Literature > Jack London
... and perhaps it was true too he had been reading too much Jack London even then... – UTV, 161.

Jack London (1876-1916), American novelist, socialist, and adverturer; in turn an oyster-pirate, hobo, sealer, goldminer, war correspondent, writer, alcoholic, and suicide, who cast himself in the role of rugged individualist and Nietzschean superman and whose life Hugh seems at times almost consiously to imitate. London's life and socialism was fraught with contradiction and he is at his best when depicting the ferocious individual struggle rather than the colelctive human dream. His best known works are The Call of the Wild (1903), The People of the Abyss (1903), White Fang (1906), Martin Eden (1909), as well as those which Hugh mentions (below).

Left: London writing The Sea-Wolf, 1904. Image courtesy Jack London State Historic Park.
The Sea-Wolf (1904). The story of Humphrey van Weyden, dilettante writer and critic who, following a collision in San Francisco Bay, is picked up by Wolf Larsen, captain of the Ghost, and taken to the sealing grounds in Japan. A struggle for supremacy ensues, at the centre of which is the poetess Maude Brewster (somewhat improbably also rescued by the Ghost). Van Weyden and Maude escape to an island, where larsen, deserted by his crew, also ends up, and after Larsen's death the lovers escape in the schooner.

There may be some parallels to the triangle presented in Under the Volcano in the contrast of the older and younger man; the younger man's supposed sensitivity; the contrast of contemplative and active personalities; and the desire for a chaste life on some northern island.

Left: The Sea-Wolf, first edition. Macmillan Company, 1904.

The Valley of the Moon (1913). Lowry's adjective "virile" to describe the book implies a judgment upon the "maturity" of Hugh's imagined advancement, the essence of which is the transition from the kind of fiercely individualist struggle depicted in The Sea-Wolf towards a socialist theory of return to the land as a next step in human evolution.

The novel appeared both in serial form, running in Cosmopolitan from April (pictured, left) through December, 1913, and in book form the same year.
The Jacket (1915). Better known as The Star Rover. The novel, perhaps London's best, is about a condemned man, Darrell Standing, an ex-professor of agronomics, who is in San Quentin for murder. He is placed in solitary confinement and is forced to undergo long spells inside the"jacket", a straitjacket into which he is tightly laced for up to ten days in a row. His method of survival is to go "star-roving"; that is, to force his mind to eliminate all thoughts of the body and to take off into its own astral world, transcending the limitations of time and space and getting in touch with its previous existences.

The novel thus celebrates "man's unconquerable will," which even Standing's final death cannot denigrate, but it is also relevant to Hugh, who is very much the prisoner of his own weaknesses and seeks achievement elsewhere. The chief irony for Lowry, however, is the relevance of the title to the Consul's fate.

Left: The Star Rover, first edition. Macmillan Company, 1915.