Jack London: A Life
By Alex Kershaw
St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages, $25.95
Jack London crammed a lot of tumult into his 40 years. He lived adventure and wrote it, and his odyssey has been a perennial fascination for biographers.
Richard O’Connor, Andrew Sinclair, James Lundquist, Earle Labor, John Perry, Philip Foner, Robert Bastrop–all produced biographical studies of Jack London during the past half-century. Earlier considerations included full-length valentines from Joan London (the author’s daughter) and Charmian Kittredge (his second wife). Deservedly popular was “Sailor on Horseback” (1937), a foray into biographical fiction when Irving Stone was in his prime.
For the reader who knows little of London’s life and hectic career, Alex Kershaw’s contribution is a sufficient introduction, giving all of the whens and wheres and hows and some of the whys. Measured against its predecessors, however, Kershaw’s book is strictly minor league. Seemingly bereft of original research and borrowing mainly from literature of the London family, it also appears as lacking in insight as in new information. As literary criticism, it is again weak, but at least the writing is forthright and graceful.
Jack London was born illegitimate in San Francisco in 1876. After his mother married John London, a widower with 11 children, Jack took his stepfather’s surname. As a child he was starved for love. Although he was his mother’s only offspring, he said she showed him no affection. Kershaw reports that London nurtured a lifelong resentment of his mother.
He was a rebellious, hard-to-manage youth, a sometime hobo with experience in jail. At 17 he shipped out on a vessel to the North Pacific. At 21 he went prospecting for gold in the Klondike. Life as a seaman brought him mostly misery, and he failed to strike it rich in Alaska. But the grim adventures gave him fodder for books that would make him rich and famous.
During the six years following Mark Twain’s death, London was the most written-about American author, and the highest paid. He was also a boozer and a womanizer. Following his initial spasm of celebrity, London divorced his first wife–Bess Maddern, mother of his two daughters–and married Kittredge.
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London is best known for his manly fiction–for “The Sea Wolf,” his most provocative novel with contradictory takes on Nietzschean philosophy; for “Martin Eden,” spinning off his seafaring experience; for “The Call of the Wild,” “White Fang” and other tales not specifically angled toward boys but savored especially by them; and for a considerable body of short stories triumphantly endowed with mood and sense of place.
Yet London was more than a fictioneer, and a majority of his books were argumentative essays espousing socialism. To be sure, he was rather a weird thinker, a philosophic amalgam of socialism and individualism.
His polemics lack staying power, but the best stories and novels live on, and the legend of Jack London that captivates Alex Kershaw may never die.