Jack London’s stories were written largely out of his own life. If they were not actual experiences cast in fiction form, they were narratives spun out of the fiber of his own experiences. Life was never certain for London. He was always on the go, and his life was an ever vigorous, vital present, with the future undetermined and unguessed. He was born in San Francisco on January 12, 1876. When he was eleven years old he left his ranch in the Livermore Valley and set out to satisfy his longing for a knowledge of the world and an expression of himself. He first went to Oakland, where, in the public library, he came under the romantic influence of such fiction writers as Washington Irving, Ouida and others. Out of Irving’s “Alhambra” he built castles in the air for himself, and launched upon a great literary career with a strong under-current of romance and an irresistible longing for adventure. He left home and joined the oyster pirates in San Francisco Bay. Then, tiring of the excitement of piracy, he turned with equal enthusiasm to the prosecution of it by joining the Fish Patrol, and was entrusted with the arrest of some who were his former comrades. Thrilling accounts of this life appeared under the title of “Tales of a Fish Patrol.” In them is a wild buccaneer spirit, and the savor of the sea. Those of us that read the “Sea Wolf” can find there a passionate expression of the author’s own experiences before the mast while seal hunting in Behring Sea or along the coast of Japan. It is full of strong appealing character and strange sea lore. The same wild breath of adventure is to be found in “The Mutiny of the Elsinore,” in which London describes thrilling experiences in a trip around the Horn. London was a worker, and labored hard among the rougher elements of life—with longshoremen and shovellers in San Francisco; in factories and on the decks of coastwise vessels. He was as good a tramp, too, as he was a laboring man. He walked the Continent over from ocean to ocean, gathering the materials for a “vast understanding of the common man.” Out of these experiences came “The Road,” which is an appealing record of sympathy with the vagrant poor, and an absorbing narrative of adventurous journeying.
London tried schooling at different times in his early life, working between hours to pay for his education. After several months of stern, hard application, in which he covered about three years’ preparatory work, he entered the University of California. The strain, however, of work and study combined was too much for him, and after three months he had to give up. Turning to things quite different, and with a desperate hope that he might find fresh inspiration in a new kind of life, he set off for the widely advertised Klondike to seek for gold. In the Klondike “nobody talks; everybody thinks; you get your true perspective; I got mine,” he says. After a year of hard toil in the north, London returned home and assumed the burden of supporting his family, his father having died while he was away. He wrote story upon story, and finally gained acceptance and success. As book after book came out, the public grew to know and recognize Jack London as one of the strongest figures in American fiction.
He passed away on November 22, 1916, in the full swing of his intellectual vigor, and it will be long before his splendid achievement is forgotten, or the last of his books is consigned to the high shelves that spell oblivion. No matter how sparing one may be in the use of the word genius, for him it could be claimed. His name is one of the few among those of the writing men of our time with which the magic word is, without hesitation, to be linked. There was genius in his invention, in his imagery, in his nervous style. To him was given to know the moods of Arctic wastes and California valleys. The struggles of his own soul and mind and body he dissected and portrayed in “Martin Eden” (1909) and “John Barleycorn” (1913). He was practically the only American writer to invade magnificently the prize-ring as a field for romantic narrative. Its seamy side, its sordid corruption, its driftage, as well as its brutal heroism, are reflected in such tales as “The Game,” “The Abysmal Brute,” “The Shadow and the Flash,” and “The Mexican.” “The Call of the Wild” (1903) challenges the very best dog-stories of all time. “The Sea Wolf” (1904) is an epic of salt brine, and creaking rigging, and man’s inhumanity to man, and the “blond masters of the world.” There followed “Burning Daylight” (1910), and “The Valley of the Moon” (1913), and “The Mutiny of the Elsinore” (1914), which is “The Sea Wolf” “in a lower key,” and “The Strength of the Strong” (1914), and a dozen more. Whatever the field, there was a sureness of touch, and a power of graphic description that made the man always a figure and a force.
REX BEACH
Rex Beach
FIVE
It was in Alaska—the field of “The Forerunner,” the Kipling poem that was for so many years lost and entirely forgotten by its author, the field of Robert W. Service’s “Songs of a Sourdough,” the field of so many of the tales of Jack London and Stewart Edward White, that Rex Beach first found literary expression. He did not set out in life to be a literary man. He was a husky youth, full of vitality and, even in his teens, a giant in strength. He was born in Atwood, Michigan, September 1, 1877, and he left his native place for the city of Chicago when he was eighteen years of age. He meant to study law, but, as he said, he “had no money—therefore had to find a place to eat.” In those days the athletic associations of several of the large cities maintained football teams of giant gladiators to entertain the multitude. Young Beach had seen just one game of football, but when he presented himself, his physical architecture was so imposing that he was engaged without hesitation, as tackle, by the athletic association football manager. The college teams used to play an annual series with these huge professionals. Later they gave it up, because the “truck-horse professionals” hired by the athletic associations could not be hurt by anything short of an ax, while the college players, as Beach said, were apt to “tear under the wing.” Beach played through the season, taking part in the games by which his team won the championship of America. Then, being desirous of eating regularly, he attached himself to the athletic association’s swimming team and broke an indoor record at water polo. That was in 1897, when the Klondike excitement broke out. He stampeded with the rest. It was the spirit of adventure and no thought of finding material for fiction that took him to the Yukon.
With two partners from Chicago, Beach was dumped off the boat at Rampart, on the Yukon, one rainy night. The three hadn’t a dollar amongst them, but they had plenty of goods. Then things began to happen. “We prepared to become exorbitantly rich,” in the words of Beach, “but it was a bad winter. There were fifteen hundred rough-necks in town, very little food and plenty of scurvy. I soon found that my strength was my legs. I could stampede with anybody. So I stampeded faithfully whenever I heard of a gold strike, all that winter.” He became dissatisfied with his two Chicago partners, because they preferred to sit around the cabin cooking tasty messes to tearing through blizzards at the tail of a dog team. They wanted to wait for their million dollars until spring, but Beach wanted his by Christmas at the latest. And so he set off, and quickly fell under the spell of the Yukon. The glare of the white Arctic night, the toil of the long trail, the complicated struggle for existence, the reversion to primitive passions inevitable in a new civilization in process of formation, made an imperative call to him, and held him fascinated. The life about him moved him to write, and before long he was embarked on a literary career. “Pardners,” his first story, appeared in 1904, and this was followed by the novel that gave him reputation—“The Spoilers,” which appeared in 1906. Then came “The Barrier” in 1907, and “The Silver Horde” in 1909. They are all virile stories of Alaskan life that have stirred many thousands of readers. Some have gone into dramatic form, “The Barrier” having attained a new and distinguished success as a film picture. In “The Ne’er Do Well” and in “The Net” Beach sought Southern scenes, the former novel having Panama as its background, and “The Net” New Orleans during the Mafia days. “The Auction Block,” published in 1914, deals with the favorite activities of modern Metropolitan life, and the sale of young girls into the marriage tie.