Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson
Fed up with the automatic assumption that his best-selling novel, The Lost Weekend (1944), was autobiographical, Charles Jackson (1903–68) once snapped to an interviewer, “It isn’t.” But it is, and Bailey finds the real-world analogue of virtually every incident in it in the course of what is less the life of an author than that of a charming human train wreck. A small man, handsome but billiard-bald in his early twenties, Jackson was tubercular and a closeted homosexual as well as an addict who popped pills when he was on the wagon. He was the spitting image of Don Birnam, Weekend’s hero, too, in his self-absorption and daydreaming, better at planning literary triumphs than achieving them. Yet everyone he ever knew, no matter how badly he stressed them, liked or, indeed, adored him, including his wife, two daughters, and loyal younger brother. He wrote only one good book, though, unlike Richard Yates and John Cheever, the alcoholic writers Bailey chronicled in the award-winning predecessors to this suavely written, magnetically readable, but less consequential biography. --Ray Olson