27. Charmian Kittredge London with Iris Jamahl Dunkle

INTRODUCTION

AMY: “Behind every great man is a great woman.” It’s a well-known platitude, but Kim, what do we think of it?

KIM: It’s kind of annoying, actually. Wouldn’t the more accurate wording maybe be, “behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes”?

AMY: Yeah, for sure. I think so. In any case, the woman we’re discussing today, Charmian Kittredge London, has always been relegated to the status of “the woman behind the man,” but when it comes to her famous husband, Jack London, she was every bit by his side (and was sometimes leading the charge). Smart, fearless, and ahead of her time, she was adventuring and writing right along with him — not to mention helping him shape his own published works. Her first book, The Log of the Snark, is a vivid and insightful account of the two-year sailing voyage (a sometimes harrowing voyage) that she and Jack charted through the South Pacific. She has always been eclipsed by her husband’s star power, however, so let’s drag her out of his shadow today, shall we?

KIM: Absolutely. So welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, everyone, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Kim Askew...

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes, and we’ve got a fantastic guest with us today to discuss Charmian Kittredge London’s fascinating life story. 

KIM: I can’t wait. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Iris Jamahl Dunkle, the author of Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer, which was published last year and is the first full-length biography to be written on Charmian London. Based in Northern California, Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She was also Poet Laureate of Sonoma County from 2107-2018 and has published multiple collections of poetry, including West: Fire: Archive which challenges preconceived, androcentric ideas about biography, autobiography and history. (And Charmian Kittredge London factors into this work as well.) Her work has been featured in Tin House, The San Francisco Examiner, Fence, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Split Rock Review and the Chicago Quarterly Review to name just a few. Iris, welcome to our show!

IRIS: Thank you so much! It’s great to be here!

AMY: So, it was such a pleasure to read this biography of yours, I have to say. I discovered after you wrote an article about Charmian for Electric Literature, and I’m so glad that I pursued that a little further and checked the book out, because I absolutely loved it. I tore through it in, like, two or three days. I thought it was really compelling.

KIM: I completely agree. You really brought her remarkable story to life in a way that I was gripped with every page, so thank you for that!

IRIS: Thank you so much!

KIM: So can you tell us a little bit about how you came to know of Charmian Kittredge and what inspired you to want to tell her story?

IRIS: Definitely. There’s really two little stories that lead to this. The first is, I grew up in Sonoma County, which is where Jack London State Park is located, and I went there on a field trip in sixth grade and kind of got to know Jack London as the first writer I ever met. Little did I know, though, by visiting that museum, that there was another writer that I was meeting that day, and that was Charmian. Because they didn’t depict her as a writer in the museum. So fast-forward years later, I’m at that park and looking at these photographs that are on the garbage cans. They’re of Jack London on a hillside — it’s an iconic photo. And I was like, “That’s really strange. I wonder who’d taken that photo?” And I was doing some research for a poem that I wrote and found out that Nelle Griffith Wilson (the poet I was researching) was friends with Charmian, and I was looking through her poetry book and found the same photo attributed to Charmian. And I was like, “Oh my gosh! Charmian took this picture!” So I reached out to a Jack London scholar and I asked them, “Did you know that Charmian took this picture?” And they were like, “We never really thought to ask that question.” And that’s when I was like, “Oh my gosh. What else did they not think to ask??!!”

AMY: Did I see somewhere that you actually worked at that museum? For some reason I had it in my head that you were a docent there or something, too, for a while.

IRIS: I did. I worked as a volunteer leading their book club, and so I brought Charmian’s books to the museum and we read them together. And I spend a lot of time at the park, because I’m kind of a book nerd. I’ve been volunteering there for years, because I’ve been a Jack London scholar for most of my adult life.

AMY: That all makes sense now. And I love that story about you visiting when you were a kid, too, and little did you know that you would be devoting so much of your life to writing about that place. One of the things about your book that you do so well is you cultivate this instant connection with Charmian right away. I knew basically nothing about her going into this, and by the time I finished reading your prologue, I was so emotionally invested because you set things up in such a way that you show us how in her later life she was kind of betrayed by people and in one instance cruelly scammed by various writers of her husband Jack’s biography, his life story — including the famous writer Irving Stone.

KIM: Yeah, that’s a heartbreaking anecdote, actually, and I wondered if the prospect of finding the truth and doing her justice, did you find it intimidating at all in light of the fact that she’d previously been so misrepresented and misused by previous biographers?

IRIS: Honestly, yes, it was really daunting. I mean, trying to write anyone’s life is daunting because you want to get it right, but writing the life of someone who has been forgotten, really, from history or misremembered, puts even more pressure. But honestly, I got really mad at Irving Stone, and that chapter, that first chapter, I had to rewrite like 10, 15 times, because I was really mad at first. And if you read, actually, all of the archival material around it, his actual letters to her, it just makes you furious.

KIM: He’s like a villain in a movie. I mean, yeah, absolutely. That is such a betrayal and so premeditated. Ugh, yeah.

AMY: He basically rifled through her secret belongings in the home when she was out. And it was disappointing, too because you’d like to think … He was the biographer of Lust For Life, the Vincent Van Goh biography that made him famous, basically, and you’d like to think that he was a great writer who does these people justice and then it really made you take a second look. And also, Rose Wilder Lane, I felt a little disappointed about her treatment of Charmian with regard to her biography of Jack. So I can imagine how you must have felt.

IRIS: Yeah, well, and if you think about those two characters, Charmian was not the only one who was wronged by them. So going back to Vincent Van Goh, the family of Vincent Van Goh actually were very, very upset by the work of Irving Stone because of the false, the untruths he was circulating about Vincent Van Goh. And if you’ve ever read Prairie Fires, the amazing biography about Laura Ingalls Wilder, the truth about her daughter, Rose, comes out as well. She doesn’t get a very good name in that book, for sure. 

AMY: But anyway, moving back onto Charmian, she was born in 1871 and she was essentially a California girl through and through. It seems like the West Coast really shaped her. There were several other women in her family who were gifted writers, right?

IRIS: Yes. Both her mother and her Aunt Ninetta. Her mother and her family came over from Wisconsin and they came over the Overland Trail to Utah and then Charmian was born in Wilmington in Southern California. But her mother, from the time she was very young, published poetry and short fiction, and Charmian kept all of her stories with her. There’s a beautiful poem called “Charmian” that she wrote for her daughter when she was, like, six months old, it’s really… anyone who has a child can really relate to it. But her Aunt Ninetta published in national magazines as well, including East Coast magazine. She wrote a novel about their life in Utah but ended up not getting it published. And she was really, really, a big part of The Overland Monthly crowd in the Bay Area.

AMY: And that was like a literary scene?

IRIS: Yeah, it was the main literary scene in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially relating to Berkeley around the turn of the century.

AMY: So before her love affair with Jack began, Charmian was an independent, financially self-sufficient young woman with a paying job. (She worked as a stenographer and was just starting to venture into writing.) But she’d also traveled by herself cross-country via railroad and she’d toured the great cities of Europe. She loved sailing and horseback riding. And there’s a quote from your book that really brings her personality into sharp focus. This is a recollection from a young neighbor of Charmian’s who reported seeing her when he was 8-years-old. And he recalled: “The first glimpse of Charmian Kittridge sparked a bright windy morning in Berkeley when, with tresses flying, she galloped past our cottage on Dana Street astride a white horse, shouted, “I’m a Valkyrie!’ to a startled child, and vanished down the highway in a cloud of dust.” What a badass she is!

KIM: She sounds SO COOL! 

IRIS: Yeah, don’t you just want to hang out with her?

KIM: So you write that her aunt Netta Eames had very liberated ideas about sex, and that’s something that she definitely passed on to her niece. They weren’t prudes when it came to sexuaity at all, we learn in the book. And on the flip side of that, history often makes Charmian out to be this loose woman who stole Jack London away from his first wife. What’s the real story of how they got together?

IRIS: Well, just to start off, Charmian was someone who was very comfortable with her sexuality, and as you said, her aunt and her uncle had an open marriage and Nanetta really believed in Victoria Woodhull's idea that a woman should be able to own her own sexuality and her own desires. So that was something that shocked me when I read it. I was like, “Oh, who knew ladies were like that back in the day?” And when I started to read about Jack and Charmian getting together, I mean… when Charmian first met Jack he was fresh off the boat, literally, from sailing to Japan, and he was a sailor, you know, like kind of bow-legged and not so refined. And so when she met him, she was like, “That’s Jack London?” But they had a luncheon together at Young’s restaurant down by the Ferry building, and they instantly hit it off as far as conversation. Jack London loved reading banned books and at the time, Tess of the D’Urbervilles [by Thomas Hardy] was a banned book, and he found out that she had a copy and he was like, “Can I come over and borrow it?” and she was like, “I guess! Sure!” He ended up coming by what she called her “den,” which was her room, and they just talked books for hours at a time. They found immediately that they had this, like, intellectual attraction to one another and this connection. I mean, his mind was like a jar full of bees and hers was exactly the same, and they would just ZING, ZING, ZING off each other in conversation. And so once they had that they felt a really, really strong attraction.

AMY: And he was single at the time?

IRIS: Yes, he was single when they first met. And they had this date set up in the future, like, a few weeks out, and all of a sudden she gets this note from Jack: “Uh, sorry, can’t make the date… I got married.” It was out of the blue. He had married Bess Maddern as a way to settle down and have some children. He thought that she had good bone structure so they could have great children together.

AMY: But clearly, he couldn’t get Charmian out of his mind…

IRIS: Like you previously said, Charmian went back East, travelled all over Europe and then came back. When she came back, she got invited to Jack London’s party. He had these parties up in the Berkeley hills. It was just, like, him, and a bunch of artists and a pot of spaghetti that Bessie made, with the small children. And so Charmian came and she immediately asked Jack to a fencing duel. He didn’t know that she had studied fencing at Mills College. She was quite good. So she challenged him, and he was like, “I got this…” and lo and behold, they had a match and she kicked his butt! He was so shocked that he ran over and kissed her, and so that was the beginning of it. Now, Jack London at the time was probably kissing a lot of ladies, but there was something about their connection from the den that carried over, and this affair started. They were in the same circle. It wasn’t like they were never seeing each other. The Overland Monthly, that literary crowd, they all intermingled at all of the events around the Bay Area, and so they were constantly seeing each other, and eventually it just started to become this really fiery, beautiful relationship where they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. And they wrote the most intense love letters that I have ever read, and funniest that I’ve ever read in my life. 

KIM: And she’s literally the opposite of what it seemed like everybody was being told you’re supposed to be at that time as a woman. She was doing everything that you weren’t supposed to do, and of course that’s incredibly enticing! I mean, how could he not fall in love with her?

IRIS: Yeah! It’s so true. And what’s really interesting is that they called each other “Mate.” They reason why is because of that connection. So he saw in her someone who was like a man, right? Somebody in his time period who didn’t follow female gender norms, and so she was what he called “game.” If they were going to go on an adventure, she would go first, you know. She’d be like, “Let’s do this.” She had no fear and always sought adventure and just was really, really intellectually engaged all the time as well. So it was a really interesting pairing, for sure. 

AMY: So, after some time he manages to extricate himself from his marriage, but Charmian does have to wait a while for that and kind of keep it on the down-low that they are together, but they do eventually get married, and for her, it was basically like being romantically involved with a national celebrity … a global celebrity…  which kind of complicated things for their courtship. He was a living legend and so they literally had the early 20th century version of paparazzi chasing after them on their wedding night at the hotel. Following that, she was doomed to be relegated to the public role of “Jack London’s wife,” but it seems like Jack was the one person who viewed her very much as his intellectual equal. 

KIM: Right, I mean, she basically took over as Jack’s personal assistant, she was his editor, his literary sounding board, and in some cases, it seemed like he even “sub-contracted” out some of his writing to her. Would you tell us a little bit about their working partnership? It was really important, and do you think her relationship with Jack ultimately encouraged or impeded her own writing pursuits?

IRIS: That’s a really good question and it’s kind of at the heart of where my study was, because what I realized when I started doing research into Charmian, the amount of help she had given Jack London in his writing… that was something that no one had ever talked about before. So I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’d better really check my facts on this one.” So I started really documenting whenever there was some sort of collaboration. So beginning with The Sea Wolf, which was the first book Jack London worked on while they were together, he’s writing to her… this was within a year of their relationship, he is writing to her asking her to help him switch the magazine version of The Sea Wolf into the novel version because it’s repurposed and it has to be changed around. In his letter he’s like, “Go ahead and make whatever changes you’d like. I trust your instinct.” So that kind of quote in the beginning, I’m like, “Oh, wow. That’s Year One.” So this idea that she was his secretary, which has stuck in Jack London scholarship for so long, was infuriating to me as I started to go deeper and deeper into this, because she had a better education than Jack London first, and second, she actually was the editor. That’s what she was trained to do. One of the ways that Jack London composed was...he composed in his head a great deal and so people were like, “Oh, he’s a genius, he just sat down and wrote the book in one draft!” Which is a bunch of bull honkey becuase he actually would go through several drafts with Charmian. They would talk through stories all the time. They were constantly talking about his work. And then much later, he started relying on her more and more. When they were writing on the Dirigo, which was a ship they sailed on from Baltimore around Cape Horn to Seattle, they worked on The Valley of the Moon, and they had done all the research for that book together and Charmian’s full pages of description were placed directly into that novel and she notes that in her diaries so there’s clear evidence of that. But you can see her input in so much more of that book because of the experiences and the way that it depicts a woman. It’s really the only book from that time period that depicts a woman that’s actually, like, a real woman and the reason why is because it was written by a real woman!

AMY: Yeah, Jack basically was like, “You’re really good at writing descriptive narrative, why don’t you just take on this part.” Who would have thought that he would do that? Everybody just attributes it all to him!

KIM: That picture of the two of them working together in the book and they’re looking into each other’s eyes and you can just see the intellectual stimulation. It very much seemed like meeting with each other on an intellectual plane and working together.

IRIS: Absolutely.

AMY: If our listeners know anything about Jack London, then they probably know about The Cruise of the Snark, which is his telling of the couple’s famous sailing trip around the world. I thought it was really interesting to discover that, of the two of them, it was Charmian who sort of willed this trip into being, is that right?

IRIS: That’s absolutely right. She’d come across Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum when it first came out in the early 1900s and she saw his exhibit when she was in Buffalo at the Pan-American Exhibit, and so when she got home, she had this dream of sailing around the world. And then when she met Jack, they both were very nautical. They both loved to sail on the bay, and so that was one of their dreams they had together was, “Oh, let’s sail around the world together.” Their relationship began with that dream and it kind of became the center of their lives.

AMY: But as you write, Jack was basically like, “Yeah, wouldn’t that be cool? At some point we can do that.” It was like a “bucket list” sort of thing, and she’s like, “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go do it!” And he was like, “Oh, okay. Yeah!” So she kind of lit the match on it a bit, which I think is cool.

IRIS: Definitely, yeah. She was ready to go. As I said, she was “game,” and she loved to travel. It was the time when she felt most like a writer, when she was traveling. 

KIM: Yeah, so on top of being able to hold her own on board the Snark, she was also kind of kicking Jack’s ass in other ways, too. There’s this surfing anecdote about Hawaii. Can you tell the story for our listeners? It’s great.

IRIS: Definitely. So they were in Waikiki when they first got to Hawaii and they had had a difficult voyage there. So one of the surfers wanted to teach Jack and Charmian how to surf. So they spent all day trying to learn how to surf on 75-lb wooden surfboards, which just sound awful, and it turns out that Charmian was able to stand up even before Jack. Jack also surfed, but the way that it was recorded in Jack’s account, and this is all in Charmian’s diary. Of course, she always recorded when she beat Jack in cards or when she did something adventurous that he couldn’t really pull off… she made note of it, but she didn’t publicly do so. So he did it finally as well, but ended up getting the worst sunburn of his life and was in bed for three days. But the way he depicts it in his Cruise of the Snark, his account of their Snark journey, it’s only him surfing; not Charmian. He totally omits her.

AMY: Of course. All right. Badass Exhibit A: “I am a Valkyrie.” Badass Exhibit 2: beating him at a fencing duel. And then Badass Exhibit 3: Getting up on the surfboard before he did.

IRIS: Again, we all just want to hang out with Charmian now.

AMY: Yeah, for sure.

KIM: Absolutely. 

AMY: And as you say in your book that omission about the surfing incident “...would re-occur throughout Jack’s account of the trip. … his feat of surfing on a ten-foot wooden surfboard would not have looked so adventurous if his small, fit wife had also accomplished the same thing.” We should also mention that Charmian basically taught Jack how to ride a horse, or at least, be way more comfortable on horseback than he initially was… It felt like she wasn’t just matching him step-for-step, but not only that, really besting him in a lot of areas. 

IRIS: Absolutely.

AMY: So we know they had a great intellectual and professional partnership, this couple, but did they manage to hold onto that love and passion that you described throughout the years? After all, Jack was seen as something of a philanderer.

IRIS: Yes, they did, actually. It was something that Charmian recorded everytime they had sex in their journal.

AMY: I was wondering about that! In this biography you have a very specific detailing of when and sometimes where…

IRIS: Yeah, it’s even more specific in the diary, so they… they called them “Lollies.” That’s their code word. It was very important to Charmian for them to maintain that intimacy. She actually would make her own lingerie, and they loved to dine naked when they went to hotels. It was a big part of their lives, their intimacy. They even on the Snark, which this was a very small ship and there were six other people on that ship — on that yacht — and they had sex almost every day. So I don’t know how they pulled it off. It probably was pretty awkward! 

AMY: There was a restaurant booth in there, too, as I recall.

IRIS: Oh, yeah. In Sacramento at the fair, they were at a restaurant and they were upstairs and people were dancing down below and they found a little intimacy there. 

KIM: Wow, intellectual… professional… sexual… it’s all there. So Iris, we were wondering if you might read us a short passage from Charmian’s book, The Log of the Snark, just to give our listeners an idea of her writing style.

IRIS: You bet, I would love to. This is a short passage from about a year into their journey, so this is 1908 and they’ve just arrived in Bora Bora. I thought I’d read this because it really gives a sense of her description. And Tehai and Bihaura, the people she’s going to mention, are two of the people they’re traveling with.

After Tehai and Bihaura had been set ashore at their request, Jack said to me: “What do you say we go over for half an hour or so?” Ernest took us to the long jetty, and we wandered in the soft cool air, attracted by music, which was accompanied by a concerted, regular chug as of some dull and toneless instrument. The grass grew to the water’s edge, and on this village green, by the forgotten graves of the decaying Mission church, we beheld an idyllic pastorale of youths and maidens dancing under a spreading flamboyante to the strange, rhythmic chant. The maids were all in white, garlanded with sumptuous, perfumed wreaths of allemanda and blumeria and tiare, mixed with drooping grass-fringes, the men likewise garlanded, and girdled in white and scarlet paréus. They moved in twos and threes, arm-in-arm, closely around the mouth-organ musicians in the centere, like bees in a swarm. The curious chug-chug was made by a measured grunt-grunt! grunt-grunt! of the dancers. There was witchery in it all — the wheel of graceful revolving forms, twining brown arms, bright eyes and white teeth glistening in a soft and scented gloom that the moon had not yet touched; and the last least veil of enchantment was added by flitting soft-glowing lights amongst the dancers’ heads. These spots of soft radiance were curly fragments of phosphorescent fungus, culled from dead and dying cocoanut trees, and set in red and silken hibiscus blossoms, worn over the ears of these flower-like women — curled flowers of captured moonshine, sometimes tender, luminous blue; sometimes evasive green, and again, mere phosphorescent white. 

KIM: That is so sensuous and evocative! Aah!

IRIS: Can I give you a contrast? Now this is Jack’s depiction of the same exact scene in his book The Cruise of the Snark:

Under the rising moon we came in through the perilous passage of the reef of Bora Bora and dropped anchor off Vaitape village. Bihaura, with housewifely anxiety, could not get ashore too quickly to her house to prepare more abundance for us. While the launch was taking her and Tehai to the little jetty, the sound of music and of singing drifted across the quiet lagoon. Throughout the Society Islands we had been continually informed that we would find the Bora Borans very jolly. Charmian and I went ashore to see, and on the village green by forgotten graves on the beach, found the youth and maidens dancing, flower-garlanded and flower-bedecked with strange phosphorescent flowers in their hair that pulsed and dimmed and glowed in the moonlight. Farther along the beach we came upon a huge grass house, oval shaped, seventy feet in length, where the elders of the village were singing himines. They, too, were flower-garlanded and jolly, and they welcomed us into the fold of little lost sheep straying along from outer darkness.

AMY: Hers is so much more poetic.

IRIS: Right?

AMY: And maybe it’s the way that you read it, too, being a poet, that it was lyrical!

KIM: Can you talk to us a little bit more about the differences between the two and actually how it sort of plays out in the complete pieces that each of them did about that voyage?

IRIS: Definitely. I think it’s important to realize that when Charmian’s entering these places she’s already an other, because women were not found in these areas at this time; white women traveling were not often the ones who were the travel writers. There was a woman that came before her named Isabella Bird, who was an amazing woman. If you haven’t read Isabella Bird you should check her out. She wrote about what were then the Sandwich Islands — Hawaii. And she traveled all over the world, including Korea and the Far East, but she wrote about Hawaii from the perspective of a woman, so she saw it differently than somebody who was in the dominant part of society, right? And so when Charmian was in these places, she saw it differently. She also had an eye for beauty, right? She had an eye for seeing things. Like, she paid attention to what kind of flowers they were; she didn’t just say that they were wearing flowers, they were hibiscus flowers with these glowing phosphorescence in the middle. Her attention to detail is very poetic. And although she did write some poetry and it was terrible (she was a terrible poet), she was very good at travel writing because not only did she seek adventure, but she knew how to capture that adventure on the page. 

AMY: As a biographer, Iris, you were fortunate that Charmian recorded so much in her personal diaries. She suffered a lot of heartbreak in her life, not the least of which was related to her desire to be a mother. 

IRIS: Definitely. One of the most important stories I wanted to tell in this book was the story of the child that Jack and Charmian lost: Joy Baby, as they called her. It was an important story that I couldn’t imagine why it was erased, and so when I started researching Charmian… She got pregnant right at the end of their Snark journey. When they came home, she was like, “I don’t feel very good,” and she found out she wasn’t sick with malaria; she was pregnant. And so she was so excited for this baby and was told all along that nothing was wrong. But when she went into labor… first off, Charmian was a very small woman, and the baby was over nine pounds, so a very large baby. So they had difficulty delivering the baby. They used forceps, and meanwhile, during this time period when a woman’s giving birth, she’s completely out, right? You’re not awake at all. And so they used forceps and messed up on baby Joy’s spine — the top of her spine — when they’re delivering her, and then, Charmian doesn’t deliver the placenta so she starts to bleed out on the table. So she’s rushed into emergency surgery. So unfortunately, baby Joy died 38 hours after she was born, and Charmian never got to see her. And then, on top of that, the doctor who did her surgery to deal with the placenta scarred her uterus so that she could no longer carry a child to term. But she didn’t know that, and so she kept trying and losing children for years to come. But she so desperately wanted to become a mother, and the diaries she wrote about that period of being in the ward and hearing all the babies crying and her milk coming in… just the pain she suffered, the depression she suffered from losing her child… it was so touching to read, and I had never seen anything like that about the Londons, so for me, it was a very personal thing that needed to be a part of this book.  

KIM: Absolutely. It was a heartbreaking and unforgettable part of it, and I feel the same, too. That’s part of her story that really needed to be told, and I’m glad that you were able to share that, as hard as it was to read it, too. So, getting back to another aspect of their relationship was her spending all this time helping him with his writing, and it really ended up coming at the sacrifice of her own writing. Amy and I wondered if that caused any tension between them? And when she did finally start really being able to put herself first, professionally speaking, when did that happen? When was she able to do that?

IRIS: You know, it was really a tough thing. When she was on the Snark was when she started to realize “Yeah, I really want to get back to being a writer.” She was a writer before she met Jack. It was really hard to do! She was in charge of Jack’s correspondence; she was in charge of Jack’s books; it was a lot of work. They did have a servant who worked for them. He did help Charmian with some of her typing, which eased up some of the work, but then she wasn’t there to help edit, right? That was her role as well. So there was a lot of tension. When she would back off at all, Jack would get upset because he needed her. She was part of his writing process. Towards the end of his life he started to get sicker and sicker, and that’s when she started to take a stand. He started to have renal failure, so he was very irritable, and she was like, “You know what? I’m just going to write my books.” She started to really commit to her life as a writer about the time of the Dirigo. Around 1912, about four years before Jack London died, she started to really focus on the fact that, “You know, I’m going to be a writer as well. And that’s what I wanted to do.” But she really was of two minds. It took a while for her to be able to let go of that role, even after Jack died. It was really difficult for her to just… she couldn’t let go of the stewardship of his career and his works, you know. She still didn’t have all the time to devote to her writing. 

AMY: After The Log of the Snark came out (which was well-received by critics), she also had two more books published. One was called Our Hawaii, which was another travelogue type book, and then she also wrote a biography of her husband following his death. But those books didn’t really do as well. So even after Jack’s death it seemed like, as you mentioned, a lot of her time was still consumed with being the protector of his work and his legacy, but she was able to carve out a new life for herself after he died, would you say?

IRIS: Yeah, she did, and in fact, she wrote four books. Our Hawaii was two different editions, and the second one was quite different. So when she was going to write the biography on Jack London called The Book of Jack London, which was a two-volume biography that she wrote about him on the urging of Jack London’s editor. So he had asked her to come take the train to New York and work with him about that. She was also in charge of dealing with all of the rights and copyright and everything, and writing the end of some of his books. So when she’s in New York…. A few years before Jack died, they had gone to a show at the Orpheum Theater in Oakland and it was Harry Houdini’s magic show. Jack was enamored; he was like, “That guy is so cool!” And went backstage and of course was like, “I’m Jack London!” So they all end up having dinner with the Houdinis. Harry Houdini was also married to a woman named Bess. They became friends, and when Jack died, Harry Houdini sent a letter of condolence to Charmian. So when she was going to New York, she mentioned to him that she was going to be there and he was like, “You have to come to my show.” So she went and sat in the front row with these tickets, went backstage afterwards, and Harry Houdini fell instantly in love with her. They started seeing each other all the time. Meanwhile, Harry Houdini is married. He invited Charmian on the first date to go to dinner with him and his wife, and she was like, “I don’t know, this is kind of weird.” But they ended up having a several-week-long affair, very, very well-documented, again, in her diaries. She called him her “Magic Lover.” But what she realized is Harry Houdini, much like Jack London, was really a charismatic and kind of self-absorbed man, and needed a lot of attention and needed a lot of her energy. She left New York for a little bit, went back up to Mt. Desert Island where her father was from and her relatives lived, and really came to terms with the idea of, like, “You know, I don’t want to get on this train again. I actually want to focus on me.” So when she went back, she was like, “Sorry, Harry, it’s over,” and went back to Glen Ellen and basically broke Harry Houdini’s heart.

AMY: That’s amazing. I love that whole anecdote. It’s crazy that she had these two amazing men in her life, even if that one was only brief and it ended on a kind of very weird note, as I recall.

IRIS: Yes.

AMY: But she also wanted to realize this dream of building her dream house, the dream house that she and Jack had always intended on building that, sort of, they didn’t quite complete during his lifetime. Can you talk about that?

IRIS: Yeah, so in their life together, from the time they got together they wanted to build this mansion called The Wolf House. And they did. They built this amazing mansion that no one had ever seen before. They spent all of their money on it. And then several weeks before they were going to move in, it burned to the ground. And during their lifetimes, both Jack and Charmian thought it was arson, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that these forensic scientists realized that, in Glen Ellen, it gets to be over a 100 degrees in August and the linseed oil that they had been putting on the floors, they left the rags next to the house and they combusted. And the house went up in flames because it was covered in linseed oil at the time. So that was a huge loss for both of them. Luckily, none of their stuff was inside because it was weeks before they were going to move in, and so Charmian dreamed of making a home where she could house all of their artifacts and really make a museum that would not only honor Jack’s life, but also honor their life together, to tell their story. Because in her first version of her biography [of Jack] it was called The Story of Us. It was the idea of both of them, because she understood that it was both of them that made the adventure. So she started working on The House of Happy Walls, which was a house she built so that it would never burn. I don’t know if you keep up with the news in Sonoma County, but we have a lot of fires here. She built this house over a decade long, slowly, with profits that she slowly earned, and the house became this amazing reflection of her. She loved to live in a place of beauty, and so the House of Happy Walls was really her final act of creating a place of beauty; a museum for Jack London, but also a home that was exactly what she wanted. She had dishes from the South Seas that had once been Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and used the coloring from those to make an aqua-colored kitchen and the tile in the dining room is all this turquoise color. There’s a fountain in that room. Upstairs, it looks like the belly of a ship, because that was the place that she loved to be. There were huge fireplaces and there were nautilus shells over the light bulbs. Everything’s just specific and totally an act of art. It’s amazing. And just a side note about that place: that is now a museum, The House of Happy Walls at Jack London State Park, the very museum I went to when I was in sixth grade. But several years ago I was asked to be part of the committee for them to refurbish it, and I was so excited. I gave them my manuscript before it was with a publisher to use as a reference, and that’s why now, you walk through and you see baby Joy’s bootie (so she’s in the story), all of Charmian’s feats and accomplishments… the whole top floor is called Trailblazer Exhibit and it’s so that little girls that go there like myself later on, will now see this kind of role model that I didn’t get to see. I started crying the first time I walked through, I was so excited. It was just like, “Oh my gosh.”

KIM: You should feel very proud.

IRIS: Thank you very much. I do.

AMY: Kim, I’m seeing a road trip at some point in our future, because I’ve never ever been there and I would love to visit. 

IRIS: Oh, we’d love to have you! We’ll go wine-tasting, too!

AMY: Absolutely. Sounds fun!

KIM: So we mentioned her passion for protecting Jack’s legacy, and you talked a little about that. Is there anything else besides the House of Happy Walls that is also Charmian’s legacy that you think people should know about as well?

IRIS: I think one thing (and this is also something I learned from writing the book), is that I considered myself to be a feminist my entire life, but it wasn’t really until I started researching Charmian that i realized that I kind of had stereotypes for what women were like at the turn of the century. And when I met Charmian in the “real,” as I call it, I realized that all of these preconceived conceptions I had of what women were like then were absolutely wrong, that of course women were just like they are now and of course, they weren’t recorded because they weren’t following “the rules.” It was really the first time I felt like I had truly done something to correct history in some way, and it felt like I got more out of the book than even anyone else who’s ever going to read it, you know? I learned a lot about what it means to be a woman in this world today. 

AMY: I feel like, reading your book, you brought her to life so well that as I mentioned, it took me about two or three days to get through this, and by the third day she felt like my friend...she felt like my gal pal. She was so cool. And I can only imagine if I felt that way, how you must have felt about her spending years getting to know her, poring through her diaries and really understanding her. I mean, you must have a really special connection with her in your heart. 

IRIS: Definitely.

KIM: So, Iris, we know that you’re a poet as well. Was switching gears to writing a biography a challenge? 

IRIS: Well, you know, it’s interesting. It became kind of part of my process. So I originally did not approach this as a biography. I was working in the archives, just curiously, because I do archival work for my poetry. The first thing I found was the Dirigo diaries, which are super lyrical. They were never published as a book. So I was reading them, and I couldn’t … I had to respond by writing poetry. So what happened was, I actually wrote poetry about all the artifacts as I was working through it, and about the process of trying to find a life that’s been buried by another. And so it became a whole book project, so I kind of wrote two books at the same time, because as a poet, I had to write a poem first, and then write prose.

KIM: That’s really cool. 

AMY: Is that the collection that you recently had published?

IRIS: Yes, it’s called West: Fire: Archive, and it talks about not only Charmian’s life, but also it talks about the fires that we had in Sonoma County and the disasters that have ravaged the West through generations. And kind of the myth of the West that we have; this whole phallocentric idea of what the West was like, the single narrative.

KIM: Do you have any other projects on the horizon?

IRIS: Yeah, so I’m working on my next book proposal and it is on another lost woman of literature named Sanora Babb. So Sanora Babb wrote this amazing book called Whose Names Are Unknown that she wrote in the Thirties while she was working at Arvin Sanitary Camp outside Bakersfield dealing with all of the refugees coming from the Oklahoma Panhandle where she had grown up. She was a writer and she worked in the camps, really connected with everyone and wrote this amazing novel. But she had shared her notes with her boss, which was Tom Collins, and one day they had a writer visit named John Steinbeck and he borrowed a lot of her notes. In fact, he quotes that he used these writer’s notes in his book. Sanora had a contract with Harper Collins and she was flown to New York that summer to finish the novel. (I mean, how awesome is that?) But a few weeks in, her editor took her into his office and said, “I’m so sorry, we’re going to have to cancel your contract because there’s another book about the Dust Bowl called The Grapes of Wrath and we can’t have two books about the Dust Bowl.”

AMY: Girl...now you’re making me angry!

IRIS: Yeah! And then it gets worse! She didn’t publish it after that. She actually was friends with Ralph Ellison. They worked on it together, but then after that, she put it in a drawer and it didn’t get published until 2004, the year before she died. It’s such a good story about the Dust Bowl. Because my family’s from the Dust Bowl and when I was growing up, my grandmother was like… I read The Grapes of Wrath and I’m like, “Grandma! It’s so exciting! I read a book about our people!” She was like, “Steinbeck didn’t get it right.” I was like, “You’re just grumpy, Grandma,” and she was like, “No, he didn’t.” And she was totally right! He set it in the wrong counties … it wasn’t the Dust Bowl that actually happened. All of the different types of people that were working in the fields … the women had these strong roles. None of that’s in The Grapes of Wrath. 

KIM: I am dying to do an episode on that! Wow, that’s incredible!

AMY: Yeah, that sounds amazing, and once again, literally a woman getting left behind in the dust.

IRIS: Yeah.

AMY: Jeesh.

KIM: Iris, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about Charmian Kittredge London. Everyone, go read Iris Dunkle’s biography of Kittredge London, then follow it up by checking out Kittredge London’s Log of The Snark!

AMY: Yeah, Iris, thank you so much! It was so fun chatting with you, and I’m so glad we got to finally know Charmian and that she’s now part of my vernacular.

IRIS: It’s been such a pleasure talking with you both, and I’m subscribing to your podcast because I love what you’re doing. Thank you!

AMY: That’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

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KIM: For more information, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really makes a difference!  

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.