August 26, 1893—Seventeen-year old Jack London landed in San Francisco after a seven-month seal-hunting expedition that inspired much of his later fiction—and that brought to the surface the weakness for alcohol that would probably contribute to his death 43 years later.
In thinking of London, what sprang to my mind first was his Klondike fiction. You know what I mean—The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and that most terrifying of short stories, “To Build a Fire.” But I’d forgotten about an equally famous book set in a different environment: The Sea Wolf, the genesis of which may have begun when London heard, while on board the Sophie Sutherland from California to Japan, about a ship’s captain whose murderous tyranny over his men would later suggest that of Wolf Larsen.
That novel, like so much of his other work, reflects London’s obsession with the struggle for existence—one that he was living in a real way as a teenager, when his jobs, in short order, included oyster pirate, fish patrolman, seaman, jute-mill and power plant coal-shoveler. London’s hope to end his days as a “work beast” led him to embrace socialism.
Yet that same belief in Social Darwinism—that some men are destined to lose, and deservedly so, in that struggle—led him to a position that, given his otherwise radical record, sounds at first off-putting to his admirers, then so downright embarrassing that it needs to be “set in context,” excused, muttered into oblivion. For London, you see, was racist.
It’s a bit of a surprise to read literary scholars saying that the attitudes of London’s characters should not be taken as his own; that one should distinguish between London’s “racialism” (the belief that races possessed characteristics that determined their behavior and achievements) and society’s “racism” (the belief that such characteristics rightly consigned these groups to degradation or discrimination); and that in writing about race, London was merely, as a professional writer needing to make a buck, giving the readers of his day what they wanted. Doesn’t sound like much of an intellectual hero to me. How about you, faithful reader?
All of this sounds like empty rationalizations when placed against London’s New York Herald column on the 1908 fight in which Jack Johnson beat Tommy Burns to become the first African-American heavyweight champion. “He was a white man and so am I,” London wrote of Burns:
“Naturally I wanted to see the white man win. Put the case to Johnson and ask him if he were the spectator at a fight between a white man and a black man which he would like to see win. Johnson's black skin will dictate a desire parallel to the one dictated by my white skin."
Comments such as those went a long way toward creating the popular groundswell for a “Great White Hope” that would put Johnson “back in his place.”
I wonder what the racial attitudes were on board the vessels of the time that contributed to this virulent attitude. After all, in Moby Dick, the crew of the Pequod is a multiracial society that has joined together on its quest for the white whale.
London also began to show signs of a thirst for alcohol that he would write about nearly 20 years later in John Barleycorn. A long midnight swim from Yokahoma to the Sophie Sutherland, anchored a mile out in the harbor, became the basis for an essay he published when he returned (briefly) to high school in Oakland in 1895.
In thinking of London, what sprang to my mind first was his Klondike fiction. You know what I mean—The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and that most terrifying of short stories, “To Build a Fire.” But I’d forgotten about an equally famous book set in a different environment: The Sea Wolf, the genesis of which may have begun when London heard, while on board the Sophie Sutherland from California to Japan, about a ship’s captain whose murderous tyranny over his men would later suggest that of Wolf Larsen.
That novel, like so much of his other work, reflects London’s obsession with the struggle for existence—one that he was living in a real way as a teenager, when his jobs, in short order, included oyster pirate, fish patrolman, seaman, jute-mill and power plant coal-shoveler. London’s hope to end his days as a “work beast” led him to embrace socialism.
Yet that same belief in Social Darwinism—that some men are destined to lose, and deservedly so, in that struggle—led him to a position that, given his otherwise radical record, sounds at first off-putting to his admirers, then so downright embarrassing that it needs to be “set in context,” excused, muttered into oblivion. For London, you see, was racist.
It’s a bit of a surprise to read literary scholars saying that the attitudes of London’s characters should not be taken as his own; that one should distinguish between London’s “racialism” (the belief that races possessed characteristics that determined their behavior and achievements) and society’s “racism” (the belief that such characteristics rightly consigned these groups to degradation or discrimination); and that in writing about race, London was merely, as a professional writer needing to make a buck, giving the readers of his day what they wanted. Doesn’t sound like much of an intellectual hero to me. How about you, faithful reader?
All of this sounds like empty rationalizations when placed against London’s New York Herald column on the 1908 fight in which Jack Johnson beat Tommy Burns to become the first African-American heavyweight champion. “He was a white man and so am I,” London wrote of Burns:
“Naturally I wanted to see the white man win. Put the case to Johnson and ask him if he were the spectator at a fight between a white man and a black man which he would like to see win. Johnson's black skin will dictate a desire parallel to the one dictated by my white skin."
Comments such as those went a long way toward creating the popular groundswell for a “Great White Hope” that would put Johnson “back in his place.”
I wonder what the racial attitudes were on board the vessels of the time that contributed to this virulent attitude. After all, in Moby Dick, the crew of the Pequod is a multiracial society that has joined together on its quest for the white whale.
London also began to show signs of a thirst for alcohol that he would write about nearly 20 years later in John Barleycorn. A long midnight swim from Yokahoma to the Sophie Sutherland, anchored a mile out in the harbor, became the basis for an essay he published when he returned (briefly) to high school in Oakland in 1895.
Though some opposing theories have been put forth in recent years over the cause of London’s death, a leading one continues to be suicide, the final manifestation of extreme behavior that might have first come to the surface in that midnight swim on the seal-hunting expedition that London and his shipmates thought had made a man of him.
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