"Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well."
"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot... The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
"Fiction pays best of all and when it is of fair quality is more easily sold. A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration... Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it."
The Aushra-namesake typing ("Jack London" was Aushra's nickname for the LIE type) is sometimes treated as a mere label, and the emotional biography (the oyster pirate, the hobo, the Klondike, the typhoons, the war zones) tempts a different reading than the archetypical businessman, but his adventures, examined closely, all turn out to have business plans attached. London (1876-1916) indeed was an LIE, albeit with an accent of passionate emotion and global concern.
At fifteen, London became an oyster pirate on San Francisco Bay. He was earning ten cents an hour in a cannery; a night raid on the oyster beds could bring more than a month of that. In typical for the type love for calculated risk, he borrowed three hundred dollars from his old nurse and bought a sloop, the Razzle-Dazzle, as capital equipment. A teenager reasoning in return-on-investment. And when the law began closing in and the other side started paying, he switched, without apparent anguish, to the Fish Patrol — chasing his former colleagues in a quite typical lack of a stubborn adherence to a side; there is a pragmatic reading the changed situation and repositioning.
Klondike was a gold rush, a consciously undertaken and funded expedition with a payoff in mind (the target, gold, turned out to be false; the material he mined there made his fortune instead, and he knew its value at once). The famous voyage of the yacht Snark was an adventure carried out with the precision of an organized venture: a yacht built especially for him, a carefully charted course spanning a seven-year period of sailing around the globe, all financed with written contracts sold prior to departure – wanderlust on schedule. The same is true of Beauty Ranch, which marked the final decade of London's life, another ambitious program of scientific farming: terraces acquired through Asian technique, the famous "Pig Palace" hog ranch – London himself cheerfully confessing, "I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate." Few great writers have ever been so frank that the prose served the enterprise. The forward orientation was constant: always the next project, organizing the present from out of the future — the voyage, the book, the ranch, the house. He planned his life for years ahead, and executed the plan.
Also typically, London was a workaholic. Every morning, he produced works with industrial regularity — sick or well, at sea or ashore, hungover or in love, for his entire working life. Over fifty books in under twenty years, from a man who also farmed, sailed, ranched, and entertained half of California. A type that lives by the situation rather than the plan does not produce a fixed daily quota for two decades.
A 100% "pure" LIE, though, does not write that "ashes rather than dust" emotionally maximalist credo. He deliberately chased intensity of feeling. Nor does a "pure" LIE spend years on the collective fate of mankind. London went undercover into the East End slums to write The People of the Abyss, living among the destitute to document industrial civilization's human wreckage; he wrote The Iron Heel, an apocalyptic vision of oligarchy and revolution; he signed himself "Yours for the Revolution" and lectured for socialism across the country for years, which is also quite unusual politics for the type (even if we keep in mind that type is only one of all things that determine your politics, and all of the other LIE's on this blog so far had more expected/stereotypical politics). This passionate-ideological layer, the "ascending" aka "Ti-Fe" love of strong emotion, the concern for global human questions, is a real accent and gives London his particular flavor, which sometimes make him look like an EIE. But he is very implausible Beta rational. He didn't rise by defeating rivals, breaking enemies, or bending anyone to his will; he rose by out-working and out-planning conditions. Even his fiction's most beloved protagonists are circumstance-overcomers in the purest form, like Buck and White Fang surviving against cold, hunger, and the wild (SLE scores the highest in wanting to "overcome" stuff, with LIE second place, but when it comes to "overcoming" circumstances and situations rather than people, LIE is first-place).
The most "Beta" character of London works is the cruel captain Wolf Larsen: he governs the Ghost entirely by fear and physical terror, relishes the crew's dread, crushes men as a demonstration of "might is right," despises weakness as a biological fact, and is a materialist brute with a high, albeit self-taught, intellect bolted on, which makes him articulate about his own brutality without softening it an inch. London insisted The Sea-Wolf was an attack on the Nietzschean superman — Larsen is deliberately destroyed by the plot, dying paralyzed and alone, his strength rotting out from under him. Martin Eden, a more autobiographical character, sits on the author's own side of the line for contrast — the writer grinding his way up through circumstance by work-discipline.
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