It was impossible to meditate daily on injustice and maintain a sunny disposition for Mate-Woman and visitors, and as problematic as his relationship with his mother had always been, the timing could have been better for Flora London to come up for a stay. Still worse, she also brought London’s step-nephew Johnny Miller, Ida’s boy, who was now twelve, with whom Flora had bonded in a way that had always eluded her with her own son. Between family and the sojourning tourists, Flora recovered some of her long-lost gregarious-ness, and London seems to have enjoyed himself, but he could not warm to Johnny. Beyond any innate jealousy he felt, his own stunted childhood made it virtually impossible for him to relate intimately to any child who was not, as he had been, a Work Beast. It was the only time his mother was known to have seen the Beauty Ranch; apparently the visit was cordial and pleasant, but she never went back.
Many of The Crowd also began making the trip up to Glen Ellen, especially George Sterling, often with Carrie, who managed to swallow her disapproval of Charmian and keep the peace. Also there were Jimmy Hopper and Arnold Genthe, the ever-funny Harry Leon Wilson, Xavier “Marty” Martínez, and Jim Whitaker, who continued his boxing and fencing practice with London. The Partington siblings also came, including Blanche, although Charmian had neutralized any threat she might pose. Between Wake Robin and the new Beauty Ranch, there was plenty of space to indulge London’s juvenile passions for flying kites, often several at once, and blowing soap bubbles. With no home yet of their own, the Londons lived in an annex of Wake Robin Lodge, and visitors batched in the cabins on the property. Despite his workload, London also hosted friends from his days as a war correspondent, Richard Harding Davis and Ed Winship with his wife, Ida. To Charmian’s growing disapproval, Glen Ellen also became a stopping place for tramps who had known her husband when he was riding the rails. Many of them were still down and out, and while sometimes diffident about doing so, usually asked for a handout. Although perennially strapped for cash himself, London almost always handed over a few dollars.
His financial burdens weighed him down, to the point that he began referring to meeting the monthly bills of his own, Bessie’s, and his mother’s households as his “Monthly Miracle.” His requests to George Brett for further draws against his future work were less and less certainly worded, and indeed his long-suffering editor finally had to tell him that he would be charged interest on future advances. To keep on the positive side of the royalty balance, London hurried up two more short pieces, reminiscences of his days as a hobo—memories that London’s visiting tramp friends could have earned their handouts by helping him to recall. These he collated with previous tramp pieces and offered to Brett as The Road, a combination memoir of his months riding the rails and exposition of tramping as an American subculture created by capitalist abuse of workers. Brett was less than enthusiastic but published it anyway: while it could be argued that The Iron Heel had expanded the book-buying market to include many angry have-nots, they were not the core of the book-buying audience. The reviewers and mainstream readers who were mortified by The Iron Heel were not likely to well receive a book that rhapsodized about life as a hobo. Even The Iron Heel, though, made money and increased their profile abroad, and London had become Macmillan’s keystone. The Road, when it appeared in November 1907, was a flop, and Brett learned first the cost of publishing a book against his formidable instincts and second that London was not infallible. While their correspondence remained cordial even in their occasional disagreements, London as he aged grew progressively less amenable to editorial guidance, something that he had taken gladly with The People of the Abyss five years before. Mentorship was Brett’s specialty, and the combination of London’s increasing financial demands and decreasing popularity strained their relationship. Placing that at risk would be dangerous indeed.
Along with London’s other financial obligations, now there were improvements to make on the ranch as well. At first London had told Brett he did not think to ever make a profit from the place, but ownership and exposure to the land nourished the transformation that had bonded him to Charmian. Nature, rather than the uncaring cosmic power of “To Build a Fire,” was now a healer and provider, and like Voltaire’s Candide, London perceived his rest in chopping his wood and making his garden grow. Hiring Werner Wiget as foreman had been the first step, and during the fall he finished the first major construction, the barn, making certain of the two-foot-thick stone walls this time. It was a massive structure with half-timber upper works supporting a forty-ton tile roof with long, low slant dormers front and back. London had not been exaggerating when he told Sterling that his ranch would anchor him permanently, and the barn was only the beginning. Johannes Reimers, the landscape architect who had been there when the great earthquake struck, had visited since, and the two planned the initial landscaping around the site for a future house, an image of which began to coalesce in London’s mind as a rustic castle of lava rock and redwood on a monumental scale.
Ranch and house would have to wait on the voyage, however. Sailing had always been his renewal, and now every shuttle across San Francisco Bay made him ache more and more to disappear into the Pacific. He had been paying Roscoe Eames $50 per month to oversee construction of the Snark, which, in fairness to Charmian’s lazy and excuse-making uncle, was not an easy job. There were literally hundreds of vendors to deal with to obtain the best materials, and being a good socialist, London directed that Roscoe use only union labor. He and Charmian were in the San Francisco shipyard often; almost obsessively they photographed the growing lattice of ribs that curved out and up from the five-ton iron keel. As the boat took shape, Charmian realized what a confined world they would inhabit as they circled the globe. One photo of the skeletal interior she captioned, “Where are we going to put it all?”4
The forty-five-foot ketch was finally launched and brought to Oakland for her fitting out. During November 1906, London and Charmian relocated to their pied-à-terre in the house he maintained for his mother so he could ride herd more closely over the vessel’s ballooning expense. The Crowd took advantage of their proximity to descend for cards or to hear Charmian put her new Steinway “B” through its paces. Flora was happy to be once again in the center of the action, but she did not approve of Jack and Charmian boxing with each other, and scolded them once when their roughhousing cracked the redwood door of the dining room. London would have been far more put out over delays in fitting out his boat had it not been for the daily lunches on “10-Minute Duck”—wild mallard or canvasback, barely cooked before pressing—at his favorite restaurant, the Saddle Rock. He loved the dish so much he published a recipe.
Before lunch came the daily thousand words; after lunch a trip to the shipyard to try to correct whatever had gone wrong that day. The Snark would not be just any boat; she would be state-of-the-art. Her two collapsible masts would allow her smoothly under the bridges on the Seine so they could dock in Paris; they planned to explore the Yellow River in China and the St. Lawrence Seaway, through the Great Lakes to Chicago, thence down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Below deck, London’s cabin was in the port bow, Charmian’s in the starboard; midships was the main cabin, with an ultramodern head with flushing toilet abaft the main cabin on the starboard side, the galley to port, where cool refreshments would be guaranteed by an ice maker. Roscoe was also provided a smaller cabin next to a seventy-horsepower motor that would keep them going through calms and up canals. The stern was ballasted by a thousand gallons of gasoline. And somewhere they must find room for four hundred books, a phonograph, and five hundred records. Visually, she was as sleek and sporty a boat as Oakland had ever seen, and designed to be fast: twelve knots under full sail, eight knots under engine power.
Most of The Crowd were on board when London nosed the Snark through the Golden Gate for her sea trials on February 10, 1907. The weather was blustery but not dangerous, the sails bellied in the wind and took them twelve miles out. Hardly had he dreamed of such a perfect boat; her two-masted riggin
g, which he had designed to mimic the English fishing boats of the Dogger Bank, made her handle almost as if she had a responsive intelligence of her own—although most of the guests got seasick. Ever since they had known London they had heard his sea tales but had never seen him in action, and they were impressed. To editors who wrote darkly that sailing a small boat to Hawaii expressed nothing less than a death wish, one replied that the Snark might sink, but London, never. Then the delays resumed, and the Londons returned to Glen Ellen—only to learn that Brown Wolf, the big dog that had supervised the composition of White Fang, had died during the winter and Wiget, knowing how they felt about him, had not the heart to inform them of it.
Turning his thoughts to crewing the vessel, London determined to take Roscoe along to run the boat, despite his demonstrated inability during her construction. He did not want to do it himself, needing to meet his quota of one thousand words per day output on the myriad new topics and ideas that inevitably would come to him during the voyage. He had needed for a long time to enlarge his repertory from Alaska and tramping and socialism, and hoped their seven-year circumnavigation would give him grist for the rest of his life.
The rebellious Manyoungi had been replaced by a young Japanese of a rather serious and somewhat religious bent, Paul Tochigi, who would serve as cabin boy. Other crew would have to be sought out, and it must have been partly for the publicity value that London put out word nationally that he was taking applications. The imagined size of his supposedly shrinking audience was corrected by the avalanche of responses, many offering money—a lot of money—just to be taken along. From every corner of the wide world, wrote Charmian, applications came from “doctors, lawyers, beggarmen, chiefs, thieves, multimillionaires, sailors single and in crews, poets, historians, geologists, painters, doctors of divinity,” and the whole cross-section of humanity. In one letter that they lingered over with gusts of laughter the applicant asked to be taken along because he found respectable people tiresome!5
One who read the announcement of the intended voyage was a twenty-two-year-old in Independence, Kansas, a clerk in his father’s jewelry store. Martin Elmer Johnson was tall and cocky, “ blond-beastly ” in London’s own parlance, and eaten up with unfulfilled longings for adventure. He had actually traveled some already; he had been to England and lived a little reality of the stranded American sailor depicted in The People of the Abyss. But the real adventure he ached for was limited to his imagination. In his dreams, “I breathed strange airs; I engaged in remarkable pursuits; by night, unfamiliar stars and constellations glittered in the sky.” Greatly magnifying his experiences and his skills, he wrote London an impassioned appeal to take him into the crew.
“I knew that my letter was one of a host of letters,” wrote Johnson later, “I knew that among those who had applied must be many who could push far stronger claims than mine.” Johnson was right; among the other applicants was a renowned chef. What London could see in Johnson, however, that he could not see in others, was, in short, himself at a younger age—bright and able and eager, but languishing for want of an opportunity. “Capacity of cook,” London telegraphed him. “Also do trick at wheel. Twenty-five dollars per month. Can you cook. What is your weight. Telegraph reply.”
Of course he could cook. “Try me,” responded Johnson, who then quit the job in his father’s jewelry store and went to work in a friend’s restaurant to learn how to cook. “I shudder as I think,” he recalled, “what weird messes I may have served up to my friend’s customers” as he learned his way around a kitchen. Nevertheless he prevailed upon his father to write to London separately, attesting to his cooking skills and his character. Probably unknown to Martin, his father added that he did not want him to go but couldn’t stop him.6
With further correspondence London was pleased with his choice, writing Johnson buoyantly, “Oh, if you have a bad temper, don’t come, for it’d be the only one on the boat! Incidentally, if you like boxing, I may tell you that all of us box, and we’ll have the gloves along. You’ll have the advantage of us on reach.” He also explained that Martin would, like everyone on board, have to turn his tricks at the wheel. Encouraged by how beautifully she handled on her trials, however, he wrote that the vessel would largely steer herself.
The last to join the crew was a young Stanford man named Bert Stolz, as mate and engineer, but whose only qualification was that he had once lived in Hawaii. London, who with his growing belly, flat feet, and recovery from hemorrhoids was as aware as Mary Austin that he was no longer the physical specimen he once was, took Stolz on as a general hand to make up the difference in what he could no longer do himself.
Once the Snark put to sea, London intended to pay for the seven-year voyage by filing stories from remote points of the globe. Like any astute freelancer, he planned to write about different aspects of the trip for different, noncompeting magazines, whether news, politics, fiction, or travelogue. This scenario, however, became as star-crossed as trying to outfit the vessel herself, and as the intended sailing date approached London was still scrambling to finalize contracts. Cosmopolitan had apparently understood that it would be his exclusive outlet and at one point suggested that London rename the boat Cosmopolitan . London replied lightly that if they cared to pay for the vessel, they could have all eight syllables of “Cosmopolitan Magazine,” and he would sell subscriptions in their ports of call. Otherwise, “boats, like horses, should have names of one syllable. Good, sharp, strong names, that can never be misheard.” Cosmopolitan had it wrong, however; London had also been negotiating with Woman’s Home Companion, Everybody’s, and others. In fact, John O. Cosgrave, who had been one of London’s earliest champions at The Wave in San Francisco eight years earlier, had become managing editor at Everybody’s after The Wave went under. He did London more good service in this new position and had just agreed to buy the serial rights to Before Adam for a handsome twelve and a half cents perword.7
When Cosmopolitan learned that London had been dealing with other periodicals, they put out furtive word that he was not to be trusted. In a hot letter to the magazine on November 18, London pointed out that he had received no response to any of his three latest letters to them, and “it would be much fairer, and certainly more logical and trouble-saving, to answer my letters instead of blatting around New York City charging bad faith on my part.” He also had the acumen to remind them that he expected to be paid separately for the photographs he would send back (as indeed is standard freelance practice) and he had already spent a considerable sum on cameras, lenses, film, and developing equipment. Even as he pressed Cosmopolitan for fast clarification of their relationship, he wrote Arthur Vance of Woman’s Home Companion, “For two cents I’d throw up the whole proposition and let everybody sue my mortgaged ranch for what they could get. . . . Cosmopolitan has been so superlatively mean that I am sure of one thing and that is I will do my very best work for Woman’s Home Companion.”8
At her christening, the deck of the Snark was jammed with the well-wishing Crowd—Carrie and George Sterling, she dressed to the nines and he alternately displaying his Greek profile to the camera and fixing his eyes on his Wolf. For a christening ensign, Jimmy Hopper merrily donated his blue-and-gold University of California football jersey. No one was present, however, when in the dark on the eve of her sailing, two large lumber scows drifted into the sleek vessel and squeezed her between them, staving in one side slightly and bowing out the other. The extent of the damage would not be known until she was at sea, but that day was postponed yet again when some unpaid trades-men had the vessel impounded by the sheriff. This was on a Saturday, and to London’s fury he could do nothing about the bills until Monday. Not until April 23 were they free of the land and all its hooks; they hoisted Jimmy Hopper’s jersey, and with cheers from the docks and whistles from the harbor London pointed her through the Golden Gate.
After downing their first dinner, Tochigi played a sad melody on his flute, cut short as first he and then Charmian rushed
up on deck, leaned over the rail, and made the heaving sacrifice of seasickness. It proved to be an omen.
The only thing that went smoothly the first several days was London’s teaching himself navigation. Roscoe Eames had previously told London that he could navigate, but his total befuddlement by the charts and instruments said otherwise. From San Francisco the Snark sailed south along the coast, not venturing into the trackless ocean until London practiced with the sextant and studied logarithms until he felt confident that he could keep them on course. In his memoir about the voyage he downplayed his quick study. “Any young fellow with ordinary gray matter, ordinary education, and with the slightest trace of the student-mind, can get books and charts, and instruments and teach himself navigation. . . . Seamanship is an entirely different matter; it requires years. . . . But navigation by observations of the sun, moon and stars, thanks to the astronomers and mathematicians, is child’s play.”
The Snark headed west; early on the sea was rough, the buffeting that the Snark took was frightful, and moving about on deck was downright dangerous. “Never for a moment could we let go of one hold without being assured of another,” wrote Martin Johnson. “I have seen many acrobatic feats, but nothing resembling in mad abandon the double handspring Mrs. London turned one day when her hand missed its hold and she landed down the companionway in the middle of the table, on top of a dinner which I had just cooked, and which Tochigi was serving.” Charmian’s memory was that she landed at the foot of the ladder. “Above us, Martin eyed me suspiciously, and ventured tentatively, ‘Now, in Kansas, in my family, the women cry when they hurt themselves like that.’ No, I shed no tears—then. But when I was alone at the wheel, under the stars, I wailed right womanly.”9
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 30