On Jack London, banned books, and political agitation.
During his short career, Jack London achieved larger-than-life stature in American literature, and in the course of that short career he, like so many other writers of the Great-American-Novelist ilk, managed to produce a book that would be blacklisted, not only by American libraries and curricula, but also by a number of contemporary European dictatorships.
Preoccupied with the revolutionary flavor of much socialist thought at the time, multiple European regimes were wary of the influence of writers like London.
That book, The Call of the Wild, is inarguably London’s most famous work, which faced challenges in the United States largely as a result of its unflinching portrayal of animal cruelty, and its less-than-flattering depiction of a fictitious Native tribe. But abroad—in Italy, Yugoslavia, and Nazi Germany, where the book was met with yet fiercer opposition—the grounds for censorship and, in some cases outright book burning, hinged solely on London’s own socialist ideology. For even while explicitly socialist themes are hardly prominent features in The Call of the Wild, in London’s life and his other writings they loomed large. Preoccupied with the revolutionary flavor of much socialist thought at the time, multiple European regimes were wary of the influence of writers like London, and censoring his magnum opus was one means of curbing his influence as a social agitator.
Regardless, London found outlets to express his views on what he saw as the pernicious nature of capitalism and the plight of the laboring classes. One of London’s more rousing articles on the subject first appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine which, while today is a women’s fashion magazine, was, at the time, a publication that fielded essays, novellas, and book reviews from the American literati, including Ambrose Bierce, Rudyard Kipling, and Edith Wharton. In a March 1906 issue London penned an essay for the magazine entitled “What Life Means To Me.” In it London not only avows what was, according to his second wife, “perhaps his most impassioned committal of himself as a rebel toward the shames and uncleanness of the capitalist system”; but in it he also implicates books as the chief eye-opener that brought him over to the “revolutionist” camp of socialism.
In honor of Banned Books Week, presented below is an illustrative excerpt from London’s 1906 article for Cosmopolitan, excerpted from the 1999 collection of his letters, No Mentor but Myself:
I had been born in the working-class, and I was now, at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore. Lack of space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only that the things I there saw gave me a terrible scare.
I was scared into thinking. I saw the naked simplicities of the complicated civilization in which I lived. Life was a matter of food and shelter. In order to eat food and shelter men sold things. The merchant sold shoes, the politician sold his manhood, and the representative of the people, with exceptions, of course, sold his trust; while nearly all sold their honor. Women, too, whether on the street or in the holy bond of wedlock, were prone to sell their flesh. All things were commodities, all people bought and sold. The one commodity that labor had to sell was muscle. The honor of labor had no price in the market-place. Labor had muscle, and muscle alone, to sell.
But there was a difference, a vital difference. Shoes and trust and honor had a way of renewing themselves. They were imperishable stocks. Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew. As the shoe merchant sold shoes, he continued to replenish his stock. But there was no way of replenishing the laborer’s stock of muscle. The more he sold of his muscle, the less of it remained to him. It was his one commodity, and each day his stock of it diminished. In the end, if he did not die before, he sold out and put up his shutters. He was a muscle bankrupt, and nothing remained to him but to go down into the cellar of society and perish miserably.
I learned, further, that brain was likewise a commodity. It, too, was different from muscle. A brain seller was only at his prime when he was fifty or sixty years old, and his wares were fetching higher prices than ever. But a laborer was worked out or broken down at forty-five or fifty. I had been in the cellar of society, and I did not like the place as a habitation. The pipes and drains were unsanitary, and the air was bad to breathe. If I could not live on the parlor floor of society, I could, at any rate, have a try at the attic. It was true, the diet there was slim, but the air at least was pure. So I resolved to sell no more muscle, and to become a vendor of brains.
Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge. I returned to California and opened the books. While thus equipping myself to become a brain merchant, it was inevitable that I should delve into sociology. There I found, in a certain class of books, scientifically formulated, the simple sociological concepts I had already worked out for myself. Other and greater minds, before I was born, had worked out all that I had thought and a vast deal more. I discovered that I was a socialist.
The socialists were revolutionists, inasmuch as they struggled to overthrow the society of the present, and out of the material to build the society of the future. I, too, was a socialist and a revolutionist. I joined the groups of working-class and intellectual revolutionists, and for the first time came into intellectual living.
Originally appearing in a 1906 article for Cosmopolitan magazine, this excerpt was taken from a collection of London’s letters, No Mentor but Myself, curated from the earlier 1988 publication of Stanford’s comprehensive Letters of Jack London.
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