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world when it came, say, to financial matters. Having been myself independent, and believing that he would take this into consideration, I looked for him to make no matter of a separate bank-account, or at least of the "allowance" loved of wives, in order that I might suffer no sense of bondage. But no. Like the bulk of men, his was the pleasure of spending his own money upon the "one small woman.' Any other arrangement was frowned upon. At the suggestion a frost seemed to spread over his face. And, seeing that it was he, I found the bondage sweet.

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Jack charmed women of all classes, and while he held a reserved opinion as to the intellectuality of the average female brain, he could not abide a stupid woman. His own adventurous mentality had made him pursue women out of curiosity, and learn them too well, perhaps, for his own good. He was of two distinct minds about them, and swung from one to the other: their innate goodness and stanchness commanded his worship, while their pitiable frailty and smallness wrung his spirit. "Pussy! Pussy!" I can hear him purr at any backbiting among his friends. Woman, weighed by his biological judgment, represented the eternal enemy, and he liked the line:

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I must admit that I have seen him play down, not always up, to women and their vanity; but, to his credit and theirs, he never left them long deceived. And he would not try to deceive one who spoke his own language, though he made it extremely difficult for that person to understand his.

He had struggled against misogyny, winning out because he had had experience enough with exceptional women of conscience and brain to keep him healthy in his point of view. Besides, in the last extremity, he was a one-woman man, glorying in the discovery of this. In my copy of "Before Adam," in 1907, he wrote: "I have read Schopenhauer, and Weininger, and all the German misogynists, and still I love you. Such is my chemism -our chemism, rather." He showed an actual reverence for the woman who "informed" her beauty or, better,

Her narrow feet are rooted in the ground, her lack of beauty, who waged inces

from Arthur Symons's "The Dance of the Daughters of Herodias." Yet this very belief, not always voiced without contempt, must have given rise to his pronouncement in "John Barleycorn," "Women are the true conservators of the race."

sant warfare upon her imperfections, who wrought excellently with the material at her hand.

Jack owned to annoyance that the public denied he could write convincingly about women. "And yet," he would say, "I know them too well to write too well about them. I'd never

He spoke of woman as "the immod- get past the editor and the censor."

$ 3

And so I became conversant with that "swarm of vibrating atoms" which men knew as Jack London, the youthful literary craftsman who had, as one critic put it, "lived with storms and spaces and sunlight like a kinsman.' That was it; the dominant note of him was spaciousness, for the inflowing and out-giving of all available knowledge and feeling, the blood of adventure, physical and mental, scorching through life's channels. "Visualization is everything for the teacher," he said, "and I love to teach, to transmit to others the ideas and impressions in my own consciousness."

And it always seemed to me, observing, that while others were merely scratching the surface of events, Jack was getting underneath them, deeper and deeper into their significances.

Religion, as the average man knows religion, had no part in him. Spiritualism had been the belief in his childhood homes, a thing of magic and fearsomeness; but his expanding perceptions could not countenance that belief. His hope for bettering human conditions had filled depths of being which might have responded to divine philosophy. As he had written to Anna Strunsky, "Somehow, we must ever build upon the concrete." Now his oft-repeated criticism rings in the ears of memory: "Will it work? Will you trust your life to it?"

To the exclusion of all else, I now devoted myself to mastering the open book that he tried to render himself to me. Even the piano was silent except when I played for Jack, and the trips to Berkeley with my music-roll became less frequent and eventually ceased, I will say to his unqualified disapproval.

He never could understand, in the long years of our brimming life, why I could not give more time to music, since he, too, loved it so. I learned the eloquence of his tongue, the fine arrogance of his certitudes; his convictions I came to respect for their broad wisdom; and I knew, too, and richly, the eloquence of his silences in the starry moments that come to those who loved as we loved, and, loving, understand mutely. More than once Jack has broken a comprehending pause, or even interrupted speech to say to me the dearest and finest of all his salutations in my thrilling ears:

"My very own twin brother!"

One thing in that earlier association with Jack was almost uncanny: he never seemed to fail of my high expectation. Tremulous, I all but expected him to fail of making good to my ideal in this or that small, fine particular. But in vain; usually he surpassed the tentative demand I made upon his quality. His own failings he had, to be sure, but they were not those ordinarily suspected of lesser men.

The frankness which we continued to practise and exalt made our relationship, through thick and thin, a gorgeous achievement. So I walked softly that spring and summer and fall, dedicated to discern with my own soul's best all of him that was possible, that I might enlarge and fix this kinship forever and forever. Upon one star I was intent: never must our love and its expression sink into commonplace, but must be kept from out "the ruck of casual and transitory things." And this was Jack's reply:

"Commonplaceness shall have no part with us unless I myself should become commonplace, and I think that can never be."

And Jack London learned his woman, playing her game as she tried to play his. With his broad sympathies, to his own peculiar interests he subjoined mine; and I, in return, widened my focus to include hobbies for which I had theretofore had no caring, thus creating fresh interests for my own sphere. Jack, for example, loved keenly a good card game. I had little use for cards, but I applied myself, to the end that before long I could play a fair game of whist or cribbage or pinochle. And when Jack found that certain stern methods of instruction distressed and stood in the way of quick absorption on my part, in all gentleness he went right about in his lifelong tactics, exhibiting due appreciation of the increasing harmony that prevailed in his life. He had until then rather prided himself upon an ability to shake knowledge into others, and I credited him with altering his way to favor me.

84

Another thing came to me for my soul's good and Jack's multiplied content—that I sinned against the Holy Ghost if I should interrupt him in the development of a spoken thought. If so interrupted, "the flight that midmost broke" was never resumed and completed. Brain and artistry were outraged and wounded, and the result was a distinct loss to myself.

"There's the one moment for everything, and it never will come again, my dear," he illustrated; but he would not go on. "I despise gabbly women," he would say. "They all talk at once, and somehow do seem to get one another; but the effect upon me is pandemonium, madness. I like you least when you are with a lot of women and join

in the babble. It ruins one's listening faculties."

Critics then, as now, were prone to despatch the subject of Jack London's personality with words like "primitive," "uncouth," "brutal." He saw the primitiveness in all life, in himself, as he saw everything else, and made all things come under the empery of his thought and written language; but he did not live primitively, inasmuch as he was of a delicate, complex, and withal simple nature. Robustness of body and mind offset, almost contradicted, that sensitiveness to impressions, that reaction to beauty of every sort,though more particularly intellectual beauty, and to sympathy from others in his mood, his aims; and his shrinking from hurt, although only from the very, very few.

Jack's writing, his thousand words a day, was done in a little workroom established in the two-room cottage, quite without any of that work fever often necessary to writers. And whensoever art conflicted with substance, he invariably maintained: "I will sacrifice form every time when it boils down to a final question of choice between form and matter. The thought is the thing." As some one has said, "He cared little for writing and a great deal for what he was writing about."

Here is further expression of his unrelenting realism, his "brass-tack" reality, although it seems to me, all having been said, that his materialism incarnated his idealism, and his idealism consecrated and transfigured his materialism.

"I no more believe in the art for art's sake theory than I believe that a human and a humane motive justifies the inartistic telling of a story. I believe there are saints in slime as well as

saints in heaven, and it depends how the slime saints are treated-upon their environment-as to whether they will ever leave the slime or not. People find fault with me for my 'disgusting realism.' Life is full of disgusting realism. I know men and women as they are, millions of them yet in the slime state. But I am an evolutionist; therefore a broad optimist. Hence my love for the human, in the slime though he be, comes from my knowing him as he is and seeing the divine possibilities ahead of him. That's the whole motive of my 'White Fang.' Every atom of organic life is plastic. The finest specimens now in existence were once all pulpy infants capable of being molded this way or that. Let the pressure be one way, and we have atavism, the reversion to the wild; the other, the domestication, civilization. I have always been impressed with the awful plasticity of life, and I feel that I can never lay enough stress upon the marvelous power and influence of environment.

"No work in the world is so absorbing to me as the people of the world. I care more for personalities than for work or art."

And he always stuck to it that Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" helped him more in his youth than any other book-save Ouida's "Signa," his initial impetus-to success in literature.

"It taught me," he said, "the subtle and manifold operations necessary to transmute thought, beauty, sensation, and emotion into black symbols on white paper; which symbols, through the reader's eye, were taken into his brain, and by his brain transmuted into thought, beauty, sensation, and emotion that fairly corresponded with

mine. Among other things, this taught me to know the brain of my reader, in order to select the symbols that would compel his brain to realize my thought or vision or emotion. Also, I learned that the right symbols were the ones that would require the expenditure of the minimum of my reader's brain energy, leaving the maximum of his brain energy to realize and enjoy the content of my mind as conveyed to his mind." But he added, "In my grownup years the writers who have influenced me most are Karl Marx in a particular, and Spencer in a general, way."

§ 5

The pleasurable course of our companionship had its normal interruptions. I had to become familiar with his man humors. His immoderate smoking was a trial; but after once broaching the subject and finding it a tender one with him, I dropped all reference to the matter. Though he admired frankness and courage, the pettish side that women know of the biggest men, where their personal comforts are in question, prevented my courage from demanding what I had confidently hoped would be its meed. I should have known better; but, then, I was learning. At no time did I ever hear him advise against smoking, yet he promised his nephew, Irving Shepard, a thousand dollars if he would refrain from smoking until he was twenty-one.

Long, hot afternoons of type-writer dictation under the trees sometimes got on our mutual touchy nerves, and we became cognizant of still more of each other's peculiar caprices. Or suddenly, not yet versed in his "brasstack" reasoning, his "arithmetic," I

might quite unwittingly start disputes in which I had no chance against the assault of his logic, and would struggle with nerves that urged me to weep in sheer feminine bafflement, hating myself the more heartily. But always before me rose an honest warning with which Jack had forearmed me.

"One thing I want to tell you for your own good and our happiness together. I do not think you are a hysterical woman. But don't ever have hysterics with me. You may think I am hard. Maybe I am; but very earliest in my environment, in the very molding of the tender thing I was, I came to recoil from hysteria-all the bestiality of uncontrol and its phenomena. And in my manhood I have seen tears and hysteria and false fainting spells, all the unlovely futility of that sort of thing that gets a woman less than nothing from me. So never, never, I pray, if you love me, show yourself hysterical. I promise you I shall be cold, hard, even curious. And I will admit, in your case, that I should be hurt as well. But remember always, this coldness is not deliberate of me; it 's become second nature, a warp. I cannot help shrinking from hysteria as from unforgotten blows. Once, when I was about three,-and this is burned into me with a hot iron, -flower in hand for a gift, I was brushed aside, kicked over, by an angry, rebellious woman striding on her ego-maniacal way. Well, I made an unhappy mouth and went on my own puzzled, dazed path, dimly wounded, non-understanding. And that woman I believed the most wonderful woman in the world, for she had Isaid so herself. So this and other So this and other hysterical scenes have seared me, and I cannot help myself."

He loved argument, but his arguing was always impersonal. I think the following letter to his friend, Blanche Partington, written in 1911, after a warm discussion upon Christian Science generally and Christ's temptation in the wilderness in particular, is of value as an illustration of this characteristic.

Dear Blanche:

Bless you for taking me just as I am, and for not implying one iota more to me than what I stand for.

I am, as you must have divined ere this, a fool truthseeker with a nerve of logic exposed and raw and screaming. Perhaps, it is my particular form of insanity.

I grope in the mud of common facts. I fight like a wolf and a hyena. And I don't mean a bit more, or less, than I say. That is, I am wholly concerned with the problem I am wildly discussing for the moment.

The problem of the "language of the tribe," I fear me, is more profound than you apprehend also more disconcerting than you may imagine for the ones who attempt to talk in the lingo of two different worlds at one and the same time.

Affectionately thine,
JACK LONDON.

Sometimes, when he had been shockingly literal in language of interpretation in one field or another, with blazing, unrepentant eyes he would lash out:

"Am I right? You don't answer. Am I right? If not, show me where I am wrong. I must be shown."

The intense effort required to "show" where I thought him wrong would keep me awake morning, noon, and night, more especially since I nearly always had to own to myself,

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