Adventure classics -- Spinning fool's gold into fame

The Call of the Wild

by Jack London

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In November 1902, 26-year-old Jack London returned to the United States from England with the manuscript of his first book in his pocket, and not much else. He was glad to accept his publisher’s advance for his next several books -- as long, he said, as he wasn’t expected to write about Alaska. He’d had enough of the far north during the gold rush of the late 1890’s. All he managed to find was a load of iron pyrites, glittering rocks better know as fool’s gold.

“I want to get away from the Klondike,” London wrote, indicating he wanted “to attempt a larger and more generally interesting field.”

Within a month, however, he was writing a story whose protagonist, a dog named Buck, reverts from a paragon of civility to primitive denizen of the wild. The story would become his famous book, The Call of the Wild. And as millions of readers know, it was set in Alaska.

“For three weeks,” biographer Alex Kershaw reports in Jack London: A Life, “(he) did nothing but follow Buck through the white silence, scratching out word after word in thick pencil. . . For once he had not paused to lecture his readers. . .but had concentrated instead on telling a story.”

In it, the half-St. Bernard Buck, who “had lived the life of a sated aristocrat” in his home in California, is stolen and sold for $300 as a sled dog during the gold rush. (The inflation calculator at http://www.westegg.com/ estimates Buck’s price was the equivalent of more than $7,000 currently.)

But high value doesn’t insure good treatment, and Buck soon finds himself in a struggle for survival.

George Platt Brett, Sr., head of McMillan Publishing, asked London to remove some
profanity, anticipating a school-age audience. And although assuring London of his liking for the story, he feared “it is too true to nature and too good work to be really popular with the sentimentalist public.”

He could not have been more wrong. Instantly hailed as a classic, the novella has since sold millions of copies and inspired numerous filmed versions. The picture illustrating this post comes from the earliest Call of the Wild movie in 1935. It starred Clark Gable and Loretta Young, whose on-screen love affair overshadows the dog’s story. (And stimulated the economy of the Pacific Northwest where it was filmed, according to
http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/ )

Years after publication of The Call of the Wild, London, in debt as usual, would return to the theme of Buck’s transformation but in reverse, to write a companion book, White Fang. London himself, after all, had returned from Alaska to his home state of “sun-kissed” California, to fame, fortune and civilization.

(Next Friday -- in a February of animal adventures, Adventure classics looks at Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka.)

Adventure classics -- The author as super-man

The Sea-Wolf

by Jack London

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In a letter to fellow writer Mary Austin, Jack London claimed to have written his 1904 novel, The Sea-Wolf, as “an attack on (Nietzsche’s) super-man philosophy.” But decades after I stayed up all night reading it, the character who stays in my mind is the amoral super-man Wolf Larsen, a character both London and his effete narrator Humphrey Van Weyden clearly both love and hate.

Perhaps that’s because, as short story author Edmund Gilligan wrote in his introduction to my 1962 edition, “I believe Wolf Larsen was London himself. In his own self London found the Wolf and Van Weyden. London divided his own personality and gave part to each.”

In my opinion, the sea captain Larsen got the better part, despite the ferocious cruelty that earned him the nickname Wolf. London blessed his anti-hero with strength both of body and character, courage and good looks -- all attributes denied, at least initially, to the “civilized” Van Weyden. Not satisfied with so many advantages, London added intellect to Larsen’s arsenal.

Although Larsen rescues Van Weyden from a wreck, his apparent altruism turns to tyranny when he presses him into servitude aboard his seal hunting ship. After a vicious kick from Larsen for a minor infraction, Van Weyden is sent to the captain’s stateroom to make the bed. “Against the wall . . . was a rack filled with books. I glanced over them, noting with astonishment such names as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe and De Quincey. . . There were scientific works, too, among which were represented men such as Tyndall,

Unable to reconcile such works with what he has seen of Larsen’s character, Van Weyden still doubts the captain’s ability to read or appreciate them.

Jack London

“But when I came to make the bed I found . . . Dropped apparently as he had sunk off to sleep, a complete Browning, the Cambridge Edition. It was open at ‘In a Balcony,’ and I noticed, there and there, passages underlined in pencil.”

No wonder London sometimes signed his letters “Wolf.” Years later, when he was rich beyond the socialist dreams of his youth, he would name the mansion he built on his Sonoma County, California, “Wolf House,” only to see the 15,000-square foot stone mansion destroyed by fire two weeks before he and his second wife planned to move in.

In a modern sidebar, Texas author Rick Riordan used the ruins of Wolf House (now protected in the Jack London State Historic Park near Glen Ellen, California) as a setting in his young adult novel The Lost Heroes. Riordan’s characters take advantage of London’s disputed parentage -- his birth records were lost in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake -- to claim, as whimsically as Larsen could, that London was an lost demigod.

For more about Riordan’s fantasy world and Jack London’s place in it, see www.rickriordan.com/
(Next Friday: It would be hard to imagine a sea captain more different from Wolf Larsen than Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander.)

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