True Fiction

Curator of the Jack London Museum and Research Center in Shreveport, Louisiana, Earle Labor first read Jack London in the seventh grade and became a London enthusiast. Seething at the long scholarly neglect of London and at critics who, making Henry James and James Joyce their darlings, disparaged seemingly effortless prose, Labor wrote in 2004 that “Jack London is difficult for the critics because he is so easy for readers.”¹ In 1961, right on the cusp of the explosion of scholarly interest in London, Labor completed his doctoral dissertation on the author. He taught perhaps the first U.S. college course on London and later interviewed London’s two daughters; examined the personal diaries of Charmian Kittredge London, Jack’s second wife; and in 1974 published a well-regarded critical analysis of London’s writings.² A teacher, a scholar, a London buff and keeper of the flame, Labor has achieved his stated aim of producing a “reliable account of his life story” (p. xvii) with this authoritative and highly readable biography.

Writing about London poses challenges. Alfred Kazin said that the greatest story London ever wrote was the one he lived. By the time he was twenty-one, Jack London had been a newsboy; “work-beast” in a cannery, laundry, and jute factory; oyster pirate; hobo; convict; socialist activist; student at Berkeley; sailor; seal hunter; Klondike Argonaut; and published author. Hailed as the “American Kipling” at twenty-four and internationally famous for The Call of the Wild (1903) at twenty-seven, he subsequently traveled to Japan and Korea to report on the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst papers and ran for mayor of Oakland, California. He also piloted his forty-five-foot sailboat, the custom-built Snark, and its small and mostly incompetent crew from San Francisco to Hawaii to the Fijis and then to the Solomon Islands (where he would fight off cannibals) and on to Australia, where he reported the heavyweight-title fight between Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson for a New York paper. In addition, he became a stock breeder and rancher in the Sonoma Valley and produced more than fifty books, including short stories, plays, political manifestos, and novels. (Lenin, on his deathbed, listened approvingly as his wife read him one of London’s stories.)

Jack London died at forty in 1916. The challenge of writing his biography lies not only in the immense number of activities he jammed into his short life; London’s penchant for basing his fiction on events of his own life has created a tender trap for his biographers. Irving Stone’s best-selling biography Sailor on Horseback (1938) relied so heavily on London’s most autobiographical novel, Martin Eden (1909), that Sailor’s publisher reissued it after one printing as a “biographical novel.” Indeed, London introduces Eden as a near clone of himself. Like London, Eden had worked in a laundry, sailed the seas, gotten bloodied in street fights, educated himself in public libraries, visited a leper colony in the Hawaiian islands, and had only a boxful of rejection letters to show for his aspirations to become a writer. Eden falls in love with Ruth Morse, a frail and ethereal beauty (her body is “a pure and gracious crystallization of her divine essence”) far above his station. Modeled on London’s first love, Mabel Applegarth, Ruth is initially repelled by everything save Eden’s muscles and primitive energy. She then warms to him as he improves his grammar and diction. But Ruth’s urgings that Eden abandon authorship for a more respectable and predictable career—Mabel had made the same plea in real life—trigger an atavistic reversion in Eden, who alarms Ruth’s genteel guests with strident affirmations that the law of the wild will always be the law of society: the strong will always rule and the weak perish. Realizing that she can never make Martin “nice,” Ruth breaks off the relationship. Ironically, she rejects Eden at the moment when, like London, he suddenly gains...