John Barleycorn - It's Not MY Fault

To start: while I found the story itself interesting, I found the writing surprisingly tedious. Surprising because London's adventure writing (White Fang, Sea Wolf, To Build a Fire, etc.) is so riveting. I think the tediousness came largely as a result of him saying the same things over and over: not just the language ("purple passages," "nicely jingled," "chesty men," "white noise"), but the experiences themselves were repetitive. Perhaps that was part of the point; certainly he tried to point out in the section about his time on the sealer that all his travels ended in saloons, and he missed the bigger set of experiences. But literary ploy or not, it made for a fairly boring book (from a writing/narrative perspective).

Now for the philosophy: my biggest problem with London's perspective on the question of alcoholism is his complete lack of ownership over his own choices. Again and again, he makes the point that his alcoholism was inevitable. Anywhere he wanted to go, he simply HAD to drink. It was just the way. How unfair! Someone should do something about that. Utter rubbish.

In a way, he is like the anti-Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the one who never comes to the understanding that true manhood lies in accepting responsibility for one's own actions. Interestingly, I remember being shocked at how much drinking Tom did in that book initially; but it tapered off as he began to accept responsibility for his decisions. Here, London never comes to that conclusion. He's like a child crying that it's not his fault he's a drunk; it's society's.

Consider the following passage: "heaven forefend me from the most of the average run of male humans who are not good fellows -- the ones cold of heart and cold of head who don't smoke, drink, nor swear, nor do much of anything else that is brave, and resentful, and stinging, because in their feeble fibers there has never been the stir and prod of life to well over its boundaries and be devilish and daring. One doesn't meet these in saloons, nor rallying to lost causes, nor flaming on the adventure-paths, nor loving as God's own made lovers. They are too busy keeping their feet dry, conserving their heart-beats, and making unlovely life-successes of theier spirit-mediocrity."

Now I'm a bit stung by this, perhaps, and perhaps that puts me in an uncharitable mood. But I would say that these are the great men; the ones who, despite the lure and temptation of the carnal life, resist for the good of themselves, their families, and their communities. They are men, and London is a child.

Consider further his accounts of public mayhem that he and his friends brought about while drunk. Never is it their fault; it's all due to John Barleycorn. And furthermore, never is there a word for those whose property had been destroyed. The Japanese restaurant owners whose establishment was destroyed by drunken Americans. No sign of regret or remorse on their behalf; only that London himself didn't get to see more of the wild Japanese town. The town that the "fire brigade" destroyed; never a thought, never a word. Just "how scary! I almost went into a whiskey-induced coma on the train! How unfair the world is to me!"

So I pity London (or at least his persona in this novel); not for his drunkenness, but for his utter inability to recognize the first and only lesson of manhood: responsibility. I think I quoted Lars and the Real Girl in an earlier post, but there's a great exchange that relates to this. Lars asks his older brother when he knew he was a man. This makes his brother evidently uncomfortable, but eventually he answers: "Well, it's not like you're one thing or the other, okay? There's still a kid inside but you grow up when you decide to do right, okay, and not what's right for you, what's right for everybody, even when it hurts... Like, you know, like, you don't jerk people around, you know, and you don't cheat on your woman, and you take care of your family, you know, and you admit when you're wrong, or you try to, anyways. That's all I can think of, you know - it sound like it's easy and for some reason it's not." When I think of "good fellows," it's men like these; they are the ones that I want to be around. Not the immature, whining, drunken man-childs that London so admires.