The Lost Weekend Read online

  CHARLES JACKSON

  THE LOST WEEKEND

  Charles Jackson was born in 1903 and raised in the township of Arcadia, New York, in the Finger Lakes region, where much of his fiction is set. After a youth marred by tuberculosis and alcoholism, Jackson achieved international fame with his first novel, The Lost Weekend (1944), which was adapted into a classic movie by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Over the next nine years, Jackson published two more novels and two story collections, while continuing to struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. In 1967, after a fourteen-year silence, he returned to the best-seller lists with a novel about a nymphomaniac, A Second-Hand Life, but the following year he died of an overdose at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan.

  Blake Bailey is the author of Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson. His other books include A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Cheever: A Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Memorial Prize. 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.

  ALSO BY CHARLES JACKSON

  The Fall of Valor

  The Outer Edges

  The Sunnier Side: Twelve Arcadian Tales

  Earthly Creatures

  A Second-Hand Life

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2013

  Copyright © 1944 by Charles R. Jackson. Copyright renewed 1971 by Rhoda Jackson Introduction copyright © 2013 by Blake Bailey

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., New York, in 1944.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication data is available at the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94873-1

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by Megan Wilson

  Cover photograph First Reflection, New York, c. 1939-October 1940, by Lisette Model © The Lisette Model Foundation, Inc. (1983). Used by permission. Photograph © National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

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  To My Wife

  And can you, by no drift of circumstance,

  Get from him why he puts on this confusion,

  Grating so harshly all his days of quiet

  With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?

  —Hamlet, III, 1.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  by Blake Bailey

  PART ONE The Start

  PART TWO The Wife

  PART THREE The Joke

  PART FOUR The Dream

  PART FIVE The Mouse

  PART SIX The End

  INTRODUCTION

  Blake Bailey

  The Lost Weekend—a novel about five disastrous days in the life of Don Birnam—was written in the early 1940s, a time when alcoholism was widely regarded as a moral failing rather than a disease. The publisher, Stanley Rinehart, realized the book would need all the clinical validation it could get, and sent advance copies to medical schools around the country. Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association, claimed that the novel captured “the very soul of the dipsomaniac” (“I found myself at the end … full of sympathy and a desire to help”), while another specialist, Dr. Herbert L. Nossen, called it “expert and wonderful—the work of a courageous man.”

  Fiction writers also tended to be enthusiastic. Sinclair Lewis, who knew whereof he spoke, found The Lost Weekend brilliant on every level—“the only unflinching story of an alcoholic that I have ever read”—and subsequently made a point of mentioning Charles Jackson as one of the few American writers who showed promise of greatness. Another alcoholic writer, however, seemed almost traumatized by the novel: William Seabrook, nowadays forgotten, was then well known as the author of Asylum (1935), the record of his incarceration at a mental hospital in Westchester County. “Here’s my honest reaction to The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson which I read word by word to the end with increasing pain and anguish,” he wrote Jackson’s publisher.

  I hate the goddam book almost as much as I hate my own inflamed conscience. “There go I but for the grace of God” and all that stuff, in that horrible, hopeless, cumulative nightmare this guy’s devil-guided pen (or portable) has envoked [sic].

  I’ve suffered as a drunk but not like that and hope to Christ I never will. It’s the only book that ever scared me. It should be soberly read by every white-collar souse in America. If it doesn’t scare the liver, lights and daylights out of him as it did me, it means the poor bastard has softening of the brain and is already sunk.…

  As it happened, Seabrook was then in the midst of a final alcoholic relapse; twenty months later he’d kill himself with an overdose of sleeping pills, though friends claimed it wasn’t a matter of deliberate suicide so much as “another drastic attempt to accomplish what he had tried, vainly, all his life to do—to get away from himself.” Jackson would have understood only too well.

  Nor was Jackson surprised by his novel’s stunning success, since, as he put it, “Almost everybody has somebody in their family who’s a drunk but who’s worth worrying about.” 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. 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.”

  The movie, released less than two years after the novel, almost swept the Oscars—winning Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay, as well as Best Actor for Ray Milland, a Welshman hitherto known as a competent light comedian for supporting roles. A near teetotaler, Milland had been coached in the ways of drunkenness by the novel’s author—a 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 Seabrook-like shock of recognition, regarding Jackson (as one journalist put it) “in the manner of a returned war hero … of a man who had been through hellfire and emerged bloodshot but unbowed.” By then Jackson had been sober for almost a decade and was appalled by how readily people identified him with his narcissistic, crypto-homosexual, writer-manqué protagonist. “One third of the history is based on what I have experienced myself,” he told Louella Parsons and others, “about one third on the experiences of a very good friend whose drinking career I followed very closely, a
nd the other third is pure invention.”

  In fact, The Lost Weekend is autobiographical in almost every particular, though ultimately it’s a little misleading to confuse Don Birnam with his creator. Whereas it’s Don’s curse to see his own alcoholic self-deceptions objectively, before he can quite enjoy them, Jackson the novelist had managed to remove himself once further—that is, by objectifying both the deluded and self-knowing Don. The first is the artist-hero of Don’s never-to-be-written masterpiece, “In a Glass”—the brooding, dissolute apotheosis of the boy who, twenty years before, had stared into his bathroom mirror in hope that poetry-writing had wrought some telltale change, some outward sign of his cherished superiority (“Clods”), now preserved only by alcohol: “Suppose the clear vision in the bathroom mirror could fade (as in some trick movie) and be replaced by this image over the bar. Suppose that lad— Suppose time could be all mixed up so that the child of twenty years ago could look into the bathroom mirror and see himself reflected at thirty-three, as he saw himself now. What would he think, that boy?” As Don excitedly considers the possibilities—gloating over the clever multivalence of his title, “In a Glass” (the whiskey glass, the mirrors past and present)—for a moment he becomes not only the hero but the author, too, of this “classic of form and content,” a kindred of Poe and Keats and Chatterton at whom his boy-self would have “nodded in happy recognition.”

  But of course the book doesn’t exist, could never exist, and Don catches himself yet again—smiling tipsily, fatuously, into a barroom mirror. This, again, is the Don who is both tragic clown and audience (“staring back at the performer in silent contempt and ridicule”), while hovering above is the triumphant novelist—Jackson—and hence the implicit irony of Don’s self-loathing diatribe:

  “In a Glass”—who would ever want to read a novel about a punk and a drunk! Everybody knew a couple or a dozen; they were not to be taken seriously; nuisances and trouble-makers, nothing more; like queers and fairies, people were belly-sick of them; whatever ailed them, that was their funeral; who cared?—life presented a thousand things more important to be written about than misfits and failures.… Like all his attempts at fiction it would be as personal as a letter—painful to those who knew him, of no interest to those who didn’t; … so narcissistic that its final effect would be that of the mirrored room which gives back the same image times without count, or the old Post Toastie box of his boyhood with the fascinating picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding …

  And yet Jackson—producer of that evocative Post Toastie box—has written just such a novel as “In a Glass,” and here we are reading it.

  But of course the author understood that there was more to addiction than narcissistic escapism; indeed, many addicts (especially among the comfortable middle class) begin life, at least, as peculiarly lovable, promising human beings—all too aware, later, of the heartbreak they cause. “[W]hy were so many brilliant men alcoholic?” Don muses. “And from there, the next [question] was: Why did you drink?” Naturally Don can give any number of answers—and does—while understanding, too, that answers don’t matter “in the face of the one fact: you drank and it was killing you. Why? Because alcohol was something you couldn’t handle, it had you licked.” This is the epiphanic “bottom” to which the addict must descend before seeking help—and yet Don keeps drinking. One thinks of the tippler in The Little Prince, who drinks because he is ashamed and is ashamed because he drinks—an insidious cycle of remorse that can either save or destroy the alcoholic: that is, either shame him into stopping once and for all, or goad him into further escape and final destruction. Not for nothing is Macbeth invoked again and again in the novel, the original title of which was “Present Fears” from Act I, Scene 3: “Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings.…” Thus Don (named for the “Great Birnam Wood”) constantly weighs his remorse over past misdeeds with his fear of what lies ahead—the “horrible imaginings” of a future that is, after all, only logical in light of the past:

  Obviously there was the will in him to destroy himself; part of him was bent on self-destruction—he’d be the last to deny it. But obviously, too, part was not, part held back and expressed its disapproval in remorse and shame.… But the foolish psychiatrist knew so much less about it than the poet, the poet who said to another doctor, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased.… Raze out the written troubles of the brain?, the poet who answered, Therein the patient must minister to himself.…

  Only Don can save himself, and yet (as poor William Seabrook and other fellow sufferers are apt to foresee) he almost certainly won’t. In the early chapters there’s a kind of black, picaresque comedy to Don’s misadventures, grading subtly into tragedy until the climactic horror of his delirium tremens—which serves, superbly, both to recall the comedy and foretell Don’s ultimate self-destruction, as his wheeling, drunken bat-self murders (and seems gruesomely to copulate with) the passive mouse: “The more it squeezed, the wider and higher rose the wings, like tiny filthy umbrellas, grey-wet with slime. Under the single spread of wings the two furry forms lay exposed to his stare, cuddled together as under a cosy canopy, indistinguishable one from the other, except that now the mouse began to bleed. Tiny drops of bright blood spurted down the wall; and from the bed he heard the faint miles-distant shrieks of dying.” This, then, is the consummation of Don’s narcissism—subject and object merging in death—though at the novel’s end we leave him alive if not very well (“Why did they make such a fuss?”), preparing for another binge.

  Don Birnam remains the definitive portrait of an alcoholic in American literature—a tragicomic combination of Hamlet and Mr. Toad, according to Time, which in 1963 reprinted the book as part of its paperback “Reading Program” of contemporary classics. The editors of Time were pleased to mention that Jackson himself was doing just fine: a devoted family man (the married father of two daughters) and chairman of the Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in New Brunswick, New Jersey—a man who now freely admitted that he was indeed Don Birnam, and hence his many hospitalizations for drug- and alcohol-related collapses in the twenty years since his famous first novel had been published. 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) movie—somewhat to the author’s woe, as there are far more moviegoers than readers of literary fiction; the upshot, oddly enough, is that the movie has all but supplanted the novel as a cultural artifact (and never mind the five other books Jackson published in his lifetime). For his part Jackson never stopped fighting against his later obscurity, and finally was even willing to sacrifice his hard-won sobriety in order to resume writing, which he’d found all but impossible without the stimulus of drugs or alcohol. A recurrence of tuberculosis resulted in the removal of his right lung in 1963, and while recuperating at Will Rogers Hospital in Saranac Lake, Jackson was given medication that not only reduced his pain but restored his creative impulse. By 1967 he was back on the Times best-seller list with a novel about a nymphomaniac, A Second-Hand Life, and was eager to resume work on his long-awaited “Birnam saga,” the first volume of which was to be titled Farther and Wilder. According to his editor at Macmillan, Robert Markel, Jackson had finished at least three hundred pages of this magnum opus when, in 1968, he took a fatal overdose of Seconal at the Hotel Chelsea, where he’d been living with a Czechoslovakian factory worker named Stanley Zednik.

  He died, of course, as “the author of The Lost Weekend,” the way he’d been invariably identified throughout his career, no matter what he wrote. Within two years, however, even his most famous nove
l went out of print, its main subject no longer a matter of such lurid, salable sensationalism—due in part to its own influence as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of alcoholism,” as Walter Winchell called it. “[S]ince the publication of Charles Jackson’s somber novel about an alcoholic,” Life magazine had reported in 1946, “an unprecedented amount of attention has been paid to the drinking of alcohol and the problems arising therefrom.” Jackson’s insights were widely cited by such organizations as AA, the National Council on Alcoholism, and the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies (where Jackson’s devoted wife, Rhoda, worked for almost fifteen years), until at last the American Medical Association was roused to recognize alcoholism, officially, as a treatable disease.

  Jackson, who’d spent so many years “on the circuit” giving talks for AA, would have been pleased by the ongoing shift in public perception, if perhaps a little exasperated where his own work was concerned: “I’m a writer first of all, and a non-drinker second,” he insisted again and again, to little avail. This was a man who’d written arguably the first serious American novel whose foremost subject is homosexuality, The Fall of Valor (1946), as well as a short story collection, The Sunnier Side (1950), that was acclaimed as the midcentury equivalent of Winesburg, Ohio. That said, his greatest book is undoubtedly The Lost Weekend, and it deserves to be rediscovered foremost as a work of art. Among writers, to be sure, its most boisterous advocates tend to be famous drinkers, too—but then, who better to attest to its enduring power? “Marvelous and horrifying … the best fictional account of alcoholism I have ever read,” said Kingsley Amis, a supreme authority in such matters. Let the reader be assured, then, that this is a work of canonical importance, for every conceivable reason.