Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings ed. by Richard W. Etulain (review)

58 Western American Literature Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings. Edited by Richard W. Etulain. (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1979. 209 pages, $7.50.) Jack London wrote one classic book about tramping in America. The Road (1907) is a series of autobiographical travel episodes which are perhaps less strictly factual accounts of journeying than they are short stories in the first person. The narrative is out of sequence, but the narrator is never out of temper or out of interesting anecdotes. Traveller, storyteller, and picaresque hero, London creates a “last frontier” along the railroad track, the iron road which he himself had followed from west to east in 1894, when he had exchanged the life of a factory “work beast” in Oakland, California, for the presumably carefree existence of an easy-riding, hardliving hobo. In truth, he simply exchanged one ordeal for another. The track which Pilgrim London pursued ran through a nation of urban-industrial growth that left precious little room for latter-day pioneers to wander. London had few illusions about what he would find over the Sierras and across the Plains. The buffalo had ceased to roam, the West was a dime novel, the Indians were under house arrest on disease-ridden reservations, and the country was gripped by hard times and high unemploy­ ment in the aftermath of the Panic of 1893. The wonder is that London put far more of his youthful high spirits than social criticism in The Road, but the absence of revolutionary rhetoric is only one of the curiosities of the book. Somehow, it still has the power to charm its reader. The freshness and sheer ebullience of the writing more than compensate for the scrambled narrative sequence, while the “distaste­ fulness” which offended the critics of 1907 strikes us today as mere local color (“The hobo,” editor Richard Etulain reminds us, “was not an inspiring subject for teenage girls and coffee-table books — two of the unrefutable tests for measuring acceptable fiction in the last years of the nineteenth century”). With the decline of the nation’s railroad and tramp population, the book has, of course, acquired an added nostalgic value, an evocation of a lost world as alien and exotic in its own way as London’s Klondike or Polynesia. And what of London’s other hobo writings? Do they possess the same vigor and vitality as the selections of The Road? Surprisingly, they do not. In collecting all of London’s diary, essay, and short fiction writing about tramps and tramping, Etulain has made an interesting discovery: once out of the autobiographical form, London was lost, unable to transmute his experiences into art. The only convincinglydrawn hobo London ever portrayed was himself, and that fact sets Etulain off on a number of cogent inquiries: “Why was he not able to produce writing about his road experiences that matched the high quality of his works on the Klondike? Was it that editors and readers were reluctant to accept the hobo? Did he lack sufficient artistic versatility to portray believ­ able tramp heroes?” Reviews 59 These and other questions need to be asked, and it is to Etulain’s great credit that he both offers and answers them. I personally find his conclu­ sions as impeccable as his research and editing. Certainly, he provides enough textual evidence for us to make a reasoned and informed judgment about London’s failure to create a memorable fictional tramp. Given the book’s modest price, its attractive cover (of a railroad track curving into the distance), the fact that it establishes for the first time the canon of London’s road writing, and that both its contents and editorial comments are a valuable resource, Jack London on the Road is a truly original and indispensable addition to the shelf of essential Londoniana. Etulain is to be congratulated for the fine detective work which has enabled him to solve one of the most puzzling riddles of Jack London’s writing career. HOWARD LACHTMAN University of the Pacific Jacob Hamblin: Mormon Apostle to the Indians. By Juanita Brooks. (Salt Lake City: Westwater Press, 1980.) Sixshooters and Sagebrush: Cowboy...