Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  Five hundred miles to the southwest lay Tahiti. Christmas Day 1907 was spent fighting a storm before reaching Papeete, where a pile of mail awaited, in which the greatest discovery was that Aunt Netta had botched his affairs beyond remedy. She had changed banks without telling him, so he had written hot checks in Hawaii; she had spent $1,000 on living quarters for Wiget and doubled her own salary; and when the newspapers printed the rumor that the Snark was lost at sea the bank foreclosed on his mother’s house.

  There was only one thing to do: suspending their trip for a month, he and Charmian trudged aboard the S.S. Mariposa for a twelve-day voyage to San Francisco, a reunion with The Crowd, and a flurry of deals to shore up his affairs before returning to Tahiti on the same vessel. They were gone a month and a day. In further exploring the Society Islands the Snark was almost capsized by gifts of fruit and fish and pork. There were further changes in crew, although Captain Warren was forgiven some theft and kept on for the time being. They rode the trades 1,500 miles west to Samoa. At Pago Pago they stayed with the governor and trekked up a mountain to pay their respects at the crypt of Robert Louis Stevenson, and they visited his villa, which was closed but they peeped in the windows. London’s remaining attempts to lecture on socialism were not amiably received. In Tahiti the French authorities had made sure the only venue made available to him was the burlesque hall, and police spies were spread through the audience; Pago Pago was little better. 17 Still, though he was politically checkmated, his creativity was liberated. Stories poured from him, many now with South Seas themes, and Charmian hammered away at her Remington. There may have been a time in his career when he could not think of new things to write, but now he was overloaded.

  After repairs in Fiji, where Captain Warren and some other crew were replaced, it was on to the Solomon Islands, where they arrived on October 27, 1908. Nine months since the emergency run to San Francisco had flown by. On Guadalcanal the Londons ensconced themselves at Penduffryn, the island’s largest copra plantation, as the guests of its owners. As they explored the Solomons, most of their decisions were pleasant ones: what to do with a beautiful but exhausted pigeon that flopped onto the deck one day at sea (London expended some of his last gasoline to carry it to the nearest island, an act that moved Johnson deeply); what to do with the daughter of a Malaitian chief who was gifted to the boat’s new captain (she was left at a mission); what to do with a bouncing Irish terrier that took up with Charmian and wouldn’t leave (they kept her, named her Peggy, and installed her as ship mascot). There were troubles, too, in the form of well-known tropical scourges: yaws—skin eruptions caused by a spirochete related to syphilis, nonsexual but capable of a destructive tertiary stage if left untreated—malaria, ngari-ngari. Most worrisome, two fistulas opened in London’s rectum. Also of concern, a skin condition began affecting London’s ability to perform even simple daily tasks, his hands and feet swollen and peeling. They pressed on with side trips while based at Penduffryn, determined not to have their fun spoiled by tropical diseases.

  London also got them lost once, in the open ocean south of the Solomons and several hundred miles east of Australia. He intended to take his bearings when they reached Lord Howe Island, but despite days of anxiety could not find it, and he discovered to his shock that he had left the chart at their base on Guadalcanal. Through most of the voyage it had been London’s determination and good humor that saw them through troubled times, but this time it was young Johnson who saved the day. “Lord,” he opined, “Howe did we miss that Island?” Howling (or, perhaps, Howe-ling) over the worst pun they could remember, it set off a contest of “Lord, Howe?” puns to which even Nakata, shivering with malaria, contributed. London reworked some tables and they raised the island two days later.

  Cruising the Solomon Islands, London gained sober insight into the primitive state of that part of the world. Although the natives might lavishly welcome armed white colonial masters, just beneath the surface lay the opportunism to scavenge them if the chance presented itself. London learned this to his horror when the Snark rammed her beautiful raked prow onto an unseen reef. “The minute before we struck,” he wrote the Greek, “not a canoe was in sight. But they began to arrive like vultures out of the blue. Half of our sailors held them off with rifles, while the other half worked to save the vessel. And down on the beach a thousand bushmen gathered for the loot. But they didn’t get it, or us.”18 Photographs of Charmian, laughing bravely among natives, also show a revolver prominently holstered on her hip. As London wrote,This is just about the rawest edge of the world. Head-hunting, cannibalism and murder are rampant. Among the worst islands of the group day and night we are never unarmed, and night watches are necessary. Charmian and I went for a cruise on another boat around the island of Malaita. We had a black crew. The natives we encountered, men and women, go stark naked, and are armed with bows, arrows, spears, tomahawks, war clubs, and rifles. . . . When ashore we always had armed sailors with us, while ten men in the whale-boat, laid by their oars with the bow of the boat pointed seaward.

  All this gave London much to think about in his evolving synthesis of the nobility of non-Western, non-technological cultures, as he had so favorably described the Hawaiians’ cultural evolution, the lack of which he was seeing in the Solomons, and how they might alter his innate belief, abiding even while eroding, in white superiority.

  When the mail caught up with him the Western world came rushing back in two letters from Bessie, one written the previous March and the second in July, with news of her intention to marry her longtime friend Charles Milner, and requiring a modification of their divorce agreement, under which if she wed again she would lose the house London built for her. If he would not agree, she threatened, she would decline the marriage and be miserable. In reply London wrote a veritable testament in rebuke. “Why, my dear child, I don’t care a whoop in high water whether you get married a second time or not. I should like to see you happily married for your own sake, but I regret that I cannot genially contribute money to finance that second marriage. . . . I have always done better by you than I agreed to do. I have always given you more than was laid down in the letter of our contract.” He threw up to her the untruths contained in her divorce allegations and subsequent lies and gossip, all of which he would see made public if she tried through the courts to get the house, and he let her know that he was sending carbon copies to everyone even remotely connected with the matter to hold her in check. His temper with her was undoubtedly made worse by realizing that his own finances were crumbling and that his political sentiments were costing him popularity in the United States. Beneath all, his books were the engine that financed his life—the voyage with its expenses, the ranch with its expenses, and his allowances to his mother, his old nurse, and his ex-wife and their children. The American economy was in the grip of a recession, and between that and his slumping popularity over his political views, the well was running dry. “I have had a big slump in all my book-sales in the States, partly due to the panic and partly due to my socialism, and I am so pinched that I scarcely know where to turn.” As one act of economy, he would soon have to suspend their voyage to generate faster work, and he was cutting Bessie’s allowance from $100 per month to $65—which if she found too great a hardship, she could mortgage the contested house.19

  At Penduffryn, London’s skin malady worsened, his hands swollen to twice their normal size and peeling so badly that he wrote that in places there were seven layers of skin in various stages of exfoliation, and his toenails had swelled as thick as they were long. Suddenly he was seized with the terror that he might have contracted leprosy from his too-free association with the residents of Kalaupapa. Preparations were made to get on a commercial passage to Australia, and a hospital. Ten days later the ship docked in Sydney, where London was relieved for his skin condition to be diagnosed as nothing more serious than bad psoriasis. He did, however, need surgery to close his two fistulas, which was successfully carried out on November 30. London wa
s always depressed when his once-hard body let him down, and the following week he and Charmian made the painful decision to abandon the around-the-world cruise. They sent Johnson back up to the Solomons to fetch the Snark, in company with a licensed mariner named Read, to bring her down and prepare her for sale.

  Recuperating in Sydney the day after Christmas 1908, London was able to file a remarkable piece of sporting reportage for the New York Herald. He was ringside for the celebrated heavyweight title bout between defending champion Tommy Burns of Canada and the flashy African-American challenger, Jack Johnson. The bout had a fascinating backstory that revealed a clear division between London’s alleged racism and his chops as a reporter. In the early twentieth century, blacks often boxed publicly and professionally but were not permitted to contest for the world championship. The phenomenally gifted Johnson challenged this bar, but the previous world heavyweight champion, Jim Jeffries, refused to fight him and retired undefeated. The title passed to Burns, but Johnson followed him all over the world, often taunting him from ringsides. When Burns went to Australia to defend his title against another challenger, Johnson pursued him, and Australian referee and fight promoter H. D. McIntosh persuaded Burns to meet Johnson in the ring.

  The bout was held in the outdoor stadium at Rushcutters Bay, attended by at least 20,000, and London estimated twice that figure or more. As Australian film director Raymond Longford shot continuously from an adjoining platform, Johnson administered a bloodcurdling beating, laughing at his opponent and the crowd alike, winning by a technical knockout when police stopped the fight in the fourteenth round. In filing his story, London admitted his natural tendency to desire the white man to win, just as, he said, had Johnson been a spectator he would have wanted the black man to win. But as he had in Korea before and would do again in Mexico, London lay his personal sentiments aside to report on the fight as it was and even chastised other white members of the press for belittling Johnson’s victory:Johnson was too big, too able, too clever, too superb. He was impregnable. His long arms, his height, his cool-seeing eyes, his timing and distancing, his footwork, his blocking and locking, and his splendid out-sparring and equally splendid in-fighting, kept Burns in trouble all the time. . . . He was smothered all the time. . . .

  Because a white man wishes a white man to win, this should not prevent him from giving absolute credit to the best man who did win, even when that best man was black. All hail to Johnson. His victory was unqualified. It was his fight all the way through, in spite of published accounts to the contrary. . . . In spite of much mistaken partisanship, it must be acknowledged by every man at the ringside that there was never a round that was Burns’s.

  A Martian landing among them, he wrote, would have asked why Burns was even allowed in the same ring with Johnson.20

  Three weeks into the New Year the Londons were based in Hobart, taking in the austere beauty of the Tasmanian National Park while coming to grips with the reality that they could not continue the Snark’s cruise. Rather than write all their friends and contacts separately, he prepared a mimeograph for all, explaining that among his operation, malaria, and other tropical afflictions, it was just too dangerous for him to continue.

  There are many boats and many voyages, but I have only one body; and after waiting and watching my condition carefully all these months, I have prescribed for myself my own climate and environment, where always before my nervous equilibrium has been maintained.

  Not only would it be foolhardy for me to attempt to continue the voyage in my present condition, but it would be practically impossible. At times this mysterious malady so affects me by its physical reactions as to make me helpless—physically helpless. . . .

  There is nothing more to say except this, namely, a request to all my friends. Please forego congratulating us upon our abandonment of the voyage. We are heartbroken.21

  London was awaiting the Snark’s arrival from the Solomons, and his intention was to sell her and be home within three months. This was confirmed in a letter to Aunt Netta the following day, advising that because of the sale she need not pay the California taxes on the vessel and specifying other small measures to economize, including not renewing magazine subscriptions.

  A month later they were back in Sydney, health largely recovered, and London was again feisty on the point of Bessie’s intention to marry and keep the house. “When I get home I’ll make things warm for her,” he wrote Eliza. His intention to sell the Snark hit a snag when she went overdue from the Solomons, and as the watch lengthened he began to fear that the vessel, never seaworthy, had sunk.22 When she finally glided into port on March 3, Charmian was heartbroken to learn that Peggy had not survived the trip. London later memorialized the dog in Jerry of the Islands, a loving tale of a feisty Irish terrier whose penchant for chasing natives with snapping abandon winds up saving the life of his master from a headhunter. Published posthumously under Charmian’s supervision, its depiction of unrelenting savagery on the part of South Sea islanders was doubtless an exponent of London’s irritation with critics who clucked that he was overstating the dangers of fraternizing with primitives.

  With grief, the Snark’s salvageable gear was removed and she was consigned to Justus Scharff Ltd. for sale. London funded Johnson, the only remnant of his original crew, to continue at least another leg of adventure before finding his way back to Kansas. Johnson let it slip that he intended to write a book about their travels, at which Charmian jotted in her diary, “Haw! Haw!” Her experience with one determined man should have led her to take him more seriously. Not only did he complete Through the South Seas with Jack London, it was better than her Log of the Snark and he beat her to press by two years—doubtless part of the reason she attacked the book as presumptuous and inaccurate. Indeed, along with the muckrakers, Martin Johnson became an important Jack London literary legacy. Like London he married a fellow adventurer, Osa Leighty of Chanute, Kansas, in 1910, and the two garnered wide fame as coauthors and filmmakers, especially of their exploration of interior Africa.23

  On April 7, 1909, London and Charmian commenced a circuitous journey back home, signing aboard the tramping 5,200-ton collier S.S. Tymeric as purser and stewardess, respectively.24 Charmian spent most of the passage in her cabin, shivering with malaria, nursed alternately by London and Nakata, but by the time they docked in Guayaquil, London had wrapped two more stories and a new novel, Adventure, which Macmillan brought out early in 1911. They surveyed the Andes, and in Quito they took in a bullfight, which London found so revolting that he excoriated the so-called sport in “The Madness of John Harned.” Then it was aboard the S.S. Erica to Panama, quarantine, and passage on the S.S. Turrialba to New Orleans, where ever-helpful Eliza wired him enough money to post a bond to spring Nakata out of immigration detention and get home.

  Entrained from New Orleans to Oakland, with Nakata safely recovered, the Londons stopped at the Grand Canyon for a look. They reached Oakland on July 21, 1909, after an absence of twenty-seven months, to a boisterous welcome from The Crowd—meals at the Saddle Rock, attending the theater, and a chance encounter with the captain of the Tymeric, whom they spirited away for a homecoming at Beauty Ranch.

  13

  THE RANCHER

  During London’s absence, Aunt Netta had not been shy about looking to her own comfort from his income, but the bad intent of her mismanagement should not be overstated. She had sold Martin Eden for $9,000 and was able to present London with a ranch more than twice the size he had left. As opportunities had presented themselves, she purchased two small adjoining tracts of 9 and 24 acres, and the 127-acre La Motte Ranch. London now owned nearly 400 acres, enough for a proper, and profitable, working ranch. In fact, only one parcel stood in the way of his owning all the land from Asbury Creek to Netta’s Wake Robin, and that was the Kohler-Frohling tract of 700 acres that reached up the east flank of Sonoma Mountain. Planted mostly in Tokay vines, its winery had been wrecked in the 1906 earthquake, and there were still stands of timber
on it, watered by three creeks. It would be a steep purchase, but the vision of a contiguous, harmonious working property inspired him to set his sights on it.

  The appearance of Martin Eden in September 1909 marked a comeback of sorts for Jack London the literary artist. Neither travelogue nor diatribe, it told the largely autobiographical story of a young sailor who wanted to be a writer, who struggled and succeeded, only to have the fruits of success turn sour in his mouth. Characters throughout the tale are transparently modeled on the real people cast throughout London’s own life, and they have provided English students with generations of term papers on who they really were and how heavily they were fictionalized. But London certainly revisited his earliest literary roots in engineering the story, for Martin Eden’s eventual plunge from the ship’s porthole is heralded with a quote from Longfellow—“A single step and all is o’er / A plunge, a bubble, and no more”—that he had used in his earliest efforts while at Oakland High School.