In October 1873, Chaney was passing through San Francisco and encountered a turn of fortune that surely only an astrologer would have believed. First, a pickpocket stole his money even as he was intending to purchase a ticket home to New York; then an unidentified “gentleman” advanced him the money to hire Dashaway Hall and lecture, in exchange for half the proceeds. Chaney was a crack speaker and debater, and was soon set up again, spending the winter in San Jose. By May 1874 he had again saved money for a fare home, when he received a letter from his wife that she had divorced him, proclaiming her own freedom to remarry but threatening that if he dared to wed again she would expose him as a cad and bounder. Three weeks later Chaney defiantly opened his relationship with Flora Wellman. While in his memoir he claimed her as his fourth wife, there is no evidence that they married, and he later denied that they had.4 They ensconced themselves in the San Francisco boardinghouse where the Chronicle’s reporter later found them, with all its color and nonconformity. She gave séances and piano lessons, and promoted his lectures and publications.
The times were lively. San Francisco had become a center of interest in spiritualism, and many of the best-known mediums visited and lectured there. Chaney and Flora came into the circle of William N. Slocum and his wife, Amanda. Slocum worked for the Chronicle’s competitor, the San Francisco Bulletin , and edited a brand-new reformist periodical called Common Sense, A Journal of Live Ideas, which advocated a hodgepodge of spiritualism, astrology, labor reform, women’s rights, and free love, and to which Chaney began contributing articles.5 When it went under in May 1875, Chaney undertook to edit and publish his own pamphlet-size periodical, the Philomathean (“lover of learning”), but that effort was disrupted with Flora’s announcement of her pregnancy and her admission (according to Chaney) of an affair with a man named Lee Smith, because of which, he said, “the lodgers were leaving on account of her being known as ‘Miss Wellman,’ ‘Mrs. Smith’ & ‘Mrs. Chaney’ all at the same time.”6
Soon after came her suicide attempts. She ventured to kill herself once with laudanum and once with a handgun that partially misfired, if it fired at all, as related in the sensational article in the San Francisco Chronicle. The piece was reprinted as far away as New England, where two of Chaney’s sisters saw it, believed it, and cut off all contact with him. Amid the recriminations that followed, a small mob threatened to hang Chaney from a lamppost. Eventually he fled the city in December 1875 for Oregon, St. Louis, and eventually Chicago—acquiring and shedding two more wives along the way.
Abandoned and destitute, Flora was cast onto the mercy of friends and moved in with the Slocums at 615 Third Street. It was in their house, on January 12, 1876, that Flora was delivered of a baby boy.
Whether for legal reasons or to insist upon recognition of her principal relationship, she named the infant John Griffith (the name of a favorite nephew) Chaney. Always waiflike in size and appearance, Flora now appeared wan and listless to a degree that was judged dangerous. Weighing just ninety pounds, she had given birth to a boy who weighed nine. The doctor recommended that she engage a wet nurse and suggested Virginia Prentiss, an African-American woman who had suffered a stillbirth on the same day Flora’s son was born. At first people judged Flora’s indifference to her baby as a result of her exhaustion, but over time, and with repeated reference to him as her “Badge of Shame,” it became clear that she was barren of maternal instinct and felt no affection for him whatsoever. His illegitimacy was no secret, for Flora had used her increasingly obvious condition to decry the wrong done her and to win the sympathy of understanding clients.
Virginia Prentiss took the infant to her house near Nob Hill, where she lived with her carpenter husband, Alonzo, who was sometimes described as being white but who was actually a light-skinned quadroon—three-quarters white but still legally black.7 So recently bereaved herself, “Jennie” Prentiss poured affection on “Johnny.” She called him her “white pickaninny,” and after a fever caused his black hair to fall and regrow for a time as white, he was her “cottonball.” She became the first mother figure in Jack London’s life. She herself had had a shattered childhood; born a slave and torn from her mother at the auction block, she took the name Virginia for the state where she had been born. Relocated to Tennessee and the Nashville-area plantation of a family named Parker, she at least had the fortune to be a house servant and not a field hand, serving as companion to the family’s youngest daughter. After the plantation was sacked by Union troops, she endured all the horrors of the refugee, not being spared even the humiliation of roadside begging for herself and her former mistress.8 They reached St. Louis, where relatives took in Mrs. Parker but turned Virginia away. She supported herself with domestic work until she could return to Nashville, where she kept house for the family of Alonzo and Ruth Prentiss. He had been an officer with the 49th Ohio during the war, but his career was cut short when it was discovered that his mother was a mulatto and he was discharged—albeit honorably, in deference to his creditable service to that point. After the Prentiss’s marriage ended, Alonzo married Virginia and they had two children of their own, Will and Annie. They relocated to Chicago and then in 1873 to San Francisco, where they believed his carpentry skills would still be in demand despite the financial panic that seized the nation that year.
From all she had observed of white people and the black experience, Jennie Prentiss formed the opinion, which she was never shy about expressing, that black people were superior to whites. She carried herself with pride, dressed with taste, and regarded her own exceptionally dark pigmentation as a badge of distinction, but the affection she gave to her cottonball, Johnny Chaney, was no less than she gave her own children. In partial payment for Virginia Prentiss’s taking Johnny off her hands, Flora, a gifted seamstress, stitched several fine shirts for Alonzo. In his carpentry, he had done some work for one John London, a forty-eight-year-old widower from Iowa with a fine, prominent brow and vast beard, with two small daughters then living in the Protestant Orphanage for want of a household. The possibility of a match seemed to be there, and the Prentisses introduced him to Flora.
London had grown up hale, a Pennsylvania farmer and then a crew boss laying railroad track, but his Civil War service in the Illinois Volunteers cost him several sieges of pneumonia and the use of one lung. He had moved his family to Iowa to build a railroad bridge and then settled them on a farm near Moscow, where his pleasant fairness and generosity won him the friendship of local Pawnee Indians. His wife died soon after giving birth to their eleventh child (and the ninth to survive). London had come to California when doctors had recommended the climate for his son, who had suffered a chest injury playing baseball. In spite of the change, the boy died soon after the move, leaving London with his two youngest daughters who had come with them, compelling him to place the girls in the orphanage until he could make a home for them. Though partially disabled, John London was yet a man of steady habits, high morals, and a kind and sympathetic nature, and he was willing to work as hard as his health would permit. The recent deaths in his family had shaken his once solid Methodist faith to the point that he was dabbling in spiritualism, making Flora a natural confidante. In John London, Flora found a second chance at respectability, and she was willing to raise Eliza, then eight, and Ida, who was five.
They exchanged wedding vows on September 7, 1876. Her name on the marriage certificate read “Flora Chaney,” although the record is silent on her having ever undertaken the formality of a divorce. London’s girls were redeemed from the orphanage, leaving young Johnny the only child left out of the equation; Flora was in no hurry to reclaim him, so he remained with his wet nurse. Exactly when he joined the London family is uncertain, but even after nominal custody was restored, he often stayed with the Prentiss family when Flora needed to be free of him. He grew up adoring his “Mammy Jennie,” a name that, considering her antebellum history, she thoroughly disliked, but could never break him of calling her, even after he grew up.
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bsp; Home life was unstable. At home, the greater part of caring for the baby fell on his stepsister, Eliza London, and the resulting bond lasted throughout Johnny’s life. London was eking out a living as a carpenter and door-to-door salesman for the Victor Sewing Machine Company, and within a couple of years the family had moved four times. They were living in a rented six-room flat on Folsom Street when Eliza was ten and Johnny was two and both contracted diphtheria, at one point lying so near death that Flora made an inquiry as to whether they might save some money by burying them together in one coffin. After their recovery, on the doctor’s advice, John London fled San Francisco and its rampant diphtheria, not to mention its cost of living, and moved his family across the bay to Oakland. There he acquired enough land to resume his former farming life, and his small market garden prospered, to the degree that he acquired a certain fame for the quality of his produce. It was a lower-middle-class living, honest and rewarding and adequate, but it was never good enough for Flora, who remembered her childhood of luxury in a seventeen-room mansion.
London was able to open his own store at the corner of Campbell Street and Seventh, and at Flora’s urging he took on a partner named Sowell to expand the operation more rapidly. They even moved in with the Sowell family, but within a short time, somehow, London lost his half of the business to his unsavory partner and in 1881 the family packed up and moved down the bay to work a small farm near Alameda. As an adult Jack London recalled being left alone briefly in a room full of packed boxes, seized with the terror of abandonment, hearing only the sound of the woman next door beating out her carpet in the yard.
The following year, Johnny at age six started primary education at the West End School. Unlike most boys of his class and era, he took to formal schooling willingly, thanks in part to his mother’s early efforts. There were some ways in which the later Jack London, and through London his biographers, have painted the bitter and frustrated Flora in too dark colors. She did teach him to read at a very early age—Eliza recalled that he could already read when he started school—and once he attended regularly, Flora visited with his teachers to check on his progress.
Johnny’s education in life also assimilated an important lesson at this time. One of his daily chores was to take his stepfather a pail of beer for afternoon refreshment from plowing. One day he grew curious about the brew, and one sip led to another. “First I sipped the foam,” he wrote of it later. “The precious-ness evaded me. Evidently it did not reside in the foam. Besides, the taste was not good.” Remembering that grown-ups often blew the foam from the top of the brew, he got down to the beer and liked it even less, but with the experiment begun, it had to go forward. “I was gulping it down like medicine, in nauseous haste to get the ordeal over.” Worried at having drunk so much, he remembered something else he had seen grown-ups do, and he took a stick and whipped up a new head of foam. “My father never noticed. He emptied the pail with the wide thirst of the sweating ploughman.” Johnny attempted to walk beside the horses but fell almost before the moving plow, narrowly escaping a terrible injury. Seeing that the boy was roundly drunk, John London carried him to some trees at the side of the field and laid him in the shade; by the time they returned to the house Johnny had become violently ill. In a later life of great familiarity with alcohol, beer was never his preference.9
Life in Alameda proved transitory. Ever busy and ever carping, Flora prevailed on John London to move again, on the day Johnny turned seven, to a larger farm in San Mateo County, south of San Francisco, six miles from the city of Colma. It was a more commercial venture to produce potatoes, and again London’s hard work started to make a success of it. He would take Johnny along with him on the great rumbling potato wagon as he made his deliveries, often stopping at the saloon in Colma for company and a beer. Here Johnny got his first taste of the warm and easy company of men, reveled in their solicitation and small gifts of a soda cracker or—an unforgettable occasion—a soft drink. This was a principal diversion, for life on the ranch was lonely, the school was inferior, and he had no playmates. Such neighbors as they had, some nearby Italians, thought it hilarious to get Johnny loaded on red wine, which also made him ill.
London’s success led to greater expansion, and before long the family moved again, back to the east side of the bay and twenty miles inland in Alameda County, to an eighty-seven-acre ranch near Livermore. Here London diversified: poultry, grapes, and fruit and olive trees, in addition to vegetables, and again London’s hard labor was rewarded. His “J.L.” brand of corn especially was sought out, and the family enjoyed the best conditions they had yet known. Johnny had a hard regimen of chores on the farm, but the school was better, and he remembered trying on his first pair of store-bought underwear. He also noted his father’s custom of selling only the most attractive produce; the Prentisses, who had moved across the bay so Mammy Jennie could be near her white child, got their pick of the culls, and the rest he gave to the poor.
Sensitive and reflective by nature, Johnny during these years fell in love with books. Always a precocious reader, he later recalled his enjoyment of John Townsend Trowbridge’s books for boys at the age of six. The following year he discovered the works of French author Paul du Chaillu, some of whose romantic adventures were cast in editions for young children, and just one of whose titles could set an excitable boy’s heart racing: Explorations & Adventures in Equatorial Africa; with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the Chace of the Gorilla, Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus, and Other Animals. Johnny was so taken with Washington Irving’s The Alhambra: A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and Spaniards that he built his own miniature Moorish palace with bricks that had fallen from the chimney, augmented with bits of wood and plaster. He had borrowed the book from a teacher, and after he had returned it, he wept the entire long distance home because he was not offered another one to borrow. Among the first nonfiction he remembered reading was a life of President James Garfield, who was assassinated in 1881. The book was titled From Canal Boy to President, and its author was Horatio Alger, with whose fictional works of optimism, hard work, and success Johnny also became familiar. He read the voyages of Captain Cook, which opened his lifelong love affair with works of the sea. He was also able to borrow dime novels and several titles of the popular Seaside Library of cheap reprints.10
By eight, he had read Ouida’s Signa, and throughout his life London averred that this was a transforming experience, a literary epiphany that set his feet down the road to becoming a writer. All this, even though he had found his copy of the work discarded on the roadside and missing its final forty pages. It was many years before he even learned the outcome of the story. This was a weighty testimonial for London to have made throughout his maturity; he wrote about it, among other places, in his autobiographical John Barleycorn and near the close of his life in a letter to a leader of the California Writer’s Club. Yet London’s biographers have shown a singular lack of curiosity about Ouida, and Signa itself.
“Ouida” was the nom de plume of Maria Louise Ramé, an English novelist with a French father, born in 1839, and best known today for her novels Under Two Flags (1867) and A Dog of Flanders (1872). She was prolific, and imagined herself the center of an influential salon that she sometimes hosted languidly from her bed, and she was wounded at being lampooned in Punch.11 Published the year before Jack London was born and the year after Ouida moved to Italy, Signa was the story of a simple Italian peasant boy, an illegitimate, who grows up to become a famous opera composer. Its opening lines demonstrate clearly the qualities that riveted the attention of a lonely boy who craved adventure, but they also show that London was not exaggerating when he described the book’s consciousness-altering effect on him, for the taproot of his own style is just as clearly seen there:He was only a little lad coming singing through the summer weather; singing as the birds do in the thickets, as the crickets do in the wheat at night, as the acacia bees do all the day long in the high tree tops in
the sunshine.
Only a little lad with brown eyes and bare feet, and a wistful heart driving his sheep and his goats, and carrying his sheaves of cane or millet, and working among the ripe grapes when the time came. . . .
Passengers come and go from the sea to the city, from the city to the sea, along the great iron highway, and perhaps they glance at the stern, ruined walls, at the white houses on the cliffs, at the broad river with its shining sands, at the blue hills with the poplars at their base, and the pines at the summits, and they say to one another that this is Signa.
But it is all that they ever do; it is only a glance.12
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 3