by Jack London
His organization originated, as Dragomiloff patiently explained the matter, for reasons that would be persuasive to anyone aware of the contradictions between the nation’s juridical ideals and the actual judiciary processes, whereby the crimes of the powerful were concealed and the offenses of the powerless exaggerated. According to Dragomiloff, he had founded the Assassination Bureau to narrow this differential in the nation-state’s distribution of justice. Hausmann’s stipulation of motive for seeking the assistance of Dragomiloff’s organization is interesting in this context for its complication of Dragomiloff’s rationale. Following Dragomiloff’s inquiring why Hausmann has not himself killed Police Chief McDuffy, the anarchist responds:
“Also, I have a—er—a temperamental diffidence about the taking of life or the shedding of blood—that is, you know, personally. It is repulsive to me. Theoretically I may know a killing to be just, but, actually, I cannot bring myself to do it.”
The stark contrast between Dragomiloff’s technically precise representations of the Bureau’s procedures and Hausmann’s emotional confession of his personal inability to carry out an assassination underscored still another of the agency’s social functions. Too large to be visible to the untrained eye, the political assassinations carried out by Dragomiloff’s bureaucracy are mediated by a long chain of command. When dispersed through the agency’s flow chart, personal responsibility becomes an empty phrase enunciated in sentences that in corroborating a bureaucratic rationale apparently entail only procedural significance. Dragomiloff’s bureaucratization of assassination had effectively reduced its political meaning to zero.
While Dragomiloff would altogether rescind a rational explanation for his actions, those actions nevertheless originated in an extremely rational debate. During an argument with Winter Hall, the young social reformer strongly opposed to the Bureau’s activities, Dragomiloff proposed the opposition between the Nietzschean Superman who decided what was best for society and the social activist who believed in society’s ability to reform itself, as the political contradiction the Bureau was founded to occlude. Dragomiloff “did not deny that he played the part of the man on horseback, who thought for society, decided for society, and drove society; but he did deny”—as London explained the basis for his dispute with Hall—“and emphatically, that society as a whole was able to manage itself.” Following several days of intense intellectual argument, however, Dragomiloff conceded defeat to Winter Hall:
“I see, now, that I failed to lay sufficient stress on the social factors. The assassinations have not been so much intrinsically wrong as socially wrong. . . . As between individuals, they have not been wrong at all. But individuals are not individuals alone. They are parts of complexes of individuals. There was where I erred. It is dimly clear to me. I was not justified.”
As a codicil to this stunning reversal, however, Dragomiloff designated the Assassination Bureau as the only social organization competent to destroy his agency, and thereby elevated Winter Hall’s ethical arguments directed against the Bureau’s political legitimacy into the precondition for a legally binding contract calling for Dragomiloff’s assassination.
By way of this reversal, London restaged the central contradiction at work throughout his corpus. That Ivan Dragomiloff, the Bureau’s founder, would not agree to his assassination without himself attempting to destroy the Assassination Bureau reveals the more inclusive structure of division we find underwriting all of London’s tales; namely, their erasure of the differences between violent crime and the law. In dividing the founder of the Assassination Bureau into the two opposed roles of state criminal and his judge, London postulated the “Reason of State” as founded on the violence it was sworn to oppose.
In The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., London’s conflation of law and violence did not finally sort itself into a neatly resolvable contradiction but into the impossibility of choosing one or another of two absolutely opposed sets of affairs. In the following paragraph from Man and Woman, War and Peace, Anthony Wilden has provided a cogent analysis of this knot of contrariety that he refers to as a double bind.
A true double bind—or a situation set up, coerced, or perceived as one—requires a choice between (at least) two states of situations that are so equally valued and so equally insufficient that a self perpetuating oscillation is set off by any act of choice between them. A double bind is thus not a simple contradiction, but rather an oscillating contradiction resulting from the strange loop of a paradoxical injunction.
A true double bind was set up in the novel after Ivan Dragomiloff enjoined Winter Hall to hire the Assassination Bureau to “take out a contract” on its founder. Under a contractual obligation to associate himself with the Assassination Bureau he also wanted liquidated, Hall could not thereafter discriminate ethical from criminal activity.
London tightened the elements of this contradictory injunction into the social logic of the remainder of a narrative that, like the Bureau, was composed of characters and incidents in the service of an increasingly vertiginous implosive energy. In the romance between Dragomiloff’s daughter, Grunya, and Winter Hall, London restored the theme of interethnic marriage; but without the promise of “development” that social Darwinism had guaranteed to London’s previously invented characters, their relationship continually verged on disappearing into a void of mutual cancellation.
Overall, The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., should be understood as having condensed London’s two central themes—law and violence—into a singularly destructive social energy. As Winter Hall and the members of the Assassination Bureau pursued Ivan Dragomiloff from New York to Hawaii, the ensuing spectacle of his deferred capture is deprived of any rationale. As Ivan disposes of member after member of his agency, their deaths do not result in a reaffirmation of either democratic or socialist principles; they disclose the void at the core of political actions that are without goal or origin and refuse any justification other than their violent enactment. Every social space through which the principals enact this struggle becomes likewise reducible to the dimensions of a reciprocal annihilation. Something like the white silence that formed the ghastly backdrop of the Klondike tales subtends the actions represented here as well.
The usages into which each member of the Bureau, in rationalizing the Bureau’s social purposes, had formerly invested his considerable intellectual energies could now, according to Breen, one of the Bureau’s most intelligent agents, be found epitomized in an explosive device with which Breen intended to liquidate the agency. “Let me show you the quintessence of universal logic,” Breen observed, “the irrefragable logic of the elements, the logic of chemistry, the logic of mechanics, and the logic of time, all indissolubly welded together into one of the prettiest devices ever mortal mind conceived.” Like the components of this device, the Bureau’s organization men could not align themselves with any political principle or social logic other than the irrefragable will to absolute violence that had incorporated them.
In turning this power against those who have presumed the authority to exercise it, however, London reveals a critically self-reflexive dimension of the novel disclosing London’s ambivalent response to the imperial adventures that his other tales had naturalized. The ambivalence is evident in Dragomiloff’s declaration of his new relationship to the agency:
“Adventure. That is it. I have not had it since I was a boy, since I was a young Bakuninite in Russia dreaming my boyish dreams of universal human freedom. Since then what have I done? I have been a thinking machine. I have built up successful businesses. I have made a fortune. I have invented the Assassination Bureau and run it.”
As subsequent events would make clear, the figure who interpreted his contract with Hall as an opportunity to initiate a deferred life of adventure was not Ivan Dragomiloff the founder of the Assassination Bureau, but his alter ego, Sergius Constantine. Constantine was the alias Dragomiloff used to found a business of another kind, S. Constantine & Co., the import company that, like Jac
k London’s Beauty Ranch, was the chief beneficiary of the international commerce that U.S. imperialism had facilitated. In signing the contract with Hall, Dragomiloff completes a change of identity from judge into fugitive by merging his interests in the Bureau with the commercial enterprise Constantine & Co., whose business ventures in Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, Ecuador, Tahiti, and Hawaii had already proved them appropriate sites for adventure. In tracking Ivan’s efforts to elude his assassins, the narrative also reveals that trajectory as coincident with a circuit of territorial annexation where violence and governance had become likewise indistinguishable.
Perhaps it was London’s increased ambivalence over his narrative’s complicity with the rule of empire that led him to abandon the manuscript with the account of Breen’s failed attempt to blow up the entire Bureau. While I cannot in the space of this Introduction do justice to the differences between the notes London left for the completion of his novel and the manuscript Robert L. Fish published, I nevertheless want to conclude with some brief remarks about the two texts that begin with an outline Fish uncovered among the London papers and included in an appendix to the 1963 version:
Hall loses Grunya, who saves Drago, and escapes with him. Then Hall, telegrams, traces them through Mexico, West Indies, Panama, Ecuador—cables big (5 times) sum to Drago, and starts in pursuit.
Arrives; finds them gone. Encounters Haas, and follows him. Sail on some windjammer for Australia. There loses Haas.
Himself, cabling, locates them as headed for Tahiti. Meets them in Tahiti. Marries Grunya. Appearance of Haas.
The three, Drago, Grunya and Hall (married) live in Tahiti until assassins arrive. Then Drago sneaks in cutter for Taiohae.
Drago assures others of his sanity; they’re not even insane. They’re stupid. They cannot understand the transvaluation of values he has achieved.
On a sandy islet, Dragomiloff manages to blow up the whole group except Haas who is too avidly clever. House mined.
Drago, in Nuka Island, village Taiohae, Marquesas. There is a wrecked cutter and assassin (Haas) is thrown up on beach where Melville escaped nearly a century earlier. While Drago is off exploring Typee Valley on this island, Hall and Grunya play off the assassin Haas, and think are rid of him.
Drago dies triumphantly: Weak, helpless, on Marquesas island, by accident of wreck is discovered by appointed slayer—Haas. Only by accident, however. “In truth I have outwitted organization.” Slayer and he discuss way he is to die. Drago has a slow, painless poison. Agrees to take. Takes. Will be an hour in dying.
Drago: “Now, let us discuss the wrongness of the organization which must be disbanded.”
Grunya and Hall arrive. Schooner lying on and off. They come ashore in whaleboat, in time for his end.
After all dead but Haas, Hall cleaned up the affairs of the Bureau. $117,000 was turned over to him. Stored books and furniture of Drago. Sent mute to be caretaker of the bungalow at Edge Moor.
The minor variations between London’s notations and Fish’s narrative testify to Fish’s ingenuity, but a scene that Fish has added as the novel’s penultimate chapter significantly altered London’s central theme. In Chapter 18 of the Fish manuscript, Dragomiloff lures three of his assailants into a stretch of water between two Hawaiian islands that is known to the natives as Huhu Kai—the “angry sea”—where a whirlpool draws them to their deaths. In adding this scene, Fish has not illuminated but simply replaced the following notation: “The three, Drago, Grunya and Hall (married) live in Tahiti until assassins arrive. Then Drago sneaks in cutter for Taionae. Drago assures others of his sanity; they’re not even insane. They’re stupid. They cannot understand the transvaluation of values he has achieved.”
The “transvaluation” in Drago’s values presumably had reference to his belated recognition that as the Bureau’s founder he was exempt from the double binds incorporating its other members. In turning their efforts to assassinate him into gratuitous opportunities to demonstrate his prowess as an adventurer, Dragomiloff retroactively transmuted the entire agency (and the Reason of State it supplements) into an extension of his will to adventure. Unlike London, Fish refused to grant Dragomiloff a Nietzschean transvaluation and aspired to combine the assassin’s absolute power over life and death with a freak natural occurrence. Fish attempted to reassign responsibility for the Bureau’s liquidation to nature alone, but also to contain the escalation of violence within a predictable deviation from Nature’s laws.
While it is difficult to ascertain his intention, Fish’s revision may have been motivated by an aversive reaction to events in U.S. political history comparable to those which took place during London’s lifetime. Fish completed the manuscript at the inaugural moment of an epoch of political violence that would take the lives of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. These assassinations recalled the political murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in 1914, which precipitated World War I. Whereas London’s novel helped imagine World War I into existence, Fish’s whirlpool isolated in Nature the violence that the Bureau’s political assassinations had socialized.
With this revised conclusion, Fish had also rendered London’s last novel formally symmetrical with “Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan,” the tale with which London had begun his literary career. But the crucial difference between Fish’s ending and London’s does not refer to formal patterns. It entails a terrible knowledge about the violence endemic to the laws of the modern nation-state that Fish struggled to evade and that Jack London may have ultimately found more difficult to survive than any natural disaster.
—Donald E. Pease
SUGGESTIONS FOR
FURTHER READING
Books by Jack London
The Abysmal Brute. New York, 1913.
The Acorn Planter. New York, 1916.
Adventure. New York, 1911.
Before Adam. New York, 1907.
Burning Daylight. New York, 1910.
The Call of the Wild. New York, 1903.
Children of the Frost. New York, 1902.
The Cruise of the Dazzler. New York, 1902.
The Cruise of the Snark. New York, 1911.
A Daughter of the Snows. Philadelphia, 1902.
Dutch Courage and Other Stories. New York, 1922.
The Faith of Men. New York, 1904.
The Game. New York, 1905.
The God of His Fathers. New York, 1901.
Hearts of Three. New York, 1920.
The House of Pride and Other Tales of Hawaii. New York, 1912.
The Human Drift. New York, 1917.
The Iron Heel. New York, 1908.
Jerry of the Islands. New York, 1917.
John Barleycorn. New York, 1913.
The Little Lady of the Big House. New York, 1916.
Lost Face. New York, 1910.
Love of Life and Other Stories. New York, 1907.
Martin Eden. New York, 1909.
Michael, Brother of Jerry. New York, 1917.
Moon-Face and Other Stories. New York, 1906.
The Mutiny of the Elsinore. New York, 1914.
The Night-Born. New York, 1913.
On the Makaloa Mat. New York, 1919.
The People of the Abyss. New York, 1903.
The Red One. New York, 1918.
Revolution and Other Essays. New York, 1910.
The Road. New York, 1907.
The Scarlet Plague. New York, 1915.
Scorn of Women. New York, 1906.
The Sea-Wolf. New York, 1904.
Smoke Bellew. New York, 1912.
The Son of the Wolf. Boston, 1900.
The Son of the Sun. New York, 1912.
South Sea Tales. New York, 1911.
The Star Rover. New York, 1915.
The Strength of the Strong. New York, 1914.
Tales of the Fish Patrol. New York, 1905.
Theft: A Play in Four Acts. New York, 1910.
The Turtles of Tasman. New York, 1916.
The Valley of the Moon. New York, 1913.
War of the Classes. New York, 1905.
When God Laughs and Other Stories. New York, 1911.
White Fang. New York, 1906.
Books by Jack London and Others
London, Jack, and Strunsky, Anna. The Kempton-Wace Letters. New York, 1903.
London, Jack, completed by Robert L. Fish. The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. New York, 1963.
Criticism and Biography
Bridgewater, P. Nietzsche in Anglosaxony: A Study of Nietzsche’s Impact on English and American Literature. Leicester, 1972.
Brown, D. Soviet Attitudes Toward American Writing. Princeton, New Jersey, 1962.
Foner, P. S. Jack London: American Rebel. New York, 1947.
Hendricks, K., and Shepard, I., eds. Letters from Jack London. New York, 1965.
Johnson, M. Through the South Seas with Jack London. New York, 1913.