On the first page of his autobiographical novel John Barleycorn, published in 1913, Jack London confesses to his second wife, Charmian, that despite his misgivings, he voted for women's suffrage because he recognized it as "an inevitable social phenomenon," but mostly because "when the women get the ballot, they will vote for Prohibition. It is the wives, and sisters, and mothers, and they only, who will drive the nails into the coffin of John Barleycorn."
Charmian is surprised by this revelation, for she considered her husband, who by his own admission is "lighted up ... pleasantly jingled" when he makes this statement, a "friend of John Barleycorn."
"I am never less his friend than when he is with me and when I seem most his friend," London answers. "He is the king of liars. He is the frankest truthsayer. He is the august companion with whom one walks with the gods. He is also in league with the Noseless One. His way leads to truth naked, and to death. He gives clear vision and muddy dreams. He is the enemy of life, and the teacher of wisdom beyond life's wisdom. He is a red-handed killer and he slays youth."
Now, we should remember that in 1912, London was a rock star. He was earning about $1.5 million a year in today's dollars, and in those pre-TV, pre-Hollywood days, he was as large a celebrity as the country knew. He was 36 and handsome in a rugged way, with a rising reputation as a writer of literary merit and endorsement contracts for men's suits and grape juice. He had come up from nothing -- he didn't own a toothbrush until he was 19 -- to become the most popular writer in America.
But John Barleycorn would complicate that image. In the book, London detailed his drinking life in all its boozy excess, explaining that while he was not an alcoholic -- "I had been born with no organic, chemical predisposition toward alcohol" -- he felt himself inexorably drawn to the stuff.
"[E]very interest of my developing life had drawn me to it," London wrote. "A newsboy on the streets, a sailor, a miner, a wanderer in far lands, always where men came together to exchange ideas, to laugh and boast and dare, to relax, to forget the dull toil of tiresome nights and days, always they came together over alcohol. The saloon was the place of congregation. Men gathered to it as primitive men gathered about the fire of the squatting place or the fire at the mouth of the cave."
London wrote that while he'd never liked the taste of alcohol, 20 years of drinking had made him tolerant of it. Removing the source of temptation was the only way to keep him from imbibing. John Barleycorn was from the beginning intended as a political tract, something the Prohibitionists could put to use.
Despite a mannered, enervated style that bears little resemblance to the tough, familiar prose of the high school English staples Call of the Wild, "To Build a Fire" and White Fang, John Barleycorn strikes us as startlingly honest book even though the idea of a celebrity tell-some is a cliche. But unlike today, when a rock star or former Disney princess being trundled off to rehab elicits at worst a heartless giggle or a schadenfreudenous shrug, it nearly ruined its author.
His image as a clean-living, robust masculine role model was undermined -- alcoholics were degenerates or dipsomaniacs, flawed not just in character but in their genes and blood. A drunk was weak and unreliable.
London's insistence that he is not alcoholic struck many of his contemporaries in the same way it appears to a modern reader -- the rummy doth protest too much. (After some argument, his publisher appended the subtitle "Alcoholic Memoirs," which could be interpreted to mean the adventures were alcoholic, not the man.) When, at the end of the book, London resolves not to give up drink but to "drink ... more skillfully, more discreetly than ever before," the decision seems pathetic. London could stop at any time. He sometimes went days without taking a drink.
But at the end, he couldn't write without a drink.
Even before Barleycorn was published, London was in decline -- although he continued to turn out his quota of a thousand words a day. (In 20 years, he published 50 books.) He had lost the thread, and he was churning out potboiler novels in order to sustain his gentleman rancher lifestyle. His socialist politics brought him trouble. A few months after the publication of Barleycorn, his house burned. And while there is a cult of London that to this day fiercely resists any suggestion that their hero was a drunk, most scholars believe alcoholism contributed to his death at age 40, probably a suicide, three years later.
John Barleycorn is not a great book and it may be most notable as a study in denial, but it does have one remarkable insight. London writes about the "white logic" that alcohol reveals, the way it can, for a certain kind of drinker, work as a solvent on all delusions: "It is when in this condition that he strips away the husks of life's healthiest illusion and gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about the neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlest power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a terrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs unswaying, and decide that in all the universe he finds for himself but one freedom -- namely, the anticipating of the day of his death."
Alcohol can show you things you cannot unsee. What William Burroughs called the "naked lunch" at "the end of every fork."
...
Some people suggest that whiskey is a toxin, and I suppose it is. But a little venom can make you healthier -- you stress and traumatize your body to make it stronger. They say whiskey wrecks the brain but that depends on how it's used; if you can remain the boss of it, it can serve you like a hard-nosed human resources director brought in to downsize the deadwood. I believe it kills off the weaker brain cells, that it makes a mind tougher and more efficient.
I'm kidding. Maybe. But a shot of whiskey can be a good thing.
A shot of whiskey is medicine.
A moderate bit of whiskey might significantly improve a body's ability to regulate insulin and glucose levels, lessening the chance for diabetes. Studies suggest whiskey -- the antioxidants and trace levels of vitamins in whiskey -- can stimulate the immune system, help to hold off colds and infections.
It can quell the jumpiness, if you are the sort of person who has a minor-key dread of social interaction. It smooths and slurs a fractious world, it warms your chest like the memory of a departed friend. A shot of whiskey can make you a better person, it can lift you above the petty and preoccupying, the perceived deprivations and humiliations of everyday existence. Dostoevsky (another rumored drunk) called "self-forgetfulness in the love of one's neighbor" the key to faith, and if alcohol can help us achieve that state, why shouldn't it be a sacrament?
It used to be that newspapers were filled with desks with bottles in drawers. It hasn't been that way for a long time (it's probably a fire-able offense to have a beer with lunch these days), but not so long ago that I don't have firsthand knowledge of it. I banged out copy on a Smith-Corona for a while; the past was full of what are now lost sensations. I doubt I'll ever again hear the wild clacking of a dozen typewriters on deadline. These days we quietly fill up screens with electronic cuneiform and drink water someone sold us.
But whiskey persists, and I get to write about it sober, holding off till the evening hours to pour an inch of sunshine in a crystal glass. I am refined about it now. I used to drink whatever was handy and cheap, and in the process discovered that I liked bourbon for the little fiery knot it provoked in my gullet and the way it tasted of smoke and ruin. It's an acquired taste, but it doesn't take long to start to pick favorites, to toggle between raw and smooth, sweet and woody, grain and malt. I know enough now to know what I like, what I will stand for and what is an abomination unto the Lord.
Like London, I shall take my drink. Knowing it is poison. Hoping for hormesis.
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Style on 08/23/2015