The towering storms of Cape Horn had been the stuff of literature for centuries, and as the Dirigo made her run through the Straits of Magellan the Londons were treated to an unforgettable and truly dangerous tempest. The bulk of the voyage, however, was like a second honeymoon. In the mornings he wrote and she typed; they worked and loved harmoniously, and they conceived a second child. Of all the ships London ever boarded, the Dirigo was the most evocative and he sucked in all her atmosphere, talking extensively to the crew; she provided the setting for his last sea novel, Mutiny of the Elsinore.
London spent much of his time in the mizzen-top, a dizzying perch in which to read, reflect, and let the fresh salt air cleanse New York and its liquor out of his system. For all the hell he had put Charmian through in his deliberate plunge to the bottom of the bottle, he made good use of it, doing extensive preliminary work on John Barleycorn. He also thought about his emergence from the “long sickness,” and what the ranch and the countryside meant to him. It allowed him to write an optimistic and bucolic finish to The Valley of the Moon, completed ten days before the Dirigo completed its nearly five-month voyage, docking in Seattle on July 26. For four days the Londons kept company with Snark veteran Martin Johnson and his new wife, Osa, before boarding a much more conventional vessel, the steamer City of Puebla, and regaining Oakland on August 2. Operating out of their pied-à-terre in Flora’s house they made a hurried reacquaintance with favorite restaurants and theaters for three days before returning to the ranch.
Oddly for one who believed himself to be increasingly tied to the land, London left almost immediately for the 1912 High Jinks with the Bohemian Club. Only four days after he left, Charmian suddenly miscarried the son he had wanted so badly. There were complications, and the necessary surgery that followed ended the possibility of their trying again. The only positive was that it happened when she was in Oakland to visit the doctor, and where she stayed to recuperate. Had it happened in the isolation of the ranch the outcome might have been far more grim. A devastated London wrote her from back at the ranch:
Dearest Love-Woman and Mate:—
I have just received your Monday night telegram; got word to Eliza who is starting immediately for Oakland; and called up 490 and talked to grandma.
I am so sorry; yet my gladness is vastly greater, in that you are all right.
I have never loved you, and all your dear things here about the house, more. . . . I wandered about the rooms and breathed your atmosphere, & felt so lonely.
Dear, dear woman!
Mate Man
He then made an attempt to cheer her up with ranch chatter—the mosquitoes were just about gone—and news of the present visitors, Frank Strawn-Hamilton and the socialite Laura Grant, Charmian’s close friend.17 Losing a second child, however, made those close to the couple wonder if the tragedy might not strain the marriage beyond saving.
Charmian was back at the ranch two weeks later, coping as best she could, determined not to seem weak or soggy, and as always, keeping her darkest fears to herself. Autumn visitors to the ranch included an Australian pianist they had befriended during the Snark cruise, Laurie Godfrey-Smith, whom London took out on the Roamer. The year 1912 had been productive for him; he was receiving top dollar for his short stories, of which ten appeared during the year. Three books were published as well, including a compendium of a dozen short stories, Smoke Bellew Tales, for Century. This volume he regarded as a potboiler and not his best work, despite their popularity, and he declined to continue the thread despite entreaties from the serializing magazine. The two books finished during the year, however, The Valley of the Moon and John Barleycorn, were works that he was proud of and had great hopes for. London fulfilled his obligation to Century: ten more stories collated as The Night Born in February 1913, including his indictment of bullfighting, “The Madness of John Harned”; the novel The Abysmal Brute was published in May of the same year; and the book that achieved the most lasting note, his life seen as a struggle for temperance in John Barleycorn, released in August 1913. After their publication, however, he returned to Macmillan to handle The Valley of the Moon in October. The patient Brett was waiting to take up the reins of his prized author again with gentlemanly correspondence, and remained London’s publisher from then on, the reward well earned.
It seemed as though London had recovered his literary voice and popularity, and his sales internationally were strong. Both the Prince of Wales and the Crown Prince of Germany were fans; he received expressions of admiration from such renowned foreign writers as Joseph Conrad, the Polish-born British adventure author of such works as Heart of Darkness. In a letter written in his calligraphic but difficult hand, Conrad took “immense satisfaction” in hailing London as “an accomplished fellow craftsman and brother in letters—of whose personality and art I have been intensely aware for many years.”18 Even with such admiration for his books, London poured ever more of himself into the ranch. For a time, “Jack’s Monthly Miracle” seemed to happen with less desperation, and there was money left for improvements. He began a dam to impound one of his creeks to form a small irrigation lake, and Wolf House rose on the heights above Asbury Creek, a fantasy of lava buttresses and redwood ramparts. He had always loved horses, and the sudden violent death of Washoe Ban had caused him sharp pain. On March 5, 1913, a new horse arrived at the ranch more remarkable than any he had seen. His name was Neuadd Hillside, not a riding thoroughbred but a shire stallion, a draft horse of colossal proportions whom London began hiring out for stud fees.
In April London was in Los Angeles for talks about rendering his stories into motion pictures. Previous ill-considered agreements that he signed resulted in tangled and acrimonious relations with the Balboa Amusement Company, but when he emerged victorious from the legal actions with his copyrights in hand, he came away with a potentially powerful new source of income. He did decline to act in any of the films, however, and Hobart Bosworth had agreed to portray Wolf Larsen in a feature film of The Sea-Wolf.
Laid low by appendicitis later in the year, London was on a downward track that was becoming pronounced; at age thirty-seven, he was bloated and in increasing chronic pain from flouting his failing kidneys with alcohol and a far too rich diet of virtually raw duck. And then there was agonizing pyorrhea, which necessitated pulling all his remaining upper teeth. To his daily intake of alcohol was added morphine to deaden a growing roster of pains, and a certain unspoken knowledge that there would be no good outcome, but he did not significantly alter his habits.
Through the summer the spectacular Wolf House crept toward completion, and Charmian began detailed planning of the interior decoration. Through the third week in August the heat was intense, the house was on the verge of occupancy, and workmen inside were wiping down the floors and woodwork with linseed oil. At the conclusion of the workday on August 22 they piled the rags on the floor before departing. The foreman suggested they take them outside, but it wasn’t done. London and the foreman regarded the house that evening with satisfaction.
At two o’clock the next morning, London awoke to Eliza shaking him violently. Wolf House was on fire, fully ablaze by the time he, Eliza, and Charmian hitched a team and got out to the site, and there was no water with which to fight the fire. It burned to the ground, leaving the monumental lava pylons rising starkly against the sky. As there was no mortgage on it, he carried no insurance.
Arson was the immediate thought. The house had been considered all but fireproof; the bark of the redwood pillars was naturally fire retardant, as was the roofing paper under the tiles. For the huge structure to be so fully involved in the fire before it was even discovered pointed to multiple sources of origin. London had recently fired a workman for slacking and insolence; he might have done it. The socialist press was scandalized that their former champion would even consider living in such a baronial mansion; one of them might have done it. Even James Shepard, who had been entangled in a vicious divorce from Eliza, was mentioned. An investigation
would have accomplished little, however, for with the exception of the lava block walls that now formed a towering ruin, the house was in ashes. Subsequent experimentation proved at least the possibility that the blaze could have begun with spontaneous combustion of the linseed cloths, but the burning of Wolf House, and the staggering financial loss it represented, will always be a mystery.
As Wolf House went up in flames, London wept fully but only briefly before, as he did with his deepest agonies, internalizing it. He suffered a devastation so complete that he appeared at first to handle it philosophically. But he was a changed man by October 5, 1913, when he was in San Francisco to watch the seven-reel motion picture of The Sea Wolf, the first feature film in the United States—or it would have been, if the previous copyright holder had not emerged from its suit against London with the right to finish its version of the story, having only to call it by another title. Thus The Sea-Wolf, curiously, was the subject of both of the first two feature motion pictures.19
Insects and bad weather had ruined much of the year’s agriculture on the ranch; London had gotten over that; he had borne the loss of a son and the possibility of starting any family with Charmian; he had survived appendicitis and endured the loss of Wolf House, and the unremitting slide of rotten luck caused him to reevaluate his ambitions and scale them back to something no more grand than reconnecting with his daughters. He visited them at Bessie’s house and offered them the chance to live on the ranch with him. It never occurred to him that he was too late.
“Almost the entire population of the world consists of little people,” he urged in a letter to Joan. “Here and there are a few of the big people. It is a hard proposition to put up to you at your age, and the chances are that in deciding on this proposition . . . you will make the mistake of deciding to be a little person in a little place in a little part of the world. You will make this mistake because you listened to your mother, who is a little person in a little place in a little part of the world, and who, out of her female sex jealousy against another woman, has sacrificed your future for you. . . . On the other hand, I offer you the big things of the world; the big things that big people live and know and think and act.” It was important, he continued, that she act now, in her formative years, because if she grew to adulthood under her mother’s tutelage, she would not be able to prevent “this malformation of you, this wizening and pinching of you into the little person—you may be able to charge this directly to your mother’s conduct in influencing your conduct, because your mother is so small, so primitive, so savage, that she cherishes a sex hatred for a woman who was bigger than she to such an extent that her face is distorted with passion while she talks about it.”
Even allowing that in the early twentieth century, children were expected to perceive and behave as miniature adults—and Joan at twelve was old enough to expect few indulgences—and even allowing that London himself had few parental reference points, his October 11 letter to her was staggeringly cruel and unreasonable. Indeed it reads less like a letter and more like one of his abstract literary compositions with the emphatic repetitions that so marked his style, and its adult content, repeatedly charging her mother with “female sex jealousy,” was stunningly inappropriate for a girl of Joan’s age. While there were ways in which London was never a child, there were also ways in which he never grew up, and this outburst was childish and self-indulgent even for one who had suffered the recent losses that he had. It was left to twelve-year-old Joan to assume the adult role in the exchange, but it took her more than two weeks: “Well, Dad, I’ve read over your letter, read it twice carefully. . . . I am satisfied with my present surroundings. . . . I resent your opinions of my mother . . . she is a good mother, and what is greater, in this world, than a good mother? . . . And now, Daddy, since we have thrashed this question out together, may we not leave it? I have nothing more to say in the matter. . . . Please, Daddy, please let me feel that this is the last of these awful letters you force me to write to you; it hurts me so to write them, and yet, you demand these kind of answers and I can only write them.”20
Ironically, it took a girl no older than Joan herself to make London see the faults of his attempt at parenting. One of their Glen Ellen neighbors and occasional guests was Earl Rogers, who with the possible exception of Clarence Darrow was the most famous criminal defense attorney in the country, and who in fact had successfully defended Darrow in his own jury-tampering trial over the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building that killed twenty-one people. On one occasion, Rogers’s daughter Adela (familiarly addressed as Nora) saddled up and went for a ride in the early morning. London and Charmian habitually worked in the mornings and never saw their guests before lunch, so Nora was startled to shortly see London galloping after her. He led her to a secluded glen, where they dismounted and he led her around the site, saying he meant to build a house for his first wife and their two girls, and asked her what she thought of the idea.
When Nora expressed her doubts that it would work out, London argued his case about Joan as frankly—typically for him—as though he had been addressing an adult. “I ask her to give me a chance to make her know me. Is that too much?”
Nora was uncomfortably pinned, but she took him on. “Not too much,” she answered, “but it may be too late. If my father had gone off and left me—when a person has showed you they can live without you for years and go all over the world, it isn’t so easy to believe all of a sudden they can’t live without you any more. . . . You have to think about Joan as she is, the way she has grown up. She’s made a choice, she had to. I don’t think she can be expected, the way you treated her, to understand you the way I do Papa.”
London stared at her, dumbfounded, and Nora realized he was accepting what she had said. “He was not like most of the grown-up people I had known,” she wrote, “who were only interested in their side. He reached out to understand even when, as it did now, it had to hurt and anger him.” The awkward moment was broken when Charmian and Earl Rogers rode up. London asked Rogers, “Can a man adopt a godchild when she’s half grown?”
Rogers thought he was bantering, and responded that that was the best time, because there was no telling how an infant might turn out; saints and pickpockets were equally troublesome. “I have decided to adopt Nora as my goddaughter,” said London.
“Charmian looked at me quickly,” recalled Nora, “her eyes narrowed to golden slits, she swung down and came and kissed me and said, ‘I shall be godmother.’”
As Rogers and his daughter rode away, he clarified to her that he was not fond of Charmian, but he felt sorry for her. Nora began struggling to fit the pieces together, that although London loved Charmian he missed and needed his family. Nora believed that Charmian was unaware that London was weighing an idea to bring them all up to the ranch, but that she felt the failure of losing their own baby, she sensed the threat, the perennial possibility that she might lose him, and “her claws went in and out and her ears went flat back like a mountain lioness.”21
Jack London had been through much in the preceding two years, and had dragged Charmian through it with him. And even now she still had to wonder how secure her position was.
14
THE JADE
London’s frequent sorties from the ranch into Oakland often included visits with Johnny Heinold, who had renamed his saloon the First and Last Chance and had presided over it, usually with a fat stogie in his mouth, since opening in 1883. London never failed to give Heinold an inscribed copy of each book as it came out. “He always found time to come around here and have his little two-finger drink and bring me his latest book with his name writ in the front,” Heinold later recalled. Away from the pressures of the ranch and its debts, London’s open-handed ways reasserted themselves. Heinold was with him one Fourth of July when they passed a cluster of children staring at fireworks for sale in a store window. London asked them where their fireworks were, and they responded that their parents had no money. “He took them kids in
to the store,” recalled Heinold, “and when they came out you couldn’t see ’em for fireworks.”1
The Oakland waterfront was sometimes where London would happen across men he had known from the tramping life, hoboes past and sometimes present, or seamen, or Klondikers, usually down-and-out. At one point he even met French Frank, now a very old man, from whom he had bought his oyster raider the Razzle Dazzle when he was fifteen. French Frank’s ire over losing Mamie the Queen of the Oyster Pirates now gone, they posed together, beaming, for a photograph. To Charmian’s dismay he would often bring such derelicts home for dinner, a decent sleep, breakfast, and a dollar to see them on their way. Sometimes they made their own way out to the ranch, almost always to be made welcome.
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 35