London / Masters The People of the Abyss

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78094-206-3
Verlag: Hesperus Press Ltd.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

A profound and moving piece of investigative journalism, Jack London's study of the London underworld remains, a century after it was written, a timely tale of poverty and injustice.In 1902, Jack London purchased some second-hand clothes, rented a room in the East End, and set out to discover how the London poor lived. His research makes shocking reading. Moving through the slums as one of the poor; eating, drinking and socialising with the underclass; queuing to get into a doss-house, London was scandalised and brutalised by the experience of living rough in Britain's capital. His clear-eyed reflections on the iniquities of class are a shaming testament to the persistence of social inequality in modern Britain.

Autoren/Hrsg.

London, Jack

Masters, Alexander

Leseproben

Foreword

Even before Jack London was born he was all over the newspapers. His pregnant mother, Flora, ran out of a San Francisco boarding house and shot herself in the forehead.

‘A Discarded Wife. Driven from House for Refusing to Destroy her Unborn Infant – A Chapter of Heartlessness and Domestic Misery,’ raged the local headline. The scoundrel – it’s important to pay attention here: as with all stories about Jack and his mother, bafflement rapidly sets in – was said to be Professor W.H. Chaney, an itinerant astrologer, who insisted he couldn’t be Jack’s father because he was impotent due to too much ‘brain work’.

But the bullet had missed; the laudanum Flora had swallowed the night before hadn’t been enough. After the blood was wiped off, she rushed away to meet her next man, a carpenter called John London. It was from him that Jack took his stability and his name.

Jack London was born, in 1876, into poverty and fibs. On the advice of spirits conjured up at parlour seances, Flora invested the carpenter’s earnings in lottery tickets, so had to make stern economies elsewhere: when Jack and his half-sister Eliza were close to dying from diphtheria, Eliza woke up briefly from her coma to overhear their mother wondering if it would be cheaper to squeeze both children into one coffin.

Much of Jack’s life (it doesn’t seem right to call such an unsettled character by his second name) and most of his writings are characterised by a struggle for escape – from cold, from predators, from social oppression, and from Mother. Aged thirteen, he scratched together two dollars and bought a small boat with leaks, ramming and battering about the docks until he learned to sail. By fourteen, he’d obtained a second-hand skiff. At fifteen, he became a pirate. For $300, sponged off a friend, he bought a sloop called the Razzle Dazzle, stole the girlfriend of the man who sold it to him, and spent the nights raiding privately owned oyster beds alongside thieving desperadoes with names like Spider and Whiskey Bob. Reckless, expert and mostly blind drunk, Jack was the hero of his dreams. He had a bestial ability to endure hard work and a suicidal obsession with romance. Frenchie Frank – the fellow who’d sold him the sloop – tried to run him down with a bigger boat in a jealous rage. Jack saw him off: steering Razzle Dazzle with his feet, he whipped out a shotgun and kept it trained on Frenchie until the sloop had sliced past the bows and Jack was away, laughing among the waves. When police raided, he charmed them with his choicest stolen oysters, doused in pepper sauce. On a third occasion – though many biographers throw up their hands in disbelief at about this point – he boarded a boat full of knife-wielding Chinese shrimp-raiders, rounded up eighteen of the most murderous, and marched them off to hokey with a gun that was really just two fingers in his pocket.

Jack’s favourite boyhood book, and the one that first made him want to become a writer, was , by Ouida: the story of the illegitimate child of a peasant girl and a footloose artist, who fights his way out of penury to become one of Italy’s most famous composers. There’s no equivalent to Ouida writing now, but she belongs in the same bracket – though Ouida is clever, funnier and much more overblown – as Jackie Collins.

After oysters, what boyhood splendour didn’t Jack enjoy? He spent eight months on a schooner, killing seals off Japan, boozing in Yokohama bars, diving into the harbour to escape the Port Authorities. He dodged across America as a hobo, jumping trains; tried to kill himself by floating out to sea on his back – and turned seventeen.

Jack London’s famous Alaskan novels and short stories are driven by the spirit of this boy. Brutish, sentimental, and featuring superhuman resistance to low temperatures, they made gentlemen cuss and ladies go pink. Yet critics insist it was these frostbitten man vs. dog/ship/big mountain tumbles around the Alaskan waste that slapped nineteenth-century American literature into shape. ‘When was released in the spring of 1900, it met with instantaneous critical success. The book was like a time-bomb blowing open the new century,’ insists his adoring biographer Irvine Stone.

The scientific attitude toward evolution and the strife among species, the amoral values of people who lived without fear of being excommunicated by the parson, the bold approach to life’s cruelty and ugliness and grimness as well as the beautiful and the good… all tolled the death knell of the anaemic, the sentimental, the evasive, the hypocritical, that marked nineteenth-century literature.

It sold next to nothing.

I read when I was a child and it put me off Jack’s books almost for good. It begins with a thrilling scene: a wolf pack hunting down a pair of prospectors, plucking away the dogs of the sled team day by day. But it ends in gush. Captured, beaten, starved, throat ripped in dog fight, White Fang gazes adoringly at his final, kind human owner and thinks of him as a ‘love-master’.

is an entirely different sort of book – at first sight. It’s an account of Jack’s brief experiences in the slums of the East End of London, 7,000 miles away from the land of toothy dogs. The American Press Association had commissioned him in 1902 to go to South Africa to report the aftermath of the Boer War, then abruptly cancelled the plan when his boat reached England. Needing something to do, Jack jumped in a hansom cab and demanded the cabbie inject him into the slums of London among the ‘starved and depraved population’.

Unlike George Orwell in , Jack had no irritating pretence that he was experiencing what it was like to be inescapably destitute: he’d come as an observer, because he was strong enough and fluent enough – in short, sufficiently unlike the people who lived there without choice – to get away with it. After he’d put on his disguise, he scuttled off to rent a secret hideaway for those times when the stench and discomfort of the streets got too much, which turned out usually to be after about three days. As an objective, trustworthy analysis, won’t do at all. On every page, Jack bursts his shirt buttons with fury and astonishment.

At the start of the twentieth century, 939 out of 1,000 people in London died in poverty; one in every four in a workhouse, infirmary or lunatic asylum; fifty-five per cent of East End children never made it to five. Many families could not afford to bury the baby at once: the corpse was stored in the bed during the day, on the kitchen table at night and, if neither of those was free, on the pantry shelf.

‘No other book of mine,’ he wrote to his friend Upton Sinclair, ‘took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor.’

Until a year ago, I’d never heard of . It sold in America, but the English, not surprisingly, didn’t take to it. I hadn’t heard either of , Jack’s futurist novel about the collapse of the plutocracy, or his essays and . Gentlemen didn’t just cuss when Jack’s socialist books appeared: they leapt for their cutlasses. The America of 1900 was as frightened of left-wing language as it is today, and Jack wanted class war: America didn’t even believe it had classes. Ladies swooned – and not entirely from horror. He was a handsome man, built like a moose. One wrote, giving her minister as a character reference, and begged him to impregnate her.

How did the schmaltzy dog-yarner turn into this firebrand? It wasn’t the East End that did it. Jack’s conversion to socialism had taken place almost a decade earlier, when America suffered a financial crash, banks collapsed, tens of thousands were on the streets, and wages were cut by forty to sixty per cent. Jack, then eighteen, had got a job shovelling coal at a power plant for eight cents an hour, thirteen hours a day. Several weeks in, he discovered he’d taken over employment for two people, was slaving for half the rate of a single person, and that one of the men he’d ousted had committed suicide because he couldn’t find any other work. Jack walked out, became a tramp, hitched, rode the hobo trains some more, stole food from homeless people, and began to think seriously about socialist revolution. In New York, in a park outside City Hall, he was drinking a glass of milk, when a policeman thwacked him across the head with a truncheon. At Niagara Falls he was arrested for vagrancy for sleeping in a field, and sentenced to thirty days’ hard labour. It was what he saw inside that jail – the quiet murders, the beatings, the screams as one tribe of men, with truncheons, battered at another locked in cells – that turned him completely. When he got back to California, he launched himself on a Herculean programme of self-education in politics, science, history and activism. When he rushed off for adventure again, this time to join the Alaskan gold rush, he saw his learning applied in practice, even if only to dogs and prospectors: the power of evolution, the ruthlessness of the struggle to survive, the importance of unity and the desolation of the weak.

It’s only at first sight that and the Alaskan novels appear so different. Jack’s aim, here as in his pot-boilers,...