[Socialism Today, No 10, July-August 1996, p. 25-28]
Sam Baskett looks at the life and work of Jack London, who died 80 years ago this November.
Jack London, (1876-1916) was one of the most widely read and highly-paid American writers of his era, at his commercial peak commanding as much as $75,000 per year. His red-blooded stories of the Far North brought him immediate attention in his early twenties, and The Call of the Wild (1903) ensured his worldwide continuing popularity: it has been translated into over eighty languages in hundreds of editions. To Build a Fire (1908) remains one of the most frequently anthologised American short stories. Multi-volume editions of London have appeared in a number of countries, including Britain, Portugal, Japan and China, In the former Soviet Union three editions of London’s complete works were published, where he was undoubtedly the most popular foreign writer.
The power of the Alaskan stories detailing the struggle for survival under extreme conditions has tended to identify London with this locale and with „primordial‘ themes. Despite broader claims of recent London scholarship he seems destined to remain for some, including the critical establishment, primarily notable as the turn-of-the century naturalist who wrote „the story about the dog‘. To accept such reductive stereotyping, however, is to ignore his radical explorations of society, as well as of natural forces. in over fifty books.
London developed his socialist perspective the hard way – he had felt the impact of social inequities through the privations of his early life in the Sun Francisco Bay area. Lack of funds precluded his attending high school and, as a young boy, he went to work in a cannery, ten hours a day, ten cents an hour. Like the boy Johnny in The Apostate, Jack rebelled. Johnny is beaten down, but 15-year-old Jack turned to a life of delinquency on the Oakland waterfront, illegal fishing interspersed with drunken escapades. gaining him early fame as the ‚prince of the oyster pirates‘.
This phase of his life ended when at seventeen he shipped out on a sealing schooner for seven months. On his return he could find nothing better than shovelling coal in a power plant, only to find that he was not climbing the ladder of success through hard work but replacing two older workers for a fraction of what they had been paid. Once again he refused to continue as a ‚work-beast‘ and ‚hit the road‘, that is. the railroad (he later recalled these experiences with „hoboes‘ in the 1907 book, The Road).
in April 1894, in the midst of an economic depression, Jack joined the West Coast contingent of ‚Coxey’s Army‘, several hundred unemployed workers marching on Washington for aid. The flamboyant Jack, however, always in search of adventure, left the march in the Midwest, beating his way east alone. Viewing Niagara Falls, he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced without trial to 30 days in jail. The horrors of this ‚unprintable‘ experience of the treatment endured by the ’submerged tenth‘ of society strengthened his resolution to better his lot, although he never lost his compassion for the victims of society -one of his late novels, The Star-Rover (1911). is an indictment of the American penal system – and he hurried back to California to start high school. half way into his nineteenth year.
Cramming feverishly, he gained admission to the University of California in the fall of 1896 but he found the pace too slow and, in 1897, answered the call of the Klondike gold strike. Always a voracious reader, by this time his largely self-directed education had included explorations of the ideas of Darwin, Adam Smith and, most enthusiastically, Herbert Spencer, at the time immensely popular for his ’synthesis‘ of the primary fields of knowledge, his affirmation of progress and human perfectibility and his belief in the individual over society.
But if London was instinctively a Spencerian individualist, so also he had come to consider himself a socialist. When he returned from the ‚road‘, he had read The Communist Manifesto, which provided an ideological perspective for his experience of society. He joined the Socialist Labour Party in 1896, attended meetings, listening to the socialist intellectuals he encountered, was arrested as the ‚Boy Socialist‘ for speaking on Oakland streets without a permit, became the Socialist candidate for mayor twice (1901, 1905), and as the by-then famous Jack London was named the first president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in 1905, giving rousing lectures at various universities, including Harvard and Yale. At the latter, he jolted his audience, challenging that socialists did not want the prevalent attitude at the university: ‚A mere deadness and unconcern and ignorance as far as socialism is concerned. Fight for us or against us! Raise your voices one way or another; be alive!‘ Receiving a standing ovation, he went on to New York to address a group of financiers, but his message, ‚you have mismanaged the world, and it shall be taken from you‘, this time received no applause.
This was all after the Klondike experience and his achievement of fame through his writing. He had found little gold but as he wrote in a pamphlet, Jack London by Himself, he had found himself in the Kiondike: „There you get your perspective. I got mine“ and it included a fiery faith in socialism as an antidote to the ills of society.
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By July 1902 Jack London was sufficiently well-known that the American Press Association asked him to go to South Africa to report on the aftermath of the Boer War. Although the assignment was cancelled by the time he could get to New York, he continued on to London to garner material for a report on the slums of the East End that he considered ’simply the book of a correspondent writing from the fields of the industrial war‘.
Although London included statistics and other data obtained from secondary sources, his account, The People of the Abyss (1903) is made vivid by the fact that, outfitting himself in second-hand clothes, for six weeks he not only observed but participated in the squalid life of „the unfit and unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten, dying in the social shambles“. Immersed in the life, he occupied similar cramped, filthy lodgings, walked the streets at night with the homeless, listened to their individual stories – and ironically counterpoints these scenes with the Edward VII coronation ceremonies he observed from Trafalgar Square.
„In this city of depredation”, he writes, „I saw a nightmare, a fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life … it was a menagerie of arrested bipeds that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and to complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they snarled too fiercely“. In his conclusion, compassionate descriptions of the victims culminates in an angry indictment of those in control. How has this situation come about? „There can be one answer only – mismanagement“. This ‚gross‘ and ‚criminal‘ arrangement must be ’swept away‘ by a new order.
The publication of The People of the Abyss aroused sufficient interest in England for a publisher there to bring out another edition with a prefatory ’note‘: „Many Englishmen, it is to be feared, will not like what Mr London has written. But is Mr London wrong?“ Noting that the author was not ‚hostile‘ toward the English, having expressed admiration for ‚the typical English character‘ in his previous books, „If his impression… is right, what then?“ The publisher offers no remedy, but neither did London: „I merely state the disease as I saw it. I have not, within the pages of that book, stated the cure as I see it“. London’s ‚cure‘ was to be advanced, not only in his ‚Intercollegiate‘ lectures, but also in a number of essays – such as How I became a socialist – and the collections War of the classes (1905) and Revolution (1910).
Two facts should be noted about London’s socialist writing. He offers no carefully thought-out programme – he was a visceral, not a theoretical socialist. Second, although continuously kept short of funds not only by grandiose enterprises, but also by the number of dependants, permanent and occasional, he ungrudgingly supported, London repeatedly published his socialist convictions even when he knew they would not sell widely and, in fact, could damage other sales as well as his reputation generally.
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The people of the Abyss – “the book I love the most‘ – indeed brought in little cash, but The Sea-Wolf which followed in 1904 proved to be extremely successful commercially and literally, despite its flaws. The unforgettable Wolf Larsen, physically and intellectually a kind of superman, is in striking contrast to the pathetic victims in the East End. The brutal yet fascinating sea captain, who has been called London’s ‚most enduring example of the intense life‘, completely dominates his crew – and the novel – until he is stricken by a symbolic brain tumour. London’s socialistic convictions are thus evident in the resolution of the novel, if not in its action. He later commented that „the superman is antisocial in his tendencies, and in these days of our complex society and sociology, he cannot be successful in his hostile aloofness“.
But London was pessimistic regarding the defeat of rampant capitalism in his next work, his most revolutionary socialist fiction, The Iron Heel, written in 1905. Growing out of his East End experience, his reaction to the recently failed revolution of his Russian ‚brothers‘, as well as his increasingly complex understanding of American capitalism, it is the ‚first American apocalyptic novel‘. In the twenty-seventh century, in the year 419 BOM (Brotherhood of Man), a manuscript is discovered which details the history of the early twentieth century, when the capitalist ‚oligarchy‘ called ‚The Iron Heel‘ takes over American society, completely suppressing all opposition and holding power for three centuries before socialism prevails. Ultimately a utopian novel The Iron Heel is thus first dystopian, a fact which attracted some socialist disapproval of London’s ‚labour of love‘.
On the other hand, despite the many artistic flaws and London’s pessimism regarding the imminent victory of socialism, the book has held attention. It received praise from Leon Trotsky, Eugene V Debs and Anatole France and in the 1930s and ’40s it seemed a ‚terrifying forecast of fascism,‘ ‚an amazingly prophetic work‘; and later, ‚a key work – perhaps a classic work – of American radicalism‘. George Orwell was to use some of its wording in 1984. Whatever the flaws of The Iron Heel, London, with his characteristic flair, raised radical issues regarding ‚the management of society that continue to await redress.
Thus, London wrote at least two considerable works calling, implicitly or explicitly, for revolution. Other short ’socialist‘ works might be mentioned: The Dream of Debs, relating the triumph of labour; The Strength of the Strong, a fable in answer to an attack by Kipling on socialism – London’s best known short, socialist work – and The Mexican, expressing „the spirit of revolution‘.
But there is always the other side of London to be considered, out of which his ’non-socialist‘ writing emerged. The Klondike experience was, Of course, seminal. Also to be mentioned are other extreme instances of London’s romantic, even rampant individualism which apparently often took over from his socialist commitment: his skilled but illfated attempt to sail his specially-built $30,000 yacht around the world, before tropical illnesses and other misfortunes forced him to abandon the voyage in the Solomon Islands, his buoyant good health permanently impaired: and there was the acquisition and improvement of a kind of pastoral fief in the California Sonoma Valley during the fast decade of his life, his 1,400 acre „Beauty Ranch‘.
London has been described, as a result of such activities, as a ‚Sailor on Horseback‘ (Irving Stone, his first biographer) and as one unable to decide whether he was a ‚revolutionary or a landed gentleman‘ (Upton Sinclair). But the non-socialist aspects of London, however, do not cancel out his major contributions to the socialism of his era. Nor do they belie the intensity of his belief in which he continued, even as he resigned from the Socialist Party in the year of his death, citing its ‚lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle‘ as it adopted ‚peaceableness and compromise‘. London should be recognised for what he was and for what he foresaw, rather than dismissing him for what he could not be and did not foresee. The socialist reader can respond with London’s worldwide audience to an exciting, often elemental, story and go on to grasp ‚the great universal motif‘ by which London authenticated the relatively unimportant plots. Such a reader was Lenin. who was ‚greatly pleased‘ with Love of Life, read to him two days before his death although the story has no direct connection to ’socialism‘, being a graphic rendering of one man’s struggle to survive alone in the Alaskan wastes.
This belief in man informs the motif of the universal human struggle – whether of man alone in the elements or in the midst of society – evident throughout London’s work, nowhere more so than in two of his most impressive books. Martin Eden (1909) and John Barleycorn (1913). In the former, the titular hero, in part London’s alter ego, is destroyed by his loss of belief in the possibility of human solidarity.
London returns to this theme in John Barleycorn, on the first-person surface London’s alcoholic memoirs, but notable for its insistence that he had been saved from his long sickness of intellectual pessimism by ‚the people‘. The theme of salvation, personal or collective, through social responsibility that works both ways, is not always in the forefront of London’s writing, but it is characteristically and inspiritingly there.
London thus adds. often inconsistently, even raggedly, his own distinctive voice to the socialist conversation. An aspect of that voice which George Orwell, for example, found particularly enlightening was London’s deep understanding of the ruling class, their self-righteous ‚ethical‘ belief that only they ‚maintained civilisation‘, standing between it and anarchy, Socialists today know a lot more than Jack London did in the early twentieth century, but his is one of the voices to be known. Listening to that voice across the decades can only result in a widening of consciousness, a more informed awareness of the perils and possibilities in the continuing struggle for human solidarity on which so much depends.
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