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.