Jack London’s Racial Lives: A Critical Biography (review)

When I teach Huck Finn (1884), my students often ask if I believe it is a racist book. My best answer is “yes and no,” a response that no doubt satisfies no one in the room but me. But I insist that the question cannot be answered categorically. Any attempt to address the issue must be nuanced, with careful elaboration and qualification. So too does any discussion related to Jack London’s racial attitudes. The issue has long since been settled, according to many a complacent critic who simply cites London’s frequent chest-thumping assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority. London was a bigot. End of discussion.

Not so fast. In her latest book Jeanne Reesman, though no apologist or hagiographer, reads London afresh, unvarnished by the critical consensus that has condemned him. To be sure, much of London’s fiction, particularly his early Klondike tales, will never appeal to the politically correct. But he was not a one-dimensional, unqualified white supremacist, as Reesman argues persuasively. In fact, he often ridiculed his white characters, especially in his South Seas stories, in contrast to the indigenous peoples whose culture and customs he admired. Put another way, London shifted or adjusted his racial attitudes over time as the result of his travels, and Reesman smartly and systematically charts this trajectory.

Not that he was consistent, or that this trajectory was smooth and predictable. London expressed repugnant racial opinions even in such late novels as Adventure (1911) and The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914). His socialism ever warred with his racialism, as in his stories about the 1911 Mexican revolution, in which he was both “the (socialist) critic of the powerful political class in Mexico” and “the (racialist) supporter of American capitalism and imperialism” (273).

Still, Reesman contends, if London “never got race ‘right,’ he furnished us with a more complex set of responses to race than any writer of his day” (205). She compares The Call of the Wild (1903), whose mongrel hero is named with the racial epitaph “Buck,” to a captivity narrative, and Martin Eden (1909) to a passing novel, a motif London often deployed in his fiction. If in theory he “espoused the ideas of ‘scientific racialism’ popular among intellectuals of his day,” in specific and concrete situations, he qualified the theory, and he was rarely “a snob or a racist in his personal life” (34). In Korea in 1904, while covering the Russo-Japanese War, London discovered “that his white race was one among others and that it was not ‘superior’ at all” (89). His cruise across the Pacific aboard the Snark in 1907–1909 “occasioned a dramatic change in his racial thinking” (109). When he fell ill during the voyage, for example, he realized he was racially unfit to adapt to the hostile environment. In a manner updating Melville’s Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), he depicted the destruction in Polynesia wrought by white “civilization.” Not surprisingly, in most of the short fiction he wrote during these months, particularly “Mauki” (1909), “his racial point of view is not that of the colonizing whites but rather of islanders themselves” (109). Covering Jack Johnson’s heavyweight fights in Sydney in 1908 and Reno in 1910, he expressed unusual admiration for the champion’s physical prowess and psychological strength, and Reesman concludes that London “turned out to be a better writer and a poorer racialist for having encountered” him (184–85). In all, Reesman’s book neatly complements her undervalued Jack London: A Study of the Short Fiction (1999) and should reignite the debate over London’s rank in the canon.