Blake Bailey - Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2013 Blake Bailey

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96220-1
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-27358-1

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Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

A permissions acknowledgments page, which constitutes an extension of this page, follows the index.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bailey, Blake, [date]
Farther and Wilder : the lost weekends and literary dreams of Charles
Jackson / by Blake Bailey.1st American ed.
p. cm.
This is a Borzoi book.
ISBN 978-0-307-27358-1
1. Jackson, Charles, 19031968. 2. Authors, American
Biography. I. Title.
PS3519.A323Z54 2013
813.52dc23
[B] 2012036685

Cover photograph of Charles Jackson
by Peter Martin, New York City, 1944
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

Manufactured in the United States of America

v3.1

For Michael Ruhlman

For though the artist may all his life remain closer, not to say truer, to his childhood than the man trained for practical lifealthough one may say that he, unlike the latter, abides in the dreamy, purely human and playful childlike stateyet his path out of his simple, unaffected beginnings to the undivined later stages of his course is endlessly farther, wilder, more shattering to watch than that of the ordinary citizen. With the latter, too, the fact that he was once a child is not nearly so full of tears.

T HOMAS M ANN , Doctor Faustus

It was like an affront; I felt a terrible sense of injustice over the way the world uses its artistsand how unimportant the artist has always been considered by society, how troublesome, and how he is popularly deserving of nothing but neglect, and indifference.

C HARLES J ACKSON (on reading that Mussorgsky, who died young, was slovenly and drunken and a drug addict)

But there are thousands of Charlie Jacksons stories about his ups and downs with life, and at some point somebody will do rather a good biography of Jackson in my opinion, because he was a very interesting man: he was sweet, he was intelligent, he was kind. I cant stand drunksthats a terrible thing to have to say as a publisher, because I know a lotbut he was a sweet drunk.

R OGER S TRAUS , Columbia University Oral History

So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!

R OBERT B ROWNING , Andrea del Sarto

The Lost Weekenda novel about five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnamwas an improbable success when it was published in 1944. Rejecting the novel, Simon & Schuster had assured its author that it wouldnt sell in the midst of a world war (Nobody cares about the individual); within five years, The Lost Weekend sold almost half a million copies in various editions and was translated into fourteen languages, syndicated by King Features as a comic strip, and added to the prestigious Modern Library. Its critical reception was no less impressive: Charles Jackson has made the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey, Philip Wylie wrote in The New York Times. His character is a masterpiece of psychological precision. His narrative method transmutes medical case history into art. The trailer for the classic movie summarized the matter nicely: Famous critics called it Powerful Terrifying Unforgettable Superb Brilliant AND NOW PARAMOUNT DARES TO OPEN THE STRANGE AND SAVAGE PAGES OF The Lost Weekend. Cut to the books title page, amid ominous music.

Director Billy Wilder had bought the novel at a kiosk in Chicago, and by the time his train arrived in Los Angeles hed read it twice and quite definitely decided to make a movie based on the book, despite its then-controversial subject: an alcoholic, as opposed to a comic drunkard or lush. Not only did I know it was going to make a good picture, said Wilder, I also knew that the guy who was going to play the drunk was going to get the Academy Award. Hollywoods A-list actors didnt agree, and after the part had been turned down by everyone from Cary Grant to Robert Montgomery, it was given to the Welshman Ray Milland, who refused to heed an all but universal warning that he was committing career suicide. The day after The Lost Weekend won Oscars for Best Picture, Actor, Director, and Screenplay, writers at Paramount Studios celebrated by dangling bottles out their windows, a tribute to Don Birnams preferred method of concealing his liquor.

Milland, a near teetotaler, had been coached in the ways of drunkenness by the novels authora balding, impeccably groomed middle-aged man whose weird combination of wistfulness and zest put the actor in mind of a bright, erratic problem child. At the time Jackson was working at MGM on a screenwriting assignment, and was bemused to find himself the most popular man in Hollywood. Everyone, it seemed, had read his book and experienced an almost seismic shock of recognition: Robert Benchley told Jackson that hed found the novel so disturbing that, for twenty minutes or so, hed been unable to take another drink. Surely such a vivid, inward-looking account had to be based on personal experience, and thus (in the words of journalist Lincoln Barnett) Jackson was eyed somewhat in the manner of a returned war hero of a man who had been through hellfire and emerged bloodshot but unbowed. Jackson himself bridled at the assumption. Sober since 1936, he had no intention of going down in history as the author of a single, thinly veiled autobiography about a crypto-homosexual drunk with writerly pretensions. One third of the history is based on what I have experienced myself, he told the movie columnist Louella Parsons and others, about one third on the experiences of a very good friend whose drinking career I followed very closely, and the other third is pure invention.

Ten years, four books, and twenty-two hospitalizations later, Jackson was ready to come clean: he was indeed Don Birnam, and only two episodes in The Lost Weekend were purely fictional (to wit: he never pawned his girlfriends leopard coat to get liquor money, nor did he stand up the hostess of his favorite bar because of an alcoholic blackout). To be sure, he could afford to be candid by then; very few people had any idea who Jackson was, and even those happy few tended to muddle the matter. I have become so used to having people say We loved your movie instead of We read your book, said Jackson, that now I merely say Thanks.

The Lost Weekend, after all, is something of an anomaly: a great novel that also resulted in a great (or near-great) moviesomewhat to the authors woe, as there are far more moviegoers than readers of serious fiction; the upshot, oddly enough, is that the movie has all but supplanted the novel as a cultural artifact, even as the novels impact endures among the literary and medical cognoscenti. Don Birnam remains the definitive portrait of an alcoholic in American literaturea tragicomic combination of Hamlet and Mr. Toad, according to