ADOLESCENCE AND YOUTH

As I worked in the libraries of the University of California, I read books about Jack London, articles from the early 1900s, and listened to the stories of elderly citizens about the writer. The facts that people told me, together with my findings from books and articles that were new to me, added to the author's biography and gradually developed in my mind a coherent story of his life.

Before becoming a professional writer, Jack London went through a difficult school of life. At ten years of age, he began selling newspapers. Still just a boy, he also worked at the cannery and other factories; he worked as a coal shoveler, and tried many other jobs. He experienced all the burden of forced labor. He had to work 10-16 hours each day. Jack would go to bed way after midnight, and at 5:30 a. m. his mother would wake him up again. Sometimes, Flora had to drag him off the bed with his blanket. Jack rubbed his sleepy eyes, quickly ate a piece of bread and gulped a cup of warm gray liquid, referred to as "coffee" in the family, and ran to work in the dark, sleepy town.

It was at an early age that Jack London became addicted to reading. With great passion, he read the magic stories of the American author, Washington Irving, collected in the book, Alhambra. Adventure books carried him away. He especially enjoyed Herman Melville's Typee, a truthful romance story about the life of the author among the natives of one of the islands in the Pacific. Attracted by the possibility of easy money, Jack became an "oyster pirate." He joined the company of adults who, under the cover of darkness, made raids on commercial oyster beds and then sold the valuable loot to the saloons and stores on the coast.

Now that Jack had some extra money, he got involved in the criminal world. Once, after a revel, he fell into the water and almost drowned, having been carried away by the fast current of the bay. This period of his life and his struggle with alcohol addiction Jack later described in John Barleycorn. The current of the criminal society could have swallowed Jack, but he had enough common sense and strength of character to break with his "friends," the lovers of easy profit. Later, as an adult, he considered it to be a remarkable act of luck that he, unlike many of his fellow oyster pirates, did not follow the slippery road. Jack did not end up killed, hanged, or drowned. The sea always irrepressibly allured Jack. For him, it was a gate into a colorful world full of unusual adventures, a world so unlike the miserable life around him. At seventeen, having hired himself out as a sailor on the schooner Sophia Sutherland, he sailed to the shores of Japan and Russian Siberia--his first trip on the ocean.

He sailed with experienced sailors. In the years of their youth, they had toiled not only with their own duties on the ship but also, according to the unwritten laws of the sea, in the serfdom of the lower-ranking sailors. They required Jack, who signed on as an able-bodied seaman, to do the same. It was not easy for him in the beginning, until he was able to establish his rights and gain the respect of the crew. Sea-voyaging was a tough school.

In 1893, black days of crisis came to America. Panic embraced the stock market, plants and factories were closed and thousands of workers were ruthlessly thrown into the streets. The machine of capitalist production that, only the day before seemed to be perfectly lubricated and adjusted, suddenly malfunctioned and began falling apart, burying thousands of lives under its debris. Those who suddenly became unemployed gathered at the front doors of plants and factories in the mornings, and crowded the ports in the afternoons, hoping for occasional employment. Hundreds of homeless people walked the streets of San Francisco and Oakland in search of temporary jobs. Shops and stores were brimming with goods, but there was no money to buy them. Hunger, the wicked companion of this crisis, emptied small home supplies and firmly took hold in working families.

For a long time after having returned from the sea journey, though older and stronger than before, Jack was not able to find a job. When he finally got one, he earned less than what he did as a boy. In spring, rumors spread about the unemployed trying to organize a march on Washington to make the government aware of the situation in the country. They planned to make the government pay for repairing streets, for road construction, and for building new schools in order to create more jobs. Jack learned that a fellow named Kelly from Oakland was gathering a group of people to head East and join the battalions of unemployed, the "industrial army." Jack decided to join Kelly's industrial army, but missed leaving with them by a couple of hours. He and a friend rushed to follow them. That was the beginning of his wanderings around a country in peril.

Jack traveled without a ticket on the roof of the train. At one of the underpasses, his coat caught on fire from a single spark. The wind, blowing from the opposite direction, spread the flames. With a lot of effort he managed to pull off the coat and put out the fire. The coat had completely burned through. The jacket underneath it was ruined as well.

In the region near the Sierra Nevadas, the spring had been an extremely cold one. It had snowed. Jack managed to travel about 200 miles as a coal stoker's assistant, but the rest of the way he rode on the roof of the train. During one of the really long stops, he was caught and forced to pay as ransom to the conductors the golden ring, which his acquaintance Lizzy Connoly had given him. London wrote about this incident in his "Tramp Diary," which appears in Jack London on the Road.

With little money in his pocket London traveled through the entire country from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. These were days of danger and adventure. The members of the "industrial army" lived on begging and thievery. Scrupulous and shy, Jack found it extremely difficult to force himself to beg at the doors. But kind-hearted women eagerly fed him. As a sort of payment, he told them fantastic stories about his descendants and his adventures. "It was fair exchange," remembered London in "Pictures" in The Road. "For their many cups of coffee, and eggs, and bites of toast, I gave full value. Right royally I gave them entertainment."

The government had mobilized the police and had sent army troops to disperse and arrest the participants of the hunger crusade. Everybody from police to train conductors hunted the "army" members. Later, the general public prosecutor boasted to President Cleveland that the measures taken by him prevented at least 60 or 70 thousand unemployed people from arriving in Washington, D. C.

Much of his journey Jack London covered on foot. His boots were torn to pieces; his feet were calloused. He courageously endured both hunger and cold. He was carried away by the struggle against conductors and the police. He deceived them with the ingeniously witty tricks that he later described in his collection of memorabilia called The Road.

Overcoming incredible obstacles, Jack finally got to Hannibal, the native town of Mark Twain in Missouri. He saw the provincial streets of the town and the shores of the great river where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the famous heroes of Twain's books, were born. There is a taciturn note dated the 24th of May, written in Hannibal in Jack's "Tramp Diary": "Went supperless to bed. . . . I can't stand starvation. "The army of the unemployed, in whose success Jack no longer believed, had been baited by the ruling powers and finally disbanded. London began tramping.

In a letter written by his mother, Jack learned that he could get five dollars in Chicago. Chicago was not far, a mere stone's throw away. A couple of days later, early in the morning, a figure in a rumpled hat and frayed gray coat slipped from the train that brought cattle to the Chicago slaughterhouse. It was Jack London.

On the day he arrived in Chicago, the workers of the Pullman factory went on strike. Pullman factories produced train passenger cars. The workers were forced to resort to a strike after repeated wage cuts and the dismissal of thousands of their co-workers. The action they pursued spread across the country with lightning speed, paralyzing the work railroads from Chicago to the Pacific. Many plants and factories closed, causing shortages in supplied goods. There were as many as one hundred thousand workers who participated in the Pullman strike. On the whole, around 700,000 people were involved in strike movements all over the United States that year.

The working class finally stood up for its rights, demonstrated its strength and unity. Its powerful demonstrations plunged capitalists into panic. The bourgeois press rallied a fierce campaign against the strikers; it accused trade unions of organizing an uprising against the nation, which was threatened by a conspiracy of anarchists. To gain a pretext for involving the army, agent provocateurs were sent into workers' organizations with the task of inciting disturbances from within.

Army troops arrived in Chicago. On the 6th of June 1894, police fired into the crowd. The next day they again fired into rows of strikers. About thirty people were killed; dozens were wounded. In the eight most restless states, the President prohibited any kind of gatherings. Federal troops had to be sent to areas besieged with unrest in the West, including San Francisco.

Carefree, happy to have an exciting opportunity to see different areas of the country and to meet new people, Jack started to ponder the reasons for the existence of poverty and wealth. Baltimore, Washington, New York, Boston—he went from one city to another. He was a witness to grief and dissatisfaction. Jack had met with injustice before and had seen the lowest of life, but the Eastern industrial states were no match for sunny California, where it was possible to ultimately find some kind of job and earn a piece of bread, where one could save money otherwise spent on winter clothing.

Months of wandering provided rich experience for the future writer. He kept a journal. Later on in his writings, Jack would come back to this period of his life. He went to Niagara Falls, one of the many splendid wonders of nature. This miraculous spectacle impressed the young man. Jack did not even notice how the night came. It was too late to think about supper. He decided to spend the night in a field. In the morning, he awoke at dawn and went to the waterfall again to enjoy the grand view, but was arrested for vagrancy on the way.

The trial on the charge of vagrancy took about fifteen seconds. It was without a jury, without giving him a chance to say a word in self-defense. He was sentenced to thirty days in prison. They chained London's left hand to the right hand of a black man, attached the chain of handcuffs to a steel pole and dragged them through the city then boarded them on a train leaving for Buffalo. There, they shaved each prisoner's head and dressed him in striped prison attire. Hard stone walls isolated Jack from the outside world. He had more than enough material to ponder and plenty of time to do it. "From the open West, where men bucked big and the job hunted the man," remembered London later in "How I Became a Socialist," he moved to "the congested labor centers of the East, where men were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they were worth." This forced him to look "upon life from a new and totally different angle. I had dropped down from the proletariat into what sociologists love to call the "submerged tenth", the very bottom of social construction."