Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  American socialists may have been annoyed with him, but Hearst was pleased. London had been among the handful of American reporters to out-maneuver their Japanese handlers and reach the scene of action. Thus at twenty-eight, London had followed up the runaway success of The Call of the Wild with gripping war stories—sometimes when there was precious little material to grip with—read by a national audience in all the Hearst newspapers. For his efforts he was paid about $4,000, and now, for the first time in his life, he had real money.

  But when he returned home in June 1904, accompanied by Manyoungi and Belle, his saddle mare, he found his personal life in greater chaos than ever before. The S.S. Korea had not even landed when London was served Bessie’s divorce suit, filed in his absence, charging cruelty and desertion and outdatedly naming Anna Strunsky as co-respondent. She also had obtained a restraining order freezing his finances until her monetary demands were satisfied. Bessie made considerable theater of the step, and demonstrated that not without reason was she a cousin of the famous actress, Ibsen interpreter, and forerunner of Method actors Minnie Maddern Fiske.

  Bessie had always hated entertaining The Crowd, but now she poured out her heart to any of them who would listen to her, especially Carrie Sterling. Any exaggerations she indulged in relating her grievances—for instance, that London and Anna Strunsky had made love in front of her—she regarded as merely paying back the pain he had caused her (although, again, in this era, the expression “making love” might as easily have referred to flirting as to anything more carnal). Another of her confidantes, whom she never suspected in the matter and whom she trusted more as a friend than the others, was Charmian Kittredge. Listening to bile she would rather not have heard, and knowing that it must all eventually land on her, Charmian fled the storm, staying with an aunt in Newton, Iowa, and determining to stay put even when London wired her the money for a train ticket to come home and meet him. When London returned to the United States as a literary superstar, the divorce action caused a sensation.

  Reporters, to Anna’s mortification, sought her out for a statement, and she obliged them. “Absurd is hardly a word strong enough to be used in regard to the silly stories about the love-making that went on before Mrs. London’s eyes. Mr. London and I were very good friends, and we treated one another as such—no more. Besides, Jack London is hardly the man to make love to another woman in his own house. . . . The ridiculous part of the whole thing is the fact that my visit to the Londons’ house occurred exactly two and a half years ago. . . . Since 1901 I have seen Mr. London but three or four times. Immediately after my visit to his home, I went to New York, and from there to London, and I have spent the greater part of my time since then in Italy, returning from Naples only four months ago.”1

  Flora London, eager to embrace the prospect of becoming once more the principal woman in her son’s life after Bessie was out of the picture, also went public in defending him. “So far as Anna Strunsky is concerned, she was at our house several years ago, when she and Jack were finishing their book together. Her behavior was always that of a good friend to all of the family. I think there is no reason for the connection of her name to Jack’s. . . . I can hardly believe that Bessie has made such charges. . . . He was loving, affectionate, and generous to a fault [to Bessie] during the first two years of that marriage. Then there began to grow a gradual coolness between them, due to her not understanding the needs of his literary work, and partly caused by the ‘hero worship’ of a lot of silly girls who wrote him letters and veritably dogged his footsteps whenever he left the house.”2

  London saw no help for Anna’s reputation but to meet with Bessie and confess that there was another woman, but that it was Charmian, not Anna. They finalized the terms of their divorce, and the price of his freedom was to agree to build Bessie a house, which cost $2,175, and the lot for it another $1,500—wiping out the entirety of his Korean earnings from Hearst. London added a proviso about the house, however: Bessie could have it and live in it, unless and until she remarried—a reasonable-sounding condition at the time, but one that would cost Bessie dearly and cause new venom to issue in future years.

  Making up for Bessie’s cleaning out his bank account, London received another $4,000 from Century for the serialization of The Sea-Wolf. But between his own living; maintaining Bessie and his daughters, and his mother and nephew Johnnie Miller; and the largesse he had resumed toward Mammy Jennie, who had fallen on reduced circumstances, he was quickly back in debt. Bessie dropped the restraining order on his finances, but her sense of rage and betrayal now had a new target—Charmian—that lasted until the day she died. An interlocutory decree was issued on November 11, which finally set the clock running on the one-year waiting period before London and Charmian could marry. In the meantime, London set up a new household in a rented cottage at Ninetta Eames’s property, Wake Robin Lodge.

  Through several difficult weeks London consoled himself by reconnecting with The Crowd, the clique of Bay Area bohemians. They had a kind of godfather of whom London grew to be very fond in sixty-two-year-old Charles Warren Stoddard, a former editor of Overland Monthly, “a figure of tossed-back hair and long fingers forever busy with a cigarette, bridging the Bret Harte period to ours.” They had corresponded as early as 1900, when London sent Stoddard a photograph of himself, “the most like, perhaps, or the most flattering. I don’t know which,” in acknowledgment of Stoddard’s praise of The Son of the Wolf.3 With his belly and white beard he rather resembled an American Victor Hugo; his universal reputation as gentle, kind, and empathetic be-lied the breath of scandal concerning his resignation from Notre Dame University, ostensibly for reasons of health but with whispers of attentions he had bestowed on certain students. Like London he cherished the dream of an intimate male companion, but unlike London he had lived this as a reality, having a close relationship with Robert Louis Stevenson, among others, and having corresponded with Herman Melville and especially Walt Whitman on sexual as well as literary matters.4 Forty years before publication of The Sea-Wolf , Stoddard’s stories drawn from his tour of the South Seas in 1864, when he was twenty-one, approvingly depicted fervent same-sex friendships with less obfuscation than the emotionally constipated desires of London’s Humphrey van Weyden. During London’s lengthy fret over whether to tell George Sterling of his feelings, he may have consulted Stoddard about it, for at the time of his careful overture to Sterling, he closed a letter to Stoddard, “With all the love in the world, & a man’s love, Jack London.”

  Also prominent among The Crowd was the humorist Harry Leon Wilson, longtime assistant editor and then editor of Puck; he had cowritten a play with Booth Tarkington, with whom he would collaborate four more times, and had produced three light, funny novels in the preceding four years. Ray Stannard Baker brought more gravitas as a longtime staffer at McClure’s magazine, and attracted to the circle social reformers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens. Tarbell was nearly fifty; her unflattering history of the Standard Oil Company permanently stained the reputation of John D. Rockefeller, but she rejected the relish of “muckraking” and insisted that her findings were balanced—never minding that Rockefeller had bankrupted her father. Steffens was ten years London’s senior and even more radical in his political thinking, and had recently written an exposé of American political corruption, The Shame of the Cities. As a newsman Baker had covered the march of Coxey’s Army, and the spotlight that London had beamed into London’s East End by writing The People of the Abyss, Baker was plotting to do with American racism—a shocking first—a project that came to fruition as Following the Color Line in 1908.

  The Crowd actually numbered more artists than writers, and one of the mainstays was the painter Charles Rollo Peters, whose moody, moonlit canvases led the other bohemians to dub him the Prince of Darkness. A native of San Francisco but a product of the Ecôle des Beaux Arts in Paris, Peters’s work had been highly praised by James McNeill Whistler. His thirty-acre estate in Monterey, Peters Gate, was a
frequent gathering place for The Crowd, whose members little guessed that his hospitality was bankrupting him. Another painter, Xavier Martínez, was a native of Guadalajara, a founder of the California Society of Artists, and soon to become the son-in-law of Jim Whitaker, London’s mentor in boxing, fencing, and the class struggle. “Marty” to The Crowd, Martínez was artistically prominent but not financially successful, and when the bohemians gathered to dine at Coppa’s in San Francisco, he could like as not be seen adding to a long mural of black cats to pay for his meal.

  Soon to join The Crowd was Michael Williams, an “incomparable talker, Irish and fey, and destined, though none of us suspected it then, to become the editor of the most respected Catholic journal in America,” the Commonweal . There was the winsome but interminably sad Nora May (but she called herself “Phyllis”) French, whose poems lamenting the position of women in the American scheme of things won her notice from a small band of feminists but no wider fame. Among The Crowd she had a smorgasbord of unhappy affairs, her greatest heartbreak alleged to have come over the disinterest from one of London’s favorites, Jimmy Hopper. “Jim Hop,” London called him—stocky and muscular beneath a mop of blond curls, he had been a football star at the University of California. London first met him at the Cole Grammar School in Oakland, their friendship blossoming only in later years as Hopper established himself as a journalist and capable practitioner of short stories. Hopper was a favorite hiking companion of George Sterling, the latter “striding through the woods at a long-legged gait that few could follow, as one saw him often with Jimmy Hopper, Sterling’s long figure always a little in advance.”

  The Crowd hailed from all over—Stoddard from Rochester, New York; Wilson from Illinois; Baker from Lansing, Michigan; Martínez from Guadalajara. The diversity created a fertile atmosphere for love affairs, for the comparison of ideas and experiences, and for commiseration on their surrounding society’s indifference to the artistic and the brilliant. Like most bohemians, they had decided that the world was cruel and brutish, and each carried as an accessory of membership a vial of cyanide, so that when the world and its stupidity became unbearable they could exit at a time and place of their own choosing.

  By far the most meaningful of London’s friendships in The Crowd continued to be that with Sterling himself. At first London presented a problem for Sterling. London was the loudest and now the best-known socialist in the Bay Area, and Sterling owed what literary existence he had to Ambrose Bierce, who was virulently antisocialist, and who sometimes made good on threats to drop protégés who went down the road of social reform. A few weeks after receiving London’s exploratory “I don’t know you” letter, Sterling wrote to Bierce, then in the East, about him, couching the introduction in careful flattery: “I’m getting very fond of Jack London. When I first made his acquaintance, about two years ago, he was, through ignorance, a lukewarm admirer of yourself. Under my tutelage he has changed, and last week actually took up the cudgels on your behalf when [Richard Walton] Tully and his wife began a verbal assault upon you at a literary (?) gathering.” Bierce’s all-clear came a week later: “I’m glad you like London; I’ve heard he is a fine fellow and I’ve read one of his books—‘The Son of the Wolf’ I think is the title—and it seemed clever work mostly.”5 Bierce had already seen an article by London in The Critic, whose subject was Bierce’s home turf, and in it London praised Bierce, to which he responded that the article was excellent and London “knows how to think a bit.”6

  London and Sterling had also spent a good deal of time together after London separated from Bessie and moved in with the Athertons, but much of it was juvenile—romping, drinking too much, and, according to Atherton, experimenting with drugs. “I well remember one night when they had been together. It was quite late when Jack came home. His eyes looked glassy . . . he was very quiet, retiring immediately. We didn’t see him again until the next morning when he related his experience. . . . He and George had tentatively indulged in hashish.”

  “To one who has never entered the land of hashish,” London said to his childhood friend, “an explanation would mean nothing. But to me, last night was like a thousand years. I was obsessed with indescribable sensations; alternating visions of excessive happiness and oppressive moods of extreme sorrow. I wandered through aeons of countless worlds, mingling with all types of humanity.” When a shocked Atherton demanded an explanation of why he had done such a thing, London invoked the writer Marie Corelli, who, he said, “couldn’t have written Wormwood if she hadn’t drunk enough absinthe to experience all those strange dreams. . . . So you see in order to write intelligently one must have certain experiences that coincide with the subject.”7

  Sterling, however, came to be more than a partner in mischief. There was something about the handsome Greek that got under London’s skin, something that fascinated him and attracted him and would not let him go. Back from Korea, though financially broken by Bessie, London was once again in the bosom of The Crowd. Late 1904 into 1905 was a halcyon time for the Greek and his Wolf. In the seamy parts of San Francisco they visited bars and Chinese prostitutes; at the Sterlings’ camp near the rugged coast of Carmel they romped and skinny-dipped and bellowed from rocky crags. Sterling posed naked, his penis pinched demurely between his thighs, and London photographed him. Many pictures also survive of a minimally clad London in he-man poses; he was proud of his blond-beastly body and was not shy about showing it off. Unpublished nudes of him also exist, with nothing tucked demurely anywhere; one of the pictures later found a home tacked to the window frame by Charmian’s desk, but whether they were taken by her or by Sterling is unknown.

  Wolf and the Greek also found yet another venue in which to be playmates: London’s celebrity had now grown to the point that he was invited to join San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, which had been started in 1872 as a means for the city’s creative element to mingle with the wealthy and powerful, and thereby benefit the arts, and artists. Their principal activity was an annual retreat in the northern redwoods for several days of impromptu plays and other general nonsense. London was energized by the intellectual atmosphere of the gathering; Sterling was already a regular, and after London first attended in 1904 he returned as often as he could.

  Charmian eventually returned from Iowa to face the music, and it was not pleasant. Despite their long regard for Ninetta Eames and the Overland Monthly, The Crowd did not take to Charmian and felt that they had to do something to get her out of the picture. As a weapon, they turned to the charms of a vivacious young drama critic named Blanche Partington. She wrote for the San Francisco Call, the same newspaper that had published London’s debut “Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan.” Her father, John Herbert Evelyn Partington, had painted portraits of several of The Crowd, including Ambrose Bierce, and she was one of four talented siblings, a brother and three sisters, who acted, sang, painted, or wrote, and associated with The Crowd in varying degrees. Unlike London, Blanche was an anarchist, a point on which Bierce had warned Sterling away from her, and on which London would have engaged her in fierce but fun combat. She was, like Sterling, a Bierce protégé, whom the latter had recruited into the literary world only to bully her into his vision that art should be practiced only for art’s sake—a point diametrically opposed to that of London, who increasingly believed that art that did not seek to reform or elevate was a waste of time. “You want to reform the world—poor girl,” Bierce admonished her, “to rise and lay about you, slaying monsters and liberating captive maids.” Declaring his disappointment, he threatened to withdraw his patronage if she could not focus herself on the quality of her writing and on that only. 8

  London was stung and angry that Charmian had stayed in hiding in Iowa even after he had sent her train fare to return and be with him. When they first opened their affair, she had pronounced herself game for her share of whatever scandal they might cause, and at that time he warned her in the plainest terms that he would hold her to it. She must prove herself seaworthy in t
he storm, and not retreat into feminine deceptions and at all costs, not hysterics. If she became hysterical around him, he swore she would find him unsympathetic and cold, although perhaps mildly curious about what she thought she might accomplish with such tactics. In his childhood he’d had quite enough, he said, of his mother’s tantrums and feigned fainting fits, and he wanted no more of that. Charmian had held out to him both the woman-love, as he had termed it, that she could sexually offer and the masculine comradeship whose lack had caused his previous affairs to burn out. Her flight to Iowa and decision not to return even when summoned was a serious failure; he had been very frank with Charmian about his expectations, and she knew in a hurry that she had woefully blundered, if she meant to keep him. London proved susceptible to The Crowd’s dangling Blanche Partington in front of him, and he responded by going after her “on the jump,” as he would say.

  Of The Crowd’s scheme to force out Charmian with Blanche, George Sterling was part and parcel, even writing to Blanche, only partly in jest, suggesting a schedule by which they could divide London between them. If London had shared his long-secret dream with Sterling, as by now he certainly had, Sterling knew Blanche would never last and that he would become the central figure in London’s affections. The intuitive Charmian divined exactly what The Crowd was up to and scratched in her diary, “Hell!” While squiring Blanche, he had not defended Charmian from either the sniping behind her back or the slights in her presence; it was one of the ways in which he was now testing her mettle. “My rule of conduct is for every man to stand on his own legs, and every woman too. I made Charmian stand on her own legs.” Realizing that she was now on a kind of romantic probation, she behaved faultlessly; she did not attempt to hide her hurt, but rather than act the part of the vengeful harpy, as Bessie would have done, she twice offered to release him from their engagement.