Great Bastards of History

by Juré Fiorillo

  But Jack’s education thrived. He was later to say that he taught himself to read, while giving credit for his voracious appetite for books to an Oakland librarian, Ina Coolbrith, who later became California’s first poet laureate. He haunted libraries, reading and studying books to learn the techniques of writing and expressing himself. Although weak in arithmetic and other subjects, Jack completed elementary school, and it was recommended that he go on to Oakland’s public high school, one of the first high schools established in California. But Flora insisted he seek a job to bring income to the hard-pressed family, which included London’s two daughters by his first marriage.

  THE BOY SOCIALIST

  At age thirteen—there were no effective child-labor laws in 1889—Jack was working in a cannery, putting in shifts of up to eighteen hours a day. The independent youth soon had enough of slave conditions. He persuaded Jennie to lend him money and bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle, the first of many vessels he would own and use as background for stories. He became an “oyster pirate,” poaching on shellfish beds in the San Francisco Bay mudflats at night and selling his loot in the Oakland fish markets in the morning. Oystermen ganged up on him and rammed his vessel. Then he switched sides and joined the California Fish Patrol. Next he signed on to a sealing schooner, the Sophie Sutherland, bound for Japan. When he returned, jobs were scarce, and he took up the life of a hobo, hopping freights and traveling cross-country on the new transcontinental railroad.

  London later wrote vividly—and horrifyingly—about that period. He was arrested for vagrancy in Buffalo, New York, and sentenced to thirty days in the Erie County Penitentiary. “Manhandling was only one of the minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen,” he wrote in The Road, his story of his hobo life. “I said ‘unprintable,’ but in justice I should say ‘unthinkable.’” Returning home again, he worked long and arduous hours in a jute mill and then in an electric power station. Those experiences and what he saw as the exploitation of the working class turned him into a socialist. Soon he was making fiery speeches against the ownership class on Oakland street corners. He became known as “the boy socialist” and even ran for governor.

  All this convinced London, as he later wrote, that he must earn a living by his brains, not his hands and muscles. He went back to Oakland High School at the age of nineteen—this time with his mother’s (and Mammie Jennie’s) encouragement—and earned a diploma. He also began writing, starting with two stories in the student magazine. It was this drive to find interesting stories and plots to write about that brought him to the old newspaper files in the Oakland Library in 1896.

  When Jack received the response from his supposed father and confronted Flora with it, he was devastated. Not that he considered Chaney an admirable father figure; he viewed Chaney’s charges of Flora’s infidelity despicable, and his claim that he could not have fathered a child because he was impotent, ludicrous. (Chaney, it turned out, had been married three times before he met Flora, and he was to marry three more times after deserting her. By “impotent,” he apparently meant “sterile.”) Jack had no sympathy for the man who claimed he was the victim, the one wronged and slandered. But Jack had now, at age twenty-one, been brought face-to-face with the hidden truth about his birth: He was illegitimate. He had to get away and wrestle to comprehend that knowledge.

  In single file, an army of goldseekers left their makeshift tent city to cross a mountain pass in quest of the supposed riches of the Klondike. The Granger Collection, New York

  IN CANADA, LONDON DEVELOPED SCURVY AND SUFFERED THE CLASSIC CONSEQUENCES—SWOLLEN GUMS, DETERIORATION OF THE JAWBONES, YELLOWING COMPLEXION, AND SUBCUTANEOUS BLEEDING AROUND THE FACE. IT WAS ALSO THE BEGINNING OF HIS HEAVY DRINKING AND CONSEQUENT ALCOHOLISM.

  In July 1897, two ships arrived in Seattle carrying miners loaded with bags of gold taken from Dawson Creek in Canada’s Yukon Territory. The news also coincided with a severe economic downturn and financial panic in the United States. Within days a stampede of eager gold seekers headed for the Yukon and the adjoining Klondike area of Alaska. Eleven days after the first cries of “Gold!” Jack joined the stampede, seeking relief from the emotional pressures of the previous few months, but also adventure and the prospect of perhaps getting rich in the process. As winter 1897 set in, Jack, his brother-in-law James Shepard, and others were frantically finishing up a jerrybuilt cabin in the Skagway area of Alaska.

  It was a hideous winter. Canada had set strict rules that immigrants to the area must carry a half year’s supply of food. But when more than 100,000 would-be prospectors descended on the frozen territory, famine quickly set in. Many of the miners faced starvation and took to eating anything at hand, like Charlie Chaplin boiling his shoes in The Gold Rush. Jack developed scurvy, an affliction caused by vitamin C deficiency because of a lack of fresh vegetables and fruits in the diet. He suffered the classic consequences—swollen gums, deterioration of the jawbones, yellowing complexion, and subcutaneous bleeding around the face. He lost his four front teeth, and his complexion was blotched with pockmarks that he carried the rest of his life. It was also the beginning of lifelong kidney disorders and of his heavy drinking and consequent alcoholism. However, he emerged with a treasure trove of experiences that he drew on for his most famous literary works, including Call of the Wild, White Fang, To Build a Fire, and Burning Daylight.

  A WRITER’S PRODUCTIVE LIFE

  Jack had always regarded writing as a ticket out of poverty, a way of making a comfortable living without hard physical labor, and he struggled to prove it, a struggle he described in his semi-autobiographical novel of a young writer, Martin Eden. His first short story, since widely reprinted and anthologized, was “To the Man on the Trail,” published in January 1899. It was a story of hobo life, for which he was offered—and was never able to collect—five dollars. He first vowed to give up the whole business, but then, prompted by his mother, tried again. This time, a magazine called The Black Cat accepted his short story “A Thousand Deaths.” He received forty dollars, his first payment ever for writing. His career as a writer was off and running.

  Thanks partly to improved printing presses run by electric power, popular magazines were thriving and formed an insatiable maw for short-story writers. Book publishing was booming, too. Not only London but also other writers benefited. He became part of a prominent turn-of-the-century writers’ group, much of it based on the West Coast, that included many whose names were to become familiar and whose works were to become classics—Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, Theodore Dreiser, and Lincoln Steffens. It was also the heyday of the muckraker. London began turning out stories at a torrid pace. Most were immediately gobbled up.

  In 1903, London sent unsolicited to The Saturday Evening Post the completed manuscript of a very long short story. It depicted the life of a domesticated mixed-breed dog that had been snatched from a family farm in Northern California, then sold in Alaska for use as a sled dog. There the dog is brutalized, breaks free, and joins a wolf pack. He eventually becomes its leader.

  The Post editor replied that he would purchase The Call of the Wild if the author would cut five thousand words from it and name a price. London agreed and set the figure at three cents a word. Published first by the Post and then as a book by Macmillan, it immediately became a huge seller, and it grew into a classic. The book London once described as “just another dog story,” has been republished many times, has been translated into more than twenty languages, and occupies a prominent niche in the pantheon of American literature. London was to say ruefully later that perhaps he should have named a somewhat higher price.

  But if Call of the Wild didn’t bring London riches, it did bring him fame. Now he was not only a best-selling author but also a national—even international—celebrity. After Call of the Wild, in 1903, London turned himself into a virtual writing machine. In rapid succession came The Sea Wolf (1904), The Game (1905), Before Adam (1907), The Iron Heel (1908), Martin Eden (1909), Burning Da
ylight (1910), and Adventure (1911). And that was only the novels. In between came short-story collections, autobiographical memoirs such as The Road, and The People of the Abyss, a polemical report of the plight of the slum dwellers in the East End of London.

  London set out to write one thousand words each day and largely reached his goal. And they were well-crafted words, too. Near the end of his career, needing money badly, he was turning out potboilers that admittedly had little literary merit. But his earlier works were almost universally well received and admired. All told, he wrote fifty-three books, and by 1913 he was earning the 2009 equivalent of $2 million a year.

  London’s personal life was frenzied—and tumultuous—too. In 1900 he married Bessie Maddern, as his career was taking off. They had been friends for several years and agreed that they had married out of friendship and convenience, not love, and because they both wanted children. They had two daughters, Joan and Bessie, later called Becky. Joan was to become herself a writer, depicting, sometimes harshly, the family relationship in her memoir, Jack London and His Times.

  IN 1916 JACK LONDON TURNED FORTY, AND IT WAS AN UNHEALTHY FORTY. THE LONG YEARS OF HEAVY DRINKING TOOK THEIR TOLL.

  At first, “Mother Girl” and “Daddy Boy,” as they called each other, seemed a compatible married couple. They both doted on the children, as family photos show. But Jack’s drinking increased, and he would frequently stay out all night. Bessie came to believe that he was visiting prostitutes. Fearing he might contract a venereal disease and thus infect her, she “refused to let him in the room with her at night,” wrote biographer Clarice Stasz. The marriage became increasingly strained.

  Jack and Charmian London visited Hawaii during a year-long Pacific cruise. The result was a bestselling book, The Voyage of the Snark, which is credited with promoting Hawaii as a tourist destination. akg-images

  On July 24, 1903, Jack notified Bessie that he was leaving her and moving out of the house. Several bitter years followed while a divorce settlement was negotiated. The family split. Jack’s mother Flora complained, apparently with justification, that Bessie was manipulating the daughters and turning them against Jack, allegedly in the hope of obtaining a juicier property settlement. She took her son’s side uncompromisingly and refused to see Bessie again. Bessie struck back by denying Flora’s efforts to visit her granddaughters.

  In 1904, Jack’s publisher, George Platt Brett Sr., hired a new secretary and introduced her to Jack. Charmian Kittredge was livelier, bubblier, and definitely prettier than Bessie. She was also openly sexier. “Finding that this prim and genteel lady was lustful and sexually vigorous was like discovering a hidden treasure,” Stasz wrote in American Dreamers: Charmian and Jack London. Jack quickly found a pet name for her, too. He called her “Mate Woman.”

  They married in 1905. They were a perfect couple, friends said. They went everywhere together and shared the same interests; she read and critiqued his writing, and he helped her with her own writing. She was eventually to write three books. In 1907, London bought a yacht, the Snark, and they spent two years cruising the Pacific; London turned the voyage into another best seller, The Cruise of the Snark. They also spent six weeks in Hawaii, which had just become an American territory. The Hawaii-based stories London wrote afterward are credited with Hawaii overcoming the stigma as a leper colony and turning it into a tourist destination.

  London needed best sellers by then. In 1905, he bought one thousand acres in Sonoma County, California, in the remote Valley of the Moon near the village of Glen Ellen (now comprising Jack London State Historic Park). He called it Beauty Ranch and endeavored to make the property a model ranch and showplace for his ideas of progressive land use and agriculture, which are now recognized as well ahead of their time. He purchased more land and confessed that he now wrote “for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that belongs to me.” He was chronically in debt.

  London began constructing a 15,000-square-foot mansion built of local redwood and stone and brought in architects from Japan and Europe as well as the United States to design it. Two weeks before he and Charmian were to move in, “Wolf House” burned to the ground. Arson was suspected, but no one was ever arrested. (The Wolf House ruins, left undisturbed, are an attraction at Jack London State Historic Park.) The ranch itself was a financial failure, a steady drain on his income that he struggled to staunch. Neighbors said the city boy was a poor manager and absentee owner who neglected the property for months at a time.

  In 1916, Jack London turned forty, and it was an unhealthy forty. The kidney disorder that had plagued him for years steadily worsened, causing great pain that he could only assuage with increasingly stronger injections of morphine. The long years of heavy drinking took their toll, too. By November his kidneys were failing, and he was slipping in and out of consciousness. Still he insisted on writing, and he began making notes for an autobiography.

  On November 22, he had an acute attack of dysentery, compounded by the kidney failure. Clearly sinking, he gave himself a morphine injection and then propped himself up in bed to read. When Charmian looked in later, his eyes were closed, his head on his chest. She assumed he was asleep and tiptoed away. Next morning the man who had risen from illegitimate birth and hardship to become one of America’s literary lions was found dead, the open book still in his hand.

  Because London had written so often and so graphically about suicide, the rumor spread (and still persists) that he took his own life, perhaps with a deliberate overdose of morphine. The death certificate gave the official cause of death as uremic poisoning, complicated by morphine.

  His “Mate Woman” outlived him by many years, dying in 1955. The mother who had once wept of her “badge of shame” outlived him, too. Flora Wellman London, long crippled by arthritis, died on January 4, 1922, aged seventy-nine. Jennie Prentiss, the bastard child’s loyal “other mother,” was with her.

  CHAPTER 12

  LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

  LEGENDARY, BUT NOT LEGITIMATE

  1888–1935

  THE “ARAB REVOLT” OPENED A NEW CHAPTER IN THE WORLD WAR I STRUGGLE FOR THE MIDDLE EAST. THE MAN WHO ENGINEERED IT WAS THE BASTARD SON OF A BRITISH NOBLEMAN WHO WOULD GO DOWN IN HISTORY.

  IT WAS ALL SO UNEXPECTED. MINUTES BEFORE, WORLD WAR I TURKISH infantrymen were mobilizing in trenches cut into a desolate desert hillside above the Gulf of Aqaba, at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula, in 1917 part of the Ottoman Empire, now Jordan. The July morning sun already glared down mercilessly, blurring their vision and conjuring up mirages that danced across the barren landscape. The Turks looked longingly yet nervously toward the cooling Gulf waters and the Red Sea beyond. Their commanders were wary of a possible assault on their position from the sea, so the trenches had been constructed to repel attacks from that direction. Behind them, to the east, lay the Great Nefudh Desert, one of the most desolate, waterless, and forbidding deserts on Earth. No attack could possibly come from that direction. The Nefudh was an impassable barrier.

  Suddenly the stillness of the desert morning was broken by the crackle of rifle fire, then the thunder of pounding hooves. As still-sleepy soldiers turned toward the noise, a wave of horse-men, firing their guns and shouting in a mysterious language, roared down on their unprotected rear. Then startlingly and frighteningly, the horsemen were joined, even outpaced, by a phalanx of desert tribesmen on camels, hundreds of camels, their desert costumes flapping, their steeds’ necks stretched out until they were almost parallel to the ground. Standing as they rode, the riders picked off Turks before they had an opportunity to raise their weapons.

  Sun-bronzed and dressed in flowing robes and headdress, “Lawrence of Arabia” passed for an Arab although he was only five feet, six inches and spoke Arabic with an Oxford accent.

  The frightened infantry were no match for the attackers. The Arabs’ leader, in a voluminous white robe with pristine Arab headdress and on a racing camel, overtook the others and positioned his camel at the head of the attack. He was only y
ards from the foremost Turkish troops when his mount suddenly stumbled and plunged forward. The rider was catapulted headfirst over the camel’s neck. His head struck the ground with an emphatic thud. While the Turks scattered, fled, or held up their hands in abject surrender, the attacking force hurried to the side of their fallen leader. Woozily he waved them away and spoke first in the language of the desert Bedouins, then in the crisp English of an Oxford-educated gentleman.

  “Aurens! Aurens!” the relieved riders called to him, for they never had been able to master the pronunciation of his surname. “Lawrence of Arabia,” technically a major in the British army but actually an adviser to the Arab irregulars, that day vaulted from illegitimacy to legendary hero, a leader and architect of the “Arab Revolt” that helped bring Allied triumph and redrew the map of the Middle East.

  THE FIVE BROTHERS

  Thomas Edward Lawrence—known as “Ned” as a child—was the second of five sons, all illegitimate by puritanical Victorian standards. His Anglo-Irish father, Sir Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, was a nobleman who drew an inheritance from estates across Ireland acquired with the help of Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabethan times, and who would become 8th Baronet of Westmeath in 1914.

  Sir Thomas married Edith Hamilton, daughter of another wealthy landowner, and had four daughters. Edith is described by historians as a bitter, vindictive woman who became increasingly obsessed with religion and insisted that the family and household staff hold prayer sessions several times a day. She lectured the family incessantly about sin, a category in which, it is said, she eventually came to include marital relations.