The Call of the Wild,
White Fang, & To Build a Fire
Modern Library; $7.95
The Valley of the Moon
Introduction by Kevin Starr
University of California Press; $14.95
Jack London's Golden State
Edited by Gerald Haslam
Heyday; $15.95
The aphorism that the prophet isn't appreciated in his own country might seem to fall woefully short when it comes to Jack London, the writer-prophet who was, in fact, the most popular, as well as the highest-paid, American author near the beginning of this century. Soon after his death at the age of 40, however, London was dislodged from his exalted position as top literary dog by younger talents like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who each followed the wild arc of his contradictory experience. Moreover, for much of the 20th century London has been far more admired in far-off places like the former Soviet Union than in the United States. Now, at the end of the century, London is largely unread and untaught in American high schools and colleges, and often ignored by the reading public at large. The prophet is indeed unappreciated at home, and even in Northern California where he was born and raised, perhaps because his passion for socialism, and his belief in the racial superiority of the white race seem muddled headed and embarrassing in a culture that demands that popular writers be political correct.
London's current status on the fringe of literary respectability seems to be changing once again. There's a new wonderful Jack London web site (sunsite.berkeley.edu/London) that is edited by SSU Professor Clarice Stasz, who is also the author of “American Dreamers: Charmian and Jack London.” There are also three new books that make it easier to find and to read London's work. The first volume is a collection of classic tales from the “Northland”- "The Call of the Wild," "White Fang," and "To Build a Fire" - which Modern Library included last year in its list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. (London was number 88, a long way behind James Joyce, William Faulkner and D.H. Lawrence.)The second volume is "The Valley of the Moon," an epic novel from 1913 that was originally serialized from April to December in Cosmopolitan Magazine before it fell entirely to the Cosmo girl. The third volume is "Jack London's Golden State," a compendium of fiction and non-fiction, edited with an introduction and a bibliography by Gerald Haslam. Reading these books you appreciate London not only as a progenitor of California literature, but as a creative genius who had the ability to turn his own protean life into the stuff of myth and legend. While his flaws are apparent in these three books, so are his strengths for telling dramatic tales with primal themes.
"The Call of the Wild," "White Fang," and "To Light a Fire" are the three works of London's that are most often associated with his name, and fans at home and abroad will have no trouble retelling them. To those who have never read London, the Modern Library volume is the most logical place to begin. "The Call of the Wild" and "White Fang" are, as London himself explained, companion pieces, each one the "antithesis" of the other. Both stories resound with breathtaking poetry and thought-provoking philosophy, and both stories are, of course, about the nature of human beings, including the complex being named Jack London, as well as about two polar-opposite canines. In case you haven't read the stories or don't remember them, let me say this: Buck, the protagonist in “The Call of the Wild,” is a domesticated dog from "the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley" who reverts to his feral past in the frozen Yukon. And White Fang is a wolf-dog from the Yukon who becomes tamed by "human kindness" in the "Southland." While these stories reflect the ideas and the values of muddle-headed social Darwinism they resonate with raw power and a sense of aesthetic beauty. I don't think that anyone who has ever read them is quite the same again.
"The Valley of the Moon," London's 1913 novel, is set entirely in Northern California - it begins in Oakland and ends in Sonoma Valley, and it takes place sometime between the 1906 earthquake and the outbreak of World War I. It's a swan-song of sorts by a man disillusioned with socialism who is searching for a new way of life and new ideals. The University of California Press has publicized it as "a road novel fifty years before Kerouac," hoping perhaps to ride the current popularity of books by Beat Generation authors. "The Valley of the Moon" does include a hefty section in which the two main characters, Billy and Saxon, travel around Northern California, but this is hardly a road novel in the current sense of the term. Unlike the Beats, Billy and Saxon walk on their own two feet.
And unlike the Beats, they want to settle down, sink roots, grow vegetables and raise horses, not go as fast as they can in search of existential adventure for its own sake. Billy and Saxon, who are hard-working refugees from the working class, are more like two upwardly mobile characters in a Horatio Alger story than the crazy hipsters in "On the Road."
Part of the charm of the novel is provided by the details of living in Northern California nearly 100 years ago. In Oakland, Billy and Saxon go to the "moving picture show" for entertainment. In Carmel, they harvest mussels and abalone and frolic with bohemians. In Sonoma County they buy 20 acres for $50 an acre (what a deal!) and set about raising horses and chickens, cultivating berries, making jams and having fun. I'm tempted to describe them as hybrid creatures somewhere between hippies and yuppies but that may be stretching the point.
Throughout the text there's an annoying litany of complaints about the newer immigrants from Southern Europe who are supplanting the old Anglo-Saxon settlers. In his introduction to “The Valley of the Moon,” California State Librarian Kevin Starr doesn't overlook the novel's "strong racist overtones," but he also argues that despite "its flaws and inconsistencies,” it appeals to “that dream of a better life which many call California." I would agree. As a refugee from the political turmoil of the 1960s who settled in Sonoma County in the 1970s, I identify with Billy and with Saxon. In fact, I'll take the bright, green richness of the countryside here over the sprawling, smudged cities of the Bay Area almost any day of the year.
“Jack London's Golden State,” which is deftly edited by Gerald Haslam, offers brief, tantalizing selections from the novels, including “The Sea-Wolf,” “Martin Eden,” and “The Iron Heel,” a futuristic fable about a brutal oligarchy and the rebel underground in America, that influenced George Orwell when he sat down to write his dystopia “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” There's also a delightful autobiographical essay that London wrote at age 30 in which he described his own haunting loneliness, his days on both sides of the law, and his early reading and writing. Though he doesn't describe his own birth outside of wedlock, which obviously shaped his feral orphan personality, he's candid about his habits and feelings. “I am not only careless and irregular, but melancholy,” he noted insightful about himself.
Haslam provides brief introductions to the individual selections and an introductory essay about London, whom he describes as a “literary outsider.” Indeed, it is in large part London's status as an outsider, and his role as a spokesman for other outsiders, that makes him so appealing, and that ensures that the call of Jack London will continue to reverberate. I guess I wouldn't want him to be too readily or too easily accepted by the mainstream. Perhaps the prophet ought not to be wholeheartedly appreciated in his own country.
A Tale of Two Readers: Kevin Starr and Gerald Haslam
On his death bed, Lenin's wife Krupskaya read him two Jack London short stories in a Russian translation, and while the Soviet leader loved one of them, he hated the other, which isn't surprising. Jack London's work is uneven and it elicits mixed responses, as many readers and critics have long noted. Kevin Starr, the California State Librarian, has surely read as much London as anyone else on the planet, and that's saying a lot since London wrote more than 50 books by the time he died in 1916 at the age of 40. Starr managed to get through his childhood and adolescence without reading a single book by London. "I didn't discover him until I was a graduate student at Harvard in the 1960s," he explains during a recent phone interview. "Then I soaked myself totally in London. I read everything he ever wrote and became mesmerized."
Starr has been monitoring the rise and fall of London's popularity over the course of the 20th century, and he suggests that while he has a cult-like status today among readers who offer total adulation, he has never been given the wider, fuller recognition in our culture that he genuinely deserves. "London ought to be in the same rank as Norris and Dreiser," Starr says. And he adds, "There is a protean talent to his engagement. He was a naturalist and an existentialist; he revealed the elemental life of human beings." Starr also feels that London will continue to be rediscovered and revisited by successive generations of readers. "London occupies a major place in California literature,” he says. “A great many people learn about the state by reading London' s work. They see the Golden State through his eyes."
Gerald Haslam, the editor of “Jack London's Golden State,” read "Call of the Wild" when he was still in high school, and he has gone on reading and rereading him ever since. He has also taught London at SSU, and has introduced several generations of students to his fiction and non-fiction. "I've noted that London's work is missing from a lot of recent anthologies of American literature," Haslam says ruefully. "He is over-looked today. He's outré from the point of view of a great many New York critics." Like Starr, Haslam has monitored the rise and fall of London's popularity and he observes that "He comes in and out of vogue."
Like many readers, Haslam himself prefers London's short stories to his novels. Get him going on the subject and he becomes passionate about “The Apostate,” a brilliant fable about a “perfect worker” who becomes a “perfect machine” and descends the ladder of evolution until he turns into a “sickly ape.” Haslam regards London as a prototype of one type of American author. “Like many others who came after him, he tried to synthesize two diverse instincts,” he explains. “London wanted to be both a tough guy and an intellectual and he never got it squared away.”
Though Haslam - like Starr - doesn't idealize London, he admires him tremendously. “He never fully realized the full dimensions of his talent,” he says. “Still, he's one of the truly great talents that America has produced.”