London had made his commitment to Charmian, but getting The Crowd to accept her looked to be a campaign of Napoleonic proportions. They had already tried to wreck the pair with Blanche Partington, to which Charmian’s brilliant response was to make a friend of her and acknowledge with a smile that she couldn’t blame any woman for loving Jack. She then left London to stew in discomfort over what the two women might talk about when alone together. Blanche, for her part, never again gave Charmian reason for jealousy.
Sterling had opposed admitting Charmian into The Crowd, but faced ultimately with the prospect of losing his Wolf or sharing him, he chose the latter. In fact, it was Sterling’s wife who presented the most immovable obstacle. In the matter of Charmian, Carrie had been a consummate hypocrite; on Charmian’s few visits to San Francisco, Carrie had welcomed her warmly and hosted her generously, leaving Charmian with no clue what was being whispered behind her back. Carrie’s own marriage to the Greek had become a nest of tensions. Dour by nature and increasingly bitter about Sterling’s preference for writing poetry over making money, and probably more aware than The Crowd knew of Sterling’s serial infidelity (for which she and Sterling’s mother blamed London), she was more than willing to believe anything that Bessie claimed of Charmian’s having wrecked her home. Carrie went so far as to write to London requiring his statement of Charmian’s conduct in the matter before she would accept her.
For a man who was famous for not making excuses for himself, London’s reply was astonishing for its patience and detail. While the Londons lived in the Piedmont bungalow, before his trip to England, “Charmian was often at the house. There was not the least iota even of flirtation between us. During that time I was tangled up with Anna Strunsky.” As his marriage became unbearable, “I made up my mind to go to pieces. . . . I was going out on the Spray to have a hell of a time, with any woman I could get hold of. I had my eyes on a dozen women.” He thought of Charmian in this connection. “I was not in love with her, had never even flirted with her.” His illicit design crashed when he fell from a wagon and was injured badly enough that he could not take the boat out at all. Charmian delivered him some supplies to take to Bessie and helped him pack. They had half an hour together, during which London realized that he loved her. After they parted, he wrote her a letter, asking to see her; they rendezvoused and admitted how powerfully they were attracted to each other. “Bessie was jealous and suspicious at that time. She feared every woman. She was jealous of the nurse-girl, jealous of everybody. Going through my wastepaper basket constantly, piecing torn shreds of letters together, etc., etc.” One letter that she reconstructed was from Charmian, but as it was typewritten she could not identify the source. London warned her of this, and over the telephone Charmian declared that she would be game for her share of the trouble.
Carrie, London challenged, had wronged Charmian in alleging that she had broken up the London household. “I don’t consider it a crime for any woman . . . to attempt to cut out a man from under the guns of another woman. . . . It happens in this case however . . . that Charmian is absolutely Not Guilty. It makes your mistake more egregious in-so-far as you have made that mistake public. And public you have made it, because already, and for weeks past, the gossip has been dribbling back that The Crowd dropped Charmian because Charmian broke up the London household.”
Rather than concede the issue Carrie replied with a pointed cross-examination, to which, again, London replied patiently and firmly, refuting her points in a lawyerly and sometimes blunt way. He avowed his continuing friendship for her but conceded nothing. Carrie seemed to allow the matter simply to drop.2 If George Sterling needed to be reassured with evidence that he still mattered to London, he needed look no farther than these patient, time-consuming, and detailed letters intended to stay on his wife’s good side, notwithstanding her turning into a sour old gossipmonger. In an earlier year Sterling had written a note to Blanche Partington suggesting a schedule by which they could share London; now after his demotion and he had awakened from the dream, Sterling could recognize and be grateful that Charmian was, in fact, sharing him, or at least was shrewd enough not to attempt to leash the Wolf. So now to atone for Carrie’s rudeness, Sterling journeyed to Glen Ellen with flowers and a new poem to extend his friendship to her.
London had made it amply clear that settling his affections on her was predicated on her ability to provide him both a woman’s love and a man’s companionship, and the test of her willingness to do so was not long in coming. Midsummer 1905 found London reading Joshua Slocum’s Voyage of the Spray, a memoir of his global travels in a thirty-five-foot sloop, ill-equipped and probably lucky to have survived. He was reading in the presence of Ninetta’s husband, Roscoe Eames, who was nearly sixty and a recreational sailor of many years’ standing. Suddenly London posed a question to Eames: if Slocum could sail the world in a thirty-five-footer with bad gear, why couldn’t they do it in a forty-five-footer with better equipment and more company aboard? Like schoolboys the two wove a fabric of mental circumnavigation, until suddenly London turned to her. “What do you say, Charmian?—suppose five years from now, after we’re married and have built our house somewhere, we start on a voyage around the world.”
Charmian had failed one test and was not about to fail again. “I’m with you every foot of the way,” she stated. And then she went him one better: why wait? He was the one who was always saying they were all dying cell by cell, they weren’t getting any younger (and she was five years older than he), they would likely never want to travel more than they did right then, and there was little use in building a house just to leave it. London “growled facetiously ” that she had hoisted him by his own petard—and she knew she had passed. Thus was born the almost two-year odyssey of planning and building the Snark—a vessel named for the mythical creature sought by a mismatched and hapless crew in Lewis Carroll’s lugubriously funny “The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits.” Still making his output of a thousand words a day, the Snark came to so dominate the rest of his attention—sketching the vessel, envisioning the voyage—that Charmian finally began teasing him that he had lost all his ambition.
Despite the pummeling that he was taking in the press for his espousal of socialist reform, London was increasingly convinced that he had, indeed, set his place at the literary table. On one of his rides with Charmian on Belle and Washoe Ban, they visited the hot springs at Agua Caliente and made the acquaintance of Captain H. E. Boyes and his wife, proper English folk who kept a proper English cottage and maintained close ties to home. In happy surprise, Boyes showed him a letter from Rudyard Kipling praising London highly and asking whether Boyes had ever met him. London, who as a much younger artist had copied out by hand whole pages of Kipling just to catch their music, was undone.3 Later in the summer, he and Charmian attended the premiere of a play called The Great Interrogation by one Ada Lee Bascom, pen name of Mrs. George Hamilton Marsden. Based on a Jack London story, the play was a rousing hit. As the drama critic for the San Francisco Examiner reported, tumultuous cries for the author led to London being discovered in a twenty-five cent seat, and he was all but pushed onto the stage to share the acclamation with Bascom. “The man that can talk the ears off a thousand Socialists,” noted the Examiner, “who is at home on any rostrum from the cart to the curb, was obviously ‘rattled.’” London modestly deflected the praise to Bascom, but the reviewer judged that the story and much of the craftsmanship were his.4
High summer was also the busy time for Roscoe and Ninetta Eames, for Wake Robin Lodge was a working tourist court, and their most famous residents proved to be something of a draw. In the afternoons, after reaching their daily quota of a thousand words, London and Charmian would often mingle with the tourists at Sonoma Creek’s swimming hole. Strangely for a man whose own small daughters had come to play little role in his own life, London frolicked almost domestically with the children of others, teaching them swimming or boxing and reading to them afterward. Charmian was
already thirty-five; if they were going to have children of their own, their marriage could not come too soon. After months of stewing over his planned inversion of The Call of the Wild, London finally began White Fang soon after his mother and nephew arrived. He had considered the piece for so long that progress on it was swift, composed mostly not in his Wake Robin cabin but at his writing table in the trees nearby, with a great woolly dog named Brown Wolf lying at his feet. The story ran about twice the length of its predecessor, with much of the difference consisting not of more complex plot, but of social and evolutionary theory on which London now felt ordained to evangelize rather than letting the story do it for him.
A new controversy began swirling about his writing as The Game entered serialization in Metropolitan magazine. Some boxing aficionados claimed that its ending, in which the protagonist is killed when his head strikes the canvas floor of the ring, was not credible, and it took an intervention by the world lightweight champion, Jimmy Britt, to settle the criticism in London’s favor.
Even as London scaled back his relationship with Sterling, the two of them went to Colma to witness Britt defend his title against Danish challenger Oscar “Battling” Nelson. Britt had defeated him once before on points, but in this bout “Bat” Nelson attacked relentlessly while Britt, who landed whole volleys of punches that had no effect, was beaten to a pulp, finally knocked out in the eighteenth round in a fight that some observers called the most gruesome and desperate they had ever witnessed. Britt might have called The Game “an epic on pugilism,” but London’s reporting on this fight was almost singularly bad. Now that he had come through his “long sickness,” it was almost as though the fevered visions of his principal themes—socialism, evolution, raw nature—were racing around in his head like bats about to fly the belfry. At one turn Nelson was an abysmal brute, a fighting animal to Britt’s mere thinking animal, at the next turn Nelson was a gaunt proletarian with nothing to lose, and Britt a complacent, sporting, “beautiful as men go” representative of the bourgeoisie seeking to protect what he had accumulated.5 Whether because he was edgy being with Sterling after their recent tension, or perhaps because they had been out drinking or smoking hashish, the verbose and repetitive piece was a caricature of his now-mature style and, once written, was well left behind.
News reports of London’s more radical-sounding lectures, and the brisk sales of The War of the Classes, prompted the Slayton Lyceum Bureau to offer him $600 per week to undertake a lecture tour across the country, to begin in late October. While it was time away from the beautiful new ranch, and time away from Charmian, who for convention’s sake could not travel with him, it was a badly needed infusion of cash to outfit the new place and to lay the five-ton iron keel of the new ketch in which they would sail the globe. In a move he would come to regret, he entrusted the vessel’s construction to Charmian’s Uncle Roscoe, who proved himself almost stunningly wasteful and incompetent.
The itinerary that the Slayton Lyceum Bureau arranged for him, far from being a sensible progression of stops, had him backtracking and crosshatching all over the Midwest before ever heading east. Sometimes he gave a lecture every other day, but usually it was every day: entrained for Kansas City on October 18, he progressed 300 miles northeast to Mt. Vernon, Iowa, near Cedar Rapids, then 150 miles farther east to Chicago, before heading 500 miles back west to Lincoln, Nebraska, then 250 miles back to Iowa, then 400 miles southeast to Indianapolis, back west to Illinois, back east to Ohio, and back west to Wisconsin. Even though he was attended by the ever-discreet, ever-attentive Manyoungi, it was a brutal zigzag of a tour.
The former boy socialist wanted to deliver jeremiads on the injustice in the world and the coming revolution, but quickly discovered that people, when not curious to hear about Alaska, were more interested in him and his much-reported love life. While he obliged them with stories of the Klondike, and tramping, and Japan, he doggedly returned to his socialist theme, reverting to methods that had worked well in The People of the Abyss; he personalized large-scale injustice to the level of the suffering individual, named and identified. “On a pile of rags in a room bare of furniture and freezing cold,” he intoned to one audience, “Mrs. Mary Gallin, dead from starvation, with an emaciated baby four months old crying at her breast, was found at 513 Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn, by Policeman McCommon of the Flushing Avenue Station.” Her three other children, ages two to eight, looked at the policeman like ravenous animals who might eat him.
The American public was willing to read about the Cockney flower girl who was paid one and a half pence for twisting together 144 artificial violets—after all, it appealed to their nationalistic feelings of superiority. To tell such stories about the United States, though, just made most people mad. The pattern developed that wherever he held court, London delighted local comrades, enlightened some of the open-minded, alienated most, and netted generally negative press coverage.
Exactly one month on the road, he happened to be in Elyria, Ohio, on November 18 when he learned that his divorce from Bessie had become final. He had a travel day before his next speech in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, on the 20th, and he wired Charmian to meet him on the 19th in Chicago to be married. That being a Sunday, some strings would have to be pulled; London promised the exclusive story to the Hearst papers, one of which, the Chicago American, had a city editor who arranged for a justice of the peace, and they were finally wed. The Hearst paper got the exclusive, but the non-Hearst papers ran with a different story (which turned out not to be true) that in Illinois divorced persons could not remarry for a year after their final decree, and that London was a bigamist. Half amused and half annoyed, London declared that he would marry Charmian in every state of the Union if he needed to.
They planned on a honeymoon in Jamaica, but the S.S. Farragut would not sail from Boston until two days after Christmas, so Charmian got to experience life on the lecture circuit for another month: Chicago and other cities in Illinois and Indiana before visiting her relatives in Iowa, who had sheltered her during the hailstorm of Bessie’s divorce action. Then the newlyweds headed east; London had time to visit New Brunswick, Maine, to speak at Bowdoin College, before making himself very prominent in Boston. He spoke not only at Harvard but at both of the city’s most famous venues, Faneuil Hall and Tremont Temple, before taking ship with wife and manservant.
The Farragut was one of four new banana boats acquired by the United Fruit Company that had originally been built for the Navy, able to deliver 35,000 bunches of bananas and fifty-three passengers each time she docked. One of the perquisites of fame was having instant friends wherever he might visit, and with his imminent arrival splashed across the Jamaican papers, once the Farragut tied up at Port Antonio the Londons were taken in tow by the local literati, led by the prominent poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. While there, London gave an interview to the Western Comrade in which he vented his building frustration with American complacency and insistence that all was well in the face of the plain want and poverty to the contrary. Identifying himself with the workers of the world despite the cushion of his lifestyle, he called himself a fairly good artisan. “The only reason I write is that I am well paid for my labor. . . . I always write what the editors want, not what I’d like to write. I grind out what the capitalist editors want, and the editors buy only what the business and editorial departments permit. The editors are not interested in the truth; they don’t want to tell the truth. A writer can’t sell a story when it tells the truth, so why should he batter his head against a stone wall?”
After a month of critical beatings for his lectures on revolution and socialism, such sentiments were understandable but could well be read as unfair to George Brett at Macmillan, who had gone above and beyond the call of editorial duty in developing America’s literary enfant terrible. Brett, however, was probably not uppermost in his mind as London fashioned these comments for a readership of comrades.
For a month, he and Charmian lived a Caribbean idyll. They were wined and fêt
ed as celebrities, they were squired around plantations, they rode horseback over Jamaica’s scenic Blue Mountains, and then they leisurely hopped a succession of small tramp steamers. They docked at Santiago, Cuba, and took in San Juan Hill, then visited Key West and Miami, shopping and sightseeing, exploring the Everglades and visiting an alligator farm, then Daytona Beach and Jacksonville. London was slated to give a lecture to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS, the student group that had been formed in the wake of his California lectures) on January 19, 1906, at New York’s Grand Central Palace, and their ship moored just in time. The five-minute ovation he received from the eager audience—some students but mostly laborers—gave him a rousing welcome home. Learning that London was in New York, Dr. Alexander Irvine, pastor of the Pilgrim Church in New Haven, Connecticut, hurried down to ask if he could work in an additional lecture at Yale. As vociferously as it was denounced by industrial barons who had a stake in exploiting the working class, socialism a century ago was also widely approved by progressive clergy as an avenue toward social justice, and Irvine was one of New Haven’s most prominent socialists.
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 27