The Lost Weekend (2 page)

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:

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 novel 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.

“The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.”

These words, on the printed page, had the unsettling effect no doubt intended, but with a difference. At once he put the book aside: closed it, with his fingers still between the pages; dropped his arm over the edge of the chair and let it hang, the book somewhere near the floor. This in case he wanted to look at it again. But he did not need to. Already he knew the sentence by heart: he might have written it himself. Indeed, it was with a sense of familiarity, of recognition, that his mind had first read through and accepted that sentence only a moment before; and now, as he relaxed his fingers’ grip and dropped the book to the floor, he said aloud to himself: “That’s me, all right.” The book hit the rug with a soft thump and the Scottie looked up from its basket. “You heard me, Mac,” he called out. “That’s what I said!” He glared at the sleepy dog and added, loudly, burlesquing his fear and his delight: “It’s
me
they’re talking about. Me!”

He had been alone for nearly an hour. When Wick left, they had had one of their familiar and painful scenes, a scene in which he played dumb, as usual, leaving to his brother the burden of talking around the subject and avoiding any specific mention of what was on both their minds.

Wick had stood in the open door and looked back and said, “I wish you’d change your mind and come with us, this afternoon.”

From the deep chair he smiled at his younger brother. “I know you do,” he said, “but I can’t. I’ll be much better off here.” He was
aware that he was acting and looking like a romantic invalid and he tried to curb this.

The brother came back in and closed the door. “Listen. We’ve had the tickets such a long while. And Helen’ll be disappointed and I’ll be disappointed. You know she’s only going because of you.”

“I’ll hear it on the radio.”

“Today’s Thursday, not Saturday.”

“Oh yes. I forgot.”

“And you look all right,” his brother went on. “Nobody would think there was a thing wrong with you—it’s all in your imagination. You look perfectly all right.”

“Wick, I could never sit through it. I’d spoil it for you and Helen and I’d be miserable myself.” Unintentionally he made the pathetic, the disarming admission: “Wick, I’ve only just recovered—it’s only been three days. I couldn’t
con
centrate.”

The brother looked at him searchingly, almost sadly, he thought. “I wouldn’t keep asking you, Don, if I didn’t think it would do you good. It would do you so much good.”

He smiled again, hanging onto his patience for dear life. “I’d run into someone I know and I can’t see anybody.”

“You wouldn’t see anybody.”

“Oh yes I would. And besides there’s Helen. I can’t have even her see me.”

“Helen’s seen you like this dozens of times.”

“There—you see? I do show it.”

“You’re exaggerating all this, Don, and just indulging yourself. Listen, Don. If I’m willing to take off the rest of the week, to take you away for a long weekend in the country—just the two of us and Mac—I should think you could do this one thing for me.
Please
come with us.”

He looked at the Scottie curled up in its basket, absently watching the two brothers. After a long pause, while he gathered his breath and his brother regarded him in that worried puzzled
way, he said: “I don’t mean to be stubborn but I’m not exaggerating and I’m not really indulging myself. Please try to understand. One more day and I’ll be all right, but today—I can’t go out now and I certainly can’t go sit through
Tristan
. Tonight, when we get together in the car and drive away, fine. But not now.—Wick, I’d go to pieces if I went out now.”

“How?” the brother asked. “And anyway, I’d be with you.”

He shook his head. “Wick, won’t you please go and forget about me? I can’t see why you want me to go when you know I don’t want to.”

“You know why I want you to go,” the brother said. “I mean,” he added quickly, “I just don’t want you to be alone when you’re feeling like this.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said, pretending not to notice the slip. He sighed, already fatigued with the familiar argument, but he believed he could keep it up forever if only it ended, finally, with his brother leaving him alone. “Will you
stop
worrying about me?”

“All right”—and he saw, with relief, that Wick had reached the point where he was afraid of pressing him too far and even now pretended to be pacified. “I’ll tell Helen you didn’t feel well enough. Will you be ready when I come back?”