The Call of Jack London

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His literary career began with a furious period of self-education, vividly portrayed in Martin Eden. Determined to claw his way out of the lower classes with no tool other than a rented typewriter, Martin, London's thinly disguised alter ego, discovers that success will have its price. London never passed up a chance to slam the American bourgeoisie, especially its narrow-minded, sexually fettered daughters. But the overcivilized females of his day were only the most blatant victims of what he saw as a wider malaise.

London was an ardent socialist--though perhaps the most unlikely socialist since Oscar Wilde. His political beliefs are clearly evident in the works he considered among his best: The People of the Abyss (1903), his nonfiction account of life in the slums of London's East End, and The Iron Heel (1908), a bit of grim prophecy masquerading as a novel in which organized labor is crushed by a global capitalist oligarchy. But the books he churned out at a thousand words a day, well or ill, made him lots of money, and he loved to spend it. When he decided to sail around the world with Charmian Kittredge, his second wife and soul mate, he began building a gorgeous boat, the Snark, which became a financial and nautical nightmare. The same bad luck dogged his experimental farm near Glen Ellen, California.

London's misfortune could be partly traced to his fondness for the bottle, which he chronicled in John Barleycorn (1913), an early alcoholic memoir. And yet every disaster also had its silver lining; each became the raw material for his next best-seller--and fuel for the Jack London myth. In Male Call: Becoming Jack London (Duke, 1996), Jonathan Auerbach argues that London's effort to cultivate this romantic persona shaped his entire career. A certain mystery still surrounds London's early death in 1916 at age 40. Poisoned by his failing kidneys, he may or may not have hastened the inevitable with a morphine overdose. "After all," writes Auerbach, "it matters little whether or not he committed suicide, as long as in so sensationally dying, Elvis-style, his name would continue to circulate past his bodily demise. In the end, Jack London still could not resist playing himself."

For modern readers, the most troubling aspect of London's work tends to be his belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority. In The Critical Response to Jack London (Greenwood, 1995), editor Susan M. Nuernberg notes that the rap on London has shifted over the years in curious ways. The critics of his day were mostly blind to his racial chauvinism for the simple reason that they shared it. On the other hand, "many early readers claimed that London was inept at portraying believable female characters whereas most recent critics find him somewhat ahead of his time in portraying the new woman." The "new woman" was a label used in the early 1900s for someone like Charmian, an adventurer (in and out of bed) who could match London's courage step for step.

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