 Chapter 1, 2, and 3 of John Barley-Corn, or Alcoholic Memoirs, by Jack London. Chapter 1 It all came to me one election day. It was on a warm California afternoon, and I had ridden down into the valley of the moon, from the ranch to the little village, to vote yes and no, to a host of proposed amendments to the Constitution of the State of California. Because of the warmth of the day, I had had several drinks before casting my ballot, and diverse drinks after casting it. Then I had ridden up through the vine-clad hills and rolling pastures of the ranch, and arrived at the farmhouse in time for another drink and supper. How did you vote on the suffrage amendment? Charmian asked. I voted for it. She uttered an exclamation of surprise. For, be it known, in my younger days, despite my ardent democracy, I had been opposed to woman's suffrage. In my later and more tolerant years, I had been unenthusiastic in my acceptance of it as an inevitable social phenomenon. Now, just why did you vote for it? Charmian asked. I answered. I answered at length. I answered indignantly. The more I answered, the more indignant I became. No, I was not drunk. The horse I had ridden was well-named the Outlaw. I'd like to see any drunken man ride her. And yet, how shall I say? I was lighted up. I was feeling good. I was pleasantly jingle. When the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition, I said. It is the wives and sisters and mothers, and they only, who will drive the nails into the coffin of John Barley Corn. But I thought you were a friend to John Barley Corn, Charmian interpolated. I am. I was. I am not. I never am. I am nevertheless his friend than when he is with me and when I see most his friend. He is the king of liars. He is the frankest truth-sayer. He is the august companion with whom one walks with the gods. He is also in league with the noiseless 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. And Charmian looked at me, and I knew she wondered where I had got it. I continued to talk. As I say, I was lighted up. In my brain every thought was at home. Every thought in its little cell crouched, ready-dressed at the door, like prisoners at midnight waiting a jailbreak. And every thought was a vision, bright-imaged, sharp-cut, unmistakable. My brain was illuminated by the clear white light of alcohol. John Barleycorn was on a truth-telling rampage, giving away the choices secrets on himself. And I was his spokesman. There moved the multitudes of memories of my past life, all orderly arranged, like soldiers in some vast review. It was mine to pick and choose. I was a lord of thought, the master of my vocabulary and of the totality of my experience, unerringly capable of selecting my data and building my exposition. For so John Barleycorn tricks and lures, setting the maggots of intelligence gnawing, whispering his fatal intuitions of truth, flinging purple passages into the monotony of one's days. I outlined my life to Charmian, and expounded the makeup of my constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born with no organic chemical predisposition towards alcohol. In this matter I was normal in my generation. Alcohol was an acquired taste. It had been painfully acquired. Alcohol had been a dreadfully repugnant thing, more nauseous than any physics. Even now I did not like the taste of it. I drank it only for its kick. And from the age of five to that of twenty-five I had not learned to care for its kick. Twenty years of unwilling apprenticeship had been required to make my system rebelliously tolerant of alcohol to make me, in the heart and deeps of me, desirous of alcohol. I sketched my first contacts with alcohol, told of my first intoxications and revulsions, and pointed out always the one thing that in the end had won me over, namely the accessibility of alcohol. Not only had it always been accessible, but every interest of my developing life had drawn me to it. 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. I reminded Charmian of the canoe houses from which she had been barred in the South Pacific, where the kinky-haired cannibals escaped from their women kind and feasted and drank by themselves, the sacred precinct's taboo to women under pain of death. As a youth, by way of the saloon, I had escaped from the narrowness of women's influence into the wide free world of men. Always led to the saloon. The thousand roads of romance and adventure drew together in the saloon and thence led out and on over the world. The point is, I concluded my Charmian, that it is the accessibility of alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol. I did not care for it. I used to laugh at it. Yet here I am at the last possessed with the drinker's desire. It took twenty years to implant that desire, and for ten years more that desire has grown. And the effect of satisfying that desire is anything but good. Temperamentally I am wholesome-hearted and merry. Yet when I walk with John Barley-Corn, I suffer all the damnation of intellectual pessimism. But, I hasten to add, I always hasten to add, John Barley-Corn must have his due. He does tell the truth. That is the curse of it. The so-called truths of life are not true. They are the vital lies by which life lives, and John Barley-Corn gives them the lie. Which does not make them towards life, Charmian said. Very true, I answered. And that is the perfectest hell of it. John Barley-Corn makes toward death. That is why I voted for the amendment today. I read back in my life and saw how the accessibility of alcohol had given me the taste for it. You see, comparatively few alcoholics are born in a generation. And by alcoholic I mean a man whose chemistry craves alcohol and drives him resistlessly to it. The great majority of habitual drinkers are born not only without desire for alcohol, but with actual repugnance toward it. Not the first, nor the twentieth, nor the hundredth drink succeeded in giving them the liking. But they learned just as men learn to smoke, though it is far easier to learn to smoke than to learn to drink. They learned because alcohol was so accessible. The women knew the game. They pay for it. The wives and sisters and mothers. And when they come to vote, they will vote for prohibition. And the best of it is that there will be no hardship worked on the coming generation. Not having access to alcohol, not being predisposed toward alcohol, it will never miss alcohol. It will mean life more abundant for the manhood of the young boys born and growing up, and life more abundant for the young girls born and growing up to share the lives of the young men. Why not write all this up for the sake of the young men and women coming? Charmian asked. Why not write it so as to help the wives and sisters and mothers to the way they should vote? The memoirs of an alcoholic I sneered, or rather John Barleycorn sneered. For he sat with me there at table in my pleasant philanthropic jingle, and it is a trick of John Barleycorn to turn the smile to a sneer without an instance warning. No, said Charmian, ignoring John Barleycorn's roughness, as so many women have learned to do. You have shown yourself no alcoholic, no dipsomaniac, but merely an habitual drinker, one who has made John Barleycorn's acquaintance through long years of rubbing shoulders with him. Write it up and call it alcoholic memoirs. And ere I begin, I must ask the reader to walk with me in all sympathy. And since sympathy is merely understanding, begin by understanding me and whom and what I write about. In the first place I am a seasoned drinker. I have no constitutional predisposition for alcohol. I am not stupid. I am not a swine. I know the drinking game from A to Z, and I have used my judgment in drinking. I never have to be put to bed, nor do I stagger. In short, I am a normal average man, and I drink in the normal average way as drinking goes. And this is the very point. I am writing of the effects of alcohol on the normal average man. I have no word to say for or about the microscopically unimportant excessivist, the dipsomaniac. There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots, who walks generously with widespread tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers. The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never falls or staggers and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body, but his brain that is drunken. He may bubble with wit or expand with good fellowship, or he may see intellectual specters and phantoms that are cosmic and logical and that take the forms of syllogisms. It is when, in this condition, that he strips away the husks of life's healthiest illusions and gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about the neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barley-Corn'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. With this man, this is the hour of the white logic of which more anon. When he knows that he may know only the laws of things, the meaning of things never. This is his danger hour. His feet are taking hold of the pathway that leads down into the grave. All is clear to him. All these baffling head reaches after immortality are but the panics of souls frightened by the fear of death and cursed with the thrice-cursed gift of imagination. They have not the instinct for death. They lack the will to die when the time to die is at hand. They trick themselves into believing they will outwit the game and win to a future, leaving the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the annihilating heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his white logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not even that yearn for a bobble of feeble souls immortality. But he knows, he knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He is compounded of meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world dust, a frail mechanism made to run for a span, to be tinkered at by doctors of divinity and doctors of physics, and to be flung into the scrap heap at the end. Of course all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the penalty the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John Barleycorn. The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler, easier. He drinks himself into soddish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and if he dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his calm mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends. In the clear white light of his logic, they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagerness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms like all the other little humans, fluttering their mayfly-like dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of chance. So is he. He realizes that, but there is one difference. He sees, he knows, and he knows his one freedom. He may anticipate the day of his death, all of which is not good for a man who is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide, quick or slow, a sudden spill, or a gradual oozing away through the years, is the price John Barley corn exacts. No friend of his ever escapes making the just-do payment. Chapter 3 I was five years old the first time I got drunk. It was on a hot day, and my father was plowing in the field. I was sent from the house half a mile away to carry to him a pail of beer. And be sure you don't spill it, was the parting injunction. It was, as I remember it, a lard pail, very wide across the top and without a cover. As I toddled along, the beer slopped over the rim upon my legs. And as I toddled, I pondered. Beer was a very precious thing. Come to think of it, must be wonderfully good. Else why was I never permitted to drink of it in the house? Other things kept from me by the grown-ups I had found good. Then this, too, was good. Trust the grown-ups. They knew. And anyway, the pail was too full. I was slopping it against my legs and spilling it on the ground. Why waste it? And no one would know whether I had drunk or spilled it. I was so small that in order to negotiate the pail I sat down and gathered it into my lap. First I sipped the foam. I was disappointed. The preciousness evaded me. Evidently it did not reside in the foam. Besides, the taste was not good. Then I remembered seeing the grown-ups blow the foam away before they drank. I buried my face in the foam and lapped the solid liquid beneath. It wasn't good at all, but still I drank. The grown-ups knew what they were about. Considering my diminutiveness, the size of the pail in my lap, and my drinking out of it with my breath held, and my face buried to the ears in foam, it was rather difficult to estimate how much I drank. Also I was gulping it down like medicine, in nauseous haste to get the ordeal over. I shuddered when I started on and decided that the good taste would come afterwards. I tried several times more in the course of that long half-mile. Then astounded by the quantity of beer that was lacking, and remembering having seen stale beer made the foam afresh, I took a stick and stirred what was left till it foamed to the brim. And my father never noticed. He emptied the pail with the wide thirst of the sweating plowman, returned it to me, and started up the plow. I endeavored to walk behind the horses. I remember tottering and falling against their heels in front of the shining chair, and that my father hauled back on the lines so violently that the horses nearly sat down on me. He told me afterward that it was by only a matter of inches that I escaped disemboweling. Vaguely too, I remember, my father carried me in his arms to the trees on the edge of the field, while all the world reeled and swung about me, and I was aware of deadly nausea mingled with an appalling conviction of sin. I slept the afternoon away under the trees, and when my father roused me at sundown, it was a very sick little boy that got up and dragged wearily homeward. I was exhausted, oppressed by the weight of my limbs, and in my stomach was a harp-like vibrating that extended to my throat and brain. My condition was like that of one who had gone through a battle with poison. In truth I had been poisoned. In the weeks and months that followed I had no more interest in beer than in the kitchen stove after it had burned me. The grown-ups were right. Beer was not for children. The grown-ups didn't mind it, but neither did they mind taking pills and castor oil. As for me, I could manage to get along quite well without beer. Yes, and to the day of my death I could have managed to get along quite well without it. But circumstances decreed otherwise. At every turn in the world in which I lived, John Barley-Corn beckoned. There was no escaping him. All paths led to him. And it took twenty years of contact, of exchanging greetings and passing on with my tongue and my cheek, to develop in me a sneaking liking for the rascal. Chapter 4 My next boat with John Barley-Corn occurred when I was seven. This time my imagination was at fault, and I was frightened into the encounter. Still farming my family had moved to a ranch on the bleak, sad coast of San Mateo County south of San Francisco. It was a wild primitive countryside in those days, and often I heard my mother pride herself that we were old American stock and not immigrant Irish and Italians like our neighbors. In all our section there was only one other old American family. One Sunday morning found me, how or why I cannot now remember, at the Morrissey Ranch. A number of young people had gathered there from the nearer ranches. Besides, the oldsters had been there drinking since early dawn and some of them since the night before. The Morrissey's were a huge breed, and there were many strapping great sons and uncles, heavy-booted, big-fisted, rough-voiced. Suddenly there were screams from the girls and cries of fight. There was a rush. Men hurled themselves out of the kitchen. Two giants, flush-faced, with graying hair, were locked in each other's arms. One was Black Matt, who everybody said had killed two men in his time. The women screamed softly, crossed themselves, or prayed brokenly, hiding their eyes and peeping through their fingers. But not I. It is a fair presumption that I was the most interested spectator. Maybe I would see that wonderful thing, a man killed. Anyway, I would see a man fight. Great was my disappointment. Black Matt and Tom Morrissey merely held on to each other and lifted their clumsy-booted feet in what seemed a grotesque elephantine dance. They were too drunk to fight. Then the peacemakers got hold of them and led them back to submit the new friendship in the kitchen. Soon they were all talking at once, rumbling and roaring as big-chested, open-air men will, when whiskey has whipped their taciturnity. And I, a little shaver of seven, my heart in my mouth, my trembling body, strung tense as a deer's on the verge of flight, peered wonderingly in at the open door and learned more of the strangeness of men. And I marveled at Black Matt and Tom Morrissey sprawled over the table, arms about each other's necks, weeping lovingly. The kitchen drinking continued, and the girls outside grew timorous. They knew the drink game and all were certain that something terrible was going to happen. They protested that they did not wish to be there when it happened, and someone suggested going to a big Italian rancho four miles away where they could get up a dance. Immediately they peered off Lad and Lassie and started down the sandy road. And each Lad walked with his sweetheart, trust a child of seven to listen and to know the love affairs of his countryside. And behold, I, too, was a Lad with a Lassie. A little Irish girl of my own age had been peered off with me. We were the only children in this spontaneous affair. Perhaps the oldest couple might have been twenty. There were chits of girls, quite grown up, of fourteen and sixteen walking with their fellows. But we were uniquely young, this little Irish girl and I, and we walked hand in hand and sometimes under the tutelage of our elders with my arm around her waist. Only that wasn't comfortable. And I was very proud on that bright Sunday morning, going down the long bleak road among the sand hills, I, too, had my girl and was a little man. The Italian rancho was a bachelor establishment. Our visit was hailed with delight. The red wine was poured in tumblers for all, and the long dining room was partly cleared for dancing. And the young fellows drank and danced with the girls to the strains of an accordion. To me that music was divine. I had never heard anything so glorious. The young Italian who furnished it would even get up and dance, his arms round his girl playing the accordion behind her back. All of which was very wonderful for me who did not dance, but who sat at a table and gazed wide-eyed at the amazingness of life. I was only a little lad, and there was so much of life for me to learn. As the time passed the Irish lads began helping themselves to the wine, and jollity and high spirits reigned. I noted that some of them staggered and fell down in the dances, and that one had gone to sleep in a corner. Also some of the girls were complaining, and wanting to leave, and others of the girls were utteringly complacent, willing for anything to happen. When our Italian host had offered me wine in a general sort of way, I had declined. My beer experience had been enough for me, and I had no inclination to traffic further in the stuff, or in anything related to it. Unfortunately one young Italian, Peter, an impish soul, seeing me sitting solitary, stirred by a whim of the moment, half filled a tumbler with wine, and passed it to me. He was sitting across the table for me. I declined. His face grew stern, and he insistently proffered the wine, and then terror descended upon me, a terror which I must explain. My mother had theories. First, she steadfastly maintained that Brunettes and all the tribe of dark-eyed humans were deceitful. Needless to say, my mother was abland. Next, she was convinced that the dark-eyed Latin races were profoundly murderous. Again and again, drinking in the strangeness and the fiersomeness of the world from her lips, I had heard her state, that if one offended an Italian, no matter how slightly and unintentionally he was certain to retaliate by stabbing one in the back. That was her particular phrase—stab you in the back. Now, although I had been eager to see Black Matt kill Tom Morrissey this morning, I did not care to furnish to the dancers the spectacle of a knife sticking in my back. I had not yet learned to distinguish between facts and theories. My faith was implicit in my mother's exposition of the Italian character. Besides, I had some glimmering inkling of the sacredness of hospitality. Here was a treacherous, sensitive, murderous Italian offering me hospitality. I had been taught to believe that if I offended him, he would strike at me with a knife precisely as a horse kicked out when one got too close to its heels and worried it. Then, too, this Italian, Peter, had those terrible black eyes I had heard my mother talk about. They were eyes different from the eyes I knew, from the blues and greys and hazels of my own family, from the pale and genial blues of the Irish. Perhaps Peter had had a few drinks. At any rate, his eyes were brilliantly black and sparkling with devilry. They were the mysterious, the unknown, and who was I, a seven-year-old, to analyze them and know their prankishness. In them I visioned sudden death, and I declined the wine half-heartedly. The expression in his eyes changed. They grew stern and imperious as he shoved the tumbler of wine closer. What could I do? I have faced real death since in my life, but never have I known the fear of death as I knew it then. I put the glass to my lips, and Peter's eyes relented. I knew he would not kill me just then. That was a relief, but the wine was not. It was cheap, new wine, bitter and sour, made of the leavings and scrapings of the vineyards and the vats, and it tasted far worse than beer. There is only one way to take medicine, and that is to take it. And that's the way I took that wine. I threw my head back and gulped it down. I had to gulp again and hold the poison down, for poison it was to any child's tissues and membranes. Looking back now I can realize that Peter was astounded. He half filled a second tumbler and shoved it across the table. Frozen with fear, in despair at the fate which had befallen me, I gulped the second glass down like the first. This was too much for Peter. He must share the infant prodigy he had discovered. He called Dominic a young, moustached Italian to see the light. This time it was a full tumbler that was given me. One will do anything to live. I gripped myself, mastered the qualms that rose in my throat, and downed the stuff. Dominic had never seen an infant of such heroic caliber. Twice again he refilled that tumbler, each time to the brim, and watched it disappear down my throat. By this time my exploits were attracting attention. Middle-aged Italian laborers, old country peasants who did not talk English, and who could not dance with the Irish girls, surrounded me. They were swarthy and wild-looking. They wore belts and red shirts, and I knew they carried knives, and they ringed me round like a pirate chorus. And Peter and Dominic made me show off for them. Had I lacked imagination, had I been stupid, had I been stubbornly mulesh in having my own way, I should never have got in this pickle. And the lads and lassies were dancing, and there was no one to save me from my fate. How much I drank, I do not know. My memory of it is an age-long suffering of fear in the midst of a murderous crew, and of an infinite number of glasses of red wine passing across the bareboards of a wine-drenched table and going down my burning throat. Bad as the wine was, a knife in the back was worse, and I must survive at any cost. Looking back with the drinker's knowledge, I know now why I did not collapse stupefied upon the table. As I have said, I was frozen, I was paralyzed with fear. The only movement I made was to convey that never-ending procession of glasses to my lips. I was a poised and motionless respectable for all the quantity of wine. It lay inert in my fear-inert stomach. I was too frightened even for my stomach to turn. So all that Italian crew looked on and marveled at the infant phenomenon that downed wine with the sang-fois of an automaton. It is not in the spirit of braggadocio that I dare to assert they had never seen anything like it. The time came to go. The tipsy antics of the lads had led a majority of the sober-minded lassies to compel a departure. I found myself at the door beside my little maiden. She had not had my experience, so she was sober. She was fascinated by the titubations of the lads who strove to walk beside their girls, and began to mimic them. I thought this a great game, and I too began to stagger tipsily. But she had no wine to stir up, while my movements quickly set the fumes rising to my head. Even at the start I was more realistic than she. In several minutes I was astonishing myself. I saw one lad, after reeling half a dozen steps, pause at the side of the road, gravely peer into the ditch, and gravely, and after apparent deep thought, fall into it. To me this was excruciatingly funny. I staggered to the edge of the ditch, fully intending to stop on the edge. I came to myself in the ditch, in process of being hauled out by several anxious-faced girls. I didn't care to play at being drunk any more. There was no more fun in me. My eyes were beginning to swim, and with wide open mouth I panted for air. A girl led me by the hand on either side, but my legs were leaden. The alcohol I had drunk was striking my heart and brain like a club. Had I been a weakling of a child I am confident that it would have killed me. As it was I know I was nearer death than any of the scared girls dreamed. I could hear them bickering among themselves as to whose fault it was. Some were weeping for themselves, for me, and for the disgraceful way their lads had behaved. But I was not interested. I was suffocating, and I wanted air. To move was agony. It made me pant harder. Yet those girls persisted in making me walk, and it was four miles home. Four miles! I remember my swimming eyes saw a small bridge across the road and infinite distance away. In fact it was not a hundred feet distant. When I reached it I sank down and lay on my back panting. The girls tried to lift me, but I was helpless and suffocating. Their cries of alarm brought Larry, a drunken youth of seventeen, who proceeded to resuscitate me by jumping on my chest. Dimly I remember this, and the squalling of the girls as they struggled with him and dragged him away. And then I knew nothing, though I learned afterward that Larry wound up under the bridge and spent the night there. When I came to it was dark. I had been carried unconscious for four miles and had been put to bed. I was a sick child, and despite the terrible strain on my heart and tissues I continually relapsed into the madness of delirium. All the contents of the terrible and horrible in my child's mind spilled out. The most frightful visions were realities to me. I saw murders committed, and I was pursued by murderers. I screamed and raved and fought. My sufferings were prodigious. Emerging from such delirium I would hear my mother's voice, but the child's brain he will lose his reason. And sinking back into delirium I would take the idea with me and be immured in mad houses, and be beaten by keepers and surrounded by screeching lunatics. One thing that had strongly impressed my young mind was the talk of my elders about the dens of iniquity in San Francisco's Chinatown. In my delirium I wandered deep beneath the ground through a thousand of these dens, and behind locked doors of iron I suffered and died a thousand deaths. And when I would come upon my father seated at a table in these subterranean crips, gambling with Chinese for great stakes of gold, all my outrage gave vent in the vilest cursing. I would rise in bid, struggling against the detaining hands, and curse my father till the rafters rang. All the inconceivable filth, a child running at large in a primitive countryside, may hear men utter was mine. And though I had never dared to utter such thoughts, they now poured from me at the top of my lungs as I cursed my father sitting there underground and gambling with long-haired, long-nailed Chinaman. It is a wonder that I did not burst my heart or brain that night. A seven-year-old child's arteries and nerve centers are scarcely fitted to endure the terrific paroxysms that convulsed me. No one slept in the thin-frame farmhouse that night when John Barley Corn had his will of me. And Larry, under the bridge, had no delirium like mine. I am confident that his sleep was stupefied and dreamless, and that he awoke next day merely to heaviness and moroseness, and that if he lives today he does not remember that night. So passing was it as an incident. But my brain was seared forever by that experience. Writing now thirty years afterward every vision is as distinct, as sharp-cut, every pain as vital and terrible as on that night. I was sick for days afterwards, and I needed none of my mind, and I was sick for days afterwards, and I was sick for days afterwards, and I needed none of my mind, and I was sick for days afterwards, and I needed none of my mother's injunctions to avoid John Barley Corn in the future. My mother had been dreadfully shocked. She held that I had done wrong, very wrong, and that I had gone contrary to all her teaching. And how was I, who was never allowed to talk back, who lacked the very words with which to express my psychology, how was I to tell my mother that it was her teaching that was directly responsible for my drunkenness? Had it not been for her theories about dark eyes and Italian character, I should never have wet my lips with the sour, bitter wine. And not until man-grown did I tell her the true inwardness of that disgraceful affair. In those after-days of sickness I was confused on some points and very clear on others. I felt guilty of sin, yet smarted with a sense of injustice. It had not been my fault, yet I had done wrong. But very clear was my resolution never to touch liquor again. No mad dog was ever more afraid of water than I was of alcohol. Yet the point I am making is that this experience, terrible as it was, could not, in the end, deter me from forming John Barleycorn's cheek-by-jowl acquaintance. All about me, even then, were the forces moving me toward him. In the first place, barring my mother ever extreme in her views, it seemed to me all the grown-ups looked upon the affair with tolerant eyes. It was a joke, something funny that had happened. There was no shame attached. Even the lads and lassies giggled and snickered over their part in the affair, narrating with gusto how Larry had jumped on my chest and slept under the bridge, how so-and-so had slept out in the sandhills that night, and what had happened to the other lad who fell in the ditch. As I say, so far as I could see, there was no shame anywhere. It had been something ticklishly, devilishly fine, a bright and gorgeous episode in the monotony of life and labor on that bleak, fog-girt coast. The Irish ranchers twitted me, good-naturedly, on my exploit, and padded me on the back until I felt that I had done something heroic. Peter and Dominic and the other Italians were proud of my drinking prowess. The face of morality was not set against drinking. Besides, everybody drank. There was not a tea-toddler in the community. Even the teacher of our little country school, a graying man of fifty, gave us vacations on the occasions when he wrestled with John Barley Cohen and was thrown. Thus there was no spiritual deterrence. My loathing for alcohol was purely physiologically. I didn't like the damn stuff. End of Chapter 4 Chapters 5 and 6 of John Barley Cohen or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 5 This physical loathing for alcohol I have never got over, but I have conquered it. To this day I conquer it every time I take a drink. The palate never ceases to rebel, and the palate can be trusted to know what is good for the body. But men do not drink for the effect alcohol produces on the body. What they drink for is the brain effect, and if it must come through the body, so much the worse for the body. And yet, despite my physical loathing for alcohol, the brightest spots in my child life were the saloons. Sitting on the heavy potato wagons, wrapped in fog, feet stinging from inactivity, the horses plodding slowly along the deep road through the sand hills, one bright vision made the way never too long. The bright vision was the saloon at Colma, where my father, or whoever drove, always got out to get a drink. And I got out to warm by the great stove and get a soda cracker. Just one soda cracker, but a fabulous luxury. Saloons were good for something. Back behind the plodding horses, I would take an hour in consuming that one cracker. I took the smallest nibbles, never losing a crumb, and chewed the nibble till it became the thinnest and most delectable of pastes. I never voluntarily swallowed this paste. I just tasted it, and went on tasting it, turning it over with my tongue, spreading it on the inside of this cheek, then on the inside of the other cheek, until, at the end, it eluded me, and in tiny drops and oozlets slipped and dribbled down my throat. Horace Fletcher had nothing on me when it came to soda crackers. I liked saloons, especially I liked the San Francisco saloons. They had the most delicious dainties for the taking. Strange breads and crackers, cheeses, sausages, sardines, wonderful foods that I never saw on our meager home table. And once I remember, a barkeeper mixed me a sweet temperance drink of syrup and soda water. My father did not pay for it. It was the barkeeper's treat, and he became my ideal of a good kind man. I dreamed daydreams of him for years. Although I was seven years old at the time, I can see him now with undiminished clearness, though I never laid eyes on him but that one time. The saloon was south of Market Street in San Francisco. It stood on the west side of the street. As you entered the bar was on the left. On the right, against the wall, was the free lunch counter. It was a long, narrow room, and at the rear, beyond the beer kegs on tap, were small round tables and chairs. The barkeeper was blue eyed and had fair silky hair peeping out from under a black silk skull cap. I remember he wore a brown cardigan jacket, and I know precisely the spot in the midst of the array of bottles from which he took the bottle of red-colored syrup. He and my father talked long, and I sipped my sweet drink and worshiped him, and for years afterward I worshiped the memory of him. Despite my two disastrous experiences, here was John Barley Corn, prevalent and accessible everywhere in the community, luring in drawing me. Here were connotations of the saloon making deep indentations in a child's mind. Here was a child, forming its first judgments of the world, finding the saloon a delightful and desirable place. Stores nor public buildings nor all the dwellings of men ever opened their doors to me, and let me warm by their fires, or permitted me to eat the food of the gods from narrow shelves against the wall. Their doors were ever closed to me, the saloon's doors were ever open, and always and everywhere I found saloons, on highway and byway, up narrow alleys and on busy thoroughfares, bright-lighted and cheerful, warm in winter and in summer dark and cool. Yes, the saloon was a mighty fine place, and it was more than that. By the time I was ten years old, my family had abandoned ranching and gone to live in the city, and here at ten I began on the streets as a newsboy. One of the reasons for this was that we needed the money, and another reason was that I needed the exercise. I had found my way to the free public library and was reading myself into nervous prostration. On the poor ranches on which I had lived there had been no books. In ways truly miraculous I had been lent four books, marvellous books, and them I had devoured. One was the life of Garfield, the second, Paul the Shalu's African Travels, the third a novel by Weda, with the last 40 pages missing, and the fourth, Irving's Alhambra. This last had been lent me by a schoolteacher. I was not a forward child. Unlike Oliver Twist, I was incapable of asking for more. When I returned the Alhambra to the teacher, I hoped she would lend me another book. And because she did not, most likely she deemed me unappreciative, I cried all the way home on the three-mile tramp from the school to the ranch. I waited and yearned for her to lend me another book. Scores of times I nerved myself almost to the point of asking her, but never quite reached the necessary pitch of a frontery. And then came the city of Oakland, and on the shelves of that free library I discovered all the great world beyond the skyline. Here were thousands of books, as good as my four wonder books, and some were even better. Libraries were not concerned with children in those days, and I had strange adventures. I remember in the catalog being impressed by the title The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. I filed an application blank, and the librarian handed me the collected and entirely unexpurgated works of Smollett in one huge volume. I read everything, but principally history and adventure and all the old travels and voyages. I read mornings, afternoons, and nights. I read in bed, I read at table, I read as I walked to and from school, and I read at recess, while the other boys were playing. I began to get the jerks. To everybody, I replied, Go away, you make me nervous. And so, at ten, I was out on the streets, a newsboy. I had no time to read. I was busy getting exercise and learning how to fight, busy learning forwardness, and brass and bluff. I had an imagination and a curiosity about all things that made me plastic. Not least among the things I was curious about was the saloon. And I was in and out of many a one. I remember in those days on the east side of Broadway, between sixth and seventh, from corner to corner there was a solid block of saloons. In the saloons, life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness. Here was something more than common every day where nothing happened. Here life was always very live and sometimes even lurid. When blows were struck and blood was shed and big policemen came shouldering in, great moments there for me, my head filled with all the wild and valiant fighting of the gallant adventurers on sea and land. There were no big moments when I trudged along the street throwing my papers in it doors. But in the saloons, even the sots stupefied, sprawling across the tables or in the sawdust, were objects of mystery and wonder. And more, the saloons were right. The city fathers sanctioned them and licensed them. They were not the terrible places I heard boys deem them who lacked my opportunities to know. Terrible they might be, but then that only meant they were terribly wonderful, and it is the terribly wonderful that a boy desires to know. In the same way pirates and shipwrecks and battles were terrible, and what healthy boy wouldn't give his immortal soul to participate in such affairs. Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges, whose names and faces I knew. They put the seal of social approval on the saloon. They verified my own feeling of fascination in the saloon. They too must have found there that something different, that something beyond, which I sensed and groped after. What it was I did not know, yet there it must be, for their men focused like buzzing flies about a honey-pot. I had no sorrows, and the world was very bright, so I could not guess that what these men sought was forgetfulness of jaded toil and stale grief. Not that I drank at that time. From ten to fifteen I rarely tasted liquor, but I was intimately in contact with drinkers and drinking places. The only reason I did not drink was because I didn't like the stuff. As the time passed I worked as boy helper on an ice wagon, set up pins in a bowling alley with a saloon attached, and swept out saloons at Sunday picnic grounds. Big jovial Josie Harper ran a roadhouse at Telegraph Avenue and 39th Street. Here for a year I delivered an evening paper until my route was changed to the waterfront and tenderloin of Oakland. The first month, when I collected Josie Harper's bill, she poured me a glass of wine. I was ashamed to refuse, so I drank it. But after that I watched the chance when she wasn't around so as to collect from her barkeeper. The first day I worked in the bowling alley, the barkeeper, according to custom, called us boys up to have a drink after we had been setting up pins for several hours. The others asked for beer. I said I'd take ginger ale. The boys snickered, and I noticed the barkeeper favored me with a strange, searching scrutiny. Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of ginger ale. Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games, the boys enlightened me. I had offended the barkeeper. A bottle of ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam beer. And it was up to me if I wanted to hold my job to drink beer. Besides, beer was food. I could work better on it. There was no food in ginger ale. After that, when I couldn't sneak out of it, I drank beer and wondered what men found in it that was so good. I was always aware that I was missing something. What I really liked in those days was candy. For five cents I could buy five cannonballs, big lumps of the most delicious lastingness. I could chew and worry a single one for an hour. Then there was a Mexican who sold big slabs of brown chewing taffy for five cents each. It required a quarter of a day properly to absorb one of them. And many a day I made my entire lunch off one of those slabs. In truth I found food there, but not in beer. Chapter 6 But the time was rapidly drawing near when I was to begin my second series of bouts with John Barleycorn. When I was fourteen, my head filled with the tales of the old voyagers, my mind with tropical aisles and far sea rims, I was sailing a small centerboard skiff around San Francisco Bay and on the Oakland estuary. I wanted to go to sea. I wanted to get away from monotony and the commonplace. I was in the flower of my adolescence, a thrill with romance and adventure, dreaming of wildlife in the wild man-world. Little I guessed how all the warp and woof of that man-world was entangled with alcohol. So one day as I hoisted sail on my skiff, I met Scotty. He was a husky youngster of seventeen, a runaway apprentice he told me from an English ship in Australia. He had just worked his way on another ship to San Francisco and now he wanted to see about getting a berth on a whaler. Across the estuary, near where the whaler's lay was lying the sloop yacht idler. The caretaker was a harpooner who intended sailing next voyage on the whale's ship Bonanza. Would I take him Scotty over in my skiff to call upon the harpooner? Would I? Hadn't I heard the stories and rumors about the idler? The big sloop that had come up from the sandwich islands where it had been engaged in smuggling opium and the harpooner who was caretaker. How often had I seen him and envied him his freedom? He never had to leave the water. He slept aboard the idler each night while I had to go home upon the land to go to bed. The harpooner was only nineteen years old and I have never had anything but his own word that he was a harpooner, but he had been too shining and glorious a personality for me ever to address as I paddled around the yacht at a wistful distance. Would I take Scotty, the runaway sailor, to visit the harpooner on the opium smuggler idler? Would I? The harpooner came on deck to answer our hail and invited us aboard. I played the sailor and the man, fending off the skiff so that it would not mar the yacht's white paint, dropping the skiff of stern on a long painter and making the painter fast with two nonchalant half-hitches. We went below. It was the first sea interior I had ever seen. The clothing on the wall smelled musty, but what of that? Was it not the sea gear of men? Leather jackets lined with corduroy, blue coats of pilot cloth, sow esters, sea boots, oil skins. And everywhere was in evidence the economy of space, the narrow bunks, the swinging tables, the incredible lockers. There were the telltale compass, the sea lamps in their gimbals, the blue-backed charts carelessly rolled and tucked away, the signal flags in alphabetical order, and the mariner's dividers jammed into the woodwork to hold a calendar. At last I was living. Here I sat, inside my first ship, a smuggler, accepted as a comrade by a harpooner and a runaway English sailor who said his name was Scotty. The first thing that the harpooner, aged nineteen and the sailor, aged seventeen, did to show that they were men was to behave like men. The harpooner suggested the imminent desirableness of a drink, and Scotty searched his pockets for dimes and nickels. Then the harpooner carried away a pink flask to be filled in some blind pig, for there were no licensed saloons in that locality. We drank the cheap rot-gut out of tumblers. Was I any the less strong, any the less valiant than the harpooner and the sailor? They were men. They proved it by the way they drank. Drink was the badge of manhood. So I drank with them, drink by drink, raw and straight, though the damn stuff couldn't compare with a stick of chewing taffy or a delectable cannonball. I shuddered and swallowed my gorge with every drink, though I manfully hid all such symptoms. Diverse times we filled the flask that afternoon. All I had was twenty cents, but I put it up like a man, though with secret regret at the enormous store of candy it could have bought. The liquor mounted in the heads of all of us, and the talk of Scotty and the harpooner was upon running the easting down, gales off the horn, and pamperos off the plot, lower topsoil breezes, southerly busters, north pacific gales, and of smashed whaleboats in the Arctic ice. You can't swim in that ice water, said the harpooner confidentially to me. You double up in a minute and go down. When a whale smashes your boat, the thing to do is to get your belly across an oar so that when the cold doubles you, you'll float. Sure, I said, with a grateful nod and an air of certitude, that I, too, would hunt whales and be in smashed boats in the Arctic ocean, and truly I registered his advice as singularly valuable information and filed it away in my brain where it persists to this day. But I couldn't talk at first. Heavens! I was only fourteen and had never been on the ocean in my life. I could only listen to the two sea dogs and show my manhood by drinking with them, fairly and squarely, drink and drink. The liquor worked its will with me. The talk of Scotty and the harpooner poured through the pent space of the idler's cabin and through my brain with great gusts of wide free wind, and in imagination I lived my years to come and rocked over the wild, mad, glorious world on multitudinous adventures. We unbent. Our inhibitions and taciturnities vanished. We were as if we had known each other for years and years, and we pledged ourselves to years of future voyaging together. The harpooner told of misadventures and secret shames. Scotty wept over his poor old mother in Edinburgh, a lady he insisted gently born, who was in reduced circumstances, who had pinched herself to pay the lump sum to the shipowners for his apprenticeship, whose sacrificing dream had been to see him a merchant man officer and a gentleman, and who was heartbroken because he had deserted his ship in Australia and joined another as a common sailor before the mast, and Scotty proved it. He drew her last sad letter from his pocket and wept over it as he read it aloud. The harpooner and I wept with him, and swore that all three of us would ship on the whale ship Bonanza, win a big payday and still together make a pilgrimage to Edinburgh and lay our store of money in the dear lady's lap. And as John Barleycorn heated his way into my brain, thawing my reticence, melting my modesty, talking through me and with me and as me, my adopted twin brother and altered ego, I too, raised my voice to show myself a man and an adventurer, and bragged in detail and at length of how I had crossed San Francisco Bay in my open skiff in a roaring south-western, even when the schooner sailors doubted my exploit. Further, I, or John Barleycorn for it was the same thing, told Scotty that he might be a deep sea sailor and know the last rope on the great deep sea ships, but that when it came to small boat sailing I could beat him hands down and sail circles around him. The best of it was that my assertion and brag were true. With reticence and modesty present, I could never have dared tell Scotty my small boat estimate of him. But it is ever the way of John Barleycorn to loosen the tongue and babble the secret thought. Scotty, or John Barleycorn, or the pair, was very naturally offended by my remarks. Nor was I loathe. I could whip any runaway sailor seventeen years old. Scotty and I flared and raged like young cockerels, until the harpooner poured another round of drinks to enable us to forgive and make up. Which we did, arms around each other's necks, protesting vows of eternal friendship, just like Black Mat and Tom Morrissey I remembered in the ranch kitchen in San Mateo. And remembering I knew that I was at last a man, despite my meager fourteen years, a man as big and manly as those two strapping giants who had quarreled and made up on that memorable Sunday morning of long ago. By this time the singing stage was reached, and I joined Scotty and the harpooner in snatches of seasongs and shanties. It was here in the cabin of the idler that I first heard blow the man down, flying cloud, and whiskey, Johnny whiskey. Oh, it was brave. I was beginning to grasp the meaning of life. Here was no commonplace, no Oakland estuary, no weary round of throwing newspapers at front doors, delivering ice, and setting up nine pins. All the world was mine, all its paths were under my feet, and John Barleycorn, tricking my fancy, enabled me to anticipate the life of adventure for which I yearned. We were not ordinary, we were three tipsy young gods, incredibly wise, gloriously genial, and without limit to our powers. Ah, and I say it now, after the years, could John Barleycorn keep one at such a height, I should never draw a sober breath again. But this is not a world of free frates. One pays according to an iron schedule, for every strength the balanced weakness, for every high a corresponding low, for every fictitious godlike moment, an equivalent time in reptilian slime, for every feat of telescoping long days and weeks of life into mad, magnificent instance, one must pay with shortened life and off times with savage usury added. Intenseness and duration are as ancient enemies as fire and water. They are mutually destructive, they cannot coexist, and John Barleycorn, mighty necromancer though he be, is as much a slave to organic chemistry as we mortals are. We pay for every nerve marathon we run, nor can John Barleycorn intercede and fend off the just payment. He can lead us to the heights, but he cannot keep us there, else would we all be devotees. And there is no devotee but pays for the mad dances John Barleycorn pipes. Yet the foregoing is all in after wisdom spoken. It was no part of the knowledge of the lad, 14 years old, who sat in the idler's cabin between the harpooner and the sailor, the air rich in his nostrils with the musty smell of men's sea gear, roaring in chorus, Yankee ship come down the river, pull my bully boys, pull. We grew maudlin, and all talked and shouted at once. I had a splendid constitution, a stomach that would digest scrap iron, and I was still running my marathon in full vigor when Scotty began to fail and fade. His talk grew incoherent. He groped for words and could not find them, while the ones he found his lips were unable to form. His poisoned consciousness was leaving him. The brightness went out of his eyes, and he looked as stupid as were his efforts to talk. His face and body sagged as his consciousness sagged. A man cannot sit upright saved by an act of will. Scotty's reeling brain could not control his muscles, and his correlations were breaking down. He strove to take another drink, and feebly dropped the tumbler on the floor. Then, to my amazement, weeping bitterly, he rolled into a bunk on his back, and immediately snored off to sleep. The harpooner and I drank on, grinning in a superior way to each other over Scotty's plight. The last flask was opened, and we drank it between us to the accompaniment of Scotty's sturturous breathing. Then the harpooner faded away into his bunk, and I was left alone, unthrown on the field of battle. I was very proud, and John Barley-Corn was proud with me. I could carry my drink. I was a man. I had drunk two men, drink for drink, into unconsciousness, and I was still on my two feet upright, making my way on deck to get air into my scorching lungs. It was in this bout on the idler that I discovered what a good stomach and a strong head I had for drink. A bit of knowledge that was to be a source of pride in succeeding years, and that ultimately I was to come to consider a great affliction. The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate white is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign, who must take numerous glasses in order to get the kick. The sun was setting when I came on the idler's deck. There were plenty of bunks below. I did not need to go home, but I wanted to demonstrate to myself how much I was a man. There lay my skiff astern. The last of a strong ebb was running out in channel in the teeth of an ocean breeze of forty miles an hour. I could see the stiff white caps, and the suck and run of the current was plainly visible in the face and trough of each one. I set sail, cast off, took my place at the tiller, the sheet in my hand, and headed across channel. The skiff healed over and plunged into it madly. The spray began to fly. I was at the pinnacle of exaltation. I sang, blow the man down as I sailed. I was no boy of fourteen living the mediocre ways of the sleepy town called Oakland. I was a man, a god, and the very elements rendered me allegiance as I bided them to my will. The tide was out. A full hundred yards of soft mud intervened between the boat-warf and the water. I pulled up my centerboard, ran full tilt into the mud, took in sail, and standing in the stern as I had often done at low tide, I began to shove the skiff with an oar. It was then that my correlations began to break down. I lost my balance, and pitched head foremost into the ooze. Then, and for the first time, as I floundered to my feet covered with slime, the blood running down my arms from a scrape against a barnacled stake, I knew that I was drunk. But what of it? Across the channel, two strong sailor men lay unconscious in their bunks where I had drunk them. I was a man. I was still in my legs, if they were knee-deep in mud. I disdained to get back into the skiff. I waded through the mud, shoving the skiff before me, and yammering the chant of my manhood to the world. I paid for it. I was sick for a couple of days, meanly sick, and my arms were painfully poisoned from the barnacled scratches. For a week I could not use them, and it was a torture to put on and take off my clothes. I swore. Never again! The game wasn't worth it. The price was too stiff. I had no moral qualms. My revulsion was purely physical. No exalted moments were worth such hours of misery and wretchedness. When I got back to my skiff, I shunned the idler. I would cross the opposite side of the channel to go around her. Scotty had disappeared. The harpooner was still about, but him I avoided. Once when he landed on the boat-warf I hid in a shed so as to escape seeing him. I was afraid he would propose some more drinking, maybe have a flask full of whiskey in his pocket. And yet—and here enters the necromancy of John Barleycorn—that afternoon's drunk on the idler had been a purple passage flung into the monotony of my days. It was memorable. My mind dwelt on it continually. I went over the details over and over again. Among other things I had got into the cogs and springs of men's actions. I had seen Scotty Weep about his own worthlessness and the sad case of his Edinburgh mother, who was a lady. The harpooner had told me terribly wonderful things of himself. I had caught a myriad enticing and inflammatory hints of a world beyond my world, and for which I was certainly as fitted as the two lads who had drunk with me. I had got behind men's souls. I had got behind my own soul, and found unguessed potencies and greatnesses. Yes, that day stood out above all my other days. To this day it so stands out. The memory of it is branded in my brain. But the price exacted was too high. I refused to play and pay and return to my cannonballs and taffy slabs. The point is that all the chemistry of my healthy, normal body drove me away from alcohol. The stuff didn't agree with me. It was abominable. But despite this, circumstance was to continue to drive me toward John Barleycorn. To drive me again and again, until, after long years, the time should come when I would look upon John Barleycorn in every haunt of men, look him up and hail him gladly as benefactor and friend, and detest and hate him all the time. Yes, he is a strange friend, John Barleycorn.