Although there are certain obvious similarities in the fiction of Jack London and Joseph Conrad—both wrote tales of the sea as well as stories set in exotic lands, and frequently both peopled their fiction with rough characters engaged in violent action—Conrad’s different emphasis, surer craftsmanship and more profound insight into the psychological motivations of his characters have made these similarities seem relatively inconsequential. London is often, even within the same book, an exponent of the cult of raw meat and red blood and a political expounder using fiction as a means of advancing the doctrines of socialism. This blatant dichotomy is in obvious contrast to Conrad’s characteristically subtle investigations of states of mind. Conrad himself bridled at being regarded “as literarily a sort of Jack London”:

Thus London’s biographers and critics have given what seems to be the proper emphasis to the London-Conrad relation when they merely note in a sentence or so that London read the English author and that at one point or another their literary interests coincided extrinsically. Actually, however, it is as misleading to minimize their similarities as to exaggerate them; and to say that London exhibits only a superficial likeness to Conrad obscures a basic correspondence which is of some significance in an over-all consideration of London’s fiction. Consequently, I would like to examine here the nature and extent of London’s relation to Conrad—not so much to determine Conrad’s “influence” but rather to illuminate an infrequently considered aspect of London’s work.

Certainly there can be no question of London’s enthusiastic regard for Conrad. Mrs. London’s record of the voyage of the Snark cites three occasions when Jack read Conrad aloud to the crew.² Frank Pease reported that London, while reading A Personal Record, exclaimed excitedly, “Here’s Conrad saying a thing about a dog in two words that I’ve been trying to say all my life and couldn’t.”³ The eponymous hero of Martin Eden, whose efforts to become a successful writer mirror the author’s own early struggles (London remarked, “I was Martin Eden”), while composing what he considers his finest work makes the following appraisal: “There’s only one man who could touch it . . . and that’s Conrad. And it ought to make even him sit up and shake hands with me, and say, ‘Well done, Martin, my boy!’” In 1915 upon reading Victory, London wrote an effusive letter to Conrad, commenting, “I had just begun to write when I read your first early work. I have . . . madly appreciated you and communicated my appreciation to my friends through all these years.”⁴

At the age of twenty-three, then, London admired Conrad greatly; and he was still asserting this admiration the year before his death. London’s affinity to Conrad indicated by these continuing expressions of respect is less explicitly illustrated on several levels in his work. At least once he appears to have borrowed from a Conrad story directly and extensively; moreover, the basic theme of two of his important books is one which recurs throughout Conrad’s writing. These correspondences appear to me to be worth examining in some detail.

II

London’s first story was published in January, 1899, and his 1915 letter to Conrad states that he began reading him about that time. Evidence of the impact of this reading on London is apparent in “In a Far Country,” London’s fifth story, which was published in June, 1899; for this story seems to be a close parallel of Conrad’s “An Outpost of Progress,” first published in Tales of Unrest the preceding year. Walter F. Wright has commented on the similarity of theme in London’s “To Build a Fire” and “An Outpost of Progress,” noting that London in the physical realm as Conrad in the mental “has illuminated the mystery of existence,”⁵ as he portrays a civilized man freezing to death in the arctic wastes. Actually, the earlier “In a Far Country” is much closer to Conrad’s story in the description of characters, as well as in situation and incidents.

In “An Outpost of Progress,” “Two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,” Carlier and Kayerts, are left in charge of a trading post on the upper reaches of an African river. Since their existence had been “only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds,” the isolation of this outpost and “the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble.” They gradually deteriorate morally, emotionally and physically, eventually one kills the other and then commits suicide. In London’s story, two “ordinary” men, the “Incapables” London repeatedly terms them, rather than undertake a hazardous thousand-mile journey with the remainder of their party, choose to spend the winter in an abandoned cabin on a tributary of the Yukon. Weatherbee and Cuthfert, “hardened to the ruts in which they were created,” find the “pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and spirit” as they “face the savage youth, the primordial simplicity of the North. . . .” The story is a record of their quarrels, their concomitant disintegration. Finally each is successful in killing the other.

Not only are both pairs of characters isolated from civilization; their isolation is described in similar terms. The “outpost of progress” is surrounded by an “impenetrable bush that seemed to cut off the station from the rest of the world. . . . they felt themselves very much alone, when suddenly left unassisted to face the wilderness. . . . The river, the forest, all the great land throbbing with life, were a great emptiness. . . . The river seemed to come from nowhere and flow nowhither.” London’s characters find that “Everything in the Northland had that crushing effect . . . the solemn forest which seemed to guard an awful, inexpressible something. . . .” Cuthfert comes to feel that “There was no Southland,” for beyond the “bleak sky-line there stretched vast solitudes, and beyond these still vaster solitudes.”

Early in “An Outpost of Progress” Kayerts and Carlier are seen through the eyes of the director of the company who comments to another employee as they leave the two at their post: “Look at those two imbeciles. They must be mad at home to send me such specimens. . . . I bet nothing will be done! They won’t know how to begin.” The “old stager” replies with a quiet smile, “They will form themselves here.” Sloper, in charge of the party in London’s story, having previously marked the incompetence of Weatherbee and Cuthfert, comments to Jacques Baptiste, a native of the Northland, as they leave the two standing in the doorway of the cabin: “Now, these two men don’t like work. They won’t work. We know that. They’ll be all alone in that cabin all winter,—a mighty long, dark winter. Kilkenny cats, well?” Baptiste responds with “an eloquent shrug, pregnant with prophecy.”

Finally, the events illustrating the demoralization of the two pairs of men coincide in the following particulars: at first all goes well, but since they are unsupervised they do nothing except what is essential and even routine tasks are slackly performed. None of the men is fitted to grapple with this situation and as the slow days pass they degenerate mentally and physically. The memory of civilization recedes and they become ill from the lack of fresh food, their appearance altering to the extent that, in a scene in both stories, each comes on the other suddenly and fails to recognize him. In both stories the characters achieve a virulent, unreasoning hatred for each other and finally quarrel fatally over the same thing, the supply of sugar. In fact, there is only one important stage of “An Outpost of Progress” that does not have a counterpart in London’s tale: the increasing moral obliquity of Carlier and Kayerts as dramatized through their passive acceptance of the selling of some friendly natives into slavery.

It is difficult to say, of course, whether London consciously borrowed from Conrad’s story. It is apparent, however, that both the situation and the theme of the two stories are the same and that the theme of “In a Far Country” is much closer to Conrad than that of any of London’s previous stories. London had handled each of his first four stories (“To the Man on Trail,” “The White Silence,” “The Son of the Wolf,” and “The Men of Forty-Mile”) as a tour de force. An unusual situation in each instance brings one of the central characters to confront violence and perhaps death. But once London has delineated the situation, sketched the characters briefly and indicated the turn of action, the story is finished. “In a Far Country” also contains many of these elements. The theme, however, is not catastrophe (surmounted or not) but disintegration. “In a Far Country,” like “An Outpost of Progress,” goes beyond the description of nature, and of man trying to exist on the “natural” physical level: Two unexceptional men, neither particularly good or bad, placed in isolation in an unfamiliar and unfriendly environment, reach a point of complete moral and emotional as well as physical breakdown. London himself was aware that this story differed from his first four, for in May, 1899, he wrote his friend Cloudesley Johns

It seems possible and even likely that London’s recent discovery and “mad appreciation” of Conrad may have been partly responsible for his somewhat different attempt in this story.

III

A statement by Martin Eden points to a more revealing if less direct aspect of London’s relation to Conrad. Eden is confident that he will merit Conrad’s approval for

In this book and in the later John Barleycorn, although London’s presentation is much more personal, uncontrolled and fragmentary than Conrad’s, the “universal thing” is a motif with which Conrad was much concerned, particularly in “Youth” and “Heart of Darkness”: an individual’s attempt to achieve self-identifying values in a tragic and ironic universe. Martin Eden is usually said to be about a writer torn between working-class and bourgeois standards; and John Barleycorn is considered a semi-accurate autobiography giving principal stress to London’s alcoholic experiences. A comparison of these two books with “Youth” and “Heart of Darkness” focuses attention on the fact that there is a level of meaning beneath their obvious statements.

It is not surprising that as late as 1907 London was reading “Youth” aloud to the crew of the Snark,⁷ for the characteristic tone of that story is of a part with the vigor of much of London’s writing, his love of the sea and the zest for life which typified his young manhood. The twenty-year-old Marlow and young Jack London in his autobiographical writings both feel that a glamorous life of romantic adventure at sea is unfolding before them, that each is on the verge of discovering his essential nature, and both experience the intoxicating sense of accomplishment of the youth just beginning to find himself. Marlow thrills to the thought of a voyage to the mysterious East, even in a “rattletrap” of a ship: “Youth and the sea. Glamour and the sea! The good, strong sea, the salt, bitter sea, that would whisper to you and roar at you and knock your breath out of you.” On the voyage Marlow begins to discover himself, that he was only twenty and

A corresponding picture of youthful exuberance is presented in Martin Eden and John Barleycorn. To young Jack London in the latter book, “the winds of adventure” blew up and down San Francisco Bay where “the afternoon sea breeze blew its tang into my lungs, and curled the waves in mid-channel. . . . There it was, the smack and slap of the spirit of revolt, of adventure, of romance, of the things forbidden and done defiantly and grandly.” Like Marlow, London is half apologetic about the actual facts of the adventure. “And now, of all this that is squalid, and ridiculous, and bestial, try to think what it meant to me, a youth not yet sixteen, burning with the spirit of adventure. . . . Came the whisper to range farther. I had not found it yet. There was more behind.” Of course the themes of alcohol and lawlessness in John Barleycorn introduce some facets of youthful experience with which Conrad does not deal, but for the most part these two aspects of London’s life merely heighten the mood of adventure which permeates both “Youth” and the parts of John Barleycorn describing London’s early life. In Martin Eden the experiences of the protagonist as a sailor are not stressed, but he has the same zest for experience, the same compulsion to realize his identity that the youthful Marlow has. The tone of the first part of the book is set by Martin’s radiant enthusiasm as he discovers a new social and intellectual world. As he begins to feel at home in that world, his confidence in his own ability mounts. “He was profoundly happy. Life was pitched high. He was in a fever that never broke. The joy of creation that is supposed to belong to the gods was his.” Slowly he begins to become aware that “The climb [to social and intellectual competence] had been easier than he expected. He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with false modesty, hide it from himself) he was superior to the beings among whom he had climbed. . . .”

In the first parts of these books then, London, like Conrad in “Youth,” gives a vivid picture of the spiritually undefeated youth exulting in his new-found powers. But twenty-two years have passed and Marlow must now say, anticipating the more somber mood of “Heart of Darkness,” that even while we are “looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone—has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash—together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions. . . . Youth, strength, genius, thoughts, achievements, simple hearts—all die. . . .” The central characters of Martin Eden and John Barleycorn have also experienced the passing of time, and the tone of the concluding portions of both books coincides with the tone of this statement and with the even darker expression of “Heart of Darkness.”⁸ In the conviction that “the so-called truths of life are not true,” but are “illusions” by which one lives, the drunken protagonist of John Barleycorn, as he sinks into “fuddled sleep,” recites “Yea, I am Youth because I die.”

In comparing the sequential pictures of youth and disillusionment in Conrad and London there is some apparent difficulty since Conrad builds his study around a single character, one story illustrating each mood, and London deals with both moods in two works. Conrad, however, foreshadows “Heart of Darkness” in “Youth,” and Marlow at the beginning of “Heart of Darkness” may be identified with the younger Marlow of the other story. Moreover, despite the fact that Martin Eden is a novel and John Barleycorn is avowedly an autobiography, the books are closely related; for the former is based directly on London’s experiences as a writer and the autobiography is often fictionalized with the result that the two together constitute a spiritual biography of the protagonist. John Barleycorn, written six years after Martin Eden, reinforces and supplements the characterization in the earlier work. The principal emphasis of Martin Eden falls on the hero’s determined drive to fulfill himself,⁹ to reach the social and economic class represented by the Morse family and to become a successful writer. The intensity of Martin’s determination leaves little time for pessimism and even little time for the re-evaluation of his original goals. Only gradually does he discover that he will not find his true identity through the achievement of middle-class social status and financial success, that the goals which have given meaning to his existence for several years are paltry and stultifying: “He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh.” In the realization that neither he nor life had turned out to be what he had envisaged, he quickly succumbs to a mood of rather sophomoric despair and eventually commits suicide. This ending, of course, is not consonant with the first part of the book, and the reader is most likely to be confused by what has been called the ambiguous tone of the conclusion. London’s purpose in Martin Eden is clarified by John Barleycorn, however. In the latter book there is still the apotheosis of individualistic striving to be found in Martin Eden. But in this book, despite the ostensible subject of alcoholism and despite London’s extreme romanticization of his physical and intellectual exploits as a young man, the tone is not ambiguous. A substantial part of John Barleycorn is an amplification of the intellectual pessimism, of the self-dissatisfaction, of the despair which led Martin Eden to suicide.

When the two books are considered together, then, the pattern of experience which London has delineated is made clear. The progression has been from almost animal gusto to satiety, from the eager quest of experience to the center of indifference. Self knowledge has led to skepticism. Marlow’s experience in “Heart of Darkness” is of the same pattern. At first he is a comparatively unreflecting young sailor, occupied with the world of “straightforward facts,” eager for adventure. (Conrad remarked, “Before the Congo I was just a mere animal.”) But Marlow-Conrad like Eden-London is led to a reassessment of himself, of his values, of life itself; and this similar experience the two writers often describe in much the same terms.

By his experience on the African river and by his “loyalty” to Kurtz, Marlow is brought to the “ordeal of looking into myself,” and he is thus led to the “threshold of the invisible”:

London, during “this long sickness of pessimism . . . meditated suicide coolly,” struggling in “the dusk of my soul” as he discourses with the White Logic which, under “a mask of hedonism,” is the “Noseless One . . . whispering his whispers of death,” and which “undefeated has never left me.” “John Barleycorn sends his White Logic, the argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero. . . .”

Marlow does not die, but he does go through a period in which there is neither hope nor desire:

London, too, during his “long sickness” turns from companionship:

In a similar vein, Martin Eden finds it an increasing strain to be with people. Of the Morse family, he realizes

And he is also isolated from his former friends: “Their mode of life, which had once been his, was now distasteful to him. . . . He developed into an alien.”

The level of experience as well as the respective attitudes of the two writers toward that experience, in these and similar passages, is manifestly different. Eden-London’s “long sickness” is apparently in part the result of reading “too much positive science” and of a somewhat immature reaction to the fact that life had not turned out as he had wished—in contrast to Marlow’s pessimism which seems to be the result of a sensitive and mature individual becoming aware, philosophically as well as emotionally, of the terrors of hell. London makes no attempt to use the traditional imagery and symbolism of the voyage to Hades which Conrad, like Virgil and Dante, employed “to create that otherwise formless region into which not only the artist but every man must descend if he wishes to understand himself.”¹⁰ And perhaps because of this very formlessness London’s characters are less able to withstand their experience. Even so, London and Conrad in these works are writing about the same problem. Their characters achieve knowledge of themselves and their world, a knowledge which leads them to an awareness of man’s capacity for and affinity to evil. This awareness is directly expressed by both authors in their frequent use of terms referring to physical and spiritual darkness. In the last two pages of “Heart of Darkness” the word darkness occurs five times; black, dusk and somber appear six. Marlow bows his head before the Intended’s faith in Kurtz, “before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her—from which I could not even defend myself.” Martin Eden, close to suicide, expresses to Lizzie Connolly his need for a similar illusion: “You are a great and noble woman. . . . And it is I who should be proud to know you. . . . You are a ray of light to me in a very dark world. . . .” But nothing can save him, and one night as the “dark wall” of the ship rushes past, he lowers himself into the Pacific. The concluding lines of the book describe his death. “There was a long rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness.” Conrad sets the final and characteristic mood of “Heart of Darkness” with this ending: “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead to the heart of an immense darkness.”

This similarity of expression is made more emphatic by the almost identical summations of life made by the two writers. Marlow remarks: “Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.” In John Barleycorn London says, “on every hand I see the merciless and infinite waste of natural selection. The White Logic insists upon opening the long-closed books, and . . . states the beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and dust.” The “truths” here stated were, of course, in part the truths of all writers who contemplated the post-Darwinian cosmology from a certain point of view. Marlow confounds the beating of the savages’ drum with the beating of his own heart; Eden’s ambitions and reactions are principally shaped by his social environment. But neither writer in these books is unremittingly a naturalist, depicting his characters as animalistic drones rigidly controlled by biological and sociological forces. Although Marlow and Eden-London are confronted by these forces, the principal emphasis is on their conscious reaction to them. These protagonists consider that the world is a dark and futile place, but even as they investigate this insight they struggle with that darkness and futility. In these works London and Conrad coincide in differing from strict naturalists, for they both present the struggle from the side of the human antagonist. If one of London’s “long-closed books” was “Heart of Darkness,” he found a view of life fundamentally in keeping with the one he had expressed in the last parts of Martin Eden and John Barleycorn.

IV

That London admired Conrad greatly, that one story, “In a Far Country,” can probably be traced directly to him, that London’s view of life, and at times the expression of that view, was somewhat similar to Conrad’s is certainly not to say that London should be regarded literarily as “a sort of Joseph Conrad.” An extended comparison of these two writers quickly becomes a contrast which sharply emphasizes London’s limitations as a prose writer and a thinker. London was a hack who refused to revise and referred to art as “consummate charlatanry”; he was a primordialist who wrote of brutal life, always “changing dogs into wolves and wolves into dogs”; and he was a social polemicist who hoped that by writing The Iron Heel he had “advanced the socialist cause by five minutes.” Conrad was most certainly none of these.

In some instances, however, London is comparable to Conrad. By this partial comparison I have attempted to draw attention to the fact that although London wrote such potboilers as Adventure and is best remembered for such works as the stories of Alaska and The Iron Heel, there were times when he did not write out of sheer commercialism and also times when he did not write about primitive life or programs of collective action. There is some necessity for making this point; for London was so flagrantly a hack, so outspokenly a socialist, so redbloodedly a primordialist that there is a tendency to assume these terms completely define his work. Indeed, critics writing about Martin Eden and John Barleycorn find much the same elements that they discover in London’s other work: Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Mammon. These elements are obviously there, but there is also something else. In these two books London deals with the minds and values of his protagonists, with their experience of life in general, in a vein that at times approaches Conrad’s.

Even though Martin Eden and John Barleycorn differ from London’s “unique” contributions which brought him fame, wealth, notoriety and a place in literary histories, in some respects they must be considered the key books in an understanding of London and his fiction. On one level, these two most personal of London’s books present a synthesis of the theories of socialism and raw individualism between which London vacillates throughout most of his work. To be sure, the protagonist in each is racked by his contradictory allegiances, but the focus of each book is on an individual in torment, not on conflicting ideologies. In presenting this individual whose values have disintegrated, London goes beyond a concern with social theory to make a final comment on life. Essentially this comment is—the horror. Underneath Martin Eden’s dudgeon that he had been misunderstood, underneath London’s insistence that the “long sickness” is behind him, it may be observed that to London socialism, individualism, materialism—nothing matters: the essential feature of these two books is the description of the youth full of zest for life who has become the adult without desire as he makes the debilitating self-discovery that he is hollow and his values are illusions.

London’s treatment of his travail remains essentially loose and personal. There is too little of the conscious effort discernible in Conrad who, as Eliot has remarked of Shakespeare, “was occupied with the struggle—which alone constitutes life for a poet—to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal.” But in both Martin Eden and John Barleycorn the agony is there. Despite the aesthetic deficiencies of his portrayal, London, perhaps without being entirely aware that he was revealing himself so fully, has given a memorable portrait of the heart of darkness of a violent soul who is not only lost, but, knowing he is lost, has subsided into the hollow man. Moreover, even if the portrait were less effectively sketched than it is, it would be worth our attention; for London has given more than a picture of his own heart of darkness. Enmeshed as he was in the diverse forces making up the chaotic multiplicity of twentieth-century life, inevitably London described a spiritual wasteland not far removed from Marlow’s, or Kurtz’s—or even Eliot’s.

Jack London was not to get a direct answer to the adulatory letter he wrote Conrad, Martin Eden did not get his desired accolade, for Conrad’s reserve against London’s verbal intemperance and his rigid adherence to artistic standards which exclude most of London’s work inevitably made him chary of acknowledging even a distant kinship to the American writer. If we are to acquire an understanding of London’s total attempt and achievement, however, we must eschew that reserve and that rigidity.

Source

From American Quarterly, 10.1 (Spring 1958), 66-77. Copyright © 1958 American Quarterly. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.