SOURCE: "After the Lost Generation: The Lost Weekend," in The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction, University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, pp. 135-57.

[In the following essay, Crowley examines Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend (1944) as indicative of a shift away from the modernist perspective of alcoholism as a sign of the modern distemper and toward the concept of drunkenness as symptomatic of a disease.]

When The Lost Weekend appeared in January 1944, Malcolm Lowry had been toiling for nearly a decade over successive drafts of Under the Volcano (1947), the magnum opus on which he had pinned his hopes of literary immortality. For Lowry, the true originality of this work consisted in his use of an alcoholic as a representative man, a symbol of the tragic modern condition. He was understandably devastated by the pre-emptive publication of Charles Jackson's novel, with its unprecedented account of a binge from the drinker's point of view, and envious of its clamorous reception: critical praise, bestseller popularity, a lucrative Hollywood contract. An out-standing film adaptation of The Lost Weekend was subsequently honored at the first Cannes Film Festival and awarded Oscars for best picture, best screenplay, best director (Billy Wilder), and best actor (Ray Milland).

Lowry's work was always inseparable from his life, and he inevitably transformed into fiction his resentment of Jackson as a fortunate rival who had stolen his thunder and blighted his dreams of success. Sigbjørn Wilderness in Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid is shocked to hear about a hit movie based on a novel called Drunkard's Rigadoon. His wife, who has been shielding him from the bad news, attempts to offer consolation: "It's purely a clinical study; it's only a small part of yours.… It could be anything else, not drinking.… Let him have his little triumph. When there's so much more in your book." But Wilderness recognizes that his novel cannot now escape seeming derivative, no matter how much "more " it may contain.

It had meant everything to him, the writing of The Valley of the Shadow of Death, the feeling of turning his greatest weakness—he loathed the phrase—into his greatest strength … the feeling that he, who up to that time had been haunted by the suspicion that he would never write anything original, that he was destined to copy all his life, had sunk his teeth into that appalling theme, that he was breaking not merely new ground, but building a terra nova, achieving something that was unique, in a sort of ultima thule of the spirit. And now … he would merely be told, as he had already been as much as told by his agent and the two American publishers who had so far rejected it, that—and had they stopped to think they must have known it could not have been so—it was merely a copy of Drunkard's Rigadoon!

In a letter to Jonathan Cape, one of the rejecting publishers, Lowry confessed that he regarded The Lost Weekend "as a form of punishment," as retribution for sins against his own artistic talent and integrity: "Youth plus booze plus hysterical identifications plus vanity plus self-deception plus no work plus more booze."

Booze eventually destroyed Malcolm Lowry, but in the long run of literary history, Under the Volcano has fared much better than The Lost Weekend. In retrospect, it seems that Lowry worked himself up over nothing. The very popularity of Jackson's novel should have assured him that it could not pose any threat to the ultimate triumph of his own with readers of discriminating taste—taste molded by the prevailing climate of modernism to favor dense and esoterically symbolic novels like Under the Volcano over readable and unpretentiously realistic ones like The Lost Weekend. Whereas the former has inspired adulation befitting a literary "terra nova" or an "ultima thule of the spirit," the latter has slipped from view except by association with the classic film. Virtually nothing has been written on Jackson's work since the initial reviews of his four novels and two collections of stories. No biography exists, and little personal information is available.

Born 6 April 1903, in Summit, New Jersey, Charles Reginald Jackson grew up in Newark, New York, a village east of Rochester. His closest companion from child-hood onward was his younger brother, Frederick, who was a model for Wick, the alcoholic Don Birnam's brother in The Lost Weekend. Another brother and sister were killed in an auto accident when Charles was thirteen; his father left home when he was twelve. After graduating from high school in 1921, Jackson worked as a reporter for the Newark Courier and, later, as a book-store clerk in Chicago and New York. He also attended Syracuse University for two semesters. After the onset of tuberculosis in 1927, he was medically confined for several years. Along with his brother, who too was infected, he sought treatment at the sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, that had provided Thomas Mann with the setting for The Magic Mountain (1924). While a patient there from 1929 to 1931, Jackson developed a drinking problem through the use of alcohol as a painkiller.

Living in New York City during the Depression, Jackson could not find steady work, and his drinking grew unremittingly worse until November 1936, when he checked into Bellevue Hospital. There in the alcoholic ward, where street drunks deposited by the police often served as experimental subjects as they dried out, Jackson's physician was Norman Jolliffe, a physiologist who had undertaken a longterm study of "the etiology of chronic inebriety." After Jackson sobered up, he found a job with the Columbia Broadcasting System, where he wrote radio plays, both originals and adaptations, as well as the daytime serial, "Sweet River." In 1938, he married Rhoda Booth, a staff writer at Fortune who, like Helen in The Lost Weekend, had been steadfast during the worst of the drinking. The next year he went freelance, continuing to produce successful scripts while teaching radio writing at New York University.

Always a voracious reader, Jackson had conducted his own literary education during his prolonged convalescence, and he had also begun writing fiction—all of which remained unpublished until two of his stories were accepted by the Partisan Review in 1939. The same year, he began an autobiographical novel about an alcoholic binge, and he finished the first draft in fourteen months. Four years later, the overnight success of The Lost Weekend put Jackson in the limelight. Critics raved; sales boomed; Hollywood beckoned. In April 1944, he began a sixteen-week contract as a screenwriter for Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and his earnings of $1,000 a week allowed him to buy a splendid colonial farmhouse in Orford, New Hampshire, where he lived with his wife and two daughters for the next decade. Jackson's success as a writer carried him through the 1940s. His second novel, The Fall of Valor (1946), a frank exploration of homosexuality, was respectfully reviewed and widely circulated by the book clubs; his short stories were selling briskly to mass-market magazines.

Jackson's third novel, The Outer Edges (1948), was less favorably received, however, and by 1950, he was running heavily into debt. Although Jackson had quit drinking in 1936, he remained dependent on sedatives (mainly Secanol) to break through writer's block and to keep his inspiration flowing. The strain of revising The Fall of Valor led to a spell of mental exhaustion in 1945, and to a jag on drugs early the following year. In July 1947, during another such binge, Jackson started drinking beer as well as taking drugs. Early in 1951, his relapses became more serious and more chronic, as he resumed periodic heavy drinking after fifteen years of nearly complete abstinence. He quickly spiraled downward, and after a suicide attempt in 1952, he was readmitted to Bellevue. Jackson did not recover his stability until he entered a clinic for alcoholism in the summer of 1953 and joined Alcoholics Anonymous upon his release.

Sober again but frozen in a writer's block, Jackson saw his productivity drop off and his celebrity fade. Having ceased to publish much fiction, he sold used cars to make a living. The Jacksons were forced to sell their Orford farm in 1954, and they moved to a rented house in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. In his later years, Jackson again worked for the broadcasting industry—as a television script editor—and he remained very active in A.A. After a long absence from the literary scene, he attempted a come-back in 1967 with A Second-Hand Life, a novel he had started in the early 1950s. The book enjoyed good sales, but it fizzled critically. The following year, his health deteriorating, Jackson ended his own life with an overdose of sleeping pills. At the time of his death, he was writing a sequel to The Lost Weekend.

Despite Jackson's present obscurity, The Lost Weekend remains a compelling novel fifty years after its first publication. Its title has passed into the American vernacular, and its portrait of the alcoholic has lost none of its psychological acuity. In addition to literary merit, The Lost Weekend has historical importance for making a major shift in the representation of alcoholism in American literature. Although the novel owes an obvious debt to Tender Is the Night—which Don Bimani considers, despite its failures, to be "the most brilliant and heartbreaking performance … in recent fiction"—it neither denies the alcoholism of its protagonist nor elevates him into a culture hero. "We are far from the romantic drinkers of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald," as Edmund Wilson says of Birnam. "The man himself is dreary in the extreme."

The man's existence during a five-day bender—the novel was originally titled "The Long Weekend"—is also extremely dreary. As Birnam drinks his way through bottle after bottle, worrying constantly about his supply and borrowing booze money at every turn (but always losing track of it), he inflicts awful damage on himself and those who care about him. An intelligent, charming, and decent man when sober, Don is transmogrified by alcohol into a scheming liar who ruthlessly exploits his well-meaning brother and long-suffering girl friend, a petty thief who cleverly (he thinks) steals a purse but humiliatingly gets caught, and a sodden bar-fly who laments his nonexistent wife's "frigidity" as he angles for a date with the hostess and then forgets about it in a blackout. Having finished off the whiskey on Friday night, he is desperate for a Saturday morning eye-opener, and he rushes out to raise a stake by pawning his typewriter—only to discover, after walking block after block for miles, that he is the butt of a joke "beyond laughter" (p. 109): every pawn shop in New York is closed for Yom Kippur! When Birnam reaches the stumble-drunk stage, he topples down the stairs and wakes up in the hospital with a fractured skull. The next day, as his binge is finally winding down, he must endure the torments of delirium tremens: a horrific hallucination of a bat devouring a mouse.

At the end, Don feels ready nonetheless for another "spell of riot" (p. 3) [All citations from The Lost Weekend, Farrar and Rinehart, 1944]. As he hides pint bottles about the apartment, making careful allowance for the loss of those his brother will likely find and confiscate, Don reassures himself that his lost weekend couldn't have been so bad as all that; he has survived it, after all. "God knows why or how but he had come through one more. No telling what might happen the next time but why worry about that? This one was over and nothing had happened at all. Why did they make such a fuss?" (p. 244). Don is trapped by such denial in an alcoholic's vicious circle; his prospects are bleak, his situation seems hopeless.

In its stark realism about what Lowry called "the calamitous suffering drink [can] cause to the drinker," The Lost Weekend resembles Under the Volcano; but Jackson does not partake, as Lowry does, of the modernist spirit(s) of the White Logic. It is Jackson's refusal to amplify his material—to extrapolate from one drunkard's downfall to a symbolic utterance about the Tragedy of Life or the Decline of the West—that distinguishes The Lost Weekend from such grandiose modernist masterpieces as Under the Volcano. The force of Lowry's novel is centrifugal; it spins outward from its center (the Consul), traversing the cosmos as it accumulates layer upon layer of Higher Meaning. The force of The Lost Weekend, on the contrary, is centripetal; it turns in on itself toward a purposefully reductive focus on drinking, unadorned by any larger significance. Why, Birnam wonders at one point, are there so many kind and faithful women who get themselves mixed up with hopeless drunks?

But from there you went on to: 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 alcoholic?—And from there, the next one was: Why did you drink?

Like the others, the question was rhetorical, abstract, anything but pragmatic; as vain to ask as his own clever question had been vain. It was far too late to pose such a problem with any reasonable hope for an answer—or, an answer forthcoming, any reasonable hope that it would be worth listening to or prove anything at all. It had long since ceased to matter Why. You were a drunk; that's all there was to it. You drank; period. (pp. 221-22)

With tough-minded pragmatism, The Lost Weekend renounces … abstract and rhetorical inflation of drunkenness.… Jackson, in fact, lampoons this sort of thing in a passage where Birnam the frustrated writer ("the books begun and dropped, the unfinished short stories; the drinking the drinking the drinking" [p. 17]) is inspired with an idea for a modernist masterpiece as he leans on the bar, gazing at himself in the mirror and recalling the literary idols of his childhood ("Poe and Keats, Byron, Dowson, Chatterton—all the gifted miserable and reckless men who had burned themselves out in tragic brilliance early and with finality" [pp. 15-16]). The story of his own miserably drunken life, he suddenly realizes, could be "a classic of form and content" on the artistic order of Death in Venice (p. 16). First the perfect title ("In a Glass") leaps to mind, and then the entire book marvelously unfolds before him:

At this moment, if he were able to write fast enough, he could set it down in all its final perfection, right down without a change or cor-rection needed later, from the brilliant opening to the last beautiful note of wise and grave irony.… Whole sentences sprang to his mind in dazzling succession, perfectly formed, ready to be put down. Where was a pencil, paper? He downed his drink.…

But caution, slow. Good thing there was no paper handy, no chance to begin impulsively what later must be composed—when, tonight maybe, certainly tomorrow—with all the calm and wise control needed for such an undertaking, (pp. 16-17)

Needless to say, Don will be too drunk either tonight or tomorrow for any literary work, if he should even happen to remember what came to him so effortlessly on a bar stool. But the fantasy spins itself out. Already, he can see the pyramidal stacks of copies in the bookshop window; he can hear a puzzled girl in the subway paying him inadvertent but profound tribute by confessing to a friend, "I can't make head or tail of this"; he can savor the bewilderment of his hopelessly ignorant mother, who will regret "the fact that he hadn't published a book she could show the neighbors and why didn't he write something that had 'human interest'" (p. 18). But then a wave of self-disgust crashes over Birnam, and he dismisses "In a Glass" as "so much eyewash": "How could he have been seduced, fooled, into dreaming up such a ridiculous piece; in perpetrating, even in his imagination, anything so pat, so contrived, so cheap, so phoney, so adolescent, so (crowning offense) sentimental!" (p. 18).

But caution, slow! Now the final page appears in Birnam's mind's eye as "clear and true as if he had seen it in print." Yes! Something in the vein of Thomas Mann, but with an ending straight out of Hemingway: with a wise and gravely ironic tagline worthy of "Isn't it pretty to think so?":

The hero, after the long procession of motley scenes from his past life (would the line stretch out to th' crack of doom?)—the hero decides to walk out of the bar and somewhere, somehow, that very day—not for himself, of course: for Helen—commit suicide. The tag: "It would give her a lifelong romance." Perfect; but not—oh more perfect still—was the line that came next, the new ending: the little simple line set in a paragraph all by itself beneath the other, on the last page:

"But he knew he wouldn't." (p. 18)

Of course, "In a Glass" parodies The Lost Weekend itself insofar as it recalls The Sun Also Rises, Tender Is the Night, and other modernist drunk narratives. Jackson pointedly calls this genre into question by mocking its bombast and complacency. Later in the novel, once again standing at a bar, Birnam drunkenly wallows in his immense affinity for the White Logic:

Was there a limit to what he could endure? It seemed not. He was more vulnerable to suffering—and at the same time, paradoxically, he had a greater capacity for it—than anyone he knew; and this was no idle or egotistic boast, something he merely fancied to be true and was proud of because it set him apart, spoke of a superior sensitivity or sensibility. An occasion or period of suffering in his past which, reckoned now in perspective, was a mere incident, one out of many in a long chain, would have stood out in the average life as a major crisis, perhaps indeed the only one, a moment where the victim had reached a peak or depth from which recovery was a lifelong process. But such moments, such peaks and depths, were his very pattern—natural, it seemed, perhaps even necessary, to his development. Why had he not been destroyed by all that happened to him? How is it he could take it over and over again and yet again? What capacity, vitality, or resilience did he have that others did not? Was it that his imagination laid hold of that suffering and transmuted it to experience, an experience he did not profit from, true, but experience all the same: a realization of who and what he was, a fulfillment of self? Was he trying to find out, in this roundabout descent to destruction, what it was all about; and would he, at the final and ultimate moment, know? (Pp. 201-2)

In a review of The Lost Weekend, Edmund Wilson singled out this interior monologue as the novel's "most revealing passage," characterizing it as a "curious perverse meditation in which the hero justifies his drinking to himself as a purposive way of life with a special kind of moral dignity." A special kind of moral dignity? Or a typically alcoholic kind of bloated self-pity? Wilson fails to note that a sober Don Birnam later castigates himself for what he regards as a shameful indulgence in egoism. "Some minor incident of suffering in his past would have stood out in the average life as a major crisis—he had actually thought and said to himself some such thing as that. How true could it be?" (p. 219).

Jackson suggests that truth for Birnam is relative to his sobriety. When he is drunk, Don's imagination heightens minor incidents into calamities, making them "greater in retrospect than they ever were at the time"; and he easily forgets that "what happened to him was no greater or no worse than what happened to everybody else." Other people suffered, "but did their self-centeredness, their self-absorption and preoccupation with self, magnify their troubles or experiences out of all proportion to the actuality and blind them to the fact that trouble was the lot of all?" (p. 219). When Don is sober, however, remorse drives him to the other extreme of self-contempt. Even as he berates himself, he knows that "this chastisement and searching of self" is "all merely part of his present low and depleted state, symptomatic of his physical condition only, and that tomorrow or next week he would bounce right back, all ego again" (pp. 219-20).

Built on a series of such interior monologues, The Lost Weekend is, as Roger Forseth remarks [in Dionysus, 3 (Spring 1991)], "psychologically exact in remaining largely in the mind of the alcoholic, for that is always where the alcoholic is." In this and other ways, the novel gives "the alcoholic stripped to the essentials" and captures "in amber the clinically defined disease of alcoholism." The oscillation so evident in Birnam between self-absorption and self-contempt, between inflation and deflation of the ego, might be taken as a psychological characteristic of alcoholics. Thus although the novel is not, as Lowry suggested, "purely a clinical study," it does have a didactic dimension that links it to temperance fiction of the nineteenth century. Whether intended by Jackson or not, one effect of The Lost Weekend, both as fiction and as film, was to inform the public about "alcoholism" by disclosing the inside story from the perspective of the "alcoholic" himself.

These terms were becoming more and more common in ordinary usage by the time The Lost Weekend appeared, mainly through the success of what historians have called the "Alcoholism Movement" in recasting American attitudes toward habitual drunkenness. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, as Bruce H. Johnson observes, a new consensus took shape as "the traditional moralistic interpretations of this form of deviant behavior were abandoned in favor of a 'scientific' or medical point of view according to which the chronic drunkard is the victim of a physiological or psychological aberration." This transformation of public opinion was accomplished, with remarkable efficiency, by a relatively small band of dedicated campaigners associated with a trio of allied institutions with overlapping memberships and interlocking purposes: Alcoholics Anonymous, the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism (later renamed the National Council on Alcoholism), and the Yale Center for Studies of Alcohol (later renamed the Yale Center of Alcohol Studies).

During its first decade (1935 to 1945), Alcoholics Anonymous branched out from its two original groups in New York and Akron, Ohio, to several other cities; and membership rose exponentially from its founding partners (William Griffith Wilson, a.k.a. "Bill W." and Robert Holbrook Smith, a.k.a. "Dr. Bob") to include a few dozen and then about 15,000 persons, nearly all of them white, middle-class men. Thanks in large part to extensive and favorable press coverage, the A.A. fellowship mushroomed to over 100,000 members by 1951. Much of this coverage was generated and orchestrated by Marty Mann, founder of the N.C.E.A., who combined a genius for public relations with an ambition to proselytize for the "disease" concept of alcoholism she had encountered in A.A. (Having first joined in 1939, she became the first female member to remain sober.) Although Mann officially dissociated herself and the N.C.E.A. from A.A., her mission was to develop the grass-roots organization needed to spread the fellowship's message. The academic wing of the Alcoholism Movement, which revolved around the research center created at Yale by Howard W. Haggard and Elvin Morton Jellinek, maintained a dispassionately scientific distance from the more fervent elements of the coalition. But the goal was much the same: to detach the study and perception of habitual drunkenness from the moral frame of reference associated with temperance and Prohibition.

The planks of the Alcoholism Movement's platform, already nailed down by the late 1930s, were that alcoholism is an illness rather than a failure of character and, therefore, a medical rather than a moral issue; that treatment of alcoholism is a public health imperative; and that, fortunately, complete rehabilitation is possible if the alcoholic is placed in competent hands. In one 1938 magazine article, "an eminent physician" was deferentially quoted (in italics, no less) as he put the weight of his medical authority behind the new common sense:

"Alcoholism," he insists, "is not a vice but a disease. The alcoholic is not a moral weakling. He is tragically ill with a mental malady. If taken in time he can often be cured. The spread of the disease can be stemmed and turned back, but only with the aid of the doctors and the psychologists who have made it their field of research and experiment. To try to do so by sumptuary laws [i.e. Prohibition] is like trying to cure and prevent tuberculosis with a cough-drop."

The visibility and respectability gained by the allied organizations of the Alcoholism Movement reflected one of its major goals: not only to promote a medicalized understanding of alcoholism, but also to create an improved image for the alcoholic—one commensurate with the perception of a post-Prohibition increase of problem drinking within the American middle class. By the 1940s, as ever more such families were affected by habitual drunkenness, the public became receptive to the idea, as Johnson says, that if "well educated, industrious members of the upwardly-mobile middle class could succumb to [the] ravages of habitual drunkenness," then perhaps "problem drinking was not merely a matter of weak will-power and moral degeneracy." Not surprisingly, the temperance stereotype of the drunkard as a skid-row derelict gradually gave way to a far more sympathetic view as the N.C.E.A. disseminated "the image of the alcoholic as a hard-working business executive who was the unfortunate victim of a disease" that strikes indiscriminately at every social level.

As articulated by E. M. Jellinek, the acknowledged spokesman for the Yale Center, the new paradigm of alcoholism posited a sharp distinction between "normal" drinkers and "alcoholics," whose addiction was evinced by an intense craving for drink and a complete loss of control over drinking. Alcohol, that is, was seen to be addictive only for a certain group: those who developed an increased tolerance, who experienced withdrawal symptoms if they tried to quit drinking, and who exhibited bodily deterioration as a result of heavy and habitual consumption. The "disease" of alcoholism was thought to be progressive (it moved from psychological to physiological dependence) and irreversible (the alcoholic could never safely return to normal drinking). The only effective treatment, according to the Alcoholism Movement, was lifelong abstinence.

Except for its absolute distinction between alcoholics and normal drinkers—a distinction that won the praise and support of the liquor industry for locating addiction in the person rather than the substance—the modern disease model offered little that was new. Its major ideas were derived from the Victorian concept of inebriety and a wealth of scientific investigations dating from the late nineteenth century. Jellinek himself first came into prominence through his work of digesting and summarizing all of the old published research on drinking and drunkenness. The new paradigm was, in essence, a triumph of publicity and conceptual packaging. "What was scientific about the disease concept of alcoholism besides its articulation by scientists is … not apparent," one historian drily observes. "Neither of its key terms—alcoholism and disease—was clearly or consistently defined.… Nor were any of its key propositions supported by controlled empirical research." Jellinek himself later retreated from his own theories. And by the 1950s, several of the scientists associated with the Alcoholism Movement were troubled by a continuing lack of validation: "In spite of all the propaganda that had been distributed, the scientific evidence supporting the disease concept was extremely tenuous."

Written when the disease concept was still rapidly gaining adherents, Jackson's novel had a symbiotic relationship with the Alcoholism Movement. Early in 1944, according to Ernest Kurtz, a Hollywood producer sought the help of Alcoholics Anonymous in making a feature "that would dramatize A.A.'s understanding of alcoholism." This project became superfluous in view of the 1945 Paramount film of The Lost Weekend, for which director Billy Wilder requested A.A. literature "to assist in the movie production." At about the same time, Jackson's publisher, Stanley M. Rinehart, wrote to Bill Wilson, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, to announce the imminent publication of The Lost Weekend and to request "A.A.'s help in promoting the book." That Rinehart sought such an endorsement (which was not granted) shows that the novel's success was perceived to depend in part on the favor of A.A. But successful propagation of the disease concept was likewise perceived by the Alcoholism Movement to depend in part on the public's reaction to a story that had potential to transform the common understanding of alcoholism.

After the movie version was released late in November 1945, it was anxiously reviewed in the Yale Center's journal by Selden D. Bacon, a prominent researcher. Because Americans were, in Bacon's judgment, "poorly informed and at the same time easily excited about excessive drinking as a moral problem," the impact of The Lost Weekend could be extremely damaging insofar as the film (which was seen to follow the book "quite closely") misled audiences into believing that all alcoholics are like Don Birnam, that anyone who drinks might become like him, that the alcoholic's prognosis is hopeless, and that "hospitals and doctors are not only useless for this condition, but are, in addition, heartless, inefficient and horrendous." What was sorely needed, Bacon insisted, was a "rational solution of the problems of alcohol," a solution based on a sound "medical viewpoint" that had not yet fully crystallized, despite the best efforts of scientific authorities. Unfortunately, the public "does not regard the Don Birnams as ill men engulfed in their habit because of their illness, and needing good medical care, not moral suasion or moral damnation. The serious student of alcoholism has tried earnestly to get public recognition of the fact that the alcoholic is an ill man; The Lost Weekend will not further, but will obstruct, this recognition."

In a later issue of the same journal, however, a psychology instructor at New York University reported that the film did not, as Bacon had feared, leave audiences with the impression that alcoholism was "hopeless and incurable." On the contrary, in a poll of 116 undergraduate students, a large majority (78%) answered "yes" to the question: "Do you think that 'The Lost Weekend' portrayed the alcoholic as an individual who is ill and requires specialized treatment?" That is, student perceptions of the movie were in accord with the Alcoholism Movement's view that "the alcoholic is ill and needs therapy."

Jackson came by his own knowledge of the disease concept directly. The Lost Weekend was based largely on his own textbook case, including his experiences at Bellevue and with private psychiatrists. Although Jackson did not join A.A. until ten years after the novel appeared, he was acquainted with the fellowship while writing it in the early 1940s. The Lost Weekend subtly incorporates A.A. ideas, sometimes in echoes or paraphrases of program sayings—as in the scene in which Birnam appears to have "hit bottom" (A.A. lingo for the moment when the alcoholic becomes fully and honestly aware of his powerlessness over alcohol). Don seems at last to be breaking through his denial as he casts aside his excuses for drinking:

To hell with the causes—absent father, fraternity shock, too much mother, too much money, or the dozen other reasons you fell back on to justify yourself. They counted for nothing 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. Why? Because you had reached the point where one drink was too many and a hundred not enough. (p. 222)

The last sentence is a familiar A.A. slogan, and the entire passage expresses the pragmatic spirit of the Alcoholism Movement; its bias toward effects rather than causes, its concern with remedies rather than etiologies.

As an intellectual, Don Birnam can't help being fascinated, however, by psychological theories about drinking—particularly by the psychoanalytic notion that alcoholism and homosexuality are closely related. Birnam recurs several times to his bad experience with "the foolish psychiatrist" who dwelt on Don's homosexual experiences in childhood. He soon discovered that "he knew more about the subject, more about pathology, certainly more about himself and what made him tick, than the doctor" (p.53). But although Birnam rejects psychoanalytic theory as mumbo jumbo, he has nevertheless been influenced by the doctor's point of view, if only as something to resist.

The Lost Weekend was written when psychoanalysis had its greatest sway in the field of alcoholism studies and treatment. A linkage between "alcoholism" and "homosexuality," both of which terms came into clinical use at the end of the nineteenth century under the aegis of psychiatry, was hypothesized in Karl Abraham's pioneering study of 1908. Abraham claimed that alcohol "stimulates the 'complex' of masculinity" because "respect for prowess in drinking is closely bound up with respect for sexual prowess." The man who does not drink "is accounted a weakling." But alcohol also loosens the mental inhibition of same-sexual libido: "When drinking, men fall on each other's necks and kiss one another: they feel that they are united by peculiarly intimate ties and this moves them to tears and to intimate modes of address." Therefore, he reasoned, "every drinking bout is tinged with homosexuality. The homosexual component-instincts, which education has taught us to repress and sublimate, reappear in no veiled form under the influence of alcohol."

Abraham's standing as Freud's loyal lieutenant gave added weight to his theories; the idea that alcoholics are "latent homosexuals" gained immediate acceptance in psychoanalytic circles and reechoed in the broader medical literature throughout the 1930s. Consider, for example, an important paper by Robert P. Knight, an American psychiatrist of the Freudian persuasion, delivered at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Knight agreed with Abraham that excessive drinking signifies "the regressive acting out of unconscious libidinal and sadistic drives"; that alcoholics exhibit a "strong homosexual conflict," which often results in "a conscious or almost conscious fear of being regarded effeminate"; that alcoholics mask their "spurious masculinity" with alcoholic fellowship, finding that "it is regarded as not grown up, as 'sissyfied', not to drink, and that to drink heavily and 'hell around' with the boys is regarded as proof of manliness and potency." From his analysis of ten cases, Knight offered the additional (and tentative) generalization that alcoholics commonly have a family background in which "an over-indulgent, over-protective" mother is combined with a "cold and unaffectionate" father who is alternately severe and indulgent. This parental constellation was often identified by psychoanalysts in the 1930s as characteristic as well of homosexuals.

Two years after Knight's paper, in a book aimed at the general reader, two non-analytic experts acknowledged that "unquestionably, repressed homosexuality may be found at the roots of alcoholic addiction." They also asserted, however, that "our experience does not justify any sweeping statement concerning a basic homosexual trend as the cause of alcoholism." And by the 1940s, even some psychoanalysts were beginning to question the orthodox view. In a clinical study published the same year as The Lost Weekend (a study that cited the novel as an informed source), Edmund Bergler reiterated the conventional Freudian wisdom on the regressive nature of excessive drinking: the alcoholic as a fixated "oral" type who acts out sado-masochistic fantasies through the substitution of the bottle for the breast, etc. But in referring to the opinion that "the disease reveals unconscious homosexual tendencies," Bergler saw no necessary linkage. Also in 1944, at the summer seminar on alcoholism sponsored by the Yale Center, Carney Landis drew similar conclusions about the claim that "the psychic reason for alcohol addiction is the incomplete repressed homosexuality which the individual cannot sublimate." Noting recent findings that "the occurrence of overt homosexuality is much more prevalent than was hitherto believed," Landis asserted that "homosexuality is an independent personality factor which is not necessarily associated with other forms of personality disorder, neurosis, psychosis or addiction."

Set in 1936, the year Jackson himself sought treatment for his drinking, The Lost Weekend follows the Freudian line on alcoholism he had encountered through his reading and in psychoanalysis. One of Jackson's sources, as the manuscript of the novel reveals, was Karl Menninger's influential book on the modes of human self-destructiveness, Man Against Himself (1938), which contains a chapter on "alcohol addiction" as a form of "chronic suicide." Like Robert P. Knight, who was also associated with the Menninger Clinic, Menninger regarded excessive drinking as symptomatic of an underlying neurosis involving psychosexual fixation and latent homosexuality: "It is almost axiomatic that alcoholics in spite of a great show of heterosexual activity, have secretly a great fear of women and of heterosexuality in general, apparently regarding it as fraught with much danger."

Throughout The Lost Weekend, Don Birnam is shown to be both wary of heterosexuality and terrified of homo-sexuality. He recalls a lover once demanding to know, "'Why do you only come to bed with me when you are drunk?" She had not been mollified by his glib reply: "Because I'm always drunk!" (p. 186). As "the foolish psychiatrist" would have insisted, Don's problem lies deeper than that: in his childhood abandonment by his father; in his adolescent fantasies, during masturbation, of his friend's father rather than of Gertrude Hort, a voluptuous girl his own age; in his traumatic experience as a college fraternity pledge, when he developed a "passionate hero-worship" for an upperclassman that "led, like a fatal infatuation, to scandal and public disgrace, because no one had understood or got the story straight" (pp. 48-49). Kicked out of the Kappa U house, Don crept home to nurse psychic wounds that have never completely healed. Years later, when he happens to encounter the man who had filled his abandoned slot in Kappa U, Don is still paralyzed by dread.

This encounter itself, which revives all of Birnam's sexual fear and ambivalence, reads as if Jackson had tailored it to fit the theories of his analysts. Birnam recalls the scene—a Greenwich Village bar—in one of his drunken reveries. A handsome young man had been standing silently beside him; just as Don was about to leave, the man offered to buy him a drink. Don immediately sensed (but did not acknowledge to himself) homoerotic overtones: the hint of a homosexual overture, simultaneously enhanced and veiled by the presence of alcohol and the bar-room practice of treating:

He looked a little worried; also faintly belligerent; the frown challenged Don not to misunderstand the impulse which prompted the invitation. Don got it at once; and as he recognized, like a veteran before a neophyte, the stage of drinking the other had reached—the confidential, the confiding stage—he began to feel superior, amused, tolerant, generous, and warmly friendly himself. "Why, thank you very much," he said with a smile. "And then perhaps you'll have one with me."…

"You probably wonder why I did that," Brad said.

"No I don't, at all." Don smiled to reassure him.

"I'm staying up late tonight and I feel like talking to somebody."

"I understand." Oh, he understood. How many times indeed, under just such circumstances, in just such places, had he been in on conversations of just this sort. That familiar opening line: it was the prelude to who knew what confidences—boring, very likely; nothing to confide about; intimate but unrevealing and finally elusive or even resentful. (Pp. 84-85)

Unlike his erstwhile fraternity brothers, Don understands that man-to-man intimacy, especially the kind inspired by alcohol, need not imply anything unmanly. Brad's familiar opening line is taken as a prelude not to sex, but to talk—and boring talk at that. Don has no more patience for boozy confidences than for homosexuals, such as the pianist at Jack's place—a "fattish baby-faced young man: Dannie or Billy or Jimmie or Hughie somebody," who sings leeringly suggestive lyrics to songs like "The 23rd Street Ferry" and "Peter and the Dyke" in which "camping, queen, faggot, meat were words frequently played upon" (p.28). Birnam's homophobic disdain extends even to his taste in bookbinding! He shudders to recall the Elbert Hubbard volumes in his father's library: "the sickeningly limp-leather Roycroft books that almost gave you the creeps to hold" (p. 148).

Don's heterosexual identity depends on his conscious revulsion from homosexuality. But he also conforms to the psychoanalytic profile of the alcoholic; unconsciously attracted to other men, he is "latently homosexual." This hidden truth becomes all-too-painfully clear when Birnam is accosted in the hospital by Bim, the insolently coquettish nurse, who contemptuously struts around the ward, purrs like Marlene Dietrich (p. 129), and makes Don—whom he flirtingly addresses as "Baby"—feel like Pola Negri being mentally undressed by "a lecherous Prussian officer in some ancient film" (p. 134):

Here was the daydream turned inside-out; a projection, in reverse, of the wishful and yearning fancy; the back of the picture, the part always turned to the wall. The flower of the ingrown seed he had in him was here shown in unhealthy bloom, ad terrorem and ad nauseam. It was aspiration in its raw and naked state, aspiration un-ennobled, a lapse of nature as bizarre and undeniable as the figures of his imagined life were deniable, bizarre, beyond reach. All that he wanted to become and, in his fanciful world, became, was here represented in throwback. He himself stood midway between the ideal and this—as far from the one as from the other. But oh, too—oh, too!—as far from the other as from the one. If he was uncomfortable in Bim's stifling presence, did he not also have reason to be comforted? Or was midway, nothing—nothing at all? (P. 135)

In accordance with psychoanalytic theory, Don understands his own alcoholism to be akin to Bim's homosexuality in the sense that both are atavistic slippages from an evolutionary (Social Darwinian) ideal: outcroppings of a "bizarre" and disgustingly animal nature that falls far short of the spiritual heights; in short, a nightmarish "inversion" of the artist's imaginative daydream. Don takes comfort—comfort that seems also to be a form of denial—in thinking that whatever his kinship to Bim may be, he still holds a higher place on the evolutionary ladder, and he is far more secure in his manliness.

This idea is developed a few pages later, as Don belatedly formulates a response to what Bim whispered to him as he was leaving the hospital: "Listen, baby.… I know you" (p. 139):

He was aware, as Bim was, of the downward path he was on; he knew himself well enough to know and admit that Bim had every reason to say what he said—but only insofar as Bim saw, in him, the potential confederate that was every alcoholic: the fellow bogged down in adolescence; the guy off his track, off his trolley; the man still unable to take, at thirty-three or -six or -nine, the forward step he had missed in his 'teens; the poor devil demoralized and thrown off balance by the very stuff intended to restore his frightened or baffled ego; the gent jarred loose into unsavory bypaths that gave him the shudders to think of but which were his natural habitat and inevitable home so long as drink remained the modus operandi of his life.… (P. 144)

Yes, Birnam allows, the alcoholic and the homosexual are both cases of arrested development; stuck in adolescence, neither can be fully a man. But "the trouble with homos," Don thinks, is that in their eagerness to embrace their own kind, in their knowing glances of recognition, they smugly assume too much: "They were always so damned anxious to suspect every guy they couldn't make of merely playing hard-to-get; so damned anxious to believe that their own taint was shared by everybody else" (p. 145). Bim, with "the bright eye of his kind," keenly observes the potential "homo" in Don. But what he fails to see is "that the alcoholic was not himself, able to choose his own path, and therefore the kinship he seemed to reveal was incidental, accidental, transitory at best. If the drunk had been himself he would not be a drunk and potential brother in the first place" (p. 144).

Such passages raise interpretive difficulties, some of which are inherent to Jackson's narrative technique—in which the narrator hovers near Don Birnam, the Jamesian center of consciousness, reporting both his words and his private thoughts (in free indirect discourse), while also keeping some ironic distance from him. But how much distance? How credible or reliable are Don Birnam's opinions meant to be? On the question of psychoanalytic theory, for instance, does The Lost Weekend finally affirm or dispute the idea that alcoholics are "latent homosexuals"? How closely may Jackson be identified with a character who is evidently based on himself?

Although Don Birnam's drunken experiences were largely derived from Jackson's, the character lacks his author's sober perspective. Birnam is undercut as a self-deluded alcoholic in the grip of denial. It would seem, then, that the passages quoted above are best read as evidence not of Jackson's sexual insecurities, but rather of Birnam's. Don's thinking is exposed here as a rationalization of his "latent homosexuality," to which he is no more capable of facing up than to his alcoholism. Since Birnam is poised at the novel's end to go off on yet another binge, the reader may reasonably infer that his self-deception will continue. In order for him to stop drinking, the novel implies, Don must accept that the alcoholic is himself and that Bim does "know" him—because the alcoholic is not only a "potential confederate," but also, as psychoanalysis would insist, a brother to the homosexual.

The Lost Weekend, like Nightwood, thus inverts the gender assumptions of those novels in which alcohol is represented as the preservative of manliness and the alcoholic as the polar opposite of the homosexual. Jackson's subversion of the drinking culture of modernism results from the assimilation into his fiction of the concept of "alcoholism" itself, along with its freight of psychoanalytic theory.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, modernism revolutionized the arts in America while Prohibition revolutionized drinking practices. The avant garde reacted against the Victorian idea of inebriation by producing a literature that idealized intoxication as iconoclasm and lionized the drunk as an anti-Puritan rebel. A major element in such texts as John Barleycorn, The Sun Also Rises, Tender Is the Night, Appointment in Samarra, and Nightwood is the representation of excessive drinking as an inevitable response of the sensitive consciousness to the nightmarish human condition.

The Lost Weekend began to close the book on these drunk narratives by exposing the literariness of their alcoholic despair. "In A Glass," Birnam's hypothetical Drunkard's Rigadoon, exists only within the claustral confines of a mind soaked in modernist fiction. As Don recognizes, "His very nightmare [the bat hallucination] was synthetic: a dream by Thomas Mann" (p. 215). In his sober moments, he realizes that his existence does not live up to the high romantic tragedy of the sort he admires in Tender Is the Night, in which the alcoholic culture hero learns the bitter wisdom of the ages from John Barleycorn. The drunken life is "merely ludicrous—ludicrous but not worth laughing at, something merely to put up with and bear with because there was nothing else to do about it" (p. 216). In its demystification of the White Logic, The Lost Weekend inaugurated a new mode of American fiction in which habitual drunkenness was figured less as a sign of The Modern Temper than as the symptom of a disease.

Charles Jackson announced publicly in 1944 that his next book would be "about the regeneration of an alcoholic," a subject which he says he has found more fascinating than that of The Lost Weekend. "Farther and Wilder," in which Don Birnam was to reappear, still remained unfinished when Jackson died in 1968; but the "more fascinating" subject of recovery from alcoholism has nevertheless become a flourishing genre.

Once the Alcoholism Movement had reconstructed the framework within which Americans understood excessive drinking, once habitual drunkenness had been medicalized as well as psychologized, then "alcoholic" writers began to become self-conscious of their "alcoholism," and fiction about drinking changed accordingly. Since the 1940s, what might be called the recovery narrative has largely superseded the modernist drunk narrative. American novelists have continued to produce some powerful stories of alcoholic degeneration, such as Natalie Anderson Scott's The Story of Mrs. Murphy (1947) or Richard Yates's Disturbing the Peace (1975). More common, however, have been fictions about relief from alcohol (and other drugs) that reflect the influence of the Alcoholism Movement in general and of A.A. in particular. Significant examples of this type are Thomas Randall's The Twelfth Step (1957), Roger Treat's The Endless Road (1960), John Berryman's Recovery (1972), Donald Newlove's The Drunks (1974), John Cheever's Falconer (1977), Ivan Gold's Sams in a Dry Season (1990), and David Gates's Jernigan (1991).

Numerous Hollywood films, some derived from popular plays or bestselling books, have also dealt explicitly with alcoholism. In several of these, too, A.A. is offered explicitly as the means to "recovery": Come Fill the Cup (1950), Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), Something to Live For (1952), I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), The Voice in the Mirror (1958), and Days of Wine and Roses (1962).

The proliferation of such works in the immediate postwar period had much to do with the cumulative success of A.A., in which recovery narratives have always played an important part. In A.A. meetings, as in all three editions of the "Big Book," members routinely tell of their personal adventures before and after joining the fellow-ship and retrace their progress from drunkenness to sobriety. These stories, which constitute a type of spiritual autobiography, have not only been adapted to fiction; they have also created a discourse for the rapidly expanding "recovery" movement of the late twentieth century.

A.A. itself was another creation of the Lost Generation of middle-class Americans who came of age during the early 1920s and who made excessive drinking a hallmark of their youthful rebellion. When this cohort reached middle age at mid-century, it was faced with the resultant drinking problems. (A common pattern in male drinkers is for alcoholism to develop gradually for twenty years or so and then to become acute when they reach their forties.) "The founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, and its emergence as a national movement around 1940," says Robin Room, "must be seen as the reaction of the initial 'wet generations' to the predicament in which they found themselves." Both the approach and the rhetoric of A.A., moreover, "were carefully attuned to the mindset of members of the initial 'wet generation' and, in particular, to the men of the generation." The anti-drink discourse of A.A. provided an alternative to the now "discredited invective of the temperance movement."

The blunt and deflationary pragmatism of A.A. also provided an alternative to the seductive grandiosity of The Modern Temper. Donald Newlove recalls how in his drinking days he sought "the just, pure expression of a kind of holy blackness I admired as the richest resource for dark language." Life's gruesome side, which he had often experienced on the job as an ambulance driver, had initiated him, he believed, into the darkest secrets of the White Logic. The deadliest ordeal was having to wrestle with a corpse wedged upside down between a bathtub and toilet:

[A]s I got down and pried I told myself that if I lived through this, that then I had gone through my Guadalcanal, my Iwo Jima, my Saipan, my Tarawa, my King Lear tree-splitting storm, my Godot, my No Exit, my holocaust, my pie-slice of the universal horror and tragedy and that I was now an accredited Twentieth-Century Writer and fully empowered to seek and state the definitive negative statement for my times and to hold a mirror up to the power of blackness, the night within the night, my Dachau, Berlin, Hiroshima, a spiritual desolation that granted me the clear right to drink. I deserved to drink to keep my good cheer and avoid suicide.

Newlove later came to realize that, like Don Birnam, he had been aggrandizing his capacity for suffering: "I still, of course, didn't know I was a drunk or that my bottom was far, far off, and that I was now only groping about in my graveyard period, a merely literary agony."

In contrast to the truly horrific suffering endured at Guadalcanal or Dachau or Hiroshima, the agony of the alcoholic "Twentieth-Century Writer"—agony that was largely self-inflicted through drinking and that served in turn to justify drinking—was "merely literary" more often than these writers wished to recognize. When F. Scott Fitzgerald gravely opined, "There are no second acts in American lives," he neglected to mention that he and many other modernists stuck in their "graveyard period" had gotten drunk during the first act and passed out during intermission.