The Woman Behind Jack London

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. And up next, we have the story of Charmian Kittridge London, brought to us by author Irish Jamal Duncle. Duncle is a teacher at Napa Valley College in California. She has loved Jack London ever since she went on a field trip to Jack London State Park when she was in middle school. This field trip sparked within her a desire to make writing her life. Here’s Faith with the story.

00:00:42
Speaker 2: Jack London, best selling American author, is known for his adventure stories such as “Call of the Wild” and “The Sea Wolf”, along with his popular short story “To Build a Fire”. But he was not only famous for his writings. During his time, he was truly a celebrity. He was known for his work old travels and his adventures and boat trips around the globe. But what many people do not know is that London was hardly a solo traveler. Many of his trips he was accompanied by his second wife, Charmian Kittridge London. We have known very little about Charmian. It’s only as of nineteen twenty that the first full length biography on Charmian Kittridge London was published by Iris Jamal Duncle. We come to find that she herself was a writer and adventurer and so much more than just Jack London’s wife. Here is author Iris Jamal Duncle and how she came across Charmian when she was looking through a book of poems and found a very famous picture of Jack London.

00:01:42
Speaker 3: The picture of Jacquelynin on the hillside on his horse is actually on Sonoma Mountain, and it said, “taken by Charmian Kittrish London”. And I had seen that photo a million times in my life. In fact, is at the park at Jacquelynin State Park, is on the garbage cans, and so it’s so familiar to me. But I had never thought to think who took that photo. And so I immediately reached out to Jack Lonnon scholars, with whom, you know, I corresponded all the time, and I said, “Did you know that Charmian took this photograph?”

00:02:15
Speaker 4: And they said, “Well, I never really thought to ask that question.”

00:02:19
Speaker 3: And that’s where I was like, “Oh, wow, well, what else haven’t we asked?” And so I went back to Charmian’s life and tried to figure out why was her story.

00:02:29
Speaker 4: Not told correctly? And the answer came in researching.

00:02:32
Speaker 3: The story of how she met Irving Stone, who wrote ended up writing a biography about her and Jack London called “Sailor on Horseback”. And she thought he just wanted to write a biography about Jack. She got visitors all the time who wanted to do that. He came into her life and just totally seduced her, acted like she was a complete intellectual.

00:02:57
Speaker 4: He adored her work.

00:02:58
Speaker 3: She had written a biography on Jack London herself. He said it was the best he’d ever read. He took her out dancing, and it turns out that through this kind of seduction he got her to sign away her legal rights to her story.

00:03:12
Speaker 4: He made her.

00:03:12
Speaker 3: Think that they would be collaborating on this story, but because she signed away her legal rights and he actually did not like her at all.

00:03:20
Speaker 4: When you start to read his letters, you start to see this. He wrote this.

00:03:23
Speaker 3: Horrible version of Charmian in his biography, a biography, it’s actually a fictional biography because of the license he took in the stories he told. And he wrote that, and Charmian was so mad about his violation of her trust that number one, she burned many of her documents, including some of her early diaries where she talked about what it was like to be a woman in the late eighteen hundreds, a woman who was college educated, a woman who was driven to find a career. She burned those because he didn’t understand it. He thought, because she didn’t get married and had different people who she dated, that she must be a, you know, a loose woman, you know, instead of, like, she knew if she got married she’d lose her job, because that’s the way it worked back then.

00:04:09
Speaker 4: And so she burned those diaries.

00:04:12
Speaker 3: She also locked everything away in the Huntington Library. And at that point, what that did when his book came out and started saying these things like she was in airhead, she, you know, really slandered her. Her husband’s name made it worse for him. Was jealous, didn’t care about anything except fashion, which is all false lies. Because of that, and because she locked down the files, the version that he published of her stuck for the next eighty years, and it wasn’t until scholars like Clarie Stuz and myself were able to dig back into that content and on earth who she really was, that the public is really getting to know her again. And so even at the Park at Jacqueline State Park. Things were telling a different story than how they really were, so it’s important to know who she really was, and that’s where the book begins is with that question.

00:05:05
Speaker 2: Charmian’s family moved across the country following the Gold Rush and started their lives in California, where Charmian was born. They were the picture of the American West. Unfortunately, at the young age of five, her mother passed away and she was left with her father, which wouldn’t last long.

00:05:24
Speaker 3: One day, her Aunt Tissy came into her dad’s boarding house and found Charmian was propped up on the bar. She’s five years old, talking to all the people who’d come into the bar right to listen to their stories. But her aunt was like, “This is no way to raise a lady.” She and Natta Nanetta, who ended up raising Charmian, sent her away to Oakland to be raised by her aunt, and that’s when Charmian started to really come into her own. Fast forward several years, and when Charmian is fourteen years old old, her father came up to visit and during that he fell ill. What happened was they sent Charmian out on an errand and they said, “You know, go get this medicine.” But when she came back, and she came back to an empty bed. Her father had died and they had removed his body, and she never got to say goodbye to him.

00:06:17
Speaker 4: And so it was a loss that was really hard for her to get over.

00:06:20
Speaker 3: Because of that, and afterwards, she became fiercely independent. She learned shorthand; she got a job working at Mills College, got her education, and finally met like minded people, these intellectual women, because Mills College was one of the first schools on the West Coast to west of the Rockies to open up for women. Then she became a stenographer and she worked for one of the largest shipping firms in San Francisco. She had an assistant that reported to her; she had purchased her own horse.

00:06:54
Speaker 4: She had a maid that cleaned her house.

00:06:56
Speaker 3: I mean, she was very successful and very confident, and she dated a lot of guys during this time.

00:07:03
Speaker 2: All her dating and socializing would soon bring her to meet the best selling author Jack London, changing the course of her life. They met through her aunt, who at the time was a writer and editor for the “Overland Monthly”.

00:07:14
Speaker 3: Jack London was not snazzy. When he was young. He looked like a sailor. He had a bow legged walk, you know, and he didn’t really get fashion quite yet. I mean, he was a very handsome man. But she was like, at first, she’s like, “Who’s this guy?”

00:07:29
Speaker 4: You know?

00:07:30
Speaker 3: But when she sat down, they had this amazing conversation. He had this mind like a jar full of bees. It was just ding, ding, ding, and she had a similar mind. They had this immediate connection. Intellectually. He’s like, “Oh, well, you review my book,” and she’s like, “Sure, whatever, I’ll do it, you know,” and I really want to borrow some of your books because she couldn’t get to banned books, so a lot of like “Tesla the Durbervilles” was banned at the time.

00:07:53
Speaker 4: She he wanted to be able to read those. So he’s like, “Can I borrow them?”

00:07:56
Speaker 3: She’s like, “Sure, come by sometime,” and so they scheduled to have him come by, and so they immediately had this connection. They had all these plans in the, you know, the go horseback riding, which Jack didn’t know how to do, and so she was going to teach him how to ride, but he, out of the blue, decided to get married and he married Bess Matern out of, like, this commitment towards being a writer, getting a schedule. You know. He thought they would make very nice children together. And so Charmian was like, “That’s weird, whatever, you know.” But something between the relationship really sparks something in her, and she’s like, “You know what, I’m going to go travel the world.” She went around Europe and started writing about her travels, which is something that she had always wanted to do. Like, since she was a child, she had dreamed of traveling the world and writing about it. So when she gets back to the Bay Area from her travels, she’s a changed woman. She goes back to working as a stenographer, and she gets invited to Jack Lennon’s house.

00:08:54
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Irish Jamal Duncle tell the story of Charmian Bridge, London. And when we come back, more of this story; a story of a time period; a story of, well, what it was like to be a woman in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. More of this remarkable story here on our American story. And we return to our American stories and we’ve been listening to Irish Jamal Duncle share the story of her book. “Charmian Kittridge, London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer.” Duncle’s book is the first full length biography arn Charmian, who was Jack London’s second wife. Her story has been told inaccurately for years and mostly forgotten. We left off after Jack had decided to marry someone else. Rather than let that get her down, Charmian began traveling, and upon her return she was invited to London’s house. Back to Irish Jamal Duncle.

00:10:19
Speaker 3: That’s where all of the artists are going for parties. She challenges Jack to a fencing match. He was like, “Oh, yeah, okay, lady, let’s do this.”

00:10:27
Speaker 4: You know, she’ll just let me win.

00:10:30
Speaker 3: But little did he know: A. Charmian had studied fencing at Mills College; B. She was not going to just let him win.

00:10:38
Speaker 4: She was very athletic, and so she went and kicked his butt, and he was so shocked he ran over and kissed her on the lips.

00:10:57
Speaker 3: Granted, Jack London had two small babies at home and he was married. They didn’t immediately have an affair, right? They had that kiss.

00:10:58
Speaker 4: She kept going to the parties.

00:11:11
Speaker 3: They were in the same social so, so they were always coming across each other and doing activities together. But slowly they started to have that connection that they had felt build into this romance that just caught on fire.

00:11:11
Speaker 4: They were so over the top and love.

00:11:13
Speaker 3: Their love letters are just ridiculous in their, in their sappiness, and sometimes they write.

00:11:19
Speaker 4: To each other like three, four times a day, and they, she’d be like, “I’m waiting by the mailbox for your letter.”

00:11:25
Speaker 3: But why they were so in love and why they called each other mate. They found each other this kind of mirror image of who they wanted, and so I think that’s why ignited so fast.

00:11:36
Speaker 4: Meanwhile, Jack’s married. He has to kind of.

00:11:38
Speaker 3: Sneak around until he finally tells his wife that he wants to be separated, and this, of course, causes a huge ruckus, in because he’s a celebrity at this point. He’s written “Call of the while”; he filed for divorce in California. A lot at that time, you had to wait a year before you could get married, and so, you know, they, they started. It was really troubling for Jack.

00:12:06
Speaker 4: He actually finally more Orley was dealing with the fact that he was leaving his young family right, and feeling bad, but.

00:12:07
Speaker 3: He still did it.

00:12:17
Speaker 4: They got married day that the divorce went through instead of waiting for this planned ceremony, and that was kind of like how it was going to be with Jack going forward.

00:12:17
Speaker 2: And off they were on their honeymoon. They went to Jamaica and Cuba and began their explorations and riding about them. When they came back to the Bay Area to start their married life together, the itch to travel got the better of them, and they started planning a boat trip on a small yacht called “the Snark”. After some delays, in nineteen oh seven, they finally set sail on “the Snark”. This is when Charmian began logging their journey. Throughout all their trips, they were being followed by reporters, and stories were being written about their adventures.

00:12:47
Speaker 3: They did all kinds of crazy adventures on the Stark, including when they’re in Hawaii. They both learned how to surf, and what’s notable is how Jack would record these, these adventures and his writing about the trip called “the Cruise of the Snark”, as if he were the only one doing these things. In reality, Charmian is also there surfing on a seventy five pound wooden surfboard with him in Waikiki, but it’s sold more copies to have just Jack London do it, and so that’s why he recorded it that way, and you see that throughout their adventures. So they travel from Hawaii to the Marquesian Island, to Tahiti, and then on to Bora Bora and beyond to the Solomon Islands, and they’d plan to continue on. But while they’re on this adventure, Jack gets sick. They both develop yahs, which is a disease that you get in the South Seas where you get these wounds on your arms that are as big as baseballs. Jack became very, very ill, and so they had to leave the Solomon Islands and travel to Australia so he could have surgery and recover. But unfortunately it was something that Jack couldn’t cover from, and they had to end their trip, and Charmian was devastated. This was probably the most important journey of her life, she felt like, and so when they had to end the trip, she sobbed. She was so sad.

00:14:14
Speaker 2: When they got back from their journey, Charmian soon found out she was pregnant.

00:14:18
Speaker 3: In May of nineteen ten. She started to get ready to give birth. She went into labor and they had been told everything was normal, but very soon into labor, they realized that everything was not normal. Charmian weighed maybe one hundred and fifteen pounds and her baby weighed over nine pounds, and she was having a very difficult labor. The doctor ended up having to use forceps, and because of that, he broke. She later called her baby “Joy Baby”.

00:14:47
Speaker 4: The doctor broke Joy’s neck.

00:14:49
Speaker 3: What makes it worse is that while she was delivering Joy, her placenta didn’t deliver, and so she was bleeding out on the table and had to be rushed into a meeting surgery, and so it turned out that she never got to see her child in the thirty eight hours that she survived. So it was a really, really sad time for Charmian. She was not only physically damaged by the birth. What happened from the surgery she had directly after giving birth was scar. It was a terrible job and she ended up with terrible scar tissue, and so she was, unbeknownst to her, she was not going to ever be able to carry a child to term.

00:15:29
Speaker 2: After the terrible loss of her baby, they went back to their adventures and Jack began research for his novel “The Valley of the Moon”.

00:15:38
Speaker 3: And by this time Charmian is a real integral part of their collaboration team. She’s taking notes, she’s giving her own perspective. And what happens is Jack actually starts incorporating some of her actual text into the novel, and so she makes note of this in her diary as he’s composing it, and we have proof of her collaboration with Jack on the actual text. And what’s really interesting is in this novel that Jack writes based on her interaction and collaboration, we see one of the first kind of real, like, women. Saxon, the protagonist from “The Valley of the Moon”, really seems like a real woman, and her experiences, like losing her child, seem really vivid and real. And the reason why is because Jack was actually talking to Charmian directly about that and she was able to give him direct feedback. After going on this journey, they decide to head to New York. They want to go on passage on the dier Ago, which is a three masted ship that they want to take around Cape Horn to Seattle. So when they get back from their journey, on the dier Ago. He ends up having an appendicitis, and when he goes in for surgery, his doctor realizes that his kidneys are in really bad shape, and he says, “You know, you’ve got to change this behavior or…”

00:17:02
Speaker 4: You’re gonna die. You know, this is not good. Your kidneys are failing.

00:17:06
Speaker 3: Little did he know that what was causing that kidney failure partially was the fact that while they were on “the Snark”, when they were experiencing the sores, they would rub mercury ointment on their sores. And because of that, obviously, mercury is.

00:17:20
Speaker 4: Not good for your kidneys. So that’s what was making him so ill.

00:17:25
Speaker 3: In the months that follow he gets worse and worse, and finally, that in November, one night he comes into Charmian’s sleeping porch Cayman and, you know, told her how much he loved her and said he was going to go read, and she looked over a few hours later and he was slumped over, and.

00:17:41
Speaker 4: She thought he’d just fallen asleep while I was reading.

00:17:44
Speaker 3: Well, the next morning Eliza rushes in, wakes her up and says, “Something’s wrong with Jack,” and so she rushes over and finds him in a coma, and it’s a coma he never wakes up from.

00:17:56
Speaker 4: They called the doctors, they do.

00:17:58
Speaker 3: Everything. But meanwhile, Jack does not wake up, and he passes away, and Charmian is devastated.