Soul Shelter

(This post is an installment of CommonSensical, a periodic feature in which we offer timeless words from thinkers and artists new and old on the subject of getting a living while protecting one’s soul.)

In his essay “What Life Means to Me” (1905), the American novelist Jack London relates the formative experiences of his working life. The essay seems fitting to share following Independence Day, as London is keenly observant regarding the pursuit of happiness, prosperity, and social standing—or what Americans have more recently come to call ‘Upward Mobility.’

I was born in the working-class. Early I discovered enthusiasm, ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became the problem of my child-life. My environment was crude and rough and raw. I had no outlook, but an uplook rather. My place in society was at the bottom. Here life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness, both of the flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented.

Above me towered the colossal edifice of society, and to my mind the only way out was up. … In short, as I accepted the rising of the sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all that made life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail and misery. …

Here London captures a powerfully American theme, one that he will learn (as have most readers) to question. The theme goes like this: With improved social standing comes not only happiness but spiritual enrichment. In other words, increased wealth or stature in turn increases one’s nobleness, graciousness, decency and dignity.

I early inquired the rate of interest on invested money. … I ascertained the current rates of wages for workers of all ages, and the cost of living. From all this data I concluded that if I began immediately and worked and saved until I was fifty years of age, I could then stop working and enter into participation in a fair portion of the delights and goodnesses that would then be open to me higher up in society.

Young London did not wish to spend his prime years in work only to enjoy freedom and ease in a more decrepit season of his life (a model known as the Deferred Life Plan). No, instead he would become his own master. In the celebrated American style, he would mold himself into a wizard of business and create his own fortune. So,

At ten years of age, I became a newsboy on the streets of a city … I had a vision of myself becoming a bald-headed and successful merchant prince. …

For a while it seemed a viable path. By sixteen, London’s zeal had taken him up “the first rung of the business ladder. I was a capitalist. I owned a boat and a complete oyster pirating outfit.” But though he’d improved his financial lot, it turned out that nobleness, graciousness, and decency did not arrive as natural byproducts of success. Instead, London found himself exploiting his boat crew for the sake of profit.

And as it happened, he would climb no further up the business ladder, for he soon found himself reduced by the greed of competing oystermen, who raided his boat and “stole everything, even the anchors.”

So much for London’s business career.

From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other capitalists. I had the muscle, and they made money out of it while I made but a very indifferent living out of it. I was a sailor before the mast, a longshoreman, a roustabout; I worked in canneries, and factories, and laundries; I mowed lawns, and cleaned carpets, and washed windows. And I never got the full product of my toil. I looked at the daughter of the cannery owner, in her carriage, and knew that it was my muscle, in part, that helped drag along that carriage on its rubber tyres. I looked at the son of the factory owner, going to college, and knew that it was my muscle that helped, in part, to pay for the wine and good fellowship he enjoyed.

But I did not resent this. It was all in the game. They were the strong. Very well, I was strong. I would carve my way to a place amongst them and make money out of the muscles of other men. I was not afraid of work. I loved hard work. I would pitch in and work harder than ever and eventually become a pillar of society.

And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer that was of the same mind. I was willing to work, and he was more than willing that I should work. I thought I was learning a trade. In reality, I had displaced two men. … I was doing the work of both for thirty dollars per month.

London now experienced a bitter irony: the lust for profit that drove industry could destroy an industry’s most precious resource, its best workers’ inborn love of work.

This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may love oysters, but too many oysters will disincline him toward that particular diet. And so with me. Too much work sickened me. I did not wish ever to see work again. I fled from work. I became a tramp … wandering over the United States and sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons. …

I was now, at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society. … The things I there saw gave me a terrible scare.

London’s avid upward mobility had come to seem more like a steep descent. For now he must not only contend with his natural born poverty, but with the oppressive shame of having failed in his social climb. What to do? London reexamined society, and came to a new conclusion about his options, one that would teach him further difficult lessons.

All things were commodities, all people bought and sold. The one commodity that labour had to sell was muscle.

But … there was no way of replenishing the labourer’s stock of muscle. The more he sold of his muscle, the less of it remained to him. It was his one commodity, and each day his stock of it diminished. …

So there had to be a better way to rise in the world than by using up the unrenewable resource of one’s physical strength. Surely work of the mind, though one might remain poor while doing it, would at least dignify one in the eyes of fellow men.

If I could not live on the parlour floor of society, I could, at any rate, have a try at the attic. It was true, the diet there was slim, but the air at least was pure. So I resolved to sell no more muscle, and to become a vendor of brains.

Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge. I returned to California and opened the books. …

Given his disillusioning experience of the working world, London’s self-education led him to socialist ideas. He soon found himself hanging out with “intellectual revolutionists.”

… I met strong and alert-brained … members of the working-class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers; professors broken on the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class and flung out because they were quick with knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs of mankind. …

Here life was clean, noble, and alive. Here life rehabilitated itself, became wonderful and glorious; and I was glad to be alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire. …

But London would learn that any hunger for social status and its ostensible dignity, like the desire for enormous wealth, necessitated eating food that made one sick. And a chief dish was hypocrisy.

As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened its portals to me … [but] my disillusionment proceeded rapidly. I sat down to dinner with the masters of society, and with the wives and daughters of the masters of society. The women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naïve surprise I discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below in the cellar. …

It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me. … [They] prattled … dear little moralities; but … the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. …

The so-called masters of society, the “preachers, politicians, business men, professors, and editors” were equally disappointing to London, who’d hoped “to find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean, noble, and alive.”

I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, automobiled with them, and studied them. It is true, I found many that were clean and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were not alive. … Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead — clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive. …

I talked … with captains of industry, and marveled at how little traveled they were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I discovered that their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed. Also, I discovered that their morality, where business was concerned, was nil.

The original goal, for London the boy, had been to attain the American dream of deliverance from poverty through personal initiative and upward mobility—to increase his social standing, find happiness, and gain spiritual enrichment all in one. But now he found himself surrounded by half-men—prosperous and well-respected, perhaps, but spiritually empty.

This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was a dummy director and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans. … This man, talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. … This man, who endowed chairs in universities, perjured himself in courts of law over a matter of dollars and cents. …

It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal, betrayal and crime—men who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who were clean and noble, but who were not alive. …

Morally and spiritually I was sickened. …

Now, in light of years spent struggling upward through the social strata in search of wealth, respectability, and spiritual fulfillment, London suddenly recognized a more meaningful wealth—and a natural dignity—he’d possessed at the beginning.

I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. …

So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. …

“What Life Means to Me” culminates as a Socialist testimony, but it’s more than manifesto. Beyond its political position, it rings with belief in the human spirit. It affirms the private struggles of individuals passionately pursuing their dreams despite the threats of a lean pocketbook, lifelong obscurity, limitations imposed by class, or the scorn of their contemporaries.

I look forward to a time when man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day. And last of all, my faith is in the working-class. As some Frenchman has said, “The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.”

Read “What Life Means to Me” in its entirety here.

You might also enjoy:

“Time for Everything”

“Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within“