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.

Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyh orse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

Skyhorse
^®
and Skyhorse Publishing
^®
are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
^®
, a Delaware corporation.

www.skyhorsepublishing.com

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

Chapter13
Finding 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

Chapter21
The 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

T
he 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 the Coast of Japan,”
in the school's magazine.