Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  The prose is evocative but simple, employing repetitive similes using words not difficult, with a rich use of color and texture, leading to a breakneck change of focus. Signa indeed is Jack London in the literary womb, and for him to have assimilated the rough marble of his later chiseled style, in a lump, at the age of eight, testifies to a frighteningly precocious little mind. He once confided to Eliza that he would not marry before he was forty, and he intended to have a huge house, one great room of which would be chock-full of books. This was, however, to be one of the last childhood confidences that he shared with the stepsister who was his rock and his comfort.

  To Flora, the hard life of a farm wife was merely a waystation on the road back to luxury; only the hope of a future of ease sustained her through her labors. She bossed the family mercilessly, feigning heart attacks if she encountered resistance. Eliza and Johnny puzzled between themselves where the household money went. The truth was that Flora was sinking it in one and then another get-rich-quick scheme, or buying tickets in the Chinese lottery, always certain that her luck was about to change and she would recapture the life she had known as a child. She still held séances, and determined that the family could use the extra income of taking in a boarder. To that end she spoke with one James Shepard. Like her husband, he was a widowed Civil War veteran, a sea captain with three children. Where in Captain Shepard Flora saw rent money, sixteen-year-old Eliza saw a ticket to freedom, and she struck rapidly. Their marriage in 1884 left Flora with no boarders and no nanny to look after Johnny. Her appraising eye fell upon her younger stepdaughter, thirteen-year-old Ida, who however was more rebellious than Eliza and would have run away if imposed upon with her sister’s full load. Losing Eliza was only the first shock of rapidly progressing calamity. Almost as suddenly the London poultry flock was wiped out by disease. Between this, Flora’s gambling, and the costs of the rapid improvement of the farm, when the mortgage came due there was no money to pay it, and the London farm that once looked so promising was foreclosed on.

  Starting anew, London loaded up his remaining family once more in the potato wagon and moved back into Oakland. He had done remarkably well for a farmer with one functioning lung, but undoubtedly the prospect of success had lent him strength; losing the farm in Livermore broke him in more ways than merely financially. Back in the city he took a succession of urban jobs—constable, night watchman—lesser and lesser jobs as his health entered a long and gradual decline. Oakland, however, held some rewards for Johnny.

  The house the Londons took on East Seventeenth Street in March 1886, modest but with twin bay windows flanking the front door, was only a short walk from the Shepards, where Eliza had settled in to raising three stepchildren. Even more to his joy, Alonzo and Jennie Prentiss had moved to Oakland from San Francisco, so he once again basked in the warmth of his Mammy Jennie. Disappointed yet again with the failure of the Livermore farm, Flora quickly seized on the opportunities presented by once more living in the city: piano lessons, séances, a kindergarten—her fortunes might be recouped yet. This time the big scheme was to operate a boardinghouse for Scottish girls who had immigrated to work in the textile mills. Again they sank money into a project in which, when the riches proved ephemeral, Flora lost interest, and it failed.

  Johnny was now ten and attended the Garfield School across the street from their house, but he was now put to work to supplement the family income, and work he did, to a degree exhausting even to read about. In later years Jack London never found joy in recalling those joyless years: his paper route—up as early as three to throw morning papers, then to school, and after school he threw evening papers. Saturdays he worked on an ice wagon, and on Sundays he set pins in a bowling alley “for a drunken Dutchman.”

  Nearly all his earnings were surrendered to his mother, and in hindsight he referred to himself as the “ Work Beast.” Indeed, London remembered these years with such bitterness that he later exaggerated the hardships, claiming to have once stolen a piece of meat from a girl’s lunch box at school. This he may well have done, but the circumstances of the London household were not that desperate. Between John London’s small earnings, Flora’s piano lessons and séances, Ida’s work as a laundress, and Johnny’s multiple jobs, they ate steak and potatoes almost nightly. This was not for luxury’s sake—it was what Flora cooked best and it was said to have been wonderful. On those rare occasions when they had company for dinner she deflected compliments, saying that the quality came from searing and dry-frying the beef in a big cast-iron skillet that she husbanded and continued to use even after a great chunk broke out of its side.

  Loss of the boardinghouse engendered a succession of moves, occasionally an improvement but generally and inexorably downward in mobility, toward the poorest neighborhoods of West Oakland, ending in an austere cottage at 944 Thirty-Sixth Street, with the principal rooms on the second floor, entered by a tiny high stoop. The gradual drift toward poverty finally robbed Flora of her dogged optimism, and her bitterness made her almost impossible to live with. She took refuge in her white heritage, warning Johnny of the inferiority of the darker races now surrounding them in the ethnic mixture of West Oakland—a stance directly opposite that of Mammy Jennie, which caused him to question racism in a way that most ten-year-olds in the 1880s never had to. Home life was made more bearable by Johnny’s affectionate alliance with his stepfather. Partly to establish their own bond and partly to escape Flora’s rages, they spent a great deal of time together, duck hunting in the expansive marshes and fishing in the bay in rented rowboats. Jack London later wrote that his stepfather was the best man he ever knew.

  The move to West Oakland led to Johnny’s enrollment in the Cole Grammar School, a two-story Victorian maze that was the largest school he had yet attended, presided over by a principal with the unfortunate name of Mr. Garlick. By now accustomed to being the new boy in school and slow to make friends, Johnny retreated increasingly into the world of books, often at the cost of having to fight schoolyard bullies who would strike them from his hands. The leader of the Cole School’s toughs was a budding young thug named Mike Pinella, who called Johnny a sissy, threw the book he was reading across the schoolyard, and was surprised to discover that the “sissy” could hold his own. Both boys wound up in Mr. Garlick’s office, who ruled that they would not be punished if they would embrace and make up. Mike Pinella was willing, but Johnny, his keen and growing sense of justice offended, refused. “I’ll take the licking, Mr. Garlick,” he said. “I know I was in the right, and I’ll do it again if I have to.”13 (Principal Garlick acquired a measure of respect for the independent boy; once when Johnny was sent to the office for refusing to sing in music class, he explained to the principal that it was impossible to sing properly when the music teacher herself could not carry a tune. Johnny returned to class bearing a note that during music class he was to be allowed to write compositions instead.) 14

  Resorting to violence to preserve his right to read in peace became less frequent as word spread that he was a boy to be left alone. His love of books even gained a powerful ally, for the move to Oakland had brought him into contact with a new mentor, who soon took an unparalleled place in his development. At ten he entered for the first time the Oakland Free Library, a remarkable institution presided over by an even more remarkable woman. Oakland’s library was only the second in the state (after the one in Eureka) and it was the product of preparation that extended back to the founding of a library association in 1868. The residential-looking, Italianate frame structure was built in 1872, then moved to City Hall Park and had a second story added in 1878. “It stood a little back from the street,” as a frequent early patron remembered, “and one climbed a few steps to enter a hallway about ten feet wide; there in front of you loomed two large, swinging doors, covered with a dark green material like oil cloth of slightly rough texture.” The ground floor was devoted to newspapers and periodicals, and a winder staircase before the swinging doors led up to the book room. “This main roo
m, about thirty-five feet square, seemed rather dark on afternoons as you entered. . . . On the west side where there were no windows, the shelves reached nearly to the ceiling and a narrow balcony, half-way up the wall, made possible the use of these high shelves.”15

  Of frail construction, one contemporary described the Oakland Free Library as “leaning” against the city hall. To young Johnny London, however, it was a temple of wonders. He first visited it while throwing his paper route, a sheaf of newspapers squeezed beneath his arm. He asked the librarian for something good to read. Over the weeks she kept him supplied and encouraged his reading, but she was unable to coax him into talking about himself or his family. She perceived that there was some family secret or shame in play, but being herself a divorcée and an estranged granddaughter of the Mormon patriarch Joseph Smith, she knew that some family matters are best not pried into. When he presented a history of Pizarro’s conquest of Peru to take home, the librarian complimented him on his choice. It was the first time anyone had taken an interest in what he read, and in exchange he finally took some cognizance of her.

  Across the counter from him he beheld a matronly, handsome woman of forty-five. Born Josephine (“Ina”) Donna Smith, she took her mother’s maiden name to publish her own poems under the nom de plume of Ina Coolbrith. She had come to California as a child, over the Sierra Nevada in a wagon train; she was only thirteen when her first poems were published, and after moving to San Francisco her writing for and helping to edit Overland Monthly gained her the fast friendship of Bret Harte and even Mark Twain. After that magazine folded she was hired as Oakland’s librarian when it was still a private subscription library in 1873, and continued when it was opened to the public. In 1886 this immensely read and capable woman became Johnny London’s literary coach, and she gave his reading an organization and purpose that stayed with him throughout his life. Beginning at age ten, he undertook to check two books per week out of the library, and did so faithfully, on a vast range of subjects far above his grade level.16

  London later memorialized the Oakland Free Library in both John Barleycorn and The Valley of the Moon. He acknowledged that those scenes represented his actual experiences and were not fictional elements of the stories. He admitted that, had it not been for such institutions, he likely could not have fashioned himself into a writer.17

  Into his early teens, he began discarding the name “Johnny” for the tougher-sounding “Jack,” even as he developed voracious loves of books and hard candy. The books were free and the candy cost dearly, but identification with either commodity was enough to brand him a weakling and a sissy, a target for Oakland’s budding dockside bullies just old enough to begin throwing their weight around. For his own defense, Johnny began cultivating his alter ego, the incorrigible delinquent, and transforming himself into a walleyed brawler. “I guess Jack was a pretty good boy when you come to figure it all out,” his mother later told journalist Joseph Noel, “but he fell in with bad company. He used to have terrible fights with the boys of the neighborhood. He got to going down to the water front. He became awfully bossy in the house. We couldn’t stand him sometimes.”18 When he was on the losing end of a fight, he at least learned that he gained respect in that world by taking a licking without complaint.

  One of the worst times—exactly when is not known—was when he learned the definition of the word “bastard,” and that he was one. According to Flora, he threw himself on the floor in a tantrum and ran away from home for two days. He returned, the injured child having retreated deep into his psyche, where he abided until the day the whole being died. But throughout his life, the injured child would surface in sudden, puerile outbursts that were usually quickly mastered. London was always ashamed of his illegitimacy, and in summary accounts of his life sketched down for correspondents, John London appears as his father without elaboration.

  While at the Cole Grammar School, Johnny made the one close friend of his childhood, Frank Atherton. Johnny was the quiet, unpopular boy who preferred reading over roughhousing; Frank was the new boy in school, slow to make friends. Their relationship began over trading cards, which could be acquired by redeeming tobacco coupons; there were different sets to complete, the most popular being celebrated racehorses, boxers, or actors. No longer doomed to solitude, Johnny sometimes brought Frank home to dinner. Flora made him welcome, but there were times when her savage temper flashed, as when she once heard Johnny explaining to Frank (in a joke perhaps instigated by John London) that the table was spread with newspapers because they were too poor for linens. Flora stormed to a closet and returned with a full set of white tablecloth and napkins, not quickly mollified by the protests that they had merely been teasing. One stint was noted and admitted, however: dessert was unknown in the London household. Flora economized there to be able to afford higher-grade cuts of meat—reason enough, if not the principal reason, for Johnny’s lifelong affliction with an incorrigible sweet tooth.

  Frank was also aware of Flora’s more exotic vocation as a spiritualist. In the mid to late 1880s interest in spiritualism generally was declining, but she was able to maintain an active practice. Their West Coast location was a help, for the Bay Area clung to its nonconformist heritage; her poor eyesight and dwarfish size—even as an adult she wore a girl’s size twelve shoe—made her seem like a more authentic candidate as a medium. And she discovered an effective “hook” for a show, channeling communications from a long-deceased Indian warrior named Plume, and her séances were punctuated with unexpected war whoops. Oakland-area children called the London home the spook house, and Johnny became accustomed to sitting on the front stoop in mortification, sometimes with Frank, while Flora held a session with clients.

  Like most boys, Johnny and Frank made great plans together, usually having to do with making their fortunes. Their greatest caper began with their crafting slingshots more powerful than the hip-pocket variety all the neighborhood boys carried. Armed with scrap-lead “bullets” that they shaped themselves, they practiced assiduously to improve their aim and determined to go duck hunting on the bay. Repeated expeditions netted only frustration, until one day they managed to kill two inedible mud hens and one hapless duck that the tide carried away as the two boys wrangled over which one had actually struck it. On their way home a Chinese laundryman offered them twenty cents apiece for the mud hens, and suddenly their avenue to fortune seemed paved for them. Quickly the hunting of ducks graduated to a scheme to hunt wildcats in the hills behind the city. Members of the Chinese tongs (organized gangs) prized the body parts of wildcats, believing they would assimilate their ferocity. This then led to a scheme to engender trouble between rival tongs to spike the demand for wildcat parts, and Jack and Frank made elaborate preparations, including a list of all they would need to commence business. Sadly for their enterprise, their first expedition found no sign of a wildcat.

  Undeterred, the boys gathered and sold enough scrap to buy a couple of used handguns and returned to the duck hunting iteration of the plan. Their marksmanship, however, was not much improved over the slingshots, and moreover Jack’s weapon proved to be so defective that its bullets splashed into the water only yards away. Furious, he slammed the pistol onto the gunwale so hard that it flew from his hand and disappeared into the bay. Frank could swim but Jack could not, and they nearly came to blows over Frank’s refusal to dive in and try to retrieve the weapon. Angrier than ever, Jack ripped the oars from their locks and cast them as far away as he could, challenging Frank to swim after them. At this Frank offered Jack his own pistol, Jack realized his stupidity, and the remainder of the day was occupied in sculling the boat by hand until they were in range of snagging the oars with fishing line and rowing home. With their friendship sealed by a violent quarrel and making up, it lasted for life.19

  This friendship also afforded Jack the beginnings of a cultural life. He knew the rudiments of music from his mother’s piano lessons, and found it pleasant, but would not have dared betray such sissified notions t
o most other boys. Frank proved to be of the same bent, however, and together they spent precious small change haunting the upper balconies of concerts and operas.

  In 1891 the newly minted “Jack” London graduated from the Cole Grammar School, having completed eight grades of primary education. His “easy” life now over, it was time to find a real job. The chronic financial needs of the family made it impossible for him to pursue any higher education, and even to farm him out as a trade apprentice would have deprived them of his earning power during any period of training. As the London family’s luck had continued its decline, they moved farther out into West Oakland, a poorer area, ethnically mixed, home to most of the area’s Chinese and increasingly the locus of Portuguese immigrants. One of the houses that the Londons rented, at 807 Pine Street, lay directly next to the railyards that serviced West Oakland’s increasing industrialization. Near the residence was a former stable that now housed the R. Hickmott Canning Company, a business that, amid a cacophony of whirling, exposed machine belts, put up a variety of produce, including asparagus, tomatoes, and peaches. Jack London, fresh from grammar school, obtained employment in Hickmott’s dingy, smelly, steamy cannery stuffing pickles into jars for ten cents an hour.

  Mercifully, he enjoyed a brief respite in the few months between leaving Cole Grammar School and entering the Dickensian gloom of Hickmott’s cannery. Frank Atherton’s parents moved to Auburn, in the historic gold mining country northeast of Sacramento, and they invited Jack to spend the summer with them. For those few months Jack and Frank lived a boy’s idyll of romping and mischief making, an adventure that an examination of London’s later days makes one wonder whether he didn’t spend the rest of his life trying to some extent to recapture. The summer also afforded him an opportunity to bond with Northern California nature in ways not provided by doing chores on the farms near Colma and Livermore. The land, and his love of the land, opened a theme for him that was ultimately realized in his closing years on the Beauty Ranch.