Jack London and us

by S.R. Palliyaguruge

This article focuses on an American author who wrote 'The Call of the Wild', 'White Fang' and 'The Sea Wolf' along with many other popular books. It is well known that he was amongst the eight American writers who could earn US$ 1000 for a short story in 1910 (roughly equivalent to $25,000 in today's term). He is also among one of the first American writers to make a lucrative career and an income exclusively from writing.

He was a prolific writer whose fiction explored several geographical locations and their cultures such as California (where he was born) Yukon, Hawaii, and the Solomon Island. He also experimented with several literary forms covering conventional love stories to science fiction. His noteworthy journalism included war correspondence, boxing stories and the life of Molokai lepers.

Due to these factors, we should examine the life and works of Jack London. It is also important to revisit his life and work because November 22 marks the ninety-three year death anniversary of Jack London.

Though part of his name is London, Jack London was born on January 12, 1876 in San Francisco of an unmarried mother of wealthy background, Flora Wellman. Because Flora was ill, an ex-slave, Virginia Prentiss, who would remain an important maternal figure while he grew up, raised Jack. Late in 1876, Flora married John London, a disabled war veteran. The family moved around the Bay area before settling in Oakland, where Jack completed grade school.

As an adolescent, he adopted the name of Jack. He worked at various hard labour jobs, pirated for oysters on San Francisco Bay, serving as a fish patrol officer to capture poachers, sailed in the Pacific ocean on a sealing ship, joined Kelly's Army of unemployed working men and returned to attend high school at age 19. In the process, he came to know the literature on socialism and received the nickname as the Boy Socialist of Oakland.

It is because of his life and background American critics identified him as 'Maxim Gorky of America'. Similar to Maxim Gorky, he led a vagrant life serving as a labourer, miner, sailor and a newspaper seller. However, it should be noted that a writer should gather life experiences at different levels. At last, Jack London began to write to "Heart", a newspaper that was a turning point in his career as a writer.

Jack revealed how he entered the field of creative writing. "In school, I was very talented in essay writing. But after I left the school, I forgot that talent. However, from time to time I tried to write while I was working at the reed factory. After working half of the day in factory, by the time I reached home in the night, I was so exhausted. But I wrote despite tiredness. "Voice of San Francisco "magazine, announced that a prize of twenty five dollars would be given for the best article. My mother encouraged me to apply for the competition. I had to wake up at 5.30 a.m. every day to go to work and I go to bed in the midnight. One day I started to write the article in the middle of the night after doing over time. By the next morning, I had written about 2000 words but I could not finish my essay. After adding another 2000 words and cutting down another 2000, I prepared the article for the competition. In 1893, I got the first prize for the article. It was that prize which encouraged taking up writing as a profession".

Library in the town helped Jack London to lead his career as a writer. Sri Lankan writers put their first step at writing at the Public Library.

London's advent began through newspapers and magazines. He wrote stories to newspapers. But the newspaper editors rejected his stories. The group of American critics who extolled the incomprehensible stories of 'great writers' rejected London calling that he used bazaar language.

Is it not the same predicament our writers face in newspapers, magazines and at the hand of critics? Criticism is a process of examining pros and cons of a work and explaining the work to the readers. Since a critic explains the story and untold story in a work, critic is a friend of the author. However, today criticism would obliterate author completely. The readers will not benefit by such criticisms. How similar is Jack London to our writers?

During his twenty years of writing life, London wrote 19 novels, 18 anthologies of Short Stories containing 152 Short Stories, 8 books on criticism and large number of newspaper articles. "The Iron Heels" which was published in 1907 was the first socialist and futuristic model novel in American literature. His novel "Martin Eden" showed a mature writer with vision on society. The protagonist is a sailor and his struggle to climb on the social ladder. However, after reaching the upper middle class, he is thoroughly disappointed with hypocritical lives led by the members of the upper middle class. It is a social critique and is similar to London's autobiography.

Like his novel "Before Adam", his novel "Call of the wild "reveals the man's nexus to animals. The novel, which is like a science fiction, takes reader to a pre-historic era. Subsequently critics were of the view that the novel was the first futuristic political novel and one, which served as a model for latter day classical writers.

Three of London's novels have been translated into Sinhala; 'Call of the Wild' (Wanapeta Adagasai), 'Before Adam' (Adamta Pera) and 'Martin Eden' (Prema Geetaya).

London has similarities and dissimilarities to our writers. The first dissimilarity is that London was a socialist but the specialty in his brand of socialism is that he has not confined himself to childish socialism like 'Janatavadee Lekhakayan' (Socialist writers). What he meant by socialism is that he firmly believed that human beings are one and the same despite their class, creed, nationality or social status or colour of the skin and they differ only by their deeds. Isn't that the basic principles of Buddhism?

He showed his vision in his novel 'Call of the Wild'. The protagonist of the novel is a dog-named Buck. The dog serves the master throughout its life and when there is no space among men, it goes back to its ancestors, wolfs. That does not mean Jack London was a socialist. He explains inherent connection between man and the animal on one hand and complexities of the life on the other hand. It is for this reason that it has become one of the great works in world literature.

Though he was a socialist, he did not write stories to prepare the society or provide models like our 'Janatavadee Lekhakayan'. This is where he differs from Sinhala writers. It is the nature of the Sinhala writers to withdraw in the face of hard life. Because of this, we could not identify Sinhala writers who climbed the social ladder from lower class to upper middle class. Jack London was a writer who rose from lower class to the upper middle class. Though he was a launderer, he did not do that job with his pen. He did not wash other's dirty linen. What he washed was the eternal agony of life. There was no other writer who climbed from the lowest rung of the social pyramid in a short period of forty years and produced large numbers of books which are now considered as part of world literature.