Men Of Action -- Jack LondonLondon Brought Poker Stories To The Masses |
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Jack London’s short life blazed bright and harsh against the dark blue sky of existence and the wake he made with the thousands of pages he wrote still knocks around boats moored in people’s minds. His creed is still worth consideration:
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out
in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom
of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
His life and his words, written and published more than 100 years ago, still resonate like some sort of cosmic echo. At his height, he was as famous as anyone in America. His stories and novels – Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea Wolf, To Build a Fire, Burning Daylight – are as unique and earnest as any American and they were not as much read as they were ingested by hungry citizens looking to understand just who they were.
London wrote hundreds of stories, essays, jokes and poems about everything from hunting gold in Alaska to farming in Japan. His lust for life and the “man must live” attitude was a huge part of his popularity. While others simply spent the days as cogs in the new industrial nation, London – and his many characters – knew their days were numbered and tried to squeeze the last sunlight out of each one.
And a lot of that entailed drinking, smoking and playing poker.
From 1889 until his death at 40 in 1916, London was a kind of authority on life in wild, boomtown America. Publishing stories and essays in places like The Atlantic and the Saturday Evening Post, he had a global audience of millions. Bars are still famous because London used to drink in them.
London used the game of poker as color and character development, and the major poker scenes in his 1910 novel Burning Daylight are some of the best written. The extremely popular novel most certainly caused boys all across the country to go buy decks of cards.
Poker was as much part of his life as the pencils he wore to nubs writing his 1,000 words a day at saloon tables all through San Francisco and Oakland.
Call of the Wild Cards
By the year of London’s birth in 1876, the California Gold Rush had begun to transform San Francisco and the Bay area into a legendary port of call. The Oakland and San Francisco of London’s youth was a city of more than 300,000.
By this time, San Francisco bypassed New Orleans as the gambling capital of the United States with hundreds of saloons spreading games of chance and poker throughout the Bay area.
Even the newspaper the Examiner, was won in a poker game by George Hearst, father of William Randolph Hearst, who would go on to become one of the richest men in the nation.
London, who grew up just north of the Bay in Vallejo, played poker in fishing shacks on the water when he was 16. London seemed to know he was to have a short life and he started it as early as possible.
Before he’d turn 19, London had worked as an oyster pirate with his own boat (the Razzle-Dazzle), as the law busting oyster pirates, an able-bodied seaman sailing the Pacific, a failed gold miner, a hobo, and a factory worker in a cannery.
It was the long shifts in the cannery that made London decide he would be a writer and would do anything in his power to make it happen. With guidance from the local librarian, he put pencil to notepad and each day, wrote at least 1,000 words, which often took a dozen or so hours.
He first sold a story in 1899 and never looked back, publishing an astounding 40 novels and hundreds of essays, short stories and poems in the next 20 years. Many of the stories are based on the men he met while traveling the world on boat, train and even foot.
Everywhere he went, men played poker. And so the prolific London included the stories of men playing poker when he wrote, men he surely played poker against. He used the mechanics of poker as plot devices and the language of poker as poetry and fact.
From the Hanging of Cultus George (1911):
“Nor had Cultus George resisted. He knew for what it was – bluff. The whites were strong on bluff. Was not draw-poker their favorite game? Did they not buy and sell and make bargains with bluff? Yes; he had seen a white man do business with a look on his face of four aces and in his hand a busted straight.”
Poker is featured extensively in London’s 1910 novel Burning Daylight. Characters are shaped by the games and London writes of the ways of poker with knowledge and skill. The establishing scene in the beginning of Burning Daylight has players fighting over a huge pot. You could tell London knows the game of poker and all its nuances. The ride begins:
“But at three in the morning the big combination of hands arrived. It was the moment of moments that men wait weeks for in a poker game. The onlookers became quiet. The farther away ceased talking and moved over to the table.”
All the money on the table ends up in the middle, thousands of dollars in gold from the Klondike gold rush. London goes on to describe the men in their time of stress. Mike Sexton might have said the same things if he was a novelist instead of a poker tournament commentator.
“Though their features showed northing, each man was beginning to unconsciously to tense. Each man strove to appear his natural self, and each natural self was different. Hal Campbell affected his customary cautiousness. French Louis betrayed interest. MacDonald retained his whole-souled benevolence, though it seemed to take on a slightly exaggerated tone. Kearns was coolly dispassionate and noncommittal, while Elam Harnish appeared as quizzical and jocular as ever. Eleven thousand dollars were already in the pot, and the markers were heaped in a confused pile in the center of the table.”
That’s more than a quarter-million dollars at today’s rates. The next five pages, the pot – and the tension – is raised a thousand times higher, with I.O.U.’s on slips of papers and deeds going in the middle. The winning hand is four kings, beating four queens and four jacks. Indeed, it’s a hand that poker players wait for their entire lives. It’s worth $127,000. London makes the scene crackle and sets off the novel like a bottle rocket.
Mark Twain and Herman Melville also wrote about and played poker, but Jack London did it better than anybody up to that point and had a wider audience. London was the mainstream authority on the rough-and-tumble, adventurous life. He was known for writing it and living it. He was an authority and poker was a big part of it because poker was everywhere he went.
London even lied about his poker winnings on returning home from the Yukon in the late 1800s in order to build his personality. According to a biography The Search for Jack London, London allowed the story that he got his gold from working a claim to stand. He flashed his gold in San Fran, and was legitimized as a gold miner.
In reality, London found the poker games in the Yukon to be much more giving than the land that originally held those nuggets for all those centuries.
London spent months in Hawaii in the 1910s, suffering from kidney stones. He spent the daylight hours working on his stories and the rest of the time playing poker “with the entrepreneurs who have turned Hawaii into a tourist destination for the rich."
According to the same book, he also did little but play poker on the Mariposa that took him home from Tahiti.
A character in a story of London’s called “Skin Bones” said: “The sweetest of all is sugar up a hundred points or four aces in a poker game.”
He means: Happiness is four aces and to London, happiness is a sure thing in a world of nothing but long-shots. His fiction was not only popular because of his obvious literary skills, but because he wrote about the real people and their cosmic fates. Poker, a game of wit and wealth, fit right in his pocket like a bottle of Scotch. He was not ashamed of it and he brought the stories to millions who gobbled his words like sweet cakes.
Jack London died at 40, most likely from kidney failure. He was right. Happiness can be four aces. And the faces of men can tell entire stories.
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