A mysterious fire left the novelist’s dream house in ruins before he could forsake the call of the wild.
“I have been asked why Jack London, socialist, friend of the common man, built so large a house,” Charmian London wrote in her biography of the husband who had called her “Mate-Woman,” and whom she had exuberantly called “Mate-Man” in return. “How shall I say? Jack could not traffic in small things.”
When he began building Wolf House, his magnificently roughhewn lair in northern California’s Sonoma Valley, Jack London was at his largest. He was the most famous writer in the world, the author of The Call of the Wild, White Fang, Martin Eden, The Sea Wolf and dozens of other books that he had composed at a scrupulous lifetime quota of 1,000 words a day, as if he were still laboring in the canneries and jute mills of his Oakland youth. Working with San Francisco architect Albert Farr, London conjured up a gnarly, rugged domicile of volcanic boulders and unpeeled redwood logs, with thick concrete walls on the inside to discourage the spread of fire and a deep, strong foundation to anchor the structure against earthquakes. He declared it would last a thousand years.
But it did not even last a day. Before London could move in, the house he had spent nine years planning and building caught fire and burned down, leaving behind a different sort of monument than the one he had intended: an enigmatic, emblematic ruin. The massive rocky skeleton of the house stands today as the centerpiece of Jack London State Historic Park, which is located about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco in a wine-growing pocket of Sonoma County known as the Valley of the Moon. The park is on the site of London’s Beauty Ranch, where he and Charmian lived during the last decade of his life. It’s a variable landscape of oak savannas and vineyards, spread out below the eastern slopes of Sonoma Mountain. But the ruin itself is enclosed within a dark mossy forest, which adds to its spectral power, and confronts visitors with a tantalizing mystery: What happened to Wolf House, and what happened to Jack London?
In 1911, the year construction on Wolf House commenced, London was only 35, and though he still looks fit and tempestuously handsome in photographs from that period, he had long since worked and drunk and smoked and medicated himself into ruinous health. “I would rather be ashes than dust!” he once proclaimed in a famous credo that has inspired generations of hard-living undergraduates. “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.”
And yet the truth is he planned Wolf House as a shrine to permanence. The man who had been an oyster pirate on San Francisco Bay, a socialist firebrand, a gold prospector in the Klondike, a war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War and a restless wanderer in the South Seas now gave every sign of being ready to settle down as a gentleman rancher on the extensive acreage he had acquired for Beauty Ranch. “I am really going to throw out an anchor so big and so heavy that all hell could not ever get it up again,” he declared.
The house was built around a central courtyard, which featured a deep reflection pool that was to be stocked with bass. Though Charmian had commodious “apartments” on the third floor, most of the other rooms in the house were a testament to the manly vigor and caged-beast working habits of its creator. There was a gun and trophy room, a manuscript vault, a huge library where all the books London had accumulated in his rootless life would finally find a home and an equally expansive writing room on the third floor. A two-story living room commanded the northwest wing of the house, but where London really meant to entertain his male guests was a hideout on the first level he had christened the Stag Party Room. Finally, London—who was too restless, too untamed and too much of a snorer to share a room with any woman, even the redoubtable Charmian—built himself a personal “sleeping tower” that perched all alone above the roof of the third floor like an eagle’s eyrie.
“It should be thought of, that house,” Charmian wrote, “in relation to Jack, not as a mansion, but as a big cabin, a lofty lodge, a hospitable tepee, where he, simple and generous despite all his baffling intricacy, could stretch himself and beam upon you and me and all the world that gathered by his log-fires.”
Wolf House took two years to build, at a price of $80,000 (the equivalent of $1.8 million today). On the afternoon of August 22, 1913, Jack and Charmian went horseback riding along a ravine at the ranch and looked down at the red-tiled roof of the great house. It was all but finished. Little remained but for the workmen to clear away the debris of construction and for the Londons’ heavy custom-made furniture to be delivered. In only a few weeks they would move in.
“How beautiful—Our House, Mate Woman!” Jack said to Charmian as they sat on their horses contemplating the building they expected would serve as their home and headquarters for the rest of their vigorous lives.
But near midnight of that same day neighbors noticed a strange glowing presence in the direction of the Londons’ ranch. Jack and Charmian were awakened at their cottage, a half-mile away from Wolf House. By that time flames and smoke were rearing high into the night sky. Jack had the horses harnessed so they could drive to the fire, but Charmian remembered his lack of urgency in getting to the site. “What’s the use of hurry?” he said. “If that is the Big House burning, nothing can stop it now!”
In a matter of hours Wolf House was destroyed. Only a smoking shell of concrete and ruddy volcanic rock remained. Jack did not seem at first to be deeply affected. He occupied himself trying to calm the anguished construction foreman, who kept crying “My child! My child!” as the house burned, and raising the spirits of distraught workers and friends who had gathered to witness the conflagration. To at least one neighbor, it seemed that the strangely cheerful London didn’t fully grasp what had happened to him.
It was not until four in the morning, when Jack and Charmian had returned to their cottage, that the full realization finally descended. “He lay in my pitying arms,” Charmian reported, “and shook like a baby.”
Jack London State Historic Park incorporates a good deal of London’s Beauty Ranch, including the wood-framed cottage where he and Charmian lived, the barns and silos and pig pens that were the heart of the ranch economy and the impounded lake at the summit of a redwood-covered hill that the Londons used for recreation. But what most park visitors come to see are the remains of the house London planned and built and dreamed of, and that finally slipped from his grasp at the moment he reached out to possess it.
The path from the parking lot leads pilgrims from grassy meadows into a deep forest glade as somber as a medieval vault. The bright velvety lichen covering the trunks of the live oaks almost glows in this subdued light, as does the lurid orange bark of the madrone trees. There are towhees in the underbrush, and woodpeckers swooping above them, and red-tailed hawks intermittently visible overhead through gaps in the forest canopy.
You come upon Wolf House sooner than you expect to, after about a half-mile of easy walking. The ruin does not crown a commanding promontory, but sits almost hidden in the primeval shade of a redwood grove. It is massive, of course, and eerie, but strangely not decrepit. Its powerful superstructure of red volcanic boulders appears sturdy enough that the house could be rebuilt tomorrow. At first glance, it is merely a jumble of towering rock and hollow space, but even a brief acquaintance with the blueprints of Wolf House will allow you to pick out the areas where the great rooms briefly existed.
The site of the Stag Party Room is plainly visible, as is the towering living room above it and the empty concrete pond that dominated the courtyard. What is most impressive about the house is not its size, however, but its insistent jaggedness. None of the volcanic boulders and cobbles that make up its exterior walls was shaped for the purpose. They were cemented into place exactly as they were blasted out of the quarry or picked up off the ground, and to this day their surfaces—weathered and covered with lichen—are startlingly sharp and irregular. It is no accident, you think, that the dream home of America’s woolliest major writer would be this cavern of unpeeled logs and unhewn rocks.
What caused the fire? The Londons came to believe that it was arson, perhaps the work of socialists angered and disillusioned over Jack’s sudden infatuation with paternal grandeur, perhaps one of the neighbors with whom he was in litigation over thorny water issues. But in 1995 a group of 10 fire experts who spent four days investigating the site determined that the blaze most likely started when a pile of linseed oil–soaked rags, left behind by a workman on the wooden floor of the dining room, had self-ignited in the heat of that August night.
It is difficult to know how hard the loss of Wolf House hit Jack London. He had more than his share of grand dreams come true. On the surface, he appeared to shrug off the collapse of this one and go on with his business. After the fire, still living in the nearby cottage, he maintained his strenuous literary output—completing another six or seven books—traveled to Hawaii and Mexico and became active in business pursuits as various as grape juice and motion pictures. But, according to Charmian, “The razing of the house killed something in Jack and he never ceased to feel the tragic inner sense of loss.”
“I’m going to live a hundred years!” London declared to his wife one robust morning not long after the fire. But he didn’t, no more than his house lasted for a thousand years. By November 1916, his kidneys, ravaged by years of disease and abuse, had pretty much ceased to function, and the lean smoldering appearance that had helped fix his legend as a fearless adventurer in his readers’ minds was gone as well. His body was bloated with the effects of uremia, and his eyes were haunted.
He was 40 when he fell into a coma one night on the sleeping porch of his cottage. Four physicians rushed to the ranch, but they could not revive him, nor could Charmian, who shook him by the shoulders and shouted into his face: “Mate! Mate! You must come back! Mate! You’ve got to come back! To me! Mate! Mate!”
He was cremated and his ashes buried on a hilltop at the ranch. There was no ceremony. No one said a word as the urn was placed into the ground: Charmian and the other mourners simply stood there in silence as a light rain fell. Then a heavy red boulder from Jack London’s ruined house was dragged up the hill by a team of horses and rolled on top of his grave.
Stephen Harrigan’s latest book is Remember Ben Clayton, a World War I–era novel.
Originally published in the August 2012 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
