by Blake Bailey
To some extent the fix was in, since the most important critic—for The New York Times Book Review—was Philip Wylie, older brother of Charlie’s best friend, Max, and himself an editor at Farrar & Rinehart! For almost every conceivable reason, in fact, Jackson could safely anticipate “that special Wylie excitement,” as he put it: the latter’s most recent book, Generation of Vipers (1942), had introduced the concept of “Momism” into the cultural discourse—a term of abuse for the emasculating, infantilizing role of the American matriarch, a theme very dear to Jackson’s heart; even more promisingly, Wylie was also an alcoholic who’d “cured” himself by means of “expert advice” and (self-taught) psychotherapy. Little wonder, then, that he loved The Lost Weekend: not only was it “the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey,” but a potential “tool” for psychiatrists and a veritable “textbook for such organizations as Alcoholics Anonymous” (which both Wylie and Jackson eschewed). Also, quite aside from the author’s clinical insights, Wylie sincerely believed in his literary greatness. “To a writer I never heard of,” his review concluded, “and one I expect to hear about the rest of my life, my hat is off.”
Other major reviews were almost as enthusiastic. The Times’s daily critic John Chamberlain called the novel “wild, phantasmagoric, a story of tumultuous pace and nervous, broken rhythms.” Nor was Chamberlain (a fastidious man) daunted by the subject matter—because of it, indeed, he considered The Lost Weekend “the most moral book in a decade,” and was only partly in jest when he recommended it to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as the “best bet” for their cause “since Billy Sunday reformed and hit the sawdust trail.” At the very least, most reviewers agreed that Jackson had taken a singularly unpromising premise—the adventures of a solitary, narcissistic drunk—and turned it into a narrative “by turns horrifying and curiously moving” (New York Herald Tribune) that kept readers “riveted to their chairs until the end” (Saturday Review). Even Time magazine—rarely nice in those days to first novels of a controversial savor—was willing to concede that Don Birnam (“a clever coward who is drinking himself to death”) was a memorable creation: “If [he] were more purely comic he would be Mr. Toad; if he were more purely tragic he would be Hamlet.”
“The irrational newspaper reviews of extravagant praise truly meant nothing to me after the first day,” Jackson suavely assured his friend Aannestad; “what I did take seriously and pay attention to was the sober long criticism of Edmund Wilson, [Robert Gorham] Davis in the Partisan Review and a very few others.” These critics were more in accord with Aannestad’s tempered view of the novel, and for a fact Jackson had taken them very seriously; Wilson’s New Yorker review had caused him (as he later told Lincoln Barnett) to take “to his bed for the rest of the day.” Commending the book as “a tour-de-force of some merit,” Wilson enumerated those features, bad and good, that made for a promising apprentice effort but little more: the prose was workmanlike, the flashbacks rather arbitrary, the protagonist “dreary in the extreme,” and yet Jackson did manage to create “a creepy psychological atmosphere” that kept one turning pages, more or less. No doubt Wilson meant to be encouraging, wistfully so, when he summed up: “The book, in fact, has so much that is good that it ought to have been three times as good and a really satisfactory piece of fiction.” Jackson, to be sure, was chastened, but also flattered that a critic of Wilson’s caliber would take such trouble on his behalf; Davis’s treatment in Partisan Review, however, was most embittering, especially given the way Jackson had supported the journal with cash donations since his debut in 1939. Still, he couldn’t have been terribly surprised: Davis, after all, was a typical contributor, inclined to fault the novel for its apathy toward “politics or ideas”: “the impairment of the self from within [as in Don’s case] parallels (but with how much less emotion and drama and meaning!) the threat of impairment of the self from without in the real world of the concentration camps.” Philip Rahv had alerted Jackson to leftist objections when he also noted a failure to connect Don’s malaise to that of the larger world (“the book conveys a sense of isolation”), in the course of which he made a remark that would have fateful implications, perhaps, for Jackson’s next novel: “I noted an insufficient separation of the author from his hero, with the result that the narcissism seems to be distributed fairly equally between the two of them.”
But on one level, of course, Jackson had never intended to separate himself from his hero. On the contrary: by looking inside himself and describing precisely what he saw, no matter how bizarre or compromising, he hoped to give a credible sense of what an alcoholic was going through. The fragments of personal experience (small-town childhood, father’s desertion, homosexual tendencies) were not meant to amount to some ideal case history, though certainly they happened to be pertinent (“He saw himself as an American everyman”). “Jackson’s purpose is to describe, not to explain,” the critic Granville Hicks wrote in his reader’s report. “The result, it seems to me, is as extraordinary a study of psychosis as I have ever read.” As an intricate portrait of one individual’s suffering, then, the novel is a brilliant success, and those who insist on sociopolitical resonance should look elsewhere—most notably to Under the Volcano, in which the implications of alcoholism are personal, political, metaphysical, and more, the result of Lowry’s awful decade-plus ordeal of adding filigree to each ingenious layer of meaning. Jackson was far less ambitious, though arguably more successful (or at any rate readable) in achieving his aims.
And ultimately Rahv is wrong to confuse Don’s narcissism with that of his creator, who transcends narcissism by exposing it so thoroughly. Whereas it is Don’s curse to see his own self-deceptions objectively, before he can quite enjoy them, Jackson the novelist removes himself once further—that is, by objectifying both the deluded and the 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 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: “Faithless muse!” he reflects (melodramatically in spite of himself). 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 troublemakers, 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 pictu
re 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.
And what of Jackson’s vaunted clinical insights? “I have never once resorted to the glib jargon of modern psychology,” he boasted to Bennett Cerf, emphasizing again that Don is an individual presented with all his quirks intact—not a type, not a composite—and so we see something of ourselves in him, and can generalize based on that. This is what Don does: “Why were drunks, almost always, persons of talent, personality, lovable qualities, gifts, brains, assets of all kinds (else why would anyone care?): why were so many brilliant men alcoholics? 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 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 “bottom” (noted by Peabody and AA) to which the alcoholic must descend before seeking help—and yet Don keeps drinking. Again, one thinks of Saint-Exupéry’s tippler, 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 (pre-Long Weekend) was Present Fears, taken from Act 1, Scene 3: “Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings … ” Thus Don constantly weighs his remorse over past misdeeds (“fraternity nightmare … Juan-les-Pins … the unaccountable things you did … the drinking the drinking the drinking”), 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 himself6.…
Only Don can save himself, and yet (as poor William Seabrook and other fellow sufferers are apt to foresee) he almost certainly won’t. Already he’s passed the threshold where cumulative remorse becomes unbearable—where even in dreams he’s harried toward suicide by masses of blond-haired fraternity boys chanting “Get Birnam! Get Birnam!” And meanwhile he drinks to escape and ends up committing further misdeeds, piles remorse on remorse, until almost everything reminds him of his own loathsomeness. Even his comforting knack for quoting Shakespeare is fraught with pitfalls, as Iago’s speech (“Who steals my purse—”) brings him smack into his antics of the night before (M. Mc.’s purse)—the ramifications of which are so ghastly that only more oblivion can quell his panic: “In spite of his trying to rationalize the whole episode of last night and his fear today, a sinking sensation plunged down through his breast again and again, his body began to get hot all over, his palms sweated: it was shame.”
Dr. Sherman’s discarded foreword had it right: “fidelity to clinical fact is art,” at least in the case of The Lost Weekend. In the early chapters there is a kind of black, picaresque comedy to Don’s misadventures, grading subtly into tragedy until the climactic horror of Don’s delirium—which serves, superbly, both to recall the comedy and to 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 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.
Is there hope for Don? What did Jackson think? On the one hand he considered writing a sequel about Don’s ultimate deliverance; on the other he seemed expressly to forbid any such possibility. In Don’s fraternity dream, an ecstatic Wick reaches him before the vengeful blond multitude, pressing a tin of pills into his hand, which Don (“Unable to bear the sight of Wick’s relief, so soon to break into grief as passionate as his joy”) slams into his mouth and awakes, sobbing: “He knew the dream was a good dream, it told him where help lay and would always lie, but that too was no comfort.… He wanted now to die, he would never be able to shake the stifling depression the dream had left with him, it would hang darkly over him as long as he remained alive.” And so the nightmare lingered—at whatever remove—though Jackson never forgot where help lay.
THE SPECTACULAR SUCCESS of The Lost Weekend (and never mind, for now, the movie) would hang over its author’s head for the rest of his life. It appeared on best-seller lists all over the country, and by the end of 1944 had sold more than 70,000 copies (an impressive figure for a literary novel, but not quite impressive enough for Jackson, who could rarely resist adding ten or twenty thousand when reporting sales to friends). In Jackson’s lifetime the novel sold over 100,000 in hardback, over half a million in paperback, and almost 200,000 in a special Armed Services edition during the war; also, sales of the novel’s fourteen translations (Jackson was particularly proud of its global appeal) came to approximately 150,000 copies. “Oh, I’m not as broke as I sound, though I’m always in debt,” Jackson remarked the year before his death. “The Lost Weekend is in 24 [sic] languages and sells regularly. There are two editions in this country right now. It’s always taken care of me: $24 from Greece here, $16 from Finland there.7 It adds up.”
Even more important than sales, to Jackson, were intimations of his permanent place in the literary firmament. That first year of publication he was careful to alert friends and family to any sign of a growing reputation: there was a big spread in Look magazine on “Five First Novelists” (“I lead off and am No. 1”), an even more promising piece in Saturday Review about “Outstanding Novelists” generally (“a fine photograph of me”), and naturally Jackson was thrilled to be on the Times critic Orville Prescott’s list of the six best novels of 1944, as well as Time’s “Fiction surprise”—singular—“of the year.” But his fondest dream was to see his work included in the Modern Library (“the nearest American equivalent to immortality”), and with this in mind he cultivated the friendship of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, until in 1948 his dream came true—briefly: “Cerf and I know each other very well,” Jackson noted in 1964, “and used to dine back and forth when he was trying to woo me away from Rinehart (I’m sure he’s not sorry now that I couldn’t be ‘won’), we no longer really like each other.…” Which is to say, when Jackson did change publishers in 1949—to Farrar & Straus, not Random House—Cerf retaliated by yanking The Lost Weekend from the Modern Library in favor of Little Women (Charlie “is pretty well disturbed,” observed his new publisher, Roger Straus).
This was a bad augury, though at the time Jackson felt certain he’d eventually do better than The Lost Weekend, whose relative meagerness he sought to emphasize by labeling it “a story”—not a novel—on the jacket of the first edition: “It was a character study, merely,” he explained, pointing out that a full-blown novel is about “the gradual development of character” in a complex situation, as opposed to the single epiphany of a short story, whatever its actual length. Ten years later, however—after any number of setbacks, personal and professional—Jackson reread The Lost Weekend and was “thunderstruck”:
It was
absolutely honest, syllable for syllable … it was a writer really on the beam, telling nothing but universal truth, and again and again I could hardly believe my eyes (it made me know how much I had forgotten of myself). There are details and insights in that book that I have never been up to since; and to me the most revealing thing of all was that The Lost Weekend was the only book, out of five books, that I wrote sober, without stimulus or sedative.
That last insight was indeed the crucial one, which would occur to him again and again—without, alas, much practical result. After all, give or take the odd naysayer, the world had proclaimed The Lost Weekend a masterpiece or very near, and Jackson (when sober) could hardly stand writing sentences that didn’t bear out that original promise. How he longed for the days when he was “writing in the dark,” when nobody expected a thing from him! How sick he became of always, always being credited as “the author of THE LOST WEEKEND,” as if his other books didn’t exist! But then, too, it was his only real prestige; convalescing on the lawn of Will Rogers Hospital, in 1963, Jackson distracted himself with the Times crossword puzzle when he noticed 23 Down: “Charles Jackson novel.” No question which one they meant. “And do you know what?” he wrote his family. “Not a single telegram came in during the day, or since.”
Things had changed, all right. Back in 1944, Jackson had rightly anticipated a big response from his hometown, at least, which he’d identified (over Boom’s objection) on the book jacket. “The important thing is your work, not the opinion of your friends and family—they get over it in time anyway,” he’d calmly informed a PM reporter shortly after publication, citing the enduring value of Look Homeward, Angel despite the outrage that Wolfe’s novel had caused in Asheville. Jackson took a somewhat different line, however, when interviewed a month later by the Newark Courier-Gazette, confessing that he’d been “greatly concerned” about the reception of The Lost Weekend in his hometown, and was therefore “highly pleased” by the general enthusiasm. This was true. Letters from friends and family were mostly glowing, usually pointing out that the correspondent had never lost faith in Charlie (“of all the old gang who had their pet day dreams, you are the only one to fulfill your ambitions”), who in turn was so touched that he not only responded to each and every letter (marking them “ANSWERED”) but also took it upon himself to provide autographed copies to Newarkians who’d enclosed checks ($2.50) for that purpose. Meanwhile he was anxious to see whether R. A. S. Bloomer—a pillar of the community—would be able to persuade Mrs. Van Duser and Miss Munson to accept a copy (autographed) for the public library. At first the man was not sanguine: Miss Munson “looked the book over here and there for about 10 minutes and simply shook her head,” he wrote Charlie in December. Once the book was actually published, though, and the subject of so much “clamor throughout the nation’s literary circles” (Courier-Gazette), a compromise was reached whereby The Lost Weekend was handed out at the discretion of Mrs. Van Duser, who wrote warmly to the author, “We are very flattered that a former patron—one of our own home boys—is now numbered among literary celebrities. I always thought you had it in you, Charles.”
