“He became quicker of movement than the other dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with ironlike muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel more ferocious, and more intelligent. He had to become all these things, else he would not have held his own nor survived the hostile environment in which he found himself.”
On July 25, 1897, a 21-year-old named Jack London boarded a ship to the Yukon to join the Klondike Gold Rush, hoping, like tens of thousands of other prospectors, to find his fortune.
He was brave, adventurous and he wrote a lot. That’s not me.
Jack London had bad kidneys and loved dogs. That’s me.
Trapped in a Florida cabin while, outside, summer fries everything to burnt exhaustion.
That London was even born is a sort of miracle.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported in June 1875 that a pregnant Flora Wellman tried to shoot herself after astrologer William Chaney, with whom she was living, disavowed the baby and tried to force Wellman to have an abortion. [So, abortion IS embedded in the American tradition.]
She gave birth to Jack six months later. Wellman married Civil War veteran John London when Jack was an infant and gave him her new husband’s name. London was a young man when he discovered Chaney was his biological father and sought him out, only to be rejected again.
He could handle rejection.
Jack London died at age forty. He did not waste his time.
Jack London, Rags to Riches and Back Again
By Joy Lanzendorfer for Alta magazine from Literary Hub. (6/2019)
In 1898, Jack London was trapped in an Alaskan cabin while, outside, winter froze everything to icy stillness.
“Nothing stirred,” he wrote later. “The Yukon slept under a coat of ice three feet thick.” London, then 22, had come to Alaska to make his fortune in the gold rush, but all he’d found was a small amount of dust worth $4.50. A diet of bacon, beans, and bread had given him scurvy. His gums bled, his joints ached, and his teeth were loose. London decided that, if he lived, he would no longer try to rise above poverty through physical labor. Instead, he would become a writer. So he carved into the cabin wall the words “Jack London Miner Author Jan 27, 1898.”
In the 1960s, that bit of graffiti helped verify the cabin, and it was divided in two. Half of the cabin remains in the Klondike, and the rest was moved to Jack London Square on the Oakland waterfront, where London grew up. The day I visited the Oakland cabin, the farmers market was going on, and smoke from cooking sausages wafted through the air. The cabin stands in the center of the square, surrounded by palm trees. Drought-resistant grasses cover the living roof like fur—something London, a pioneer in sustainable agriculture, might have appreciated.
Since the cabin is closed to visitors, I peered through the windows, looking for his signature, which I later learned is in the Klondike portion of the cabin. It seemed fitting that this symbol of the creative sea change in London’s life stands in the place where he experienced abject poverty. London would travel the world and achieve immense literary success, but he would never fully shed the weight of that poverty.
Beside the Oakland cabin is Heinolds’ First and Last Chance Saloon, opened in 1883. London was a lifelong regular. He started drinking there as a teenager, often to blackout as he tried to keep up with the older men. The saloon, made out of timbers from a scrapped whaling ship, stands out like a wooden thumb among the glass buildings along the waterfront. Inside, it’s small, dark, and covered in memorabilia. The floor slants steeply, so that sitting on a barstool feels like drinking on the mess deck of a pitching ship. It’s easy to imagine sailors and dockworkers crowding in there to escape the chill of the Bay Area fog.
People seemed delighted with the saloon. Several peered in through the doorway and said how cute it was. At a table, a man was talking local history to a rapt audience. A couple at the bar asked why the saloon was there, and the bartender explained that it was because of London. “People come in and say that Jack London drank here, so they have to drink here too,” he said. “Although, that has died off a bit lately. London’s not as popular with the kids. I don’t know why, because I had to read all his books in middle school.”
For anyone who has struggled with money or sought to better themselves, London’s life and work still feel startlingly relevant. In some ways, Oakland’s current income disparity isn’t that different from during the writer’s childhood—the yachts along the pier are a sharp contrast to the homeless camps throughout the city.
London often wrote about the exploitation he experienced as a “work beast.” At 14, he pulled 16-hour shifts at a cannery for 10 cents an hour. Then he became an oyster pirate, stealing from company oyster beds at night and selling his haul by day. He was a sailor, killing seals from the deck of a boat and getting a severe case of shingles. Later, he shoveled coal for $30 a month, spraining both wrists before someone confessed that he was working a job meant for two men.
No matter how he tried, poorly paid physical labor did nothing to improve his circumstances. [At age fifty, I took a job bagging groceries for $4.50 an hour.]
When London returned from the Klondike, he dove into writing, churning out thousands of words. For months, he got nothing for his efforts but rejection letters—over 600 of them. [The spiritual equivalent of The Frozen North. That’s not me.}
“Everything I possessed was in pawn, and I did not have enough to eat,” he wrote of that time. “I was at the end of my tether, beaten out, starved, ready to go back to coal-shoveling or ahead to suicide.” Then he sold two short stories, one for $5 and another for $40. [Forty dollars just what I got paid for my first national magazine feature in 1975.]
Slowly, he began publishing, and in 1903 he wrote three books, including The Call of the Wild.
He followed up with more hits—White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, and Martin Eden, among others. By his late 20s, he was the highest-paid writer in the United States.
He spent that money on a 1,400-acre property in Glen Ellen that he called Beauty Ranch. Today, it’s Jack London State Historic Park, one of the most complete literary sites in the United States. For $10, you can take a self-guided tour, hike the trails, or join a free docent-led tour. There are also private tours and horseback riding. When I visited, wildfires had recently threatened the park, and artifacts that had been evacuated were still in storage. However, the museum, a rustic rock mansion that London’s second wife, Charmian Kittredge London, built after his death, had just undergone a renovation.
The museum also delves into London’s relationship with Charmian, his “mate woman,” who possessed qualities London wanted in a wife. She was sporty and liberated, and she never resorted to “hysterics,” something he wouldn’t tolerate. They honeymooned on his 55-foot sailboat, the Snark, which he had spent over a year and $30,000 building. It had state-of-the-art collapsible masts, flush toilets, room for 400 books, and even an ice maker. Sleek and graceful, it could go 11 knots at full sail. While London intended to sail the Snark around the world, he managed only one trip through the south Pacific before cost and illness forced him to sell it for $4,500.
A docent pointed out London’s medical kit, a leather zip-up bag with vials of pills and powders. A nearby placard said that it “contained cocaine drops for toothaches, opium for pain, heroin for a bad cough, and mercury chloride to heal open skin wounds.” While on the Snark, everyone got sick with yaws, a bacterial infection that causes weeping wounds. “They all had their different remedies to cure it,” I was told. “And Jack’s remedy of choice was mercury chloride. So, he was pounding the mercury into his system for about a year and a half, which of course damaged his kidneys beyond repair.”
I look at that list of drugs and I can honestly say, my last choice would be mercury chloride.
Decades ago, I came to a fork in the road and kept on going straight. Found myself deep in the weeds. Didn’t want to go crazy like other people. Even the best examples end up burned at the stake. Locked up in a padded room. Nobody is ever buying that Jesus impersonation.
I was reading this classic and the protagonist was everything I wanted to be. Like me, he had been badly misused. He gave me hope. All I had to do was internalize Buck.
A big strong dog you could trust.
A Writer with the Heart of a Dog: Early Review of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild
“Jack London seems to possess an intuition of the dog life.”
He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.
*
“Jack London’s news story, The Call of the Wild, is the romance of Buck, a great dog. Buck’s sire was a St. Bernard, and his mother was a Collie, and he was shaggy, big of body, strong of muscle and stout of heart. He was stolen from a California ranch and taken to live in the far glacier land of the North, where he was put in a team with work dogs and made to carry the Yukon mail. Jack London seems to possess an intuition of the dog life, and the dog heart, an insight which must have come from intimacy and communion with some big, noble, shaggy friend; and the story is related with a simple, direct, dramatic force which enchains interest; and which is art. The Republic unhesitatingly recommends The Call of the Wild as a story of quality, not surpassed by Bob, Son of Battle, and not approached by any other similar tale.
[…]
“During the four years of his puppyhood in California, Buck had lived the life of a country gentleman, fond of activity, of the water and the hunt, but ignorant of hardship and toil. Stolen and taken into the Yukon country, his character changed and he became hard under the hard conditions of life, a leader and master among dogs, turning back toward savage instincts. As time goes on he hearkens more and more to the ‘Call of the Wild’ until, at last, after years fraught with incident and adventure, he yields himself to the mastery of primitive instincts—to the wild, both without and within himself—and reverts to savagery in the great wilderness of the North. The change from gentleman to savage is effected gradually and traced with absorbing interest. Hamilton Wright Mable says truly: ‘The story has a deep psychologic interest, and may be read as a striking parable; but it is, above all, an absorbing tale of wild life, full of pictorial power and abounding in striking incidents of frontier town, camp and adventure.’ ”
–The St. Louis Republic, August 8, 1903
Reviews from Book Marks.
For the remaining story, click here.
600 rejections. Jesus.
I’ve got work to do.