London returned to the United States in 1903. For a couple of years London and Anna Strunsky had been writing a joint novel, The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903). The idea came when they were onboard London's boat, The Spray. Anna later wrote: "He (Jack London) was speaking of eugenics. He was saying that love was a madness, a fever that passes, a trick. One should marry for qualities and not for love. Before marrying one should make sure one is not in love. Love is the danger signal... Jack proposed that we write a book together on eugenics and romantic love. The moon rose, paled, and faded from the sky. Then the night came awake and our sails filled. Before we landed we had our plot, a novel in letter form in which Jack was to be an American, an economist, Herbert Wace, and I am an Englishman, a poet, Dane Kempton, who stood in relation to him of father to son." James Boylan, the author of Revolutionary Lives: Anna Strunsky and William English Walling (1998) has pointed out: "They decided the method of collaboration - a real exchange of letters between her home in San Francisco and his across the bay in Oakland. Neither of them stated outright the underlying proposition, nor was there a hint of what Bessie (Jack London's wife) thought of it: that Anna would be attacking the loveless basis of his marriage, and he defending it, a possibly cataclysmic scenario." London told his friend, Cloudesley Johns: "A young Russian Jewess of San Francisco and myself have often quarrelled over our conceptions of love. She happens to be a genius. She is also a materialist by philosophy, and an idealist by innate preference, and is constantly being forced to twist all the facts of the universe in order to reconcile herself with her self. So, finally, we decided that the only way to argue the question out would be by letter." https://spartacus-educational.com/JlondonJ.htm
Хотя и член партии социалистов, Лондон был не просто поклонником евгеники. Он восхищался Киплингом и верил в генетическое превосходство англо-саксонской расы.
London told her he was reading Seven Seas by Rudyard Kipling. "The Anglo-Saxons were the salt of the earth, he declared. He forgave Kipling his imperialism because he wrote of the poor, the ignorant, the submerged, of the soldier and sailor in their own language." Anna was a socialist and was critical of his desire to become rich. "I looked for the Social Democrat, the Revolutionist, the moral and romantic idealist; I sought the Poet. Exploring his personality was like exploring mountains and the valleys which stretched between troubled my heart ... He was a Socialist, but he wanted to beat the Capitalist at his own game. To succeed in doing this, he thought, was in itself a service to the Cause; to show them that Socialists were not derelicts and failures had certain propaganda value." London wrote warmly about Anna to Elwyn Irving Hoffman: "I should like to have you meet Miss Anna Strunsky some time. She is well worth meeting.... She has her exoteric circles and her esoteric circles - by this I mean the more intimate and the less intimate. One may pass from one to the other if deemed worthy.... She loves Browning. She is deep, subtle, and psychological. She is neither stiff nor formal. Very adaptive. Knows a great deal. Is a joy and delight to her friends. She is a Russian, and a Jewess, who has absorbed the Western culture, and who warms it with a certain oriental leaven." https://spartacus-educational.com/USAstrunsky.htm
После смерти Джека Лондона (в 40 лет от передозы морфия) Анна Струнская написала о нем воспоминания:
"His standard of life was high. He for one would have the happiness of power, of genius, of love, and the vast comforts and ease of wealth. Napoleon and Nietzsche had a part in him, but his Nietszchean philosophy became transmuted into Socialism--the movement of his time--and it was by the force of his Napoleonic temperament that he conceived the idea of an incredible success, and had the will to achieve it. Sensitive and emotional as his nature was, he forbade himself any deviation from the course that would lead him to his goal. He systematized his life. Such colossal energy, and yet he could not trust himself! He lived by rule. Law, Order and Restraint was the creed of this vital, passionate youth. His stint was a thousand words a day revised and typed. He allowed himself only four and one-half hours of sleep and began his work regularly at dawn for years. The nights were devoted to extensive reading of science, history and sociology. He called it getting his scientific basis. One day a week he devoted to the work of a struggling friend. For recreation he boxed and fenced and swam--he was a great swimmer--and he sailed--he was a sailor before the mast--and he spent much time flying kites, of which he had a large collection. Like Zola's, his first efforts were in poetry. This no doubt was the secret of the Miltonic simplicity of his prose which has made him the accepted model for pure English and for style in the universities of this country and at the Sorbonne. He had always wanted to write poetry, but poets proverbially starved--unless they or theirs had independent incomes--so poetry was postponed until that time when his fame and fortune were to have been made. Fame and fortune were made and enjoyed for over a decade, but yet the writing of poetry was postponed, and death came before he had remembered his promise to himself. <...> He believed in the inferiority of certain races and talked of the Anglo-Saxon people as the salt of the earth. He inclined to believe in the biological inferiority of woman to man, for had he not watched women and men at the Piedmont Baths and had the women not shivered on the brink of the swimming pool, "not standing up straight under God!" He believed that right made might. He fled from civilization and systematically avoided it. He bad a barbarian's attitude toward death, holding himself ready to go at any time, with total indifference to his fate. He held that love is only a trap set by nature for the individual. One must not marry for love but for certain qualities discerned by the mind." https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/walling/london.htm
His 1908 novel The Iron Heel depicted the rise of fascism in an America eventually freed by a socialist hero. The Nazis burned this and other socialist-leaning works in 1933, but did not, however, ban London's adventure stories. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jack-london
На родине он полузабыт, о чем свидетельствует известная сцена из романа Набокова "Пнин".
Carrying his purchase, wrapped in brown paper and Scotch-taped, he entered a bookstore and asked for Martin Eden. 'Eden, Eden, Eden,' the tall dark lady in charge repeated rapidly, rubbing her forehead. 'Let me see, you don't mean a book on the British statesman? Or do you?' 'I mean,' said Pnin, 'a celebrated work by the celebrated American writer Jack London.' 'London, London, London,' said the woman, holding her temples. Pipe in hand, her husband, a Mr Tweed, who wrote topical poetry, came to the rescue. After some search he brought from the dusty depths of his not very prosperous store an old edition of The Son of the Wolf. 'I'm afraid,' he said, 'that's all we have by this author.' 'Strange!' said Pnin. 'The vicissitudes of celebrity! In Russia, I remember, everybody - little children, full-grown people, doctors, advocates - everybody read and re-read him. This is not his best book but O.K., O.K., I will take it.'
London returned to the United States in 1903. For a couple of years London and Anna Strunsky had been writing a joint novel, The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903). The idea came when they were onboard London's boat, The Spray. Anna later wrote: "He (Jack London) was speaking of eugenics. He was saying that love was a madness, a fever that passes, a trick. One should marry for qualities and not for love. Before marrying one should make sure one is not in love. Love is the danger signal... Jack proposed that we write a book together on eugenics and romantic love. The moon rose, paled, and faded from the sky. Then the night came awake and our sails filled. Before we landed we had our plot, a novel in letter form in which Jack was to be an American, an economist, Herbert Wace, and I am an Englishman, a poet, Dane Kempton, who stood in relation to him of father to son."
James Boylan, the author of Revolutionary Lives: Anna Strunsky and William English Walling (1998) has pointed out: "They decided the method of collaboration - a real exchange of letters between her home in San Francisco and his across the bay in Oakland. Neither of them stated outright the underlying proposition, nor was there a hint of what Bessie (Jack London's wife) thought of it: that Anna would be attacking the loveless basis of his marriage, and he defending it, a possibly cataclysmic scenario."
London told his friend, Cloudesley Johns: "A young Russian Jewess of San Francisco and myself have often quarrelled over our conceptions of love. She happens to be a genius. She is also a materialist by philosophy, and an idealist by innate preference, and is constantly being forced to twist all the facts of the universe in order to reconcile herself with her self. So, finally, we decided that the only way to argue the question out would be by letter."
https://spartacus-educational.com/JlondonJ.htm
Хотя и член партии социалистов, Лондон был не просто поклонником евгеники. Он восхищался Киплингом и верил в генетическое превосходство англо-саксонской расы.
London told her he was reading Seven Seas by Rudyard Kipling. "The Anglo-Saxons were the salt of the earth, he declared. He forgave Kipling his imperialism because he wrote of the poor, the ignorant, the submerged, of the soldier and sailor in their own language." Anna was a socialist and was critical of his desire to become rich. "I looked for the Social Democrat, the Revolutionist, the moral and romantic idealist; I sought the Poet. Exploring his personality was like exploring mountains and the valleys which stretched between troubled my heart ... He was a Socialist, but he wanted to beat the Capitalist at his own game. To succeed in doing this, he thought, was in itself a service to the Cause; to show them that Socialists were not derelicts and failures had certain propaganda value."
London wrote warmly about Anna to Elwyn Irving Hoffman: "I should like to have you meet Miss Anna Strunsky some time. She is well worth meeting.... She has her exoteric circles and her esoteric circles - by this I mean the more intimate and the less intimate. One may pass from one to the other if deemed worthy.... She loves Browning. She is deep, subtle, and psychological. She is neither stiff nor formal. Very adaptive. Knows a great deal. Is a joy and delight to her friends. She is a Russian, and a Jewess, who has absorbed the Western culture, and who warms it with a certain oriental leaven."
https://spartacus-educational.com/USAstrunsky.htm
Reply
"His standard of life was high. He for one would have the happiness of power, of genius, of love, and the vast comforts and ease of wealth. Napoleon and Nietzsche had a part in him, but his Nietszchean philosophy became transmuted into Socialism--the movement of his time--and it was by the force of his Napoleonic temperament that he conceived the idea of an incredible success, and had the will to achieve it. Sensitive and emotional as his nature was, he forbade himself any deviation from the course that would lead him to his goal. He systematized his life. Such colossal energy, and yet he could not trust himself! He lived by rule. Law, Order and Restraint was the creed of this vital, passionate youth. His stint was a thousand words a day revised and typed. He allowed himself only four and one-half hours of sleep and began his work regularly at dawn for years. The nights were devoted to extensive reading of science, history and sociology. He called it getting his scientific basis. One day a week he devoted to the work of a struggling friend. For recreation he boxed and fenced and swam--he was a great swimmer--and he sailed--he was a sailor before the mast--and he spent much time flying kites, of which he had a large collection. Like Zola's, his first efforts were in poetry. This no doubt was the secret of the Miltonic simplicity of his prose which has made him the accepted model for pure English and for style in the universities of this country and at the Sorbonne. He had always wanted to write poetry, but poets proverbially starved--unless they or theirs had independent incomes--so poetry was postponed until that time when his fame and fortune were to have been made. Fame and fortune were made and enjoyed for over a decade, but yet the writing of poetry was postponed, and death came before he had remembered his promise to himself. <...>
He believed in the inferiority of certain races and talked of the Anglo-Saxon people as the salt of the earth. He inclined to believe in the biological inferiority of woman to man, for had he not watched women and men at the Piedmont Baths and had the women not shivered on the brink of the swimming pool, "not standing up straight under God!" He believed that right made might. He fled from civilization and systematically avoided it. He bad a barbarian's attitude toward death, holding himself ready to go at any time, with total indifference to his fate. He held that love is only a trap set by nature for the individual. One must not marry for love but for certain qualities discerned by the mind."
https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/walling/london.htm
Reply
Нацисты сжигали его социалистические книги.
His 1908 novel The Iron Heel depicted the rise of fascism in an America eventually freed by a socialist hero. The Nazis burned this and other socialist-leaning works in 1933, but did not, however, ban London's adventure stories.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jack-london
В СССР он пользовался рекордной популярностью.
Джек Лондон был вторым после Х. К. Андерсена по издаваемости в СССР зарубежным писателем за 1918-1986 годы: общий тираж 956 изданий составил 77,153 млн экземпляров.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BA_%D0%9B%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BD
На родине он полузабыт, о чем свидетельствует известная сцена из романа Набокова "Пнин".
Carrying his purchase, wrapped in brown paper and Scotch-taped, he entered a bookstore and asked for Martin Eden.
'Eden, Eden, Eden,' the tall dark lady in charge repeated rapidly, rubbing her forehead. 'Let me see, you don't mean a book on the British statesman? Or do you?'
'I mean,' said Pnin, 'a celebrated work by the celebrated American writer Jack London.'
'London, London, London,' said the woman, holding her temples.
Pipe in hand, her husband, a Mr Tweed, who wrote topical poetry, came to the rescue. After some search he brought from the dusty depths of his not very prosperous store an old edition of The Son of the Wolf.
'I'm afraid,' he said, 'that's all we have by this author.'
'Strange!' said Pnin. 'The vicissitudes of celebrity! In Russia, I remember, everybody - little children, full-grown people, doctors, advocates - everybody read and re-read him. This is not his best book but O.K., O.K., I will take it.'
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