Table of Contents
ALSO BY JAMES L. HALEY
Title Page
Dedication
Praise
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1 - THE WORK BEAST
Chapter 2 - THE OYSTER PIRATE
Chapter 3 - THE SEAL HUNTER
Chapter 4 - THE TRAMP
Chapter 5 - THE STUDENT
Chapter 6 - THE PROSPECTOR
Chapter 7 - THE ASPIRING WRITER
Chapter 8 - THE MUCKRAKER
Chapter 9 - THE WAR CORRESPONDENT
Chapter 10 - THE LOVER
Chapter 11 - THE CELEBRITY
Chapter 12 - THE SAILOR
Chapter 13 - THE RANCHER
Chapter 14 - THE JADE
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
NOTES
BOOKS BY JACK LONDON
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
INDEX
Copyright Page
ALSO BY JAMES L. HALEY
FICTION
Final Refuge
The Lions of Tsavo
The Kings of San Carlos
NONFICTION
Passionate Nation: The Epic History of Texas
Stephen F. Austin and the Founding of Texas
Sam Houston
Texas: From Spindletop Through World War II
Most Excellent Sir: Letters Received by Sam Houston,
President of the Republic of Texas, at Columbia, 1836-1837
Texas: An Album of History
Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait
The Buffalo War: The History of the Red River
Indian Uprising of 1874-1875
CO-AUTHOR
One Ranger Returns (with H. Joaquin Jackson)
To Greg Walden, with love and thanks
He was youth, adventure, romance.
He was a poet and a thinker.
He had a genius for friendship.
He loved greatly and was greatly loved.
—ANNA STRUNSKY
He just jumped into life with both feet in that courageous way of his, and he got romance and mystery and beauty out of it where other men could see only labor. That’s genius.
—JOHNNY HEINOLD
His eyes were those of a dreamer, and there was almost a feminine wistfulness about him. Yet at the same time he gave the feeling of a terrific and unconquerable physical force.
—ARNOLD GENTHE
Here was youth, exuberance, throbbing life.
Here was the good comrade, all concern and affection.
—EMMA GOLDMAN
PREFACE
Nearly a decade before the death of Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain’s place as America’s favorite author was usurped by a California adventurer not yet thirty years old. In 1902, Jack London was regarded merely as an up-and-coming short story craftsman, but during the following year he took the American literary stage by storm with no fewer than three significant books: an introspective probe into the nature of affection and relationships in The Kempton-Wace Letters; a conscience-searing cri de coeur for social justice in The People of the Abyss; and then, the major sensation, a muscular Alaskan adventure novel titled The Call of the Wild. Following these in 1904 with the darkly hair-raising The Sea-Wolf, London fast became a full-fledged literary phenomenon, a front-page celebrity, and the highest-paid writer in America.
The mass of readers who lionized the gentle humor of Mark Twain were unaware that he had hidden his true feelings from them—his anguish at the human condition and his disgust with the moral failure of American capitalism and militarism. London shared these feelings, but in him the readership encountered a vastly different artist. He was an angry young man who could enthrall them with his adventure stories, but he also wrote flame-throwing jeremiads against the social injustices of his day. London’s early circumstances—illegitimacy and poverty, years of brutish child labor and numerous personal and galling experiences with class prejudice—kindled a socialist fire in his belly that never abated. After he attained the national stage, his dismay was unassuageable that the public who adored his novels and stories did not care to hear his political opinions. After his death, memory of his politics was conveniently erased and he was refashioned as the quintessential author of boys’ adventure stories. He thus became, and remains, perhaps the most misunderstood figure in the American literary canon. (He is not the only hero in our historical pantheon to have been given a bath before inclusion there—Charles Lindbergh comes to mind, from the right, and Helen Keller, from the left.)
London’s books and stories were wildly popular during his lifetime, and just as quickly dismissed as a fad after his untimely death at age forty in 1916. During the “Red Scares” of the 1920s and 1950s his attacks on capitalism called his American loyalties so much into question that, though he was long dead, the FBI opened a dossier on him. Too popular to suppress, he was retained as a literary icon of juvenile adventure, and his keen sense of social justice was quietly forgotten, except by college professors and dedicated socialists.
Jack London was a socialist not because he was lazy or sought to live on the labor of others; few American writers have ever worked harder to educate and improve themselves, or have produced a more prolific stream of work. He was a socialist because of the manifest evil that he saw result from the abuses of unrestrained capitalism—the operative word being “unrestrained.” London himself was a lifelong capitalist, an entrepreneur; he built up a successful ranch with innovative demonstration projects, he licensed his famous name to commercial products, he took risks and did not whine when gambles failed. But the United States of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the heyday of the ugliest excesses of unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism, the “Gilded Age” (Mark Twain’s term) of corporate oligarchy, of worker abuse and oppression. The result was breathtaking social injustice as vividly displayed as it is in today’s very comparable era. London witnessed the lower-class laborers slaving all their lives with no chance of getting an even break, and it represented to him a betrayal of the American dream that he unforgivingly set his face against. When London resigned from the American Socialist Party not long before his death, it was not because he had lost his zeal; he resigned because its members had lost theirs.
His political views, however, were not the only source of controversy about this immensely complex figure. He vigorously defended the rights of native peoples against exploitation by white, industrialized, Western society, but he was also a “racialist” who believed that those people were better off not mixing with whites. The difference between this and a racist was a distinction too subtle for many people in his own time as well as today, and he has proven vulnerable to a charge of racism. He was a robustly physical and highly sexualized man who struggled to find expression in a society still bound by the pruderies of the Victorian age. A spiritual man with a lifelong interest in the passion and teachings of Jesus, he was mortified at the role religion played in maintaining an unjust society, and claimed to embrace atheism to the end. Throughout his life he was tortured by the self-imposed imperative to do right by those whom fate had placed close to him, and despite the generous advances he received for his books, he often lived in poverty as he supported them. Yet he would have to be counted as a poor husband and a disastrous father. While in some ways he was never a child, in other ways he never grew up. When London met and ultimately married the woman who should have been ideally suited for him, maturity and even fidelity still eluded him.
There have been many Jack London biographies, primarily of three types. The first and most numerous has been the biography for juvenile readers, meant to satisfy their curiosi
ty about this fascinating man who fired their imaginations with The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf. The second approach has been the general biography, fast and punchy, recounting his extraordinary life while avoiding interpretation that might get in the way of reading it as an adventure story. They are necessarily short and, excepting certain occasional flashes of insight, superficial. In addition to these books of Jack London “lite,” there have been many volumes of limited scope: Jack London and Alaska, Jack London and the South Seas, Jack London and socialism, Jack London and women.
The third type of Jack London biographies have approached his life as literary criticism, principally emanating from a tight circle of scholars intent on vindicating London as a Great Writer. At this they have succeeded, even while admitting that there were two marked tiers of quality in London’s prolific output. First there were the works of stunning originality and descriptive power, written in service either to his deeply studied craft of the novel wedded to his own high adventures, or to stinging the nation’s conscience for its callous disregard of its most vulnerable members. Beneath that, though, was what even London called his hackwork, written in service to putting out a thousand words a day, every day, to make enough money to support his shrewish mother, and his demanding, unforgiving first wife and their two daughters; help his aged African-American wet nurse; provide handouts for an endless stream of wanderers down on their luck; and support his own expansive lifestyle. Nevertheless, the literary-critics-as-biographers have shown that London was a leader, not a follower, of the early twentieth-century “muckrakers,” an admired correspondent of Upton Sinclair and others. He was also the first of the gritty American naturalistic writers, paving the way with his own rejection slips and controversy for Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and others whose standard fare was the humble and the disenfranchised. In general, however, these books have given London biography a “lit-crit” complexion that doesn’t adequately plumb his deep and complicated psyche.
From the time I first began seriously reading Jack London, and reading about Jack London, this project has raised fundamental questions for me about the art of biography that were different from those I had to navigate with my own biography of Sam Houston. Both men have been written about not just extensively, but exhaustively. With Houston I had the advantage of working with hundreds of newly discovered papers, whereas London’s entire known canon of letters has been meticulously catalogued and cross-referenced. Both men are the subject of regular conferences, symposia, and round tables, and yet for all the discussion and all the London books already on the shelf, I do not believe that his story has really been told.
I have noticed that much the same kinds of controversies swirl about Jack London as they do Sam Houston. Just as great pieces of art affect every individual uniquely, providing as many interpretations as there are persons to consider it, even so the important figures from our past reveal themselves differently to different students. Often it seems that we regard them, not for their own stories, but for what we ourselves need for them to represent to us, and scholars to date have given us irreconcilable portraits of this artist: Jack London drank himself to death, or Jack London was never actually seen to be drunk. Jack London treated his first wife, Bessie, with kindness and consideration, or he was horrible to her. His second wife, Charmian, was a childish tomboy whom he had to humor and accommodate, or Charmian was a massively intelligent and dedicated helpmate who facilitated his success. Jack London never cheated on Charmian, or Jack London jumped anything in a dress. Jack London ended his life a suicide, or Jack London died of natural causes. And as with Sam Houston, much of the circular criticism delivered in conferences and printed reviews, which decry “errors” in the findings of others, is often merely strongly held interpretation, with the real Jack London dwelling somewhere within the staked and defended parameters of their collective theses.
Further mirroring the writing on Sam Houston, many of the previous works on Jack London were produced to deliver a certain spin. As a biographer, I do not feel that hiding the ball, telling only selective and sometimes misleading episodes of his life, as his widow, Charmian, did in her two-volume The Book of Jack London (1921), gives good or honest biography. Nor do I feel that for a writer to shamelessly ingratiate himself to heirs and executors, as Irving Stone is alleged to have done to obtain their cooperation for Sailor on Horseback (1938), gives good or honest biography. An interview conducted in 2000 with London’s great-nephew Milo Shepard, who helped prepare Earle Labor’s magnificent three-volume collection of London papers, contains horror stories of scholarly sycophancy and misprision, of documents purloined from collections of papers, of whole collections artfully gutted, or of collections withheld from view unless heirs felt confident that only a certain impression would result from using them.1 From all this I have concluded that what London needs is a biographer’s eye—not the eye of a vestal flametender, nor an acolyte, nor a revisionist, but a biographer’s eye—from totally outside the existing circle. If this is seen therefore as a guerrilla piece, or unauthorized, or unblessed, that’s because it is. My Jack London must necessarily be different from Labor’s, or Kershaw’s, or Sinclair’s, or Stasz’s, or Kingman’s. That is the nature of biography. No one will understand Jack London by reading only one or two books, any more than any figure worthy of biography can be understood from reading only one or two books. Reading in depth, pro and con, light and heavy, is the only way to gain a nuanced understanding of the figures in our history who are worth knowing.
And often this is a question not of researching the subject, but of penumbral investigation, researching around the subject. One example that struck me in the present case: when London traveled to England in the summer of 1902 to write The People of the Abyss, he crossed the Atlantic on the R.M.S. Majestic. Only a couple of the previous biographers mention the name of the ship at all, and even then only in passing (so to speak), but the vessel would have been fraught with meaning for London and his experiences and his vehement socialist beliefs. London the lifelong sailor must have been breathless at the sight of her; but London the socialist must have been repelled. The great Atlantic liners—and the Majestic was the mightiest at the time—made their reputations by transporting the wealthy in elegance, but their operating expenses were paid with steerage warrens crammed with hopeful immigrants, most of whom were merely trading their English abyss for an American one. Indeed, London’s first letter written from onboard the Majestic shows so clearly that the prevalent class injustice was foremost in his mind. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate his mental attitude at the time he commenced this important book, but previous treatments have overlooked this element for want of some related, but indirectly related, maritime history.
There are also times when biography must cast an eye forward. London’s dispatches from the Mexican Revolution in 1914, which caused dismay and rage within the American socialist movement when they were printed, need to be seen in the context of Mexican history since then to understand that London’s journalistic eye had cut straight to the heart of the issues as they were, not as they were imagined by armchair ideologues. The question was not whether he had betrayed his socialist ideals; the lasting importance of those pieces is that he was right. Biography requires context, and context requires research a bit broader than the subject himself. And that is perhaps the greatest missing element in the long shelf of Jack London books already published. People who were close to him and shaped him and were important to him have in the books about him been reduced to figures about whom little is illuminated, from Ina Coolbrith to Cloudesley Johns to George Brett to Mary Austin and many others; they need to be presented on his canvas with enough detail to give his own portrait depth and shading, and not be merely exponents of his massive correspondence.
It would be presumptuous indeed to claim that this volume is definitive; of course it is not. But I do believe that in portraying him in a more detailed setting I have made his story accessible to a larger audienc
e that needs to know why he was important.
I was at a Christmas party the first time I related to a writer friend that I was beginning work on Jack London. A prominent magazine editor nearby suddenly stood in and began reciting—not talking about but reciting—“To Build a Fire.” London’s stories still thrill. But what I want readers to reflect on is why he was, and is, an important writer, what his experience meant and how our country has, and has not, changed since his time. The disparity of wealth and income in the United States is at the greatest extreme it has been since London’s own time. And as class divisions again solidify, as increasing millions of Americans slip into poverty, and as the need to have even the most basic social safety net is called into question by establishment reactionaries, no writer in our national canon speaks with greater authority to the America of the twenty-first century than Jack London.
Talking about London with another writer friend, over lunch at the Texas Chili Parlor, a passing busboy noticed my copy of The People of the Abyss on the table. He was young and blond and poor, and I learned later that he was hopeless and drank too much, but he set down his plastic tub of dirty dishes, made free to leaf through the book, joined our conversation with gusto—and landed intelligent points. Nothing would have pleased Wolf more.
AUSTIN, TEXAS
NOVEMBER 2009
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