Sunday morning is one of my best times for reading, reflecting and exploration. Nothing much happens on Sunday unless a natural disaster or revolution takes place, making first-string journalists give up their weekend. So a while ago I came acdross this interesting conversation in a comments thread at Obsidian Wings where Dr. Science has posted a list of "Books of the year."
jrudkis: Old Book: Jack London's People of the Abyss
I think it is especially appropriate as we have one of our major political parties interested in going back to the work rules of 1906, and the current leader for the GOP nomination wants to put kids back to work.
I think it is also of interest as the UK was in the same relative state as an empire, had significant worker displacement due to "outsourcing" and automation.
Parts are a hard slog, but for me it was a cure for the GOP that was lurking inside me.
Plus it is a free download for Kindle.
Hartmut: I guess few people know today that Jack London was a dirty commie ;-). I didn't until I read The Iron Heel (in a GDR edition that somehow found it's way into the Siemens company library that served as the (semi-public) library in this part of town when I still went to school).
hairshirthedonist: Hartmut, I would guess it would be hard not to be a commie given the working/living conditions he describes. The Iron Heel was interesting too, but I found it dissappointing and incomplete. I did like his Scarlet Plague, though.
I think both London and Sinclair missed the rise of unions as a counter to the oligarchy and a correction to working conditions. Although maybe they were just wrong by a century or so.
"Parts are a hard slog, but for me it was a cure for the GOP that was lurking inside me." Do your parents know about this?:
jrudkis: "Do your parents know about this?"
yes, my mother accepted my "coming out" with grace, but dad is not speaking to me.
hairshirthedonist: I think he's more hard-headed since switching from Piels to Budweiser.
With yesterday's remembrance of Looking Backward in recent memory, this exchange piqued my curiosity about another old book. Sure enough it's another public domain book and People of the
Abyss can be found (for free) at the Guttenberg Project. I most likely won't get around to reading the whole book, but the first chapter and a random pick of Chapter Thirteen (Dan Cullen, Docker) gave me a general idea abouot the thrust of the book.
(Same is true, incidentally, of Uncle Tom's Cabin that Dr. Science also listed with very positive comments
...a revelation -- not *at all* what I was expecting. I'll be writing more about it later, but I'll just say that I think it's not a "sentimental novel", it's an emotional one. The characters are not stereotypes, as I had been led to expect, but are more realistic than those in, say, Dickens, and *far* more believable than those in Melville.
Several years ago I read a few chapters myself and was impressed the same way.)
The similarites of what is described in these books and today's news should not be a surprise to any student of history. But no matter how much we know intellectually, what we face personally (suffering of a family member, being the victim of a really bad accident, facing death) overcomes intellect with all the panic of running out of air under water. Readers here are smart enough to connect the dots connecting these old books with today's reports of demonstrations and protests in cities all over America as well as the rest of the world. Until the last few days I didn't know there was so much bad blood between Vladimir Putin and a large and growing number of Russians.
That said, Steve's vision of "The Collapse" and the End Times predictions of Christian Zionists are not that far apart. The agents of causation are not the same but they share a sense of helplessness confronting forces over which we have little meaningful control.So here is Chapter XIII of Jack London's People of the Abyss. I have not experienced the conditions described here but I am keenly aware that among the growing thousands of homeless people now found around American cities in every state there are conditions as bad or worse. There are individuals with the same measure of intelligence and industry. And there are tragedies every bit as quietly dramatic as what is described here.
CHAPTER XIII�DAN CULLEN, DOCKER
I stood, yesterday, in a room in one of the �Municipal Dwellings,� not far from Leman Street. If I looked into a dreary future and saw that I would have to live in such a room until I died, I should immediately go down, plump into the Thames, and cut the tenancy short.
It was not a room. Courtesy to the language will no more permit it to be called a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a mansion. It was a den, a lair. Seven feet by eight were its dimensions, and the ceiling was so low as not to give the cubic air space required by a British soldier in barracks. A crazy couch, with ragged coverlets, occupied nearly half the room. A rickety table, a chair, and a couple of boxes left little space in which to turn around. Five dollars would have purchased everything in sight. The floor was bare, while the walls and ceiling were literally covered with blood marks and splotches. Each mark represented a violent death�of an insect, for the place swarmed with vermin, a plague with which no person could cope single-handed.
The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was dying in hospital. Yet he had impressed his personality on his miserable surroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what sort of man he was. On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi, Engels, Dan Burns, and other labour leaders, while on the table lay one of Walter Besant�s novels. He knew his Shakespeare, I was told, and had read history, sociology, and economics. And he was self-educated.
On the table, amidst a wonderful disarray, lay a sheet of paper on which was scrawled: Mr. Cullen, please return the large white jug and corkscrew I lent you�articles loaned, during the first stages of his sickness, by a woman neighbour, and demanded back in anticipation of his death. A large white jug and a corkscrew are far too valuable to a creature of the Abyss to permit another creature to die in peace. To the last, Dan Cullen�s soul must be harrowed by the sordidness out of which it strove vainly to rise.
It is a brief little story, the story of Dan Cullen, but there is much to read between the lines. He was born lowly, in a city and land where the lines of caste are tightly drawn. All his days he toiled hard with his body; and because he had opened the books, and been caught up by the fires of the spirit, and could �write a letter like a lawyer,� he had been selected by his fellows to toil hard for them with his brain. He became a leader of the fruit-porters, represented the dockers on the London Trades Council, and wrote trenchant articles for the labour journals.
He did not cringe to other men, even though they were his economic masters, and controlled the means whereby he lived, and he spoke his mind freely, and fought the good fight. In the �Great Dock Strike� he was guilty of taking a leading part. And that was the end of Dan Cullen. From that day he was a marked man, and every day, for ten years and more, he was �paid off� for what he had done.
A docker is a casual labourer. Work ebbs and flows, and he works or does not work according to the amount of goods on hand to be moved. Dan Cullen was discriminated against. While he was not absolutely turned away (which would have caused trouble, and which would certainly have been more merciful), he was called in by the foreman to do not more than two or three days� work per week. This is what is called being �disciplined,� or �drilled.� It means being starved. There is no politer word. Ten years of it broke his heart, and broken-hearted men cannot live.
He took to his bed in his terrible den, which grew more terrible with his helplessness. He was without kith or kin, a lonely old man, embittered and pessimistic, fighting vermin the while and looking at Garibaldi, Engels, and Dan Burns gazing down at him from the blood-bespattered walls. No one came to see him in that crowded municipal barracks (he had made friends with none of them), and he was left to rot.
But from the far reaches of the East End came a cobbler and his son, his sole friends. They cleansed his room, brought fresh linen from home, and took from off his limbs the sheets, greyish-black with dirt. And they brought to him one of the Queen�s Bounty nurses from Aldgate.
She washed his face, shook up his conch, and talked with him. It was interesting to talk with him�until he learned her name. Oh, yes, Blank was her name, she replied innocently, and Sir George Blank was her brother. Sir George Blank, eh? thundered old Dan Cullen on his death-bed; Sir George Blank, solicitor to the docks at Cardiff, who, more than any other man, had broken up the Dockers� Union of Cardiff, and was knighted? And she was his sister? Thereupon Dan Cullen sat up on his crazy couch and pronounced anathema upon her and all her breed; and she fled, to return no more, strongly impressed with the ungratefulness of the poor.
Dan Cullen�s feet became swollen with dropsy. He sat up all day on the side of the bed (to keep the water out of his body), no mat on the floor, a thin blanket on his legs, and an old coat around his shoulders. A missionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth fourpence (I saw them), and proceeded to offer up fifty prayers or so for the good of Dan Cullen�s soul. But Dan Cullen was the sort of man that wanted his soul left alone. He did not care to have Tom, Dick, or Harry, on the strength of fourpenny slippers, tampering with it. He asked the missionary kindly to open the window, so that he might toss the slippers out. And the missionary went away, to return no more, likewise impressed with the ungratefulness of the poor.
The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unaneled and unsung, went privily to the head office of the big fruit brokers for whom Dan Cullen had worked as a casual labourer for thirty years. Their system was such that the work was almost entirely done by casual hands. The cobbler told them the man�s desperate plight, old, broken, dying, without help or money, reminded them that he had worked for them thirty years, and asked them to do something for him.
�Oh,� said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to refer to the books, �you see, we make it a rule never to help casuals, and we can do nothing.�
Nor did they do anything, not even sign a letter asking for Dan Cullen�s admission to a hospital. And it is not so easy to get into a hospital in London Town. At Hampstead, if he passed the doctors, at least four months would elapse before he could get in, there were so many on the books ahead of him. The cobbler finally got him into the Whitechapel Infirmary, where he visited him frequently. Here he found that Dan Cullen had succumbed to the prevalent feeling, that, being hopeless, they were hurrying him out of the way. A fair and logical conclusion, one must agree, for an old and broken man to arrive at, who has been resolutely �disciplined� and �drilled� for ten years. When they sweated him for Bright�s disease to remove the fat from the kidneys, Dan Cullen contended that the sweating was hastening his death; while Bright�s disease, being a wasting away of the kidneys, there was therefore no fat to remove, and the doctor�s excuse was a palpable lie. Whereupon the doctor became wroth, and did not come near him for nine days.
Then his bed was tilted up so that his feet and legs were elevated. At once dropsy appeared in the body, and Dan Cullen contended that the thing was done in order to run the water down into his body from his legs and kill him more quickly. He demanded his discharge, though they told him he would die on the stairs, and dragged himself, more dead than alive, to the cobbler�s shop. At the moment of writing this, he is dying at the Temperance Hospital, into which place his staunch friend, the cobbler, moved heaven and earth to have him admitted.
Poor Dan Cullen! A Jude the Obscure, who reached out after knowledge; who toiled with his body in the day and studied in the watches of the night; who dreamed his dream and struck valiantly for the Cause; a patriot, a lover of human freedom, and a fighter unafraid; and in the end, not gigantic enough to beat down the conditions which baffled and stifled him, a cynic and a pessimist, gasping his final agony on a pauper�s couch in a charity ward,��For a man to die who might have been wise and was not, this I call a tragedy.�
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