Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  London declined his freedom, and during the spring of 1905, The Crowd’s intrigues against Charmian finally grated against his sense of justice. She and London began again, and as their affair blossomed London realized more clearly than ever that she was everything Bessie was not. She was lusty and enjoyed sex—or as she euphemized it, “lolly,” and they quickly took to referring to each other as Mate Man and Mate Woman, terms that he had devised and used as long ago as the ill-fated A Daughter of the Snows. Charmian’s sense of adventure was as fearless as his own, and her keenness for practical jokes was as game as his. She was fiercely intelligent and independent, and he had to learn how to relate to a woman he could neither con nor dominate. London relished the experience, however, and slowly she won him back. On May 10 he confessed his affair with Blanche; it was a painful interview, but cathartic, and served to let Charmian know she was still in the game.

  As far as London’s relationship with the rest of The Crowd was concerned, it would not be altogether fair to assert that the Wolf merely basked in the worship of the lesser members of his pack. There is no doubt that the San Francisco bohemians enlarged his artistic sensibilities in exchange for the increased artistic credibility his presence lent them. London came away from his involvement with Blanche with a more sophisticated appreciation of music, which stayed with him for life. (This at least worked to Charmian’s advantage, as she was a virtuoso pianist.) But it was the lovely Greek who best repaid London’s friendship with his critical appraisal. “At this time,” wrote one of The Crowd, “one found him reading manuscript and proof for London with a meticulous interest that never flagged; his diction was irreproachable, and his feeling for the fall of a sentence and the turn of a figure particularly sensitive. The two of them used to talk over their literary projects with even exchange.” London’s photographer friend Arnold Genthe noted the same thing. “They would write all day in adjoining rooms and in the evening go over each other’s work. Jack London in those days rarely gave a manuscript its final typing until he had submitted the drafts to Sterling, who had an eagle eye for careless writing.”9

  In one surviving earlier exchange, as he read through The Call of the Wild, Sterling challenged use of the words “penetrated” and “rippling” in the sentence “In the fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent, where wild-fowl had been, but where then there was no life or sign of life—only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches.” London stuck to his guns, but in a letter Sterling appealed the point to Bierce, who replied, “The passage that you quote from Jack London strikes me as good. I don’t dislike the word ‘penetrate’—rather like it. It is in frequent use regarding exploration and discovery. But I think you are right about ‘rippling’; it is too lively a word to be outfitted with such an adjective as ‘melancholy.’”10 Of course, London had stood on the shores of cold northern lakes and observed how such rippling could magnify the sense of loneliness and melancholy, and they had not.

  From late 1904 into 1905 there was plenty of work to edit, for London had long since established the rule, and he lived by it, doggedly, of writing 1,000 words every day, without fail, whether or not inspiration was upon him. He wrote a short piece, “The Story of Keesh,” which was sold to Holiday, and an “Explanation of Socialist Vote in U.S.” for the Examiner. Knowing of London’s circumstances, George Brett sent him $3,000 against The Sea-Wolf’s earnings and stayed in close editorial touch as London vented a plume of his socialist steam in a volume of reformist essays that Brett published in April 1905 as The War of the Classes. The final essay in it was a reworking of “How I Became a Socialist,” which he had written for John Spargo upon his return from England. He also produced a new novel, set in the world of boxing, called The Game, which came out in June. Then he turned his attention to a collection of short stories for juvenile readers. Just as The Cruise of the Dazzler recounted his days as an oyster pirate, this new one was drawn from the days after he joined the law, Tales of the Fish Patrol, published in September.

  Sterling’s editorial eye never faltered, and moreover it was Sterling who, to his credit, tapped into an entirely new vein of London’s creativity, a sweet gift of expression that would have shocked the readers who even then were snatching The Sea-Wolf, which had finally appeared in book form in October 1904, off the bookstore shelves and shuddering over its savagery. London wrote a poem about Sterling; it was never published, but the Greek cherished it among his papers, perhaps his consolation prize for later losing the Wolf himself.

  Entitled “George Sterling,” so there would be no mistaking what it was about, it describes a beneficent gardener who manually and gently opens an iris bud that was having difficulty blooming. Serene in rhythm and propelled by a complex rhyming sequence, it shows to a startling degree what kind of poet London could have become, had he been free to follow his earliest natural childhood bent: gentle, loving, inquisitive, enthralled and enthralling.

  Here was a side of London’s creative wherewithal that readers of his muscular fiction and his angry socialism would never become familiar with, and Sterling had the satisfaction of knowing that it was he who had unfolded London’s artistic edges. But Sterling, for his part, gained more than the satisfaction of mentorship from his intimate association with London, and he gained more even than validation, for despite his own formidable talent he must have been aware that he would be catalogued as a “minor” poet. Time spent with London was time away from the cold realities of his own life that were an artistic cruelty. Carrie was not shy about letting him know that he was a disappointment to her, and as she aged, all that remained of her former beauty was her bone structure. And then there was Bierce, who bossed him unmercifully; London gave Sterling the freedom of his deep sensuality, where Bierce projected his prudery to such an extent that, once on a canoe trip, he forced Bierce to jump into the river when Carrie rounded a bend unexpectedly because it was unseemly for Sterling’s own wife to see him in a bathing suit.11

  Here was a side of London’s creative wherewithal that readers of his muscular fiction and his angry socialism would never become familiar with, and Sterling had the satisfaction of knowing that it was he who had unfolded London’s artistic edges.

  The idea that their feelings for each other may have tapped into the sexual has proven more appealing to authors of Jack London literary criticism than to his leading biographers, who have been virtually unanimous12 in their conclusion that both he and Sterling would have been livid at any hint of homosexual suspicion. And that is undoubtedly true, for the only frame of reference they would have had for homosexuality in that era were the effeminate, rouge-cheeked inverts London had seen lounging about the Flatiron Building, mincing and posing. According to the prevailing paradigm, if two men had relations, one must necessarily assume the role of a woman; Wolf and the Greek were nothing like that. London’s relation of his dream to Charmian, however, characterizing his ideal male companion, explicitly embraced love of the body as well as love of the spirit. Nor is it realistic to think they were unaware of such sentiments elsewhere among the more effeminate men of The Crowd, whether on the part of the older Charles Warren Stoddard or the younger Michael Williams, with both of whom they maintained warm friendships. So if sometimes on their drunken pub crawls or amid their swimming and fencing and nude photography and poetry reading and shared confidences, there were moments when they stumbled across the discovery that love can be masculine on both parts, without either of them resorting to the pathetic feminized caricature that was the popular perception of the homosexual at that time, they would not have been the first to do so. Nor would they have been the first to conclude that the rest of the world would not understand it, and decide to keep it between themselves. London was never bashful about recommending the therapeutic value of recreational sex, and Sterling was equally forthright in his contention that orgasms liberated creativity. Although the most noted affairs of bo
th men were certainly with women, it seems not improbable that Wolf and the Greek found time and circumstance for one another, but neither man ever committed to paper how deep their relationship extended.

  It was Charles Warren Stoddard who discovered the charm of Carmel-by-the-Sea, a hamlet on the coast southwest of Monterey, and very near the thirty-acre estate of Charles Rollo Peters. The Crowd was seized with the rapture, partly out of disaffection with mainstream society, partly out of a sense of their own superiority, and largely because of rent spikes caused by completion of the Hall of Justice near their San Francisco haunts, to relocate there and live as a colony of artists, free to inhale the purity of their own atmosphere. The setting offered the inspiration of nature, and the privacy to pursue their lives and bohemian liaisons free from the scrutiny of lesser, conventional people. They adopted rules that were informal but strict. One of their first decisions was not to pave the lanes and encourage tourists with their horseless carriages. Mornings were for work; there was to be no socializing before noon. Most illumination was by candlelight; kerosene was permitted but frowned upon, and electricity was not allowed to intrude its harsh glare. Likewise there was no gas for cooking, and no stores in which to shop. Meals were prepared over fires, and lists of needed supplies were posted by the road so the Monterey grocers would know where to come out and deliver them—even as London’s stepfather had once plied such a trade. Socially, there was to be no standing upon rank; ambitious beginners were treated with the same respect as the working professionals. It was an egalitarianism fueled at least in part by the presence of so many socialists, who happily shared food, drink, and rhetoric with such gusto that when the dour old capitalist Ambrose Bierce visited the group, he shook the dust from his feet as he left and vowed never to return.

  Sterling, to wife Carrie’s mortification, resigned from his uncle’s real estate firm and resolved to live, full time, as a poet. Sterling built a house at their camp there—or rather it was provided for him by his aunt, Missus Havens. They called it the Bungalow, an oversized cabin on a hilltop, the focal point of which “was a large oblong room, with a large fireplace, a wide porch, and back of the house a ring of trees surrounded by skulls, and having in the midst a fireplace in the form of an altar.”13 Believing that the dream London had handed him of their indissoluble love was still in effect, Sterling reserved the neighboring lot for him, counting on living next to his Wolf. But it was not to be.

  Even as they romped and read poetry together, London had been sinking deeper into his “long sickness,” the depression that had begun to take hold of him before leaving for Korea. Dividing his time between Charmian and her people in Glen Ellen, and Sterling and The Crowd as they began relocating to their colony at Carmel, London felt torn in two. Eventually he must make a decision, and when London had to inform Sterling that he was going to establish his household near Charmian’s aunt in Glen Ellen, Sterling wrote him an anguished letter on the death of their dream, and sounding out whether there might still be a chance for them. “No,” London wrote him back, “I am afraid that the dream was too bright to last—our being near each other. . . . It’s not through any fault of yours, nor through any fault of mine. The world and people just happen to be so made.”14

  To any man who ever failed to keep the love of another man, no more gentle reproof could have been possible. Elsewhere in the letter London described his current financial woes in detail—hundreds of dollars in doctors’ and dentists’ bills for Flora, Bessie, the two girls, Mammy Jennie, and his stepsister Ida Miller, who had spent five weeks in the hospital, and that was apart from “the several hundred dollars that Bessie’s lawyer hooked me up for.” His purpose, he explained, was to demonstrate to Sterling that there was still an intimacy between them. “You are the only person in the world I’d take the trouble for. The rest could go to the devil and I wouldn’t care. But you, dear Greek, you I do want to know.” But as for the idyll that they both once had envisioned, that dream would have to be put away. “If you don’t understand now, some day sooner or later you may come to understand.”

  One thoughtful biographer has suggested that London would have loved Sterling completely if he had dared, but that his eventual choice of Charmian over him represented the same calm harbor that his choice of Bessie over Anna Strunsky had provided a few years before: social acceptance, safety from ridicule, and a refuge from his own passions, which he well knew could be tempestuous. 15 This view is consonant with London’s habitual self-sacrifice in his desire to do the right things by others—his life-long support of Flora despite her manipulative shrewishness, and the generous allowance he settled on Bessie and the girls. It would also embrace London’s active study of the subconscious, and his wariness of the consequences it could wreak on careless decisions.

  London was aware that he had intellectual equals among the bohemians in San Francisco, in ways that Charmian could not compete with. But during the course of 1905 he also came to realize that he did not need other equal captains; what he needed was his Mate—one who loved and helped and understood and steadied him in ways that The Crowd could not compete with. George Sterling left London a more complete artist than he found him, but that service did not save him. Soon after London’s gentle letter demoting the Greek’s station in his life, Charmian could write in her diary, “So good to be going about publicly together—Jack and I. I’ve waited so long, so long.”16

  London himself was simpler in his assessment to Charmian that he had chosen her because she represented to him both man-love and woman-love. Indeed, therein probably lay the root of his “long sickness,” his inability to force himself to abandon the dream once more after Sterling had come so close to actualizing it. Reluctant to put it away, but perhaps realizing that the only way left to fulfill his relationship with Sterling was to risk being relegated to the literary and social margin like Stoddard and Magnus, London saw in Charmian the best way out, and he took it. Even from a distance Bierce knew that Sterling was heartsick about something, but did not question him. “No,” he wrote a correspondent, “George has not acquainted me with his trouble, and of course I have not asked him. Something about Jack London, wasn’t it?” As time had passed, Bierce’s earlier tentative approval of London had soured and withered until he was able to add, “I detest Jack London. He has a lot of brains, but neither honesty nor shame.”17

  Sterling seems to have passed through a crisis of his own, spending not all his time at the new bungalow in Carmel, but also living part time out of a room at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, a safe nest from which he began pursuing a shadow life away from Carrie and her frustrated expectations. London continued an affectionate relationship with him, but on the understanding now that he and Charmian would be married as soon as his divorce became final. Wolf and the Greek went together down to Colma, just south of San Francisco, to cover the lightweight boxing championship for Hearst,18 and they frequently made the rounds of bars when London was in the city. They became regulars at a trotline of taverns, where London gained more local fame for his consumption of “cannibal sandwiches” of raw meat and onions, or duck that had barely been passed over a flame before being pressed, and occasionally getting into fights. Both Carrie and Sterling’s mother blamed London’s bad influence for the beginning of Sterling’s long, gradual breakdown, but in reality it was probably not London, but losing London, that was the beginning of his descent.

  Jack London opened 1905 by briefly evading his personal dramas with a trip to Los Angeles to lecture. First fan Cloudesley Johns had escaped both his poverty and his dusty village to a comfortable house and income in the city. For himself, Johns had worked out a stamp of socialism similar to London’s own, one that demanded an equality of opportunity for everyone, but one that accepted a well-appointed life as a reward for hard work. He had begun hanging about the Socialist Party in Los Angeles, and through him they invited London to speak in Simpson Hall on January 8. (London did make it clear to his first fan that he would need to brin
g Manyoungi to prepare hot baths for him: “I never could stand a cold sponge.” The socialist who had survived winter in a Klondike cabin was clearly evolving.)19 One result of the flurry of body punches that London had landed on the book-reading public—to say nothing of his looks and his sensational divorce—was their curiosity to see him and hear him speak. This was an art he had begun honing on the street corners of Oakland, and now that he could make trade on his celebrity, he was anxious to tell the people what was wrong with the country. His Los Angeles speech was favorably reported by Julian Hawthorne, son of one of America’s literary giants. “Upon his big, hearty, healthy nature is based a brain of unusual clearness and insight . . . his opinions are his own—independent, courageously expounded; with no trace of pose.”

  If London took his Los Angeles success as a harbinger of wider welcome for his message of social reform, however, he would have to absorb a cruel disappointment. At the end of January he was back home, invited to pick his own subject and lecture at the University of California at Berkeley, where he had been a student for only one semester. He chose the topic of “Revolution,” perhaps forgetting this was the same class of people whose clothing he used to launder; they were unlikely to be interested in upending the social order. His Berkeley speech—logical, expository, persuasive—created enough converts among the students that a Socialist Club was started in his wake, but the coldness of his reception there and in other places only served to convince him the more strongly that a just society would never be voluntarily handed down by the class who would lose their privileged position in doing it. The hostility he encountered only helped him rest his case that justice must be taken by revolution. But as it happened in Berkeley, the day’s worst gaffe was more lighthearted, when his accusation that literature was being taught using irrelevant texts was countered with a show that students were studying The Call of the Wild, and he accepted the loud laugh at his expense in good humor. The new Socialist Club, at least, was an idea that took. A national organization of collegiate socialists was formed in New York the following September, with London as at least nominal president and Upton Sinclair as vice president.