I have written before about writers hitting the booze, and came
across this famous Oakland bar where Jack London (London is seen in the above
picture studying or writing there as a young man - I guess they didn’t card young men then to see if underage), Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, and Robert Louis
Stevenson had a few brewskies at one time or another. I gave up what Poe once called
“the Instrumentality of Foul Intemperance.”
But people that give it up do it for themselves only and are not in the
Temperance League with Carrie Nation, so to speak. They wish everyone else a merry time.
From the www.heinoldsfirstandlastchance.com SITE:
”Opened in 1883 by Johnny Heinold as J.M. Heinold’s Saloon, this
Historic Landmark looked much then as she does today. She was built right here
in 1880 from the timbers of an old whaling ship over the water in a dock area
that even then was at the foot of Webster Street. For nearly three years, the
building was used as a bunk house by the men working the nearby oyster beds.
Then in 1883, Johnny’s $100 purchase, with the aid of a ship’s carpenter, was
transformed into a saloon. It is for
good reason that this is known as Jack London’s Rendezvous.”
”As a schoolboy, Jack London (1876-1916) studied at these same
tables we still use today. Later, he would return to his favorite table and
write notes for The Sea Wolf and Call of the Wild. At age 17, he confided to
John Heinold his ambition to go to the University of California and become a
writer. Johnny lent London the money for tuition and, although he never got
beyond his first year, it was while studying at this saloon and listening to
the stories of shipmates and stevedores that he developed his thirst for
adventure.”
”The theme of men bravely facing danger appears throughout the
best of his works. Indeed Johnny Heinold and The First and Last Chance Saloon
are referenced seventeen times in London’s novel John Barleycorn. Heinold’s
saloon was where he met Alexander McLean, known for such cruelty at sea that
his boat was nicknamed The Hell Ship. At the time of its writing, McLean became
a model for London’s Wolf Larsen in The Sea Wolf.”
”Jack London is not the only spirit that kept company in these
walls. Robert Louis Stevenson spent time here while waiting for his ship to be
outfitted for his final cruise to Samoa. Other notables to sit at this bar
include Joaquin Miller, Robert Service, Charles E. Markham, Earle Gardner, Erskine
Caldwell, Ambrose Bierce, and Rex Beach.”
There is a musical venue bar in uptown New Orleans called The
Maple Leaf which often has poetry slams.
There was a dipsomaniac poet that basically resided there, homeless
actually, named Everette Maddox (1945-1989).
At the end he pined for a woman from Alabama and sought her out but to
no avail. The last part of his life he
wandered the streets and sometimes slept in the back of a parked dump
truck. He ended up dying, perhaps of
consumption due to alcohol.
King of the Bohemian movement poet George Sterling (1869-1926),
longtime friend of Jack London and Lovecraft buddy Clark Ashton Smith and who
was mentored by a much older Ambrose Bierce, carried a cyanide capsule with him
wherever he went. He often frequented
the Bohemian Club, a famous bar in San Francisco. Whenever people asked about it, he said,
speaking of the hereafter: ”A prison becomes a home, if you have the key.” He took the cyanide pill one day in November
of 1926 at the Bohemian Club and died.
Here is the long version of why Jack London quit college and
started on his long career, starting with his birth:
”London’s mother, Flora Wellman, a music teacher and spiritualist
who claimed to channel the spirit of a Native American chief, became pregnant,
presumably from her union with William Chaney, an astrologer she lived with in
San Francisco. According to Flora Wellman’s account as recorded in the San
Francisco Chronicle of June 4, 1875, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion,
and when she refused, he disclaimed responsibility for the child. In
desperation, she shot herself. She was not seriously wounded, but she was
temporarily deranged.
”In 1897, when he was 21 and a student at the University of
California, Berkeley, Jack London searched for and read the newspaper accounts
of his mother’s suicide attempt and the name of his biological father. He wrote
to William Chaney, then living in Chicago. Chaney responded bizarrely,
considering the nature of the exchange, that he could not be Jack’s father
because he was impotent; he casually asserted that Jack’s mother had relations
with other men and averred that she had slandered him when she said he insisted
on an abortion. In fact, he concluded, he was more to be pitied than Jack.
London was devastated. In the months following his discovery of his father who
disavowed him and what Chaney did to London’s mother, he quit school at Berkeley
and went to the Klondike.”
In the near future please be on the lookout for my 12th novel,
CREATURE FEATURE, cowritten with David Mathew:
A journalist and his son travel to the midwest and the small town
of Templeton to start a new life. The
television station that hires him as a news writer also hires him to be the
kooky midnight horror movie emcee. As
they adjust to their new home they realize that the citizens of this town are
basically neurotic if not downright crazy, and the schools there have the
highest suicide rate in the country.
There is a sinister rich old family, the Hawkins, who basically own and
run the town. Jim is beginning to think
they could be a supernatural force behind the crazed fear.
2.99, kindle.
2.99, kindle.
Also, Rachmaninoff’s Ghost and Swamp Witch Piquante and Scream Queen Bisque are new
reprints out now. Both .99 kindle, Amazon.
