London in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates ed. by Jeanne Campbell Reesman (review)

Jack London has often been celebrated as a rugged individualist, a solitary hero pulling himself up by his bootstraps, trudging alone down the trail, sailing solo across the sea. But as Jeanne Campbell Reesman's edited collection London in His Own Time repeatedly reveals, London surrounded himself with friends, old and new. He was, in the words of fellow gold hunter Marshall Bond, a "social butterfly" who enjoyed wild parties, group excursions, and long conversations (64). "I never knew a man to enjoy company more than he," recalled Oakland bartender Johnny Heinold (58). London in His Own Time (part of the University of Iowa Press's "Writers in Their Own Time" series) allows us to see the celebrity author through many different perspectives of those who knew him—some casually, some intimately. This kaleidoscopic vision breaks apart the stereotypes and gives us a fuller sense of London's personality than any single biography could.

For us readers, he is "Jack London," the name printed boldly at the bottom of all his title pages. But this collection displays his many other identities to his contemporaries. To his daughters, Joan and Becky, he was "Daddy"; to his first wife, Bess, he was "Daddy Boy"; to his second wife, Charmian, he was "Mate." To the librarian of his Oakland youth, Ina Coolbrith, he was "dear lad," while to his stepsister Eliza he was "Old Boy." His editor at Macmillan, George Brett, and his personal valet, Yoshimatsu Nakata, addressed him as "Mr. London." To his boyhood gang of oyster pirates, he was "Prince"; to his fellow teenage tramps, he was "Sailor Kid"; and to the best friend of his adult years, George Sterling, he was "Wolf." One later acquaintance, impressed by his hospitality, referred to him as "the Big Chief" (170).

These identities are exhibited in a loosely chronological fashion. The contributors to this collection are assembled roughly in the order that they first met London, and their communications and reminiscences thus work, over the course of the book, to describe him as he grows from boy to man, from young author to established celebrity. The most appealing material is concentrated near the beginning, depicting the author in his youth. Grammar school chum Frank Irving Atherton tells a story of studious, bookish Jack being pestered by a bully at recess and then suddenly fighting back like a wildcat. College classmate James Hopper recalls London's presence on the Berkeley campus as being like a burst of sunshine lifted from the surface of the sea.

To Hopper, London was "boyish and loveable" (51), and indeed, the adjective "boyish" returns again and again in this book; half a dozen different people use it to explain London's charm. He was "a breezy-boyish-looking man" in the eyes of writer Armine von Tempski (230), always ready to play. More than one figure here remarks on his love of flying kites. One participant in a "boyish romp" was Chicago newspaperman-turned-Hawaiianentrepreneur Alexander Hume Ford, who observed that "Jack wouldn't listen then and never would in later years to our playing the grown-up," adding that "the boyishness never left Jack" (227). In her preface, Reesman urges readers to discover that London and his friends and family "were very funny people with a sometimes-over-the-top devotion to humor" (10), and the attention to this dimension of the author's character is a welcome corrective to the scores of critical essays that have, over the years, too often treated him as naively sincere in all things.

London in His Own Time primarily features laudatory material: reminiscences by those who were happy to know, however fleetingly, the larger-than-life hero—and happy to get their own name...