Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  Rather than worrying about the war with Spain, London was more concerned that at this moment socialists were taking a drubbing in world opinion over the assassination of the beautiful Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary. She had been killed by an anarchist, not a socialist, but the distinction was too fine for the appreciation of most. “Poor woman it was not her fault for she was born so,” he wrote; she was merely the doomed exponent of a doomed political system. But London had become increasingly aware that to the average American indoctrinated with the ideals of patriotism, socialists, communists, and anarchists had all become lumped together into a bomb-throwing, vaguely Slavic cartoon that was inaccurate, and out of which they needed to be educated.

  By the holidays he was gloomy once again, writing to Mabel on Christmas Day that the rent was due on his typewriter—he had finally rented one rather than wear out the Shepards’—and it would have to go back at the end of the month. “About the loneliest Christmas I ever faced—guess I’ll write to you.” Christmas was a season that exalted family ties, but his family had always been small and difficult. Now he was coming up on twenty-three, when many his age were settling down with wives and children; when he stopped to ponder it, he was lonely for it. “The ways of the gods are inscrutable—and do they make and break us just for fun? . . . [The world] is like a great Chinese puzzle—in every little community are to be found the Islands of the Blest, and yet we know not where to look for them. And if we do, our ticket in Life’s Lottery bears the wrong number.”9

  While London wished his friends a happy New Year, the tally of his six months since returning to Oakland measured his small sale to Overland Monthly and his more substantial sale to The Black Cat against the receipt of forty-four rejections. After the first of the year his mood hardly improved when he endured yet another rite of passage: the rejection letter that many new writers receive containing the friendly and well-intended, but still intrinsically insulting, suggestion that he try to make his living at another trade. It came from Youth’s Companion, and like many young writers, London retreated into a legalistic defense against specific criticisms. To the charge of exceeding the specified length in the pieces submitted, he responded, “Five of my seven chapters were within fifty of three thousand words; one exceeded that number by one hundred and fifty; and another sank to about twenty-six hundred.” He wondered if his double-spacing had led them to miscount his wordage. What he, like nearly all in this circumstance, simply could not face was the intimation that he simply wasn’t good enough; and what the publishers for their part could not recognize was that being a writer was not just something he wanted to do, increasingly that was who he was, and he could no more excise that from his being than he could amputate a limb. “Some day I shall hit upon my magnum opus,” he vowed. “And then, if my struggling expression at last finds tongue, I will not have to go to the poor house because my muscles no longer work. And if not—well, so be it.”10

  In Alaska he had physically endured a similar Sisyphean struggle, packing and hiking nearly thirty miles for each mile actually accomplished—only to be confronted at the end by the spirit-killing sight of the Chilkoot Pass. Just as he was undergoing the same frustrating repetitiveness in the quest for publication, the ultimate challenge to his determination confronted him: on January 16 he received the results of his civil service exam. He had sailed through it with the impressive score of 85.38 out of 100. According to his local post-man, he had an excellent chance to be appointed an extra man at $45 per month, and then in a few months to be made a regular carrier with a monthly salary of $65. Fate had offered him a cruel bribe. He had just turned twenty-three. Kelly’s Army and then Alaska had left him with a marked distaste for walking, but delivering mail was nothing compared to shoveling coal, the wage was more than double, the work was permanent, and he dared not lose sight of his obligation to support his mother and nephew. All he had to do was forswear a literary career and relegate it to the status of hobby. It nearly tore him in half.

  Into the breach, unexpectedly, stepped his mother. Whether she recognized that he had been laboring for the family since the age of ten, or whether she saw how desperately he wanted to succeed as a writer, or whether her gambler’s hunch told her that if he succeeded, she could at long last recover her social station, as the mother and sponsor of a great writer, that she had spent her life striving for—probably it was a combination of all three—Flora told him he could forgo the opportunity with the post office. She had gained a small pension as the widow of a Civil War veteran, and combined with the income from the piano lessons, they would get by somehow. Taken aback and profoundly grateful, London prevaricated when the offer from the post office came, trying to win the concession that he could pass up the first opening and still be in line for the next one. An offended postmaster ended that possibility with a huff, declaring that the offer was good for once only. In a temper he told the postmaster to forget it, and Jack London’s die was cast as an author, or nothing.

  With publication of his first stories also came—unbidden but welcome—his first fan letter, praising “To the Man on the Trail.” It was from a young man named Cloudesley Johns, the postmaster in the lonely, tumbleweed-studded outpost of Harold, California, near the western edge of the Mojave Desert.

  “Dear Sir:—” London responded. “What an encouragement your short note was. . . . It’s the first word of cheer I have received (a cheer, far more potent than publisher’s checks).” Virtually any cheer would have been worth more than the $7.50 London received for the story, of course, but the surprise and joy that any writer receives with the first fan letter was not lost on him.11

  Only with further communication did Johns confess his real aim—he wanted advice to help with his own beginning efforts at writing. He sent London a story for his evaluation, and London offered good advice: “Keep yourself wholly out of the story—I noticed a number of ‘I’s. They jar. Let it be all third person.” “Don’t permit repetition (it is sometimes allowable, but rarely) . . . in four words, ‘waves’ appears twice—change to billows, anything else.” “Strike out ‘of which we can have no conception’—while you cannot elucidate the why or how . . . you clearly do conceive the possibility of such a thing.” All was given with the assurance of someone who had been publishing for twenty-three years, not someone who was twenty-three years old.12

  Their correspondence lengthened and warmed; they met; Johns was a year older than London, intense and handsome, with dark eyes, a cleft chin, a shock of thick black hair, and, on occasion, a luxurious handlebar moustache that could have been an advertisement for a barbershop quartet. Northern California was an oasis for Johns; his own sun-baked town of Harold, at the northern base of the San Gabriel mountains where the Southern Pacific Railroad crossed the Fort Tejon military road, had already seen its heyday a few years before when it boasted as many as five buildings, then declined when the railroad moved the yard for its booster engines to flatter ground a few miles north.13

  As they became better friends London met Johns’s family and took a special shine to his grandmother, Mrs. Rebecca Spring. She had once been in the circle of the great Bostonians of American literature. For London, who had figured out that he was illegitimate and had no family heritage of his own, to hear her personal recollections of Holmes and Emerson and Longfellow was to hear, saga-like, the story of his own tribe. It was a clan into which he had insinuated himself, and to which, by his own daring, he now belonged. His friendship with Johns lasted the rest of his life.

  Then there was more encouragement, the sale of a short story to another periodical, a local literary weekly called The Wave. Across from the University Club on Sutter Street was the newly rented photographic studio of the German émigré Arnold Genthe. A highly educated classicist, he had come to San Francisco employed as the tutor of a baron’s son, took up photography so he could send pictures home to his family, and he gained fame for his naturalistic portraits that were a stark contrast to the high, formal poses that peopl
e were used to. After opening the studio in 1898 he became a sensation, photographer to the famous and the glamorous. Early in Genthe’s career, a handsome young man entered the studio and handed him a note from John O’Hara Cosgrave, editor of The Wave. It read, “Please make a picture of bearer. He has written a rattling good story for The Wave and I feel sure he will be heard from in the future.” Genthe looked up and saw a visage created for the camera. He “had a poignantly sensitive face,” wrote the artist. “His eyes were those of a dreamer, and there was almost a feminine wistfulness about him. Yet at the same time he gave the feeling of a terrific and unconquerable physical force.” Genthe was challenged to capture that on film, and his pictures of London are among the most revealing ever taken.14 It was the beginning of a durable friendship.

  While his fiction submissions were finding their mark with increasing frequency, London’s ardent political views never strayed far from his heart. As a socialist he was somewhat obligated to be a pacifist as well, and in 1900 he placed an essay titled “The Impossibility of War” in the Overland Monthly. In preparing it he did enough homework to quote this general and that war minister, and dutifully recite the technological advances in both artillery and small arms, and the staggering cost of naval competition. It is his conclusions, however, that still strike home and make one wish that the bemedaled martinets who marched their cannon fodder out of the trenches in World War I had taken some heed of it: “Future wars must be long. No more open fields; no more decisive victories; but a succession of sieges fought over and through successive lines of wide-extending fortifications. . . . A condition of deadlock will inevitably result. . . . Since infantry can no longer drive infantry from a fortified position, the artillery [will] come to be greatly relied upon . . . and the side that advances, advances into extermination.”15 From military considerations he segued into the economic and social repercussions of future war: the loss of confidence in securities markets, currency collapse, loss of farm production leading to starvation, and, waiting at the end, revolution. And so it came to pass for the imperial houses of Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary.

  Jack London’s growing bibliography increased his profile among a clique of writers, artists, socialists, and bohemians in San Francisco, collectively known as The Crowd. It was a natural group for London to be drawn to, including his socialist mentor, Frank Strawn-Hamilton, and Jim Whitaker, who had continued London’s tutelage in boxing and fencing. It was in The Crowd that London finally began meeting and socializing with people who made for natural allies, not wharf rats for whom he had to buy drinks to blend in, or high school swells he felt pressure to impress. The Crowd quickly assimilated him, and he formed friendships that profoundly influenced him for the rest of his life.

  In December 1899, at a lecture by Austin Lewis at the Turk Street Temple, Strawn-Hamilton introduced London to a fetching, slender young brunette who would play a large role in his life in the coming years. Her name was Anna Strunsky; she was almost twenty-one, born in Babinotz, Russia, the fifth of six children in a Jewish family who immigrated to New York and then settled in San Francisco. Her maternal grandfather was a rabbi, her father owned a profitable liquor business, and she lacked only a semester to graduate from Stanford. She was more brilliant than beautiful, but for London at almost twenty-four, to meet a woman who could duel with him intellectually as well as engage him emotionally was a fascinating novelty. Doubtless they had heard of each other before; she was as famous for her outspoken socialism in San Francisco as he was in Oakland, and they both had ambitions to be authors. “We shook hands,” Anna remembered, “and remained talking to each other. I had a feeling of wonderful happiness. To me it was as if I was meeting in their youth LaSalle, Karl Marx or Byron, so instantly did I feel that I was in the presence of a historical character.”16

  One of the most prominent members of The Crowd, socially if not artistically, was the poet George Sterling. Seven years older than London, Sterling was tall and impossibly pretty, but not photogenic. Few pictures captured the essence of him, first because of his penchant for exaggerated aesthetic poses, but more important because his was a face, like the marble busts of Alexander the Great, best seen in movement. He was London’s height but more athletically built, sloe-eyed looking down a long and aquiline nose, with a lower lip that tended to pout although he smiled easily. He was originally from Sag Harbor, in the eastern part of Long Island. His father had converted to Catholicism when George was seventeen and George converted with him; at Saint Mary’s College in Maryland, he considered a life in the priesthood but did not pursue it. He went west to work in an uncle’s real estate office, where he met and married Caroline “Carrie” Rand. Imbued with a poet’s nature, he was dedicated to beauty in any form, but his writing tended to block up without the stimulus of sharp sensation to release his creativity. It was to this need that those around him ascribed his affinity for saturating tactile experiences—the sting of cold surf, the danger of dizzying cliffs, and amorous physicality. “We all of us did know that George required the stimulus of sex to have a releasing effect on him,” wrote one of The Crowd. “We knew, and lived in a kind of terror what it might bring on Carrie . . . for whom we all had the tenderest affection.”17 Considered a “mystical, rum-drinking humanitarian . . . poet of austere exoticism,” Sterling wrote without much notice until he was discovered and championed by Ambrose Bierce, “Bitter Bierce,” the famously unpleasant old columnist of the San Francisco Examiner and minion of William Randolph Hearst.

  Despite the paltry $5 he received for “To the Man on the Trail” from Overland Monthly, London found a champion in that journal’s editor, Ninetta Eames. Following his first story in January, she published “The White Silence” in February, “The Son of the Wolf ” in April, and five more through the course of the year. Eames’s sponsorship allowed London to focus his writing on the topic he knew best—as when the main character of “Son of the Wolf,” Scruff Mackenzie, takes an Indian wife to alleviate the loneliness of the prospecting life—and concentrate his energy on deepening his narrative voice instead of casting about for imaginative ideas. His work and her guidance were vindicated when the Overland stories were compiled and published in book form as The Son of the Wolf by Houghton-Mifflin, a front-rank publisher, in 1900.

  Ninetta Eames invited him to lunches, for which she paid, brought him into her home near Berkeley, and introduced him to her niece and goddaughter, Charmian Kittredge, who had been doing some of the editing on his stories, for which she self-deprecatingly referred to herself as the assistant sub-scissors. Charmian (a Greek name that she shared with the lady-in-waiting of Cleopatra) was five years older than London, accustomed to culture and nice clothes, and to polished, well-educated friends. Her aunt’s literary prominence placed her in The Crowd, but Charmian’s affinity for more popular culture led her to prefer its fringes.

  Upon meeting London at her aunt’s house just as he was leaving an appointment with a copy of Boyd’s Composition Eames had lent him, she was struck equally by his beauty and his clothes—“shabby bicycle trousers and dark gray woolen shirt. A nondescript tie, soft bicycle shoes and a worn cap.” For his part he noticed that she was not shy and not pretty.

  “So that’s your wonderful Jack London,” she sniped when he had gone.

  Eames stood her ground. “With genius, clothing doesn’t matter.”

  Her faith in him paid off when Son of the Wolf hit the bookstores, and London finally savored the sweet revenge not tasted by every starving artist: window-rattling reviews. From coast (“These stories are realism, without the usual falsity of realism”—New York Times), through the interior (“It is to be doubted if Kipling ever wrote a better short story than ‘The Son of the Wolf’”—Kansas City Star), to coast (“You cannot get away from the fascination of these tales”—San Francisco Chronicle) he triumphed. It was all heady praise for a young man who wore “shabby bicycle trousers.”

  Charmian joined them for lunch soon after at Young’s in Sa
n Francisco, where she took greater note not just of his long-lashed blue eyes, but that “there was about his feature a chastity, an untried virginity of expression that seemed greatly at odds with . . . his rather dubious career.”18 Like everyone who met him and wrote about him during his youth, she was captured by his openness and his questioning, as though he were looking, she wrote, for something he had never known.

  On another visit to the Eames house, while Ninetta was interviewing Jim Whitaker for an article about London, Charmian took him into her den and showed him her books and curios. She learned that he had never learned to dance. He rhapsodized at the mention of Kipling. They shared an affinity for Thomas Hardy; he recommended Jude the Obscure, which she had never read, and he borrowed Tess of the D’Urbervilles with a promise that he “had a conscience about books” and would take good care of it.

  Of all The Crowd, though, it was the alluring Anna Strunsky who most captured London’s attention. His attraction to Mabel Applegarth began to fade, and the intellectual sympathy between London and the brilliant young Russian served as the prelude to a powerful physical attraction. It almost reached the pitch of romance. London’s longing for a home life had grown into a void, and in desperation, he proposed to Anna. She was a passionate and vital creature, but her life had been strangely sheltered—her response to him was to blush and turn away, really for no more reason than that was what good girls did in novels. London knew how to take a woman, but he had no idea how to court one; he took her hesitation for rejection and let the matter drop, his soul crushed.