No Mentor but Myself: Jack London on Writing and Writers (review)

The first edition of the miscellany No Mentor but Myself, published twenty years ago, assembled letters, essays, reviews, and selections from London’s fiction and autobiographical works that related to his literary career, including his views on books and the profession of letters. These selections were arranged chronologically, except for selections from Martin Eden, which were reserved for the end “as a culmination of London’s feelings about writing.”

In the intervening two decades, of course, much has occurred in London scholarship, including the publication of the three-volume Stanford edition of London’s letters (1988). The new edition of No Mentor but Myself includes forty-five pages of letters, placed at the end of the book, most of them from the Stanford edition. Three letters are newly discovered and are printed here for the first time. The added letters are arranged not in order of composition but in “thematic clusters.” Thus, there are two different principles of organization at work in the new volume. I would have preferred that the old and new materials be integrated according to a single plan, and I suspect that the new volume represents a compromise dictated by expediency, or perhaps a sentimental reluctance to disturb the form of the original edition. Nonetheless, one is happy to have the new letters to Charmian, Stoddard, Sterling, and others.

The book is a pleasure for anyone interested in London or in the rapidly changing world of writing and publishing in the early twentieth century. We learn much about the practical business of authorship, such as dealing with editors and publishers and tracking manuscripts. There is, one admits, material in this collection to support the view that London was interested only in the arithmetic of authorship: words typed per day, manuscripts shipped, money received. The numbers are indeed here, as London recalls the hard work and pluck that made his life a commercial success, an author’s version of a Horatio Alger story. But these writings reveal much more than a concern with decimals and poundage. Astonishingly well read, London had a keen aesthetic sense. He was an astute reviewer, and wise in his advice to young writers. His long essay “The Terrible and Tragic in Fiction” reveals a knowledge of literary history that might even be called scholarly (a compliment he probably would have disdained). He shows, in almost all of his letters and essays, that mix of qualities we recognize as distinctively his own: patience, generosity, comradeship, pride, toughness, social consciousness, and love of the language.