It is a rare thing to find me reading non-fiction. I tend to like the escape that fiction provides, it has been this way since I read Pet Cemetery in one sitting in the ninth grade. I did have to give an oral book report the next day, but still. When John Updike died a few years ago I discovered his novels, short stories and the brilliant Rabbit Angstrom. Reading him so late in life was probably better for me, as I can relate. Then I discovered John Cheever, yes, also late, and I listen to Anne Enright read The Swimmer, over and over, it is pure magic. All of this was foreshadowed by Richard Yates and Revolutionary Road, which led to Mad Men (television can sometimes be distracting, but in this case, another version of a time, place and brand of working man I was keen on), and then down the path to the man who wrote the biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty, Cheever: A Life, the biographer Blake Bailey.
His own story is so intensely personal that it seems wrong to talk about it with people who have not read The Splendid Things We Planned. In retelling this book to my girlfriend I reminisced with a sour twang of nostalgia that it reminded me a lot of how I felt when I left my first Alcoholic Anonymous meeting where I said aloud, “holy shit, those people are fucked up.” Again, I was young, and anxious.
In the literary circles I travel, Blake Bailey’s name holds icon status. His books about the chestnuts of modern literature are nothing short of amazing. His forthcoming opus on Philip Roth will mostly likely eclipse the sun, as Roth seems to be the one writer that everyone reads. This book should be no different, but it is too personal and for many reasons scary, beyond the realm of what you and I would think is scary. Blake’s brother Scott was on a self-destructive path fueled by alcohol from a very early age. Mr. Bailey retells a moment at the start of this tragedy where his parents almost throw infant Scott, who wouldn’t stop crying, off the roof of their apartment building. If you have had a child who won’t stop crying, you can relate. It is a cold glass of water to the face, and we’re only on page one.
Scott grows up in the shadow of successful parents, and the booze is always around, and Scott starts screwing up. Blake backdrafts off his brother, and suddenly it looks like they will sink in the same rowboat. We know Blake will become a success, but Scott, we’re not so sure about. This story reads like a thriller, as if written by Cormac McCarthy, and edited by A.M. Homes. I loved Bailey’s literary tuning fork; it sounds macabre, even sinister. By the time Scott and Blake get to high school life is nothing but a wafer thin batch of seconds between what terrible things Scott does next. Blake grows up, and Scott never does, he just gets bigger. It is a profile of arrested development and it infects Scott the moment he takes up drinking. His synapses never connect in his brain, and he spirals down the vortex of life. Occasionally he grabs Blake’s hand, or his mother’s (also a drunk) and tries to get them to help him. In every instance they give him more booze or money, they are basically killing him, and everyone knows it. Eventually Dad remarries, divorce seemed to be imminent with all the philandering that he did, even though it’s viewed through Blake’s rose-colored glasses. Scott goes to NYU, which seems ridiculous, almost insultingly so. One semester and he is done, thrown out for a laundry list of things, and then he falls through a glass door, or kicks it in, trying to get his mothers attention, as she is there to take him home. Instead, she sends him to family members in Germany. Scott comes back and from what I can tell turns tricks on the street of Manhattan. Blake is waffling along himself, living here and there, in school at Tulane, and generally going nowhere. This is an honest and wicked appraisal of one’s salad days, even if the wounds are self-inflicted.
Suddenly Scott finds God, and we get a reprieve from the bad. Blake pulls the nose up, and then Scott joins the Marines. Scott has never done anything with his life but drink. He’s never met a car he didn’t wreck, visits the gray bar mansion repeatedly, and generally ruins his parent’s lives. At no time, not even once, did someone in the family or a close friend say, “You need to cut Scott off, bar him from your home. Don’t answer the phone when he calls. Do not give him money, or support of any kind.” This is the poster family for an intervention. When push comes to shove, Blake and his mother buy a gun. It is so stupid that I cannot even begin to imagine what would have happened next if Scott had come home. So, you’re going to shoot your brother? Kill him? This isn’t East of Eden; although in retrospect it certainly shaded in that direction.
I read this book in several large chunks, and have had a wicked time justifying or explaining the experience to anyone. Mr. Bailey has left a permanent mark on my reading history, and I am both sad and happy that it’s over.
