Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  London later wrote enough of the tramping life to present a certain raffish but worldly wise self-image, positioning himself as polite society’s correspondent in a seamy world they themselves would never dare enter. But life as a hobo had a darker side, a tangle of the secrets of lusty men with few options. He knew the public would never accept such a netherworld of sex and sexual servitude (not much different from what he had witnessed a year earlier aboard the Sophia Sutherland) and his knowledge of it would remain unwritten. Yet his knowledge of it is undeniable: he dedicated his later tramping memoir, The Road, to Josiah Flynt, a fellow hobo he had met on the rails, who was less reticent.

  Flynt contributed an essay, “Homosexuality Among Tramps,” to Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis, the pathbreaking sex researcher whose books London later knew well and owned. Flynt offered the very modern estimate that 10 percent of tramps were homosexual.10 In the tramps’ well-established sexual hierarchy, a young novice who was vulnerable for being unfamiliar with hobo life, known as a “gay-cat,” might well attach himself to an older and more accomplished tramp, a “profesh,” exchanging security for sexual favors, after which the young ward became known as a “prushun.” The phenomenon was well known enough that in The Road London was emphatic in his assertion that he had never been a prushun, but had graduated directly from road kid to profesh.

  In Chicago London collected all of Flora’s letters, using the money to outfit himself in used clothes (“after a great deal of wrangling . . . amongest [sic] the Jews of South Clark st.”). After a shave and dinner he went sightseeing, attended the theater, and found lodging for fifteen cents—the first proper bed he had slept in since leaving home. He spent the next day, May 30, at the World’s Fair, and the day after that boarded a lake steamer for the sixty-mile run to St. Joseph, Michigan, home of his mother’s sister, Mary Everhard.

  The sojourn with his aunt’s family was restful—he liked his cousin so well that in later years he named the hero of his novel The Iron Heel after him, Ernest Everhard—and then he took to the rails again. He had always wanted to see Niagara Falls, and eluding the inevitable cons and shacks, hopped a convenient boxcar to Buffalo, New York. The sight did not disappoint, and he gazed at the falls transfixed until after eleven at night. His instincts warned him that Niagara Falls was not a community to welcome hoboes, and he walked all the way out of town before jumping a fence and bedding down in a field. He had slept only briefly when he awoke at very first light; he wanted one more look at the falls. He couldn’t begin to beg for breakfast until eight, giving him plenty of time to appreciate the thundering waterfall. Walking down a quiet street, he saw three men walking toward him, whom he at first took for fellow tramps but then realized to his horror that it was two tramps in the custody of the constable who had arrested them. “I should have turned and run like the very devil,” he wrote of it later. “He’d never have run after me, for two hoboes in the hand are worth more than one on the get-away. But like a dummy I stood still when he halted me.”11

  Unable to provide the name of a hotel where he was staying, London was arrested with the others and given the proverbial bum’s rush to night court. He later excoriated the flatfoot who arrested him for working on commission (perhaps choosing to forget that he himself had worked on precisely the same terms for the California Fish Patrol). As it transpired, his arraignment was the only trial he would have. It consisted of the bailiff intoning for each case, “Vagrancy, your honor,” to which the judge, Police Justice Charles Piper, would reply, “Thirty days.” The accused were not allowed to speak. The one man before London who did speak was permitted to say he was homeless, but only because he had lost his job and had nowhere else to go. “Why did you quit your job?” demanded the judge. The man explained that he had not quit but had been let go; he was given thirty additional days for quitting his job. When London’s turn came, he attempted to plead not guilty, to which the judge said, “Shut up,” and he was taken away and shackled. His demand to see a lawyer was met by gusts of laughter.

  If vagrancy was a crime, London had been committing it with abandon for weeks—the irony was that he had not committed it in Niagara Falls. Indeed he had taken trouble to walk on sore feet out of Niagara Falls before sleeping. Throughout London’s written recollections of his life, he often changed the facts of various experiences to suit the dramatic needs of its telling. This was not one of them. Every time he wrote of it his vocabulary could barely contain his bitterness. Police Justice Piper, who heard these cases, could not possibly have known the effect he had on one of the most fertile young minds in America. To London, it was bad enough that the economy was engineered to benefit the wealthiest few, who held the means in such a powerful grip as to strangle any chance that lesser people might have for advancement. Now it was clear to him that the law, which in the United States was commonly trumpeted as the great leveler, was equally rigged. In his mind, what had been an ardent sympathy for economic reform began to harden into a case for revolution. For these thirty days, he thought, he would do his time and await his release, and when he was free he would write such a tract, file such a lawsuit, as would shake the American judiciary to its foundations.12

  His home for the next month was the Erie County Penitentiary, and for the journey he was handcuffed to a large, affable young black man, whose only reaction was to laugh, shake his head, and repeat, “Oh, Lawdy.” It was the new convict in the train seat behind them who most engaged London’s attention. He described him as squat and powerful, but with a certain kindness and humor in his eyes. “As for the rest of him,” he wrote, “he was a brute-beast, wholly unmoral,” but as they talked London realized that he must attach himself to this man, that he could help him in prison. The man had an empty pipe, which London filled with his own tobacco, and divided the remainder with him. He became London’s “meat,” he referred to him as his pal, and he proved invaluable.

  On June 29, 1894, the Erie County Penitentiary logged the entry of “John London, 18, single, father & mother living, occupation sailor, religion atheist . . . term of 30 days, charge of Tramp.”13 As they were being processed, his pal showed him how to toss a packet of his few personal effects to a trusty (an employed inmate) on an upper gallery so they would not be confiscated; when they were inoculated for smallpox, his pal advised him sternly to suck out the wound. London did so, escaping the gruesome, egg-sized boils that erupted on the arms of those who didn’t know better.

  At last London was placed in a cell and heard the lock snap behind him. Its other resident was young and seemed companionable enough, although he was a veteran of two years in an Ohio prison. As they talked, London’s horror grew as he discerned that the walls and ceiling were alive with bedbugs, issuing from and disappearing into chinks in the masonry. Dinner was brought at noon, two chunks of bread and a quart of thin soup. Having already set to killing as many bedbugs as they could, the two drank the soup but chewed the bread to putty and used it to seal the vermin within the cracks in the mortar—effort that proved fruitless, as they were transferred to a new cell two galleries higher that evening.

  In prison London discovered that there were two classes of men, the abusers and the abused. Although not vicious by nature, given the choice he would rather be one of the former than the latter, especially after watching an inoffensive black youth be bludgeoned and pushed down five flights of stairs, at last crumpling in a screaming heap at London’s feet. The prison officials expected the trusties and hall-men to keep the pen running smoothly, and had no interest to inquire how that was done.

  London had chosen well with whom to share his tobacco that first day. It turned out that the pal he made (he later wrote that they called each other “Jack,” the only name by which we know him) was in a position to take care of him. The five hundred inmates were controlled by thirteen hall-men; his pal became one on the first day, and he let London know that he would get another one fired and arrange for London to replace him. The footsore teenager who had s
till been wearing leather splints on his wrists from shoveling coal had to work in the yard for only two days before his pal made good on his word. Thus London became part of the graft that was the prison commerce, and the terrible similarity between himself on the inside and the corporate barons on the outside was not lost on him:And at times, while all these men lay hungry in their cells, I have seen a hundred or so extra rations of bread hidden away in the cells of the hall-men. It would seem absurd, our retaining this bread. But it was one of our grafts. We were economic masters inside our hall, turning the trick in ways quite similar to the economic masters of civilization. We controlled the food-supply of the population, and, just like our brother bandits outside, we made the people pay through the nose for it.

  Bread, while necessary, was not the coin of the realm; that was tobacco, and by extorting two or three rations of bread for a plug of tobacco, the trusties became wealthy, in prison terms, even to the point of accumulating cash. One with whom London shared a cell for a time counted out his $16 in savings every night, threatening London with a terrible fate if anything happened to it.14

  Bread was only one graft, but in fact every aspect of the inmates’ daily life was governed by some form of corruption, with order maintained by the most savage corporal discipline. If a man so much as looked like he was going to protest, even as London had tried to protest at his so-called trial, “Our own rule was to hit a man as soon as he opened his mouth—hit him hard, hit him with anything. A broom-handle, end-on, in the face, had a very sobering effect. . . . We could not permit the slightest insolence. If we did, we were lost.”

  Rarely in later years London alluded also to the prison’s sexual brutality, but only in generalities. He hardly needed to spell it out that as a trusty, he was in a position to avoid abuse. Whether that meant that, as an element of keeping his place in the hierarchy, he was compelled to join in abusing others, he never said.15

  Prison was not without some friendly cooperation, if not kindness. One inmate over whom he was the trusty was serving sixty days for being caught eating out of the dinner garbage of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. (It was good bread, he said, and the meat was “out of this world.”) For him London procured a length of thin, stiff wire, which the man crafted into very serviceable safety pins; London began paying him for them in extra bread rations, while himself setting up a profitable trade in that otherwise unknown commodity. The commerce had a certain familiarity, not unlike his shrewdness with trading cards when he was a child, or sailing his skiff out to ships in the Oakland estuary to collect kerosene tins. Business was business.

  London’s pal Jack kept the expectation that when they got out, the two of them would become partners in something—if not crime, then perhaps life on the road. Indeed they were released together on the same day, July 29, and they started on foot for Buffalo, the pal thinking of a saloon, London planning his escape. As soon as they reached the city and entered a bar, London found a distracting moment to dart out the back door, jump the fence, and hop a southbound freight train. He rued the necessity of it. “I’d have liked to say good-bye. He had been good to me. But I did not dare.”

  Having had a month in the penitentiary to see how every pathetic attempt at redress, every feeble grasp for justice had resulted, somehow in some way, only in calling down punishment, he gave no further thought toward a lawsuit for violating his civil rights. All he wanted between himself and Buffalo was distance.

  He continued south to Baltimore, then east to New York and, ironically, Boston, the cradle of American liberty. That irony, however, turned into an epiphany, for on this leg of the journey he met some truly learned hoboes who catalyzed his own intellectual quest. In Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park he chanced upon a luxuriantly bearded tramp named Frank Strawn-Hamilton, a vivid socialist who all but bowled him over with his command of political and economic theory.

  His mind suddenly alight with all the things he wanted to learn, London braced himself to ride the rails home as fast as he could. Looking to give commission-hunting American constables a wide berth, he finished his trek west through Canada, much of it in biting cold, ending in Vancouver, where he intended to earn his passage home on a ship. Discouraged at first that none would take him on, London was cheered by the discovery that Canadians were more forthcoming in their sympathy for the homeless unemployed. He wrote a few years later that he spent several weeks there. “I was never given a handout there in all the time I slammed back gates—always was ‘set down’ to tables. I was only refused twice, and both times because I came out of meal hours. And, further, at each of said places I was given a quarter of a dollar to make up for the refusal.”16 Canadian generosity left a deep impression.

  Persistence finally paid off in employment as a stoker on the immigrant steamer S.S. Umatilla of the Pacific Steamship Company, a smallish vessel that for years plied the waters of the Northwest, ferrying human cargo who had to swear their age, nationality, race, health, wealth (including an amount if less than $500), and whether or not they were an anarchist or a polygamist. If there was one thing London could do, it was shovel coal, and the passage home went swiftly. He entered the Golden Gate once more, and now it was time for his life to begin.

  5

  THE STUDENT

  Returning from his months on the road as 1894 waned, Jack London found himself stimulated by his discovery, especially in the East, that many tramps while monetarily down-and-out owned a deep wisdom about the world. The American economy and its society might claim that penury was the just lot of the masses who funneled the wealth they generated up to the drawing-room set. Among the hoboes, however, he found men who were able to compensate for their banishment from the economy with a vivid life of the mind. They lived on handouts, but they understood life in a way he did not. The experience presented him with a profound and alluring mystery.

  Home again, he looked to the Oakland Public Library with renewed expectation for answers, and once again that institution proved a godsend. His treasured Ina Coolbrith had retired, but her nephew had been hired as reference librarian. His name was Frederick Irons Bamford, Canadian by birth and a Christian Scientist, lately an English professor at Hesperian College. A more bookish-looking librarian could not have been cast for a play—his desk in the library was never without a vase of fresh flowers—but by the greatest of good fortune he was the very man London needed to know: brilliantly well-read, an ardent socialist, eagerly introducing him to a stream of philosophy, economics, and political argument.

  To London’s previous acquaintance with Darwin was added Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations, Benjamin Kidd and Social Evolution, and Kant and The Critique of Pure Reason. London’s previous pass at Herbert Spencer’s work had dazzled him with its brilliance but he never felt that he understood it. Now he could perceive in First Principles a kind of grand unifying theory, how Darwin’s natural selection had also allowed dominant and subservient social classes to emerge, and how the very idea of natural selection, the survival of the fittest, necessarily meant that man was perfectible. And for man to be perfectible gave effect to Nietzsche in Man and Superman. The lit fuse of his mind sparked through master after master; this was life, and it began to make sense. At some level it snagged in his mind that Darwin’s survival of the fittest and London’s growing dedication to social justice conflicted, for unfairness and cruelty enforced the survival of the fittest. But he could set that aside to think through later; for now, the broad strokes had to be assimilated.

  His time on the rails had been crucial in defining his cast of mind at this time. The country’s wealthy might salve their consciences by clucking that hoboes were lazy and shiftless, and certainly he had met those who would rather wander than work, but they were not a majority. The whole reason for Coxey’s Army was to demonstrate how badly most of them did want to work. Many of them had been as employed as he had been, as tied to pittance wages, until illness or injury cost them their jobs. Unless they had family to support them, they were cast out of t
he economic house to wander the country like pariahs until they starved, froze to death, or were imprisoned. What worried London most were the older ones; it was not a long leap to imagine what his own stepfather’s fate would have been without him, Flora, and Eliza and Captain Shepard. London was young and strong, but he would not always be, and deep down he had to admit he was not as strong as he posed. His chest and back were brawny, but his extremities were delicate. He had sprained his wrists shoveling coal and had to wear splints for nearly a year; his small, flat feet had broken down after only several miles of walking with Kelly’s Army. What he saw in the older tramps, toothless and hollow-chested, was his own inevitable end if he did not escape the clutches of physical dime-an-hour wage slavery.

  London’s months on the rails, followed by Bamford’s tutelage, at last gave him clarity on what to do with his own life. To pull out of this lethal whirlpool was imperative, and he determined, within the fire of his avid, urgent new curiosity about everything, to find a way to make a living with his mind instead of his muscles. He would learn, and then he would write.

  Back in Oakland he found his family, for once, holding their own late in 1894. Home was a cottage at 1639 Twenty-Second Avenue, not the worst they had lived in, with a bay window and a lattice arch over the stoop at the head of a long flight of steps. His mother had returned to giving piano lessons, and his stepfather was able to hold modest employment as a “special policeman.” His beloved stepsister Eliza, her much older husband, Captain Shepard, and their family lived around the corner from them and were also reasonably secure, supporting themselves as pension lawyers.