Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography

Notes

307 abbreviations The Jack London Collections in the Huntington Library are cited throughout the notes: manuscript collection (heh jl), ephemera (heh jle), broadsides (heh jlb), and rare books (heh hl). introduction 1. London, Letters of Jack London, 244. Subsequent references are cited in the text as Letters. 2. London’s intellectual and identity conflicts illustrate Kwame Anthony Appiah’s idea that social identities can be obstacles to the pursuit of an ethical life: when a social identity is incoherent, it has “a set of norms associated with it, such that, in the actual world, attempting to conform to some subset of those norms undermines one’s capacity to conform to others. . . . The incoherence of a social identity can lead to incoherence in individual identities: to someone’s having an identity that generates projects and ambitions that undermine one another” (Appiah, 282). 3. Dale L. Ross, 57. 4. Joseph C. Sciambra, 11. 5. Sciambra, 1–2. 6. Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 378. 7. Philip S. Foner, 59. 8. Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 268. 9. Paul Lauter, 17. 10. For major contributions, see especially the works of Susan Nuernberg, Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, Clarice Stasz, Andrew Furer, Gary Riedl, Thomas R. Tietze, Joseph C. Sciambra, Lawrence I. Berkove, Jonathan Auerbach, David Moreland, Noël Mauberret, Eijii Tsjuii, James Slagel, Rod Edmond, Lawrence Phillips, and Jessica Greening Loudermilk. N O T E S 308 notes to introduction and chapter 1 11. David Brion Davis, 62. 12. London, Complete Short Stories of Jack London, 1993. Subsequent references to London’s short stories are from this edition and are cited in the text as Stories. chapter 1. jack london and race 1. Stoddard Martin, 4. 2. Grief passes freely about the Pacific as London’s fantasy figure, in contrast to the toll the Snark voyage took on London’s health. Though Grief needs no doctors to survive the Pacific, his name is a marker of London’s struggles there. 3. Lawrence Berkove, “Jack London’s Second Thoughts,” 60–76. 4. Henry James, preface, Portrait of a Lady, x–xi. 5. Haole is a slightly pejorative term for a Caucasian person in Hawai‘i; kama‘āina is a Hawaiian term meaning either that one was born in Hawai’i or that one has lived there long enough to belong. 6. I use the term “Melanesian” in its historical sense only; as a term based on skin color and applied by Westerners, it is rejected by indigenous peoples today in favor of self-naming. 7. Charmian London, Book of Jack London, I:143. 8. Earle Labor, in Homer L. Haughey and Connie Kale Johnson, 4. 9. London, “The House Beautiful,” in Revolution and Other Essays, 166. 10. Haughey and Johnson, 5. 11. London, “House Beautiful,” 166–67, 171–72. 12. London said he used an outer and an inner self to structure his stories: “There are tricks and devices I use—tools in the art. I build a motive—a thesis, and my story has a dual nature. On the surface is the simple story any child can read—full of action, movement, color. Under that is the real story, philosophical, complex, full of meaning. One reader gets the interesting story, the other sees my philosophy of life” (quoted in Russ Kingman, Pictorial Life of Jack London, 90). 13. George Wharton James, 366–67. 14. Ibid. 15. Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 3. 16. Ibid., 11–12. In an early science fiction tale, “A Thousand Deaths,” London imagines a son who is the victim of his scientist-father’s experiments at playing Frankenstein ; the son is repeatedly killed by his father then restored to life in his father’s laboratory. 17. Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 35–36. 18. Jack London to Maitland LeRoy, 3-page signed typescript, 24 March 1900. Collection of Peter H. Stern, Boston, Mass. 19. Franklin Walker, 12. London did not look for an apprenticeship nor make any notes to chapter 1 309 attempt to use skills he learned in school: “On the contrary, a great restlessness possessed him. He was to spend the next four years holding odd jobs, rebelling against routine responsibilities, seeking adventure both inside and outside the law.” He escaped to the Bay, where he could “sail on it unrestricted, . . . sleep on it where [he] pleased, [and] make a living . . . by the use of brawn and...