“Living hand to mouth. . .”

F JACK LONDON'S nine published stories prior to his debut in the Overland Monthly in January, 1899, the first periodical to pay him for his work was the Boston-based fiction monthly The Black Cat. The story he submitted to them was "A Thousand Deaths" and after some serious cutting, it appeared in the May, 1899, issue. He had submitted the story to Scribner's and the Bacheller Syndicate (which had syndicated Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage) with no success but the handsome check for $40 he received for it from Black Cat editor Herman D. Umbstaetter paid off some debts and got his bicycle out of hock. That check, London wrote in his notebook, was, "First money I ever received for a story." (He did not count the contest money he received from the San Francisco Morning Call for "Story of a Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan").

One of London's early, and certainly lesser, science-fiction experiments, "A Thousand Deaths" concerns a 30-year-old wandering seaman who deserts his ship in San Francisco Bay, drowns, but awakens on board a yacht, brought back to life by a mad scientist who is experimenting in resuscitating the dead.

Coincidence, that desperate refuge of a writer who has written himself into a corner, rears its ugly head when it is revealed that the mad scientist is the sailor's father.

"The Plague Ship," a 1897 composition submitted to McClure's and the Bacheller Syndicate but not published in the author's lifetime, is by contrast a suspenseful yarn about a yellow fever epidemic that has stricken the steamer Casper off the Pacific coast. London steps up the tension: the ship is overloaded with cargo and 158 passengers, has broken a propeller shaft and is blown hundreds of miles off course in a remote part of the Pacific in the heat of a tropic midsummer. Some of the crew have succumbed to the disease, others are on the verge of mutiny.

The plot centers of the two physicians on the plague ship, a Dr. Chandler from Boston, returning from an expedition in Peru, and Dr. Maud Appleton, "of Southern origin," described as "beautiful as the word goes, but owing more to a pleasant, forceful personality than to her physical charms."

After first disagreeing on the disease, the doctors, working separately, try various treatments on the fevered passengers. Meantime, the crew deserts, commandeering the lifeboats, and the ship drifts unmanned until a man-of-war finds them.

In due course announcement of the marriage of Drs. Appleton and Chandler appears in the San Francisco press.

Written in 1898 after his return from the Yukon, London submitted "A Dream Image" to McClure's, Atlantic, and Fireside Companion before retiring it unpublished. In his cardboard-covered notebooks on his story submissions, he wrote, "If published, let it be under the nom de plume of Jack Lansing."

"Dream Image" is another of London's youthful attempts to create rich, yacht-and-estate-owning society characters. He could not create them believably at age 22 when their life was as foreign to him as the outer planets, nor, for that matter, could he create them even after he became one of them.

The story is confusing and not remotely believable.

Guilbert Ralston, one of the seven sons of a rich merchant prince who as youths terrorized the countryside (we are not told where it is) disappears "while still in his nonage." He is remembered by Helen Garthwaite. When a little girl Guilbert and she "plighted their troth" and spent an afternoon in childish frolic.

Now, her brother returns home from summer holidays to spend a week before returning to college. He brings with him a friend, an M.A. and Ph.D., who wants to meet Helen. While the two are talking a schooner enters the bay and threads its way expertly to anchorage. By a truly amazing coincidence "'Guilbert, wild Guilbert has returned at last,' was the hum of surprise which traveled up and down the jetty."

Helen and Guilbert, of course, marry.

London broadened his submissions in 1898, sending "An Old Soldier's Story" to Youth's Companion, St. Nicholas, Philadelphia Times, and Outlook, and for only the third time in his life received a check: $5 from American Agriculturist, a New York weekly journal and the centerpiece of a system of regional magazines that included the New England Homestead in Springfield, Mass., and Orange Judd Farmer in Chicago. The story appeared in all three on May 20,1899.

Originally titled "On Furlough," this little gem, apparently gleaned from stepfather John London's Civil War experiences, leads off with the line, A REAL INCIDENT, WHICH OCCURRED IN THE LIFE OF THE WRITER'S FATHER.

In 1863, a Union soldier named Simon goes home to Illinois on furlough to see his family and find new recruits. By the time he is ready to return to his regiment he has 30 men willing to enlist and earn a bonus. But Simon has overstayed his furlough and falls afoul of a provost marshal whose duty is to arrest deserters at $25 a head. These bounty hunters are roundly hated for bringing trouble on innocent soldiers and Simon escapes, saddles his father's black stallion and outruns the marshal to the Rock Island train station.

At Quincy, Simons gathers his recruits, delivers them to his regiment, and earns a second furlough.

Magazine editors in 1898, as is the case (probably magnified a hundredfold) today, were inundated with unsolicited manuscripts, all but a handful returned to the author without perusal -- an automaton process London described brilliantly in Martin Eden. Such was the fate of "The Devil's Dice Box," sent to McClure's and Munsey's magazines and returned. The story, London's first Klondike adventure, was shelved and did not appear in print until sixty years after the author's death (Saturday Evening Post, December, 1976).

McClure's and Munsey's made a mistake, as magazines often do: the story is excellent and one can but wonder what compelled them to decline such a gripping and timely work -- the gold rush, after all, was still going on in 1898.

In any event, "Devil's Dice Box" was rejected and London made a cryptic note, "To be changed," in his notebook. This may have had to do with changing the name of one character from "Malemute Kid" to "Innuit Kid" since the character dies in "Dice Box" and Malemute Kid was destined to appear in seven future stories.

"Dice Box" takes place before the gold rush and is told by a man named James Ralington who has written the account on a birch-bark "manuscript": Seven men and a Haines Mission girl are working claims near the mouth of the Stuart River when a "Man from out of the East" appears in camp. He has over 100 pounds of gold nuggets on his sled and a harrowing tale of murder, gold madness, starvation, a cache of $50,000 in gold and the mine that yielded it, hidden in the heart of the Northland "a thousand miles beyond the uttermost bounds of civilization."

There is a haunting quality to the story, and word-paintings of the "white silence" of the Northland that are reminiscent of Yukon tales soon to appear in Overland Monthly, notably in the epic "An Odyssey of the North."

("Never did Christmas Day look down on a stranger scene. It was high noon, and the upper rim of the sun, barely showing above the southern horizon, cast a blood-red streak athwart the heavens. On either hand a sun dog blazed, while the air was filled with scintillating particles of frost. . .")

It is also interesting to see here a prelude to London's "In a Far Country" (Overland Monthly, June, 1899), published just a year later, when in "Dice Box" two starving factions fight over their dogs and the narrator says, "I have heard of the Kilkenny Cats but never did I dream of taking part in a similar combat."

"The Test: A Clondyke Wooing" was submitted to Cosmopolitan and Overland Monthly and rejected by both, yet it is a good-humored, light-hearted yarn, the kind told around a campfire, of gold rush legendry. Set in raucous Dawson at the height of the stampede, Jack Harrington, the Mastadon King, falls for Lucille, a "dainty arctic princess." He teaches her to play the violin; she professes her love for him, and he asks "Would you cleave unto me and follow me to the ends of the earth, in misery, toil and hardship?"

She gets a chance to prove her cleaving when Harrington plays faro and loses his mine and his fortune. She follows this King of the Northland when he joins a stampede to Swede Creek. In an isolated cabin they eat bacon and beans on tin plates by the light of a slush-lamp, she plays the violin during his long absences, and she does not complain.

Eventually they return to Dawson.

It was all a test: all along, Harrington owned a mile of Dominion Creek and was rich as Eldorado.

The folks in Dawson lay bets that Jack and Lucille will break for Chilkoot Pass and the "Outside" in the spring.

"A Klondike Christmas" was one of but eight stories that remained unpublished until long after London's death in 1916. He submitted it to Round Table and Youth and Age and the latter magazine accepted it in March, 1899, offering to pay upon publication. But after ten months passed with the story yet to appear, London retrieved it and in September, 1900, shelved it. It appeared for the first time in Boy's Life in December, 1976. The story, slight, plotless, unexciting, but well told, concerns the brothers Clarence and George who are occupying a 10-by-12-foot cabin at the mouth of the Stuart River in Yukon Territory on Christmas Day, 1897. They enjoy the heat from a roaring stove while the temperature outside hovers at -65 degrees and celebrate their good fortune by fixing a meal of bacon, beans and bread. The celebration is topped off perfectly when strangers appear at the cabin and add moose meat, sugar, condensed milk, hotcakes and honey to the feast and when an Associated Press reporter drops in with a fat packet of letters from home.

London returned from the Yukon in July, 1898, and by September and October ("Living hand to mouth," as he wrote Mabel Applegarth) was writing furiously, completing such stories as "The Devil's Dice Box," "The Men of Forty Mile," "The White Silence," "The Handsome Cabin Boy," and "In the Time of Prince Charley," while waiting for the results of a postal exam he had taken for a job as mail carrier.

A study of The Complete Stories of Jack London (Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard, eds., three vols., Stanford University Press, 1993), in which the stories are printed in the order they were written, reveals that in 1898 London wrote nine stories, and in 1899, 25. Among these 34 stories are the imperishable Northland classics that comprised The Son of the Wolf, and sandwiched between these are a number of tales London candidly called "rubbish." These latter, which with a few remarkable exceptions, were potboilers sent to low-level magazine markets, earning a few dollars to buy more envelopes and postage stamps.

"The Handsome Cabin Boy" (The Owl, July 1899; after dunning the magazine London received $1.50 for it), is a strange throwback, written between "To the Man on Trail" and "A Son of the Wolf," a stark example of London writing of that milieu about which he knew nothing from experience: drawing-rooms and rich men with yachts.

Here, two wealthy San Franciscans make a wager about telling the difference between a man and a woman.

The cabin boy in question, is on one of the bettor's yacht headed for Honolulu and when "he" falls overboard and is helped back on deck, is discovered by the yachtsman to be a girl, "a chit of a child" of 16, an orphan and "a soubrette of no mean ability." The yachtsman takes "her" to Honolulu, to concerts and long drives in the country, and by the time they return to San Francisco, apparently oblivious to her tender age, has fallen for her.

But he loses the wager. The chit of a girl, quite cleverly disguised (wearing "a couple of pneumatic cushions, the kind used by football players" -- best known today as "falsies") turns out to be the brother of the other bettor.

Except for some unintended comic dialogue ("Pshaw! Ha! Ha! Ha!" "Pfaugh! you wanton!", etc.) "In the Time of Prince Charley" (Conkey's Home Journal, September, 1899) is a good little historical romance, almost an outline for a Walter Scott-like novel. The narrative is set in 18th century Scotland with "deadly claymores flashing above plaid and tartan," and "clan-cries of the gillies, charging with their chiefs." London must have been noticing the popularity of "historicals" in the magazine fiction markets and reading of the Jacobite Rebellion of the 1740s in creating Griffith Risingham, a captain in King George II's army, summoned home to Scotland by Prince Charley (Charles Edward, heir apparent to James II), who is preparing to march on Edinburgh.

Risingham woos Aline, the daughter of a Highland chief.

"A Lesson in Heraldry" (National Magazine, March 1900) made the rounds of four other magazines until National paid $5 for it.

It falls in the "rubbish" category. Mabel Armitage is a 12-year-old "embryonic St. Cecelia," "an apotheosis of all that was best, a radiant, celestial creature." But Mabel has a devil deep in her heart, "a devil which sometimes issued forth, and under divers guises, perturbed men's souls greatly." She has a mentor, one Cap Drake, an erudite man but a lie-teller and when Mabel asks about the meaning of the stipes on the American flag, Cap hems and haws and pretends to know but doesn't. Grace sobs convulsively, then finds out the meaning of the stripes on her own.

London received $20 for "Their Alcove," written in 1899 and after five other submissions, was published by an excellent magazine, Woman's Home Companion, in September, 1900. It is a story of a man's regret over a broken love affair, and retracing places where the two had intimate moments, in particular a library alcove where they discussed intellectual matters.

"The Unmasking of a Cad," sold by Tillotson & Sons Syndicate to, of all things, the Monmouthshire (England) Weekly Post and published on July 1, 1899, is another rich people story. It involves characters with names like Percy (the cad), Hallam ("a gentleman of the old school""), and Maud -- how Jack London loved the name Maud! -- Hallam's "sweet and womanly" sister with whom Percy is engaged until his caddishess is unmasked in a crowded cafe.

London made a significant break-through with "Pluck and Pertinacity," a 1,500-word Yukon story published by Youth's Companion on September 22, 1899. Almost as important as the $25 he received for it was the satisfaction of breaking into one of the prestigious magazines of the day.

The story is of an unnamed Dutchman who against all odds travels to the Klondike country to search for gold, endures famine, mishap, frostbite, and bad luck, but determines to stay and make his fortune and buy back his pet bulldog which he sold for a grubstake at Sixty-Mile post.

In "The Rejuvenation of Major Rathbone" (Conkey's Home Journal, November, 1899), London returns to the science-fiction genre of "A Thousand Deaths" with a good-humored story about alchemy, chemistry, and the "Elixir of Life." The mad scientist here is Dover Wallingford, given to expounding on Schopenhauer, who has invented a lymph fluid that returns youth to the elderly. He rejuvenates an old dog first, then another old dog, his uncle, Major Max Rathbone, an enfeebled Civil War veteran. When the major becomes too rambunctious in his new-found youth, Dover recalls his uncle's romance when a young man with a Miss Deborah Furbush, now an elderly invalid spinster. Dover and his partner go to work on Miss Furbush's injections and within a fortnight the major and she are strolling around the garden together, growing younger by the day.