Walmart to Wolf House: Sonoma County Essays
Page 11
The Wolf House’s living room was 18 x 58 feet with a soaring two story, raftered ceiling. Unfinished balconies ringed the second story. An alcove in the living room housed Charmian’s Steinway grand piano, which seemed out of place opposite the huge stone fireplace that provided warmth and an atmosphere that had to appear medieval.
“My house,” Jack wrote, “will be standing, act of God permitting for a thousand years.” There is no doubt that Jack planned Wolf House as a monument to his legacy and as a remedy for his imagined lack of a real home as a child.
But he never spent one night in his dream home. On the night of August 22, 1913 the nearly completed, but unoccupied Wolf House burned to the ground.
Theories abound as to what, or who, may have caused the fire. Arson was immediately suspected. Charmian wrote a friend following the fire, “We lost nearly $50,000 net, Jack tells me. But more than any financial loss is the deep hurt that we have felt over the wanton destruction of so much beauty, the deepest hurt lies in the indisputable fact that it was set afire by some enemy.”
Despite his carefully cultivated image as “Champion of the Common Man” Jack had no short supply of enemies. A crusader for Socialism at the turn of the century, Jack’s fervor waned as his income increased. He became everything that he formerly despised: a wealthy, aristocratic land owner. His Socialist friends who had helped, probably more than any editor or publishing house, to make Jack a popular and widely read author felt betrayed. Jack wrote his resignation from the party: I am resigning from the Socialist Party because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle. I was originally a member of the old, revolutionary, up-on-its-hind-legs, fighting Socialist Labor Party. Since the whole trend of Socialism in the United States of recent years has been one of peaceableness and compromise, I find that my mind refuses further sanction of my remaining a party member. Jack mailed his resignation, citing the party’s “lack of fire and fight” from Honolulu, where he was vacationing with Charmian.
Jack had also dammed Graham Creek where it flowed through his property, cutting off water to adjacent farms, making him less than popular with his neighbors. The week before the fire Jack had fired a ranch hand for not feeding his dogs properly. He was also notoriously stingy with the construction workers, docking them a day’s pay for any work missed or botched. It would have been incredibly easy for a disgruntled employee or vengeful Socialist zealot to hide in the surrounding redwoods until nightfall and then torch the structure.
After the fire, around the hamlet of Glen Ellen there were rumors that Charmian, tired of Jack’s well-documented drinking and womanizing actually started the fire to take away from Jack what he cherished most in this world: his legacy for the future, Wolf House.
There was also some speculation that Jack London set the fire himself. His writing career had stagnated and he was deep in debt. He was submitting previously published short stories, with different titles, to new magazines in order to generate income. Four weeks before the fire, on July 21, 1913 he had taken out an insurance policy. After the claim was settled (incredibly, in eight days) Jack wrote the following letter to the National Union Fire Insurance Company:
Gentlemen:
Most satisfactory and gratifying has been the promptness with which your representatives appeared on the scene of my fire, investigated the matter and settled the claim. So pleasant has our relationship been, that I feel my catastrophe was almost worth while in order to learn that there was such quick, straight dealing in this world.
Sincerely,
Jack London
Hardly the words of a man heartbroken over the loss of a house anticipated for ten years, built to last 1000, and burned to the foundation before he moved in. But perhaps Jack anticipated the fire as well, There is little more to say about this house I am to build seven or ten years from now. There is plenty of time in which to work up all the details in accord with the general principles I have laid down. It will be a usable house and a beautiful house, wherein the aesthetic guest can find comfort for his eyes as well as for his body. It will be a happy house—or else I’ll burn it down.
The ruins of Wolf House, gutted and never occupied, serves as an even more apt monument; an almost perfectly macabre and mysterious shrine to Jack London’s memory; to his spirit which was never, truly, at peace or at home anywhere.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
At 6:30 P.M., November 21, 1916, Jack London partook of his dinner. He was taken during the night with what was supposed to be an acute attack of indigestion. This however, proved to be a gastro-intestinal type of uraemia. He lapsed into coma and died at 7:45 P.M., November 22.
Dr. W.S. Porter
Dr. A.M. Thompson
Dr. W.B. Hays
Dr. J.W. Shiels
As in life, Jack’s death was surrounded with controversy and mystery. Despite the Death Certificate that listed “Uraemic Poisoning” as the cause of death, the newspapers erroneously reported that Jack died of food poisoning several hours after eating a hearty meal. This confusing and contradictory news reports provided fuel for those who believed that Jack had committed suicide. Jesse B. Rittenhouse wrote, “There has been some speculation as to whether London took his own life, but I can say that George Sterling told me that he did….”
Although the jury will always be out on the possibility of suicide, it is highly unlikely. The day he died he sent his daughters a note making an appointment to take them out before leaving for New York City and he exhibited, although he was in terrible, constant pain from kidney disease, no other signs of wanting to end his life. Historian Andrew Sinclair concluded, “That he sped his death unintentionally by taking too large a dose of narcotics that evening. Yet even without that assistance he would soon have died from the kidney disease.”
H.L. Mencken said simply, “I daresay Jack London’s finish was due to his chronic alcoholism in youth. He was a fearful drinker for years and ran to hard liquor.”
After his death, Jack’s books became American Classics.
Charmian never remarried.
Wolf House was never rebuilt and was donated to the California Park System in 1960.
Jack London’s ashes are buried beneath a stone from the foundation of the Wolf House, just a quarter-mile from his ill-fated almost home.
Ninety years after his death Jack remains a hero, a Sonoma County legend, and an enigma.
APOLOGIA
It requires a blithe arrogance to comment upon and judge the life and actions of a fellow human. Because, in the end, that is all we can be: human. The lives of the greatest and most brilliant are fraught with doubt, indecision and frailty. With all I’ve said and pronounced about Gentleman Jack London there exists, for me, a bond between us. I’ve always wanted to be a writer and he’s the biggest example of a writer I had as a boy growing up in Sonoma County. I’ve always been disappointed that the quality of his writing never measured up, for me, to the literary status he’s been given, but Jack has always been an inspiration to me, his work ethic (he published 41 books) and his maverick spirit. And I must admit that walking, beneath the redwoods, past his grave; to sit in the shadows of the ruins of Wolf House is the closest I’ve ever come to treading on sacred ground.
The End
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About the Author
Rob Loughran has published over 200 articles and 40 short stories in national magazines. He has eight children and 16 grandchildren. He has trod, repeatedly, upon most of the trails and beaches in Sonoma County.
Walmart to Wolf House: Sonoma County Essays is his 24th book but he also enjoys a career as a failed screenwriter. Rob’s “day job” is waiting tables at The Farmhouse Inn, Forestville, CA.
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