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.