After my long sickness my drinking continued to be convivial. I drank
when others drank and I was with them. But, imperceptibly, my need for
alcohol took form and began to grow. It was not a body need. I boxed,
swam, sailed, rode horses, lived in the open an arrantly healthful life,
and passed life insurance examinations with flying colours. In its
inception, now that I look back upon it, this need for alcohol was a
mental need, a nerve need, a good-spirits need. How can I explain?
It was something like this. Physiologically, from the standpoint of
palate and stomach, alcohol was, as it had always been, repulsive. It
tasted no better than beer did when I was five, than bitter claret did
when I was seven. When I was alone, writing or studying, I had no need
for it. But--I was growing old, or wise, or both, or senile as an
alternative. When I was in company I was less pleased, less excited,
with the things said and done. Erstwhile worth-while fun and stunts
seemed no longer worth while; and it was a torment to listen to the
insipidities and stupidities of women, to the pompous, arrogant sayings
of the little half-baked men. It is the penalty one pays for reading the
books too much, or for being oneself a fool. In my case it does not
matter which was my trouble. The trouble itself was the fact. The
condition of the fact was mine. For me the life, and light, and sparkle
of human intercourse were dwindling.
I had climbed too high among the stars, or, maybe, I had slept too hard.
Yet I was not hysterical nor in any way overwrought. My pulse was
normal. My heart was an amazement of excellence to the insurance
doctors. My lungs threw the said doctors into ecstasies. I wrote a
thousand words every day. I was punctiliously exact in dealing with all
the affairs of life that fell to my lot. I exercised in joy and
gladness. I slept at night like a babe. But--
Well, as soon as I got out in the company of others I was driven to
melancholy and spiritual tears. I could neither laugh with nor at the
solemn utterances of men I esteemed ponderous asses; nor could I laugh,
nor engage in my old-time lightsome persiflage, with the silly
superficial chatterings of women, who, underneath all their silliness and
softness, were as primitive, direct, and deadly in their pursuit of
biological destiny as the monkeys women were before they shed their furry
coats and replaced them with the furs of other animals.
And I was not pessimistic. I swear I was not pessimistic. I was merely
bored. I had seen the same show too often, listened too often to the
same songs and the same jokes. I knew too much about the box office
receipts. I knew the cogs of the machinery behind the scenes so well
that the posing on the stage, and the laughter and the song, could not
drown the creaking of the wheels behind.
It doesn't pay to go behind the scenes and see the angel-voiced tenor
beat his wife. Well, I'd been behind, and I was paying for it. Or else
I was a fool. It is immaterial which was my situation. The situation is
what counts, and the situation was that social intercourse for me was
getting painful and difficult. On the other hand, it must be stated that
on rare occasions, on very rare occasions, I did meet rare souls, or
fools like me, with whom I could spend magnificent hours among the stars,
or in the paradise of fools. I was married to a rare soul, or a fool,
who never bored me and who was always a source of new and unending
surprise and delight. But I could not spend all my hours solely in her
company.
Nor would it have been fair, nor wise, to compel her to spend all her
hours in my company. Besides, I had written a string of successful
books, and society demands some portion of the recreative hours of a
fellow that writes books. And any normal man, of himself and his needs,
demands some hours of his fellow men.
And now we begin to come to it. How to face the social intercourse game
with the glamour gone? John Barleycorn. The ever patient one had waited
a quarter of a century and more for me to reach my hand out in need of
him. His thousand tricks had failed, thanks to my constitution and good
luck, but he had more tricks in his bag. A cocktail or two, or several,
I found, cheered me up for the foolishness of foolish people. A
cocktail, or several, before dinner, enabled me to laugh whole-heartedly
at things which had long since ceased being laughable. The cocktail was
a prod, a spur, a kick, to my jaded mind and bored spirits. It
recrudesced the laughter and the song, and put a lilt into my own
imagination so that I could laugh and sing and say foolish things with
the liveliest of them, or platitudes with verve and intensity to the
satisfaction of the pompous mediocre ones who knew no other way to talk.
A poor companion without a cocktail, I became a very good companion with
one. I achieved a false exhilaration, drugged myself to merriment. And
the thing began so imperceptibly that I, old intimate of John Barleycorn,
never dreamed whither it was leading me. I was beginning to call for
music and wine; soon I should be calling for madder music and more wine.
It was at this time I became aware of waiting with expectancy for the
pre-dinner cocktail. I WANTED it, and I was CONSCIOUS that I wanted it.
I remember, while war-corresponding in the Far East, of being
irresistibly attracted to a certain home. Besides accepting all
invitations to dinner, I made a point of dropping in almost every
afternoon. Now, the hostess was a charming woman, but it was not for her
sake that I was under her roof so frequently. It happened that she made
by far the finest cocktail procurable in that large city where
drink-mixing on the part of the foreign population was indeed an art. Up
at the club, down at the hotels, and in other private houses, no such
cocktails were created. Her cocktails were subtle. They were
masterpieces. They were the least repulsive to the palate and carried
the most "kick." And yet, I desired her cocktails only for sociability's
sake, to key myself to sociable moods. When I rode away from that city,
across hundreds of miles of rice-fields and mountains, and through months
of campaigning, and on with the victorious Japanese into Manchuria, I did
not drink. Several bottles of whisky were always to be found on the
backs of my pack-horses. Yet I never broached a bottle for myself, never
took a drink by myself, and 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.