CHAPTER CVIII

SUPERMANHOOD

We come now to the first of the writers of our time who was born of the working class, and carried his working-class consciousness into his literary career. He was the true king of our story tellers, the brightest star that flashed upon our skies. He brought us the greatest endowment both of genius and of brain, and the story of what America did to him is a painful one.

Jack London was born in San Francisco, in 1876, which made him two years my senior. We took to exchanging our first books, and a controversy started between us, which lasted the rest of his life; the last letter I received from him was an invitation to come up to the ranch and continue it. “You and I ought to have some ‘straight from the shoulder’ talk with each other. It is coming to you, it may be coming to me. It may illuminate one or the other or both of us.” I answered that I was finishing a job of writing; but that as soon as the job was done I would come and “stand the gaff.” And then I read that he was dead!

It was the old question, several times stated in this book, of self-discipline versus self-indulgence; or, as Jack would have put it, asceticism versus self-expression. Which way will a man get the most out of life? Believing in his own nature and giving it rein, living intensely and fast; or distrusting his nature, all nature, stooping to mean cautions and fears, imposing a rule upon his impulses--and so cutting himself off from his joyful fellows, and exposing himself to painful sneers?

I see Jack vividly, as he was at our first meeting, when he came to New York in 1904 or 1905. At that time he was in the full glory of his newly-won fame, and we young Socialists had got up a big meeting for him at Grand Central Palace. Our hero came on a belated train from Florida, arriving when our hearts were sick with despair; he came, radiant and thrilling, in spite of an attack of tonsilitis, and strode upon the platform amid the waving of red handkerchiefs, and in a voice of calm defiance read to the city of New York his essay, “Revolution.”

New York did not like it, needless to say. But I liked it so well that I was prepared to give my hero the admiration of a slave. But we spent the next day together, chatting of the things we were both absorbed in; and all that day the hero smoked cigarettes and drank--I don’t remember what it was, for all these red and brown and green and golden concoctions are equally painful to me, and the sight of them deprives me of the control of my facial muscles. Jack, of course, soon noted this; he was the red-blood, and I was the mollycoddle, and he must have his fun with me, in the mood of the oyster pirate and roustabout. Tales of incredible debauches; tales of opium and hashish, and I know not what other strange ingredients; tales of whisky bouts lasting for weeks! I remember a picture of two sailor boys at sea in a small boat, unable to escape from each other, conceiving a furious hatred of each other, and when they got ashore, retiring behind the sand-dunes to fight. They fought until they could hardly walk--and then they repaired to town to heal their bruises with alcohol.

The next time we met was six or eight years later; and this time the controversy was more serious. For now Jack had read “Love’s Pilgrimage,” and was exasperated by what seemed to him a still less excusable form of asceticism, that of sex. Here was a so-called hero, a prig of a poet, driving a young wife to unhappiness by notions born in the dark corners of Christian monkeries. I am not sure just how I defended poor Thyrsis; I am not sure how clearly I myself saw at that time the peculiar working of sex-idealism which had manifested itself in that novel; the impulse a man has to be ashamed of advantages given to him by nature and society, and so to put himself chivalrously under the feet of a woman--raising her, an image of perfection, upon a pedestal of his own self-reproach. Sometimes she refuses to stay upon this pedestal; and so results a comical plight for a too-imaginative ascetic!

The argument between Jack and myself was handicapped on that occasion by the fact that his voice was almost entirely gone because of a sore throat. He was trying the alcohol treatment; my last picture of him in the flesh was very much of the flesh, alas!--with a flask of gin before him, and the stumps of many cigarettes in his dinner-plate, and his eyes red and unwholesome-looking. He has told the story of his travels in the Kingdom of Alcoholia himself, told it bravely and completely, so I am not obliged to use any reserve in speaking of this aspect of his life. I went away, more than ever confirmed as a mollycoddle!

But Jack London was a man with a magnificent mind, and a giant’s will. He fought tremendous battles in his own soul--battles in despite of his own false philosophy, battles which he was fighting even while he was quarreling at other men’s self-restraint. He went on a trip around the Horn, which lasted several months, and drank nothing all that time; also, he wrote that shining book, “John Barleycorn,” one of the most useful and most entertaining ever penned by a man.

It was our habit to send each other our new books, and to exchange comments on them. When I read “John Barleycorn” I wrote that the book had made me realize a new aspect of the drink problem, a wrong it did to men who never touched it--in depriving them of companionship, making them exiles among their fellows. So much of men’s intercourse depends upon and is colored by drinking! I, for example, had always felt that my friendship with Jack London had been limited by that disharmony.

He wrote in reply that I was mistaken; it was especially with my attitude towards sex that he disagreed. We exchanged some letters about the matter, and mentally prepared ourselves for that duel which will never be fought. In concluding the subject of alcohol, let me point out that Jack himself settled the controversy by voting for “California Dry” at the election held a few days before his death. His explanation was that while he enjoyed drinking, he was willing to forego that enjoyment for the sake of the younger generation; and it would indeed be a graceless ascetic who asked more than that!

So far as concerns the matter of sex, the test of a man’s philosophy is that at the age of forty he has kept his belief in womankind, in the joy and satisfaction that true love may give. Where the philosophy of “self-expression” had led Jack London was known to many who heard him tell of a book he planned to write, giving the whole story of his experiences with women. He meant to write it with the same ruthless honesty he had used in “John Barleycorn”; revealing his tragic disillusionment, and his contempt for woman as a parasite, a creature of vanity and self-indulgence.

Jack’s conquests among the sex had been many, and too easy, it would seem; like most fighters, he despised an unworthy antagonist. The women who threw themselves at his head came from all classes of society, drawn to him as moths to a flame; but it is evident that his philosophy was to blame for the fact that there were so few among them he could respect. There were surely many able to hold the interest of a great man, who did not share his philosophy, and therefore remained unnoticed by him.

It is not generally the custom to write of these things in plain words; but in the case of Jack London it would be futile to do otherwise, because he spoke of them freely, and would have written of them in the same way. His whole attitude was a challenge to truth-telling, a call for frankness, even to the point of brutality. The book he planned was to be published under some such name as “Jack Liverpool”--which you must admit would hardly have been a very adequate disguise. I have heard one of his best friends say that he is glad Jack never lived to write it.

For my part, believing as I do that the salvation of the race depends upon unmasking the falsehoods of our class-morality--the institution which I call “marriage plus prostitution”--I cannot but sigh for this lost story. What an awakening it would have brought to the mothers of our so-called “better classes,” if Jack London had ever given to the world the true story of his experiences with their daughters! As a school boy in Oakland, for example, with the young girls of the comfortable classes in that city! He and his companions, sons of workingmen and poor people, looking up to the great world above them inquiringly, made the strange discovery that these shining, golden-haired pets of luxury, guarded at home and in their relations with their social equals by the thousand sleepless eyes of scandal, found it safe and pleasant to repair to secret rendezvous among the willow thickets of Lake Merritt, and there play the nymph to handsome and sturdy fauns of a class below the level ever reached by the thousand sleepless eyes!

When you listened to a narrative such as that, you realized the grim meaning that Jack London put into his essay, “What Life Means to Me,” telling of the embitterment that came to him when he, the oyster pirate and roustabout, broke into the “parlor floor of society”:

Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, they were merely the unburied dead.... The women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below in the cellar.... It is true these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but, in spite of their prattle, the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and prostitution itself.

Jack London had a dream of another kind of love; the dream of a strong, free, proud woman, the mate for a strong, free, proud man. This dream came into his writings at the start; into “A Daughter of the Snows,” his third novel--the very name of it, you perceive. This story, published in the second year of the present century, was crude and boyish, but it had the promise of his dawning greatness, and was the occasion of my first letter to him, and the beginning of our friendship. Afterwards he told this same dream of the perfect mating, over and over again; he continued to tell it long after he had ceased to believe in it.

This necessity of writing about sex in a way that was utterly insincere must have been the main cause of that contempt for his own fiction which London was so swift and vehement to proclaim. The expression of this contempt was the most startling thing about him, to any one who admired his work. “I loathe the stuff when I have done it. I do it because I want money and it’s an easy way to get it. But if I could have my choice about it I never would put pen to paper--except to write a Socialist essay, to tell the bourgeois world how much I despise it.” I remember trying to persuade him that he must have enjoyed writing the best of his stories--“The Sea Wolf” and “The Call of the Wild”; but he would not have it so. He was a man of action; he liked to sail a boat, to run a ranch, to fight for Socialism.

His real attitude towards woman was expressed in “Martin Eden,” his most autobiographical novel, whose hero gives his final conclusion about life by dropping himself out of the porthole of an ocean steamer at night. This hero is a working boy, who makes a desperate struggle to rise from poverty; but the girl of the world of culture, whom he idealizes and worships, proves a coward and fails him in his need. That is one wrong an uncomprehending woman can do to a man; and yet another is to comprehend his weaker part too well. I have heard friends of London’s boyhood tell how he came back from the Klondike with the flush of his youthful dream upon him--the dream of the primitive female, the “mate” of the strong and proud and free man; and how a shrewd young woman saw her chance and proceeded to play the primitive female in drawing-rooms, leaping over tables and chairs, and otherwise exhibiting abounding energy. But when this game had accomplished its purpose she did no more leaping, but “settled down,” as the phrase is; and so came a divorce.

This “Martin Eden” is assuredly one of Jack London’s greatest works; he put his real soul into it, and the fact that it was so little known and read, must have been of evil significance to him. It taught him that if an American writer wants to earn a living with his pen--especially an extravagant living--it is necessary that he should avoid dealing in any true and vital way with the theme of sex. Either he must write over and over again the dream of primitive and perfect mating, a phenomenon unreal and unconvincing to people who are not primitive, but who have intellects as well as bodies to mate; or else, if he deals with modern life, he must give us details of the splendid and devastating passions of the prosperous--the kind of perfumed poison now all the rage. One saw the beginning of that in “The Little Lady of the Big House,” and I count this book the most sinister sign in the life of Jack London. A man can hardly have a thirty-six thousand dollar a year contract with the Hearst magazines and still keep his soul alive!

I would say to myself, mournfully, that America had “got” Jack London, just as it “got” Mark Twain! But then something would happen to show me that I had given up hope too soon. Jack had a mind which worked unceasingly, and impelled him irresistibly; he had a love of truth that was a passion, a hatred of injustice that burned volcanic fires. He was a deeply sad man, a bitterly, cruelly suffering man, and no one could tell what new vision he would forge in the heat of his genius. If I write of him here severely it is because I believe in the rigid truth, which he himself preached; but I would not leave anyone with the idea that I do not appreciate his greatness, both as a writer and a man.

There were many among his friends and mine who gave him up. He went to Hawaii, and the “smart set” there made a lion of him, and he condescended to refer appreciatively to their “sweet little charities” on behalf of the races they were exploiting. He went to Mexico, and fell under the spell of the efficiency of oil engineers, and wrote for “Collier’s Weekly” a series of articles which caused radicals to break out in rage. Jack was a boy to the end, and must make new discoveries and have new enthusiasms. If a naval officer took him over a battleship, he would perceive that it was a marvelous and thrilling machine; but then in the quiet hours of the night he would see the pitiful white faces of the stokers, to whom as a guest of an officer he had not been introduced!

Yes, for he had been in the place of these stokers, and their feelings had been stamped upon his soul. He might set up to be a country gentleman, and fall into a fury with his “hands” for their stupidity and incompetence; but if you said to him, “How about the class war?” instantly he would be there with his mind. “Yes, of course, I know how they feel; if I were in their place I would never do a stroke of work I did not have to.” It is a stressful thing to have an imagination, and to see many sides of life at once!

Jack had a divine pity, he had wept over the East End of London as Jesus wept over Jerusalem. For years afterwards the memories of this stunted and debased population haunted him beyond all peace; the pictures he wrote of them in “The People of the Abyss” will be read by posterity with horror and incredulity, and recognized as among the most powerful products of his pen. Those, with his vivid and intensely felt Socialist essays, constitute him one of the great revolutionary figures of our history. I know that he kept a spark of that sacred fire burning to the very end, for a little over a year before his death I tried him with the bulky manuscript of “The Cry for Justice.” The preface he wrote for it is one of the finest things he ever did, and some of it will be carved upon his monument:

It is so simple a remedy, merely service. Not one ignoble thought or act is demanded of any one of all men and women in the world to make fair the world. The call is for nobility of thinking, nobility of doing. The call is for service, and such is the wholesomeness of it, he who serves all best serves himself.

That is what life had taught him at the end. But it was not easy for him to learn such a lesson, for he had an imperious nature, fierce in its demands, and never entirely to be tamed. The struggle between individualism and Socialism was going on in his whole being all the time. In the copy of “Martin Eden” which he sent me he wrote: “One of my motifs in this book was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled for so far not a single reviewer has discovered it.” After reading the book I replied that it was easy to understand the befuddlement of the critics; for he had shown such sympathy with his hard-driving individualist hero that it would hardly occur to anyone to take the character as a warning and a reproach.

You feel that same thing in all his books--in “The Sea Wolf,” and especially in “The Mutiny of the Elsinore”; the Nietzschean world-conqueror has conquered London’s imagination, in spite of his reason and his conscience. If I have written here with cruel frankness about the personal tragedies of his life, it is because I would not have posterity continue in the misunderstanding of which he complained in the case of “Martin Eden.” No, do not make that mistake about his life and its meaning; most certainly it is not a glorification of the red-blooded superman, trampling all things under his feet, gratifying his imperious desires. Rather is it a demonstration of the fact that the world-conquering superman, trampling all things under his feet and gratifying all his desires, commits suicide by swallowing laudanum at the age of forty, because pleasure and wealth and fame have turned to ashes on his lips. Jack’s friends say that the cause was a desire for two women at the same time; but I don’t believe that a mature, intellectual man will kill himself for such a reason, unless his moral forces have been sapped by years of self-indulgence.

It was the “Martin Eden” ending, which had haunted Jack London all his life, and which in the end he made a reality. What a shame, and what a tragedy to our literature, that capitalist America, the philosophy of individualist greed and selfishness, should have stolen away the soul of this man, with all his supreme and priceless gifts! He had seen so clearly our vision of fellowship and social justice--how clearly, let him tell you in his own words, the last words he wrote upon ethical matters:

He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of service, will serve truth to confute liars and make them truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will perish; will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not beautiful. And he who is strong will serve the weak that they may become strong. He will devote his strength not to the debasement and defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity for them to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and beasts.

These words are from “The Cry for Justice,” “this humanist Holy Book,” as London called it. Such words, and actions based upon them, make precious his memory, and will preserve it as long as anything in American literature is preserved. Perhaps the best thing I can add to this chapter is a statement of what I personally owed to him--the utmost one writer can owe to another. When he was at the height of his fame, and I was unknown, I sent him proofs of “The Jungle,” explaining that I had been unable to find a publisher, and wished to raise money to publish the book myself. There are many jealousies in the literary world; some who win its laurels by bitter struggle are not eager to raise up rivals. But Jack was not one of these; he wrote a letter about the book, hailing it as “The ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of Wage Slavery,” and rallying the Socialist movement as by a bugle-call to its support. If that book went all over the world, it was Jack London’s push that started it; and I am only one of a score of authors who might tell the same story of generous and eager support.

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