Of course, no personal tale is complete without bringing the narrative of
the person down to the last moment. But mine is no tale of a reformed
drunkard. I was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed.
It chanced, some time ago, that I made a voyage of one hundred and
forty-eight days in a windjammer around the Horn. I took no private
supply of alcohol along, and, though there was no day of those one
hundred and forty-eight days that I could not have got a drink from the
captain, I did not take a drink. I did not take a drink because I did
not desire a drink. No one else drank on board. The atmosphere for
drinking was not present, and in my system there was no organic need for
alcohol. My chemistry did not demand alcohol.
So there arose before me a problem, a clear and simple problem: THIS IS
SO EASY, WHY NOT KEEP IT UP WHEN YOU GET BACK ON LAND? I weighed this
problem carefully. I weighed it for five months, in a state of absolute
non-contact with alcohol. And out of the data of past experience, I
reached certain conclusions.
In the first place, I am convinced that not one man in ten thousand or in
a hundred thousand is a genuine, chemical dipsomaniac. Drinking, as I
deem it, is practically entirely a habit of mind. It is unlike tobacco,
or cocaine, or morphine, or all the rest of the long list of drugs. The
desire for alcohol is quite peculiarly mental in its origin. It is a
matter of mental training and growth, and it is cultivated in social
soil. Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone. All drinkers
begin socially, and this drinking is accompanied by a thousand social
connotations such as I have described out of my own experience in the
first part of this narrative. These social connotations are the stuff of
which the drink habit is largely composed. The part that alcohol itself
plays is inconsiderable when compared with the part played by the social
atmosphere in which it is drunk. The human is rarely born these days,
who, without long training in the social associations of drinking, feels
the irresistible chemical propulsion of his system toward alcohol. I do
assume that such rare individuals are born, but I have never encountered
one.
On this long, five-months' voyage, I found that among all my bodily needs
not the slightest shred of a bodily need for alcohol existed. But this I
did find: my need was mental and social. When I thought of alcohol, the
connotation was fellowship. When I thought of fellowship, the
connotation was alcohol. Fellowship and alcohol were Siamese twins.
They always occurred linked together.
Thus, when reading in my deck chair or when talking with others,
practically any mention of any part of the world I knew instantly aroused
the connotation of drinking and good fellows. Big nights and days and
moments, all purple passages and freedoms, thronged my memory. "Venice"
stares at me from the printed page, and I remember the cafe tables on the
sidewalks. "The Battle of Santiago," some one says, and I answer, "Yes,
I've been over the ground." But I do not see the ground, nor Kettle Hill,
nor the Peace Tree. What I see is the Cafe Venus, on the plaza of
Santiago, where one hot night I drank and talked with a dying consumptive.
The East End of London, I read, or some one says; and first of all, under
my eyelids, leap the visions of the shining pubs, and in my ears echo the
calls for "two of bitter" and "three of Scotch." The Latin Quarter--at
once I am in the student cabarets, bright faces and keen spirits around
me, sipping cool, well-dripped absinthe while our voices mount and soar
in Latin fashion as we settle God and art and democracy and the rest of
the simple problems of existence.
In a pampero off the River Plate we speculate, if we are disabled, of
running in to Buenos Ayres, the "Paris of America," and I have visions of
bright congregating places of men, of the jollity of raised glasses, and
of song and cheer and the hum of genial voices. When we have picked up
the North-east Trades in the Pacific we try to persuade our dying captain
to run for Honolulu, and while I persuade I see myself again drinking
cocktails on the cool lanais and fizzes out at Waikiki where the surf
rolls in. Some one mentions the way wild ducks are cooked in the
restaurants of San Francisco, and at once I am transported to the light
and clatter of many tables, where I gaze at old friends across the golden
brims of long-stemmed Rhine-wine glasses.
And so I pondered my problem. I should not care to revisit all these
fair places of the world except in the fashion I visited them before.
GLASS IN HAND! There is a magic in the phrase. It means more than all
the words in the dictionary can be made to mean. It is a habit of mind
to which I have been trained all my life. It is now part of the stuff
that composes me. I like the bubbling play of wit, the chesty laughs,
the resonant voices of men, when, glass in hand, they shut the grey world
outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated
pulse.
No, I decided; I shall take my drink on occasion. With all the books on
my shelves, with all the thoughts of the thinkers shaded by my particular
temperament, I decided coolly and deliberately that I should continue to
do what I had been trained to want to do. I would drink--but oh, more
skilfully, more discreetly, than ever before. Never again would I be a
peripatetic conflagration. Never again would I invoke the White Logic.
I had learned how not to invoke him.
The White Logic now lies decently buried alongside the Long Sickness.
Neither will afflict me again. It is many a year since I laid the Long
Sickness away; his sleep is sound. And just as sound is the sleep of the
White Logic. And yet, in conclusion, I can well say that I wish my
forefathers had banished John Barleycorn before my time. I regret that
John Barleycorn flourished everywhere in the system of society in which I
was born, else I should not have made his acquaintance, and I was long
trained in his acquaintance.