Northland Stories (2 page)

Recognizing the shaky financial status of magazine work, as well as the ephemeral, fragmentary nature of magazine print, London also aspired to publish books—a more enduring, prestigious, and lucrative medium. Regionalism offered writers one crucial means to move from magazines to books by allowing them to conceive of their shorter, discrete productions as potentially part of a greater whole unified by a single sense of place. Needing a steady income to pay his bills, London could take his chances on monthly piecemeal magazine placement and still hope for a second, larger bonus to come: a collected volume; in effect being paid twice for these same stories.

From an aesthetic point of view regional writing could also give authors greater control over their productions. Pieces that were often cut and maimed by magazine editors worrying about length could be restored to their proper condition as parts of a coherent body of work, thereby reinforcing the integrity of the author himself. Consider, for instance, London's first big breakthrough. In August 1899 his long, ambitious Klondike tale “An Odyssey of the North,” was accepted by the prestigious
Atlantic Monthly,
which had been publishing regional writing since the Civil War. The magazine offered London the prodigious sum of $120 if he was willing to shorten the story's opening by three thousand words, which he quickly agreed to do. Within a few months his first collection of nine Klondike stories,
The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North,
had been accepted for book publication by the equally prestigious publisher Houghton, Mifflin, with the concluding tale “An Odyssey of the North” returned to its original state.

London's triumph was largely a matter of timing, combined with a shrewd submission strategy. Just as he was beginning to shop around for a book publisher in the summer of 1899, London stopped publishing his Klondike stories in the local San Francisco magazine
Overland Monthly
(once edited by Bret Harte) to try for greater national exposure. More pointedly, the publishing house Houghton, Mifflin actually owned the
Atlantic Monthly,
whose influential editor William B. Parker was so impressed with “An Odyssey of the North” that he recommended London's entire volume when London submitted it to Houghton, Mifflin soon thereafter. Grasping the intimate relationship between a respected magazine and its parent company, London was thus able to parlay their acceptance of his short stories into a book contract.

As the example of “An Odyssey of the North” shows, London's early successes as a writer to a large extent derived from his knack for seizing the opportunities presented by turn-of-the-century publishing's multiple venues. From the very start of his career, London regarded virtually all of his pieces as potential parts of books; in the back of an early notebook recording magazine submissions, rejections, and acceptances, the young writer spent page after page trying to organize previously published works, listed by title and word count, into various groupings—“Hints on Writing,” “Economic Essays,” “Future Tales,” and, of course, “Klondike Tales”—that would each add up to a book. Set in one particular region, London's Yukon material was particularly apt to be construed as a “series,” as he himself called this writing. After his Northland story “To the Man on Trail” was accepted by the
Overland Monthly
in December 1898 (mistitled and for the paltry sum of five dollars), the editor, James Howard Bridge, encouraged London to submit more work in the same vein as a kind of package deal. Bridge even began numbering London's story subtitles consecutively as they appeared monthly in order to remind his magazine's readers that London's stories constituted a continuing Northland saga.

Both Bridge and London understood that these stories needed more than just a common setting to make them cohere as a series. Following the practice of other regionalists, particularly popular writers of Westerns, London organized his
Overland
magazine stories around a recurring character, the “Malemute Kid,” who would end up appearing in seven out of the nine tales collected in
The Son of the Wolf.
A hardened veteran of the Klondike, the Kid initially served as the presiding moral center of London's fictional Northland. In his various roles as arbiter of disputes, sympathetic auditor, and main actor, the Malemute Kid offered London's magazine readers an exemplary source of manly strength and wisdom. Yet despite Bridge's enthusiasm for the Kid, London in his letters to friends betrayed a certain impatience with his own creation, who bore a perilously close resemblance to stock frontier figures peopling so many dime novel Westerns and detective stories produced during the 1870s, ‘80s, and '90s. This dime novel mode of publishing was frequently modeled after factory production, with authors anonymously or pseudonymously churning out stories and novels dominated by trademark protagonists such as Deadwood Dick, Old Sleuth, and Nick Carter. In many cases these character types became the legal property of the publishers who hired the writers, and not the writers themselves.

Jack London simply would not allow a fictional protagonist—even one of his own devising—to overshadow his potential fame as a man of letters. Beyond character and setting, he searched for a way to impress upon these Northland tales his unique authorial personality, what he termed (in an 1899 advice essay addressed to other literary aspirants) the writer's “stamp of ‘self'.” In this respect the instrumental tale bearing such a stamp remains “The White Silence,” which appeared second in the
Overland
series, but which London pointedly selected to lead off his first collected volume,
The Son of the Wolf.
Titled “A Northland Episode” when first submitted to
Godey's
on October 4, 1898, the story's far more suggestive revised title derives from a passage midway through the narrative. Recounting the desperate race of the half-starving Malemute Kid, a companion named Mason, and his Indian wife, Ruth, on trail across the frozen wilderness, London pauses to offer a context for their toil: “with the awe, born of the White Silence, the voiceless travelers bent to their work.”

In the course of narrating the subsequent sacrifice of one of these three characters for the sake of the other two, London repeats four times this capitalized expression. This recurring signature phrase, “the White Silence,” designed to establish the author's strong individual presence (his and his alone) at the same time that it figuratively registers an atmosphere of menace and wonder governing the Northland landscape, also appears at key moments in other stories throughout the collection. The phrase clearly maps a state of mind, not a geography—a mood in which the activity of work speaks louder than words. Here we can see how London's concept of a fictional “field” is more interesting and innovative than a mere “series,” looking forward to modernist short story cycles such as Jean Toomer's
Cane
(1923) and Hemingway's
In Our Time
(1925), whose discrete parts are unified by lyrical abstractions beyond specific place or people or plot.

To appreciate more fully how London's Northland tales actually function as a coherent “field” of writing, we need to return to the year 1897. London's brand of regionalism, it turns out, would come to depend on a complex unfolding symbolic genealogy. In June, about a month before leaving for the Yukon, London received a remarkable pair of letters from an itinerant astrologer named W. H. Chaney, whom London had lately suspected of being his real biological father. Bluntly denying his patrimony, Chaney left London with little but to muse on his presumed illegitimacy. London's response to Chaney's denial was to submit for national publication an early batch of stories, among them a curious gothic potboiler entitled “A Thousand Deaths.” London later credited this lurid tale with saving his literary career when it was finally accepted for the hefty sum of forty dollars in early 1899. The story concerns a mad scientist who at first fails to recognize his own son, but then repeatedly subjects him to sadistic rounds of lethal torture and miraculous resuscitation, only to be himself vaporized by the son in the end.

This story carries profound implications for London's attempts at self-location as a writer. Cruelly rejected by his ostensible father, London within weeks submitted a fantasy about a son's patricidal revenge and then immediately headed north. Upon his return, he began generic streamlining, focusing on a series of stories all set in the Yukon whose characters are united by virtue of belonging to a single common family. London called this family the “Wolf” clan, identifying his fictional Northland protagonists (including his surrogate the “Malemute Kid” and implicitly himself) collectively as “The Son of the Wolf”—the story which appeared third in the
Overland
sequence, but whose title London chose for his first collected volume. And so began Jack London's lifelong fascination with the figure of the wolf, his personal projection of dominance and power, as well as the intimate nickname by which he would call himself a few years later in affectionate letters to his wife, Charmian, and his best friend, George Sterling.

Trading in the surname “Chaney” for “Wolf,” the aspiring author in the field of the Klondike “found myself” (as he fondly liked to recall) by replacing his biological father with an imaginary set of tribal clansmen. By “Wolf” London meant something rather specific, as the seldom reprinted title story makes quite clear. A young but grizzled gold prospector named Scruff Mackenzie leaves his cozy cabin to seek wealth of another sort—a wife and helpmate. He boldly chooses for his bride the daughter of an Indian chief, whose tribal clan, “the Raven,” has come to identify these few strange white men invading the Northland as “Sons of the Wolf.” Forcibly stealing the royal daughter against the wishes of the natives, Mackenzie warns his vanquished foes to heed “the Law of the Wolf.” This law the Indians themselves have associated with “the fighting and destructive principle”—the Devil—as opposed to the “creative principles” governing their tribe.

“Wolf” thus stands for the white race, whose sons are conceived by London as belonging to their own totemic clan which is defined by, even as it is opposed to, Native Americans. While “the Law of the Wolf” in this story explicitly concerns the white man's exacting brand of punishment, more generally, totemic law functions in London's fictional Northland to dictate social relations. These relations depend on racial difference, which is why Mackenzie seeks a red bride, no less than a princess, who also happens to be the sister of Ruth in “The White Silence.” The irony is that although the Indians in the tale argue against interracial marriage in order to preserve the purity of their threatened clan, the “Wolf” Mackenzie fears no such impurity. In fact the white man is compelled to take a racial Other as his mate, given the practice of exogamy, which under totemic law prohibits marriage within a single group. The native “Raven” conversely adopt the familiar rhetoric of United States citizens, such as President Teddy Roosevelt, who reacted to the great influx of immigrants and “alien” peoples at the turn of the century by darkly prophesizing racial suicide. By putting this dread of mixed blood in the mouths of Indians, London forced his contemporary readers to question some of their most basic assumptions about race.

Clearly not all of the more than fifty stories London set in the Klondike concern miscegenation. “In a Far Country,” for instance, tells the chilling tale of two men of differing social classes cooped up together in a cabin—a difficult “marriage” of another sort anticipating the intense homoerotic strife between men that London would later explore in his novel
The Sea-Wolf
(1904). But from “The Son of the Wolf” and “The White Silence,” which introduces us to the pregnant native wife, Ruth, (and her impending half-breed child), to the powerful tales “The League of the Old Men” and “The Story of Jees Uck,” miscegenation lies at the very heart of London's early Northland narratives. In “An Odyssey of the North,” to cite one notable example, London actually offers two stories of racial intermingling: the tale of the Indian Naass who narrates his obsessive quest to retrieve his intended Indian bride, Unga, stolen from him on his wedding night by a mighty superhuman white man; and the related myth of the Indian's own racial origins which can be traced to a prior primal encounter between white and red, whose fates have been linked, this myth suggests, long before the recent incursion of the likes of the Malemute Kid, Mason, and Mackenzie.

These relations between white men and red women have enormous import for our understanding of London's Northland as a single evolving conceptual field extending beyond individual stories and even beyond individual collections of stories. Although it is intriguing to speculate about his ordering of tales within particular volumes—why “The White Silence” precedes “The Son of the Wolf” in
The Son of the Wolf,
for example—we therefore need to consider how miscegenation (sanctioned by whites but feared by native men) operates more broadly throughout these tales to establish for London an imaginary kinship based on a rediscovered patriarchal order.

London's progressive search for patriarchy takes place in three stages that roughly correspond to his first three volumes of stories. Throughout
The Son of the Wolf
(1900) he represents white men ravishing Indian brides. The next volume,
The God of His Fathers
(1901), focuses on the strength of these red “daughters of the soil” as mates, while simultaneously exploring the role of white women as mothers (but not wives). In his third Northland collection,
Children of the Frost
(1902), London finally directs his attention to tribal elders, the royal fathers who are originally responsible for setting totemic law even as they have become increasingly victimized by the rapacious sons of the Wolf.