Death In Hyde Park

AUTHORS’ NOTES

When Bill and I learned that Jack London, the noted American adventure writer, had visited the British capital at the time of the coronation of Edward VII, we decided that he would play a major part in the book that we had in mind. We had read and enjoyed many of his stories; we knew that he was a self-avowed Socialist; and we knew that his book, People of the Abyss (written during the months of August, September, and October 1902), was a scathing critique of the slum conditions in the East End. Although we didn’t know much else about him, he seemed to be a perfect character for our novel-a major American writer, in the right place at the right time, with strong political sentiments of the right sort.

But as we began to read about London ’s life, other aspects of his character began to overshadow his writing and his radical political beliefs. The man brimmed with exuberant life and sexual energy. He was greedy for experience, for fame, for money and all the things money could buy. He was the center of the universe for himself and for those who loved or desired him, often to their detriment. On the train trip from California to New York, a few weeks before the beginning of our novel, he fell into a railway-car sexual affair with a “sweet woman” with whom “nothing remained when our three days and nights were over.” He claimed never to have loved Bess (the woman to whom he was married at the time of this novel, the mother of his two daughters) and walked out on her in July 1903, claiming that she was turning him into a “house animal” and his home into a “prison.” He had already begun an ardent affair with Charmian Kittredge, who learned to sail, box, decipher Jack’s handwriting, offer judicious stylistic suggestions, and corrected and retyped his typescripts-all the prerequisites, one imagines, for a successful relationship with Jack London. But when Bess filed for divorce, she named another woman, Anna Strunsky, whom Jack had also loved (and quite as passionately as he now loved Charmian) in 1902. Bess’s error was corrected, and (despite several miscellaneous new affairs) Jack and Charmian were married in November 1905.

As Jack’s enormously energetic life went on, many other conflicts emerged within this complex and self-destructive man. But at the time he appears in our novel, his greatest energies (outside of his writing) seem to have been devoted to finding the love of his life, his “mate woman,” and that is the way we have portrayed him. While his sexual relationship with Nellie and his romantic attraction to Lottie are entirely fictional, we believe they are an accurate portrayal of Jack London’s uses of women, and that they show him as he was, at once passionate and manipulative.

London loved hard, lived large, and died early, before his fortieth birthday, his life a study in contradictions. As a Radical Socialist, he was eager for the revolution, but he pursued the capitalist dream to the last day of his life, accruing as much as he could and spending far more than he earned. As a writer, he had a stunning and disciplined talent, but his other appetites pulled him away from his work; as he said himself, he preferred living to writing, and while his readers gobbled up his stories, his critics felt that the more he wrote, the less memorable was his writing. As an adventurer, he genuinely loved the wilderness of the sea and the frozen North; as a skilled self-promoter, he knew that to sell his books, he had to sell his adventurous life. (Unlike other writers of his era, he would be very much at home in our time.) But it is these complexities and contradictions that made Jack London large, large as the world, larger than life, and that is the way he will be remembered.