SUPERMANHOOD
We come now to the first of the writers of our time who was born of the
working class, and carried his working-class consciousness into his
literary career. He was the true king of our story tellers, the
brightest star that flashed upon our skies. He brought us the greatest
endowment both of genius and of brain, and the story of what America did
to him is a painful one.
Jack London was born in San Francisco, in 1876, which made him two years
my senior. We took to exchanging our first books, and a controversy
started between us, which lasted the rest of his life; the last letter I
received from him was an invitation to come up to the ranch and continue
it. “You and I ought to have some ‘straight from the shoulder’ talk with
each other. It is coming to you, it may be coming to me. It may
illuminate one or the other or both of us.” I answered that I was
finishing a job of writing; but that as soon as the job was done I would
come and “stand the gaff.” And then I read that he was dead!
It was the old question, several times stated in this book, of
self-discipline versus self-indulgence; or, as Jack would have put it,
asceticism versus self-expression. Which way will a man get the most out
of life? Believing in his own nature and giving it rein, living
intensely and fast; or distrusting his nature, all nature, stooping to
mean cautions and fears, imposing a rule upon his impulses--and so
cutting himself off from his joyful fellows, and exposing himself to
painful sneers?
I see Jack vividly, as he was at our first meeting, when he came to New
York in 1904 or 1905. At that time he was in the full glory of his
newly-won fame, and we young Socialists had got up a big meeting for him
at Grand Central Palace. Our hero came on a belated train from Florida,
arriving when our hearts were sick with despair; he came, radiant and
thrilling, in spite of an attack of tonsilitis, and strode upon the
platform amid the waving of red handkerchiefs, and in a voice of calm
defiance read to the city of New York his essay, “Revolution.”
New York did not like it, needless to say. But I liked it so well that I
was prepared to give my hero the admiration of a slave. But we spent the
next day together, chatting of the things we were both absorbed in; and
all that day the hero smoked cigarettes and drank--I don’t remember what
it was, for all these red and brown and green and golden concoctions are
equally painful to me, and the sight of them deprives me of the control
of my facial muscles. Jack, of course, soon noted this; he was the
red-blood, and I was the mollycoddle, and he must have his fun with me,
in the mood of the oyster pirate and roustabout. Tales of incredible
debauches; tales of opium and hashish, and I know not what other strange
ingredients; tales of whisky bouts lasting for weeks! I remember a
picture of two sailor boys at sea in a small boat, unable to escape from
each other, conceiving a furious hatred of each other, and when they got
ashore, retiring behind the sand-dunes to fight. They fought until they
could hardly walk--and then they repaired to town to heal their bruises
with alcohol.
The next time we met was six or eight years later; and this time the
controversy was more serious. For now Jack had read “Love’s Pilgrimage,”
and was exasperated by what seemed to him a still less excusable form of
asceticism, that of sex. Here was a so-called hero, a prig of a poet,
driving a young wife to unhappiness by notions born in the dark corners
of Christian monkeries. I am not sure just how I defended poor Thyrsis;
I am not sure how clearly I myself saw at that time the peculiar working
of sex-idealism which had manifested itself in that novel; the impulse a
man has to be ashamed of advantages given to him by nature and society,
and so to put himself chivalrously under the feet of a woman--raising
her, an image of perfection, upon a pedestal of his own self-reproach.
Sometimes she refuses to stay upon this pedestal; and so results a
comical plight for a too-imaginative ascetic!
The argument between Jack and myself was handicapped on that occasion by
the fact that his voice was almost entirely gone because of a sore
throat. He was trying the alcohol treatment; my last picture of him in
the flesh was very much of the flesh, alas!--with a flask of gin before
him, and the stumps of many cigarettes in his dinner-plate, and his eyes
red and unwholesome-looking. He has told the story of his travels in the
Kingdom of Alcoholia himself, told it bravely and completely, so I am
not obliged to use any reserve in speaking of this aspect of his life. I
went away, more than ever confirmed as a mollycoddle!
But Jack London was a man with a magnificent mind, and a giant’s will.
He fought tremendous battles in his own soul--battles in despite of his
own false philosophy, battles which he was fighting even while he was
quarreling at other men’s self-restraint. He went on a trip around the
Horn, which lasted several months, and drank nothing all that time;
also, he wrote that shining book, “John Barleycorn,” one of the most
useful and most entertaining ever penned by a man.
It was our habit to send each other our new books, and to exchange
comments on them. When I read “John Barleycorn” I wrote that the book
had made me realize a new aspect of the drink problem, a wrong it did
to men who never touched it--in depriving them of companionship, making
them exiles among their fellows. So much of men’s intercourse depends
upon and is colored by drinking! I, for example, had always felt that my
friendship with Jack London had been limited by that disharmony.
He wrote in reply that I was mistaken; it was especially with my
attitude towards sex that he disagreed. We exchanged some letters about
the matter, and mentally prepared ourselves for that duel which will
never be fought. In concluding the subject of alcohol, let me point out
that Jack himself settled the controversy by voting for “California Dry”
at the election held a few days before his death. His explanation was
that while he enjoyed drinking, he was willing to forego that enjoyment
for the sake of the younger generation; and it would indeed be a
graceless ascetic who asked more than that!
So far as concerns the matter of sex, the test of a man’s philosophy is
that at the age of forty he has kept his belief in womankind, in the joy
and satisfaction that true love may give. Where the philosophy of
“self-expression” had led Jack London was known to many who heard him
tell of a book he planned to write, giving the whole story of his
experiences with women. He meant to write it with the same ruthless
honesty he had used in “John Barleycorn”; revealing his tragic
disillusionment, and his contempt for woman as a parasite, a creature of
vanity and self-indulgence.
Jack’s conquests among the sex had been many, and too easy, it would
seem; like most fighters, he despised an unworthy antagonist. The women
who threw themselves at his head came from all classes of society, drawn
to him as moths to a flame; but it is evident that his philosophy was to
blame for the fact that there were so few among them he could respect.
There were surely many able to hold the interest of a great man, who did
not share his philosophy, and therefore remained unnoticed by him.
It is not generally the custom to write of these things in plain words;
but in the case of Jack London it would be futile to do otherwise,
because he spoke of them freely, and would have written of them in the
same way. His whole attitude was a challenge to truth-telling, a call
for frankness, even to the point of brutality. The book he planned was
to be published under some such name as “Jack Liverpool”--which you must
admit would hardly have been a very adequate disguise. I have heard one
of his best friends say that he is glad Jack never lived to write it.
For my part, believing as I do that the salvation of the race depends
upon unmasking the falsehoods of our class-morality--the institution
which I call “marriage plus prostitution”--I cannot but sigh for this
lost story. What an awakening it would have brought to the mothers of
our so-called “better classes,” if Jack London had ever given to the
world the true story of his experiences with their daughters! As a
school boy in Oakland, for example, with the young girls of the
comfortable classes in that city! He and his companions, sons of
workingmen and poor people, looking up to the great world above them
inquiringly, made the strange discovery that these shining,
golden-haired pets of luxury, guarded at home and in their relations
with their social equals by the thousand sleepless eyes of scandal,
found it safe and pleasant to repair to secret rendezvous among the
willow thickets of Lake Merritt, and there play the nymph to handsome
and sturdy fauns of a class below the level ever reached by the thousand
sleepless eyes!
When you listened to a narrative such as that, you realized the grim
meaning that Jack London put into his essay, “What Life Means to Me,”
telling of the embitterment that came to him when he, the oyster pirate
and roustabout, broke into the “parlor floor of society”:
Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life,
they were merely the unburied dead.... The women were gowned
beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that
they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known
down below in the cellar.... It is true these beautifully gowned,
beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little
moralities; but, in spite of their prattle, the dominant key of the
life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally
selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities and
informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and
the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends
stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and
prostitution itself.
Jack London had a dream of another kind of love; the dream of a strong,
free, proud woman, the mate for a strong, free, proud man. This dream
came into his writings at the start; into “A Daughter of the Snows,” his
third novel--the very name of it, you perceive. This story, published in
the second year of the present century, was crude and boyish, but it had
the promise of his dawning greatness, and was the occasion of my first
letter to him, and the beginning of our friendship. Afterwards he told
this same dream of the perfect mating, over and over again; he continued
to tell it long after he had ceased to believe in it.
This necessity of writing about sex in a way that was utterly insincere
must have been the main cause of that contempt for his own fiction which
London was so swift and vehement to proclaim. The expression of this
contempt was the most startling thing about him, to any one who admired
his work. “I loathe the stuff when I have done it. I do it because I
want money and it’s an easy way to get it. But if I could have my choice
about it I never would put pen to paper--except to write a Socialist
essay, to tell the bourgeois world how much I despise it.” I remember
trying to persuade him that he must have enjoyed writing the best of his
stories--“The Sea Wolf” and “The Call of the Wild”; but he would not
have it so. He was a man of action; he liked to sail a boat, to run a
ranch, to fight for Socialism.
His real attitude towards woman was expressed in “Martin Eden,” his most
autobiographical novel, whose hero gives his final conclusion about life
by dropping himself out of the porthole of an ocean steamer at night.
This hero is a working boy, who makes a desperate struggle to rise from
poverty; but the girl of the world of culture, whom he idealizes and
worships, proves a coward and fails him in his need. That is one wrong
an uncomprehending woman can do to a man; and yet another is to
comprehend his weaker part too well. I have heard friends of London’s
boyhood tell how he came back from the Klondike with the flush of his
youthful dream upon him--the dream of the primitive female, the “mate”
of the strong and proud and free man; and how a shrewd young woman saw
her chance and proceeded to play the primitive female in drawing-rooms,
leaping over tables and chairs, and otherwise exhibiting abounding
energy. But when this game had accomplished its purpose she did no more
leaping, but “settled down,” as the phrase is; and so came a divorce.
This “Martin Eden” is assuredly one of Jack London’s greatest works; he
put his real soul into it, and the fact that it was so little known and
read, must have been of evil significance to him. It taught him that if
an American writer wants to earn a living with his pen--especially an
extravagant living--it is necessary that he should avoid dealing in any
true and vital way with the theme of sex. Either he must write over and
over again the dream of primitive and perfect mating, a phenomenon
unreal and unconvincing to people who are not primitive, but who have
intellects as well as bodies to mate; or else, if he deals with modern
life, he must give us details of the splendid and devastating passions
of the prosperous--the kind of perfumed poison now all the rage. One saw
the beginning of that in “The Little Lady of the Big House,” and I count
this book the most sinister sign in the life of Jack London. A man can
hardly have a thirty-six thousand dollar a year contract with the Hearst
magazines and still keep his soul alive!
I would say to myself, mournfully, that America had “got” Jack London,
just as it “got” Mark Twain! But then something would happen to show me
that I had given up hope too soon. Jack had a mind which worked
unceasingly, and impelled him irresistibly; he had a love of truth that
was a passion, a hatred of injustice that burned volcanic fires. He was
a deeply sad man, a bitterly, cruelly suffering man, and no one could
tell what new vision he would forge in the heat of his genius. If I
write of him here severely it is because I believe in the rigid truth,
which he himself preached; but I would not leave anyone with the idea
that I do not appreciate his greatness, both as a writer and a man.
There were many among his friends and mine who gave him up. He went to
Hawaii, and the “smart set” there made a lion of him, and he
condescended to refer appreciatively to their “sweet little charities”
on behalf of the races they were exploiting. He went to Mexico, and fell
under the spell of the efficiency of oil engineers, and wrote for
“Collier’s Weekly” a series of articles which caused radicals to break
out in rage. Jack was a boy to the end, and must make new discoveries
and have new enthusiasms. If a naval officer took him over a
battleship, he would perceive that it was a marvelous and thrilling
machine; but then in the quiet hours of the night he would see the
pitiful white faces of the stokers, to whom as a guest of an officer he
had not been introduced!
Yes, for he had been in the place of these stokers, and their feelings
had been stamped upon his soul. He might set up to be a country
gentleman, and fall into a fury with his “hands” for their stupidity and
incompetence; but if you said to him, “How about the class war?”
instantly he would be there with his mind. “Yes, of course, I know how
they feel; if I were in their place I would never do a stroke of work I
did not have to.” It is a stressful thing to have an imagination, and to
see many sides of life at once!
Jack had a divine pity, he had wept over the East End of London as Jesus
wept over Jerusalem. For years afterwards the memories of this stunted
and debased population haunted him beyond all peace; the pictures he
wrote of them in “The People of the Abyss” will be read by posterity
with horror and incredulity, and recognized as among the most powerful
products of his pen. Those, with his vivid and intensely felt Socialist
essays, constitute him one of the great revolutionary figures of our
history. I know that he kept a spark of that sacred fire burning to the
very end, for a little over a year before his death I tried him with the
bulky manuscript of “The Cry for Justice.” The preface he wrote for it
is one of the finest things he ever did, and some of it will be carved
upon his monument:
It is so simple a remedy, merely service. Not one ignoble thought
or act is demanded of any one of all men and women in the world to
make fair the world. The call is for nobility of thinking, nobility
of doing. The call is for service, and such is the wholesomeness of
it, he who serves all best serves himself.
That is what life had taught him at the end. But it was not easy for him
to learn such a lesson, for he had an imperious nature, fierce in its
demands, and never entirely to be tamed. The struggle between
individualism and Socialism was going on in his whole being all the
time. In the copy of “Martin Eden” which he sent me he wrote: “One of my
motifs in this book was an attack on individualism (in the person of the
hero). I must have bungled for so far not a single reviewer has
discovered it.” After reading the book I replied that it was easy to
understand the befuddlement of the critics; for he had shown such
sympathy with his hard-driving individualist hero that it would hardly
occur to anyone to take the character as a warning and a reproach.
You feel that same thing in all his books--in “The Sea Wolf,” and
especially in “The Mutiny of the Elsinore”; the Nietzschean
world-conqueror has conquered London’s imagination, in spite of his
reason and his conscience. If I have written here with cruel frankness
about the personal tragedies of his life, it is because I would not have
posterity continue in the misunderstanding of which he complained in the
case of “Martin Eden.” No, do not make that mistake about his life and
its meaning; most certainly it is not a glorification of the red-blooded
superman, trampling all things under his feet, gratifying his imperious
desires. Rather is it a demonstration of the fact that the
world-conquering superman, trampling all things under his feet and
gratifying all his desires, commits suicide by swallowing laudanum at
the age of forty, because pleasure and wealth and fame have turned to
ashes on his lips. Jack’s friends say that the cause was a desire for
two women at the same time; but I don’t believe that a mature,
intellectual man will kill himself for such a reason, unless his moral
forces have been sapped by years of self-indulgence.
It was the “Martin Eden” ending, which had haunted Jack London all his
life, and which in the end he made a reality. What a shame, and what a
tragedy to our literature, that capitalist America, the philosophy of
individualist greed and selfishness, should have stolen away the soul of
this man, with all his supreme and priceless gifts! He had seen so
clearly our vision of fellowship and social justice--how clearly, let
him tell you in his own words, the last words he wrote upon ethical
matters:
He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of
service, will serve truth to confute liars and make them
truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will perish;
will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not beautiful.
And he who is strong will serve the weak that they may become
strong. He will devote his strength not to the debasement and
defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity
for them to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and
beasts.
These words are from “The Cry for Justice,” “this humanist Holy Book,”
as London called it. Such words, and actions based upon them, make
precious his memory, and will preserve it as long as anything in
American literature is preserved. Perhaps the best thing I can add to
this chapter is a statement of what I personally owed to him--the utmost
one writer can owe to another. When he was at the height of his fame,
and I was unknown, I sent him proofs of “The Jungle,” explaining that I
had been unable to find a publisher, and wished to raise money to
publish the book myself. There are many jealousies in the literary
world; some who win its laurels by bitter struggle are not eager to
raise up rivals. But Jack was not one of these; he wrote a letter about
the book, hailing it as “The ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of Wage Slavery,” and
rallying the Socialist movement as by a bugle-call to its support. If
that book went all over the world, it was Jack London’s push that
started it; and I am only one of a score of authors who might tell the
same story of generous and eager support.