Wolf: The Lives of Jack London
Page 39
Even as Charmian burned her lovers’ letters before she died, her honesty about London’s life and her willingness to cooperate with would-be biographers was equally evasive and inconsistent. She could be sharp in her criticism of books that were prepared without her permission, including Martin Johnson’s Through the South Seas with Jack London, which she described as “presumptuous.” In her own two-volume biography, The Book of Jack London, she omitted certain unsavory aspects of his character, although she was candid about others. She encouraged his daughter, Joan, in writing her biography but declined to open her papers, or her memory, to others, and forced at least one unapproved book to be withdrawn from sale. Irving Stone finally obtained her cooperation by persistent and obsequious attention so he could write Sailor on Horseback.
By 1940 she was somewhat impaired by a series of small strokes, but she was present in 1943 at the launching of the Liberty Ship S.S. Jack London. She was eighty-four when she passed away at home early in 1955; she was cremated, and the great lava stone was moved from atop London’s grave to place her ashes next to his.
London’s beloved and devoted stepsister Eliza Shepard continued to manage the ranch in an amicable arrangement with Charmian; after her death it passed to descendant Milo Shepard, who oversaw its transition into the Jack London State Park.
Charmian, as executor of his estate, continued to provide for his dependants. Flora Wellman Chaney London, hard to the end, died in January 1922. She was survived by several months by Jennie Prentiss, who because of increasing senility had been placed in a home. Jennie was ninety-one. Charmian was generous in her treatment of London’s former wife, Bess, who never ceased blaming her for destroying her marriage. Perhaps the most succinct characterization of Bess Maddern London was that bestowed by her daughter Becky. Once asked what her mother’s occupation was, she replied that she was a professional martyr.
Even as she was torn between her feuding parents, Joan London became torn between her mother, who hated Charmian, and Charmian herself, who was blameless in that matter and mentored Joan in her own attempt at a literary career. Even though Joan was painfully aware that her mother had dedicated her life to poisoning her and her sister against their father, Joan’s biography, Jack London and His Times, is nonetheless flavored with that toxin. Dour and humorless herself, her biography alternates facts of London’s life with essays on the development of socialism, a cause to which she was devoted. Becky was too young to share Joan’s bitter memories of their father’s desertion, and took more after him in hale and adventurous temperament. Their divergent personalities led to rifts between the sisters from time to time. Becky did not visit her father’s grave until well into her old age.
Ina Coolbrith, the Oakland librarian who took an interest in London when he was only ten years old, which he never forgot, went on to become the poet laureate of California. She was accorded many honors, including the presidency of the Congress of Authors and Journalists for the Panama-Pacific Exhibition of 1915, and she was twice asked to compose graduation odes for the University of California. She saved some of her best work for her golden years, published posthumously in Wings of Sunset. She passed away at eighty-seven in 1928; the legislature adjourned the day of her funeral, and a peak in the Sierra Nevada that overlooks the pass where she first entered the state was named for her.
Anna Strunsky’s comradely marriage to William English Walling, a co-founder of the NAACP, fell apart over irreconcilable party differences. As one of a family of Russian Jews driven from home by czarist pogroms, she embraced Bolshevism. He was of a prominent New England family and espoused a milder American socialism, deploring Bolshevism. She was a pacifist during World War I; he endorsed the U.S. role in it. She bore him five children (four lived) before they separated. Walling obtained a Mexican divorce in 1932, which she declined to recognize, and he died four years later. Anna maintained an avid interest in social justice until her death; she was just short of eighty-five when she passed away in 1964.
George Sterling, without his Wolf, went into a long and sad decline. Among the Carmel bohemians it was an article of identity to carry a vial of cyanide, and Carrie Sterling quaffed hers not long after London’s death, freeing her widower to relocate to New York, where he was regarded as a once-talented regional has-been. He returned to San Francisco, and by the time the real quality of much of his work was rediscovered, and some honors began to flow his way (H. L. Mencken nominated him as the first American poet laureate) he was too broken down to attend an event held in his honor, and he swallowed his cyanide a few days short of the tenth anniversary of London’s death.
Perhaps the strangest tale of the London circle after his death is that of Jack London himself. By the end of his life he had regained much of the popularity he lost during his most intense proselytizing for social justice, but during the national hysteria of the “Red Scare” in the 1920s, regard for him fell again in the glare of shallow patriotism. Under J. Edgar Hoover the FBI compiled a posthumous dossier on his supposed anti-American sympathies, and during the McCarthy era of the 1950s he came into disfavor once more. It was the unsinkable, compelling nature of his stories, however, underpinned still by The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, that prevented his assignation to literary ignominy. It has been left to our own generation, incensed by financial outrages on the part of corporate tycoons that devastated the middle class and led to the economic collapse of late 2008, to realize that London in his clarion calls for social justice was articulating abiding truths that our country seems doomed to have to learn over and over and over and over.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea of publishing a literary biography in today’s marketplace is a brave one, so special thanks are owed to my agent, Jim Hornfischer, for his enthusiasm for it, and to the editors at Basic Books, Lara Heimert and Brandon Proia, for their solicitous encouragement during the process. The market being what it is, I was grateful for the positive testimonials of two booksellers, Jo Virgil and Frank Campbell, that they believed people actually would buy a biography of London.
Further, thanks are extended to Dorothy Lazard of the Oakland Public Library, Sandra Johnston of the Alaska State Library, Julia DeVore of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, and most particulary to Natalie Russell at the Huntington Library. An extra thanks to Ms. Lael Morgan for lending me her copies of the Londons’ photographs taken during the voyage of the Snark, and to the Huntington Library for kindly giving permission to reproduce photographs from its London archive.
NOTES
PREFACE
1 The interview with Shepard is archived at the California Digital Library, www.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docld+kt8p30068x&doc.view=content&chunk.id=d0e3759&toc.depth=1&brand=calisphere&anchor.id=0.
CHAPTER 1
1 “A Discarded Wife,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 4, 1875.
2 Mood, “Astrologer from Down East,” 778-782.
3 Quoted in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 22.
4 Mood, “Astrologer from Down East,” 792.
5 www.spirithistory.com/96calhis.html, accessed August 16, 2008; Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 11.
6 Quoted in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 19.
7 Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 13; cf. Stasz, Jack London’s Women, 7.
8 The details of casualties among the family that owned her was something that Virginia Prentiss would never discuss, saying only that she and her former mistress were the only survivors. Stasz, Jack London’s Women, 7.
9 London, John Barleycorn, Chapter 3. Because of the varying pagination in the many editions of this work, citations from this autobiographical treatment are to chapter.
10 London to Houghton Mifflin Co., January 31, 1900, in Labor, et al., Letters of Jack London (hereinafter Letters), 1:148.
11 For the obligatory mentions of Signa see Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 27; Stone, Sailor on Horseback, 21; Sinclair, Jack, 6; O’Connor, Jack London, 33; and Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 24.
Perhaps the most readable of the widely available biographies, Kershaw, Jack London: A Life, oddly omits Signa from his childhood reading list at page 16. For varying views of Ramé’s life, see Yvonne French, Ouida: A Study in Ostentation (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1938), or Eileen Bigland, Ouida, The Passionate Victorian (London and New York: Jarrolds, 1950). Ouida’s life bore other strange similarities to London’s, including her similar output of about forty volumes, and her lifelong love of dogs and horses, for whose welfare she was a passionate advocate. She died in Viareggio in 1908.
12 Ouida, Signa (London: Chapman & Hall, 1875), 1-2.
13 Frank Atherton, Jack London in Boyhood Adventures, manuscript quoted in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 32.
14 C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 1:59.
15 Bamford, Mystery of Jack London, 158.
16 “Nobody at home bothered their heads over what I read,” London wrote Coolbrith many years later. “I was an eager, thirsty, hungry little kid. . . . You were a goddess to me.” London to Coolbrith, December 15, 1906, in Letters, 2: 650-651. The Overland Monthly later resumed publication, but it lacked the spark of the original, leading San Francisco literary capo Ambrose Bierce, later well acquainted with London, to refer to it as the Warmed-Overland Monthly.
17 See London to Marion Humble, December 11, 1914, in Letters 3: 1391-1392.
18 Noel, Footloose in Arcadia, 20. Noel interviewed Flora in 1905 at the floodtide of London’s early fame, but this is a source I have used with caution. His sometimes unsympathetic account of London’s life cannot help but have been colored by the fact that London’s eventual break with him was acrimonious and even abusive—not unusual, for London. However, Noel was also known to defend London long after he had motive to color his reminiscence in negative ways, as seen in Stasz, American Dreamers, 206. Noel’s book contains errors, but in general has the accuracy of a skilled journalist writing often without documentary buttressing. Given that Footloose in Arcadia is as much about George Sterling and Ambrose Bierce as it is about London, I have used it when it can illuminate and can either be substantiated or is so clearly within London’s behavioral parameters that one can presume it is truthful—and bearing in mind that others close to Jack London sometimes went an equal distance to present him in a positive light, as seen in Milo Shepard’s comments on Charmian’s Book of Jack London in “The Jack London Story and the Beauty Ranch,” interviews conducted by Caroline C. Crawford, 70, archived at www.archive.org/details/londonbeautyranc00sheprich.
19 Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 32-35.
CHAPTER 2
1 Higgins, “Jack London on the Waterfront,” archived online at www.jacklondons.net/first_and_Last_chance.html. The sign over Heinold’s bar was a reference to the prohibitionist, correctly spelled Carry Nation, famous for breaking up saloons with a hatchet. In 1998 the owner of the bar maintained that Heinold purchased the dictionary for London when he was ten. San Francisco Chronicle, January 9, 1998, at www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1998/01/09/EB29535.DTL.
2 Oysters native to San Francisco Bay were exhausted soon after settlement and were supplanted by oysters from farther north on the Pacific coast; they were the ones replaced by the Atlantic transplants. Booker, “Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates on San Francisco Bay,” 63-88. In fact, the very first game conservation law enacted by California, in 1851, protected the proprietary rights of those who transplanted oysters of other than local species, but it was the railroad that appropriated the law into a scope that none foresaw and created such public discontent. See “Department of Fish and Game Celebrates 130 Years of Serving California,” Outdoor California, November-December 1999, reproduced at www.dfg.ca.gov/publications/history.html.
3 Higgins, “Jack London on the Waterfront,” www.jacklondons.net/first_and_Last_chance.html. London’s recollection in John Barleycorn, Chapter 7, was that Jennie Prentiss was enthusiastic about lending him the money.
4 One biography that accepts the story is Kershaw, Jack London: A Life, 17. However, Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 37, points out that Mamie and her sister were chaperoned, which makes this rendition of their first coupling somewhat suspect. One might also note that the expression to “make love” in this era might mean only innocent sweet talk; it did not become the usual euphemism for having sex until some decades later. London did aver to Cloudesley Johns that she was his mistress. London to Johns, March 30, 1899, in Letters, 60.
5 C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 1: 84-85.
6 Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 42-43.
7 London, John Barleycorn, Chapters 5, 11.
8 The description of “Old Scratch” Nelson in London’s later autobiographical John Barleycorn might lead one to think that he had been embellished for fictional use, but a similar description of him in C. K. London, Book of Jack London, 89, and his recollection by Johnny Heinold in Higgins, “Jack London on the Waterfront” make it seem a reasonable assumption that his essential character was accurately related.
9 “White and Yellow ” was the first story in Tales of the Fish Patrol, first published in The Youth’s Companion, February 16, 1905.
10 London to Corresponding Editor, Youth’s Companion, March 9, 1903, in Letters , 1:348-350. As London inscribed one copy of Tales of the Fish Patrol, “Find here, sometimes hinted, sometimes told, and sometimes made different, the days of my boyhood.” Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 44.
11 In addition to a growing amount of human waste, San Francisco Bay also started receiving the effluent from dairies, slaughterhouses, three oil refineries, and a copper smelter. Booker, “Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates in San Francisco Bay,” 79-81.
CHAPTER 3
1 John Sutherland, “Appendix 1” in London, The Sea-Wolf, Oxford University Press ed., 2000.
2 Higgins, “Jack London on the Waterfront,” www.jacklondons.net/first_and_Last_chance.html.
3 San Francisco Chronicle, August 18, 1906. After the publication of The Sea-Wolf , the reporter was seeking to uncover its historical roots. Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 49-50, found documentation that the ship was only four years old, but that would not preclude the vessel from masquerading under other names if she was engaging in contraband trade.
4 Eames, “Jack London,” quoted in Kershaw, A Life, 22-23.
5 Noel, Footloose in Arcadia, 223-224. Stasz, Jack London’s Women, 33, summarily characterized London’s estimation of homosexuality as being “repugnant,” which leaps rather beyond his views expressed here and elsewhere, or that would be expected by his familiarity with the works of Josiah Flynt and Havelock Ellis. C. K. London, Book of Jack London, 1:97-98, wrote that London once defended himself with a dinner fork against the unwanted advances of a Greek sailor. Her comment that, “as for unnatural crimes, these were not admissible in his magnificently balanced body and mind,” does not showcase her at her most objective. Clearly, based on his remarks to Noel and Monahan, they were at least admissible.
6 London, John Barleycorn, Chapter 16.
7 London, “Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan,” San Francisco Morning Call, November 12, 1893. In John Barleycorn, Chapter 17, London places the hunting off the coast of Siberia, which was not likely as those waters were closed to sealing and patrolled by a Russian cruiser.
8 London, Cruise of the “Snark,” Foreword.
9 London, The Sea-Wolf, Chapter 17.
10 As with recollections of his oyster piracy, London’s fictional accounts of his adventures are sometimes used as source material in biographies on account of their factual basis, but London was given to such embellishment that the actual facts are inseparable from his storytelling. For an adept parsing of this episode, see Watson, “Jack London’s Yokohama Swim and His First Tall Tale,” extracted from Studies in American Humor and accessible at www.compedit.com/watson.htm.
11 London to Mabel Applegarth, November 30, 1898, in Letters, 1:25.
12 London, John Barleycorn, Chapter 18.
13 London did not record having visited any Asian brothels, but he seems to have mentioned it to his wife Charmian, as in her biography she acknowledges his having been the “squire of more than one Madame Chrysanthéme on her native heath.” C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 141. See also Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 68.
14 London, John Barleycorn, Chapter 20.
CHAPTER 4
1 Quoted in Etulain, ed., Jack London on the Road, 34. From Davis’s going home and London’s note in his diary, one might infer that London had pressured Davis to make the venture to begin with.
2 Ibid., 38.
3 Ibid., 56. The ring had been a gift from a dating interest named Lizzie Connelen.