Jack London and Naturalism

Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney in San Francisco on January 12, 1876. His father left before he was born. He took the surname of his stepfather, John London, and grew up poor in Oakland, across the bay. He left school young to work, and read constantly at the public library.

Britannica calls him “the highest-paid writer in the United States” of his time, and says “his earnings never matched his expenditures.” He wrote about 50 books in 17 years. The Jack London Online Collection at Sonoma State University describes him as a “proud socialist” and also names his “dark side”: depression, heavy drinking, “anti-Semitism, and mixed ideas about race.” The section on his views on race looks at that side.

Summary. “Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail.” It is nine o’clock and there is “no sun nor hint of sun.” The man, who is never named, is heading for an old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where “the boys” are already in camp. He hopes to be there by six. He is “a new-comer in the land” and this is his first winter. “The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.” To him, “Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero.”

He spits, and there is “a sharp, explosive crackle.” He knows spit crackles on the snow at fifty below, “but this spittle had crackled in the air.” At his heels trots “a big native husky, the proper wolf-dog.” The dog is uneasy. “Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment.” The narrator gives the real number: “It was seventy-five below zero.”

The creek hides springs under the snow. The man watches for them, and at half-past twelve he reaches the forks and builds a fire to eat his lunch. Then, “at a place where there were no signs,” he breaks through and wets himself “half-way to the knees.” He must build a fire to dry his feet. He does it well, and smiles at the advice of “the old-timer on Sulphur Creek” that no man should travel alone after fifty below. He decides “those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them.”

But he has built the fire under a spruce. Every twig he pulls shakes the tree. A bough tips its load of snow, it brings down the boughs below, and “the fire was blotted out!” “It was as though he had just heard his own sentence of death.” His fingers will not work. He drops his matches, lights one with his teeth, then lights all seventy at once and burns his hands to start a new fire. A piece of moss falls on it, his shivering scatters it, and it goes out.

He tries to kill the dog to warm his hands inside its body, but he cannot hold a knife. He runs until he falls. At last he decides he has been “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” and should meet death “decently.” He imagines the boys finding his body. “You were right, old hoss; you were right,” he mumbles to the old-timer. He falls asleep. The dog waits, catches “the scent of death,” and trots off toward camp, “where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.”

London published a story called “To Build a Fire” twice, and they are not the same story. The first appeared in The Youth’s Companion, a magazine for young readers, on May 29, 1902. The second, the one most people read now, appeared in The Century Magazine in August 1908 and was collected in Lost Face in 1910.

• 1902: the man has a name, Tom Vincent. There is no dog. It is not as cold. His fire is not put out by snow. He survives with lasting frostbite and becomes, in the words of the Wikipedia summary, “a more melancholic but wiser person.”
• 1908: the man has no name. A dog goes with him. It is seventy-five below. The fire is blotted out, the second fire fails, and he dies.

The first version is a lesson: be careful and you will learn. The second is naturalism: being careful is not enough, because the cold does not care. Ask what the dog adds, and why London took away the man’s name.

Summary. “Old Koskoosh listened greedily.” He is blind, and he sits by a small fire in the snow while his people break camp around him. He hears his granddaughter, Sit-cum-to-ha, beating the dogs into their harnesses, and the lodges coming down one by one. His son, the chief, is “a mighty hunter.” The tribe is hungry, the trail is long, and Koskoosh is too old to travel. They are leaving him behind, as was their custom with the very old.

His son comes back for a moment. “Is it well with you?” “It is well.” “There be wood beside you,” the son says, “and the fire burns bright.” Koskoosh answers, “I am as a last year’s leaf, clinging lightly to the stem.” The son leaves. Now “the measure of his life was a handful of fagots.” When the last stick burns, the frost will come.

He does not complain. “It was the law of all flesh.” Nature “had no concern for that concrete thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the species, the race.” He remembers the women and men he knew, and then a day in his boyhood when he and his friend Zing-ha followed the track of an old bull moose that wolves had cut out from the herd. They found where it made its last stands, and then they found what was left of it.

The fire burns down. A wolf howls close by. “A cold muzzle thrust against his cheek.” He grabs a burning stick and waves it, and a ring of wolves gathers round. Then he asks himself, “Why should he cling to life?” He drops the stick into the snow. “Again he saw the last stand of the old bull moose, and Koskoosh dropped his head wearily upon his knees. What did it matter after all? Was it not the law of life?”

London wrote about workers’ rights and called himself a socialist for most of his adult life. He also held racist views that were common among white Americans of his time, and he put some of them in print. Students can study his stories and still be honest about this.

• Jack Johnson. In 1908 Jack Johnson became the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion. London, writing about boxing for newspapers, openly called for a white boxer to beat him. Two days before Johnson fought the former champion Jim Jeffries in 1910, London described Jeffries as “the chosen representative of the white race, and this time the greatest of them.” Johnson won in the fifteenth round.
• “The great white hope.” The phrase is often credited to London. Wikipedia notes that the term was used outside boxing in the 1800s, and that a famous line about saving “the white race” was added later by a boxing writer, Nat Fleischer. What is clear from London’s own writing is that he wanted a white champion.
• Asian immigration. In 1904 he wrote an essay called “The Yellow Peril,” using a racist phrase of the day about fear of China and Japan. Yet he ended it by admitting his own view might be “a product of Western race-egotism.”
• Other stories. Some of his stories, such as “The Mexican,” “The Chinago” and “Koolau the Leper,” treat people of color with sympathy and show the cruelty of white power. In “The Law of Life” the narrator respects Koskoosh’s calm but also calls his mind “barbaric.”
• Socialism and race. London’s socialism spoke for working people, but in his time many white socialists did not count all workers equally. The Sonoma State collection sums him up as having “mixed ideas about race.” Both things were true of him at once.

In class, talk about the ideas and the time, not about classmates. Quote London’s racial writing only when you need it as evidence.

• Jack London, “To Build a Fire” (1908 version), in Lost Face (1910), Project Gutenberg eBook #2429 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/2429).
• Jack London, “The Law of Life,” in Children of the Frost (1902), Project Gutenberg eBook #10736 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/10736).
• The Jack London Online Collection, Sonoma State University Library (london.sonoma.edu) (a “proud socialist” who grew up in working-class Oakland, Beauty Ranch, his “dark side,” including “anti-Semitism, and mixed ideas about race”).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Jack London” (birth name and dates, Oakland, oysters and the fish patrol, the voyage to Japan, the hobo year and socialism in 1894, the highest-paid writer, Glen Ellen and Wolf House, “To Build a Fire” as “a masterly depiction of humankind’s inability to overcome nature,” reprinted in Lost Face).
• Wikipedia, “Jack London” (Virginia Prentiss and the Razzle-Dazzle, the Sophie Sutherland and “Typhoon off the Coast of Japan,” sailing on July 12, 1897, with Captain Shepard, scurvy, The Call of the Wild and the $750 sale, the Socialist Party of America, the Oakland mayoral races, the ranch, his resignation and death, his views on race, Jack Johnson and “great white hope,” “The Yellow Peril”), “To Build a Fire” (the 1902 Youth’s Companion version of May 29, 1902, Tom Vincent, and the 1908 Century version), “The Law of Life” (McClure’s, March 1901), “Wolf House” (the fire of August 22, 1913) and “Jack Johnson vs. James J. Jeffries” (London’s words before the 1910 fight; Johnson’s win in the fifteenth round).
• Summaries are our own paraphrases. Every quotation from the stories was checked against the Project Gutenberg texts above. Quotations from London’s journalism and essays are as quoted in the Wikipedia articles above.
• Art: the spruce and fire and the dog on the trail illustrations and the preview image are original artwork made for Jugami.