Jack London (Photos)

[Don Olney]

http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid51/p70b11c0f17ef0a28d75c7e6dffe86372/fca5d897.gif

That's me, a young Jack London at age 16 in the log cabin I built in the summer of 1976 in the Adirondacks. I built it by hand with only an axe, a hatchet, a crosscut saw, a hammer, and a steel bar. The stove was made from a 30 gallon Civil Defense water drum. Door and window were from an old garage overhead door. Flooring and roof were planks from an old shed. Roof beams I split by hand. You need snow shoes to get to it (or out of it) in the winter. That's a real wolf collar on that parka. I killed the wolf with my bare hands too and skinned it with a penknife.

http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid51/p6a3e8e7aec85f843302bfdc43f8e764d/fca5d8e3.jpg

That's a somewhat older Jack London last fall in Jack London Square in Oakland, CA. This cabin was originally located somewhere in the Yukon Territory. It was determined that London had lived in it from handwriting found on the ceiling. Half the logs were moved to Oakland for the dedication of the Square in 1970 and this cabin was built out of them. A city in Canada built another cabin out of the other half of the logs. Looks like a car took a chunk out of this one -- someone skidding into or out of Heinolds First & last Chance Saloon perhaps?

http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid58/p12001754ff50897c810d38957a0bdbd5/fc64da63.jpg

Bronze statue of Jack London in Oakland.

A few Jack London sites:

http://www.geocities.com/jacklondons/

http://www.jacklondon.com

http://www.parks.sonoma.net/JLStory.html

http://www.jacklondonsquare.com/historyframe.html

"I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dryrot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time."

-Jack London

[Ariel]

Thank you for the pictures and text. Jack London was one of my childhood idols. Always a boat and water person, I went "to sea" with him in my backyard fantasies.

[ishmael]

"I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dryrot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time." Any American lad worth his salt is a London fan!

The thing that amazes me is what a full life, in such a short time. He died at what, forty five?

Nice cabin.

[Rocky]

Forty, from an overdose of belladonna. Some say suicide but more likely he was trying to get to sleep dealing with chronic pain from shingles or something that he picked up on one of his adventure cruises with his bride in the South Pacific. His estate in Napa is well worth a visit. His stone mansion burned down just before completion but the ruins are still there. He had pig sties and walls built by Chinese and Italian laborers, showing their very different styles. But what is most piquant is the modest little white farmhouse where he actually lived and did much of his writing, and also where he died. As an exercise in creative writing I used to try to memorize a paragraph, say the opening paragraph of Call of the Wild, and then try to duplicate it. Gave me a good appreciation of his style, which was not just concise but quite finely honed. I do that with Conrad too, just for fun.

[ 04-04-2003, 08:42 PM: Message edited by: Rocky ]

[Dave Fleming]

Yes the shell of the house in Glen Ellen just west of Sonoma, CA., in the Valley of the Moon is worth seeing. Wolf House is the name of it.

[ishmael]

Ooff, forty. And still he wrote prolifically, and for the most part well.

He suffered from yaws, a spirochete not unlike syphilis, picked up in the South Pacific during the cruise of the Snark. Was treated with mercury compounds, and morphias. But he was also a prodigious drunk, by most accounts. All from memory.

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

Jack London

I looked that one up.

I went through a 'London period' about twenty years ago. He was a man of powerful personal conflict. While a devoted socialist, he also believed in Nietzsche's uber mensch; thought he was exemplar of a superior race of man.

"I contradict myself, very well I contradict myself, I contain multitudes."

WW

[ 04-04-2003, 08:03 PM: Message edited by: ishmael ]

[ishmael]

And 'Wolf House' was a tragic denoument to an intense life. As I remember, London was imagining a 'modern' farm, with all the latest discoveries and agricultural techniqes. The house burned just before they were to move in, and less than a year before he died.

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what is heaven for?"

Interesting that the shell of the house is still there. I'd like to see that someday.

[ 04-04-2003, 08:30 PM: Message edited by: ishmael ]

[Rocky]

Yaws, that's nasty, the world sure changed when penicillin came along. I think he was a drunk the way General Grant was a drunk, just enough to get a reputation. If you get out that way Ish, forget the wineries, that's just tourist crap, Glen Ellen is near Calistoga where Robert Louis Stevenson travelled with his bride, go fly a glider and check out the hot springs. One of the loveliest spots in California. After his death his widow built another attractive house and lived there for decades. It has a lot of his memorabilia.

I always wondered what he would have had to say about the carnage of WWI had he lived a little longer. His writing was part of the genre that glorified the "cleansing" nature of violence. Don't call me a liberal faggot pinko hippy, I'm just making an observation. I've always been a big fan of his, he was the ultimate self-made man.

[ 04-05-2003, 05:31 AM: Message edited by: Rocky ]

[ishmael]

Rocky,

London is fascinating. This thread inspires me to go to the library and find a passel of biographies and read about him again.

What do you think he would have said about the carnage of WWI?

And, I kinda agree about the 'quintessential self made man', 'cept I think it's a way too limited category to contain the likes of a Jack London. He was a rare and not often fostered phenomenon; some special movement of the spirit that most of us can only watch in awe. The metaphor of a brilliant comet comes to mind.

[ 04-04-2003, 10:31 PM: Message edited by: ishmael ]

[ishmael]

http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid58/p2b9f9ad19be81c5a1e7a8cc9cb6114cd/fc646aec.jpg

[ishmael]

http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid58/pa4686e5d4394f1474adb5d9f069cdae2/fc646079.jpg

[ishmael]

I'm suprized so few have picked this one up and run with it. I guess London isn't that 'popular' these days.

Their loss.

[Peter Malcolm Jardine]

Call of the wild was one of my favorite childhood books.. smile.gif

[ishmael]

A project, for the next week, will be to go to the library and find his extended essay: Beneath the Heel

In a revolutionary way, anticipating Thompson and Kerouac and Wolfe, he disguised himself as a sailor, down on his luck, and went into the slums of London's East End, circa 1904, and wrote about it. One of his books I've not read yet.

[Jay]

The other half of Jack London's cabin is in Dawson City, Yukon Territory. Author Dick North and native guide Joe Henry and Joe's son Victor discovered the cabin some decades back. Dick is an avid London historian, and set out to rediscover the cabin based on local lore and London's own accounts of his one winter in the Klondike. I was aquainted with Dick North up until we left two years ago, and at that time he was trying to uncover the last known whereabouts of the Snark. Joe passed away last year, aged 104 if I remember correctly.

www.yukonweb.com/community/dawson/ (http://www.yukonweb.com/community/dawson/) klondike_sun/apr12-02.htmld/

www.yukonweb.com/community/dawson/ (http://www.yukonweb.com/community/dawson/) klondike_sun/june12-98.htmld/

[Matt J.]

Just bought a compilation book of London's short stories. Read nearly all of them when I was a little kid in... maybe 6th grade or 10-11 years old - great stuff. I didn't think he did justice to the sea, though - or I never got my satisfaction from him for the sea. Great stories, nonetheless.

Every so often, it's nice to read of the wilderness as it was back then. there's something raw about the life in those stories.