There were now a total of fourteen Western reporters, including London, with the most famous of them, Dick Davis, still stuck in Tokyo, his temper souring. As the action moved north, their camp was moved to the Manchurian town of Feng Wang Cheng, where they were told little and allowed to do less. London’s portion of the camp was distinctive, both for the American flags he always kept flying there, for his hospitality, and for Manyoungi, always cooking, mending, brewing tea, providing whatever London needed almost before he thought to ask for it.
While in camp, London had a favorite saddle horse named Belle, who had belonged to the Russian minister in Seoul. A sailor, London was not a natural rider, and he became an equestrian autodidact, picking up various clumsy habits and never learning to look comfortable in a saddle. He characterized Belle as a joy, and the only gentle riding horse in Korea. “I am my own riding teacher,” he wrote to Charmian, who was an accomplished equestrian and who scandalized her proper friends by disdaining the ladylike sidesaddle; she rode astride a horse like a man—to London’s admiration. “I hope I don’t learn to ride all wrong. But anyway, I’ll learn to stick on a horse somehow, and we’ll have some glorious rides together.”17
That London cared for his horses was undeniable. He could be enraged by cruelty to animals, and his exposure to the Asian cultural indifference to brute suffering was hard to bear. At one point, in company with Dunn, he witnessed a fully loaded packhorse hobble by on three legs, the off-hind leg being broken and strapped up to its belly. A soldier was pulling him along hard by the halter. “Look at that for cruel ignorance,” London told Dunn. “God damn him.” According to Dunn, the soldier heard them and answered in English. “‘If leg don’t touch ground, very soon mend.’ And the little yellow brother laughed. We wanted to hit him but we didn’t—it would have started an ‘international incident. ’”18 Nor was the lame horse the worst he had to see. The Korean, he reported in one dispatch, “eats his dogs, not only when he is hungry but when he wishes to titillate his stomach with a delicacy.” Old dogs, he wrote, were eaten as commonly as mutton was in the West, but puppies were a great delicacy. He must also have observed that the approved way to tenderize the meat was to beat the dog before killing it.19 This was not the way to instill cultural appreciation in the author of The Call of the Wild.
Much has been written of the racism, both explicit and implied, in London’s Korean dispatches. With the partial exception of Davis, the same could be said equally of any of the Western correspondents. They saw elements of Asian culture that contradicted their own Western notions of honor and decency and fair play, from obsequious dissimulation to sneak attacks without a declaration of war to animal cruelty. London’s reporting, however, expressed it in ways more nuanced than is sometimes reported in his biographies.20
After the Japanese defeated the Russians along the Yalu River, and London and other reporters were shown a cell full of Russian prisoners of war, it was true that he felt a pang of racial sympathy for the jailed men whose eyes were, he wrote, bluer than his own. He did not write that it was unnatural or even unfortunate that soldiers of the Asian race had defeated and captured them; all he said was that it sharpened his realization that he had been living as a foreigner among an alien race. Moreover, his questioning of the tactics by which the Japanese had won the battle—they had suffered a thousand killed and wounded in a frontal assault on the enemy position when a simple flanking maneuver would have compelled the Russians either to surrender or be cut to pieces attempting a retreat—showed a grasp of the Japanese military philosophy that the United States would have done well to study a generation later.
As London appreciated, the Japanese outfought the Russians rather than outmaneuvered them. They did so to make their enemy lose face in the eyes of other Asian nations whose respect the Japanese intended to claim. “The Asiatic does not value life as we do. The generals of Japan have no press of populace at home to harp at the cost of victory, while they do have at home a press and a people clamorous . . . for splendid victory, and never mind the cost.” Of the Asian performance in the battle, he wrote, “The Japanese never stopped nor hesitated. Twice they reinforced their line, advancing at the double across the shelterless sands, the while every gun of every battery worked at fever heat. . . . The Japanese are so made that nothing short of annihilation can stop them.”21
That the Japanese were out to not just defeat the Russians but humiliate them was driven home not by London, but by a Japanese press attaché, who told him bluntly, “Your people did not think we could beat the white. We have now beaten the white.” Even knowing that it was Russia who had brought about the conflict by demanding port concessions in Japanese-controlled Korea, London was chilled by the fanatical militarism he observed among the Japanese. “Henceforth,” he wrote to Charmian, “I shall preach the Militant Yellow Peril.” The Western press corps’ ethnocentrism also perceived few correctives in a society even more racist than their own, a society in which they were guests but were also decidedly egin: barbarians, and there were lines that they were not to cross.
The reporters now assigned to the First Army were corked up in a grove of pine trees near a temple, under strict orders not to stray beyond carefully circumscribed boundaries. Life in the camp was not unpleasant once the weather began to warm—“In the afternoon, the call goes forth, and we (the correspondents) go swimming in a glorious pool—clear water, over our heads, plenty of it”—but it was impossible to cover the war from there. “I am at liberty to ride into headquarters at Feng-Wang-Cheng, less than a mile away,” he fumed to Charmian. “And I am at liberty to ride about in a circle around the city of a radius little more than a mile. Never were correspondents treated in any war as they have been in this. It’s absurd, childish, ridiculous, rich, comedy.” He worried that his letters would be impounded by the censors, but they proceeded through the post, perhaps because they contained the welcome promise that he was going to quit the country. Unless Hearst could arrange for him to cover the war from the Russian side, which was unlikely, “as you read this I may be starting on my way back to the States, to God’s country, to White man’s country. At any rate, believe me . . . it would take many times bigger salary for me to put in another year in Japan.” 22 London was also uncertain whether the photos he was taking would ever be seen. Lacking a development kit, he had to mail off the undeveloped film, which could easily have been seized by the censors, but for all the restrictions he was working under, London’s pictures remain among the best visual documentation of the Russo-Japanese War and its environs.
Encamped at Feng Wang Cheng, London learned the position of the white under Japanese control to his cost when he socked a Japanese servant he caught trying to prevent his groom from obtaining his fair portion of fodder. The mapu, Korean horse grooms, relied on the Japanese army for forage for their correspondents’ horses, and they applied for it weekly at the commissariat. All was in close proximity, and one day London overheard one of his mapus in a hot dispute with a Japanese whom he recognized as one he had seen stealing supplies from him before. He intervened, and when the man made a threatening feint, London punched him, once—“he fell right into it, and then down with a thud. And he went around whimpering in bandages for two weeks.”
For a white to strike a Japanese, regardless of how low in station, was stunning, unthinkable. London was summarily arrested, and there followed another emergency cable to Davis, who was still fuming in Tokyo, awaiting his own travel documents, to intercede for him. This was a very serious matter—it was not out of the question that London might be executed for such an outrage. The case was heard by Kuroki’s chief of staff, to whom it was explained that frontier Americans had their own version of bushido, the code of conduct governing samurai warriors, and that in London’s culture, it was necessary to meet an insult with a physical blow. Davis, who was famous for his skill with powerful circles, managed to bring major diplomatic pressure to bear, and the disapproving squint from abroad may have been what influen
ced Fuji to forbear punishing London. Still, the incident set all the Western reporters on their guard for days; they armed themselves, alert to the possibility that one of the Japanese would attempt to vindicate their racial honor with a reprisal that doubtless would have met with the military’s tacit approval.
By the time he was released, London was so exasperated that when another of the reporters, Fred Palmer, offered the palliative that London should at least admit the Japanese were brave in a charge, he blurted back, “so are the South American peccary pigs in their charges!” It was another remark that came back to haunt him, further coloring his reputation as a racist, but London had in fact already written in detail of the Japanese’s impressive military prowess. They “are surely a military race,” he testified in his dispatches. “Their men are soldiers, and their officers are soldiers. . . . Patriotism is their religion and they die for their country as the martyrs of other peoples die for their gods.”23 London’s latter-day critics may be correct that there was a racist subtext to his observations, but of the factual truth of his reporting, the United States learned a generation later. (They might have done particularly well to study the Japanese tactic of opening a conflict with a sneak attack on distant naval bases.)
London’s disgust with the whole venture had not eased by the time he determined to quit the enterprise. He filed a final sarcastic dispatch on June 2, JAPANESE OFFICERS CONSIDER EVERYTHING A MILITARY SECRET, in which he actually quoted from the correspondents’ operating instructions: “For the present and until further notice the transmission of any dispatches . . . where wireless telegraphy is employed is forbidden. . . . From to-day and until further notice it is forbidden to take photographs or make sketches. . . . The necessary steps are being taken to see that this order is obeyed. It may be found necessary to enforce a still stricter censorship than that already existing.” All the reporters in the camp, English, French, and American, signed a joint cable to all their papers protesting the impossibility of their situation and declaring their further attempts to cover the war futile. The Japanese censors, “by their usual Asiatic indirection,” wrote London, “which involved the subtlest dialectics and discussion of things metaphysical, and concerning all things under the sun except the point at issue,” made the telegram disappear.24
Even as London had gone to Korea without official sanction, he sought none in leaving on June 4; he stopped back in Tokyo, where he reconnected with Davis, presumably thanking him for the intercessions that retrieved his camera at Moji and possibly prevented his execution in Korea. “I liked him very much,” wrote Davis, “he is very simple and modest and gave you a tremendous impression of vitality and power. He is very bitter against the wonderful little people and says he carries away with him only a feeling of irritation.” Davis counseled that with time London would just remember the good things. Still, Davis was somewhat wistful that as a correspondent London had, by his initiative and courage, scooped the most celebrated war reporter in America. “I did envy him so, going home after having seen a fight and I not yet started.”25
In returning to America, London brought home with him two acquisitions he could not do without: Belle, the mare who had formerly belonged to the Russian consul, and the very Westernized Manyoungi, who had become indispensable as his valet and aide, and who had agreed to continue in his employ.
The serialization of The Sea-Wolf had begun in January, and when London returned in midsummer he found himself at the center of a literary firestorm. Prose such as The Sea-Wolf had never been published; there was no mistaking that it marked a sea change in American letters. The polite manners of the Gilded Age were torn asunder in the brutal naturalism of a story about a milquetoast writer, Humphrey van Weyden, who is rescued from a collision and brought aboard the sealing schooner Ghost, only to be virtually enslaved as a cabin boy by the monstrous captain Wolf Larsen. The captain rules his ship by brutalizing his crew in scenes that shocked and terrified readers, even as Humphrey fell into a kind of morbid, sensualized thrall of his captor. The open-sea rescue of Maud Brewster, her and Humphrey’s escape onto a desert island, and then their fresh confrontation with Larsen created a shock wave in American literature. After the serialization in Century, all 40,000 copies of the book’s first printing were sold before being shipped, as were the 15,000 copies of the second printing.
The critics were quick to recognize its importance. The Boston Herald, which had praised him so well for The People of the Abyss, took equal cognizance of The Sea-Wolf. The New York Herald hailed it as “a superb piece of craftsmanship.”26 The Sea-Wolf, however, had a serious weakness. Its depiction of life on a sealing schooner was as vivid and authentic as London’s memory of the Sophia Sutherland could provide—even Larsen was based on an infamous sealing captain London had heard of during his seven months before the mast, Alexander McLean. The relationship between Humphrey and Maud, however, was stilted and prudish out of all proportion to the rest of the story, and indeed wrecked the story, especially for those critics who felt that once London had opened the door to honest, naturalistic narration, to retreat into polite convention where Maud was concerned was distracting and dishonest.
First in line among London’s critics was Ambrose Bierce. To his protégé George Sterling he fumed that, while the creation of a stunning character like Wolf Larsen was an accomplishment Protean enough for any one man’s lifetime, “the love element, with its absurd suppressions and impossible proprieties, is awful.” At Macmillan, Brett also perceived the faults of The Sea-Wolf but published it without requiring any major revisions. It was a safe bet that the American public was more comfortable with violence than with sex, and in any event he still regarded London as an author-in-progress. In this era editors were content to nurture a developing author through flawed masterpieces.
While generations of English literature papers have been written on the strongly implied homoeroticism contained in The Sea-Wolf, only once, apparently, was London directly asked about that aspect of his characters. He received a letter from Maurice Magnus, an American travel journalist and one of the few openly homosexual writers of the Edwardian era. He was London’s own age, and he was well known for a point of view—that the sexual impulse cannot be denied—that mirrored London’s own. In London’s writings, Magnus observed, London never articulated what became of the sexual imperative among men who found themselves together. “Do you evade that for the sake of Anglo-Saxon prudery of your readers?” Magnus inquired of him. “Tell me please.” London had of course addressed the topic directly on point in private conversation, with Joseph Noel and others, to their shock, but his reply to Magnus was curiously sharp and defensive:I have always imagined Wolf Larsen . . . as “knowing” women—but I did not think it necessary explicitly so to state in my writing.
You are certainly right. A certain definite percentage of men are so homosexual, or so nearly homosexual, that they can love another man more than they can love any woman. But then, I dare say, no homosexual man is qualified to say whether a fictional woman is real or not to a normally sexed man. . . .
Surely, I have studied the sex problem even in its “most curious ways.” I, however, have drawn men-characters who were sexually normal. I have never dreamed of drawing a homosexual male character. . . .
“I think I get your point of view,” he concluded snidely. “Am I wrong? Do you get my point of view? Flatly, I am a lover of women. Sincerely yours, Jack London.”
There was nothing in Magnus’s inquiry that should have been interpreted as a personal overture requiring London to affirm his own heterosexuality. That he dismissed Magnus with such abruptness indicates either that he read the letter as such, or that he knew of Magnus’s reputation and wanted no association with him, or perhaps that he felt vulnerable that the realization of his long-cherished dream in his special relationship with Sterling might become public knowledge and be misunderstood, or perhaps merely that in the spirit of those times, he could not afford to let even a rumor get started that he
had created characters of ambivalent sexuality.27 Then again, he may have been disgusted with his work, because pandering to “American prudes,” as London himself called them to Brett, had indeed been a consideration in crafting Humphrey’s chivalrous but unrealistic bearing toward Maud on the desert island.
The question of whether London’s increasingly intense friendship with Sterling had any bearing on the homosexual undertones of The Sea-Wolf, or indeed with the surprisingly lyrical descriptions of male beauty, stripped and muscular, in the novel that followed it, a boxing tale titled The Game, exasperates defenders of his heterosexuality. And it is somewhat ironic that the issue was clouded just as London’s sex life was about to be buffeted by a typhoon such as he had only witnessed on the Pacific.
10
THE LOVER
Jack London’s dispatches from Korea, attacking what he perceived to be a dangerous and chilling streak of fanatical militarism on the part of the Japanese, were mainly greeted with hostility in the American socialist quarter. The ethnocentric tone in which he wrote them later fueled a charge of racism when seen through modern sensitivities. Still, even as London acknowledged that it was Russia who was the aggressor in this conflict, it took a world war a generation after London’s death to vindicate his observations about Japan’s culture of militarism.
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 22