Throughout those long weeks, London spent his time doing what many of the great novelists do. He sat back, sipped his coffee, listened, absorbed, and made Morrell’s story his own. Within days of Morrell’s departure, Jack London began writing his eighth and final novel.
The Star Rover is one of London’s most passionate books. The writing is tense and sparse, filled with a below-the-radar rage at the inhumanity of the inmate’s long nights of suffering and a romantic’s eye toward a life that could have been lived in a better place, under far more serene conditions. The novel is an intriguing mix of London’s writing at its best. With the eye of an artist, he sketches the warm bond of friendship shared by the prisoners, who are as relaxed swapping stories in their cells as he once had been in front of many campfires, surrounded by hard men with hard tales to tell. These passages are quickly followed by a deep and brutal plunge into their sinister reality, as those very same prisoners are beaten and strapped into their straitjackets and left to ponder the misery of their existence. The Star Rover is a work of pure power. It is written with energy and force, brilliantly marching between the nether worlds of brutality and beauty, horror and happiness, nightmares and daydreams.
When it was first published in 1915, the critics, growing weary of London’s page-turning and emotional sagas, were quickly put off and attacked the novel with a viciousness never directed at any of his prior works. This backlash discouraged readers from flocking to it as readily as they had to White Fang, Martin Eden, or The Sea-Wolf. But London was neither deterred nor disappointed. He had, as he always set out to do, told exactly the story he wanted to tell, in his own manner and under the weight and glory of his own words. To him and now to us, nearly ninety years later, The Star Rover is proof that a great work will always withstand the harshest tests that time can throw its way, outlast any critical assault, and survive the battle. According to Irving Stone’s brilliant biography of London, Sailor on Horseback, the author wrote a letter to one of the few critics who had praised The Star Rover. “If my stories are fierce,” he wrote, “then life is fierce. I think life is strong not fierce, and I try to make my stories as strong as life is strong.”
A few months before he died on November 22, 1916, a victim of either uremic or morphine poisoning, London answered a letter sent to him by a young woman growing weary of the struggles of a writer’s life. “The game is worth the candle,” London wrote. “Yes, indeed, the game is worth the candle.”
We have never had and may never have again a writer as strong as Jack London.
And his is a candle that will burn till the end of days.
LORENZO CARCATERRA is the author of the novels Sleepers, Apaches, Gangster, and Street Boys, and a memoir, A Safe Place. He lives in New York State.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
This edition of The Star Rover reprints the text of the first American edition, published by the Macmillan Company, New York, in 1915. Minor obvious typographical errors have been corrected for this edition.
CHAPTER I
All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me.—Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of your childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of forming—ay, of forming and forgetting.
You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these lines, you remember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places into which your child eyes peered. They seem dreams to you to-day. Yet, if they were dreams, dreamed then, whence the substance of them? Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest dreams is the stuff of our experiences. As a child, a wee child, you dreamed you fell great heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as things of the air fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and many-legged creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other faces nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than you know now, looking back, you ever looked upon.
Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness, of other-lifeness, of things that you had never seen in this particular world of your particular life. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds? Perhaps, when you have read all that I shall write, you will have received answers to the perplexities I have propounded to you, and that you yourself, ere you came to read me, propounded to yourself.
Wordsworth knew.
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