The Lost Weekend Read Online Free PDF

poured in a rush, details, incidents, names, ideas, ideas. At this moment, if he were able to write fast enough, he could set it down in all its final perfection, right down without a change or correction needed later, from the brilliant opening to the last beautiful note of wise and grave irony. The things between—the things! … The wrench (the lost lonely abandonment) when his father left home and left him—but anything, practically anything out of childhood, climaxed by the poetry-writing and the episode of the bathroom mirror; then on to Dorothy, the fraternity nightmare, Dorothy again, leaving home, the Village and prohibition, Mrs. Scott, the
Rochambeau
(the
Bremen
,
LaFayette
,
Champlain
,
de Grasse
); the TB years in Davos; the long affair with Anna; the drinking; Juan-les-Pins (the weekend there that lasted two months, the hundred dollars a day); the pawnshops; the drinking, the unaccountable things you did, the people you got mixed up with; the summer in Provincetown, the winter on the farm; the books begun and dropped, the unfinished short-stories; the drinking the drinking the drinking; the foolish psychiatrist—the foolish foolish psychiatrist; down to Helen, the good Helen he always knew he would marry and now knew he never would, Helen who was always right, who would sit through
Tristan
this afternoon resisting it, refusing to be carried away or taken in, seeing it and hearing it straight off for what it was as he would only be able to see it and hear it after several years of irrational idolatry first.… Whole sentences sprang to his mind in dazzling succession, perfectly formed, ready to be put down. Where was a pencil, paper? He downed his drink.
    The time. Four o’clock. Mrs. Foley would be there now but to hell with that! This was more important. But caution, slow. Good thing there was no paper handy, no chance to begin impulsively what later must be composed—when, tonight maybe, certainly tomorrow—with all the calm and wise control needed for such anundertaking. A
tour de force
? Critics would call it that, they’d be bound to, but what the hell was the matter with a
tour de force
for Christ’s sake that the term should have come to be a sneer? Didn’t it mean a brilliant performance and is “brilliance” something to snoot at? His mind raced on. But how about “As Through a Glass Darkly”?—or “Through a Glass Darkly”? No, it had been done to death; trite; every lady-writer in the land had used it at one time or another, or if they hadn’t, it was a wonder. “In a Glass” was perfect—he saw stacks of copies in bookshop windows, piled in tricky pyramids (he would drop in and address the bookseller with some prepared witticism, like, “I appreciate the compliment you pay my book by piling it up in the window like a staple that should be in every home; but couldn’t you add a card saying ‘Send in ten wrappers and get a free illustrated life of the author’?”—hell, that was too long for wit, he’d have to cut it down), he glanced over people’s shoulders in the subway and smiled to himself as he heard one girl say to another “I can’t make head or tail of this”—(she had something if she meant “tale”), he read with amusement an embarrassed letter from his mother regretting the fact that he hadn’t published a book she could show the neighbors and why didn’t he write something that had “human interest”? With a careful glance about him he picked up his glass, offered a silent rueful toast to human interest, and drank.
    Suddenly, sickeningly, the whole thing was so much eyewash. How could he have been seduced, fooled, into dreaming up such a ridiculous piece; in perpetrating, even in his imagination, anything so pat, so contrived, so cheap, so phoney, so adolescent, so (crowning offense) sentimental? Euphoria! Faithless muse! What crimes are committed in thy—
There
was a line he might use; and oh, another: the ending!—the ending sprang to his mind