The Lost Weekend—a novel about five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam—was an improbable success when it was published in 1944. Rejecting the novel, Simon & Schuster had assured its author that it wouldn’t sell in the midst of a world war (“Nobody cares about the individual”); within five years, The Lost Weekend sold almost half a million copies in various editions and was translated into fourteen languages, syndicated by King Features as a comic strip, and added to the prestigious Modern Library. Its critical reception was no less impressive: “Charles Jackson has made the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey,” Philip Wylie wrote in The New York Times. “His character is a masterpiece of psychological precision. His narrative method … transmutes medical case history into art.” The trailer for the classic movie summarized the matter nicely: “Famous critics called it … ‘Powerful …’ ‘Terrifying … ’ ‘Unforgettable … ’ ‘Superb … ’ ‘Brilliant … ’ AND NOW PARAMOUNT DARES TO OPEN … THE STRANGE AND SAVAGE PAGES OF … The Lost Weekend.” Cut to the book’s title page, amid ominous music.
Director Billy Wilder had bought the novel at a kiosk in Chicago, and by the time his train arrived in Los Angeles he’d read it twice and quite definitely decided to make a movie based on the book, despite its then-controversial subject: an alcoholic, as opposed to a comic drunkard or lush. “Not only did I know it was going to make a good picture,” said Wilder, “I also knew that the guy who was going to play the drunk was going to get the Academy Award.” Hollywood’s A-list actors didn’t agree, and after the part had been turned down by everyone from Cary Grant to Robert Montgomery, it was given to the Welshman Ray Milland, who refused to heed an all but universal warning that he was committing “career suicide.” The day after The Lost Weekend won Oscars for Best Picture, Actor, Director, and Screenplay, writers at Paramount Studios celebrated by dangling bottles out their windows, a tribute to Don Birnam’s preferred method of concealing his liquor.
Milland, a near teetotaler, had been coached in the ways of drunkenness by the novel’s author—a balding, impeccably groomed middle-aged man whose weird combination of wistfulness and zest put the actor in mind of “a bright, erratic problem child.” At the time Jackson was working at MGM on a screenwriting assignment, and was bemused to find himself the most popular man in Hollywood. Everyone, it seemed, had read his book and experienced an almost seismic shock of recognition: Robert Benchley told Jackson that he’d found the novel so disturbing that, for twenty minutes or so, he’d been unable to take another drink. Surely such a vivid, inward-looking account had to be based on personal experience, and thus (in the words of journalist Lincoln Barnett) “Jackson was eyed somewhat in the manner of a returned war hero … of a man who had been through hellfire and emerged bloodshot but unbowed.” Jackson himself bridled at the assumption. Sober since 1936, he had no intention of going down in history as the author of a single, thinly veiled autobiography about a crypto-homosexual drunk with writerly pretensions. “One third of the history is based on what I have experienced myself,” he told the movie columnist Louella Parsons and others, “about one third on the experiences of a very good friend whose drinking career I followed very closely, and the other third is pure invention.”
Ten years, four books, and twenty-two hospitalizations later, Jackson was ready to come clean: he was indeed Don Birnam, and only two episodes in The Lost Weekend were purely fictional (to wit: he never pawned his girlfriend’s leopard coat to get liquor money, nor did he stand up the hostess of his favorite bar because of an alcoholic blackout). To be sure, he could afford to be candid by then; very few people had any idea who Jackson was, and even those happy few tended to muddle the matter. “I have become so used to having people say ‘We loved your movie’ instead of ‘We read your book,’ ” said Jackson, “that now I merely say ‘Thanks.’ ”
The Lost Weekend, after all, is something of an anomaly: a great novel that also resulted in a great (or near-great) movie—somewhat to the author’s woe, as there are far more moviegoers than readers of serious fiction; the upshot, oddly enough, is that the movie has all but supplanted the novel as a cultural artifact, even as the novel’s impact endures among the literary and medical cognoscenti. Don Birnam remains the definitive portrait of an alcoholic in American literature—a tragicomic combination of Hamlet and Mr. Toad, according to Time, whose publisher reprinted the novel in 1963 as part of its paperback “Reading Program” of contemporary classics. A special introduction was written by Selden D. Bacon, the director of the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies, who observed not only that The Lost Weekend was an impressive work of art, but also that it had “exerted a profound influence on the field with which it deals. Its very title has become a synonym for the condition it describes.” The editors of Time seemed especially pleased to mention that Jackson himself was now chairman of the Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a solemn proselytizer for the Twelve Steps—a man, in short, who had learned the hard way that an alcoholic (“a natural addict”) could not be helped by medicine, psychiatry, or religion: “If he does not find escape or evasion in drink,” the editors remarked, echoing Jackson, “he will turn to some other form of addiction.”
Jackson, at last, had become the sort of respectable burgher he’d always, albeit paradoxically, resembled. In her 1973 profile, “The Fan,” Dorothea Straus—wife of Jackson’s publisher, Roger—remembered the bow ties and natty pastel shirts Charlie had affected, the little clipped mustache beneath a long elegant nose (“like a sandpiper’s beak”): “His prim appearance contradicted what I knew of him: the drinking, homosexual encounters, and attraction to ‘rough trade.’ Rather, he looked the warm family man he was also, and the small-town citizen of upstate Newark, New York, where he grew up and which, in some sense, he never left.” Certainly Jackson preferred the role of provincial family man (a married father of two daughters) to that of a raffish homosexual, but, truth be known, he was becoming more than a little bored with the sober life. Back in 1948, when his third novel (The Outer Edges) was published, Jackson had claimed to be writing his masterpiece: “a massive Don Birnam saga” that would encompass at least three Proustian volumes and ultimately describe how Birnam defeated his many demons. But the novel hadn’t materialized, nor had any other, and by the early sixties Jackson considered himself washed up. “Malcolm Lowry as novelist was fortunate in his death,” he ruefully noted in the Times Book Review of another alcoholic, one-masterpiece writer. “Once dead, he no longer had to cope with the impossible struggle, but could become, instead, a legend … [one of] the growing glamorous company of Artists Who Died Young.… One can’t help wondering what would have happened to their careers if they had been put to the cruel test, the realistic test, of survival.”
Jackson’s self-doubt had been certified in 1962, when Roger Straus informed him—during one of their many affable lunches—that Farrar, Straus and Cudahy was dropping him from its list. Straus simply didn’t believe that Charlie had it in him to write novels anymore, and the publisher couldn’t afford another decade of doling out advances and personal loans. Jackson could hardly argue. His last book (Earthly Creatures, a story collection) had been published in 1953—oddly enough, the same year Jackson had joined AA and become one of its most ardent crusaders. Since then he’d (usually) enjoyed a kind of “vegetable health,” as he wrote in an unpublished confession, “The Sleeping Brain”: “Oh, I was well, all right … and was outwardly proud, and very voluble on the subject, of having won my private battle with alcohol and barbiturates.” But once his friend and publisher had lowered the boom, he couldn’t help reflecting that in the decade before 1953—a time of ghastly collapses and domestic tumult—he’d managed to write five books.
Jackson’s creative rebirth came about in a curious, if not wholly unexpected, manner. A recurrence of tuberculosis had resulted in the removal of his right lung, and while recuperating at Will Rogers Memorial Hospital in Saranac Lake, New York, Jackson was given drugs that not only reduced his pain but restored his ability to write. Rather heroically—or heedlessly, depending on how you look at it—the decrepit Jackson left his devoted wife, Rhoda, and resumed the “impossible struggle” to realize the promise of his vaunted first novel; a return to addiction was, in the end, a price he was more than willing to pay. By 1967 he was back on the Times best-seller list with a novel about a nymphomaniac, A Second-Hand Life, and was eager to resume work on his long-awaited “Birnam saga,” What Happened, the first volume of which was titled Farther and Wilder. According to his editor at Macmillan, Robert Markel, at least three hundred pages of this magnum opus had been completed when, in 1968, Jack- son took a fatal overdose of Seconal at the Hotel Chelsea, where he’d been living with a Czechoslovakian factory worker named Stanley Zednik.