Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  London had tried twice before to gain admittance to Whitechapel Workhouse, without success, as it was full. Most workhouses could accommodate between 150 and 300 indigents; Whitechapel was one of the largest in the country, with a capacity of 600.19 The door was customarily opened at six in the evening, and though he joined the line at three, he was number twenty, and they were admitting only twenty-two on that night. A dozen more were in line after him, hoping against hope that some in front of them would leave. London had a chance to talk to the first in line, a laborer called Ginger (British slang for a redhead) who had been employed by a fishmonger until he was given too heavy a crate to carry and herniated his back. One charity hospital let him rest for four hours, rubbed Vaseline on his back, and packed him off. He was treated similarly at a second one. “But the point is,” London wrote indignantly, “the employer did nothing, positively nothing, for the man injured in his employment.” Now Ginger’s effective working life was over, and his only future was the workhouse, or starvation on the street.

  At least getting food in the workhouse lacked the prayers and hymns of the Salvation Army. Immediately on being enrolled he received what he at first thought was a brick but proved to be a small loaf of bread. Ushered farther on down into a cellar, he also received three-quarters of a pint of corn gruel in which to dip it. Salt was scattered on the tables for the men to dredge their bread through. At seven the men were stripped and taken to bathe, two tubs of water for twenty-two of them (although this was against health regulations in most cities). The previous user handed his towel to London, who saw as the man turned away that his back was pocked with open sores. London bathed and dried minimally, and all were issued blankets and workhouse uniforms before trooping back upstairs to sleep.

  In the morning he took a photograph of the dormitory where homeless people slept—a high corridor with windows down both sides, both walls lined with what appear to be ballet barres coiled with rolls of canvas, one after the other. Down the center of the corridor two more iron railings ran parallel, with a narrow passage between them. At night the canvas beds were unrolled from the outer rails and fastened to the inner ones, creating hammocks. The strips of canvas were eighteen inches wide and nearly touched each other, so that when one man shifted his position during the night it created a ripple of disturbance to the end of the hall. Such disturbances were incessant because the hammocks did not hang level, but from high on the wall to low at the aisle, so that one slid down as he slept. At the lowest point they were about eight inches off the floor; after finally drifting off to sleep, London awoke at the six a.m. breakfast call to find a rat on his chest.

  Of the work actually done in a workhouse, had it been in a prison it would have gone under the heading of “hard labor.” Breaking granite into rubble was a principal occupation for the men, or else “picking oakum,” unraveling the fibers of scrapped hemp rope, which were sold to manufacturers to mix with pitch and used for caulking wooden boats. Needlework was a common task of poor women, and since the workhouses were all the country had in the way of shelter for elderly indigents, surviving photographs depict vast halls of white-capped old women bent over their toil. The wage they received, even by the standards of the Abyss, was so small that London overheard one younger woman urging another to sneak away with her to life as a streetwalker rather than this. He asked another woman on the outside if she thought she might end up in a workhouse. “Gawd blimey if I do,” she spat out. “There’s no ’ope for me, I know, but I’ll die on the streets. No work’ouse for me, thank you, no indeed!”

  The work London drew was considered light duty: cleaning the sick wards in the workhouse hospital across Thomas Street. Reforms enacted in 1867 had mandated removal of regular inmates into separate buildings so they would not be disturbed by the screams from the sick and imbecile wards. London and several others were convoyed to the hospital to scrub floors and empty garbage cans of fouled bedding and bandages. “Don’t touch it, mate,” one of the regulars advised him. “Nurse says it’s deadly.”

  Enrollment in a casual ward obligated one to stay two nights and a day, but London bolted, although leaving without permission was punishable by up to two weeks in jail. He continued undercover for the next four weeks, submerging himself in the East End for days at a time before retreating to his room to bathe and write. Still affecting his stranded-sailor guise, he nearly betrayed himself once by paying for a meal with a gold sovereign, prompting close questioning by the “Cockney Amazon” proprietress as to where he had obtained such an extravagant fortune—the coin’s denomination was one pound sterling.

  In his writing London made heavy use of the statistical data provided him by the Social Democratic Federation, finding that the raw numbers of the government’s own studies concerning the economy, population, food portions, disease, and mortality were in and of themselves every bit as eloquent—and damning—as the anecdotal instances he could augment them with. And during this month his correspondence settled back to a normal tone with Anna Strunsky. “What rot this long-distance correspondence is!” he wrote her on September 28. “About the time you are receiving harsh letters from me, I am receiving the kindest letters from you.” Of her explosion over Bessie’s pregnancy and his explosion in return, he explained, “You have never had the advantage of seeing a prizefighter knocked out . . . but should you have seen such a man, panting, exhausted, dazed, bewildered, terrific blows landing upon him from above, below, and everyside—then you would understand my condition when I received that frightful letter from you. My arms flew about madly, blindly, that is all. And I am sorry. I should have taken the knock-out clean & not put up any defense.”20

  With The People of the Abyss completed, London’s long-cherished goal of a continental vacation found itself competing with an overwhelming desire to return home. He limited his Grand Tour to three weeks in France, Germany, and Italy. Delayed by a train wreck in La Spezia, he fell in with a Frenchman who offered to take him sailing in the harbor. They visited an Italian warship and became friendly with the boatswain, who obtained shore leave and showed them the town. “Both he and the Frenchman were revolutionists,” he wrote later. “Birds of a feather, you know—and by three in the morning there were a dozen of us, singing the Marsellaize (spl?) and clashing with the police.”21

  After this adventure it was high time to return, and London touched foot on the dock in New York on November 4, looking more like one of his East End subjects than America’s premier ascendant author. “He wore a wrinkled sack coat,” recalled a friend who met him at the pier, “the pockets of which bulged with papers and letters. His trousers bagged at the knees. He was minus a vest, and his outing shirt was far from immaculate. A leather belt around his waist took the place of suspenders. On his head he wore a dinky little cap.”

  One of his first stops was to see George Brett at Macmillan and ask the loan of $150 to get home and back to work. As soon as he returned to California in mid-November London was back in harness, filing a sycophantic puff piece on laying the cornerstone of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building for the San Francisco Examiner, which not coincidentally Hearst also owned. Most writers venture cautiously into a career by keeping the day job, but London had committed himself irrevocably to the life of an artist, having concluded that not to do so would inflict catastrophic psychological damage upon himself. He had lived all the incarnations of the Work Beast that he intended to. As he approached his twenty-seventh birthday, with multiple households dependent on his efforts, he must write whatever he could sell, and he knew it. But in Brett and Macmillan he saw the opportunity for relief from drudgery such as praising Hearst, a chance for a supportive publisher with whom he could build a relationship and a history. After careful drafting and revising, London typed out a risky nine-page letter to Brett. “Now, concerning myself and the work I wish to do, I should like to have a good talk with you. The hurry and bustle is over with . . . and I think I can say what I wish to say somewhat more coherently than I could when I was
rushing through New York.

  “In the four months I have been away, my stock of articles and stories has been disposed of to the magazines; so I return home without these assets, without income, and with nothing before me but to sit down and write up another stock. . . . Of course, this means the work of months.” Brett, he noted, had been kind enough to take an interest in his career and wanted to consider his future books, and London wanted to write books. However, “the returns from a book, from the moment of beginning the first chapter, do not arrive for a year or two, but the tradesmen’s bills arrive the first of each month. . . . I have no income save what my pen brings me in the magazine and newspaper field. . . . We live moderately. One hundred and fifty dollars per month runs us, though we are seven, and oft-times nine when my old nurse and her husband depend upon us. Now, if I am sure of this one hundred and fifty dollars per month, I can devote myself to larger and ambitious work.” London described six books that he had in mind, including The Kempton-Wace Letters and The People of the Abyss, and asked Brett for an advance-stipend of $150 per month for a year to see him through the whole program of six titles.

  “Once I am in a position,” he concluded, “where I do not have to depend upon each day’s work to keep the pot boiling the next day, where I do not have to dissipate my energy on all kinds of hack, where I can slowly and deliberately ponder and shape the best that is in me, then, at that time, I am confident that I shall do big work.”22

  Brett’s artful angling had landed the most promising writer in the country, and he telegraphed his acceptance to London immediately to ease the young author’s mind before sending a longer letter with the contract. That document contained the important revision that London take two years to produce the six volumes. “I hope,” wrote Brett, “that your work from this time on will show the marks of advancement which I found so strong in your earlier books. But which is not so marked in the last volume or so, these showing signs of haste. There is no real place in the world of literature for anything but the best a man can do.”

  It was an observation with which London had no trouble agreeing; he had concluded that A Daughter of the Snows was hopeless even as he corrected its proofs—an estimation that time has done nothing to alter. To be fair, Daughter was a first novel. Ninety-nine writers in a hundred enjoy the blessing that their first novels never see light of day. Especially when conceived with “literary” pretensions, they are inevitably clumsy and didactic, with the characters acting as megaphones for their creator’s philosophy—all of which could be truly said of London’s first effort. By the standards of the day it was publishable—Lippincott’s had found it so—but judged by what people came to expect of Jack London, it was at best a student effort. London had mastered the language, but not the art. As London defended himself to Brett, however, he had written the novel more than two years previous, and the juvenile stories in Century Co.’s The Cruise of the Dazzler dated from even earlier. London had no control over when they would be published, and that both volumes appeared at the same time Brett published Children of the Frost was just bad luck all around, and “gave rise to a feeling that I had become unduly prolific and was turning out regular machine stuff.” With the financial security now afforded him, London was certain he could perform up to Brett’s expectations.

  Brett was impressed with The People of the Abyss, but unknown to London he sent both it and The Kempton-Wace Letters to an outside reader, English professor G. R. Carpenter at Columbia University, for evaluation. Carpenter recommended turning down both books, the latter for being overwrought and not believable, and the former for being brutish and distasteful—which was to say, modern; this represented the usual reaction of polite pedants to the arrival of American naturalism. Brett, however, had invested too much effort in London to cut him loose so soon. Shrewd publisher that he was, he followed his own instinct and accepted both books for publication, but with a few suggestions for The People of the Abyss: that London be more specific on the health hazard of white lead production (one of many lethal occupations whose deaths and disability he described in the book), that he make a firmer connection between poverty and crime, and that he end the book on a note more positive than the relentlessly depressing narrative of the whole. Finally, doubtless in agreement with Dr. Carpenter’s observation that this was “scarcely the thing” for Macmillan’s English division to publish, Brett suggested that the author mute any direct criticism of the new king.

  “I think your idea is excellent,” London answered concerning a more hopeful last chapter, and promised to communicate further on the other suggestions. 23 He must have approved them as well, for the finished book contains only the brief glimpse of Edward VII that London himself had, his crown described as “flashing” within the coach although it was pouring down rain. It also contains a bloodcurdling description of the symptoms of lead poisoning that inevitably befell workers who ground carbonated lead for paint, including the case of one young woman who was fired for missing work once she fell ill. She obtained a position at a second company, where she worked until she dropped dead at her station. (Meaningful health regulations were not enforced in the white lead industry until 1929.) London’s solution to providing a more hopeful last chapter was ingenious, arguing not kindness or morality or even justice, but efficiency. Recapitulating arguments he had made in his 1900 Cosmopolitan essay, “What Communities Lose by Competition,” he introduced a comparison between society in England and society as practiced among the Inuit of the Yukon delta. The former society enjoyed an average per capita wealth of some £350, the latter only about £2, yet the Inuit prospered or suffered as a community. In England, even in times of the greatest plenty, there was a large segment of the population who never had adequate food or clothing or shelter or fuel. That, he alleged, was inefficient. “If this is the best that civilization can do for the human then give us howling and naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and squatting place than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss.”24

  The People of the Abyss was a success both in the marketplace, where it sold a solid 20,000 copies, and among critics. According to the Boston Herald, the book was “an eloquent arraignment of civilization, a book which stirs the blood, takes away the appetite, and opens the door to socialism.” London by now subscribed to an author’s clipping service, and the reviews he assembled in his scrapbook were salve to his socialist soul. His effort was similarly endorsed by the Cavalier: “There are others whom cold and lifeless statistics are powerless to stir . . . who will be moved by the new and living meaning Jack London has given those statistics. These will not be alarmed by the conclusion of timid readers—‘such books will make socialists of everybody.’”25

  When The People of the Abyss was released in Britain, however, the reaction was largely hostile, although civilly expressed, drawing upon that inexhaustible national store of reserved disdain. What they could not declaim as falsehood, they faulted for style. “He has written of the East End of London as he wrote of the Klondike,” sniffed the London Daily News, “with the same tortured phrase, vehemence of denunciation, splashes of colour, and ferocity of epithet. He has studied it ‘earnestly and dispassionately’—in two months! It is all very pleasant, very American, and very young.”26

  “If I were God one hour,” London retorted, “I’d blot out all London and its 6,000,000 people, as Sodom and Gomorrah were blotted out, and look upon my work and call it good.”27

  A copy of the book came into the possession of George Wharton James, a prolific California writer who had begun developing a friendship with London. The English-born James had gained a reputation as an admirer and photographer of American Indians, and he wrote lovingly of them and of California natural history. He was London’s senior by eighteen years but still a physical specimen, as London wrote approvingly of him as a “gorgeous, splendid man.” London inscribed the copy of The People of the Abyss to James, “God’s still in his heaven, but all’s not wel
l with the world. Read here some of the reasons of my socialism, and some of my socialism. Walk with me here, among the creatures damned by men and then wonder not that I sign myself, Yours for the Revolution, Jack London.”28 Indeed, as a document of manifesto and the reasons for manifesto, the book lost none of its visceral impact over the next century. Even allowing for the author’s predisposition toward the subject and his artful sequencing of events, The People of the Abyss was a mile-stone both in social reform writing and in its naturalistic treatment—in short, muckraking.

  And now, what to do next? His literary barrel was empty, but when he had written his brave proposal for a multi-book contract to Brett in November, the first concern London expressed to him was his desire to put the Alaska motif to rest. “In the first place, I want to get away from the Klondike. I have served my apprenticeship at writing in that field, and I feel that I am better fitted now to attempt a larger and more generally interesting field.”29 One ghost of his Alaska memories, however, had continued to haunt him: during his stay in Dawson City, he had pitched his tent next to the cabin of Louis and Marshall Bond. London adored animals, and he had fallen in love with their enormous dog, Jack. He also felt badly for the way he had treated a dog in his earlier short story “Diable—A Dog.” (The title was changed to “Bâtard” when it was collated into The Faith of Men.)

  For a last visitation to the North, he began a new story, about a loving California family pet named Buck, kidnapped, mistreated, and mischanced into forced survival in the Alaska wilderness. He intended it as a 4,000-word short story, but for the first time in his life, a muse seized his hand—no struggle for technique or searching for the right word, as for the first time the artist shaped characters and events swiftly and with the confidence of his craft. It is a signal breakthrough for every author when a story writes itself for the first time, and he arose, shaken, not with a short piece but with a novel. He settled on the title The Call of the Wild.