Jack London owes his enduring literary reputation to the continued popularity of what Earle Labor has called his Northland Saga, a body of fictional and nonfictional writings about his experiences during the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush. But London’s literary career had in fact begun four years earlier with the publication in the San Francisco Morning Call of “Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan,” for which he was awarded that paper’s top literary prize of twenty-five dollars. The art of the story lay in the subtle linkages London established between the violent forces released during the storm and the instinctual energies the crew mobilized in defense. From this first story London understood his literary craft to entail the disciplined recording of intense forces that in surging through him had precipitated an increasingly destructive urge to write. London found in the incitement to physical adventure an objective correlative for the excitement inherent to the writing drive. As he struggled to transmute the adventurer’s immersion in experience into an equivalently absorbing field of force, London encountered anew the exhaustion he had experienced in his boyhood from work in a cannery. London’s herculean work schedule (fifteen-hour workdays, up to forty-eight hours without food or sleep) finally required such an expenditure of physical energy that the conclusion of “Typhoon”—“And so with the storm passed away the bricklayer’s soul”—might have also served as an eerie epitaph.
In the twenty-three years between the publication of “Typhoon” and his death from uremic poisoning at the age of forty, on November 22, 1916, London had produced nearly two hundred short stories, twenty novels, and three full-length plays, along with several volumes of lectures and correspondence. The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., the mystery thriller Robert L. Fish completed in 1963, was one of several of London’s manuscripts published posthumously. When it appeared in the same year as John F. Kennedy’s assassination, The Assassination Bureau’s central premise—that a shadow government of unelected officials was engaged in covert activities in the name of the national security—lent a weird aura of credibility to the manifold conspiracy theories that surfaced in the wake of that national tragedy.
If London had lived another fifty years, as did Robert Frost, who was born in 1874, two years before London, in all probability he could not have resisted adding to the still accumulating speculations about the events that took place in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. London’s more than four hundred pieces of nonfiction certainly bear significant witness to his prodigious compulsion to have his say about almost any topic (from animal rights, anthropology, environmentalism, greed, Marxian socialism, Nietzschean supermen, political corruption, primitivism, prizefighting, racial oppression, social reform, and social Darwinism, to war and xenophobia) likely to incite impassioned debate.
Characteristically, London did not propose a systematic understanding of any of these topics, but approached each as if he were staking a claim on the energies the topic aroused. The restless curiosity with which London at first took possession of, then abruptly abandoned, controversial subjects paid tribute to the writer who had sought out these matters as occasions to exercise his craft rather than to accrue knowledge. London’s essays are perhaps best understood as efforts at consuming these subjects with an appetite his rational processes could not possibly have gratified. Nevertheless, three of the cited topics—Marxian socialism, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Superman, and social Darwinism—in the contradictory responses they consistently evoked, provided London with a tendentious intellectual orientation.
In London’s universe, altruism and individualism did not cancel each other out. Neither predisposition could be understood as either wholly itself or completely reducible to the other; each, instead, productively resisted the other. The aggression with which London pursued his socialist allegiances did not oppose but actively solicited his Nietzschean convictions. When configured within the “evolutionary” narrative logic of social Darwinism, the Marxian socialist and the Nietzschean individualist became equally charged if mutually aversive alter egos. The intense energies released in their reciprocal animosity effected the extensive field of force through which London developed his other narrative characters, their plots and events.
The spectacular absence of motive for the instantaneous conversion of London’s characters into their apparent opposites—the abrupt conversion within the first forty pages of The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., for example, of Ivan Dragomiloff from a Nietzschean individualist into an apparently committed social reformer—derives in part from London’s belief that these two figures constituted different valuations of the same social force. London had in fact lived the reversibility of these roles throughout his life. Having achieved at age fifteen a reputation as the most accomplished of the oyster pirates working the San Francisco Bay, London impulsively switched his loyalties. Within the span of a single year, London joined the California Fish Patrol in Benicia as a deputy patrolman assigned responsibility for the oyster pirates’ capture. The writer would find metaphysical warrant for such reversals in the belief that the laws upon which the natural order depended for its perpetuation and the violence society was founded to oppose were, in fact, one.
London’s susceptibility to the gold fever following the 1897 discovery of gold in the Klondike resulted in part from a wish to test this theory of symbolic violence. But the promise of attaining instant wealth on a barren, treacherous landscape also had profound appeal for his literary imagination. When he traveled to the Klondike, he was in search of subject matter that would establish his literary reputation. Ironically the trip afforded London a reprieve from a writing compulsion whose pathology included a discipline that often left him with no time to eat or sleep. Before the Klondike expedition, London imposed immense demands on creative talents lacking an appropriate subject. When he returned to California in 1898, he numbered himself among the nineteen of twenty gold seekers who came out of the experience as impoverished as when they had entered it. But he had found materials that for the writer were more valuable than gold, rich veins of legend and folklore he would mine over the next two decades as the raw material for close to one hundred stories, essays, and lectures.
“It was in the Klondike that I found myself,” London later explained. If that statement can be credited as true, the Klondike marked for his career a watershed of a still different kind. Jack London was born out of wedlock in San Francisco, California, on January 12, 1876. His mother, Flora Wellman, grew up as the black sheep in a relatively prosperous Ohio family; his father, “Professor” W. H. Chaney, was an astrologer, con artist, and philanderer who abandoned Flora shortly before Jack, who would never lay eyes on him, was born. When Jack was eight months old, Flora married John London, a widower and Civil War veteran with a carpenter’s income and two daughters of his own. Along with her energy and craft Jack inherited from his mother an erratic temperament and a fatal attraction to “get-rich-quick” schemes that nearly bankrupted the London family during the boy’s formative years but that his Klondike tales, in realizing, would install at the core of London’s creative personality. The social standing that was afforded London the author provided as well the legitimacy denied him from birth.
London’s teenage years might be characterized as a series of adaptations to increasingly turbulent circumstances. When he turned fourteen, Jack left school and worked to supplement the family income in Hickmott’s Cannery for as many as eighteen hours a day at ten cents an hour. At fifteen he began what would become a series of legendary careers when he bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle and became known as “Prince of the Oyster Pirates” for raiding the commercial oyster beds in the bay off Oakland. Two years later he shipped aboard the Sophia Sutherland, a sailing schooner in search of seal furs in the Northwest Pacific, and scene of the events memorialized in “Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan.” In 1893 he joined Kelly’s Army, the Western regiment of Coxey’s march on Washington, to protest the economic depression, then deserted in Hannibal, Missouri, on May 25, 1894, to tramp across the country. That adventure ended with his arrest for vagrancy in Niagara, New York, in late June, a thirty-day sentence in the Erie County Penitentiary, and the real-life basis for tramping reminiscences published thirteen years later in The Road (1907).
Following his twentieth birthday, London left Oakland High School without a diploma to start cramming for the University of California entrance exam. At the University of California at Berkeley, where he enrolled shortly thereafter, London joined the Socialist Labor party and discovered the passionate interest in Marxian socialism that led to the nickname “Oakland’s Boy Socialist.” He dropped out of Berkeley, after only one semester, to begin his formal career as a writer. He tried his hand at everything, writing not only scientific and sociological essays but short stories, humor, prose and poetry of every kind. “On occasion I composed steadily, day after day, for fifteen hours a day,” London observed matter-of-factly. “At times I forgot to eat, or refused to tear myself away from my passionate outpouring in order to eat.”
On July 25, 1897, six months after his twenty-first birthday, Jack London accompanied Captain J. H. Shepard on a four-hundred-mile trek across Alaska en route to the Yukon River, and a place to assuage his gargantuan appetites for writing matter. In the following passage from “Gold Hunters of the North” London described the literary substance found there as if it were imaginative matter whose exuberant self-display spontaneously exceeded any writer’s narrative powers. “The Alaskan gold hunter is proverbial,” he remarked apropos of this drive, “not so much for his unveracity, as for his inability to tell the precise truth. In a country of exaggerations, he likewise is prone to hyperbolic descriptions of things actual. But when it came to Klondike he could not stretch the truth as fast as the truth stretched.”
The Klondike encouraged London to find the nexus of contradictions informing his own character displaced onto an Arctic habitat whose conditions are generalized in the following description from “The White Silence”: “All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole specks of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world . . . Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance.” Here, as well, law and violence were not opposed but encoded as interchangeable energies. London deciphered the code in “The Law of Life”: “To perpetuate was the task of life, its law was death.”
Throughout the stories collected in The Son of the Wolf (1900), the first volume of the Northland Saga, London proposed the Alaskan timber wolf as the representative in Nature of contradictions he believed socially pervasive. Like Jack London, the Klondike wolf found the (Nietzschean) loner and the (socialist) pack animal equivalently attractive social personae. The featured story of the volume contained an account of the elevation of the wolf into the white prospectors’ totem animal. After “Scruff” Mackenzie sought to marry Zarinska, daughter of the chief of the Tananas, he aroused the jealousy of the tribal shaman. In his efforts to persuade Zarinska of Mackenzie’s shortcomings, the shaman characterized the white man’s malicious and destructive qualities as attributes inherited from the Wolf in contrast with “the creative principle as embodied in the Crow and the Raven.” Scruff Mackenzie’s rival thereby stigmatized him as the son of the Tananas’ enemy clan. The name stuck. In the Northland tales written thereafter, Wolf became known as the tutelary presence who guarded the entire white population, the figure in whose sign they conducted heterogeneous transactions ranging from fur trading to interracial marriage.
In an effort to correlate biological with literary paternity, Jack London married his former mathematics tutor, Bessie Maddern, on April 7, 1900, the same day Houghton Mifflin published The Son of the Wolf. Over the next three years, he became, in rapid succession, the father of two daughters, Joan and Bess London, the author of seven additional books, and the lover of Anna Strunsky. Strunsky was a brilliant young social philosopher of Russian-Jewish heritage London had met at socialist Austin Lewis’s lecture at Stanford in December 1899, and with whom he later collaborated on a book-length dialogue about love, published anonymously in 1903 as The Kempton-Wace Letters. In that same marathon year London initiated a new love affair, this time with Clara Charmian Kittredge, the woman London believed was endowed with all the virtues of his “mate-woman.” To mark this turning point in his public life, London published two books, The People of the Abyss, a sociological study of the abject living conditions in London’s East End, and The Call of the Wild, a novella about a dog’s success in adapting to the Klondike wilderness.
The Call of the Wild substituted track dogs for indigenous tribes-people as privileged mediators with the Klondike wolf, and London thereafter eliminated miscegenation as a narrative theme. The first tales in the Northland Saga were concerned with white prospectors whose struggles to learn the natives’ ways led to the reciprocal commercial and social exchanges epitomized as interracial marriage. The shift in focus of The Call of the Wild represented a significant transformation in London’s continuing narrative. In place of the gold hunters, London’s narrative followed the tracks of a part Scotch shepherd, part Saint Bernard ranch dog named Buck, whose fortunes changed dramatically when a Mexican gardener kidnapped him from a Santa Clara estate.
The Call of the Wild replaced the earlier tales of miscegenation with this story of a mixed breed whose spectacular regression in the Yukon wilderness elevated him into London’s literary trademark. This alteration in narrative focus reflected attitudes on questions of race and interracial marriage that prevailed among London’s readers. As their means of taking verbal possession of the Klondike, Buck erased offending erotic relations from the readers’ memory and offered in their place the sentimental education of a noble creature who always remained loyal to the masters to whom he truly belonged. The extensive relay Buck traced through the Northland wilds linked Judge Miller’s Santa Clara estate with John Thornton’s camp, and thereby expanded the circle of his masters’ symbolic property to include the entire Klondike region. Thornton effectively incorporated Buck’s instincts with his own brute impulses in a scene wherein, as proof of the claim that “nothing was too great for Buck to do when Thornton commanded,” there appears the following astonishing description:
. . . the men and dogs were sitting on the crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bed-rock three hundred feet below. John Thornton was sitting near the edge, Buck at his shoulder. A thoughtless whim seized Thornton . . . “Jump Buck!” he commanded, sweeping his arm out over the chasm. The next instant he was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge. . . .
But London forged the most telling connection between Buck’s former life as the central status symbol on Judge Miller’s Santa Clara estate and his future destiny as the white totem for the region at the precise moment when the dog took revenge against the Yeehats, the native tribe responsible for the murder of John Thornton. “Death,” London writes of Buck’s inheritance of his master’s self-destructive impulse,
left a great void in him, somewhat akin to hunger, but a void which ached and ached, and which food could not fill. At times, when he paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of it; and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself—a pride greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of the club and fang.
The totemic system London founded in the narrative of Buck might be understood as a linguistic compensation for Anna Strunsky’s having unexpectedly broken off their interethnic relationship in September of 1902. But it is more simply an early indication of the racism that would eventuate in the notorious diatribes London directed in his subsequent writings against what he called the “yellow peril,” and that would entail as an addendum to what has been called his “white logic”: the proposition that he placed race loyalty above his obligations to international socialism. By 1903, U.S. imperialist ideology had mutated home-grown antiforeignism into a comparable strain of racism whose symptoms are discernible in the following observations from Henry Pratt Fairchild’s The Melting Pot Mistake:
What such a country really needs to concern itself about is the effect of race mixture. . . . If we can imagine the mating of two persons of absolutely pure stock of different races, each of the offspring would receive half of its determiners from the germ plasm of one race and the other half from the germ plasm of the other race. In other words, they would be strictly half-breeds . . . the mongrel.
London’s contribution to U.S. imperialism now limited such experiments in breeding to his animal protagonists. The willingness the mongrel Buck displayed in The Call of the Wild to sacrifice his life in executing John Thornton’s will would be subsequently acted out on a much larger scale in the U.S. imperial adventure whose dates more or less coincided with Jack London’s personal chronology, and whose trajectory—Hawaii, Panama, Cuba, the Pacific Rim—London’s later tales would retrace. In White Fang, the sequel to The Call of the Wild, London redescribed the entirety of the Klondike as the narrative property of the gold prospectors who had depleted the region of its resources. Whereas The Call of the Wild had recorded Buck’s regressive adaptation to the wilderness, White Fang reversed direction and described a wolf’s transformation from a natural force into a surrogate national agent. White Fang’s progression from Klondike nature to U.S. culture reenacted as its plot the nation’s imperialist design.
The reversibility of the two plots mirrored a larger reversal at work in the ideological accounts of imperialism wherein the acquisitive drives of an imperial adventurer were transcribed as defensive reactions directed against what these adventurers described as the senseless aggression of native populations. By finding it thoroughly acted out in companion dog stories, London effectively reinscribed the entire circuit of U.S. imperial appropriation—its aggressive policies of colonial annexation followed by the blandishments of acculturation—upon the “white silence” of the Klondike. Delinking White Fang from the network of associations he shared with Northwest tribal communities, London realigned his interests with the more inclusive project of U.S. imperialism in the South Pacific, in which such later writings as The Cruise of the Snark, South Sea Tales, The House of Pride and Other Tales of Hawaii, and The Son of the Sun would play a significant role.
The dramatic shift in London’s narrative attention from the kinship between wolves and men in the Klondike to the secret society of The Assassination Bureau, too, requires a more complicated explanation. Ivan Dragomiloff, the protagonist of London’s unfinished novel, in fact had more in common with the patient Sigmund Freud named “Wolf Man” than with either the “Son of the Wolf,” his precursor in the London archive, or the werewolf from the popular imagination.
I mention Freud’s patient here as a point of historical reference and to provide a linkage between an obsessional theme in London’s writing and a lifelong pathology. Jack London shared the Wolf Man’s intense anxieties over the conditions of his parentage. The writer’s intense fascination with wolves originated with the coincidence of two events: his reading of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and his discovery that he was William Chaney’s illegitimate son. After reading the tale of a human child raised by wolves who instructed him in how to survive nobly in the wilderness, Jack London imagined himself a feral child for the remainder of his life. By way of this fantasy London defended himself against the images of violent dispossession—seven white wolves sitting outside his bedroom window—inhabiting the Wolf Man’s dreams.
The Wolf Man shared the social space inhabited by were-wolves and feral children—the fabulous boundary separating nature from culture—but his nightmares disclosed a very different understanding of that boundary’s effects. Stories of children raised by wolves fill in the missing link between humans and animals by transforming wolves into substitute parents. Legends of were-wolves reinstate that difference between nature and culture that wolf parents had traversed by disclosing the frightening consequences for the human form of parents who are actual wolves. The Wolf Man’s anxieties do not refer to the inmixing of species but to the substitution of a violent for a humane environment. Freud referred to his patient Sergei Pankiev as the Wolf Man because of his recurrent fear that the seven white wolves sitting outside his bedroom window would swallow up his life.
While unlike in other respects, Sergei Pankiev and Ivan Dragomiloff shared a Russian past in which their patrimony was threatened (and in the case of Pankiev, finally lost) in the Russian Revolution. Dragomiloff played a minor part in the Russian Revolution of 1905 that had threatened to dispossess Sergei Pankiev of his patrimony, and Pankiev compulsively recalled the possible breakup of his family estate in the periodic return to his dream life of what Freud named a “primal scene.” In this case the primal scene should be understood as a terrifying revelation of the bestial world that Pankiev associated with the Russian revolutionaries who threatened him with dispossession. After London’s publication of White Fang and his beginning work on The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., the wolf had become London’s personal totem, a species of living property that, as had Buck for Judge Miller’s possessions, established a taxonomy for his other writings (The Sea-Wolf, White Fang), as well as his real estate holdings (“Wolf House”) and his second wife, Charmian Kittredge (London married “mate-woman” in 1905). But London’s sole reference to wolves in The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., was strictly metaphorical, and occurred when Ivan Dragomiloff nostalgically recalled his daughter Grunya’s childhood incarnation as “a she-wolf of a cub without morality or manners.”
In their migration from the “white silence” in London’s Northland Saga to the white horror outside Sergei Pankiev’s, London’s totem animals had exchanged their furs for the uniforms of clandestine revolutionaries as well as the czar’s secret police, who, in the interests of state security, routinely assassinated Russian dissidents. The Wolf Man’s dreams dated back to the period of the Russo-Japanese War that Jack London covered for the Hearst syndicate, following his divorce from Bessie London in 1904. That same year, secret police sought out the czar’s enemies in the vicinity of Sergei Pankiev’s country estate. In the plot line of The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., London rationalized the political murders the white wolves represented in the silence of Sergei Pankiev’s dreams.
In response to a query from Winter Hall, his daughter’s fiancé Dragomiloff provided the following sketch of his life:
“My father was a contractor in the Russian-Turkish War. . . . He made a fortune of sixty million rubles, which I, as an only son, inherited. At university I became inoculated with radical ideas and joined the Young Russians. We were a pack of Utopianists and dreamers, and of course we got into trouble. I was in prison several times. My wife died of smallpox at the same time that her brother Sergius Constantine died of the same disease. This took place on my last estate. Our latest conspiracy had leaked, and this time it meant Siberia for me. My escape was simple. My brother-in-law, a pronounced conservative, was buried under my name, and I became Sergius Constantine. Grunya was a baby. I got out of the country easily enough, though what was left of my fortune fell into the hands of the officials. Here in New York, where Russian spies are more prevalent than you imagine, I maintained the fiction of my name.”
This passage indicates Ivan Dragomiloff’s capacity to impersonate both of the political agencies Pankiev feared—the secret police as well as clandestine revolutionaries—in a shadow government that predicted the KGB and the CIA, as well as the national security state. In his role as double agent, Ivan Dragomiloff also profoundly deepened Jack London’s understanding of the relationship between violence and the modern nation-state.
The targets in The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., differed from the Klondike wolves’ prey in that they were not the victims of an explicitly acknowledged will to violence. Bureaucrats in Dragomiloff’s agency favored covert activities and other substitutive procedures whereby the modern state concealed even from itself its necessary complicity with violence. In The Call of the Wild, London had rationalized Buck’s violence against the Yeehats as the dog’s “natural” response to their killing his master. But in The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., London designated the state’s authority to take the life of a private citizen as the most brutal exercise of violence. He then situated this authority in a bureaucratic organization founded by a Russian immigrant who exercised this power with the moral dignity and logical insight derived from wide reading in civil and moral law. That the assassins in Dragomiloff’s Bureau could, without being seen or held accountable, take the lives of citizens, whose deaths they understood as the precondition for the recovery of a morally just society, indicates that, at least in the assassins’ minds, they had not broken the law, but refined its efficiency.
Several trails link the subject matter in London’s tales of the Northland with The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. A now-extinct land bridge once extended from Russia to North America and enabled the wolves from Sergei Pankiev’s recurrent nightmare to roam throughout Jack London’s Yukon. Two books published before London began working on The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., in 1910 developed what might be understood as its transitional themes. In preparation for writing The People of the Abyss (1903), a sociological study of living conditions in East London, London reenacted Buck’s regressive evolution. In August 1902 he disguised himself as a derelict in East London and then disappeared for six weeks into what were then believed to be the worst slums in the Western Hemisphere. In a letter to Anna Strunsky he vowed that as a consequence of this experience he would replace adventure with romance as his dominant genre: “I am made sick by this human hellhole called London Town. I find it almost impossible to believe that some of the horrible things I have seen are really so,” London complained. “Henceforth I shall dream romances for other people and transmute them into bread and butter.”
With the publication of The Sea-Wolf (1904) London complicated his resolve in a formula demonstrating uncanny intuition into the change in his public’s needs. He did not abandon the theme of survival under abject conditions that had secured his popularity but interlinked it with motifs from the sentimental romance. “My idea is to take a cultured, refined, super-civilized man and woman,” as he explained his new formula to his publisher, George P. Brett, “and throw them into a primitive sea environment where all is stress and struggle and life expresses itself simply, in terms of food and shelter.” The Sea-Wolf and The People of the Abyss relocated Wolf, the totem figure from his literary imagination, in environments—the slums of London, the open sea—that, while different from the Klondike, nevertheless recalled its demands on the survival instinct. London’s experiences in East London had confirmed his earlier conviction concerning the identity of cultural law and violence. Living under conditions in which a “dog-eat-dog” mentality supervened all other social relationships, London discovered a sociopolitical habitat of the lone wolf, whose literary formulation had been invented in The Call of the Wild and tested in Wolf Larsen, the protagonist of The Sea-Wolf. A literary precursor of Ivan Dragomiloff, Larsen combined instinctual courage with the ruthless will to power that constituted the only political order he ever acknowledged.
Following his marriage to Charmian Kittredge on November 19, 1905, London revised significantly the habit of construing his life only as raw material for his writing. In his eleven years of marriage to Charmian, the couple reversed this understanding and turned London’s most popular literary formula—combining the themes of survival and sentimental romance—into the basis for their relationship. After they set sail in 1907 for a seven-year around-the-world cruise on Snark, the schooner London had had built for thirty-five thousand dollars, the theme of survival predominated. During extensive travel throughout the South Seas and Polynesia—from Hawaii to the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti. New Hebrides, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Australia—Jack and Charmian contracted multiple tropical diseases and returned after only two years to Beauty Ranch, London’s California estate.
As Jack migrated from the region of the midnight sun to that of the rising sun, his stories registered more complex affiliations. His narrators’ efforts at heroic self-possession intermingled with accounts of territorial annexation. In importing as national romance the illness, disappointment, and frustration he and Charmian had earlier exported to the South Sea islands, London constructed what might be considered an alternative economic system. His literary imports were as dependent on the success of U.S. imperialist policy in the South Seas as was S. Constantine & Co., the import/export business Ivan Dragomiloff used as a front in The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. After taking imaginative possession of the islands by appropriating their various cultural artifacts to the dominant themes in the national mythology, London invested the capital he had accrued from this symbolic property in an unsuccessful effort to make a killing in the California real estate market. While he was unable to capitalize on this investment during his lifetime, by the time of his death, in 1916, he had nevertheless accumulated more than a thousand acres of what would become the most valuable land in Sonoma County.
Although it included significant themes from London’s preceding works, The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., also introduced different sociopolitical materials. When London began work on the novel, the nation’s twin demons of chauvinism and xenophobia had reemerged across the country. The Immigration Restriction League, an organization established in 1894, was representative of this influence. Its leaders addressed letters to governors throughout the United States and inquired ominously whether immigrants were desired in their states and, if so, of what races. The National League for the Protection of American Institutions, founded at about the same time, arranged conferences for the executive officers of “patriotic societies of the United States.” The American Protective Association appealed to the interests of big business when it represented itself as a corporate organization able to consolidate Americans against what it referred to as “radical conspirators” and against foreign competition.
These “patriotic” societies had nominated the Mafia and the Molly Maguires, secret groups instituted in the late nineteenth century to protect the economic interests of Italian and Irish immigrants, as prominent examples of the anti-Americanism they were founded to combat. President McKinley’s assassination by an anarchist in 1901 intensified a growing hysteria whose symptoms are evident in the heterogeneous attitudes that constellated around “aliens” in extant political tracts. According to this literature, immigrants were understood to be responsible all at once for (a) the nation’s worsening socioeconomic condition as well as its political remedies; (b) heightened aspirations for self-improvement and the proliferation of subhuman urban environments; and (c) dramatically increased respect for law and order but also the terrifying rise in crime.
These ambivalent responses constitute the sociopolitical backdrop for incidents in The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. In crafting the novel, London did not isolate these contradictions or sort them into different characters and contrastive scenes but conscripted them into the service of a monumental plot reversal. After opening the narrative with a scrupulously detailed account of Dragomiloff’s absolute commitment to the terms of agreement he had established with Will Hausmann, the secretary of the anarchistic Caroline Warfield group, only twenty pages later London constructed an encounter between Dragomiloff and another client, Winter Hall, during which Dragomiloff startlingly agreed to disband his entire organization. The terms of the dissolution required, moreover, that Dragomiloff himself become the chief target of the Assassination Bureau he had founded.
From its inception Dragomiloff’s relation to the Bureau had been admittedly quite complicated. According to the Bureau’s flow chart, he was primarily responsible for two separate company functions. As the Bureau’s founder, he was chief executive in charge of issuing orders but also the adjudicative officer who decided on the ethical validity of agency contracts. His argument with Winter Hall effectively turned these two figures against each other. After deliberating on the grounds of their dispute, the judge in Ivan found the Bureau’s chief executive guilty of a crime against the state, and issued the order that he be put to death. But the agency could not execute the order without also reenacting Ivan’s crime. Marked as a target for an assassination he had himself ordered, Dragomiloff had effectively elided any practical difference between the Bureau’s crime against the state and its usurpation of the state’s absolute authority to execute criminals.
In his earlier transaction with Hausmann, Dragomiloff had carefully explained the ethical standards according to which the Bureau conducted such business. When Hausmann proposed the anarchist slogan “the hounds of the law must be taught the red lesson again” as the rationale for assassinating a corrupt chief of police, Dragomiloff refused this incendiary rhetoric as antithetical to the organization’s two working rules: (1) the Bureau would not “fill an order” until Dragomiloff was satisfied that it was ethically justifiable; (2) if the Bureau failed to complete the assignment after one full year, the money would be returned, less ten percent for processing it. This account distinguished the Assassination Bureau’s procedures from those of nativist groups and secret societies alike. The Bureau was unlike either of these social entities in that it could not be affiliated with any specific national, political, or ethnic cause, and its relatively open commercial transactions stood in stark contrast to the secret, ideologically motivated activities of nativists and nonnativists alike.
His organization originated, as Dragomiloff patiently explained the matter, for reasons that would be persuasive to anyone aware of the contradictions between the nation’s juridical ideals and the actual judiciary processes, whereby the crimes of the powerful were concealed and the offenses of the powerless exaggerated. According to Dragomiloff, he had founded the Assassination Bureau to narrow this differential in the nation-state’s distribution of justice. Hausmann’s stipulation of motive for seeking the assistance of Dragomiloff’s organization is interesting in this context for its complication of Dragomiloff’s rationale. Following Dragomiloff’s inquiring why Hausmann has not himself killed Police Chief McDuffy, the anarchist responds:
The stark contrast between Dragomiloff’s technically precise representations of the Bureau’s procedures and Hausmann’s emotional confession of his personal inability to carry out an assassination underscored still another of the agency’s social functions. Too large to be visible to the untrained eye, the political assassinations carried out by Dragomiloff’s bureaucracy are mediated by a long chain of command. When dispersed through the agency’s flow chart, personal responsibility becomes an empty phrase enunciated in sentences that in corroborating a bureaucratic rationale apparently entail only procedural significance. Dragomiloff’s bureaucratization of assassination had effectively reduced its political meaning to zero.
While Dragomiloff would altogether rescind a rational explanation for his actions, those actions nevertheless originated in an extremely rational debate. During an argument with Winter Hall, the young social reformer strongly opposed to the Bureau’s activities, Dragomiloff proposed the opposition between the Nietzschean Superman who decided what was best for society and the social activist who believed in society’s ability to reform itself, as the political contradiction the Bureau was founded to occlude. Dragomiloff “did not deny that he played the part of the man on horseback, who thought for society, decided for society, and drove society; but he did deny”—as London explained the basis for his dispute with Hall—“and emphatically, that society as a whole was able to manage itself.” Following several days of intense intellectual argument, however, Dragomiloff conceded defeat to Winter Hall:
“I see, now, that I failed to lay sufficient stress on the social factors. The assassinations have not been so much intrinsically wrong as socially wrong. . . . As between individuals, they have not been wrong at all. But individuals are not individuals alone. They are parts of complexes of individuals. There was where I erred. It is dimly clear to me. I was not justified.”
As a codicil to this stunning reversal, however, Dragomiloff designated the Assassination Bureau as the only social organization competent to destroy his agency, and thereby elevated Winter Hall’s ethical arguments directed against the Bureau’s political legitimacy into the precondition for a legally binding contract calling for Dragomiloff’s assassination.
By way of this reversal, London restaged the central contradiction at work throughout his corpus. That Ivan Dragomiloff, the Bureau’s founder, would not agree to his assassination without himself attempting to destroy the Assassination Bureau reveals the more inclusive structure of division we find underwriting all of London’s tales; namely, their erasure of the differences between violent crime and the law. In dividing the founder of the Assassination Bureau into the two opposed roles of state criminal and his judge, London postulated the “Reason of State” as founded on the violence it was sworn to oppose.
In The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., London’s conflation of law and violence did not finally sort itself into a neatly resolvable contradiction but into the impossibility of choosing one or another of two absolutely opposed sets of affairs. In the following paragraph from Man and Woman, War and Peace, Anthony Wilden has provided a cogent analysis of this knot of contrariety that he refers to as a double bind.
A true double bind—or a situation set up, coerced, or perceived as one—requires a choice between (at least) two states of situations that are so equally valued and so equally insufficient that a self perpetuating oscillation is set off by any act of choice between them. A double bind is thus not a simple contradiction, but rather an oscillating contradiction resulting from the strange loop of a paradoxical injunction.
A true double bind was set up in the novel after Ivan Dragomiloff enjoined Winter Hall to hire the Assassination Bureau to “take out a contract” on its founder. Under a contractual obligation to associate himself with the Assassination Bureau he also wanted liquidated, Hall could not thereafter discriminate ethical from criminal activity.
London tightened the elements of this contradictory injunction into the social logic of the remainder of a narrative that, like the Bureau, was composed of characters and incidents in the service of an increasingly vertiginous implosive energy. In the romance between Dragomiloff’s daughter, Grunya, and Winter Hall, London restored the theme of interethnic marriage; but without the promise of “development” that social Darwinism had guaranteed to London’s previously invented characters, their relationship continually verged on disappearing into a void of mutual cancellation.
Overall, The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., should be understood as having condensed London’s two central themes—law and violence—into a singularly destructive social energy. As Winter Hall and the members of the Assassination Bureau pursued Ivan Dragomiloff from New York to Hawaii, the ensuing spectacle of his deferred capture is deprived of any rationale. As Ivan disposes of member after member of his agency, their deaths do not result in a reaffirmation of either democratic or socialist principles; they disclose the void at the core of political actions that are without goal or origin and refuse any justification other than their violent enactment. Every social space through which the principals enact this struggle becomes likewise reducible to the dimensions of a reciprocal annihilation. Something like the white silence that formed the ghastly backdrop of the Klondike tales subtends the actions represented here as well.
The usages into which each member of the Bureau, in rationalizing the Bureau’s social purposes, had formerly invested his considerable intellectual energies could now, according to Breen, one of the Bureau’s most intelligent agents, be found epitomized in an explosive device with which Breen intended to liquidate the agency. “Let me show you the quintessence of universal logic,” Breen observed, “the irrefragable logic of the elements, the logic of chemistry, the logic of mechanics, and the logic of time, all indissolubly welded together into one of the prettiest devices ever mortal mind conceived.” Like the components of this device, the Bureau’s organization men could not align themselves with any political principle or social logic other than the irrefragable will to absolute violence that had incorporated them.
In turning this power against those who have presumed the authority to exercise it, however, London reveals a critically self-reflexive dimension of the novel disclosing London’s ambivalent response to the imperial adventures that his other tales had naturalized. The ambivalence is evident in Dragomiloff’s declaration of his new relationship to the agency:
“Adventure. That is it. I have not had it since I was a boy, since I was a young Bakuninite in Russia dreaming my boyish dreams of universal human freedom. Since then what have I done? I have been a thinking machine. I have built up successful businesses. I have made a fortune. I have invented the Assassination Bureau and run it.”
As subsequent events would make clear, the figure who interpreted his contract with Hall as an opportunity to initiate a deferred life of adventure was not Ivan Dragomiloff the founder of the Assassination Bureau, but his alter ego, Sergius Constantine. Constantine was the alias Dragomiloff used to found a business of another kind, S. Constantine & Co., the import company that, like Jack London’s Beauty Ranch, was the chief beneficiary of the international commerce that U.S. imperialism had facilitated. In signing the contract with Hall, Dragomiloff completes a change of identity from judge into fugitive by merging his interests in the Bureau with the commercial enterprise Constantine & Co., whose business ventures in Mexico, the West Indies, Panama, Ecuador, Tahiti, and Hawaii had already proved them appropriate sites for adventure. In tracking Ivan’s efforts to elude his assassins, the narrative also reveals that trajectory as coincident with a circuit of territorial annexation where violence and governance had become likewise indistinguishable.
Perhaps it was London’s increased ambivalence over his narrative’s complicity with the rule of empire that led him to abandon the manuscript with the account of Breen’s failed attempt to blow up the entire Bureau. While I cannot in the space of this Introduction do justice to the differences between the notes London left for the completion of his novel and the manuscript Robert L. Fish published, I nevertheless want to conclude with some brief remarks about the two texts that begin with an outline Fish uncovered among the London papers and included in an appendix to the 1963 version:
Hall loses Grunya, who saves Drago, and escapes with him. Then Hall, telegrams, traces them through Mexico, West Indies, Panama, Ecuador—cables big (5 times) sum to Drago, and starts in pursuit.
Arrives; finds them gone. Encounters Haas, and follows him. Sail on some windjammer for Australia. There loses Haas.
Himself, cabling, locates them as headed for Tahiti. Meets them in Tahiti. Marries Grunya. Appearance of Haas.
The three, Drago, Grunya and Hall (married) live in Tahiti until assassins arrive. Then Drago sneaks in cutter for Taiohae.
Drago assures others of his sanity; they’re not even insane. They’re stupid. They cannot understand the transvaluation of values he has achieved.
On a sandy islet, Dragomiloff manages to blow up the whole group except Haas who is too avidly clever. House mined.
Drago, in Nuka Island, village Taiohae, Marquesas. There is a wrecked cutter and assassin (Haas) is thrown up on beach where Melville escaped nearly a century earlier. While Drago is off exploring Typee Valley on this island, Hall and Grunya play off the assassin Haas, and think are rid of him.
Drago dies triumphantly: Weak, helpless, on Marquesas island, by accident of wreck is discovered by appointed slayer—Haas. Only by accident, however. “In truth I have outwitted organization.” Slayer and he discuss way he is to die. Drago has a slow, painless poison. Agrees to take. Takes. Will be an hour in dying.
Drago: “Now, let us discuss the wrongness of the organization which must be disbanded.”
Grunya and Hall arrive. Schooner lying on and off. They come ashore in whaleboat, in time for his end.
After all dead but Haas, Hall cleaned up the affairs of the Bureau. $117,000 was turned over to him. Stored books and furniture of Drago. Sent mute to be caretaker of the bungalow at Edge Moor.
The minor variations between London’s notations and Fish’s narrative testify to Fish’s ingenuity, but a scene that Fish has added as the novel’s penultimate chapter significantly altered London’s central theme. In Chapter 18 of the Fish manuscript, Dragomiloff lures three of his assailants into a stretch of water between two Hawaiian islands that is known to the natives as Huhu Kai—the “angry sea”—where a whirlpool draws them to their deaths. In adding this scene, Fish has not illuminated but simply replaced the following notation: “The three, Drago, Grunya and Hall (married) live in Tahiti until assassins arrive. Then Drago sneaks in cutter for Taionae. Drago assures others of his sanity; they’re not even insane. They’re stupid. They cannot understand the transvaluation of values he has achieved.”
The “transvaluation” in Drago’s values presumably had reference to his belated recognition that as the Bureau’s founder he was exempt from the double binds incorporating its other members. In turning their efforts to assassinate him into gratuitous opportunities to demonstrate his prowess as an adventurer, Dragomiloff retroactively transmuted the entire agency (and the Reason of State it supplements) into an extension of his will to adventure. Unlike London, Fish refused to grant Dragomiloff a Nietzschean transvaluation and aspired to combine the assassin’s absolute power over life and death with a freak natural occurrence. Fish attempted to reassign responsibility for the Bureau’s liquidation to nature alone, but also to contain the escalation of violence within a predictable deviation from Nature’s laws.
While it is difficult to ascertain his intention, Fish’s revision may have been motivated by an aversive reaction to events in U.S. political history comparable to those which took place during London’s lifetime. Fish completed the manuscript at the inaugural moment of an epoch of political violence that would take the lives of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. These assassinations recalled the political murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in 1914, which precipitated World War I. Whereas London’s novel helped imagine World War I into existence, Fish’s whirlpool isolated in Nature the violence that the Bureau’s political assassinations had socialized.
With this revised conclusion, Fish had also rendered London’s last novel formally symmetrical with “Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan,” the tale with which London had begun his literary career. But the crucial difference between Fish’s ending and London’s does not refer to formal patterns. It entails a terrible knowledge about the violence endemic to the laws of the modern nation-state that Fish struggled to evade and that Jack London may have ultimately found more difficult to survive than any natural disaster.
—Donald E. Pease