On Jack London’s birthday, revisit Caleb Crain on the author’s exploration of love and hunger in settings where life is hard to sustain.
It was his last stint of conventional employment. In July, 1897, news spread that gold had been discovered in the Klondike, a region in northwestern Canada. Prospecting was finders keepers, like oyster piracy—but legal. It involved a long, dangerous journey with rough men, like hoboing—but with a chance of fabulous wealth. Luckily for London, gold fever struck not only him but also his stepsister’s sixty-year-old husband, who purchased ship fare, clothes, and equipment for both men.
The prose of some novelists takes on erotic intensity in passages of romance; the prose of others, during moments of self-discovery. In London’s case, that kind of intensity comes with descriptions of hardship, labor, and survival. In the opening chapters of “White Fang,” two men ferrying the corpse of a third through the Klondike are shadowed by wolves, which are reminiscent of “children gathered about a spread table and awaiting permission to begin to eat.
With success came romantic opportunities. In the fall of 1899, London went steady with Elizabeth May Maddern, the fiancée of a late friend, but he was soon bicycling to the house of a Russian-born Stanford student and socialist named Anna Strunsky. “It was as if I were meeting in their youth La Salle, Karl Marx, or Byron,” Strunsky recalled.
In 1905, London relinquished city life, moving with Charmian to the countryside north of San Francisco. Though they had some good times together, something went badly wrong with the last decade of London’s life. He wrote steadily and earned prodigiously—by 1913, he was making more than ten thousand dollars a month, nearly a quarter of a million in today’s money—but he spent at an even higher rate. A custom-made boat, the Snark, cost more than five times its estimate, and, even so, it leaked.
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