In suggesting that alcoholism was a chemical condition marked by irresistible craving, he anticipated the transformation of our understanding of addiction from a defect of character into a disease, and recognized the reason that it would remain, at best, an uneasy hybrid of the moral and the medical.
But, then, it was a few decades before “denial” entered the lexicon as a sign of alcoholism-and in other ways London was remarkably prescient. Reading “John Barleycorn” a century after it was published, one is tempted to conclude that London was a terrible sot, and to wonder how he couldn’t recognize his own bluster as further evidence of the problem he swore he didn’t have. Because he lacked any “organic, chemical predisposition to alcohol,” he was always able to “drink when I wanted, refrain when I wanted,” and remained “thoroughly the master of John Barleycorn.” With one fateful exception: a period, shortly after he returned from a failed attempt to sail around the world, when he found himself “in the heart and deeps of me, desirous of alcohol.” After twenty-five years of drinking, “I had the craving at last, and it was mastering me.” The loss of control was only temporary, he claims, but it so unnerved him that he became a suffragist-not out of a concern for equal rights, but because he figured women would sway the country to Prohibition, which he favored on the ground that if a man with his “gorgeous constitution” could be rendered a slave to John Barleycorn, merely by repeated exposure, then no one was safe. “I was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed,” he writes in the last chapter. But he was not, he tells us again and again, an alcoholic.
well, it’s not entirely clear, but he came to, the next night, in a strange boarding house, after seventeen hours in a “comatose condition.”īy the time London wrote down these recollections, in “John Barleycorn,” published in 1913, he was both a famous writer and an every-day drinker, although he generally held off from booze until he’d met his thousand-word daily quota. It may have been San Leandro or Niles”), brawling on the train back to the city, and ending up . . . At least once, he combined all three activities, downing whiskey “like so much medicine” somewhere south of Oakland (“I think the place was Haywards. As a teen-ager, he drank prodigiously, got into fights, and suffered epic hangovers. Jack London started drinking at age five, plunging his face into a bucket of beer he was carrying to his father and lapping it up he spent the afternoon lying sick under a tree.
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