What to See in London

Abstract

Carolyn Johnston. Jack London—An American Radical? Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.205 + xviii pp. Stoddard Martin. California Writers: Jack London, John Steinbeck, The Tough Guys. London: Macmillan, 1983.224 pp. Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, ed. Critical Essays on Jack London. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983.298 + viii pp. Charles N. Watson, Jr. The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.304 + xv pp. Since his death in 1916 there has been no dearth of books on Jack London— but most have been biographies. The tacit consensus seems to hold with Alfred Kazin that "The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived"; and the story that he lived all but obscured the stories that he wrote. Both his second wife, Charmian, and his elder daughter, Joan, offered their versions of the life in The Book of Jack London (1921 ) and Jack London and His Times (1939), respectively. In addition, his rags-to-riches-to-remorse saga has been rehearsed book-length about once every decade since: Irving Stone, Sailor on Horseback (1938); Philip Foner, Jack London: American Rebel (1947); Richard O'Connor, Jack London: A Biography (1964); Franklin Walker, Jack London and the Klondike (1966); Andrew Sinclair, Jack: A Biography of Jack London (1977); and Russ Kingman, A Pictorial Biography of Jack London (1979). Only half way through the 80s, the accustomed quota of London biography has already been met twice over: first, in Joan Hedrick's quirky psycho-biography, Solitary Comrade: Jack London and His Works (1982), which sets out to expose "the man who hid behind the celebrated public persona" not by reading his life into his work—the usual procedure— but his work into his life: transforming, that is, all his fictions into crypto- biography; and second, in one of the works here under review, Carolyn Johnston's more standard, but also more sensible study, Jack London—An American Rebel? Whether this accelerating rate of production in the London- bio industry will continue unabated or whether a saturation point approaches, I dare not hazard a guess; but even so fascinating a life as London's begins to pale after so many retellings. Besides, like most lives, it is depressing to read about.