Call of the Atlantic: Jack London’s Publishing Odyssey Overseas, 1902–1916, by Joseph McAleer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Call of the Atlantic: Jack London’s Publishing Odyssey Overseas, 1902–1916, by Joseph McAleer K. Brandt Kenneth (bio) Call of the Atlantic: Jack London’s Publishing Odyssey Overseas, 1902–1916, by Joseph McAleer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xvi + 208 pp. Cloth, $100. Joseph McAleer’s Call of the Atlantic offers a thorough history of Jack London’s business dealings with his British publishers and agents. London’s relations with the publishing industry outside of North America has received scant attention from scholars, though his interactions with foreign publishing houses regarding agent agreements, translation rights, serializations, and book contracts occupies a sizable portion of his correspondence with editors. The prospect of McAleer’s exhaustive focus on the back-and-forth between London and his publishers and agents may seem like a necessary but arid field of inquiry. But this is Jack London—one of the most complicated literary drama kings of the twentieth century—and McAleer makes good use of his stagey subject. The study quickly develops into a kind of Jamesian saga of a colorful and rowdy upstart from the American West encountering the sober and conservative English publishing world. In his publishing negotiations, London emerges as feisty, mercurial, demanding, distrustful, and, at times, something of an impish fibber. Of course, London was well aware that the publishing world was amply stocked with its own share of plush-footed fabulists. This is one of the reasons why he called his profession the “writing game.” By the early 1900s books had plainly become commodities and publishing was acknowledged as a capitalist enterprise. For London, it becomes a contest where commercial publishers profess that their corporate interests and the author’s welfare are one. Sometimes this is true; however, as London believed, because publisher (capital) and author (labor) both desire maximum profit, it would be dunderheaded to think the association immune from conflict and duplicity. If the author is not vigilant—and fails to push, pry, and promote—publishers will eventually attempt [End Page 89] to exploit or sideline the writer in pursuit of their own capital interests. London’s suspicions about underlying profit motives generated much of his indecision, surliness, and cynicism when it came to playing the game with agents and editors. In recounting London’s many publisher-agent transactions, McAleer’s narrative strategies work well to imbue agents and editors with tangible motives and emotions, attributes one cannot usually glean from reading London’s letters alone. We learn, for instance, of the interesting travel and writing career of the adventurous Harry Parry Robinson, managing director of Isbister & Co., Ltd., who published early London volumes in Britain, including The Son of the Wolf and The People of the Abyss. Robinson, caught in his own naturalistic kink, missed the plum chance to publish The Call of the Wild because he was laid up with diphtheria that rendered him too feeble to reply to the offer for English rights. Similar personal sketching fleshes out other publishing personnel, including Algernon Methuen, William Heinemann, and Hughes Massie. McAleer dutifully foregrounds the commercial facets of the publishing business, but breathing a bit of humanity into players other than London enhances and illuminates his account. Another worthwhile feature are the illustrations of advertisements and early British printings of London’s books—especially the “cheap editions” that are regularly discussed in the author’s correspondence but rarely reproduced visually in biographies, articles, or critical monographs. McAleer’s judicious integration of letters among publishers and agents reveals the dismay that London’s erratic book-to-book sales caused. He produced moneymakers with the likes of The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, and Burning Daylight, but these were offset by weaker sellers such as The People of the Abyss, The Road, and The Iron Heel. Unsurprisingly, British (and American) editors clamored for more “open-air” (71) novels from London in the pattern of his dog and adventure tales. As one editor put it, “The public seems to look upon him as a favourite only when he is writing animal stories” (72). But more often than not, he dodged these constant editorial pleas and opted to write books with sharper sociopolitical...