Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:

JACK LONDON
AND HIS CALL
OF THE WILD
 
Jack London …
 
The most comprehensive collection of Jack London’s letters, over fifteen hundred of them, fills three volumes in the voice of the phenomenal sire of Buck and White Fang, Wolf Larsen and Martin Eden, from his days as the Boy Socialist of Oakland and youthful Klondike backpacker to the eve of his death at forty, of uremia, or stroke, or accidental overdose of his painkiller of preference, heroin, or perhaps all of these, but really of exhaustion, of having lived so as to feel every moment of his life to the limit, and to see the cruelly farcical conclusion to so many of his dreams.
 
He grew up in and around Oakland, California. His mother was Flora Wellman, a cold, bitter little woman given to spiritualism. His father of record, John London, was a failed storekeeper who worked at the end of his life as a night watchman on the Oakland docks. The family’s shameful secret was that Jack’s real father was William Chaney, an itinerant astrologer and all-around con man who had lived with Flora Wellman out of wedlock and abandoned her when she became pregnant. When his son finally learned this and wrote to him, Chaney denied his paternity. This was about the time the young man’s favorite author, Rudyard Kipling, published The Jungle Book, with its tale of Mowgli, a human child raised by wolves to live the honorably savage ways of the wild. Jack London symbolized himself as a kind of feral orphan all his life.
 
The author’s teenage years were conditioned by the economic depressions of the times. He worked long hours in a cannery and a jute mill. Scrappy and in a hurry to grow up, he learned the habit of manly drinking in saloons on the Oakland waterfront. He turned himself into an expert small-boat sailor and used a little skiff to loot the commercial oyster beds of the South Bay. At seventeen he shipped out as an able-bodied seaman on a sealing schooner to Japan, the Bokin Islands, and the Bering Sea. On his return he shoveled coal ten hours a day for the Oakland, San Leandro, and Hayward Electric Railway. Then he hit the road again, this time joining the western contingent of Coxey’s Army, a march of the unemployed upon Washington, but quitting by the time he got to Missouri and wandering on his own as far as Buffalo, where he was arrested for vagrancy and served a thirty-day jail sentence that probably included sexual abuse at the hands of the inmates.
 
Returning home, he vowed to raise himself out of the poverty, menial labor, and social degradation he named “The Pit.” From his early childhood he had been a reader: fiction, philosophy, poetry, political theory—everything. Now he saw in books the means to his freedom. He joined a debating society and found friends in the community of local Socialists. He was a sturdy, handsome blond fellow with wide-set blue eyes, a square jaw, and a great intensity of feeling that people found charismatic. His best friends were Ted and Mabel Applegarth, brother and sister, a cut or two above him in education and dress and manners. He learned some of the softer ways of gentility from them, and began to court Mabel.
 
The young man became a popular speaker for the Socialist Labor Party. He had read Marx and concluded that the terrors of the life of the lower classes could not be eliminated by anything less than a revolution in the American economic system. His letters to the editor were published in the papers. A fair example of his political self-confidence is to be found in a letter dated 1896, when, age twenty, he writes to the Oakland Times to warn of the illusory value of competition between the two Oakland water companies: “Selling water at a loss, the company with the smallest capital … will go under. The other company will now … make Oaklanders who enjoyed the low rates sweat, by raising them.… Competition [is] a waste of labor and capital, and always results in monopoly. Is there any path out of the wilderness?… I would ask [the reader] if he has ever heard of municipal ownership?” This sort of thing brought him notoriety as the “Boy Socialist of Oakland.” But he was not really precocious; he had lived in his twenty years enough to have gained the experience, and with it the self-assurance, of a man twice his age. The genius of his life, and its torment, finally, was its accelerated rate.
 
There is something else: He was a quick study and leapt on the history of his times like a man to the back of a horse. When the gold fever came to San Francisco, Socialist or not, he caught it and joined the rush to the Klondike to find his fortune.
 
Of course he would join the gold rush. It was the hardy test of manhood and promise of wealth that no red-blooded American socialist could resist. “I expect to carry 100 lbs. to the load on good trail, and on the worst 75 lbs.,” he wrote Mabel from Alaska in a tone of self-commiserating heroism. “For every mile … I will have to travel from 20 to 30 miles. I have 1000 lbs. in my outfit.” Yet he must have had some hope or prevision of the Yukon as the land of his literary dreams. He made the difficult portage only to spend the winter snowbound in a cabin south of Dawson City. Then he developed scurvy, and rather than pan for gold, he convalesced in the saloons of Dawson and listened to the tales of the sourdoughs. Here was the large romance of cold, bitter life to suit his theories. By the spring of the following year, recovered partially from his scurvy and totally from his gold fever, he rafted down the Yukon River and returned by steamer to San Francisco with exactly four and a half dollars in gold dust for his effort.
 
But he came away with something that, as he himself said, enabled him to “pan out a living” for the rest of his life. He had found a country for his imagination, a terrain for his orphan soul.
 
Methodically setting himself the task of becoming a professional author, Jack analyzed the stories he liked, or copied them out by hand so as to learn how they were put together, and wrote his own pieces with their example in mind. He mailed so much stuff off to the magazines that he had to devise a system of record-keeping to keep track of it. Rejections poured in. But within a year he had sold a tale of the Northland to the Atlantic Monthly and he was off and running. He published his first collection of short stories, The Son of the Wolf, in 1900, and true to the rapid metabolism of his fate, four short years later he was the most popular writer in the country.
 
Industrial America turned out to have a vast appetite for the romance of Nature, for the adventure of creatures, human or animal, unmediated by civilization. By 1904 Jack London was the author of ten published books, including The Call of the Wild, A Daughter of the Snows, Children of the Frost, and his classic novel The Sea Wolf. His pieces, essays, and stories filled the magazines. He wrote from the capital of his emotionally desolate boyhood, and from the life he had seen on the sea and the land, and from the servitude he had endured. He wrote prodigious amounts. The big newspapers hired him out as foreign correspondent. In England on the way to cover the Boer War for the Associated Press he was called off the assignment and, making the most of his situation, dropped out of sight and became a denizen of the slums of London’s East End, emerging to write The People of the Abyss, a classic of investigative reporting on poverty and homelessness, which he produced in seven weeks.
 
Jack London does not in his letters readily exhibit the astonishment or dissociation or gratitude that sudden fame effects in people. He got used to the big time very quickly. He was an avid reader of Nietzsche and had come to believe in the power of Will. He believed his life was evidence of his superior strength of will. (Inevitably, the aspiring writer who communicated with him would be admonished to work hard.) Although he had managed at a late age to complete high school, he was essentially an autodidact; he had educated himself on the run, and he had the self-taught, self-made man’s weakness for the Idea that Explains Everything. From the same desire to find a form for the chaos of his experience he fell in step with the slick conclusions of social Darwinism, seeing in his own travels on the road and the sea, and in the harsh snow country, confirmation of the idea of the survival of the fittest—meaning, in his Kipling-riddled mind, the best racial stock. So he was by his mid-twenties, a carrier of the fashionable and mutually exclusive ideas of his time—democratic socialism and pseudoscientific racism—in the body of his own burning vitality.
 
No wonder his letters are for the most part characterized by overbearing opinions. He may admit to sorrow or weariness but seldom to self-doubt. He will in 1899 confidently tell his friend Cloudsley Johns, “That the Teutonic is the dominant race of the world there is no question … The Negro races, the mongrel races … are of bad blood.” In a letter of 1900 to the same friend he philosophizes, apropos his materialistic views: “The fundamental characteristic of all life is IRRITABILITY.” Another quality of these letters is the love of argument, disputation. He conducts every casual correspondence with fan or critic like a debate. The need to communicate is overwhelming. He is world-famous in 1905 when he writes: “Dear Comrade, I can’t read your letter. I’ve wasted twenty minutes, ruined my eyesight, and lost my temper and I can’t make out what you have written. Try it over again and more legibly. Sincerely yours, Jack London. P.S. I can’t even make out your name.”