12 Books of Boyhood. #5

Dad’s mother was a very straightlaced lady, resolutely upper middle class, the widow of a senior-ish Canberra public servant, who never pretended she wasn’t unhappy that her oldest son had married an unpolished country girl.
I no longer have the copy of The Iron Heel which she gave me at the beginning of sixth form but I can only imagine she thought Jack London-wolves-goldmining, this’ll be safe, when in fact it’s the Communist Manifesto rendered as fiction and set me firmly on the path to revolutionary socialism.
Not suddenly, but definitely. I had been notionally anyway a Fabian for a couple of years; at uni the Fabians packed me off to the Anarchists; and the conscription/Vietnam War debate meant that I spent my second and third first years (I eventually did five before I managed a second year) mostly with SDS and the anti-war movement. After that I was married, a truck driver, and my politics went back to being theoretical.
It also led me to being a Jack London fan and seeking out information about him, though all I remember now is that he was a working class boy, self-educated, and later, when he prospered he had a big block in San Francisco with Australian eucalypts down the bottom of the garden under which lived some hobo-philosophers. The one book of his I never read and always wanted to was The People of the Abyss (1903) about the London underclass. Wiki says it inspired Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.
It seems Jack London (1876-1916) wasn’t completely self-educated, but was in and out of school, making it into U. Cal. Berkley before dropping out. By the time The Iron Heel came out in 1908, London had been an oyster pirate, prospected for gold in the Klondike, reported on the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, been married twice, had 10 or so novels to his credit including Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), and had toured America lecturing on socialism. The ‘big block’ I remember was a 1,000 acre ranch on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain, now Jack London State Historic Park.
He died at age 40, on the porch of his ranch house, while ill, alcoholic, and self-administering (over the counter!) morphine and opium for pain relief.
The Introduction to the Penguin edition pictured above is written by Jonathon Auerbach who writes that the term ‘Iron Heel’ was in circulation in the latter 1800s, being used by Henry James to refer to the patriarchy – women “trampled under the iron heel of man”; and by President Grover Cleveland, who uses it much as London did 20 years later – referring to “trusts, combinations and monopolies” with “the citizen … trampled to death beneath an iron heel.” They/we don’t make politicians like that anymore.
The book tells the story of revolutionary hero Ernest Everhard (how Freudian is it to give yourself a name like that) and takes the form of a manuscript written by Everhard’s wife, Avis, and discovered and annotated seven centuries later when a utopian Brotherhood of Man has finally been achieved.
Of course the point of this is London can make his alter ego as valiant and all-seeing as he likes and then (mildly) disparage himself through his wife’s mostly hero-worshipping observations and the future editor Meredith’s detachment. I have always thought this novel the very worst example of a guy writing from a woman’s POV, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t so bothered this time around.
I’m not going to persuade any of you to pick up this book, unless there are some young radicals among my wider readership. As fiction it is barely readable. The first half is a series of lectures, framed as Avis’s university professor father inviting Everhard to dinner to debate politics with various corporate lawyers, capitalists and a well-meaning bishop.
“Amongst the revolutionists I found, also, warm faith in the human, ardent idealism, sweetness of unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom – all the splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was clean, noble, and 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.”
To which the corporate lawyer responds:
“We have no words to waste on you. When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine guns will our answer be couched. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces.”
Throughout, London uses the historian seven centuries ahead to comment in often extensive footnotes. After this speech he quotes from Ambrose Bierce’s The Cynic’s Word Book (1906): “Grape-shot, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.”
Everhard challenges Avis to tour the slums with him, to see how injured men were discarded by the mills and denied compensation; the slave-like conditions worked by men, women and children. She (and the bishop) are brought round to his point of view. The professor is offered the opportunity to denounce Everhard, refuses, loses his position and is defrauded of his shareholdings and his home and must himself live in the slums.
London is writing at a time when revolutions were in the air, in France over the previous century; in Russia, with Feb and Oct 1917 to come; even meek and mild Australia, which had just elected the world’s first Labour government. And at a time of immensely unequal wealth. “… in the United States, only nine-tenths of one per cent are from the Plutocracy, yet the Putocracy owns seventy per cent of the total wealth.”
As it turns out, we avoided London’s revolution by the creation of a large and prosperous middle class – which eventually included the great majority of workers – who were happy to go along with Capitalism, for as long as that grotesque disparity in wealth was flattened out. Neo-liberalism, Thatcher and Regan began the end of that period in the 1980s, and now we are back with London 120 years ago, but with a more quiescent working class, possibly because of the distribution of manufacturing work to Asia and the huge and ongoing influx of migrant workers into all the western economies.
In 1912, that is, a few years in London’s future (yes, this is dystopian SF), the Socialists, and the small business Grange Party win a large part of the vote, but the Oligarchy, the party of big business, which London calls the Trusts, control the courts, as we are seeing once again, and their victories are meaningless.
A general strike in the US and in Germany, averts War, but the Oligarchy learns its lesson too well and sets out to crush the workers. First, as it always does, buy paying some workers very well so that they will act against the interests of their fellows.
Then, all over the US, agents provocateurs in the employ of the Iron Heel instigate riots and revolts which are put down with massacres of workers and farmers. It is hard for us to consider farmers as revolutionaries but look at Steinbeck, two or three decades later and the small cotton farmers impoverished and forced off their land by the coming of large mechanised agri-businesses.
Congress is disrupted by a bomb and all the Socialists are arrested. The Revolution holds its fire, while its leaders, as did the ANC in S Africa in the 1970s, maintain control from their prison cells. Soon Everhard escapes (to the Sonoma ranch of “a writer friend of mine”). Revolution breaks out, but the Iron Heel prevails. Only the editor from the future, after the Second and Third Revolutions, gives us cause for hope.
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Jack London, The Iron Heel, first pub. 1908, this edition Penguin, 2006. 255pp
June’s “books of boyhood” will be Edgar Allan Poe. Specifically, The ‘Imp of the Perverse’ because I am often afflicted by it, but probably one other as well, maybe ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’.