Even before Jack London was born he was all over thenewspapers. His pregnant mother, Flora, ran out of a San Francisco boarding house and shot herself in the forehead.
‘A Discarded Wife. Driven from House for Refusing to Destroy her Unborn Infant – A Chapter of Heartlessness and Domestic Misery,’ raged the local headline. The scoundrel – it’s important to pay attention here: as with all stories about Jack and his mother, bafflement rapidly sets in – was said to be Professor W.H. Chaney, an itinerant astrologer, who insisted he couldn’t be Jack’s father because he was impotent due to too much ‘brain work’.
But the bullet had missed; the laudanum Flora had swallowed the night before hadn’t been enough. After the blood was wiped off, she rushed away to meet her next man, a carpenter called John London. It was from him that Jack took his stability and his name.
Jack London was born, in 1876, into poverty and fibs. On the advice of spirits conjured up at parlour seances, Florainvested the carpenter’s earnings in lottery tickets, so had to make stern economies elsewhere: when Jack and his half-sister Eliza were close to dying from diphtheria, Eliza woke up briefly from her coma to overhear their mother wondering if it would be cheaper to squeeze both children into one coffin.
Much of Jack’s life (it doesn’t seem right to call such anunsettled character by his second name) and most of his writings are characterised by a struggle for escape – from cold, frompredators, from social oppression, and from Mother. Aged thirteen, he scratched together two dollars and bought a small boat with leaks, ramming and battering about the docks until he learned to sail. By fourteen, he’d obtained a second-hand skiff. At fifteen, he became a pirate. For $300, sponged off a friend, he bought a sloop called the Razzle Dazzle, stole the girlfriend of the man who sold it to him, and spent the nights raiding privately owned oyster beds alongside thieving desperadoes with names like Spider and Whiskey Bob. Reckless, expert and mostly blind drunk, Jack was the hero of his dreams. He had a bestial ability to endure hard work and a suicidal obsession with romance. Frenchie Frank – the fellow who’d sold him the sloop – tried to run him down with a bigger boat in a jealous rage. Jack saw him off: steering Razzle Dazzle with his feet, he whipped out a shotgun and kept it trained on Frenchie until the sloop had sliced past the bows and Jack was away, laughing among the waves. When police raided, he charmed them with his choicest stolen oysters, doused in pepper sauce. On a third occasion – though many biographers throw up their hands in disbelief at about this point – he boarded a boat full ofknife-wielding Chinese shrimp-raiders, rounded up eighteen of the most murderous, and marched them off to hokey with a gun that was really just two
