I have read a little Jack London in the past and now came upon this autobiography. At the start of the 20th century, London was a force in the world of literature, earning the equivalent of $1,000,000 per year after taxes for his fiction. As implied by the title, London was a man of the bottle. John Barleycorn is a euphemism for liquor, and London writes about his own alcoholic exploits. The author, and the man who wrote the forward, John Sutherland, argue that London was not an alcoholic, but that may have been by the standards of 1913 when he wrote this book, three years before his death in 1916 at the age of 40. This was 20 years before the founding of AA and general better knowledge about the difference between alcoholics and those who are not. London does talk about the melancholy that is induced by his prodigious drinking bouts, and it is probable that his death was either directly or indirectly a suicide: “It is a meditation on alcohol induced pessimism that John Barleycorn is most unequivocally successful.” London wrote, “I drank every day, and whenever opportunity offered I drank to excess; for I still labored under the misconception that the secret of John Barleycorn lay in drinking to bestiality and unconsciousness. I became pretty thoroughly alcohol-soaked during this period. I practically lived in saloons; became a barroom loafer, and worse.” Finally, London rationalized, “Whisky was dangerous, in my opinion, but not wrong. Whisky was dangerous, like other dangerous things in the natural world. Men died of whisky; but then, too, fishermen were capsized and drowned, hoboes fell under trains and were cut to pieces.” So, that’s enough, and after skimming some more pages, I closed this book. You have the essence of it, and now it is time for this blogger to return to fiction.
West Coast Don
No comments:
Post a Comment