Farther and Wilder by Blake Bailey

Author:Blake Bailey [Bailey, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-96220-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

AFTER HE’D FINISHED The Fall of Valor, Jackson had been eager to get started on his Proustian saga, What Happened. By then his magnum opus—“which will earn me (I truly know) an international prestige”—had begun “plaguing [him] day and night,” but at the time he simply couldn’t afford to take a three-year (at least) break from more lucrative, less demanding projects. By 1948, however, Jackson could hardly wait to get on with it, realizing that another hastily written failure like The Outer Edges might damage his reputation beyond repair, and besides he felt certain that he was at the height of his powers—indeed, that it was now or never.

But alas, Jackson had a big nut—the mansion in New Hampshire, the townhouse on the Upper East Side, children in private school, a lavish fondness for pretty things—and his financial situation seemed almost immune to improvement. That summer in Hollywood, then, he’d found himself sorely tempted on meeting the great Fanny Brice, who was shopping around for a biographer to tell her story on a more or less fifty-fifty financial basis. “When I meet the guy I’ll know him,” she said, whereupon Jackson tried to look “keen as all hell” and ask “Just the Right Leading Questions” as to how Brice had gone from a ragamuffin singing for pennies to an internationally acclaimed star. “Anyway,” he wooed her afterward, “whether we like it or not, Fanny dear, we’re hooked. I won’t be able to get you out of my system until I try to explore and capture on paper that personality that is yours and those tremendous gifts that are yours.”

Brice’s agent, Abe Lastfogel, drew up the papers, and Leonard Lyons announced to the world that the famous comedienne had finally found her “ideal” biographer: “Jackson was about to start his new novel, but found the Brice offer irresistible. It was a package-deal, covering magazine serialization, book publications, movie sale and the screenplay—which would net him more than $200,000.” Jackson wrote Brice that she would likely consider it “so much bull-shit” (a rare bit of profanity on his part, the better to seem a fellow rough-diamond type) if he claimed that his “chief interest” in such a project was “the story of Fanny Brice and to hell with the money, but the fact is that this wild-sounding statement isn’t far from the truth”; to the Gershwins, however, he admitted that his interest was pretty much equally divided between the two, Brice and money. In fact he was utterly miserable: he’d already interrupted What Happened to work on the Milestone script, and now he was proposing himself as a show-business biographer. Hardly the sort of thing Proust would do.

Nevertheless Jackson had resigned himself to another nine months (at least) of very exacting hack work, when Rhoda—at two in the morning, the night before he left for New York to close the Brice deal—came into his room and begged him not to do it. Yes, they were deeply in debt, and nobody knew it

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