John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs — Chapter 38-39

CHAPTER XXXVIII

The foregoing is a sample roaming with the White Logic through the dusk of my soul.

To the best of my power I have striven to give the reader a glimpse of a man's secret dwelling when it is shared with John Barleycorn.

And the reader must remember that this mood, which he has read in a quarter of an hour, is but one mood of the myriad moods of John Barleycorn, and that the procession of such moods may well last the clock around through many a day and week and month.

My alcoholic reminiscences draw to a close.

I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-day on the planet is my unmerited luck--the luck of chest, and shoulders, and constitution.

I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years; that a not large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the tale.

I survived, through no personal virtue, but because I did not have the chemistry of a dipsomaniac and because I possessed an organism unusually resistant to the ravages of John Barleycorn.

And, surviving, I have watched the others die, not so lucky, down all the long sad road.

It was my unmitigated and absolute good fortune, good luck, chance, call it what you will, that brought me through the fires of John Barleycorn.

My life, my career, my joy in living, have not been destroyed.

They have been scorched, it is true; like the survivors of forlorn hopes, they have by unthinkably miraculous ways come through the fight to marvel at the tally of the slain.

And like such a survivor of old red war who cries out, "Let there be no more war!"

so I cry out, "Let there be no more poison-fighting by our youths!"

The way to stop war is to stop it.

The way to stop drinking is to stop it.

The way China stopped the general use of opium was by stopping the cultivation and importation of opium.

The philosophers, priests, and doctors of China could have preached themselves breathless against opium for a thousand years, and the use of opium, so long as opium was ever accessible and obtainable, would have continued unabated.

We are so made, that is all.

We have with great success made a practice of not leaving arsenic and strychnine, and typhoid and tuberculosis germs lying around for our children to be destroyed by.

Treat John Barleycorn the same way.

Stop him.

Don't let him lie around, licensed and legal, to pounce upon our youth.

Not of alcoholics nor for alcoholics do I write, but for our youths, for those who possess no more than the adventure-stings and the genial predispositions, the social man-impulses, which are twisted all awry by our barbarian civilisation which feeds them poison on all the corners.

It is the healthy, normal boys, now born or being born, for whom I write.

It was for this reason, more than any other, and more ardently than any other, that I rode down into the Valley of the Moon, all a-jingle, and voted for equal suffrage.

I voted that women might vote, because I knew that they, the wives and mothers of the race, would vote John Barleycorn out of existence and back into the historical limbo of our vanished customs of savagery.

If I thus seem to cry out as one hurt, please remember that I have been sorely bruised and that I do dislike the thought that any son or daughter of mine or yours should be similarly bruised.

The women are the true conservators of the race.

The men are the wastrels, the adventure-lovers and gamblers, and in the end it is by their women that they are saved.

About man's first experiment in chemistry was the making of alcohol, and down all the generations to this day man has continued to manufacture and drink it.

And there has never been a day when the women have not resented man's use of alcohol, though they have never had the power to give weight to their resentment.

The moment women get the vote in any community, the first thing they proceed to do is to close the saloons.

In a thousand generations to come men of themselves will not close the saloons.

As well expect the morphine victims to legislate the sale of morphine out of existence.

The women know.

They have paid an incalculable price of sweat and tears for man's use of alcohol.

Ever jealous for the race, they will legislate for the babes of boys yet to be born; and for the babes of girls, too, for they must be the mothers, wives, and sisters of these boys.

And it will be easy.

The only ones that will be hurt will be the topers and seasoned drinkers of a single generation.

I am one of these, and I make solemn assurance, based upon long traffic with John Barleycorn, that it won't hurt me very much to stop drinking when no one else drinks and when no drink is obtainable.

On the other hand, the overwhelming proportion of young men are so normally non-alcoholic, that, never having had access to alcohol, they will never miss it.

They will know of the saloon only in the pages of history, and they will think of the saloon as a quaint old custom similar to bull-baiting and the burning of witches.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Of course, no personal tale is complete without bringing the narrative of the person down to the last moment.

But mine is no tale of a reformed drunkard.

I was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed.

It chanced, some time ago, that I made a voyage of one hundred and forty-eight days in a windjammer around the Horn.

I took no private supply of alcohol along, and, though there was no day of those one hundred and forty-eight days that I could not have got a drink from the captain, I did not take a drink.

I did not take a drink because I did not desire a drink.

No one else drank on board.

The atmosphere for drinking was not present, and in my system there was no organic need for alcohol.

My chemistry did not demand alcohol.

So there arose before me a problem, a clear and simple problem: THIS IS SO EASY, WHY NOT KEEP IT UP WHEN YOU GET BACK ON LAND?

I weighed this problem carefully.

I weighed it for five months, in a state of absolute non-contact with alcohol.

And out of the data of past experience, I reached certain conclusions.

In the first place, I am convinced that not one man in ten thousand or in a hundred thousand is a genuine, chemical dipsomaniac.

Drinking, as I deem it, is practically entirely a habit of mind.

It is unlike tobacco, or cocaine, or morphine, or all the rest of the long list of drugs.

The desire for alcohol is quite peculiarly mental in its origin.

It is a matter of mental training and growth, and it is cultivated in social soil.

Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone.

All drinkers begin socially, and this drinking is accompanied by a thousand social connotations such as I have described out of my own experience in the first part of this narrative.

These social connotations are the stuff of which the drink habit is largely composed.

The part that alcohol itself plays is inconsiderable when compared with the part played by the social atmosphere in which it is drunk.

The human is rarely born these days, who, without long training in the social associations of drinking, feels the irresistible chemical propulsion of his system toward alcohol.

I do assume that such rare individuals are born, but I have never encountered one.

On this long, five-months' voyage, I found that among all my bodily needs not the slightest shred of a bodily need for alcohol existed.

But this I did find: my need was mental and social.

When I thought of alcohol, the connotation was fellowship.

When I thought of fellowship, the connotation was alcohol.

Fellowship and alcohol were Siamese twins.

They always occurred linked together.

Thus, when reading in my deck chair or when talking with others, practically any mention of any part of the world I knew instantly aroused the connotation of drinking and good fellows.

Big nights and days and moments, all purple passages and freedoms, thronged my memory.

"Venice" stares at me from the printed page, and I remember the cafe tables on the sidewalks.

"The Battle of Santiago," some one says, and I answer, "Yes, I've been over the ground."

But I do not see the ground, nor Kettle Hill, nor the Peace Tree.

What I see is the Cafe Venus, on the plaza of Santiago, where one hot night I drank and talked with a dying consumptive.

The East End of London, I read, or some one says; and first of all, under my eyelids, leap the visions of the shining pubs, and in my ears echo the calls for "two of bitter" and "three of Scotch."

The Latin Quarter--at once I am in the student cabarets, bright faces and keen spirits around me, sipping cool, well-dripped absinthe while our voices mount and soar in Latin fashion as we settle God and art and democracy and the rest of the simple problems of existence.

In a pampero off the River Plate we speculate, if we are disabled, of running in to Buenos Ayres, the "Paris of America," and I have visions of bright congregating places of men, of the jollity of raised glasses, and of song and cheer and the hum of genial voices.

When we have picked up the North-east Trades in the Pacific we try to persuade our dying captain to run for Honolulu, and while I persuade I see myself again drinking cocktails on the cool lanais and fizzes out at Waikiki where the surf rolls in.

Some one mentions the way wild ducks are cooked in the restaurants of San Francisco, and at once I am transported to the light and clatter of many tables, where I gaze at old friends across the golden brims of long-stemmed Rhine-wine glasses.

And so I pondered my problem.

I should not care to revisit all these fair places of the world except in the fashion I visited them before.

GLASS IN HAND!

There is a magic in the phrase.

It means more than all the words in the dictionary can be made to mean.

It is a habit of mind to which I have been trained all my life.

It is now part of the stuff that composes me.

I like the bubbling play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men, when, glass in hand, they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse.

No, I decided; I shall take my drink on occasion.

With all the books on my shelves, with all the thoughts of the thinkers shaded by my particular temperament, I decided coolly and deliberately that I should continue to do what I had been trained to want to do.

I would drink--but oh, more skilfully, more discreetly, than ever before.

Never again would I be a peripatetic conflagration.

Never again would I invoke the White Logic.

I had learned how not to invoke him.

The White Logic now lies decently buried alongside the Long Sickness.

Neither will afflict me again.

It is many a year since I laid the Long Sickness away; his sleep is sound.

And just as sound is the sleep of the White Logic.

And yet, in conclusion, I can well say that I wish my forefathers had banished John Barleycorn before my time.

I regret that John Barleycorn flourished everywhere in the system of society in which I was born, else I should not have made his acquaintance, and I was long trained in his acquaintance.

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