Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography John Dudley (bio) Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography, by Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. xviii + 389 pp. Cloth, $34.95. For generations of biographers and critics, Jack London's attitudes toward race have posed consistent and frustrating challenges. Admirers of London's best writing tend to dismiss the author's often troubling racial characterizations and pronouncements as an unfortunate distraction from his many strengths as a stylist and storyteller. Likewise, less sympathetic readers find in London's racism sufficient grounds to dismiss his work altogether. Jeanne Campbell Reesman's book exposes the limitations of both critical tendencies and instead posits a view of London and his work that is both refreshingly direct and rich in its implications. Although firmly in the camp of London's admirers, Reesman claims that the issue of race not only represents a significant part of London's writing, but is in fact central to it. Moreover, she argues, what emerges from a thorough consideration of London's life and his varied literary output is a complex, evolving, and incomplete attempt to confront notions of racial difference that distinguishes London from his contemporaries and, indeed, from most white writers of the past century. Few writers have led lives as colorful or eventful as London's, and despite the attention his life has received, most critics have linked his biography to his fiction in largely superficial ways. Avoiding the obvious mythmaking that dominates popular biographies of London, Reesman instead places several key experiences, particularly his travels to the South Pacific, alongside the literary representations that emerged from these experiences, and she discovers an ongoing struggle between the flawed racial theories London often quite actively espoused and the more complex and subtle actualities that his fiction documents. As Reesman claims, "he is better in the particulars than in the theories," but even London's theories were subject to revision and reconsideration and merit considerable further study. Among other sources, Reesman draws upon earlier work by Clarice Stasz, [End Page 83] as well as the biographical recollections of London's daughters, in exploring the significant, and conflicting, roles played by London's mother Flora and his "surrogate mother," Virginia Prentiss, an African-American neighbor and caregiver who remained close to London throughout his life, and whose stories of slavery were part of London's upbringing. As a child, London often lived in the Prentiss household. Caught between the conventional biases and inconsistent spiritualism of Flora and the reliable, pragmatic support of "Aunt Jennie," London confronted the difficult realities of race from an early age; to employ Reesman's organizing metaphor, he inhabited multiple racial houses in his subsequent career. Key to Reesman's argument is Tzvetan Todorov's distinction between racism and "racialism." While racism constitutes behavior that dismisses or degrades those marked by racial difference, racialism describes comprehensive theories that define this difference, its origins, and its impact on both the individual and community. What has been characterized as London's racism, according to Reesman, is more often evidence for his racialism, and this set of beliefs underwent continuous revision and evolution throughout his career. Indeed, when contrasted with his contemporaries or literary descendents, such as Frank Norris or Ernest Hemingway, London gives unusual prominence to racial "Others" in his writing, from the native people of his South Sea or Klondike tales to the Japanese and Mexicans in his war dispatches. In these characterizations, Reesman finds telling inconsistencies that correspond to crucial moments in London's personal and professional life. London's essay on "The Yellow Peril" remains among his most infamous racially-charged statements, but other examples of his journalism from Russo-Japanese War in 1904 offer more conflicted views about the Japanese. Reesman connects London's obsessive racialism with regard to Japan to his anxieties about his newfound success as a writer and frustrations at "presuming and not presuming the enemy's mind." Likewise, London's well-known reports on the career of boxer Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion, offer insight into the struggle between misguided racial abstractions and the author's own artistic integrity as...