He had begun learning as an autodidact; he could finish that way. He retreated to his back room in his parents’ cottage, hunched with his cigarettes over the table Eliza had given him, and went to work. His close friends from Oakland High School were equally appalled over his treatment, and committed to help him. Jacobs and Bess Maddern were now engaged; Bessie tutored him in mathematics, and Fred tutored him in physics and chemistry. It would have been easier with access to a laboratory, but he would manage. Mabel Applegarth, with all her grace and social polish, and with whom he found himself increasingly in what he took to be love, helped him make up his shortcomings in English, and the vagaries of spelling that pocked his tramping diary disappeared from his letters. With sample exams from Berkeley in hand as his guide, for three months, nineteen hours a day, London labored in white heat to show up Mr. Anderson and the bluenoses at the University Academy, to prove to them that they could not get rid of him quite so easily.
London had no idea there was yet one more broadside he had to absorb, when he bicycled to Berkeley to begin the three-day regimen of entrance exams on August 10, 1896. The university had been inundated with applications and the school had recently raised its entrance standards. When he sat down to the first test he was horrified to discover it was far more difficult than what he had prepared for. For three days, for paper after paper, the certainty crept over him that he was in over his head. How could he explain such a failure? How could he accept life as a Work Beast?
Back home, he rolled some food and blankets into a knapsack, borrowed a small Whitehall, and sailed out onto the bay in a stiff wind, breathing in the salt air as though it were life itself. He turned north, entering San Pablo Bay, and then east through the Carquinez Straits, where he had so nearly drowned. He had intended to sail on to Suisun Bay, but with wind and tide behind him he put the tiller over to port and nosed into the tule flats of Benicia, and sought out the old Fish Patrol crowd. “For the first time in my life I consciously, deliberately desired to get drunk.” Since entering Oakland High School, making friends with whom to study and play chess and write articles for the Aegis, he had not drunk and had not wanted to drink. He had visited Johnny Heinold at the First and Last Chance and occasionally borrowed money from him, but since leaving the waterfront and his need to hide his intellect and his curiosity, alcohol had held no appeal for him. Now, however, he intended to tie one on.
Charley LeGrant, his old boss at the California Fish Patrol, and his wife, Lizzie, greeted him with full hugs. “All the survivors of the old guard got around me and their arms around me.” They invaded the local saloon, Jorgenson’s, where “more old friends of the old free and easy times dropped in, fishermen, Greeks, and Russians, and French. They took turns in treating, and treated all around in turn again.” Word spread that Jack was back; old-timers came and went, but London drank with them all. One who went by “Clam,” who had been Young Scratch Nelson’s partner before London, showed up, and Nelson’s memory was hailed and toasted. Eventually LeGrant had London fetch his grip and shifted the party to a large Columbia River salmon boat, which he supplied with charcoal, a grill, and a fresh-caught black bass—but no more liquor. He let London, drunk or not, sail her defiantly out onto a wind-whipped Suisun Bay; they ripped through the chop, bawling out the old sea chanties—“Black Lulu,” “I Wisht I Was a Little Bird,” “The Boston Burglar”—as increasing bilge sloshed around their ankles.
They were out for a week, as far as Antioch; there they tied up to a potato sloop where old pals provided fishermen’s stew redolent of garlic, and Italian bread and claret. In warm dry bunks, “we lay and smoked and yarned of old days, while overhead the wind screamed through the rigging and taut halyard drummed against the mast.” If this was what life intended for him, it wasn’t so bad.
But there were ends to tie up, and London returned to Oakland to await the result of his exams. When the verdict came it probably shocked him: he had passed, and was accepted to the University of California. Having been approved, there was still the matter of money, but Heinold had been counseling him for years to finish his education. He willingly lent London the $40 in tuition, allowing him to enter Berkeley for the fall term of 1896, a freshman in the Class of 1900, or as they referred to themselves, the “Naughty-Naughts.”
At sixteen London had accomplished his need to be a man among men; now, at twenty, he was a student among students, and at Berkeley one he chanced across was Jimmy Hopper, whom he had known somewhat at Cole Grammar School. “He was going to take all the courses in English,” wrote Hopper. “All of them, nothing less. Also, of course, he meant to take most of the courses in the natural sciences, many in history, and bite a respectable chunk out of the philosophies.”
For once in his life, London looked about him and thought he must be happy. “Sunshine,” Hopper characterized him, “a strange combination of Scandinavian sailor and Greek god.” He rolled on sea legs when he walked, dressed with no thought to fashion, his brown hair sun-bleached to gold and seldom trimmed, but with a friendly openness “that was like a flood of sunshine.”10
At Berkeley London worked off his stress with boxing gloves in the gymnasium, employing the rudiments of the sport that Jim Whitaker had taught him, augmented with a youth spent fighting without rules, and it was in the gym that he learned an important lesson. After one particular round, one of the upper-class young men that London had come to sneer at criticized him for whaling on an over-matched opponent. London’s insolent challenge in response was at first ignored, but accepted after he backed it up with a quick swing that was dodged. “As you wish,” said the upper-class snot. A crowd gathered as London attacked him with everything he had, but nothing landed, and after he winded himself, the bluenose laid him out with two punches, one in the nose and the second in the throat. London hated it when people judged him because of his background; now he had done the same thing, and paid for it.
Even as he gratified his hunger for knowledge and culture, London became increasingly curious about his own beginnings. If he had ever snooped through his mother’s papers he would have found, dated September 7, 1876, her marriage certificate to John London, under the name Flora Chaney. From his own birth date of January 12 of that year he knew he was eight months old when they married. Mammy Jennie must have told him many times the story of how she had introduced Flora to John London, who, therefore, could not have been his father. Searching back through the morgue of the San Francisco Chronicle, he discovered the June 1875 article with its lurid description of the trouble between Flora and William Chaney, of his alleged demand that she undergo an abortion, and of her attempted suicides.
Knowing that to ask his mother the details of that period would have spun her into a rage, London consulted a local astrologer to learn more about Chaney. He learned that Chaney had once been quite famous, that in 1890, long after leaving San Francisco, he had authored a Primer of Astrology and Urania, which contained a great deal of memoir as well, and now in advanced years he was working in the Chicago area at the so-called College of Astrology. Fearing the consequences if Flora learned that he had opened a correspondence with Chaney, London persuaded Ted to allow him to use the Applegarth home as his return address, and penned a letter on May 28, 1897.
Chaney answered promptly on June 4 and seemed forthcoming with the facts of his relationship with Jack’s mother. “There was a time when I had a very tender affection for Flora; but there came a time when I hated her with all the intensity of my intense nature, & even thought of killing her & myself. . . . Time, however, has healed the wounds & I feel no unkindness towards her, while for you I feel a warm sympathy, for I can imagine what my emotions would be were I in your place.” However, probably fearing that the young man wanted something, perhaps money, he denied paternity. “I was never married to Flora Wellman . . . but she lived with me from June 11th, 1874 till June 3rd 1875. I was impotent at that time, the result of hardship, privation & too much brain-work.” A young man who, like Flora, was from Oh
io, was also living with them, and he might have been Jack’s father. “The neighbors gossiped & talked scandal,” wrote Chaney, “but I know nothing of my own knowledge.” There was another candidate, as Flora had also “lived with Lee Smith of Seattle, as his wife, for a month,” in the boardinghouse where Chaney took up residence, Smith’s wife having deserted him to live with another man. Or still another possibility was a stockbroker who had paid Chaney $20 to cast a nativity for him. When it was finished, “Flora asked the privilege of taking it to him, to which I assented. A rumor reached me later that she frequently met him afterwards. His wife & daughter . . . were then in Europe.” Chaney heard later that Flora had attempted to blackmail him. Beset by business reverses, the stockbroker moved to Oregon and a couple of months later killed himself. “I do not know as either was your father, nor do I know who is.” Perhaps thinking to forestall any request for help, Chaney concluded, “I am past 76 & quite poor. But on the 15th inst. I am going to Michigan for a vacation, my first in 13 years. One of my students has offered me a home during summer in return for teaching her.”11
Unsatisfied, London wrote him again, asking for more specifics. Chaney answered again with what seemed like dutiful patience, this time detailing his reason for ending the relationship:The cause of our separation began because Flora one day said to me:
“You know that motherhood is the great great desire of my life, & as you are too old—now some time when I find a good, nice man are you not willing for me to have a child by him?”
I said yes, only he must support her. No, she must always live with me & be the wife of “Prof. Chaney.” A month or so later she said she was pregnant by me. I thought she was only trying me & did not think she was pregnant.
The fight that followed, according to Chaney, lasted a day and a night, after which he broke off their relationship. When he refused her hysterical pleas to continue as they had been, she rushed to the house of an acquaintance named Ruttley and there attempted her “suicides.” According to Chaney it was a sham, and he cited witnesses whom London might still find in the San Francisco area to affirm that she never intended serious harm to herself.
Certainly Chaney would have been placing himself in the most favorable light possible in his relation of events, but London knew all too well that what Chaney described was well within Flora’s established parameters. Besides, it did not take great calculation to realize that Flora was already three months along when she first broached the subject to Chaney, and she must have been testing the safety of revealing to him that she was expecting. A majority of London’s biographers have concluded that Chaney was the likeliest possibility to be his real father; however, if that had indeed been the case, there would have been no need for Flora to frame the issue in terms of finding “a good, nice man” by whom she could get a baby. If Chaney had been the father, she would have simply announced her condition and importuned him to do the right thing. She must have already found a good, nice man, or else Chaney by 1897 had pondered his deception in sufficient detail to stand up to more than casual scrutiny.
Chaney had given London quite a shocking account of life among the San Francisco free lovers. “A very loose condition of society was fashionable . . . at the time & it was not thought disgraceful for two to live together without marriage. I mean the Spiritualists and those who claimed to be reformers.” Within that context, he wrote, he had believed Flora’s character honorable, but it was her rages that had driven him away—a point on which young London had plenty of history of his own. “Her temper was a great trial, & I had often thought before that time that I must leave her on account of it, & not for loose morals, for I did not ever suspect her up to that time.”
Chaney may not have thought her conduct scandalous, but Flora’s tempestuous libido succeeded in breaking up the boardinghouse where most of the involved parties had resided. “One day when I came home,” Chaney wrote to London, “I found all the lodgers moving away & great excitement throughout the house. As soon as I entered the room, Flora locked the door, fell on her knees before me & between sobs begged me to forgive her.” It was then that he learned of her affairs, and his life, he wrote, would have been much happier had he abandoned her at that moment. After her pregnancy became known, and her “suicide” attempts, and the slanderous article appeared in the Chronicle, his own life became hell for the next decade, including a sister who blamed him in the matter and broke off contact. He had hired a detective to investigate Flora’s would-be suicide, but the Chronicle refused to publish his findings and a retraction. “Then I gave up defending myself & for years life was a burden.” Only recently, in his old age, had he cobbled a life together again, “and now I have a few friends who think me respectable.”
If Jack London had known of the eerie parallels between his early life and Chaney’s—his hatred of manual labor, his attempts to escape to sea, even embracing a flirtation with piracy, his obstinacy against accepting conventional wisdom, his wrongful imprisonment, his desire to grow a life of the mind through books, to say nothing of his serial philandering—he would have been amazed at the detail in which Chaney had pre-lived his own life, and might well have taken their similar paths for at least the possibility of Chaney’s paternity. He might perhaps have tried to pursue a relationship with him, but all the evidence is that he dropped the matter after these two letters. Chaney lived for six more years, dying in Chicago in 1903 at age eighty-two.
London’s semester at Berkeley had gone adequately, but he began to feel annoyed at spending so much time studying subjects that did not seem to bear on what he considered to be the large issues of life or that he could teach himself. And when the London family found their finances once again in peril, it became necessary for the gifted son, the one who had become used to being pampered at home with his cigarettes and fruit arranged just so on his studying table, to find a job.
He withdrew from the University of California, although he claimed he did so with minimal regret. He had, indeed, found other venues both of learning and of expressing himself. His brother-in-law, Captain Shepard, allowed him use of his newly acquired typewriting machine when it wasn’t needed for his own business, although as with bicycles, it took some epic battles and a few injuries to train himself in its use. The brand name was Blickensdorfer, which London could have named the demon that lived within it. “The keys of that machine had to be hit so hard that to one outside the house it sounded like distant thunder or someone breaking up furniture. I had to hit the keys so hard that I strained my first fingers up to the elbows, while the ends of my fingers were blisters burst and blistered again. Had it been my machine I’d have operated it with a carpenter’s hammer.”12
Although he later acquired a fondness for bicycle trips, London’s disgust with typewriters and his later disdain for automobiles evidenced a lifetime suspicion of technology. Shepard’s typewriter, however, did yeoman service in turning out a stream of literature, London’s first great burst, including letters expounding on socialism to local newspaper editors. They were closely reasoned, and for the most part quite good. “The labor of the United States is not the debtor class,” he alleged in one. “They owe nothing for the simple reason that no one will trust them. Who composes this debtor class? The men of small capital—the men, who, when a debtless laborer produces ten dollars’ worth of wealth, pockets eight of it and gives him two as a wage.”13
The Applegarths had moved to San Jose, but in continuing to crave encouragement from Mabel, the depths of London’s desire to make it as a writer became more apparent. At the upper end of the scale, published articles paid at a rate of two cents per word. To write only five publishable words was therefore the equivalent of an hour’s laboring wage; he had to find a way to make it work. Deep down he knew that he was still learning, that what he was offering for sale now was rightly rejected. “I made ambitious efforts once,” he later wrote of this period to Mabel Applegarth. “I was the greenest of tyros, dipping my brush into whitewash and coal tar . . . wi
thout a soul to say ‘you are all wrong, herein you err; there is your mistake.’ . . . My elephantine diction was superb—I out-Johnsoned Johnson. I was a fool—and no one to tell me.”14
He joined the Socialist Labor Party, which brought him more contact with Whitaker and Strawn-Hamilton, but the crowds he attracted to his impromptu speeches on the courthouse square began to make the city take note of an ordinance against public gatherings held without the mayor’s written permission. After a number of socialist speakers had been run out of the square, the party determined to challenge the law, and London volunteered to be the one taken. On February 10, 1897, he had just started a lecture on the Speaker’s Corner when he was arrested and taken to jail. At his arraignment he demanded a jury trial, and unlike in Buffalo, this time he got one. Appealing to the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech, and to the memory of Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday had just been celebrated, his impassioned argument managed to hang the jury, eleven to one voting to acquit, after which the city declined to refile the charges. Although the Applegarths stuck by him, the arrest marked him as an incendiary and cooled the ardor with which Oakland’s polite element had begun to take an interest in him.
Nevertheless, the publicity won for the socialist cause was such that the Socialist Workers Party entered the twenty-one-year-old Berkeley dropout as a candidate for the Oakland School Board. It was becoming apparent, however, that his flight into political activism and writing was an indulgence that was hurting his family. The final straw landed when John London, feeble as he was becoming, offered to try to keep working to support Jack in his writing. That was unbearable.
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 12