Sporting Blood: Selections from Jack London’s Greatest Sports Writing by Howard Lachtman

Abstract

270 Western American Literature montage of Pascalian passion and the thought of one who has partaken deeply in the literature of the past while living the daily griefs and exulta­ tions, who finally says: The life of this world iswind. Windblown we come, and windblown we go away. All that we look on is windfall. All we remember is wind. VENETA LEATHAM NIELSEN, Logan, Utah Sporting Blood: Selections from Jack London’s Greatest Sports Writing. Edited by Howard Lachtman. (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1981. 269 pages, $14.95.) The most notable of the late 1981 and early 1982 book-length Jack London works are Western Tanager Press’s new printing of London’s “Alcoholic Memoirs,” John Barleycorn, Joan Hedrick’s Solitary Comrade: Jack London and His Work (University of North Carolina Press), and this excellent and entertaining collection of London’s sports writing. Howard Lachtman, editor of the book, has supplied an engaging intro­ ductory essay on London as “our first celebrity sportswriter” and a page of scene-setting and commentary before each of the 15 selections. The selections themselves show a refreshing invention on the part of the editor. One might expect that a collection with this title would include London’s two famous boxing stories, “A Piece of Steak” and “The Mexican,” and most certainly that memorable essay on surfing, “A Royal Sport,” taken from The Cruise of the Snark. The inclusion of “The Madness of John Harned,” a bloody bullfight tale set in Ecuador, would occur to an editor thinking more in terms of “contest” than strictly in “sport,” and even “Small Boat Sailing,” although a rare item from the posthumous col­ lection, The Human Drift, has a certain clear raison d’etre here. But that is but one-third of the contents of Sporting Blood. The remainder is both a reflection of Lachtman’s deep knowledge of London’s massive canon and as deep an understanding of the combativeness, compe­ tition and conflict that London took for granted as “the essence of life as well as fiction.” There is represented here, then, such fine and rarely seen selections as London’s observations on the communal stone-fishing of Bora-Bora, the card game in “A Goboto Night” (one of the David Grief stories from A Son of the Sun), the climb up Hakeakala on the island of Maui, Hawaii, “The Amateur Navigator” from Cruise of the Snark, a bodysurfing melodrama originally titled “The Kanaka Surf,” an adventure from London’s tramp days, “Holding Her Down,” two stories from Smoke Bellew — dealing with Reviews 271 roulette and a dogsled race — , the warring bricklayers in Valley of the Moon, and a deadly human hunt from Adventure. Whether or not all these qualify as “sports writing” is perhaps debat­ able, but the quality of contest, of competition, is as evident in London’s handling of the bricklayer’s tug-of-war and ensuing melee as it is in the harrowing tale of Tom King, the washed-up Australian fighter of “A Piece of Steak” whose arteries have lost their elasticity and he his endurance. As Lachtman points out in his introductory piece, London took pride in his sporting instincts and while certainly no accomplished athlete, he swam, boxed, fenced, jumped, put the shot, tossed the caber, rode horseback, sailed boats and kites, surfed, went target-shooting and bicycling. He was a man of superb energy, “first and foremost a man of sporting blood and fighting spirit,” in Lachtman’s words. And from his own love of sport and belief in it as something reflective of society, came his somewhat pioneering use of it in fiction and essay. DALE L. WALKER The University of Texas at El Paso Emerson Hough. By Delbert E. Wylder. (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co.; Twayne’s United States Authors Series, 1981. 163 pages, $13.95.) Emerson Hough by Delbert E. Wylder is a study in six chapters of a nearly forgotten author once famous as an outdoor-western journalist, con­ servationist, and popular western and historical novelist. The book is based on fully acknowledged use of two unpublished studies of Emerson Hough (“Emerson Hough and the Southwest: Selected Letters,” compiled by Dorys Crow Grover of East...