After the death of famous people, many people try to appropriate their lives. This was the case with Jack London. The socialists were the most insistent, because they needed a writer who was proletarian and who had been a great success with the public. Even the Bolsheviks found in London’s works the voice of the oppressed American masses, and Jack London became the most widely read American author in Russia. The socialists interpreted his life as simply as possible; as the tragic story of an American revolutionary who had been seduced by capitalism. They praised his predictions of a grim dictatorship and Trotsky himself wrote that Jack London was a better prophet than Lenin. Others accused his wife of urging him to become a landlord, and blamed him for being ultimately corrupted by his own success. Only his daughter Joan, in her second unfinished and unpublished biography, saw him as a jaded man, full of doubts, who finally realised that society was to blame for his warped nature.
Joan died before she could complete her reconciliation chapter with her father, and his widow published two volumes of memories of him in 1921. She remained faithful to his legend and she has refused to forget it. She faithfully repeated all the myths that Jack had woven about his family and never mentioned that he was an illegitimate child. She claimed that he was the scion of a noble English family and a genius without equal.
Some members of London’s inner circle of friends have dismissed the official versions of his life. They claimed he committed suicide or even that he was poisoned by his own wife. They presented him as a young socialist who, after divorcing his first wife, had gone out and given himself over to debauchery. But Jack, who really loved to indulge in pleasure, was eventually killed by alcohol and drugs. It is also true that his close friends, both men and women, died very quickly after his death. This led to the legend of a suicide club, whose first victim was supposedly Jack.
His public image depended on extensive newspaper reports of what he was doing. He could not, of course, defend himself from the grave. The books had to speak for him, but unfortunately they were of varying quality. He may not have written the greatest American novel, but he liked to think of himself as the greatest American novelist of his time.
Those who emulated his way of life and his concise, clear, sometimes even rough way of writing, such as Ernest Hemingway, forgot to mention what they owed to Jack London. Even John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac forgot that London paved the way for the American adventure novel. Only Henry Miller admitted after his death that Jack London was the bravest novelist of his generation.
In a letter written shortly before his death, London stated that he was a farmer by profession. “What do I do? In short, I am trying to do what the Chinese have done for forty centuries. I am restoring the worn-out soil of our hills, destroyed by our wasteful, pioneer Californian farmers.”
In the end, he left the poverty of the city and the dream of the Red Revolution to devote himself to the ruined earth and the dream of the Green Revolution. Of course, it is not yet possible to deduce from all this who Jack London actually was. Because really, who was he?
“At the age of fifteen, Jack rebelled against everything he had ever been taught. He was terrified of fighting with the boys in the neighbourhood. He used to go to the harbour. He became the man of the house. Sometimes we couldn’t stand him.”
Flora, his mother, a woman full of energy and spiritualistic habits, knew how to say it. She was too busy to deal with her son. Like all poor Californians, she was looking for a recipe to get rich quick. As she failed to do so, she gradually became bitter and her small stature began to take a toll.
Jack was her illegitimate son. John London, whom the boy thought was his father, was a kindly man, but in poor health, ready to take on any job. The family moved around a lot. From San Francisco across the bay to Oakland and then to a farm in Alameda. Living in the desolate countryside after having tasted the playgrounds of the city was miserable for Jack. The hardship soon drove them back to the impoverished Oakland area, close to the dilapidated harbour and San Francisco Bay, where Jack was left to fend for himself.
The boy had to work 14 hours a day in a cannery. He hated the loud machines and the endless repetition of the same movements. He saw no future for himself and his dream. Petty theft was the easiest way for him to get money. He became a predator of oyster farms, a regular visitor to harbour taverns, a brawler and a reveler. He stole money and clothes from drunken workers. If it hadn’t been for the public library and his love of books, he would probably have ended up the leader of a gang of thieves.
Once he was beaten so badly that he almost died, and he realised that his friends from the harbour were walking down the road of death. Some faster, others slower. He decided to take a different route and leave California. At the age of seventeen, he was working as a seaman on a 150-ton trimaran bound for Japan and the Bering Sea to hunt seals. The only thing he took with him were a few books.
At sea
He was not a sailor, of course, but he was willing to obey orders and learn. Despite his small stature – he was only 171 centimetres tall – he did not allow anyone to tower over him. The sailors considered him a good, if a little strange, comrade. He used every spare moment to pick up a book, and his oil lamp always burned long into the night. On the way to the Bonin Islands, they put him in charge of the rudder and he steered the ship through a storm. He was unbearably tired, but happy:
“I tamed the rudder with my own hands and guided hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of wood and iron through several million tonnes of wind and waves. I feel a pride within me that has no limits, that is mine and mine alone. It is something organic. Every fibre in me trembles with it.”
Finally, they set sail for Siberian waters, intending to hunt seals. It was a bloody job. Month after month, they pecked, skinned and threw the remains to the sharks. It was then that Jack realised the nature of a life-and-death struggle. It was a cruel battle for existence, dictated by the fur market. When the hunt was over, the ship sailed home to San Francisco, and Jack returned home after a night’s sleep with what money he had left.
He was lucky enough to read an invitation in the Morning Call newspaper for young readers to write a short poem. He entered the competition and sat down at an old typewriter. He won the first prize of 25 dollars, even though the letter was full of banalities. He wrote what he had experienced at sea and added a little imagination. The story began with the seal hunters going out to hunt and ended with the death of a sailor whose canvas-wrapped body did not sink because it was underweight, but was rocked by the waves of the stormy sea.
Readers were left breathless when they read the poem. But he spent the prize before he even got it. He had to find a job. He spent ten hours a day sewing sackcloth in a jute spinning mill, for a wage of little more than nothing. 1893 was a year of economic crisis and employers were constantly cutting wages. He was glad to get a job at all. The carefree days of his youth were over. He was trying to cross the social ladder that led from the bottom and climb higher so that he could court girls from better families.
He left the jute factory and became a coal loader for the boilers. He was strong, worked fast and worked a lot. He was later told that his salary of $30 a month saved the management two workers’ wages and brought the company a saving of $50 every month. He was frustrated, so he joined a large group of unemployed men who marched on Washington to protest about the lack of jobs. He travelled as a stowaway on freight trains, running from the police and shivering from the cold in the city parks. The unemployed were slowly drifting eastwards and he with them.
He was hungry, pillaging gardens and stealing bread, running away from brutal railway workers. He listened to the campfire talk of the workers, the Klansmen, the Indians, the ruined peasants, learned of the crimes of Pinkerton’s detectives and strikebreakers, and the principles of socialism became familiar to him, even though they meant little to him.
But fewer and fewer of the unemployed were willing to stick it out to the end, and the movement slowly disintegrated. Sam somehow made it to Chicago and Niagara Falls, where he was jailed for 30 days for vagrancy. In prison, he experienced things he had never dreamed of. He was told that one in ten of the professional klutzes was said to be homosexual. His experience as a prisoner of war taught him that if you wanted to stay alive among the outcasts, you had to be depraved.
He then returned home to Oakland via Canada. It’s been six years since he left school, and he’s now decided to make up for it. At the age of nineteen, he found himself in a high school among sixteen-year-old boys. He had given up drink and studied hard, falling in love with girls and behaving awkwardly in front of them for fear of missing out on some sailor’s profanity. He had time to read Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Henri Saint-Simon, Joseph Fourier and the Communist Manifesto and thought that private property was acquired by theft. Soon he was preaching socialism to a small crowd in an Oakland park.
In August 1896, he took the university entrance exams, passed and became a student, but dropped out after the second trimester. Four years of study seemed too much, as he felt his time was limited and there was not enough money at home. But he did not give up writing. He wrote for up to fifteen hours a day, essays, sonnets, tragedies, sketches, and often what he wrote could not be read because he scribbled terribly. Many would say that he was illiterate, and his poor knowledge of grammar only added to this impression.
But the newspapers kept returning everything he wrote. Convinced that he could not make a living from writing, he took a job in the laundry at Belmont College. He was again a working stiff, selling his muscles rather than his brains. He vowed never to return to the hell of the manual labourer, so the Klondike gold rush easily lured him into a new adventure.
In July 1897, he boarded a steamer full of gold-seekers, packed on board like sardines. A quarter of a million people were trying to find their fortune along the Bonanza stream. But only fifty thousand made it there, and only one thousand returned richer than when they left. On the shore, when the ship arrived, there was indescribable chaos. Thousands of men were struggling under the weight of their luggage, and those who had no money to hire Indian porters got nowhere.
In the lower areas of Chilkoot, the heat was intense and Jack carried his luggage naked to the waist, but when they reached the top of the pass, the late August heat turned to cold and rain. An unseen snake of people and equipment snaked up the pass. They encountered mountains of abandoned supplies on the way to the top, then had to build boats or rafts to navigate the rapids to reach Dawson. Many drowned or went astray.
In Dawson, hunger was the biggest fear of all, and Jack and a few others decided to settle in an abandoned shack at the mouth of the Stewart River, which was said to be a vein of ore. Here they staked their sites.
But there was only enough gold for a handful, as gold miners did not have modern machines to dig through the river bed. Jack was disappointed. Even if he melted frozen gravel with a tailings fire and sifted the black earth for a grain of gold here and there, he earned no more than if he had worked in a cannery.
He returned to Dawson. He went from pub to pub, absorbing the incredible stories he heard from the gold diggers. The most important thing this winter was to survive. He knew he was burnt out, his body was in a desperate state and he wanted to go back to California. He was writing a diary which he hoped to be able to rework into a literary work. On the way, he survived scurvy and worked as a stoker on a ship to ensure his passage home. He returned there a year after he left, bringing back gold dust worth only four and a half dollars.
He wanted to make some money fast, so he sent his Alaskan stories to local newspapers. Most of them were rejected, saying it was no longer interesting. Then the local magazine, Overland Monthly, published eight stories from the far north and he got seven and a half dollars for each one. He believed he could make a living from writing, and this working philosophy helped him survive the first 15 harrowing months after his return to California.
He wrote cheap and fanciful articles for backwater magazines, supposedly to suit the tastes of his readers, and in October 1899 the Atlantic Monthly sent him a cheque for $120 for An Odyssey North. A publisher took heart and offered to publish his Alaskan stories in a book called Son of the Wolf.
He soon met his great love, 17-year-old Anna Strunsky. Her father’s house was open to intellectuals from the Bay Area and always packed for unknown guests. They met at a socialist rally and a passionate friendship began, tumultuous and full of stormy intellectual and physical differences. He was attracted to Anna but could not marry her because he had no money. He liked to talk about love, but he could not afford it. He wanted a woman with whom he could share a bed and who would take care of the children and leave him alone to read and write all day.
Anna, an intellectual student at Stanford University, was not what he wanted. He needed a modest woman who would not expect too much of him. And he found it. Bess Maddern was free because her fiancé had died, and Jack had already earned enough money from his writing to move with his mother to a better neighbourhood and rent a small villa. He took it and they married.
At first, they were quite happy. They enjoyed cycling and sex, Bess started to love him and he was determined to make their rational marriage a happy one. But something was missing. Repressed feelings were crippling him. Barely four months after their marriage, he wrote to Anna Strunsky, more passionately than ever. There was an intellectual bond between them that he could never have had with his wife. But his career was taking off at the age of twenty-four, and Son of the Wolf was well received. He was even paid in advance for commissioned stories.
East end
After his marriage and his literary success, he had to give up the port gangs and the young socialist workers and find friends in accordance with his profession. He did not meet with the socialists any more, although he did not leave socialism. His new circle of friends called themselves a clique. These were the elegant bohemians of San Francisco. It was here that he met George Sterling, a young, timid man full of ambition. George introduced him to the life of the elite, and Jack showed him the world of harbour cramps, boxing, gambling and easy girls. They gave each other what they lacked. Jack confessed only to him that marrying Bess had made him “a hypocrite behind bars”.
Twenty years later, their relationship would be called latent homosexuality, although they would indignantly deny it, as their physical contact was limited to boxing and wrestling. Jack initially brought his wife along to the elite picnics, but she didn’t like the whole thing and withdrew from the clan in the autumn of 1902, when she gave birth to their second daughter. Behind the scenes, a battle raged to break the bond between the two male friends. Sterling’s wife accused Jack of teaching her to get drunk and fly after other women, while Bess resented her husband for spending time with his friends when he could have been with their children.
His publisher has since reminded him not to write so often, as working too much does not guarantee the right quality. But he needed the money, because he was always in debt, having to support two households, his mother’s and his own. It was not possible to live on quality writing alone at that time. So he signed the worst contract of his life. In 1902, he sold The Call of the Wild to a publisher for a paltry 2000 dollars. Millions of copies of this, his first big bestseller, were subsequently printed, and if he had negotiated royalties then, he could have solved many of his financial problems. But he needed the money then, not later.
Now that he was famous, he wrote only for money. He became famous too quickly and the law went his way. He was vaguely aware of this. He was depressed and, to avoid depression, he began courting Anna Strunsky. He even suggested that they write a book together. This was unusual, because in it they were to represent completely opposite views. During the two years they worked together, they became very close and Bess was unutterably jealous. The disagreements during the writing of the book did not quell their passion, but the intellectual conflict between them caused them to break up for the first time. He wrote passionate letters to her: “You are the one I want most in the world, you, the pride of womanhood. I have tried to tell you my deepest thoughts, but I have not been able to say them in a way that you would understand.” No wonder Jack and Bess’s marriage was on the brink of scandal.
Suddenly, he was offered a different escape from the law. He was invited to report on peace in southern Africa after the Boer War. His wanderlust was reawakened and the hope that he would be free if only he left home was rekindled. But he rejoiced prematurely, for his appointment as Southern Africa reporter was cancelled when he arrived in London. He did not want to return home, sinking into the squalor of London’s slums and drinking himself into a stupor, especially after he received a letter from Ann telling him that their relationship was over.
He bought himself an old worn-out suit, pretended to be an unemployed American sailor and wandered around the port towns. He had long wanted to write a book about the poor suburbs and show the other side of capitalism, the life of exploited workers. “Working-class families are already animalistically happy if they can eat their fill. The colour of their lives is grey and dull.”
He easily found the hell he wanted to describe as he scoured the poorest areas of the East End. He visited cheap lodgings for klutzes, and spent two nights in a Whitechapel workhouse. To get a piece of bread, he was sent to sweep up in a hospital, where he removed the excrement of sick orphans. To earn his Sunday breakfast, he had to wait for four hours with hundreds of people, listening to a long sermon about the feast that would await the poor in heaven when they stopped starving on earth.
He then completed the book People from the Bottom. He felt he had to return home and continue his role as a father, husband and writer. He forcibly patched up his marriage, tried to forget his love for Anne and hid how he was suffering.
Publishers warned him to stop wasting his time writing for magazines and sending them literary rubbish, and to get down to serious work, or they would stop giving him money. He took the time to write his masterpiece, The Call of the Wild, in the winter of 1902. The novel is not just a story about a dog, but a hymn to life, death and nature. In it, he linked his repressed nature with the nature of animals. Buck has to pull a sledge in the far north as a sled dog. His new human masters leave him to toil almost to death. The love of his rescuer John briefly converts him, but the rescuer’s death at the hands of human savages changes Buck and he becomes the leader of a wolf pack bent on revenge against man.
With the money he got for Call of the Wild, Jack bought an old sailing boat with one mast. He needed freedom and the sea could give him that, as tensions in his marriage continued. He sailed through the Golden Gate and up the Sacramento River on a rough tide, stalked geese in the fog behind a tall whiptail, drank with oyster thieves in coastal taverns, sailed in the fog through the ferry field and enjoyed being alone with nature. This is the origin of his great novel The Sea Wolf, which tells the story of how two ships collided in the fog. The main character is rescued by a seal hunter who is a mixture of Melville’s Captain Ahab and a real-life poacher.
That’s when Charmian Kittredge, whom he had known before, came into Jack’s life. According to most of the clan, she spent so much time chasing a disgruntled Jack until she destroyed his already damaged marriage. Jack had lost Anna, his marriage was suffocating and hindering him, and he was looking around for other women who would be brave enough to get into hot love-making with him.
It started in June 1903. He sent his wife and child to a summer house and stayed alone, writing The Sea Wolf and sailing around the bay. Then an accident happened. He was riding a unicycle, went into a ravine, was thrown out and injured his leg. At home, when he was in bed, it was Charmian who visited him most often. He tried to approach her and she did not resist, because she was emancipated and had a lot of experience. Jack was married, but he had made up his mind. They were living in a time when a married man could have an affair and a woman could put her whole reputation on the line.
One day Bess said he was going to divorce her, but he didn’t say why. She was jealous of Anna Strunsky, even though she was living in New York at the time. In addition, there were rumours that Jack and Bess were just living a biological marriage without love. He left the next day, but feeling guilty, he became even more immersed in his sexual passion for Charmian. He was tired of writing, physically exhausted from lovemaking and penniless. So he readily accepted an offer from newspaper companies to travel to Korea in 1904, where a conflict between the Russians and the Japanese was looming. But this did not diminish his neurosis, which drove him to write like a man possessed.
Jack has always had a cult of the perfect male body. He liked to be photographed in his swimming trunks, boxing and flexing his muscles, painting George Sterling naked on the beach, and including similar descriptions in his novels. But on a trip to Japan, his confidence in his own body began to erode. Years of grim health worries began. He had already suffered severe bouts of shingles and scurvy, his knees had been injured, and now he had injured his ankle on the boat.
Although he was limping, he decided to leave Japan for Korea, despite not having received Japanese permission to go to the front in Manchuria. But he wanted to go there anyway. He hired a junk and steered it himself while the crew of three Koreans lazed about. On land, he made his own way, different from that of the other correspondents. He had a servant, a special kitchen and his own tent with the American flag flying. He took hundreds of good photographs, and it was these photographs that were the first photographs of the conflict to be published in the American press. He had come further north than any other reporter and his dispatches from Korea were a testament to his courage.
But it also brought him inconvenience. His rivals complained to the authorities in Tokyo that only he was allowed unrestricted movement, and he was recalled from the front and kept behind it with other war correspondents. He did not stand still, and the Japanese authorities threatened him with a court martial. He avoided this by travelling back to America. His prejudice against Asians was thus increased, so that he began to speak not only of the yellow economic danger, but also of the military danger.
This angered most of his socialist friends, especially after they heard him swearing at members of the Asian race. He also had apocalyptic visions and foresaw for 1976 a Chinese invasion the likes of which the world had never seen. He was convinced that the world would then have to decide and exterminate one billion Chinese with bacteriological weapons.
Charmian
Back in California, he found everything at home in complete disarray. Charmian had left because she feared a scandal, and Bess demanded all the money he had earned from the newspaper. He was lonely and hurt, but only succeeded in persuading Bess to give him his freedom, citing elopement rather than infidelity as the reason for the separation. This was his first period of disgust with life. He began to contemplate suicide.
When Charmain came to Oakland for a short time, he didn’t love her as passionately as he used to and often took refuge on his sailboat. Charmaine clung to him more and more and tried to be helpful. She typed and proofread The Sea Wolf for him and typed the boxing novel The Game, which introduced boxing stories to American literature. The protagonist of the story, Joe, dies in front of his lover after a fight in which he wins – a sign of the author’s gloomy pessimism. Jack’s real disgust with life was more of a physical than a philosophical nature. He could hardly walk and was thought to have a malignant tumour in his rectum. Everything hurt and he feared a slow and horrible death.
Afraid of dying, he wanted to afford everything life had to offer. He began to make love to a woman from the clan, the literary critic Blanche Partington. His friend George Sterling encouraged this affair, saying that he would give Jack to her on Saturdays and Sundays. Charmian admitted in March 1905 that she had lost Jack, but she did not give up until Jack renounced Blanche.
They were together again. Jack tried to introduce Charmian to the clan, but she wouldn’t accept it. He also turned his back on Sterling because of Charmian. He was deeply hurt and moved with his wife to the artists’ colony of Carmel, which became both paradise and hell.
On Jack and Charmian’s first visit to Carmel, it was obvious why Charmian was so protective of her little darling. Women were throwing themselves at him, lurking to rub against his skin. The Carmel artist colony was a utopia built on the sand dunes, and Jack effectively described it in his later novel Valley of the Moon. It was also his answer to why he decided to farm rather than go bohemian in Carmel.
By then, he had decided it was time to get out of the city and create his own paradise on a piece of land. Charmian also urged him to buy a large ranch near Glen Ellen, where land was cheap. But the land would have to be worked. Will Jack be able to do that as well as write? Of course, he couldn’t do without writing, and so came The White Eyed Man, in which he describes how a man raises a wolf cub from the wing. In this allegorical tale, where a lone beast is saved by the love of a human being, in the end White-Eye remains a wolf, an individualistic wolf who refuses to join the human pack.
In the meantime, Jack was running back and forth with his desires. He shocked society with his advocacy of the Russian Revolution, and Charmian married as conventionally as possible in November 1905. He preached that the rich should have their property confiscated, and he himself became a landlord. He wanted to build a yacht and sail the seven seas in seven years. He maintained an army of servants and indeed built himself a yacht that cost him a fortune. To the socialists, he was just a figurehead, neither a real fighter nor an orthodox theoretician.
Party members used him for his name alone, and his lectures always attracted large crowds. He came to them in a dishevelled black suit with a carelessly tied tie, more proletarian than artist. He sometimes lectured to the privileged powerful about the coming of the revolution and wondered why they shook their heads. Jack believed in the revolution, but this belief was of a more emotional nature. He had a thirst for justice but feared social disintegration.
He then wrote the thrilling socialist novel The Iron Heel, in which he accurately predicted the rise of fascism in its various stages. Semi-military groups break the resistance of the workers, and the artificially induced collapse of the stock market sweeps away property. In America, now the Iron Heel of totalitarianism, workers go underground and operate according to the methods of modern terrorists.
Londoon’s The Iron Heel is even more exciting than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984. This black pessimism stunned the socialist leaders. Critics had him in their teeth, and after 1905 his books began to sell less well, and in some places they were even taken off bookshops’ shelves.
Before he could build the yacht, an earthquake and fire struck San Francisco on 18 April 1906. The city burned for three days and three nights. Firefighters had already started to demolish some buildings with dynamite to prevent the fire from spreading. The next day, Jack sat among the rubble with city workers and wrote about the fire. He wrote about how it had wiped out the city’s society without its conclusions having socialist tendencies.
The earthquake also left him financially exhausted. After the earthquake, the price of building materials skyrocketed, and in 1907 his yacht cost him thirty thousand dollars instead of seven. He mortgaged his house in Oakland and had to write to order every day under the pressure of loans.
When he finally sailed his yacht Snark through the Golden Gate, everyone felt sick, but not him, standing at the helm. The boat’s deck leaked, the fuel bunker leaked, the vegetables spoiled, and Jack dreamed of taming cyclones, tornadoes, blizzards and torrential downpours. He wanted to have an adventure and write a novelised story about his struggle with nature.
Tales from the South Seas
He took a yacht trip to Hawaii mainly to prove his physical strength, but it ended in failure. The crew was incapable, so Jack and Charmian took turns at the helm. The ship battled through storms and fear, leaking in every nook and cranny. The inadequate food put Jack to bed, so it was Charmian who steered most of the time.
In Hawaii, he recovered enough to give in to the childless life of the rich. They were invited everywhere and given dinners, and he was invited to the Queen of Hawaii. He learned this pastime from one of the last Hawaiians who still knew the ancient skill of surfing. The ship was in desperate need of repair, but Charmian and he visited other islands, including a leper colony on Molokai.
Then, finally, it was repaired for good, and Jack set off on the 2000-mile journey to the Marquesas Islands. For two months, they battled the winds. Jack was now in his element; master of the sea and the life on it. He rented a house on Nuku Hiva where his childhood idol, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, lived. He also visited Tahiti, Fiji, the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands.
He was plagued by chillies, both he and Charmain contracted malaria and yellow fever, and the Snark became a real sick ship. Jack still fainted occasionally, got scabies and stayed in the cabin. During the voyage to Sydney, he started writing South Sea Tales. In Sydney, he had to stay in hospital for almost five months and his spells were treated with arsenic acid. Arsenic and later mercury damaged his kidneys, brain and nerves. He then sold the Snark for a paltry USD 3 000. His wanderings in the Pacific were over. He would return home intent on creating a new myth about himself – the myth of the battle for dominion over the earth.
Farmer and landlord
He and Charmian moved to a ranch and Jack was convinced he was going to become a real farmer. As a child, he was delighted to learn that Charmian was pregnant. Now he will have a descendant to carry on his work on the farm. He decided to build a new big stone house and call it Wolf House. The cost of it ate up everything he earned and he started borrowing money. But what a disappointment when Charmian gave birth to a baby girl, who died a few days later. Out of desperation, he went to the harbour, got drunk and whipped and ended up at the police station. Should he have continued writing at all, since the critics thought he had gone mad as a writer?
He knew he had to keep on the reins because – or so he thought – his health was deteriorating. He had become an imaginary patient. Because he coughed, he thought he had jaundice. He blamed the rashes on his skin on arsenic poisoning. In 1911, for the first time, the insurance company refused to insure him because he was in too poor health. So he began to collect books on various diseases and always blamed doctors for his ailments. He was no longer as reverent as he used to be. He was a man who had compromised with life. Even though he knew that the new remedy for herpes, salvarsan, contained arsenic, he did not give it up. He secretly feared that he had untreated syphilis and he was afraid of going mad like Guy de Maupassant and Nietzche.
All the symptoms of the last years of Jack’s life point to arsenic poisoning. He injected himself with salvarsan using a needle without consulting a doctor. At the beginning of the 20th century, little was known about the disastrous consequences of taking the wrong drugs. At least one tenth of Americans and Europeans were thought to have a venereal disease at that time. If we had examined the medical records of many personalities and the delusions of many artists and revolutionaries before the First World War, we would have learned a great deal about their strange behaviour.
So Jack had more and more poisons in him. He tried to flush them out of his body and drank at least three bottles of water a day. Charmian hid his condition because he did not want to admit to himself how ill he was. He always fulfilled his obligations with perseverance, but on the rare occasions when he could no longer tame his physical and mental suffering, he exploded in such anger that it destroyed his whole reputation. He was considered unbalanced at the very time when he was most in control and most devoted to his land and his family.
He was particularly capricious towards those closest to him. He hired parolees as workers and allowed them to exploit him. He was a model employer to the thirty workers who built his Wolf House. But to his ex-wife Bess and their two daughters, he was hard and unjust, suspicious and distressed. He even went so far as to make a will, leaving everything to Charmian and pushing the child out of it. He never invited his mother Flora to the ranch either.
He used to receive ten thousand letters a year and was so polite that he answered every one. When he could no longer bear the monotony of life, he would hitch his horse to a cart and ride to a nearby village, where he would drink in the pubs and argue about everything. Sometimes he drank a whole litre of whisky, but he didn’t care. Despite his many illnesses, his books were published one after the other. He was a professional writer with a great deal of experience.
His prejudices have now been carried away. He argued that interbreeding races can produce wonderful and beautiful people. It could be said that he avoided sexual scenes in his writing. In some of his works, especially in Tales from the South Sea, he showed a real disgust for the human body. He was afraid of his own flesh, not of the female body. He did not include sexuality in his writing for the simple reason that magazines would not buy it and he depended on their fees.
But now he loved the land, his ranch. He studied the land and spent all his money on it. He studied everything about it so avidly that the Valley of the Month is full of practical advice on farming. He planted sixty thousand eucalyptus trees and prevented soil erosion. For three years he planted rape and Canadian beans and endured the ridicule of his neighbours, just to replenish the soil. But the improvements did not bring progress.
Slandering malicious journalists was the price he had to pay for his fame. His public image as a drunkard and a brawling womaniser was so notorious that many who caught him in a bar brawl or in a strange woman’s bed declared that he was Jack London. Jack responded to these scandals by writing letters of protest, proving that his feet had never set foot on that floor and that his name had been misused.
Pain
Sometimes he escaped from the hustle and bustle to rest. He would launch the boat, raise the sail and let the wind drive him back and forth across the bay. He could barely walk. His weak legs and the weakness in his stomach meant that he could move very little. He relied on the strength of his arms and chest to pull the sail in. His stomach problems made him seriously ill, but Charmian’s second pregnancy gave him renewed hope that he would have a son. But Charmian miscarried and Jack began to realise that he would not get a son, the heir to the ranch. The realisation that she could not give birth hit Charmian hard. She saw that Jack was getting sicker and sicker and that he was becoming estranged from her.
Knowing that his daughter Joan would be the heiress of the ranch, Jack tried with all the passion of a father to persuade her to leave her mother and come to him. He wrote to her that he was ill, reminded her that he was her father, fed her, clothed her and gave her a roof over her head. But Joan did not want to leave her mother and refused to let him speak ill of her. Jack did not answer her until four months later. He explained to his daughter that his life was full of disgust, that he was tired and no longer interested in anything. He ended this savage letter by saying: ‘If you are dying and you ask me to come to your bedside, I will certainly come. If I am dying, I will not care to see you at my bedside.”
He wrote this letter after being operated on for appendicitis in the summer of 1913. The doctor who operated on him warned him that if he did not stop drinking, he would die of kidney failure and that he should start exercising and losing weight. Jack ignored the advice and continued to drink and exercise. He bought more opiates, the kind he had taken in the Solomon Islands, to relieve the pain of his haemorrhoids. From then on, alcohol replaced morphine and heroin. Of course, he pretended to the world to be perfectly healthy, but sometimes he would confess in a letter to a friend: “I am lost and the flames of my youth are extinguished. I lie on my deathbed in a hospital, and night and day I vomit up the entrails of my youth.”
If he wasn’t suffering from a hellish gut, he was suffering from his teeth, and he spent most of 1913 at the dentist’s. He had all his upper teeth pulled to stop his gums rotting. 1913 was a year of disasters for him. The Wolf House burned down. Jack thought he had a fireproof house built. But the beams, the roof and the floor burned like matches and all that was left of the house were the stone walls. No one could find out who had struck the match, but all the evidence pointed to a man-made fire.
Luckily, the house was insured, but he couldn’t complain about the money. He had already signed a five-year contract with Cosmopolitan magazine in 1912 for the exclusive right to publish sequels to his works, long and short. He was therefore paid 2000 dollars every month. By then he had written thirty-nine books in thirteen years, about three a year, and he was committed to continuing at that pace.
But he did not give up the drugs and used them to relieve persistent pain in his kidneys and bladder. With them, he regained control over the secrets of the subconscious. But he was very disappointed to find that he was not going to get rich from the new film industry. A Hollywood director proposed to him to make a film based on the novel The Sea Wolf. When it was made, it turned out that there had been two film versions and one play based on the same work. Jack had to litigate for a long time to protect his copyright. During this legal battle, he was involved in the creation of the American Copyright Society.
When the revolution broke out in Mexico and America sent the American Expeditionary Corps to Vera Cruz, Jack was asked to go there and report. Of course Charmian wanted to go with him. She would not hear of leaving such a sick and angry man alone on the road. When they arrived in Galveston, Texas, they were not allowed to take a military cargo ship to Vera Cruz. The reason was a Good Soldier brochure signed by Jack, which had been circulating, in fact, an appeal to young men not to enlist in the army. “The lowest goal in your life is to become a soldier. A good soldier never tries to tell right from wrong, he just obeys …”
It is true that Jack was on the side of the revolutionaries, but he vehemently denied signing the pamphlet. The seven articles he wrote on Mexico show how confused and uncertain he was. The US intervention was supposedly to protect US citizens, but in reality it was to protect US oil interests. Jack’s racism flared up here. He wrote that all the problems were the fault of the mestizos – the mestizos who were neither mouse nor cat, from Pancho Villa to Emiliano Zapata.
He visited the Tampico oil fields and admired the adventurous spirit of American oilmen. He even bumped into a few acquaintances from the far north of Alaska and one said to him, “Jack, this isn’t the Klondike. There’s a lot more money to be made here than in all the gold mines in the world.”
Such sentiments in the articles must have hurt Jack’s socialist admirers very much. Jack spoke here as a racist, a chauvinist and a defender of capital. He rarely stepped out of the bars of Vera Cruz and Tampico. His role was unwittingly taken over by the journalist John Reed, who infiltrated with Villa’s guerrillas and was in danger of being killed every day. But Jack was unaware that he no longer had the enthusiasm he once had, that he had lost faith.
The outbreak of the First World War only further complicated his attitude towards socialism. He fell ill with pneumonia, and it was a close call before he died. The pain in his guts was so severe that he had completely exhausted his supply of narcotics.
Addict
At the beginning of 1915, he was still plagued by financial difficulties. The Mexican War had confused him, the European War had almost destroyed him. Magazines were in need of different material, the English market was dead. “The war has hit the literary market very hard,” he complained. He spent the next 12 months with his wife in Hawaii. He no longer wanted to go on adventures, he just enjoyed being among other rich people. The sea eased his pain and he was convinced he had found his last heaven on earth.
He wrote little. His last long novel, Three Hearts, is a very mediocre work of sentimental immaturity. It was also the first time he was asked to adapt a film script into a novel. To ask a writer of London’s calibre to do something like that was actually an insult. But he agreed because he was offered the obscene sum of 45 000 dollars.
He returned to his beloved ranch knowing that he had to write again, as its upkeep required huge sums of money. The ranch was hardly generating any income and employed many people. At that time, there was no control over the sale of narcotics and Jack bought as much as he used from the pharmacies. He became his own doctor and no one paid attention to how much drugs he was taking. As his spirit degenerated along with his body, he lost his nerve when someone attacked him.
In March 1916, the thought that he was about to die crossed his mind for the first time. At forty, he had uncontrollably indulged his appetite. His complexion was grey, his body was abundant, his ankles were forced over his low shoes, his nerves were at their end and he was mentally numb. He began to write another novel, How We Die, in which he describes five different people at the moment of death. On the twenty-first of November he took a powerful sleeping pill. The last words he said to Charmian were strange: “Thank God, you are not afraid of anything.”
Charmian went for a walk and came back in about an hour. She found him half asleep among his books and went to bed. Just before dawn the next morning, Jack injected himself with a fatal drug, fell into a coma and blacked out. He was treated for a morphine overdose and a pump was used to try to flush the poison out of his stomach, but to no avail. He died at 19.45 on 22 November.
What actually caused his death has never been made clear. Charmian had the body quickly cremated, which made further investigation into his death impossible. For a long time, rumours circulated that he had committed suicide, although there was insufficient evidence to prove it. It is not known how much morphine he took that night. But he had been a moving corpse for some time and the fact that he had not collapsed earlier was due to his willpower.
But he certainly did not prepare for death, as he left no farewell letters. The strong injection before dawn seemed to have been only a stimulus, not a deliberate end. Jack did not kill himself that night. He had killed himself slowly, over a long decade; he had worked too much, cursed too much, eaten too much, drank too much and taken too much medicine. As he wrote in Martin Eden: ” Not death, life he feared , this desire to live, this terrible feeling that he wanted to suffocate you; he was afraid of the last throes of life.”
