Tough guy
Benny Green
Jack: A life of Jack London Andrew Sinclair (Weidenfeld £6.95) Jack London is the oddball hero of the Socialist pantheon, the rugged he-man crusader whose heavy breathing disturbs the cerebral quietude of that august establishment. Most of us swallow a few snorts of London's crude beer in adolescence, reel away in amazement and awe, and somehow never quite come back to the same saloon ever again. A confused impression therefore gathers, of a man whom everybody has read but almost nobody now reads, a statement so ridiculous that London would have bellowed with laughter at it, saying, `What do you mean by almost nobody? Why, you mean the fancy Dans of the literary establishment. Ordinary people read my books and they always will.' I am inclined to think that London is right, for it is impossible to imagine White Fang, The Call of the Wild, above all The Iron Heel falling entirely out of view.
And yet a sense persists of a writer far removed from any sort of literary life at all, a successful prosodist whose literary sensibility is so suspect that every time his biographer comes up with a small fact confirming that perhaps poor London could read and write after all, we are surprised. The reason is a very interesting one, and one which is admirably brought out by Sinclair's excellent account of London's messy existence. It must have been a fairly impossible task, but Sinclair has with complete success imposed on the appalling chaos of London's life the coherence of intelligent biography. The story is a marvellous one to tell, but before now I remember coming only across bits and pieces, accounts of episodes, half-hints at this and that and the other. Sinclair has compressed it into less than 300 pages, a feat so impressive that I imagine that next time he feels inclined to nip over to New York he may try walking it.
For one thing London must be a strong contender for the handsomest American writer of the last hundred years; the portrait on the cover makes Scott Fitzgerald look like a milksop, and it is this sheer animal energy wherein lies the key to London, who was that extremely rare bird, the workingclass writer, by which I mean the manual worker who shovelled coal, went to sea, toiled with his hands till they bled, existed on a dollar a day, went to prison, lived as a tramp, and emerged from this hair-raising odyssey with a view of the Socialist future so radically different in texture from those of
the theorists and the armchair researchers that to this day The Iron Heel is hardly ever mentioned as a revolutionary text. And yet The Iron Heel, the book for which London will be longest remembered, is a much, much tougher exposition of what lies ahead than anything written by anyone else before or since. 'As a vision of the rise of totalitarian power', writes Sinclair, The Iron Heel still is more disturbing than either Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell's 1984, and he goes on to say that 'its pest simism shook the democratic Socialist leaders in 1906'. Sinclair is absolutely justified to make those observations; The Iron Heel is a frightening, frightful book, a book of immense, swaggering power and perceptiveness regarding bestiality which reduces the rival Utopians whom Sinclair mentions to the status of girlish gigglers. What did London know about that gave him this remarkable originality of vision?
The answers are all provided in the first three chapters of Sinclair's biography, in which London, an illegitimate Californian born into a pioneering society, was brutalised by the very necessity of staying alive. Before he was sixteen London, who had done his apprenticeship slaughtering seals in the Arctic Circle, saw that Man was an animal, that hungry mean men were animals to each other, that life was cheap and that unless there was 'some other way', as they used to put it, there was no hope anywhere. He remains an important figure in this context because The Iron Heel is one of the earliest works of what you might call Unutopia. From Thomas More and Campanella, right down to William Morris, idealists had been projecting their idea of the Socialist or Christian or Technological future. Somewhere between Morris and London the idea turned sour, the felicities of one turning into the horrors of the other, so that by the time Huxley and Orwell arrived, their pessimism was already oldfashioned. It is clear enough from Sinclair's text where London's brutal realism was nurtured, but it remains tempting to ask where he picked up his idea of espousing a cause by boiling its mythical future in the blood of the heroes of the revolution.
Sinclair duly records London's list of writers who influenced his thought, Kipling,
Poe — and H.G. Wells, whose When the Sleeper Wakes and A Story of the Days to Come are generally cited as the progenitors of The Iron Heel. But the bleakest Utopia of all, the very first of the Unutopias, had come from Wells long before that. The Time Machine, conceived by Wells when he was twenty-one, and which he says he lifted from
Hawthorne, remains the most uncom promisingly brutal projection of the future yet achieved by any western writer. What London brought to that pessimism was a fleshly sense of evil. While Wells could dream of insects whose 'antennae waved like carter's whips', London could end his book
with-the harpies of the revolution tearing their plutocratic victims limb from limb.
Strong meat from a literary tough guy, whose bewildering life demanded a competent biographer and has now found one.
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