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Overview
Jonathan Auerbach shows that London’s personal identity was not a basis of his literary success, but rather a consequence of it. Unlike previous studies of London that are driven by the author’s biography, Male Call examines how London carefully invented a trademark “self” in order to gain access to a rapidly expanding popular magazine and book market that craved authenticity, celebrity, power, and personality. Auerbach demonstrates that only one fact of London’s life truly shaped his art: his passionate desire to become a successful author. Whether imagining himself in stories and novels as a white man on trail in the Yukon, a sled dog, a tramp, or a professor; or engaging questions of manhood and mastery in terms of work, race, politics, class, or sexuality, London created a public persona for the purpose of exploiting the conventions of the publishing world and marketplace.
Revising critical commonplaces about both Jack London’s work and the meaning of “nature” within literary naturalism and turn-of-the-century ideologies of masculinity, Auerbach’s analysis intriguingly complicates our view of London and sheds light on our own postmodern preoccupation with celebrity. Male Call will attract readers with an interest in American studies, American literature, gender studies, and cultural studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822397243 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/26/1996 |
| Series: | New Americanists |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Lexile: | 1720L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 656 KB |
About the Author
Jonathan Auerbach is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Read an Excerpt
Male Call
Becoming Jack London
By Jonathan Auerbach
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9724-3
CHAPTER 1
The Question of a Name
"WANTED—Any kind of work; will typewrite reasonably, receive and deliver same." So stated the notice placed 4–11 January 1899 by Jack London in the Oakland Tribune 's "Situations Wanted—Male" classified section.
A few months before the start of the twentieth century, a young working- class writer came across a newly published book entitled 500 Places to Sell Manuscripts (1899). Part of a fledgling American industry promoting and marketing the production of literature, this book was compiled by James Knapp Reeve, also the founder of The Editor, a recently established magazine that billed itself as a "journal of information for literary workers." "Feeling rather nervy one day," as he wrote his fellow aspirant Cloudesley Johns, Jack London sent The Editor "a skit of 1700 words of advice to young authors," choosing the magazine, his letter to Johns suggests, because it was listed in Reeve's book as promising to "pay liberally." That a twenty-three-year-old author with no books and less than fifteen published stories to his credit at the time would presume to give advice to other young writers is nervy indeed, a bold confidence validated by The Editor 's decision to go ahead and publish London's "skit of 1700 words," which he gave the impressive title "On the Writer's Philosophy of Life" (October 1899).
"On the Writer's Philosophy of Life" was the first of several advice essays published between 1900 and 1903—crucial documents for understanding Jack London's attitude toward writing. Along with his early letters to Cloudesley Johns (to whom he wrote almost one hundred times during this period), these essays are particularly revealing for a writer who was never especially given to theorizing about his craft. The fact that London published the piece to make money (only five dollars, as it turned out) does not negate his advice but serves to confirm it, for the essay itself is preoccupied with market considerations: not simply how or what to write but how to write in a way that will get you published—London's lifelong focus. At this early stage of the young literary worker's apprenticeship, London's advice seems mainly self- addressed, a kind of thinking out loud about his chances. Although sometimes couched in ironic humor, these strategic plans remain noteworthy for displaying the still relatively unknown author's uncanny ability to locate himself and his prospective readers within the emerging literature industry.
As Christopher Wilson and other critics have pointed out, from early on London unromantically viewed writing as a kind of labor that used the brain rather than the body, so that his repeated insistence in this essay that the writer develop a "working philosophy" really amounts instead to developing a philosophy of work. Anyone who has spent any time reading London's early letters to Johns and other aspiring authors will be struck by how such shoptalk is continually phrased in terms of word counts, routinized production timetables, rates of pay, regimented daily writing schedules—a kind of literary Taylorism.
London's actual writing practice in this early stage of his career was largely derived from his reading of other people's advice: essays published in the identical sort of trade journals where he had managed to place his "philosophy of life" piece. For example, in London's copy of the April 1895 issue of The Writer, one of the first and most prominent of these periodicals (begun in 1887), we find an article entitled "My Record of Manuscripts," which described a system for documenting submissions that London himself would begin using a few years later (1898) on his return from the Yukon (see figure 1). Subtitled, like The Editor, "A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers," The Writer offered its readers an astonishing array of practical tips, from how to avoid writer's cramp, to buying paper economically and methods for enclosing stamps with submissions, counting words, preventing typewriter keys from locking, and preserving newspaper clippings. The magazine also provided personal testimonials by successful writers ("How to Make Writing Pay"), formulas for short story composition, warnings about plagiarism, and a "Personal Gossip about Authors" column.
What The Writer studiously avoided, quite remarkably, was virtually any talk about the content of literature—the kinds of earnest discussions about the ethical responsibilities of the artist, romance versus realism, poetic technique, and so on that filled the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Scribner's. Although such established middle- class magazines were still devoted to arbitrating taste along the lines of a nineteenth-century, belle lettres model (however updated by a focus on realism), these new "how-to" professional journals quite literally treated publishing primarily as manufacture, a largely mechanical process to be studied, broken down into its component parts (paper, stamps, typewriters) and component skills, and then duplicated. Sending the same kind of advice to those periodicals that he was also reading for useful hints, London thus helped early on to recycle a new kind of information aimed at "literary workers" like himself.
Insofar as this writing about writing focused on the technological and institutional conditions by which words materialized and circulated in print, these trade journals and directories in effect served to shadow both established and newer mass-circulation middlebrow magazines (such as McClure's), casting into relief what the self-evident "literature" of these other magazines generally refused or neglected to admit in their own pages. London's aim in perusing The Writer was not only to publish more advice for it but also to use this professional information to break into magazines with a wider readership, who were not aspiring writers themselves. Gaining such an audience depended on London's rather particularized awareness of his initial working medium: popular mass-circulation magazines. Yet instead of simply rehashing the practical tips that he himself was taking, London began to understand in these essays how this mass market required a different way of thinking about the figure of the author—a new way of construing the writer's person in relation to the market.
"On the Writer's Philosophy of Life" represents London's initial attempt to develop such a model of authorship. His advice opens as we might expect, clearing a space between the "literary hack" on the one hand and "genius" on the other. "You are no genius," London briskly informs his reader, not because genius/inspiration no longer exists (to be replaced by hard work and calculation), but more pointedly because "if you were you would not be reading these lines." Geniuses do not peruse The Editor looking for helpful information—nor, presumably, do they submit advice for such trade journals either. Instead, London and his readers more modestly represent writers with "ambitions and ideals" seeking "distinction" in their chosen "field." Such distinction, London next remarks in anticipation of his reader, depends on "being original" and "constantly strengthening that originality." Having raised the specter of literary tradition that had burdened writers from the Romantics on, London just as quickly tends to diminish this anxiety of influence by asserting that "you cannot expect to become original by following the blazed trail of another." Viewing authorship primarily as a professional field where success counts more than immortality, London sidesteps traditional assumptions about literary vocation that insist on some dialectical tension between originality and imitation.
In bluntly giving his advice, London also pays little attention to a related Emersonian double bind: how to authorize or teach or formalize a self-reliance that cannot be imposed upon. London seems oblivious to these paradoxes, his concept of originality leading him to a more curious and perhaps more modern sort of problem. For London, writers do not "become original" by each being themselves, marching to their own drummers, but rather by putting "the stamp of 'self' upon their work—a trade mark of far greater value than copyright" (8). Such a "stamp of personality of individual view" (10), London finally suggests, functions as "a philosophy of life," the "yardstick" by which "every permanently successful writer" (8) measures the world and is measured by it. Philosophy here is not primarily an abstracted or systematic way of thinking but something London would continually forge from his enormous intellectual energy and curiosity to make himself—to make his person in print—cohere as a published writer.
Setting off "self" with quotation marks, Jack London boldly accepts as a starting premise for literary success what few if any authors before him would or could allow: that originality does not originate in the a priori inviolate person of the individual but must be "stamped" or imprinted with the defining "trade mark" of selfhood and thereby given "value" in the marketplace. Success in the market means personal validation, the "stamp" of approval conferred during the process of getting into print. But where did the writer's validating stamp come from? Although "intellectual giants" like Shakespeare possessed an "individual standard" that puts them beyond comparison ("each was himself"), these "permanently successful" masters, London insists, were not born great but "somehow, from the world and its traditions ... acquired something which their fellows did not." That vague "something" London defines simply as "something to say," which in turn depends on "thinking thoughts which the world would like to hear" (9).
In his subsequent advice essays, London's efforts to locate and define literary greatness would continue to depend on his trying to resolve the ostensible tension between self-mastery and the market's mastery of the writer—to break down the apparent opposition between artistic autonomy and popular appeal. Here his advice still retains traces of traditional Romantic notions of inspired creativity, a self by which and through which transcendental expression is enacted. But by immediately removing himself and his fellow professional aspirants from the category of genius, London is left to rehearse or simulate such artistic activity by way of sheer diligence: a "working philosophy" whose "strong central thread" helps to project the figure of the writer in the world apart from his or her particular writing. Just as trade journals like The Editor and The Writer tended to treat literary content as an afterthought deriving from the material means of production and publication, so too does London, extending this logic, construe authorship itself as primarily a procedural matter. For London, these authorial procedures have less to do with compositional practice per se than with the set of attitudes or habits of mind that the disciplined professional must study and cultivate in hopes of capturing the attention of the public.
Key to this reconceiving of the author is London's emphasis on trademark, a concept that not only foregrounds writing as a kind of commercial manufacture but, more crucial, also emphasizes the writer's potential as a corporate entity. London seeks to maintain some control over the delivery of letters by suggesting to his fellow aspirants how they can each claim a standardized "self" as a material but mobile sign that is part of a larger market structure even as it continues to stand for the individual. Embodying publication itself, the person of the author would carry far more weight than his or her specific written work: a unifying trademark, applied to various products across the board (the corpus of writing) as opposed to a single copyright laying claim to an individual piece of work. If the writer's "self" is a detachable logo, marked again and again in the material act of writing for a public, then the primary task is to market it as your own.
To conceive of originality as corporate and stamped—uniformly unique—carries us well beyond the problematics or poetics of celebrity as experienced by Romantics such as Lord Byron. Closer to home, we might be inclined to view London's assumptions about authorship in the light of Ben Franklin's or Walt Whitman's efforts at self-promotion, Poe's parodic debunking of artistic endeavor in "The Philosophy of Composition" and "How to Write a Blackwood's Article," Fanny Fern's construction of the writer's public persona in her newspaper columns and Ruth Hall, or Melville's bitter satire on the publishing industry in the seventeenth chapter of Pierre. Jack London is certainly not the first author to treat writing as a form of production in the capitalistic marketplace or to appreciate how such a market turns the author into a kind of commodity. Yet I would still maintain some critical distinction: here the issue is neither the threat of debasement nor the need to revise the public, literary self to accommodate and exploit the expectations and demands of a particular audience. London's initial piece of advice implies that even to gain any niche in this new kind of mass market, the author's "person" must be commercially deployed from the start, well before reception becomes a concern. Unavailable to antebellum authors, a trade directory such as 500 Places to Sell Manuscripts— arranged by mutually exclusive generic categories—explicitly functioned to organize the literary field as well as the workers operating within it. The author is not so much compromised by institutions of publishing as generated from them.
Perhaps the closest analog for London's construction of authorship in "On the Writer's Philosophy of Life" can be found in the life and work of Mark Twain, who as early as 1873 sought unsuccessfully to trademark his invented pen name as a way of protecting his writing against theft in the marketplace. Punning on the commercial trading of "Mark," Twain was primarily interested in establishing his personal trademark in lieu of an international copyright agreement that was years away from acceptance. By the time Twain came to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), the concept of trademark had begun to resonate beyond strictly legal matters to express Twain's complex appreciation of his own celebrity and theatricality: as his stand-in Hank Morgan observes while considering the "reputation" of a rival "new magician," "a man can keep his trade-mark current in such a country, but he can't sit around and do it; he has got to be on deck and attending to business, right along." The performer's trademark thus serves to sustain a previously secured reputation in constant need of maintenance for a volatile market and a fickle public.
But why not invent the very grounds for approval as well? London's own effort from the start of his career to incorporate and authorize himself, via a validating "stamp of personality," speaks to certain changes in trademark law taking place near the turn of the century. In 1898, a year before London published this essay, President McKinley empowered a commission to revise patent and trademark statutes in response to a series of Supreme Court cases (starting with the 1890 Minnesota Rate case) that redefined property to include the concept of "goodwill": a corporation's nonmaterial assets such as its anticipated earning power, national recognition, and potential value when sold. Submitted in 1900, the commission's report proposed a bill (passed in 1905) that turned registered trademarks into the legal signs of such corporate goodwill. A trademark now could function as an exclusive, permanent symbol signifying a set of intangible expectations above and beyond what a company physically owned and made. Possessing a clear but mysterious potential value to be measured at the moment of market exchange, such newly consecrated arbitrary markers—Ivory Soap, Uneeda Biscuits, Coca-Cola, and so on—allowed Jack London to think about the potential goodwill of his own (brand) name as he first sought to circulate himself as a national man of letters. If corporations were beginning to assume the attributes of persons (thanks to court rulings on trusts during the 1880s), then perhaps authors, by way of a magical naming, could be made to resemble corporations.
As I have suggested, London's interest in trademarking, as opposed to the more familiar notion of copyrighting, is part of a larger impulse in these advice essays to develop a new model for authorship in relation to the mass market. For the first time, the International Copyright Law of 1891 finally assured that newly published American authors would receive a royalty or strict percentage of book sales. Although such a scheme still kept publishers in control of the selection, editing, production, and distribution of writing, at least the author could participate freely in the market by assuming a direct share of profit or loss. For London, as for Twain and James, this arrangement was certainly preferable to alternative models in place toward the end of the nineteenth century: a factory model resembling wage slavery, for instance, by which writers working anonymously for publishing houses were paid piecemeal to churn out dime novels at an incredibly rapid rate. London was equally suspicious of a more financially secure journalistic model: working as a salaried staff editor or writer for a national magazine or newspaper. Early on he was approached by both McClure's and Cosmopolitan with such offers, but the letters sent from Cosmopolitan editor John Brisben Walker (starting 13 December 1900) indicate that London was concerned about losing his freedom under such a proposal as well as his right to take a direct cut of the sales of his writing, which had the potential for enormous gains. Although as a freelancer London agreed in 1901 to write a series of articles for the San Francisco Examiner, his motives for doing so had less to do with making money from journalism, as we shall see, than with positioning himself for subsequent magazine and book publication.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Male Call by Jonathan Auerbach. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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