What to See in London

Whatto See in London CarolynJohnston. Jack London-An American Radical? Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. 205 +xviii pp. Stoddard Martin. California Writers: Jack London, JohnSteinbeck, The Tough Guys. London: Macmillan, 1983. 224 pp. Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, ed. Critical Essays on JackLondon. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983.298 + viii pp. CharlesN. Watson, Jr. The Novels of Jack London: A Reappra1~ml. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. 304+ xv pp. Gorman Beauchamp Sincehis death in 1916there has been no dearth of books on Jack London but most have been biographies. The tacit consensus seems to hold with Alfred Kazin that "The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived"; and the story that he lived all but obscured the stories that he wrote. Both his second wife, Charmian, and his elder daughter, Joan, offered their versions of the life in The Book ofJack London (1921)and Jack London andHis Times (1939),respectively. In addition, his rags-to-riches-to-remorse sagahas been rehearsed book-length about once every decade since: Irving Stone, Sailor on Horseback (1938); Philip Foner, Jack London: American Rebel (1947);Richard O'Connor ,Jack London: A Biography (1964);Franklin Walker, Jack London and the Klondike (1966); Andrew Sinclair, Jack: A Biography of Jack London (1977); and RussKingman,A Pictorial Biography ofJack London (1979).Only half way through the 80s, the accustomed quota ofLondon biography has already been met twice over: first, in Joan Hedrick's quirky psycho-biography, Solitary Comrade: Jack London and His Works (1982),which sets out to expose "the man who hid behind the celebrated public persona" not by reading his life into his work-the usual procedurebut his work into his life: transforming, that is, all his fictions into cryptobiography ; and second, in one of the works here under review, Carolyn Johnston's more standard, but also more sensible study, Jack London-An American Rebel?Whether this accelerating rate ofproduction in the LondonCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 1986, 69-80 70 Gorman Beauchamp bio industry will continue unabated or whether a saturation point approaches, I dare not hazard a guess; but even so fascinating a life as London's begins to pale after so many retellings. Besides, like most lives, it is depressing to read about. Ironically, given this attention to London the personality, until recently (the last dozen years or so) comparatively little attention was accorded to London the artist. There were, of course, numerous essays, some-like Kazin's in On Native Ground (1942),Maxwell Geismar's in Rebels and Ancestors(1953l and Charles Walcutt's in American Literary Naturalism (1956)-valuable assessments of London's literary artistry. The sort of sustained examination repeatedly undertaken of his life was not undertaken of his writing, however. until the 70s, with Earle Labor's Jack Lundon (1974) and James McClintock's White Logic (1975). With these studies, a renewed attention to London the artist began and it, too-as the works reviewed here attest-appears to be growing apace, redressing the biographical overbalance of the past. Before turning to a consideration of these works, I should, however, concede that the old-fashioned New Critic's distinction that I have drawn here between biography and criticism isdifficult to maintain in dealing with London, perhaps even impossible. Not only do the biographers generally offer criticism of the works (sometimes only en passant, sometimes in detail), but the critics generally invoke biography in their explications, since few writers are so palpably present in their fictions as London is in his. Not for him the sort of receding selfeffacement of a Henry James. Most of London's protagonists are idealized alter-egos. Mary McCarthy somewhere claims that most American novels are really ventriloquist acts, a claim particularly cogent in relation to London. Still-to switch metaphors-the dancer must be separated from the dance in so far as possible, since the dance, after all, is the legitimate subject of literary criticism. Of the four books under review here, the collection of essays edited by Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin provides ''The most substantial collection" -at least according to the General Editor of the series of which it is part- "ever published on...