Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  If ever there was a time when London could return to school and finish his education, this was it, and when he announced his intention, resuming his schooling became almost a family project: Flora furnished a room at the rear of the house for him, to serve as his dual study and bedroom. His earnings, when he was home, had helped anchor the family since he was about eight, and the more she could do to keep him there and out of saloons and off the waterfront, the better. Eliza gave him a table at which to study, and there was a wardrobe, a bed, and a nightstand with a lamp—an austere cell in which to undergo his metamorphosis, but also safe, dry, and dependable. (Flora was a stickler for comfortable beds. “I always have good beds in my house, if I haven’t anything else.”)1

  All his life, London had known of his mother’s penchant for playing financial long shots. As children he and Eliza wondered why it was the family never had any money when everyone was working at something, and usually more than one thing. John London also gambled, but only in a quietly amused, small-stakes way; with Flora it was an obsession. Putting herself in the hands of Plume, her Indian spirit guide, she played the Chinese lotteries, hectored her husband into insupportable business expansions, invested hard-earned money in financial jags like her failed boardinghouse for Scottish immigrant girls—all in a quest to recapture the life of ease that had spoiled her as a girl and that she had scorned as a disturbed young woman. By the mid 1890s she had virtually resigned herself to poverty. With no expectations, there could be no more disappointment. However, her first bet on her son’s literary ability, encouraging him to enter the Call’s contest, paid off when he won. His chance of eventual success was certainly greater than her declining husband’s, so preparing to pamper him during his coming academic rigors seemed less a long shot than an investment.

  Assisting him further, Eliza gave him a bicycle on which to traverse the forty blocks to Oakland High School, although he took to it slowly and had numerous mishaps until she also provided a training wheel. Often he would ride around the corner in the mornings to breakfast with Eliza and show up “bruised, dripping wet and red in the face, his curls all tousled, fighting mad”2 at having taken a fall in just that short distance. More important, Eliza gave him an improved chance at a social life by financing a regimen of dental work. Sailing and tramping had long since given him the habit of tobacco—chain smoking, and then chewing to ease the pain of his rapidly decaying teeth. He had never in his life owned a toothbrush, until now. With a new upper plate, he could once again smile without embarrassment, but Eliza extracted a promise to stop chewing tobacco.

  On January 12, 1895, Jack London turned nineteen. Only recently had he enrolled in high school with students significantly younger than him. As he had discovered during his first attempt at gentrification in the YMCA, he had little in common with them. Not only were they younger, they were callow, even innocent, reminding him of the childhood he’d never had. He was also separated from them by poverty; he took a part-time job as the school’s janitor. After school, the other students went home to their families; London stayed late to sweep up.

  Yet for all that, his younger peers regarded him with something like awe. His physical beauty and maturity worked to his advantage, to be sure, but his worldly experience held many of them in a kind of rapture. He was a force of nature, set down before an impressionable audience. Certainly he acted the exotic part, never quite sure when he should put forward the dockside bully and when he could be himself, open and inquiring. Some were put off by him. Georgia Loring, in his French class, attributed his vacillating behavior to an inferiority complex arising from shame over his background. And then there was his profession of socialism. Fred Bamford at the Oakland Public Library, who had become a close friend, guided London’s reading through the angriest seekers of social justice. London, with all the certitude of a nineteen-year-old, repeated their slogans with equal temper. The students at Oakland High, mostly very conventional children of very conventional parents, were alternately impressed by him and frightened of him.

  London’s main interest was writing, and a foreign-language teacher, Mollie Connors, once came across London moping over a composition that the English teacher had marked up beyond recognition. She asked what was wrong, and he answered, “It’s no use, Miss Mollie. I’m going to quit. I came here to study English because I thought I could write—but I can’t. Look at this.” Miss Connors read through the paper and its corrections. “Never mind, Jack,” she said calmly. “I’m going to tell you a secret: The only trouble is that you can write, and she can’t. You keep right on.”3 Mollie Connors may have saved London’s intellectual life that day.

  The most popular extracurricular activity at the school was membership on the Aegis, the school publication. London lacked the underclass credits to join the staff, but he did submit stories and essays almost from the time he walked through the door. The work was far superior to that of students who had seen little and lived less, and although everyone knew he was the janitor, he made respectful friends and no fewer than eight of his pieces were published in the journal during the year.

  In the Aegis pieces one sees the melding, the alloying of growing craft with life experiences, incorporating elements from the previous week and as far back as the first books he read. London’s boyhood friend Frank Atherton was living in San Jose at the time, and he came up to accompany London to a concert and then explore the Barbary Coast. In one frowsy nightclub they found the crowd being entertained by a genuinely gifted violinist, which brought back memories of Ouida’s Signa. London forged these pieces into a story, “One More Unfortunate,” published in the Aegis, about a poor young violinist who dreams of a great concert career but drowns himself when the only engagements he can get are in tawdry dives. Another piece described the Bonin Islands, a personal travelogue that none of the other students could hope to match, and quite persuasive considering that he personally, contrary to his own regretful preference, never saw much of the islands beyond the waterfront stews. Under a thin veil of fiction, two other stories recounted life as a hobo riding the rails, but the ring of authenticity was so strong that the doubtful propriety of the stories for young readers was outweighed by their merit. Virtually alone among the high school students in knowing what he believed and why, he saw his socialist manifesto, the first he had attempted, published in March 1895 (“Arise, ye Americans, patriots and optimists! Awake! Seize the reins of a corrupted government and educate your masses!”) to considerable consternation at his argument that social and moral degradation was the inevitable result of unregulated wage slavery.

  London was also able to vent these opinions at the high school’s Henry Clay Club, a debating society where his passion for oral argument could be given free rein. He made friends there, best among them Ted Applegarth, a young man with an English accent who came from a home of books and music and intellectual discourse. He visited the Oakland library one day just to strike up a conversation with London, an act that made a large impression. London’s visits to the Applegarth home—he was amazed to see real oil paintings on the walls—set before him the banquet of the mind he had always hungered for; even better, Ted had an older sister, Mabel, who was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. London fell hard for her. She was a beauty, she was a muse; for her the Sailor Kid shed his crust and willingly became a pining schoolboy. She was enchanted, and just as willingly she undertook to sand his rough edges, teaching him propriety in both subject-verb agreement and which fork to pick up at dinner. Mabel’s mother was her indefatigable chaperone, and London grew fond of her, “charming, witty and tactful as well as sympathetic with his strivings.”4 It was at least in part to impress Mabel that he spent some of his precious money on a dictionary, with the determination to learn twenty new words every day. Ted taught London to play chess, a game in which Mabel was not interested, but she was alert to express her shock when London followed a stupid move with an unstoppable expletive. Mabel was frail—in fact she had consumption—and
to help her recover from the dangerous illness, the Applegarths took London with them on vacation to Yosemite. London later wrote his paeans to her as Ruth Morse in Martin Eden. He earned his keep with the Applegarths with his gift for storytelling, being careful to watch his language, and seeing the world through his eyes they came to appreciate him.

  Along with the Applegarths, London grew close to Fred Jacobs. Small and slim and blond, he wore glasses, an assistant in the reference department at the Oakland library. Although he wrote at home, London read as much as he could in the library, just for the atmosphere of being surrounded by books, and Jacobs frequently helped him with homework. Chemistry was Jacobs’s own interest, tending toward photography, a skill at which London later excelled. London also developed a fondness for Jacobs’s girlfriend, Bess Maddern, who was a whiz in math class, and, unusually for girls, athletically inclined and a bicycle enthusiast. She was a great contrast to Mabel Applegarth; Bessie was raven-haired and independent, confident in areas of her knowledge but painfully insecure when discussions got out of her depth.

  London had succeeded in making friends above his social station, but every time he might have allowed himself to think he had escaped his background, his past, the ball and chain of Twenty-Second Avenue would materialize at Oakland High to drag him back down, either in the need to visit Johnny Heinold and borrow some money, or in the person of John London, who would show up at school to visit and usually borrow money. There is no doubt that Jack London loved his stepfather, and the older man’s decline had been hard to watch. He’d had to give up the job as special policeman for the less strenuous post of night watchman on the waterfront. In his pride to continue to try to do for himself, John even undertook to sell photographs door to door, but drawing on their old alliance of mutual support in the face of Flora’s demands and rages, he would ask to borrow small amounts to avoid going home empty-handed. Often Jack had no money to lend him, and in turn had to borrow it from his friends on the Aegis. It would be difficult to imagine anything more humiliating.

  In addition to Fred Bamford’s guidance in reading, and classes at Oakland High School, London found a third source of edification, the “Speaker’s Corner” on the courthouse square. Often on the way home from school he would pause to listen to the rhetoric, often socialist in nature, and one day heard a familiar eloquent voice. It was Frank Strawn-Hamilton, the tramp who had set London’s mind on fire in Baltimore. In fact it was Strawn-Hamilton who, in company with the Socialist Labor Party’s local financial secretary, had gotten the Speaker’s Corner going. At first, the busy townsfolk were not interested in listening to lectures, but the speakers hit on the tactic of first arguing loudly, then hotly, with each other, and as a crowd gathered hoping to witness a fight, they would join forces for a public lecture, which, owing largely to Strawn-Hamilton’s brilliance as a speaker, became a watched-for event.5

  At the Speaker’s Corner London also met the British Herman “Jim” Whitaker, who became a close friend and mentor. Like many of the men London selected for his inner orbit, Whitaker was several years older, a miller’s son who became a career soldier before buying his freedom and immigrating to Canada. Relocating to Oakland with his wife and six children, he endured two months of grinding want before being hired by the local socialists to manage a grocery cooperative. Whitaker had been an instructor in the British army, and during after-hours at the co-op, he taught London the main points of boxing (where London on the waterfront had been merely brawling) and fencing, both of which sports London practiced enthusiastically for the rest of his life.

  Before long, London was confident enough in his socialist grounding to begin taking the soapbox himself at Speaker’s Corner. His debate practice in the Henry Clay Society had sharpened his speaking skills to such a degree that his energetic defense of socialism won him local fame; the San Francisco Chronicle presented an article about him in early 1896:Jack London, who is known as the boy socialist in Oakland, is holding forth nightly to the crowds that throng City Hall Park. There are other speakers in plenty, but London always gets the biggest crowd and the most respectful attention.

  London is young, scarcely 20, but he has seen many sides of the world and has travelled extensively. . . . He is a high school boy, and supports himself as a janitor in the institution. At present he is fitting himself for a course at the University of California, where he will make a specialty of social questions.

  The young man is a pleasant speaker, more earnest than eloquent, and while he is a broad socialist in every way, he is not an Anarchist. . . . Any man, in the opinion of London, is a socialist who strives for a better form of government than the one he is living under.6

  Those students who were born of money, those who had never been Work Beasts, had no idea why he was so vituperative in his attacks on the capitalist system, and not everyone was enchanted after hearing the “boy socialist” hold forth. One of these naysayers was Georgia Loring from French class, who had been a student at the Hopkins Art School. “Beneath all his literary ambition,” she recalled, “he was at heart, mind, and body, a Socialist. His blood was full of it. Boiling with it. His street speaking proved this, and the violence of his remarks that I have heard was terrifying in the extreme. When giving one of these talks he seemed to lose himself and to be clutching at the throats of his enemies in ‘The class struggle.’ His vigor and earnestness showed Ambition, but in the background there loomed the hideous red devil of Revenge—revenge for some fancied wrong.”7 Ironically, Georgia Loring would have to hear a lot more of socialism before all was said, for she became engaged to marry Fred Bamford, the reference librarian who had become London’s coach in zeal to uplift the masses.

  Indeed he was not an anarchist, but among those who heard the boy socialist hold forth was one very well-known anarchist, Emma Goldman, who marked him for future greatness, and future acquaintance. Throughout these months as student and janitor, London never lost sight of his ultimate ambition, and poured his energies into molding himself into a writer. He studied and copied antique forms of poetry, and in a later rapid exchange of letters with Ted Applegarth showed that he knew the compositional rules for “the ballade, the rondel, the rondeau, the roundel, the rondelay, the triolet, the sestina, or the villanelle. . . . They are all pretty structures, and so severe as to give the best of training in versification.”8 He scoured dictionary and thesaurus to increase his vocabulary beyond all need; once he criticized a phrase in one of Applegarth’s poems as “pleonastic,” when he might have simply written “redundant.” He even found a use for “supererogatory,” quite a word for a student whose handwriting still looked like a fourth grader’s. Like many young writers, he was working his dictionary a little too hard.

  The awkward chemistry of a twenty-year-old taking lessons with children four years younger began to make itself felt, both in his own frustration and in pressure from the other students’ parents, through the PTA, that something be done about this young man who argued for socialism and told brutish stories to their children about skinning seals and stealing rides on railroads. When London dropped out there was probably some relief on both sides, but the question of college still presented itself. The entrance exams at Berkeley, where Mabel was a student, were exacting, but a diploma from an accredited preparatory school was just as acceptable as one from Oakland High. Both Ted Applegarth and Fred Jacobs enrolled in courses at a prep school called the University Academy, housed in a four-story Italianate villa in Alameda. It was a two-year curriculum, and expensive beyond his abilities, but the superintendent, a man named Anderson, recognized London’s accomplishments to date and agreed that he need register only for the final term of courses, and an appeal to Eliza got the fees paid.

  For once, London was able to steep himself in learning; under the tutelage of excellent teachers he threw himself into the courses, fully engaged and intellectually thriving. It was the experience of a lifetime, right up to the time, after five weeks, that Mr. Anderson called him into his offic
e, told him his tuition would be refunded, and expelled him. The line handed him was that his classwork had been brilliant, but the academy’s accreditation was in jeopardy by letting a student burn through the course work in one term that took other students two years. “He was very sorry,” London wrote later of Anderson, “ but . . . tongues were wagging about my case. In four months accomplish two years’ work! It would be a scandal, and the universities were becoming severer in their treatment of accredited prep schools. He could n’t [sic] afford such a scandal, therefore I must gracefully depart.”9 London was certain, however, that it was the students of the privileged who simply didn’t want him there, were sick of being shown up by this raffish, unconventional delinquent, and brought the pressure to bear to get rid of him.

  London’s own vast vocabulary would have been paupered to describe what this abrupt dismissal did to him: he was outraged, heartbroken, humiliated. His disaffection with some highly touted but never quite defined American way, begun by the economic trap into which he was born, brought to a boil by his treatment as a Work Beast, perfected by Mr. Justice Piper in Buffalo’s night court, was now given the only restatement London needed. He was not wanted. To excel in learning was the last chance for reconciliation between Jack London and the society that produced him; henceforward, it would be war.