Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  London had also been spending time with his former math tutor, Bess Maddern, who was bereaved with the death of Fred Jacobs. He had taken a fever on his way to Cuba and became one of the many casualties of the Spanish-American War that had nothing to do with battle. She was brilliant at mathematics but quickly retreated into irritation when the conversation turned to unknown subjects. London was gregarious; she was a quiet homebody. What they had most in common was a love of bicycling, and during their long trips together they found themselves amiably attracted.

  With the matter of his love for Anna in awkward limbo, he decided to marry Bessie with little thought to future happiness. Two romantic disappointments, first with Mabel Applegarth and then with Anna, were enough to convince an impatient young man that mutual passion was too much to hope for in a marriage. Bessie was presentable, her family was reasonably well off, she would make a good mother, and they got on well together. That was enough. He did not love her, and she knew it; she was too heartsick over losing Jacobs to know what her feelings were, but she believed he could come to love her in time. London had made a lunch date with Charmian Kittredge, which he broke with a polite, typewritten note, announcing that rather than lunch, he and Bessie would be married that day—April 7, an auspicious day for new beginnings, as it was also the publication date of The Son of the Wolf.

  Eames was no shrinking violet herself, a veteran of San Francisco’s days of free love and flouting convention, just as was his mother. “Heaven and earth!” she exclaimed. “The boy must be crazy to dream that marrying in cold blood is living life!” The nuptials were exchanged politely, they vacationed on bicycles. Flora London had found some hope for her own future as his literary sponsor, and she was shocked and embittered when the new couple moved in together, not with her, but into a two-story house on East Fifteenth Street. It took only a short while to conceive their first child, a daughter named Joan, born in the house three days after London’s twenty-fifth birthday.

  During the waning months of 1901 London’s good-natured sparring with Anna on the nature of love blossomed into an idea for a book. In this new work, a collection of letters, London would take the voice of Herbert Wace, arguing that marriage should not be based on physical love, which was a chimera that promised a false future. Rather it should be predicated on enduring qualities of respect and companionship, of compatibility as potential parents, and other qualities that were recognized by the mind, not the heart. Anna would take the voice of an older father figure whom they named Dane Kempton, and contend passionately for the opposite view, that romantic heat was the soul and sustenance of a successful marriage.

  It was divinely ironic that London proposed the new book while sailing on the Spray, a small sailboat he had acquired, with both Bessie and Anna—Bessie, whom he had wed in an amicable but passion-bereft partnership of the very kind he would advocate in the new book, and Anna, to whom he was attracted as though by gravity itself, whom he would have married had she not demurred at the critical moment only because she thought she was supposed to. Being modern and bohemian, they both felt no compunction about discussing the new book within the full hearing of Bessie, ever the companionable sport.

  London had now known Anna for two years and had fallen increasingly under her spell: her high small Tatar eyes and hint of a Russian accent, her natural wasp waist never bound by a corset, her incandescent socialist brilliance. The more they framed and edited their letters with an eye toward publication, and the more London contended persuasively for platonic marriage, the more his relationship with Bessie, ironically, crumbled. Unseasonable rains flooded the cellar of their house on Fifteenth Street, and London moved the family into the large and aptly named Villa Capriccioso of his sculptor friend Felix Peano. London adored the eccentric house with its round windows and tiny hidden staircases; Bessie loathed it. The Crowd came to depend upon “Wednesday at Jack’s,” and London lived for his weekly open house for his friends; Bessie abhorred them. He was full-blooded and highly sexualized; she according to him could barely tolerate mating. “She’s devoted to purity,” he told George Sterling and Joseph Noel. “Every time I come back after being away from home for a night she won’t let me be in the same room with her if she can help it. . . . When I tell her morality is only evidence of low blood pressure, she hates me.”19 There was friction between Bessie and his mother, which Flora cultivated and tried to capitalize on. Somehow London managed to work on A Daughter of the Snows for McClure’s, another mainstream publisher that began courting his work, while living in Peano’s strange villa, and he finished it after a brief move to a large, fashionable house he couldn’t afford on Bayo Vista Avenue.20

  In the heat of completing what they titled The Kempton-Wace Letters, London invited Anna to stay with him and Bessie until they finished. “During the first few days of my stay Mrs. London was very cordial and manifested great interest in our work,” said Anna a couple of years later, “but, after a stay of five days, I became convinced that, for some reason, Mrs. London had begun to dislike me.”21 In this reminiscence Anna neglected to mention that on one occasion Bessie had returned home unexpectedly to find her and London editing the manuscript with her sitting in his lap. When Anna packed up and left a few days later, Bessie was generous enough to affect regret that she was leaving so soon.

  As London’s situation became financially as well as emotionally untenable, his friend Sterling, poet and bohemian at heart but a real estate agent in the real world, offered him the rent of a rustic bungalow in the Piedmont Hills overlooking Oakland. Not coincidentally, it neighbored the Sterlings’ own home. Redolent of happier rural days when his stepfather was still alive, London pounced on it. “We have a big living room,” he wrote first fan Cloudesley Johns,We could put the floor space of almost four cottages into this one living room alone. The rest of the house is finished in redwood, too, very comfortable. We have also the cutest, snuggest little cottage on the same ground with us, in which live my mother and my nephew. Chicken houses and yards for 500 chickens. Barn for a dozen horses, big pigeon houses, laundry, creamery, etc., etc. A most famous porch, broad and long and cool, a big clump of magnificent pines, flowers and flowers and flowers galore, five acres of ground.

  London expected no intention to ever leave, he said, unless a mob showed up and burned him out.22 Bessie too approved of the Piedmont bungalow, and their relationship improved to the extent that they conceived a second child toward the end of January, but their widening incompatibility was becoming too great to bridge.

  As London and Anna finished The Kempton-Wace Letters by correspondence, the salutations of his letters to her graduated from “Dear Anna” at the beginning of 1901, to “Dear, dear Anna” in May, “Dear You” in October, and finally for the first time “Dear, dear you,” on January 5, 1902: “You look back on a tumultuous and bankrupt year; and so do I. And for me the New Year begins full of worries, harassments and disappointments. So you? I wonder?”23

  8

  THE MUCKRAKER

  In 1898 Jack London had returned from the Klondike with the resolution to turn himself into a writer. What he discovered was that turning one’s life was like turning a large ship: one might put the wheel hard over, but it takes some distance for her to answer the helm. After three fierce years, however, he had done it. His first book had appeared to ecstatic reviews, he was working on his second, The Kempton-Wace Letters, with Anna, and had undertaken a third, expanding his Yukon motif into a novel called A Daughter of the Snows. He had won the acceptance of the brightest intellectuals in San Francisco, married, and become a father. He was struggling financially, as most writers do, and he bore the literary badge of romantic entanglements, but that he had started up the literary mountain was undeniable. What he needed now was a breakthrough; Ninetta Eames had gotten him noticed, but now he needed a mentor with a larger profile than hers to set him on the national stage.

  At first London did not recognize what a godsend, for both his obscurity and his poverty, had arrive
d at the very close of 1901, a letter from one of the United States’ leading publishers, George P. Brett of Macmillan & Co. More than thirty years before, Brett’s father, George Edward Brett, had been a London book distributor when he was hired by the company’s founder, Alexander Macmillan, to open an American branch of his publishing house. Thereafter the New York address of 63 Bleecker Street became a mecca for leading American authors. Brett brought his son into the business in 1874 as a sales representative when he was only sixteen, and by the time he took over the reins of the American branch upon the senior Brett’s death in 1890 there was no phase of the publishing industry he had not mastered. With the American book-buying market having come to rival that of Britain, the younger Brett negotiated a large degree of operating autonomy from the parent company, leaving him free to acquire books by American authors on American topics. An omnivorous and perceptive reader, Brett had followed the serialization of London’s Alaska tales, both collections of which, he could not help but notice, came from different publishers. The Alaska stories, he wrote to London, “represent very much the best work of the kind that has been done on this side of the water.” If London had any book manuscripts to show, Brett wanted to publish him, now and in the future.

  London answered promptly and politely. “I have a novel, but McClure, Phillips & Co. are to publish it. . . . However, I have a series of Klondike short stories under way. Forty thousand words are done, and I have about ten or fifteen more thousand words to do to complete the series, which I call by the general title, Children of the Frost.” If Brett cared to see them, he would be happy to send them.1

  The Kempton-Wace Letters was now almost ready to show, as London’s Herbert Wace was judged to have lost the debate when his sweetheart rejected his suit and cast him off on his platonic and self-sufficient own. London was doubtless satisfied with this ending, because what he had really been contending for were the principles on which he had married Bessie, and that union had by now degenerated into hell on earth. Anna Strunsky divined as much, later writing that both in their conversations and in the book, he had argued his case for platonic marriage “so passionately as to again make one suspect that he was not as certain of his position as he claimed to be.” Early in May, Anna visited the Piedmont bungalow and London told her that his marriage was hopelessly broken and asked her again to marry him. In the oddly voiced third person of her memoir, Anna recalled of her refusal that she told him, “It was one thing to be in love with him when he was free like herself,” but now that he had a wife and child, she did not think it possible to finally capture what they once almost had. London, however, pressed his suit, and “with a tumult of joy in her heart . . . she promised to marry him.”2 Within a couple of weeks she changed her mind, however, explaining that she did not love him enough to begin married life by crushing the marriage of another woman. London was still reveling in having finally wrung it from her that she loved him, and he would not take this new tone as a final refusal. For the moment he resumed his role as affectionate friend and co-author in polishing The Kempton-Wace Letters.

  In truth he dared not give up on Anna, because not only was his marriage broken beyond repair, but he was afraid that his career was beginning to founder as well. Brett did ask to see the collection of stories comprising Children of the Frost, but although working furiously London was $3,000 in debt, and he had mined his literary Klondike bare of ore with his completion of A Daughter of the Snows and these new stories for Macmillan. He had been correcting the novel’s proofs and was heartsick to discover that even to his own eye it read like hackwork, by turns flat and melodramatic. He had gotten ahead of himself. He had sold himself as a novelist and discovered, too late, that the forces that pull a novel are vastly larger and more complex than those for a successful short story. He wasn’t up to it yet. “It is terrible to doctor sick things,” he wrote to Anna. “Every batch seems the worst till the next batch comes along.”3 McClure Phillips & Co. did not find the manuscript very compelling either, but they were able to sell it to Lippincott’s for more than they had paid for it, and as poor as London judged the work, he reaped $165 for the difference.

  What he needed was a new turn entirely, and this salvation arrived about July 16 when he received a telegram from the American Press Association, inquiring into his interest in traveling to South Africa to interview military officers who had fought in the Boer War, which had just ended.4 His recent Overland Monthly piece on “The Impossibility of War” had cited various engagements from that conflict, and he was a good candidate for the job. It was an offer that answered many needs, escaping Bessie not least among them; he wired his acceptance immediately, packed that night, and boarded a train for New York the next day. Cameron King, a comrade and mutual friend of Anna’s (and, unknown to London, a competing suitor), saw him to the station.

  “The Desert, Nevada,” he wrote Anna the next day. “Dear, dear You:—Just a line to let you know that all is well, that I am exceedingly warm, that the train is wobbling, and that I am thinking of you.” The sentiment may have been true as of that moment, but there was a second reason the train had been rocking: London had suddenly found a powerful release for his pent-up frustration with Bessie. As he later wrote to a confidante, “You remember when I started for South Africa. In my car was a woman traveling with a maid and a child. We came together on the jump, at the very start, and had each other clear to Chicago. It was sexual passion, clear and simple. . . . There was no glamour of the mind, not even an overwhelming intoxication of the senses. Nothing remained when our three days and nights were over.”5 The recipient of this naked honesty, intended as a warning of the ease with which the sexual beast within him could be set free, was Charmian Kittredge, the very modern niece of Overland Monthly’s Ninetta Eames.

  On arriving in New York, London checked in at the American Press Association and was crestfallen to learn that his assignment had been canceled because the generals who were to have been his interview subjects had already dispersed from the war zone. With his passage to England already purchased, however, he began casting about for another project. His ship, the White Star liner R.M.S. Majestic, did not sail for another week, and while staying at the press association he received a forwarded letter from John Spargo, who was on the editorial board of a socialist monthly called The Comrade. Spargo solicited an article on how London had become a socialist, to which he amiably agreed, but advised that he could not tend to it until he returned from abroad several months hence. Meanwhile, that new English project had begun to form in his mind. “I may do some writing of the London slums,” he added, “possibly a book, though as yet everything is vague & my main idea is to get a vacation.”6

  As this new thought developed, he tried it out on his new benefactor, George Brett at Macmillan, where the seed fell on ground more fertile than he knew. Macmillan had been founded by adherents of “Christian Socialism” and had published reformist books since its inception; Brett himself had begun acquiring for Macmillan the works of Jacob Riis, the pathblazing Danish-American social reformer, wooing him away from his previous publishers Scribner’s Sons and Century. Riis’s 1890 exposé of the New York slums had spurred that city ’s police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, to improve conditions. Brett had published Riis’s autobiography the year before and was just bringing out The Battle of the Slum, to which London’s examination of the homeless paupers in England would likely make an effective companion. Encouraged, London wrapped up his affairs at the American Press Association and enjoyed a brief reunion with his first fan and fast friend, Cloudesley Johns. He had ridden the rails to New York to sample life there as a starving artist, which was proving more precarious than he had anticipated; London lent him $10 and headed for the pier.

  He had traveled aboard steamships before—as a coal stoker aboard the Umatilla after the debacle with Kelly’s Army, and on City of Topeka en route to Alaska—but they could not have prepared him for the sight of the R.M.S. Majestic. She was the pride of the White St
ar Line and one-time holder of the Blue Riband, the trophy for setting a speed record in crossing the Atlantic, a feat that she accomplished in five days and eighteen hours. The former oyster pirate and sealer regarded her gleaming white honeycomb of superstructure rising above the beetling black hull, stretching nearly six hundred feet long beneath two towering yellow and black funnels. She was powered by two gigantic engines that swept her 1,500 passengers through the water at over twenty knots. London the socialist, however, saw something much more. By the turn of the century the great Atlantic liners, each new one larger and faster than the last, had become indelible symbols of Western industrial capitalism, but they also embodied its hypocrisy. Their reputations were made by hosting the vacationing wealthy in opulent salons and staterooms, but their operating expenses were paid with deep black bellies full of steerage-paying immigrants headed to the New World—a few to find opportunity, and the rest to be chuffed like human coal into the boilers of capitalist exploitation, as London himself so very nearly had been.

  On his first full day at sea, London wrote a letter to Anna Strunsky, “Dear You:—I meet the men of the world . . . in Atlantic liner smoking rooms, and, truth to say, I am made more hopeful for the Cause by their total ignorance and non-understanding of the forces at work. They are blissfully ignorant of the coming upheaval, while they have grown bitterer and bitterer towards the workers. You see, the growing power of the workers is hurting them and making them bitter while it does not open their eyes.” With some of his temper vented, the rest of the note was a love letter: “my love, my dove . . . there are many To-morrows, and we will make them all To-days.” Anna was to give a lecture that day at Pacific Grove. “Possibly you are speaking at this present moment. Well, good luck be with you, comrade. I know you will do well.”7