An Autobiography of Jack London Read online

  An

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  of

  JACK LONDON

  An

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  of

  JACK LONDON

  Edited and Introduced by Stephen Brennan

  Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Brennan

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  London, Jack, 1876-1916.

  An autobiography of Jack London / Jack London, Stephen Brennan (editor).

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-62087-364-9 (alk. paper)

  eISBN 978-1-62087-953-5

  1. London, Jack, 1876-1916. 2. Authors, American--20th century--Biography.

  I. Brennan, Stephen Vincent. II. Title.

  PS3523.O46Z46 2013

  813’.52--dc23

  [B]

  2012034937

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One THE ROAD

  Chapter1 Confession

  Chapter2 Holding Her Down

  Chapter3 Pictures

  Chapter4 “Pinched”

  Chapter5 The Pen

  Chapter6 Hoboes That Pass in the Night

  Chapter7 Road-Kids and Gay-Cats

  Chapter8 Two Thousand Stiffs

  Chapter9 Bulls

  Part 2 THE CRUISE OF THE SNARK

  Chapter10 Forward

  Chapter11 The Inconceivable and Monstrous

  Chapter12 Adventure

  Chapter13Finding One’s Way About

  chapter14 First Landfall

  Chapter15 Royal Sport

  Chapter16 Lepers of Molokai

  Chapter17 The House of the Sun

  Chapter18 A Pacific Traverse

  Chapter19 Typee

  Chapter20 Nature Man

  Chapter21The High Seat of Abundance

  Chapter22 Cruising in the Solomons

  Chapter23 Amateur M.D. 307

  Chapter24 Back Word

  Part Three John Barleycorn

  Introduction

  “We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. “

  —Oscar Wilde

  The art or practice of autobiography—that is, writing about one’s self—has been going on since folk first took up sticks to scratch their names in the mold. The practice of calling this scribbled self-publication an autobiography, is of a more recent origin. The word itself doesn’t appear in English until the late 1700, when some wag famously judged it too “pedantic” for general use, and even today the word retains a faintly sophistical air. But eventually a whole literary genre grew up around the idea that one could—perhaps even should—write one’s own biography, that is, practice autobiography.

  We know the impulse well enough. Which of us has not, at one time or another, experienced an almost overwhelming compulsion to tell his or her own story, to get it out and get it down on paper? I was there and I saw all, and this and that occurred, and this is how I felt about it, and how I feel about it now.

  If one accepts a holistic take on the genre—that is, that autobi-ography comes in many forms—one recognizes an array of sub-genres. There are the diarists and composers of memoir, tell-all, and true-confessions. Even formal journalism is sometimes practiced as a true-life adventure story—depending on the point of view. Thus the journal-keepers of an earlier time became the journalists of a later age. Fact is, if you insert yourself into, or are already an actor in, the story you are telling, you are writing autobiography. Sorry, but that’s how it is.

  And of course there are many reasons to sit down and write one’s own story.

  Brag is one of them. Look at all I’ve accomplished! Ain’t I swell? Or, one may purpose apology. Autobiography in ancient times was called apologia—translated “confession,” mea culpa. This may be regarded as telling a tale—cautionary or otherwise—on one’s self. Or one can write defensively, like an old general attempting to explain or excuse old slaughters; or aggressively, to hurt or wound, to settle old scores, to spin. Or one may write for the sheer pleasure, or pain, of conjuring and confronting—perhaps re-configuring—old memories, absent friends, heartbreaks.

  Implicit in most autobiography is the desire to be remembered, and to be remembered aright—whatever aright might mean. Mark Twain said somewhere that he wished to write his own biography, so he “could rely on getting in all the facts.”

  The facts of Jack London’s life are not in doubt. He was born John Chaney, in San Francisco in 1876, to an unwed mother by the name of Flora Wellman and a father, W. H. Chaney, whom Jack was never to know. By and by Flora (a music teacher and sometimes spiritualist) married up with John London a hard-working, quiet man, with two daugh-ters. One of these girls, Eliza, is said to have acted as little Jack’s mother surrogate. They remained close all of Jack’s life. The family lodged in various places in the Bay area, but soon settled in Oakland. There they lived what we might today call a middle-class—what they called a working-class— life. Either way, theirs was not the abject poverty London was to later suggest. The boy attended school in Oakland, was an indifferent student, and often a truant, routinely slipping away for a day’s ramble down on the city’s waterfront. Here first, at a young age, Jack learned to drink. Not, as he was later to assert, for the drink itself, for the “jingle,” but more for the company of other men and boys, their acceptance and fellow-ship. By his early teens Jack was ditching school, almost all the time. But, quite amazingly, he had by this time discovered the Oakland Public Library, and in particular the librarian, Ina Coolbrith (she was later to become the first Poet Laureate of the State of California) who loaned the boy books, and guided his course of reading. By night Jack sailed his own small boat, and oyster-pirated in the rich shell beds of the Bay, usually managing to elude the harbor patrol. Eventually his little sloop became damaged, and Jack turned around and worked for the State Fishing Patrol, doing his best to thwart other oyster pirates. But soon he had enough of this and signed aboard a sealing schooner bound for the islands in the seal-rich northern Pacific. This experience was to inspire his later fictional masterpiece The Sea Wolf. When he returned home, the States were in severe recession owing to the financial panic of 1893. Jack tried his hand at a couple of back-breaking jobs, but quickly gave them up and hit the road, beginning his life as a “tramp.” As the expression went, he joined “Kelly’s Army,” an informal association of thousands of unemployed, determined to march on Washington.

  These hobo adventures, riding rails, looking for work, begging for food, and ducking the railroad company “bulls,” he was to later chronicle in his memoir The Road. In 1894 Jack served a thirty-day sentence for vagrancy, in the Erie County Penitentiary, in Buffalo NY. This time, returning home, he set himself to get an education, completing his high school work and publishing his first short story, ‘Typhoon Off th
e Coast of Japan,” in the school’s magazine.

  In 1896 he attended Berkeley College, but quit after the first year. In 1897 he joined the gold rush and took passage to the Klondike. This time in Alaska was to furnish Jack London with inspiration for many short stories, and for his two most famous works: The Call of the Wild and White Fang. Again returning to Oakland, he set himself to becoming a published author. By 1900, Jack’s twenty-fourth year, he was doing very well indeed, selling his tales of adventure to several of the big magazines. In this year Jack married Bessie Maddern, with whom he was to have two daughters, but their marriage ended after four years. In 1905 he married Charmian Kittredge. He called her his “mate-woman,” and their marriage was to last the rest of his life. The Call of the Wild had been published in 1903 and became an instant best-seller. Jack London has been a best-seller every year since—that’s over one hundred years. Which other American author can we say the same of? Mark Twain perhaps. By 1913 he was the best-paid, most famous, most widely read American author in the world. In his short writing life—only sixteen years—he wrote twenty-five novels, dozens and dozens of short stories, plays, and essays. Today he is recognized as a forerunner of such literary giants as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Jack Kerouac.

  Jack London was also an adventurer, journalist, celebrity, polemicist, and drunk. And it was the drink that got him in the end, John Barleycorn. He died at his ranch of uremia, or kidney failure, very likely brought on by an acute alcoholic condition. He was forty years old.

  An Autobiography of Jack London is composed of excerpts of three works: The Road (1907), The Cruise of the Snark (1911), and John Barleycorn (1913). I have retained the variant punctuation and spelling of the originals.

  Stephen Brennan

  West Cornwall, CT

  PART ONE

  The Road

  Chapter 1

  Confession

  There is a woman in the state of Nevada to whom I once lied continuously, consistently, and shamelessly, for the matter of a couple of hours. I don’t want to apologize to her. Far be it from me. But I do want to explain. Unfortunately, I do not know her name, much less her present address. If her eyes should chance upon these lines, I hope she will write to me.

  It was in Reno, Nevada, in the summer of 1892. Also, it was fair-time, and the town was filled with petty crooks and tin-horns, to say nothing of a vast and hungry horde of hoboes. It was the hungry hoboes that made the town a “hungry” town. They “battered” the back doors of the homes of the citizens until the back doors became unresponsive.

  A hard town for “scoffings,” was what the hoboes called it at that time. I know that I missed many a meal, in spite of the fact that I could “throw my feet” with the next one when it came to “slamming a gate” for a “poke-out” or a “set-down,” or hitting for a “light piece” on the street. Why, I was so hard put in that town, one day, that I gave the porter the slip and invaded the private car of some itinerant millionnaire. The train started as I made the platform, and I headed for the aforesaid millionnaire with the porter one jump behind and reaching for me. It was a dead heat, for I reached the millionnaire at the same instant that the porter reached me. I had no time for formalities. “Gimme a quarter to eat on,” I blurted out. And as I live, that millionnaire dipped into his pocket and gave me . . . just . . . precisely . . . a quarter. It is my conviction that he was so flabbergasted that he obeyed automatically, and it has been a matter of keen regret ever since, on my part, that I didn’t ask him for a dollar. I know that I’d have got it. I swung off the platform of that private car with the porter manoeuvring to kick me in the face. He missed me. One is at a terrible disadvantage when trying to swing off the lowest step of a car and not break his neck on the right of way, with, at the same time, an irate Ethiopian on the platform above trying to land him in the face with a number eleven. But I got the quarter! I got it!

  But to return to the woman to whom I so shamelessly lied. It was in the evening of my last day in Reno. I had been out to the race-track watching the ponies run, and had missed my dinner (i.e. the mid-day meal). I was hungry, and, furthermore, a committee of public safety had just been organized to rid the town of just such hungry mortals as I. Already a lot of my brother hoboes had been gathered in by John Law, and I could hear the sunny valleys of California calling to me over the cold crests of the Sierras. Two acts remained for me to perform before I shook the dust of Reno from my feet. One was to catch the blind baggage on the westbound overland that night. The other was first to get something to eat. Even youth will hesitate at an all-night ride, on an empty stomach, outside a train that is tearing the atmosphere through the snow-sheds, tunnels, and eternal snows of heaven-aspiring mountains.

  But that something to eat was a hard proposition. I was “turned down” at a dozen houses. Sometimes I received insulting remarks and was informed of the barred domicile that should be mine if I had my just deserts. The worst of it was that such assertions were only too true. That was why I was pulling west that night. John Law was abroad in the town, seeking eagerly for the hungry and homeless, for by such was his barred domicile tenanted.

  At other houses the doors were slammed in my face, cutting short my politely and humbly couched request for something to eat. At one house they did not open the door. I stood on the porch and knocked, and they looked out at me through the window. They even held one sturdy little boy aloft so that he could see over the shoulders of his elders the tramp who wasn’t going to get anything to eat at their house.

  It began to look as if I should be compelled to go to the very poor for my food. The very poor constitute the last sure recourse of the hungry tramp. The very poor can always be depended upon. They never turn away the hungry. Time and again, all over the United States, have I been refused food by the big house on the hill; and always have I received food from the little shack down by the creek or marsh, with its broken windows stuffed with rags and its tired-faced mother broken with labor. Oh, you charity-mongers! Go to the poor and learn, for the poor alone are the charitable. They neither give nor withhold from their excess. They have no excess. They give, and they withhold never, from what they need for themselves, and very often from what they cruelly need for themselves. A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog.

  There was one house in particular where I was turned down that evening. The porch windows opened on the dining room, and through them I saw a man eating pie—a big meat-pie. I stood in the open door, and while he talked with me, he went on eating. He was prosperous, and out of his prosperity had been bred resentment against his less fortunate brothers.

  He cut short my request for something to eat, snapping out, “I don’t believe you want to work.”

  Now this was irrelevant. I hadn’t said anything about work. The topic of conversation I had introduced was “food.” In fact, I didn’t want to work. I wanted to take the westbound overland that night.

  “You wouldn’t work if you had a chance,” he bullied.

  I glanced at his meek-faced wife, and knew that but for the presence of this Cerberus I’d have a whack at that meat-pie myself. But Cerberus sopped himself in the pie, and I saw that I must placate him if I were to get a share of it. So I sighed to myself and accepted his work-morality.

  “Of course I want work,” I bluffed.

  “Don’t believe it,” he snorted.

  “Try me,” I answered, warming to the bluff.

  “All right,” he said. “Come to the corner of blank and blank streets”—(I have forgotten the address)—”tomorrow morning. You know where that burned building is, and I’ll put you to work tossing bricks.”

  “All right, sir; I’ll be there.”

  He grunted and went on eating. I waited. After a couple of minutes he looked up with an I-thought-you-were-gone expression on his face, and demanded:—

  “Well?”

  “I . . . I am waiting for something to eat,” I said
gently. “I knew you wouldn’t work!” he roared.

  He was right, of course; but his conclusion must have been reached by mind-reading, for his logic wouldn’t bear it out. But the beggar at the door must be humble, so I accepted his logic as I had accepted his morality.

  “You see, I am now hungry,” I said still gently. “To-morrow morning I shall be hungrier. Think how hungry I shall be when I have tossed bricks all day without anything to eat. Now if you will give me something to eat, I’ll be in great shape for those bricks.”

  He gravely considered my plea, at the same time going on eating, while his wife nearly trembled into propitiatory speech, but refrained.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said between mouthfuls. “You come to work tomorrow, and in the middle of the day I’ll advance you enough for your dinner. That will show whether you are in earnest or not.”

  “In the meantime—” I began; but he interrupted.

  “If I gave you something to eat now, I’d never see you again. Oh, I know your kind. Look at me. I owe no man. I have never descended so low as to ask any one for food. I have always earned my food. The trouble with you is that you are idle and dissolute. I can see it in your face. I have worked and been honest. I have made myself what I am. And you can do the same, if you work and are honest.”

  “Like you?” I queried.

  Alas, no ray of humor had ever penetrated the sombre work-sodden soul of that man. “Yes, like me,” he answered.

  “All of us?” I queried.

  “Yes, all of you,” he answered, conviction vibrating in his voice.

  “But if we all became like you,” I said, “allow me to point out that there’d be nobody to toss bricks for you.”

  I swear there was a flicker of a smile in his wife’s eye. As for him, he was aghast—but whether at the awful possibility of a reformed humanity that would not enable him to get anybody to toss bricks for him, or at my impudence, I shall never know.