John Barleycorn, as Charmian took to euphemizing his consumption since that book’s appearance, occasionally got the better of him. One of his favored cronies these days was Earl Rogers, who was well down the road to alcoholism himself. At a whim during one of his visits, London harnessed a team to the buggy and whisked Rogers off to visit friends, leaving Charmian and Rogers’s daughter Nora at the ranch. When they didn’t return that evening, or the next day, or the next, young Nora witnessed the terrible effect that London’s binges had on Charmian. “Her laugh fluttered higher and higher and broke like a light globe. Neither of us slept except in catnaps, starting at the sound of a sleepy bird, the wind in the redwoods, the footfall of imagination. . . . Charmian was sharp and bitter. Nothing was ever said between us about drink. A man’s family did not discuss this, nor admit it.” What disturbed Nora most was that Charmian had apparently given in to these absences. “By nature,” she wrote, “Charmian London wasn’t a quitter. Even people who didn’t like her admitted she had more guts than any other female they’d ever known.” At one point George Sterling arrived at the ranch and joined in the vigil.
On such aggrieved nights Charmian could retire to her sleeping porch, fated to her insomnia, but at the back of her desk, taped to the windowsill, she kept a pin-up photograph of her Mate-Man, a stunning full-length frontal nude from his younger days, deep-chested and beautiful and virile, his arms lowered and outstretched as though he was about to scoop her off her feet. On such sleepless and deeply humiliating nights as these she could at least gaze at the picture and conjure earlier days, and repeat to herself that he always, at last, came home.
And so he did. London and Rogers appeared again after five days, riding small burros, reeking of alcohol and body odor, singing and joking. “I am a little confused,” said Rogers. “Why am I riding this burro?”
“You are confused,” said London, “because at this moment you are not sure whether you are a man dreaming you are a burro or a burro dreaming you are a man. We all have these moments.” Unsteadily they made their way onto the terrace.
“You might have waited for me,” said Sterling coldly. Charmian busied herself about the house but eventually had to comment, “You have had a long visit this time with your friend John Barleycorn.” London began to wax eloquent, refusing to acknowledge the nightmare he had put her through. Charmian gained control of the situation, reminding him that dinner was long since ready, and he had guests who were starving. At that London did apologize, but stumbled and fell as he led the company in to dinner. Charmian endured the return without further criticism or hint of her pain.9 Nora also read John Barleycorn, and she considered it “still the best book ever written on alcohol, I jumped nearly out of my skin for I had heard so much of it as he walked up and down the terrace at Glen Ellen with the sailor’s gait and answered violently” any barbs that Charmian ventured.10
Not all visitors to the ranch were subjected to such drama. Frederick Irons Bamford was one of his oldest and most useful friends, and although he and Bamford had corresponded warmly, London had actually seen Bamford’s wife, Georgia, only once, at her wedding, since their days at Oakland High School, when the vehemence of their political differences had precluded anything like friendship. Her record of their few days’ visit to the ranch afforded another unvarnished look at the failing Jack London. He and Charmian were now so traveled that they lived among mementoes. The central room of the cottage was, she noted, “divided by hangings of South Sea Island tappa cloths. The front, or living room part, contained the grand piano, a couch, several chairs, and two beautiful Korean chests.” On the oblong dining table in the rear portion of the room, Nakata had created a centerpiece of fresh pomegranate cuttings around a bowl of goldfish the same color as the buds.
Her view of London as distant and occasionally curt, even with Charmian, showed that he had not mellowed since a similar demeanor had been recorded by Joseph Noel before the sailing of the Snark. There were a couple of times when Georgia caught London looking at her, and she thought he might engage her in a private conversation, but he did not. “I was reminded of the old days,” she wrote, “when he would not speak to me because of my capitalistic associations, as he thought.”
She was aware not to expect the Londons to appear before noon, as they did their work in the mornings, but in the afternoons they went swimming in their new lake, and visited Aunt Netta at Wake Robin Lodge, where Georgia was shown the great shire stallion, Neuadd Hillside, who had become London’s pride and joy, and was an engine of ranch work. She and Charmian rode to the ruins of Wolf House, Charmian indicating where the principal rooms had been and how she had planned to decorate them. Georgia was struck by the irony that London the implacable socialist had created such an opulent retreat only to see it come to ashes. At dinner with other guests, including a Silesian who had accompanied them up from the station, she found London more his old self, passionate in discourse and game for argument. “I could vividly see the Jack of the olden days exactly as he leaned, sprawled and slouched over his desk at High School. . . . He spoke with a violent jerk to his voice, much as he had when giving a talk on the beauties of Socialism—anything to hammer his idea ‘home.’ He waved his arms and ran his fingers through his hair so that it became as disheveled as it used to be. The only difference from long ago seemed to be that now he was sure of himself.”11
Still, Georgia sensed a sadness behind his showy bluster, a discontent at growing older, a sense of losing the inspiration and sense of discovery that was part of the package of youth. She sensed London becoming jaded. In early October he and Charmian boarded the graceful old Roamer to poke about the inland delta. He still worked, and kept George Brett supplied with books that sold well and were lucratively serialized. Like a dying star bursting into a supernova, London abandoned the short story for a rapid series of novels: The Mutiny of the Elsinore came out in September 1914, The Scarlet Plague and The Star Rover in 1915, and The Little Lady of the Big House and a collection of previous stories, The Turtles of Tasman, in 1916.
They sailed the Roamer all the way up to Stockton, where they moored her and traveled with a tour to Truckee, in the Sierras near Lake Tahoe, to attend the Winter Garden Festival and frolic in knee-deep snow. By the end of January they were back at the ranch, but the cold and damp had excited an onset of rheumatism that caused him much pain. London had long told friends that one of the advantages of carrying his office “under his hat” was the ability to work anywhere. He loved the ranch but was not daily needed there, for Eliza ran the place beautifully. February would be a good time to leave for Hawaii and see if he could recover some vitality there. He and Charmian were in San Francisco to see the opening of the great Panama-Pacific Exhibition and then left the next day on the S.S. Matsonia for five months in the islands.
The many photographs of them on this stay in Hawaii portray a laughing and contented couple, locking elbows back to back in their bathing suits and hoisting each other in the air. Others show him lounging and writing, barefoot and wrapped in a Japanese robe. He could no longer surf, but the successful Outrigger Club now stood where they had once spent happy weeks in a tent cabin, and there were endless parties either for them or with them. There was no cure, of course, for failing kidneys, especially since he bullishly ate and drank as he pleased, but the curative trip had its effect; he felt better, and when they returned to the ranch in late July, he was ready to tackle the mountain of correspondence that had accumulated in his absence.
Much of his daily correspondence was from writers—beginners seeking advice, journeymen needing encouragement, even established professionals looking for a moment of commiseration. London answered them all doggedly, helpful or encouraging by turns, even when he did not feel like it. The leader owed no less to his pack.
J. Torrey Connor, who headed the fiction section of the California Writers Club, wrote to ask how London had become such a success. His answer was as revealing as it was flip: “(1) Vast good luck (2) Good health
(3) Good brain (4) Good mental and muscular coordination (5) Poverty . . . (8) Because I got started twenty years before the fellows who are trying to start to-day.” He also paid a tribute a final time to the influence of reading Ouida’s Signa when he was eight years old.12
Of his many correspondents, one particularly distressing case was the hard-headed Mary Austin, who had taken up residence in New York only to discover that the romance of the desert Southwest carried less clout than it once did. She determined to become more of a generalist, and Harper had let her a contract for a life of Jesus of Nazareth, whose full-bloodedness and passion, she was convinced, had been drained and sooted by centuries of cant and candle smoke. The result was The Man Jesus, a prescient book that anticipated the “historical Jesus” movement by more than half a century, but for which she took a critical beating.
Austin wrote London a bitter complaint about the experience; it was a subject upon which London, whose attraction to the teachings of Jesus offset his alienation from accreted religious doctrine, was in sympathy with her treatment. “I have read and enjoyed every bit of your ‘Jesus Christ’ book as published serially in the North American Review,” he answered her, but he was baffled that she was so offended that most readers did not understand it. “Long ere this,” he added, “I know that you have learned that the majority of people who inhabit the planet Earth are bone-heads.” He offered the example of his own Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden, both of which were attacks upon Nietzsche’s Übermensch idea, but “nobody discovered that.” He suggested that instead of complaining, she should draw contentment from her frequent characterization as the greatest American stylist, conferred on her by H. G. Wells and others. “The world feeds you,” he concluded, “the world feeds me, but the world knows damn little of either of us. Affectionately yours, Jack London.”
The world, however, was not feeding Mary Austin as generously as it once had. Though she needed new work badly, she continued to alienate publishers and her career took a nosedive. Under assumed names she was reduced to factory work, making mannequin wigs and artificial flowers; she even sold pencils and undertook a relationship with a Chicago concrete laborer. Her fate was a cautionary tale of artistic ego, and ample vindication for London’s lifetime of cautious management of his career, his cultivation of publishers and ultimate return to the safe harbor of Macmillan.13
The previous winter and spring in Hawaii had proved to be so restorative that the Londons returned, boarding the S.S. Great Northern on December 16 and heading out into the Pacific once more. They attended a New Year’s Eve reception in the Iolani Palace, where they were presented to the former queen, Liliuokalani, who was now quite elderly, and who had accepted her overthrow but was still bitter about it. There was a lesson in her politely frosty conversation with them: like London, she had once cared for a cause—her nation and people—more deeply than for her own welfare, but she had made poor judgments in pursuit of her goals. Like London, she encountered opposition to her ideas that proved irresistible, and now she had come to some wisdom, too late to matter to anyone but herself.
London’s differences with American socialists that began over his reportage of the Mexican civil war widened in their differing views of the Great War that was raging in Europe. He had expended much of the fire of his youth in the cause of social justice, but now socialist rhetoric took an increasingly anarchistic tone, where he saw in the conflict the chance for democratic ideals to triumph over the hidebound medieval anachronisms of central European autocracy. He also saw how the few gains made for common people during the Progressive Era had doused the fire of what American socialism had been in pressing for meaningful reforms. He also had been reading Carl Jung and realized some of the missteps he had taken in his own lifetime of advocacy. As all these factors worked within him, he sat down and wrote an important letter:Honolulu, March 17, 1916
Dear Comrades:
I am resigning from the Socialist party, because of its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle. . . .
My fighting record in the cause is not, even at this late date, already entirely forgotten. Trained in the class struggle, as taught and practiced by the Socialist labor party, my own highest judgment concurring, I believed that the working class, by fighting, by never fusing, by never making terms with the enemy, could emancipate itself. Since the whole trend of Socialism in the United States during recent years has been one of peaceableness and compromise, I find that my mind refuses further sanction of my remaining a party member. Hence . . . my resignation.
If races and classes cannot rise up and by their own strength of brain and brawn, wrest from the world liberty, freedom and independence, they never in time can come to these royal possessions.
The necessary corollary, he concluded, was that the oppressed people who had their freedom handed to them “on silver platters” would not know what to do with it. He resigned for his wife as well and closed the letter, “Yours for the Revolution, Jack London.”14
When the episode had passed, Charmian asked him, “What will you call yourself henceforth? Revolutionist? Socialist? What?”
He got over the anger of the moment, but it left him saddened. “I am not anything, I fear. I am all these things. Individuals disappoint me more and more, and more and more I turn to the land.”15 Beauty Ranch had proven to be the one entity that had not disappointed his spiritual investment.
While in Hawaii, the Londons reconnected with Louis von Tempsky, the polo-playing manager of the Haleakala Ranch. Nine years had elapsed since the saucy fourteen-year-old Armine and her sister had engaged London in the crimson-splattered raspberry fight high on the slopes of the volcano. Not only had she survived his brutal critique of her juvenile writing efforts, she had determined to attempt a career in literature and now submitted some of her recent work to him. Unfortunately for her, she still thought that her schoolgirl’s effort at manuscript preparation was good enough, and again he let her have it:I do not go into any question of style, treatment, pitch, taste, handling; I have marked only for one particular thing. . . .
This particular thing is slovenliness. There is no other name for it. . . . The editor does not exist who would read five pages of any manuscript so slovenly typed as these MSS pages of yours have been typed. . . .
Such slovenliness advertises to any editor, with a glance at a couple of pages, that you have no sincere regard for literature, no sincere desire to write literature. . . .
Please believe that I still love you for all of your other good qualities, but that such love for you does not mitigate the harshness of my chastisement of you for . . . submitting such horrible, awful, and monstrous typed manuscript to me!
And further deponent sayeth not.
Affectionately yours,
Jack London
P.S. Just the same, you ought be damned well ashamed of yourself!
Again the young von Tempsky survived the barrage; she was thirty-five when her novel Hula was published and turned into a movie starring “It Girl” Clara Bow. She went on to publish several more, and London, who often advised his friends against pursuing literary careers and then admitted his sympathy when the advice was ignored, would have smiled.16
Three essays about Hawaii that London wrote for Cosmopolitan stemmed from this sojourn, published in the months directly preceding his death, and demonstrated his continued deftness at mixing consumer interest with social commentary, amid his undiminished capacity to tell a story. Hawaii as an independent kingdom had been doomed, he wrote. Either Japan must acquire it, or the United States. The last king, David Kalakaua, recognized this, and chose Japan, offering his daughter and heiress Princess Kaiulani in a royal marriage to the imperial family. Had it not been for the Japanese loathing of diluting their pure race, the tropical paradise might have been theirs. Just as he had in The People of the Abyss, London cited census figures to back up his assertions: in 1914, there were well over three times as many Japanese residents in the Hawaiian Islands than a
ny other national group: Chinese, Filipinos, Americans, or even native Hawaiians. Yet while all the other groups were cross-mating with Polynesian abandon, only six Japanese had married outside their own. Instead, wrote London, “the haoles, or whites, overthrew the Hawaiian Monarchy, formed the Dole Republic, and shortly thereafter brought their loot in under the sheltering folds of the Stars and Stripes. There is little use to balk at the word ‘loot.’ The white man is the born looter. And just as the North American Indian was looted of his continent by the white man, just so the Hawaiian was looted by the white men of his islands. Such things be. They are morally indefensible.”
London went on to acknowledge the conflicted conscience of the concerned American, admitting on the one hand the moral turpitude of how Hawaii was acquired, while confessing joy and relief in the acquisition. Better our navy in Pearl Harbor than Japan’s. (The transfer might have been inevitable, but it was not forgiven. At the New Year’s Eve reception where the Londons were presented to former Queen Liliuokalani, she shook hands with them, but according to Charmian, she looked like she would rather have killed them.)17
The Hawaii articles for Cosmopolitan were some of his last quality works. His literary output, still a thousand words per day, every day, was workmanlike, certainly better than what most other publishing writers were doing, but lacked the inspiration of his earlier years. As many literary scholars have noted, his best work was behind him. And that isn’t surprising. London became a writer first to support himself, and second to find himself. He accomplished the first goal, ensconced on one of the most beautiful properties in California. At the second goal he succeeded in a personal way, for ever since he had sought and devoured education like a starving man when he came home from tramping at nineteen, he knew what he believed and why, and he could argue brilliantly why others should believe it, too. But he did not succeed in a public way. His desire to kindle revolution, or rather, his desire to see social justice done, even by revolution if it came to that, was disappointed. Like the rest of the ardent socialists of the day, he prophesied as inevitable a revolution that never came.
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 37