Fifty Books Project 2023

He had never been so sure of himself in his life, so much the master of his every smallest move, gesture, muscle; he was so calm, so thoroughly at ease and at home, that now he meant to prolong the moment as long as possible, savoring its every second to get the most out of it.

The Lost Weekend, by Charles Jackson

I knew this story from the movie with Ray Milland and, of course, from having lived with alcoholics.  It is an alarming, clear and true (if somewhat simple) view of a man’s consciousness and the lengths to which he goes to fool himself.  It has generally been described as an important entry into the literature of addiction, and it is that.  However, I was attracted to it recently as an entry into the world of queer literature. 

Don Birnham is a writer who never writes.  We follow him over the course of a five-day weekend when his brother, who is a kind of caretaker, leaves for a little vacation and Don goes on a long drinking spree, spending the entire five days trying to get hold of money and spending it on drink.  He consumes a tremendous amount of alcohol, drinking water glasses full of rye in a few gulps and does vivid damage to his body and his nerves.  

Over the course of that time, we get a constant window into his thinking and, through his memories, his life to that point.  What is easily revealed – and left out of the 1945 film version – is that Don is gay.  He has not exactly admitted this to himself and it seems that his drinking is in part motivated by his desire not to have to face this fact.  But we learn of a teenage affair with another boy, an incident in which he confessed love to a fraternity brother and was driven from the fraternity and several love affairs with women that founder over his lack of sexual desire for them.  He makes a great deal of the idea that he is more sensitive, more attuned to music and literature and that no one understands that part of him.  It is clear to the reader that he is misunderstood, but not for his love of art and music.

However, Jackson is not interested in plumbing Birnham’s sexuality as a cause of his drinking.  Jackson was himself an alcoholic and was an early believer in the idea that alcoholism is a disease and should be treated as such.  In this philosophy, is not fully in the power of the drinker to choose whether or not to drink and, therefore, psychological issues or social issues that seem to drive him to drink are less important.  In this novel, for the most part, Don Birnham drinks because Don Birnham drinks.  His psyche is more a tool to help him refuse to face the damage he is doing to himself and others so that he can summon the willpower to drink again.

As a result, the novel spends an inordinate amount of time demonstrating Birnham’s ability to build himself up, let his ego swell as he sees himself as all-powerful, an unrecognized genius who cannot possibly fail.  In the passage quoted above, Birnham is stealing a woman’s pocketbook in a bar and congratulating himself on the subtle little maneuvers that have allowed him to slip the bag into his coat.  His self-congratulations go on for pages, right up until he is thrown out of the bar and sees himself as a humiliated fool.  But each crash, every failure and humiliation simply causes him to find another fantasy to build himself up and start the cycle over again.  In the course of the novel he imagines himself as a great writer and plans out a novel that will capture the essence of life and a musician who can express inexpressible emotions. (As far as we can tell he neither actually writes nor plays an instrument.). He is a great ladies man who must regularly disappoint women because they simply don’t understand him, and a reader of great sensitivity who often, while drunk, forces others to listen to him slur his way through passages that they are not as capable as he is of appreciating.

There are times when this cycle feels too easy – or rather Birnham’s belief seems too easy to rekindle.  The destructive power of the downward slide is vivid and frightening, but Birnham never faces those consequences for more than a few minutes before finding a way to justify drinking again. This is especially true as the novel progresses and Birnham has gone days without eating or bathing or changing his clothes, after he has been badly injured and rendered incapable of any normal interaction.  An old girlfriend – ironically named Helen – comes to the rescue and leaves him with her housekeeper (unbelievably named Holy Love, so that he wakes up being watched over by Holy Love.)  But he simply allows these women to get him cleaned up enough to sneak out to buy several pints of whiskey and hide them around his brother’s apartment.

There is a certain cleverness in locking us into Birnham’s consciousness – we only occasionally get a glimpse of how disturbing a figure he has become through the reactions of others.  But we wonder about his brother’s response – how could he have left this man alone?  And the novel ends just before his brother returns with Birnham attempting to hide the damage he has done to himself and prepare for the next binge. We can presume that this relationship is causing the brother serious emotional and economic pain, but we are left with only our presumptions.  Helen is too saintly and patient to give us any sense of the emotional damage he is causing.  We are left with the notion that the addict is largely a danger only to himself.  If you have lived with one, you know different.