10

PART I:

ANALYSIS OF LONDON’S WRITING ON ASIA

CHAPTER I:

LONDON’S CAREER AND FOCUS ON ASIA

Biographers have produced a great number of worthy volumes about Jack London’s life, but most pay little regard to London’s incredible work as both a reporter and raconteur of life in Asia, Hawaii and the Pacific at the dawn of the twentieth century. His coverage of the early phases of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) was the best of any Western reporter because while most Western reporters sent to cover the war found themselves marooned in Tokyo dependent on propaganda announcements furnished by Japanese authorities, London in early 1904 commandeered a series of native ships that brought him to the Japanese army marching through Korea to confront the well entrenched Japanese army in Manchuria. London’s vivid and lengthy dispatches provide an excellent portrait of war-torn Korea as Russian forces retreated before the steady and highly disciplined march of Japanese troops northward towards Manchuria.

London, however, was more than a mere chronicler of the first major war of the twentieth century. He had read extensively about Japanese and Chinese history and culture before starting his mission as a journalist and had a keen eye for regional history and culture. His reporting represented the best of feature writing, describing local conditions, the mood of the people as well as the state of military affairs. London transports the reader into the scene, allowing him to feel as though he is marching through the Korean countryside together with the Japanese army. His excellent photography also contributed to his worth as a masterful journalist. Indeed, London’s dispatches from Korea and Manchuria, when read as a whole, constitute a lively adventure tale even more compelling than many of his best novels.

London was born on 12 January 1876 in San Francisco, California to Flora Wellman (1843-1922) and astrologer William Henry Cheney (1821-1903).[1] Cheney, an itinerant but well-known astrologer, lived with Flora Wellman from 1874 to 1875, but abandoned her when he heard she was pregnant. Eight months after Jack’s birth, she married an itinerant farmer, John London (1828-1897).[2] Jack took his step-father’s last name. The Londons lived in a number of places in the Bay area for the next two decades as John worked without much success as a truck gardener growing vegetables and raised chickens for the local market.

During his early years Jack attended a number of different schools, but never showed much interest in formal education. His family expected him to contribute his labor not only on the farm, but also in other endeavors to boost the family income. As early as age ten he was selling newspapers, working on the farm, and experiencing many of the hardships faced by so many impoverished families of the time.

As a young teenager London spent much of his time working a seemingly endless array of tiring and menial jobs in such places as a cannery and a jute mill and elsewhere as a window-washer, longshoreman, and even a watchman. Tiring of this work and ceaselessly fascinated with the sea, London borrowed some money, bought his own sailing vessel, Razzle Dazzle, and became an “oyster pirate” in the Bay—stealing oysters from privately-owned beds in the dead of night and selling them at high prices to local restaurants. After pursuing this line of work with moderate success, he was forced to stop when the ship’s mainsail burned and he lost his crew. Ironically, Charley Legrant of the California Fish Patrol offered him a position as a deputy in his force. The former pirate briefly became an enforcer, arresting other pirates and keeping half of the collected fines as his salary.[3]

What is remarkable is that while living in Oakland he discovered the local pubic library and an amiable librarian, Ina Coolbrith, who happily fed his enthusiasm for literature. He spent much of his scant free time reading many of the classics of literature. A biographer writes:

He read everything he could lay his hands on, principally history and adventure, and all the old travels and voyages. He read mornings, afternoons and nights. He read in bed, he read at the table, he read as he walked to and from school, and he read at recess while the other boys were playing.[4]

London’s life changed dramatically in 1893 when he joined the crew of the Sophie Sutherland, a three-masted sealing schooner bound on a voyage to the northern coasts of Japan and along the chain of islands that ascended to the Bering Sea off the coast of Russia. Several of the sailors constantly taunted and teased their young colleague, but his prowess as a scrappy fighter soon won him a respectful reputation as being “one of the boys.” They first sailed to the Japanese Bonin Islands[5] (Ogasawara Shoto, south of Tokyo) where they caroused in local bars and made final preparations for their sealing operation. London’s visit to the Bonin Islands was his first to a foreign country and was the start of his fascination with Japan.

The Sophie Southerland stopped in Yokohama Japan on its way back to San Francisco. The visit was brief, lasting three weeks, but London took the time to explore both Tokyo and Yokohama and to absorb as much as he could of local color and culture. He made many mental notes which later served as the basis of his first three short stories on Japan: “Sakaicho, Hona Asi and Hakadaki,” “A Night’s Swim in Yeddo Bay” (both 1895) and “O Haru” (1897).

While sailing off the coast of Japan, London’s ship encountered a violent typhoon that shook the ship and nearly ripped off its sails. There were times during the storm when the crew felt sure that their ship was doomed, but to their amazement seventeen year-old London grabbed the steering wheel and held the schooner on course during the severest hours of the storm. London‘s first published story, “Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan,” is a literary recounting of this trying experience.

Another formative experience came in 1894 when at the age of seventeen London joined “General” Charles T. Kelly’s march on Washington DC.[6] He traveled east determined to join the march, but as the march itself fizzled, London went on to Chicago, then New York, where he observed some of the city’s worst slums, and finally to Niagara Falls on his way home to California. While at Niagara a policeman arrested him for vagrancy and a court sentenced him to 30-days penal servitude in a Buffalo jail. In The Road, he wrote:


Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say 'unprintable'; and in justice I must also say 'unthinkable'. They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of things as I there saw them."[7]

London’s trip exposed him to the miserable conditions facing so many of America’s poor. Upon his return home London determined that he did not want to spend the rest of his days as a menial laborer:

I had been born in the working class, and I was now, at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel house of our civilization. This is part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore. . . . I was scared into thinking I saw the naked simplicities of the complicated civilization which lived. Life was a matter of food and shelter. In order to get food and shelter men sold things. . . . Labor had muscle and muscle alone, to sell. . . . I learned further that brain was likewise a commodity . . . . It too was different from muscle. A brain seller was only at his prime when he was fifty or sixty years old, and his wares are fetching higher prices than ever. But a laborer was worked out or broken down at forty-five or fifty. I had been in the cellar of society, and I did not like the place as a habitation. The pipes and drains were unsanitary, and the air was bad to breathe. If I could not live on the parlor floor of society, I could, at any rate, have a try at the attic. It was true the diet there was slim, but the air at least was pure. So I resolved to sell no more muscle and become a vendor of brains.[8]

He desired instead to become a “brain merchant,” but realized first he must receive the rudiments of a higher education. In 1895 he attended Oakland High School and after studying frantically for the entrance examinations for the University of California at Berkeley, he entered the school as a freshman. He

excelled in his classes, but had to drop out during his second semester due to his lack of funds.

After London quit his formal education, he decided that he wanted to make his living as a writer. For most of the rest of his life he met his vow to write a thousand words a day every day. He began writing short stories, essays and in time book-length manuscripts. At first he had a very hard time getting any of his work published, but in due course a few and then later many more journals began to publish his work. He was clearly a very talented writer and it was not long before he became famous.

London’s experience as a laborer and his upbringing in a less than well-to-do family nurtured a deep sympathy for the plight of the working man and considerable disdain for the wealthy capitalists whom London blamed for the poverty of the oppressed. Many of London’s essays throughout his career focus on the misery of the poor, but he did not confine himself to mere writing. In 1896, London joined the Socialist Labour Party and soon thereafter became one of its most active members. He twice ran as the party’s candidate for mayor of Oakland (he only received a few hundred votes in each election) and was often found giving impromptu speeches in Oakland’s parks and street corners. Later, in a 1905 essay, “How I became a Socialist,’ he wrote:

It is quite fair to say that I became a Socialist in a fashion somewhat similar to the way in which the Teutonic pagans became Christians—it was hammered into me. Not only was I not looking for Socialism at the time of my conversion, but I was fighting it. I was very young and callow, did not know much of anything, and though I had never heard of a school called “Individualism,” I sang the paean of the strong with all my heart.”[9]

London achieved his greatest fame for his writing about life in the Klondike during the region’s famous gold rush of the late 1890s. He joined the hordes of other treasure-seekers in 1897 who moved north by boat and then traversed overland into the depths of the Yukon. A vigorous twenty-year-old, he made money as a river pilot, but never found an ounce of gold. He hung out in Dawson, largely an instant tent city with a few hastily-built saloons, banks, stores and warehouses. He arrived too late to stake claims in the immediate vicinity of Dawson and was not inspired to investigate untested sites and waters farther out in the wilderness.

London spent most of his days and nights hanging out in saloons and other spots around town, talking to all kinds of people, hearing their stories, questioning old-timers about life there in pre-gold-rush days, and soaking in the atmosphere. He kept a detailed journal, accumulating enough material to later write the classics that would later make him one of the most popular writers of all time. However, a touch of scurvy so weakened him that he returned to San Francisco penniless only a year after he had sailed north to seek his fortune.

His true writing career began in 1898 and 1899. He devoted his time solely to writing, churning out 61 separate essays and stories in 1899 alone. During the early 1900s he also began writing books, some of which were novels, while others were anthologies of his stories or non-fiction works like People of the Abyss (1903), a lengthy study of London’s teeming slums. He also found time to marry Bess Maddern (1876-1947) with whom he would have two daughters, Joan (1901-1971) and Bess (1902-1992). He divorced Bess in 1905 and married Charmian Kittredge (1871-1955), with whom he had a daughter Joy who died in infancy.

London served as a working journalist on three occasions: during the Russo-Japanese War London traveled to Japan and then marched through Korea and Manchuria with the Japanese army as a correspondent for the San Francisco Examiner; he reported on the San Francisco earthquake for Collier’s; and in 1914 he journeyed to Mexico to cover the revolution. In 1907 he paid for the construction of a schooner, the Snark, in which he and Charmain and a small crew sailed to Hawaii and then on to the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, the Soloman Islands, and Australia.

Jack and Charmain purchased a small ranch (“The Beauty Ranch”) near Glen Ellen in the Sonoma County Valley of California not far from San Francisco. Over the years they enlarged their property buying adjacent tracts of land and even went as far as to construct a large mansion on their property which they called “Wolf House.” Just before they were to move into the mansion, the building was destroyed by a fire of mysterious origins. Mourning the loss of their dream house, the Londons continued to live in their ranch cottage.

London’s health deteriorated rapidly during 1916 due to the ravages of uremia, likely brought on when he received treatments of mercury for sores on his body during the Snark expedition. He died on 22 November 1916 at the age of forty. Charmain managed his estate, wrote a book about her late husband, and continued to live on their property until her death in 1955. Both her and Jack’s ashes are buried in a small wooded knoll on their estate near the stone ruins of Wolf House. It is a lovely but very lonely spot nestled in a wet green forest that is visited by thousands of admirers every year.