Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography

Chapter 2. True North or White Silence? Slave vs. "Zone-Conqueror" in the Klondike

TWO TrueNorthorWhiteSilence? Slavevs.“Zone-Conqueror”intheKlondike This page intentionally left blank 57 T he klondike was London’s first defining frontier of self and vocation. There his Anglo-Saxon identity could be tested in a stark environment in which both “natural” ability and adaptation could play a part. Instead of focusing merely on the theme of survival against the elements, London wrote stories that have much more to do with negotiated survival among racial Others in which innate characteristics can matter less than adaptability and the desire for community. In his Klondike fiction London thus turns to such conflicted racial tropes as the Noble Savage, biracialism and passing, the tragic mulatto, “double-consciousness,” Darwinian competition, and projections of white anxieties and sympathies onto racial Others. His first novel, A Daughter of the Snows (1902), fails because of its racialist agenda, while his world-classic novella, The Call of the Wild (1903), draws much of its enduring mythic power from the American genre of the slave narrative with its epic conjoining of individual freedom and the search for a home. Robert H. Redding views the Klondike Gold Rush as a romantic moment in North American history: the men and women London wrote about were largely westerners like himself from San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and points between: “They were failed business men, hopeful youngsters, adventurers , fools, sharks, prostitutes, good people and bad. For most, it was as much the search, as the gold itself that counted. The Westward movement had died.” As “inheritors of a driven past, just as London had been,” and still eager for adventure, “They welcomed the North, because here was the chance to prove they were still hardy, and could cope.”1 But Canadian historian Pierre Berton offers a more naturalistic view: the Klondike Gold Rush “resembled a great war” from which it was impossible to emerge unchanged, “and those who survived it were never quite the same again.” It “brutalized some and ennobled others, but the majority neither sank to the depths nor rose to the heights; 58 chapter 2 instead, their characters were tempered in the hot flame of an experience which was as much emotional as it was physical.”2 London was similarly romantic in his visions of the Klondike but realistically desperate for cash and willing to struggle for it. As a socialist he possessed a critical consciousness of the phenomenon, and as a racialist he imagined Anglo-Saxon triumph. In the Klondike London found little gold but something more valuable: “It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.”3 This perspective derived from new geographies and houses of identity. He saw the terrible results of the greed for gold and the effects of white expansion upon the Indians. Not personal success in gold prospecting, but a larger theme of brotherhood characterizes the northern tales, notwithstanding his Kiplingesque race heroes whose “AngloSaxon ” strengths pave their way to success. In the Klondike, London found a way to redefine self and society not only by journeying far away and pushing himself to the limit, but also, wearied by clashes among capital, white workingmen , and Asian immigrants in the cities back home, a welcome new arena in which he could reconsider what manhood and citizenship meant. Among his characters, white values and prowess are celebrated but also questioned and often bettered by those of Indians, so that London’s internal conflicts of race, gender, and class are played out in his Klondike stories. The search for home and identity is often enacted through a recurring pattern of searching for a father. In February 1897 London left the University of California due to lack of money; at the same time he was unsuccessful in entering into a relationship with his presumed biological father, William H. Chaney. He was working grueling days in the laundry of Belmont Academy, memorably detailed in Martin Eden. On July 14, 1897, he along with everyone else on the West Coast read of the forty passengers home from the Klondike who disembarked from the Excelsior at San Francisco, none with less than three thousand dollars in gold nuggets and dust: “So heavy was the booty they carried in bags, tin cans, and valises that they chartered the Palace Hotel bus to take them directly to the mint,” Franklin Walker writes.4 Thousands poured into San...