By Max Musson:
Jack London 1876 – 1916, was the son of Flora Wellman a woman of Puritan stock who was deserted by her husband while London was still very young. At the age of 13 London was already working in a local canning factory, later becoming an oyster pirate, a fisheries patrolman, a student and a gold prospector during the Klondike Gold Rush. These early experiences gave London a massive amount of material upon which to base his later writings and in 1898 he began a career as a writer and as a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.
He is best remembered as the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush. He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as “Mutiny on the Elsinore” and and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.
Often criticised for his race based characterisations of the characters in his many books, London demonstrates a vivid appreciation of the natural order that pervades human existence. London was also a great believer in social justice and he can therefore be regarded in these respects as a proto-nationalist writer.
The following poem is taken from London’s novel, ‘The Mutiny on the Elsinore’ and it demonstrates a feeling of the continuity of life transcending the generations and an appreciation of the genetic inheritance, perhaps genetic memory that links us with our forefathers and those who will issue from us.
In the Lives of All My Fathers
[By Jack London]
It is nothing new.
I have been here before.
In the lives of all my fathers have I been here.
The frost is on my cheek,
the salt bites my nostrils,
the wind chants in my ears, and it is an old happening.
I know, now, that my forebears were Vikings.
I was seed of them in their own day.
With them I have raided English coasts,
dared the Pillars of Hercules,
forayed the Mediterranean,
and sat in the high place of government
over the soft sun-warm peoples.
I am Hengist and Horsa;
I am of the ancient heroes even legendary to them.
I have bearded and bitted the frozen seas,
and, aforetime of that,
ere ever the ice ages came to be,
I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer gore,
slain the mastodon and the sabre-tooth,
scratched the record of my prowess
on the walls of deep buried caves – ay,
and suckled she-wolves side by side with my brother cubs,
the scars of whose fangs are now upon me.
-o0o-
By Max Musson © 2012
# # # #