Blake Bailey. (2013). Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Blake Bailey. 2013. Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

Blake Bailey. Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

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1. • role: Author
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   • bioText:

     Blake Bailey is the author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Cheever: A Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes.  He edited a two-volume edition of Cheever’s work for the Library of America, and in 2010 received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
     

   • name: Blake Bailey

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2013-03-19T00:00:00-04:00

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Farther and Wilder

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From the prizewinning biographer of Richard Yates and John Cheever, here is the fascinating biography of Charles Jackson, the author of The Lost Weekend—a writer whose life and work encapsulated what it meant to be an addict and a closeted gay man in mid-century America, and what one had to do with the other.
Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend—the story of five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam—was published in 1944 to triumphant success. Within five years it had sold nearly half a million copies in various editions, and was added to the prestigious Modern Library. The actor Ray Milland, who would win an Oscar for his portrayal of Birnam, was coached in the ways of drunkenness by the novel’s author—a balding, impeccably groomed middle-aged man who had been sober since 1936 and had no intention of going down in history as the author of a thinly veiled autobiography about a crypto-homosexual drunk. But The Lost Weekend was all but entirely based on Jackson’s own experiences, and Jackson’s valiant struggles fill these pages. He and his handsome gay brother, Fred (“Boom”), grew up in the scandal-plagued village of Newark, New York, and later lived in Europe as TB patients, consorting with aristocratic café society. Jackson went on to work in radio and Hollywood, was published widely, lived in the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, and knew everyone from Judy Garland and Billy Wilder to Thomas Mann and Mary McCarthy. A doting family man with two daughters, Jackson was often industrious and sober; he even became a celebrated spokesman for Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet he ultimately found it nearly impossible to write without the stimulus of pills or alcohol and felt his devotion to his work was worth the price. Rich with incident and character, Farther & Wilder is the moving story of an artist whose commitment to bringing forbidden subjects into the popular discourse was far ahead of his time.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Donna Rifkind, New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Scrupulous and compassionate ... As a portrait of the artist as a ruined man, Bailey's account is a chilling addition to the museum of literary failure, to be mounted somewhere in the long hall between 'The Crack-Up' and 'The Shining.'"
2. • premium: False
   • source: Sarah Douglas, New York Observer
   • content: "The novelist Charles Jackson may not be as well known as subjects of Blake Bailey's previous biographies ... but he is no less fascinating. In Farther & Wilder ... Mr. Bailey portrays his life with the same dogged attention to detail, literary panache and brilliant storytelling that he brought to those other subjects ... Mr. Bailey's triumph is in fleshing out both Jackson's literary legacy and the man himself."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Carl Rollyson, The Star Tribune
   • content: "A fascinating anatomy of failure."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist
   • content: ". . . Suavely written, magnetically readable."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.

     COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.)

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From the prizewinning biographer of Richard Yates and John Cheever, here is the fascinating biography of Charles Jackson, the author of The Lost Weekend—a writer whose life and work encapsulated what it meant to be an addict and a closeted gay man in mid-century America, and what one had to do with the other.
Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend—the story of five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam—was published in 1944 to triumphant success. Within five years it had sold nearly half a million copies in various editions, and was added to the prestigious Modern Library. The actor Ray Milland, who would win an Oscar for his portrayal of Birnam, was coached in the ways of drunkenness by the novel’s author—a balding, impeccably groomed middle-aged man who had been sober since 1936 and had no intention of going down in history as the author of a thinly veiled autobiography about a crypto-homosexual drunk....

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