Read Online The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson - Free Book Online Page B

of his personal effects, about his brother’s danger, arrest, death—and to do that was to suffer too much. Don knew that at this moment Wick was up and waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Hansen to get his breakfast on the coal range at the farm—or he was already out feeding Mac, or playing with him on the lawn, or throwing sticks in the water for him to swim out to—while he sat here, hanging onto himself, waiting for the liquor store to open, waiting to get started again on the bout that Wick would not allow himself to think of, thank heaven, for five more days. And waiting, knowing that the remorse would pass and high spirits return with the first drink of the day, he deliberately reviewed and explored that remorse, as if self-abasement were a kind of expiation, as if this were his last chance at self-search, as if the promised drinks were justified provided he faced the facts and knew in advance what he was in for.
    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 them—or not too many of them—was something he couldn’t fathom. Life offered none of those prizes you’d been looking forward to since adolescence (he less than others, but looking forward to them all the same, if only out of curiosity). 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 or 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 was a mug’s game and there ought to be a law. But there wasn’t any law, there was no rhyme or reason; and with the sour-grapes attitude of “Why the hell
should
there be”—which is as near as you ever came to sophistication—you retired within yourself and compensated for the disappointments by drink, by subsisting on daydreams, by livingin a private world of your own making (hell or heaven, what did it matter?), by accomplishing or becoming in fancy what you could never bring about in fact.
    The foolish and tricking fancies of yesterday afternoon, for instance. “In a Glass”—who would ever want to read a novel about a punk and a drunk! Everybody knew a couple or a dozen; they were not to be taken seriously; nuisances and trouble-makers, nothing more; like queers and fairies, people were belly-sick of them; whatever ailed them, that was
their
funeral; who cared?—life presented a thousand things more important to be written about than misfits and failures. “Don Birnam: A Hero Without a Novel.” “My Life; or, Words To That Effect.” “Total Recall: An Anthology.” “I Don’t Know Why I’m Telling You All This”—oh he’d have a circus dreaming up titles but that’s as far as he’d ever get and a good thing too. Like all his attempts at fiction it would be as personal as a letter—painful to those who knew him, of no interest to those who didn’t; precious or self-pitying in spots, in others too clever for its own good; so packed with Shakespeare that it looked as if he worked with a concordance in his lap; so narcissistic that its final effect would be that of the mirrored room which gives back the same image times without count, or the old Post Toastie box of his boyhood with the fascinating picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding— But it was silly to consider the book at all or to think of it for a moment. He only wanted to be The Artist, anyhow, with no thought of the meaning or content of the work which would win him such a title—just as he wanted to be (and often fancied himself, especially in drink) an actor