In the “brush,” of course, Darling finds relief, “feeling that the sunshine was an elixir of health.” He studies the robust, carefree animals, and concludes that they are “splendidly vigorous” because “they lived naturally, while he lived most unnaturally.” By the time London meets him in Tahiti, and despite the efforts of insanity commissions to certify him for his dissidence, he is almost entirely self-sufficient and has imitated the natural world to such an extent that his health—considered ruined by the experts—is “perfect.” As with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous emphasis on the relative “manhood” of the American and the New Zealander in his essay “Self-Reliance,” in which Emerson claimed that “the white man has lost his aboriginal strength,” the “natural” is equated with the recovery of a masculinity perceived as being under threat from a “feminizing” modernity.

Such yearning for authenticity is played out in many of London’s best Pacific tales. In “Koolau the Leper,” for example, Koolau’s empathy with the land and desire for freedom enable him to triumph over the “blue-eyed” American police, as London illustrates the injustices of disease and the natives’ loss of their land. “The Heathen” traces the moral education of the American narrator, Charley, whose life is saved and then transformed by Otoo, the “heathen” whose physical and moral courage act as the model of good behavior. A similar pattern is enacted in “The House of Pride,” in which the contrast between the overcivilized Percival Ford and his half-brother, the half-Kanaka Joe Garland reiterates London’s enthusiasm for pleasure and hostility to the “righteous” New England Puritanism that (for him) continues to dictate a repressive and regimented lifestyle to too many of his countrymen.

London’s late tales, mostly collected posthumously in On the Makaloa Mat (1919), go even further in their challenge to dominant American values. It is important to note not only the content of such stories—myths and detailed histories of the times before colonization, usually ignored by white chroniclers—but also their form. Tales like “The Bones of Kahekili” and “Shin-Bones” do more than analyze and record other cultures. Rather, they incorporate the native tradition of spoken storytelling within their structure, in a fusion of orality and literacy, traditional myth and literary professionalism.

At the end of “Shin-Bones,” Prince Akuli, a figure located between the traditions of Hawaiian culture and the commercialism of modern life, comments that, “This is the twentieth century and we stink of gasoline.” In many ways, Akuli represents London’s attitude to life. The prince is part of an ancient dynasty and is fully conversant with its traditions. On the other hand, he has been educated in England, been an officer in the British army, and has a love of expensive automobiles. Akuli’s embrace of the new, and knowledge of oral history point toward the dilemma apparent in so many of London’s short stories about the Pacific. On the one hand, figures such as David Grief or Prince Akuli are adventurers and nature lovers, constantly testing themselves against the land and other men. On the other, they are in the vanguard of the colonization of that world and illustrate London’s belief that such transformation is inevitable. As a result, their actions are instrumental in the destruction of the lifestyle that Grief epitomizes, and create a sense of pessimism in many of the tales. Although stories such as “The Heathen” do offer the possibility of self-transformation, London suggests that the spaces for such personal fulfillment are rapidly being eradicated. At the very moment when other cultures are seen to be disappearing in the face of industrialization and global capitalism, the sense of alienation felt by London’s white American protagonists in their own society means that they must look toward and identify with the very Otherness they are simultaneously helping to destroy.

FROM HOUSE OF PRIDE
AND OTHER TALES OF HAWAII

THE HOUSE OF PRIDE

Percival Ford wondered why he had come. He did not dance. He did not care much for army people. Yet he knew them all—gliding and revolving there on the broad lanai of the Seaside, the officers in their fresh-starched uniforms of white, the civilians in white and black, and the women bare of shoulders and arms. After two years in Honolulu the Twentieth was departing to its new station in Alaska, and Percival Ford, as one of the big men of the Islands, could not help knowing the officers and their women.

But between knowing and liking was a vast gulf. The army women frightened him just a little. They were in ways quite different from the women he liked best—the elderly women, the spinsters and the bespectacled maidens, and the very serious women of all ages whom he met on church and library and kindergarten committees, who came meekly to him for contributions and advice. He ruled those women by virtue of his superior mentality, his great wealth, and the high place he occupied in the commercial baronage of Hawaii. And he was not afraid of them in the least. Sex, with them, was not obtrusive. Yes, that was it. There was in them something else, or more, than the assertive grossness of life. He was fastidious; he acknowledged that to himself; and these army women, with their bare shoulders and naked arms, their straight-looking eyes, their vitality and challenging femaleness, jarred upon his sensibilities.

Nor did he get on better with the army men, who took life lightly, drinking and smoking and swearing their way through life and asserting the essential grossness of flesh no less shamelessly than their women. He was always uncomfortable in the company of the army men. They seemed uncomfortable, too. And he felt, always, that they were laughing at him up their sleeves, or pitying him, or tolerating him.