JOHN BARLEYCORN

By James Burrill Angell

In support of the existential motif of the semi-autobiographical Martin Eden, Jack London, through John Barleycorn, revealed the "long sickness" of philosophical dread that formed the basis of his characterization of Martin Eden. In his attempt to escape the realities of existence uncovered in his quest for Truth, London turns to drink, and therein lies the connection to prohibition in a work that is wholly autobiographical. Moreover, what London reveals in his rejection of alcohol serves to reinforce the origins of Martin's existential character:

. . .I never dreamed of turning to John Barleycorn for a helping hand. I had life troubles and heart troubles which are neither here nor there in this narrative. But, combined with them, were intellectual troubles which are indeed germane. In the eagerness of youth I had made the ancient mistake of pursuing Truth too relentlessly. I had torn her veils from her, and the sight was too terrible for me to stand. This long sickness of pessimism. . .I had it very bad. 163)

The Faustian overtones of this passage can't be overlooked, but the question remains whether or not London could become the Ubermensch he admired. The fact is he couldn't evolve into the Ubermensch any more than Nietzsche or Martin Eden. In John Barleycorn, London describes the precise experiences Martin Eden encountered, and when we recall the author was planning on entitling the novel, Success, then the irony reinforces the idea that he was attempting to parody the Alger novel in order to create an entirely new motif: "Success--I despised it. Recognition--it was dead ashes. Society, men and women above the ruck and muck of the waterfront and the forecastle--I was appalled by their unlovely mediocrity. Love of woman--it was all like the rest. Art, culture--in the face of the iron facts of biology such things were ridiculous" (164). This is the nihilist state Martin Eden embodies mid-novel, and is the state London experienced in his waning years. Yet, London goes one step further than this powerful depiction of alienation in John Barleycorn: he blames his existential insights on alcohol rather than the philosophical dilemma that created the drinking problem. In the following lines he describes the existential reality he cannot escape:

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...He destroys birth and death and dissipates to mist the paradox of being, until his victim cries out..."Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss." (192)

The "White Logic" is scientific deterministic truth (what I will later refer to in Henry Adams' Education as pessimistic naturalism) that an alcoholically induced imagination will not let him escape.¹ Here is an individual stripped of the "containing framework" of the old traditions in true existential fashion. London continues:

I am aware that within this disintegrating body, which has been dying since I was born, I carry a skeleton, that under the rind of flesh which is my face is a bony, noseless death's head. All of which does not shudder me. To be afraid is to be healthy. Fear of death makes for life. . .The world-sickness of the White Logic makes one grin jocosely into the face of the Noseless One and to sneer at all the phantasmagoria of living.(194)

This passaage echoes Martin Eden being so "sated" with life he's lost the desire to live, but London doesn't stop there in a paragraph that would have made Brissendon proud. Further reinforcement of the existential motif occurs when London carries on a discussion with the White Logic, which very well could be Martin Eden describing how humanity sustains itself in a meaningless world:

Let the doctors of all the schools condemn me, White Logic whispers... What of it? I am truth. You know it. You cannot combat me. They say I make for death. . .It is truth. Life lies in order to live. . .Life is a ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse permeate each the other and all the others. . .Only in man is morality, and man created it--a code of action that makes toward living and that is the lesser order of truth. (195)

That "morality" is "the lessor order of truth," coupled with "life lies in order to live," reinforces the influence of Nietzsche in a letter written to a J.H. Greer in August, 1915, just two years after the publication of John Barleycorn:

I have been more stimulated by Nietzsche than by any other writer in the world. At the same time I have been an intellectual enemy to Nietzsche. Both Martin Eden and the Sea Wolf were indictments by me of the Nietzschean philosophy of the super-man--of course both such indictments were based upon the vital lie of life.²

The "vital lie of life" upon which his indictment of Nietzsche rests belies the difficult existential reality London attempted to hide from through drink. He knew the realities Nietzsche spoke of were true, but couldn't consciously admit them. London even depicts Martin Eden confronting this realization: "Perhaps Nietzsche had been right. Perhaps there was no truth in anything, no truth in truth--no such thing as truth" (377). As a result, London turned to an intense interest in socialism to find meaning, a subject that dominates much of his fiction. London was outraged when critics misinterpreted his Martin Eden as the embodiment of Nietzschean philosophy. He meant the novel to reveal the dangers of individualism and the power of socialism, but with the Greer letter taken into consideration, it seems that even London himself didn't consciously realize what he was expressing through his art. John Barleycorn and the Greer letter bolster the existential nature of Martin Eden in a profound way.

Although London didn't know the terminology to be applied to his philosophical dilemma, its reality, and his denial of that reality, certainly led to his early death. Like Nietzsche before them, London and Martin Eden experienced an existential encounter with the "Noseless One" neither would survive. London hints at the existential dread that never really left him--although he says he quit drinking--and this dread presumably led to the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, which many called suicide: "And when the evening is over and good-night said, I go back through my book-walled den to my sleeping porch and to myself and to the White Logic which, undefeated, has never left me" (204).

The scientific determinism of the White Logic was first encountered by a young London on his journey to the Klondike, so to blame these thoughts on drink is cowardly. James McClintock analyzes this encounter with the White Logic and suggests London felt existential pangs early on: "What is revealing in this description of an order of truth that strips man of hope and is 'the antithesis of life,' is that London uses the imagery of the Northland to evoke it. It is cosmic, cold, and 'pulseless.' The burden of cosmic truth is death, and it saturates the Arctic landscape. Compare the introduction of White Fang. . .":

A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness.

This _expression of pessimistic determinism is also reminiscent of Melville's "Encantadas" or "Enchanted Isles" (1854), in which he depicts the bleakness of London's White Logic through descriptions of the Galapagos Islands: "But the special curse, as one might call it of the Encantadas, that which exalts them in desolation above. . .the Pole, is that to them change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows."³ Unlike London, Melville is continually invoking the Eternal God, "In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist,"⁴ so though descriptively similar, the two worlds expressed by each writer are vastly different: in one God still exists, in the other God is dead.

In a way that echoes the early existentialism of Carlyle, McClintock comments on what might be the ultimate irony of American manifest destiny: "The new land that calls men to be yea-sayers is infused with a law of necessity, with cold, stillness and death that spell an ever-lasting No."⁵ The Northland can be compared to a wasteland, and coupled with the previous quote, "Life is a ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse permeate each the other and all the others," one can almost hear T.S. Eliot's "Gerontion" (1920) or even the fragmentary nature of "The Hollow Men" (1925). "Like the Thames daughters in The Waste Land he [London/Martin Eden] finds himself in a world in which he 'can connect⁄ Nothing with nothing.'"⁶

London's use of such stark imagery certainly prefigures the later existential writing of the post-World War years and powerfully captures the 19th century fin de siécle's encounter with nothingness.

¹ James McClintock p. 47.

² "To J.H. Greer," 4 August 1915, The Letters of Jack London, III, p. 1485.

³ Herman Melville, "The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles," in Great Short Works of Herman Melville, (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 60.

⁴ Melville, p. 61.

⁵ McClintock, p. 48.

⁶ Baskett, 'Splendid Dream,' p. 145.