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Thursday, September 15, 2005
Doubling London; or, What to do with “Dry, Dusty History”
On January 21, 1906, Jack London, three months divorced from Bess Maddern, three months married to Charmian Kittridge, entered Mrs. Stenberg’s Sacramento apartment with lascivious intent. Sometime that evening, Mrs. Selinger (a dear friend and frequent alibi of Mrs. Stenberg) informed the young adulterers of her encounter with a “Hindoo.” He threatened exposure, she said, though not in those words.
The previous November, the Los Angeles Times had editorialized Jack’s divorce: “The Times suggests that the incident will serve well enough to call attention to the fact that the public is inclined to look more leniently on divorces where alleged ‘geniuses’ are concerned.” Now Jack knew the public will not look leniently on another divorce. He knew that this time it will frown on him “the same as upon all others who put themselves outside the pale of decency by reprehensible actions.” And what, Jack thought, what about Mr. Stenberg, branded a cuckold in boldface from Sacramento to New York City. He might respond with a reprehensible action of his own. “Pay the Hindoo what he wants,” Jack said.
Months later, London explained his actions to a friend: “There’s no use getting them into trouble with their husbands, even if they are rattle-brained.”
Later that same January night, at a meeting of the New York Educational Alliance, London entranced another sympathetic crowd with talk of the lucky cave man. “He Didn’t Have to Ask for the Right to Work,” read the byline the next morning. “If he woke up hungry he picked up his club and sallied forth.” London glanced down. He had first delivered this diatribe the previous March on the banks of the Sacramento River. He continued: “He was able, more or less, to satisfy his hunger. There was nobody between him and his work.”
The Hindoo wanted too much. He wrote London every month. The letters were unsigned, but the Hindoo was unconcerned. Jack would know who he is. London continued to work. He completed Before Adam. On June 9, he mailed George Sterling the manuscript. “It’s just a skit, ridiculously true, preposterously real.” London implored him to “jump on it.” “I guess you know the thing’s pretty punk,” was Sterling’s reply, “or you’d not suggest that I roast it.”
The Hindoo played both sides. He persecuted Mrs. Stenberg on Jack’s behalf, and London on Mrs. Stenberg’s or Mrs. Selinger’s. (Possibly his own.) His actions confused London, who no longer understood to whom he was beholden. He wrote Mrs. Stenberg:
Now I am writing to you for information. I am the real Jack London. I don’t know you. I don’t know the Hindoo. I don’t know Mrs. Stenberg, much less love her. Was this all a concoction of yours, or did you really know some fellow who claimed that he was Jack London?
Four days after finishing Before Adam, on June 14, 1906, London informed Elwyn Hoffman that “I undoubtedly have a double impersonating me.” In a letter written around the same time to A.L. Babcock, the President of the Yellowstone National Bank of Billings, Montana, London complained that “This double of mine is always getting me into trouble.”
When I was East in January of this year, he was making love to a married woman with two children in Sacramento…
When I was in Boston last year, he was in San Francisco, my native city, entering into engagements with school-teachers to gather data for a volume on Education…
When I was in California, he was lugging away an armful of books from the Astor Library in New York, on the strength of his being I.
When I was in California, in the 1900s, he was in Alaska, and when I was in China, in 1904, I was meeting people who had met him in Alaska in 1900.
Jack London never caught up with his double or, as he later suspected, doubles. He tracked this particular double off-and-on during the first half of 1906 while writing what would become Before Adam. While I do not wish to establish a strict causal connection between London’s concern for this double and the structure of the narrative in Before Adam, the structure suggests London thought seriously about what, in the novel, he calls “this semi-dissociation of personality” (9). The anonymous narrator dreams of another life in the Younger World. “My dream life and my waking life were lives apart,” he says, “with not one thing in common save myself. I was the connecting link that somehow lived both lives” (5). But this dissociation is not complete.
Although his “dream personality lived in the long ago, before ever man, as we know him, came to be,” the narrator’s “wake-a-day personality projected itself, to the extent of the knowledge of man’s existence, into the substance of [his] dreams” (12). The narrator insists that he is a “freak of heredity” in possession of “stronger and completer race memories” than the average person (18). These memories belong to an “other-personality …. vestigial in all of us,” but more pronounced in him: “This other-self of mine is an ancestor, a progenitor of my progenitors in the early line of my race” (19). Unlike most of us, the narrator possesses more than racial memories—“the flying dream, the pursuing monster dream, color dreams, [and] suffocation dreams”—he possesses “the memories of one particular and far-removed progenitor” (20). The narrator’s “other-personality” or “other-self” struggles for survival in the violent Younger World, terrifying the narrator awake nightly. The narrator cannot help but be concerned about the fate of this particular progenitor, who he christens “Big-Tooth.” Nor can he control what happens to Big-Tooth. He can only observe, in disgust, in horror, the short violent lives of his ancestors. Although this parallel between the narrator’s self and other-self and London and his doubles seems strained, Before Adam is the first in a series of novels populated by literary doubles. As Jonathan Auerbach notes in his account of how London incorporated his trademarked “self” into The Iron Heel (1908), Martin Eden (1909), and Burning Daylight (1910), “each novel’s main character, magnified and glorified, plays out a different imaginary career for London” (229).
While there are many possible reasons for London to become concerned with literary doubles at this particular moment in his career (and Auerbach intelligently addresses many of them in Male Call), some may complain that this explanation stinks of authorial intent and the determinism so often associated with it. Others may complain that this explanation is too historically deterministic, too bound to the moment of when London produced Before Adam. What interests me is the larger connections to be drawn from this nexus of personal, historical and literary history: the helplessness of the unnamed narrator to alter the behavior of his double possibly doubles the impotence London felt to do anything about his doubles.
Comments
I’m no London scholar, just a sometime reader, so I ask the following questions innocently, going largely on what you have written.
Is there significant evidence, beyond that which you have cited, that London really had a double, or genuinely thought he had one? I ask this because the Babcock letter you excerpt reads like parody. It reads like a man talking about things he did when he was drunk, or in a manic state, or under a split personality. Or like an author talking about his protagonists as alter-egos. Even doing so with the intention of fooling a literal-minded correspondent. Even the Mrs. Stenberg letter, from this standpoint, could be an effort at self-protection, or a plank in a prospective legal action. Obliterate this perception if necessary.
A couple of other thoughts:
Seems as if London had a very different and much broader investment in the concept of racial memory than he would have had in the problem of having an impersonator. Going back to Call of the Wild (1903), doesn’t the pooch protag dream the experiences of a “racial” ancestor? But you acknowledge the impersonator issue is only an intriguing backdrop to the specific nature of the ancestral double in Before Adam.
Is there any significance to the TYPE of alter-ego/doubling plot in question, since London favored another kind, that of the workingman/intellectual? In addition to the self-at-war in Martin Eden, there is “South of the Slot” (1909), in which an undercover social researcher develops a working-class identity which he loses control of, and eventually gives himself up to. I love that story.
In The People of the Abyss (1903), London himself goes gonzo, melodramatically going undercover as down-and-out in the East End of London. But as far as I can recall he never comes close to losing himself in the identity, and rather than claiming it’s an echo of his earlier life, he insists that English poverty is much harder than American, due to a comparative lack of freedom and open space.
“the helplessness of the unnamed narrator to alter the behavior of his double possibly doubles the impotence London felt to do anything about his doubles.”
In the end it’s hard not to read London’s perceptions about his impersonator as some sort of iteration of this career-long interest in / obsession with doubles. But I’d want to respect the difference between letters and stories.
EC,
Everything within quotation marks comes from London’s letters. He not only believed he had a double, but on 30 March 1911 one of his doubles was arrested for forging a check in his name in Cinncinati (I can provide the citation in the Cinncinati Post if you’d like). While I agree with you that it’s important to respect the difference between the letters and the stories, there’s a correspondence between the anxieties expressed in the letters and the processes that occur in the stories and novels that I simply can’t ignore. Maybe I should (and that’s the point of this post), but if I’m to dismiss them I want to do so on solid ground, and I don’t feel like I’ve anything of the sort to stand on yet.
That said, I take your criticisms quite seriously, and will reread “South of the Slot” in the morning and respond to them. I could opine on People of the Abyss, but I’ll hold off on that until I see how that line of thought developed in “South of the Slot” (which, despite my immersion in all things London, I can’t at the moment remember). (Wow, it pains me to write that last sentence. I am the London expert! I know all things London! Only I don’t. Damn this dissertation and its deleterious effects on my psychological stability.)
“He not only believed he had a double, but on 30 March 1911 one of his doubles was arrested for forging a check in his name in Cinncinati (I can provide the citation in the Cinncinati Post if you’d like).”
Scott, thanks for the clarification; no need for hard proof.
“I take your criticisms quite seriously, and will…”
Only if you really really want to. The last thing I want to do is keep either of us from our dissertations, though I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on “Slot.” I don’t quite have criticisms; I tried to say I agree with you that this is an intriguing biographical analog to a major trope in London’s writing, and then I just mentioned the first things I would consider in pursuing it, such as asking whether the double in Before Adam is really a special case. Then I thought, in terms of the letters, well, I’d want to avoid category mistakes. I had already found the anaphora in the Babcock letter beguiling, and in my comment read it out of context.
On the other hand, I ain’t afraid of no biographical criticism. We find ourselves making disclaimers, because certain grad students, flush with the thrill of early theory infatuation, will denounce any reference to an author’s life as myopic determinism or intentional fallacy. I was once informed by a self-proclaimed Marxist Reception Theorist that I should stop thinking about Twain’s early career as a humorist because it might foreclose the contemporary political possibilities of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He was more a Stalinist critic than a Marxist one, I think.
Fascination, Scott. But isn’t an interest in the dissociation of personality pretty widely shared at the turn of the c.?
It is, Sean, but what struck me was timing of London’s interest, the fact that it blossomed around the same time his prose takes a turn toward thinly-veiled-hagio-autobiographies. It’s almost as if he felt he had lost ownership of himself and thus a need to repurchase his life and reputation in his fiction. (How’s that for wild psychologizing?) Then there’s the fact that all this is wrapped in his various theories of personal and social evolution (material I didn’t post here for irrational fear that someone’d steal it and publish it before I can).
EC, your self-proclaimed Marxist Reception Theorist sends chills down my spine. (Plus, even by the terms of his own argument, to say that satire has no place in politics is quirky to the point of...a superlative I would’ve used if I didn’t post under my own name.)
Then there’s the fact that all this is wrapped in his various theories of personal and social evolution
I was thinking of that (so intently that my ability, such as it is, to form sentences briefly departed). I think I remember reading in Adolph Reed’s book on DuBois an undeveloped thought that the era’s prominent interest in double consciousness was especially suited to the lamarckian social reformers he thinks best called fabian.
Sean, aren’t there a few essays out there on Pauline Hopkins and the split self, with references to William James?
It’s always interested me how, with literature’s marked turn toward the scientistic at the turn of the last century, one can trace a concomitant rise in the quasi mystical forces also seen as guiding human lives: magnetism, instincts, id, mesmerism, split selves, ideology, and so on. Forces at once scientific and spiritualist.
This is how I’ve always read the conspiracies and paranoia in Pynchon, anyway.