The Book of Jack London
by . New Aork: The Century Company. 1921. Two vols., 12mo, xvi+42.5, and viii + 414 pp. Illustrated. $10.00.
A CHILD of five years, he tramped a ploughed field with a tin pail of beer. A lad of fifteen, he worked at a machine ten hours a day for ten cents an hour. A wild blade of sixteen, with a girl to bear him company, he sailed his own boat in a lawless trade, and met on the man’s terms, gun in hand, the most reckless pirate of them all. As foremast hand, he served for seven months in a sealing-schooner, and as a professional tramp, he beat his way across the continent and back again; then, burning with ambition, he worked nineteen hours a day to prepare for college and wrote The Call of the Wild, The People of the Abyss, and The Sea-Wolf. There, in itself, is a story worth telling.
Biography written by one so near to the subject is not to be judged by the unyielding standards of abstract criticism. It could not be important, nor is it desirable to have it so. But if Mrs. London’s book is intensely partisan, it is unflinchingly honest. Every line, every word is imbued with loyalty and affection; yet it is written without omission, perversion, or false reserve. It is, in short, exactly the story that the man himself would have most desired, who wrote in reply to one regretting that he had published in The Rood so much about his own life: ‘It is all true. It is what I am, what I have done, and it is part, of the process by which I have become.’
So remarkable were the things he did, and the process by which he ‘became,’ that there is a keen feeling of personal loss when one misses in his life that subtler spiritual sense which might have kindled in his work a Pentecostal fire.
To read The Book of Jack London is to meet a man of clear mind, unyielding determination, broad and intense interests, quick pride, and marked talent. The book follows him with singular intimacy, from earliest childhood through periods of wretched squalor and wild adventure; it goes with him in his magnificent march up from the waterfront gutters, where, for a few years, be stumbled blindly; it reveals the aspirations and triumphs of his manhood. No one except his wife could have written it at all; and that she could have written it so well and so completely is amazing, it does not pretend to give, in any sense, a critical estimate of the writer and his work, which is perhaps the thing that would be most difficult for Mrs. London to do in mere cold justice: rather, in its sympathetic pages lives and breathes the lovable, enthusiastic, very human Jack London that Charmian London knew and wants the world to know.
CHARLES BOARDMAN HAWES.