Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  By his own estimation, The Long Weekend was “probably the most talked-about unpublished novel in New York.” Simon & Schuster had been keeping tabs on Jackson ever since his Partisan Review debut, though he worried the publisher might be “a little too high pressure” for his purpose; meanwhile Max Wylie had alerted his own publisher, Farrar & Rinehart, and the previous November Jackson had mailed them his first chapter along with a copy of Dr. Sherman’s letter attesting to its clinical validity. The publisher replied that several editors had found the book “tremendously interesting”: “The only doubt in our minds is whether or not there is enough variety in a long drunk to sustain the reader’s interest through a novel. We are anxious to see more of the book and hope you will send it along as soon as it is completed.” When the book was ready, Jackson was almost frantically eager to gratify all the mounting curiosity; handing the typescript to his prospective agent, Bernice Baumgarten of Brandt & Brandt, the voluble author began to give a blow-by-blow, but was abruptly cut off: “No, don’t tell me anything about it, I just want to read it.” This brand of candor, bordering on the austere, had won Baumgarten the trust of such illustrious clients as John Dos Passos, Mary McCarthy, E. E. Cummings, and many others, including her then-celebrated husband, Cozzens. As for Jackson—her temperamental opposite—he had only to wait a single day for her verdict (“a fine job”).

  By then he entertained the hope of becoming the legendary editor Max Perkins’s next great find (“Scribners, too, wouldn’t mind at all the passages about their Scott Fitzgerald”), but Baumgarten thought it best to oblige Simon & Schuster, which promptly rejected the novel as too morbidly insular in a time of world war. Publisher John Farrar, however, was almost beside himself with enthusiasm, and would always take pride in the fact that he’d insisted on the book’s greatness in the face of some initial timidity. “I finished the manuscript on the train coming down from the country last night,” his partner, Stanley Rinehart, wrote Baumgarten on August 2, “got off at 125th Street in a non-alcoholic daze and walked right through the edge of the Harlem riot at midnight without knowing anything about it.” And yet Rinehart was a bit squeamish about publishing, especially given the downbeat ending, which Jackson would not hear of altering a whit; on the other hand, Dr. Sherman’s letter had given Rinehart an idea to present the novel as a kind of case history “in the field between fiction and non-fiction.” At any rate, by the time Jackson visited the firm two days later, Farrar and Rinehart and their various colleagues had conquered their misgivings en masse. “Everybody came in to meet me,” Charlie wrote Rhoda afterward, “and each one exclaimed over his favorite chapter or passage.… Stan expects it to sell for years, to offend many, to infuriate M. D.’s et cetera, but he said they (F&R) couldn’t help themselves: it’s the most extraordinary piece of writing he has seen (he said) in many years.”

  One problem was the book’s title, The Long Weekend: though Jackson was attached to it (“the only logical title”), he’d recently discovered at least two other books with the same title. Max Wylie suggested Time-Out, which the author considered “trivial”; for the sake of gravitas he was attracted to his beloved Shakespeare, asking Rinehart’s opinion of This Confusion (from the novel’s Hamlet epigraph) and All Is the Fear (from Macbeth: “All is the fear and nothing is the love, / As little is the wisdom, where the flight / So runs against all reason”). He also liked the more denotative A Weekend in the City—since the novel begins, after all, with a proposed weekend in the country—but worried that it sounded like “a short-story and one by Charles Brackett1 or some other ‘light’ writer.” In the end he left it up to the publisher, who added a phrase to the language by changing only two letters of the working title.

  Later in August, Jackson did a last thorough revision, adding twenty-four pages to the typescript: namely, a scene at the end of Chapter Two where Don, to his horror, meets the man who took his place in Kappa U (Jackson thought the “fraternity nightmare” needed some slight amplification “without throwing the book out of balance”), and also several new pages in the Bellevue section establishing that the nurse George (as he was then known)2 “really had some cause” for implying that Don was homosexual. Indeed, as Jackson told Rinehart, most of the additional twenty-four pages “are further developments of the same, and will start controversy all over the place.”

  “I AM DOING SO WELL that it’s almost shameful,” Jackson wrote a friend that fall. “The daytime serial that I have been writing for the past 20 months begins going out over WJZ on October 4th, which means even more money. On top of that Farrar & Rinehart has bought my novel The Lost Weekend which is going to curl the hair of the entire country.” What would prove the most exciting (in a good way) year of Jackson’s life had begun with a long family vacation in Nantucket that summer, during which he’d revised his novel, kept up with Sweet River, and met a handsome Marine captain recently wounded at Guadalcanal, Vince Kramer, who would reappear as Cliff Hauman in The Fall of Valor. Also, while relaxing at the actress Patricia Collinge’s house, Jackson had pleasantly caught the attention of Bette Davis (“Who’s that sweet little man on the couch?”), with whom he’d be reunited in Hollywood. The MGM contract that would make this possible was still months in the future, but something of the sort was already in the air (“on account of the reputation the book will shortly earn me”) when Jackson demanded a raise of ten dollars per script from Blackett-Sample-Hummert; given that Sweet River was soon to be picked up by the Blue Network and aired over 172 outlets (up from the original 12), the agency decided to grant the raise retroactively—effective March 1943—which meant an additional lump sum of $1,050, and Jackson planned to double his price once the show went network in November, by which time he would have written five hundred scripts (“and I think it still stinks,” he wrote Boom).

  Farrar & Rinehart went on debating whether to present The Lost Weekend as a kind of fictionalized case history, and therefore asked the obliging Dr. Sherman to expand his letter into a foreword that would serve to contextualize, perhaps, certain of the novel’s more troubling points. For his part, Jackson lucidly argued that a “clinical apology” would “scare the average reader, and the superior reader doesn’t need it”: “Psychiatrists could write their foolish heads off ‘explaining’ HAMLET, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, etcetera, but these works will stand long after ‘modern psychology’ has been superseded by a new science even more modern.” A few days later, however, Dr. Sherman faithfully submitted his piece, which after a fashion was sensitive to all sides of the issue: “I can think of few documents which have more impressed me with the truth that fidelity to clinical fact is art,” he wrote. “The author of this extraordinary tract on the secret passageways of the alcoholic mentality has taken clinical experience and raised it to the level of high poetry.” Dr. Sherman further assured the reader that the dread subject of homosexuality—crucial, alas, to any intelligent treatment of alcoholism—was presented with “the greatest delicacy.” The word “tract” was perhaps sufficient to steel Jackson’s opposition to the foreword; in any event he allowed that Sherman might be quoted in advertising, but again cautioned against “launch[ing] the book on a flood of merely clinical approval.” Stanley Rinehart agreed not to include the piece in the book (grudgingly: he thought it a “humdinger”), though he promptly attached it to advance copies of the novel that went to med-school faculties all over the country. Responses were diverse, and seemed largely to depend on whether a given reader perceived alcoholism as a scientific or moral issue. As Rinehart had anticipated, some of the letters he received would prove nothing less than marketing gold. Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association, claimed that the book 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.” Dr. Haven Emerson of Columbia, however, deplored the “continuo
us subtle pleading for a social and individual indulgence towards all such periodic drunkards,” though he considered the book “a masterpiece as a case history.”

  Fiction writers were mostly enthusiastic, but here again it was a highly personal matter. Sinclair Lewis, who knew whereof he spoke, found the novel brilliant on every level—“the only unflinching story of an alcoholic that I have ever read … as terrifying yet as absorbing as the real thing”—and subsequently made a point of mentioning Jackson as one of the few American writers who showed promise of greatness. William Seabrook, on the other hand, seemed almost to despise Jackson. Nowadays forgotten, Seabrook was then well known as the author of Asylum (1935), the record of his voluntary incarceration at a mental hospital in Westchester County; the book depicted alcoholism as a disease deserving of one’s compassion, but in this regard Seabrook had found The Lost Weekend decidedly wanting. “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 Rinehart.

  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.…

  The Lost Weekend is a lousy-cheerful title for such a deadly book. A truer title would be the Spanish proverb, “There Is No Cure for Drunkenness But Death.” If Charles Jackson wrote this book cold-sober without ever having gone through those hideous horrors himself, I hope as a once-celebrated drunkard, hope to god and pray, that he’ll make you-know-what-kind-of-a-pot of money out of it, spend it all on lousy Cuban rum, drink himself into delirium tremens, die of acute alcoholism in Bellevue or the gutter and be buried face-downward in a drunkard’s grave so that the more he scratches the deeper to hell he’ll go.

  One reason for the man’s oddly peevish tone was that he did, in fact, suspect that Jackson was “a sober, self-righteous bright-boy who can take it or leave it alone,” and thus his book contained, in Seabrook’s highly subjective view, “not a grain of pity ponderable enough to balance the left hind leg of a louse.”3 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, needless to say, would have understood only too well.

  Another writer to whom The Lost Weekend came as a blow was Malcolm Lowry, who at the time had spent almost a decade working on his own alcoholic masterpiece, Under the Volcano. “After reading the book,” he wrote his English publisher, Jonathan Cape, “it became extremely hard for the time being to go on writing and having faith in mine.” Still, for all his vagaries, Lowry tended to be a good sport about things; weathering thoughts of suicide, he resolved to get over his “unworthy professional jealousy” and even wrote Jackson a congratulatory note to the effect that he’d “beaten him to it” (and never mind the damage done to Lowry’s Lunar Caustic—about a drunk in Bellevue!—which he’d envisaged as the second part of a trilogy that was to include Under the Volcano). Nor was Lowry entirely misguided in his despair: “The mescal-inspired phantasmagoria, or heebie-jeebies, to which Geoffrey [Firmin, in Under the Volcano] has succumbed,” noted a reader for Cape (whose ambivalence would necessitate a prolix apologia on Lowry’s part), “is impressive but I think too long, wayward and elaborate. On account of [which] the book inevitably recalls … The Lost Weekend.”

  The only response to which Jackson took adamant exception was that of Edna Ferber, whom he’d fondly remembered waiting on while a clerk at Kroch’s in 1925. Indeed, he might have mentioned this to Rinehart, whose request for a blurb was met with startling vehemence, as Ferber saw fit to condemn “the Hitlerian treatment of the Jew in this book”: “There they are,” she wrote, “lumped together on page 146—homosexuals, drunks, Negroes, Jews. Well, I resent it and here is my written resentment, however futile. These are frightful times for the Jews of the world. In the name of the millions of murdered men, women and children I wish to record my objection to this added drop of poison.”4 Jackson detested bigotry in every form, particularly anti-Semitism; writing in 1945 to a German publisher who (he worried) might have objected to passages in The Lost Weekend about a Jewish pawnbroker, Jackson claimed he would have rather destroyed his book than give offense of that kind. As for Ferber, at the very least she was “irresponsible,” or so he determined to make unforgettably clear to her: “I resent and protest [your letter] bitterly,” he wrote, “because of my own passionate and active concern over the tragic plight of the Jew in these times.” The point of the passage under attack, he continued, was “purely psychological … no more anti-Semitic than the not dissimilar passage in Proust (the son of a Jew) who first pointed out the curious anomaly of the uncertain position held in society by the homosexual and the Jew”; Jackson had added the Negro (“so quick on the trigger … ”) as another example of “persons suffering from a consciousness of being different from (or above, or below) the social norm, and alternately proud and sensitive on the point.” He doubted, however, that his friend Richard Wright (of Native Son fame) would have accused him of bigotry as a result.

  And indeed, I cannot help but feel that such a reaction as yours, Miss Ferber, is witch-hunting and (if we must use the word) “Hitlerian” book-burning in reverse. If things have come to such a pass that the word “Jew” cannot be set down in print without someone crying “Race-prejudice!”, then alas, the Jew is already lost.…

  I have carefully read over your letter and mine, and you might be interested to know that the net effect of both of them has been to make me race-conscious and uncomfortable as I have never been before … and every time I have here set down the word “Jew” in my letter, I have had the astonished and awful feeling (for the first time in my life) that it was a term of opprobrium and abuse, rather than the ancient and dignified name of a noble and intelligent people.

  A year later Ferber remarked in Time magazine that, among current writers, she was “most interested in Charles Jackson for The Lost Weekend.” Jackson replied: “I have seen many small allusions to The Lost Weekend during the past year, but no single one of them (nor, I think, all of them combined) has given me anywhere near the same joy … I salute you humbly but from the depths of my heart.”

  JACKSON’S CONFIDENCE began to surge as publication approached—especially since he’d received the endorsement of his good friend and “severest critic,” Elling Aannestad, an editor at Norton whose only (faint) claim to fame was having coaxed the classicist Edith Hamilton to publish her first book, The Greek Way (1930).5 Pitilessly candid, Aannestad had been one of the few readers of The Long Weekend’s first chapter to withhold any hint of praise: he’d been bored, he said, by the surfeit of internal monologue, and moreover cautioned Jackson about his “simple style” (“sometimes it approaches what you wish most to avoid—affectation”). Having read the finished manuscript, though, Aannestad found it “a triumphant”—if still flawed—“piece of work”: “I don’t see why anyone should ever need to deal fictionally with alcoholism again; you’ve done it.… I’m hoping, Charlie, that you can withstand fame, because I think you’re in for it.” One key to keeping his head, the man advised, was not to take the more lavish praise too seriously; critics, after all, were likely to think the novel “better and more important than it is.” As if promptly to prove his point, a seasoned literary editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ted Robinson, beat other reviewers to the punch by sending his e
arly appraisal directly to the author (for whom it became his “most prized single letter”): The Lost Weekend, said Robinson, was “one of the most brilliant performances in modern fiction … among the permanent masterpieces of the literary art … the book of the year …” And so on.

  Another reason for high hopes was the ingenious campaign devised by Farrar & Rinehart’s publicity manager, Helen Murphy, who would receive an award that year for her efforts. “Five days out of a man’s life—one of the strangest, most remarkable narratives ever written,” read the cryptic advertisements that began appearing in early January 1944, accompanied by an illustration of five fluttering calendar pages. Title, author, and subject were omitted, and the word “narrative” was chosen to obscure whether the work in question was fact or fiction. A second series of ads gave a synopsis of the plot as it would appear on the dust jacket: “The minute his brother Wick closed the door behind him Don Birnam felt positively lightheaded, joyous … five whole days ahead of him with no one watching him”; another coy paragraph mentioned Don’s “insatiable appetite for experience” and “passion for Scott Fitzgerald,” until—at last—the beguiled reader was informed that Don was “in the grip of alcohol.” Meanwhile advance copies were sent not only to literary and medical worthies, but to entertainers and politicians such as Wendell Willkie; curiosity was so aroused that the first printing was raised from ten thousand to twenty thousand—ten times higher than usual for a first novel. And finally, on January 25, 1944 (four days before publication), Farrar & Rinehart planned to give an elegant party in Jackson’s honor at the Burberry Room on East 52nd: “Gobs of celebs will be there from the stage, screen, press, radio and publishing world,” Charlie reported to Boom, “and my knees go weak at the thought.” Boom shared the letter with their mother, who (somewhat mollified by all the fuss) wrote Charlie, “Isn’t it wonderful it is the party instead of what used to make [your knees] shake that way in the book. And it will never be like that again thank God—happy, happy days!”