July 26, 2025 • 19 mins
Discover the untold story of renowned author Jack London, who tragically passed away at just forty years old. In this deeply personal memoir, London shares his life through the lens of his relationship with alcohol, personified as John Barleycorn. Despite the prevailing controversies surrounding his demise, Londons candid exposition of his battles with alcoholism was far ahead of its time, pre-empting modern theories of addiction. With an extraordinary blend of honesty and insight, he unveils his encounters with both the demons and deities of his life, personified by his friend and foe, John Barleycorn. (Summary by Peter Kelleher)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter thirty seven of John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs by
Jack Lundon. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings
are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,
(00:21):
please visit LibriVox dot org. Chapter thirty seven, Come says
the white logic, and forget those Asian dreamers of old time.
Fill your glass and let us look at the parchments
of the dreamers of yesterday who dreamed their dreams on
(00:46):
your own warm hills. I pour over the abstract of
title of the vineyard called chakuay on the rancho called Petaluma.
It is a sad long list of the names of men,
beginning with Manuel Michel Torreno, one time Mexican governor, Commander
(01:13):
in chief and Inspector of the Department of the Californias,
who deeded ten square leagues of stolen Indian land to
Colonel Don Mariano Guadalupe Valhejo for services rendered his country
(01:35):
and for moneys paid by him for ten years to
his soldiers immediately. This musty record of man's land lust
assumes the formidableness of a battle. The quick struggling with
the dust. There are deeds of trust, mortgages, certificates of release, transfers, judgments, foreclosures,
(02:05):
writ of attachment, orders of sale, tax lians, petitions for
letters of administration, and decrees of distribution. It is like
a monster ever unsubdued, this stubborn land that drowses in
this Indian summer weather, and that survives them all the
(02:30):
men who scratched its surface and passed. Who was this James,
King of William, so curiously named the oldest surviving settler
in the Valley of the Moon, knows him not yet.
Only sixty years ago he loaned Mariano G. Vallejo eighteen
(02:57):
thousand dollars on security of certain lands, including the vineyard
yet to be and to be called Chokay. Whence came
Peter O'Connor, and wither vanished. After writing his little name
of a day on the woodland that was to become
(03:19):
a vineyard, appears Luis Somo Chiane, a name to conjure with.
He lasts. Through several pages of this record of the
enduring soil. Comes Old American stock thirsting across the Great
(03:40):
American Desert, mule backing across the Isthmus, wind jamming around
the horn to write brief and forgotten names, where ten
thousand generations of wild Indians are equally forgotten names like Hallecks, Sweat, Tait, Denman, Tracy, Grimwood,
(04:07):
Carlton Temple. There are no names like those today in
the Valley of the Moon. The names begin to appear
fast and furiously, flashing from legal page to legal page,
and in a flash vanishing. But ever the persistent soil
(04:29):
remains for others to scrawl themselves across. Come the names
of men of whom I have vaguely heard, but whom
I have never known. Colar and Frolling, who built the
great Stone Winery on the vineyard called Tokay, but who
(04:49):
built upon a hill up which other vineyardists refused to
haul their grapes. So Coler and Frolling lost the land.
The earthquake of nineteen hundred and six threw down the winery,
and I now live in its ruins. La Motte. He
(05:11):
broke the soil, planted vines and orchards, instituted commercial fish culture,
built a mansion renowned in its day, was defeated by
the soil and pasted, And my name of a day
appears on the site of his orchards and vineyards, of
(05:34):
his proud mansion, of his very fish ponds. I have
scrawled myself with half a hundred thousand eucalyptus trees. Cooper
and Greenlaw on what is called the hill Ranch. They
left two of their dead, little Lily and little David,
(05:57):
who rest today inside a tiny square of hand hewn palings. Also,
Cooper and Greenlaw, in their time cleared the Virgin forest
from three fields of forty acres. Today I have those
(06:17):
three fields sown with Canada peas, and in the spring
they shall be plowed under for green manure. Haska a
dim legendary figure of a generation ago, who went back
up the mountains and cleared six acres of brush in
(06:39):
the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil,
reared stone walls and house, and planted apple trees. And
already the site of the house is undiscoverable. The location
of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration
(07:01):
of the landscape. And I am renewing the battle, putting
in Angora goats to browse away the brush that has
overrun Haske's clearing and choked Haske's apple trees to death.
So I too, scratch the land with my brief endeavor,
(07:25):
and flash my name across a page of legal script
ere I pass, and the page grows musty dreamers and ghosts.
The White Logic chuckles. But surely the striving was not
altogether vain, I contend it was based on illusion, and
(07:50):
is a lie, a vital lie, I retort and pray,
What is a vital lie but a lie? Logic challenges,
Come fill your glass and let us examine these vital
liars who crowd your bookshelves. Let us dabble in William James,
(08:14):
a bit a man of health, I say from him,
we may expect no philosopher's stone, but at least we
will find a few robust, tonic things to which to
tie rationality gelded to sentiment, the White Logic grins. At
(08:36):
the end of all his thinking, he still clung to
the sentiment of immortality. Facts transmuted in the alembic of
hope into terms of faith, the ripest fruit of reason,
the stultification of reason. From the topmost peak of reason,
(09:00):
James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that
all is well and will be well. The old, oh
ancient old acrobatic flip of the metaphysicians, whereby the reasoned
reason quite away in order to escape the pessimism consequent
(09:26):
upon the grim and honest exercise of reason. Is this
flesh of yours you? Or is it an extraneous something
possessed by you? Your body? What? Is it? A machine
for converting stimuli into reactions? Stimuli and reactions are remembered,
(09:53):
They constitute experience. Then you are in your consciousness, the
experiences you are at any moment, what you are thinking
at that moment. Your eye is both subject and object.
It predicates things of itself, and is the things predicated.
(10:18):
The thinker is the thought, The knower is what is known.
The possessor is the things possessed. After all, as you
know well, man is a flux of states of consciousness,
a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self and
(10:40):
other self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad cells, a continual becoming,
but never being, a will of the wisp, flitting of
ghosts in ghost land. But this man will not accept
of himself. He ref uses to accept his own passing.
(11:03):
He will not pass, He will live again, if he
has to die to do it. He shuffles, atoms and
jets of light, remotest nebulae, drips of water, prick points
of sensation, slime, oozings and cosmic bulks, all mixed with
(11:28):
pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises,
and pompous arrogances, And of the stuff builds himself an
immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He
(11:50):
squirms on his dunghill, and like a child lost in
the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he
is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that
is destined to be as free as they. Monuments of egotism,
(12:12):
reared by the epi phenomena, dreams and the dust of
dreams that vanish when the dreamer vanishes, and are no
more when he is not. It is nothing new these
vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and mumbling them like
(12:35):
charms and incantations against the powers of Night. The voodoos
and medicine men and the devil devil doctors were the
fathers of metaphysics. Night and the noseless One were ogres
that beset the way of light and life. And the
(12:57):
metaphysicians would win by if they had to tell lies
to do it. They were vexed by the brazen law
of the Ecclesiast that men die like the beasts of
the field, and their end is the same. Their creeds were,
their schemes, their religions, their nostrums, their philosophies, their devices
(13:24):
by which they half believed they would outwit the noseless
one and the night bog lights, vapors of mysticism, psychic overtones,
soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and
(13:46):
tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pans,
psychic hallucinations. This is the stuff, the phantasms of hope,
that fills your bookshelves. Look at them, all the sad
(14:10):
wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels, your Schopenhauer's,
your Stringbergs, your Tolstoys and nietzs cheese. Come, your glass
is empty, fill and forget I obey, for my brain
(14:31):
is now well. A crawl with the maggots of alcohol,
and as I drink to the sad thinkers on my shelves.
I quote Richard Hovey, abstain not life and love, like
night and day, offer themselves to us on their own terms,
(14:53):
not ours. Accept their bounty, while ye may before we
be accepted by the worms. I will cap you, cries
the White logic. No, I answer, while the maggots madden me.
I know you for what you are, and I am
(15:13):
unafraid under your mask of hedonism. You are yourself the
noseless one, and your way leads to the night. Hedonism
has no meaning. It too is a lie at best,
the coward's smug compromise. Now I will cap you. The
(15:37):
White Logic breaks in. But if you would not this
poor life fulfill lo, you are free to end it
when you will, without the fear of waking after death.
And I laugh my defiance. For now and for the moment,
(15:58):
I know the White Logic to be the arch impostor
of them all, whispering his whispers of death. And he
is guilty of his own unmasking, with his own genial chemistry,
turning the tables on himself, with his own maggots, biting
(16:20):
alive the old illusions, resurrecting and making to sound again
the old voice from beyond of my youth, telling me
again that still are mind. The possibilities and powers which
life and the books had taught me did not exist.
(16:41):
And the dinner gone sounds to the reversed bottom of
my glass, jeering at the white logic. I go out
to join my guests at table, and with assumed seriousness,
to discuss the current magazines and the silly doing of
the world's day, whipping every trick and rusts of controversy
(17:06):
through all the paces of paradox and persiflage. And when
the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully disconcerting
to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois fetishes, and
to laugh and epigram at the flitting god ghosts, and
(17:29):
the debaucheries and follies of wisdom, the clowns, the thing,
the clown. If one must be a philosopher, let him
be Aristophanes. And no one at the table thinks I
am jingled. I am in fine fettle, that is all.
(17:51):
I tire of the labor of thinking. And when the
table is finished, start practical jokes and set all playing
at games, which we carry on with bucolic boisterousness. And
when the evening is over and good night, said, I
(18:11):
go back through my book walled den, to my sleeping porch,
and to myself, and to the white logic, which undefeated
has never left me. And as I fall to fuddled sleep,
I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it. I
(18:33):
heard youth calling in the night. Gone is my former world? Delight,
for there is not my feet may stay. The morn
suffuses in today. It dare not stand a moment still,
But must the world with light fulfill more evanescent than
(18:56):
the rose. My sudden rainbow come and goes plunging bright
ends across the sky. Yay, I am youth, because I die.
End of Chapter thirty seven
Chapter thirty seven of John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs by
Jack Lundon. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings
are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,
(00:21):
please visit LibriVox dot org. Chapter thirty seven, Come says
the white logic, and forget those Asian dreamers of old time.
Fill your glass and let us look at the parchments
of the dreamers of yesterday who dreamed their dreams on
(00:46):
your own warm hills. I pour over the abstract of
title of the vineyard called chakuay on the rancho called Petaluma.
It is a sad long list of the names of men,
beginning with Manuel Michel Torreno, one time Mexican governor, Commander
(01:13):
in chief and Inspector of the Department of the Californias,
who deeded ten square leagues of stolen Indian land to
Colonel Don Mariano Guadalupe Valhejo for services rendered his country
(01:35):
and for moneys paid by him for ten years to
his soldiers immediately. This musty record of man's land lust
assumes the formidableness of a battle. The quick struggling with
the dust. There are deeds of trust, mortgages, certificates of release, transfers, judgments, foreclosures,
(02:05):
writ of attachment, orders of sale, tax lians, petitions for
letters of administration, and decrees of distribution. It is like
a monster ever unsubdued, this stubborn land that drowses in
this Indian summer weather, and that survives them all the
(02:30):
men who scratched its surface and passed. Who was this James,
King of William, so curiously named the oldest surviving settler
in the Valley of the Moon, knows him not yet.
Only sixty years ago he loaned Mariano G. Vallejo eighteen
(02:57):
thousand dollars on security of certain lands, including the vineyard
yet to be and to be called Chokay. Whence came
Peter O'Connor, and wither vanished. After writing his little name
of a day on the woodland that was to become
(03:19):
a vineyard, appears Luis Somo Chiane, a name to conjure with.
He lasts. Through several pages of this record of the
enduring soil. Comes Old American stock thirsting across the Great
(03:40):
American Desert, mule backing across the Isthmus, wind jamming around
the horn to write brief and forgotten names, where ten
thousand generations of wild Indians are equally forgotten names like Hallecks, Sweat, Tait, Denman, Tracy, Grimwood,
(04:07):
Carlton Temple. There are no names like those today in
the Valley of the Moon. The names begin to appear
fast and furiously, flashing from legal page to legal page,
and in a flash vanishing. But ever the persistent soil
(04:29):
remains for others to scrawl themselves across. Come the names
of men of whom I have vaguely heard, but whom
I have never known. Colar and Frolling, who built the
great Stone Winery on the vineyard called Tokay, but who
(04:49):
built upon a hill up which other vineyardists refused to
haul their grapes. So Coler and Frolling lost the land.
The earthquake of nineteen hundred and six threw down the winery,
and I now live in its ruins. La Motte. He
(05:11):
broke the soil, planted vines and orchards, instituted commercial fish culture,
built a mansion renowned in its day, was defeated by
the soil and pasted, And my name of a day
appears on the site of his orchards and vineyards, of
(05:34):
his proud mansion, of his very fish ponds. I have
scrawled myself with half a hundred thousand eucalyptus trees. Cooper
and Greenlaw on what is called the hill Ranch. They
left two of their dead, little Lily and little David,
(05:57):
who rest today inside a tiny square of hand hewn palings. Also,
Cooper and Greenlaw, in their time cleared the Virgin forest
from three fields of forty acres. Today I have those
(06:17):
three fields sown with Canada peas, and in the spring
they shall be plowed under for green manure. Haska a
dim legendary figure of a generation ago, who went back
up the mountains and cleared six acres of brush in
(06:39):
the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil,
reared stone walls and house, and planted apple trees. And
already the site of the house is undiscoverable. The location
of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration
(07:01):
of the landscape. And I am renewing the battle, putting
in Angora goats to browse away the brush that has
overrun Haske's clearing and choked Haske's apple trees to death.
So I too, scratch the land with my brief endeavor,
(07:25):
and flash my name across a page of legal script
ere I pass, and the page grows musty dreamers and ghosts.
The White Logic chuckles. But surely the striving was not
altogether vain, I contend it was based on illusion, and
(07:50):
is a lie, a vital lie, I retort and pray,
What is a vital lie but a lie? Logic challenges,
Come fill your glass and let us examine these vital
liars who crowd your bookshelves. Let us dabble in William James,
(08:14):
a bit a man of health, I say from him,
we may expect no philosopher's stone, but at least we
will find a few robust, tonic things to which to
tie rationality gelded to sentiment, the White Logic grins. At
(08:36):
the end of all his thinking, he still clung to
the sentiment of immortality. Facts transmuted in the alembic of
hope into terms of faith, the ripest fruit of reason,
the stultification of reason. From the topmost peak of reason,
(09:00):
James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that
all is well and will be well. The old, oh
ancient old acrobatic flip of the metaphysicians, whereby the reasoned
reason quite away in order to escape the pessimism consequent
(09:26):
upon the grim and honest exercise of reason. Is this
flesh of yours you? Or is it an extraneous something
possessed by you? Your body? What? Is it? A machine
for converting stimuli into reactions? Stimuli and reactions are remembered,
(09:53):
They constitute experience. Then you are in your consciousness, the
experiences you are at any moment, what you are thinking
at that moment. Your eye is both subject and object.
It predicates things of itself, and is the things predicated.
(10:18):
The thinker is the thought, The knower is what is known.
The possessor is the things possessed. After all, as you
know well, man is a flux of states of consciousness,
a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self and
(10:40):
other self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad cells, a continual becoming,
but never being, a will of the wisp, flitting of
ghosts in ghost land. But this man will not accept
of himself. He ref uses to accept his own passing.
(11:03):
He will not pass, He will live again, if he
has to die to do it. He shuffles, atoms and
jets of light, remotest nebulae, drips of water, prick points
of sensation, slime, oozings and cosmic bulks, all mixed with
(11:28):
pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises,
and pompous arrogances, And of the stuff builds himself an
immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He
(11:50):
squirms on his dunghill, and like a child lost in
the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he
is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that
is destined to be as free as they. Monuments of egotism,
(12:12):
reared by the epi phenomena, dreams and the dust of
dreams that vanish when the dreamer vanishes, and are no
more when he is not. It is nothing new these
vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and mumbling them like
(12:35):
charms and incantations against the powers of Night. The voodoos
and medicine men and the devil devil doctors were the
fathers of metaphysics. Night and the noseless One were ogres
that beset the way of light and life. And the
(12:57):
metaphysicians would win by if they had to tell lies
to do it. They were vexed by the brazen law
of the Ecclesiast that men die like the beasts of
the field, and their end is the same. Their creeds were,
their schemes, their religions, their nostrums, their philosophies, their devices
(13:24):
by which they half believed they would outwit the noseless
one and the night bog lights, vapors of mysticism, psychic overtones,
soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and
(13:46):
tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pans,
psychic hallucinations. This is the stuff, the phantasms of hope,
that fills your bookshelves. Look at them, all the sad
(14:10):
wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels, your Schopenhauer's,
your Stringbergs, your Tolstoys and nietzs cheese. Come, your glass
is empty, fill and forget I obey, for my brain
(14:31):
is now well. A crawl with the maggots of alcohol,
and as I drink to the sad thinkers on my shelves.
I quote Richard Hovey, abstain not life and love, like
night and day, offer themselves to us on their own terms,
(14:53):
not ours. Accept their bounty, while ye may before we
be accepted by the worms. I will cap you, cries
the White logic. No, I answer, while the maggots madden me.
I know you for what you are, and I am
(15:13):
unafraid under your mask of hedonism. You are yourself the
noseless one, and your way leads to the night. Hedonism
has no meaning. It too is a lie at best,
the coward's smug compromise. Now I will cap you. The
(15:37):
White Logic breaks in. But if you would not this
poor life fulfill lo, you are free to end it
when you will, without the fear of waking after death.
And I laugh my defiance. For now and for the moment,
(15:58):
I know the White Logic to be the arch impostor
of them all, whispering his whispers of death. And he
is guilty of his own unmasking, with his own genial chemistry,
turning the tables on himself, with his own maggots, biting
(16:20):
alive the old illusions, resurrecting and making to sound again
the old voice from beyond of my youth, telling me
again that still are mind. The possibilities and powers which
life and the books had taught me did not exist.
(16:41):
And the dinner gone sounds to the reversed bottom of
my glass, jeering at the white logic. I go out
to join my guests at table, and with assumed seriousness,
to discuss the current magazines and the silly doing of
the world's day, whipping every trick and rusts of controversy
(17:06):
through all the paces of paradox and persiflage. And when
the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully disconcerting
to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois fetishes, and
to laugh and epigram at the flitting god ghosts, and
(17:29):
the debaucheries and follies of wisdom, the clowns, the thing,
the clown. If one must be a philosopher, let him
be Aristophanes. And no one at the table thinks I
am jingled. I am in fine fettle, that is all.
(17:51):
I tire of the labor of thinking. And when the
table is finished, start practical jokes and set all playing
at games, which we carry on with bucolic boisterousness. And
when the evening is over and good night, said, I
(18:11):
go back through my book walled den, to my sleeping porch,
and to myself, and to the white logic, which undefeated
has never left me. And as I fall to fuddled sleep,
I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it. I
(18:33):
heard youth calling in the night. Gone is my former world? Delight,
for there is not my feet may stay. The morn
suffuses in today. It dare not stand a moment still,
But must the world with light fulfill more evanescent than
(18:56):
the rose. My sudden rainbow come and goes plunging bright
ends across the sky. Yay, I am youth, because I die.
End of Chapter thirty seven
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