Jack London's Fear of Insanity in the Tropics

Abstract

Jack London's Fear of Insanity in the Tropics Jay Williams (bio) Adventuring is meant to conquer fear. Yet men can go crazy at sea. Never-ending open water, a threat to mental stability itself, heaves at times with vicious storms, waves that would dwarf a forty-three-foot ketch, such as the one that Jack and Charmian London sailed from San Francisco to the Solomon Islands. But not back. He abandoned the trip after seventeen months. He gave various reasons, emphasizing physical ailments, but his final words on the matter are in the afterword to The Cruise of the Snark. Although he graphically explains how badly swollen and diseased his hands were, thus making it impossible to move "about on a small rolling boat," he cited his Australian doctors to explain the cause of the swelling and peeling. They "agreed that the malady was non-parasitic, and that, therefore, it must be nervous" (Backword 338).1 Hence, to California, where he had "always maintained a stable nervous equilibrium." What he meant by "nervous" and "nervous equilibrium" has never been interrogated, least of all by London. When we do so, we are led to the real reasons London terminated his Snark voyage. It wasn't his hands. It was his mind and therefore his identity.2 He doesn't publicly explore this surprising analysis. He wants people to believe he is referencing merely the ordinary mental anguish that accompanies physical suffering. More likely, he wants to deflect attention away from the cause to the symptoms. Privately, he was deeply concerned about his own mental health and the danger of psychic collapse. In a veritable mania about the subject of the psyche and its illnesses, through the years he conducted a thorough investigation in the literature of nervousness. On board the Snark, he read William Thomson's Brain and Personality and Joseph Jastrow's Subconscious (C. London, Diary 12 Mar. and 17–20 Apr. 1908). He was already familiar with the work of Alfred [End Page 121] Binet and Pierre Janet (Williams, Author, 248–51). In the future he would read further in the literature to find clues to why he was susceptible to mental exhaustion and breakdown. He would purchase at least five monographs published by the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, including works by Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank. He read Karl Abraham's Dreams and Myths; Richard von Kraft-Ebbing's Textbook of Insanity and Psychopathia Sexualis; Caleb Saleeby's Worry: The Disease of the Age, David Lincoln's Sanity of Mind, Williams James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, Samuel A. Tannenbaum's 1916 article "Psycho-Analysis" in The American Journal of Urology and Sexology, and a host of other books and articles on mental states. He cited Freud in his preface, written in 1915, to Osias Schwarz's General Types of Superior Men (Preface 6). He read Carl Jung (see Letters 3: 1597–98). This is just a sampling; many of his library books have been lost (especially those he read on the Snark) or are in private unknown hands. The architecture and diseases of the mind fascinated him, in a horrified sort of way, because even a temporary nervous breakdown meant the loss of identity, especially of authorial identity. According to Elsie Martinez, "one of the obsessions Jack had, George Sterling told us, was that he was losing his mind like his mother. Sterling used to soothe him by declaring he was merely suffering from exhaustion" (148). We don't know what time period she refers to, and her memory and/or sources are sometimes questionable. Still, a significant amount of his fiction directly or indirectly reflects that obsession and examines the lives of insane, partially insane, or neurasthenic characters. The White Silence, so predominant in London's Klondike stories, drives some of London's Northland inhabitants mad. Even in notes for unwritten tales, insanity is a theme: "Negro cook—black as ace of spades—He has provisions etc. Goes crazy. Makes his way south. Camp of Indians. Witch doctress speaks of strange portents. Enter crazy nigger singing" ("Klondike Sketches"). Then there is "The White Man's Way," featuring Old Ebbits, he...