1903

BACK from Europe, Jack's solemn purpose was to achieve harmony within himself when he should again be at home in the Piedmont bungalow. He devoted himself to this idea, with earnest intention toward the development of his children, and strove to convince himself that all was well with him. As note this paragraph to Cloudesley, dated January 27, 1903:

The Wednesday evenings and Sunday outings were resumed, new acquaintances came and went. Among other writers who shared in the Piedmont gaieties were W. C. Morrow, Dr. C. W. Doyle, and Philip Verrill Mighels, whose novel, "The Inevitable," made simultaneous appearance on Lippincott's fall list with "A Daughter of the Snows." Frank Norris, with whom Jack London had previously gotten tangled in press controversy, had died the year before, or undoubtedly he would have been one in the Crowd.

To me Jack was always friendly, if a trifle impersonal; and once in a while he referred with genial quizzicalness to my failure to review his first book. He presented me with a copy of "The Cruise of the Dazzler," inscribing it:

Journalists came thousands of miles to interview him, and of them all I think he most cared for that brilliant and lovable soul Fannie K. Hamilton, whose surpassing appreciation of him was a sustained joy for all his years. As to his mode of life he said to her:

Odd little experiences came his way, hurts delivered by pinch-natured debtors to his kindness. Two of them were totally unexpected—one, when a friend he had assisted in various ways spent an entire night showing him conclusively why he, Jack London, was doomed to failure in literature; the second, when another, far more indebted, cut him dead in a Piedmont home, before "The Crowd," He seemed a veritable mark for slights from persons whose touchiness and jealousies restrained them from truly knowing his unsuspecting good-nature and fellowship:

"Did you see——cut you when he came into the room Sunday, when you and George were playing pedro?" asked his indignant hostess.

"No!" with incredulous, bright interest. "You don't say so! I was so intent on my rotten hand that I never noticed . . . why, I said Hello, didn't I? I'm sure I did. . . . Now I do remember just for an instant it seemed the air was chilly, and then it went right out of my head. Why, the son of a gun!" he added amiably, "what did he do that for! What have I done to him?"

And the short-lived wonder gave place to other and more profitable curiosities about the world in which he

lived. For the largest part of his life, he stedfastly refrained to take to himself slights or petty humors of men and women. Near the end, sadly enough, they began to gather in a formidable cloud upon his horizon of values. To Anna, in a letter, he commented upon the incident:

But it would appear that the young husband and father waged a losing fight for the livable contentment of his resolutions. As early as the middle of February, when again he wrote Cloudesley, his final words bespeak a desire for solitude:

A letter to Anna Strunsky, written a month later during an illness, illustrates the heavy pressure he was putting upon himself to gain financial footing to do justice to his little family, as well as an almost superhuman struggle to shake free from "hack-work" and get down to worthy achievement. (I remember dropping in one day to see the babies, and noticing Jack, much tousled, very pale, and with a don't-disturb-me look appealing through the wel-

coming smile. Jack, who a few short years earlier had been striving to master common grammar, to develop "grammatical nerves," was now typing the manuscript of a story that was destined to ring around the world and be treasured in the universities of his country as a jewel of English literature—"The Call of the Wild." At the same time he was shaping up material for the sea novel referred to in the above letter to Cloudesley, which was "The Sea Wolf," hardly less noted; while arrangements had been perfected with Macmillans to bring out "The Kempton-Wace Letters.") Below is the letter to Anna:

Desperate for funds, with bills pressing, Jack London hesitated not to accept two thousand dollars flat from The Macmillan Company for "The Call of the Wild," which was to be brought out in July, following serial publication begun immediately in the Saturday Evening Post, for which he received seven hundred dollars. And "The Call of the Wild," for which he pocketed only this total of twenty-seven hundred dollars, scored an instantaneous hit, leaped into the front ranks of the "best-sellers" and made money for everyone but the author. However, lest there be misunderstanding on this ground, let me go on record with the fact that Jack London came to maintain that he gained rather than sacrificed in the transaction, in view of the world-wide advertising upon which the Macmillans spent enormous sums.

"Mr. Brett took a gamble, and a big chance to lose. It was the game, and I have no kick," he stoutly asserted. "Also," Jack would add, "Mr. Brett stood almost certainly to lose on 'The Kempton-Wace Letters,' and I'm willing to lay a bet that the Company never much more

than cleaned up expenses on that splendid but misunderstood and unpopular book."

"The Kempton-Wace Letters" subsequently went out of print in both the United States and England. In 1921 the book was resurrected, and reprinted in London by Mills & Boon, Ltd.

Jack's aptness for titles was never more happily evidenced than in "The Call of the Wild." And yet, both serial and book publishers entreated a different one. Jack concurred with their dissatisfaction, and told them he was quite willing they should invent a better. That they could not, or at least did not, gives one pause.

Jack was systematically criticized by a certain type of reviewers of all times, for his "brutality." I am inclined to think the following, from a letter to Mr. Johns of March 16/03, must have been the most surprising commission he ever received:

"If you have any 'horror' stories, submit them to Book man. I have the following from Bookman:

"'Don't you happen to have up your sleeve a dramatic tale with plenty of battle, murder, and sudden death—a story with real horror in it? Remember, the more gore the better."

One New York critic of "The God of His Fathers" had pleased Jack.

And an English reviewer characterized this collection as "Epic Stories of the North."

In another note to Anna, Jack is seen emerging from his hermit mood in a reference to the pleasure of a fortnight's visit each from the Lily Maid and Cloudesley Johns. And

below are brief communications to his two friends upon one matter or another:

Of same date to Cloudesley:

"The Kempton-Wace Letters" was published in May, and Jack received his first copy of the book through the Glen Ellen post office, in Sonoma County, whither he had removed his family to camp on my Aunt's place on Sonoma Mountain, "Wake Robin Lodge." Here a congenial company of acquaintances met in the summers, making merry in the incomparable woods bordering Graham and Sonoma Creeks, swimming in the pools, tramping, boxing, fencing, kiting, and gathering about the campfire at dusk for discussion and reading. On one such night Jack, in firelight supplemented by a lantern, read aloud the "Letters." While several members of my family participated in all this rural delight, I was able to be present upon only an occasional week-end. I was fortunate enough to make one of the thralled circle that formed about the flickering logs on the June evening Jack London read aloud in his musical voice, at one sitting, "The Call of the Wild," which had just come to his hand.

Jack's state, and his method of speculation upon that of another, is shadowed in the following, written to George Sterling in June of 1903:

During this period, some of his friends sensed the breaking strain the young man was undergoing, and that all was not well in the Londons' ruddy-brown tent cottage and environs amidst the spicy-perfumed laurels edging the Graham's bank; but they would have been shocked had they known the strain was so taut that for some time back Jack had avoided sleeping with his old familiar pistol in the same room, lest he do himself an injury in his trouble- ridden slumber. Which would point to the surmise that unhappy as he thought himself, he valued existence sufficiently to take steps to preserve his own.

Much suffering he concealed in the solitude of a leafy study on a mossy shelf down the bank, where at a rustic table he worked steadily on his novel, "The Sea Wolf"; or under an hilarious exterior as he played water-tag with a bevy of camp children, or blind-man's bluff among the trees and blossomy undergrowth on the Sonoma's marge. Mornings he rose betimes and went out ostensibly for small game, with a conspicuous absence of bags upon his returnings. This gave rise to an endless string of

verses, goodnaturedly taunting and wholly affectionate, composed by little Dorothy Reynolds and Henry Breck and their playmates, and chanted shrilly by the juvenile company by campfire, to the tune of "Mr. Dooley." Here are some of the verses:

"O Mr. London,
Mr. London,

The finest man the rabbits ever knew;

He always sought them
But never shot them,

For that was Mr. London's way to do.

"He started early
One Sunday morning:

He said, I will be sure to get one now!'

And gazing upward
Upon the hillside,

He saw a rabbit there as big as a cow.

"He raised his rifle,
He shook a trifle;

The rabbit looked at him reproachfully.

He said, I cannot,'
He said, I will not,'

And so he let the rabbit turn and flee.

CHORUS

"O it's strange when upon returning,
    How his hunter's skill he'd praise,
About those monstrous rabbits
    In his early morning chase.
O it's then that our hearts are gladdest,
    And it seems it can't be true,
When he has to eat that bacon
    Instead of rabbit stew."

It was during these dawn and sunrise hauntings of this sloping wall of Sonoma's valley that Jack London

fell hopelessly in love with the "Sweet Land" he evermore was to adore and make his heart-home.

Evidently his plans were to spend as little time thence forth as he could possibly avoid at the once desirable bungalow in Piedmont, as cited by his next contemplated absence, in a letter of July 2:

In answer to some question from George Sterling, he again outlines his philosophy of work: "No, I don't approve of Pegasus plowing if he can fly. But I believe in his plugging like hell in order to fly."

Of course this tension of spirit could not last, in one so dynamic and intense as he. In spite of every effort, struggle as he would to carry out his scientific-mating experiment, he became beaten at his own game; and it was by a curious irony of events that his ultimate failure should have been coincident with the appearance of "The Kempton-Wace Letters," dealing the lie direct to his once boasted rule-of-thumb program.

Indeed, not long afterward we learned that in a copy of this book presented to a young cousin of mine, he had

written refuting a brave argument once held with her in camp:

This he repeated in my own copy three months after our marriage.

For now, abruptly, "out flew the web and floated wide," the fabric he had so carefully designed, so faithfully woven to its last least pattern of fidelity. It had got beyond him and he tore it and cast it to the winds. He did not care whither he went, nor how, nor with whom. He caught at a wild unthought-out suggestion for a northern trip without an ending and not without a companion. Largely owing to restlessness, he renounced the steamer voyage as lightly as he had conceived it. But he remained unshaken in determination to start living by himself, at the first moment he could break up at the bungalow and see his family housed comfortably where he would have convenient access to his little ones.

Let no one, quick to condemn his action, dream that all this chaos of the established was easy for a man of Jack London's stamp. Deeply he loved his children, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. But he had committed a boundless mistake in his arrogant youth, and the penalty that was inevitable had overwhelmed him commensurately. "I must work hard to bring things out as right as I can," with sad eyes he said to one of us, "though it be work that shall wring my heart"—thinking of his babies, and not a little of the radical disturbance of their mother s round of existence. Sometimes, it seemed, he almost doubted his own strength to go through with what he had been driven to undertake.

But desire for freedom had wrung him vitally from all other considerations—he who could never be really free, in his whole life of responsibility for others. From Piedmont, in the midst of the rack of tearing up—everyone concerned

oppressed with the impermanence of what had seemed so secure—Jack wrote:

And on the 29th:

He found a cozy five-room flat in Oakland, at what was then 1216 Telegraph Avenue, to which he moved his mother and Johnnie, setting aside space for his own belongings while he should be away in the sloop. The two babies and their mother were quartered in another flat a few blocks distant. From his new habitation he wrote Cloudesley:

That there was no lack of anguish on Jack's part for pain inflicted throughout this separation, may be judged, reticent though he was in general, from the closing remark of the next letter. Also he gives a line on his expectation of benefit to his work in the new order of life. To his mind,

there could be no two ways about the latter, for the double homes demanded his very best effort to earn big prizes, although meanwhile he must deliver a certain amount of "hack:"

To Cloudesley, September 5, 1903:

The next letter shows his desire again to roam the world:

On the 21st he wrote Cloudesley:

The reviewers, again with three new books thrown suddenly at their heads, making eight within three meteoric years since this astonishing young writer had shot into vision, were stunned not only by numbers but by the total dissimilarity of the three—"The Call of the Wild," "The Kempton-Wace Letters," and now "The People of the Abyss." British critics, theretofore gathering in enthus-

iasm, were of two minds about "The People of the Abyss." Mainly it was resented and condemned as an inexcusable infringement on his part to come to their shores and turn out the London slums for the world to view. They thought he would be better occupied in those of his own land. A minority, however, accorded the book its due. And two years later, the Archbishop of Canterbury, inspecting New York's East Side, exclaimed: "Amazing! I am astonished at it all. The slums of New York are not nearly so bad as the slums of London. And the mean streets are not so mean as the East End of our great English city."

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