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.
: when poor people become intellectuals they fret endlessly over the immaterial nature of their production. Just as Jack London quelled his conscience with vigorous assertions of the workiness of his labors, the Kaufman household obsessively catalogues its "work performed." So when an entire day passes in which I haven't marked a lick or thought about my dissertation . . . you can only imagine. I feel less than useless. My father drove an ambulance. Saved people's lives. 
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