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    John Barleycorn
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    John Barleycorn
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    John Barleycorn
    Ebook302 pages4 hours

    John Barleycorn

    By Jack London

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Trajectory presents classics of world literature with 21st century features! Our original-text editions include the following visual enhancements to foster a deeper understanding of the work: Word Clouds at the start of each chapter highlight important words. Word, sentence, paragraph counts, and reading time help readers and teachers determine chapter complexity. Co-occurrence graphs depict character-to-character interactions as well character to place interactions. Sentiment indexes identify positive and negative trends in mood within each chapter. Frequency graphs help display the impact this book has had on popular culture since its original date of publication. Use Trajectory analytics to deepen comprehension, to provide a focus for discussions and writing assignments, and to engage new readers with some of the greatest stories ever told.

    "John Barleycorn" by Jack London is the account of Jack London's life growing up and his struggle with alcoholism.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrajectory, Inc.
    Release dateOct 1, 2014
    ISBN9781632096487
    Unavailable
    John Barleycorn
    Author

    Jack London

    Jack London (1876-1916) was an American writer who produced two hundred short stories, more than four hundred nonfiction pieces, twenty novels, and three full-length plays in less than two decades. His best-known works include The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, and White Fang.

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    Reviews for John Barleycorn

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    • 4/5
      An autobiography of sorts from Jack London, who set out late in his short life to write a book advocating for Prohibition based on his personal struggles with alcohol over the years, ‘John Barleycorn’ being British slang for alcohol. While the book is not meant to be the comprehensive story of his life, it touches on enough of his many adventures and the way alcohol was intertwined with them as to be fascinating.Coming from poverty and a home without love in San Francisco, London was an oyster pirate out on the Bay as a teenager, rode across the country by railroad as a hobo, sailed on long ocean voyages, and went north to the Klondike during the gold rush. He is an early form of Kerouac; rough and unpolished, but with the gift of articulating his experiences, and indeed, one of his books was titled ‘The Road’. In this book, he touches on the phases of life with varying levels of detail, but it’s enough to form a pretty good picture, and spur interest in further reading. Among other things he describes back-breaking labor and long hours in a cannery, a steam laundry, and shoveling coal, occupations which would help form his socialist political views – the natural reaction and movement in response to the extreme capitalism of the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately, this belief in the brotherhood of the working man did not prevent him from embracing racism and the viewpoint of white superiority, though mercifully those views aren’t display in ‘John Barleycorn’.Via his personal experience, what the book is really about the insidious ways alcohol has upon a person’s life. He repeatedly describes being in situations as a young man where to be sociable and accepted in a group of men meant going to the saloon with them, that he never liked the taste of alcohol and would avoid it when he could, but that he liked the camaraderie. Oftentimes his drinking was to great excess, and included a time when he fell into the San Pablo Bay and was in the water, inebriated, for about four hours, struggling towards the end against the tidal flows of the Vallejo and Carquinez Straits. It was his first instance of having suicidal thoughts, which he attributed to John Barleycorn telling him that it would be a fine way to die, and it’s a gripping passage. As he got older, London would eventually crave the bottle, drinking throughout the day, and finding excuses for having more. Despite the honesty of these chapters, it’s fascinating (and sad) that he was still in denial about being an alcoholic, thinking that label only applied to someone with a biological predilection for the stuff, which he clearly(!) didn’t. Regardless, his solution was to advocate banning it, starting with voting for women’s suffrage to improve the chances of that happening – though it was ironic, as Upton Sinclair noted, that he was a drinker who had no intentions of stopping himself. London believed future generations would look back at his as one that had barbarically allowed legal drinking, obviously not foretelling the outcome of the Prohibition experiment in America which would begin just four years after his early death at 40. Once he had made it as a writer, and a very successful one at that, London had it all in life, and yet suffered from depression, which as those afflicted with the condition know, is independent of all of the things which are supposed to make us happy. The book has several existentially haunting chapters, where he writes of the whispers of the ‘White Logic’, the inner voice personifying the nihilism of severe depression. He saw alcohol as taking the blinders off him, and seeing life with all of its repetition, tedium, and meaninglessness exposed. These are truly stark passages, riveting and nightmare-inducing, maybe because in their horror I saw glimmers of the truth, and maybe because of how sad London’s life was towards the end.Quotes:On adventure in life:“For always, drunk or sober, at the back of my consciousness something whispered that this carousing and bay-adventuring was not all of life. This whisper was my good fortune. I happened to be so made that I could hear it calling, always calling, out and away over the world. It was not canniness on my part. It was curiosity, desire to know, an unrest and a seeking for things wonderful that I seemed somehow to have glimpsed or guessed. What was this life for, I demanded, if this were all? No; there was something more, away and beyond.”On love, this as a young man already experienced in adventure, but not in the ways of love:“Then came the agony of apprehension and doubt. Should I imprison in my hand that little hand with the dangling, scented gloves which had just tapped my lips? Should I dare to kiss her there and then, or slip my arm around her waist? Or dared I even sit closer?Well, I didn’t dare. I did nothing. I merely continued to sit there and love with all my soul. And when we parted that evening I had not kissed her. I do remember the first time I kissed her, on another evening, at parting – a mighty moment, when I took all my heart and courage and dared. We never succeeded in managing more than a dozen stolen meetings, and we kissed perhaps a dozen times – as boys and girls kiss, briefly and innocently, and wonderingly. We never went anywhere – not even to a matinee. We once shared together five cents worth of red-hots. But I have always fondly believed that she loved me. I know I loved her; and I dreamed day dreams of her for a year and more, and the memory of her is very dear.”On reading, loved the last line of this, and hope the old glory of youthful passion never fades:“And I was very happy. Life went well with me. I took delight in little things. The big things I declined to take too seriously. I still read the books, but not with the old eagerness. I still read the books to-day, but never again shall I read them with that old glory of youthful passion when I harked to the call from over and beyond that whispered me on to win to the mystery at the back of life and behind the stars.”On transience:“And yet, with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder around me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without me. I remember the men who broke their hearts and their backs over this stubborn soil that now belongs to me. As if anything imperishable could belong to the perishable! These men passed. I too, shall pass.”On the ‘White Logic’, this is so dark:“But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He transvalues all values. God is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends – in the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagerness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of chance. So is he. He realizes that. But there is one difference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his one freedom: he may anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not good for a man who is made to live and love and be loved.”And this one:“’Let the doctors of all the schools condemn me,’ White Logic whispers as I ride along. ‘What of it? I am truth. You know it. You cannot combat me. They say I make for death. What of it. It is truth. Life lies in order to live. Life is a perpetual lie-telling process. Life is a mad dance in the domain of flux, wherein appearances in mighty tides ebb and flow, chained to the wheels of moons beyond our ken. Appearances are ghosts. Life is ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse, permeate each the other and all the others, that are, that are not, that always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past. … Through all the apparitions that proceeded you and that compose the parts of you, you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire, and gibbering you will pass on, interfusing, permeating the procession of apparitions that will succeed you.’”On youth, this while drunk with a group of sailors ashore on one of Japan’s Bonin Islands:“And one last picture I have, standing out very clear and bright in the midst of vagueness before and blackness afterward. We – the apprentices and I – are swaying and clinging to one another under the stars. We are singing a rollicking sea-song, all save one who sits on the ground and weeps; and we are marking the rhythm with waving square-faces. From up and down the street come far choruses of sea-voices similarly singing, and life is great, and beautiful, and romantic, and magnificently mad.”
    • 4/5
      What begins as London's argument in favor of prohibition turns into a colorful, thoughtful, sometimes boastful, often reflective memoir where the author wrestles with such questions as what distinguishes an alcoholic from a person who abuses alcohol, how alcohol is thoroughly entwined with culture (especially male culture, from London's viewpoint) and why he finds drinkers so much more interesting than non-drinkers. You don't have to agree with all of his conclusions to find this entertaining, imaginative (in London's conversations with John Barleycorn) and often profound.
    • 5/5
      A brutally honest? account of John Barleycorn or Alcoholism that Jack London wishes was eliminated even before he was born. I listened to this on Librivox, paying careful attention to every word because I am afraid I may know someone who is also friends with this rather destructive chap.
      Jack London's analysis is sharp but he never is canny enough to give it up. Jacks Life was one brought up in dire poverty, no money, with poverty of circumstances, not helpful and contributing to the destructive alcoholism. But he ends up -due to his considerable self taught talents as a Writer (he was let down at School as a working class lad) mean't he ended up with houses, marriage, wife, friends. Only his ever present 'friend' John Barleycorn would haunt him for the rest of his life-whether he liked it or not and often one hears how he HATED his habit but was in it's unbeknowns to him lethal permanent grip that would in his 40's kill him (end stage alcoholism which I googled sounds horrible could not continue). Therein is the inherent sadness of the book, Jack London's helplessness in the face of his alcoholism, despite abstinence on a ship at sea and in writing work, when he has a drink it reclaims him as his own and so the destructive path continues, despite ' a satisfying love relationship''warm nights' (us women do see something terribly endearing in these men you know!!), and other good stuff coming to him as a result of his hard grafts as Writer.
      Jack London is seen as a hard worker who is grievously wounded by working in a Coal Firing plant? that is no better than slave labour. It was good to see him work again but we have a wounded animal flinching from his wounds.
      Jack London exposes us to his wounds and hurts. John Barleycorn his master doesn't help, sure it would not help as it compounds stigma and makes life difficult for loving friends, family etc. Those wounds are not healed. But I can only thank the Lord that good stuff happened to him at the final part of his life to give him some kind of life-when so many sad alcoholics meet such ghastly fates.
    • 5/5
      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!
    • 4/5
      More delusion than memoir, I'm guilty of seeing my own reflection. London, under the spell of "White Logic," died without a true understanding of his condition. May his adventurous spirit live on.
    • 3/5
      This is a pathetic memoir in which London writes about his alarming drinking problem (stemming back to his childhood) all the while denying that he’s an alcoholic. The edition I have has a nice introduction by Pete Hamill in which he plainly states that London was a hack who wasted what talent he had by churning out inadequate work and, of course, drinking himself to death. It's an entertaining book, but I might respect it more if London had called it Denial.
    • 5/5
      Jack London is the master of denial in John Barleycorn. His drinking takes him on adventures he cannot fully remember. He wakes up with his shoes, jacket, and of course, his money stolen with no memory of how he ended up where he is and yet, it is not his problem. It's John Barleycorn's problem. London calls alcohol John Barleycorn as if to personify the alcoholism; allowing Barleycorn to take the blame and London to be absolved of it. Early in the narrative London illustrates his confusion with John Barleycorn, "I am. I was. I am not. I never am. I am never less his friend than when he is with me and when I seem most his friend" (p 4). Sure. In addition to denial London is obsessive. Everything he does is to the extreme. Shoveling coal, studying books, drinking, writing. Whatever he does he attacks it, spending 15 hours a day at it.
    • 4/5
      "John Barleycorn" is a character from an English folk song. In essence, it is alcohol personified. When Jack London wrote a memoir about his struggles with alcohol, he picked that as its name. It is a vivid portrayal of the struggle and denial associated with alcoholism, although Jack firmly denies that he had any inherent inclination to abuse alcohol, whether through the biology of addiction or genetic disposition. He saw addiction more as a function of social pressure.In his memoir, Jack shows himself to be a strong supporter of prohibition. He even goes so far to reveal that he supported suffrage (the women's right to vote), because he believed that women voters would be the key to enacting prohibition.Jack showed a degree of naivety in assuming that it would be easy to stop abusing alcohol once prohibition was enacted, since he assumed the period of prohibition would be an era when no one else drinks and no drink would be obtainable. Of course, we have the advantage of hindsight and we can reject that notion as foolish. After seeing years of prohibition (both of alcohol and other substances), we now know that prohibition removes neither supply nor demand.Jack London envisioned a time when the use of alcohol would be relegated to the status of other defunct activities such as witch burning. Thankfully he was wrong.
    • 4/5
      Jack London actually has some fun with this. He tempers these anecdotes about his adventures with alchohol with enough humor so that the reader isn't too horrified at, for example, his almost dying from alchohol poisoning at age seven. It verges on didacticism, but he pulls away in self-deprecating style, not wanting to repeat his over-zealous socialist years.The dark side to this book is his insistance that even though he is NOT an alcoholic, he had no choice but to drink. If he didn't drink, he argues, he wouldn't be accepted as a man. Instead of blazing his own path, which he certainly appeared to be capable of, he gave in to a sort of cultural limbo. He couldn't be a manual worker, but he wasn't ready for the 20th century man's world of office life or academia.