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never knew a desire to take such a drink. Oh, if a white man came
into my camp, I opened a bottle and we drank together according to
the way of men, just as he would open a bottle and drink with me
if I came into his camp. I carried that whisky for social
purposes, and I so charged it up in my expense account to the
newspaper for which I worked.
Only in retrospect can I mark the almost imperceptible growth of
my desire. There were little hints then that I did not take,
little straws in the wind that I did not see, little incidents the
gravity of which I did not realise.
For instance, for some years it had been my practice each winter
to cruise for six or eight weeks on San Francisco Bay. My stout
sloop yacht, the Spray, had a comfortable cabin and a coal stove.
A Korean boy did the cooking, and I usually took a friend or so
along to share the joys of the cruise. Also, I took my machine
along and did my thousand words a day. On the particular trip I
have in mind, Cloudesley and Toddy came along. This was Toddy's
first trip. On previous trips Cloudesley had elected to drink
beer; so I had kept the yacht supplied with beer and had drunk
beer with him.
But on this cruise the situation was different. Toddy was so
nicknamed because of his diabolical cleverness in concocting
toddies. So I brought whisky along--a couple of gallons. Alas!
Many another gallon I bought, for Cloudesley and I got into the
habit of drinking a certain hot toddy that actually tasted
delicious going down and that carried the most exhilarating kick
imaginable.
I liked those toddies. I grew to look forward to the making of
them. We drank them regularly, one before breakfast, one before
dinner, one before supper, and a final one when we went to bed.
We never got drunk. But I will say that four times a day we were
very genial. And when, in the middle of the cruise, Toddy was
called back to San Francisco on business, Cloudesley and I saw to
it that the Korean boy mixed toddies regularly for us according to
formula.
But that was only on the boat. Back on the land, in my house, I
took no before breakfast eye-opener, no bed-going nightcap. And I
haven't drunk hot toddies since, and that was many a year ago.
But the point is, I LIKED those toddies. The geniality of which
they were provocative was marvellous. They were eloquent
proselyters for John Barleycorn in their own small insidious way.
They were tickles of the something destined to grow into daily and
deadly desire. And I didn't know, never dreamed--I, who had lived
with John Barleycorn for so many years and laughed at all his
unavailing attempts to win me.
Part of the process of recovering from my long sickness was to
find delight in little things, in things unconnected with books
and problems, in play, in games of tag in the swimming pool, in
flying kites, in fooling with horses, in working out mechanical
puzzles. As a result, I grew tired of the city. On the ranch, in
the Valley of the Moon, I found my paradise. I gave up living in
cities. All the cities held for me were music, the theatre, and
Turkish baths.
And all went well with me. I worked hard, played hard, and was
very happy. I read more fiction and less fact. I did not study a
tithe as much as I had studied in the past. I still took an
interest in the fundamental problems of existence, but it was a
very cautious interest; for I had burned my fingers that time I
clutched at the veils of Truth and wrested them from her. There
was a bit of lie in this attitude of mine, a bit of hypocrisy; but
the lie and the hypocrisy were those of a man desiring to live. I
deliberately blinded myself to what I took to be the savage
interpretation of biological fact. After all, I was merely
forswearing a bad habit, forgoing a bad frame of mind. And I
repeat, I was very happy. And I add, that in all my days,
measuring them with cold, considerative judgment, this was, far
and away beyond all other periods, the happiest period of my life.
But the time was at hand, rhymeless and reasonless so far as I can
see, when I was to begin to pay for my score of years of dallying
with John Barleycorn. Occasionally guests journeyed to the ranch
and remained a few days. Some did not drink. But to those who
did drink, the absence of all alcohol on the ranch was a hardship.
I could not violate my sense of hospitality by compelling them to
endure this hardship. I ordered in a stock--for my guests.
I was never interested enough in cocktails to know how they were
made. So I got a bar-keeper in Oakland to make them in bulk and
ship them to me. When I had no guests I didn't drink. But I
began to notice, when I finished my morning's work, that I was
glad if there were a guest, for then I could drink a cocktail with
him.
Now I was so clean of alcohol that even a single cocktail was
provocative of pitch. A single cocktail would glow the mind and
tickle a laugh for the few minutes prior to sitting down to table
and starting the delightful process of eating. On the other hand,
such was the strength of my stomach, of my alcoholic resistance,
that the single cocktail was only the glimmer of a glow, the
faintest tickle of a laugh. One day, a friend frankly and
shamelessly suggested a second cocktail. I drank the second one
with him. The glow was appreciably longer and warmer, the
laughter deeper and more resonant. One does not forget such
experiences. Sometimes I almost think that it was because I was
so very happy that I started on my real drinking.
I remember one day Charmian and I took a long ride over the
mountains on our horses. The servants had been dismissed for the
day, and we returned late at night to a jolly chafing-dish supper.
Oh, it was good to be alive that night while the supper was
preparing, the two of us alone in the kitchen. I, personally, was
at the top of life. Such things as the books and ultimate truth
did not exist. My body was gloriously healthy, and healthily
tired from the long ride. It had been a splendid day. The night
was splendid. I was with the woman who was my mate, picnicking in
gleeful abandon. I had no troubles. The bills were all paid, and
a surplus of money was rolling in on me. The future ever-widened
before me. And right there, in the kitchen, delicious things
bubbled in the chafing-dish, our laughter bubbled, and my stomach
was keen with a most delicious edge of appetite.
I felt so good, that somehow, somewhere, in me arose an insatiable
greed to feel better. I was so happy that I wanted to pitch my
happiness even higher. And I knew the way. Ten thousand contacts
with John Barleycorn had taught me. Several times I wandered out
of the kitchen to the cocktail bottle, and each time I left it
diminished by one man's size cocktail. The result was splendid.
I wasn't jingled, I wasn't lighted up; but I was warmed, I glowed,
my happiness was pyramided. Munificent as life was to me, I added
to that munificence. It was a great hour--one of my greatest.
But I paid for it, long afterwards, as you will see. One does not
forget such experiences, and, in human stupidity, cannot be
brought to realise that there is no immutable law which decrees
that same things shall produce same results. For they don't, else
would the thousandth pipe of opium be provocative of similar
delights to the first, else would one cocktail, instead of
several, produce an equivalent glow after a year of cocktails.
One day, just before I ate midday dinner, after my morning's
writing was done, when I had no guest, I took a cocktail by
myself. Thereafter, when there were no guests, I took this daily
pre-dinner cocktail. And right there John Barleycorn had me. I
was beginning to drink regularly. I was beginning to drink alone.
And I was beginning to drink, not for hospitality's sake, not for
the sake of the taste, but for the effect of the drink.
I WANTED that daily pre-dinner cocktail. And it never crossed my
mind that there was any reason I should not have it. I paid for
it. I could pay for a thousand cocktails each day if I wanted.
And what was a cocktail--one cocktail--to me who on so many
occasions for so many years had drunk inordinate quantities of
stiffer stuff and been unharmed?
The programme of my ranch life was as follows: Each morning, at
eight-thirty, having been reading or correcting proofs in bed
since four or five, I went to my desk. Odds and ends of
correspondence and notes occupied me till nine, and at nine sharp,
invariably, I began my writing. By eleven, sometimes a few
minutes earlier or later, my thousand words were finished.
Another half-hour at cleaning up my desk, and my day's work was
done, so that at eleven-thirty I got into a hammock under the
trees with my mail-bag and the morning newspaper. At twelve-
thirty I ate dinner and in the afternoon I swam and rode.
One morning, at eleven-thirty, before I got into the hammock, I
took a cocktail. I repeated this on subsequent mornings, of
course, taking another cocktail just before I ate at twelve-
thirty. Soon I found myself, seated at my desk in the midst of my
thousand words, looking forward to that eleven-thirty cocktail.
At last, now, I was thoroughly conscious that I desired alcohol.
But what of it? I wasn't afraid of John Barleycorn. I had
associated with him too long. I was wise in the matter of drink.
I was discreet. Never again would I drink to excess. I knew the
dangers and the pitfalls of John Barleycorn, the various ways by
which he had tried to kill me in the past. But all that was past,
long past. Never again would I drink myself to stupefaction.
Never again would I get drunk. All I wanted, and all I would
take, was just enough to glow and warm me, to kick geniality alive
in me and put laughter in my throat and stir the maggots of
imagination slightly in my brain. Oh, I was thoroughly master of
myself, and of John Barleycorn.
But the same stimulus to the human organism will not continue to
produce the same response. By and by I discovered there was no
kick at all in one cocktail. One cocktail left me dead. There
was no glow, no laughter tickle. Two or three cocktails were
required to produce the original effect of one. And I wanted that
effect. I drank my first cocktail at eleven-thirty when I took
the morning's mail into the hammock, and I drank my second
cocktail an hour later just before I ate. I got into the habit of
crawling out of the hammock ten minutes earlier so as to find time
and decency for two more cocktails ere I ate. This became
schedule--three cocktails in the hour that intervened between my
desk and dinner. And these are two of the deadliest drinking
habits: regular drinking and solitary drinking.
I was always willing to drink when any one was around. I drank by
myself when no one was around. Then I made another step. When I
had for guest a man of limited drinking calibre, I took two drinks
to his one--one drink with him, the other drink without him and of
which he did not know. I STOLE that other drink, and, worse than
that, I began the habit of drinking alone when there was a guest,
a man, a comrade, with whom I could have drunk. But John
Barleycorn furnished the extenuation. It was a wrong thing to
trip a guest up with excess of hospitality and get him drunk. If
I persuaded him, with his limited calibre, into drinking up with
me, I'd surely get him drunk. What could I do but steal that
every second drink, or else deny myself the kick equivalent to
what he got out of half the number?
Please remember, as I recite this development of my drinking, that
I am no fool, no weakling. As the world measures such things, I
am a success--I dare to say a success more conspicuous than the
success of the average successful man, and a success that required
a pretty fair amount of brains and will power. My body is a
strong body. It has survived where weaklings died like flies.
And yet these things which I am relating happened to my body and
to me. I am a fact. My drinking is a fact. My drinking is a
thing that has happened, and is no theory nor speculation; and, as
I see it, it but lays the emphasis on the power of John
Barleycorn--a savagery that we still permit to exist, a deadly
institution that lingers from the mad old brutal days and that
takes its heavy toll of youth and strength, and high spirit, and
of very much of all of the best we breed.
To return. After a boisterous afternoon in the swimming pool,
followed by a glorious ride on horseback over the mountains or up
or down the Valley of the Moon, I found myself so keyed and
splendid that I desired to be more highly keyed, to feel more
splendid. I knew the way. A cocktail before supper was not the
way. Two or three, at the very least, was what was needed. I
took them. Why not? It was living. I had always dearly loved to
live. This also became part of the daily schedule.
Then, too, I was perpetually finding excuses for extra cocktails.
It might be the assembling of a particularly jolly crowd; a touch
of anger against my architect or against a thieving stone-mason
working on my barn; the death of my favourite horse in a barbed
wire fence; or news of good fortune in the morning mail from my
dealings with editors and publishers. It was immaterial what the
excuse might be, once the desire had germinated in me. The thing
was: I WANTED alcohol. At last, after a score and more of years
of dallying and of not wanting, now I wanted it. And my strength
was my weakness. I required two, three, or four drinks to get an
effect commensurate with the effect the average man got out of one
drink.
One rule I observed. I never took a drink until my day's work of
writing a thousand words was done. And, when done, the cocktails
reared a wall of inhibition in my brain between the day's work
done and the rest of the day of fun to come. My work ceased from
my consciousness. No thought of it flickered in my brain till
next morning at nine o'clock when I sat at my desk and began my
next thousand words. This was a desirable condition of mind to
achieve. I conserved my energy by means of this alcoholic
inhibition. John Barleycorn was not so black as he was painted.
He did a fellow many a good turn, and this was one of them.
And I turned out work that was healthful, and wholesome, and
sincere. It was never pessimistic. The way to life I had learned
in my long sickness. I knew the illusions were right, and I
exalted the illusions. Oh, I still turn out the same sort of
work, stuff that is clean, alive, optimistic, and that makes
toward life. And I am always assured by the critics of my super-
abundant and abounding vitality, and of how thoroughly I am
deluded by these very illusions I exploit.
And while on this digression, let me repeat the question I have
repeated to myself ten thousand times. WHY DID I DRINK? What
need was there for it? I was happy. Was it because I was too
happy? I was strong. Was it because I was too strong? Did I
possess too much vitality? I don't know why I drank. I cannot
answer, though I can voice the suspicion that ever grows in me. I
had been in too-familiar contact with John Barleycorn through too
many years. A left-handed man, by long practice, can become a
right-handed man. Had I, a non-alcoholic, by long practice become
an alcoholic?
I was so happy. I had won through my long sickness to the
satisfying love of woman. I earned more money with less
endeavour. I glowed with health. I slept like a babe. I
continued to write successful books, and in sociological
controversy I saw my opponents confuted with the facts of the
times that daily reared new buttresses to my intellectual
position. From day's end to day's end I never knew sorrow,
disappointment, nor regret. I was happy all the time. Life was
one unending song. I begrudged the very hours of blessed sleep
because by that much was I robbed of the joy that would have been
mine had I remained awake. And yet I drank. And John Barleycorn,
all unguessed by me, was setting the stage for a sickness all his
own.
The more I drank the more I was required to drink to get an
equivalent effect. When I left the Valley of the Moon, and went
to the city, and dined out, a cocktail served at table was a wan
and worthless thing. There was no pre-dinner kick in it. On my
way to dinner I was compelled to accumulate the kick--two
cocktails, three, and, if I met some fellows, four or five, or
six, it didn't matter within several. Once, I was in a rush. I
had no time decently to accumulate the several drinks. A
brilliant idea came to me. I told the barkeeper to mix me a
double cocktail. Thereafter, whenever I was in a hurry, I ordered
double cocktails. It saved time.
One result of this regular heavy drinking was to jade me. My mind
grew so accustomed to spring and liven by artificial means that
without artificial means it refused to spring and liven. Alcohol
became more and more imperative in order to meet people, in order
to become sociably fit. I had to get the kick and the hit of the
stuff, the crawl of the maggots, the genial brain glow, the
laughter tickle, the touch of devilishness and sting, the smile
over the face of things, ere I could join my fellows and make one
with them.
Another result was that John Barleycorn was beginning to trip me
up. He was thrusting my long sickness back upon me, inveigling me
into again pursuing Truth and snatching her veils away from her,
tricking me into looking reality stark in the face. But this came
on gradually. My thoughts were growing harsh again, though they
grew harsh slowly.
Sometimes warning thoughts crossed my mind. Where was this steady
drinking leading? But trust John Barleycorn to silence such
questions. "Come on and have a drink and I'll tell you all about
it," is his way. And it works. For instance, the following is a
case in point, and one which John Barleycorn never wearied of
reminding me:
I had suffered an accident which required a ticklish operation.
One morning, a week after I had come off the table, I lay on my
hospital bed, weak and weary. The sunburn of my face, what little
of it could be seen through a scraggly growth of beard, had faded
to a sickly yellow. My doctor stood at my bedside on the verge of
departure. He glared disapprovingly at the cigarette I was
smoking.
"That's what you ought to quit," he lectured. "It will get you in
the end. Look at me."
I looked. He was about my own age, broad-shouldered, deep-
chested, eyes sparkling, and ruddy-cheeked with health. A finer
specimen of manhood one would not ask.
"I used to smoke," he went on. "Cigars. But I gave even them up.
And look at me."
The man was arrogant, and rightly arrogant, with conscious well-
being. And within a month he was dead. It was no accident. Half
a dozen different bugs of long scientific names had attacked and
destroyed him. The complications were astonishing and painful,
and for days before he died the screams of agony of that splendid
manhood could be heard for a block around. He died screaming.
"You see," said John Barleycorn. "He took care of himself. He
even stopped smoking cigars. And that's what he got for it.
Pretty rotten, eh? But the bugs will jump. There's no forefending
them. Your magnificent doctor took every precaution, yet they got
him. When the bug jumps you can't tell where it will land. It
may be you. Look what he missed. Will you miss all I can give
you, only to have a bug jump on you and drag you down? There is no
equity in life. It's all a lottery. But I put the lying smile on
the face of life and laugh at the facts. Smile with me and laugh.
You'll get yours in the end, but in the meantime laugh. It's a
pretty dark world. I illuminate it for you. It's a rotten world,
when things can happen such as happened to your doctor. There's
only one thing to do: take another drink and forget it."
And, of course, I took another drink for the inhibition that
accompanied it. I took another drink every time John Barleycorn
reminded me of what had happened. Yet I drank rationally,
intelligently. I saw to it that the quality of the stuff was of
the best. I sought the kick and the inhibition, and avoided the
penalties of poor quality and of drunkenness. It is to be
remarked, in passing, that when a man begins to drink rationally
and intelligently that he betrays a grave symptom of how far along
the road he has travelled.
But I continued to observe my rule of never taking my first drink
of the day until the last word of my thousand words was written.
On occasion, however, I took a day's vacation from my writing. At
such times, since it was no violation of my rule, I didn't mind
how early in the day I took that first drink. And persons who
have never been through the drinking game wonder how the drinking
habit grows!
When the Snark sailed on her long cruise from San Francisco there
was nothing to drink on board. Or, rather, we were all of us
unaware that there was anything to drink, nor did we discover it
for many a month. This sailing with a "dry " boat was malice
aforethought on my part. I had played John Barleycorn a trick.
And it showed that I was listening ever so slightly to the faint
warnings that were beginning to arise in my consciousness.
Of course, I veiled the situation to myself and excused myself to
John Barleycorn. And I was very scientific about it. I said that
I would drink only while in ports. During the dry sea-stretches
my system would be cleansed of the alcohol that soaked it, so that
when I reached a port I should be in shape to enjoy John
Barleycorn more thoroughly. His bite would be sharper, his kick
keener and more delicious.
We were twenty-seven days on the traverse between San Francisco
and Honolulu. After the first day out, the thought of a drink
never troubled me. This I take to show how intrinsically I am not
an alcoholic. Sometimes, during the traverse, looking ahead and
anticipating the delightful lanai luncheons and dinners of Hawaii
(I had been there a couple of times before), I thought, naturally,
of the drinks that would precede those meals. I did not think of
those drinks with any yearning, with any irk at the length of the
voyage. I merely thought they would be nice and jolly, part of
the atmosphere of a proper meal.
Thus, once again I proved to my complete satisfaction that I was
John Barleycorn's master. I could drink when I wanted, refrain
when I wanted. Therefore I would continue to drink when I wanted.
Some five months were spent in the various islands of the Hawaiian
group. Being ashore, I drank. I even drank a bit more than I had
been accustomed to drink in California prior to the voyage. The
people in Hawaii seemed to drink a bit more, on the average, than
the people in more temperate latitudes. I do not intend the pun,
and can awkwardly revise the statement to "latitudes more remote
from the equator;" Yet Hawaii is only sub-tropical. The deeper I
got into the tropics, the deeper I found men drank, the deeper I
drank myself.
From Hawaii we sailed for the Marquesas. The traverse occupied
sixty days. For sixty days we never raised land, a sail, nor a
steamer smoke. But early in those sixty days the cook, giving an
overhauling to the galley, made a find. Down in the bottom of a
deep locker he found a dozen bottles of angelica and muscatel.
These had come down from the kitchen cellar of the ranch along
with the home-preserved fruits and jellies. Six months in the
galley heat had effected some sort of a change in the thick sweet
wine--branded it, I imagine.
I took a taste. Delicious! And thereafter, once each day, at
twelve o'clock, after our observations were worked up and the
Snark's position charted, I drank half a tumbler of the stuff. It
had a rare kick to it. It warmed the cockles of my geniality and
put a fairer face on the truly fair face of the sea. Each
morning, below, sweating out my thousand words, I found myself
looking forward to that twelve o'clock event of the day.
The trouble was I had to share the stuff, and the length of the
traverse was doubtful. I regretted that there were not more than
a dozen bottles. And when they were gone I even regretted that I
had shared any of it. I was thirsty for the alcohol, and eager to
arrive in the Marquesas.
So it was that I reached the Marquesas the possessor of a real
man's size thirst. And in the Marquesas were several white men, a
lot of sickly natives, much magnificent scenery, plenty of trade
rum, an immense quantity of absinthe, but neither whisky nor gin.
The trade rum scorched the skin off one's mouth. I know, because
I tried it. But I had ever been plastic, and I accepted the
absinthe. The trouble with the stuff was that I had to take such
inordinate quantities in order to feel the slightest effect.
From the Marquesas I sailed with sufficient absinthe in ballast to
last me to Tahiti, where I outfitted with Scotch and American
whisky, and thereafter there were no dry stretches between ports.
But please do not misunderstand. There was no drunkenness, as
drunkenness is ordinarily understood--no staggering and rolling
around, no befuddlement of the senses. The skilled and seasoned
drinker, with a strong constitution, never descends to anything
like that. He drinks to feel good, to get a pleasant jingle, and
no more than that. The things he carefully avoids are the nausea
of over-drinking, the after-effect of over-drinking, the
helplessness and loss of pride of over-drinking.
What the skilled and seasoned drinker achieves is a discreet and
canny semi-intoxication. And he does it by the twelve-month
around without any apparent penalty. There are hundreds of
thousands of men of this sort in the United States to-day, in
clubs, hotels, and in their own homes--men who are never drunk,
and who, though most of them will indignantly deny it, are rarely
sober. And all of them fondly believe, as I fondly believed, that
they are beating the game.
On the sea-stretches I was fairly abstemious; but ashore I drank
more. I seemed to need more, anyway, in the tropics. This is a
common experience, for the excessive consumption of alcohol in the
tropics by white men is a notorious fact. The tropics is no place
for white-skinned men. Their skin-pigment does not protect them
against the excessive white light of the sun. The ultra-violet
rays, and other high-velocity and invisible rays from the upper
end of the spectrum, rip and tear through their tissues, just as
the X-ray ripped and tore through the tissues of so many
experimenters before they learned the danger.
White men in the tropics undergo radical changes of nature. They
become savage, merciless. They commit monstrous acts of cruelty
that they would never dream of committing in their original
temperate climate. They become nervous, irritable, and less
moral. And they drink as they never drank before. Drinking is
one form of the many forms of degeneration that set in when white
men are exposed too long to too much white light. The increase of
alcoholic consumption is automatic. The tropics is no place for a
long sojourn. They seem doomed to die anyway, and the heavy
drinking expedites the process. They don't reason about it. They
just do it.
The sun sickness got me, despite the fact that I had been in the
tropics only a couple of years. I drank heavily during this time,
but right here I wish to forestall misunderstanding. The drinking
was not the cause of the sickness, nor of the abandonment of the
voyage. I was strong as a bull, and for many months I fought the
sun sickness that was ripping and tearing my surface and nervous
tissues to pieces. All through the New Hebrides and the Solomons
and up among the atolls on the Line, during this period under a
tropic sun, rotten with malaria, and suffering from a few minor
afflictions such as Biblical leprosy with the silvery skin, I did
the work of five men.
To navigate a vessel through the reefs and shoals and passages and
unlighted coasts of the coral seas is a man's work in itself. I
was the only navigator on board. There was no one to check me up
on the working out of my observations, nor with whom I could
advise in the ticklish darkness among uncharted reefs and shoals.
And I stood all watches. There was no sea-man on board whom I
could trust to stand a mate's watch. I was mate as well as
captain. Twenty-four hours a day were the watches I stood at sea,
catching cat-naps when I might. Third, I was doctor. And let me
say right here that the doctor's job on the Snark at that time was
a man's job. All on board suffered from malaria--the real,
tropical malaria that can kill in three months. All on board
suffered from perforating ulcers and from the maddening itch of
ngari-ngari. A Japanese cook went insane from his too numerous
afflictions. One of my Polynesian sailors lay at death's door
with blackwater fever. Oh, yes, it was a full man's job, and I
dosed and doctored, and pulled teeth, and dragged my patients
through mild little things like ptomaine poisoning.
Fourth, I was a writer. I sweated out my thousand words a day,
every day, except when the shock of fever smote me, or a couple of
nasty squalls smote the Snark, in the morning. Fifth, I was a
traveller and a writer, eager to see things and to gather material
into my note-books. And, sixth, I was master and owner of the
craft that was visiting strange places where visitors are rare and
where visitors are made much of. So here I had to hold up the
social end, entertain on board, be entertained ashore by planters,
traders, governors, captains of war vessels, kinky-headed cannibal
kings, and prime ministers sometimes fortunate enough to be clad
in cotton shifts.
Of course I drank. I drank with my guests and hosts. Also, I
drank by myself. Doing the work of five men, I thought, entitled
me to drink. Alcohol was good for a man who over-worked. I noted
its effect on my small crew, when, breaking their backs and hearts
at heaving up anchor in forty fathoms, they knocked off gasping
and trembling at the end of half an hour and had new life put into
them by stiff jolts of rum. They caught their breaths, wiped
their mouths, and went to it again with a will. And when we
careened the Snark and had to work in the water to our necks
between shocks of fever, I noted how raw trade rum helped the work
along.
And here again we come to another side of many-sided John
Barleycorn. On the face of it, he gives something for nothing.
Where no strength remains he finds new strength. The wearied one
rises to greater effort. For the time being there is an actual
accession of strength. I remember passing coal on an ocean
steamer through eight days of hell, during which time we coal-
passers were kept to the job by being fed with whisky. We toiled
half drunk all the time. And without the whisky we could not have
passed the coal.
This strength John Barleycorn gives is not fictitious strength.
It is real strength. But it is manufactured out of the sources of
strength, and it must ultimately be paid for, and with interest.
But what weary human will look so far ahead? He takes this
apparently miraculous accession of strength at its face value.
And many an overworked business and professional man, as well as a
harried common labourer, has travelled John Barleycorn's death
road because of this mistake.
I went to Australia to go into hospital and get tinkered up, after
which I planned to go on with the voyage. And during the long
weeks I lay in hospital, from the first day I never missed
alcohol. I never thought about it. I knew I should have it again
when I was on my feet. But when I regained my feet I was not
cured of my major afflictions. Naaman's silvery skin was still
mine. The mysterious sun-sickness, which the experts of Australia
could not fathom, still ripped and tore my tissues. Malaria still
festered in me and put me on my back in shivering delirium at the
most unexpected moments, compelling me to cancel a double lecture
tour which had been arranged.
So I abandoned the Snark voyage and sought a cooler climate. The
day I came out of hospital I took up drinking again as a matter of
course. I drank wine at meals. I drank cocktails before meals.
I drank Scotch highballs when anybody I chanced to be with was
drinking them. I was so thoroughly the master of John Barleycorn
I could take up with him or let go of him whenever I pleased, just
as I had done all my life.
After a time, for cooler climate, I went down to southermost
Tasmania in forty-three South. And I found myself in a place
where there was nothing to drink. It didn't mean anything. I
didn't drink. It was no hardship. I soaked in the cool air, rode
horseback, and did my thousand words a day save when the fever
shock came in the morning.
And for fear that the idea may still lurk in some minds that my
preceding years of drinking were the cause of my disabilities, I
here point out that my Japanese cabin boy, Nakata, still with me,
was rotten with fever, as was Charmian, who in addition was in the
slough of a tropical neurasthenia that required several years of
temperate climates to cure, and that neither she nor Nakata drank
or ever had drunk.
When I returned to Hobart Town, where drink was obtainable, I
drank as of old. The same when I arrived back in Australia. On
the contrary, when I sailed from Australia on a tramp steamer
commanded by an abstemious captain, I took no drink along, and had
no drink for the forty-three days' passage. Arrived in Ecuador,
squarely under the equatorial sun, where the humans were dying of
yellow fever, smallpox, and the plague, I promptly drank again--
every drink of every sort that had a kick in it. I caught none of
these diseases. Neither did Charmian nor Nakata who did not
drink.
Enamoured of the tropics, despite the damage done me, I stopped in
various places, and was a long while getting back to the splendid,
temperate climate of California. I did my thousand words a day,
travelling or stopping over, suffered my last faint fever shock,
saw my silvery skin vanish and my sun-torn tissues healthily knit
again, and drank as a broad-shouldered chesty man may drink.
Back on the ranch, in the Valley of the Moon, I resumed my steady
drinking. My programme was no drink in the morning; first drink-
time came with the completion of my thousand words. Then, between
that and the midday meal, were drinks numerous enough to develop a
pleasant jingle. Again, in the hour preceding the evening meal, I
developed another pleasant jingle. Nobody ever saw me drunk, for
the simple reason that I never was drunk. But I did get a jingle
twice each day; and the amount of alcohol I consumed every day, if
loosed in the system of one unaccustomed to drink, would have put
such a one on his back and out.
It was the old proposition. The more I drank, the more I was
compelled to drink in order to get an effect. The time came when
cocktails were inadequate. I had neither the time in which to
drink them nor the space to accommodate them. Whisky had a more
powerful jolt. It gave quicker action with less quantity.
Bourbon or rye, or cunningly aged blends, constituted the pre-
midday drinking. In the late afternoon it was Scotch and soda.
My sleep, always excellent, now became not quite so excellent. I
had been accustomed to read myself back asleep when I chanced to
awake. But now this began to fail me. When I had read two or
three of the small hours away and was as wide awake as ever, I
found that a drink furnished the soporific effect. Sometimes two
or three drinks were required.
So short a period of sleep then intervened before early morning
rising that my system did not have time to work off the alcohol.
As a result I awoke with mouth parched and dry, with a slight
heaviness of head, and with a mild nervous palpitation in the
stomach. In fact I did not feel good. I was suffering from the
morning sickness of the steady, heavy drinker. What I needed was
a pick-me-up, a bracer. Trust John Barleycorn, once he has broken
down a man's defences! So it was a drink before breakfast to put
me right for breakfast--the old poison of the snake that has
bitten one! Another custom begun at this time was that of the
pitcher of water by the bedside to furnish relief to my scorched
and sizzling membranes.
I achieved a condition in which my body was never free from
alcohol. Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol. If I
travelled to out-of-the-way places, I declined to run the risk of
finding them dry. I took a quart, or several quarts, along in my
grip. In the past I had been amazed by other men guilty of this
practice. Now I did it myself unblushingly. And when I got out
with the fellows, I cast all rules by the board. I drank when
they drank, what they drank, and in the same way they drank.
I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me.
The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was
no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I
began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by
taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was
not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with
a drink.
The gravity of this I realised too well. I made new rules.
Resolutely I would refrain from drinking until my work was done.
But a new and most diabolical complication arose. The work
refused to be done without drinking. It just couldn't be done. I
had to drink in order to do it. I was beginning to fight now. I
had the craving at last, and it was mastering me. I would sit at
my desk and dally with pad and pen, but words refused to flow. My
brain could not think the proper thoughts because continually it
was obsessed with the one thought that across the room in the
liquor cabinet stood John Barleycorn. When, in despair, I took my
drink, at once my brain loosened up and began to roll off the
thousand words.
In my town house, in Oakland, I finished the stock of liquor and
wilfully refused to purchase more. It was no use, because,
unfortunately, there remained in the bottom of the liquor cabinet
a case of beer. In vain I tried to write. Now beer is a poor
substitute for strong waters: besides, I didn't like beer, yet all
I could think of was that beer so singularly accessible in the
bottom of the cabinet. Not until I had drunk a pint of it did the
words begin to reel off, and the thousand were reeled off to the
tune of numerous pints. The worst of it was that the beer caused
me severe heart-burn; but despite the discomfort I soon finished
off the case.
The liquor cabinet was now bare. I did not replenish it. By
truly heroic perseverance I finally forced myself to write the
daily thousand words without the spur of John Barleycorn. But all
the time I wrote I was keenly aware of the craving for a drink.
And as soon as the morning's work was done, I was out of the house
and away down-town to get my first drink. Merciful goodness!--if
John Barleycorn could get such sway over me, a non-alcoholic, what
must be the sufferings of the true alcoholic, battling against the
organic demands of his chemistry while those closest to him
sympathise little, understand less, and despise and deride him!
But the freight has to be paid. John Barleycorn began to collect,
and he collected not so much from the body as from the mind. The
old long sickness, which had been purely an intellectual sickness,
recrudesced. The old ghosts, long laid, lifted their heads again.
But they were different and more deadly ghosts. The old ghosts,
intellectual in their inception, had been laid by a sane and
normal logic. But now they were raised by the White Logic of John
Barleycorn, and John Barleycorn never lays the ghosts of his
raising. For this sickness of pessimism, caused by drink, one
must drink further in quest of the anodyne that John Barleycorn
promises but never delivers.
How to describe this White Logic to those who have never
experienced it! It is perhaps better first to state how impossible
such a description is. Take Hasheesh Land, for instance, the land
of enormous extensions of time and space. In past years I have
made two memorable journeys into that far land. My adventures
there are seared in sharpest detail on my brain. Yet I have tried
vainly, with endless words, to describe any tiny particular phase
to persons who have not travelled there.
I use all the hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries of
time and profounds of unthinkable agony and horror can obtain in
each interval of all the intervals between the notes of a quick
jig played quickly on the piano. I talk for an hour, elaborating
that one phase of Hasheesh Land, and at the end I have told them
nothing. And when I cannot tell them this one thing of all the
vastness of terrible and wonderful things, I know I have failed to
give them the slightest concept of Hasheesh Land.
But let me talk with some other traveller in that weird region,
and at once am I understood. A phrase, a word, conveys instantly
to his mind what hours of words and phrases could not convey to
the mind of the non-traveller. So it is with John Barleycorn's
realm where the White Logic reigns. To those untravelled there,
the traveller's account must always seem unintelligible and
fantastic. At the best, I may only beg of the untravelled ones to
strive to take on faith the narrative I shall relate.
For there are fatal intuitions of truth that reside in alcohol.
Philip sober vouches for Philip drunk in this matter. There seem
to be various orders of truth in this world. Some sorts of truth
are truer than others. Some sorts of truth are lies, and these
sorts are the very ones that have the greatest use-value to life
that desires to realise and live. At once, O untravelled reader,
you see how lunatic and blasphemous is the realm I am trying to
describe to you in the language of John Barleycorn's tribe. It is
not the language of your tribe, all of whose members resolutely
shun the roads that lead to death and tread only the roads that
lead to life. For there are roads and roads, and of truth there
are orders and orders. But have patience. At least, through what
seems no more than verbal yammerings, you may, perchance, glimpse
faint far vistas of other lands and tribes.
Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal. What is normal
is healthful. What is healthful tends toward life. Normal truth
is a different order, and a lesser order, of truth. Take a dray
horse. Through all the vicissitudes of its life, from first to
last, somehow, in unguessably dim ways, it must believe that life
is good; that the drudgery in harness is good; that death, no
matter how blind-instinctively apprehended, is a dread giant; that
life is beneficent and worth while; that, in the end, with fading
life, it will not be knocked about and beaten and urged beyond its
sprained and spavined best; that old age, even, is decent,
dignified, and valuable, though old age means a ribby scare-crow
in a hawker's cart, stumbling a step to every blow, stumbling
dizzily on through merciless servitude and slow disintegration to
the end--the end, the apportionment of its parts (of its subtle
flesh, its pink and springy bone, its juices and ferments, and all
the sensateness that informed it) to the chicken farm, the hide-
house, the glue-rendering works, and the bone-meal fertiliser
factory. To the last stumble of its stumbling end this dray horse
must abide by the mandates of the lesser truth that is the truth
of life and that makes life possible to persist.
This dray horse, like all other horses, like all other animals,
including man, is life-blinded and sense-struck. It will live, no
matter what the price. The game of life is good, though all of
life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.
This is the order of truth that obtains, not for the universe, but
for the live things in it if they for a little space will endure
ere they pass. This order of truth, no matter how erroneous it
may be, is the sane and normal order of truth, the rational order
&f truth that life must believe in order to live.
To man, alone among the animals, has been given the awful
privilege of reason. Man, with his brain, can penetrate the
intoxicating show of things and look upon the universe brazen with
indifference toward him and his dreams. He can do this, but it is
not well for him to do it. To live, and live abundantly, to sting
with life, to be alive (which is to be what he is), it is good
that man be life-blinded and sense-struck. What is good is true.
And this is the order of truth, lesser though it be, that man must
know and guide his actions by with unswerving certitude that it is
absolute truth and that in the universe no other order of truth
can obtain. It is good that man should accept at face value the
cheats of sense and snares of flesh and through the fogs of
sentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion. It is good that
he shall see neither shadows nor futilities, nor be appalled by
his lusts and rapacities.
And man does this. Countless men have glimpsed that other and
truer order of truth and recoiled from it. Countless men have
passed through the long sickness and lived to tell of it and
deliberately to forget it to the end of their days. They lived.
They realised life, for life is what they were. They did right.
And now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon the
imaginative man who is lusty with life and desire to live. John
into my camp, I opened a bottle and we drank together according to
the way of men, just as he would open a bottle and drink with me
if I came into his camp. I carried that whisky for social
purposes, and I so charged it up in my expense account to the
newspaper for which I worked.
Only in retrospect can I mark the almost imperceptible growth of
my desire. There were little hints then that I did not take,
little straws in the wind that I did not see, little incidents the
gravity of which I did not realise.
For instance, for some years it had been my practice each winter
to cruise for six or eight weeks on San Francisco Bay. My stout
sloop yacht, the Spray, had a comfortable cabin and a coal stove.
A Korean boy did the cooking, and I usually took a friend or so
along to share the joys of the cruise. Also, I took my machine
along and did my thousand words a day. On the particular trip I
have in mind, Cloudesley and Toddy came along. This was Toddy's
first trip. On previous trips Cloudesley had elected to drink
beer; so I had kept the yacht supplied with beer and had drunk
beer with him.
But on this cruise the situation was different. Toddy was so
nicknamed because of his diabolical cleverness in concocting
toddies. So I brought whisky along--a couple of gallons. Alas!
Many another gallon I bought, for Cloudesley and I got into the
habit of drinking a certain hot toddy that actually tasted
delicious going down and that carried the most exhilarating kick
imaginable.
I liked those toddies. I grew to look forward to the making of
them. We drank them regularly, one before breakfast, one before
dinner, one before supper, and a final one when we went to bed.
We never got drunk. But I will say that four times a day we were
very genial. And when, in the middle of the cruise, Toddy was
called back to San Francisco on business, Cloudesley and I saw to
it that the Korean boy mixed toddies regularly for us according to
formula.
But that was only on the boat. Back on the land, in my house, I
took no before breakfast eye-opener, no bed-going nightcap. And I
haven't drunk hot toddies since, and that was many a year ago.
But the point is, I LIKED those toddies. The geniality of which
they were provocative was marvellous. They were eloquent
proselyters for John Barleycorn in their own small insidious way.
They were tickles of the something destined to grow into daily and
deadly desire. And I didn't know, never dreamed--I, who had lived
with John Barleycorn for so many years and laughed at all his
unavailing attempts to win me.
Part of the process of recovering from my long sickness was to
find delight in little things, in things unconnected with books
and problems, in play, in games of tag in the swimming pool, in
flying kites, in fooling with horses, in working out mechanical
puzzles. As a result, I grew tired of the city. On the ranch, in
the Valley of the Moon, I found my paradise. I gave up living in
cities. All the cities held for me were music, the theatre, and
Turkish baths.
And all went well with me. I worked hard, played hard, and was
very happy. I read more fiction and less fact. I did not study a
tithe as much as I had studied in the past. I still took an
interest in the fundamental problems of existence, but it was a
very cautious interest; for I had burned my fingers that time I
clutched at the veils of Truth and wrested them from her. There
was a bit of lie in this attitude of mine, a bit of hypocrisy; but
the lie and the hypocrisy were those of a man desiring to live. I
deliberately blinded myself to what I took to be the savage
interpretation of biological fact. After all, I was merely
forswearing a bad habit, forgoing a bad frame of mind. And I
repeat, I was very happy. And I add, that in all my days,
measuring them with cold, considerative judgment, this was, far
and away beyond all other periods, the happiest period of my life.
But the time was at hand, rhymeless and reasonless so far as I can
see, when I was to begin to pay for my score of years of dallying
with John Barleycorn. Occasionally guests journeyed to the ranch
and remained a few days. Some did not drink. But to those who
did drink, the absence of all alcohol on the ranch was a hardship.
I could not violate my sense of hospitality by compelling them to
endure this hardship. I ordered in a stock--for my guests.
I was never interested enough in cocktails to know how they were
made. So I got a bar-keeper in Oakland to make them in bulk and
ship them to me. When I had no guests I didn't drink. But I
began to notice, when I finished my morning's work, that I was
glad if there were a guest, for then I could drink a cocktail with
him.
Now I was so clean of alcohol that even a single cocktail was
provocative of pitch. A single cocktail would glow the mind and
tickle a laugh for the few minutes prior to sitting down to table
and starting the delightful process of eating. On the other hand,
such was the strength of my stomach, of my alcoholic resistance,
that the single cocktail was only the glimmer of a glow, the
faintest tickle of a laugh. One day, a friend frankly and
shamelessly suggested a second cocktail. I drank the second one
with him. The glow was appreciably longer and warmer, the
laughter deeper and more resonant. One does not forget such
experiences. Sometimes I almost think that it was because I was
so very happy that I started on my real drinking.
I remember one day Charmian and I took a long ride over the
mountains on our horses. The servants had been dismissed for the
day, and we returned late at night to a jolly chafing-dish supper.
Oh, it was good to be alive that night while the supper was
preparing, the two of us alone in the kitchen. I, personally, was
at the top of life. Such things as the books and ultimate truth
did not exist. My body was gloriously healthy, and healthily
tired from the long ride. It had been a splendid day. The night
was splendid. I was with the woman who was my mate, picnicking in
gleeful abandon. I had no troubles. The bills were all paid, and
a surplus of money was rolling in on me. The future ever-widened
before me. And right there, in the kitchen, delicious things
bubbled in the chafing-dish, our laughter bubbled, and my stomach
was keen with a most delicious edge of appetite.
I felt so good, that somehow, somewhere, in me arose an insatiable
greed to feel better. I was so happy that I wanted to pitch my
happiness even higher. And I knew the way. Ten thousand contacts
with John Barleycorn had taught me. Several times I wandered out
of the kitchen to the cocktail bottle, and each time I left it
diminished by one man's size cocktail. The result was splendid.
I wasn't jingled, I wasn't lighted up; but I was warmed, I glowed,
my happiness was pyramided. Munificent as life was to me, I added
to that munificence. It was a great hour--one of my greatest.
But I paid for it, long afterwards, as you will see. One does not
forget such experiences, and, in human stupidity, cannot be
brought to realise that there is no immutable law which decrees
that same things shall produce same results. For they don't, else
would the thousandth pipe of opium be provocative of similar
delights to the first, else would one cocktail, instead of
several, produce an equivalent glow after a year of cocktails.
One day, just before I ate midday dinner, after my morning's
writing was done, when I had no guest, I took a cocktail by
myself. Thereafter, when there were no guests, I took this daily
pre-dinner cocktail. And right there John Barleycorn had me. I
was beginning to drink regularly. I was beginning to drink alone.
And I was beginning to drink, not for hospitality's sake, not for
the sake of the taste, but for the effect of the drink.
I WANTED that daily pre-dinner cocktail. And it never crossed my
mind that there was any reason I should not have it. I paid for
it. I could pay for a thousand cocktails each day if I wanted.
And what was a cocktail--one cocktail--to me who on so many
occasions for so many years had drunk inordinate quantities of
stiffer stuff and been unharmed?
The programme of my ranch life was as follows: Each morning, at
eight-thirty, having been reading or correcting proofs in bed
since four or five, I went to my desk. Odds and ends of
correspondence and notes occupied me till nine, and at nine sharp,
invariably, I began my writing. By eleven, sometimes a few
minutes earlier or later, my thousand words were finished.
Another half-hour at cleaning up my desk, and my day's work was
done, so that at eleven-thirty I got into a hammock under the
trees with my mail-bag and the morning newspaper. At twelve-
thirty I ate dinner and in the afternoon I swam and rode.
One morning, at eleven-thirty, before I got into the hammock, I
took a cocktail. I repeated this on subsequent mornings, of
course, taking another cocktail just before I ate at twelve-
thirty. Soon I found myself, seated at my desk in the midst of my
thousand words, looking forward to that eleven-thirty cocktail.
At last, now, I was thoroughly conscious that I desired alcohol.
But what of it? I wasn't afraid of John Barleycorn. I had
associated with him too long. I was wise in the matter of drink.
I was discreet. Never again would I drink to excess. I knew the
dangers and the pitfalls of John Barleycorn, the various ways by
which he had tried to kill me in the past. But all that was past,
long past. Never again would I drink myself to stupefaction.
Never again would I get drunk. All I wanted, and all I would
take, was just enough to glow and warm me, to kick geniality alive
in me and put laughter in my throat and stir the maggots of
imagination slightly in my brain. Oh, I was thoroughly master of
myself, and of John Barleycorn.
But the same stimulus to the human organism will not continue to
produce the same response. By and by I discovered there was no
kick at all in one cocktail. One cocktail left me dead. There
was no glow, no laughter tickle. Two or three cocktails were
required to produce the original effect of one. And I wanted that
effect. I drank my first cocktail at eleven-thirty when I took
the morning's mail into the hammock, and I drank my second
cocktail an hour later just before I ate. I got into the habit of
crawling out of the hammock ten minutes earlier so as to find time
and decency for two more cocktails ere I ate. This became
schedule--three cocktails in the hour that intervened between my
desk and dinner. And these are two of the deadliest drinking
habits: regular drinking and solitary drinking.
I was always willing to drink when any one was around. I drank by
myself when no one was around. Then I made another step. When I
had for guest a man of limited drinking calibre, I took two drinks
to his one--one drink with him, the other drink without him and of
which he did not know. I STOLE that other drink, and, worse than
that, I began the habit of drinking alone when there was a guest,
a man, a comrade, with whom I could have drunk. But John
Barleycorn furnished the extenuation. It was a wrong thing to
trip a guest up with excess of hospitality and get him drunk. If
I persuaded him, with his limited calibre, into drinking up with
me, I'd surely get him drunk. What could I do but steal that
every second drink, or else deny myself the kick equivalent to
what he got out of half the number?
Please remember, as I recite this development of my drinking, that
I am no fool, no weakling. As the world measures such things, I
am a success--I dare to say a success more conspicuous than the
success of the average successful man, and a success that required
a pretty fair amount of brains and will power. My body is a
strong body. It has survived where weaklings died like flies.
And yet these things which I am relating happened to my body and
to me. I am a fact. My drinking is a fact. My drinking is a
thing that has happened, and is no theory nor speculation; and, as
I see it, it but lays the emphasis on the power of John
Barleycorn--a savagery that we still permit to exist, a deadly
institution that lingers from the mad old brutal days and that
takes its heavy toll of youth and strength, and high spirit, and
of very much of all of the best we breed.
To return. After a boisterous afternoon in the swimming pool,
followed by a glorious ride on horseback over the mountains or up
or down the Valley of the Moon, I found myself so keyed and
splendid that I desired to be more highly keyed, to feel more
splendid. I knew the way. A cocktail before supper was not the
way. Two or three, at the very least, was what was needed. I
took them. Why not? It was living. I had always dearly loved to
live. This also became part of the daily schedule.
Then, too, I was perpetually finding excuses for extra cocktails.
It might be the assembling of a particularly jolly crowd; a touch
of anger against my architect or against a thieving stone-mason
working on my barn; the death of my favourite horse in a barbed
wire fence; or news of good fortune in the morning mail from my
dealings with editors and publishers. It was immaterial what the
excuse might be, once the desire had germinated in me. The thing
was: I WANTED alcohol. At last, after a score and more of years
of dallying and of not wanting, now I wanted it. And my strength
was my weakness. I required two, three, or four drinks to get an
effect commensurate with the effect the average man got out of one
drink.
One rule I observed. I never took a drink until my day's work of
writing a thousand words was done. And, when done, the cocktails
reared a wall of inhibition in my brain between the day's work
done and the rest of the day of fun to come. My work ceased from
my consciousness. No thought of it flickered in my brain till
next morning at nine o'clock when I sat at my desk and began my
next thousand words. This was a desirable condition of mind to
achieve. I conserved my energy by means of this alcoholic
inhibition. John Barleycorn was not so black as he was painted.
He did a fellow many a good turn, and this was one of them.
And I turned out work that was healthful, and wholesome, and
sincere. It was never pessimistic. The way to life I had learned
in my long sickness. I knew the illusions were right, and I
exalted the illusions. Oh, I still turn out the same sort of
work, stuff that is clean, alive, optimistic, and that makes
toward life. And I am always assured by the critics of my super-
abundant and abounding vitality, and of how thoroughly I am
deluded by these very illusions I exploit.
And while on this digression, let me repeat the question I have
repeated to myself ten thousand times. WHY DID I DRINK? What
need was there for it? I was happy. Was it because I was too
happy? I was strong. Was it because I was too strong? Did I
possess too much vitality? I don't know why I drank. I cannot
answer, though I can voice the suspicion that ever grows in me. I
had been in too-familiar contact with John Barleycorn through too
many years. A left-handed man, by long practice, can become a
right-handed man. Had I, a non-alcoholic, by long practice become
an alcoholic?
I was so happy. I had won through my long sickness to the
satisfying love of woman. I earned more money with less
endeavour. I glowed with health. I slept like a babe. I
continued to write successful books, and in sociological
controversy I saw my opponents confuted with the facts of the
times that daily reared new buttresses to my intellectual
position. From day's end to day's end I never knew sorrow,
disappointment, nor regret. I was happy all the time. Life was
one unending song. I begrudged the very hours of blessed sleep
because by that much was I robbed of the joy that would have been
mine had I remained awake. And yet I drank. And John Barleycorn,
all unguessed by me, was setting the stage for a sickness all his
own.
The more I drank the more I was required to drink to get an
equivalent effect. When I left the Valley of the Moon, and went
to the city, and dined out, a cocktail served at table was a wan
and worthless thing. There was no pre-dinner kick in it. On my
way to dinner I was compelled to accumulate the kick--two
cocktails, three, and, if I met some fellows, four or five, or
six, it didn't matter within several. Once, I was in a rush. I
had no time decently to accumulate the several drinks. A
brilliant idea came to me. I told the barkeeper to mix me a
double cocktail. Thereafter, whenever I was in a hurry, I ordered
double cocktails. It saved time.
One result of this regular heavy drinking was to jade me. My mind
grew so accustomed to spring and liven by artificial means that
without artificial means it refused to spring and liven. Alcohol
became more and more imperative in order to meet people, in order
to become sociably fit. I had to get the kick and the hit of the
stuff, the crawl of the maggots, the genial brain glow, the
laughter tickle, the touch of devilishness and sting, the smile
over the face of things, ere I could join my fellows and make one
with them.
Another result was that John Barleycorn was beginning to trip me
up. He was thrusting my long sickness back upon me, inveigling me
into again pursuing Truth and snatching her veils away from her,
tricking me into looking reality stark in the face. But this came
on gradually. My thoughts were growing harsh again, though they
grew harsh slowly.
Sometimes warning thoughts crossed my mind. Where was this steady
drinking leading? But trust John Barleycorn to silence such
questions. "Come on and have a drink and I'll tell you all about
it," is his way. And it works. For instance, the following is a
case in point, and one which John Barleycorn never wearied of
reminding me:
I had suffered an accident which required a ticklish operation.
One morning, a week after I had come off the table, I lay on my
hospital bed, weak and weary. The sunburn of my face, what little
of it could be seen through a scraggly growth of beard, had faded
to a sickly yellow. My doctor stood at my bedside on the verge of
departure. He glared disapprovingly at the cigarette I was
smoking.
"That's what you ought to quit," he lectured. "It will get you in
the end. Look at me."
I looked. He was about my own age, broad-shouldered, deep-
chested, eyes sparkling, and ruddy-cheeked with health. A finer
specimen of manhood one would not ask.
"I used to smoke," he went on. "Cigars. But I gave even them up.
And look at me."
The man was arrogant, and rightly arrogant, with conscious well-
being. And within a month he was dead. It was no accident. Half
a dozen different bugs of long scientific names had attacked and
destroyed him. The complications were astonishing and painful,
and for days before he died the screams of agony of that splendid
manhood could be heard for a block around. He died screaming.
"You see," said John Barleycorn. "He took care of himself. He
even stopped smoking cigars. And that's what he got for it.
Pretty rotten, eh? But the bugs will jump. There's no forefending
them. Your magnificent doctor took every precaution, yet they got
him. When the bug jumps you can't tell where it will land. It
may be you. Look what he missed. Will you miss all I can give
you, only to have a bug jump on you and drag you down? There is no
equity in life. It's all a lottery. But I put the lying smile on
the face of life and laugh at the facts. Smile with me and laugh.
You'll get yours in the end, but in the meantime laugh. It's a
pretty dark world. I illuminate it for you. It's a rotten world,
when things can happen such as happened to your doctor. There's
only one thing to do: take another drink and forget it."
And, of course, I took another drink for the inhibition that
accompanied it. I took another drink every time John Barleycorn
reminded me of what had happened. Yet I drank rationally,
intelligently. I saw to it that the quality of the stuff was of
the best. I sought the kick and the inhibition, and avoided the
penalties of poor quality and of drunkenness. It is to be
remarked, in passing, that when a man begins to drink rationally
and intelligently that he betrays a grave symptom of how far along
the road he has travelled.
But I continued to observe my rule of never taking my first drink
of the day until the last word of my thousand words was written.
On occasion, however, I took a day's vacation from my writing. At
such times, since it was no violation of my rule, I didn't mind
how early in the day I took that first drink. And persons who
have never been through the drinking game wonder how the drinking
habit grows!
When the Snark sailed on her long cruise from San Francisco there
was nothing to drink on board. Or, rather, we were all of us
unaware that there was anything to drink, nor did we discover it
for many a month. This sailing with a "dry " boat was malice
aforethought on my part. I had played John Barleycorn a trick.
And it showed that I was listening ever so slightly to the faint
warnings that were beginning to arise in my consciousness.
Of course, I veiled the situation to myself and excused myself to
John Barleycorn. And I was very scientific about it. I said that
I would drink only while in ports. During the dry sea-stretches
my system would be cleansed of the alcohol that soaked it, so that
when I reached a port I should be in shape to enjoy John
Barleycorn more thoroughly. His bite would be sharper, his kick
keener and more delicious.
We were twenty-seven days on the traverse between San Francisco
and Honolulu. After the first day out, the thought of a drink
never troubled me. This I take to show how intrinsically I am not
an alcoholic. Sometimes, during the traverse, looking ahead and
anticipating the delightful lanai luncheons and dinners of Hawaii
(I had been there a couple of times before), I thought, naturally,
of the drinks that would precede those meals. I did not think of
those drinks with any yearning, with any irk at the length of the
voyage. I merely thought they would be nice and jolly, part of
the atmosphere of a proper meal.
Thus, once again I proved to my complete satisfaction that I was
John Barleycorn's master. I could drink when I wanted, refrain
when I wanted. Therefore I would continue to drink when I wanted.
Some five months were spent in the various islands of the Hawaiian
group. Being ashore, I drank. I even drank a bit more than I had
been accustomed to drink in California prior to the voyage. The
people in Hawaii seemed to drink a bit more, on the average, than
the people in more temperate latitudes. I do not intend the pun,
and can awkwardly revise the statement to "latitudes more remote
from the equator;" Yet Hawaii is only sub-tropical. The deeper I
got into the tropics, the deeper I found men drank, the deeper I
drank myself.
From Hawaii we sailed for the Marquesas. The traverse occupied
sixty days. For sixty days we never raised land, a sail, nor a
steamer smoke. But early in those sixty days the cook, giving an
overhauling to the galley, made a find. Down in the bottom of a
deep locker he found a dozen bottles of angelica and muscatel.
These had come down from the kitchen cellar of the ranch along
with the home-preserved fruits and jellies. Six months in the
galley heat had effected some sort of a change in the thick sweet
wine--branded it, I imagine.
I took a taste. Delicious! And thereafter, once each day, at
twelve o'clock, after our observations were worked up and the
Snark's position charted, I drank half a tumbler of the stuff. It
had a rare kick to it. It warmed the cockles of my geniality and
put a fairer face on the truly fair face of the sea. Each
morning, below, sweating out my thousand words, I found myself
looking forward to that twelve o'clock event of the day.
The trouble was I had to share the stuff, and the length of the
traverse was doubtful. I regretted that there were not more than
a dozen bottles. And when they were gone I even regretted that I
had shared any of it. I was thirsty for the alcohol, and eager to
arrive in the Marquesas.
So it was that I reached the Marquesas the possessor of a real
man's size thirst. And in the Marquesas were several white men, a
lot of sickly natives, much magnificent scenery, plenty of trade
rum, an immense quantity of absinthe, but neither whisky nor gin.
The trade rum scorched the skin off one's mouth. I know, because
I tried it. But I had ever been plastic, and I accepted the
absinthe. The trouble with the stuff was that I had to take such
inordinate quantities in order to feel the slightest effect.
From the Marquesas I sailed with sufficient absinthe in ballast to
last me to Tahiti, where I outfitted with Scotch and American
whisky, and thereafter there were no dry stretches between ports.
But please do not misunderstand. There was no drunkenness, as
drunkenness is ordinarily understood--no staggering and rolling
around, no befuddlement of the senses. The skilled and seasoned
drinker, with a strong constitution, never descends to anything
like that. He drinks to feel good, to get a pleasant jingle, and
no more than that. The things he carefully avoids are the nausea
of over-drinking, the after-effect of over-drinking, the
helplessness and loss of pride of over-drinking.
What the skilled and seasoned drinker achieves is a discreet and
canny semi-intoxication. And he does it by the twelve-month
around without any apparent penalty. There are hundreds of
thousands of men of this sort in the United States to-day, in
clubs, hotels, and in their own homes--men who are never drunk,
and who, though most of them will indignantly deny it, are rarely
sober. And all of them fondly believe, as I fondly believed, that
they are beating the game.
On the sea-stretches I was fairly abstemious; but ashore I drank
more. I seemed to need more, anyway, in the tropics. This is a
common experience, for the excessive consumption of alcohol in the
tropics by white men is a notorious fact. The tropics is no place
for white-skinned men. Their skin-pigment does not protect them
against the excessive white light of the sun. The ultra-violet
rays, and other high-velocity and invisible rays from the upper
end of the spectrum, rip and tear through their tissues, just as
the X-ray ripped and tore through the tissues of so many
experimenters before they learned the danger.
White men in the tropics undergo radical changes of nature. They
become savage, merciless. They commit monstrous acts of cruelty
that they would never dream of committing in their original
temperate climate. They become nervous, irritable, and less
moral. And they drink as they never drank before. Drinking is
one form of the many forms of degeneration that set in when white
men are exposed too long to too much white light. The increase of
alcoholic consumption is automatic. The tropics is no place for a
long sojourn. They seem doomed to die anyway, and the heavy
drinking expedites the process. They don't reason about it. They
just do it.
The sun sickness got me, despite the fact that I had been in the
tropics only a couple of years. I drank heavily during this time,
but right here I wish to forestall misunderstanding. The drinking
was not the cause of the sickness, nor of the abandonment of the
voyage. I was strong as a bull, and for many months I fought the
sun sickness that was ripping and tearing my surface and nervous
tissues to pieces. All through the New Hebrides and the Solomons
and up among the atolls on the Line, during this period under a
tropic sun, rotten with malaria, and suffering from a few minor
afflictions such as Biblical leprosy with the silvery skin, I did
the work of five men.
To navigate a vessel through the reefs and shoals and passages and
unlighted coasts of the coral seas is a man's work in itself. I
was the only navigator on board. There was no one to check me up
on the working out of my observations, nor with whom I could
advise in the ticklish darkness among uncharted reefs and shoals.
And I stood all watches. There was no sea-man on board whom I
could trust to stand a mate's watch. I was mate as well as
captain. Twenty-four hours a day were the watches I stood at sea,
catching cat-naps when I might. Third, I was doctor. And let me
say right here that the doctor's job on the Snark at that time was
a man's job. All on board suffered from malaria--the real,
tropical malaria that can kill in three months. All on board
suffered from perforating ulcers and from the maddening itch of
ngari-ngari. A Japanese cook went insane from his too numerous
afflictions. One of my Polynesian sailors lay at death's door
with blackwater fever. Oh, yes, it was a full man's job, and I
dosed and doctored, and pulled teeth, and dragged my patients
through mild little things like ptomaine poisoning.
Fourth, I was a writer. I sweated out my thousand words a day,
every day, except when the shock of fever smote me, or a couple of
nasty squalls smote the Snark, in the morning. Fifth, I was a
traveller and a writer, eager to see things and to gather material
into my note-books. And, sixth, I was master and owner of the
craft that was visiting strange places where visitors are rare and
where visitors are made much of. So here I had to hold up the
social end, entertain on board, be entertained ashore by planters,
traders, governors, captains of war vessels, kinky-headed cannibal
kings, and prime ministers sometimes fortunate enough to be clad
in cotton shifts.
Of course I drank. I drank with my guests and hosts. Also, I
drank by myself. Doing the work of five men, I thought, entitled
me to drink. Alcohol was good for a man who over-worked. I noted
its effect on my small crew, when, breaking their backs and hearts
at heaving up anchor in forty fathoms, they knocked off gasping
and trembling at the end of half an hour and had new life put into
them by stiff jolts of rum. They caught their breaths, wiped
their mouths, and went to it again with a will. And when we
careened the Snark and had to work in the water to our necks
between shocks of fever, I noted how raw trade rum helped the work
along.
And here again we come to another side of many-sided John
Barleycorn. On the face of it, he gives something for nothing.
Where no strength remains he finds new strength. The wearied one
rises to greater effort. For the time being there is an actual
accession of strength. I remember passing coal on an ocean
steamer through eight days of hell, during which time we coal-
passers were kept to the job by being fed with whisky. We toiled
half drunk all the time. And without the whisky we could not have
passed the coal.
This strength John Barleycorn gives is not fictitious strength.
It is real strength. But it is manufactured out of the sources of
strength, and it must ultimately be paid for, and with interest.
But what weary human will look so far ahead? He takes this
apparently miraculous accession of strength at its face value.
And many an overworked business and professional man, as well as a
harried common labourer, has travelled John Barleycorn's death
road because of this mistake.
I went to Australia to go into hospital and get tinkered up, after
which I planned to go on with the voyage. And during the long
weeks I lay in hospital, from the first day I never missed
alcohol. I never thought about it. I knew I should have it again
when I was on my feet. But when I regained my feet I was not
cured of my major afflictions. Naaman's silvery skin was still
mine. The mysterious sun-sickness, which the experts of Australia
could not fathom, still ripped and tore my tissues. Malaria still
festered in me and put me on my back in shivering delirium at the
most unexpected moments, compelling me to cancel a double lecture
tour which had been arranged.
So I abandoned the Snark voyage and sought a cooler climate. The
day I came out of hospital I took up drinking again as a matter of
course. I drank wine at meals. I drank cocktails before meals.
I drank Scotch highballs when anybody I chanced to be with was
drinking them. I was so thoroughly the master of John Barleycorn
I could take up with him or let go of him whenever I pleased, just
as I had done all my life.
After a time, for cooler climate, I went down to southermost
Tasmania in forty-three South. And I found myself in a place
where there was nothing to drink. It didn't mean anything. I
didn't drink. It was no hardship. I soaked in the cool air, rode
horseback, and did my thousand words a day save when the fever
shock came in the morning.
And for fear that the idea may still lurk in some minds that my
preceding years of drinking were the cause of my disabilities, I
here point out that my Japanese cabin boy, Nakata, still with me,
was rotten with fever, as was Charmian, who in addition was in the
slough of a tropical neurasthenia that required several years of
temperate climates to cure, and that neither she nor Nakata drank
or ever had drunk.
When I returned to Hobart Town, where drink was obtainable, I
drank as of old. The same when I arrived back in Australia. On
the contrary, when I sailed from Australia on a tramp steamer
commanded by an abstemious captain, I took no drink along, and had
no drink for the forty-three days' passage. Arrived in Ecuador,
squarely under the equatorial sun, where the humans were dying of
yellow fever, smallpox, and the plague, I promptly drank again--
every drink of every sort that had a kick in it. I caught none of
these diseases. Neither did Charmian nor Nakata who did not
drink.
Enamoured of the tropics, despite the damage done me, I stopped in
various places, and was a long while getting back to the splendid,
temperate climate of California. I did my thousand words a day,
travelling or stopping over, suffered my last faint fever shock,
saw my silvery skin vanish and my sun-torn tissues healthily knit
again, and drank as a broad-shouldered chesty man may drink.
Back on the ranch, in the Valley of the Moon, I resumed my steady
drinking. My programme was no drink in the morning; first drink-
time came with the completion of my thousand words. Then, between
that and the midday meal, were drinks numerous enough to develop a
pleasant jingle. Again, in the hour preceding the evening meal, I
developed another pleasant jingle. Nobody ever saw me drunk, for
the simple reason that I never was drunk. But I did get a jingle
twice each day; and the amount of alcohol I consumed every day, if
loosed in the system of one unaccustomed to drink, would have put
such a one on his back and out.
It was the old proposition. The more I drank, the more I was
compelled to drink in order to get an effect. The time came when
cocktails were inadequate. I had neither the time in which to
drink them nor the space to accommodate them. Whisky had a more
powerful jolt. It gave quicker action with less quantity.
Bourbon or rye, or cunningly aged blends, constituted the pre-
midday drinking. In the late afternoon it was Scotch and soda.
My sleep, always excellent, now became not quite so excellent. I
had been accustomed to read myself back asleep when I chanced to
awake. But now this began to fail me. When I had read two or
three of the small hours away and was as wide awake as ever, I
found that a drink furnished the soporific effect. Sometimes two
or three drinks were required.
So short a period of sleep then intervened before early morning
rising that my system did not have time to work off the alcohol.
As a result I awoke with mouth parched and dry, with a slight
heaviness of head, and with a mild nervous palpitation in the
stomach. In fact I did not feel good. I was suffering from the
morning sickness of the steady, heavy drinker. What I needed was
a pick-me-up, a bracer. Trust John Barleycorn, once he has broken
down a man's defences! So it was a drink before breakfast to put
me right for breakfast--the old poison of the snake that has
bitten one! Another custom begun at this time was that of the
pitcher of water by the bedside to furnish relief to my scorched
and sizzling membranes.
I achieved a condition in which my body was never free from
alcohol. Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol. If I
travelled to out-of-the-way places, I declined to run the risk of
finding them dry. I took a quart, or several quarts, along in my
grip. In the past I had been amazed by other men guilty of this
practice. Now I did it myself unblushingly. And when I got out
with the fellows, I cast all rules by the board. I drank when
they drank, what they drank, and in the same way they drank.
I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me.
The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was
no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I
began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by
taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was
not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with
a drink.
The gravity of this I realised too well. I made new rules.
Resolutely I would refrain from drinking until my work was done.
But a new and most diabolical complication arose. The work
refused to be done without drinking. It just couldn't be done. I
had to drink in order to do it. I was beginning to fight now. I
had the craving at last, and it was mastering me. I would sit at
my desk and dally with pad and pen, but words refused to flow. My
brain could not think the proper thoughts because continually it
was obsessed with the one thought that across the room in the
liquor cabinet stood John Barleycorn. When, in despair, I took my
drink, at once my brain loosened up and began to roll off the
thousand words.
In my town house, in Oakland, I finished the stock of liquor and
wilfully refused to purchase more. It was no use, because,
unfortunately, there remained in the bottom of the liquor cabinet
a case of beer. In vain I tried to write. Now beer is a poor
substitute for strong waters: besides, I didn't like beer, yet all
I could think of was that beer so singularly accessible in the
bottom of the cabinet. Not until I had drunk a pint of it did the
words begin to reel off, and the thousand were reeled off to the
tune of numerous pints. The worst of it was that the beer caused
me severe heart-burn; but despite the discomfort I soon finished
off the case.
The liquor cabinet was now bare. I did not replenish it. By
truly heroic perseverance I finally forced myself to write the
daily thousand words without the spur of John Barleycorn. But all
the time I wrote I was keenly aware of the craving for a drink.
And as soon as the morning's work was done, I was out of the house
and away down-town to get my first drink. Merciful goodness!--if
John Barleycorn could get such sway over me, a non-alcoholic, what
must be the sufferings of the true alcoholic, battling against the
organic demands of his chemistry while those closest to him
sympathise little, understand less, and despise and deride him!
But the freight has to be paid. John Barleycorn began to collect,
and he collected not so much from the body as from the mind. The
old long sickness, which had been purely an intellectual sickness,
recrudesced. The old ghosts, long laid, lifted their heads again.
But they were different and more deadly ghosts. The old ghosts,
intellectual in their inception, had been laid by a sane and
normal logic. But now they were raised by the White Logic of John
Barleycorn, and John Barleycorn never lays the ghosts of his
raising. For this sickness of pessimism, caused by drink, one
must drink further in quest of the anodyne that John Barleycorn
promises but never delivers.
How to describe this White Logic to those who have never
experienced it! It is perhaps better first to state how impossible
such a description is. Take Hasheesh Land, for instance, the land
of enormous extensions of time and space. In past years I have
made two memorable journeys into that far land. My adventures
there are seared in sharpest detail on my brain. Yet I have tried
vainly, with endless words, to describe any tiny particular phase
to persons who have not travelled there.
I use all the hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries of
time and profounds of unthinkable agony and horror can obtain in
each interval of all the intervals between the notes of a quick
jig played quickly on the piano. I talk for an hour, elaborating
that one phase of Hasheesh Land, and at the end I have told them
nothing. And when I cannot tell them this one thing of all the
vastness of terrible and wonderful things, I know I have failed to
give them the slightest concept of Hasheesh Land.
But let me talk with some other traveller in that weird region,
and at once am I understood. A phrase, a word, conveys instantly
to his mind what hours of words and phrases could not convey to
the mind of the non-traveller. So it is with John Barleycorn's
realm where the White Logic reigns. To those untravelled there,
the traveller's account must always seem unintelligible and
fantastic. At the best, I may only beg of the untravelled ones to
strive to take on faith the narrative I shall relate.
For there are fatal intuitions of truth that reside in alcohol.
Philip sober vouches for Philip drunk in this matter. There seem
to be various orders of truth in this world. Some sorts of truth
are truer than others. Some sorts of truth are lies, and these
sorts are the very ones that have the greatest use-value to life
that desires to realise and live. At once, O untravelled reader,
you see how lunatic and blasphemous is the realm I am trying to
describe to you in the language of John Barleycorn's tribe. It is
not the language of your tribe, all of whose members resolutely
shun the roads that lead to death and tread only the roads that
lead to life. For there are roads and roads, and of truth there
are orders and orders. But have patience. At least, through what
seems no more than verbal yammerings, you may, perchance, glimpse
faint far vistas of other lands and tribes.
Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal. What is normal
is healthful. What is healthful tends toward life. Normal truth
is a different order, and a lesser order, of truth. Take a dray
horse. Through all the vicissitudes of its life, from first to
last, somehow, in unguessably dim ways, it must believe that life
is good; that the drudgery in harness is good; that death, no
matter how blind-instinctively apprehended, is a dread giant; that
life is beneficent and worth while; that, in the end, with fading
life, it will not be knocked about and beaten and urged beyond its
sprained and spavined best; that old age, even, is decent,
dignified, and valuable, though old age means a ribby scare-crow
in a hawker's cart, stumbling a step to every blow, stumbling
dizzily on through merciless servitude and slow disintegration to
the end--the end, the apportionment of its parts (of its subtle
flesh, its pink and springy bone, its juices and ferments, and all
the sensateness that informed it) to the chicken farm, the hide-
house, the glue-rendering works, and the bone-meal fertiliser
factory. To the last stumble of its stumbling end this dray horse
must abide by the mandates of the lesser truth that is the truth
of life and that makes life possible to persist.
This dray horse, like all other horses, like all other animals,
including man, is life-blinded and sense-struck. It will live, no
matter what the price. The game of life is good, though all of
life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.
This is the order of truth that obtains, not for the universe, but
for the live things in it if they for a little space will endure
ere they pass. This order of truth, no matter how erroneous it
may be, is the sane and normal order of truth, the rational order
&f truth that life must believe in order to live.
To man, alone among the animals, has been given the awful
privilege of reason. Man, with his brain, can penetrate the
intoxicating show of things and look upon the universe brazen with
indifference toward him and his dreams. He can do this, but it is
not well for him to do it. To live, and live abundantly, to sting
with life, to be alive (which is to be what he is), it is good
that man be life-blinded and sense-struck. What is good is true.
And this is the order of truth, lesser though it be, that man must
know and guide his actions by with unswerving certitude that it is
absolute truth and that in the universe no other order of truth
can obtain. It is good that man should accept at face value the
cheats of sense and snares of flesh and through the fogs of
sentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion. It is good that
he shall see neither shadows nor futilities, nor be appalled by
his lusts and rapacities.
And man does this. Countless men have glimpsed that other and
truer order of truth and recoiled from it. Countless men have
passed through the long sickness and lived to tell of it and
deliberately to forget it to the end of their days. They lived.
They realised life, for life is what they were. They did right.
And now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon the
imaginative man who is lusty with life and desire to live. John