JOHN BARLEYCORN(约翰·巴雷库恩)

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JOHN BARLEYCORN

by Jack London (1876-1916) 1913

JOHN BARLEYCORN

CHAPTER I

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 divers drinks after casting it. Then I had ridden up through the vine-

clad hills and rolling pastures of the ranch, and arrived at the farm-house

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 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 jingled.

"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 Barleycorn----"

"But I thought you were a friend to John Barleycorn," Charmian

interpolated.

"I am. I was. I am not. I never am. I am never less his friend

than when he is with me and when I seem most his friend. He is the king

of liars. He is the frankest truthsayer. He is the august companion with

JOHN BARLEYCORN

whom one walks with the gods. He is also in league with the Noseless

One. His way leads to truth naked, and to death. He gives clear vision,

and muddy dreams. He is the enemy of life, and the teacher of wisdom

beyond life's wisdom. He is a red-handed killer, and he slays youth."

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 a jail-break. 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 choicest 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 make-up of my

constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born with no

organic, chemical predisposition toward 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 physic. 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 the deeps of me, desirous of

alcohol.

I sketched my first contacts with alcohol, told of my first intoxications

JOHN BARLEYCORN

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 womenkind and feasted and drank by themselves, the sacred

precincts taboo to women under pain of death. As a youth, by way of the

saloon I had escaped from the narrowness of woman's influence into the

wide free world of men. All ways 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 sermon, "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 Barleycorn I suffer all the damnation of intellectual

pessimism.

"But," I hastened to add (I always hasten to add), "John Barleycorn

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 Barleycorn gives them the lie."

"Which does not make toward life," Charmian said.

"Very true," I answered. "And that is the perfectest hell of it. John

Barleycorn makes toward death. That is why I voted for the amendment

JOHN BARLEYCORN

to-day. 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 know 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--ay, 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 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 instant's 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.'"

JOHN BARLEYCORN

CHAPTER II

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 wide-spread, 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 staggers nor falls,

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 spectres 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 Barleycorn's subtlest power. It is easy for

any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a terrible ordeal for a man to stand

upright on his two legs unswaying, and decide that in all the universe he

JOHN BARLEYCORN

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 yearned-for

bauble 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 physic,

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

sottish 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 meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do

JOHN BARLEYCORN

they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little

humans, fluttering their May-fly life- dance of an hour. They are without

freedom. They are puppets of chance. So is he. He realises 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 Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever escapes making the

just, due payment.

JOHN BARLEYCORN

CHAPTER III

I was five years old the first time I got drunk. It was on a hot day,

and my father was ploughing 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, 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 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 afterward. 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 to foam afresh, I took a stick

JOHN BARLEYCORN

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 ploughman, returned it to me, and started up the

plough. I endeavoured to walk beside the horses. I remember tottering

and falling against their heels in front of the shining share, 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 disembowelling. 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

circumstance decreed otherwise. At every turn in the world in which I

lived, John Barleycorn 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 in my cheek, to develop in me a

sneaking liking for the rascal.

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JOHNBARLEYCORN1JOHNBARLEYCORNbyJackLondon(1876-1916)1913JOHNBARLEYCORN2CHAPTERIItallcametomeoneelectionday.ItwasonawarmCaliforniaafternoon,andIhadriddendownintotheValleyoftheMoonfromtheranchtothelittlevillagetovoteYesandNotoahostofproposedamendmentstotheConstitutionoftheStateofCalifornia.Becauseofth...

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