“Malicious chance was having its laugh at him.”

WHATEVER grip alcohol had on Jack London at age 31, when "Created He Them" appeared in Pacific Monthly (April 1907), one thing is certain: He knew the destruction that lay in the path of the alcoholic and — who knows? — perhaps wrote the story to remind himself of what could lie ahead.

The alcoholic of the story is Al, age 26. His brother George is taking him to an asylum of some kind, presumably to dry out — what would be called today an "intervention." George arrives at Al and Mary's house to pick up his brother and take him to the destination, having to convince Mary again that there is no other choice. Al has changed his mind and says he will not go, that he has "stomach problems," that's all. George berates him as a "poor, feeble old man," a mere shadow of the brother who swam and boxed with George as a youth.

“It's not a bluff... I mean it.”Al finally agrees to go, taking a belt or two of whiskey until George commandeers him and removes the bottles from his luggage. At the institution, as they walk the grounds, Al says he is not staying and George abandons hope, has the urge to kill his brother who has ruined his, Mary's, and their children's, lives. He presents Al a revolver: "It's not a bluff," George says, ". . . I mean it. And if you don't do it for yourself, I shall have to do it for you."

George, feeble but not feeble-minded, decides to stay.

NOTE: The story bore a much better title, "The Turning Point," when it appeared in the September, 1907, issue of the British Windsor Magazine.

"A Wicked Woman" (Smart Set, November 1906) is a virtual blueprint illustrating why it is not productive to be overly critical of short fiction written a century ago unless century-ago standards are applied. This story, another of London's drawing-room settings (when writing of the hoi polloi in its noisome environment always served him better), is complete with the stiff, polysyllabic Dorian Gray-style dialogue London always employed ineptly. The result is ridiculous by modern standards; even so, while it is virtually impossible to imagine, Loretta's moronic naivete may have been believable to readers in 1906.

Loretta has broken up with Billy and gone to Santa Clara to be with Mrs. Hemingway and her husband. Mrs. Hemingway writes to Edward Bashford at the Athenian Club in San Francisco, a man she had once "violently loved" in pre-marital days. "Artistically and temperamentally he was a Greek. He was fond of quoting Nietzsche . . . too shrewd, too profound, ever again to be afflicted by the madness of youths in their love of truth," etc etc. and, whatever it means, "He was superficial — out of profundity."

In any event, Mrs. Hemingway tells Bashford of sweet, innocent Loretta, "immaculate bud of womanhood," a "true, unsullied, and innocent woman," while Billy meantime writes Loretta every day, telling of his sufferings and broken heartedness as Loretta blossoms in his absence, playing piano, picking flowers, and learning to fly-cast.

“Oh, I shall go mad!”Now Bashford shows up and is quickly stricken by this "slender flower" who has located a personality and discovered a will of her own as, London writes in a female stereotype felonious today, acceptable in 1906, "she developed the pretty little tyrannies that are latent in all pretty and delicate women."

She confesses to Ned "Oh, Ned, if you only knew how wicked I am!" as he professes his love for her. "Too late! . . . . I am such a wicked woman . . . Oh, I shall go mad!" she says, confessing that she should marry Billy because she did this thing — "We were together almost every evening. . . .I was so young." Ned thinks he catches the drift and says "The scoundrel!"

Yes, she says, she ought never to have let Billy kiss her and that "when a woman allowed a man to kiss her, she always married him — that it was terrible if she didn't. It was the custom," crafty Billy had told her.

Overblown in length (at nearly 10,000 words), "The Wit of Porportuk" (New York Times Magazine, December 1906) is the sad tale of the Indian girl El-Soo of Holy Cross Mission who, at age 16, is being groomed to complete her education in the States. She is quick, intelligent, reads and writes English, is a singer and artist and excels in mathematics. Before she can travel to the U.S., however, she is summoned to Tana-naw Station, on a bend of the Yukon, to see her father, chief Klakee-Nah, who is dying and is deep in debt to the village Shylock, Porportuk.

Porportuk has absorbed all of Klakee-Nah's wealth through debts and now looks upon El-Soo with a possessive eye. She, however, has no eye for Porportuk, an old man, nor for any man but Akoon, a great seal-hunter who has wandered to such places at Sitka, Hudson's Bay, Siberia, and Japan.

Klakee-Nah calls for an accounting of his debts — $15,967.75 — and promises to pay them in the next world. But Porportuk has no interest in the next world and all of the chief's belongings — house, mines, and share in the steamer Koyokuk (which is at the bottom of the Yukon) — are worthless.

El-Soo sells herself at public auction to wipe out her father's debts and permit him safe passage to the next world; Akoon says he will kill whomever is the high bidder. Present for the auction at Tana-naw are Indians, inspectors, voyageurs, Bonanza kings, — and Porportuk, who outbids everybody at $26,000. He pays with the notes and mortgages, which El-Soo promptly tears to pieces, and the rest in gold dust weighed out on the spot, which she flings into the Yukon.

El-Soo flees, is picked up by Akoon, and the two make their way up the Porcupine River, and on foot across the Rockies to the Mackenzie River country where they fall in with a band of Mackenzie Indians. There, however, Porportuk overtakes them and presents his case to a native council which agrees that El-Soo is Porportuk's property.

“'It is just,' the old men said.”Here the story takes a daring turn. Porportuk, instead of claiming El-Soo, confesses to Akoon that he has thought the matter over. He is an old man who cannot keep up with a woman constantly running away. He presents her to Akoon with the admonition, "Never will she run away from you . . . " whereupon he aims his rifle and shoots El-Soo through her ankles so that she will never walk again.

Porportuk asks the old men of the native council, "Is it just?"

"'It is just,' the old men said. And they sat on in silence."

Another long (9,465 words) Yukon story is "Morganson's Finish" (Success, May 1907) in which the demons of bad luck won't let the title character up. He is on his literal last legs, hauling his sled along the frozen Yukon, thinking of getting to Dyea and finding some fresh vegetables. Some miles out of Minto he sets up camp, drinks spruce tea for his scurvy, eats biscuits, and waits, having conceived the idea of bushwhacking somebody on the trail, thereby gaining dogs, a sled, and money. Soon "he grew to think of himself as the rightful and deprived owner of the sled-load of life."

He waits many days, his scurvy worsening, a cold snap reaching 60 below zero as he waits while sleds pass — a mail carrier, Mounties, others. Somehow he kills a moose and gorges on its meat; he daydreams of selling the meat for fifty cents a pound in Minto, buying dogs and going south to sun and civilization without resorting to the sled-load of life. But wolves attack his cache of moose meat and he salvages only a few pounds, and in fighting off the wolves expends all but seven of his cartridges.

He manages to return to Minto and in a camp on Christmas eve he awaits three men to come along the trail, one of whom, Jack Thompson, is said to have made two million dollars on Bonanza and Sulphur creeks.

The sled comes at last and Morganson rests his rifle in a notch of a tree and kills all three men. His bad luck worsens as the dead men's lead dog sinks its teeth deep in Morganson's calf, tearing the main artery although, in the biting cold, the desperate bushwhacker does not know he is mortally wounded.

He searches the men. There is no money: "It was a joke. Malicious chance was having its laugh at him."

He becomes calm as his blood runs into the snow. He cannot rise. He was no longer afraid. Tears freeze his eyes shut, His anger passes. "He had heard faintly the howling of the dogs, and had a fleeting thought that in the mastering of his flesh the frost no longer bit. Then the light and the thought ceased to pulse beneath the tear-gemmed eyelids, and with a tired sigh of comfort he sank into sleep."

NOTE: The story was retitled "Finis" when it appeared in The Turtles of Tasman (September 1916), the last of London's books published in his lifetime.

"Morganson's Finish" also contains one of several variations on the masterful opening words of London's best-known story, "To Build a Fire" (The Century Magazine, August 1908): "Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray. . ." Here, "Dawn broke and merged into day. It was cold and clear." In an earlier story (see Part XII of this series), "The Unexpected" (McClure's, August 1906), appeared the line, "The day of the execution broke clear and cold," and in "'Just Meat'," the story to follow, the line is, "Dawn broke and merged into day. It was cold and clear."

Actually, there are at least three other variations on the line, beginning with a 1902 story, "Chris Farrington, Able Seaman" (Youth's Companion, May 23, 2024).

London's string of long — in all cases, overlong — stories in this period is accountable to the author's cash flow, specifically the enormous amount of cash flowing to the building of the Snark. Close upon the writing of "'Just Meat'" (Cosmopolitan, March 1907), London had fourteen men employed in construction of the Snark, had purchased a 3,500-pound, four-cylinder engine for the ketch-rigged yacht, and was paying to have the engine shipped to San Francisco by rail from New York. And, since the major magazine markets were now paying London an average of ten cents a word for his short fiction, a story like "'Just Meat,'" jumped up to 6,417 words, brought in $641.70. On the other hand, he received a paltry $60 (under two cents a word) from Smart Set for "A Wicked Woman" (3,130 words), written in this same period, and had to dun the magazine to get paid. Especially in the Snark era, from the building of the boat in 1906 to the sale of it, at a nearly complete loss, at the end of 1909, London wrote to buy the things he needed and wrote long for the topmost dollar.

“...a typical child of the gutter.”In "'Just Meat,'" two thugs, Matt and Jim, pull off a burglary-robbery. Jim, small, irritable, high strung , anemic, "a typical child of the gutter") was the lookout; Matt , heavy, hairy, a gorilla in strength, was the inside man who strangled the homeowner. At their cheap rooming house the lugs lay out the loot, diamonds large and small, a string of pearls, rich beyond their imaginings, and divvy it up.

Matt is wary of Jim, is a former cowboy who wants to buy a cattle ranch in Arizona. When he sees Jim ogling his bag of jewels he says, "If you do me dirt, I'll fix you . . . . I'd bite right into your throat an' eat you like that much beefsteak."

They learn from the paper that the man Matt killed had robbed his partner, had a half million in jewels, including the famous Haythorne pearl necklace, and was set to sail for the South Seas on the Sajoda when Matt robbed and killed him.

In keeping with the cliche that there is no honor among thieves, Matt dopes his and Jim's coffee with strychnine, takes an emetic of mustard and water to counteract the poison in his cup and won't let Jim have any of it. He takes three doses. Jim collapses, babbles incoherently, paws the air, and lies motionless. Soon thereafter Matt realizes the emetic has failed. He tries to get to the door and to the drugstore for an antidote but goes into paroxysms, fumbles with the locks on the door, leans his weight against it and slides gently to the floor.

After being rejected by Everybody's, Cosmopolitan, and Atlantic, "Goliah" (Red Magazine [London], December 1908), was published first in England, then in the Bookman (February 1910) in the U.S. The 9,707-word story, which is distinguished among all of London's socialistic work in that it does not contain a believable premise, character, or, indeed, sentence, earned the author fifty British pounds and $100 U.S. dollars. Variously described as a racist, socialistic, communistic, fascistic, dystopian (anti-utopian) nightmare, it is in fact a juvenile socialistic, futuristic mad-scientist fantasy, the first of several London would write, and is closely related, at least chronologically, to The Iron Heel (1908), London's epic socialist novel. The author sent The Iron Heel to the Macmillan Co., his book publisher, in December, 1906, and sent "Goliah" to Everybody's the following February.

The story begins on January 3, 1924, when Walter Bassett, a captain of industry, receives a letter from a mysterious "Goliah," postmarked Palgrave Island, an isolated and uninhabited volcanic island on the line of 160 degrees west longitude, 10th parallel north latitude. The letter asks Bassett and nine other industrial magnates to gather with Goliah on Palgrave "for the purpose of considering plans for the reconstruction of society upon a more rational basis" since "the majority of people are weighed down by their inertia and are serfs of the will of the government." He states that on March 3 the yacht Energon would sail from San Francisco, that those who fail the summons will die.

Only Bassett goes aboard; the nine others die by "A sort of violent disintegration of the tissues."

On March 24 Goliah summons ten politicians, restating that he must be obeyed, that "I am after laughter, and those who stand in the way of laughter must perish." He states that he is a scientist and has made a tremendous discovery that places all the world at his mercy and that his world will be dominated by happiness and laughter.

The 10 politicians do not go aboard the yacht and all die.

Eventually certain authorities and reporters are permitted to board the Energon ("the rabble was firmly kept off") and discover the crew composed "principally of Scandinavians, — fair-haired, blue-eyed Swedes, Norwegians afflicted with the temperamental melancholy of their race, stolid Russian Finns, and a slight sprinkling of Americans and English." (This is an Anglo-Saxon, an Aryan, yacht — no blacks, Indians, Orientals or Mexicans are in Bassett's scheme of happiness and laughter.)

The government sends warships against the Energon and they are blown up within a half-mile of the yacht. Goliah announces all warships will be destroyed or flung on the scrap-heap, armies disbanded, warfare to cease.

He summons ten scientists ("The savants were ludicrously prompt"), then all generals, war-secretaries, and "jingo-leaders" die, martial law is declared, child-labor is abolished, women factory workers are dismissed to their homes, all sweat-shops are closed, the government takes possession of all factories, shops, mines, ships, railroads, and producing land. Wall Street dies. The 400,000 "idle gentlemen of the country" who had lived upon annuities and other invisible incomes, are put to work; graft disappears and with it the politicians who depended upon it); the national work day dwindles to five hours as the standard of living increases.

And so Utopia replaces normal life on the planet. On New Year's 1925 all nations disarm at Goliah's order; private property and crime virtually vanish; household chores are simplified; the birth-rate falls ("People ceased breeding like cattle"); there is more time for recreation and the "pursuit of beauty and nobility and all the higher attributes"; indeed human dissatisfaction practically disappears as "The world had become gay. . ."

In 1937 Goliah reveals the mysterious force he calls "energon" ("nothing more nor less than the cosmic energy that resides in the solar rays") and in San Francisco on June 6, 1941, Goliah shows his face for the first time.

The terrorist-murderer-mad scientist is Percival Stultze, a German-American who in 1898 had worked in the Union Iron Works and been secretary of Branch 369 of the International Brotherhood of Machinists. In 1901 he was enrolled at the University of California where he was noted to be absent-minded. He is blue-eyed, short-sighted, wears spectacles. This "master-mind of the ages" is beloved for the way he screws up his face when he laughs, and for "his simplicity and comradeship and warm humanness, and for his fondness for salted pecans, and his aversion to cats."

“the wonder-city of Asgard, rises in awful beauty...”Today, the narrator says, "in the wonder-city of Asgard, rises in awful beauty that monument to him that dwarfs the pyramids and all the monstrous blood-stained monuments of antiquity. And on that monument, as all know, is inscribed in imperishable bronze the prophecy and the Fulfillment: 'All will be joy-smiths, and their task shall be to beat out laughter from the rising anvil of life.'"

An editorial note at the end of the story reveals that "Goliah" was the work of Harry Beckwith, a 15-year-old student at Lowell High School in San Francisco, that the "essay" won the Premier prize for high school composition in 2254 and that, "last year Harry Beckwith took advantage of the privilege earned, by electing to spend six months in Asgard."

NOTES: "Asgard" is the mythical "wonder city" mentioned in a footnote in Chapter 21 of The Iron Heel. The city was 52 years in the building "during which time a permanent army of half a million serfs was employed." Asgard was completed in the signal year of 1984, A.D. Incidentally, George Orwell (penname of Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950), author of the celebrated dystopian fantasy Nineteen Eighty-four (published in 1949), knew London's work and wrote of him (quite unevenly, depicting too short a time spent reading London's works) in a 1945 Introduction to the British edition of Love of Life and Other Stories. London, Orwell said, was "a Socialist with the instincts of a buccaneer and the education of a nineteenth-century materialist," and pronounced the obvious in stating that the theme of London's fiction was "the cruelty of nature" where "Life is a savage struggle, and victory has nothing to do with justice."

Philip S. Foner, in his Jack London, American Rebel (New York: Citadel, 1964), wrote that in "Goliah" London demonstrated "a lack of understanding of the basic tenets of Socialism, which rejected all terrorist, anarchistic, individualistic policies and worked for the broadest of peaceful mass activity, condoning force only in those situations in which self-defense is necessary and peaceful progress barred."

According to Martin Johnson in his Through the South Seas with Jack London (London: Dodd, Mead, 1913), the story was written in January, 1907, while the Snark was under construction. "One day, he [London] read me the first part of it, in which he destroyed the Japanese Navy," Johnson wrote. "'And today, I destroy the American Navy,' he told me gleefully. Oh, I haven't a bit of conscience when my imagination gets to working."