The Sea Wolf (with an Introduction by Lewis Gannett)

By Jack London

Jack London’s 1904 novel “The Sea Wolf” is the story of Humphrey van Weyden, an effete gentleman who finds himself shipwrecked when the San Francisco ferry his is aboard collides with another ship in the fog. Adrift in the bay, Humphrey is rescued by Wolf Larsen, the brutish captain of a seal-hunting schooner, the “Ghost”. However his relief in being saved is short-lived, for he is soon put to work, essentially enslaved as a cabin boy forced to do menial work aboard the “Ghost” by Larsen. Humphrey finds that he must quickly adapt to the harsh environment of the vessel and over the course of the novel becomes toughened up by the strenuous work aboard the ship and in defending himself against other brutal members of the crew. Reportedly based on the real life sailor Captain Alexander MacLean, it is the characterization of Wolf Larsen that is the standout of the novel. A primitive, animalistic force, Captain Larsen is depicted as a perfect specimen of masculinity, a man with no moral compass, who values only his own survival and pleasure. “The Sea Wolf” is a thrilling tale of maritime adventure which stands as one of London’s finest literary achievements. This edition includes an introduction by Lewis Gannett and a biographical afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Dec 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781420957044

Jack London

Jack London (1876-1916) was an American novelist and journalist. Born in San Francisco to Florence Wellman, a spiritualist, and William Chaney, an astrologer, London was raised by his mother and her husband, John London, in Oakland. An intelligent boy, Jack went on to study at the University of California, Berkeley before leaving school to join the Klondike Gold Rush. His experiences in the Klondike—hard labor, life in a hostile environment, and bouts of scurvy—both shaped his sociopolitical outlook and served as powerful material for such works as “To Build a Fire” (1902), The Call of the Wild (1903), and White Fang (1906). When he returned to Oakland, London embarked on a career as a professional writer, finding success with novels and short fiction. In 1904, London worked as a war correspondent covering the Russo-Japanese War and was arrested several times by Japanese authorities. Upon returning to California, he joined the famous Bohemian Club, befriending such members as Ambrose Bierce and John Muir. London married Charmian Kittredge in 1905, the same year he purchased the thousand-acre Beauty Ranch in Sonoma County, California. London, who suffered from numerous illnesses throughout his life, died on his ranch at the age of 40. A lifelong advocate for socialism and animal rights, London is recognized as a pioneer of science fiction and an important figure in twentieth century American literature.

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THE SEA WOLF

By JACK LONDON

Introduction by LEWIS GANNETT

The Sea Wolf

By Jack London

Introduction by Lewis Gannett

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5703-7

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5704-4

This edition copyright © 2017. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of The Sea Wolf, Illustration to the book by Jack London., English School, (20th century) / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Chapter XXXIX

Biographical Afterword

Introduction

If Jack London had been born in 1946 instead of 1876 he might have been labeled first an underprivileged child and then a juvenile delinquent. He might have become a beatnik, And he might never have written a book.

Instead, he wrote fifty books in fifteen years of furious creativity, some of them—notably The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf—landmarks in American literature and read around the world.

It could be argued that his life was a symbolic epitome of America: born of a dream that faded; harsh childhood in a kind of wandering wilderness; divorce from his own past; growing up too fast and too soon; wild frontier youth; disciplined labor and undisciplined spending; unparalleled generosity and a prosperity that was never enough to satisfy; frustrated confusion as to how to handle such prosperity; and the bitterness of bewilderment. America’s history has run fast; for Jack London personal history ran all too fast.

Most of his books were in some sense autobiographical; the literal, factual record of his life was a bit too melodramatic to become wholly credible fiction. Jack London's mother, Flora Wellman, had run away from a comfortable home in Massillon, Ohio, when she was twenty-five; she never heard again from her parents, or they from her. Why she ran away, where she ran to, or precisely what she did in the three years after she left Ohio neither her son nor any of his biographers ever discovered. She earned at least part of her living by giving music lessons. In Seattle she met the man she claimed was Jack London’s father, a roving Irish seaman, astrologer and universal reformer known as Professor Chaney, with whom she lived for a year as man and wife.

Her son was born in San Francisco. On January 14, 1876, the Chronicle of that city carried an item reading CHANEY—In this city, January 12, the wife of W. H. Chaney, a son. Jack was that son. The son never saw his father, and before he was a year old his mother had married an elderly widower named John London, a railroad worker, farmer, salesman, an up-and-down, mostly down, man. The boy first went to school under the name of John Griffith London.

Just when the boy learned that John London was not his father is not certain, but it was early. Six months before Jack was born, the Chronicle had printed a lurid story about the attempted suicide of Flora Chaney, whose husband was reported to have driven her from her home for refusing to destroy her unborn infant—a chapter of heartlessness and domestic misery. The story, of course, was Flora’s, and how much of it was true no one can say today. But such stories, once told, get around, and linger. When, just turned twenty, Jack London discovered the address of Professor Chaney in Chicago, he wrote to ask if he was in fact his father. Chaney, then past seventy, wearily, or perhaps craftily, denied it. I was never married to Flora Wellman, he wrote, but she lived with me from June 11, 1874, until June 3, 1875. I was impotent at that time, the result of hardship, privation, and too much brain work. Therefore I cannot be your father, nor am I sure who your father is.

Irving Stone wrote Jack London’s life-story, Sailor on Horseback, in 1938—early enough to talk with Jack London’s two wives, his mothering step-sister and his boyhood friends, and Irving Stone is convinced only by Professor Chaney’s statement that he never was married to Flora Wellman. Many warm wild Irish traits in Jack London’s character seem to Irving Stone to stem direct from Chaney’s genes. Maybe so—indeed, probably so, though neither talent nor character is reliably heritable. What is certain is that Jack London grew up aware that he was an illegitimate son. In notes for an unfinished autobiography he suggested that he might have guessed it from a kitchen quarrel when he was six.

Jack’s mother early advertised for a wet nurse, and acquired the services of Mammy Jenny Prentiss, a large generous-spirited colored woman who gave the baby—and the growing boy—more emotional security than his erratic mother ever could. By the time Jack was six the family had moved through various sections of San Francisco and across the bay to Oakland. Mammy Jenny, on her own, always managed to live nearby; she too crossed the bay to be near her white child, and when he needed help, it was to her that he turned.

In San Francisco the family had taken in a boarder and with the rent money supported a Chinese servant. In Oakland they lived behind the grocery store that for a time kept John London busy. At other times Jack’s foster-father worked as a carpenter, as a sewing-machine salesman, as a peddler of gold-leaf frames for saloon mirrors. He rented a farm in Alameda, where Flora made life lively with spiritualist séances, when Jack was seven. Then there were two years down the foggy coast at San Mateo, where John and Flora London hoped to make a fortune growing potatoes. After a year they leased a sunnier farm in Livermore, back of Oakland, where they hopefully planted olive trees.

Of course they never picked an olive. The bank foreclosed on the farm; the London tribe—which included two older step-sisters, John London’s children by an earlier marriage—next undertook to keep a boarding-house for twenty Scottish girls employed in a cotton-mill. At first they did well; they even made a down payment on a second bungalow boarding-house—and lost both to the banks. By the time Jack London was eleven, his father being out of work, the family’s chief source of income was the money Jack could earn—carrying a newspaper route (twelve dollars a month), riding an ice-wagon on Sundays (irregular) and setting up pins in a bowling-alley (tips).

But Jack London had something for which neither the known facts of his heredity nor the shifting colors of his environment can wholly account. He read. In Livermore, before he was ten years old, his schoolteacher lent him Washington Irving’s Alhambra, and he adored it; a neighbor lent him a volume of African travels, and Ouida’s romantic novel Signa, about an illegitimate Italian boy who became a great composer. In Oakland Jack discovered the public library, and his avidity for books made him the great experience of the librarian’s life. Years afterward Ina Coolbrith used to recall the unkempt, blue-eyed, curly-headed boy who would shamble into the library with a load of newspapers under his arm, would lovingly pat the bindings of the books on the shelves, asking eager questions and reading rapidly with the starved hunger of an alley-cat.

He was on his own, but there was something special in Jack London’s own. Legends grew up about him in the later years of his success, and there must have been some truth behind the legends. Schoolmates recalled that he used to swap his extra papers for the picture-cards then given away with cigarette-packs, and trade the cards for cash; and he was so keen a trader that some of the boys paid him a commission to sell their pickings to the junkman. Yachtsmen at the club where his stepfather worked for a time recalled Jack’s energy in swabbing decks and reefing sails, his courage in crawling out on a boom when the spume was flying, his eagerness to earn an extra dime.

He was chosen class historian at his grade school, but he did not attend his own commencement because he did not own a respectable suit of clothes. Besides, clothing was not what Jack cared about. At just about commencement-time he bought a leaky boat, for two dollars which he saved by pennies. A year later he was able to pay six dollars for a second-hand skiff, which in due time he equipped with sails and oars, and soon he was a recognized master mariner of the nearer reaches of the estuary and the bay. But it was his third boat which launched Jack on the wild joys—and pains—of living, to be reflected in many of his later books.

He had gone to work in a cannery after leaving school—ten hours a day as a minimum, overtime constant (once, he boasted later, he had worked thirty-six hours at a stretch), and he hated the drudgery, even when it netted him all of fifty dollars a month. Hours alone on his boat were his escape; the boat was an introduction to a world beyond the pinched life of his family. Through his boat he learned about the oyster pirates of the Lower Bay, who often made fifty dollars in a single night, and spent it even faster.

Jack heard that a man called French Frank would sell his tail-sailed sloop, the Razzle Dazzle, for three hundred dollars. Jack didn’t have three hundred dollars, of course, and neither did his mother or his stepfather, nor would they have given it to him if they had it. He made straight for Mammy Jenny. Anything Mammy had was Jack’s. With her money he bought the sloop—and with it more than he knew. His factory days were over, though he would never forget them. He was fifteen years old, and on his own.

The oyster beds at the head of the bay were privately owned, but their owners worked them only by daylight. At night the oyster pirates took over, risking their lives and their boats, fighting the tide rips, the watchmen of the Fish Patrol, and each other, selling their booty on the Oakland docks for sums of which no mere wage-earner dreamed.

French Frank sold his sloop one sunny morning, and invited Jack to celebrate with a jug of wine. Jack accepted. Opposite him at the table sat French Frank’s girl, Mamie, known as Queen of the Oyster Pirates. She shifted allegiance with the boat, and after that afternoon Jack, not yet sixteen, was called Prince of the Oyster Pirates. Mamie initiated Jack into love and served as his crew. She helped him fight rival aspirants, for his boat, his oysters and herself.

There had been the years of poverty. Now began the years of adventure. All of them would contribute, in time, to the years of writing.

The oyster pirates were a hard-drinking, hard-fighting, polyglot crew. Jack fought and drank with them, and never forgot the stories they told—or the stories they lived. Between raids he would wander up to Ina Coolbrith at the library and borrow more books—or get drunk. One night, aiming to return to his sloop at the Benicia pier, he missed his footing and was swept out with the tide through Carquinez Straits. The cold water sobered him; before he was far into San Pablo Bay a Greek fisherman hauled him over the side of the boat. It was years—at least so Jack told it afterward—before he took another drink. Whatever happened to him was, eventually, grist for his writing.

When a state official, an admirer of Jack’s seamanship, suggested that Jack give up the erratic joys of oyster piracy and join the Fish Patrol, Jack switched with no sense of conflicting loyalties; soon his feats in catching and cowing Chinese shrimp raiders and Greek salmon thieves added to the legendry of the Prince of the Oyster Pirates. Jack himself may have contributed to the legends. Years later he inscribed a copy of his Tales of the Fish Patrol with these words: Find here, sometimes hinted, sometimes told, and sometimes made different, the days of my boyhood when I, too, was on the Fish Patrol.

Nothing held him long. He became a longshore bum; he hoboed it on the rods over the mountains into Nevada. To all appearances he was just another dead-end kid. One night in a waterfront saloon he met a harpooner from a sealing-ship; the next day he signed as an able-bodied seaman—formal papers were not then necessary—on the Sophia Sutherland, a hundred-ton three-master, bound for the Bonin Islands south of Japan and the sealing-grounds of the Northwest Pacific.

It was a seven-months voyage, the first time Jack had ever sailed outside the Golden Gate and the last time he would sail before the mast. The captain was no such brute as Wolf Larsen of The Sea Wolf, and the Sophia Sutherland picked up no castaways, but the Scandinavian crew, most of them more than twice Jack’s age, must have been just such men as the crew of Wolf Larsen’s hell-ship, and the stories they told of other voyages and other masters all went into the hive of Jack London’s mind. It would be eleven years before he would write The Sea Wolf, but that voyage was its germ.

Jack was not yet eighteen when he returned. He came home to a country in one of its recurrent states of shock, known in history as the Panic of 1893 or the Depression of the Nineties. Jack found his family in debt, the older John feeling lucky to have a precarious small-pay job as a town constable. Jack had saved his wages. He paid the family debts, bought himself a second-hand suit and some forty-cent shirts and set out to look for work. It is an essential part of the Jack London story that, for all his restless rootlessness, he never loafed. He might quit one job after another, or go on tremendous binges. He never took time out to sit down and be sorry for himself.

Jack found himself a job in a jute-mill, ten hours a day, ten cents an hour. But there seemed more future at the Oakland Street Railway's power plant, and he shifted to passing coal, at thirty dollars a month. He quit that when he learned that he was doing the work previously done by two family men, each of whom had been paid more than he, and that one of these, unable to find another job, had killed himself.

Another significant thing happened that gloomy winter. Jack’s mother showed him an announcement of a prize contest being conducted by the San Francisco Call—twenty five dollars for a two-thousand-word story. She urged him to write out one of the stories he had been telling, and he did. In three nights at the kitchen table he wrote and rewrote an account of a typhoon off the coast of Japan. Flora personally carried the manuscript across the bay and presented it to the newspaper editor, and five judges unanimously awarded the prize to Jack. Second and third prizes went to college students . . . It was the first story, so far as the record has been preserved, that Jack London ever wrote; it grew straight out of his experience; and it was dramatically alive. It didn’t seem to mean much to Jack at the time, but it was the beginning of a career.

In April, 1894, Jack joined an army of the unemployed which was hoboing across the continent in a March on Washington, the precise purpose of which was never very clear. In the East they called it Coxey’s Army and said it was radical, (There would be echoes of it forty years later in the bonus marchers who converged on Washington in 1932 and were dispersed by troops under orders from President Hoover and General Douglas Mac Arthur.)

For Jack London the jungle journey to the East wasn’t radical. For him the trip was adventure; it was fun. He left Oakland after the first detachment of the army of the unemployed had already crossed the Sierras; off and on, all the way, he was on his own. He loved the contacts with men who had seen the world. . . . And this time he was taking notes. He kept a diary. It was another chapter in the story of how Jack London became a writer.

The Army of the Unemployed gradually disintegrated. Its General Kelly was locked up in Omaha, and for a time the army walked. A friendly railwayman stole an engine for them, and at least a part of the army moved into Iowa in style. Some of the Iowa towns, sympathetic with its hardships, provided municipal welcomes and free feeds. The railroads, however, looked askance and refused free transportation. For a merry week the army rafted down the Des Moines River, Jack one of a happy party of ten who poled ahead and aimed to organize municipal welcomes along the way. Jack dropped out at Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain’s home town, rode the rods on his own to Chicago, and somehow made his way to Boston, Baltimore, and Niagara Falls, all of which left him with keen memories.

In Boston he sold a story, about sleeping in the parks, for ten dollars. In Baltimore a friend handed him a copy of The Communist Manifesto. In Niagara Falls the police arrested him, and jailed him for thirty days on a charge of vagrancy.

In later years Jack liked to recall—and he probably believed it—that Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto had changed his mind and converted him to socialism, but it seems improbable that the European pamphlet had any decisive influence upon him. His experiences with the hobo army undoubtedly enhanced the native sense of sympathy with the underdog, and the resentment against arrogant authority, which Jack had already acquired on the docks behind the Golden Gate and in the fo’c’s’l of his sealing schooner. The battles with the brakemen and the railway police also accentuated his sense that a man gets what he fights for, and no more, which for the rest of his life was to war in him with his generous sense of sympathy for the weak.

One thing became clear to Jack on his weird see-America-first excursion; he wanted to become a writer, and for that he would need more education. So on his return to California he entered the Oakland High School, paying his way by serving as floor-scrubber and window-washer. He was nineteen years old—no inconspicuous average student. He had seen the world, and wrote of his adventures in it for the high-school paper; he refused to conform to its necktie and hat conventions; occasionally he appeared as a speaker on Socialist soapbox platforms. Once he got himself arrested—the policeman argued that free speech did not include use of the city streets without a license—and consequently was interviewed by the city newspapers. Through a classmate and the classmate’s older sister, Mabel Applegarth, he was introduced to the first gentle home he had ever known, and he found what he came to call the parlor floor of society confusing. Later, in Martin Eden, he would write of it as embittering. He fell in love, after a fashion, with Mabel Applegarth, and she with him, but she also made him aware that he was coming up out of the cellar. He didn’t belong.

Jack’s devotion to the academic process called education didn’t last as long as he planned, though it lasted longer than might have been expected. He stuck it out at the Oakland High School for a year and a half before he decided that he was wasting his time. Next he briefly attended a cram school, which expelled him because, as he told the story, he was learning too fast. At any rate, he did enough cramming at the school and on his own to pass examinations entitling him to enter the University of California in the autumn of 1896.

At Berkeley he eagerly enrolled in three courses of English—one in literature and two in composition, one of these described in the catalogue as based principally upon the reading of nineteenth-century writers on science—Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer and others. Jack swallowed books like a hungry fish snapping at bait—readers of The Sea Wolf as of others of his books will note the frequent references to his readings of that year. He was astonished to discover that his fellow-students were not as eager as he, and that his professors lacked enthusiasm for controversy. By midyears he was through. The university was not giving him what he wanted; he wanted more living. On February 4, 1897, he was granted honorable dismissal; and within a few months he was on his way to the Klondike.

It was typical of Jack London to renounce the university for the life of a prospector on an icy river, and also typical of him that when he moved he carried in his blanket-roll copies of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Years later, when Jack London had become famous, his fellow-prospectors remembered those books in his blanket-roll. They also recalled that he walked miles to borrow a copy of Kipling’s Seven Seas.

Jack London was in the vanguard of the great gold rush and, like the great majority of his fellows on the mountain passes, he failed to find gold. As always, he found experience—stuff for stories. He also found scurvy; he was a skinny wreck when, in the spring of 1898, he with two companions floated and rowed and poled fifteen hundred miles down the Yukon River to the Bering Sea and a ship for home.

Back in Oakland, he was more than ever determined to be a writer. He had read; he had lived; he did not know anyone who had ever had anything published, but he had faith in himself. He liked to boast, afterward, that he had deliberately written for money, and in the end had made money. But Jack London’s self-interpretations are not wholly to be trusted. To the end of his life he was a man of unresolved contradictions—a self-conscious he-man, with a touch of Nietzschean superman philosophy; a world-embracing, soft-hearted socialist, out to save mankind from itself; sometimes consciously, and often unconsciously, an artist.

That winter of 1898-1899 was Jack London’s year of bursting from the chrysalis. He told his socialist friends that he would be content if he could write a thousand words a day and sell them at a cent a word, but for months rejection followed rejection. He studied the magazines to discover the secrets of success, the masterpieces to discover the secrets of style. He entered prize contests. He sent a long serial story to The Youth’s Companion, which did not want it. He was thrilled when the Overland Monthly, a San Francisco magazine with more tradition than money, accepted his story To the Man on Trail, amazed when the editor offered to pay a mere five dollars for it, embittered when he had to go to its office and shout to obtain even the five dollars. The Overland had prestige, and Black Cat did not, but the Black Cat magazine, paying forty dollars for a horror story in that same month of December, 1898, kept Jack London alive. Years later he would write that "literally and literarily I was saved by the Black Cat short story . . . I was at the end of my tether, beaten out, starved, ready to go back to coal shoveling or ahead to suicide."

But in the next six months Jack London had poems published in Town Topics, travel stories in Home Magazine and the Buffalo, N.Y. Express, articles on language in the American Journal of Education; and he lived on the rewards, which amounted to almost fifteen dollars a month. The tide turned when the highbrow Atlantic Monthly paid $120 for his story called The Odyssey of the North, and Houghton, Mifflin, publishers, offered him a contract for a book of short stories. Irving Stone, Jack London’s best biographer, dug up the Boston publisher’s timid but percipient report on the young author’s manuscript: He uses the slang of the mining camps a little too freely, in fact he is far from elegant, but his style has freshness, vigor and strength . . . The reader is convinced that the author has lived the life himself.

Jack London had arrived. He was able to get his bicycle out of hock.

He was also able, for the first time, to think seriously about getting married, and since the girl with whom he thought he had fallen in love was still disturbed by his poverty and his roughness, he proposed marriage to another girl, also of middle-class background, on a basis of companionship. Meanwhile he discussed the relationship of the sexes so ardently with a girl of Russian revolutionary background that he and Anna Strunsky decided to become joint authors of a book on the topic, which saw the light in 1903, as The Kempton-Wace Letters. In the midst of these discussions and on the day of publication of his first book, Jack married the companion, Bessie Maddern. Within a year they had a daughter, within two years two daughters, within three a divorce.

The transition from penury to success was sudden but not immediate, and it was never total. Son of the Wolf, London’s first book, did not sell as well as he had hoped, though it led to the contract by which S. S. McClure agreed to pay Jack a monthly stipend of $125 in return for first rights to all his stories. Within months the stipend, which had seemed to spell wealth, proved inadequate. Jack was spreading himself, in assorted directions. As a family man, he needed better housing. On the side he ran for mayor of Oakland on the Socialist ticket (245 voted for him). He published another book of stories in 1901, and in one month of 1902 he published three books with three different publishers, and also went to England for a newspaper syndicate and wrote an exposure of poverty in London’s East End, People of the Abyss. When McClure began to lose faith in him, Jack found a new sponsor in George P. Brett of the American Macmillan Company.

In six weeks’ furor, early in 1903, Jack wrote the story that would make him world-famous, The Call of the Wild. He began it as a short story and it rapidly grew into a short novel. He sent it to the Saturday Evening Post, which responded with a check for two thousand dollars—wealth to Jack. He sold the book rights to Brett for the same sum; if he had been willing to wait for royalties, he might have made a hundred thousand dollars from it. It sold a million copies, and was translated into a dozen languages. The Sea Wolf, published in 1904, had an advance sale of forty thousand copies, tremendous for the period, and, like The Call of the Wild, was immediately snapped up for translations.

Before he died in 1916, alcoholic, despondent and in debt, Jack London would write a total of fifty books, among them the semi-autobiographical Martin Eden and John Barleycorn, but his place in the history of letters rests on those two books, The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf, written in his middle twenties.

The story of the great dog, half St. Bernard, half shepherd, forced to break with the code of civilization and return to Wolfishness, obviously derives from Jack’s year in the Klondike. As a story it has a beautiful stripped simplicity; and it reads as well today as it did in 1903. The Sea Wolf as obviously finds its background in Jack’s teenage year on a sailing ship, but its philosophy, sometimes confused and often misinterpreted, is the opposite of that of The Call of the Wild.

What Jack London thought his novel had to say he set down in a letter to Mary Austin in the year before his death. I have again and again written books that failed to get across, he complained. Long years ago, at the very beginning of my writing career, I attacked Nietzsche and his superman idea. This was in ‘The Sea Wolf.’ Lots of people read ‘The Sea Wolf’, no one discovered that it was an attack upon the superman philosophy . . . I do not worry about it. . . . I go ahead content to be admired for my red-blooded brutality and for a number of other nice little things like that which are not true of my work at all.

Of course he did worry about it. He worried a lot in those later years, about a lot of things. Some critics had understood his repudiation of superman ethics, others had accurately discerned that he had an uncanny power in writing about red-blooded brutes. Apart from some of the characters who were variations of Jack London’s own self, Wolf Larsen is the most memorable human character he ever put on paper. And, while many critics have insisted that Maud Brewster, the cultured gentlelady who shifts the course of the story midstream, lacked flesh-and-blood reality, the fact is indisputable that she is precisely the type of woman toward whom Jack himself, in real life, was repeatedly drawn. Or, at least, the type he thought his inamoratas were. At the time he was writing The Sea Wolf, he was sure he had found her in Charmian Kittredge, who was about to become his second wife.

Some critics have called Jack London one of the first American realists, others call him a romantic. Irving Stone, in Sailor on Horseback, written in the 1930s when such phrases were fashionable, called him the first of America’s proletarian writers. But Jack London does not fit neatly into any of the critics’ categories, if, indeed, they ever mean much of anything. As a realist London is sometimes said to have carried on the tradition begun by Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, but there is no evidence that either seriously influenced his work. Kipling did, though London regarded himself as an opponent of Kipling philosophy, and sometimes was.

Kipling, like Jack London, was one of the great story-tellers of all time. Also like London, he did his best work, almost instinctively, in his twenties; and, again like London, he sometimes contradicted himself. (Men remember that Kipling said East and West would never meet, and forget that the lines which immediately followed declared that there was neither East nor West when strong men stood face to face.) Jack London had learned, on the waterfront and in Alaska, to respect brute strength, despite his intellectual disavowal of superman philosophy. What he wrote sometimes expressed what he felt more powerfully than what he thought, or thought he thought.

In his contradictions Jack London was a man of his American times. He was a self-educated frontiersman when the frontier was vanishing. The waterfronts were his first frontier; he sought others at sea and in the Klondike, and found little satisfaction in them. Like his contemporary, Theodore Roosevelt, he preached the strenuous life, and also wanted something more. Comparing primitive bestiality with middle-class money values, he could not help half-glorifying it. He called himself a socialist, and signed his letters Yours for the Revolution, but did not really know what he meant by either word, socialism or revolution. He was forever trying to build a bigger house than his neighbors, and he would always give his last dollar to a friend, and be a little annoyed when it was not repaid.

He never wrote better than he did in The Call of the Wild and in The Sea Wolf, though he wrote and wrote and wrote, so much and so fast that before the end he was paying young men—Sinclair Lewis among them—to devise plots for him. The last decade of his life was anti-climax. He lectured, and hated his middle-class audiences. In 1905 he ran a second time on the Socialist ticket for mayor of Oakland, and this time garnered 981 votes. The romantic marriage for which he left his first wife and his two daughters of course failed as romance, though Charmian was willing to share adventure with him to the end. He poured $30,000 that he could not afford into a ketch on which he sailed to the South Pacific, and came home sick and broke. He poured more money into a dream castle in the mountains of the wine country north of the bay, and it burned, or was burned. He lost the gusto that had been the essence of the man and of his writing, and it is still debated whether he died of alcoholism or invited death with sleeping tablets.

Jack London was not yet forty-one when he died. He had lived painfully and prodigally, and much too fast. He could never settle down and be content. He had despised money and had yearned for it, and made it as few writers ever do, and had