London Calling
`BETWEEN you and me, I wish I had never opened the books. That's where I was a fooL' Thus Jack London to a friend at the very moment when he was about to write his most famous books and enter on a period of spec- tacular popularity and unimagined earnings. Knowing his biography and now reading this selection of his letters, one is apt to see in such a remark a sudden premonition of the misery, harassment and ever-accelerating self-destruc- tiveness which seem to be almost the inevitable lot of the modern American writer who becomes a legend in his own lifetime.
Jack London in particular seems to have been made for the sort of mainly physical existence which offered such challenges and satisfactions in the American West during the later nineteenth century. His physical prowess and daring are undeniable and few writers can have had such a wildly adventurous life in the external world. And yet, forty volumes produced in as many hectic years; and now a 500-page volume of his letters, which, we are told, represents a mere frac- tion of the voluminous correspondence which he kept up through all the years of his tempestuous life. Perhaps it was a disaster for him when he 'opened the books.' But once the impoverished and uneducated Jack London encountered litera- ture he brought to it the same energy that he Invested in his mining, his sailing, his fighting and his drinking.
He set about learning to write as he might have set about learning to box; he did not &dually assimilate ideas—he collided with them and tussled with them, crudely and passionately. He went in for punishing bouts of reading in much the same way as he would take off for a gigantic drinking spree. 'I prefer living to writing,' he wrote to an unknown fan. Not the least amazing thing about Jack London was the staggering amount he did of both. The letters make absorbing reading. Not memorable in the way those of Keats or Lawrence are, they nevertheless reveal with great vividness a sort of classic 'progress' of the young self-made American writer.
First, the early years of struggle, uncertainty and an insatiable appetite for life. 'Hungry! Hungry! Hungry! he writes to a girlfriend. From the start he reveals a tormenting inner dividedness—he wants to be a rover and a scholar. There was the call of the wild, but also the call of the library, the university, domesticity and social success. 'That's the trouble of having one's nature dominated by conflict- ing impulses,' he so pertinently writes. Early on he was closely drawn to suicide (there is a long key-letter in which he describes a nearly success- ful attempt) and he often returns to the subject, as though half-aware of the inevitable end.
Then the years of initial success and the rise to fame. Here he is very interested in the tech- niques of his trade (his insistence on 'the elimination of the artist' in writing a story is a curious echo of Henry James's similar dictum). At this time he also starts to formulate his philosophy of existence—for he felt that every writer must have one. The ideas are often naive, derivative and confused. But achingly heart- felt. 'I have at last discovered what I am. I am a materialistic monist, and there's damn little satis- faction in it.' All evolution, all change, is from without, in; not from within, out. The fundamen- tal characteristic of all life is utarranusrv. In other words, capacity for feeling pressures from without.'
He certainly felt his share of external pres- sures. We read of the endless troubles occa- sioned by the break-up of his first marriage and his marriage to Charmian (there are some very bitter letters to his first wife and some very touching ones to his estranged daughter). More than that, every bum, every ex-criminal or prisoner in trouble, every struggling would-be writer in America at the time seems to have appealed to London for help or money, and to his infinite credit he seems to have tried to do something for all of them. He must have been one of the busiest men in America, but he was never too busy to help a man who was down.
Finally, there are the years of the doomed world-voyage in the `Snark,' and his attempt to `return to the soil'--only to have his dream- house (nine years in the making) burnt down by an unknown arsonist. All the time he is frenziedly writing to make money—and as fast as it comes in 'it just leaks away.' His later letters are covered with a rash of dollar signs—testifying to inextricable and soul-destroying financial diffi- culties. These are the years of 'success' which are, of course, really the years of saddest failure. He must occasionally have yearned for the freedom of the truly wild thing. Once, for in- stance, he cannot sleep after catching a dolphin. `The leaping, blazing beauty of it gets on my brain.' But he was too gregarious to live away from his fellow-men. Indeed, some of the most interesting passages in these letters concern his attitude towards socialism and 'the brotherhood of man.'
He did a great deal for the movement and at times was passionate in the cause of socialism. and his compassion for the trampled-down poor of the world, though never soft, was often fierce. (Revealingly he says, 'I think I put more of my heart into The People of the Abyss than into any other book.') On the other hand, as his books show, he was preoccupied with powerful individuals. He is constantly writing letters ex- plaining that Martin Eden and other books are `indictments of individualism' or that The Sea Wolf is an attack on `the super-man philosophy.'
was a socialist before I was a writer/ he will insist; or again, `Martin Eden failed and died, in my parable . . . because of his lack of faith in man.' Did Jack London really have that faith? There is a curiously moving letter written two years before his death in which he explains: 'I am Martin Eden. I would not die but I went largely through Martin Eden's experience. Martin Eden died because he was an indi- vidualist, I live because I was a socialist and had social consciousness.'
But at heart he was an individualist—one of the most remarkable ones in the history of American literature. And, like Martin Eden, he killed himself. TONY TANNER
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