‘London was a prolific writer, authoring over 400 pieces of nonfiction, 200 short-stories,
and more than fifty books. Among his later works, The Iron Heel (1907), a dystopian
novel containing premonitions of Fascism, and John Barleycorn (1913), a semiautobiographical portrait of an alcoholic, are notable. His final years were marked by
various unsuccessful projects of a non-literary nature; during this time, despite his doctor's
warnings, he continued to drink heavily and consume his regular diet of raw meat and raw
fish. He died on November 16, 1916.’
~Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism
‘London was never able to root his ideas in his emotions; he never deepened attitudes into
personality; he left his own soul unexamined while he mapped out the minds of others,
until his life (with its sea voyages, alcoholism, and money grubbing) took on the aspect of
an obsessive flight from self that he had never explored and that he finally came to fear
and abhor... London was a free thinker who raided the philosophies of Nietzsche, Spencer
and Kidd as he once raided the oyster beds of San Francisco Bay. What he read he wrote,
what he stole he sold, without any of the ideas he used tincturing his system; his mind was
a faculty divorced from his personality, a sponge that he regularly squeezed for the
popular magazines.’
~Richard Gid Powers, Introduction, The Science Fiction of Jack London
17
17
1897
1898
The War of the Classes (1905)
'How I Became a Socialist’
“I was a rampant individualist. […] like one of Nietzsche's blond beasts [but] I was affected on the
day when I first saw the walls of the Social Pit rise around me and felt myself slipping down, down,
into the shambles at the bottom. […] I think it is apparent that my rampant individualism was pretty
effectively hammered out of me, and something else as effectively hammered in.[…] All my days I
have worked hard with my body and according to the number of days I have worked, by just that
much am I nearer the bottom of the Pit. I shall climb out of the Pit, but not by the muscles of my body
shall I climb out I shall do no more hard work, and may God strike me dead if I do another day's hard
work with my body more than I absolutely have to do.”
Revolution, and Other Essays (1906)
The Iron Heel (1908)
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earliest of the modern dystopian novels
Marxist application of historical materialism
Feudalism, Republic, capitalism’s Oligarch’s, Brotherhood of Man
(Orwell reviewed, influenced 1984)
White Logic
‘In the cellar of society London had embraced two opposing methods of escape: individualism and
socialism–the first an assertion of his strength and cunning for personal and material success; the
second avowing mass strength and political revolution for social justice and the transformation of
society so that there should be neither cellar nor abyss. For a long time, London had been able to
maintain the conflicting ideas side by side, but individualism gradually dominated the socialism,
and though it never conquered altogether, it became London's primary mode of belief and
expression.
From that time on, though he was to become world-famous and a millionaire, London was
dogged by an intensified sense of failure and hopelessness. He was estranged from his first wife and
his children. His second marriage did not result in the sons he wanted so badly, or in any surviving
offspring, and his second wife provided less the 'mate woman' than he had hoped. He was alienated
from his old Socialist comrades and finally resigned from the Socialist Party altogether. He was now
a confirmed alcoholic and his melancholy deepened with its 'White Logic.' Slowly, inevitably, the
teo well-springs that had sustained him, his writing and his socialism, were poisoned. Though he
forced himself to write, and hated it, his inventiveness and creativity flagged so badly that he began
to buy plots and plagiarize other books, and his writing was no longer seriously reviewed.’
~James I. McCintock, White Logic: Jack London’s Short Stories (1975)
John Barleycorn (1913)
(semi) auto-biography
where alcohol introduces the 'white logic,' andonly in the last chapters is the nihilism
of 'white logic' pitted against "the lesser truth" which "makes life possible to persist":
John Barleycorn "To be stupid is to be happy," I contend.
"Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?” [says the White
Logic]
Oh, the victim cannot combat John Barleycorn.
"One step removed from the annihilating bliss of Buddha's Nirvana," the White Logic adds. ”Oh well, here's the
house. Cheer up and take a drink. We know, we illuminated, you and I, all the folly and the farce."
And in my book-walled den, the mausoleum of the thoughts of men, I take my drink, and other drinks, and roust out
the sleeping dogs from the recesses of my brain and hallo them on over the walls of prejudice and law and through all
the cunning labyrinths of superstition and belief.
"Drink," says the White Logic. "The Greeks believed that the gods gave them wine so that they might forget the
miserablness of existence. And remember what Heine said."
Well do I remember that flaming Jew's "With the last breath all is done: joy, love, sorrow, macaroni, the theatre, limetrees, raspberry drops, the power of human relations, gossip, the barking of dogs, champagne."
"Your clear white light is sickness," I tell the White Logic. "You lie."
"By telling too strong a truth," he quips back.
"Rationality gelded to sentiment," the White Logic grins. "At the end of all his thinking he still clung to the sentiment
of immortality. Facts transmuted in the alembic of hope into terms of faith. The ripest fruit of reason the stultification
of reason. From the topmost peak of reason James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that all is well and will
be well--the old, oh, ancient old, acrobatic flip of the metaphysicians whereby they reasoned reason quite away in
order to escape the pessimism consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason.” [...]
The foregoing is a sample roaming with the White Logic through the dusk of my soul [...] to give the reader a glimpse
of a man's secret dwelling when it is shared with John Barleycorn. And the reader must remember that this mood,
which he has read in a quarter of an hour, is but one mood of the myriad...
The soul, in nature, with death.
(Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Jung, et al)
White Silence
‘The afternoon wore on, and with the awe, born of the White Silence, the voiceless
travelers bent to their work. Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his
futurity,–the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the
earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery,–but the most tremendous, the most
stupefying of all, is the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens
are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at
the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a
dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot's life, nothing more.
Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of things strives for utterance. And
the fear of death, Of God, of the universe, comes over him,–the hope of the Resurrection
and the Life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence,–it
is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.’
~ The Son of the Wolf (1900)