Eight days more—June 26—brought them into the Yukon’s vast delta, where at last they confronted an element of danger. St. Michael’s lay up the northernmost channel, which was a minor outlet. If they picked the wrong channel they could wind up being ejected into the Bering Sea with but little prospect of being found. With considerable trepidation they picked a route, which put them into the choppy sea near Point Romanoff, an easy sail from St. Michael’s. In this isolated water London met the man he called the most interesting he had yet encountered in the Arctic, a French-Italian priest named Robeau, whom they took into their boat because his kayak was in danger of foundering. A Jesuit and highly educated, which won him London’s sympathy right away, he had devoted his twelve years in Alaska to preparing a written grammar of the Inuit language. Bemused, London listened as Robeau rhapsodized on the Inuit language, as “moods, tenses, articles, adverbs, etc., fill the air.” For once he felt as a complacent capitalist must feel when he held forth on the advancement of the proletariat.
In St. Michael’s London found a steamer that was willing to sign him on as a coal stoker in exchange for passage to Port Townsend, Washington. Eight days out, however, weakened by the scurvy, London seriously burned his hand at the boiler he was feeding and was excused from duty thereafter. Those eight days’ wages at least financed a steerage berth from Port Townsend to San Francisco.
Back in Oakland he discovered that his family had been through some wrenching changes. His stepfather had died nine months before, and Flora had reduced her lifestyle, moving into a smaller place on Foothill Boulevard. London’s stepsister, not his beloved Eliza but the younger Ida, had developed into a wild child, married young and separated, and now had deposited her little boy, Johnny Miller, with Flora to raise. And galling as it was, Flora seemed to have found the maternal instinct to take care of the boy, with affection that she had never shown Jack.
There was no money and bills were due. Now he was responsible for the family, and he had brought back gold dust worth $4.50. This time, however, Jack London refused to just stare bleakly at the prospect of becoming once more the Work Beast. In the frozen vastness of the Arctic he had sworn to himself to become a writer, no matter what it took. And that was what he meant to do.
7
THE ASPIRING WRITER
One of the hardest things was to face Eliza. She had fled the family woes and was on a camping trip when he returned to Oakland. As much as Jack yearned to see her again, the joy of their reunion would not be unalloyed. She had allowed him to risk money from her and Captain Shepard’s business, she had placed a mortgage on her house, and as if that weren’t enough, she had paid for her father’s funeral while he was gone. And now London had to admit that he had come back broke.
All John London was able to bequeath to his stepson was a good mackintosh that was worth $15. Jack was stricken by news of his death but, desperate for cash, he pawned it for $2. He also hocked his own bicycle and his watch; one friend from the waterfront traded him a dress suit bundled in newspapers for an assortment of his personal odds and ends. He needed the suit, but far more than that, he needed the $5 the pawn shop paid for it. As he’d been with sports cards and kerosene tins, he was still a canny trader.
There was simply no work, even for a Beast. He registered at five different employment agencies, he held out his services in three newspapers, but there was nothing doing. Willing as he was to trade on his handsome looks, he was unable to land any modeling jobs. Scurvy gone, he was strong again but found no success with any of the advertisements he answered seeking an aide to the elderly infirm. Finally in early August he pawned his pinch of gold dust and headed to Nevada for more prospecting but returned in defeat again. All was not yet lost in the Yukon; he had pulled out of his mining claim and come home rather than die from scurvy, but his partners had promised to write him if it turned productive. If there were gold to return to, he would end up a wealthy man yet. But he certainly could not count on it.
Always in the back of his mind was the desire to write, to publish, and when he wasn’t looking for work he was writing like mad. After what he felt was relentless preparation, London decided it was time to put his work to the test, and wrote his first query letter on September 17, 1898, to the editor of the San Francisco Bulletin.
I have returned from a year’s residence in the Clondyke, entering the country by way of Dyea and Chilcoot Pass. I left by way of St. Michaels, thus making altogether a journey of 2,500 miles on the Yukon in a small boat. I have sailed and traveled quite extensively in other parts of the world and have learned to seize upon that which is interesting, to grasp the true romance of things, and to understand the people I may be thrown amongst.
I have just completed an article of 4,000 words, describing the trip from Dawson to St. Michaels in a rowboat. Kindly let me know if there would be any demand in your columns for it—of course, thoroughly understanding that the acceptance of the manuscript is to depend upon its literary and intrinsic value.
Yours very respectfully,
Jack London
The rejection was swift, penciled beneath London’s query. “Interest in Alaska has subsided in an amazing degree. Then, again, so much has been written, that I do not think it would pay us to buy your story. Editor.”1
Less than a week later he tried again, with a political piece titled “The Devil’s Dice Box.” It too was turned back, first by the popular illustrated monthly Collier’s Magazine and then by several others, until it finally resided in London’s file of “retired” pieces he had lost hope of selling.2 He tried poems; he had mastered the classical forms and could fill any template of rhyme and meter with fluffy metaphors or histrionic tragedy. He tried essays and short stories; in a week he completed a serial of over 20,000 words that he submitted to Youth’s Companion, but it, too, was rejected.
He had read a news piece indicating that for published work, an author could expect a rate of at least $10 per 1,000 words; using the same calculus with which he correctly estimated his ability to pack his gear across the Yukon, he grandly figured that he could live comfortably on the $600 per month he could earn by writing just 3,000 words per day. He had no idea that very few writers ever produce 3,000 sellable words per day. As a sailor London had proven that he could navigate either San Francisco Bay or Lake Laberge under the black of clouds or a new moon, but as a writer he was discovering that to labor in the dark, with no hint other than reading the popular magazines for what editors might buy, got him nowhere. The pennies that he was spending for stamps, both to make the submissions and include return postage for the rejected pieces, seemed like a fortune.
He renewed his friendship with the Applegarths but Mabel, once his muse and his porcelain ideal, was increasingly proving herself to be her mother’s daughter. Cautious and conventional, she was sympathetic toward his desire to write but discouraged him from doggedly pursuing it. When he mentioned to her that the U.S. Post Office was about to offer the civil service examination, she leapt at the chance to steer him toward that safe harbor. It was not what he wanted to hear, and a pall descended between them just as Mabel began to feel she might actually fall in love with him. His friendship with Ted Applegarth became the new focus of his visits, and Mabel did not take well to being relegated to the sidelines. It took an incident—she cleared their chessboard of its pieces in anger at being ignored—for her to realize, from his measured response, that she had lost him. Their friendship remained, however, and to spare her feelings London maintained the pretense of courtship.
Then came the first spark of interest in his writing that might prove her wrong about his literary chances. Oakland’s Fifth Ward Republican Club sponsored a political essay contest, which he won along with $20 in prize money. It was enough to give him more hope, but not enough to change his circumstances. Bowing to reality, on October 1, 1898, he took the civil service examination so he could have a secure job as a mail carrier, still hoping against hope that literary success would rescue him from committ
ing to further day labor. He passed that crucible of anxiety endured by all young writers, of waiting with bated breath for the postal delivery, only to hear nothing, good or bad, from anybody. And like most young writers, he endured the humiliation of not getting paid. “Everything seems to have gone wrong,” he confided to Mabel. “I have’nt [sic] received my twenty dollars for those essays yet. Not a word as to how I stood in my Civil Service Exs. Not a word from the Youth’s Companion, and it means to me what no one can possibly realize.”3 He had submitted a serial titled “Where Boys are Men,” of 3,000 words in each of the seven chapters, to Youth’s Companion. After they rejected it, London learned one more nuance of literary journeymanship: the pieces were accepted the next year by Youth and Age, but they were never actually printed.
He was gruesomely organized in recording his submissions, every rejection slip filed, every penny for postage stamps logged. What a blessing it would have been if he could have endured the frustration in privacy, but Flora saw every packet that crossed their threshold, and Eliza heard about each one. Mabel tried to help him, but her best advice continued to be that he give up, once going so far as to remind him of his duty toward the security of his family. Mabel had become perhaps his closest confidante, but in daring to refer him to a sense of “duty,” she fouled a tripwire that set off a detonation—all his past resentments and his present frustrations poured out in a torrent of recrimination.
I was eight years old when I put on my first undershirt made at or bought at a store. Duty—at ten years I was on the street selling newspapers. Every cent was turned over to my people. . . . I worked in the cannery. I was up and at work at six in the morning. I took half an hour for dinner. I took half an hour for supper. I worked every night till ten, eleven and twelve o’clock. My wages were small, but I worked such long hours that I sometimes made as high as fifty dollars a month. Duty—I turned every cent over. Duty—I have worked in that hellhole for thirty-six straight hours, at a machine, and I was only a child. I remember how I was trying to save money to buy a skiff—eight dollars. All that summer I saved and scraped. In the fall I had five dollars as a result of absolutely doing without all pleasure. My mother came to the machine where I worked and asked for it. I could have killed myself that night. After a year of hell to have that pitiful—to be robbed of that petty joy.
How often, as I swept rooms at High School, has my father come to me at work and got a half dollar, a dollar, or two dollars [sometimes] when I did not have a cent, and went to the Aegis fellows and borrowed it.4
And apart from all this, when he returned from the Klondike he had done everything he could think of to sell himself as a Work Beast again. Writing was all that was left for him; his first choice was now his last, by default and by desperation.
London’s night, however, passed its darkest point before dawn. To the venerable Overland Monthly he had submitted a short story, “To the Man on the Trail,” a cleverly ambiguous title that sounded like it might offer advice to novice Klondikers, but which actually repeated a toast at a Christmas gathering in a Yukon cabin. The story might as well have depicted his own previous Christmas at Split-Up Island. The host, the Malemute Kid, is preparing a dubious punch of whiskey, brandy, and pepper sauce when the gathering is interrupted by the arrival of an exhausted passing stranger, whom they bed down and speed on his way the next morning, moments before the Mountie pursuing him also stops at the cabin. The Malemute Kid renders the lawman no aid, and only by demanding of a Jesuit who would not lie—even named Father Roubeau—does the Mountie learn that his quarry mushed out not fifteen minutes before. The men curse themselves for helping an outlaw, when the Malemute Kid wises them up, saying that what the stranger stole was only what his victim had stolen from him. It was an inevitable first London piece, combining the Yukon with the quest for fairness in a cheating world.
At the lowest moment of reading rejection letters and sending manuscripts back out to second and third and fourth choices, London received a letter from Overland Monthly. The editors were overstocked in accepted manuscripts, it said, but they thought it was a fine story, and if he would take $5 for it, they would publish it next month. Therein lay another lesson for the novice writer: if it was good enough to publish, and publish in a journal that had hosted Mark Twain and Bret Harte, why would they pay him only an eighth of a penny per word? But $5 was nearly a week’s wage for a Work Beast, and he accepted. Then came the next lesson: waiting on the check. For months. And months.
Then London extracted another letter, from one H. D. Umbstaetter, editor of a nickel per copy monthly magazine of short stories called The Black Cat. They would pay him forty dollars to publish his submission, “A Thousand Deaths.” They found the piece wordy, however, and wanted to cut it in half. London did not argue. They could cut it in half twice, he responded, if they would just pay promptly. A dozen years later, London wrote an introduction to a hardcover collection of stories from The Black Cat called The Red Hot Dollar . In it he recounted the sale of “A Thousand Deaths.”
Everything I possessed was in pawn, and I did not have enough to eat. I was sick, mentally and physically, from lack of nourishment. . . . I was at the end of my tether, beaten out, starved, ready to go back to coal-shoveling or ahead to suicide. . . . I had once read in a Sunday supplement that the minimum rate paid by the magazines was ten dollars per thousand words. But during all the months devoted to storming the magazine field, I had received back only manuscripts. Still I believed implicitly what I had read in the Sunday supplement.
He went on to recount the sale of “To the Man on the Trail” to Overland Monthly, and his despair at learning that the pay rate was vastly less than what he had been led to believe. But then the offer from The Black Cat had come that same afternoon. “Literally, and literarily, I was saved by the ‘Black Cat’ short story. . . . The marvelous and unthinkable thing that Mr. Umbstaetter did, was to judge a story on its merits and to pay for it on its merits. Also, and only a hungry writer can appreciate it, he paid immediately on acceptance.”5
Years after selling “A Thousand Deaths,” it was apparent that London still believed in its literary merits. For an early effort it was a curious amalgam of experience and imagination. Its opening is reminiscent of London’s own near-drowning in the Carquinez Straits during his Fish Patrol days, but the story quickly evolves into a tale of twisted science. Some of its elements show the mark of the beginner: that the mad scientist who rescues a drowning sailor does not recognize his own son is a heavy imposition on the reader’s credulity, and then ultimately it proves irrelevant to the story. However, the science-fiction plot, that the scientist has discovered the secret of reanimation and perfects it by repeatedly killing his captive son, is actually quite effective. The setting allows young London to fully deploy his ruthlessly bulked up—not to say “supererogatory”—vocabulary in perhaps the only way that is not pedantic and annoying. And certainly the rescue of a flailing sailor from San Francisco Bay by someone who proves to be a monster was a motif famously recycled years later in The Sea-Wolf.
In recalling the dark days before Umbstaetter and The Black Cat came to his rescue, London may have been venting a bit of hyperbole with the claim that he had thought of suicide, but his old friend Frank Atherton did not think so. He had come up from San Jose for a visit and found London so despondent that he lengthened his stay until he felt assured that London would not harm himself. Indeed he stayed so long that London missed his own trip down to San Jose to spend Thanksgiving with the Applegarths. He had written of suicide to Mabel as well. “As long as my mother lives, I would not do this; but with her gone tomorrow, if I knew that my life would be such, that I was destined to live in Oakland, labor in Oakland at some steady occupation, and die in Oakland—then to-morrow I would cut my throat. . . . You may call this foolish effervescence of youthful ambition . . . but I have had my share of toning down.”6 What propelled him out of contemplating suicide, he told Atherton, was a visit by a young lady friend of his, a
lso despondent and threatening to kill herself. As he reasoned her out of it, he talked himself out of it as well. “I am going to stick to my writing,” he told Atherton, “and the publishers are going to accept it whether they like it or not. And some of these days they’ll be glad to . . . pay me a good price for it; you just wait and see.” Yet another lesson of the aspiring writer: the helpless yawing from hopelessness to manic self-confidence. 7
Doubtless Jack London missed his other friends. Eliza’s stepson Herbert had enlisted to fight in the Spanish-American War, and Fred Jacobs of the Oakland library had enlisted in the Hospital Corps, leaving London to keep Jacobs’s fiancée, Bess Maddern, company and go on bicycling excursions with her. In later years, the conflict between the United States and Spain endured more critical scrutiny as an act of American imperial expansion at the expense of a crumbling former power. At the time, however, patriotism was fervent, and London had little difficulty justifying it within his growing socialist doctrine. To him the war seemed “but a stroke against monarchy & for political democracy. . . . [It] is easily apparent that political democracy must come before industrial democracy—and there it is, perfect political & industrial democracy combined are really what?—Socialism.”8
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 15