Northland Stories, Page 2

  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.

  Does London’s primary identification between white men and the domineering Wolf make him a blatant racist? His interest in giving some voice to the “Raven” who bestow the designation “Wolf” on their more aggressive foes would suggest otherwise. Most recent discussions of turn-of-the-century theories of race assume Anglo-Saxon supremacy was modeled either on conquest and exploitation of the colonized subject, or else, a bit more improbably, on the isolationist’s dread of racial contamination altogether. But once we take London’s initial representation of “Wolf” and “Raven” clans seriously, his rendering of interracial marriage throughout his Northland suggests a third, more intricate set of possibilities in keeping with early-twentieth-century ethnographers and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Émile Durkheim. These writers found in totemism one way to theorize about the religious foundations of secular society. Like these thinkers, albeit less systematically, London discovered how primitivism in general and totemism in particular could help make some sense of the rapid social changes brought about by a bewildering modernity. These changes more immediately and personally for London concerned his own status in the social order as an ambitious working-class Nobody with no cultural capital trying to make a name for himself in publishing—to imagine his place, establish a field of kinship, as an author.

  Most commentary on these early Klondike tales has tended to shy away from race altogether to concentrate on London’s heroic representations of manhood—virtues such as valo
r, loyalty, and steadfastness displayed by the Malemute Kid and his comrades. These moral attributes constitute what London calls “the code of the Yukon”: how men in the wild and in the absence of civil law interact with one another. Assumed as unchanging universal constants, or a bit more pointedly as prime components of London’s literary naturalism, these manly characteristics take on an inert, static quality. But focusing on totemism allows us to historicize such concepts by reading them in relation to the question of race. By so merging race and manhood in relation to totemic law—equating the sons of the Wolf with white men who sustain their clan by taking red women—London in effect manages to revise, if not completely reinvent, turn-of-the-century notions of manhood as well as race.

  A small but especially important clue to understanding this conceptual revision can be found in London’s prefatory dedication to The Son of the Wolf. Summing up the collection’s thematic integrity, this preface serves as the author’s sharpest gloss on his own work. The dedication reads: TO THE SONS OF THE WOLF WHO SOUGHT THEIR HERITAGE AND LEFT THEIR BONES AMONG THE SHADOWS OF THE CIRCLE. By linking the ambiguous word “heritage” with the verb “sought,” London implies that white manhood is a condition that must be earned, achieved, and won, not passively taken for granted. Like the White Silence, racial categories in the Northland refer primarily to a state of mind. Here London overturns the prevailing belief of many of his contemporaries who assumed that racial difference was grounded in a set of natural, biological givens. For all of his professed adherence to Darwin’s theory, London’s views on race more closely anticipate Durkheim’s. Analyzing totemic kinship as an abstract system of social organization governed by the symbolic logic of religion, Durkheim insisted that clan affiliations in primitive societies need not depend strictly on geographical region or biological blood-lines, as previous ethnographers had supposed.

  If London’s protagonists become Wolves amidst the White Silence by virtue of their will and hard work, then it stands to reason that the category of “whiteness” would be available to anyone. In this regard the most interesting and resonant recurring Northland character is not the Malemute Kid, but Sitka Charley, an Indian trail guide and letter carrier who (unlike the Kid) continues to show up in London’s fiction after the first volume of stories. Charley is a “white” Indian, as London takes some length to explain in the opening paragraph of “The Wisdom of the Trail”: “Sitka Charley had achieved the impossible. Other Indians might have known as much of the wisdom of the trail as did he; but he alone knew the white man’s wisdom, the honor of the trail, and the law.... Being an alien, when he did know he knew it better than the white man himself.” While the concluding reference to the native as an “alien” generates a sharp set of ironies of its own, at least London entertains the possibility that an Indian man could in effect convert to whiteness by virtue of fully realizing its higher law. Charley’s symbolic status becomes crucial later in the story when he is paired on trail with a Mrs. Eppingwell, one of only two white women in The Son of the Wolf. Unwilling or unable to imagine reverse miscegenation—a red man taking a white bride—London links Charley and this (already married) woman at a more abstract conceptual level: What Charley learns to love and respect about Mrs. Eppingwell is her toughness, which in so resembling his own enables him to appreciate “why the sons of such women mastered the land and the sea, and why the sons of his own womankind could not prevail against them.”

  Introducing this white mother by way of a converted Indian, whose “manhood” is “nourished” by her presence, London’s thinking on race takes a considerable turn in “The Wisdom of the Trail.” In the absence of any white fathers (the presumed father W. H. Chaney had denied him, after all), London relies on white mothers to help define his sons of the Wolf precisely at the moment a powerful “white” red man has emerged in his fiction to destabilize fixed racial categories. As many feminist theorists have suggested, patriarchy is anxiety-provoking because fathers can remain invisible, in ways that mothers, as birth givers, tangibly cannot; to counteract the authority of a “white” Indian who threatens to undermine the “Wolf” clan’s essential foundations, London bypasses the missing father altogether to reanchor racial identity along matrilineal lines.

  London codifies this genealogy of mothers in the dedication prefacing The God of His Fathers, which reads: TO THE DAUGHTERS OF THE WOLF WHO HAVE BRED AND SUCKLED A RACE OF MEN. Ostensibly a parallel to the dedication prefacing his first volume, this second, curious dedication actually works quite differently. London would seem to have skipped a generation. Although he introduces these women as daughters of the “Wolf” clan (presumably still representing the white race), London immediately shifts to their roles as mothers, so that “a race of men” have in effect become the sons of the daughters of the Wolf. Part of the confusion stems from London’s effort in these stories to treat two very distinct sorts of women at once: Indian wives, who are celebrated in tales such as “Where the Trail Forks,” “Siwash,” and “Grit of Women” (narrated by Sitka Charley) for their loyalty and endurance of hardship, and white mothers, who somehow magically pass on their own strength to their sons.

  By such a sharp bifurcation between the roles of mother and helpmate, London manages to avoid (for the most part) the unsettling prospect of the half-breed—a possibility which has loomed large in his Northland since the character of the pregnant Ruth appeared in “The White Silence.” Akin to the mulatto, the figure of the half-breed threatens to blur racial difference. But in steering clear of such blurring by keeping the roles of mother and wife so separated, London creates other problems for himself, obscuring the very distinction between “Raven” and “Wolf” that he had initially posited in his early Klondike tales.

  Comparing these two dedications enables us to see a larger set of contradictions beginning to riddle Jack London’s growing Northland field. As the second dedication suggests, London is moving in two directions at once: backward in mythic time searching for the origins of patriarchy, and forward in historical time documenting the incursion of whites in the Yukon Territory. The introduction of Mrs. Eppingwell in the Far North signals a stage in the colonizing process that inevitably must follow the appearance of the original “Wolf” Mason, but which also functions for London to explain how these men got there in the first place. Historians of the Canadian fur trade have noted how the introduction of white women into the Far North triggered an increase in racism aimed against native women, who were readily accepted as mates until white women arrived on the scene.2 In this regard there is some historical validity behind London’s dedication in The God of His Fathers praising white women, whose strength is linked. to the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Such an ideology, or rather theology of race, is depicted most dramatically in the volume’s first (and title) story. But in so refusing to give up native women as wives, emphasizing white women solely as mothers of the race, London mixes history with myth in his continuing search for the foundations of patriarchy.

  In his next collection, Children of the Frost, that search would take him past symbolic mothers to return to the missing father. The “Wolf,” London discovered, could be understood only directly in relation to those tribal elders whose daughters had been taken as brides. In a letter to his Macmillan publisher, George Brett, London remarked that his ambition in writing this volume of stories was to represent the Indian’s point of view. But most of these rarely reprinted tales have a far more specific focus, documenting in effect the tragic destruction of patriarchal law itself at the hands of the white race. These Indian leaders are old and they are dying along with their children, emasculated by liquor (“The Death of Ligoun”), by Christianity (“Keesh, the Son of Keesh”), by the hunger for material goods (“Li Wan, the Fair”), and other gifts bestowed by the white man. Digging deeper and deeper for the sources of patriarchy, London gradually has come up against an all too present history. Even a familiar tale like “The Law of Life,” which would seem to offer the purest demonstration o
f nature’s Darwinian logic, takes on a more urgent and immediate cast when set in the context of these other disturbing and violent stories portraying ruined kings.

  Such a dark view of defeated manhood compels London to alter his representation of women. While the first two collections of Klondike stories depict native women as items of exchange who assure bonds of totemic kinship among men, here London begins to see these native fathers and daughters as unwilling actors in a larger historical process driven by the expansion of capital into foreign lands. No longer governed by miscegenation, social relations in the Northland have become mainly dictated by commerce, with commodities replacing squaws as fetishized objects of desire for both white and red men. The economy of the totem, based on the principle of exogamy, has turned into the rule of the capitalist State.

  The destructive force of commerce had made itself felt in London’s Far North since “The Son of the Wolf.” But in these earlier tales London is more intent on imaginatively establishing his “Wolf” kinship than in exploring the consequences of his exploitation of a regional field. Only by letting dying patriarchs speak for themselves does London begin to come to terms with his attempted reconstruction of race. In this regard London’s crowning achievement remains “The League of the Old Men,” one of his greatest and most poignant tales, which he chose to conclude Children of the Frost. The main action of the story takes place in a court of law, where Old Imber, an Indian chief, faces punishment for murdering whites. The figurative “Law of the Wolf” is thus rendered as a concrete institution which no longer dispenses the Malemute Kid’s informal (but highly moral) brand of frontier justice. In the earlier tale “To the Man on Trail” the Kid and his mates triumph over the official agents of the law. But now the wisdom of the trail has given way to the machinery of a trial. Yet in moving from trail to trial whom does London view as the real criminal?