A Collection of Nonfiction Short Stories

I’ve been making a few sweeping changes to my blog recently. It’s the year for change, I guess.

One of these changes has been to add a “Support This Blog” page, which allows me to drink more coffee and buy more books (thanks to the generosity of patrons like you!). Another change has been a “Short Stories” page dedicated to my favorite short-story authors, including the great Jack London. In crafting that page, I got a hankering once more for London’s incredible gift and chose as my next read The Human Drift (1917). Quite a book!

What I loved most about this collection of six stories was London’s comments to his editors that “these are true accounts, not fiction”—and true they are. In this book, we’re not reading “stories” but rather articles and essays—or perhaps chapters within a very specific memoir, where the master author of wit and economy recounts experiences past from an age now long forgotten. Jack London may not be for everyone, I readily admit that, but man he scratches my itch every few years!

As I normally do with short-story collections, I’ll record here the notes that I took while reading this book. Some of my notes might contain so-called “spoilers,” but since this book is 107 years old (at the time of this writing), I think I’m allowed such freedom.

1. “The Human Drift”

In this initial titular essay, Jack London behaves like a teacher, describing some of the people-drifts that have taken place in what he deems “human history.” He’s pessimistic about us as a species, noting a number of our flaws that he believes destine humanity to be a mere blip in evolutionary history. Here’s a few examples:

• Humans created weapons even before they ever created religion, suggesting we’re bent more on self-harm than on salvation.
• Referencing a Dr. Jordan, he says that we’ve the horrible habit of sending our best citizens off to die in wars, leaving our second-best at home to breed—suggesting that war is actually the opposite of “the survival of the fittest.”
• Humans have died by the millions at different points throughout history due to wars, family, etc., a good and natural process that keeps Earth’s population in check. With 1.75 billion people on earth in 1917, he predicted there’d be an “appalling” rise due to our increased living standards, upwards of 500 million people in the U.S. alone by 2017. He’s not terribly far off on this prediction and might have been spot-on had America not been so hell-bent on infanticide for the past 50 years (63 million abortions = a whole lot of people prevented the right to grow up and have families of their own).

High living standards aren’t necessarily a bad thing—they just mean we’re ultimately setting ourselves up for disaster. He writes:

The planet is being subdued. The wild and the hurtful are either tamed or eliminated. From the beasts of prey and the cannibal humans down to the death-dealing microbes, no quarter is given; and daily, wider and wider areas of hostile territory, whether of a warring desert-tribe in Africa or a pestilential fever-hole like Panama, are made peaceable and habitable for mankind. … There was never so much peace in the world as there is to-day.

Jack London foresaw longer lives and more marriages in the future, meaning more healthy births and a lower infant-mortality rate (one pro-abortion argument, in fact, that doctors must do today what Nature had always done throughout history). Because he envisioned a world with a shocking 3 billion people (he was off on that one!) with longer life expectancies, he also postulated that Socialism alone would have the capacity to feed such a massive volume of people. Such a possible population terrified London:

The magnitude of population in that future day is wellnigh unthinkable. But there is only so much land and water on the surface of the earth. Man, despite his marvellous accomplishments, will never be able to increase the diameter of the planet. The old days of virgin continents will be gone. The habitable planet, from ice-cap to ice-cap, will be inhabited. And in the matter of food-getting, as in everything else, man is only finite. Undreamed-of efficiencies in food-getting may be achieved, but, soon or late, man will find himself face to face with Malthus’ grim law. Not only will population catch up with subsistence, but it will press against subsistence, and the pressure will be pitiless and savage. Somewhere in the future is a date when man will face, consciously, the bitter fact that there is not food enough for all of him to eat.

He doesn’t stop there, though. He also gets into the topic of micro-organisms and their own drift that will (thankfully) help keep human population in check. His ultimate point in this essay is that our waves of humanity suggest the possibility of an eternity of evolutions past and future: those that came and went before the advent of people, and those that will continue far past our own demise. Humans are but “a phantom, a flash of light, and flutter of movement across the infinite face of the starry night.”

2. “Small-Boat Sailing”

Early on in this essay, London writes that “A sailor is born not made.” He recollects that at age 12, he met a true sailor, a British runaway who actually didn’t know the first thing about sailing a small boat. Jack learned everything he could about small boats while fishing the rivers of Sacramento. Sometimes alone, sometimes with another, London found that he had to know everything and do everything aboard his little vessel, being on constant watch and never taking his guard down. Once he finally went to the sea at age 17, he knew almost everything about big ships simply because he had learned about the smaller ones! He thus viewed small boats as the best schooling for sailors of all types. He writes:

After all, the mishaps are almost the best part of small-boat sailing. Looking back, they prove to be punctuation of joy. At the time they try your mettle and your vocabulary and may make you so pessimistic as to believe that God has a grudge against you. But afterward—afterward with what pleasure you remember them and with what gusto you relate them to your fellow skippers and fellowhood of small-boat sailing.

3. “Four Horses and a Sailor”

In this article, Jack London the sailor becomes a horse-driving landlubber for a time. He’s unfamiliar with horses in general and must find a way to drive a team of 4 along the backroads of California. He speaks often of his wife, Charmian, in this one. It’s also filled with horse jargon, but I found that I could follow what he was talking about simply because he doesn’t take his readers for fools—and he’s such a fantastic, engaging writer!

It was cool that in this article he also encourages his readers to get into California on the ground-floor—he predicted a rush of population someday to this beautiful region with its delightful climate. He seemed particularly fond of Vallejo and the area around San Francisco Bay. Perhaps he couldn’t imagine what that rush of population would look like—and what those people would ultimately do to the region. But how cool it would be to visit ca. 1917 California for a time!

4. “Nothing That Ever Came to Anything.”

This is a wonderfully humorous tale of London’s correspondence with a military officer in Ecuador. When London sees a leopard skin in a shop, he pantomimes to ask where he can get one for himself. A boy puts him in touch with the soldier and becomes their letter-runner from that point on. Through a series of notes and gifts and requests for payment up front, London and this man he’s never met become fast friends and even faster enemies. It’s a great story stripped from London’s travels, and I love to see his eye for anecdotes sure to entertain!

5. “That Dead Men Rise Up Never”

Here we have another anecdote from London’s life, this time from age 17 aboard his first ship at sea. It’s a spectacular little ghost story. It’s almost on par with Edgar Allan Poe—though perhaps less imaginative, since it’s a true story.

6. “A Classic of the Sea”

It’s weird to review a book review, but that’s where I find myself. In this article, London reviews the classic book Two Years before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. I actually own a copy of this book published nearly 200 years ago, and I’ve been interested in trying it. Knowing that London himself viewed the 75-year-old memoir as “a classic of the sea” means that it truly is something worth checking out. London loved it for its frank look at sailing by a man who himself wasn’t a sailor, though he was a go-getter and had an eye for detail and a hand to write it that none atop the sea could equal.

I’m glad that my return to Jack London’s shorter works was made up of articles and essays rather than fiction. It reminds me that this man lived life—you can see that in his 1907 book, The Road—and didn’t just sit at a desk daydreaming about it. His stories then are built on reality, embellished perhaps, but in that signature London way where he actually strips away from the book everything that’s unnecessary, leaving us with a story that’s rough and raw and memorable. He’s an author worth reading.

©2024 E.T.

Read More from Jack London:

• The Call of the Wild (1903)
• The Game (1905)
• Before Adam (1906)
• The Road (1907)
• When God Laughs (1911)
• The Human Drift (1917)
• Love of Life and Other Stories (1907)
• The Red One (1918)
• Stories of the North (1965)