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

Reviews 91 The Letters of Jack London. Edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III and I. Milo Shepard. (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1988. 3vols., $139.50.) In 1965, Odyssey Press published a fat and handsome book titled Letters From Jack London, edited by Irving Shepard and King Hendricks, which brought together something like 400 examples of Jack London as epistolarian. This pathmarking volume, although only sparsely annotated, has, until now, with publication of this monumental three-volume work (1,557 letters, all exhaustively annotated), been the polestar for Jack London studies. By and large, London biography—and there is a lot of it—has produced, to say the least, an unsatisfactory assortment of works: pseudo-psychoanalytic (Andrew Sinclair’sJack), grotesquely debunking (John Perry’sJack London: Man or Myth?), overfictionalized (Irving Stone’sSailor on Horseback), overjournalistic (Richard O’Connor’s Jack London: A Biography), and over­ wrought (Charmian K. London’s The Book of Jack London). The solider works are the specialized-critical ones, not the biographies— such works as Earle Labor’s marvelous Jack London (in the Twayne U.S. Author Series), Carolyn Johnston’s Jack London—An American Radical?, Philip Foner’s Jack London: American Rebel, James McClintock’s White Logic: Jack London’s Short Stories and Franklin Walker’s Jack London in the Klondike. The present editors, in winnowing through over 4,000 Jack London letters housed in libraries and special collections from New York and Virginia to Utah and California, made their selection on sound criteria. They wanted each letter to convey some significant aspect of London’s character and to provide important information about his life, thought, personal and professional rela­ tionships and his work—not only as a writer but as a businessman, social reformer, traveler and farmer. In this endeavor, one can have confidence (even without seeing the 2,500 letters not selected) that the editors have succeeded. We might have expected that any work published in three large and expensive volumes, that occupied its editors twelve years and used many thousands of dollars of grant money, would “illuminate” Jack London’s life. One could hardly have expected less, especially in view of the very limited illumination that had previously been shed. Labor, Leitz and Shepard have accomplished more in these Letters of Jack London than the word “illuminate” reflects. The light shed, for once, isblessedly uneven—neither all harsh nor all soft, but a natural, human mixture of the two, and from it emerges the best picture of Jack London we are apt to have until a gifted biographer puts these pieces of the puzzle together with all the other pieces and tells the real life of this elusive, contradictory, complex American. Beginning in 1896, on the eve of his departure for the Klondike gold rush, at a time when he officially joined the Socialist Labor Party and passed a semester at the University of California at Berkeley, and ending with a letter to his daughter Joan the day before his death at age 40 in November, 1916, here 92 Western American Literature are leisurely letters to friends, lesson-filled letters to fans and writing tyros, hotly angry, demanding, rapid-fire letters to editors, idea-filled, money-begging, apologetic letters to publishers, defensive letters to his critics, touching letters to his daughters and others he loved, admiring and questioning letters to fellow writers, shocked, outraged, malignant letters to enemies and fallen former friends. The letters are meticulously annotated—a herculean task given the seem­ ingly limitless array of people, many (if not most) of them obscure, to whom London w'rote his letters—and the notes do more than merely identify the addressee, they provide the background of the issue at hand, often by para­ phrasing the letter to which London isresponding. In addition, these volumes contain 112 photographs, many published for the first time, plus cartoons, drawings, maps, autograph inscriptions and letter facsimiles. The Letters of Jack London represents the only dependable biography of London we have to date. If and when a dependable one is written, these volumes will not lose their value. DALE L. WALKER University of Texas, El Paso Lesser Evils: Ten Quartets. By Gary Soto. (Houston: Arte...