John Barleycorn: Jack London’s Alcoholic Memoirs

One product description for this book called Jack London’s drinking career “heroic in scale,” which is a helluva way of describing it. The book opens with a conversation with his wife Charmain and them discussing women’s suffrage. London, as it turns out, is for the woman’s right to vote – but only because he thinks their collective votes would enact prohibition, which he thinks he needs to quit drinking.

Jack understood all the contradictions of drinking, “the king of liars” and “the frankest truthsayer,” but he’s also trapped in its lies, and it can be hard to tell how truthful he’s being about his drinking even when he’s admitting to drinking. He talks about how drinking is especially devastating for the thinking person because the “white logic” of alcohol illuminates soul-crushing truths about life while it lubricates your wit and socialization. His character Martin Eden saw more and more of the ugliness of the world the more he educated himself, and the smarter among us will reach to that some conclusion with John Barleycorn. Artists and writers and performers and people who think too much and feel too deeply and have gone through trauma, they’re all particularly susceptible to the answers John Barleycorn offers.

It’s also shocking how cavalierly London tells his very first experience with drinking. He was five years old! His dad told him to go fetch a pail of beer and he’s carrying it all the way over to him, spilling it all over himself while he wonders what adults see in it. So he sets it down and dunks his head in the pail! And now he knows what the big deal is! And this is presented as like, “haha I got alcoholic poisoning when I was five years old and again when I was seven lol.” Like wow.

There are passages that the author of this essay found relatable to his own relationship to drinking. A taste “painfully acquired” and not even liking the taste of it, and cultures all over the world throughout time depended on one’s participation in drinking at gatherings. It’s a gut-wrenching firsthand account of an alcoholic and how they think and view the world. It’s an excellent insight for anyone not familiar with alcohol addiction, and it can also be very valuable to help re-contextualize one’s own complicated relationship with drinking. There are no cures or solutions offered here — just a super-honest account on what life is like when you’re an alcoholic.  



John Barleycorn also works as a memoir of Jack London’s storied life. He was a part of the socialist movement and was homeless and was a sailor and also ventured deep into Alaska and worked in factories and grappled with John Barleycorn the whole time. It’s a fascinating memoir on multiple levels, and Jack London’s writing here is as good as his masterpieces.

Fun fact: John Barleycorn is also where the idea of drunks seeing pink elephants originated.

Click on the book cover to buy John Barleycorn!

We also covered other works of Jack London, including White Fang and Call of the Wild and Iron Heel and The Game and The Sea-Wolf and John Barleycorn and Before Adam and Martin Eden and A Daughter of the Snows and The Cruise of the Dazzler.

Cover Image Credit: Background image of saloon interior is circa 1897 and is part of the public domain, per Wikimedia Commons. Book cover image of Jack London is by Arnold Genthe and is also part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. Beer glass image is by stux and is courtesy of Pixabay.

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