Why this book: As a boy, I read a number of Jack London short stories as well as his novels The Cruise of the Dazzler, White Fang, and of course Call of the Wild.   I re-read Call of the Wild about 10 years ago and loved it – (reviewed here) the sled-dogs were a great metaphor for a SEAL platoon.  In the meantime, I’ve become something more of an outdoorsman myself, and have spent some time studying Nietzsche who I knew was an inspiration to Jack London.  Jack London was reputed to be a somewhat larger than life but flawed character who died young.   Intrigued, I decided to find out more

Summary in 3 Sentences: Jack London grew up very poor in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1800s, and with very little support from his family, was largely on his own in a very tough world to survive and get by.  Blessed with an intrepid spirit, he confidently dove into the toughest environments and toughest challenges, and with pluck, grit and an uncanny ability to get along with people, he managed to survive and prevail.   After many amazing adventures, and many false starts as a writer, he eventually became one of the most successful and best recognized authors in the world, but like many other such great adventurers, his toughness and skill at managing physical challenges and adversity did not translate into a well-managed life in the labyrinth of civilization, and his generosity and appetite for always wanting more, eventually were his undoing.

My Impressions: What a life! In his 40 years, Jack London lived more than almost anyone in a lifetime of twice as many years.  His is truly a rags-to-riches story.  His adventurous spirit compelled him to take on one risky adventure after another and his warm and congenial personality helped him to get along easily with people at every level of the social spectrum.  His life included such a wide variety of adventures with such a wide variety of people, he was never at a loss for material for his next story.   He was also blessed with a great imagination which gave him the ability to create a variety of compelling stories based not only on what he experienced, but also stories built with variations on what might have happened.

He was an avid reader and student. When he had no money, he haunted the libraries. When he did have money, he built a great personal library.  What he couldn’t experience himself, he experienced vicariously through the writings of others. He studied their styles. And then created his own.

Among the more amazing things he undertook, and survived, were:  as a 16 year old he was an independent oyster “pirate” with his own boat and live-in female mistress;  when that didn’t work out, he became part of the California Fish Patrol in San Francisco Bay; later he traveled across the Pacific working on an ocean going Seal hunting schooner; during the depression of 1893, he worked at a wide variety of grueling jobs at slave ages; he spent a year riding the rails as a tramp, begging food, living in hobo camps, and just getting by.  At age 20 he came back to the Bay Area and went back to and graduated high school, but as badly as he wanted to,  he couldn’t go to university – he had to work to support his mother.  All this time he was writing and submitting his stories to various magazines.   Eventually, his unique writing style and the amazing stories he wrote began to be noticed, and slowly, he was able to make a living from writing.

His fame grew – from his many short stories and then from his novels, most famously The Call of the Wild.  He and his writing eventually were in great demand, he was paid well for his work, and making a living was no longer a challenge.  But managing his money and resources was.  From the early 1900s until his death in 1916, he published an enormous amount of work, from novels, to autobiographical pieces to a large number of short stories.

London always struggled with money.  In his early years he had none, was often on the verge of starvation, and lived from hand to mouth.  His need for money drove him to write prolifically.  When he eventually became famous and well-paid for his work, he spent considerably more than he made, became recklessly extravagant, and was always in debt, which again forced him to continue writing and submitting work for publication at an amazing pace.   He was by nature trusting and generous, and was taken advantage of not only by unscrupulous dealers, but also by his friends.   He was never able to get himself out from under financial pressure – as soon as he got a significant sum, he paid off his debts, and then took on another hugely expensive endeavor, for which he did not manage costs and expenses well. And so, the debt continued.

This biography by Irving Stone was written in the mid 1930s just 20 years after London’s death, when most of those who knew Jack London well were still alive. Stone was given access to a huge trove of London’s letters and documents, and was able to conduct extensive interviews with many of those closest to Jack London when he lived.  Irving Stone makes clear in his book that he was a great admirer of  Jack London – and indeed there is much to admire about him.  But he also describes London’s foibles and failings, though it does seems he is careful to not too aggressively go after him or some of those who did not serve London well – as many of those were still alive  It was a different time, and London had only been dead two decades.

Who was Jack London?  I’ll share a couple of paragraphs out of Sone’s book  that give you a small taste of Stone’s writing style and a sense for the character he wrote about (w page numbers from my old signet paperback, for my own reference)

He had a strong gregarious instinct, he liked to rub against his own kind, yet in society he saw himself as a fish out of water.  Because of his background, he took to conventionality uneasily, rebelliously.  He was used to saying what he thought, nothing more nor less.  The hard hand of adversity, laid upon him at the age of ten, had left him sentiment but destroyed sentimentality. It had made him practical so that he was sometimes known as hard, stern, and uncompromising; it had made him believe that reason was mightier than imagination, that the scientific man was superior to the emotional man. “Take me this way” he wrote to Anna Strunsky in the early days of their acquaintanceship, “a stray guest, a bird of passage splashing with salt-rimmed wings through a brief moment of your life – a rude blundering bird, used to large airs and great spaces, unaccustomed to the amenities of confined existence.” (p106)

Hargrave records that Jack was intrinsically kind, irrationally generous, a prince of a good fellows to be with.  He had a gentleness that survived the roughest associations.  In argument when his opponent had caught himself in the web of his own illogic, Jack threw back his head and gave vent to infectious laughter.  Hargrave’s parting estimate of Jack is too genuine to be tampered with. “Many a long night Jack and I outlasting the vigil of the others, sat before the blazing spruce logs and talked the hours away.  A brave figure of a man he was…An outdoor man, in short a real man, a man’s man.  He had a mental craving for truth. He applied one test to religion, to economics, to everything: What is truth?  He could think great thoughts. One could not meet him without feeling the impact of a superior intellect.  He faced life with superb assurance, and faced death serenely imperturbable. ” (p 78-79)

He loved Nature tenderly for all the beauties there were in her, but above all, he loved her for her force, the terrific strength with which she dwarfed all mankind. (p 70)

There were four primary periods of London’s life that he turned to, to mine his experiences for his short stories and novels: 1. his time on the waterways around San Francisco as a young sailor, oyster pirate and then as a Fish Patrol official; 2. His time as an Able Bodied Seaman on a sealing schooner in the Pacific; 3. His time as a tramp criss-crossing the United States looking for short term work, food, and hanging out with the other tramps. 4. (perhaps most importantly) his time in the Klondike during the Alaska Goldrush, and 5. his sailing voyage in his sailing ship The Snark to Hawaii, the South Pacific,  and Southeast Asia.

London was an ardent and very outspoken socialist – and seeing how he grew up mostly with the poor and disenfranchised, it is not hard to understand.  He was extremely well read,  and very disciplined in his reading and his writing. It is interesting and ironic that for London, Nietzsche was a major source of much personal inspiration.  Nietzsche was an ardent individualist and hated institutional constraints on the freedom and self-expression of the strong, which characterize the socialism that London advocated for. London was aware of the incongruity but it didn’t seem to bother him.  Perhaps he assumed based on his life up to that point, that with enough bravado and courage, an ardent individualists like himself would always find a way to buck the system.

The last several years of his life read like a tragedy –  he was being consumed by hangers-on, taken advantage of by those he trusted, and there were so many who wanted a piece of him and his wealth. He struggled to maintain his larger-than-life persona and the life-style he enjoyed – the wealthy man of the people, generous to a fault, hail-fellow-well-met, drinker, a visionary for whom no task or project was too great. When one of his great dreams – the building of the Beauty Ranch house in Sonoma County – literally went up in flames just as it was being completed, his spirit seemed broken.  The sparkle left his eye, his drinking increased, his health failed and he seemed to go into a deep depression.  He was already ill and in pain from a variety of causes, his poor health was exacerbated by his alcohol, and he was taking morphine to help him sleep. One morning he didn’t wake up.  There was a long standing rumor of suicide, but most current biographers dispute that.

Irving Stone doesn’t directly address London’s  alcoholism as a major vice – I believe in part due to the sensitivities of the period when he was writing the book .  But subsequent biographies do, and most attribute his decline in large measure to his drinking.  If you see parallels in this regard to Hemingway and even Steinbeck, you are not alone.

After reading the book, I read 4 of his short stories: The King of the Greeks, The White Silence,  Grit of Women, and Love of Life.   Common themes among those four are common themes in much of London’s work: great persistence and struggle in the face of great adversity, courage, loyalty, and the power and beauty of nature.  I would like to read more –  I find appealing London’s love of adventure and adventurous people, his fascination with those who are willing to get outside their comfort zones, take on risk and seek adventure – and become better for it.  His stories explore the toughness and the tenderness of the human spirit.  And I loved his positive tenacity, his playfulness, his vitality, and his exuberance for life.

There are probably more current biographies than this one, but they certainly build on Irving Stone’s research written so soon after London died.  It is my understanding that this was the first of the truly serious biographies of London.  It is a fascinating read and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  If anyone who reads this would like to join me in a further exploration of Jack London, and would like to read more of his short stories or perhaps one of his lesser known novels, please contact me.