Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  It is easy for modern eyes to see the early twentieth-century socialists as naive and slightly ridiculous. No nation more than the United States has ever had a stronger vision of its own political and moral righteousness, even when that vision has been misdirected and even manipulated into willfully not recognizing societal evil in its midst. The very idea that Americans indoctrinated with their own patriotism would ever take to the streets to force radical governmental change now seems slightly laughable. It seemed less so then, for socialism itself a century ago was seen as a more idealistic concept—hence its support by respected clerics such as New Haven Pilgrim Church’s Dr. Alexander Irvine, who invited London to lecture at Yale in 1906. In books such as The People of the Abyss and The War of the Classes, and in fiery lectures from coast to coast, London argued the best case that he could that the United States, indeed all of the capitalist West, had fallen short not just of their professed ideals, but of fundamental justice to society’s most vulnerable people. And the country collectively shrugged. London had already succeeded for himself in the capitalist system, and if the country did not care to supply the full measure of fairness he called for, he could, himself, retire to his ranch to raise pigs and eucalyptus trees.

  Some conditions did improve, and the muckrakers had indeed helped to make things better. The Jungle of Upton Sinclair, an ardent London admirer, caused passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Another law, restricting child labor, was enacted thanks partly to the Woman’s Home Companion issue of September 1906, which focused national attention on the subject and in which London had written the lead article. However, the reforms—and they were significant—that managed to struggle into existence during the Progressive Era sucked popular support from the remainder of the socialist agenda. Workplace safety and compensation for workplace injury, a livable or at least minimum wage, old-age pensions, recognizing the legitimacy of labor unions—all of which London demanded for the dignity of the workers who generated the nation’s wealth, all lay in the future, some far in the future, some still not fully achieved. But to the extent that he wanted to be able to make them happen, he didn’t.

  London devoted much of his last energy to fiction—The Acorn Planter and Little Lady of the Big House both came out in 1916. Perhaps because he no longer suffered from the depression that plagued his earlier years—an angst that lent immediacy to the conflicts of his earlier work—the later pieces, including Valley of the Moon, which marked his return to Macmillan in 1913 and was particularly idyllic, were written with his mature polish but simply did not grab and throttle a reader. George Sterling noticed the decline, and his commenting on it led to heated arguments. As Joseph Noel logged, “Jack had said that ‘The Little Lady of the Big House’ was the greatest story ever conceived by man. After one reading George had declared it mediocre. Time has vindicated this judgment. Jack suffers in this novel, and in other late stories of his, the fate of every writer with too well-defined style. He sounds like a burlesque of himself.”18 John Barleycorn, which recounted those earlier days and recaptured their vital struggle, was probably his last really important book. The Star Rover shows a last burst of imagination, hearkening back to Before Adam for its inspiration of recounting lives unknown, but drawing as ever upon both his outer and inner life. Protagonist Darrell Standing is an agronomist (drawing upon London’s studies to improve the ranch) who is wrongly convicted (Buffalo penitentiary again) and condemned for murder. He transcends the tortures of his captor the warden (a dash of “A Thousand Deaths”) to live via astral projection the adventures of a Roman legionary, an Elizabethan soldier, a French nobleman, and various other lives. The book was a flop and existed rather within the pale of Noel’s closing judgment, but also was better than its fate. It displayed a more spiritual aspect than London’s previous books, and was better appreciated by following generations.

  Back at the ranch by July 1916, he was able to visit Sacramento for the California State Fair on September 3, but it was increasingly obvious to Charmian that her Mate-Man was in a downward glide. To the chronic uremia that must kill him were added kidney stones and their unique brand of agony, and acute rheumatism. It is also possible that he was undergoing a regimen of salvarsen, a difficult and dangerous arsenic-based treatment for venereal disease. Although she had never made an issue of it, she was aware that he had had sexual flings when out “pirooting,” but learned to content herself with the security that he would always come home to her.

  London’s chronic pain had its impact on his still voluminous correspondence, usually impatient and sometimes vituperative. This was shown most vividly in his breaking with Spiro Orfans, a carpenter and socialist from Seattle with whom London had always enjoyed fencing and arguing politics. Charmian had never liked him and considered him something of a non-contributing hanger-on, but London had stoutly defended him as having paid his way with the pleasure of his company. He had been equally loyal to his other acquaintances from former and poorer days, the tramps and socialists who helped mold him into the writer he was. But now London felt that Orfans’ mooching had been excessive, and let him know of it in no uncertain terms.19

  To the tramps and former tramps who wanted less of him, just desired to associate themselves with his name, he could be more generous. “One thing . . . you can take straight from me,” he wrote one named Charles Brown, “because of my own tramping experiences you can scarcely find a tramp today in the United States who has not hoboed with me, slept with me, gone to jail with me, etc. etc. Of course they all claim this whether they really have or not, and who am I to say nay to their stories?” There were a few times he drew a line; once was with Leon R . Livingston, who had tramped across the continent more than fifty times under the road name of “A-No. 1” and became a lecturer on hoboes. He had taken to telling audiences that the great Jack London abandoned the road on his advice, and requested London to send him an autographed photo of himself acknowledging this as fact. “You are making a mistake telling folks this fairy-tale,” London answered him. “No, it is impossible for me to do as you ask me to do.” London’s reasons for resuming sedentary life, to study and write, were well known. “I can go pretty far, but I can’t make a direct and palpable liar out of myself.” To cushion the blow London invited A-No. 1 to visit the ranch again.20

  Otherwise there was a sharp and crabby turn in his correspondence in the fall of 1916. “Why did God make you to love a fountain pen when your handwriting is so hard to read,” he inquired of Mrs. H. P. Agee of Honolulu. Even Sterling felt his sting after he called off a visit to the ranch when he missed the car that London had sent to pick him up at the Santa Rosa train station. He bluntly accused the Greek of “laziness or uncaringness on your part, implying that you don’t care a whoop what unfair stresses and strains you throw on me and my ranch people.”21

  London had not been speaking idly when he told Charmian, in the wake of his resignation from the Socialist Party, that he felt himself drawn increasingly to the land. Back in California, disillusioned and increasingly ill, he devoted himself like Voltaire’s Candide to improving the Glen Ellen ranch. At the end of October he answered an inquiry from Countryside Magazine’s Geddes Smith, that he was “that sort of farmer, who, after delving in all the books to satisfy his quest for economic wisdom, returns to the soil as the source and foundation of all economics.” And being Jack London, he was methodical in his approach. “I am rebuilding worn-out hillside lands that were worked out and destroyed by our wasteful California pioneer farmers. I am not using commercial fertilizer.” Rather, he wrote that he was following the Chinese model, rotating nitrogen-gathering cover with manure fertilizer, which had worked for 4,000 years, and he was getting results. Using a nitrogen-enabling soil additive marketed under the name of Westrobac and plowing under the first crop, they were able to harvest from one field planted in a mixture of oats and vetch an impressive two tons per acre, and that was in a dry year.22

  One inestimable tragedy struck on October 22, when gigantic Neuad
d Hillside fell dead in his pasture, and the event signaled a flurry of new difficulties. After nine years of faithful service, Yoshimatsu Nakata left the Londons’ employ to pursue an education. He left on affectionate terms, but a new valet, Tokinosuka Sekiné, had to be trained. Edward Payne and his wife, Aunt Netta whom London had once trusted completely, had broken with him to the point of suing him for damages to their property caused by construction of his dam. Two trials over the space of three weeks settled the issue in his favor, but on November 10 he was stricken with food poisoning.

  By the third week in November it seemed like everything took an optimistic turn again, and there was reason to look to the future. He was keen on work, and cabled Collier’s publisher Edgar Sisson an offer to do a “dandy article” on man-eating sharks. There was also a congenial letter from a new literary magazine called the Seven Arts, expressing interest in any uncommitted material he lad lying around.23 His rebound in national notice also included a visit by the Gaumont Newsreel Company, which filmed him on the ranch on November 16. And in ranch affairs, London emerged victorious from the vexatious water rights suit; to shore up good relations he had all the combatants to lunch at the ranch. He gave them a tour of the dam site, and all agreed that the suit had been unnecessary. J. Torrey Connor of the California Writers Club gifted him with a small green Aztec idol for his desk, with which he was delighted. “The god-damned little god has arrived in all his godliness,” he wrote her. “I can’t thank you enough for parting with your little treasure . . . tell me some more about it—all you know about it, please.” His morning reading had come to include an illustrated journal called Every Week. “Curses on you,” he wagged to the editor. “I wish the man who writes the captions had never been born. I just can’t refrain from reading every word he writes.” He was planning a trip to New York to look after his affairs, and settle the Millergraph boondoggle with Noel once and for all. Before then, however, he believed he had time to take his daughters for an outing. “Next Sunday,” he wrote Joan, “will you and Bess have lunch with me at Saddle Rock, and, if the weather is good, go for a sail with me on Lake Merrit. If the weather is not good, we can go to a matinee of some sort. Let me know at once. I leave Ranch next Friday.”24

  The coming days would be busy. London was heavily occupied with plans for another trip to New York and four days later he rode out to look over another tract of property near the ranch that he wanted to acquire. The next day, November 21, he suffered from vomiting and diarrhea. His dinner did not sit well, and he retired early, forgetting his nightly play with Possum, the fox terrier to which he and Charmian had become so attached. “Thank God,” he said to her almost presciently, “you’re not afraid of anything.” At the cottage on the Frohling property, where they had now lived for five years, they utilized his and her sleeping porches that flanked the entry. When she retired, Charmian glanced over to his room and saw him, green reading visor on his brow, his head on his chest, having dozed off.

  Before eight the next morning, Eliza was awaked by a furious pounding at the door of her nearby house; it was Sekiné, distraught that he had not been able to awaken London. He had come to her because he was forbidden to wake Charmian. Eliza found her stepbrother comatose, his face blue, his breathing labored. At the bedside was a syringe, and an empty vial of morphine. Charmian was awakened at once; the phone was out, and the nearest doctor, A . M. Thomson, was sent for. When he arrived he diagnosed an overdose of morphine. London’s own physician, William S. Porter, was summoned from Oakland, as well as Thomson’s assistant, and Dr. J. W. Shiels from San Francisco.

  The physicians gave him 50cc of atropine and got him to his feet, yelling at him, walking him around the room. Charmian shouted that the dam had broken, hoping that would get through to him, but it did not. During the day it appeared a couple of times as though he were surfacing, and Charmian called out to him, “Mate, come back!” They laid him in her sleeping porch, where he was seen a couple of times to pound the mattress lightly with a weak fist. At a quarter of eight that night the struggle ceased.

  The question of whether Jack London killed himself has been a live and contentious one almost from the moment he stopped breathing. Charmian was alert to the possibility of her Mate’s memory being tainted with the brush of suicide, and even in the shock of the moment remonstrated with the doctors to ascribe his death only to the uremia; her biography of London five years later omits any mention of the morphine. The suicide story certainly had the element of artistic suffering to recommend it; the Carmel bohemians were known for carrying their vials of cyanide in order to choose the time of their exits. When George Sterling learned of the Wolf ’s death his first reaction was to exclaim that he had killed himself. From whatever impetus, the story was repeated in magazine articles and over the years repeated again in lightly prepared introductions to subsequent editions of novels and story collections.25 In the first biography of London not connected to the family, Irving Stone’s 1938 Sailor on Horseback, the event is cleverly phrased that London made a “calculation of the lethal dose of the drug.” Common sense weighs against this, however. If London intended to end his life, there would have been no need to figure the weight-to-dosage ratio of morphine; he would simply have taken all he had. In all probability what he was calculating was the maximum dose he could take without harm, but did not reckon on his weakened condition amplifying the medicine’s effect.26

  After his death, Anna Strunsky memorialized him for the socialist journal The Masses. Her own literary gift had no trouble summarizing the inspiration he had lent to the movement. Her personal memories, however, were much more affectionate, tender to the point of causing one to wonder whether she did not always regret having not spent her life with him.

  I see him in pictures, steering his bicycle with one hand and with the other clasping a great bunch of yellow roses which he had just gathered out of his own garden, a cap moved back on his thick brown hair, the large blue eyes with their long lashes looking out star-like upon the world—an indescribably virile and beautiful boy, the kindness and wisdom of his expression somehow belying his youth.

  I see him lying face down among the poppies and following with his eyes his kites soaring against the high blue of the California skies, past the tops of the giant sequoias and eucalyptus which he so dearly loved. . . .

  I see him on a May morning leaning from the balustrade of a veranda sweet with honeysuckle, to watch two humming birds circling around each other in their love ecstasy. He was a captive of beauty—the beauty of bird and Bower, of sea and sky and the icy vastness of the Arctic world. No one could echo more truthfully the “Behold, I have lived” of Richard Hovey. . . .

  “Behold, I have lived!”27

  It is for others to know his life through his attributed credo, written to an Australian activist for women’s rights, Vida Goldstein. The original is lost but was recalled by London’s great-nephew Milo Shepard:I would rather be ashes than dust!

  I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should

  be stifled by dry-rot.

  I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than

  a sleepy and permanent planet.

  The function of man is to live, not to exist.

  I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.

  I shall use my time .28

  EPILOGUE

  Charmian Kittredge London had devoted herself to her husband and his career. She had not been blind to his temper or his infidelities, nor was she ever bashful about registering her hurt. She later said that the night he died was the first sound sleep she’d had in weeks. A casket was brought to the ranch; London was laid out in a favorite gray suit and taken to Oakland for a funeral service. She did not go, according that time for his first family and a select few of The Crowd. George Sterling read a poem he composed for the occasion, full of thous and thines and farewells, but he was too broken up to have written anything truly memorable. After the b
ody was cremated, Sterling and some others brought the urn back to Beauty Ranch, where a small crypt had been prepared in a glade where the children of the previous owners were also buried. It was the place he had asked, when the time came, to be interred. A great block of maroon lava, rejected for having been too large to use in building the Wolf House, was positioned over his ashes.

  In widowhood, Charmian became the keeper of Jack London’s flame, traveling and speaking widely about him and his books. From the same lava quarry that gave rise to Wolf House she built a large, comfortable home on Beauty Ranch, the House of Happy Walls, which she turned into a museum of his papers and artifacts, and she guided the posthumous publication of many remaining manuscripts. She was too vital a human being to grieve for the rest of her life, however. A year and a quarter after his death, she was engaged in an affair with Harry Houdini (sometimes referred to in her diary as “Magic One”) and had many other lovers through her long and full life, once juggling over half a dozen suitors at one time.