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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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapters thirty eight and thirty nine 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, please visit LibriVox dot org. Chapter
(00:28):
thirty eight. The foregoing is a sample roaming with the
white logic through the dusk of my soul. To the
best of my power, I have striven to give the
reader a glimpse of a man's secret dwelling when it
is shared with John Barleycorn. And the reader must remember
(00:50):
that this mood, which he has read in a quarter
of an hour, is but one mood of the myriad
moods of John Barleycorn, and that the procession of such
moods may well last the clock around, through many a
day and week and month. My alcoholic reminiscences draw to
(01:15):
a close, I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker
can say, that all that leaves me alive today on
the planet is my unmerited luck, the luck of chest
and shoulders and constitution. I dare to say that a
(01:38):
not large percentage of use in the formative stage of
fifteen to seventeen could have survived the stress of heavy
drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years,
that a not large percentage of men could have the
(02:00):
alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived
to tell the tale. I survived through no personal virtue,
but because I did not have the chemistry of a dipsomaniac,
and because I possessed an organism unusually resistant to the
(02:24):
ravages of John Barleycorn, and surviving, I have watched the
others die not so lucky down all the long sad road.
It was my unmitigated and absolute good fortune, good luck, chance,
(02:47):
call it what you will, that brought me through the
fires of John Barleycorn. My life, my career, my joy
in living have not been destroyed. They have been scorched.
It is true, Like the survivors of forlorn hopes, they have,
(03:08):
by unthinkably miraculous ways, come through the fight to marvel
at the tally of the slain. And like such a
survivor of old red war who cries out, let there
be no more war, so I cry out, let there
(03:30):
be no more poison fighting by our youths. The way
to stop war is to stop it. The way to
stop drinking is to stop it. The way China stopped
the general use of opium was by stopping the cultivation
(03:51):
and importation of opium. The philosophers, priests, and doctors of
China could have preached themselves breathless against opium for a
thousand years, and the use of opium, so long as
opium was ever accessible and obtainable, would have continued unabated.
(04:17):
We are so made, that is all. We have, with
great success, made a practice of not leaving arsenic and
strycht nine and typhoid and tuberculosis germs lying around for
our children to be destroyed. By treat John Barleycorn the
(04:42):
same way. Stop him. Don't let him lie around, licensed
and legal to pounce upon our youth. Not of alcoholics,
nor for alcoholics do I write, but for our youths,
for those who possess no more than the adventure stings
(05:07):
and the genial predispositions, the social man impulses, which are
twisted all orri by our barbarian civilization, which feeds them
poison on all the corners. It is the healthy, normal
(05:27):
boys now born or being born, for whom I write.
It was for this reason more than any other, and
more ardently than any other, that I rode down into
the valley of the Moon all a jingle and voted
for equal suffrage. I voted that women might vote, because
(05:54):
I knew that they, the wives and mothers of the race,
would vote John Barleycorn, out of existence and back into
the historical limbo of our vanished customs of savagery. If
I thus seem to cry out as one hurt, please
(06:17):
remember that I have been sorely bruised, and that I
do dislike the thought that any son or daughter of
mine or yours should be similarly bruised. The women are
the true conservators of the race. The men are the wastrels,
(06:40):
the adventure lovers, and gamblers, and in the end it
is by their women that they are saved. A boat
man's first experiment in chemistry was the making of alcohol,
and down all the generations to this day, man has
(07:00):
continued to manufacture and drink it, and there has never
been a day when the women have not resented man's
use of alcohol, though they have never had the power
to give weight to their resentment. The moment women get
the vote in any community, the first thing they proceed
(07:22):
to do is to close the saloons in a thousand
generations to come. Men of themselves will not close the
saloons as well. Expect the morphine victims to legislate the
sale of morphine out of existence. The women know they
(07:44):
have paid an incalculable price of sweat in tears for
man's use of alcohol. Ever, jealous for the race, they
will legislate for the babes of boys yet to be born,
and for the babes of girls too, For they must
be the mothers, wives and sisters of these boys, and
(08:08):
it will be easy. The only ones that will be
hurt will be the topers and seasoned drinkers of a
single generation. I am one of these, and I make
solemn assurance, based upon long traffic with John Barleycorn, that
(08:30):
it won't hurt me very much to stop drinking when
no one else drinks, and when no drink is obtainable.
On the other hand, the overwhelming proportion of young men
are so normally non alcoholic that, never having had access
to alcohol, they will never miss it. They will know
(08:54):
of the saloon only in the pages of history, and
they will of the saloon as a quaint old custom
similar to bull baiting and the burning of witches chapter
thirty nine. Of course, no personal tale is complete without
(09:19):
bringing the narrative of the person down to the last moment.
But mine is no tale of a reformed drunkard. I
was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed. It
chanced some time ago that I made a voyage of
one hundred and forty eight days in a wind jammer
(09:42):
around the Horn. I took no private supply of alcohol along,
And though there was no day of those one hundred
and forty eight days that I could not have got
a drink from the captain, I did not take a drink.
Did not take a drink because I did not desire
a drink. No one else drank on board. The atmosphere
(10:08):
for drinking was not present, and in my system there
was no organic need for alcohol. My chemistry did not
demand alcohol. So there arose before me a problem, A
clear and simple problem. This is so easy, why not
(10:30):
keep it up when you get back on land. I
weighed this problem carefully. I waited for five months in
a state of absolute non contact with alcohol, and out
of the data of past experience, I reached certain conclusions
(10:53):
In the first place, I am convinced that not one
man in ten thousand or in one hundred thousand is
a genuine chemical dipsomaniac. Drinking, as I deem, it is
practically entirely a habit of mind. It is unlike tobacco,
(11:17):
or cocaine, or morphine or all the rest of the
long list of drugs. The desire for alcohol is quite
peculiarly mental in its origin. It is a matter of
mental training and growth, and it is cultivated in social soil.
(11:40):
Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone. All
drinkers began socially, and this drinking is accompanied by a
thousand social connotations, such as I have described out of
my own experience in the first part of this narrative.
(12:01):
These social connotations are the stuff of which the drink
habit is largely composed. The part that alcohol itself plays
is inconsiderable when compared with the part played by the
social atmosphere in which it is drunk. The human is
(12:21):
rarely born these days who without long training in the
social associations of drinking, feels the irresistible chemical propulsion of
his system toward alcohol. I do assume that such rare
individuals are born, but I have never encountered one. On
(12:45):
this long five months voyage, I found that among all
my bodily needs, not the slightest shred of a bodily
need for alcohol existed. But this I did find. My
need was mental and social. When I thought of alcohol,
(13:06):
the connotation was fellowship. When I thought of fellowship, the
connotation was alcohol. Fellowship and alcohol were Siamese twins. They
always occurred linked together. Thus, when reading in my deck chair,
or when talking with others, practically, any mention of any
(13:30):
part of the world I knew instantly aroused the connotation
of drinking and good fellows, big nights and days and moments,
all purple passages and freedoms thronged my memory. Venice stares
at me from the printed page, and I remember the
(13:54):
cafe tables on the sidewalks the Battle of Santia, someone says,
and I answer, yes, I've been over the ground, But
I do not see the ground, nor kettle Hill, nor
the peace tree. What I see is the cafe Venus
(14:18):
on the Plaza of Santiago, where one hot night I
drank and talked with a dying consumptive. The East end
of London, I read, or someone says, and first of all,
under my eyelids leap the visions of the shining pubs,
(14:41):
and in my ears echo the calls for two of
bitter and three of scotch the Latin quarter. At once.
I am in the student cabarets, bright faces and keen
spirits around me, sipping cool, well dripped absinthe, while our
(15:04):
voices mount and soar in Latin fashion. As we settle
God and art and democracy and the rest of the
simple problems of existence. In a pampero off the river plot,
we speculate if we are disabled of running into Buenos Aires,
(15:28):
the Paris of America, and I have visions of bright,
congregating places of men, of the jollity of raised glasses,
and of song and cheer and the hum of genial voices.
When we have picked up the Northeast trades. In the Pacific,
(15:51):
we try to persuade our dying captain to run for Honolulu.
And while I persuade myself again, drinking cocktails on the
cool Laannae and fizzes out at Wakaki where the surf
rolls in, someone mentions the way wild ducks are cooked
(16:16):
in the restaurants of San Francisco, And at once I
am transported to the light and clatter of many tables,
where I gaze at old friends across the golden brims
of long stemmed rhine wine glasses. And so I pondered
(16:39):
my problem. I should not care to revisit all those
fair places of the world, except in the fashion I
visited them before. Glass in hand. There is a magic
in the phrase. It means more than all the words
(16:59):
in the dictionary can be made to mean. It is
a habit of mind to which I have been trained
all my life. It is now part of the stuff
that composes me. I like the bubbling play of wit,
(17:19):
the chesty laughs, the resident voices of men. When glass
in hand they shut the gray world outside and prod
their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse. No,
(17:41):
I decided, I shall take my drink on occasion, With
all the books on my shelves, with all the thoughts
of the thinkers shaded by my particular temperament, I decided
coolly and deliberately that I should continue to do what
(18:02):
I had been trained to want to do. I would drink,
but oh more skillfully, more discreetly than ever before. Never
again would I be a parapatetic conflagration. Never again would
(18:24):
I invoke the White logic. I had learned how not
to invoke him. The White Logic now lies decently buried
alongside the long sickness. Neither will afflict me again. It
is many a year since I laid the long sickness away.
(18:48):
His sleep is sound, and just as sound is the
sleep of the White logic. And yet in conclusion I
can well, I'll say that I wish my forefathers had
banished John Barleycorn before my time. I regret that John
(19:10):
Barleycorn flourished everywhere in the system of society in which
I was born. Else I should not have made his acquaintance.
And I was long trained in his acquaintance. End of
(19:32):
Chapter thirty nine, recorded by Peter kellerher Eastport, Medway, Nova, Scotia.
End of John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London
Chapters thirty eight and thirty nine 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, please visit LibriVox dot org. Chapter
(00:28):
thirty eight. The foregoing is a sample roaming with the
white logic through the dusk of my soul. To the
best of my power, I have striven to give the
reader a glimpse of a man's secret dwelling when it
is shared with John Barleycorn. And the reader must remember
(00:50):
that this mood, which he has read in a quarter
of an hour, is but one mood of the myriad
moods of John Barleycorn, and that the procession of such
moods may well last the clock around, through many a
day and week and month. My alcoholic reminiscences draw to
(01:15):
a close, I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker
can say, that all that leaves me alive today on
the planet is my unmerited luck, the luck of chest
and shoulders and constitution. I dare to say that a
(01:38):
not large percentage of use in the formative stage of
fifteen to seventeen could have survived the stress of heavy
drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years,
that a not large percentage of men could have the
(02:00):
alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived
to tell the tale. I survived through no personal virtue,
but because I did not have the chemistry of a dipsomaniac,
and because I possessed an organism unusually resistant to the
(02:24):
ravages of John Barleycorn, and surviving, I have watched the
others die not so lucky down all the long sad road.
It was my unmitigated and absolute good fortune, good luck, chance,
(02:47):
call it what you will, that brought me through the
fires of John Barleycorn. My life, my career, my joy
in living have not been destroyed. They have been scorched.
It is true, Like the survivors of forlorn hopes, they have,
(03:08):
by unthinkably miraculous ways, come through the fight to marvel
at the tally of the slain. And like such a
survivor of old red war who cries out, let there
be no more war, so I cry out, let there
(03:30):
be no more poison fighting by our youths. The way
to stop war is to stop it. The way to
stop drinking is to stop it. The way China stopped
the general use of opium was by stopping the cultivation
(03:51):
and importation of opium. The philosophers, priests, and doctors of
China could have preached themselves breathless against opium for a
thousand years, and the use of opium, so long as
opium was ever accessible and obtainable, would have continued unabated.
(04:17):
We are so made, that is all. We have, with
great success, made a practice of not leaving arsenic and
strycht nine and typhoid and tuberculosis germs lying around for
our children to be destroyed. By treat John Barleycorn the
(04:42):
same way. Stop him. Don't let him lie around, licensed
and legal to pounce upon our youth. Not of alcoholics,
nor for alcoholics do I write, but for our youths,
for those who possess no more than the adventure stings
(05:07):
and the genial predispositions, the social man impulses, which are
twisted all orri by our barbarian civilization, which feeds them
poison on all the corners. It is the healthy, normal
(05:27):
boys now born or being born, for whom I write.
It was for this reason more than any other, and
more ardently than any other, that I rode down into
the valley of the Moon all a jingle and voted
for equal suffrage. I voted that women might vote, because
(05:54):
I knew that they, the wives and mothers of the race,
would vote John Barleycorn, out of existence and back into
the historical limbo of our vanished customs of savagery. If
I thus seem to cry out as one hurt, please
(06:17):
remember that I have been sorely bruised, and that I
do dislike the thought that any son or daughter of
mine or yours should be similarly bruised. The women are
the true conservators of the race. The men are the wastrels,
(06:40):
the adventure lovers, and gamblers, and in the end it
is by their women that they are saved. A boat
man's first experiment in chemistry was the making of alcohol,
and down all the generations to this day, man has
(07:00):
continued to manufacture and drink it, and there has never
been a day when the women have not resented man's
use of alcohol, though they have never had the power
to give weight to their resentment. The moment women get
the vote in any community, the first thing they proceed
(07:22):
to do is to close the saloons in a thousand
generations to come. Men of themselves will not close the
saloons as well. Expect the morphine victims to legislate the
sale of morphine out of existence. The women know they
(07:44):
have paid an incalculable price of sweat in tears for
man's use of alcohol. Ever, jealous for the race, they
will legislate for the babes of boys yet to be born,
and for the babes of girls too, For they must
be the mothers, wives and sisters of these boys, and
(08:08):
it will be easy. The only ones that will be
hurt will be the topers and seasoned drinkers of a
single generation. I am one of these, and I make
solemn assurance, based upon long traffic with John Barleycorn, that
(08:30):
it won't hurt me very much to stop drinking when
no one else drinks, and when no drink is obtainable.
On the other hand, the overwhelming proportion of young men
are so normally non alcoholic that, never having had access
to alcohol, they will never miss it. They will know
(08:54):
of the saloon only in the pages of history, and
they will of the saloon as a quaint old custom
similar to bull baiting and the burning of witches chapter
thirty nine. Of course, no personal tale is complete without
(09:19):
bringing the narrative of the person down to the last moment.
But mine is no tale of a reformed drunkard. I
was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed. It
chanced some time ago that I made a voyage of
one hundred and forty eight days in a wind jammer
(09:42):
around the Horn. I took no private supply of alcohol along,
And though there was no day of those one hundred
and forty eight days that I could not have got
a drink from the captain, I did not take a drink.
Did not take a drink because I did not desire
a drink. No one else drank on board. The atmosphere
(10:08):
for drinking was not present, and in my system there
was no organic need for alcohol. My chemistry did not
demand alcohol. So there arose before me a problem, A
clear and simple problem. This is so easy, why not
(10:30):
keep it up when you get back on land. I
weighed this problem carefully. I waited for five months in
a state of absolute non contact with alcohol, and out
of the data of past experience, I reached certain conclusions
(10:53):
In the first place, I am convinced that not one
man in ten thousand or in one hundred thousand is
a genuine chemical dipsomaniac. Drinking, as I deem, it is
practically entirely a habit of mind. It is unlike tobacco,
(11:17):
or cocaine, or morphine or all the rest of the
long list of drugs. The desire for alcohol is quite
peculiarly mental in its origin. It is a matter of
mental training and growth, and it is cultivated in social soil.
(11:40):
Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone. All
drinkers began socially, and this drinking is accompanied by a
thousand social connotations, such as I have described out of
my own experience in the first part of this narrative.
(12:01):
These social connotations are the stuff of which the drink
habit is largely composed. The part that alcohol itself plays
is inconsiderable when compared with the part played by the
social atmosphere in which it is drunk. The human is
(12:21):
rarely born these days who without long training in the
social associations of drinking, feels the irresistible chemical propulsion of
his system toward alcohol. I do assume that such rare
individuals are born, but I have never encountered one. On
(12:45):
this long five months voyage, I found that among all
my bodily needs, not the slightest shred of a bodily
need for alcohol existed. But this I did find. My
need was mental and social. When I thought of alcohol,
(13:06):
the connotation was fellowship. When I thought of fellowship, the
connotation was alcohol. Fellowship and alcohol were Siamese twins. They
always occurred linked together. Thus, when reading in my deck chair,
or when talking with others, practically, any mention of any
(13:30):
part of the world I knew instantly aroused the connotation
of drinking and good fellows, big nights and days and moments,
all purple passages and freedoms thronged my memory. Venice stares
at me from the printed page, and I remember the
(13:54):
cafe tables on the sidewalks the Battle of Santia, someone says,
and I answer, yes, I've been over the ground, But
I do not see the ground, nor kettle Hill, nor
the peace tree. What I see is the cafe Venus
(14:18):
on the Plaza of Santiago, where one hot night I
drank and talked with a dying consumptive. The East end
of London, I read, or someone says, and first of all,
under my eyelids leap the visions of the shining pubs,
(14:41):
and in my ears echo the calls for two of
bitter and three of scotch the Latin quarter. At once.
I am in the student cabarets, bright faces and keen
spirits around me, sipping cool, well dripped absinthe, while our
(15:04):
voices mount and soar in Latin fashion. As we settle
God and art and democracy and the rest of the
simple problems of existence. In a pampero off the river plot,
we speculate if we are disabled of running into Buenos Aires,
(15:28):
the Paris of America, and I have visions of bright,
congregating places of men, of the jollity of raised glasses,
and of song and cheer and the hum of genial voices.
When we have picked up the Northeast trades. In the Pacific,
(15:51):
we try to persuade our dying captain to run for Honolulu.
And while I persuade myself again, drinking cocktails on the
cool Laannae and fizzes out at Wakaki where the surf
rolls in, someone mentions the way wild ducks are cooked
(16:16):
in the restaurants of San Francisco, And at once I
am transported to the light and clatter of many tables,
where I gaze at old friends across the golden brims
of long stemmed rhine wine glasses. And so I pondered
(16:39):
my problem. I should not care to revisit all those
fair places of the world, except in the fashion I
visited them before. Glass in hand. There is a magic
in the phrase. It means more than all the words
(16:59):
in the dictionary can be made to mean. It is
a habit of mind to which I have been trained
all my life. It is now part of the stuff
that composes me. I like the bubbling play of wit,
(17:19):
the chesty laughs, the resident voices of men. When glass
in hand they shut the gray world outside and prod
their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse. No,
(17:41):
I decided, I shall take my drink on occasion, With
all the books on my shelves, with all the thoughts
of the thinkers shaded by my particular temperament, I decided
coolly and deliberately that I should continue to do what
(18:02):
I had been trained to want to do. I would drink,
but oh more skillfully, more discreetly than ever before. Never
again would I be a parapatetic conflagration. Never again would
(18:24):
I invoke the White logic. I had learned how not
to invoke him. The White Logic now lies decently buried
alongside the long sickness. Neither will afflict me again. It
is many a year since I laid the long sickness away.
(18:48):
His sleep is sound, and just as sound is the
sleep of the White logic. And yet in conclusion I
can well, I'll say that I wish my forefathers had
banished John Barleycorn before my time. I regret that John
(19:10):
Barleycorn flourished everywhere in the system of society in which
I was born. Else I should not have made his acquaintance.
And I was long trained in his acquaintance. End of
(19:32):
Chapter thirty nine, recorded by Peter kellerher Eastport, Medway, Nova, Scotia.
End of John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London
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