Jack London
From Philosopedia
London, Jack (12 January 1876 - 22 November 1916)
London, who wrote Call of the Wild (1903), was a novelist with a humanist viewpoint, according to Corliss Lamont, who liked his socialistic outlook.
The “bastard son of a wandering astrologer [William Chaney] whom he never saw” and of a Welsh farm girl [Flora Wellman, who later married John London, whose name was given to Jack], London started out as a gold-seeker in the first Klondike rush, a newspaper correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War, and in 1914 a war correspondent in Mexico.
His crude Call of the Wild and White Fang (1906), both of which show empathy with animals, are more complex than some of his Soviet admirers appreciated or his English detractors granted. In the former, Buck - an offspring of a St. Bernard and a Scotch shepherd dog - is stolen in California and shipped to the Klondike where he is trained as a sledge dog. Loyal to his new master, John Thornton, Buck wins a wager by dragging a thousand-pound load on a sledge. But when Indians murder Thornton, Buck responds to the call of the wild, abandoning humans and returning to a wolf pack.
The other novel tells the story of White Fang, offspring of an Indian wolf dog and a wolf, whose Indian owner had tormented him to make him more savage but whose new owner subdues him by kindness.
London liked Marx as well as Nietzsche, finding their diametrically opposed theories of value both in his writing and in his personal outlook. London’s freethought is most evident in Before Adam (1907). “I am a hopeless materialist,” London once declared. “I see the soul as nothing else than the sum of activities of the organism plus personal habits - plus inherited habits, memories, experiences, of the organism. I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.”
Critic Scott L. Malcomson has written that “London wrestled with the implications of individualism. He wrote in a 1905 letter of having ‘recently emerged’ from the Nietzsche ‘sickness.’ The fight against individualism became an article of faith for him. ‘I have been more stimulated by Nietzsche than by any other writer in the world. At the same time I have been an intellectual enemy to Nietzsche. Both Martin Eden and The Sea Wolf were indictments by me of the Nietzschean philosophy of the superman.”
Socialism, however, provided little more than a placebo for the Nietzsche sickness. In his “How I became a Socialist,” London took the position that individuals would convert to socialism out of a terror of remaining in the lower class. Of this Malcomson remarks, “Hatred of one’s class position is probably not the best way to build class solidarity.”
When eighteen, London had experienced how strong men much like himself could be brutalized by an all-powerful, unforgiving system he called “John Law” and which punished poverty. He was arrested in Niagara Falls 29 June 1894 on a charge of vagrancy, for the police had commenced a crackdown on vagrants who were alleged to be giving the city a bad name. The Buffalo Courier headlined its story, “Swarms of Dude Hoboes,” reporting that “[t]hese fellows are not deserving of charity as they wear good clothing and one fellow had a valuable gold watch and several gold rings. The authorities are bound to rid the city of these gentlemen.” One of the thirteen cases cleared from the docket was “John Lunden.” Young London was handcuffed to a tall black prisoner, shackled to the remainder of the troop of convicted vagrants, and unceremoniously led through the streets of Niagara Falls. After a thirty-day sentence, he and a fellow prisoner panhandled some change in Buffalo, went to a German saloon which his new friend wanted to rob, and London made a quick exit, jumping from the men’s room window in the back of the saloon. He then hopped a freight train and returned to California. Until the day of his premature death, London maintained that he was not allowed to plead guilty or not guilty. Reporter David Florek has speculated that London’s jailing may have inspired his description of Buck, the canine hero of Call of the Wild:
- Then the rope was removed and he was flung into a cagelike crate. There he lay for the remainder of the weary night, nursing his wrath and wounded pride. He could not understand what it all meant. What did they want with him, these strange men? Why were they keeping him pent up in this narrow crate? He did not know why, but he felt oppressed by the vague sense of impending calamity. Several times during the night he sprang to his feet when the shed door rattled. . . .
According to the police docket, London said he was single, had a mother and father who were living, listed his occupation as “sailor,” and said his religion was “atheist.” On another occasion, London was an arson suspect. In 1910 upon becoming famous but broken in health and frayed in spirit, he planned a house to be called Wolf House at Glen Ellen, a few miles north of San Francisco. Its two-story living room ran the length of the 15,000-square-foot U-shaped house, and it was built around a spring-fed pool stocked with fish. “It will be a happy house—or else I’ll burn it down,” he once wrote in an essay (published in The House Beautiful, 1960). Just days before he was to move in, the house went up in flames. London was one of several suspects. A few weeks prior he had insured the place for $6,000., a small amount inasmuch as it was estimated to have been worth $80,000 at the time.
However, in 1980 Professor Robert N. Anderson of San Jose State University wrote that workers polishing a wooden mantle had left oil-soaked rags in the dining room, that deprived of circulating air they heated to the point that they started smoking, and that they eventually caught fire. An alcoholic, London committed suicide at the age of forty.
His plaintive epitaph, THE STONE THE BUILDERS REJECTED, is near the burial plot in Sonoma, California.
{Buffalo News, 26 June 1994; CE; CL; JM; RAT; TYD}
