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MOTHERS AND FATHERS
I was impotent at that time, the result of hardship, privation & too much brain-work. Therefore I cannot be your father, nor am I sure who your father is.
—W. H. CHANEY TO JACK LONDON
The future was anything but promising for the child who entered the world on January 12, 1876. His mother was scarcely strong enough to nurse him, and his putative father had abandoned them both. During the first few weeks following his birth, the infant destined to win international fame as Jack London appeared to have no future at all.
His mother was Flora Wellman, a fascinating woman worthy of being a character in one of London’s stories. Jack quite likely had her in mind as model for Mrs. Grantly, the spiritualist in his story “Planchette”:
“A weird little thing … Bundle of nerves and black eyes. I’ll wager she doesn’t weigh ninety pounds, and most of that’s magnetism.”
“Positively uncanny.”
Uncanny is one of several words that might fit the character of Flora Wellman. To her own granddaughters she was an enigma. Joan London provides this illuminating vignette:
It is her face which commands attention. Spectacled, large-nosed, square-jawed, it could be the face of a man. Beneath well-defined brows her gaze is disconcerting, faintly hostile, even a little contemptuous; above the determined chin, her mouth is a firm straight line. Humorless, stubborn, opinionated, intelligent—it is an extraordinary face.
Flora was an extraordinary woman. She was born on August 17, 1843, the daughter of Marshall Daniel Wellman, the “Wheat King” of Massillon, Ohio. Two events particularly would shape Flora’s character: the death of her mother when she was three years old and a severe case of typhoid fever she came down with at thirteen. The first stunted her emotional growth and left her with permanent psychological scars. (Although pampered by her father, she passionately hated the woman he married in 1847 and never fully recovered from her mother’s untimely death.) The second stunted her physical growth, impaired her eyesight, and cost her the loss of much of her hair. She reached her maturity standing barely four and a half feet tall.
At sixteen she ran away from Massillon to Alliance, Ohio, where she lived for a while with her sister Mary Everhard. She returned home a few years later to help care for another sister, but the prodigal daughter was never again quite welcome in the Wellman family. After the Civil War she left Massillon for good, with no regrets on her part or on the part of the townspeople—local whispers insinuated a covertly scandalous affair with a married man. Little is known about her wanderings until 1873, when she stopped off in Seattle. There she boarded for several months in the home of “Mayor” Henry Yesler and his wife. Yesler, former mayor of Springfield, Ohio, knew that the Wellmans were a family of considerable prestige, but he may not have known of Flora’s apostasy. It was in the Yesler home that she first met the man destined to play the most dramatic role in her life: William Henry Chaney.
While Flora has been treated unkindly by many of London’s biographers, Chaney has fared even worse. Usually disparaged as a kind of footloose astrological huckster, “Professor” Chaney was in fact a celebrity of considerable distinction. He made for good newspaper copy: a dynamic figure who drew serious audiences to his popular public lectures. His friendship with the Yeslers attests to his respectability. In Flora Wellman he would find a soul mate. Although their backgrounds were vastly different, their personalities were weirdly similar—perhaps too similar.
Born on January 13, 1821, in the backwoods of Maine, the son of a yeoman farmer who died when the boy was nine years old, Chaney was bound out to several farmers, all of whom he detested. At the age of sixteen he ran off and worked for a while as a carpenter before going to sea. He served for a short time in the U.S. Navy, but in 1840 he jumped ship in Boston. He then headed west for the Mississippi River with a dream that he would travel downriver to the Gulf Coast and join a gang of pirates. The dream faded into reality when, stricken with an attack of fever, he was sidetracked in the Ohio country and compelled to settle for less romantic ventures, such as school teaching and store clerking. At the age of twenty-five he read for the law in Virginia and, during the next two decades, worked as an itinerant attorney, editor, and sometime preacher. In October 1866, now in New York City, he reached a major turning point in his checkered career: he met Dr. Luke Broughton, the famous English lecturer and editor of Broughton’s Monthly Planet Reader and Astrological Journal.
Broughton had settled in America a decade earlier and had launched his journal on April 1, 1860, explaining that “it would serve as a handbook on such various subjects as Astrology, Astronomy, Astro-Phrenology, Zodiacal Physiognomy, Hygiene, Medical Botany, Astro-Meteorology, and the useful branches of Mathematics [for the] farmer, traveler, merchant, and the youthful inquirer after truth.”
In his October 1864 issue, Broughton managed to erase a bit of the April Fool’s Day stigma that some skeptics had attached to his work when he warned that, during the coming months, President Lincoln would have “a number of evil aspects afflicting his Nativity” and that he should be “especially on his guard against attempts to take his life; by such as fire arms.” When Chaney met him, Broughton, while planning to establish an institution to be called the Eclectic Medical University, had set up headquarters in a spectacular Broadway suite. One reporter described Broughton’s sanctum as “luxuriously furnished, with winged mythological beings, Cupids, Venuses, and Dianas, presided over by Mercury, [and enhanced by] mystical configurations and puzzles cabalistic hanging against the wall in mysterious and uninterpreted grandeur.”
Chaney was captivated when he met Broughton in these exotic surroundings, and his conversion to astrology was immediate. Broughton himself was impressed by this intense young Jack-of-many-trades and took him at once under his astrological wing. To this newfound religion Chaney remained faithful to the end. Appearances to the contrary, he was at heart a humanitarian idealist who envisioned astrology as a panacea for the spiritual malaise of modern civilization.
Chaney’s marital fidelity was less constant than his devotion to Broughton’s creed. In 1867 he married the third in a series of six wives. In 1869, leaving this wife behind, he headed west to spread the word about astrology. He spent a couple of years in Salem, Oregon, then moved to San Francisco, where he began delivering lectures on “Astro-Theology.” On June 11, 1874, according to his autobiography, he “took another wife,” with whom he lived until June 3, 1875.
This new wife was Flora Wellman. By 1874, Flora had come a long way from Massillon, Ohio. After her stay in Seattle, she headed south for San Francisco, accompanying “a lady as a traveling companion,” she vaguely explained to her curious granddaughter years afterward. Arriving in “The City,” she found a locale far more congenial to a freethinking individualist...