Abstract
In “Memoirs of Jack London,” which was published eight months after Jack London’s death in November 1916, Anna Strunsky Walling pays tribute to one of the most prolific and successful writers at the turn of the twentieth century. Her essay is not only an obituary and a paean to commemorate “London’s genius” but also a deeply personal attempt to understand the complexity of London’s life and oeuvre. Even though the dominant tone of the memoir is that of veneration, admiration and fascination with an adventurous man, inspirational friend and devoted socialist writer, Strunsky conveys doubts as to some of the ideologies endorsed by London. At one point, the flow of praise sounds a discordant note:
He was youth, adventure, romance, he was a poet and a social revolutionist. He had a genius for friendship. He loved greatly and was greatly beloved. But how to fix in words that quality of personality that made him different from everyone else in the world? How convey an idea of its magnetism and of the poetic quality of his nature? He is the outgrowth of the struggle and the suffering of the Old Order, and he is the strength and the virtue of all its terrible and criminal vices.1
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Notes
Strunsky Walling cited in A. Kershaw (1997), Jack London: A Life (London: HarperCollins Publishers).
J. Campbell Reesman (2009) Jack London’s Racial Lives: A Critical (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press).
J. London, Letter to Houghton Mifflin, January 31, 1900, in J. London (1999), No Mentor But Myself: Jack London on Writers and Writing. D. L. Walker and J. C. Reesman (eds.) (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 13.
J. Auerbach’s Male Call: Becoming Jack London draws attention to London’s use of lycanthropy in his personal and private life for the construction of masculinity. J. Auerbach (1996), Male Call: Becoming Jack London (Durham: Duke University Press).
A. Sinclair (1977) Jack: A Biography of Jack London (New York: Pocket Books), 12. See also Reesman, Jack London’s Racial Lives. This is how Strunsky recalls London’s musings on his experience in Mammy Jennie’s house: “As we sat there on the dunes he pictured it for me. It had been good in his mammy’s house. It had been warm, sparkling, resounding with the voices of merry children, his foster brothers and sisters with whom he had played, unconscious of the difference of color, black as they were, and he whiter than the average.” Strunsky Walling, “Memorabilia.” Box 35, Folder 445, 8. Beinecke Library at Yale University.
J. London, A Letter to Cloudesley Johns, August 10, 1899, in E. Labor, R. C. Leitz, III, and I. Milo Shepard (eds.) (1988), The Letters of Jack London (Stanford: Stanford University Press), I, 103–104.
A. J. Naso (1981), “Jack London and Herbert Spencer,” Jack London Newsletter, 14, 1 (January–April), 29.
C. London (1921) Jack London (London: Mills & Boon), 69.
H. Spencer (1865) Social Statics or, The Conditions essential to Human Happiness Specified and The First of Them Developed (New York: D. Appleton and Co.), 46.
J. London (1982) The Iron Heel in J. London, Novels and Social Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1982), 333.
D. H. Dickason (1941), “David Starr Jordan as a Literary Man,” Indiana Magazine of History, 37, 4 (December), 345–358.
D. Starr Jordan, The Call of the Nation, cited in D. K. Pickens (1968), Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), 63.
D. Starr Jordan (1899), Imperial Democracy (New York: Appleton and Co.), 18.
D. Starr Jordan (1898), Foot-notes to Evolution: A Series of Popular Addresses on the Evolution and Life (New York: D. Appleton & Co.), 146.
E. Haeckel, Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte (1868), 549,
cited in R. Weikart (2004), From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave), 105.
See C. Stasz (2001), Jack London’s Women (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press).
J. Tavernier-Courbin (2002), “Jack London and Anna Strunsky: Lovers at Cross-Purposes,” in S. S. Hodson and J. Campbell Reesman (2002), Jack London: One Hundred Years a Writer (San Marino CA: Huntington Library), 21–43. See also Reesman, Jack London’s Racial Lives ; and Stasz, Jack London’s Women.
See letter from London to Strunsky, June 2, 1902 (Letters, I, 296); letter, June 10, 1902 (Letters, I, 298); or letter, July 18, 1902. When London was divorcing Madden, both his first wife and the press blamed Strunsky for the mar-riage breakup, even though in fact it was a sudden romantic involvement with Charmian, his future second wife whom he met in June 1903, that speeded up the divorce. On the significance of the relationship with London for Anna Strunsky, see also J. R. Boylan (1998), Revolutionary Lives: Anna Strunsky and William English Walling (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press); and Stasz, Jack London’s Women.
J. London and A. Strunsky (1903) Kempton Wace Letters (New York: Macmillan), 4.
See D. Starr Jordan (1907), The Human Harvest: A Study of the Decline of Races through the Survival of the Unfit (Boston: American Unitarian Association), 42.
“Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement” of the American Philosophical Society, http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics, date accessed August 26, 2014. A review of eugenically oriented articles of that time displays the same tendency to frame eugenics within the discourse of animal breeding. See, for example, S. Myrick, “End the Wild Oats Days of Men. Perfect Woman Gives Views on Eugenics,” in The Washington Post, January 28, 1917, 10.
See E. Black (2003), War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press), 147–155. The mounting research on blindness and heredity led to the publication in 1920 of a report by the United States Bureau of the Census: “The Blind Population in the United States: 1920.” The report confirmed the link between study of blindness and eugenics.
C. B. Davenport (1913) State Laws Limiting Marriage Selection Examined in the Light of Eugenics. Eugenics Record Office Bulletin, 9 (June).
Joan London (1939) Jack London and His Times (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 229.
E. Labor (1974) Jack London (New York: Twayne Publishers), 68.
R. Kingman (1979) Pictorial Life of Jack London (New York: Crown), 103–104.
J. London (1914) A Daughter of the Snows (Paris: Thomas Nelson and Sons).
E. A. Ross (1914) The Old World and the New (New York: The Century).
J. London (1960), “In a Far Country,” in The Call of the Wild, the Cruise of the Dazzler, and Other Short Stories of Adventure (New York: Platt and Monk), 452.
For a discussion of liberalism, eugenics and the writing of T. S. Eliot, see D. J. Childs (2001), Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 75–76.
J. London (2008), “The Salt of the Earth,” in J. London, The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. J. Raskin (ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press), 98–115. In a letter of February 13, 1901, London refers both to him finishing A Daughter of the Snows and to his plans to “write my long-deferred ‘Salt of the Earth.’” Letters, I, 240.
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© 2015 Ewa Barbara Luczak
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Luczak, E.B. (2015). “Practical-Headed Judgment of a Stock-Breeder”: Sexual Selection in the Early Fiction of Jack London. In: Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545794_3
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