackson’s papers in the basement. Among these papers I found three hundred pages of letters from Jackson and his wife Rhoda to Charlie’s brother, Boom, so I read those first.
I’m not quite sure how many people in this room have read The Lost Weekend or how many have watched the movie. But if you have seen it, you may recall the apartment where Don, the main character, lives with his brother, Wick. It turns out that that apartment in the movie is an exact replica of the apartment that Charles shared with his brother Fred, called Boom, on East Fifty-fifth Street, in the mid-1930s. That was the time when Charlie was at the worst of his alcoholism, and his brother was trying to get him back on his feet again. It was very much the same situation that you had in The Lost Weekend.
D. T. MAX
What else did you find?
BLAKE BAILEY
I also found the original typescript of The Lost Weekend, which Charlie had given to Dartmouth in 1949. So it’d been there for a long time.
I read the letters. And those three hundred pages confirmed everything that was in The Lost Weekend. Charlie had been a mess, and he’d also struggled with pill addiction later on in his life. Boom, his brother, became very frustrated with him. The letters sort of taper off in the late fifties, something that suggests that at that point Boom was sick of Charlie’s messing up. Rhoda comes across as very long-suffering, but very devoted, too, because Charlie was the kindest, sweetest of men. And when he was sober, he was a wonderful husband and father. His daughters adore him to this day.
The letters to Boom were so fascinating that I began to look at the other boxes. They were a treasure trove. I found practically every letter that Jackson had written as an adult, to Judy Garland, to Thomas Mann …
D. T. MAX
At that point, you decided that he would be the subject of your next biography?
BLAKE BAILEY
It was a fascinating story, a mystery to be solved. How did he go from sobriety, and why did he stop writing? He did not publish a novel from 1948 to 1967. What was he doing in between? At some point I even thought he became a used-car salesman, because I found a book called How to Buy a Used Car, by Charles R. Jackson, but it turned out it wasn’t the Charles Jackson, even though the middle initial was the same. Anyway, he went nearly twenty years without publishing a novel, and then the novel that he did publish, the year before his death, made the New York Times bestseller list. Charlie was still famous in those days, and so when the author of The Lost Weekend came back out of nowhere to publish this, it became a big event and the book did really well. After it came out, he was interviewed by Barbara Walters on The Today Show. It was a great story. I had a ball working on it.
D. T. MAX
If you were to make a case for the fiction by Charles Jackson besides The Lost Weekend, what would you send us to read?
BLAKE BAILEY
The two books that have just been reissued by Vintage, very much at my behest. That is, his first book of short stories, The Sunnier Side, which critics just raved about at the time. It was one of the most reviewed books of 1950. And the New York Times did a little sidebar about it, explaining that of the fifty-seven major reviewers that reviewed it, only five wrote negative reviews. That’s huge! The book was regarded as the latter-day equivalent of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
D. T. MAX
For those of us who have a literary-historical mind-set, where would you put Charles Jackson in terms of American letters? In other words, who does he connect to? What traditions is he writing out of? Does he leave any descendants?
BLAKE BAILEY
That is a very difficult question to answer. The Lost Weekend, especially in its early couple of chapters, has what we critics would call a Wavian quality. He writes like the early comic novels of Evelyn Waugh. Don Birnam is a sort of Chaplinesque character, stumbling from one calamity to another, and there is a sort of a funny, picaresque quality to him. Part of the book’s genius is the way that those early, kind of Wavian chapters grade into horror, in the latter part of the book. You almost don’t notice it happening. Charles Jackson acknowledges a debt to Waugh. But there is a black, surreal zaniness to The Lost Weekend that one also finds in [Nathanael West’s] Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. But I think it’s sort of an affinity of the cultural ethos.
D. T. MAX
He didn’t read Nathanael West, though.
BLAKE BAILEY
There is no evidence that he ever read him. Nathanael West died before The Lost Weekend was published, so he probably didn’t read Charles Jackson, either.
D. T. MAX
The first review that has come out for your Charles Jackson biography is a rave from Adam Kirsch, writing in the Wall Street Journal. The headline is “A Great American Biography.” Playfully and charmingly, the review posits the following axiom for biography: “Common sense suggests that the better a writer is, the more he deserves to have his story told, but it is precisely the genius’s genius that no biographer can explain, or usually even evoke.” And therefore, by implication, somewhere along this continuum, the worse the writer, the more room there is for great biography. I wonder if you agree or disagree with this.
BLAKE BAILEY
I think there are nuances to what Adam actually said that eluded your paraphrase.
D. T. MAX
But do you agree with that? Is that something you thought going into Charles Jackson? Sort of, if I do some immortal genius, then there’s no room for me.
BLAKE BAILEY
No. First of all, he basically says, Charles Jackson was not a genius, like Cheever, arguably, like Yates, and certainly like Philip Roth. He was just an above-average guy who dreamed of being a genius. But no, that’s not the mystery I was trying to solve. The mystery I was trying to solve was how did the near-genius who wrote The Lost Weekend write such pedestrian books later? And you can almost not recognize the author of The Lost Weekend in most of the work that followed, albeit not all of it. The short answer for why Jackson never equaled the achievement of The Lost Weekend is because he was always stoned when he was writing his later work. He wrote The Lost Weekend cold sober. He’d been sober for almost eight years, and that was his talent, that was Charles Jackson when he was on the beam. He was freaked out by the success of The Lost Weekend, and, let me emphasize, we tend to forget that it was a huge hit. It’s been so overshadowed by the movie, but it sold half a million copies. It was in the Modern Library. It was turned into a comic strip, a syndicated comic strip. You know you’ve made it when—
D. T. MAX
But it was booted out of the Modern Library.
BLAKE BAILEY
Only because of Bennett Cerf.
D. T. MAX
Who knew that?
BLAKE BAILEY
Well, Bennett Cerf had been courting Charlie Jackson for years to come away from Farrar and Rinehart to Random House, and when the time came, Charlie did leave Farrar and Rinehart—which was then Rinehart and Company—because Farrar had joined up with Roger Straus, so he followed him to Farrar and Straus. Bennett Cerf retaliated by yanking The Lost Weekend from the Modern Library and replacing it with Little Women. That’s tough.
D. T. MAX
Why isn’t there room for both of them?
BLAKE BAILEY
You didn’t really follow that previous thought to the end, so may I do so? Charlie was completely freaked out by his own success. He had Edmund Wilson raving about him, and he was like, “What am I going to do now? I’m just this misfit from the sticks, little Newark, New York, twenty miles from Lake Ontario, where they thought I was a goofball”—and a sissy, I might add. So it freaked him out, and he was totally blocked. He found the only way to get unblocked was to take Seconal, to take tranquilizers.
I found medical notes from his doctor, who wasn’t even a psychiatrist. It was this doctor who treated him in Hanover, New Hampshire, Dr. Sven Gundersen, who also treated Robert Frost. A pulmonary specialist. But he was the one. Charlie liked him, so he would go to Mary Hitchcock Hospital and dry out whenever he overdosed, or went on a bender, or what have you. Gundersen wrote, “Mr. Jackson is addicted to Seconal.” They’re reds. They’re tranquilizers. Serious tranquilizers. And Gundersen added, “Seconal is a powerful tranquilizer, however, oddly enough, it has the reverse effect on Mr. Jackson.” When Charlie took it, he would become galvanized, he’d soar, and just suddenly the thoughts would be rushing in and he’d be writing them on paper.
I don’t know if any of you here are fiction writers, but it is axiomatic: you do not try to write fiction when you’re drunk or stoned. It’s always terrible. John Cheever knew that. Cheever was taking his first drink of the morning earlier and earlier, until he was sneaking into the pantry for a scoop of gin at nine o’clock in the morning. But that simply meant that he had to wrap up the writing at eight forty-five. It did not mean that he would get the scoop of gin and then go write. He knew better.
Now, Charlie loved the idea of being a celebrated writer. Don Birnam, his character, has all these fantasies of being not only a genius writer, but also a genius actor, and a genius piano player, and all that. That’s Charlie. So he had to play out the role of the writer, and if that meant being addicted to Seconal most of his adult life, that’s what he had to do. But he did not write a single published word after The Lost Weekend that was not written under the influence of tranquilizers.
D. T. MAX
What about The Sunnier Side?
BLAKE BAILEY
Two of its best stories, “Palm Sunday” and “Rachel’s Summer,” were written in 1939, when he was still sober, before he’d even written The Lost Weekend. And they’re pioneering. Charlie was a completely autobiographical writer, and “Palm Sunday” is a totally true story about how he was molested by the choirmaster in his small town, when he was fourteen. “Rachel’s Summer” is about his older sister, Thelma, getting hit by the train. Charlie’s sister and brother were killed by a train when he was thirteen, and in the small town of Newark, New York, rather than comforting the family, they instead spread a rumor that Thelma had been pregnant at the time she died and that God in his infinite wisdom had taken her before the disgrace became obvious. This rumor blighted Charlie’s mother’s life for the rest of her years.
D. T. MAX
I’m wondering what makes a good subject for a biography. If there were a biographer-in-the-making out here, what would you tell him or her to look for?
BLAKE BAILEY
The prerequisite of writing a literary biography is, make sure you admire the work. If you don’t, you’re going to waste a lot of your time on miserable labor, and it’s excruciating. You’ve got to be obsessive to write a decent biography. As you may have noticed, I’m wired pretty tight, so, I’m the man for the job. One needs to admire the work, and have a good story.
Charlie was a great story. Here’s a man who wrote a novel of genius. He never equaled the achievement, but he never stopped trying. In the meantime, he got into one horrific scrape after another. He got tuberculosis. He had this closeted gay mentor who made sure that he and his gorgeous bother, also gay, named Boom, lived a life of luxury in Davos, Switzerland. This was Bronson Winthrop, a big Wall Street lawyer, the partner of Henry Stimson, who was the Secretary of War in FDR’s cabinet. He was fabulously wealthy, erudite, and cultured, and Charlie was his protégé, and he was a closeted gay man.
D. T. MAX
You think there was no romantic involvement between Bronson Winthrop and either of the brothers?
BLAKE BAILEY
No. Bronson Winthrop was a big fan of Plato.
D. T. MAX
That’s what they all say.
BLAKE BAILEY
That is what they all say! Bronson’s father, Egerton—the subject of a celebrated portrait by Sargent—was Edith Wharton’s best friend. And Bronson had this gallery of pictures of his protégés over the years, but Charlie insisted that he was the most innocent man he’d ever met. Now, Boom, his brother, definitely stirred Bronson. Charlie had the platonic, intellectual friendship with him, and Bronson saw Boom and said, “I’d like to sublimate my passion for that.” I have a gorgeous picture of Boom in my book that you should check out.
D. T. MAX
Since you are an unusually productive biographer, I’d like to talk about your processes. One senses very little time is wasted, despite the carpools with the eight-year-old daughter, and taking the beagle for a walk. If I have this right, you’ve said that you take three pages of single-spaced notes, and turn it into two pages of finished prose. Tell us a little about that.
BLAKE BAILEY
What do you do?
D. T. MAX
I have no such equation, so I’m really curious. Is there a way that you accumulate your notes first, so you have this incredibly beautiful sort of pile of a book-in-waiting, and you begin to write it out of a complete stack of notes?
BLAKE BAILEY
Yes, when you’re done with your research, after however many years, your computer is ready to explode with undifferentiated data that you need to put in order, so I go and I lie down on my very comfortable couch—I have a very comfortable couch in my study, since you asked. And I don’t allow myself to look at anything, or consult anything. And I’ve got my legs over the beagle, because she loves that. Then I write down all the major episodes of my subject’s life. And if it doesn’t occur to me off the top of my head, it’s not worth writing down. I fill up a legal pad, and then I type that up, and then I cut-and-paste, and start thinking about structure. Do I want to be strictly chronological? No. I want it to be thematic and semi-chronological. I want to talk about the alcoholism here, and I want to talk about his doting relationship with his daughters here, and this incident attaches nicely to this theme, and—blah, blah.
After about a year, I have a rough structure, and I’m starting to plug stuff in. I call it “rough structure,” but it’s extremely complex by then. I’m plugging in the research, plugging in, plugging in. Say I’ve interviewed a couple hundred people, and I have five versions of one anecdote. I take the best line from each, this person told it best. And as you’re going along, you’re throwing stuff out, winnowing, winnowing. The structure is refining itself. Finally, after about two years of working on the outline, I have absolutely every line in place. I have, say, seven hundred pages of single-spaced notes. I know exactly how the book is laid out, and I can start writing. Producing two double-spaced pages of finished prose a day is tough, but if you’ve got your notes in order, it’s completely doable.
D. T. MAX
So you’re able to sit there at a certain moment and say you’re two-thirds of the way through the writing of your biography.
BLAKE BAILEY
I can calculate mathematically how many days I have before I’m finished.
D. T. MAX
So when your daughter asks when will you be done, you can actually give an answer?
BLAKE BAILEY
June 14th.
D. T. MAX
Do you ever find that you’ve collected notes on a part of the writer’s life that doesn’t interest you much?
BLAKE BAILEY
Yes. The only real problem I encounter once I have my notes is when I realize that I don’t really have to include certain bits. I feel like this part is superfluous—and that’s great. And this sometimes means that I finish the three pages, or whatever, early that day, and I only need to write a single paragraph. So I’ve done my allotment, and I can take a walk or go to a movie.
D. T. MAX
We spoke of Charles Jackson as the exception, in regards to the rest of the writers you have written about, but let’s look at it from a different point of view. We have in Richard Yates an anguished, alcoholic, middle-aged writer with possible bisexual tendencies.
BLAKE BAILEY
I wouldn’t agree with bisexual. I kind of vacillated about that, but didn’t put it in the book.
D. T. MAX
The reviewers did. You don’t think that’s true?
BLAKE BAILEY
That Yates had bisexual tendencies? I think he was terrified of being perceived as a sissy because he was a mama’s boy. He had this drunken, overprotective mother. His childhood was a nightmare, and he clung to her skirt because he had nothing else to cling to, so the rest of his life he played this bogus man’s man persona, but I don’t think that that necessarily points to the sexual proclivities.
D. T. MAX
All right, I’m going to withdraw the question. I’m going to ask you this one.
BLAKE BAILEY
Which is, “Why do I always write about bisexual men?”
D. T. MAX
No, let me try to rephrase this in a way that will squeak past the biographer’s gaze. So you’ve written about three middle-aged men in anguished—
BLAKE BAILEY
They weren’t always middle-aged …
D. T. MAX
Men in anguished relationship to their prose, heavily alcoholic, and basically blocked. And then comes Philip Roth. How do you fit him into your paradigm?
BLAKE BAILEY
I have no “paradigm” per se. Every writer is a mass of contradictions. Every human being is a mass of contradictions.
D. T. MAX
Philip Roth said to the New York Times, “I work for Blake Bailey now.” You’re giving him a Form 1099 at the end of the year. How did that happen?
BLAKE BAILEY
I found out that Philip and my predecessor, Ross Miller, had called it quits, so I went home and wrote Philip a letter saying, “I’m available. I’m between projects. You remember me. We corresponded about my Cheever book”—because he and Cheever were friends. About a week later I was on a weekend trip with my family, and I was driving over a narrow, rickety bridge on the eastern shore of Virginia, and my brand-new iPhone rang. It said “Blocked,” and I thought it was the Obama people, since they’d been calling me incessantly because I’d volunteered for the 2008 campaign, and when they call, it always said “Unknown.” My wife insisted that I should keep my eyes on the road, and I said I should take the call since it did not say “Unknown.” She snapped the phone out of my hand and said, “Watch the road. We’re going to drive off the bridge.” So I got back to my bed-and-breakfast and I’m soaking in a tub and I pick up my message and Philip Roth has left a voice message. He has this lovely, sort of sonorous, Murrow-esque voice.
So here’s Philip Roth. He got my letter. He wants to talk to me. I immediately try to call him back, and it’s one of those Verizon answering services, where it says, “The person you’re trying to call is not available. Click.” You can’t even leave a message for them. So I said to my wife, “Thanks a lot. Now I can’t be Philip Roth’s biographer.” But I went home, and sure enough the phone rang again, and it said “Blocked,” and you know I threw myself on the phone, and it was Philip Roth again, and he immediately launches into this story about Charles Jackson. When Roth got out of the Army in 1956 he needed a job, and his brother Sandy was an art director at J. Walter Thompson ad agency, and Charlie was a script editor at Kraft Television Theatre, which was produced by J. Walter Thompson. So Philip had an interview with Charlie, and Philip tells me that story. Then he stops, and there’s a pensive pause, and he says, “Do you ever write about someone who’s still alive and not drunk all the time?” And I said, “No. You’d be my first, and I’d really like to talk about it.”
D. T. MAX
But he also admired your work, right? He had read the Cheever.
BLAKE BAILEY
He had read both Cheever and Yates, I think.
D. T. MAX
What did he say about them?
BLAKE BAILEY
He liked them, especially the Cheever book.
D. T. MAX
Has he read the Jackson?
BLAKE BAILEY
Yes. He finished it in three days. That’s pretty good. And he called me up and said, “Blake, this is really wonderful.” But really he was consoling me. “I don’t know if it’s going to be a big seller, Blake. It’s wonderful, and you and I know that, but it’s an awfully sad story.” To that effect.
D. T. MAX
In reviews of your biographies, it’s pointed out that you capture a subject’s humanity, humanness, that sort of thing. That obviously requires a sort of act of empathy on your part. You make it sound sort of very dry and technical, but obviously there’s an act of a human being encountering another human being going on in your pages.
BLAKE BAILEY
Okay, well, thank you. That’s a generously worded question, Dan, and I appreciate it. There’s a character in Exit Ghost, Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, and it’s a young would-be literary biographer named Richard Kliman. He wants to write a sort of pathography of E. I. Lonoff, Nathan Zuckerman’s revered mentor, and his thesis, Kliman’s thesis, is that Lonoff had an incestuous relationship—this is kind of informed by the Henry Roth story—with his half-sister, and that this scandal, this trauma, shaped his whole life and shaped his whole work. Now, this is what Philip hates. He hates tendentiousness. He hates pat generalizations. He hates psychobabble. And this is what a bad biographer does. A bad biographer reaches a general opinion about a subject, just to make it accessible—he’s a good man, say, or he’s a bad man. It’s poisonous.
I gather all the evidence. Everything I can get my hands on. Everyone’s testimony, and it is wildly contradictory. I heard things about Cheever from his detractors that would absolutely make your hair stand on end. You take it all, and you sift it, and you find what the themes are. In any human life the themes are multifarious, especially in a writer’s life. F. Scott Fitzgerald said there could never be a good biography of a good writer, because he’s too many people if he’s any good. You have to keep an open mind, because your subject is too contradictory, and you’ve got to somehow reconcile all those contradictions. Like anyone else, I, too, have my despicable qualities—
D. T. MAX
Your wife is a pain management psychologist.
BLAKE BAILEY
But I am not the sum of my despicable qualities, and in a great artist, despicable qualities tend to be even larger, but so are the virtues.
D. T. MAX
I’m very intrigued by your forthcoming memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned. Usually the biographer disappears behind the subject. That’s the standard position. We don’t know anything about Blake, really, but his biographer will know something about him that’s not easy to find—
BLAKE BAILEY
Nobody’s going to write a biography of me—no biographers except Strachey, maybe, get their own biographies—so, if people are interested, I hope they’ll just read my memoir.