The Summit of Life

At his death in November 1916, London was wracked by alcohol, morphine, bad kidneys, and possibly lupus, a mixture of afflictions mostly of his own doing. Yet in a photograph taken a few days earlier he looks about as fit as ever: wavy dark hair, floppy tie, riding boots, riddling smile. He was 40—twice married, once divorced, with a wife, two daughters, and a motherly stepsister, all of whom he loved long and generously, also jealously.

Born in San Francisco in 1876 to a mother who staged séances to turn a buck, his paternity a puzzle, London went to work at 10 in saloons and bowling alleys to help support the family. While a teenager he worked the oyster beds of the Bay Area from all angles: first as a pirate looting oysters, then on the “Fish Patrol” out to nab pirates, on the principle that it takes one to know one. He fired boilers, toiled in a cannery and a steam laundry, and shipped on a sealing ship for Japan. During the 1890s gold rush he endured an epic winter in the Klondike and, later on, would sail the South Seas—finding there, like his forerunner Herman Melville, both a purgatory and paradise.

Out of this toil and adventure came hundreds of stories and essays and some 50 books. Jack London became the most-read author in America, though his formal education was spotty at best. He had lasted only a single term at the University of California before his funds ran out. He then schooled himself, unevenly, on a self-imposed forced march through the Oakland Public Library, with an emphasis on Darwinian and Marxist theories and the survival-of-the-fittest positivism of Herbert Spencer. Query: What might have become of him, and what would American letters have lost, if student loans and MFAs had been handy, or literary salons like Gertrude Stein’s in Paris? One likes to think that London would have taken a quick look and lit out for the territory.

Philosophically, London shares much with Joseph Conrad, whom he venerated. Their literary themes overlap: the sea, the primitive in human nature, political insurrection. The assertive romanticism of London’s life and work recalls the character Stein in Lord Jim. When a man is born, says Stein, he falls into a dream as into the sea. If he tries to climb out, he drowns. “The way,” Stein insists, “is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.” This code of individualist bravura echoes through London’s work, often clashing with his socialist avowals.

The idea plays out in his one sure masterpiece, The Call of the Wild (1903). Schoolboys, and maybe girls, used to devour this atavistic canine novel practically whole. I first wolfed it down one evening before bedtime, skipping, on television, Our Miss Brooks with the statuesque Eve Arden, who looked not a bit like Miss Pickering. In the novel, Buck, a ranch dog lazing in the California sun, is kidnapped to the Klondike and slapped into sled harness, where he’s soon at one with the icy wastes and his primal soul:

Call me Buck. Was then and still am. The novel is wrongly understood to be only for children. I’m cheered, though, to learn from my cousin, a school librarian, that Buck’s saga is still on her shelves, and even on the curriculum for seventh-graders in her district.

The beast yowls again in The People of the Abyss (1903), an account of six weeks the author spent in London’s East End—donning rags, haunting the workhouses, sleeping on slimy streets. If such misery and squalor were civilization, then

But his leftist bent is clear in the book; already he had run (and lost) on the Socialist ticket for mayor of Oakland.

How to square London’s heady individualism with a forced leveling of condition—how both could prevail, symbiotically—was never settled in his work. By his own lights, he became a socialist during a cross-country trip at age 18 with Kelly’s Army of the unemployed en route to Washington. This he recounts in The Road (1907), a backhanded compliment to Theodore Roosevelt’s creed of the strenuous life. The book is lively, the journey a lark. As a lefty travelogue, it far surpasses John Steinbeck’s cramped and crotchety (and partly imaginary) Travels with Charley. Diary in hand, London hoboes his way from Oakland to Council Bluffs, Iowa, flamboyantly outfoxing the railways’ dogged enforcers. At stops on the way he “throws his feet”—goes begging door-to-door—confiding in the reader that he has no intent of working a lick.

When a duo of old ladies sits him down to eat, he snows them with lurid tales of life on the road, his true apprenticeship as a writer. On the Des Moines River, where Kelly’s Army becomes a navy in makeshift boats, shaking down farmers and townsfolk for food, London sprints ahead of the fleet to glom the choicest spoils for his own loyal crew.

Socialism plays no obvious part in these escapades until Niagara Falls, where he’s jailed on vagrancy charges. For 30 days he busies himself with yardbird racketeering: dealing tobacco and swindling other inmates. His sentence he considers unjust, hence his socialist conversion. By any reckoning of the transcontinental crime spree he’s just completed, he merely gets his deserts.

The most political of London’s major works, The Iron Heel (1908), is also the weakest. A fable of the fascist putdown of a socialist revolution, it stars a hero with a portfolio much like the author’s, a lion of the masses with a tumescent name for the ages. Ernest Everhard has not only his radical principles but also a teary lover to narrate his story. It’s a humdrum Marxist homily with a procession of grisly visuals at the close, when the mob of the underclass, stripped of the right to bear arms (that much rings true) is massacred in the streets of Chicago by the rooftop machine guns of the oligarchs:

The literary self-consciousness evident in those lines mars the whole project. What London meant by the book is hard to make out; the dismal ending rattled, even incensed, many of his followers. It does seem to foreshadow his eventual scuttling of socialist tropes.

If jail had made London a Marxist, alcohol made him a “materialist monist.” The illusions of God’s existence and man’s afterlife were shown him by the “white logic” of drink—which turned him back to more drink for succor. So he writes, or preaches, in John Barleycorn (1913), the “alcoholic memoir” in whose opening he rides on horseback to cast his vote for women’s suffrage in California, hoping that women would bring about prohibition. His materialism clops also through the autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909), depicting the struggle of a self-educated young individualist to become a writer. A literary success at last, the hero, despairing at life’s lack of meaning, drops himself off in the sea—the destructive element, in essence an ocean of booze.

With and without the help of drink, so much went wrong. With his wife Charmian, London envisioned a seven-year voyage around the world on the Snark, a sailboat he had designed. Out of this troubled trip would come the story collections that most intrigued me, South Sea Tales (1911) and A Son of the Sun (1912). The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 delayed their departure; then, in the Solomon Islands, they bumped up against the native islanders, still cannibalistic, and the blackbirders, slave ships out to “recruit” labor. In a humid climate dripping with infection, the Londons and their crew fell sick with dysentery, malaria, and festering sores. As related in The Cruise of the Snark (1911), they gave it up after only five months, steaming home from Australia.

He had acquired a vast ranch in the Sonoma Valley, or Valley of the Moon—and what was all this adventuring but a quest for home? Wolf House, a kind of rustic precursor of William Randolph Hearst’s mansion at San Simeon, was far along in construction when, one night, a fire reduced it to ruins, both Londons watching in tears. His other home, the ramparts, also flamed out: In 1916 he resigned from the Socialist party, soured by its failure to fight for the revolution. What had held him all along may have been the struggle, not the cause.

From then on, his shelter was Charmian alone. She fed and nursed him, detecting his flirtation with Carl Jung’s poetics of the collective unconscious. He underlined Jung’s paraphrase of the counsel of Jesus to Nicodemus: “Think not carnally or thou art carnal, but think symbolically and then thou art spirit.” His late stories, notably “The Red One” published two years after his death, in which a scientist discovers a lethal deity in the Solomons, reflect that stirring.

What, before his decline, was the “ecstasy that marks the summit of life”? I have my own notion. Early in that illusory seven-year voyage, he navigated the desolate 2,000-mile crossing from Hawaii to Nuku Hiva in the remote Marquesas. Only after starting did he discover that the crossing was practically impossible, the currents and trade winds working against it all the way. It took him two months, and he must have felt immense pleasure in the landfall on Nuku Hiva, a primeval nirvana he had longed to see since reading, as a boy, Melville’s account of jumping ship there and breaking bread with the chummy epicurean cannibals of the Taipivai valley. The population had now shrunk, and together, the Londons cantered horses up wild slopes of coconut palm and flowering hibiscus, the blue ocean spread out below like a blessing.

Tracking London, as he had tracked Melville, my wife and I made our way a few years ago to Nuku Hiva. With an anthropologist from Easter Island, we hiked along a rocky stream, past stone platforms where Marquesans once had woven their palmy houses, and then climbed a steep trail—kept open mostly by wild pigs—and crossed a ridge and skidded down to a sparse little village with a pink slice of beach and a colonnade of palms. More than once along the way, I’d caught a faraway misty glimpse of a couple on horseback, scrabbling for the ridgetop. I saw what I saw. My wife, not buying it, nudged the anthropologist. With a shrug and a wink, he bent to pick up a shell.

Parker Bauer is a writer in Florida.