Related News
Biography tells rollicking, good tale
Print Edition
The superficial reader “will get the love story & the adventure,” Jack London wrote, in 1903, of the story that would become “The Sea-Wolf,” “while the deeper reader will get all of this, plus the bigger thing lying underneath.” These are the typically blunt words of a writer who seemed to think of his work in terms of purchase value. Here, he might have been describing his own life: much adventure, a sort of love story, a weird bang of a finish. In a new biography by the London scholar Earle Labor, the “bigger thing” has a harder time coming out: Perhaps it doesn’t exist.
As a rollicking, turn-of-the-century tale in his own style, the London story reads well. Born in 1876, London was the illegitimate child of a philandering astrologist (who later, in a creative move, denied paternity by claiming impotence).
He came of age in a golden era of political corruption, when the octopus of the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly still held the West Coast in its grip.
Growing up, he found himself in places where human cruelty flourished, was formed by witness to it and developed a rare aptitude for conveying it in fiction. By the age of 22, he’d worked as an oyster pirate, served time in prison, ridden the rails as a tramp, joined a seal-hunting schooner bound for Japan, marched with Coxey’s army of the unemployed and searched for gold in the Klondike rush. In an effort to make a go at writing (the goal of which, ironically, was to help him avoid a life of hard labor), he turned these firsthand experiences into profitable novels and stories, among them the brilliant “The Sea-Wolf,” “The Call of the Wild,” “Martin Eden” and the nonfiction “The People of the Abyss.”
By his mid-30s, he’d established himself as one of the most popular storytellers in a genre he helped create: a particularly violent style of naturalism in which one man battles the cruel, capricious ways of both human nature and Mother Nature, and often loses. By 40, he’d settled at his Beauty Ranch in Glen Ellen, California, where he would feast for a time on a two-mallard-a-day diet (a delicacy) before dying of uremia in November 1916.
The final frame reveals a person perhaps not innately contradictory but forced, by his time, into contradiction: London as both lawbreaker and abider, no sooner giving up poaching oysters from the San Francisco Bay than taking a job with something called the California Fish Patrol, arresting the very sort of person he used to be. He was caught early between the warring forces of socialism and capitalistic success, a magnet at each pole. He became, consequently, both a dedicated socialist and a dedicated maker of money in the capitalist style. His personal life was fraught with the same unconscious tensions as his politics.
Yet fascination, in the London case, is not exactly a bridge to empathetic engagement. Interest in the man as artist is hard to begin with, thanks to the dated nature of his work. But there are points of serious interest to latch on to, ultimately: the troubled relationship to success, the problems with capitalism, the issue of being born into an especially awkward, unemotional and corrupt moment in American history.
But the “bigger thing” remains submerged, while the tip of the iceberg we get is only interesting in bizarre flashes. The invention remains more interesting than the inventor, and has the same fish-out-of-water problem from being scrutinized in a century not its own.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
