Jack London and his Alcoholic Memoirs

Meet John Barleycorn.

In the early years of the 20th Century, writer Jack London was the equivalent of a rock star. A ruggedly good-looking sportswriter, globetrotting war correspondent, successful novelist and short story writer, London came up the hard way on the Oakland docks in California. He had his first drink at the age of 5, ran an oyster smuggling operation as a teenager, and allegedly brought the sport of surfing from Waikiki to the West Coast. At least one critic has referred to him as the Norman Mailer of the early 1900s.

In 1913, the author of the Call of the Wild published what was arguably his least successful book, John Barleycorn, a non-fiction account carrying the subtitle Alcoholic Memoirs. John Sutherland, professor of English Literature at University College in the UK, wrote in his introduction to the Oxford edition of Jack London’s book that London had pitched the book as “the bare, bald, absolute fact… of my own personal experiences in the realm of alcohol.” As Sutherland notes, “The drunk’s stigma was, however, indelible in 1913. No one of London’s public standing had ever come clean on the question of problem drinking before—at least not while at the zenith of their power and fame.”

Yet what are we to make, Sutherland asks, of London’s assertions, “three times in the first five pages, that drinker he may be, but ‘I was no hereditary alcoholic… I have no constitutional predisposition for alcohol.’”? Is this, the critic asks, “self-delusion or self-knowledge?”

After reading the book, I would have to say a little bit of both, given the limitations of medical knowledge at the time.  In London’s view, common back then, “dipsomania” was a chemical, congenital defect, much maligned and considered to be as rare as one in every several thousand drinkers. Nonetheless, several prominent London biographers have asserted that Jack London was chronically drunk-sick in his later years, ultimately dying of uremia and other complications brought on by years of excessive drinking. Writer Upton Sinclair claimed in 1915 that he had seen London wandering Oakland “dazed and disagreeably drunk.” Still others claim London’s bar bills were always modest and much of John Barleycorn is fiction. Yet London writes frankly of his morning shakes and hair-of-the-dog drinking and suicidal impulses. Describing his life in 1910, London writes: “I achieved a condition in which my body was never free from alcohol. Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol…. There was no time in all my waking time, that I didn’t want a drink.”

Was Jack London a Hemingway-style brawler or a hopeless alcoholic? As we have come to understand, it is sometimes possible to be both, for a while. Jack London was not writing for a medical journal, he was relating the experiences of his own life. And when the battle for universal suffrage began in earnest, London was an early an enthusiastic backer, on the grounds that if women got the vote, alcohol prohibition would surely follow, and the children of American would be saved from the wiles of John Barleycorn.

The lack of enthusiasm for the book when it was published stemmed, in part, from these built-in ambiguities. In addition, writes Sutherland, “John Barleycorn is an extended meditation on pessimism, or alcohol induced melancholy.” These days, we are more likely to refer to this condition as depression. This was not the Jack London his fans had come to know and love, even though London insisted in the book that he was “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.”

For all the hedging, there is plenty of recognizable plain talk about the devotees of Mr. Barleycorn: “When good fortune comes, they drink. When they have no fortune, they drink to the hope of good fortune. If fortune be ill, they drink to forget it. If they meet a friend, they drink. If they quarrel with a friend and lose him, they drink…. He coarsens and grossens them, twists and malforms them out of the original goodness and fineness of their natures.”

In another passage describing the tavern life of tradesmen and laborers, he “saw men doing, drunk, what the would never dream of doing sober…. Time and again I heard the one explanation: If I hadn’t been drunk I wouldn’t a-done it.”

And as time passes, Jack London, the resolutely non-alcoholic, highly-regarded novelist, finds the terrain underneath his own feet is changing: “And the thing began so imperceptibly, that I, old intimate of John Barleycorn, never dreamed whither it was leading me…. It was at this time I became aware of waiting with expectancy for the pre-dinner cocktail. I wanted it, and I was conscious that I wanted it…. And right there John Barleycorn had me. I was beginning to drink regularly, I was beginning to drink alone.”

These developments shook up London sufficiently for him to ask himself: “Had I, a non-alcoholic, by long practice, become an alcoholic?” He has no trouble marshaling evidence for the argument: “The more I drank the more I was required to drink to get an equivalent effect…. Whenever I was in a hurry, I ordered double cocktails. It saved time.”

There were other warnings: “Where was this steady drinking leading? But trust John Barleycorn to silence such questions. ‘Come on and have a drink and I’ll tell you all about it,’ is his way.”

London concludes, before taking most of it back in later pages: “There are hundreds of thousands of men of this sort in the United States to-day, in clubs, hotels, and in their own homes—men who are never drunk, and who, though most of them will indignantly deny it, are rarely sober. And all of them fondly believe, as I fondly believed, that they are beating the game.”

And finally, this: “But a new and most diabolical complication arose: The work refused to be done without drinking. It just couldn’t be done. I had to drink in order to do it.”

In the end, let us hear from his last wife, Charmian, who made the following entry in her diary on July 1, 1912: “I know now that Jack, facing the writing of John Barleycorn, intends to drink moderately in the future, just to prove to an unbelieving public that he is the opposite of an ‘alcoholic’, that he is not afraid of being an alcoholic, and never was an alcoholic. Perhaps he is right, but I feel a trifle dashed.”

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Six Writers Who Battled the Bottle

Book review.

In The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, author Olivia Laing’s stated goal is “to know why writers drink, and what effect this stew of spirits has had upon the body of literature itself.” To which I can only say, best of luck. The goal is impossibly ambitious; the book itself a bit digressive and loosely organized. But Laing has harvested a satisfying litany of literary anecdotes related to drinking, and throws out a few of her own.

The writers she submits to scrutiny are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver—all of them unambiguously alcoholic and, for most of their lives, resolutely in denial. Only two of them—Carver and Cheever—attained some measure of sobriety in their later lives. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at 44, Hemingway and Berryman committed suicide, and Tennessee Williams either choked on a bottle cap or died of an overdose of pills. If any of that sounds deliciously romantic, than this is a book you need to read. “People don’t like to talk about alcohol,” Laing flatly states. “They don’t like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don’t like to examine the damage it does and I don’t blame them.”

Start with John Cheever, author of The Wapshot Chronicle, Bullet Park, The Falconer, and short stories, including “The Swimmer,” which begins: “It was one of those mid-summer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’”

“I cannot remember my meanness,” Cheever wrote poignantly, “because my recollections are damaged by alcohol.” It may have been literally true. Cheever suffered from aphasia, hallucinations, and seizures.  On the basis of a CAT scan from 1975, Laing makes the argument that Cheever suffered from diffuse cerebral atrophy, and possible Korsakoff syndrome, a neurological disorder seen almost exclusively in alcoholics.

Tennessee Williams, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire and The Night of the Iguana, also suffered a litany of medical problems directly related to alcohol, including peripheral neuritis in his feet. “Of course I would love to believe the good doctor,” Williams wrote, “but I don’t quite believe him.”

The title of Laing’s book comes from Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Brick, the alcoholic son, frequently takes “a little short trip to Echo Spring,” referring to the liquor cabinet containing his favorite brain of bourbon. But awareness has a way of creeping in around the edges. In an early story that foreshadowed the play, the character of Brick says, “A man that drinks is two people, one grabbing the bottle, the other one fighting him off it, not one but two people fighting each other to get control of a bottle.” 

Williams endured years of psychoanalysis and spent time in mental hospitals. He dutifully kept detailed notebooks: “Two Scotches at bar. 3 drinks in morning. A daiquiri at Dirty Dick’s, 3 glasses of red wine at lunch and 3 of wine at dinner—Also two Seconals so far, and a green tranquilizer whose name I do not know and a yellow one I think is called reserpine or something like that.” Now think of making it through a single day under that load of intoxicants.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, best known for his novel The Great Gatsby, wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in 1934: “I have drunk too much and that is certainly slowing me up. On the other hand, without drink I do not know whether I could have survived this time.” Laing notes that this ambivalence “could be interpreted as a refusal to see alcohol as a cause rather than a symptom of his troubles,” and in this Fitzgerald was by no means alone. For Fitzgerald, as for many others of the day, being “on the wagon” often meant restricting oneself to beer and the occasional glass of champagne. Fitzgerald, on the wagon at the rate of 30 beers a day, said that “when I swell up I switch to cokes.”

Laing provides us with a litany of these “excuse notes” from her writers: “I drink because it improves my work. I drink because I am too sensitive to live in the world without it. There are hundreds more of these,” she writes. In Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, she finds “an example of someone flat-out denying their own disease….” My own personal favorite is Hemingway’s letter in which he claims to be amazed and chagrined that alcohol, something “I could not have lived without many times; or at least would have cared to live without; was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.”

John Berryman, poet, Pulitzer Prize Winner, National Book Award winner, and author of The Dream Songs, also battled depression and a tendency to fall down stairs, breaking arms, legs, and wrists. He served a stint as a creative writing instructor at the University of Iowa writing program, as would John Cheever and Raymond Carver. He ended up at the University of Minnesota, where he dried out repeatedly at Hazelden and other local clinics. Even Berryman’s most ardent supporters gave up on him. His chairman at the university said of him: “I concluded that the only John one could love was a John with 2 or 3 drinks in him, no more & no less, & such a John could not exist.” Berryman killed himself by jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis.

Let’s let Raymond Carver—poet, short story writer, and legendary drunk— have the last word. In a 1982 poem, he wrote:

And then…something: alcohol—

What you’ve really done

And to someone else, the one

You meant to love from the start.