John Barleycorn by Jack London

This is a book that is entirely about protesting too much. He is not an alcoholic, Jack London insists - just a "normal, average man," as he puts it over and over, hoping to actually convince himself. He has no hereditary or "organic, chemical predisposition towards alcohol." He spends a lot of time arguing about how he doesn't like alcohol - I'll come back to this later - and that it took a long time for him to even vaguely warm up to it, so that means he's clearly not addicted now, as he writes this book in 1913 and talks about how, not long before, he had to drink to start writing and drink to reward himself for writing and drink before meals and drink during meals and drink after meals.

But he's a "normal, average man"! He never loses control of his body, never gets maudlin or slurred in his speech - he's not one of those drunks, the real alcoholics, but like the good drinkers, the ones where alcohol stimulates the brain and brings men together in good fellowship.

And yet the whole aim of the book is to argue that alcohol is horrible and should be banned entirely - which would obviously be a vast improvement of society for everyone and easily accomplishable.

London is misleading himself about multiple things here. And this reader suspects one lurking reason London wanted alcohol outlawed was so that he would be forced to stop drinking - if everyone stopped drinking, that would be easier for him, so that was his preferred outcome.

John Barleycorn is the story of an alcoholic who doesn't want to admit it, a masterpiece of special pleading, a towering monument to the principle that no one thinks he's one of the bad people. Jack London could write John Barleycorn, therefore he is not an alcoholic and he should be taken seriously when he says alcohol should be outlawed. Presumably, if he were an alcoholic, then his opinions would be meaningless because...I'm not quite sure, it's probably the usual "not manly enough" bullhockey.

To be fair, there's been a lot of advances in treating and understanding addiction since 1913 - and I'm pretty sure London didn't do any research for this book in the first place, so his model of addiction is whatever he picked up along the way, and his opinions and viewpoint are entirely his own.

And I do have to say that London is both very entertaining and very honest about his history here - it's just that he's so invested in his vision of himself as both totally normal and clearly superior that he can't conceive that there could be anything inherently wrong with him on any level. He seems to have the kind of self-image where failures can happen through damage - he worked himself hard when young, and now parts of his body just don't work right, because he broke them - but no similar model applies to his mind, and there's no such thing as something that was damaged to begin with in his body.

I also found it darkly amusing this this supposedly radical Socialist pins so much of the core of his argument against alcohol on the inherent superiority of women, on the ways that alcohol - as he sees it, entirely used by men among men; there's no sign that he realized that women could even drink, let alone become addicted - damages the lives of women in the usual late-19th century Abolition talking points. He seemingly doesn't realize that the Victorian "angel of the household" idea - which he has swallowed entirely, from the evidence here - is not the only model of the relations of the sexes, and that women can have agency and do things entirely on their own. They could drink, they could work, they could run businesses: they could brew beer, as many did for centuries in what was in large part a female occupation. If women were damaged by their men drinking away their money, that's not an alcohol problem at its core - it's a women dependent on men problem.

But that's always the way: no one is as radical as they think they are, no one is as fearless at confronting their real flaws as they want to believe.

London writes chronologically, which makes some bits amusing to a modern reader. His repeated assertions that he didn't like the taste of alcohol falls somewhat flat when he starts out with his first drink, from a pail of cheap beer that he carted out into the woods to his father at age five. Everything else he drank from there for a long time - "long time" here stretching maybe fifteen years, to about the age of twenty, still younger than the modern drinking age - was similarly cheap. London doesn't seem to have realized that no one likes cheap drinks: they are famously lousy. People drink them because they want to get drunk quickly and easily, and because they can't afford better.

And, indeed, when London gets to the age where he has money and he discovers cocktails and fancier drinks, he somewhat buries the fact that he does like those drinks. He is indeed a "normal, average man" - but not in the ways he thinks. Cheap gutrot tastes bad. Expensive drinks taste good. His argument is not what he thinks it is.

I may be picking on John Barleycorn too much. It is an honest, well-written book, about one man wrestling with his own addiction in the absence of any societal support or larger framework of understanding. It's heroic in that.

But I should be clear. John Barleycorn aims to do two things: to explain London's own drinking life, and to advocate for complete Abolition. The first, as I've noted, detours around several immense blind spots and things London just couldn't or didn't know. And the second did not go at all the way he expected, for reasons deeply related to those very blind spots. So it is an interesting book - cleanly and muscularly written, as usual with London - but the reader has to be aware of both what London didn't realize about himself and what happened afterward to prove London wrong.

(Reader note: I read this in the Library of America Novels and Social Writings volume, which is currently out of print but will probably cycle back one of these years. I will always recommend LoA books for public domain American authors. I've also linked what looks like a solid, reputable edition of John Barleycorn above, but PD publishing can be the Wild West, so always keep an eye out for who published a particular edition and whether you can trust that publisher to do it right.)