Remembering Jack London | Mechanics' Institute

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Remembering Jack London

On this day, exactly a century ago, the 20th century lost one of its literay giants when Jack London passed away at the age of 40. On Wednesday, November 16, Mechanics' Institute celebrated his life with a panel discussion led by Heyday Books Founder Malcom Margolin. Jonah Raskin, editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution, delivered an eloquent summing up of Jack London's life and outlook:

I believe that Jack London was a Californian and a radical, but one could argue that he was neither.  After all he was a contradictory character and from one point of view rather conventional. He married twice believe in the institution of marriage, had two daughters whom he loved, supported his biological and his surrogate mothers and his first wife, too, after their divorce, wanted to be rich, made a fortune (and spent it), amassed a large estate he called Beauty Ranch, had servants and defended the use of servants, bought stuff continually – a telephone, Dictaphone, telegraph, horses, pigs, a fire engine, a luxury car and more — took out fire insurance and life insurance policies.


Believed human beings, except for the occasional superman, were prisoners of their environments and espoused many of the conventional ideas of the time about African Americans, American Indians and Asians, admired the British Empire, depicted the Anglo Saxon “race” as the salt of the earth and defended the U.S. military invasions of Puerto Rico and the Philippines because they liberated the inhabitants from Spanish tyranny and in 1916 he urged entry into WWI on the side of the Brits.
 
On the other hand, he was a member of the Socialist Party for 20 years, ran for mayor of Oakland twice as a socialist and lost, supported the Russian Revolution of 1905, endorsed selective assassinations as a political weapon, considered himself a comrade of the Industrial Workers of the World (The Wobblies), defended them when they were arrested and jailed, went on a lecture tour from UC Berkeley to Harvard and gave a speech – later an essay - called “Revolution” in which he urged the masses to seize the property of the ruling classes.
 
Advocated for animal rights at a time when animals were routinely exploited in vaudeville acts; condemned child labor, supported campaigns for the eight hour day, believed citizens should use the referendum and recall politicians to change the political system, condemned prison conditions, solitary confinement, and the straight jacket, and befriended anarchists like Emma Goldman who called him “The only revolutionary writer in America.”
 
London co-founded with his pal, Upton Sinclair, The Intercollegiate Socialist Society, an organization for college undergraduates that was the forerunner of SDS. He became its first president, wrote and spoke tirelessly for left wing causes, practiced organic agriculture, used green construction to build Wolf House and wanted to create a worker cooperative on his estate. A cultural revolutionary, on the cusp of modernism, he was one of the fathers of prison literature, apocalyptic and dystopian fiction in The Iron Heel and The Scarlet Plague and helped to lay the groundwork for The New Journalism of the 1960s. He smoked hash, inhaled and got high.
 
A Californian? Maybe. Born with an unquenchable wanderlust, he traveled to England, South America, Asia, Australia, and he was often on the road as a hobo and as a passenger who rode first class. He was also at sea as a sailor from the time he was a young man until late in life. During the last decade he was alive, he spent nearly as much time away from home as he did at home. In his last year, he seemed to find himself in multicultural Hawaii, where Carl Jung’s archetypes, which he had just discovered, struck him as more alive than anywhere else, including California.
 
Still, London was a child of California.  He befriended the bohemians in Carmel, where he partied, sold his books to Hollywood, went to Hollywood to make deals, and sued Hollywood producers who tried to steal his work. As a cub reporter he wrote for William Randolph Hearst, attended UC Berkeley, cheered Cal against Stanford in the Big Game, photographed and described the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. He was not only a Californian, but also specifically a Bay Area author.
 
He loved to go into the Oakland Hill and lie down be in a field of poppies, the California state flower, and where he could look out at San Francisco, the Golden Gate, then un-bridged, over to Marin and out to the Pacific Ocean. He described this spectacular view in the essay “The Poppy Field” and added, “Beneath lies all the world,” which he meant literally and figuratively. When his first publisher Houghton Mifflin in Boston asked him for a capsule biography, he wrote back to say that he was as a “bay-faring adventurer” and hastened to add, “San Francisco is no mill pond by the way.” Bostonians, he assumed, might not have known.
 
Moreover, in this same letter, London listed the jobs he’d taken in and around the Bay: salmon fisher, oyster pirate, schooner sailor, fish patrolman and longshoreman. Before he turned to the typewriter, he worked at hard physical labor in an era when the Bay Area boasted factories, shipyards and working class neighborhoods with lively cultures, radical politics and trade union movements. If the Bay is at the heart of his world, the key points around it for him are San Francisco, where he was born, Oakland, where he spent much of his boyhood and adolescence – (and where was dubbed “The Boy Socialist”) – and Glen Ellen where he ranched and where he died. The Bay Area gave birth to London and nurtured him. In was his port of entry into the world and the destination to which he always returned. He wrote about it loving in essays like “The Golden Poppy,” and in novels like Martin Eden, The Valley of the Moon, The Star Rover and The Iron Heel. The Call of the Wild and White Fang both take place in the Yukon, though Call begins in California and White Fang ends there.


The Star Rover begins and ends in San Quentin. Martin Eden unfolds in Oakland and San Francisco. The narrator in The Iron Heel describes the coming of a dictatorship to the United States from her hideout in Sonoma. In The Valley of the Moon an Oakland wife and husband travel from the East Bay to Monterrey and then to Glen Ellen where they buy land and settle down.


London thought of himself as a Californian, and East Coast publishers and editors labeled him a California outdoorsman who played as hard as he worked: rode horseback, boxed and often composed his books in the open air. The Bay Area was in his DNA.


To describe London as a Bay Area writer isn’t meant to be a slap in the face. Readers usually depict Faulkner as a Southerner. They call Emily Dickinson a New Englander. In their own localities, both Faulkner and Dickinson tapped into the universal. So did London. A localist and a regionalist, he turned the Bay Area into a springboard that propelled him into the cosmos. His books call to Californians perhaps more than to Americans elsewhere, but they also call to the soul of California that lives in readers everywhere around the world.
 

Posted on Nov. 22, 2016 by Pam Troy