Fire Season Lone Wolves
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THE REDWOOD COAST Volume 10, Number 4 REVIEW Fall 2008 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer HABITAT ist politics, he was the wealthiest writer of his era and he owned large tracts of land in Sonoma County. Breast-fed and raised by an African-American nursemaid (the Fire Season ex-slave Daphne Virginia “Jennie” Pren- tiss), he was an unabashed white suprema- cist capable of churning out the crudest C. Kevin Smith formulations of racial bigotry. It’s often been said that histori- My house is made of wood so old, so dry cal figures attract the biographers they From years beneath the pilot-light blue sky deserve, but I’m not so sure that is the A stranger’s idle gaze could be the match case with London. His is a unique situa- That sends us all to blazes—Where was I? tion in which many of the artifacts of his life were long sequestered not only from —JAMES MERRILL , “Home Fires” the public, but from scholars as well. Although a veritable academic industry am standing before my shelves has risen up around London and his writ- of books—hundreds of books. A ings over the last three decades, there has I lifetime of books. Hundreds more not been a definitive biography published nestle in boxes in the basement. My eyes in the 90-odd years since his death. Jack race across the rows of spines. I must London has yet to meet his match. be fast for we are evacuating, the fire is uncontrolled and is burning this way. My ondon was born to an unmarried mind feels laser-sharp, focused and clear, Lmother in San Francisco in 1876. It almost empty. I scan the familiar titles, is believed that his father was William speed-reading my floor-to-ceiling shelves. H. Chaney, an itinerant writer, lecturer My fingers pull out three volumes. I exit and astrologer, who lived with London’s my office, books in hand, turning once mother, Flora Wellman, in the year to let my eyes rest upon the shapes of its preceding his birth. Before her son’s first many objects, the walls and windows, birthday, the troubled Flora married Civil the unfinished projects on my desk, the War veteran John London, who raised the books on my desk, the stacks of books on SY GEOFFREYCOURTE LLEC TIONDUNN CO young boy as his own, along with other the floor. I look at the chair, the table, the Jack London at Bohemian Grove, Sonoma County, August 1904 siblings from his previous marriage. The lamp. I leave. I shut the door behind me. London clan moved throughout the Bay I do not know when, or if, I will return. Area, living at various locales in the East Earlier that morning, a Wednesday, Bay and as far south as the San Mateo I had sat at my desk and sent an email Lone Wolves Coast, then finally back to Oakland, where to my worried family about the fires in “Jack” attended grammar school and sold Big Sur. I told them what the authorities The many lives of Jack London newspapers from street corners to help his had told us the previous evening at the family make ends meet. community fire meeting, that there was no London’s childhood poverty may have immediate danger, no evacuation foreseen. Geoffrey Dunn been somewhat exaggerated by the author Highway 1 would remain open, businesses in later years, but the young London most would remain open. Thirty minutes after n The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath London wrote about love and sport, certainly worked various jobs in canner- my reassuring email, we were notified that and Ted Hughes (1994), Janet literary ambition and alcoholism, betrayal ies, jute mills and laundries. He cleaned our side of the highway, the west side, Malcolm brilliantly illuminated and political assassination. He wrote saloons and shoveled coal, worked as a was under an advisory evacuation. (The the constructive nature of biogra- travelogues and futuristic potboilers. In ship hand and became an oyster pirate fires were burning only on the east side phy and called into question both his brilliant maritime epoch, The Sea on San Francisco Bay. Later, he hoboed of the highway.) Within a few hours the Ithe arrogance and intellectual duplicity Wolf (1903), he paid personal homage to across the country, was imprisoned in advisory would be changed to mandatory. of any claim to packaging human life so Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. And in a Buffalo for a month, returned to Oakland By the end of the day we would be miles neatly between two covers, be they paper series of books like The People of Abyss High School, dropped out, went back to from home, unsure if we would ever see or cloth. “Biography can be likened to (1903), War of the Classes (1905), The try college at the University of California, it again. a book that has been scribbled in by an Road (1907), The Iron Heel (1908) and then dropped out from there, too, before We: myself, my partner Jeff, two cats, alien,” she observed. “After we die, our Revolution and Other Essays (1910), embarking on a yearlong venture in search Misha and Pearl, and Emile, the 90-year- story passes into the hands of strangers. London laid bare the evils of “predatory” of gold in the Klondike. old artist and friend we take care of. We: The biographer feels himself not to be a capitalism, promoted the possibilities of Through it all, London was a voracious my notebooks and journals, boxes of let- borrower but a new owner, who can mark democratic socialism and warned against reader, as literature and historical texts ters, family photographs; Jeff’s computer and underline as he pleases.” the coming tyranny of centralized govern- provided him with imaginary escapes and camera equipment; our art, so much So it has been with the life of the ment. He was as revolutionary as he was from the tedium of his workdays and the of it created by people we know; Emile’s American novelist and adventurer Jack prolific, a legacy that has been lost on emotional vacuum of his family. He had art, as much as we could pack in the time London. For nearly a century now, various many of his conservative biographers, but returned to California from the Yukon in allowed. Two trips to Carmel, first with strangers have marked and underscored which has been superbly reclaimed in The the summer of 1898, essentially broke, yet Emile and the cats, then with a car and a his life as they pleased. Indeed, some have Radical Jack London: Writings on War determined to become a writer. U-Haul we’d rented several days before, ripped out entire passages, while others and Revolution (2008), edited by Sonoma By then, London had also become an in the event, which seemed unlikely at the have speculated—and even fabricated— State University professor Jonah Raskin ardent advocate for socialism. He had time, we would have to evacuate. what may have appeared between the lines [see review, page 9]. joined the Oakland chapter of the Social- Evacuate: e = out + vacuus = empty. of his life. It makes for an interesting, if London’s was a life full of Whitman- ist Labor Party as early as 1896 and had To evacuate is to empty your home of troubling, biographical mosaic, which esque contradictions. In spite of his social- become a well-known regional figure on yourself. This is physically possible; it is from a distance takes on something of the stump for socialist causes, twice run- emotionally impossible. It is not possible shape and definition, but from close-up ning unsuccessfully for mayor of Oakland to empty “home” out of your self—the bears little resemblance to the life at all. Certainly no literary on the socialist ticket. The San Francisco home that lives inside you. Even if ev- Certainly no literary legacy in the legacy in the history Chronicle dubbed him “the boy socialist erything remains intact, there is breakage. history of American arts and letters has of Oakland” and reported that the hand- What once was whole—the constellation been more distorted, more diminished, of American letters some and athletic London was “holding of objects and bodies and memories and than London’s. While he was America’s forth nightly to the crowds that throng desires that comprise your experience of (and perhaps the world’s) most popular has been more dis- City Hall park.” home—is split apart into pieces, into the novelist, short story writer and journal- torted than London’s. London’s work ethic matched his piecemeal fragments of your evacuation. ist during his lifetime, his reputation has ambition. He adhered to a rigorous writing You take what feels most precious and been reduced over the years to being While he was perhaps regimen of one thousand words per day. leave behind the rest, abandoning the sud- the author of juvenile “dog stories” and By the spring of 1900, the 24-year-old denly haunted shell of your household to “Klondike tales.” While London’s two the world’s most popu- author had already landed several of his the gods of fate or fortune. You hope your canine classics, Call of the Wild (1903) lar writer during his stories in leading literary magazines, home survives whatever catastrophe has and White Fang (1906), have undoubtedly including Harper’s Weekly, The Atlantic precipitated your evacuation so you can contributed to that reduction, his col- lifetime, his reputation Monthly and McClure’s.