He was called Jack. He wrote about his “zest for experience”, about the exhilaration of riding box cars, about being “an American hobo” and a “stranger in a strange land”. He travelled around with “kin-brothers” and painted fantastic word pictures of drinking under the night sky, lying with a newspaper under his head: “Above me the stars were winking and wheeling in squadrons back and forth as the train rounded the curves ... ”
But he didn’t write a book called On the Road. In 1907, 50 years before Jack Kerouac’s novel became a bestseller, Jack London wrote his own masterpiece, called, wait for it, The Road. Without that vivid and extraordinary memoir, the second half of the 20th century would have looked a whole lot different. London was the daddy-o of the Beats. He even looked the part, with his dark good looks and penchant for leather jackets. More importantly, he both walked the walk and talked the talk.
His life story is astonishing. As detailed in The Road, he tramped the length and breadth of the US in 1894, aged just 18. Before that, he’d spent long brutal hours working in cannery factories and sailing on seal ships bound for Japan. Romantically, he got most of his education sitting at a makeshift desk in a saloon. The owner took such a shine to him, he paid for him to go to university. In true Beat style, London dropped out. Later, he sailed down the Mississippi on a raft, then joined the Klondike gold rush, got scurvy and discovered leftwing politics.
Oh, and he wrote more than 20 novels, a good handful of nonfiction books, and dozens of short stories before expiring, aged just 40, in the late stages of alcoholism, hopped up on morphine and with a body wrecked by hard years of use and abuse.
So it’s easy to see why Kerouac always named London as a foundational influence – and why he might have been the only author to get a namecheck in On the Road. But Jack London is more than just a proto-Beat. He was also a profound influence on Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and Norman Mailer. Lenin liked him, too. In her book Memories of Lenin, the revolutionary leader’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya said that when the revolutionary leader was dying she read him a tale by London:
Love of Life – it is still lying on the table in his room. It was a very fine story. In a wilderness of ice, where no human being had set foot, a sick man, dying of hunger, is making for the harbour of a big river. His strength is giving out, he cannot walk but keeps slipping, and beside him there slides a wolf – also dying of hunger. There is a fight between them: the man wins. Half-dead, half-demented, he reaches his goal. That tale greatly pleased Ilyich (Lenin). Next day he asked me to read him more Jack London.
It must have helped, of course, that for a long time, London was a fellow traveller. He was a sharp critic of the inequalities and injustices of the “gilded age” in which he lived. That’s part of the reason George Orwell (whom London inspired to write Down and Out in Paris and London) also found him so interesting. And why London still feels all too relevant, this month, 100 years after his death, as we endure a second gilded age of rampant inequality, overweening press barons, and gold-plated political monsters. It’s sad to say that his depictions of dire poverty in People of the Abyss, and of the surveillance state in The Iron Heel, still have plenty to teach us.
But before I paint Jack London as some kind of leftwing saint, I should also point out that he was more complicated (and more interesting) than that. He eventually left the Socialist party of which he was a member. He enjoyed both earning and spending huge amounts of money, dressing in fine clothes and enjoying the high life. In an essay quoting the passage above from Krupskaya, Orwell says that Krupskaya went on to read her husband a second story from London that turned out to be “saturated with bourgeois morals”, and “Ilyich smiled and dismissed it with a wave of his hand”.
Less amusingly, London also held plenty of the less appealing social Darwinist and racial theories of his age and indulged a “cult of the Nordic”. Orwell says: “London could foresee fascism because he had a fascist streak in himself: or at any rate a marked strain of brutality and an almost unconquerable preference for the strong man as against the weak man.”
While he took on London’s character, Orwell also had a few choice words about his mentor’s prose: “London is a very uneven writer. In his short and restless life he poured forth an immense quantity of work, setting himself to produce 1,000 words every day and generally achieving it.” That shouldn’t put us off, however. Although Orwell complained that much of this work was “scamped and unconvincing”, he also conceded that London “produced at least six volumes which deserve to stay in print, and that is not a bad achievement from a life of 40 years”.
Annoyingly, Orwell doesn’t name which six. And confusingly he singles out at least seven for praise: The Road, The Jacket, Before Adam, The Valley of the Moon, The Iron Heel, People of the Abyss, and a collection of short stories, Love of Life and Other Stories.
That list might give us a good place for us to start as we make a selection for this month’s reading group. Although, of course, that would be to ignore London’s most famous (and brilliant) novels White Fang and The Call of the Wild. There’s a fine list to choose from. As often, we’ll put it to the vote.
To nominate your favourite, just name it in the comments below. If you could give a reason, that would be fantastic – but it’s not compulsory. I’ll come back in a few days to tot up the totals. Just to add to the fun, since he wrote so much, and since so many of his books are so short, I’m tempted to try and look at two works this month, so feel free to name more than one.
