On January 21, 1906, Jack London, three months divorced from Bess Maddern, three months married to Charmian Kittridge, entered Mrs. Stenberg’s Sacramento apartment with lascivious intent. Sometime that evening, Mrs. Selinger (a dear friend and frequent alibi of Mrs. Stenberg) informed the young adulterers of her encounter with a “Hindoo.” He threatened exposure, she said, though not in those words.
The previous November, the Los Angeles Times had editorialized Jack’s divorce: “The Times suggests that the incident will serve well enough to call attention to the fact that the public is inclined to look more leniently on divorces where alleged ‘geniuses’ are concerned.” Now Jack knew the public will not look leniently on another divorce. He knew that this time it will frown on him “the same as upon all others who put themselves outside the pale of decency by reprehensible actions.” And what, Jack thought, what about Mr. Stenberg, branded a cuckold in boldface from Sacramento to New York City. He might respond with a reprehensible action of his own. “Pay the Hindoo what he wants,” Jack said.
Months later, London explained his actions to a friend: “There’s no use getting them into trouble with their husbands, even if they are rattle-brained.”
Later that same January night, at a meeting of the New York Educational Alliance, London entranced another sympathetic crowd with talk of the lucky cave man. “He Didn’t Have to Ask for the Right to Work,” read the byline the next morning. “If he woke up hungry he picked up his club and sallied forth.” London glanced down. He had first delivered this diatribe the previous March on the banks of the Sacramento River. He continued: “He was able, more or less, to satisfy his hunger. There was nobody between him and his work.”
The Hindoo wanted too much. He wrote London every month. The letters were unsigned, but the Hindoo was unconcerned. Jack would know who he is. London continued to work. He completed Before Adam. On June 9, he mailed George Sterling the manuscript. “It’s just a skit, ridiculously true, preposterously real.” London implored him to “jump on it.” “I guess you know the thing’s pretty punk,” was Sterling’s reply, “or you’d not suggest that I roast it.”
The Hindoo played both sides. He persecuted Mrs. Stenberg on Jack’s behalf, and London on Mrs. Stenberg’s or Mrs. Selinger’s. (Possibly his own.) His actions confused London, who no longer understood to whom he was beholden. He wrote Mrs. Stenberg:
Now I am writing to you for information. I am the real Jack London. I don’t know you. I don’t know the Hindoo. I don’t know Mrs. Stenberg, much less love her. Was this all a concoction of yours, or did you really know some fellow who claimed that he was Jack London?
Four days after finishing Before Adam, on June 14, 1906,
London informed Elwyn Hoffman that “I undoubtedly have a double
impersonating me.” In a letter written around the same time to A.L.
Babcock, the President of the Yellowstone National Bank of Billings,
Montana, London complained that “This double of mine is always getting
me into trouble.”
When I was East in January of this year, he was making love to a married woman with two children in Sacramento…
When I was in Boston last year, he was in San Francisco, my native city, entering into engagements with school-teachers to gather data for a volume on Education…
When I was in California, he was lugging away an armful of books from the Astor Library in New York, on the strength of his being I.
When I was in California, in the 1900s, he was in Alaska, and when I was in China, in 1904, I was meeting people who had met him in Alaska in 1900.
Jack London never caught up with his double or, as he later suspected, doubles. He tracked this particular double off-and-on during the first half of 1906 while writing what would become Before Adam. While I do not wish to establish a strict causal connection between London’s concern for this double and the structure of the narrative in Before Adam, the structure suggests London thought seriously about what, in the novel, he calls “this semi-dissociation of personality” (9). The anonymous narrator dreams of another life in the Younger World. “My dream life and my waking life were lives apart,” he says, “with not one thing in common save myself. I was the connecting link that somehow lived both lives” (5). But this dissociation is not complete.
Although his “dream personality lived in the long ago, before ever man, as we know him, came to be,” the narrator’s “wake-a-day personality projected itself, to the extent of the knowledge of man’s existence, into the substance of [his] dreams” (12). The narrator insists that he is a “freak of heredity” in possession of “stronger and completer race memories” than the average person (18). These memories belong to an “other-personality …. vestigial in all of us,” but more pronounced in him: “This other-self of mine is an ancestor, a progenitor of my progenitors in the early line of my race” (19). Unlike most of us, the narrator possesses more than racial memories—“the flying dream, the pursuing monster dream, color dreams, [and] suffocation dreams”—he possesses “the memories of one particular and far-removed progenitor” (20). The narrator’s “other-personality” or “other-self” struggles for survival in the violent Younger World, terrifying the narrator awake nightly. The narrator cannot help but be concerned about the fate of this particular progenitor, who he christens “Big-Tooth.” Nor can he control what happens to Big-Tooth. He can only observe, in disgust, in horror, the short violent lives of his ancestors. Although this parallel between the narrator’s self and other-self and London and his doubles seems strained, Before Adam is the first in a series of novels populated by literary doubles. As Jonathan Auerbach notes in his account of how London incorporated his trademarked “self” into The Iron Heel (1908), Martin Eden (1909), and Burning Daylight (1910), “each novel’s main character, magnified and glorified, plays out a different imaginary career for London” (229).
While there are many possible reasons for London to become concerned with literary doubles at this particular moment in his career (and Auerbach intelligently addresses many of them in Male Call), some may complain that this explanation stinks of authorial intent and the determinism so often associated with it. Others may complain that this explanation is too historically deterministic, too bound to the moment of when London produced Before Adam. What interests me is the larger connections to be drawn from this nexus of personal, historical and literary history: the helplessness of the unnamed narrator to alter the behavior of his double possibly doubles the impotence London felt to do anything about his doubles.
great post.
Posted by: luke Mergner | Friday, 16 September 2005 at 09:19 PM
Originally from the North Bay Area and raised in the London mythe - as a child, I met Irving Stone and Charmain London - an opportunity to read London in translation here in France, where I have lived since 1965, has opened doors to his use of metaphore. When the flowery language is borne down to its skeletal latin origins, the reading becomes entirely other. The translator's influence of the reading taken into account, the result still seems an interesting souce?
Posted by: Barbara Becquiot | Friday, 17 August 2007 at 03:32 AM