Of Jack London, Earle Labor, and William Dean Howells

I was listening to a recent Art of Manliness podcast in which host Brett McKay replayed “Jack London’s Literary Code,” an episode originally broadcast in January 2020. His guest, Dr. Earle Labor, died on Sept. 15 at the age of 94, leading to the rebroadcast. Labor was one of the world’s foremost London scholars, which makes him a man worthy of respect.

What caught my ear was a comment early in the program about why it took so long for London to be recognized as a major American author worthy of study. Labor cast the blame on William Dean Howells, a shady character I first heard about from Deuce Richardson over at DMR books, years ago. See a more recent piece, "The Dead Hand of William Dean Howells."

From the interview (about the 8 minute mark of the podcast):

Brett McKay: For your PhD you did the first major study on Jack London as a true literary artist, and you were really breaking new ground because for a long time the literary establishment didn’t take London’s work seriously, and very few scholars had studied his craftsmanship. Why was that and what is the status of London today in literature, particularly in terms of scholarship?

Earle Labor: It’s on the rise for sure, and has been for the past generation or so… but for a long time he was dismissed as little more than a hack writer for adventure stories and what have you. Fortunately there have been a number of breakthroughs just in the last two or three decades… I have a lecture I give sometimes on the politics of literary reputation, and I explain to my students, look, the books you read, the ones you read in high school and many that you read in college, were not handed to Moses on that tablet, they were selected by a certain group, and those are the so-called elite. They decided what you were going to read. They decide for example that you are going to read Shakespeare and maybe Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, which is fine, but they should be also assigned Jack London’s The Sea Wolf or something in addition to Call of the Wild. 

London was not part of the group that makes those decisions. For one thing London was a western writer. They were not part of the eastern establishment that pretty well dictated the literary selections at the time in the 19th/even 20th century. Eric Miles Williamson uses the term the “Ivy Mafia”… that may not be quite fair but I think it’s kind of fun. Anyhow, the ideas that it’s those easterners, back in the 19th century, even the early 20th century centered around Boston/New York. William Dean Howells was the leader of that group for a generation. Interesting that he encouraged writers like Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, even Emily Dickinson, and here’s London at the time, the most popular of all of them, and virtually ignored by William Dean Howells. Now that’s got to have been deliberate I think. All of that ties in to what I call the politics of literary reputation, which has impeded the reputation of Jack for a number of years, but finally we’re getting that recognition. 

Howells dismissal of London strikes me as the same attitude met by Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft in their writing days, and in the decades after their death: “Pulp hacks” ignored, or certainly not worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway or Fitzgerald, or more recently the likes of Updike or Irving. Such elitist attitudes persisted well into the late 20th century, and possibly still do in some circles.

I think (or I’d like to think) that the portrayal of fantasy/speculative fiction as something categorically lesser than realistic novels is now a thing of the past. I’ll admit I don’t keep up with academia or current literary theory. But it does seem like fantasy has moved from its former place in mom’s basement to the adult’s table.

Or, it might be that there is no more literary establishment/intelligentsia, what with the reshuffling of the western canon and the death of Harold Bloom and others of his ilk.

Regardless, adieu Dr. Labor, and thanks for your lifelong work illuminating the contributions of London, a forefather of sword-and-sorcery and one of the great authors of our time.

Apropos, a link to an old piece I wrote for The Cimmerian on Jack London's The Call of the Wild.