The irony of London’s comeback novel was that its meaning was universally misinterpreted. “I must have bungled it,” he wrote to Sinclair Lewis, “for not one reviewer has discovered it.” He expressed the same bafflement to Blanche Partington and, later, to Mary Austin. Martin Eden was analyzed as praise of Nietzsche and individualism, when in fact he meant it as a torpedo fired into the side of Nietzschean philosophy. Eden the character, he wrote to Blanche, “was unaware of the needs of others. . . . He worked, strove, fought for himself alone. And when disillusionment came, when love, fame, the worthwhileness of the bourgeoisie—all things—failed, why there was nothing left for him to live for.” Seen another way, both Jack London and Martin Eden had suffered the “long sickness” of Nietzsche; London had survived, and Eden had not. The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf were more popular than Martin Eden, but the latter book came to enjoy greater respect among succeeding generations of writers, who can so easily fall prey to the same disaffection and sense of futility. As a cautionary tale, Martin Eden probably did more good than London ever knew.
In his own life, what gave him purpose and direction was less and less his own writing, although he continued his thousand words per day, good ones or bad ones, for his income. More and more he lived for Beauty Ranch, and as he had hoped, he began to recover the health ravaged by months in the tropics. While his formerly frightening skin disorder had already been diagnosed as no more than a bad case of psoriasis, any lingering fears of leprosy were dispelled when he came across an army medical treatise, Effects of Tropical Light on White Men, by Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Woodruff. Near the equator, it explained, the ultraviolet range of the sun’s rays was more intense than in northern latitudes, and Caucasian skin slowly cooked in it. His disfigured hands would improve. What worried him now were his kidneys. Besides abusing them with years of heavy drinking, he had done them more damage than he knew by taking mercury chloride for the yaws he suffered from in the South Pacific.
He was depressed as much as debilitated by his maladies. He still occasionally affected he-man poses in bathing suit or underwear, trying to hold in his growing paunch but no longer fooling himself that he was the specimen he once was. It was time to settle down, build up the ranch, and start a family with Charmian. At thirty-four, he knew he had best get on with it. They had been living in the annex of Wake Robin since 1906, and now they were planning to move into the old winery ’s cottage on their original purchase—a move not actually accomplished until 1911. Beyond that, his thoughts returned to that high slope above Asbury Creek that he and Charmian had selected, and which Johannes Reimers had long since begun landscaping to be ready for his mighty house. In a way, it had been forming in his mind since he was a child, when he boasted to his stepsister Eliza that one day he would live in a house, one room of which would contain nothing but his books, and now he meant to do it, for his library was scattered in boxes all over the ranch. This house would have a library nineteen feet by forty, with a spiral staircase up to a study of equal dimension. In their present circumstance there had never been room to entertain The Crowd, or even more than a few visitors at a time. Nearly a decade before, London had written Anna Strunsky of the almost helpless pleasure he took in entertaining. “I have the fatal faculty of making friends, and lack the blessed trait of being able to quarrel with them. And they are constantly turning up. My home is the Mecca of every returned Klondiker, sailor, or soldier of fortune I ever met. Some day,” he added, “I shall build an establishment, invite them all, and turn them loose upon each other. Such a mingling of castes and creeds and characters could not be duplicated. The destruction would be great.”1 In the contemplated new house he planned to be able to seat fifty for dinner.
Slowly, determinedly, ideas became sketches; he engaged architect Albert Farr of San Francisco and sketches became blueprints. It was to be a colossal four-story castle, the spaces of the first floor nestled among monumental pylons of purple-brown lava blocks quarried from ancient volcanic flows there in the Valley of the Moon, with upper works of redwood framed by lava chimneys and topped by a massive tile roof. The porte cochere would be framed with redwood trunks, still clad in their bark, approached along a reflecting pool. The ground floor would host grand entertaining: a kitchen, a dining room, and a party room eighteen feet by fifty-eight. Stairs led up to the parlor floor, with a vast, two-story living room the same size as the party room, surrounded by a balcony that led to guest rooms; London’s own bedroom would be an aerie on the fourth floor. Sight was never lost, though, that the house would be the beating heart of a working ranch. There was a gunroom, root and wine cellars, and a milk room.
When George Sterling saw the plans he immediately christened the place Wolf House, an apt name not only because it would be the lair of the Wolf and his Mate, but because the architecture masterfully evoked the great tourist lodges of the western wilderness. The cost would be phenomenal and it would be a project of years, but thanks to the $9,000 Aunt Netta had obtained for Martin Eden, and then the Snark sale for $4,500 (about 15 percent of the boat’s construction cost), not to mention his backlog of manuscripts written during the voyage, there was enough to begin.
Charmian did her part, conceiving a child in late September or early October 1909; husband and wife were overjoyed, and anticipation for the addition to the household was keen. Boy or girl, London told visitors, he was having a baby with his Mate-Woman and he truly had no preference for the child’s sex—although those who knew him well believed he ached for a son.
From April 30 through May 2, 1910, the ranch had a distinguished houseguest: Emma Goldman had been on a lecture tour, promoting anarchy through thirty-seven cities in twenty-five states, organized by her lover and traveling partner, Ben Reitman. Across the breadth of the country she got a fresh taste of America’s devotion to conformity and hatred of anything that smacked of less than jingoistic patriotism. She learned to appreciate surprises, as when she was defended by the newspaper in Denver, and she reveled in some of life’s more sublime ironies, as in Reno, when women who were in town to obtain quick divorces successfully demanded that she be put out of their hotel because of her espousal of free love. She had not seen London since his days as the Boy Socialist in 1897. She had, however, read and admired his books; in San Francisco she sent him a note inviting him to attend her lecture. “Dear Emma Goldman,” he shot back. “I have your note. I would not go to a meeting even if God Almighty were to speak there. The only time I attend lectures is when I am to do the talking. But we want you here. Will you not come to Glen Ellen and bring whomever you have with you?”
Charmed, Goldman spent three days at Beauty Ranch with Reitman and her attorney, E. E. Kirk, and was fortunate enough to behold the Londons at, apparently, the height of happiness. Charmian was now great with their keenly expected child, and London was overflowing with verve and intellect. Goldman was now forty-one, and while London was thirty-four she saw him, perhaps because of their respective stations in their political movements, as a full generation younger than herself, but she admired the flowering of the promise she had first marked in him in 1897. “How different was the real Jack London from the mechanical, bell-button socialist of The Kempton-Wace Letters! Here was youth, exuberance, throbbing life. Here was the good comrade, all concern and affection. He exerted himself to make our visit a glorious holiday. We argued about our political differences, of course, but there was in Jack nothing of the rancour I had so often found in the socialists I had debated with. But, then, Jack London was the artist first, the creative spirit to whom freedom is the breath of life.”
Goldman appreciated that London admitted the virtues of anarchy, but he maintained staunchly that society was not ready for them and must pass through a period of socialism before people could responsibly undertake to live without laws or authority. “In any case,” she wrote, “it was not Jack London’s politics that mattered to me. It was his humanity, his understanding of and his feeling with the complexities
of the human heart.” She chose not to mention that they also suffered one of London’s practical jokes. Playing on the reputation of anarchists as bomb-throwers, London once left on Reitman’s dinner plate a little red book entitled Four Weeks, A Loud Book. When Reitman opened it, it blew up with a huge bang. “They ’re such soft people, anarchists,” London later said to Charmian, laughing, “when it comes to actual violence—and when they try to do it, they usually make a mess of it because they’re dreamers. . . . He must have thought it was a bomb, for he went positively green.”2
Charmian too was aglow during the visit, although Goldman feared she was exerting herself too much for her advanced pregnancy. “Charmian hardly rested,” she wrote, “except after dinner, when she would sew on the outfit for the baby while we argued, joked and drank through the wee hours of the morning.” 3 London tolerated his differences of opinion with Goldman over anarchy with what was, for him, a mild tone. As he confided to Charmian, “The anarchists whom I know are dear, big souls whom I like and admire immensely. But they are dreamers, idealists. I believe in law . . . you can see it in my books—all down in black and white.” Charmian was equally taken with Goldman and presented her a lace handkerchief as a keepsake of the sojourn.
Emma Goldman departed with her suite, never guessing the extent to which Charmian labored to create that illusion of effortless domestic bliss, when in fact life on the ranch could be anything but. Indeed, the preceding months had not been easy ones; the boys had been drinking too much, especially George Sterling, who had been making himself obnoxious on a punch he mixed from Amer Picon liqueur, with London usually getting equally inebriated to keep him company. At one point Charmian’s forced projection of happiness crossed an unseen line, and London barked at her to stop making him love her in public. Even he felt the excess of this rebuke and apologized with a baby grand piano, a Steinway she had long pined for.4
Other visitors during this season included London’s childhood mate, Frank Atherton; his first fan, Cloudesley Johns, who came to show off his new wife and remained for a month; the tramp calling himself “A No. 1” from London’s days of riding the rails; minor literary figures such as editor Lem Parton; and the remarkable Lucy Parsons, an anarchist and founder of the International Workers of the World.5 Those close to the Londons were sure that Charmian wished many of them would go away but, doggedly gracious, she never let on. Instead, she abided by forming a couple of creative alliances, the first with Carrie Sterling, she who had been so against admitting Charmian to The Crowd, and who had grilled London in stunningly nosy letters demanding to know details of their relationship before the divorce from Bessie. Mary Austin had written of the care they had all taken to shield Carrie from George Sterling’s serial infidelities, but eventually they failed, and Carrie was now unexpectedly learning about life in humiliation. In a brilliant maneuver Charmian extended her friendship to a former enemy and was rewarded with genuine affection—even as was the case with her second alliance, with her former rival Blanche Partington.
Soon after Goldman’s visit, London saw the opportunity to complete the ranch and moved to strike: the seven hundred acres of the Frohling winery’s exhausted soil would cost some $26,000, but it connected London’s two existing tracts and was a perfect candidate to be resurrected by his renewed zeal for the land. He didn’t have the money—the Snark was for sale in Australia and he had been answering queries about her particulars, but there had been no taker. Then he remembered George Brett. “It is a long time since I’ve written to you for a lump of money in advance,” he wrote on May 5, pointing out that Brett now had six manuscripts in hand awaiting publication, the best candidate of which was the novel Burning Daylight. The New York Herald had paid $8,000 for the serial rights to this saga of an honest but somewhat naive man undone by Wall Street sharks, on whom he ultimately takes his revenge, which London said indicated a healthy book sale. He needed $5,000, but he regarded his present prospects as so good that he hoped not to ask for such a favor again.6
While expanding the ranch, he also divested himself of one small tract. Ninetta Eames finally had enough of the woebegone Roscoe and divorced him, uniting herself instead to Edward Payne, with whom she had been in business. London gifted her with a sunny meadow of seventeen acres. But for the rest, 1,100 acres, cleared and able to produce, or else untouched and scenic, which was of equal though different value, therein London saw his future. “In a few years,” he wrote in his journal, “this valley will prove what I have said. Men will learn that by modern methods more reward can be brought from ten acres of land than in the old days could be obtained from two or three hundred.” 7 He sought and received advice from the famous Dr. Luther Burbank, the horticulturist who lived in nearby Santa Rosa. Burbank was already celebrated for developing a superior potato before he moved to California from Massachusetts in 1875, and now the ever-busy old man managed thousands of simultaneous cross-breeding experiments. One of them was a spineless cactus, which London began growing on his ranch. The crop that ended up exciting him most, however, was eucalyptus.
Many American investors at the time were excited about the prospects of importing Australian eucalyptus, a species of gum tree, to replace eastern hardwoods that had been depleted for furniture and other manufactures. The pitch was that the eucalyptus grew fast, did not need rich soil, and would provide quality hardwood in less time than replanting American species. California farmers flocked to the opportunity, and London looked at the scrubby hillsides of the old La Motte place now on his ranch and saw dollar signs. In one season he planted 16,000 eucalyptus trees, notwithstanding that they had to be watered for the first two years and it was two hundred feet down to the nearest creek. Still strapped for cash, he extracted from his files a letter of December 1, 1909, from the Fuller & Johnson Manufacturing Co. of Madison, Wisconsin, which had sought to draw near his name and fame with a demonstration of one of its engines on the ranch. London now asked for an engine and pump, using for a credit reference his entries in The Dictionary of American Authors and Who’s Who in America. He planned to plant 25,000 more gum trees the next year, and wrote Brett, “If I could get you out here and tell you the profits of eucalyptus-growing, you’d quit the publishing business.” He was wrong on that last point. Like most speculative bubbles, the craze for growing gum trees soon popped, and California was left with countless groves of eucalyptus with little marketable value. By that time London had planted several times his original acreage, but he took the collapse in stride, realizing that he had stabilized his soil while giving himself what would, in time, become beautiful groves to ride through.8
London’s improvements to the ranch extended well beyond the venture in eucalyptus trees. To complement the huge barn completed after the earthquake, he began planning an equally sturdy blacksmith shop and two substantial grain silos, the first in California to be built of concrete blocks. He began planning a large-scale swine operation, centered on a state-of-the-art rock enclosure and pens capable of housing three hundred animals. Dubbed the “Pig Palace,” it became a showpiece of the ranch and, London expected, would contribute to the income stream.
After five days in the hospital, Charmian underwent a cesarean section to deliver a daughter, Joy, on June 19, 1910, but the baby was fatally injured in the difficult extraction and expired after a day and a half. The shock to both father and mother was profound, but during her subsequent weeks in the hospital Charmian slowly came to terms with the loss of her daughter. “I am a mother,” she wrote a friend. “I bore a child—but there is not a child. . . . How much better that my arms never nested her, seeing she was to go so soon. She is more a child of the imagination, and must always remain so.”9 Charmian was so devastated she had to be sedated, and a heartsick London went to meet Joseph Noel at the Tavern Café for a drink. London had previously agreed to report for the New York Herald on what was being billed as the fight of the century, between Jack Johnson, the reigning heavyweight champion who was, to the mortification of a racist cou
ntry, black, and former champion Jim Jeffries, recalled from retirement to put Johnson back in his place. On the way to meet Noel, London purchased some copies of Jeffries’s autobiography, one for himself and three for friends. When London entered the bar its owner, Tim Muldowney, thought the colorful books were posters warning against social diseases, and he told London not to post them; London, in no mood to mess with, told him off. Muldowney began throwing punches and ejected London from the bar. London filed assault charges, Muldowney filed counter charges, and the police judge, George Samuels, released both men until a trial date of July 8, when he hoped they would be in better condition to testify.
The issue was still hanging over London’s head when he left town to cover the upcoming prizefight. It was slated, meaningfully, for July 4, and there was unprecedented national anticipation. Johnson, from Texas, had reigned as undisputed heavyweight champion since pummeling Tommy Burns in Australia. White supremacists in America were mortified and infuriated, and eventually persuaded Jeffries to come out of a seven-year retirement to take Johnson down. Promoted as the “Great White Hope,” Jeffries shouldered the burden even knowing that he was too old, too fat, and too out of condition to win. London himself accepted the job because the fight would be in San Francisco and close to home, but after a legal wrangle it was moved to Reno. After the loss of their daughter London was reluctant to make the trip, but Charmian, still in the hospital, as she would be for several weeks more, sensed his need for a change of scene, and sent him on his way. The national buildup to the bout was so keen that London had agreed to file stories for ten days before the actual event, reporting on the principals, their training camps, the mood of the city—building what in a later time would be called “hype.”
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 33