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Few novels have made the transition from book to screenplay as quickly and successfully as The Lost Weekend, a 1944 narrative by Charles Jackson that was made into a film in time to take several Academy Awards for 1945, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. The Hollywood version, with its depictions of delirium tremens and Ray Milland's desperate search for a pawnshop where he can obtain money to buy a drink, is a classic film; the novel, although a bestseller in its time, is now seldom read. It deserves and rewards reading, however, as a compelling, well crafted, and often ironic novel.
For readers familiar with James Joyce's short stories, yet another reason for its claim on our attention is the novel's opening: "The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot" (LW 3). Placed within quotation marks in The Lost Weekend, these words are taken from the book that Jackson's protagonist Don Birnam is reading, a book later identified as Dubliners ( LW 8-9 ). The line derives from a scene in "Counterparts" in which Farrington, the protagonist of Joyce's story, is thinking of his need for a drinking spree (D 91).1 It is interesting to note the way Don responds to Joyce's words:
These words, on the printed page, had the unsettling effect no doubt intended, but with a difference. At once he put the book aside: closed it, with his fingers still between the pages; dropped his arm over the edge of the chair and let it hang, the book somewhere near the floor. This in case he wanted to look at it again. But he did not need to. Already he knew the sentence by heart: he might have written it himself. Indeed, it was with a sense of familiarity, of recognition, that his mind had first read through and accepted that sentence only a moment before; and now, as he relaxed his fingers' grip and dropped the book to the floor, he said aloud to himself: "That's me, all right." ( LW 3 )
In this portrayal of a reader who resists what he imagines to be the author's intentions rather than his own impulse toward dissipation, Don identifies himself so readily with Farrington...