Strenuous Life

SAILOR ON HORSEBACK--Irving Stone--Houghton Mifflin ($3).

Theodore Roosevelt characterized his age when he preached the virtues of the strenuous life. To later students, that period looks more like a hyperthyroid era of American history--an era marked by strident praise of action for the sake of action, when Richard Harding Davis was reporting breathless adventures in South America, Roosevelt I was hunting in Africa, and an inclusive, optimistic belief in the value of a he-man-diet of sleeping under the stars, and spending hours in the saddle suffused popular literature.

Laureate of the hyperthyroid era was Jack London, socialist and believer in Nordic supremacy, who wrote 50 books in 16 years and lived as strenuously as the he-men he wrote about. In Sailor on Horseback, Irving Stone, whose novelized biography of van Gogh, Lust for Life, was a best-seller four years ago, gives a good picture of London's incredible literary labors, a good account of his strenuous domestic life, a dim picture of the period in which his books flourished. Originally serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, Sailor on Horseback is brisk and candid, has few of the selfconscious, lugubrious literary passages that weighed down Lust for Life.

Author Stone makes much of the contradictions in London's career--his belief in socialism and his desire for wealth, his belief in sexual freedom and his desire for a quiet home life, his enormous good nature and his periods of despondency. Author Stone also tries to trace London's talent to his father, who was, he says, not John London but an eccentric, intelligent astrologer named Chaney. Whoever his father was, London spent such an adventurous youth that his stored-up experiences were good for 16 years of novel writing. He had been an oyster pirate in San Francisco Bay, a sourdough in Alaska, a sailor, barber, patrolman, tramp, marcher in Coxey's Army, when at 23 his stones won national attention. Thereafter his life settled to its pattern: he was always broke, although he made a lot of money; he was always successful, always in trouble with women. Robbed right and left (he lent $50,000 to friends, could collect only $50 when in need), he sank $34,000 in his ill-fated yawl, the Snark, and lost $70,000 when a great house he built burned as he prepared to move in.

Author Stone, himself a smart and self-confident young man, admires the youthful London and all his works for reasons that appear a bit superficial. As critics pointed out when Sailor on Horseback was serialized, some of its best passages are lifted from London's autobiography (John Barleycorn) with a mere transposition of pronouns from "I" to "he."

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