Dr. Makwa Speaks

: Sunday: Writer, Rejected

unmannedpress:

If you’re ever in Oakland, we invite you to get a beer with us at the Jack London bar, and we’ll drink to rejection. It will be fun. Plus, Jack London received hundreds of rejections before publishing a single story. Here is a fine example from The Saturday Evening Post. Apparently, the…

If you live in the Bay Area, you can hit Jack London’s birthplace in downtown San Francisco, his drinking hole in Oakland (where he bought his first boat), the university he attended, the castle he tried to build, and the room where he died. If you’re up to that sort of thing. I’m fascinated with Jack London not just because his books have meant a lot to me, and not just because he was an incredibly successful writer. When you look closely at his life, you see how successful Jack London is also closely associated with his grandiose failures. At Beauty Ranch in Sonoma, his literary rejections are on display, and there’s an exhibit that tells the story of his perilous “Cruise of the Snark,” a journey that was supposed to have lasted seven years but folded much earlier than that, and left him recovering in a hospital for months. His castle was supposed to stand for a thousand years, but instead burned down before he moved in. And on that ranch, he died of ailments brought on—or at least aided—by his alcoholism, a disease he claimed to have conquered in “John Barleycorn.” I’m not sure what to make of all of that; dreaming big made him successful, but you could argue that it considerably shortened his life. There’s a scene in Barleycorn where young Jack London is on a tiny skiff, fighting a nasty squall, and he admits being possessed with a suicidal contempt of nature, an overpowering hubris, a complete abandonment of self-preservation, and it strikes me that all of his endeavors—the Snark, the Wolf House, the battle with alcoholism, the writing, the socialist politics—recall that scene on the ocean, London soaked and battered by the storm, howling at God and ready to die. 

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    If you live in the Bay Area, you can hit Jack London’s birthplace in downtown San Francisco, his drinking hole in...

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    SONOMAAAAAH

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40. oldmanandtheblog said: I received my first *official* rejection letter this past year. I thought about framing it myself. Also, I’ll take you up on that drink.
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