#67： The Manliness of Jack London With Earle Labor
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Length
1 hour and 9 minutes
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144.31306
Summary
A few years ago, we did an extensive series about the life of Jack London, the writer who wrote such greats as White Fang, Call of the Wild, and Seawolf. After I learned that the foremost expert and scholar on Jack London is the Curator of the Jack London Museum in Shreveport, Louisiana, I had to get him on the show.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. A few years ago,
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we did this extensive series about the life of Jack London, the writer who wrote such greats as White
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Fang, Call of the Wild, Seawolf, and just tons and tons of virile manly short stories. After I finished
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the series, I learned that the foremost expert and scholar on Jack London, his name is Earl Labor. He's
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the curator of the Jack London Museum in Shreveport. He teaches American literature at Centenary College
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of Louisiana. He's been working on a biography of Jack London for the past couple decades. And it came out
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last year. I picked up a copy, read it. It's great. It's the best biography that I've read on Jack
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London. And I had to get him on the show to discuss the life of Jack London because to me, Jack London,
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there's so much we can learn as men from his life. He just lived an incredible, fascinating life,
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full of adventure, full of hard work, full of discipline, full of romance. I mean, he was the
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complete man. Anyways, Professor Labor and I talk about the life of Jack London, his work, and what
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lessons men can take from his life today. So stay tuned. Earl Labor, welcome to the show.
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Okay, so you have studied the life and career of Jack London for your entire academic career,
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professional career. And you've been working on this biography for decades. What's the origin of
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your interest in London? Well, I first got the call, I'm going back over 70 years. When I was in
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grade school in Tuskehoma, Oklahoma, we had a little library there. And one day I found a book titled
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Jack London's Stories for Boys, and I got very interested in that. And so I read that, read The
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Call of the Wild. Didn't hear any more about Jack London, actually, for the next several years.
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He never was mentioned when I went to high school or none of my classes in college. However, my best
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friend, World War II veteran, combat infantryman, he was only a couple of years older than I was,
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but seemed far older, I guess, because of the experiences he hadn't been through. Anyhow,
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he was taking a course at SMU in the modern American novel under Professor George Bond. And
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seems incredible because London was untouchable by most of the academics then. But Dr. Bond,
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along with Faulkner and Hemingway and some of the other writers like Fitzgerald,
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assigned Jack London's Martin Eden as one of the novels in that course.
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My friend P.B. Lindsay read it. He told me, he said, Earl, you got to read this
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novel by Jack London. I said, what are you talking about? He says, Martin Eden. I said,
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I've never heard of it. He said, well, you'll find it, you'll find not only interesting, but
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relevant and powerful. Well, Brad, at the time, I was more interested in some other things,
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mostly extracurricular. But when I was in the Navy stationed at the Recruit Training Center in
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Bainbridge, Maryland, had a weekend pass up to Manhattan and was browsing in a newsstand there
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and saw this 25-cent paperback of Martin Eden. I remember my buddy had recommended it, so I said,
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well, I'll give it a try. I started reading it on the bus back to the base, and I was captivated.
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In fact, I was so captivated that I finished it that night in my bunk with a flashlight,
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and I vowed if I ever went back for a degree, a PhD, I was going to make Jack London the subject
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of my dissertation. And that's where the interest really was sparked.
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So, yeah, that's very fascinating. You mentioned that for a while in your education and in your
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schooling, you didn't hear much about Jack London. And it might be because a lot of people think of
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Jack London as simply a popular, i.e. lowbrow adventure writer for young adults, but that really
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does a disservice to his work. How has Jack London's standing as an author changed over the years,
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Well, there's been a dramatic change in the last 50 years, Brett. I think the problem from the outset
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was that most people, including the critics and members of the academic establishment,
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hadn't read much Jack London and Penny London, maybe some of his dog stories.
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Some of them hadn't even read the Seawolf, which is one of his bestsellers, in fact, made into more
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movies than any other film I know about. It's been made into, I guess, a dozen different film
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versions. What I'm saying is that they hadn't bothered to read London. Also, the fact that he was popular
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happened to be a kind of negative with a lot of members of the, what, the establishment or the
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literary elite. Let me just stop for a moment and say one reason that I think they disliked Jack
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London was that he's so easy to read for the common or general reader. You don't need a college
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education or you don't need a college professor to tell you how to understand Jack London, not like Ezra
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Pound or T.S. Eliot or James Joyce or even William Faulkner. In other words, he threatened to put the
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critics out of business, take your bread off their table. You can understand why they might not want to
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deal with him. Anyhow, I'm going back to, I think, the dramatic change. Well, let me give you one other
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story here. One of my favorite stories, and I mentioned this in the biography, 1963, Sam Baskett,
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Michigan State University and president of the Michigan College English Association,
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introduced me to the annual conference of the association as, quote, the other Jack London
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scholar, unquote. Of course, there were a few others at the time, but that gives you an idea of what the
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situation was with the establishment, the academic establishment. I'm saying the great awakenings,
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I call it, really took place starting about the mid-1960s with the publication of the one-volume
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edition of his letters edited by King Hendricks and Irving Shepard. My own book, Great Short Stories of
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Jack London, was published in the Harper Perennial Classic series. Franklin Walker's Jack London and the
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Klondike, which is still a very major work on that period in London's life, came out then. Perhaps
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most important was Hensley Woodbridge's monumental bibliography, which provided a kind of a basic
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research tool for London scholars. And shortly after that, Woodbridge founded the Jack London newsletter,
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which gave the Jack London folks a forum where they could exchange ideas and articles and what have
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you. And toward the end of that decade, Russ Kingman, who had a very successful advertising
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business in Oakland, decided to move up to Glen Ellen near the Jack London State Park and Ranch and
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opened up a Jack London bookstore. And that later became a kind of mecca for London fans, as well as
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some good many scholars. He also inaugurated the annual Jack London birthday banquet, which is still held
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every year and attracts participants from not only this country, but overseas as well. I'm trying to
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give you a short history because I could go on all afternoon with this. But anyhow, things really took
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off in the 1970s. I know that several major journals, including Modern Fiction Studies, published
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Centennial Issues, 1976, the centennial of Jack's birth. Also, we got my edition, my, excuse me, my book,
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Jack London in the Plain United States Author Series, which is the first major
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critical biography, first book-length critical biography or study of London's works as artistry.
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And also, Jim McClinox's study of his short stories came out that year. And not long after that,
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a few years after that, Chuck Watson's book on London's novels came out. By the way, in the 1980s,
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our edition of the letters, three-volume edition of London's letters published by Stanford got first,
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got the front page reviews in both the New York Times and the London Times Literary Subliminal.
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So that was something, I think, that kind of waked up a few people to the fact that London might be
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more than just a hack that wrote some boss stories. Also, that along about 1988 or so,
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Clarice Stass's biography about both Charmian and Jack, American Dreamers, was the first major study of
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Charmian, the most reliable one, I should say, because she had been pretty well, I think, disparaged or
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downplayed in some of the earlier biographies. Of course, by now, we've got the Jack London Foundation,
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which was also established by Russ Kingman back in the 70s, and it puts out a quarterly newsletter
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and also sponsors the annual Jack London Banquet. We've got the Jack London Society, which has been
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going very steady now for almost two decades, which was founded by one of my own students,
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Gene Raisman, who's done some definitive studies on London short stories, as well as the racial issue
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and things of that sort. And they put out a quarterly journal, too. So we're moving ahead,
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finally, after all those years. So I guess that kind of gives you an idea of what's happened the last
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50 years, which has really been an amazing burgeoning of scholarly interest in Jack London.
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M-A-N at checkout. And now back to the show. So as I read your biography, one thing I discovered was
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that much of Jack London's fiction was based on his own life and experiences. And the man,
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man lived an incredible life. I mean, he had so many adventures before he even turned 30 years old.
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For our listeners who aren't familiar with Jack London's life, can you give us some of the
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Well, let's see. See if I can keep this fairly brief for you because it's such an interesting
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period of his life. You know, he had a very tough childhood coming from a working class family and
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what have you, sometimes on the verge of poverty. He later claimed he had no boyhood at all,
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which wasn't quite true, but that's the way he remembered it. Had to go to work at a factory
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as soon as he finished grade school, sometimes working 12, 15, even some. On one occasion,
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I think he said about 18 hours of stretch there. One of his most powerful stories, The Apostate,
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tells about that kind of experience. Jack himself wasn't quite like the poor young fellow in The
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Apostate, but there was a kind of emotional autobiography in that work in terms of the
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terrible working conditions back before we had child labor laws and what have you. He had enough
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of that factory work at the age of 15, said he was tired of being a factory work beast and became a
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member of a gang out there called the Oyster Pirates of San Francisco Bay. Now, these weren't kids.
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These weren't teenagers. These were full-grown men. They were criminals, pretty hardened criminals in
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some cases. But he managed to get $300 from his Aunt Jenny Prentice, who had been this wonderful
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African-American woman who had been his wet nurse and almost like a second mother to him ever since his
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infancy. Anyhow, she lent him enough money to buy a boat from one of the veteran pirates named
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French Frank. And so he joined that bunch of grown criminals. He said later on, the miracle of my
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life is that I live to be 21, because most of my buddies were either dead or in prison by then.
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And that was true. He spent a year with the Oyster Pirates. What they were doing, of course, was raiding
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the commercial oyster beds around the very area there, which were guarded. They were guarded.
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They had the big companies that owned them or put guards out there, so it was risky business. They had
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to do most of their work at night. And still, it was touch and go with the authorities and with the
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policemen. He managed to survive. And after a year, they had decided he was going to change and go to
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the side of the law. So he joined the California Fish Patrol. Now, he wasn't going around arresting some
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of his buddies up where he had been, but he went down south so that it was a different area for him
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to police. He spent several months with the California Fish Patrol. And then, at the age of 17,
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he shipped as a Navy-bodied citizen aboard the Sophia Sutherland on an eight-month voyage for the
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Northwest Pacific Ocean to hunt seals. This was one of the most important phases of his younger years
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because he got to see a lot of the world, including a number of islands in Japan, before they actually
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hit the sealing grounds out there. He also got a lot of the material that he would later use in his
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novel, The Sea Wolf. After that voyage, he came back, had to work again for a while in the factory,
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but after another year or so, he decided he was going to hit the road again, and he joined
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the western contingent of Cox's Army, this army of the unemployed that was marching on Washington back
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in 1893 to protest the kind of terrible working conditions that they had, and he spent several
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months with them. He quit that army, he quit that group at Hannibal, Missouri, and decided to light
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out on his own Hobo. Now, back then, Hobo meant the road, as he called it, meant the railroad. There
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weren't any highways to speak of, and all the travel like that, most of it was by train, and so he hopped
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cars, which was kind of a risky business too, freight cars and what have you, and managed to get on up
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east, saw a good deal of the east, but he wanted to see Niagara Falls, got in late one night in a
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sidecar pullman, he called it, a boxcar, strolled out and took a look at the falls at night, and they
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were so beautiful. Then he flopped, as he said, in a nearby field to get some sleep, wanted to get up
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the next morning to see the falls by daybreak, but he never made it. As he was walking through
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downtown Niagara Falls, he got tapped on the shoulder, and this constable, who was actually a
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kind of bounty hunter, got a, I think, a buck forever hobo that he arrested, arrested him, and he
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was brought before court and sentenced to 30 days in the Erie County Penitentiary. He said,
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Judge, I'm not a vagrant. I've got money. The judge says, Son, you argue, I'm going to give you 60 days.
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So Jack shut up and took his 30 days, but that was one of the most important experiences of his life.
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As he said later on, I saw things in that penitentiary that I can, I can't write about. I can scarcely
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think about him. We know enough now about some of the conditions, especially if we've seen that
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movie, The Shawshank Redemption. We know enough about the way prison conditions were back then to
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kind of imagine some of the stuff he saw. Anyhow, that was enough to determine him to go back and
00:21:53.800
get an education. So when he got out of jail, he did a little more sightseeing, then headed back to
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Oakland, went to high school, spent, oh, let's see, spent, I think, a year and a half before he
00:22:07.780
decided he was going to try to get in college, managed to pass the entrance exams to the University
00:22:13.980
of California, Berkeley by studying intensively on his own, and spent one semester there, then had
00:22:22.420
to drop out because of financial conditions, and that we're going now to about 1897 when he's 21 years
00:22:33.260
old. This is the time of the great Kondike gold rush, which is, I think, the greatest gold rush in the
00:22:43.960
history of American culture or whatever. And he managed to get up there, and he spent a year in
00:22:52.720
the Klondike. And he said later on that was where he found himself. And that gives you, he came back
00:23:02.700
and then started writing intensively to become what he thought would be a successful writer. So that gives
00:23:10.800
you some idea of his youthful experiences. Very good. So you mentioned that he had a bit of formal
00:23:20.240
schooling, did grade school, did some high school, and then he went to college for a bit. But he was
00:23:27.900
largely self-educated. He did a lot of studying on his own, and teaching him how to himself how to write
00:23:34.460
on his own. Where do you think he got that discipline and tenacity to stick to his strenuous
00:23:40.360
study regimens? And are there any takeaways for our college days listeners that they could use from
00:23:46.800
Jack London? Well, Brad, he had amazing self-discipline. It's just absolutely astonishing. Also, he was
00:23:57.600
tremendously motivated to succeed to pull himself out of the social pit as he had witnessed it. He later said to
00:24:07.040
himself, poverty made me hustle. At the same time, he had this incredible willpower and self-discipline. By the way,
00:24:16.880
I've counted more than 600 rejections he got during the first five years of his career. But he refused to give up
00:24:24.100
him when his friends and family were telling him to get a steady job. Sometimes he would spend
00:24:32.500
all in writing itself. He'd spend 12 or 14 hours a day. He tried to limit himself to two or three
00:24:40.740
hours sleep a night, but he couldn't get by on that. He finally managed to get a set regimen of five
00:24:46.660
hours a night, which he stuck with the rest of his life. He was a voracious reader. That was one of the
00:24:57.940
factors, I think, in his success. But I'm going back to your question about his self-education.
00:25:04.020
He had fallen in love with books, he said, when he was about, I think, five years old or so.
00:25:09.940
And he tells about some of the earlier books he read, such as Washington Irving's Alhambra and
00:25:19.460
a couple of other famous travel books or what have you. Also, a story by an author named Wida about a
00:25:31.780
young Italian boy who succeeds, what have you. In other words, he had been a voracious reader from his
00:25:39.300
very early childhood. And I think that was one of the reasons that he was able to maintain this kind
00:25:46.420
of self-motivation to become a writer himself. Okay, so you mentioned all the rejections
00:25:54.660
London faced when he was first starting out. Besides being a voracious reader, what else did he do to
00:26:08.100
Let me back up a little bit here. You mentioned, I clipped in, college-age listeners, what could
00:26:18.100
May I back up for that just a minute? I got to bring in my, if you don't mind, I asked my daughter,
00:26:26.260
Andrea, about this question because she was a student of mine not too many years ago in my
00:26:34.500
Jack London course. By the way, I have a 22-year-old daughter. I lost my wife to cancer 25 years ago.
00:26:46.660
I have four wonderful children from that marriage. But Andrea has been a godsend to me, and she's
00:26:56.340
become a kind of Jack London fan. I asked her this question, by the way. I said, well, what would you
00:27:02.740
say about these students? She said, you know, Jack wrote a thousand words minimum a day. She said that'd
00:27:11.540
be, and she said that'd leave most college students balking. She said, at the same time,
00:27:24.340
said most students would still do well to have his kind of motivation and his kind of schedule. So,
00:27:33.380
I just wanted to bring that in, if you didn't mind. We'll move on now. Tell me what the next
00:27:39.460
question was, please. Well, how did he improve his writing during those years he was getting all
00:27:46.020
those rejection letters? Ah, well, let me see if I can get that from the outset. For one thing,
00:27:56.580
I think the fact that he was a reader helped him considerably. But at first, when he was trying
00:28:06.420
to break into the literary marketplace, bear in mind, Brett, that there were about 500 magazines out
00:28:13.460
in those days, that we didn't have television, we didn't have movies, we didn't have the radio,
00:28:21.300
we certainly didn't have computers or what have you, and that the magazine was the major
00:28:26.900
cultural medium or what have you at the time. So, there are a lot of chances for a writer to break
00:28:34.980
in with short stories and poems and articles and what have you, even novel serials. So,
00:28:42.820
he was trying to write the kind of stuff that was being published in the popular magazines.
00:28:49.780
Now, most of that was sentimental crap trap and what have you, was second rate. So,
00:28:54.900
what he was trying, what he was producing was third rate. Bless his heart. I've read,
00:29:01.140
in fact, we published some of those stories in our complete edition, in the Stanford edition there,
00:29:08.660
and you can understand why they were rejected. But what he did, he began copying the works of
00:29:19.860
Kipling. He was reading intensively such contemporaries as Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson,
00:29:29.140
even some of the earlier masters like Poe and Melville actually copying some of their works
00:29:35.540
to get a feel of what it was, especially Kipling's plain style. He also said he read Herbert Spencer's
00:29:46.500
pamphlet, Philosophy of Style, which taught him to use words that would
00:29:52.420
clearly convey the meaning of his stories. In other words, unlike some of the contemporaries or
00:30:01.380
modern writers I mentioned earlier, I'm thinking of Faulkner and Henry James and James Joyce,
00:30:10.340
he wrote so clearly that the reader could understand what he was telling without any help from the
00:30:17.940
professors or the critics. That's one reason, as I say, he's not been very popular with the establishment.
00:30:25.620
Now, back to his year in the Klondike, which was a turning point in his writing,
00:30:33.060
he said, it was in the Klondike I found myself. He said, you get your true perspective up there,
00:30:38.660
I got mine. He didn't do any writing up there. He did a lot of listening. He did a lot of first-hand
00:30:47.540
observing. Of course, he had some interesting experiences himself. Most of what he wrote about
00:30:52.740
later on was stuff that he had heard other miners, sourdoughs and tenderfoots talk about,
00:30:59.780
some of the legends up there. Anyhow, when he came back, he had something really substantial
00:31:06.900
to work with, as well as he had been over that year kind of mulling, and I think his style
00:31:16.020
was improved, even though he hadn't been writing up there. I think he needed that period of kind
00:31:22.980
of maturing or whatever. When he got back, he was still a little unsure of himself, as you can tell
00:31:29.940
from his letters back in 1898 or so when he came back. But early in 1899, the Atlantic Monthly accepted the
00:31:44.260
story of his story called An Odyssey of the North. And they said, Dear Mr. London, we'll accept your
00:31:53.700
story here, give you $120 plus a year's free subscription to the Atlantic Monthly if you'll let
00:32:02.020
us cut, if you don't mind cutting about a third of it. He didn't like the idea of cutting it, but he was
00:32:09.620
going to take their offer because $120 then was three or four months pay in the factories. Plus,
00:32:19.940
and this is the most important thing, if you made it in the Atlantic Monthly, you were in because that
00:32:27.060
was probably the most important magazine, not only in America, but maybe in the world. And once he got
00:32:34.180
into the Atlantic Monthly, he was set. Let me mention something else, though, in terms of his success.
00:32:44.660
There have been several studies of genius, successful genius, not only in writing, but also in sports
00:32:52.740
and music and mathematics and computers and what have you. And a common denominator there,
00:33:01.140
according to some of the experts, is thousands of hours spent in practice. At least one, maybe two of
00:33:10.500
these experts have set 10,000 hours as the standard there of practice. And Jack London would have met
00:33:20.740
that standard in terms of the hours he spent reading and writing and perfecting his trade. Once he had
00:33:27.460
perfected that, that was it. In other words, once he began producing his best work in, say, 1900 or so,
00:33:39.380
from then on, he did that without too much trouble. It was amazing he could turn out these stories,
00:33:47.620
as I say, minimum 1,000 words a day. What he did often was to mull a while. He'd make notes and then
00:33:55.620
mull over the stories. But once he started writing, he'd get it down there. And almost,
00:34:03.060
without exception, there were very few revisions that he would make. It's amazing what he was able
00:34:11.940
to produce. Anyhow, I hope I've answered your question.
00:34:15.780
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00:35:18.980
And now back to the show. You did. So one thing that I've noticed in Jack London's fiction,
00:35:27.540
then I also saw this in your biography when you talked about personal letters from Jack London,
00:35:34.180
was he had this idea of living a life with the spirit of adventure and romance. First,
00:35:41.540
what did London mean by that? And then second, do you think people today in the 21st century
00:35:48.740
are capable of living a life filled with the spirit of romance and adventure?
00:35:52.580
Oh, it's a good question, Brent. Let me, uh, uh, let me see here. I guess if you read my book,
00:35:59.940
you've read Jack London's famous credo where he says it's better to, I mean, the function of man is
00:36:06.900
to live, not to exist. He wants to be a meteor and all that. So I think that pretty well in one way
00:36:14.100
sums up his attitude. But, uh, I say in my biography, he was a natural born seeker. Uh,
00:36:22.100
and I, and that's something I think that no other biographer is quite said in the same way.
00:36:27.860
And that this is one of our most basic, uh, primal drives that, excuse me, uh, that the, uh,
00:36:39.620
scientists have discovered in the last few decades, along with the drive for what food, fear,
00:36:48.100
and, uh, all the sex of what have you, that in all mammals, there is this deep seated primal, uh,
00:36:56.180
seeking drive often that, uh, pushes us to seek new, uh, adventures, even sometimes,
00:37:05.620
though it may be at the risk of life. Sometimes it means, uh, uh, that this drive overrides some
00:37:12.260
of those other fundamental drives. Anyhow, I'm saying that Jack was a natural born seeker and
00:37:17.780
had an extraordinarily powerful seeking drive like you, Tennyson's Ulysses. He wanted to drink
00:37:24.340
life to the leaves and savor every drop of it, even if it meant risking his own life. Romance and
00:37:30.660
adventure meant seeking new worlds, uh, to explore, uh, dangerous, unexplored, what,
00:37:38.740
terror and incognito, including the worlds of the mind, by the way, wasn't just out there
00:37:44.660
geographically, but he was, uh, uh, he was a seeker in terms of knowledge throughout his life,
00:37:50.740
even to the end of his life. Note, for example, I talk about his discovery of the work, the theories
00:37:58.180
of Carl Gustav Jung just a few months before he died. He said to charming his wife, I'm standing
00:38:06.020
on the edge of a world so new, so terrible, so wonderful. I'm almost afraid. Look over into it.
00:38:11.380
Uh, his use of the word almost, I think, is important, because he mastered his fear and
00:38:18.260
underwent a really major, uh, psychological and philosophical transformation or awakening,
00:38:26.340
perhaps I should call it, before his death and produced some of his finest stories the last
00:38:31.860
several months of his life. Actually, a bit of irony here, uh, he had been writing with what
00:38:40.900
Jung calls, uh, a primordial vision from almost from the start. I mean, the Call of the Wild,
00:38:49.140
for example, is, is full of what we call myth and archetypes and what have you. It's a wonderful
00:38:55.620
book in terms of, of that universal appeal. But, uh, as I say, London realized at the end there that
00:39:04.020
he had, he had been missing something. And I think he was undergoing a significant, uh, what spiritual
00:39:10.820
awakening as well as philosophical awakening toward the end there. Brett, I think that it's still
00:39:18.420
possible, but it's much more difficult now. We, and it's, it's much more difficult now for folks
00:39:26.340
than it was for me when I was coming along. Uh, there are so many more restrictions and what have
00:39:34.100
you. Too many young people, I'm afraid, are trying to get their romance and adventure playing video games
00:39:41.220
and watching spectacular videos and, and what have you. They're bombarded with all these things that
00:39:50.340
we didn't have when I was growing up, for example, and no television. Then we didn't have the radio,
00:39:55.860
but, uh, back when Jack was coming along, they didn't even have that. So, uh, young folks had to go
00:40:02.420
out on their own to, to seek adventures instead of finding them on a computer screen or TV screen or what
00:40:10.500
have you. Uh, I see, I've got something for Andrea here that I'm, I'll share with you if you don't mind.
00:40:17.620
Uh, uh, it says it's definitely possible. She said to live with the spirit of adventure, but many
00:40:24.020
American lives seem to be too small and too regulated. I guess that's something else. We're
00:40:30.100
closed in by restrictions or whatever that we didn't, that we didn't have back in those days.
00:40:35.460
Uh, she says if guided tourists in there and that doesn't bring new schedules along for their
00:40:42.100
vacation, that's it. And also she says financial constraints, but back in, in Jack's day and mine,
00:40:52.420
financial constraints were something we broke to go out to find adventure and, and romance or whatever,
00:40:58.260
because, uh, uh, we sometimes made money doing that. I can tell you more about my own experience
00:41:05.300
later on, but Jack, of course, when he got out, uh, uh, hobo and he, he managed to, to get food and,
00:41:13.780
and even money sometimes to keep going out there. It's just that it's more difficult, I think,
00:41:20.340
in every respect, uh, for folks now, it's still there, but, uh, it's not as easy to get.
00:41:28.100
Let's, uh, let's discuss the manliness of Jack London, because this is the art of manliness after
00:41:34.340
all. Uh, he did all these manly deeds. He was extremely competitive, extremely driven,
00:41:42.020
uh, tried to be physically strong, um, raised hell. He was a known ladies man, et cetera, et cetera.
00:41:48.820
But he was also very sensitive and had a deep, rich, emotional life. Um, what do you think Jack
00:42:00.740
It's a great question, Brad. Uh, uh, I don't know that many of us could match, uh, London and
00:42:13.700
all those aspects of what we call manliness, but, uh, we can certainly practice the art of
00:42:22.820
manliness as you've kind of demonstrated in your website to your listeners. Um, let me,
00:42:30.660
uh, let me see if I can clarify this a little further in terms of what you've already brought
00:42:39.460
up here. First, I think it's important to know that Jack wasn't merely the macho man.
00:42:48.100
Uh, I think London was what, what I would call the complete man who had accepted his
00:42:56.420
on him or sensitive feminine element as an essential component of his, of his whole self. Now I'm
00:43:04.900
getting into union psychology here, but the idea is that each of us has elements of both the masculine
00:43:13.060
and feminine. I don't mean in any kind of literal sense, but those characteristics we associate with
00:43:18.820
those two, uh, genres in our psyche and that in order to become a complete person, we've got to assimilate
00:43:29.220
and recognize and appreciate those elements. I love, uh, for example, I'm quoting that, uh, famous photographer,
00:43:38.580
portrait photographer, Arnold Genthy, who is a good friend of Jackson, uh, described London's face as,
00:43:46.820
as I'm quoting here, poignantly sensitive. His eyes were the eyes of a dreamer. And there was almost
00:43:56.260
a feminine wistfulness about him. And yet at the same time, he gave the feeling of a terrible and
00:44:05.620
unconquerable physical force at unquote. At the same time, Jack despised cowardice in a man.
00:44:14.820
He, he, he could weep, but he never could whine or whimper. He was, I'm, I'm thinking of other
00:44:24.980
characteristics. He was fearless. Now I'm going to say that by example, uh, men, a true man should be
00:44:36.340
fearless, but not foolish. There's a limitation there. And sometimes Jack simply didn't recognize his own limits,
00:44:43.140
I think. I think also in terms of this idea of man in this from Jack, we get the concept of self
00:44:51.940
reliance and self determination, but not self absorption. In other words, and not totally wrapped
00:45:02.500
up in oneself. I mean, some of Jack's, uh, uh, uh, major characters, I'm thinking of Wolf Larson and
00:45:10.340
Martin Eden die because they're too self-absorbed in a sense. And they're not interested enough and
00:45:18.820
kind enough to the other human beings around them. Also, of course, there, there's the business,
00:45:25.540
I think in getting close to nature, if we can, and if possible, get closer to nature in the wild.
00:45:32.420
Uh, and it is possible nowadays. In fact, uh, I still, I, one of my, uh, grandsons,
00:45:42.580
he, he lifts weights, he plays rugby, and he goes out, uh, climbs mountains in the Rockies every
00:45:49.220
summer. So he's found a way to find that adventure, even though we have difficulties nowadays doing it.
00:45:57.060
I think he's, he's got the idea of manliness there. I hope that gives you some, some idea or
00:46:04.340
an answer to your question. It did. Um, so one thing I found as I was reading your biography is that
00:46:12.980
while there's so much to admire about Jack London, he also had his flaws, um, like any person. What were
00:46:21.460
Jack London's biggest flaws that haunted his career and personal life? Oh my, well, he was subject to
00:46:28.820
fits of depression. I think he was, he may have been bipolar. Uh, he hated bullies, but especially in
00:46:38.580
the later years of his life, he could do some bullying himself, especially when he was suffering
00:46:44.020
from some of his, uh, medical ailments and what have you. Uh, as tremendous seeking drive, I think
00:46:54.420
might be considered a fault in view of the many times he, he endangered his life and even the lives of
00:47:01.860
maybe his wife, Charmin, and some of the crew members of his boat, the snark there.
00:47:06.900
Yeah. In other words, he was an extremist. And I think that can be dangerous. He also refused to
00:47:19.380
accept reality at times. He loved life and, and was in denial of the fact that he was so very,
00:47:26.340
very ill up to the very end. He was also in denial about his alcoholism. He always claimed that he was
00:47:36.740
not, uh, uh, drunkard. And that I think is true. I mean, nobody ever saw him after he was grown,
00:47:45.700
but, uh, out of, out of control. In fact, his wife, Charmin, said he just got more intense
00:47:53.620
intellectually. And I think his friends say the same thing. I think there's no question, though,
00:47:59.700
that he suffered the symptoms of, of alcoholism. And I know that's an ailment. I don't know
00:48:06.660
whether it considered a flaw in his character, but it's certainly a problem that he had.
00:48:11.620
And he was also in denial in terms of, uh, taking enough exercise and doing the right kind
00:48:20.260
of eating, staying on a healthful diet after he, after he got older. Those are the,
00:48:29.620
Okay. Um, it sort of leads us to the, my next question. Let's talk about his death
00:48:36.100
because it's something that's very controversial. Um, many people, including some Jack London
00:48:42.260
biographers believe that London committed suicide and they use this belief to tarnish London and his
00:48:49.780
legacy. But you come to a different conclusion in your biography. Um, how did Jack London die?
00:48:56.100
This is a major issue, Brett. And I've been contending with this for the past, uh, half century or more.
00:49:06.020
This canard or fly, whatever you want to call it, uh, started in 1938 with a publication of Irving
00:49:14.660
Stone's sailor on horseback. And it's been perpetrated, uh, and perpetuated ever since then.
00:49:22.180
And it's amazing to me that it's, it's held on the way it has in the, in the light of,
00:49:28.900
of all evidence. I guess a lot of, uh, scholars, even, even the serious scholars think it's more,
00:49:37.060
somehow more colorful or whatever than he commits suicide, but there's not a shred of evidence
00:49:42.900
that he committed suicide. In fact, on the night before his death,
00:49:49.300
I think the last letter he wrote was a letter to his two daughters in saying he was going to be down
00:49:55.220
in Oakland, wanted to take them out to a picnic the following week before he went on a trip to
00:50:00.500
New York City. There's no, no indications that he was thinking of suicide. There's some possibility.
00:50:08.900
We don't know for sure. There's some possibility that he may have administered, uh, uh,
00:50:15.780
self-administered morphine the night, uh, before he died, but it's been clinically proven that that
00:50:23.700
was not the, probably not the cause of his death. Uh, there've been several studies done recently by
00:50:31.220
distinguished physicians and medical scientists, what have you demonstrating that the probable
00:50:40.900
cause of his death was, uh, uh, stroke and heart failure. Now he was suffering from kidney problems
00:50:50.660
for the last three years of his life. And there were four attending physicians during his dying hours
00:51:00.020
there, all of whom attributed his death to natural causes. The newspapers at the time, uh, also said
00:51:08.580
that his death certificate signed by Dr. Porter also attributes his death to uremia. Now, because he had
00:51:17.700
been suffering from kidney problems, that seemed to be the logical thing, but the, that is the symptoms
00:51:24.740
when they found him that last morning, uh, he was in a sort of paralytic state. One, his, there was that,
00:51:35.220
uh, what, uh, what we call cyanotic, cyanotic, uh, coloring in his face. And, and, uh, uh,
00:51:44.020
as I think Charlie said, he, he, he tried to beat the, the, uh, bed with one arm, but the other arm
00:51:51.700
could not move. All of that points to the symptoms of, of stroke, I think. And that's what I've tried to
00:52:00.820
make clear in my biography. I've, and if you look at my end notes, you'll see a good deal of, uh,
00:52:06.740
substantiation of what I've just said there about his, about his death and even about the,
00:52:13.300
the drug overdose, which is, I say, uh, that, that is, is highly debatable even in itself.
00:52:21.060
So you are a, uh, a college professor and you teach a course on Jack London and his work.
00:52:29.700
What do you hope your students get out of reading Jack London's fiction?
00:52:33.140
Well, let me, uh, uh, let's see. I think, uh, uh, he's, he's got plenty to stay for,
00:52:49.220
to stay for our, uh, all of us nowadays and including, uh, uh, uh, my students and others,
00:52:57.100
the whole business of, uh, uh, of seeing what adventure may, may be possible for them.
00:53:05.660
The, uh, possibility maybe of getting out of the city. And I think perhaps as important as anything,
00:53:15.740
the importance of reading, but also connecting what you read with life. I, I keep thinking about
00:53:24.380
Emerson who said, only so much do I know as I have lived. And so with Jack, and I think even with
00:53:31.660
students today, it's important to, to relate what they're reading and, uh, even what they're viewing
00:53:41.180
on video or what have you to real life, to make that vital connection. The world's still a very
00:53:48.300
fascinating place, even though we're restricted in so many ways that we weren't when I was
00:53:54.220
growing up and certainly when, when Jack was growing up. My, my students invariably have
00:54:01.900
been very, uh, positive in their responses to London's work and his talk of adventure and what
00:54:09.820
have you. And I think more than one has actually, has actually gone on the adventure trail himself or
00:54:18.060
herself as a result of readings of Jack. And I'm hoping in any, in any case, it's opened their minds
00:54:25.580
to worlds out there that they might not have dreamed of otherwise.
00:54:32.140
Um, Herodotus, the famous historian, um, said that biography should be used as moral instruction.
00:54:40.300
And are there lessons you hope readers will take away from the life of Jack London after reading
00:54:47.980
Uh, another good question, Brent. I'm trying to, uh, let me see how I can best approach this.
00:54:56.540
What are there? Uh, let me see. Don't be afraid of life or life's challenges. I think that's one,
00:55:04.780
uh, message they could get out of here. I think that's a moral lesson. Avoid self-pity. Be open,
00:55:13.100
fair, and honest, and dealing with your fellow human beings. Be honest with yourself. Be open to
00:55:21.740
new ideas and opportunities, but avoid extremes. I think Jack, uh, sometimes couldn't draw the line
00:55:29.900
there. He, he, he tended too often to go beyond that, uh, that line. He was an extremist. He admitted
00:55:38.380
himself. I think characteristics like kindness, decency, courage, all of these are lessons can be,
00:55:47.420
I would hope be conveyed from the life of Jack London. I know this is going to sound a little corny,
00:55:53.900
but I think a major thing that I would like my readers to, to get from this book is the importance
00:56:02.140
of love. I don't mean, uh, I mean, love in the fullest sense, love of life, love of adventure,
00:56:11.900
but, uh, also love of, uh, of nature, love of the other creatures on God's earth. And that means the
00:56:21.820
animals, as well as the human beings, Jack, Jack was very much in love with life and in its fullest
00:56:28.940
sense. And I'll mention again that, uh, this is a major theme in the call of the wild, the white
00:56:35.900
thing. And it's also a major theme in the sea wolf. If you read the sea wolf, well,
00:56:41.420
flarson is the most impressive character in American fiction, I think, but will flarson dies because he is,
00:56:48.540
he's not in love with much, even with himself. I think the, the survivor hero of the book in a
00:56:56.940
sense is Humphrey van Wade, who falls in love with this woman and, and becomes a total man as a result
00:57:05.900
of it. Just as Jack, I think fell in love with charming in London. Well, flarson reflects a good
00:57:11.660
deal of, uh, of Jack's, what he called long sickness. And he said later on that love of people
00:57:18.220
and love of a woman cured him, which I think it may have. Uh, oh, let me mention one other thing.
00:57:25.340
And I guess I can put a moral, uh, kind of moral implication on this or what have you.
00:57:32.620
Jack loved the earth, love mother earth. Remember the last several years of his life,
00:57:37.100
he devoted to restoring the earth out there in the valley of the moon, to building, rebuilding
00:57:45.820
the land. He was a pioneer in ecology. So I'm saying that I think that can be included as one of the
00:57:55.660
moral implications or perhaps I'd say inferences. I want the, the reader to get from reading about his
00:58:03.100
life. Very good. That was all wonderful, wonderful, um, insights. Um, so I'd like to talk a little
00:58:11.580
bit about your life because as I was trying to find out your contact information and in our conversations
00:58:19.900
and email, I learned that you had, have had a life that somewhat mirrored Jack London's in a few ways.
00:58:28.140
Um, you did some really strenuous and manly things as a young man, but ended up a man of letters,
00:58:35.660
like Jack London. Can you talk a bit about your, your younger life and how did those experiences
00:58:42.300
as a young man affect your work as a, an adult? Well, I appreciate, I appreciate the question.
00:58:51.020
So bear with me. Sure. Uh, there, there are some similarities now. Let me start by saying there's
00:58:57.980
no way I could match Jack London and, and either, uh, uh, his, uh, his physical exploits or his, uh,
00:59:07.980
his certainly not in his magnificent, uh, literary exploits. But I, I did have a little similarity
00:59:16.140
in my childhood. I was a depression kid. My family never suffered from acute poverty,
00:59:23.420
but we were on the edge. I never went hungry as a child, but there were times when, uh, life was
00:59:29.820
pretty tough. I mean, there were times when we certainly didn't have a car. There were times
00:59:34.700
when we were, uh, buying day old bread for a nickel of a loaf, but that was, there's nothing wrong with
00:59:41.100
that. Um, my folks, uh, sent me to Dallas technical high school to learn a trade back in
00:59:51.340
those days. Oh, usually it's only rich for kids that could afford to go to college. So I went to
00:59:58.380
Dallas tech. I, I did pretty well in machine shop, wood shop, electric shop, auto shop. Uh,
01:00:06.700
I did very well in drafting probably would have become a draftsman as my, uh, career,
01:00:14.140
except for a wonderful English teacher who spotted me virtually the first week in class as a college
01:00:21.500
material. She groomed me for four years. We wrote a theme a week. She groomed me for college and helped
01:00:28.940
me get scholarships at SMU so that I was able to, to go to college. And I was
01:00:35.740
able to write to after all that practice. I don't know if I had 10,000 hours like Jack, but
01:00:41.180
I did a lot of writing, uh, under her tutelage. And that made a big difference in my success in,
01:00:47.580
in college. But even then, uh, I had to work, uh, particularly in the summers. Uh, one summer,
01:00:56.060
I spent, uh, stringing barbed wire fence in East Texas and another summer, second summer,
01:01:03.420
excuse me, baiting hay up in Oklahoma. Uh, next summer, I worked on a maintenance crew at Lone Star
01:01:12.860
Steel in, uh, in Texas down there. So, uh, I, I, and I'd had other jobs. I were, I worked for a while
01:01:21.520
in a, when I was in school, worked in a bakery for a while, worked in a, uh, a fish market for a while.
01:01:29.200
Oh, I remember my mom wouldn't let me come in the back door. When I got home in the evenings,
01:01:34.240
she had me change my clothes out in the garage because, uh, I've been working with the fish all
01:01:40.000
day. I'm just saying that, uh, all that, I think may have been in one way good for me. It certainly
01:01:46.820
made me appreciate school. I was always ready to go back to school when the time came, but the big
01:01:52.420
adventure I had closest to Jack London came when I was, after I graduated from SMU in 1949,
01:02:00.860
my best friend I mentioned earlier, P.B. Lindsey from Gilmer, Texas, the, uh, the veteran,
01:02:09.460
he and I decided we were going to get away from all this, all the restrictions of, of society and
01:02:16.860
civilization and all that, kind of like Jack hitting the road. We were going to work the wheat harvest
01:02:21.780
all the way from the Texas handle, panhandle up to Canada. And that would give us enough, uh, money
01:02:28.580
to, uh, grub steak, whatever, to buy the supplies to go out into the Canadian wilderness and spend a
01:02:36.500
year. We even spotted a lake out there totally away from all kinds of civilization. We were going
01:02:42.760
to go out there and build a cabin and just spend a year in the wilderness or whatever. Now, Brett,
01:02:49.220
I got to admit that the good Lord was with us. We didn't make it to Canada, but we had some remarkable
01:02:54.500
adventures along the way. In fact, uh, my next book, which I'm working on right now is going to be a
01:03:02.500
celebration of that particular odyssey, which took place in one of the most significant periods in
01:03:09.860
American cultural history, which never been celebrated. I'm talking about that unique five
01:03:15.780
year period in American history between the end of the second world war and beginning of the Korean
01:03:21.540
war. Unlike the twenties, nobody's done much with that. And I think while there's still somebody
01:03:27.140
around who remembers it, it ought to be celebrated because it was, it was very different, very special.
01:03:32.420
So, I mean, all the veterans coming back America, there was an aura of optimism then that I think
01:03:39.140
we never had before, maybe not since. I mean, the American folks had, uh, uh, we had lived successfully
01:03:48.340
through triumphantly through a depression and, uh, and the large, the biggest war in history,
01:03:56.100
we had emerged triumphant where America was the, uh, clearly the most powerful nation in the world.
01:04:02.500
Look at what we'd accomplished. So we felt that the sky was the limit. And as a result, uh, uh,
01:04:10.420
as I say, there was a kind of aura about that period that I think needs to be celebrated. And I want
01:04:15.940
to do that in this book of mine because my friend PB and I were part of that. I mean, the idea that we
01:04:22.660
could go up there and, uh, uh, do all that was, uh, it sounds and sounds very foolish now,
01:04:29.780
but at the time we felt we could do it. After all, we were both, uh, uh, we both won gold medals
01:04:35.460
in weightlifting. And I, uh, you know, I, I did some weightlifting there, competitive Olympic lifting,
01:04:40.900
and, and we didn't know what our limits were at the time that that would come later. But that, uh,
01:04:48.020
particular Odyssey took us through the Midwest up to the, even as far as, uh, the, uh, Yellowstone
01:04:56.020
and what have you. I worked on building grain elevators. I worked, uh, uh, let's say some of
01:05:04.900
the other jobs on the wheat field. We worked, uh, uh, threshing wheat or harvesting wheat. We worked,
01:05:12.180
uh, for a while up in, uh, Kansas City. I even had a little like London. I had a
01:05:17.860
little bit of boxing experience, but unlike London, I had enough of that and decided I'd
01:05:21.860
stick with weights because I, I preferred that kind of passive resistance. And I even, uh,
01:05:28.180
had a job trimming hams and armors meat packing plan. So all of that, I think in one sense, uh,
01:05:34.900
might relate to, to Jack and what he went through. As I say, the world in many ways is more open than I
01:05:41.380
had, I had no worries about, uh, hitchhiking. All those adventures we had, not once did we
01:05:48.020
encounter drugs, alcoholism or what have you. Uh, I'll give you one example here. And if you've
01:05:54.100
got time, sure. One of our, our toughest jobs was with an alfalfa mill out in Western Kansas.
01:06:02.260
Now, some of the other work had been, I guess as strange, I certainly working in the steel mill was
01:06:09.380
more dangerous in some ways, but this alfalfa mill out west of Arne, Kansas involved our sacking dried
01:06:17.620
alfalfa feed for, uh, livestock. And they, the way it happened, they would bring in the trucks
01:06:25.140
around this fresh alfalfa and it would be dried and tied up to top of this, uh, uh, this furnace and
01:06:34.580
come down in these, uh, uh, funnels to, to, uh, uh, the, uh, workplace below where we were supposed
01:06:42.100
to sack it in 100 pound seed sacks. And each, there were three, there were three pipes coming down
01:06:48.580
and then, uh, we'd put, uh, uh, in the sack on the one that's, uh, uh, on the other one. When that
01:07:03.060
sack is full, we stretch it over, stretch it to the other one. We affect the full of that sack over the
01:07:09.300
scales. Make sure it weighs 100 pounds, exactly. If it's too much, take a little out and throw it in the
01:07:16.840
We took a little out of the barrel and put in there.
01:07:21.280
When they're full, we sew them up, load them up forward to a dolly
01:07:33.460
The problem was this fine green dust was in the air all the time,
01:07:40.680
and it got into our lungs, into our eyes, into our ears and what have you.
01:07:45.220
And finally, my friend got a case of best pneumonia from it.
01:07:51.080
Anyhow, that was probably the worst job we had.
01:08:00.400
at least helped motivate me to come back and get a master's degree at SMU.
01:08:08.500
but I wanted to give you an idea of what I'm doing with that book
01:08:16.920
Yeah, I can't wait to read that when it comes out.
01:08:19.980
Well, Earl Labor, this has been just a fascinating discussion.
01:08:28.700
As I say, I appreciate your interest and your patience,
01:08:30.920
and I look forward to corresponding with you again concerning The Art of Man in this.
01:08:41.540
and I just love listening to what you had to say about Jack London.
01:08:50.000
Professor Labor is the curator of the Jack London Museum in Shreveport,
01:08:53.040
and he teaches American literature at Centenary College, Louisiana,
01:08:55.700
and he is the author of the biography Jack London and American Life.
01:09:01.180
You can find that on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere,
01:09:04.620
and I recommend that all of you go pick up a copy and read it.
01:09:12.380
Well, that wraps up another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast.
01:09:17.480
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com,