Farther and Wilder

January 28, 2013
A once-celebrated American novelist wrestles with the Big Three writerly adversaries—substance abuse, repressed homosexuality, and social conformity—in this rich, probing biography. National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Bailey (Cheever: A Life) explores the interplay between Jackson’s lurid fiction—his autobiographical 1945 best seller The Lost Weekend became a classic of alcoholic lit and was adapted into a hit movie of the same name by Billy Wilder; later works depicted child murder, nymphomania, and then-scandalous homosexual yearnings—and his prodigal life, a whirlwind of booze-and-pills benders, overdoses, DUIs, hospitalizations, and perpetual debt that caused anguish for his wife, friends, and publishers. The author shrewdly analyzes Jackson’s sometimes crippling, sometimes fertile contradictions: his narcissistic swerving between grandiosity and self-loathing; his ambition to be a respectable paterfamilias while pursuing furtive gay trysts; his love-hate relationship with the small-town normalcy of his boyhood, which he mined for seamy material; his dependence on drugs that helped him overcome epic writer’s block but warped his prose. Bailey offers clear-eyed, tart-tongued interpretations of Jackson’s uneven oeuvre, setting them in a thorough, well-paced, entertaining narrative that features movie stars and intellectuals, evocative scenes of mid-20th-century literary life, and relationships that unfold with novelistic complexity. The result is another compelling portrait of a conflicted writer whose genius emerges in dubious battle with his demons. Photos. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick & Williams.

Starred review from January 15, 2013
Author of acclaimed biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates, Bailey makes a rather surprising case for the resurrection of this deeply prescient and problematic novelist, who broke open taboos about alcoholics and homosexuals well before it was cool and championed F. Scott Fitzgerald when he was in the process of being remaindered. Charles Jackson (1903-1968) was the author of an unlikely best-seller, The Lost Weekend (1944), which was rendered into a tremendous film noir by Billy Wilder the next year. He rode moments of spectacular success in his early life and many more troughs of despair and drug addiction later on. Bailey traces his early upbringing in the idyllic village of Newark, in upstate New York, an iconic Arcadia in his fiction, where he nonetheless suffered the early traumas of his older sister and brother's deaths in a car accident, abandonment by his father and molestation at the hands of a visiting organist at his church. Bailey gets at the compulsive element to Jackson's personality and his decorous exterior as a "respectable burgher," disguising his proclivity for excessive drink and gay sex. Yet he was always a man of high Shakespearean ideals and deep feeling who was vilified and embraced in turn. Although sober for a good decade, during which he produced his best, most feverish work, and a husband and father of two daughters living for a spell as a kind of writerly squire in New Hampshire, he succumbed to abuse of barbiturates as a result of recurring lung issues, and his last works--e.g., A Second-Hand Life--were committed to oblivion. Bailey urges a revisiting of the work of this fascinating novelist of keen psychological depth. Eloquent, poignant portrait of the artist as outsider and misfit.

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February 15, 2013

Charles Jackson's novel The Lost Weekend was the basis of the 1945 Academy Award-winning film of the same name that also earned Academy Awards for actor Ray Milland and director Billy Wilder. Bailey (Cheever: A Life), recently named as Philip Roth's authorized biographer, provides here a richly detailed, well-documented look at Jackson's troubled life, from his traumatic childhood in Arcadia, NY, to his suicide in the Chelsea Hotel in 1968. Jackson is portrayed as living a "double life"; he was a happily married family man on the one hand, but on the other hand was also drawn to clandestine homosexual encounters. Bailey chronicles Jackson's bouts with tuberculosis, his lifelong struggle with alcohol and drug abuse, his work with Alcoholics Anonymous, and his excursions into radio, television, and Hollywood to earn a living. Jackson resented having to do "hack work," which he blamed for his failure to complete more creative projects. Yet his creative juices seemed to flow freely only on barbiturates, which, over time, took their toll. VERDICT Bailey's absorbing biography will interest literary scholars as well as general readers, particularly those drawn to pathography. In conjunction with Vintage's reissue of The Lost Weekend as well as The Sunnier Side, a collection of Jackson's stories, this promises to generate fresh interest in his work.--William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2013
Fed up with the automatic assumption that his best-selling novel, The Lost Weekend (1944), was autobiographical, Charles Jackson (190368) once snapped to an interviewer, It isn't. But it is, and Bailey finds the real-world analogue of virtually every incident in it in the course of what is less the life of an author than that of a charming human train wreck. A small man, handsome but billiard-bald in his early twenties, Jackson was tubercular and a closeted homosexual as well as an addict who popped pills when he was on the wagon. He was the spitting image of Don Birnam, Weekend's hero, too, in his self-absorption and daydreaming, better at planning literary triumphs than achieving them. Yet everyone he ever knew, no matter how badly he stressed them, liked or, indeed, adored him, including his wife, two daughters, and loyal younger brother. He wrote only one good book, though, unlike Richard Yates and John Cheever, the alcoholic writers Bailey chronicled in the award-winning predecessors to this suavely written, magnetically readable, but less consequential biography.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)