Yet even as he rose to become a best-selling author and household name, John Barleycorn (his name for alcohol) accompanied him all the way. With outsize strength and ambition he slaved at menial jobs, made his way to sea as a teenage “oyster pirate,” and sought adventure and education with a blazing hunger. Holding confoundingly contradictory opinions on the subject, he tries but never manages to reconcile them, but his efforts to understand what blinds him, are sincere.īorn in 1876, the illegitimate son of an astrologer, by the age of ten London was working to help his family. And so is John Barleycorn, which contains some of London’s finest autobiographical writing.įor all London’s simplicity of style, there’s nothing superficial or unsophisticated about his examination of drinking and how it affected his life. I actually prefer London’s more non-fictional writing to his sea and dog yarns: Martin Eden (1909), the semi-autobiographical story of a poor young man’s passionate struggle for literary success, and The People of the Abyss, his 1903 foray into the poor conditions in the city of London’s East End, are both riveting. I’ve always liked Jack London – not the subtlest writer, but one of great force, natural vigor, and a compelling storyteller of a clear spoken type that was freshly minted in a time when anything in the world seemed possible if you only worked hard and used your talents, Horatio Alger style. Uncertain where to begin researching, I decided to read Jack London’s story of his own drinking life, John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs (1913). So I’ve become intrigued by the blotto drinking of his era, which was probably far more prevalent before the postwar drug revolution. I only ever remember seeing him a few times, but he was handsome, gentle, and grieved at being kept apart from his only child. Paul Eaton Reeve (1908-1961) was a Greenwich Village poet who, after the fashion of his species, determinedly drank himself to death. I’ve been trying to write a memoir about my father, but have come to realize how little I know about alcoholism in the early 20 th century.

Jack london barleycorn