Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  London agreed, and preparations raced ahead. A Beaux Arts-style poster of London by Max Dellfant was plastered all over the Yale campus the morning of January 26, and Woolsey Hall was packed to its capacity of 3,000 for the event. Keenly aware that he was in the lion’s den of American capitalism and that many in his audience were the sons of some of the country’s most offensive robber barons, London stood at the edge of the stage, speaking quietly, almost gently, but clearly, for two hours to a silent hall. “It was probably the straightest thing they had ever heard,” reported the local newspaper. “It was truth by the chunk.” Before the talk his pending arrival had caused such controversy that the professors were reduced to pleading with the students to hear him out fairly. After the talk, the students shanghaied London to a dormitory and crowded in until there was no escape, clamoring for more. “He is very gentle,” wrote the reporter. “He speaks softly in conversation, but the boys were conscious that behind the gentle voice was the heart and nature of a lion.”6

  Even more gratifying than his open-minded reception at Yale was London’s discovery that his recent notoriety was beginning to bring new disciples out of the woodwork. In New York he was contacted by the vice president and chief organizer of the ISS, an ardent young comrade named Upton Sinclair, and they had lunch. Almost three years younger than London, Sinclair had just completed an exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry that he called The Jungle, which was published later that year and caused the national outrage that London, who gave the book a laudatory review, had been able to raise only with his preaching and his love life. The two became friends until London’s death, although principally by correspondence because Sinclair, a teetotaler from Baltimore, loathed alcohol and would not keep company with drinkers. London’s literary gift was multifaceted, and his attention was divided among fiction, nonfiction, and drama; Sinclair’s was not, and he went on to far surpass London as a muckraker airing the dirty linen of the American economy and society. In New Haven, London had also been approached by a somewhat nervous student named Sinclair Lewis, editor of the Yale literary magazine and a protégé of Upton Sinclair who had worked on the latter’s experimental commune. Just short of turning twenty-one, Lewis was in some awe of London, but as he recalled, “The great man was extremely friendly to the skinny, the red-headed, the practically anonymous secretary.”7 Their paths would cross again soon in California, and they too became friends for life.

  All too soon London, Charmian, and Manyoungi were back on the road to lecture in Chicago, St. Paul, and North Dakota. However, the bad press London had received for his political views and his hasty marriage caused some sponsors to cancel his appearance, creating gaps in the schedule; there were also reports of his books being removed from library shelves, justified by his alleged moral turpitude. Happy together but exhausted, London and Charmian felt no guilt in calling off the tour early and returning to California in early spring 1906.

  As well paid as he was for the lecturing, and even with White Fang a hit (although rather less so than The Call of the Wild had been), there was still no rest for the most famous writer in America, as the need for money was constant. Partly because of Roscoe Eames’s poor management and partly because London insisted on purchasing only the finest materials, construction of the Snark was running so over budget and behind schedule that the local press had begun referring to the enterprise as “London’s folly.” In addition to his own and Charmian’s expenses, and meeting the upkeep of Bessie and the girls, now he bought a comfortable two-story home with Ionic pilasters at 490 Twenty-Seventh Street in Oakland, into which he moved his mother, with a stipend of $60 a month, his nephew Johnny Miller, and Mammy Jennie. All he asked in return was that a bedroom be kept free for him and Charmian as their pied-à-terre when they were in Oakland.

  Once home, it was time to reconnect with The Crowd, whose members were dividing their time between their old haunts in San Francisco, where rents had exceeded the ability of most of them to stay, and the arts colony they were organizing in Carmel. The idea of artists and writers living in proximity to one another, allies in empathy and creativity, was compelling enough to attract outsiders, who had to be vetted for suitability to admit into the circle. One of the more remarkable figures to descend on Carmel was Lewis, the tall, gaunt, young scarecrow of a writer. Nine years younger than London, he was consummately ambitious and so pompous that his Yale classmates had joked that he was the only man on campus who could fart through his mouth. But he brought with him one magical possession that made him a locus of attention. Michael Williams, the Irish poet and regular of The Crowd, recalled that “Lewis brought a trunk with him to Carmel . . . that became locally famous and a thing of wonder to the writers there, most of whom were six-days-a-week loafers, and mere Jock o Five Dreams compared with the new arrival. For that trunk was packed with a veritable card index of a fiction manufacturer. . . . There were clippings galore, news stories that might be the source of fiction plots; there were innumerable sketches in words of persons, places, happenings recorded by Lewis himself. . . . There were dozens, scores, hundreds of possible plots for novels, short stories, plays. Once he sat up all night with Jack London in George Sterling’s bungalow, going through the plot file.” London, far from feeling threatened by the newest and most genuine talent to show in Carmel, bought several plot ideas from him.8 London was always frank in admitting that the invention of stories was his weakest point, although he could “everlastingly elaborate”—a confession that could be verified by a survey of his Alaska stories, and a few heated claims of plagiarism from earlier writers. London was also aware that while Lewis was entrained across the country, though he was not yet reduced to tucking himself above wheel trucks as London had done, he still could not afford passage in a sleeper and crossed the country in carriage cars. Paying Lewis $5 or $10 each for a small sheaf of plots provided new material, helped Lewis with some cash, and according to Williams, no more reduced Lewis’s store of ideas than removing two cups of water from a pond.

  Another newcomer at Carmel who was particularly keen on meeting London was Mary Hunter Austin, an interpreter of Southwestern life and literature who had been heaped with critical praise for her Land of Little Rain, published in 1903 when she was thirty-five. Like Nora May French, she was a discovery of C. F. Lummis of Out West magazine, but the force of her style and determination to be noticed made her a success, whereas French’s career never caught fire. On her first visit to San Francisco, in that year, she had attached herself to George Sterling with all the force of a repressed matron yearning for attention and affection before her advancing age made moot the possibility. There were occasions when Austin and London found themselves in the same circle of discussion, and the liberated bohemians felt free to discuss virtually anything, including sex. To Sterling’s well-known belief that sex released creativity, London’s contribution was that what the men responded to was the apparent need of women to prefer “the tenth share of a man of distinction to the whole of an average man.”

  In response the highly independent Austin snapped, “I never needed a love affair to release the subconscious in me!” There is no note of the subject having been pursued further, but Austin’s abrupt dismissal of therapeutic sex would have struck some present as divinely sour grapes, for she was not attractive. It was well gossiped by then that on her introduction to San Francisco in 1903, she had been taken to dine at Coppa’s restaurant. The new venture of an immigrant chef from Turin named Giuseppe Coppa—The Crowd called him, with suitable fun, Papa Coppa—quickly became a favored haunt of the leading bohemians because of the low prices and heaping portions. They earned their keep, however, for customers were drawn by a wall of whimsical caricatures of the bohemians by such artists as Maynard Dixon and Gelett Burgess as well as Xavier Martínez. The decor featured distinctive black cat decorations and a facsimile of a rotund man displaying a witty motto: PASTE MAKES WAIST. The artistes welcomed Mary Austin to the table but then in coded under-the-table footsie dec
ided not to invite her into their circle. She was brilliant enough, they allowed, but she was ugly.9 In the three years since, whenever she was in San Francisco she became a frequent companion of Sterling, who genuinely admired her writing and continued to introduce her to his contacts. In 1906, she determined to move to the area, and with the friendship of Sterling and London, the rest of The Crowd were cornered into accepting her.

  Austin had enormous appreciation for Sterling’s aesthetics but considered him too closely tied still to Ambrose Bierce, and she once became irked with him for being reluctant to introduce her to his mentor. Sterling was afraid she might inadvertently reveal how close he and the Wolf had become, and Bierce had come to vigorously disapprove of London. Once she met him, Austin disapproved of Bierce, who cooled his relationship with Sterling over the latter’s embrace of London’s political views. “ We were not, at Carmel, inclined to the intellectual outlook,” she recalled, “except that there was a general disposition to take Jack seriously in respect to the Social Revolution.” Sterling had little political inclination of his own, which made it easier for him to defer to the views of his Wolf.

  London and Mary Austin did not start off well together; at one session he held forth on the merits of Darwinian evolution, which she shrugged off, not being very impressed that, apparently, he was just learning of it. (That was unjust; it was on his mind because he had been working on Before Adam, a novel with protohuman characters.) For his part, London challenged her claim to psychic powers, which resulted in a hot argument one night at the Sterlings’ bungalow. With these and their initial collision over the issue of sex and creativity, Austin admitted that she and London “had to shake down a bit” before working out the kind of friendship they would have,10 and how they would share Sterling’s affections. Eight years older than London, she was homely and opinionated and arrogant, and to the perception of those around them she was jealous of the time Sterling spent with London. After she moved to Carmel, the rest of The Crowd learned that her eccentricities more than qualified her for acceptance among even the stranger of them—she sometimes dressed as a Native American princess and preferred to do her writing in a tree house—but London did not let The Crowd’s derision define his own response to her. He knew from their machinations against Charmian that they had a shallow and catty side, and eventually Austin and London settled into a collegial, lifelong friendship.

  For her part, Austin pronounced herself fascinated by his interaction with Sterling. “They were new to me, Jack and George . . . a source of endless intellectual curiosity. They were, for instance, the first two men I had known who could get drunk joyously in the presence of women whom they respected. For in the outlying desert regions where I had lived, this was not done. So I gave myself to discovering what the others got out of it.” She also had genuine respect for London’s writing; she was aware of his self-deprecating admission that he bought story ideas from others such as Sinclair Lewis, but did not believe that he needed them. “I have always suspected that Jack’s buying of plots for short stories from any writer with more plots than places to bestow them was chiefly a generous camouflage for help that could not be asked or given other wise.”11

  The Crowd’s doubts about Austin’s psychic powers may have been given an overhaul after she arrived in San Francisco on April 17, 1906, to confer with a publisher about her novel Isidro. She was to stay at the Palace Hotel, with its famously elegant Palm Court, but once there she telephoned her brother and half a dozen others that she was terrified by a premonition that the hotel was about to collapse. Most soothed her, telling her she had merely been working too hard and to get some sleep, but her friend Kitty Hittell invited her over to spend the night, which Austin accepted.12 At a quarter past five the next morning San Francisco was shattered by a massive earthquake, and the Palace Hotel was consumed in the first day of the firestorm.

  At Glen Ellen Charmian, habitually a late sleeper, had a less theatrical premonition, awakening with a start about five a.m., wondering what could have disturbed her so. She had just lain back down when the tremor struck, first a sickening few lurches, followed by a pause. “Then it seemed as if some great force laid hold of the globe and shook it like a Gargantuan rat.” They had houseguests, the Norwegian landscapist Johannes Reimers, whose counsel London had sought about plantings for the ranch, and his wife. All gathered in the living room, comparing their observations of having seen the surrounding trees “thrash crazily, as if all the winds of all quarters were at loggerheads.” From Aunt Netta’s lodge, London and Charmian ran to a barn they rented at the nearby Fish Ranch, where they found that their spooked horses had broken their halters. Willie, the stable boy, swore to them that he had seen the enormous madrone tree by the barn lay down and stand up again, “which was less lurid than many impressions to which we listened that day.”

  Within a half hour London and Charmian were mounted, riding for the Beauty Ranch. From its height they made out two distant columns of smoke, one in the direction of San Francisco, the other toward Santa Rosa, which was also devastated by the quake, but that news was overshadowed by the destruction of San Francisco. London wondered aloud whether the city had been swallowed by the sea, or whether the Atlantic might be even then lapping at the other side of the Rockies. Their attention was diverted by the loss of their new barn; London had ordered stone walls two feet thick, and only from the ruins learned that he had been cheated by the workmen: the walls had only been faced with stone and filled with rubble.13

  Remarkably, the quake had not distorted the railroad tracks, and as quick as they could they left for Santa Rosa, and on seeing the damage there went on to San Francisco. For most of his life London had endured a recurring nightmare of wandering through scenes of desolation and horror at the end of the world, and their walk through San Francisco during the fire seemed almost the very realization of that fear. Several times they were nearly trapped by the flames as London snapped photographs, when he would spy the last route of retreat from the advancing wall of fire. Charmian recalled a man being carried on a stretcher, in extremis, his back broken, and she was aware as their eyes met that she was the last woman he would ever see. They saw the Fairmont Hotel ignite as they made their way up Nob Hill; there was no water pressure with which to fight the fire, and they felt the ground shake as army troops under General Funston dynamited buildings in the path of the flames to create a firebreak. They spoke to one wealthy man named Perine; in shock that his mansion and his life’s memories were about to go up in flames, he gave the Londons a tour of the house and his fine things, and he asked Charmian to play the piano. She demurred, but London urged her on. “Do it for him,” he whispered. “It’s the last time he’ll ever hear it.” No sooner had she started than Perine was overcome by emotion, and they left him to his doomed elegance. On the stoop of another house that was not in danger they slept fitfully until daybreak.

  The next day they found the ferry still running, and crossed over to Oakland to rest at the house London kept for his mother and to take in what they had seen. Perine was only one of thousands who lost everything that day, including friends of theirs. Most of The Crowd had relocated to Carmel and escaped the worst of the devastation, but Arnold Genthe lost his photographic studio; Ina Coolbrith lost her home. After leaving the Oakland library in 1893 she had moved to San Francisco, renowned as one of California’s leading literati, and indeed the first female member of the Bohemian Club. Soon after, in a remarkable show of affection, California’s leading writers subscribed construction of a new house for her on Russian Hill. London himself wrote her an affectionate remembrance, recalling her praise of him for checking out the book about Pizarro: “If you only knew how proud your words made me. . . . I was raw from a ranch, you see. But I stood greatly in awe of you—worshipful awe. . . . No woman has affected me to the extent you did. I was only a little lad. I knew absolutely nothing about you. Yet in all the years that have passed I have met no woman so noble as you.” Remembering also that that was
when he had bricked off his artistic nature behind a wall of drinking and brawling, he concluded, “I am all iron these days; but I remember my childhood, I remember you; and I have room in me yet, and softness, too, for memories.”14 Almost alone in a sea of ruins, Coppa’s and the rest of its block on Montgomery inexplicably survived. Rendering his restaurant unapproachable by the mounds of debris, however, Giuseppe Coppa decided to close, serving a “Last Supper” that was understood to also close San Francisco’s bohemian age.

  Having surveyed the cataclysm, London told Charmian that he could never write about what they had seen, that it beggared description. He was, however, the best writer to witness the destruction, and when Collier’s offered him a celebrity’s wage of 25 cents a word for an account of the event, he wrote “The Story of an Eyewitness,” one of the starkest and most vivid glimpses of a city brought to its knees.

  A few weeks later, London and Charmian saddled up Fleet and Washoe Ban for a two-week ride through Northern California, for a short vacation that would allow them to take in how well the area had ridden out the earthquake. Soon after this trip something far worse than the earthquake befell them. London and Charmian returned from running errands in Oakland to the news that Washoe Ban had entangled himself in a barbed-wire fence and mangled one of his legs to the bone. They knew from a singled horrified look that he would have to be destroyed. London had once witnessed a botched attempt at putting down a horse, and the agony of it burned into his memory. He told his foreman Wiget he would do it himself if he had to, but he didn’t want to. Knowing London’s great love for the chestnut thoroughbred, the horse that had cemented his love for Charmian, Wiget said no, he would do it. London instructed him to place the bullet in the center of the X drawn from left ear to right eye, right ear to left eye. He and Charmian held each other in a hammock near the house, waiting on the gunshot, and when it came, both wept fully.