Jack London

[Dominic Hughes]

If Jack London is chased forever from our historical memory by the dog
he invented, then we will lose one of the most intriguing, bizarre
figures in American history, at once inspiring and repulsive. In his
40 years of life, he was a "bastard" child of a slum-dwelling suicidal
spiritualist, a child laborer, a pirate, a tramp, a revolutionary
Socialist, a racist pining for genocide, a gold-digger, a war
correspondent, a millionaire, a suicidal depressive, and for a time
the most popular writer in America. In Wolf: The Lives of Jack London,
his latest biographer, James L. Haley, calls London "the most
misunderstood figure in the American literary canon"—but that might be
because he is ultimately impossible to understand.

London nearly died by suicide before he was even born. His mother,
Flora Chaney, was a ragged, hateful hysteric who reacted to anyone
disagreeing with her by screaming that she was having a heart attack
and collapsing to the floor. She had grown up in a 17-bedroom mansion,
but she ran away as a teenager and ended up joining a religious cult
that believed it could communicate with the dead. She had an affair
with its leader, William Henry Chaney, who beat her when she got
pregnant and demanded she have an abortion. She took an overdose of
laudanum and shot herself in the head with a—fortunately—
malfunctioning pistol. When the story was reported in the press, a mob
threatened to hang Chaney, and he vanished from California forever.

When Flora delivered Jack in the San Francisco slums in 1876, Flora
called him "my Badge of Shame" and wanted nothing to do with him. She
handed him over to a black wet nurse (and freed slave) named Virginia
Prentiss, who let him spend most of his childhood running in and out
of her home. She called him her "white pickaninny" and her "cotton
ball," and he called her "Mammy," no matter how many times she told
him not to.

"I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths
of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak," he
wrote years later. As soon as he left primary school, he was sent to
work in a cannery, stuffing pickles into jars all day, every day, for
almost nothing. For the rest of his life, he was terrorized by the
vision of a fully mechanized world, where human beings served The
Machine. The shriek of machinery pierces through his fiction,
demanding that human beings serve its whims.

He didn't get a toothbrush until he was 19, by which time his teeth
had rotted. London grew up into America's first great depression,
slumping from one unbearable job to another. He shoveled coal until
his whole body seized up with cramps. He tried to kill himself for the
first time by drowning, but a fisherman saved him. He began to notice
the legions of toothless, homeless men on the streets, broken by
brutal work and left to die in their 40s and 50s. He responded, at
first, with a cold Nietzschean individualism, insisting he would
escape through his own personal strength and courage.

http://www.slate.com/id/2261928/

Dom