The Call of the Wild and White Fang (39 page)

The story is really the record of the uncivilizing of Buck, the process by which the latent wild impulses of his nature, evoked by the life of hardship to which he was subjected, gradually gained the ascendancy, and finally called him back for good and all to the life of the forest and the leadership of a pack of wolves. It may be imagined that in the case of a St. Bernard weighing 140 pounds this revolution was not accomplished without signs of struggle along the course of progress, and the surmise is more than bourne out by a perusal of the book. If nothing else makes Mr. London’s book popular it ought to be rendered so by the complete way in which it will satisfy the love of dog fights apparently inherent in every man. Very nearly every dog’s paw was against Buck, and he won his way not only to eminence, but even to just plain ordinary permission to exist, by proving himself times out of number the best all-around dog in the train. It is the rule there that no civilized dog can stand up against the “huskies,” or native dogs, but Buck accomplished even that remarkable feat because he had intelligence enough to adapt himself to new conditions.

—July 25, 1903

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

The Call of the Wild
is a story altogether untouched by bookishness. A bookish writer might, beginning with the title, have called it An Instance of Atavism, or A Reversion to Type. A bookish reader might conceivably read it as a sort of allegory with a broad human application ; but its face value as a single-minded study of animal nature really seems to be sufficiently considerable. The author, too, must be allowed to stand upon his own feet, though one understands why he should have been called the American Kipling. His work has dealt hitherto with primitive human nature; this is a study of primitive dog nature. No modern writer of fiction, unless it be Kipling, has preserved so clearly the distinction between animal virtue and human virtue. The farther Buck reverts from the artificial status of a man-bounded domestic creature to the natural condition of the “dominant primordial beast,” the more strongly (if unwillingly) we admire him. There is something magnificent in the spectacle of his gradual detachment from the tame, beaten-in virtues of uncounted forefathers, his increasing ability to hold his own among unwonted conditions, and his final triumph over the most dreaded powers of the wilderness: “He was a Killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survived. Because of all this he became possessed of a great pride in himself, which communicated itself like a contagion to his physical being.... But for the stray brown on his muzzle and above his eyes, and for the splash of white hair that ran midmost down his chest, he might well have been mistaken for a gigantic wolf, larger than the largest of the breed.... His cunning was wolf cunning and wild cunning; his intelligence, shepherd intelligence and St. Bernard intelligence; and all this, plus an experience gained in the fiercest of schools, made him as formidable a creature as any that roamed the wild. A carnivorous animal, living on a straight meat diet, he was in full flower, at the high tide of his life, overspilling with vigor and virility.... Every part, brain and body, nerve tissue and fibre, was keyed to the most exquisite pitch; and between all the parts there was a perfect equilibrium or adjustment. To sights and sounds and events which required action, he responded with lightning-like rapidity. He saw the movement, or heard the sound, and responded in less time than another dog required to compass the mere seeing or hearing. He perceived and determined and responded in the same instant. His muscles were surcharged with vitality, and snapped into play sharply, like steel springs. Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy, and pour forth generously over the world.” The making and the achievement of such a hero constitute, not a pretty story at all, but a very powerful one.

—November 1903

Comments on White Fang

THE NATION

This is the kind of thing Jack London does best. In this atmosphere he wears neither his street swagger nor his more distressing company manners. As a biographer of wild animals he has hardly an equal. A generation ago this remark would have meant little, but what with Mr. Kipling, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Thompson-Seton, the Rev. Mr. Long, and the rest, the field of natural letters, as it might be called, has become conspicuous. It is the “pathetic” consideration which gives such books their hold upon us; we like to speculate as to the relations or analogies between beast-kind and mankind. Perhaps we do not believe that a stag is capable of soulful love, or a moose of consecutive thought, or a cuckoo of deliberately teaching its offspring to suck eggs; at least we take our disbelief seriously.

Mr. London has not, so far as we know, entered into any controversy, but he has written several books which present feral nature as something distinctly apart from human nature. “White Fang” complements “The Call of the Wild” in showing how readily wild animals may submit themselves to human rule, and how naturally domestic animals may revert to freedom. These dogs and wolves do not talk or think humanly. Instinct impels them and the discipline of experience teaches them what to avoid and what to seek. “Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite. But the cub did not think in man-fashion. He did not look at things with wide vision. He was single-purposed and had but one thought or desire at a time.” Three-parts wolf, the cub grows up to become in the end the willing slave of a man who has bestowed upon it such love as a human being may allow an inferior. Being a brute, its experience is brutal, a continuous performance of dog-fights, with no sparing of bloody detail. But, indeed, squeamishness would be out of place here, for if the writer dwells on the savagery of the creature’s experience, it is that he may emphasize its fitness. He believes that wild beasts get quite as much pleasure as pain out of the life which they are intended to live. It is under the white man’s brutality that White Fang is nearly driven to madness.

—November 1906

Comments on Jack London

H. L. MENCKEN

The quasi-science of genealogy, as it is practiced in the United States, is directed almost exclusively toward establishing aristocratic descents for nobodies. That is to say, it records and glorifies decay. Its typical masterpiece is the discovery that the wife of some obscure county judge is the grandchild, infinitely removed, of Mary Queen of Scots, or that the blood of Geoffrey of Monmouth flows in the veins of a Philadelphia stockbroker. How much more profitably its professors might be employed in tracing the lineage of truly salient and distinguished men! For example, the late Jack London. Where did he get his hot artistic passion, his delicate feeling for form and color, his extraordinary skill with words? The man, in truth, was an instinctive artist of a high order, and if ignorance often corrupted his art, it only made the fact of his inborn mastery the more remarkable. No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in “The Call of the Wild,” or in parts of “John Barleycorn,” or in such short stories as “The Sea Farmer” and “Samuel.” Here, indeed, are all the elements of sound fiction: clear thinking, a sense of character, the dramatic instinct, and, above all, the adept putting together of words—words charming and slyly significant, words arranged, in a French phrase, for the respiration and the ear. You will never convince me that this aesthetic sensitiveness, so rare, so precious, so distinctively aristocratic, burst into a bio-genetic flower on a San Francisco sand-lot. There must have been some intrusion of an alien and superior strain, some
pianissimo
fillup from above; there was obviously a great deal more to the thing than a routine hatching in low life. Perhaps the explanation is to be sought in a Jewish smear. Jews were not few in the California of a generation ago, and one of them, at least, attained to a certain high, if transient, fame with the pen. Moreover, the name, London, has a Jewish smack; the Jews like to call themselves after great cities. I have, indeed, heard this possibility of an Old Testament descent put into an actual rumor. Stranger genealogies are not unknown in sea-ports....

But London the artist did not live a
cappella.
There was also London the amateur Great Thinker, and the second often hamstrung the first. That great thinking of his, of course, took color from the sordid misery of his early life; it was, in the main, a jejune Socialism, wholly uncriticised by humor. Some of his propagandist and expository books are almost unbelievably nonsensical, and whenever he allowed any of his so-called ideas to sneak into an imaginative work the intrusion promptly spoiled it. Socialism, in truth, is quite incompatible with art; its cook-tent materialism is fundamentally at war with the first principle of the aesthetic gospel, which is that one daffodil is worth ten shares of Bethlehem Steel. It is not by accident that there has never been a book on Socialism which was also a work of art. Papa Marx’s “Das Kapital” at once comes to mind. It is as wholly devoid of graces as “The Origin of Species” or “Science and Health”; one simply cannot conceive a reasonable man reading it without aversion; it is as revolting as a barrel organ. London, preaching Socialism, or quasi-Socialism, or whatever it was that he preached, took over this offensive dullness. The materialistic conception of history was too heavy a load for him to carry. When he would create beautiful books he had to throw it overboard as Wagner threw overboard democracy, the superman and free thought. A sort of temporary Christian created “Parsifal. ”A sort of temporary aristocrat created ”“The Call of the Wild.”

Also in another way London’s early absorption of social and economic nostrums damaged him as an artist. It led him into a socialistic exaltation of mere money; it put a touch of avarice into him. Hence his too deadly industry, his relentless thousand words a day, his steady emission of half-done books. The prophet of freedom, he yet sold himself into slavery to the publishers, and paid off with his soul for his ranch, his horses, his trappings of a wealthy cheesemonger. His volumes rolled out almost as fast as those of E. Phillips Oppenheim; he simply could not make them perfect at such a gait. There are books on his list—for example, “The Scarlet Plague” and “The Little Lady of the Big House”—that are little more than garrulous notes for books.

But even in the worst of them one comes upon sudden splashes of brilliant color, stray proofs of the adept penman, half-wistful reminders that London, at bottom, was no fraud. He left enough, I am convinced, to keep him in mind. There was in him a vast delicacy of perception, a high feeling, a sensitiveness to beauty. And there was in him, too, under all his blatancies, a poignant sense of the infinite romance and mystery of human life.

—from
Prejudices: First Series
(1919)

Questions

1. How does London preserve the distinction between “animal virtue” and “human virtue,” as
The Atlantic
puts it, or between “feral nature” and “human nature,” as in the excerpt from
The Nation?

2. Does the wild call because it is the opposite of a civilization we blame for what ails us, or is the call something that humans instinctively feel?

3. Does London’s fiction make good on his claim that Darwin and socialism work hand in hand?

4.
The Call of the Wild
and
White Fang
have been and continue to be immensely popular—even among readers who are not dog-lovers. Can you explain what makes the two books satisfying to so many readers?