The Cruise of the Snark (2 page)

At least as far as his lasting reputation is concerned, Jack's greatest experience was not at sea but in the Klondike goldfields. At the end of 1902, Jack was working on a social novel,
The People of the Abyss,
and his greatest book,
The Call of the Wild.
It would be hard to overemphasize the achievement of the latter book. It was unique in American literature, and in it Jack synthesized many currents of literature more successfully than at any other time in his career. Jack was on a roll when he began his greatest sea story,
The Sea-Wolf
(1904).

Jack owned the North; but he was too late—after his contemporaries Kipling, Stevenson, and Conrad (themselves second-generation writers of the sea)—to do much with the sea-novel. And
The Sea-Wolf
would not be any reader's candidate for the perfect novel. Its elements remain fragmentary, but in this work Jack created his most powerful human character in Wolf Larsen, skipper of the sealing-schooner
Ghost.
Although not without antecedents like Melville's monomaniacal Captain Ahab or Dana's cruelly arbitrary Captain Thompson, Larsen emerges
sui generis
from Jack's amalgamation of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. And yet the vision that gave birth to Wolf Larsen fails to sustain the rest of the book. Although Jack tries to describe a sea more truthful than Harvey Cheyne's and a love more fit for survival than Moran's, the scenes with Hump and Maud never escape their artificiality. For better or worse, Maud's arrival signals a triumph of civilization as clearly as the elder Cheyne's railroad trip across America. London's naturalism in
The Sea-Wolf
is romanticism on all fours. Yet Jack would not have admitted that his art in
The Sea-Wolf
was incoherent: to Jack realism probably meant getting the storm scenes right, while characterization was more about fidelity of character to type—to types as Jack saw them, not necessarily at all what the world would judge to be specimens of humanity. Nothing could be more firmly in the romantic tradition than Jack's notion of type—it accounts for his best characters as well as his worst, his racism as well as his interpretation of the animal world. And Maud represented something in addition for Jack: she was an audience for Hump, the necessary adulatory witness of Hump's passage into a manhood uncompromised by his civility. At a time when Jack was succumbing to the seductions of Charmian Kittredge and initiating a divorce from his first wife, the arrival of Maud in Jack's imagination is perhaps more significant than her arrival on the
Ghost.

Perhaps, after all, Jack knew more truths about dogs than about people. As a writer, Jack was best standing at the edge of a boreal forest he could fill with canine creatures of his imagination. Though he tried, he could not fill the sea with his own life, instead leaving in his pseudo-autobiographical sea fiction, in Melville's words, only a “white and turbid wake.” Aside from the characterization of Larsen, Jack's imagination seemed to work only re-constructively. He could dismantle the recent sea novels of Kipling and Norris and reassemble them into a work that seemed to diminish most of the themes and nearly every effort towards realistically complex characterization. Norris had handled naturalism with a more honestly scientific mind, however crude his first book may otherwise have been. But perhaps Jack's greatest problem was that by the time he wrote
The Sea-Wolf,
science at sea had pretty much left fiction behind. And sea fiction, as it matured at the end of the nineteenth century, may well have left writers like Jack behind.

Born in 1857, Joseph Conrad was a generation older than Jack, a generation he had spent at sea. Once he had turned to fiction in the mid 1890s, Conrad would never forget that he was an artist, while Jack never forgot he was writing for money. By 1903, Conrad had already written
Nigger of the
Narcissus,
Lord Jim,
and
Youth
—any one of which shows more artistic integrity than Jack's whole maritime output. Jack admired Conrad, as he admired Melville, without a prayer or an intention of ever writing like either of them. To the craft of language, in the Conradian sense, Jack was entirely a stranger.

But Jack had done something Melville had only begun and Conrad had never attempted: he had built a persona for himself as a man who had done something. Jack's readers may have been naïve in their appreciation of literature, but they were quick to appreciate the man. Here was a man who as a kid had gone to sea under the most brutal conditions and had survived to write about it. And here was a young man who had gone to the goldfields of the frozen north and had again survived to write about it. He had mingled among the slums of the world, and had not been degraded, had not been crushed by disease or poverty. And after the publication of
The Sea-Wolf,
Jack's persona was further honed to the point where even his friends began to call him “Wolf.” Jack had been tested in the caldron of brute nature and had been found fit.

Whether, as Alfred Kazin maintained, the greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived, or whether the greatest story Jack ever wrote was the one he wanted us to
believe
he lived, Jack was personally and commercially wrapped up in this persona. By the time he began to consider the
Snark
voyage, Jack was neither simply writer nor adventurer but—like Hemingway a generation later—was both: a public adventurer who was expected to put himself in harm's way and to report the result to the panting public.

Jack had two models before him as he envisioned the great voyage he would undertake. Of course, he had been inspired by Herman Melville's
Typee
(1846). Melville's alter-ego Tomo would evolve, as Hershel Parker has suggested, into America's first literary sex star, until the phrase “the man who lived among cannibals” was only a slightly disguised euphemism. But although Melville may have drawn Jack to the Marquesas, Jack already had a Fayaway in Charmian. And besides, Melville had jumped ship to win his vacation in paradise, while Jack intended to sail his own vessel.

He got the idea from Joshua Slocum, whose
Sailing Alone Around the World
had appeared in book form in 1900, and which Jack and Charmian read aloud in 1905. Slocum had built his own yacht with his own hands from the crumbling remains of an oyster sloop. He had then carefully selected his crew of one (he had sailed on a small boat voyage with his family before, and did not choose to repeat the experiment), and sailed single-handedly around the world—the first solo circumnavigation of the globe.

Slocum's writing style was unpretentious. As a failed ship captain, Slocum seemed also destined to be a failure as a writer. Two previous voyage narratives had netted him practically nothing. He was, as Conrad would have put it, at the end of his tether when he sailed out of Boston Harbor in 1895 on the rebuilt
Spray.
But Slocum's voyage clarified both spirit and mind. When he came to write about his three-year voyage, an “easy literary concord” resulted, in the words of Haskell Springer, “from his remarkable competence with both tiller and pen.” Springer's choice of the word “concord” is perhaps subliminal: at its best Slocum's book reads like a saltwater
Walden.

In
Sailing Alone Around the World,
Slocum achieved a perfect balance of ship, sailor, and the sea. Everything in the book is seasoned with the salt of the
Spray,
her skipper, and the watery world in which she sailed. But when in July 1906 Jack described both the voyage he planned to take and the book he planned to write about it in a prospectus to
Woman's Home Companion,
his model was no longer Slocum but Robert Louis Stevenson.

In the struggle for survival, Stevenson was losing fast. Born in 1850, he never outgrew childhood sickliness, but his search for a better environment for his failing lungs took him on journeys by canoe, donkey, train, and ship. He also found a soulmate, Fanny, under whose care he wrote his masterpiece
Treasure Island
(1883), the first of a number of successes. By 1888, Stevenson and Fanny were able to journey to the South Pacific, stopping (as would Jack) at the leper colony at Molokai and island-hopping their way to Samoa. There Stevenson would settle and, despite a brief and productive respite in health, die in 1894, honored throughout the world as “Tusitala”—the Teller of Tales. Stevenson did not live to complete a proposed collection of descriptive pieces: they were haggled together after his death as
In the South Seas
(1896). Stevenson had been catering to the demand of readers to see the sea through the eyes of the now-great writer, but Stevenson made the crippling mistake of leaving himself largely out of his observations—a mistake that, unfortunately, would be largely repeated in Jack's own book, both in prospectus and in the writing. Despite enjoying great reputations as literary personae, neither Stevenson nor Jack really got the point that they had to be in the foreground of any view of the South Seas they chose to give. On the other hand, both books were by dying men who in some deeply psychological way may have been unable or unwilling to look squarely at their own lack of fitness in the great South Pacific archipelago.

So although he was inspired to take the voyage by Slocum, as a literary project the trip was handicapped by Jack's infatuation with Stevenson. Nevertheless, the voyage-cum-book was an easy sell to the magazines, even if some of his friends thought he was crazy. As Jack's contemporary, arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, might have remarked, only the unprepared have adventures.

Still another influence began to bear on the
Snark
project. The greatest living American writer of London's day was Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens (1835-1910). Jack may have looked up Twain's
Roughing It
(1872) for its account of Hawaii. And as recently as 1897 Twain had published the account of his own circumnavigation,
Following the Equator.
Jack liked Twain's laconic irony, and adopted it in most of the essays that would become
The Cruise of the
Snark, but in none so much as in the first two chapters, originally titled “The Voyage of the
Snark
” and “Building of the Boat.”

The Twain experiment was a healthy one for Jack, and probably would have worked if one didn't suspect that behind all the supposed irony Jack wasn't, after all, falling for his own dream. Twain, after all, had wrecked the
Walter Scott,
but Jack was actually going to do this thing. And he was, in true Jack form, going to do it by himself. There was no Adirondack Murray of the sea to trick the innocent into the jaws of romance—even Tomo had fled from Fayaway's valley in fear for his life. Although he may have rankled under the celebration of capitalism while being attracted to Kipling's captain of industry (a kind of superman), Jack wanted to believe in
Typee
and
Captains Courageous.
He had a dream and it shanghaied him.

The first of Jack's preliminary articles appeared in
Cosmopolitan
for December 1906, prefaced by the following somewhat premature paragraph:

 

The article was illustrated with photographs of Jack and the still a-building
Snark,
one of which bore the caption, “Jack London and the skeleton of his forty-five foot boat, in which he will sail around the world for the Cosmopolitan Magazine.” Jack was furious. Besides resenting the implication that he was undertaking the voyage as a convenience to the
Cosmopolitan,
Jack knew full well that he had already negotiated to place
Snark
material in other periodicals. There would be no more articles for the
Cosmopolitan
this trip

But the voyage wouldn't begin anyway. Although he had chosen his crew by year's end, the
Snark
refused to be finished. Jack was no Slocum, and even if he had wanted to build the boat with his own hands, he needed to keep those hands busy writing in order to pay for the adventure. Not one of the crew he had arranged, not even Charmian's uncle Roscoe Eames who supposedly was to provide the maritime experience of the outfit, was competent to oversee the building of such a vessel. And in the wake of the earthquake of 1906, new building put a premium on materials, labor, and transportation that often brought construction of the
Snark
to a halt. Not until spring of 1907 did Jack desperately decide to sail the still-unfinished yacht to Hawaii.

When, on April 23, 1907, the
Snark
sailed out the Golden Gate, she carried three people on board who would chronicle the voyage, although it would be misleading to say they stuck to her to the end—since the intended circumnavigation would never come to pass. With as much discipline as any writer ever displayed, Jack continued his daily grind, writing for a set number of hours nearly every morning on a rainbow of subjects. Charmian was probably a lot smarter than Jack—and she was probably a better travel writer, if their respective
Snark
books are admitted as evidence. But she idolized Jack—both the man and the persona, if there was any difference to her—and she had the advantage of making Jack the persona of her book while developing her own narrative voice. Martin Johnson turned out to be a far better writer than cook. Martin was a perfect boy-companion for Jack, as Jack almost certainly realized when he chose him out of the myriads of applicants for a position on the
Snark.
Martin was still young enough to adulate Jack, but he was also probably, after all, more intelligent. Navigation was Jack's greatest intellectual achievement; for Martin, repairing the engine was an exercise in logic and organization that was more likely characteristic. Jack would remain an enormously popular writer of fiction, but Martin would grow up to be the most celebrated adventurer of his day. Martin, of course, had the advantage of hero and heroine, both ready-made, for his book, and retained a distinct enough voice that he does not too frequently lose himself in his admiration (which was real and profound) of his shipmates. And it is Martin, after all, who provides the most direct evidence of the sincerity of the Jack London persona—evidence important when one weighs the artistic and personal successes or failures of the voyage.