John Barleycorn Book

I always believed that Jack London kind of sucked. Like most people, I read 'To Build a Fire' and Call of the Wild in school, and was bored senseless, wishing the hero would just freeze to death faster.

John Barleycorn proved me completely wrong. In it, London is funny and sharp and angry about all the right things. Lately it's been marketed as a pro-prohibition book, which I think obscures the point. London is not concerned with alcoholism as a disease. What he's trying to pin down is the malevolent spirit of the ancient god of drink, personified, as of old, as John Barleycorn. It's the best description I've ever read of the glories of drinking to excess - the shining nights, the wild tales, the companionship - and exactly why this is so dangerous to the thinking person. He argues that it's precisely the best, the strongest, the brightest, the wildest, who poison themselves with drinking, worn down by the dullness of normal life; that drinking becomes an adventure, a sign of courage and great-heartedness. But he also believes that John Barleycorn demands your life as payment, and brings, instead of wisdom, what he called 'the White Logic', a sort of super-lucid, nihilistic despair.

The book is filled with these mystical, revelatory, poetic ravings, passages so beautiful I wish I could just tear them out and plaster them on walls for everyone to read. But there's tons of other great stuff in here, too - stories about the socialist movement, and about working in factories and hopping trains and grappling with cheap typewriters and sailing and fighting and oyster pirates and Aristophanes and loving and eating too much candy. It's been a great read, and it's given me a lot to think about. I mean, alcoholism is such an easy answer, isn't it? If you drink too much, you're an alcoholic; you have a disease, you need treatment. London's viewpoint is more complex and feels more valid: that you drink because that is what people of vision do, and you drink together, and your life is richer, and you put aside the injustices of the world - what he calls the cold iron collar around the neck of your soul. Therefore, change not yourself, but the world. I love it! The answer isn't repentance and detox and rehab and counseling, it's revolution!