The match, when it took place, was even more of a slaughter than Johnson’s fight with Burns, and London’s reportage of the historic event was similar to what he filed from Australia. Accepting in himself that he had personally wanted Jeffries to win, he deconstructed the rounds accurately and without bias, recounting both the taunts directed at Johnson from Jeffries’s handlers and trainers, and the cries from the audience of 20,000, “Don’t let the negro knock him out!” Johnson answered everything with a smile and banter. At the beginning, Jeffries refused to shake hands, which London criticized. From the first round, when Jeffries’s trainer would insult him, Johnson would smile, and land a punishing flurry on the Great White Hope, until they recognized the pattern and kept quiet.
It was obvious to London from the start that Jeffries had no chance. “What he failed to bring into the ring with him was his stamina, which he lost somewhere in the last seven years. Jeff failed to come back. That is the whole story.” He saw clearly, setting hype aside, that Johnson outclassed Jeffries in every way: “There is nothing heavy or primitive about this man Johnson,” wrote London. “He is alive and quivering, every nerve fiber in his body and brain, withal that it is hidden, so artfully, or naturally, under that poise of facetious calm of his. . . . His mind works like chain lightning and his body obeys with equal swiftness.” London did not rank it as a great fight. “Faster, better fights may be seen every day of the year in any of the small clubs in the land.” Nevertheless, “Johnson is a wonder. No one understands him, this man who smiles. . . . And where now is the champion who will make Johnson extend himself, who will glaze those bright eyes, remove that smile and silence that golden repartee?” Of all the white reportage on the Johnson-Jeffries debacle, London’s, though he admitted joining in the widespread hope that a white champion would come forward, was fair and honest.10 He managed not to mention that he had wagered $4,000 on Jeffries, and lost.
Back in Oakland, London had to stand trial over the bar fight with Muldowney, at which he expected to be vindicated and to see Muldowney convicted of assault. In court on July 8, Police Judge Samuels quietly dismissed all charges and let both go. London was enraged, first because that was how he usually reacted to manifest injustice, second because he was being deprecated in the national press as a drunken brawler, and probably spurred also by the desire to prove to Charmian that he was not culpable in the affair. He asked Noel, a journalist friend to whom he had assigned dramatic rights to The Sea-Wolf , to poke around. What he said he discovered was that Muldowney’s bar was owned by Judge Samuels, and London went off like a skyrocket. He might have to accept such treatment as a penniless tramp in Buffalo, but Jack London the author demanded fairer treatment at the bar of justice than at the bar of the Tavern Café. He penned an open letter, widely published, in which he threatened Samuels. “Entrenched in your miniature high place, under the sacred panoply of the law, with behind you the policemen’s clubs, the city prison cells, and the right to punish for contempt . . . you elected to bully me. Someday, somewhere, somehow, I am going to get you legally, never fear. I shall not lay myself open to the law. . . . But get you I will . . . and I shall get you to the full hilt of the law.” The judge responded, also in the newspapers, tut-tut-ting London’s temper. He “received a fair deal . . . and was not mistreated. . . . This young man has long been known as an obstreperous youth. . . . He is an Oakland boy, and is still a boy—a foolish boy, at that.”11 The only satisfaction London actually got from the matter was Samuels’s being turned out of office at the next election, and he sluiced his venom into a short story, “The Benefit of the Doubt,” for which the Saturday Evening Post paid him $750—well enough earned for his black eye.
As the time approached for the Bohemian Club’s annual summer High Jinks, Charmian felt able, cocooned among friends and family, to encourage London to go and have fun. This event, however, promised more drama than those in previous years.
After a long residence in the East, Ambrose Bierce had moved back to California in 1910, which left his protégé George Sterling in a stew to keep him from finding out how close he and London had been. While London remained as popular as ever among The Crowd, Bierce had been nursing an ever-growing disdain for London that passed the boundary of hatred but seems to have stopped short of insisting that Sterling choose between them. London had managed to avoid confrontations with him by not attending gatherings when he was warned that “Bitter Bierce” would be there, but at the 1910 High Jinks they were sure to meet. “Damn Ambrose Bierce,” he wrote to Charmian. “I won’t look for trouble but if he jumps me, I’ll go him a few at his own game. . . . If we meet, and he’s introduced, I shall wait & watch for his hand to go out first. If it doesn’t, hostilities begin right there.”12
Secluded among the redwoods on the Russian River, where amicable sociability between the wealthy and the creative sets was the whole reason for the gathering, warfare somehow did not break out. Bierce and London were once seen drinking at the same campfire with Sterling and Arnold Genthe, after which Wolf and the Greek conducted Bierce safely back to his tent through some dark forest, but beyond that, the confidence was kept.
With the Snark gone and sailing still in his blood, London acquired a graceful thirty-foot yawl called the Roamer, in which he intended to make one of his periodic explorations of the inland delta. She was forty years old and cost only $175, tall and lateen-rigged to catch every breath of wind, with an unusually large cabin for such a small boat. When Charmian was recovered enough, they were out for weeks with Nakata and a new cook named Yamamoto, renewing their closeness and recovering themselves after their trauma.
February 1911 brought an inquiry close to his heart. Henry W. Lanier was secretary of Doubleday, Page & Company; in addition to its line of books, Doubleday also published Country Life in America and wanted London to write an article about sailing one’s own boat. London responded with a brief summary of his open-boat experience, from the flatboat on the Des Moines River with Kelly’s Army, to the trip down the Yukon, to the frigid sampans off the coast of Korea, to the Snark. The project went into his hopper, but work was not rapid.
He and Charmian worked in a visit with his old friend Felix Peano, the sculptor in whose eccentric Villa Capriccioso he and Bessie stayed for a while when they were married. He was now living in Los Angeles, and during the trip the Londons also visited Catalina Island and witnessed a new land speed record set by racer Barney Oldfield. Later the year reached highlight as London harnessed four horses to his Studebaker wagon for a tour of Northern California and Oregon. With Nakata attending them, it was a restful and joyous vacation, unhurried, not knowing the next day ’s route until inquiring of local bar patrons the conditions of the roads ahead and the locales for the best fishing. With several side trips and sojourns, including ten days on a friend’s houseboat near Eureka, the four-in-hand jaunt lasted from June 12 to September 5. The only nuisances were the pestering of reporters in seemingly every town, and the regularity of London being asked to speak publicly. In too good a humor to rise to any bait, he eschewed socialism as his topic and spoke on everything from comparative climates to horse driving.
Nevertheless it was a working vacation. He maintained his quota of a thousand words per day, and in 1911 London published more short stories than in any other year, nearly thirty, in addition to the novel Adventure, with its vivid descriptions of Melanesian headhunters. There was also a potpourri of stories on various themes in When God Laughs, and two volumes of South Seas stories and reminiscences, South Sea Tales and The Cruise of the Snark. It was a protean output, even for London. In fact, 1911 would have been an ideal year, had it not been for souring relations with Bessie, who wanted more money and used his occasional visits to his daughters to press the issue, resulting in royal battles in front of the girls. In one incident that came to have a life of its own in retelling, during a visit to Bessie’s house London asked his younger daughter, nine-year-old Becky, if she did not trust him to take care of her no matter w
hat a situation looked like, then pretended to pitch her through a closed window. He accidentally swung her too close to it, cutting one foot badly enough that he carried her across the street to the hospital. Becky remembered the incident lightly, but her older sister, Joan, embellished it bitterly, portraying him as drunk at the time.
As the year drew to its close, several factors led London and Charmian to plan a visit to New York. As both London and Brett had hoped, the cruise of the South Pacific had engendered a whole new London franchise, which now he had in mind to expand further. During 1910 and 1911 he added to his fiction possibilities by purchasing fourteen more of Sinclair Lewis’s story ideas, but more important, a new novel had begun to come to him, a mutiny on a full-rigged sailing ship, the likes of which he had never sailed and which were fast becoming extinct. He had also begun thinking about an autobiography, not a bland memoir but one that plumbed the reasons for his lifelong relationship with alcohol. Prohibition had long since become the most widespread political cause célèbre in America, and as he meditated on the topic dispassionately, he found himself somewhat surprised to be coming around, tentatively, to the point of view that alcohol should be banned. But whatever political opinion he eventually came to, an explanatory but somewhat repentant memoir from a writer of such prominence could be a massive seller. John Barleycorn, he was thinking to call it; he had done a lifetime of research on drunkenness already, and perhaps it was merely rationalizing to believe that a visit to New York would allow him a final exploration of new depths not yet explored.
On an unrelated matter, London needed to investigate a financial boondoggle in which he had involved himself to the extent of mortgaging Flora’s house again, a new process for producing three-color lithography. When local printers had pronounced the technique a breakthrough, London raised money himself and recruited his friend Noel to pitch in. With modest capital in hand, they moved the inventor, a man named Miller, to New York to start developing his Millergraph. In a case of life imitating art, in this case the Wall Street skullduggery of Burning Daylight, stock was issued, with London’s name at the head of the company to attract investors, all of whom lost money when the printing process, which was truly good, lost out to competing advances in lithography. London had felt railroaded by correspondence from the company’s supposed managers and wanted to get to the bottom of why the company was failing. Then, too, as accommodating as Brett had been over the years, London had begun to feel, as highly successful writers sometimes do, somewhat like a captive of one house, and he wished to make some new contacts. Thus the plans were laid to spend some weeks in New York, and then to board a tall ship to return home via an old-time sail around Cape Horn, with the vessel eventually docking in Seattle.
They departed Oakland by train on December 24 and arrived in New York on the second day of 1912. There they were met by F. G. Hancock, a correspondent who had supplied London with newspaper and magazine clippings for enough years to have developed a friendly rapport. Hancock installed them in his apartment at 40 Morningside Park East. Tending straight to business, London had some hope of working out a publishing agreement with Doubleday, Page & Co., for which he was writing “The Joy of Small-Boat Sailing” for its Country Life in America magazine. Doubleday agreed to publish a collection of his stories, A Son of the Sun, which came out in May. But a week after his arrival the company secretary, Henry Lanier, waived off a long-term agreement, with a note that Doubleday feared it would not be able to do London’s books the justice that a writer of his stature deserved. This was a danger sign to any writer that his stature was not what it used to be. “Hell,” London wrote in response, “I haven’t started to write yet.”13 London also made a four-day trip to Boston to see what he could arrange with Houghton-Mifflin, but nothing was doing there, either. Back in New York he struck a deal instead with Century for six books, dealing with W. B. Parker, an editor to whom he had submitted manuscripts back in his grim and starving days as a beginner. Dependable Eliza was now managing his literary affairs in his absence, as well as the ranch, and London sent her specific instructions on the dispatch of completed manuscripts while he was at sea—specifics he would not have had to tell an experienced editor such as Aunt Netta, such as making sure to send the typewritten manuscripts, not his handwritten drafts. She could, he wrote, expect advance money of $1,000 per month for six months, keeping some in reserve should he and Charmian arrive in Seattle without funds the following summer.14
At Macmillan Brett was correct and professional during London’s flirtation with other publishers, offering to advance him money—which he had been asked to do enough times in the past, God knew—while he was in the city. Brett’s politeness under pressure was the best way of getting his wayward author home again. London declined for himself but asked Brett to keep available $1,000 on his account that Noel might need to disentangle the Millergraph business.
With his affairs returned to a sort of order, there was time for society. One friendly face of The Crowd was in town, Arnold Genthe, and London and Charmian reciprocated the California visit of Emma Goldman. Of keener interest, however, was his reconnection with Anna Strunsky. Since their warmly remembered romance she had traveled and lectured as far as Geneva in support of socialists in Russia, and she had married a good comrade, William English Walling. Oddly for one who had argued for passionate marriage in The Kempton-Wace Letters, she was not particularly attracted to her husband and procrastinated consummating their relationship for some months. Charmian felt no qualms about the reunion, for Anna was another former rival with whom she had not just made peace, but become friends, which was as much Anna’s doing as her own.15
In New York, however, Charmian was often left alone in Hancock’s apartment, as London left on drinking expeditions with Noel and others, such as Michael Monahan, the editor of Papyrus, a small literary journal. Sometimes there were incidents that made it into the papers. Jack and Charmian London were far too public a couple for him to carouse at night without her and not excite comment, but he took no cognizance that she found this deeply humiliating, and the two months in New York were, for her, hell. “The city reached into him,” she wrote, “and plucked to light the least admirable of his qualities.” And he had warned her already that he intended to souse to his limit on this trip, to plumb his personal depths for material that he would use in the new John Barleycorn memoir.
I know my man, she kept telling herself, having no choice but to trust the vivid distinction he had always drawn between his deep love for her and the mere sexual adventuring to which he had always been drawn. And as she knew, “I had never yet waited in vain to welcome back the sane and lovable boy.” She hearkened back to another warning he had given her early in their marriage: “Don’t forget what I have been and been through. There may, mark, I only say may come times when the temptation to ‘drift’ . . . will stick up its head, and I may follow. I have drifted all my life—curiosity, that burning desire to know.” She was forced to accept that this was such a time, “but I knew my man, and, content or not, waited.” When he was sober he was loving and attentive, and sometimes referred jokingly to what he called his “pirooting,” but it made the experience no less galling for Charmian, who sometimes had to learn from newspapers or from gossip “the story of a hard-fought game of cards . . . or a weird experience of one sort or another with some nameless waif he had elected to trot around with.”16 Three such nameless waifs, actresses of color, were riding in an automobile with London when it was involved in an accident from which he emerged banged up and with glass in his mouth. All refused treatment and hurried from the scene before it could be publicized.
Once, after losing patience with London on the subway Charmian snapped at him to keep his house in order, to which he replied with a chilling defiance that he would do as he pleased. What got Charmian through it was the knowledge that she would soon have him all to herself again on that long voyage back to California. The exchange ended with her muttering aloud that she longed for that t
all ship that would take them home. It proved to be the Dirigo, a four-masted bark of 3,000 tons. She was departing from Baltimore, and before sailing the Londons paid their respects to the grave of Edgar Allen Poe—London in a newly shaved head, a prank that left Charmian truly and earnestly furious to the point that she refused to be seen with him unless he wore a hat.
Maine-built and named for the state’s motto, “I Lead,” the Dirigo was among the last of a majestic breed, a tall ship indeed rigged with skies and royals above single topgallants and double topsails. A sweeping 312 feet long, 45 feet in the beam, and drawing 25 feet of water, she rose in the ways the same year that London was hunting seals in the Bering Sea, and for the eighteen years since she had hauled bulk cargo—coal, sugar, case oil—to and from every corner of the planet—Shanghai, Honolulu, Rio de Janeiro, Delaware, Liverpool—her six- to nine-month voyages managed to pay for themselves because she could disgorge 5,000 tons of cargo at a destination.
She was not, however, rated for passengers, so the Londons and Nakata signed aboard as crew although their passage cost him $1,000. They came aboard with a new member of the family, a barely weaned fox terrier they named Possum, a $10 purchase from a pet store and a far cry from the shaggy wolf-dogs with which London had come to be associated, but soon rooted deep in their affections. The journey did not begin well for Charmian, as she was nearly devoured by bedbugs until her bunk was thoroughly cleaned. However, the long days at sea restored much of their strained relationship. Her lovable boy had indeed returned to her, and Charmian ventured to ask him whether, in New York, he would have preferred her to have withdrawn from him and given him totally free rein. “No,” he said, “you did exactly as you should have done. If you had left me, I don’t know what I should have done.” Once again, Charmian had charted the right course to keep him, without buoy or lighthouse. It was a needed comfort for her because, as she had signed aboard as stewardess, she wound up nursing the Dirigo’s captain, who was in the terminal stage of stomach cancer.
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 34