London was now famous enough that when he spoke, news of it extended far beyond the cities where he lectured. When word of his uncompromising viewpoints reached the East, he discovered how entrenched was the economic system he bid to destroy. Laudatory reviews of his stories were now mixed with attacks on his political views, which were widely held to be un-American and dangerous. He was also famous enough to generate news on another front: Charmian may have won London from the embrace of Blanche Partington, but she had known London since he was an impoverished nobody; she could not have prepared for the challenge, now that he was a national celebrity, that the press would be as interested in his private life as in his literary output.
She had to learn to ignore rumors of his infidelity. He had remolded his short story “Scorn of Women,” published in his second book, The God of His Fathers, into a play, and he was interested in the actress Blanche Bates for the central role of Freda Maloof, a saloon dancer in Dawson during the Klondike rush. (London also discussed the role of Freda with, of all people, Bessie’s cousin Minnie Maddern Fiske, and with the legendary Ethel Barrymore, who was initially interested, but by the time the play was published late in 1906 she had decided it was not right for her.) When London appraised Bates performing in another play three nights running, visited her in her dressing room, and hosted a dinner party for her, Charmian was left to read in the newspapers of Bates and London’s romantic linkage and reputed upcoming marriage. Charmian knew of London’s intense focus on the play, for she had been typing up his drafts, and she knew that he had also discussed the role with another actress, Mary Shaw, whom he had seen in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Thus her Mate-Man’s denial was sufficient against the charge of involvement with Bates, but now there was a new shoal to navigate in their relationship—a meddlesome press in search of a sensation. She already well knew his randy nature, so she must either trust him or not, and she chose to believe him, assessing that he had not spared her feelings for a lie up to then, and likely would not start now.
London’s rumored affair with Blanche Bates lent some spice only days later to his allowing the Oakland socialists to enter his name for mayor. He postponed campaigning, however, so that he and Cloudesley Johns could sail into the Sacramento delta on the Spray to write and recreate for six weeks. In doing so he left Charmian in charge of editing and correcting the manuscript of the essay “The Class Struggle,” a component of the upcoming The War of the Classes, and forwarding it to the publisher. It was an imposition, to be sure, but also gave evidence of his trust in and reliance on her, which she was all too glad to have.
In early May 1905, just when London was agonizing over how to tell Charmian about his affair with Blanche Partington, he was in active ferment over a new novel. His Oakland mentor Fred Bamford was a crack reference librarian, and London wrote him for some preliminary information: “Can you find out for me the following: (1) When do wolves mate? (2) How long do they carry their young? (3) What time of year do they bring forth their young? All this data is for a new book I am beginning.” It took Bamford the better part of a day to round up the answers, and ever afterward he related with pride that he had been part of the inception of White Fang.20 Actually, however, the taproot for the book extended back to the previous December, when London was struck by, and made notes on, a piece he read in the San Francisco Chronicle. Local author Flora Hines Loughead had considered The Call of the Wild and reversed the process in “The Call of the Tame: An Antithesis,” about the domestication of a wild wolf-dog. London always acknowledged that the weakest point of his artistry was inventing plots, but once an idea was planted, he could develop it with high panache. Loughead’s article electrified him. The next day he dashed off a hasty, ebullient letter to Brett: “I’m dropping you a line hot with the idea . . . Not a sequel to Call of the Wild. But a companion to Call of the Wild. I’m going to reverse the process. Instead of the devolution or decivilization of a dog, I’m going to give the evolution, the civilization of a dog.—development of domesticity, faithfulness, love, morality, & all the amenities & virtues. . . . A complete antithesis to the Call of the Wild. And with that book as a forerunner, it should make a hit. What d’ye think?”
Brett, whose company had made a fortune on The Call of the Wild with their single $2,000 lump-sum payment, saw the possibilities in a heartbeat and responded with encouragement, but cautioned that the new tale should not be in any way an extension of the first. The break should be complete. Relearning how energizing it can be when author and editor are mutually attuned, London responded enthusiastically. “Yes, your idea . . . is precisely my idea. There must be no hint of any relation between the two. Even in title I had decided there should not be the slightest resemblance. I have figured on naming book after dog—White Fang, for instance, or something like that.”21 White Fang he was indeed, the offspring of a male wolf and female half-wolf, half-dog who eventually takes her pup back to the Indian village she abandoned. Abused by the other dogs in the camp, his lot a misery, White Fang’s fate worsens when he is sold for whiskey money to a white tough named Beauty Smith and is trained for the dogfighting arena. Turned into a killer until he is bested and nearly killed by a bulldog, White Fang is rescued by Weedon Scott, learns kindness and how to respond to it, and is taken to California to live out his days as a pet. Although he agreed to make no similarity or reference to The Call of the Wild, the story ends with a curious symmetry to the first book, in saving the life of Scott’s father, a judge.
By May London was deep in thought over the new story, and almost ready to begin. Instead of settling among the bohemian community as Sterling and others of The Crowd so dearly wanted, London continued working out of his cabin at Wake Robin Lodge. Charmian was with him, but careful now to observe social convention: she stayed in the main house, he in his lodge.
Gradually Charmian took over Sterling’s duties as London’s first reader and responder. Her eye was different from Sterling’s, but it was a good eye even so. Sterling was a poet, alert to the impropriety of a word to the feel or meter of a sentence; Charmian’s eye was more purely editorial, reading for general flow and cohesion. She believed in London’s gift as completely as Sterling, but she was slower to intrude herself into his work. Doubtless she would have written, and later did write, in a vastly different style—more erudite and grammatically clever—and there were hints that she wished he had written, as Ambrose Bierce demanded from his protégés, with more thought to artistic purity. “Never was I able to wring from him any worship of art for art’s sake,” she lamented, “although he strove for art . . . [and] attained art, high art at times.” But London was adamant that he did not care to be weaned from his conclusion that “I no more believe in Art for Art’s sake theory than I believe that a human and humane motive justifies the inartistic telling of a story.”
Between the two of them, he was the stylistic pioneer, and she had the good sense not to contest him on points of style that he had already put to rest in his own mind. “Long hot afternoons of typewriter dictation under the trees sometimes got on our mutual touchy nerves,” she recalled. “I might unwittingly start disputes in which I had no chance against the assault of his logic.” Occasionally she felt herself on the verge of tears, but stifled them when she remembered his cold warning against feminine hysterics.22 In time they worked more smoothly together; indeed they were a formidable team. Her aunt’s husband, Roscoe Eames, was a secretarial entrepreneur who had developed an unconventional but efficient form of shorthand that she had mastered, and she was an ace typist, reaching well over a hundred words per minute on her Remington No. 7 typewriter, newly purchased especially for her role as amanuensis to America’s most popular author. These skills in addition to her sharp editorial instincts made her a vast help in his work.
And they had fun. In an era in which nearly all photographs were formal and stiffly posed, in most of the photographs of them they mug and pose and grimace over their work, often in full laughter. When she typed the final versions
of his countless letters, she reserved the option to temper his tendency to hyperbole with her own corrections. “It’s warm, nay, hot,” London wrote Fred Bamford late in the summer of 1905. “I am dripping sweat. Charmian, who is hammering the typewriter, says she is dribbling sweat! (Didn’t either, Mr. B.—C.K .) And we’re going swimming; and after that, when it gets cooler, to drive an unruly cow up to the ranch.”23 To prove her gameness she even boxed with him. She stood in and took her licks, and occasionally landed a shot of her own, one occasionally drawing blood from the other, an occasion for praise and solicitous inquiry. It would have been a high price for a woman to pay for a man, had Charmian not understood the nature of sport and been keen to compete. One did not box, she allowed, without the expectation of getting one’s blood up and thinking it healthy to do so. She also noted that he never took cheap shots at her and never landed punches on any “feminine unmentionables.” In further fairness, London always freely admitted her superiority at her own sport, riding horses, and made sure that she knew how much he wished he could match her grace in the saddle.
They loved each other madly, but they slept apart. She suffered from insomnia, and he thrashed in his sleep and might rise to read or write or light up a cigarette at any hour. He smoked and suffered the smoker’s cough; she did not smoke, but quickly learned that it was a sensitive subject with him that she was not to press. In any event, his divorce would not be final until the following autumn, and some heed still had to be paid to convention. As satisfying as it was, however, for him to finally have a partner whose libido matched his own, Charmian was also alert to the fact that emotional intimacy still eluded him as his depression approached a crisis. Throughout the spring and summer she had acted as his typist and secretary, sparring partner and bedmate, but emotionally he had held her at arm’s length or more.
And to be sure, his “long sickness” held their relationship hostage even as it gave him no peace with George Sterling. It turned out there were multiple reasons he had been distant from her. He felt guilty about his involvement with Blanche Partington. He also grew discouraged when the body of which he was so proud began letting him down. He had developed his flat feet marching with Kelly’s Army, and he had nearly died of scurvy in Alaska, but now he suffered symptoms that all but convinced him that he had bowel cancer and that his long climb out of obscurity was headed toward a cruel joke with his early death. Treatment, when he finally sought it, showed nothing worse than hemorrhoids, which were corrected with minor surgery. But neither of those reached into the root of his depression. Where members of The Crowd each kept a vial of cyanide, London kept a pistol, but once he actually began weighing suicide, he disposed of it when he could no longer guarantee that he wouldn’t use it.
Nevertheless, he was not beyond reach. He and Charmian went riding daily, her body conforming elegantly to the movements of her horse and he bouncing helplessly up and down in his saddle. As they explored the tracts around Wake Robin, the country around Sonoma Mountain quickly came to have a particular effect on him that went beyond its being scenic. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he felt peace there. They explored one small ranch property that was for sale. About forty acres of it had once been cleared for a vineyard, now fallow. The remaining ninety acres began on the southeast with a forested defile along Asbury Creek, crossed the Valley of the Moon, and spread up hills covered with majestic stands of timber on the flank of Sonoma Mountain. It took his breath away and he put up a $500 option to purchase it. He described it to George Brett as “the most beautiful, primitive land to be found in California. There are great redwoods on it, some of them thousands of years old . . . there are great firs, tan-bark oaks, maples, live-oaks, white-oaks, black-oaks, madrono and manzanita galore. There are canyons, several streams of water, many springs, etc. . . . for the last two months I have been riding all over these hills, looking for just such a place.” London asked Brett to forward $6,500 of royalties, pointing out that they had already been earned by The Sea-Wolf. The place had to be saved, lumbermen were already on the property when he snapped it up, and he must pay the balance or lose his $500 option. “Arrange it any way you wish,” he insisted, “every moment counts.”24
Brett found a way to comply, and London thus acquired the first tract of the Beauty Ranch that occupied him for the rest of his life, writing Sterling that he was throwing out an anchor so heavy that all hell could not get it up again. It was a signal moment for him, not just because it gave him a retreat to enjoy with Charmian, but it gave him as well a whole new set of themes to develop in his writing. London had begun his literary career with the terror of nature and steeped it in the cruelty of people one against another. Now for several months he had basked in the fierce and steadfast love of a woman he deeply respected, and now for the first time he realized the redemptive power of nature, the ability of the land to heal itself and those on it. Perhaps it might even heal him.
The effect showed in his writing. In a sense, White Fang, on which he was hard at work and in which the application of love and kindness healed the savagery of its subject’s early life, also healed the bleak ending of The Call of the Wild. Only several days before writing Brett for the money to complete purchasing the ranch, he had completed a story, “All Gold Canyon,” that was radically different from his previous work in feeling and lyricism and sense of wonder, in which a wild gorge heals itself after the incursion of rapacious miners. 25 The story opened a hopeful theme that he amplified in many later works, but this first appearance of it escaped Charmian’s intuition; indeed she was almost convinced that she had lost him. She and Aunt Netta both had been urging him to stay indefinitely at Wake Robin but he declined. He wanted to go sailing; the Spray was moored at Napa, and Charmian sadly accompanied him toward there on horseback, through the forests of Nunn’s Canyon with its multiple bridges over a tumbling stream. On this trip the land’s cure finally, inexplicably, took; his mood lightened and then rocketed. He exulted in the landscape; he accounted that he had received a $350 prize for the short story “A Nose for the King” in a contest sponsored by The Black Cat, and he asked her to buy him a horse with it. At the top of a grade he stopped and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You did it all, my Mate Woman. You’ve pulled me out. You’ve rested me so. . . . Something wonderful has happened to me. I am all right now. Dear My Woman, you need not be afraid for me any more.” At last she knew that their kiss goodbye was not the end, and “there was that in his eyes which brought tears to mine. But it was the happy rain of a new day. . . . I turned and retraced the road, hardly able to contain myself.”26
11
THE CELEBRITY
Jack London originally rode to literary fame on the trio of The Kempton-Wace Letters, The People of the Abyss, and The Call of the Wild, published in rapid succession. Since then, amid a steady production of articles, juvenile stories, and reportage, it was The Sea-Wolf that had kept public attention riveted on him. Now it was time for his maturing voice to consolidate the laurels won early on.
Publication of The War of the Classes in April 1905 underscored the national news coverage he had been garnering for his increasingly outspoken views on social reform. Its collected essays, old and new, summarized his characteristic revolutionary message that seemed less and less popular. But backed by George Brett and his long history of publishing social reform, he hoped that with room to clarify and expound, his message would sound less threatening.
While some found it incongruous that the country’s loudest socialist traveled with an obsequious Oriental valet, London became increasingly provocative in his rhetoric. Following up the lecture at Berkeley with another at Stockton, and then in giving one passionate speech during his ensuing campaign for mayor, he vented his frustration that audiences, while they admitted his intelligence and fire, rejected his political views. At one point he even ventured to insult his audience: “You are ignoramuses. Your fatuous self-sufficiency blinds you to the revolution that is surely, surely coming, and which will as sur
ely wipe you and your silk-lined, puffed up leisure off the map.” No longer merely the “boy socialist” of Oakland, London made his first public foray as a bona fide celebrity, and he made a mess of it.
Brilliant as he was at preaching to the socialist choir, as a representative to the general public he was an unalloyed disaster. What eluded him was the fact that the kind of stem-winding barnburner of a speech that would galvanize an audience of radicals was exactly the wrong tack to take with nonpolitical laymen he might have persuaded, but whom instead he alienated and alarmed. In the election, he quadrupled the tally he received four years earlier, to 941, but he still finished only third. Worse, he lost any possibility of winning over converts; SOCIETY CLOSES GATES ON YOUNG AUTHOR , noted the Los Angeles Examiner—as though being debarred from the company of those he had been calling “drones and parasites” was a punishment.
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 25