The survival of the fittest: it was a shock that strong, deep-chested Ban could come to such an end. This tragedy gave a painful turn to London’s work on what in some aspects was his most daring novel to date, Before Adam, serialized in Everybody’s before publication in book form in February 1907, only three months after White Fang. The narrator is a young boy who, when he sees a caged lion in the circus, reacts with primordial frenzy because the cat awakens in him a latent racial memory of the Tawny One, the terror of his kind, who were the cave people. In this novel primarily of atavism, London marshaled the forces of evolution, modern psychology, and what was known at the time of anthropology to reconstruct the wanderings of the boy’s distant ancestor Big-Tooth and his tribe, and their struggle to survive in a world of terrifying beasts and protohumans called the Tree People.
The unexpected combination of storytelling ability with the Darwinian theory that had fascinated him since his student days created a sensation as much in the scientific community for transforming their dry lectures into high drama, as it did in literary circles for its inventiveness. A noted anthropology professor at Yale actually began using it as a textbook, while the New York Times marveled at this “romance of the unknown ages, of the creatures that may have been . . . all endowed with poignant reality.” It was perhaps London’s most fiercely imaginative novel and sold an astonishing 65,000 copies, yet it is virtually forgotten today.
When London chose Charmian over Sterling, it turned out there was wisdom in the selection beyond settling his emotional quandary over where to place his primary love and loyalty. By choosing Glen Ellen over Carmel, he also chose productive work over pretentious indolence, for the bohemians of the colony on the coast began suffering a widespread onslaught of what one observer called “Carmelitis.” Outsiders and newcomers noticed right away the tendency toward procrastination and outright laziness. They might have established a rule that no socializing took place before noon so they could work, but that did not mean much work got done. London’s thousand-word daily output, corrected and now typed by Charmian, would not have thrived in their artsy atmosphere.
Outing Magazine began the serial publication of White Fang in May 1906, continuing until October, when Macmillan brought out the book. George Brett was ebullient over London’s effort in the novel, which he found “to be a much better knitted piece of work than any other long story that you have written, and to show a clear advance in your art.” He especially found it an improvement over The Sea-Wolf, which he finally allowed himself to criticize for losing interest at the end, in the fatuous propriety of Humphrey and Maud on their desert island. Some critics disagreed with Brett over White Fang, charging that to reverse the process described in The Call of the Wild showed a lack of originality. When Bach wrote a fugue, however, the inversion of the subject was an expected part of the form, and even so White Fang proceeded naturally from The Call of the Wild. It also, unknown to the critics, issued from London’s newfound optimism that came from acquiring the Beauty Ranch at Glen Ellen and the end of his “long sickness.” “I am an evolutionist,” London answered the critics. “I have always been impressed with the awful plasticity of life and I feel that I can never lay enough stress upon the marvelous power and influence of environment.”
The robust sales of White Fang established that his critics did not have nearly as wide a reach as he did, although London had done much to resuscitate his own reputation after returning from the controversial lecture tour with the publication of a moderate and sincere piece in Cosmopolitan titled “What Life Means to Me.” He had written it in Newton, Iowa, the previous autumn, resting with Charmian and her relations. In it he retreated from none of what he had lectured the country, but in clear prose he described his beginnings in the working class, his imagination of what it must be like to live “on the parlor floor” of society, and his rise to fame. Upon meeting the rich and powerful, however, he found moral decay he had never imagined. “I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met men incoherent with indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that each year killed more babies than even red-handed Herod had killed.” In explaining his socialism as simply his reaction to discovering corruption and moral bankruptcy at the heart of capitalism, “What Life Means to Me” brought Cosmopolitan more requests for reprints than it had ever received before.15
Doubtless some of the critical brickbats were hurled less at White Fang than at London himself, with whom the jingoistic press was becoming increasingly annoyed for his socialist preaching. A few months after its appearance no less a personage than President Theodore Roosevelt weighed in on the novel, accusing London of “nature faking.” “London describes a great wolf-dog being torn in pieces by a lucivee, a northern lynx,” he carped. “This is about as sensible as to describe a tom cat tearing in pieces a thirty-pound bull terrier. Nobody who really knew anything about either . . . would write such nonsense.” It was a signal moment, for the former Oakland wharf rat to have occasioned the notice of the president of the United States, but the criticism was reprinted with something approaching glee in the newspapers that found London so objectionable. Embarrassingly for them and for Roosevelt, however, the president must have only been told the story and not read it for himself, because he had the facts exactly backward. “The President is evidently a careless reader of my stories,” London answered. “He has rushed into this criticism all twisted around. . . . My story was about the wolf-dog killing the lynx and eating the body.”16 Unaccustomed to being gainsaid, Roosevelt fired off a hot letter to the editor of Collier’s, which had printed London’s reply, but let the matter drop with a huff.
The essential lesson for London from White Fang was that his Alaska motif had finally run its course. He had survived a winter in the Yukon and knew that its cold and its dangers were relentless; indeed his adventures there should have killed him three or four times over. His writing about it, however, had become equally relentless, and he had exhausted readers’ interest in the frozen North. What he needed was a new subject entirely, and with the Snark finally nearing completion, that need would be filled presently. Worn out from a stint of hard production, he needed a rest before undertaking what would surely be a physically taxing small-boat voyage across the Pacific. So in February 1907 London and Charmian descended on Carmel for a sojourn of several days, which so electrified the bohemian community that they suspended their “rule” that all were forbidden from doing anything but work before noon.
Since relocation to the colony had been hastened by the great earthquake, The Crowd had devolved into two more or less distinct sets: they called themselves the Eminently Respectables, those such as Mary Austin, the MacGowan sisters, and photographer Arnold Genthe, who worked hard and were sociable when time permitted, and the merely Respectables, the more convivial who enjoyed the good life and whose output suffered for it—Sterling, Jimmy Hopper, Lucia Chamberlain, Fred Bechdolt, Xavier Martínez, and others. 17 All were congenial in the evenings, though, and the real society took place usually on the beach, usually over feasts of fresh abalone. On one particular occasion as night approached, Hopper was taking a photograph of Sterling, who had scaled a cliff in his bathing suit and stood, posed as a Poseidon with a trident. Mary Austin was communing with her Indian princess alter ego, standing on the beach in beaded buckskins, her arms raised to the western twilight, chanting what sounded like Browning: “’Tis a Cyclopean blacksmith striking frenzied sparks on the anvil of the horizon.” London, who had been gorging on an abalone steak, decided to bring her down a tone. “Hell!” he bellowed at her with fork in hand. “I say, this sunset has guts!”18
For such cookouts on the beach at Point Lobos, Sterling had composed a piece of nonsense doggerel he called “The Abalone Song,” complete with its own trite little tune, although it could a
lso be sung to “Yankee Doodle.” The Crowd regularly bawled it out over roaring beach fires:Oh, some folks boast of quail on toast, because they think it’s toney;
But I’m content to owe my rent and live on abalone.
Abalone! Abalone! Abalone! Abalone!
I’m content to owe my rent and live on abalone.
Oh, Mission Point’s a friendly joint, where every crab’s a crony,
And true and kind you’ll ever find the clinging abalone.
Abalone! Abalone! Abalone! Abalone!
True and kind you’ll ever find the clinging abalone.
Some live on hope, some live on dope, and some on alimony,
But my Tom Cat and I get fat on tender abalone.
Abalone! Abalone! Abalone! Abalone!
My Tom Cat and I get fat on tender abalone.
Oh, some like jam and some like ham, and some like macaroni;
But bring to me a pail of gin and a tub of abalone.
Abalone! Abalone! Abalone! Abalone!
Bring to me a pail of gin and a tub of abalone.
There were over a dozen verses19; others of The Crowd contributed their own until there were said to be more than ninety. Very likely the song was sung doggedly while preparing the feast: Sterling and Hopper dove for them at the foot of the cliffs, after which the abalones had to be pounded for an hour to tenderize them, and then boiled for another hour or more before grilling. Throughout the revelries, Austin kept her perspicacious eye, when not appraising Sterling’s near-naked body, on London. She noted that he was “sagging a little with the surfeit of success . . . making him prefer the lounging pitchwood fire or the blazing hearth.” His magnetism, however, was undiminished, and Charmian had to remain vigilant. Austin may not have conceded the “ biological necessity” of women to prefer sharing a man of distinction, but as she saw plainly enough, “Women flung themselves at Jack, lay in wait for him.”20
Such women were soon to run out of chances, however, for the Snark, hampered by both Roscoe Eames’s incompetence and by materials shortages occasioned by San Francisco’s rapid rebuilding, was finally ready for her sea trials.
12
THE SAILOR
Seven years before, in June 1900, Jack London had written to The Crowd’s senior statesman, Charles Warren Stoddard, to acknowledge a compliment to his writing. He was also somewhat familiar with Stoddard’s own career. “ You have been down in the South Seas, haven’t you?” he wrote. “That’s where I’ve always longed to go, and somehow never made it.” His rounding of the Hawaiian Islands on the Sophia Sutherland and shore leave in the Bonin Islands “only served to make me hungry ever since.”1
He first mentioned the possibility of a long ocean voyage to Charmian during their year of waiting for the divorce from Bessie to become final. Although she was becoming more secure in their relationship, there were moments when he could be abrupt and domineering with her, even mean. Thus, there was a certain determination to the unending cheer and helpfulness that visitors to Wake Robin so noticed in her during summer and fall 1906. She loved her Mate-Man, to be sure, but beyond that she believed in him, to the point of ploughing past his increasingly evident shortcomings, knowing that when he was done being sharp or nasty to her, he would come right again. She came to depend upon it.
The journalist Joseph Noel left a telling vignette of his stay as a houseguest at Glen Ellen. As with all guests, he arose and Manyoungi served him breakfast without a peep from his hosts. Mornings were when London did his writing and he was not to be disturbed. London called Noel upstairs at about eleven o’clock, where he was still in bed, a large walnut four-poster, Noel wrote, “of the kind affected by captains of windjammers.” London was sitting against large pillows with pages of manuscript about him on the bed. Cigarette butts were mounded in a saucer on the nightstand, and Noel noticed a green-shaded reading lamp and a decanter of scotch surrounded by glasses. As the two drank whiskey, Charmian entered with a cheery “Good morning,” and fetched away the morning’s work to type.
I drink a second drink. So does Jack. Manyoungi comes in with two cups of coffee. Manyoungi is an obsequious mind-reader. Before you know it he has everything you want at your elbow.
Between sips of the coffee Jack asks his bodyservant for a certain portfolio. The boy brings it, opens it, and places the bundle of new notes on the quilt in front of the master. . . . I hear the steady click of a typewriter touched by expert fingers. “That would be Charmian typing off the morning’s work,” I say. Jack nods. There are pages from a book in the litter. Having arranged them to his satisfaction, he reaches up and, with the old-fashioned wooden clothes pins, fastens them in little bundles to a clothesline strung across the bed. . . .
Charmian comes in again. Altogether it is hardly ten minutes since she picked up the last page of Jack’s longhand script from the bed. She is back with the whole thing finished. “If we do as well tomorrow with this story as we did today, we’ ll have something great,” she says with quiet enthusiasm. You feel the enthusiasm.
“What do you mean by that we?” Jack snaps. The enthusiasm evaporates.
“Well, I just mean . . . ”
“Don’t mean it. Get busy with these.”
He gives her a sheaf of notes scribbled with a pencil. She leaves to copy them off. For a moment her eyes differ but slightly from Manyoungi’s. There is a beaten look in them.
When Charmian joined them downstairs she was cheerful again, London’s shortness with her having been shrugged off. “A thousand and twenty-one words today, Mate,” she said. Noel called it bookkeeping in paradise.2
It could not have been long after Noel’s visit that Manyoungi, too, finally had enough of his hauteur and asked to address him as “Mr. London,” as the other employees did. London refused, insisting on being addressed as “Master.”
“Would God care for a beer before retiring?” Manyoungi asked coldly.
“No, Manyoungi, I don’t want anything from you.” He was fired the next day. According to Charmian, although this might have been one of the more rose-tempered pages in her biography, what grated on Manyoungi was not London’s arrogance, but the impending world voyage. He did not want to go, and he got his wish.
London’s short temper might have stemmed in part from the fact that, oddly for a man who was about to cruise the globe in a $30,000 yacht, his literary attention had been focused on some final broadsides at the capitalist system he was leaving behind. One was an essay, “The Somnambulists,” which was largely a recapitulation of the revolutionist essays from the preceding year. The robber barons who were exploiting labor and keeping workers in penury to produce shoddy goods and adulterated food were, he wrote, oblivious to the havoc they were wreaking in the lives of the have-nots. “He will bribe . . . a state legislature for a commercial privilege; but he has never been known, in all his sleep-walking history, to bribe any legislative body in order to achieve any moral end, such as . . . child labor laws, pure food bills, or old age pensions.” Child labor had been much on his mind, anyway. Unable, to his distress, to accept an invitation to make a tour of the American South and investigate factory and mill conditions there, he instead wrote “The Apostate,” a memory of his own days of wage slavery in the jute mill. It was published in the landmark September 1906 issue of Woman’s Home Companion, which wielded considerable influence in the eventual passage of a national Child Labor Act.
As if these were not enough, he also undertook a new novel, The Iron Heel. Just as Before Adam imagined Paleolithic life as humanlike drama, this story looked ahead to a bleak future, when a revolt of the workers, led by a Londonesque Ernest Everhard (named for London’s Michigan cousin), has been crushed by the oligarchy. Now for their punishment, they are forced like slaves raising a pyramid to build the city of the oligarchs’ supremacy, which was completed, significantly, in 1984. The Iron Heel found itself in the middle of a genre tradition: London probably got the idea from William J. Ghent’s Our Benevolent Feudalism (published in 1902 by Ma
cmillan),3 which had gotten the idea from an earlier article in the Independent. The Iron Heel, in turn, was later read by a British socialist writer named Eric Arthur Blair, who under his pen name of George Orwell took his own shot at the concept in Nineteen Eighty-four, published in 1949.
The Iron Heel suffered from haste (London wanted to turn it in before leaving on his voyage and stay out of debt to Macmillan) and shrillness. It contained not so much dialogue as staged dialectical prophecy. As with his more intemperate stump speeches, the book was cheered by socialists but received coldly by the more patriotic press. Despite its lack of art, the novel had its greatest influence abroad and was praised by Anatole France and Leon Trotsky.
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 29