The Russian Jack London

Most Russian families of a certain background have many collections of the multivolume collected works of various authors. These were state approved authors and the editions were affordable. The translations were usually exceptional as well, because folks with a love of art and a knowledge of foreign languages often didn’t have anything else to do with their skill. So on the shelves of older, university educated Russians you will certainly find the collected works of Pushkin, probably Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. If they are particularly fond of the written word, you’ll find modern writers like Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Akhmataova. Among foreign writers, the list is more limited. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Stendahl, maybe some Hemingway. And quite common is Jack London.

Jack London. I know my way well around American literature, and I remember Jack London as the writer of Klondike adventure stories like Call of the Wild and White Fang that I read as a boy in junior high school. I was sufficiently impressed with his Russian reputation to look him up again and see what all the fuss is about.

It seems Americans have declined to remember that he was also a pioneer journalist – possibly one of the first ‘New Journalists’ perhaps – and a raging, unapologetic socialist, which accounts for his getting into print in the Soviet Union in the first place. It is pretty amazing that this quintessentially American writer has been best defined abroad, and his important place in American letters has been nearly forgotten.

In terms of the scale of his output, his comfort with prose and nonfiction, and his engaged public persona, he is a direct descendant of Mark Twain. They even share a sort of open-minded world view, though London is far less funny (though he had a definite streak of very black humor). He set the parameters of what it was to be a successful writer much the same way F. Scott Fitzgerald a generation later would. He made a fortune writing, enough to become a comfortable gentleman farmer in Sonoma Valley. His work defined masculinity for a generation, the same way Hemingway would in the later generation. His nonsense, do-or-die attitude to writing as a son of the working class was followed by Henry Miller. His writing as a wide-eyed optimist roving the American land in The Road would double back in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. His belief in the raw power of nonfiction as a genre would find an echo in Hunter S. Thompson. And he was a groundbreaking freelancer, a true pro. He allegedly asking other writers about what they were paid until at least 1913, when he was already the most successful freelancer in the country. (I could also add he wrote a collaborative epistolary novel, a tract against cruelty to animals, and a thriller about a plague that wipes out humanity).

And in terms of the ideas he tackled and tried out, he was quite farsighted. I just finished reading The Iron Heel, his completely forgotten dystopian novel from 1908 about a near future marred by a oligarchic ruling class that establishes a nasty police state that calls to mind 1984 – and was indeed read by creators of imaginary police states like George Orwell, as well as creators of actual police states like Leon Trotsky.

I will concede that it is not the most best written novel I’ve read lately. As a stylist, London leaves a lot to be desired when he veers away from spare adventure stories. He did not benefit from Modernism’s revolution in streamlined, straightforward prose – and alas, he did live at a time when you were paid by the word. So there is a tiresome wordiness in the book, especially when he steers from concrete plot points and into the world of ideas. The Iron Heel is beset by thoroughly unnecessary characters, and the entire first half is a bleak lecture on the basics of Marxist thought, that makes you ready to throw the thing aside before it starts getting good.

That accounts for part of why he fell away – his style simply fell out of fashion. But that happens to the best of them. Only a few of Henry James’ many novels are read today for the exact same reason. Another reason that I think most Americans would deny is simple Cold War politics. The irrational fear of communism drove reasonable Americans to insanity, and I believe that they threw away London in a fit of overzealous book burning. Today, when you think of a omnipresent police state you automatically, unconsciously turn to Orwell’s bleak vision of “Big Brother.” It is left-wing socialist thinking run amok. London’s vision of right wing capitalist thinking run amok has vanished.

I believe Jack London represents an important and lost thread in American literature. It is about the intimate interaction between fiction and non-fiction, and whose loss has been calamitous. As London put it in 1903: “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration: Light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it."

I am developing a half-baked Secret History about all this, and maybe I’ll post it when it gets to be about two-thirds baked.