Tired of life?
Ian Sansom
JACK LONDON: A LIFE by Alex Kershaw HarperCollins, £20.00, pp. 335 London makes good copy. Just as `swinging' London is periodically rediscov- ered by journalists in search of a fashion, so too Jack London is periodically redis- covered by writers in search of a hero. It is perhaps no coincidence that London's lat- est biographer, Alex Kershaw, is a journal- ist who used to write for the glossies. Parts of the book have already been extracted and edited down for the Guardian's Week- end supplement. London's life is full- colour, feature material.
By the time he was 21 the illegitimate London had already worked as a cannery worker, an oyster-pirate, a sealer, and a coal-shoveller, had travelled across Ameri- ca, been imprisoned for vagrancy, and dropped out from the University of Cali- fornia at Berkeley. His days as a Klondike gold-prospector, rancher, South Seas adventurer, war reporter and bon viveur were yet to come. He published his first book when he was 24 and was only 40 when he died. London was a swinger, but no slacker.
There's little in Kershaw's Life that isn't already in Andrew Sinclair's Jack, pub- lished in 1978 (and not, as Kershaw claims, 1977), although contemporary mores allow Kershaw's account to be generally spicier and more explicit. Kershaw explores in some detail, for example, the evidence of repressed homosexuality in London's nov- els, particularly in The Sea-Wolf (which Kershaw or his editors mistakenly call The Sea Wolf), and pulls no punches in his description of London's relationship with his second-wife, Charmian:
At last, here was a woman who adored forni- cation, expected Jack to make her climax, and to do so frequently, and who didn't burst into tears when the sadist in him punched her in the mouth.
Like Sinclair, Kershaw at times drifts into fiction and fantasy — 'Beside him at the production line other children buckled down and accepted their fate, resigned to a future of mind-numbing labour' — and he has a tendency towards careless talk and amateur psychologising. Explaining how London developed his philosophy of the superiority of the white-skinned Western races, he describes, in characteristically garbled tenses, how London's mother Flora `raised Jack with the belief that "dark- skinned races are not to be trusted". He will never be able to shake this monkey off his back.' The phrasing here is both clumsy and inappropriate.
But then London was prone to such slop- piness himself. With a 1,000 words a day habit, he churned out more than 50 books over a 16-year period. Of course, only a tiny proportion of this output was any good; even the best books are raw or undercooked. The Call of the Wild (1903), for example, is a ludicrously sentimental story about a dog called Buck (Tuck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing'), and John Barleycorn (1911) is a self-pitying piece of semi-autobiographical propaganda about the evils of alcohol.
Still, the achievement stands, and per- haps only the aspiring and the self-educat- ed can really appreciate its true meaning and its profound self-contradictions — the aggressive self-assertion and accompanying uncertainties, the clumsiness and the mani- acal hunger for knowledge, the death-wish and the will to survive. Only the middle classes view writing as a vocation. For oth- ers, like London, it's a career, or it's noth- ing. 'I prefer living to writing,' he wrote to Alice Lyndon in 1909. He made the right choice.
Unfortunately, London's lust for life eventually destroyed his art. Like the mid- dle-aged Orson Welles dragging himself round the talk-shows and flogging Paul Masson wines, London in later life was a pitiful figure: physically huge, bloated from over-eating, reduced to endorsing cigars and breath-mints and advertising gentle- men's clothing. He died in 1916 on a Cali- fornian ranch, his dream home into which he'd poured thousands of his hard-earned dollars. It's still not clear whether he com- mitted suicide, or whether he simply gorged and drugged and overworked him- self to death. The books are merely a residue — the marc, and the mark, of a life hard-pressed, and well spent.
`Look kids – your dad's made the front page'
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