Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  Generosity to those he had known, he seldom begrudged. It was the demands of his literary position now that taxed him. It was ten years now since he had rocketed to fame with The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf. In his decade as leader of America’s literary pack, he had been challenged and snapped at by traditionalists who hated the new naturalism in writing, by capitalists who hated his socialism, and by socialists who thought his expansive lifestyle inconsistent with the principles he espoused. His popularity had waxed and waned, and just as that of the wolf who battles his way to lead the pack discovers that there is nowhere to go from there but down, London’s vigor began to decline. He was now thirty-seven, and his health was in alarming decline, as the years of abusing his body with alcohol, cigarettes, and raw meat, and the aftereffects of tropical diseases, all began to manifest themselves with aches and pains that would soon mature into rheumatism and uremia and kidney stones.

  Still, his celebrity brought a never-ending correspondence from complete strangers who wanted something, offered something, needed something. They wanted his endorsement of their inventions and patent medicines. Impoverished artists needed grubstakes. Half tired and half exasperated, he groused to one friend that in an average year he was offered the chance to buy into a hundred gold mines. Requests for help in getting something published, either by reading and offering advice or even publishing it under his own name, arrived close to daily, as did pleas to “furnish college educations to orphan boys, endow old ladies’ homes with libraries . . . and contribute to every bazaar that was ever got up by a ladies’ aid society.” And those were in addition to letters from socialists calling his attention to wrongs that they wanted him, particularly, to expose. He answered their letters daily to the bottom of the stack, although it ate into his life force to do it. A few he could help, but precious time was lost each day excusing himself from “the flotsam and jetsam that swamp this ranch ten-deep year in and year out and all the time.”2

  At least he could indulge in some laughs at people who impersonated him for whatever lark or advantage they could get out of it. London was astonished to receive a letter written with easy familiarity from a total stranger, and answered, “I am not so much surprised at receiving a letter from a dead man as I am from receiving a letter from a live man whom I have never met and who knows me as well as you know me, and who has eaten and slept with me as often as you have eaten and slept with me. . . . This man you traveled with made believe he was Jack London. Your letter makes me very curious, and I should be hugely delighted if you would kindly take the time to give me further information about this namesake of mine.” He also, predictably, invited him to the ranch. “I always have the grub and hard liquor, and the latchstring is always out.”3

  Losing Wolf House was not his last adventure with fire, as the next month a blaze that roared down Sonoma Creek threatened the town of Glen Ellen itself. London rushed ranch hands to the town and assumed direction of fire brigades that saved the town; for his efforts, he was hailed as a hero. That was quite enough excitement, and he soon boarded the ever-comfortable old Roamer for a cruise of the inland waterways. He was still producing his thousand words per day and had been nursing one particular project, recruiting different magazines to sponsor him in a stint of travel writing about great tourist destinations of the world. It would serve the same purpose as the aborted Snark voyage, but with the luxury of being a paying passenger. The first installment would be about Japan, which he had not visited since his days before the mast on the Sophie Sutherland. Those plans were put on hold, though, when he learned that his affairs in New York, both with the Millergraph lithography process and with Joseph Noel over dramatic rights to The Sea-Wolf, had so fouled themselves that there was no escaping a second trip there, in February 1914. He returned nearly $4,000 poorer for clearing the copyright, which was at least a moral victory, for he had been sued for $40,000.

  In addition to the literary output, celebrity brought ancillary opportunities that he used to boost his income, such as lending his name to commercial products. Still handsome, he was featured as a model when Royal Tailors of New York and Chicago bought a full-page ad in Cosmopolitan, a journal in which he had frequently published. It was John Barleycorn that provided one likely opportunity. The book appeared in 1913, the last of his contracted six with Century, with a leering, bleary-eyed London on the jacket. Aside from being the first recorded use of “pink elephants” as the prototypical hallucination of a drunk, the volume was an assessment of his drinking and his life. London’s own friends were taken aback that he could look so honestly in the mirror; his friend Upton Sinclair reviewed it as “assuredly one of the most useful, as well as one of the most entertaining books ever penned.” In his memoir, therefore, London’s correlation of alcohol with the search for male bonding gives the surest testimonial of what he had long ago confessed to Charmian of his need for a deep and unshakeable Man-Love.

  More visibly, a nation in the grip of the Prohibition movement was ready to embrace a sinner come to self-realization, and an Arizona prohibitionist visited him at Glen Ellen with the novel proposition that grapes from the ranch be pressed and sold as nonalcoholic juice instead of to a winery. Lending his name to a product that served a popular cause was intriguing and made sense from every direction; Tom Wilkinson of the International Press Association in San Francisco, an investor, drew up documents creating the Jack London Grape Juice Company and forwarded them for London’s signature. A few days later, however, London’s enthusiasm for the venture was sidetracked by another new writing opportunity.

  In the years following 1910, news in the United States was increasingly distracted by a tumultuous civil war in Mexico. The three-decade-long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz was brought down in 1911, but his successor, Francisco Madero, was no sooner in place than Madero’s army chief, Victoriano Huerta, seized the government and had Madero killed. Huerta’s fellow conspirators, Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, and Francisco “Pancho” Villa, then turned on him and on one another in a free-for-all that by 1914 was as bloody as it was confusing. Intricately entwined in it all was American capital investment, which had replaced the political colonialism of Spain with its own economic overlordship.

  The United States opposed the Huerta regime, and early in April the U.S. Navy landed marines in the Mexican port of Vera Cruz on the reediest of pretexts to ensure that arms shipments intended for Huerta were interdicted. Fighting appeared likely, and on April 16 Collier’s contacted London with a head-turning offer of $1,100 per week, plus expenses for himself and Nakata, if he would go to Mexico and report on the mayhem. Sensing a chance to expound upon the class struggle in an underdeveloped and colonially victimized country, London agreed, provided the publication would pay expenses for his Mate to go as well. His terms were met, and the three left the next day for Los Angeles to board a train for Galveston, Texas, there to board ship for Vera Cruz.

  There was one issue he wanted settled before leaving the country. His misadventures with Noel, with the Millergraph, and with Balboa Entertainment had given him good evidence that he needed to be more watchful and bloody-minded when it came to business. From Galveston he sent Eliza the batch of papers concerning the grape juice company, with explicit instructions to have them read by a lawyer to ensure that he was in no wise liable for any debts incurred by the venture. If the existing agreements did not leave him clear, she was to insist on new papers being drawn up. “Also, pledge no grapes from our ranch to the Company, unless said grapes are paid for in cash in just the same way as you sell grapes to a winery.” He had had quite enough of goodnaturedly trusting people who could take advantage of him. (He was wise. The company did go under, he was sued for part of the obligation, and he was found not liable.)

  In Galveston, London encountered unexpected opposition. The expedition to Mexico was under command of Major General Frederick Funston, the same whose demolitions had prevented more of San Francisco from burning than actually did after the earthquake. Fun
ston had been angered by an article he read that had appeared under London’s name, which he regarded as unpatriotic and insulting to the military. “Young men:” London’s article read, “the lowest aim in your life is to become a soldier. The good soldier never tries to distinguish between right and wrong. He never thinks; never reasons; he only obeys. . . . If he is ordered to fire down a crowded street when the poor are clamoring for bread, he obeys.”4 The incensed Funston would not take London’s suite on any ship in his command.

  In Japan ten years before, officers more clever than Funston at railroading the press had not been able to keep London out of Korea, and he was not discouraged now; he counterattacked on two fronts. First he went over Funston’s head and out of his branch of service, and received an offer from the secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, of passage on a destroyer if he could not find another way. Second, he wrote a disavowal of the objectionable piece to the editors of the Houston newspapers and repeated to the editor of the Army and Navy Register, explaining that parts of the article were quoted from his novel The Iron Heel, but he had nothing to do with it, and “it was one canard of a thousand canards that at one time & another have been circulated about me.” Besides, he offered in a last line of defense, no less a journalist than the great Richard Harding Davis would state that “London couldn’t have written it, because it’s bad English.”5

  London was still awaiting a decision when fighting erupted in Mexico, resulting in the deaths of nineteen American servicemen. With Funston mollified, London shipped out on the U.S. Army transport Kilpatrick, with Charmian following a day later on the Atlantis. The Kilpatrick would be the first ship to unload soldiers once they reached Vera Cruz, and there were three other troop ships with her, escorted by three torpedo boats and joined by the pre-dreadnought battleship Louisiana, all steaming in line ahead; it was slow going, as one of the transports had engine trouble. On board with London were four other war correspondents, including the veteran Davis, who had saved London’s camera and possibly his life in Korea ten years before. Sitting with them on deck one day was a green “cub” reporter, working feverishly on a dispatch. They asked him what he found to write about before ever landing, and he answered cheekily, “Well, maybe I see things you fellows don’t see.” The teasing he took from the older hands after that was ruthless.6

  In Korea ten years before, London had strained every fiber and provoked the Japanese authorities to get to the front of battle. He wisely did not do so now. Although he had turned only thirty-eight, his he-man myth was becoming harder to maintain, and his hale appearance increasingly was held together only by the ferocity of his constitution. Tropical Mexico was infamous for savaging the health of gringos, and having once been laid low by a host of tropical maladies in the Pacific, London did not need another lesson. (Davis, too, suffered, writing that he quickly lost eight pounds in humid heat “that would sweat water out of a chilled steel safe.”) Then, too, in Korea there had been recognized national armies and something resembling organization to the Japanese handling (albeit manipulating) a press corps. Mexico was nothing like that. There the choice was among roving bands of murderous brigands, and the danger inherent in contacting and reporting on them had only the year before claimed the life of someone London knew well. Both the experience and reportage of war had long been a staple of Ambrose Bierce, London’s longtime literary critic and social scold. “Bitter Bierce” at seventy-one had gone to Mexico to report on Pancho Villa, disappeared, and was never heard from again.

  What London found in Mexico threatened his ideals in ways they had not been challenged before, and forced his socialist sympathies to give way to the hard gaze of the journalist on the ground. At the opening of the Mexican Revolution he had written some pieces praising the peonage for rising up against their oppressors, but now the outrage of his dispatches revealed the writer still at the height of his powers, who had needed only the proper goading to set a record straight.

  I, for one, cannot comprehend how it is germane whether Madero was a patriot or a grafter; whether Huerta is a heroic figure of an Indian or a lunatic black Nero; whether Huerta murdered Madero. . . .

  What I see, with all this talk of little things filling my ears, is a torn and devastated Mexico, in which twelve million peons and all native and foreign business men are being injured and destroyed by the silly and selfish conduct of a few mixed breeds. I see a great, rich country . . . being smashed to chaos by a handful of child-minded men playing with the tragic tools of death made possible by modern technology. . . .

  From garret to basement the dwelling of Mexico is being torn to pieces. . . . The stay at home American listens to the slogans uttered by the various leaders of this anarchy and makes the mistake of conceiving the leaders in his own image and of thinking that “Liberty,” “Justice,” and a “Square Deal” means the same to them as they mean to him.

  Nothing of the sort. In the four centuries of Spanish and Mexican rule, liberty, justice and the square deal have never existed. Mexico is a republic in which nobody votes. Its liberty has ever been construed as license. Its justice had consisted in an effort at equitable division of the spoils of an exploited people. . . . And so it is with all the rest of the bombastic and valorous phrases in the vocabulary of the Mexican. . . .

  These “breeds” do politics, issue pronunciamentos, raise revolutions or are revolutionized against by others of them, write bombastic unveracity that is accepted as journalism in this sad, rich land, steal payrolls of companies and eat out hacienda after hacienda as they picnic along on what they are pleased to call wars for liberty, justice and the square deal.7

  Back in the United States, London was excoriated by the socialist organizations as a traitor to the cause, and indeed his Mexican dispatches have also caused some London biographers no little consternation. They have rightly taken note that in Mexico, apart from two days’ riding with rebel troops, London did not venture into the hinterlands of insurgency, but accepted the hospitality of the capitalist-run estates. But this does not defeat his point. London saw that there was not one obstacle to social justice in Mexico, but two: the traditional exploitative ruling class was bad enough, but even worse was the bemedaled parade of cynical martinets who lived high by spreading death and ruin, while claiming to advance the cause of the impoverished peonage. If anything set London off it was hypocrisy, in this case that of the avaricious generalissimos claiming to care for the suffering peasants while laying waste the country that fueled the outrage of his Mexican dispatches. If London had been incorrect in this assessment, then his Mexican reportage could be written off as bought propaganda, but Mexico’s experience, from then to the present hour of warring drug cartels, shows that his ire was not misplaced at all.

  Dick Davis perceived the same elements as London. “I hate to say it,” he wrote, “but I like these Mexicans. . . . They are human, kindly; it is only the politicians and bandits like Villa who give them a bad name. But, though they ought to hate us, whenever I stop to ask my way they invite me to come in and have ‘coffee’ and say, ‘My house is yours, señor,’ which certainly is kind after people have taken your town away from you and given you another flag and knocked your head off if you did not salute it.”8

  In the relative safety of Vera Cruz Charmian was able to mingle and socialize with war correspondents and military officers. London had received fan mail from sailors for years, and now he and Charmian were entertained in high style aboard the American warships. In one of the first serious articles that London had ever written, “The Impossibility of War” for Overland Monthly that got him sent to England to write The People of the Abyss, London had given an apocalyptic view of the future of combat. Now he got an up-close view of how accurately he had predicted the evolution of the technology of death. In Vera Cruz the lumbering old U.S.S. Louisiana was joined by the most modern battleships of the new dreadnought concept, the Arkansas and the New York, each mounting a dozen twelve-inch rifles that could rain seven tons of high explosives
down upon an enemy with each flaming broadside. The Londons were in Mexico only a month before he was laid low with acute dysentery and evacuated on the transport Ossabaw back to Galveston.

  By the third week in June they were back on the ranch, and able to watch the firestorm of ire that his Mexico pieces raised among the socialists who had memorized their slogans—as indeed he long had done—but knew nothing of conditions in Mexico. Disillusioned that his comrades were more interested in their rhetoric than in learning the truth, it was the beginning of the end for him as a participant in that faction.

  Progress on the ranch also drew his attention away from the cause that once anchored his existence. Part of his heart had burned to a cinder with Wolf House, but as he and Charmian settled back into their cottage at the old Frohling winery, he was able to witness the healing and productive renewal of cared-for land. The new lake was stocked with fish; that acreage still in brush now had Angora goats on it, there were Jersey cows in the meadows, he had settled on the Duroc breed to raise in the circular stone Pig Palace under construction, and ripening crops rose toward the sun. But he could not heal himself, and increasingly he took opiates for the pain of his failing kidneys. He tried valiantly to keep his fate, the death hovering nearby that he had long referred to as “the Noseless One,” at arm’s length, although he still ate voraciously of rich rare duck and drank too much.