The Letters of Jack London: Vols. I, II, and III edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard (review)

REVIEWS Labor, Earle, Robert C. Leitz, III, and I. MiIo Shepard, eds. The Letters ofJack London: Vols. I, II, and III. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988. 1784 pp. Cloth: $139.50. This selection of some 1557 letters out of the more than 4000 available is by far the most extensive collection of Jack London letters ever published, the most extensive collection having previously been Letters from Jack London, ed. King Hendricks and Irving Shepard (1965), which contained some 402 letters. The letters selected "reflect significant facets of London's personality and provide important information about his life, his personal and professional relationships, and his various careers as writer, businessman, social reformer, traveler and scientific farmer" (p. xxvi). The vision of London that ultimately emerges from these letters is that of a man who, despite the problems that plagued his life and career, despite grinding poverty and privation in his early years, and despite declining health and financial disasters in his last years, held fast to an unfailing love of humanity and to a passionate love of life itself. The essentially positive and optimistic vision of life that pervades his work and makes it so readable in spite of its often gruesome naturalism also pervades his correspondence. No matter what hope or dream collapses, whether it be his dream house burned to the ground, his hopes of fatherhood with Charmian, his dreams of the good life and of Beauty Ranch, London always rebounds and never loses his capacity for hope. Similarly, London remained intellectually alive and enthusiastic to the end, discovering Carl Jung's revolutionary theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious in 1916 with as much fire as he had Darwin's evolutionary theories in 1897 and integrating them during the last six months of his life into several remarkable stories. These letters also show us a London who knew how to promote himself with publishers and editors, deliberately cultivating a "mythic image of himself as the American Adam" (p. xvi), and who worked hard at presenting himself as a nononsense businessman whose business was writing, an image which unfortunately hurt him in the eyes of literary critics and from which his literary reputation has greatly suffered in North America. Having had some rather distressing experiences with editors at the beginning of his writing career, he felt that they were all unscrupulous and had no qualms about bargaining for top dollar for his stories. Ironically, he sold The Call of the Wild, the power and literary value of which London was quite unaware, outright to Macmillan for $2,000.00; royalties of this best-seller, which was printed and reprinted in millions of copies, would probably have been enough to solve his financial problems for the rest of his life. London emerges from these letters as a sensitive, unassuming, exceptionally open and energetic human being, despite the tough guy stance he often affected for public consumption, a stance that was essentially self-protective but which many took at face value and still do, as evidenced by Peter Kemp's review of these same letters in the Times Literary Supplement (June 9—15, 1989). Nothing, for instance, could be less tough than his letters to Charmian Kittredge, with whom he fell madly in love after having married Bessie Maddern for practical and scientific reasons, and whom he married in 1905, the day after his divorce from Bessie became final. London's devotion to Charmian, which lasted to the end of his life, is in fact rather touching. What is perhaps most surprising was London's willingness to correspond with would-be writers and share the tricks of the trade with them. Few writers are so willing to explain how they work and thus foster competition. But there was no 242Reviews small-mindedness about London, and he obviously felt secure enough in his achievement to help those who sought his advice. In fact these letters to Cloudesley Johns, Max Feckler, Jess Dormán, Esther Andersen, Ethel Jennings, and others, put together with his essays and articles dealing with the craft of writing and the predicament of authors who both wish to eat and make a valid contribution to literature, make up London...