Author Under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London, 1893–1902, by Jay Williams (review)

Jay Williams’s new monograph is a unique biography, not about Jack London’s life, a story that has been told and retold by many biographers, but about his conception and development of himself as an author. The book is a comprehensive composing history, in which Williams brings together his theoretical approach to authorship with findings from original archival research on London’s interactions with the publishing industry. To do this, Williams presents an ambitious framework of no fewer than “six contexts—bohemianism and socialism, spiritualism and photography, a Pacific consciousness, and the world of publishing—together with three models of authorship—the craftsman, the poet, and the genius—and the six manifestations of London’s nonnegotiable commitment to the formation of his authorial identity—locale, mobility, documentation, continuous production, dual publication, and publicness.” Clearly, Williams is forthright from the very beginning that this will be a theoretically intricate book, as these items sit in uneasy relationship to each other in a complex matrix. It is not possible to unravel in this review what takes Williams 463 pages to explore. There is a bohemian free-spiritedness in Williams’s capacious argument, which leads to unexpected paths of inquiry, and it expects a high level of critical engagement from the reader. The arguments cannot all be adequately summarized, but I will attempt to tease out a few of the most novel ideas about London’s authorship.

Williams opens his introduction with an epigraph from London’s semi-autobiographical John Barleycorn: “Life lies in order to live. Life is a perpetual lie-telling process. . . . Appearances are ghosts. Life is a ghost land.” The presence of ghosts looms large in Williams’s multilayered conception of London’s authorship—the spectral figure of the author, the “unknown” and “unseen” that London makes visible in his work or that lies buried for the reader to uncover, and what Williams calls the “symbiotic relationship between haunted author and haunted reader.” To Williams, London’s creative use of the “author figure” in its myriad permutations is “the central concern for London as an author”; it is thus the central concern that Williams pursues as he demonstrates that London does not adopt the typically distanced authorial stance of objective realism associated with turn-of the-century realist and naturalist writers. Rather, “the figure of the author, writer, liar, and tall-tale teller appears in nearly all his work.” The origins and inspirations for these various author figures are integral to London’s evolving conception of his identity as a writer. Williams suggests that the spirit of the author is “manifested” through various characters and themes in his fiction: “London was troubled—that is, haunted—by his own creative power.”

Throughout this book, Williams reveals the ghostly presence of the author who speaks the truth, as London would say, with “sincerity.” Chapters 1 and 2 follow London’s evolving authorial persona from hobo to news-paperman: “As a hobo-ghost he identifies with the ghostly downtrodden and assumes the dress of the newspaperman to speak as the hobo-ghost to make the plight of the poor known.” Williams employs concepts of absorption and theatricality to explore London’s immersion in the interior world of his characters and settings, or in other cases, his more anterior stance with respect to his audience. For Williams, London is at his best—-i.e., most sincere—when his characters embody (or spiritually channel?) the ethical concerns and radical social critique of the author. Quoting from Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author”—”in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered”—Williams posits, “There exists a relationship between the living figure of Jack London and his representations of authors and author figures, but it is not the one-to-one correspondence of a code.” Indeed, Williams’s reading of the complexity of London’s authorship exemplifies what Barthes calls the “composite” nature of writing...