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John Barleycorn

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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!

CHAPTER XXXV

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

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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.

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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

Barleycorn sends his White Logic, the argent messenger of truth

beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as

interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero,

dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable

fact. John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, the liver

live. He destroys birth and death, and dissipates to mist the