The Lost Weekend, a 1944 novel by Charles Jackson, is a powerfully rendered and therefore sickening account of a binge conducted by 33-year-old Don Birnham, a sometimes writer who is rendered with acute understanding of alcoholism's ghastly and degrading effects.Birnham is portrayed as a romantic and literate child with a vivid imagination whose father left his family as a boy and who was humiliated by a homosexual crush on a college classmate as a young man. Afterward he also suffered from tuberculosis, but the focus of the novel is on booze and Birnham's unstinting efforts to obtain it, eluding the good intentions of his younger brother Wick and his female friend Helen.The setting is New York City. We're in the 30s. One of those claustrophobic apartments with small closets, a small kitchen, bedrooms just for sleeping, and a living room with a record player and some books. For much of the novel, that's where we stay, although there is a fantastic scene entailing Don racing up 2nd Avenue where he hopes to find a pawn shop to hock his typewriter (not on Yom Kippur, however) and another fine scene in the alcoholics ward of a public hospital and finally a great hallucinatory sequence that ends up in a bloody struggle between a nonexistent bat and a nonexistent mouse.For anyone who has ever had too much to drink, or who has had a friend or relative who is an alcoholic, this is a novel that's almost too vivid to take. In fact, I'd venture that a lot of people today would put it down. The literary problem has to do with both sympathy for the protagonist, which is hard to muster, and current understanding of alcoholism.Don Birnham could be an appealing figure. He's educated, well-traveled, and clever, but here's the rub: an alcoholic is not really a person. The mind of an alcoholic may function, but it's not in control. The addiction--like most addictions--runs the show and becomes a kind of body-mind, almost moving without the individual's say-so. I'll go further: the body-mind does in fact move without the mind-mind's say-so. Once in spell of recovery F. Scott Fitzgerald (a hero to Birnham for good literary reasons) asked someone if he had just picked up and swallowed a glass of gin. He was told he had. He didn't know he was going to do it and he didn't know he did it. That's alcoholism. At a certain level of chronic alcohol abuse, an individual like Don will steal, pawn, beg, lie, betray, hide...do anything to make sure the booze remains available.And then he will drink. The quantities Don consumes during this weekend are astonishing, but not incredible. An alcoholic can and will down quarts of whatever in a day. Quarts! He will, as Don does, knock back six drinks in an hour. He will, as Don does, empty every empty bottle one last time for one last drop, although he doesn't employ the trick many alcoholics know well: you hold an empty bottle under running hot water; this produces an extra drop or two.Don can remember love for his mother, his home town, works of literature, music and film. He's gifted in these memories. I doubt, however, that the regnant consciousness being portrayed--other than the venal cunning--is actually Don's. It's Charles Jackson's in full and painful recollection not only of his bad times as an alcoholic but of his good times.Two of my friends in adolescence were alcoholics by their early twenties. I saw one drink a full bottle of vodka in twenty minutes. We sent him off in an ambulance. Another visited me in Baltimore and we headed out for a bookstore. He asked if we could stop in a bar. It was 11 a.m. I said okay. He had a beer. Halfway into his beer he told me that he had been desperate for that beer since 8, when he woke up, and his life was nothing but the next drink. He was 22. Recently, he said, he apparently had flipped his prized Toyota Celica and awakened in a garage where it had been towed. No memory of any of this. Another beer. He was calm enough for the bookstore now. He like most of the books I liked. Then we went back to a bar. I still didn't want anything to drink. The stratagems and rationalizations of the alcoholic are only superficially what the alcoholic is about. The core issue is the horrific impersonality of the overwhelming addiction. Some people evidently are more vulnerable to this than others; sometimes a core difficulty earlier in life is the trigger; sometimes the difficulty would appear to be genetic.In years past, alcoholism and drug addiction have been associated with creative personalities. There has been talk of "fire in the brain," or so much pain in the heart that the artist must douse it with one kind of sedative or another. We can list Fitzgerald,, Faulkner, Poe, Coleridge and countless others as examples of this school of thought. The long-lived, long-productive counter--examples get left out. Henry James wasn't an excessive drinker, nor was Tolstoy. We know nothing about Shakespeare as a person, but I would wager that he drank early in life and gave it up. No one could write King Lear or The Tempest in his cups.As I read The Long Weekend, I thought that the story of an alcoholic was being fabulously well-told from within Don Birnbaum's humiliations but no story about an alcoholic should be about the alcoholic himself; it should be about the people stuck with or trying to help the alcoholic. We get some of this in the form of Don's frazzled brother and stoic lady friend. We do not get, however, to the cruelest moment in personal entanglement with an alcoholic,the moment when you tell him or her it's over: another drink and I'm done with you, another drink and I have no hope for you; another drink and you're dead to me because I'm moving on.The actual crises of the chronic alcoholic of the binge or constant variety are true sufferings, but the deepest cut and moral challenge befalls the outsider in taking the ultimate moral step of saving the lost soul by banishing it...ceasing to enable it...shutting down all sympathy and love because that's what the alcoholic needs and that's what the enabling outsider needs for either of them to survive beyond alcohol's grip.The Lost Weekend had a strong impact and Jackson went on to write a few more books of varying success before his addiction and TB combined to break up his late-life marriage and erratically reborn career. The book remains relevant even if it is medically somewhat off-the-mark, focusing more on the personality than the physiology. That said, we are living in an era of binge drinking at college that is no different from what Jackson describes, and this binge drinking goes on into the twenties and thirties and sometimes beyond. I always wince when I see a particular ad for alcohol that ends with the sweet warning, "Drink responsibly!" At best this is just alcohol venders trying to make sure they don't kill the goose that laid the golden egg. At worst it's hypocritical advice from friends who are no one's friends but their own. For more of my comments on contemporary literature and issues, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).
Charles Jackson's 1944 The Lost Weekend is a gripping probe into the mind of an alcoholic--the euphoria and the terror, the self-congratulation and the remorse, the understanding and the turning away. Really, as long as the term probe is used, one might reach next for lancet or scalpel, but of course such would not be fitting. These tools, after all, slice straight and clean, yet Jackson's artful third-person-limited prose and the artfully tipsy stagger of his plotting that hints, reveals, withholds, reveals in bits again is like a corkscrew, or perhaps some piece of fractal geometry that slithers into the corrugations of the brain, and somehow opens the gray matter up for inspection.Many are familiar with the film adaptation starring Ray Milland, which of course is superb for its day, but of course Jackson's original novel is better. Avoiding spoilers, let us just say...well, that the book may not be quite as cheery as the film, perhaps. Many memorable images and scenes from the movie indeed do come straight out of the text: the bottle on the string--but, oh, how long we will wait for this in the book!--the planned trip to the country with brother Wick, the disappointing of bar "hostess" Gloria, the endless sweating stagger to pawnshops closed for Yom Kippur, the woozily confident purse caper in the restaurant, the fall down the stairs and the meeting of the creepy, faintly predatory male nurse Bim, the delirum tremens-induced vision of squeaking, bleeding mouse devoured by carnivorous bat.Whereas Milland's character in his youth actually had been a promising writer, however, with a story published in the Atlantic Monthly, here Don Birnam is a nothing and a nobody. Oh, he had potential, certainly--everyone could see it. His second-grade teacher even wrote a gushing letter to Don's mother, saying that he was the brightest and most promising pupil she had ever had. At age ten the sensitive lad studied his face in the mirror as he cried at the realization that his father truly had abandoned the family and would never come back, and as a teenager he made it a point to write a poem every night, no matter how late he had to stay up. He knows his "Poe and Keats, Byron, Dawson, Chatterton--all the gifted miserable and reckless men who had burned themselves out in tragic brilliance early and with finality"--and this brand of genius of course has an allure to "[t]he romantic boy."Don did not have even a year in college--that little incident with an upperclassman in his fraternity, wherein seemingly natural hero-worship led to a letter rather too warm not to lead to scandal and disgrace with fortune and men's eyes. Nevertheless, he is well traveled and beautifully well read. Switzerland, France, England, Greenwich Village--been there. Shakespeare, Byron, Chekov, Joyce, Fitzgerald--read 'em. But he can imagine being a writer, and writing the great novel of drunkenness and promise and self-deception and revelation, only when half-soused...just as he imagines being a master concert pianist despite not yet having learned to play, or being a great actor despite never having performed, or professing to a class on F. Scott Fitzgerald despite not even having earned a B.A. degree. Many a film makes such alcoholic pretension seem humorous, but just as the Milland version does not, neither has the source novel. The ironies are sad and grim, the situation frustratingly inescapable.Jackson, then, is the great literary revealer that Don Birnam, regardless of his French and his German and his jaunty allusions to works up and down the canon, cannot be. How can a single drink just to start the fun lead to another of seemingly benign effect, then to a larger one, another taken in a gulp, and a few more no longer counted, as reason jumps by flea-hops from topic to topic, grows elliptical, finally sinks into the mire of a blackout? Jackson shows us, in a deeply introspective style that deftly pulls to the surface his central character's submerged motivations, his strengths, and his weaknesses with the same eye for detail that gives us an irresistible seven-page travelogue of the 65-block stagger lower, ever lower, through the socioeconomic strata of New York City. In the end it is Charles Jackson's gritty, forthright, and yet delicately rendered novel itself, not the actions of Don Birnam, that give any hope for the future.
Do You like book The Lost Weekend (1996)?
Perhaps instead of being titled The Lost Weekend, this book should have been titled The Lost Cause. If you're looking for a tale of someone falling into the depths of alcoholism and them coming out a changed and better person, look elsewhere, because here you will only find a tale of someone falling into the depths of alcoholism. Here there is no fulfilled redemption.So, why read the book?Don Birnam, the protagonist, though he displays a great deal of intelligence and self-awareness, very seldom surprises. He steals, neglects people, wastes money without remorse, and the reader always sees it coming. He is often despicable and self-serving despite his underlying sincerity, and the reader very seldom expects any change from him or finds himself sympathizing with him.So why read the book?His family and friends enable him, lending him money, allowing him to pawn off his possessions.So why...The reader may not be able to sympathize, but he or she can certainly empathize. Birnam may be abhorrent, but he knows that he is, and though the reader is seldom convinced that there is hope for him, Birnam is sometimes able to convince himself that there is hope but is ultimately powerless. It is this to which the reader can relate. The reader is also given further insight into the nature of alcoholism without being hit over the head with elements of victimization. In the end, though, it is Jackson's style that makes this such a great read— poetic yet still authentic and provocative.It is certainly not an uplifting book. Perhaps that is why I have decided to award it four stars instead of five.
—Tom Carson
I think this may be one of those examples where the film is better known and more celebrated than the book. In the past few months on GR I've seen several similar - didn't even know the film had been based on a book until the title popped up in the feed on here.
—Darran Mclaughlin
'Suppose a bottle should materialize before him full and unopened.' A classic literary trope, twisted upon the sole obsession of the writer. This is the kind of book we are dealing with here in 'The Lost Weekend.' Charles Jackson channels his alcoholic, autobiographical self into the character of Don Birnam, a writer with his Great Novel bursting from his creative pores but forever enslaved to the brutal booze. Whiskey is his undoing, and to escape it he plans on a family weekend in upstate New York with his brother and sister-in-law. However, Birnam loses his nerve at the last moment and begs off the trip, convincing his naive brother to allow him to stay in their Manhattan flat for the long weekend. Starting with a hidden cache of whiskey ('the emergency bottle'), Birnam embarks upon a stunning weekend of drunkenness, debauchery and self-hatred.Never mind the intricacies of the plot. 'The Lost Weekend' takes place over a period of four to five days, which finds Birnam perched upon the highs of a good drunk, spending his money and surrounded by friends, to the lows of suffering the shakes and screams of delirium tremens, admitted to Bellevue. What happens in between is not as important as the lessons imparted. This is Jackson's own voice talking here, in snippets and well observed asides. Jackson is undoubtedly a great writer, and his story compels us to consider the stunting effect that booze has had on his talents. Truly, the classic archetype of the sodden writer doesn't always produce a Hemingway or Fitzgerald. There must be thousands of Jackson's out there in the past and present.Jackson's own cynicism bites hard on the conscience of the reader. He is a brutal observer of human nature, and dissects the silliness of daily life like sashimi. For instance, as Birnam staggers through a bar, peering through a cloud of hazy smoke, broke and broken after being caught stealing a lady's handbag, he sneers at the 'dreamy tosspots ... they live in and search the past not to discover where and at what point they missed the boat but only to revel in the fancied and fanciful pleasures of a better happier and easier day; they eat of and are eaten by ennui, with no relief from boredom even in their periodic plunges from euphoria to despair or their rapid rise back to the top again. They wake up on mornings such as this, all but out of their minds with remorse." The everyday people, those who live and die without being remembered or cared for; they pass like ghosts through the drunken conscious mind of this failed writer. I can't say I haven't felt the same after too many drinks and drifting thought he foggy city at twilight. All people are ghosts at that hour, unreal and unbelievable. For an alcoholic however, reality is far better perceived through booze. It crystallizes and focuses the subject.The coup de grace of this novel arrives in the final unmerciful psychological dissection of the Birnam/Jackson. I suspect this was the entire reason for this novel: a therapeutic homeopathy. 'The Lost Weekend' doesn't stint in its disgust for Birnam's behavior, and because of that, it has become possibly he first literary portrait of the disgusting effects of alcoholism. Getting the shakes isn't a glamorous thing. Unlike the movie, however, Jackson's protagonist seems to be running away from a deeper identity issue: his own sexuality. There are only a handful of instances we can point to, but the implied homosexual tendencies of Birnam compel him to booze it up with increasing vigor, and a subtle come-on by a hospital worker seems to seal the deal, pushing Birnam over the edge. The worker says repeatedly, 'I know you.' Not in the personal sense, but in the secret sense. It is a rather disturbing episode, and no doubt it is mirrored in Jackson's own life somehow. Birnam's sad end is predicated with a hopeless self-understanding: 'He supposed he was only one of several million persons of his generation who had grown up and, somewhere around thirty, made the upsetting discovery that life wasn't going to pan out the way you'd always expected it would; and why this realization should have thrown him and not then - or not too many o them - was something he couldn't fathom... Adulthood came through with none of the pledges you'd been led somehow to believe in; the future still remained the future - illusion: a non-existent period of a constantly-receding promise, hinting fulfillment yet forever withholding the rewards. All the things that had never happened yet were never going to happen after all.' It is an utterly painful moment, and ironically brought Jackson a lot of the success that he seemed to give up on.This is a highly recommended book, and it is a fast read. It is best experienced while you put yourself in the mindset of 1950's noir, in a dark and damp New York City. It can be a very alienating place.
—Shivesh
