Redskin in the Parlor

By Melvin Maddocks

JACK: A BIOGRAPHY OF JACK LONDON by Andrew Sinclair

Harper & Row; 297pages; $12.95

JACK LONDON: THE MAN, THE WRITER, THE REBEL by Robert Barltrop Urizen Books/Pluto Press; 206 pages; $10

IRVING STONE'S JACK LONDON:

SAILOR ON HORSEBACK (A BIOGRAPHY) AND 28 SELECTED JACK LONDON STORIES Doubleday; 777 pages; $12.95 Jack London was the stuff of dust-jacket writers' dreams. His life read better than other novelists' plots. Before he was out of his teens he had, among other things, shipped on a sealing expedition to the Bering Sea, worked 14-hour days in a California cannery, ridden the hobo rails cross-country and served 30 days in a Buffalo jail for vagrancy. A heavy drinker by the age of 16 with a voracious appetite for undercooked meat and slightly overripe women, he gave every promise of going on to become a late-19th century rebel without a cause--one of those frontiersmen with no frontier whose energies slowly dissipate in an aimless barroom brawl with life.

Then in 1897, at 21, Jack London, along with a small army of fellow American misfits, took off for the Klondike. A year later he returned with only $4.50 worth of gold dust, but he had struck a mother lode in himself. He discovered he was a writer. After a few short stories in the manner of an Alaskan Rudyard Kipling, he scribbled a rattling yarn about a sled dog named Buck who, when his master was killed, turned wild in a snarling if romantic rejection of civilization. The Call of the Wild sold in the millions and made a myth of its mythmaker. Now, with the publication of two new biographies and the republication of a third, the question is: How seriously must a 1977 reader take Jack London?

London came to take himself very seriously indeed. He thought of himself as a socialist, though he was the highest-paid writer of his day--making over $70,000 a year, owning four houses at one time plus a $30,000 ketch named the Snark.* Worse, as a Darwinian, London got his theories of evolution all mixed up with his notions of Nordic supremacy. The white man, he insisted, could stand the cold better than the Indian could, and in the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries fight of 1910 he rooted for Jeffries to "wipe the golden smile off the nigger's face."

Unfortunately, London's two latest biographers and would-be revivalists--both Englishmen--take London the self-made intellectual almost as seriously as he took himself. Andrew Sinclair, an ex-Cambridge don, has written probably the fairest account of London's life. British understatement proves to be just what the subject requires. But when it comes to London's books, Sinclair labors. Prophets are fashionable these days, so he recommends that The Iron Heel be reread as a prediction of fascism and argues that London's inside-dog stories anticipate the behavioral theories of Konrad Lorenz.

Robert Barltrop--an ex-boxer and historian of the British Socialist Party --has written a vivid summary of London's early years. But he worries continually about whether his man was a good Marxist or not. Meaning: Is Martin Eden a crude but effective indictment of the bourgeoisie, or just a disguised autobiography whose motive was spite?

London deserves selective rereading for more elementary reasons. The late Philip Rahv once divided American writers into palefaces and redskins. Like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain before him and Ernest Hemingway after him, Jack London was a redskin. He swaggered out of the Californian and Alaskan frontiers to confound the Eastern palefaces balancing their teacups on the Genteel Tradition. With all necessary rudeness he informed them about the primal facts of man and other beasts. Life was a wilderness, and what one fought for with tooth and claw was survival.

The last ten years of London's life reduced him to self-parody. The young tough of the San Francisco waterfront with a mystical faith in his body became a hypochondriac by the time he was 30. He mistook his smoker's cough for TB and a case of piles for a tumor. He tried to extend his legend by a disastrous voyage to the South Pacific on the Snark. He could hardly have survived at all without the help of his second wife Charmian, a strong-willed woman who won his heart by boxing with him.

He gave up the strenuous life (including walking) and ended up a paunchy man with bad kidneys, rheumatism, swollen ankles and insomnia, dosing himself on morphine, belladonna, heroin and strychnine. In his rather high-flown 1938 biography, Sailor on Horseback, Irving Stone, going with the best story, suggests that on the night of Nov. 21, 1916, Jack London, only 40, deliberately took an overdose of morphine. There can be no doubt that London was a classic case of self-destruction, American style. From the start his frantic greed for life signaled extraordinary terrors. In his best work-- The Call of the Wild, The One Thousand Dozen, To Build a Fire--the message still emerges like a stifled cry: nature intends to kill everything that lives, and will succeed in the end. Not always, not often, but now and then rocks, ice, dark night, implacable loneliness and the specter at the end of the trail--the nightmare of Jack London's life--also became his poetry.

-- Melvin Maddocks

* One of his several Oriental servants found him so unegalitarian that--just before he was fired--he asked London: "Will God have some beer?"

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