Jack London's Women (review)

Taking as its subject London's "Good Jack"–"Bad Jack" relationships with women, Claire Stasz expands American Dreamers (1988), her earlier work on London's second wife, Charmian Kittredge, to examine London's relationships with his mother, Flora Wellman London; his "second mother," African American neighbor Virginia Prentiss; his first wife, Bess Maddern; lover and collaborator Anna Strunsky Walling; his stepsister Eliza London Shepard; and his two daughters by his first marriage, Joan London Miller and Becky London Fleming. Stasz rightly seeks to refute the bad rap these women have received from some prior biographers.

Stasz is a knowledgeable scholar of London—especially of his explorations of gender—and in Jack London's Women she provides social context for the women's lives and interesting observations on London and women, including the possibility that his notions of racial purity may have been inspired by the personal pride of Virginia Prentiss. But like many group biographies, this one is diffuse and unsure of its subject. Only after London dies two-thirds of the way through is there any real room for the women in the book. It would have been better to write on only one of these "quintessential California women" (52)—perhaps London's daughter Joan, who went on to become a socialist leader, labor organizer, biographer, and novelist. Reading about Joan's vacillating feelings about her father and her on-again, off-again friendship with Charmian is intriguing; reading the aging resentments of London's peripheral descendents, some of whom supplied Stasz with their views, is not.

Only the very well-informed London scholar can sort through this material to separate facts from supposition. Although Stasz lectures literary critics about historical veracity, she is guilty of egregious failures of documentation. Footnotes are irregular, obfuscated, or missing. Where is the source for Eliza's burning of all Flora's love letters from Chaney? For Flora wanting her son to go to work at the age of ten only to help his "nervous tics"? For Jack's screaming, "Let it die! Let it die!" following the birth of his daughter Joan, her head temporarily misshapen by forceps? We read that Jack infected Bess with gonorrhea, was madly jealous of Bess's relationship with Charles Milner, and was repeatedly unfaithful to Charmian. How does Stasz know these things, given the absence of sources? Although Charmian's diary notes more than one occasion upon which Jack saw his daughters when he temporarily returned to California from the South Seas, Stasz prefers to relate only Joan's childhood memory that he only called once and didn't bother to wake Becky at all.

There is a certain disingenuousness here, especially when Stasz gushes over the "first family," as she calls Bess's descendents. Perhaps the logic is that because Bess was faithful to Jack, she was a good person and her family's version must be the truest. Stasz takes at face value Joan's assertion that at the age of five she formed a "lifelong commitment to racial equality" (84) yet expresses shock that London as breadwinner and successful writer was more "powerful" than the women around him. It would have helped had Stasz made use of the widely recognized contributions of another scholar of these women, Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, who receives only a brief mention on page 348. And in her next book Stasz should eliminate such needless personal self-justifications as "My identification with Charmian appeared as a counter-ego or Jungian shadow"; "It seemed prudent to pass beyond midlife myself before trying to appreciate fully the four decades of life Charmian experienced as a widow"; and "After all, I have been enthralled by Jack London, for he loved strong-willed, questioning women."

Such statements suggest Stasz's over-identification with subjects who should remain historical to the social historian. Instead of making allusions to how "the ‘London industry'" has promoted its "machinations" against truth, perhaps Stasz...