Four Quarters of Light Read Free

why.
    I finished the book with my muse from Alaska driving and directing the story. Sometimes I look at it on the bookshelf in my study and think how it would not be there, indeed how it would not exist in any form, had I not received those mysterious letters from the Alaskan wilderness. I had rid myself of my eighteenth-century musician but a new and more prescient Alaska was calling to me with irresistible attraction. It had now given itself a voice that was separate from my own fantasizing. So I chose to return with a head full of questions about that inspiring landscape and the primitive animism that exists there.
    Jack London once wrote in a letter, ‘When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many things he has learned, he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods andoften times he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped.’ There was something in those words of London’s that excited my imagination about my mysterious pen friend, and the magic that connected us. She was not just some figment of my frustrated imagination, she was real and living out there in the boundless wilderness. Her communications had moved psychic mountains for me, and the acknowledgement on the flyleaf of the book hardly seemed sufficient reward. But could I find her in that huge country? If I was to accept London’s words, what would I have to abandon, and what reverses would I have to make? For a moment I thought of Joseph Conrad’s failed heroes who are devoured by the landscape they enter, and I recoiled at the journey that was beckoning me.
    I thought again of London and the struggles of his heroes, men and dogs, against the forces of nature and one another. His stories embody a recognition of primal forces that can transform or crush people, at the same time hinting at something in the personality of their author, an illegitimate child whose poverty-stricken childhood taught him how to fight to survive. Like myself, the author would take himself off on small voyages of discovery, surviving on his wits and animal cunning. As a man, he was strongly influenced by Marx, Hegel, Spencer, Darwin and Nietzsche, from whose works he evolved a belief in humanism and socialism and an admiration for courage and individual heroism. I was drawn to this complex, tragic man. A writer who wrote in the naturalist tradition of Kipling and Stevenson. A Marxist who flirted with dangerous notions of the superhero. A socialist who argued against the Mexican Revolution. But, ultimately, a man who drew his own map in life. In many respects London was like one of his strongest characters. In
The Sea Wolf
(1904), Wolf Larsen is the incredibly brutal but learned captain of the
Ghost
who is doomed by his individualism. The central character of Mark Eden was also ominously autobiographical, not only telling of an ex-sailor who becomes a writer but also of the emotional turmoil, the loss of identity and selfhood and ultimate suicide. Maybe the author’s idealism was too highly pitched. Hewas shipwrecked by failed marriages, bankruptcy, alcoholism and suicide. Obviously there had been some dark, self-destructive alter ego that would not allow the man to ‘reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped’. He certainly had much to say about fear. He considered it mankind’s basic emotion, a kind of primordial first principle that affects us all. But understood in the right way, fear need not be a harness. London’s protagonists challenged it, even chose at times to forget it. Fear was a prime motivator for London the man, too: it made him shake off the shackles of conformity and achieve success.
    â€˜There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise,’ he once said. I had unknowingly tasted that ecstasy as a child with my face buried in the author’s epic in a tiny two-up-two-down family home whose confines