The Contradictory Sides of Jack London

Jack London had contradictory sides in that one did not "talk" to the other, but before that a brief sketch of his life is needed. He was a brilliant man, brilliant but uneducated. Forced to work grueling jobs to support his mother and family, he had no time for schooling, and when he did return to high school he had sailed the Pacific in a schooner, tramped across America with Kellys’ Army, masses of the unemployed converging on Washington, and been thrown in jail for being a bum.

He looked on his high school classmates and could hear the innocence in their questions about freedom and democracy. He had grown up under the ruthless thumb of the robber barons of the early Twentieth Century. Feeling he must better himself, he attended a semester at University of California, Berkeley, after cramming for entrance exams under tutelage of his first wife, Bess Maddern, but became bored and left. Nobody there knew about life as he did.

At age thirteen, in 1889, he worked 12 to 18 hours a day in a cannery. He knew child labor before laws against child labor existed. Life for him was continual battle, and so at sixteen he found nothing wrong with becoming an oyster ­­­­pirate, sailing his sloop to steal them in San Francisco Bay.

During the Gold Rush he borrowed money from his stepsister Eliza to buy supplies and sailed with her husband, Captain Shephard, to the Klondike to strike it rich. Once there, London and the Captain stood at the bottom of Chilkoot Pass watching a steady line of men tied together, weighted down with boxes of provisions, trudging wearily up it. Both had been warned against going over it. Shephard turned back. London reached the other side and, bone weary, trudged on the Dead Horse Trail strewn with animal carcasses, then to the Klondike. His health ruined, he returned just as poor to San Francisco after rafting in freezing waters down the Yukon and after a desperate winter in a log cabin. He went there to get rich and came back with a bad case of skin rot.

A distinction is often made between literature and pot boilers. While he had little interest in writing literature, he did write tales that stand as literature although he wrote for money. He had one ambition—to avoid wage slavery and its soul-deadening demands in textile factories. He looked at the swells on Market Street with their fancy coats and vests, homburg hats, and high-button patent-leather shoes, and thought they had it made. He didn’t have their chances in life and could see only one way out. Write. Write and make lots of money.

He wrote, and was rejected. He wrote and was again rejected. After countless rejections he became discouraged until he sold one short story, which renewed his ambition. He kept writing and his major success came with Call of The Wild, a novella still regarded as London’s masterpiece.

Given his impoverished background, he believed he must struggle to survive, and he found an ideology for it in Herbert Spencer's rendering of Darwin.

His contradictory sides. Call of The Wild reveals London’s view of life, the world given him by his birth. Struggle to survive. He read Darwin on natural selection and Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism with its twisted view of evolution that justified burgeoning Capitalism—survival of the elite fittest. J.P. Morgan and other robber barons read Spencer and found “scientific” justification for their greed and exploitation of the masses. Spencer told them they deserved what they got because they were the best. London saw in himself a man who had to be fit to survive. Among his many books, strength is paramount. In Call of the Wild the dog Buck must learn to be strong to survive as he changes from domestic animal to one suited for the wilderness in which he finds himself. In The Sea Wolf a literary critic, Humphrey van Weden—an effeminate name to London— is a survivor of an ocean collision and is rescued by Wolf Larsen, powerful and amoral. London also read Friedrich Nietzsche, with the philosopher's disparagement of the morality of the meek and praise of the Übermensch, or superman. Larsen is a prototype for Nietzsche's superman. In London we find a celebration of the individual, strong, self-reliant, and above the weak masses. Yet in Martin Eden, we find a criticism of individualism. Martin Eden's life is driven by the typical London struggle as he seeks status and success but finds they are empty. He has been blind to the community that holds humankind together. Without fellow-feeling, his life itself becomes empty.

From Spencer, London took a message. He had personally experienced horrible, life-sapping days behind factory machines, his ears ringing with their noise, and he turned away from it to socialism.He awaited the revolution of the working class, when the masses rose up against their chains. He joined the Socialist Party, wrote for its publications.

For all that, Jack had not thought through the disconnect between the one and the other, between survival of the fittest and socialism.

The first ideology justifies that the elite survive; in the other, the masses overturn the elite.

This disconnect can be found in his personality. In key aspects he was not in touch with himself. On one side was the primal man, believing only the strong survive. On the other was a human being deeply sympathetic to the hungry, weary, and exploited, and also deeply in need of love—a man who supported his family and gave generously to anybody in need who wrote him. In later years he turned from socialism, then resigned the party and devoted his efforts to Beauty Ranch, at Glen Ellen near Sonoma, verged on the Napa Valley, and north of San Francisco. He was an environmentalist before there were environmentalists. He wanted to show what could be done to raise food without exploiting the soil. He had prize cattle, bulls, and horses. An atheist, his first religion had been Spencer and socialism, and he turned to his new religion, earth itself.

London gradually descended into ill health and finally death at forty in 1916. In the autobiographical John Barleycorn he wrote of his struggle with alcoholism. Jack ate several very rare ducks—read bloody ducks—daily. Maybe because of the ducks he died of uremic poisoning. He had been schooled in the College of Hard Knocks and espoused strength before adversity but something was lacking in the world—like Martin Eden he found no comfort in it. Given his stark view of life, no wonder that he thought of suicide many times before he died. Morphine was a standard pain reliever then and some have a different explanation in that when he reached for it to relieve his pain, he intentionally over-dosed so that he would suffer no longer.

Perhaps, too, he would have found reason to live had his two sides "talked" to one another so that he could accept that he need not continually test his strength against adversity. In gentleness we accept ourselves and can prosper internally.