Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography

Chapter 8."Mongrels" to "Young Wise Ones": On the Mexican Revolution and On the Makaloa Mat

EIGHT “Mongrels”to“YoungWiseOnes” OntheMexicanRevolutionand OntheMakaloaMat This page intentionally left blank 267 Apassage from charmian’s Log of the Snark speaks to Jack and Charmian London’s continuing quest for many homes: “We have lived a little, you and I, Mate-Woman,” Jack said this morning, as we took our book under an awning out of the glare. We had been talking over our travel experiences and the people we had met, from Cuba to Molokai, from Paris to the Marquesas. A vivid life it is, and we hold it and cherish it every minute, every hour of to-day, and yesterday, and the fair thought of days that are coming.1 The Londons continued their travels after the Dirigo voyage, spending long weeks aboard their new sailboat, the Roamer, on the bays and sloughs of the Sacramento River delta, a home-away-from-home that provided relaxation and healthy exercise. The ranch had its demands, and London was writing steadily on several books. He claimed, “I have notes for over 100 novels filed away on my shelves, and possibly 500 short stories.”2 However, the strain of trying to continue his frenzied pace at writing and on the ranch took their toll, and his drinking became an acute problem. Two trips in their last two years were of great consequence, their trip to Vera Cruz so London could report on the Mexican Revolution, and their two long trips to Hawai‘i in 1915 and 1916, where London found another second home and wrote some of his most powerful short stories. London biographers and critics have long described September 1912 to May 1916 as a period of professional decline or a loss of direction, when London virtually ceased writing short stories and instead concentrated on longer works: The Abysmal Brute (1913), John Barleycorn (1913), the three Sonoma novels of 1913–16, The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914), The Scarlet Plague (1915), The Star Rover (1915), the Michael and Jerry dog books (1917), and The 268 chapter 8 Acorn-Planter: A California Forest Play (1916). Notwithstanding the absence of short stories—his best genre—and his many physical and personal problems of his last several years, London’s “decline” of 1912–16 did not mean he stopped producing meaningful work. The novels from this period contain racial themes of self-definition, personal and artistic. In their own ways, each of these late works speaks to the search for homes, whether on Dick Forrest’s hacienda , in a new world swept nearly empty by a terrible plague unleashed from a Berkeley laboratory, or in the astral search for the imprisoned self through time and space. Space constraints prohibit me from examining each of these works in detail, so instead I concentrate only on the late works that make race the centerpiece of their narratives and themes, his Mexican Revolution journalism and the last of his late Hawaiian tales, “The Water Baby.” During the last two years of his life London continued to suffer more setbacks in his financial, professional, and personal lives. As before, in 1912–13 especially , his bodily illnesses brought with them an illness of spirit. The “White Logic,” as London referred to John Barleycorn’s inescapable alcoholism, had almost completely subsumed the writer. He suffered several ailments, including the onset of kidney disease. Only in his last few months in Hawai‘i in 1916, after reading of Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, was London able to write some of his greatest works, none of which display the racialism of Adventure or The Mutiny of the Elsinore. In Hawai‘i his health improved for a time when he substituted fruit juice for highballs, and rest and exercise for worry and overwork. London’s last Hawaiian stories revive the values of a better possible world, what critic Jessica Loudermilk calls a “supraracial” home for brother- and sisterhood.3 In his last few months London experienced a spiritual reawakening by conceiving his imaginative self within a global community, a regeneration he desperately needed. An example of London’s worst temper during this time appears in a February 24, 1914, letter he wrote to Joan. He remained frustrated that Bessie would not let their daughters visit the ranch while Charmian as there, which meant that if he wanted to see them he had to arrange visits and outings with them in San Francisco and nearby. Responding to a...