Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  4 Hamaker, “The Commonweal Comes to Kearney, 1894,” www.bchs.us/BTales_197905.html.

  5 Etulain, ed., Jack London on the Road, 47-48.

  6 London, Jack London and His Times, 75-76.

  7 Flora to London, May 22, 1894, in London, Book of Jack London, 160-161.

  8 Etulain, ed., Jack London on the Road, 51.

  9 Ibid., 35.

  10 Sinclair, Jack, 23.

  11 London, The Road, “Pinched.”

  12 Ibid. London’s outrage on his being railroaded to jail was longstanding and consistent enough that Charmian London, The Book of Jack London, 1: 183, continued to plead his case in emotional terms five years after his death.

  13 Erie County Penitentiary records, quoted in Kershaw, Jack London: A Life, 36.

  14 London, The Road, “The Pen.”

  15 See Noel, Footloose in Arcadia, 223-224.

  16 London to Elwyn Hoffman, June 17, 1900, in Letters, 1: 194.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 1: 188.

  2 Quoted in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 60.

  3 C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 1: 191.

  4 Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 100.

  5 Joan London, Jack London and His Times, 125-126.

  6 San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 1896.

  7 Bamford, The Mystery of Jack London, 44-45.

  8 London to Applegarth, November 14, 1898, Letters, 1: 20.

  9 London, John Barleycorn, Chapter 22.

  10 Hopper, “Tribute to London,” quoted in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 67.

  11 This and following letter quoted in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 18-21. Noel, Footloose in Arcadia, 18, also cites Flora’s liaison with Lee Smith. Unless he got the information from London, which seems improbable because London was deeply ashamed of his illegitimacy, his source may even have been Flora herself, whom he was known to have interviewed. Stasz, Jack London’s Women, 14, finds Chaney ’s account “contaminated by self-defense” but rightly concludes that his paternity was not certain. If Chaney actually believed that he was London’s father and was seeking to dodge responsibility, his tendency would have been to communicate less, not at such length.

  12 London, John Barleycorn, Chapter 23.

  13 London to Editor, Oakland Times, July 29, 1896, in Letters, 4.

  14 London to Mabel Applegarth, November 27, 1898, in Letters, 22.

  15 C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 1: 218.

  16 Johnston, American Radical, 57n43.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 Mrs. Applegarth to London, July 22, 1897, quoted in C. K. London, Book of Jack London, 1: 224-225.

  2 C. K. London, Book of Jack London, 1: 226.

  3 London to Mabel Applegarth, August 8, 1897, in Letters, 1: 11.

  4 “Like Argus of the Ancient Times,” Hearst Magazine, March 1917.

  5 Fred Thompson diary, quoted in Sinclair, Jack, 44.

  6 There is a thread of a story that London earned $3,000 by going back and piloting several dozen boats through the narrows. This seems to begin with Stone, Sailor on Horseback, 88, but is not credible. See Sinclair, Jack, 261n5. The story surfaces in O’Connor, Jack London, 88. The germ of the tale may lie in the fact that beginning the next year, the Northwest Mounted Police began requiring that Klondikers hire skilled pilots to get them through the rapids.

  7 C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 1: 225. See Sinclair, Jack, 46, for an assessment of Thompson’s assertion. Henderson Creek did later yield millions in gold, but it took heavy machinery to extract it.

  8 Quoted in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 77.

  9 Quoted in C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 1: 235.

  10 Jensen, Jack London at Stewart River, quoted in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 79.

  11 W. B. Hargrave to C. K. London, quoted in Book of Jack London, 1:237. By far the best synoptic comparison of characters and events actually experienced by London in the North, and the literary use he made of them, is Walker, Jack London and the Klondike, a very useful source.

  12 London, Klondike Diary, quoted in C. K. London, Book of Jack London, 1: 254.

  CHAPTER 7

  1 London to Editor of the Bulletin, September 17, 1898, quoted in Hendricks and Shepard, Letters, 3n; Labor, et. al., eds., Letters, 1: 18; and in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 83. One wonders how often and hard this editor chastised himself in later years.

  2 “The Mammon Worshippers” finally saw publication in the December 1976 issue of Saturday Evening Post—sixty years after London’s death.

  3 London to Mabel Applegarth, November 27, 1898, in Letters 1: 22.

  4 London to Mabel Applegarth, November 30, 1898, in Letters, 1: 24-25.

  5 London, “Introduction,” The Red Hot Dollar, vi-viii.

  6 London to Mabel Applegarth, November 30, 1898, in Letters, 1: 24.

  7 Atherton manuscript, quoted in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 85.

  8 London to Edward Applegarth, September 13, 1898, in Letters, 1: 12.

  9 London to Mabel Applegarth, December 25, 1898, in Letters, 1: 31-32.

  10 London to Corresponding Editor, Youth’s Companion, in Letters, 1: 41-42.

  11 London to Cloudesley Johns, February 10, 1899, in Letters, 1: 45.

  12 London to Johns, February 22, 1899, in Letters, 1: 46-49.

  13 The Fort Tejon Road is now Barrel Springs Road in Palmdale. The railroad needed flatter ground for its booster engines to get up energy to get trains over the San Gabriel Mountains. Harold was populated mostly by Chinese railroad workers; nearby Palmenthal had about sixty families of Swedish immigrants who, previous to starting their journey, had been told that when they began to encounter palm trees they would be near the ocean, and they mistook Joshua trees, giant cacti, for palms and settled in the desert. www.palmdalelibrary.org/history/.

  14 Genthe, As I Remember, 74.

  15 London, “The Impossibility of War,” archived online at www.jacklondonsnet/journalism/impossibility.html.

  16 C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 319-320.

  17 Austin, Earth Horizon, 302.

  18 C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 4-6.

  19 Noel, Footloose in Arcadia, 150.

  20 Not well known today, Peano was born in Parma, studied in Turin, and was working in the Oakland area by the early 1890s. Thirteen years London’s senior, he moved to Los Angeles soon after the Londons moved out of Villa Capriccioso. Most at home in the art of architecture, he often worked in hammered or undercut copper, and while most famous for his “Doors of Life,” he also designed numerous canal bridges in Venice, California. He died at age eighty-five in 1949. American Art Annual, 1925; Who’s Who in American Art 1938-41.

  21 Boylan, Revolutionary Lives, 24.

  22 London to Johns, February 23, 1902, in Letters, 1: 282-283.

  23 London to Anna Strunsky, January 5, 1902, in Letters, 1: 269-270.

  CHAPTER 8

  1 George Brett to London, December 27, 1901; London to Brett, January 4, 1902, in Letters, 1: 267. The American writer Winston Churchill (born three years before the British statesman of the same name) characterized Brett as having “an undoubted genius for publishing, but he possesses likewise the higher genius for friendship.” Quoted in Kershaw, Jack London: A Life, 110. Brett had published Churchill’s first novel, Richard Carvel, in 1899 to great success.

  2 Anna (Strunsky) Walling Manuscripts, quoted in Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, “Jack London and Anna Strunsky, Lovers at Cross-Purposes,” in Hodson and Reesman, eds., One Hundred Years a Writer, 29.

  3 London to Anna Strunsky, June 7, 1902, in Letters, 1: 297, and elsewhere.

  4 Stone, Sailor on Horseback, 166, and derivative works (e.g., Labor, Jack London, 91, and Kershaw, Jack London: A Life, 114) give the date as July 21. However, London’s first letter to Anna Strunsky written from the train is dated July 18. Letters, 1: 301.

  5 London to Strunsky, July 18, 1902, in Letters, 1: 301; Stone, Sailor on Horseback, 166.

/>   6 London to John Spargo, July 28, 1902, in Letters, 1: 302. The contemplated article, “How I Became a Socialist,” subsequently appeared in March 1903 and was collated into The War of the Classes in 1905.

  7 London to Strunsky, July 31, 1902, in Letters, 1: 303-304, and elsewhere. London sailed on the first Majestic, which went into service in 1890 and was retired in 1911; the later, more famous, and even larger Majestic was a German vessel (the former Bismarck) seized as a war prize during World War I. The captain of London’s ship was Edward J. Smith, who was later given commands of the ever-larger new ships Baltic, Adriatic, Olympic, and, to his doom, Titanic. Ironically, this first Majestic was pulled out of retirement to replace the Titanic late in 1912.

  8 London to Strunsky, August 16, 1902, in Letters, 1: 305.

  9 Hamilton, ed., The Tools of My Trade, 149.

  10 www.hssworld.org/doctorji/abajinarrations/1.htm . Bharatmata is a motherly personification of India, not dissimilar to the role played by Britannia to the English, or Marianne to the French.

  11 London, People of the Abyss, 63. James Connolly was quite correct in his assessment of the event being promoted as propaganda. After Queen Victoria’s nearly forty-year withdrawal from public life, Edward VII was acutely aware of the need to restore the monarchy to public favor. It was he who reinstituted public royal ceremonies now taken for granted, such as the state openings of Parliament, which had fallen into disuse.

  12 Marguerite Patton, The Coronation Cookbook, quoted at http://news.bbc.uk/1/hi/programmes/breakfast/1947639.stm. For many of the poor, this was actually their second coronation banquet. At the time the king took ill, the food for the first feast had already been lardered into the palace kitchen. Cartloads of mutton, quail, sturgeon, asparagus, and strawberries were donated to the poor in W hitechapel. Gile St. Aubyn, Edward VII, Prince & King (New York: Atheneum, 1979).

  13 Auerbach, Male Call, 139.

  14 London to Cloudesley Johns, August 17, 1902, in Letters, 1: 305.

  15 Tavernier-Courbin, “Jack London and Anna Strunsky, Lovers at Cross-Purposes,” in Hodson and Reesman, eds., One Hundred Years a Writer, 30.

  16 London to Strunsky, August 21, 1902, and August 25, 1902, in Letters, 1: 305-308.

  17 Tavernier-Courbin, “Jack London and Anna Strunsky: Lovers at Cross Purposes,” in Hodson and Reesman, eds., One Hundred Years a Writer, 31.

  18 http://users.ox.ac.uk/~peter/workhouse/. Workhouses most commonly occupied not one building but large complexes housing the different wards and functions. Many such structures remain, having been converted to other uses; the Whitechapel Workhouse, however, was demolished in 1965.

  19 “The Story of Workhouses,” http://users.ox.ac.uk/~peter/workhouse/.

  20 London to Strunsky, September 28, 1902, in Letters, 1: 312-313.

  21 Quoted in Kershaw, A Life, 121.

  22 London to Brett, November 21, 1902, in Letters, 1: 317-323.

  23 O’Connor, Jack London, 170; Brett to London, December 17, 1902; London to Brett, December 30, 1902, in Letters, 1: 331.

  24 Johnston, American Radical, 76; London, People of the Abyss, 288.

  25 Boston Herald, November 28, 1903; Cavalier, No. 11.

  26 London Daily News, November 28, 1903.

  27 Quoted in Kershaw, A Life, 120. “If I Were God One Hour” was a poem that was one of London’s first published works. It appeared in San Francisco’s Town Topics on May 11, 1899.

  28 London to Ina Coolbrith, December 15, 1906, in Letters, 2: 650; Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 115. James was not universally well thought of by the native California writers, some of whom thought he was faking his Indian material. Austin, Earth Horizon, 296.

  29 London to Brett, November 21, 1902, in Letters, 1: 318.

  CHAPTER 9

  1 London, “How I Became a Socialist,” The Comrade, March 1903. Stasz, American Dreamers, 129, and others have noted that London’s understanding of Nietzsche was incomplete, as he seemed to equate the Übermensch with the “Blond Beast,” where in the philosopher’s actual scheme the “Blond Beast” was what the Superman could rise above.

  2 Bamford, The Mystery of Jack London, 129-130. London inscribed the Bamfords’ copy of The Call of the Wild to them on July 23, 1903; although The People of the Abyss preceded it in publication, London gave the couple their copy the following Christmas. Ibid., 174. In fairness, Georgia did possess some grasp of the sentiments of the underclass, citing in her memoir the story of an English judge, when he was unable to understand a defendant who was an old Cockney woman, asking her what class she was from. She retorted that there were only two, “them that ’as, and them that ’asn’t.” “Perhaps,” Bamford allowed, “the old woman was right.” Ibid., 92.

  3 London to Charmian Kittredge, [early] July 1903, in Letters, 1: 370-371. Charmian’s own memoir gives a more complete text, adding a paragraph that he chose her because he found in her qualities that he thought he would find only in a man, with woman-love thrown into the bargain. Book of Jack London, 2: 83.

  4 London to Kittredge, [early] July 1903, in Letters, 1: 372.

  5 London to George Sterling, July 11, 1903, in Letters 1: 374-375.

  6 Reproduced in Hamilton, ed., The Tools of My Trade, 262.

  7 London to Brett, August 10, 1903, in Letters, 1: 378.

  8 London to Kittredge, January 13, 1904, in Hendricks and Shepard, Jack London Reports, 4.

  9 London to Kittredge, January 20, 21, and 24, 1904, in Hendrick and Shepard, Jack London Reports, 5-6, also in C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 1: 404-405.

  10 Davis, Adventures and Letters, 311; C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 402.

  11 Dunn, World Alive, 115.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Quoted in Kingman, Pictorial Biography, 136.

  14 London, John Barleycorn, 262-263.

  15 London to Brett, April 3, 1904, in Letters, 1: 423.

  16 C. K. London, Book of Jack London, 1: 412-415.

  17 London to Kittredge, March 11, 1904, in Letters, 1: 419.

  18 Dunn, World Alive, 119.

  19 Hendricks and Shepard, Jack London Reports, 76.

  20 See, for instance, Sinclair, Jack, 106.

  21 Hendricks and Shepard, Jack London Reports, 105, 103.

  22 C. K . London, Book of Jack London, 1: 420.

  23 Hendricks and Shepard, Jack London Reports, 53, 103.

  24 Ibid., 123-124.

  25 Davis to Mother, June 13, 1904, in Adventures and Letters, 305. Six weeks later Davis’s disgust with Japanese mendacity was approaching London’s own: “The only mistake I made was in not going home the first time they deceived us instead of waiting.” Some weeks further on: “So, our half-year of time and money, of dreary waiting, of daily humiliations at the hands of officers . . . was to the end absolutely lost to us.” Ibid., 311.

  26 Quoted in O’Connor, Jack London, 198.

  27 Maurice Magnus to London, September 21, 1911; London to Magnus, October 23, 1911, in Letters, 2: 1042-1043. Curiously, Magnus framed his question around the character Burning Daylight, but London answered in terms of Wolf Larsen as well. After his death in 1920, Magnus’s Memoir of the French Foreign Legion, about his service during World War I, was published with a scathingly critical introduction-remembrance by D. H. Lawrence, which elicited disapproval from other writers. Magnus may also have been emboldened to write London on this topic by having read The Game, whose praise of male beauty Magnus might well have thought exceeded purely aesthetic appreciation.

  CHAPTER 10

  1 San Francisco Chronicle, June 30, 1904. Given the heat of their on-and-off relationship, Stasz, Jack London’s Women, 92, found her protestations somewhat wanting.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Austin, Earth Horizon, 301; London to Stoddard, June 21, 1900, in Letters, 1: 195.

  4 The biographical entry for Stoddard at www.newadvent.org/cathen/14298b.htm draws on previous Catholic accounts based on his teaching career. His online biography at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
/Charles_Warren_Stoddard reprises the same material, with the addition of his sexuality. For an example of Stoddard’s defiant living out of his sexuality heedless of the stigma and consequences, see Tayman, The Colony, 126ff.

  5 Sterling to Bierce, September 5, 1903, and Bierce to Sterling, September 12, 1903, in Bierce, A Much Misunderstood Man, 110-111.