31. Author Jack London's "Alcoholic Memoirs" a powerful book

By Tom O'Connell

There are many superstars today, but nearly 100 years ago author Jack London was the role model for 20th century fame. In an age when people became well known through newspapers and books he became a household word all over the world.

But rarely does a superstar sit down and write a whole book about his problems with alcohol, as Jack London did. His book, "John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs," published in 1913, helped bring about national Prohibition.

The author of "The Sea-Wolf" and "The Call of the Wild" had an excessive relationship with alcohol, which he described as his "anodyne," or "pain reliever." And the entire book is a study in what we now call denial.

While describing a life-threatening alcoholic lifestyle, London repeatedly denies being  alcoholic. "I was no hereditary alcoholic...I have no constitutional predisposition for alcohol." Like the medical community in his era, he states that "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."

However, in an account of his behavior just before he wrote his alcoholic memoirs, writers Andrew Sinclair and Richard O'Connor reported that he nearly drank himself to death in New York on a binge that went on around the clock day after day. Then he set out on a five-month cruise during which he was abstinent. And because he could stay dry for months at a time through sheer willpower he did not think he was an alcoholic. But stopping is common in alcoholism. It's staying stopped for more than a few months that provides the challenge. Alcoholism, for many, includes cycles of abstinence and relapse.

London's book is a study in addiction and pessimism. He writes clearly about his  divided self, which is the condition all addicts face. On the one hand, when he considers himself optimistic he acknowledges having everything in life that an ambitious person could want. Yet in his pessimistic mood he is weary of the world and suffers from melancholy which he describes as "The Long Sickness." He also is subject to the terrifying "White Logic" in which the drinker in withdrawal sees life as meaningless and unbearable.  

Describing his early years, London says, "All ways led to the saloon....The point is 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....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."

However, he sees the gutter drinker as the only real alcoholic and not himself. He says he is the "other type of drinker," the one with "imagination" and "vision." The one who is "pleasantly jingled." He says that with this kind of drinker, "It is not his body but his brain that is drunken." And yet when he describes the pessimism that sets in for such a drinker he describes it as "soul-sickness, life-sickness."

He got the term "soul-sickness," as the pioneers of AA did decades later, from psychologist William James's "The Varieties of Religious Experience." London read this book while writing "John Barleycorn." 

London's book is a very powerful description of "The Long Sickness."

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