THE ADVENTURES OF JACK LONDON
...en London found himself working his way back to the town of Oakland. In Oakland is where London first found success, but like his sporadic work ethic, it was a product of the unpredictable times. People often called him the Kipling of the Klondike. His hard earned fame went to his head as did the liquor. On the day his first book of stories was published he got married. (Watson 3) Jack and Bess, his wife, were exact opposites of each other. He would do his work away from home to keep away from her. Jack and Bess eventually divorced due to Jack’s indiscretions. Charmaine Kittredge became his typist and later close companion. For six weeks Jack lived as a bum in the slums of England and wrote “The People of the Abyss”. The story was about homeless people. It was London’s personal favorite. He wrote it in the summer of 1902. The next story he wrote was about a dog he became friends with while he lived in the Yukon Territory. This story began to flow quickly and in five weeks he had written a genius novel “The Call of the Wild.” It is a great example of North American literature and almost every high school student has read the book or at least is familiar with it. (Watson 4) Brakhage 3 Jack London changed his views after studying the works of Charles Darwin, Rudyard Kipling, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Jung, and many more. If one were to sort through London’s work one could definitely find the emotional and literary developments shown through the way his characters react in their environment. Sorting through his work to find the philosophical roots would be a difficult task, but the variety and energy of his narratives would definitely make for an interesting search. Howard Lachtman described London as “…a born teller of tales who wrote as he lived – in a hurry. The writer, like the man, was a creature of force and eloquence, pulsing with enthusiasm or indignation.” (Lundberg 1) Although London was just as famous as an action-writer, he was a genius at describing the physical agony of slow death. London’s descriptions in “The White Silence” are real enough to send a chill down the back of anyone who has traveled in the northern wilderness in the middle of winter: Nature has many tricks where with she convinces man of his sanity –the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heavens artillery –but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all is the passive phase of 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. London often made death the theme of his work; Arthur Calder-Marshall said London “was always very much in love with death,” and his books make it very obvious that he spent a lot of time thinking about the subtleties and progressions of different ways of dying. Jack London had some first-hand experience having barely survived drowning after a suicide attempt Brakhage 4 by swimming to exhaustion in San Francisco Bay while drunk at the age of sixteen. A lot of the action in “To Build a Fire” deals with the slow process of freezing to death at seventy five degrees below zero. Strangely, Jack never gave his characters names in this story. London’s books are mostly about the struggle between living creatures and nature. Due to Jack’s history of frequent alcohol abuse, he suffered from many health issues, especially kidney problems. He was diagnosed in March of 1916 with an obstruction in his kidneys. It was caused by poisoning himself with arsenic that led to nephritis, an inflammation and internal spasm which caused his body not to discharge the toxins in his body. He was threatened with death by uremia. His condition was made worse by his poor diet of raw fish and meat. The doctors managed to ease the muscle spasm long enough for him to release the toxins. He didn’t feel well enough to leave Hawaii, until four months later, after they changed his diet to mil...