by Jack London
Contents
INTRODUCTION
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
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JACK LONDON’S NOTES FOR THE COMPLETION OF THE BOOK
ENDING AS OUTLINED BY CHARMIAN LONDON
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1963
Published as electronic edition 2002
Copyright © Jack London, 2002
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US:
ISBN 978-1-1011-9937-4 in MS Reader format
ISBN 0786508450 in Adobe eReader format
JACK LONDON
The Assassination
Bureau, Ltd.
Completed by
ROBERT L. FISH
from Notes by
JACK LONDON
With an Introduction by
DONALD E. PEASE
PENGUIN BOOKS
INTRODUCTION
Jack London owes his enduring literary reputation to the continued popularity of what Earle Labor has called his Northland Saga, a body of fictional and nonfictional writings about his experiences during the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush. But London’s literary career had in fact begun four years earlier with the publication in the San Francisco Morning Call of “Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan,” for which he was awarded that paper’s top literary prize of twenty-five dollars. The art of the story lay in the subtle linkages London established between the violent forces released during the storm and the instinctual energies the crew mobilized in defense. From this first story London understood his literary craft to entail the disciplined recording of intense forces that in surging through him had precipitated an increasingly destructive urge to write. London found in the incitement to physical adventure an objective correlative for the excitement inherent to the writing drive. As he struggled to transmute the adventurer’s immersion in experience into an equivalently absorbing field of force, London encountered anew the exhaustion he had experienced in his boyhood from work in a cannery. London’s herculean work schedule (fifteen-hour workdays, up to forty-eight hours without food or sleep) finally required such an expenditure of physical energy that the conclusion of “Typhoon”—“And so with the storm passed away the bricklayer’s soul”—might have also served as an eerie epitaph.
In the twenty-three years between the publication of “Typhoon” and his death from uremic poisoning at the age of forty, on November 22, 1916, London had produced nearly two hundred short stories, twenty novels, and three full-length plays, along with several volumes of lectures and correspondence. The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., the mystery thriller Robert L. Fish completed in 1963, was one of several of London’s manuscripts published posthumously. When it appeared in the same year as John F. Kennedy’s assassination, The Assassination Bureau’s central premise—that a shadow government of unelected officials was engaged in covert activities in the name of the national security—lent a weird aura of credibility to the manifold conspiracy theories that surfaced in the wake of that national tragedy.
If London had lived another fifty years, as did Robert Frost, who was born in 1874, two years before London, in all probability he could not have resisted adding to the still accumulating speculations about the events that took place in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. London’s more than four hundred pieces of nonfiction certainly bear significant witness to his prodigious compulsion to have his say about almost any topic (from animal rights, anthropology, environmentalism, greed, Marxian socialism, Nietzschean supermen, political corruption, primitivism, prizefighting, racial oppression, social reform, and social Darwinism, to war and xenophobia) likely to incite impassioned debate.
Characteristically, London did not propose a systematic understanding of any of these topics, but approached each as if he were staking a claim on the energies the topic aroused. The restless curiosity with which London at first took possession of, then abruptly abandoned, controversial subjects paid tribute to the writer who had sought out these matters as occasions to exercise his craft rather than to accrue knowledge. London’s essays are perhaps best understood as efforts at consuming these subjects with an appetite his rational processes could not possibly have gratified. Nevertheless, three of the cited topics—Marxian socialism, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Superman, and social Darwinism—in the contradictory responses they consistently evoked, provided London with a tendentious intellectual orientation.
In London’s universe, altruism and individualism did not cancel each other out. Neither predisposition could be understood as either wholly itself or completely reducible to the other; each, instead, productively resisted the other. The aggression with which London pursued his socialist allegiances did not oppose but actively solicited his Nietzschean convictions. When configured within the “evolutionary” narrative logic of social Darwinism, the Marxian socialist and the Nietzschean individualist became equally charged if mutually aversive alter egos. The intense energies released in their reciprocal animosity effected the extensive field of force through which London developed his other narrative characters, their plots and events.
The spectacular absence of motive for the instantaneous conversion of London’s characters into their apparent opposites—the abrupt conversion within the first forty pages of The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., for example, of Ivan Dragomiloff from a Nietzschean individualist into an apparently committed social reformer—derives in part from London’s belief that these two figures constituted different valuations of the same social force. London had in fact lived the reversibility of these roles throughout his life. Having achieved at age fifteen a reputation as the most accomplished of the oyster pirates working the San Francisco Bay, London impulsively switched his loyalties. Within the span of a single year, London joined the California Fish Patrol in Benicia as a deputy patrolman assigned responsibility for the oyster pirates’ capture. The writer would find metaphysical warrant for such reversals in the belief that the laws upon which the natural order depended for its perpetuation and the violence society was founded to oppose were, in fact, one.
London’s susceptibility to the gold fever following the 1897 discovery of gold in the Klondike resulted in part from a wish to test this theory of symbolic violence. But the promise of attaining instant wealth on
a barren, treacherous landscape also had profound appeal for his literary imagination. When he traveled to the Klondike, he was in search of subject matter that would establish his literary reputation. Ironically the trip afforded London a reprieve from a writing compulsion whose pathology included a discipline that often left him with no time to eat or sleep. Before the Klondike expedition, London imposed immense demands on creative talents lacking an appropriate subject. When he returned to California in 1898, he numbered himself among the nineteen of twenty gold seekers who came out of the experience as impoverished as when they had entered it. But he had found materials that for the writer were more valuable than gold, rich veins of legend and folklore he would mine over the next two decades as the raw material for close to one hundred stories, essays, and lectures.
“It was in the Klondike that I found myself,” London later explained. If that statement can be credited as true, the Klondike marked for his career a watershed of a still different kind. Jack London was born out of wedlock in San Francisco, California, on January 12, 1876. His mother, Flora Wellman, grew up as the black sheep in a relatively prosperous Ohio family; his father, “Professor” W. H. Chaney, was an astrologer, con artist, and philanderer who abandoned Flora shortly before Jack, who would never lay eyes on him, was born. When Jack was eight months old, Flora married John London, a widower and Civil War veteran with a carpenter’s income and two daughters of his own. Along with her energy and craft Jack inherited from his mother an erratic temperament and a fatal attraction to “get-rich-quick” schemes that nearly bankrupted the London family during the boy’s formative years but that his Klondike tales, in realizing, would install at the core of London’s creative personality. The social standing that was afforded London the author provided as well the legitimacy denied him from birth.
London’s teenage years might be characterized as a series of adaptations to increasingly turbulent circumstances. When he turned fourteen, Jack left school and worked to supplement the family income in Hickmott’s Cannery for as many as eighteen hours a day at ten cents an hour. At fifteen he began what would become a series of legendary careers when he bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle and became known as “Prince of the Oyster Pirates” for raiding the commercial oyster beds in the bay off Oakland. Two years later he shipped aboard the Sophia Sutherland, a sailing schooner in search of seal furs in the Northwest Pacific, and scene of the events memorialized in “Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan.” In 1893 he joined Kelly’s Army, the Western regiment of Coxey’s march on Washington, to protest the economic depression, then deserted in Hannibal, Missouri, on May 25, 1894, to tramp across the country. That adventure ended with his arrest for vagrancy in Niagara, New York, in late June, a thirty-day sentence in the Erie County Penitentiary, and the real-life basis for tramping reminiscences published thirteen years later in The Road (1907).
Following his twentieth birthday, London left Oakland High School without a diploma to start cramming for the University of California entrance exam. At the University of California at Berkeley, where he enrolled shortly thereafter, London joined the Socialist Labor party and discovered the passionate interest in Marxian socialism that led to the nickname “Oakland’s Boy Socialist.” He dropped out of Berkeley, after only one semester, to begin his formal career as a writer. He tried his hand at everything, writing not only scientific and sociological essays but short stories, humor, prose and poetry of every kind. “On occasion I composed steadily, day after day, for fifteen hours a day,” London observed matter-of-factly. “At times I forgot to eat, or refused to tear myself away from my passionate outpouring in order to eat.”
On July 25, 1897, six months after his twenty-first birthday, Jack London accompanied Captain J. H. Shepard on a four-hundred-mile trek across Alaska en route to the Yukon River, and a place to assuage his gargantuan appetites for writing matter. In the following passage from “Gold Hunters of the North” London described the literary substance found there as if it were imaginative matter whose exuberant self-display spontaneously exceeded any writer’s narrative powers. “The Alaskan gold hunter is proverbial,” he remarked apropos of this drive, “not so much for his unveracity, as for his inability to tell the precise truth. In a country of exaggerations, he likewise is prone to hyperbolic descriptions of things actual. But when it came to Klondike he could not stretch the truth as fast as the truth stretched.”
The Klondike encouraged London to find the nexus of contradictions informing his own character displaced onto an Arctic habitat whose conditions are generalized in the following description from “The White Silence”: “All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole specks of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world . . . Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance.” Here, as well, law and violence were not opposed but encoded as interchangeable energies. London deciphered the code in “The Law of Life”: “To perpetuate was the task of life, its law was death.”
Throughout the stories collected in The Son of the Wolf (1900), the first volume of the Northland Saga, London proposed the Alaskan timber wolf as the representative in Nature of contradictions he believed socially pervasive. Like Jack London, the Klondike wolf found the (Nietzschean) loner and the (socialist) pack animal equivalently attractive social personae. The featured story of the volume contained an account of the elevation of the wolf into the white prospectors’ totem animal. After “Scruff” Mackenzie sought to marry Zarinska, daughter of the chief of the Tananas, he aroused the jealousy of the tribal shaman. In his efforts to persuade Zarinska of Mackenzie’s shortcomings, the shaman characterized the white man’s malicious and destructive qualities as attributes inherited from the Wolf in contrast with “the creative principle as embodied in the Crow and the Raven.” Scruff Mackenzie’s rival thereby stigmatized him as the son of the Tananas’ enemy clan. The name stuck. In the Northland tales written thereafter, Wolf became known as the tutelary presence who guarded the entire white population, the figure in whose sign they conducted heterogeneous transactions ranging from fur trading to interracial marriage.
In an effort to correlate biological with literary paternity, Jack London married his former mathematics tutor, Bessie Maddern, on April 7, 1900, the same day Houghton Mifflin published The Son of the Wolf. Over the next three years, he became, in rapid succession, the father of two daughters, Joan and Bess London, the author of seven additional books, and the lover of Anna Strunsky. Strunsky was a brilliant young social philosopher of Russian-Jewish heritage London had met at socialist Austin Lewis’s lecture at Stanford in December 1899, and with whom he later collaborated on a book-length dialogue about love, published anonymously in 1903 as The Kempton-Wace Letters. In that same marathon year London initiated a new love affair, this time with Clara Charmian Kittredge, the woman London believed was endowed with all the virtues of his “mate-woman.” To mark this turning point in his public life, London published two books, The People of the Abyss, a sociological study of the abject living conditions in London’s East End, and The Call of the Wild, a novella about a dog’s success in adapting to the Klondike wilderness.
The Call of the Wild substituted track dogs for indigenous tribes-people as privileged mediators with the Klondike wolf, and London thereafter eliminated miscegenation as a narrative theme. The first tales in the Northland Saga were concerned with white prospectors whose struggles to learn the natives’ ways led to the reciprocal commercial and social exchanges epitomized as interracial marriage. The shift in focus of The Call of the Wild represented a significant transformation in London’s continuing narrative. In place of the gold hunters, London’s narrative followed the tracks of a part Scotch shepherd, part Saint Bernard ranch dog named Buck, whose fortunes changed dramatically when a Mexican gardener kidnapped him from a Santa Clara estate.
The Call of the Wild replaced the earlie
r tales of miscegenation with this story of a mixed breed whose spectacular regression in the Yukon wilderness elevated him into London’s literary trademark. This alteration in narrative focus reflected attitudes on questions of race and interracial marriage that prevailed among London’s readers. As their means of taking verbal possession of the Klondike, Buck erased offending erotic relations from the readers’ memory and offered in their place the sentimental education of a noble creature who always remained loyal to the masters to whom he truly belonged. The extensive relay Buck traced through the Northland wilds linked Judge Miller’s Santa Clara estate with John Thornton’s camp, and thereby expanded the circle of his masters’ symbolic property to include the entire Klondike region. Thornton effectively incorporated Buck’s instincts with his own brute impulses in a scene wherein, as proof of the claim that “nothing was too great for Buck to do when Thornton commanded,” there appears the following astonishing description:
. . . the men and dogs were sitting on the crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bed-rock three hundred feet below. John Thornton was sitting near the edge, Buck at his shoulder. A thoughtless whim seized Thornton . . . “Jump Buck!” he commanded, sweeping his arm out over the chasm. The next instant he was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge. . . .
But London forged the most telling connection between Buck’s former life as the central status symbol on Judge Miller’s Santa Clara estate and his future destiny as the white totem for the region at the precise moment when the dog took revenge against the Yeehats, the native tribe responsible for the murder of John Thornton. “Death,” London writes of Buck’s inheritance of his master’s self-destructive impulse,