Northland Stories Read Free

protagonist—even one of his own devising—to overshadow his potential fame as a man of letters. Beyond character and setting, he searched for a way to impress upon these Northland tales his unique authorial personality, what he termed (in an 1899 advice essay addressed to other literary aspirants) the writer’s “stamp of ‘self’.” In this respect the instrumental tale bearing such a stamp remains “The White Silence,” which appeared second in the Overland series, but which London pointedly selected to lead off his first collected volume, The Son of the Wolf. Titled “A Northland Episode” when first submitted to Godey’s on October 4, 1898, the story’s far more suggestive revised title derives from a passage midway through the narrative. Recounting the desperate race of the half-starving Malemute Kid, a companion named Mason, and his Indian wife, Ruth, on trail across the frozen wilderness, London pauses to offer a context for their toil: “with the awe, born of the White Silence, the voiceless travelers bent to their work.”
    In the course of narrating the subsequent sacrifice of one of these three characters for the sake of the other two, London repeats four times this capitalized expression. This recurring signature phrase, “the White Silence,” designed to establish the author’s strong individual presence (his and his alone) at the same time that it figuratively registers an atmosphere of menace and wonder governing the Northland landscape, also appears at key moments in other stories throughout the collection. The phrase clearly maps a state of mind, not a geography—a mood in which the activity of work speaks louder than words. Here we can see how London’s concept of a fictional “field” is more interesting and innovative than a mere “series,” looking forward to modernist short story cycles such as Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) and Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), whose discrete parts are unified by lyrical abstractions beyond specific place or people or plot.
    To appreciate more fully how London’s Northland tales actually function as a coherent “field” of writing, we need to return to the year 1897. London’s brand of regionalism, it turns out, would come to depend on a complex unfolding symbolic genealogy. In June, about a month before leaving for the Yukon, London received a remarkable pair of letters from an itinerant astrologer named W. H. Chaney, whom London had lately suspected of being his real biological father. Bluntly denying his patrimony, Chaney left London with little but to muse on his presumed illegitimacy. London’s response to Chaney’s denial was to submit for national publication an early batch of stories, among them a curious gothic potboiler entitled “A Thousand Deaths.” London later credited this lurid tale with saving his literary career when it was finally accepted for the hefty sum of forty dollars in early 1899. The story concerns a mad scientist who at first fails to recognize his own son, but then repeatedly subjects him to sadistic rounds of lethal torture and miraculous resuscitation, only to be himself vaporized by the son in the end.
    This story carries profound implications for London’s attempts at self-location as a writer. Cruelly rejected by his ostensible father, London within weeks submitted a fantasy about a son’s patricidal revenge and then immediately headed north. Upon his return, he began generic streamlining, focusing on a series of stories all set in the Yukon whose characters are united by virtue of belonging to a single common family. London called this family the “Wolf” clan, identifying his fictional Northland protagonists (including his surrogate the “Malemute Kid” and implicitly himself) collectively as “The Son of the Wolf”—the story which appeared third in the Overland