This necessity of writing about sex in a way that was utterly insincere must have been the main cause of that contempt for his own fiction which London was so swift and vehement to proclaim. The expression of this contempt was the most startling thing about him, to any one who admired his work. “I loathe the stuff when I have done it. I do it because I want money and it’s an easy way to get it. But if I could have my choice about it I never would put pen to paper--except to write a Socialist essay, to tell the bourgeois world how much I despise it.” I remember trying to persuade him that he must have enjoyed writing the best of his stories--“The Sea Wolf” and “The Call of the Wild”; but he would not have it so. He was a man of action; he liked to sail a boat, to run a ranch, to fight for Socialism. His real attitude towards woman was expressed in “Martin Eden,” his most autobiographical novel, whose hero gives his final conclusion about life by dropping himself out of the porthole of an ocean steamer at night. This hero is a working boy, who makes a desperate struggle to rise from poverty; but the girl of the world of culture, whom he idealizes and worships, proves a coward and fails him in his need. That is one wrong an uncomprehending woman can do to a man; and yet another is to comprehend his weaker part too well. I have heard friends of London’s boyhood tell how he came back from the Klondike with the flush of his youthful dream upon him--the dream of the primitive female, the “mate” of the strong and proud and free man; and how a shrewd young woman saw her chance and proceeded to play the primitive female in drawing-rooms, leaping over tables and chairs, and otherwise exhibiting abounding energy. But when this game had accomplished its purpose she did no more leaping, but “settled down,” as the phrase is; and so came a divorce. This “Martin Eden” is assuredly one of Jack London’s greatest works; he put his real soul into it, and the fact that it was so little known and read, must have been of evil significance to him. It taught him that if an American writer wants to earn a living with his pen--especially an extravagant living--it is necessary that he should avoid dealing in any true and vital way with the theme of sex. Either he must write over and over again the dream of primitive and perfect mating, a phenomenon unreal and unconvincing to people who are not primitive, but who have intellects as well as bodies to mate; or else, if he deals with modern life, he must give us details of the splendid and devastating passions of the prosperous--the kind of perfumed poison now all the rage. One saw the beginning of that in “The Little Lady of the Big House,” and I count this book the most sinister sign in the life of Jack London. A man can hardly have a thirty-six thousand dollar a year contract with the Hearst magazines and still keep his soul alive!