THE STORY OF JACK LONDON.

Taranaki Daily News, 25 February 1922, Page 11

THE STORY OF JACK LONDON.

HIS TWO MARRIAGES. . One of the great surprises of this publishing season has been the big demand for the Life of Jack Jjondon, by his wife, which Mills and Boon have published in two handsome volumes at 30s net. The life is of great length, but apparently not. too long for those many lovers of open-air life who have heard the call of the wild and to whom Jack London was a leader into a larger life. “Mrs. London’s biography, illustrated by a large number of photographs of her husband, in all of which the potent fascination of his personality is apparent, has a warmth \nd occasionally a vehemence of exp. -sion, well suited to its subject,” says the Scotsman.

“His first marriage, when he was twenty-four, was eminently characteristic of his fashion of taking a situation by storm. The story is told in. a letter to the writer, who did not then imagine that about five years later she herself would be his wife.

. ‘You know I do things quickly. Sunday morning last, I had not the slightest intention of doing what I am going to do. 1 came down and looked over the house I was to move into—that fathered the thought. Sunday evening, I opened transartions for a wife; by Monday evening I had the affair well under way; and next Saturday morning I shall marry—a Bessie Maddem, cousin to Minnie Moddern Fiske. Also, on said Saturday, as soon as the thing is over with, we jump on our wheels for a three days’ trip, and then back to work.’

“It was a. union which furnished s striking proof of the truth of the adage about marrying in haste and repenting at leisure. In about eighteen monthrhe contracting parties separated; and at the end of four years from the wedding there was a divorce. A year later Jack Ixmdon took refuge ftom his lonliness in marriage with Miss Charmian Kitteredge. It was the happiest of marriages, and.he appears to have found a mate who was at one with him in energy and a delight in life. Literature, travel, agriculture were pursued with a consuming interest which eventually wore out even his stalwart frame, and in October, 1916, he was borne from the sunny Californian slopes, which he loved so well, to his grave.

“The circumstances of his life made a man of him gt an age when ordinary boys still retain much of the child. Nature, however, compensated him for a precocity which wifs full of dangers by endowing him with a boyishness of spirit which endured, unabated, until the close of his life. Hardship—and his earlier years, in San Francisco and elsewhere, were full of hardship—had no souring influence upon him, and to the end, with a frank, ifearless outlook upon life, he retained, in many respects, much of the simplicity of a child. Newsboy, sailor, seal-hunter, coal-shoveller, worker in a jute factory, and other things besides, not to mention sundry spells of imprisonment for vagrancy. Jack London lived with much of the fierce intensity with which, in his books, he depicted the scenery and life of the Klondyke. As a writer, his genius was for the episodic. He was a master of the short story, but where he essayed a longer literary flight much of his power deserted him’. In his life there was something of the same episodic quality, sustained, however, by an energy which approached to violence.” Here is an extract from a letter of his showing the kind of childhood he had:

“At ten years I was on the street selling newspapers. Every cent was turned over to my people, and I went to school in constant shame of the hats, shoes, and clothes I wore. From then on I had no childhood. Up at three o’clock in the morning to carry papers. When that was finished I did not go home, but continued on to school. School out. my evening papers. Saturday I worked on an ice wagon. Sunday I went to a bowling alley and set up pins for drunken Dutchmen.”