Kempton-Wace Letters, The.
INSCRIBED
(Strunsky, Anna and Jack London) The Kempton-Wace Letters. London: Isbister and Company Limited, 1903.
8vo.; hinges fragile; some pages uncut; light foxing throughout; front endpaper offset; t.e.g.; blue cloth; stamped in white and blind; faded and lightly soiled. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First English edition of this novel in letters, written by Anna Strunsky, writing as the fictional Dane Kempton, and Jack London, writing as Herbert Wace; with two pages of publisher’s advertisements in the rear, and penciled tick marks throughout. OCLC locates four copies.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the second endpaper: To my dear Comrades Jean Longuet and Mrs. Longuet, Anna Strunsky. Paris, July, 1906. Jean Longuet was the grandson of Karl Marx, and a prominent French Socialist, and was a witness at the Paris wedding of Strunsky and William English Walling. On the half-title, Strunsky has also written: “Dane Kempton – Anna Strunsky/Herbert Wace – Jack London.”
The Kempton-Wace Letters is divided into thirty-eight chapters and each chapter consists of one single letter. Though the letters are fictionalized, the relationship between the young man, Herbert Wace, and the older male poet, Dane Kempton, mimics London and Strunsky’s own. The correspondents talk about love and romance, and “The London-Strunsky arguments about love and life, initially growing out of spontaneous conversation, took on an extended and self-consciously serious form in an elaborate exchange of correspondence. The very contrast of their temperaments acted as a powerful magnet between them” (Fink, Leon. Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997; 150). This resulted in their decision to publish the book: “London and Strunsky hatched a thinly veiled correspondence (the only collaborative intellectual enterprise in which London ever engaged), which was published anonymously in 1903 as The Kempton-Wace Letters. The letters accentuated the differences between the two authors on love and romance, with London attempting anonymously to defend his own, utilitarian approach to marriage” (Fink, 151).
The “utilitarian” approach to love and marriage is indeed remarkable in Wace’s letters. Wace writes, comparing himself to Kempton, that, “But be it as it may, yours was a world of ideas and fancies, mine a world of things and facts” (21). And, later, “I am arranging my life so that I may get the most out of it, while the one thing to disorder it, worse than flood and fire and the public enemy, is love” (41). In the following letter, Wace continues this thought: “You worship the idea; I believe in the fact…You take an emotional delight in living; I an intellectual delight” (47). The sensual Kempton counters with the argument that “Feeling and thinking are not mutually exclusive, and the great personality feels deeply because he thinks highly, feels keenly because he sees widely. Common sense is not incompatible with uncommon sense, evil does not of necessity attend beauty, nor weakness the strength of genius” (56). In a later letter, Kempton talks about women, revealing progressive feministic views:
To-day there is a change in attitude. Woman is new-born in strength and dignity, and the highest chivalry the world has ever known is in blossom. She is an equal, a comrade, a right regal person. She is no longer a means but an end in herself, not alone fit to mother men but fit to live in equality with men. I repeat, she is not a means but an individual, with a soul of her own to rear. Because of the greater and more general emancipation of woman the subtlety of modern love has become possible. (118)
Fink explains that after its publication, this book created personal and professional problems for both Strunsky and London, namely, for the fact that London walked out on his wife, Bessie, who had accused Stunsky of breaking up their marriage. Though London denied any romantic alliance with Strunsky at the time, Strunsky later admitted that “while they were working together on the book, Jack London had indeed proposed that they run away to New Zealand or Australia and get married. Initially, she had whispered ‘yes,’ but after thinking it over and consulting with her mother, Anna demurred, and the matter was never raised again” (Fink, 153). Strunsky and London were also accused publicly of inventing the scandal of their romance to sell more copies of the book.
Strunsky (1878-1964) was born in Russia and moved with her parents and her five brothers and sisters to New York City when she fourteen. The family soon headed West, settling in San Francisco, and Strunsky was recognized as a bright child. Later, she earned a degree from Stanford. She was friends with artists, writers and political people; at a Socialist Labor Party meeting in 1899, she met Jack London, and the pair became inseparable. Their relationship was both personal and professional – they exchanged manuscripts, had dinner out, read poetry together with other friends – and it was tinged with romantic affection. After the publication of The Kempton-Wace Letters, Strunsky met William English Walling – the couple traveled together to St. Petersburg to witness the expected revolution – and they were married in 1906.
After her marriage, Strunsky’s Socialism flourished. Even during her Stanford days she dabbled in Socialism – there is a paper she wrote when she was twenty titled, “Specialization of Vocation under Capitalism” (1897). From 1906-1908 she traveled to Russia to study social and economic conditions, and then spent two more years in Europe. Upon returning to the States, the Walling’s settled in Connecticut. Anna gave birth to four children between 1910 and 1918, and published her first book, Violette of Pere Lachaise, in 1915. She also published “Memoirs of Jack London” in New Masses (1917).
Her other interests centered around activism. She helped dedicate a California state park built around the ruins of Jack London's home, participated in Quaker social action projects, followed the activities of the War Resisters League, the League for Mutual Aid, the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment, the League for Industrial Democracy, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. which her husband had helped to found. She died in Greenwich Village.
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Fink, Leon. Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997.
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