The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
THE CALL OF THE WILD
CHAPTER I - Into the Primitive
CHAPTER II - The Law of Club and Fang
CHAPTER III - The Dominant Primordial Beast
CHAPTER IV - Who Has Won to Mastership
CHAPTER V - The Toil of Trace and Trail
CHAPTER VI - For the Love of a Man
CHAPTER VII - The Sounding of the Call
LOVE OF LIFE
WHITE FANG
PART ONE: THE WILD
PART TWO: BORN OF THE WILD
PART THREE: THE GODS OF THE WILD
PART FOUR: THE SUPERIOR GODS
PART FIVE: THE TAME
A Note on Jack London’s Life and Works
Selected Bibliography
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PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS
THE CALL OF THE WILD, WHITE FANG, AND OTHER STORIES
Jack London—his real name was John Griffith London—had a wild and colorful youth on the waterfront of San Francisco, his native city. Born in 1876, he left school at the age of fourteen and worked in a cannery. By the time he was sixteen he had been both an oyster pirate and a member of the Fish Patrol in San Francisco Bay and he later wrote about his experiences in The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902) and Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905). In 1893 he joined a sealing cruise which took him as far as Japan. Returning to the United States, he travelled throughout the country. He was determined to become a writer and read voraciously. After a brief period of study at the University of California he joined the gold rush to the Klondike in 1897. He returned to San Francisco the following year and wrote about his experiences. His short stories of the Yukon were published in Overland Monthly (1898) and the Atlantic Monthly (1899), and in 1900 his first collection, The Son of the Wolf, appeared, bringing him national fame. In 1902 he went to London, where he studied the slum conditions of the East End. He wrote about his experiences in The People of the Abyss (1903). His life was exciting and eventful. There were sailing voyages to the Caribbean and the South Seas. He reported on the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst papers and gave lecture tours. A prolific writer, he published an enormous number of stories and novels. Besides several collections of short stories, including Love of Life (1907), Lost Face (1910), and On the Makaloa Mat (1919), he wrote many novels, including The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea-Wolf (1904), The Game (1905), White Fang (1906), Martin Eden (1909), John Bardeycorn (1913), and Jerry of the Islands (1917). Jack London died in 1916, at his home in California.
Andrew Sinclair has also edited a further collection of stories by Jack London for Penguin Classics, entitled The Sea-Wolf and Other Stories.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1923, James Dickey earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Vanderbilt University, graduating magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. He began devoting his full time to poetry at the age of thirty-eight. A Guggenheim Fellow, he was twice appointed Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. In addition to his many volumes of poetry, he is the author of the novel Deliverance.
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“Bátard” first published in The Faith of Men and Other Stories by
the Macmillan Company 1904
The Call of the Wild first published by the Macmillan Company 1903
“Love of Life” first published in Love of Life and Other Stories by
the Macmillan Company 1907
White Fang first published by the Macmillan Company 1906
Published together in The Penguin American Library 1981
Published in Penguin Classics 1986
Published in Penguin Books 1993
Copyright © Andrew Sinclair, 1981 Introduction copyright © James Dickey, 1981
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Introduction
“Primeval” is a word often used to describe Jack London’s work, his attitude toward existence, and his own life. From the beginning of the intensive self-education he undertook early in his adolescence through the end of his life at the age of forty, he prided himself on his “animality,” and identified with his chosen totem beast, the wolf. His gullible friend, the California poet George Sterling, called him Wolf, he referred to his wife as Mate-Woman, named his ill-fated mansion in the Sonoma Valley Wolf House, and created his most memorable human character, Wolf Larsen, in The Sea Wolf. Larsen exemplifies all of the characteristics London admired most: courage, resourcefulness, ruthlessness, and above all, a strength of will that he partly bases on that of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Larsen’s favorite lines from Milton are “To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:/Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” a sentiment with which London certainly concurred.
This attitude toward the figure of the wolf—a kind of Presence, an image, a symbolic and very personal representation of a mythologized human being—is pervasive throughout all of London’s Arctic tales and is implied in many of his other fictions. The reader should willingly give himself over to this interpretation of the wolf, and conjure the animal up in the guise of the mysterious, shadowy, and dangerous figment that London imagines it to be. We should encounter the Londonian wolf as we would a spirit symbolic of the deepest forest, the most extremely high and forbidding mountain range, the most desolate snowfield: in short, as the ultimate wild creature, supreme in savagery, mystery, and beauty.
The mythic wolf that London “found” in his single winter spent in the Canadian North during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897—98 and imbued with strangeness and ferocity bears in fact little resemblance to any true wolf ever observed. In studies by biologist Adolph Murie and researchers like L. David Mech and Boyce Rensberger, the wolf emerges as a shy and likable animal with a strong aversion to fighting. There is no evidence that any wild wolf has ever killed a human being in North America. As Rensberger notes, “It has a rather playful, friendly nature among its fellows. Research findings to date show wolves to exhibit many of the behavioral patterns that should find favor among the more sentimentally inclined animal lovers.”
And yet London’s wolf is very much a part of the consciousness of many people, and as the wolfs habitat continues to shrink under the pressure of oil pipelines and other industrial encroachments, its mystery and its savage spirituality increase, now that vulnerability has been added. We need London’s mythical wolf almost as much as we need the wildernesses of the world, for without such ghost-animals from the depths of the human subconscious we are alone with ourselves.
That Jack London, the Klondike, the wolf, and the dog should have come together in exactly the circumstances that the gold-fever afforded seems not so much a merely fortunate conjunction of events but a situation tinged strongly with elements of predestination, of fate. Born in poverty only a little above the truly abject, London displayed almost from the beginning such a will to dominate as might have been envied by Satan himself, or for that matter, by Milton. His early years were spent as a boy criminal, specializing in the piracy of oyster b
eds in San Francisco Bay, as a tramp on the roads and railroads of the United States and Canada, and as a laborer—or what he called a work-beast—in various menial and humiliating jobs, which fixed his mind irrevocably in favor of the exploited working classes and against any and all forms of capitalism, at least in theory.
During his later travels and his battles for survival in the economic wilderness, he came quickly to the belief that knowledge is indeed power. In his case, knowledge was more than the simple and too-abstract word “power” implied; it was muscle, blood, teeth, and stamina; it gave the force and direction that the will must take. When he landed in the Yukon in 1897, he had already read, with virtually superhuman voraciousness, hundreds of books and articles, principally in the fields of sociology, biology, and philosophy. He was alive with ideas and a search for ultimate meaning that amounted to an obsessively personal quest, and shared with the pre-Socratic philosophers—Thales, who assumed that water is the basic substance; Anaximenes, who believed the same thing of air; Anaximander, with his space or “boundlessness”; and Heraclitus, with process and fire—a belief that the great All is single and can be known. As he moved farther into the winter wilderness of the northern latitudes, he came increasingly to the conclusion that the “white silence” of the North is the indifferently triumphant demonstration of the All, the arena where the knowable Secret could most unequivocally be apprehended and, as the conditions demanded, lived. The snowfields, mountains, forests, and enormous frozen lakes were to London only the strictest, most spectacular, and unarguable symbols of the universal abyss, the eternal mystery at the heart of nothingness, or the eternal nothingness at the heart of mystery, as Herman Melville saw it in Moby Dick.Is it that by its [whiteness‘s] indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?
London’s whiteness, though its similarities of meaning are strikingly close to Melville’s, has also some basic differences.A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
London’s scattered but deeply felt reading had so imbued him with Darwinian principles that he looked on the landscape of the Yukon as a kind of metaphysical arena in which natural selection and the survival of the fittest were enacted unendingly, illustrating (though to no perceiver but the casual) the “Law.” The North is a background that determines character and action, bringing out in men certain qualities from the psychic depths of the race of all living beings. London does not attempt, as Melville does, to strike through the “mask.” The “mask” in London’s tales is more the classic mask of the actor, the mask that each participant feels rising to his face from the setting of the drama, the frozen features that rerum natura has always reserved for it.
As George Orwell has remarked, London’s instincts “lay toward acceptance of a ‘natural aristocracy’ of strength, beauty and talent.” Few writers have dwelt with such fixation on superlatives: “the strongest,” “the biggest,” “the handsomest,” “the most cunning,” “the fiercest,” “the most ruthless.” One cannot read these stories without agreeing with Orwell that “there is something in London [that] takes a kind of pleasure in the whole cruel process. It is not so much an approval of the harshness of nature, as a mystical belief that nature is like that. ‘Nature red in tooth and claw.’ Perhaps fierceness is the price of survival. The young slay the old, the strong slay the weak, by an inexorable law.” London insists, as Melville does not, that there is a morality inherent in the twin drives of animal evolution; brute survival and the desire of the species to reproduce itself are not primary but exclusive motivations.
In this savage theater of extremes, this vast stage of indifference, where “the slightest whisper seemed sacrilege,” London felt himself to be a man speaking out of the void of cosmic neutrality and even to it and for it, wearing, really, no mask but his half-frozen face, from which issued in steam and ice the truth of existence: the way things are.
The actors are men and dogs.Down the frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed with frost. Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapor that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the dogs....
In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. At the rear of the sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man whose toil was over—a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down until he would never move nor struggle again. It is not the way of the Wild to like movement.
In the Arctic and particularly in the Gold Rush Arctic, the dog was of paramount importance. Men could not cover the great distances involved, much less carry their food and equipment, on foot. There were as yet no machines, not even railroads. Horses would have bogged down hopelessly in the snow and could not have lived off the food, such as fish, that the environment supplied. The solution to the finding and mining of gold was the dog, because of its physical qualifications, its adaptability, and even its kinship to other creatures occupying the “natural” scheme of things in which it was to function.
London’s anthropomorphizing of animals is well known, and the instances in which he overindulges this tendency are frequent and sometimes absurd. He was no Rilke or Lawrence, seemingly able to project his own human point of observation into another entity, either living or inorganic, and become the contemplated Other. He could not and certainly would not have wanted to know, as Aldous Huxley said Lawrence did, “by personal experience, what it was like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the mysterious moon itself. He could get inside the skin of an animal and could tell you in the most convincing detail how it felt and how, dimly, inhumanly, it thought.” London had no wish to negate himself in favor of becoming an animal; the London dog or wolf is presented not as itself but as London feels that he would feel if he were embodied in the form of a dog or a wolf. The self-dramatizing Nietzschean is always very much present. In the canine battle scenes, for example, London analyzes with an almost absurd and quite human confidence the various “tactics” employed by the participants.But Buck possessed a quality that made for greatness—imagination. He fought by instinct, but he could fight by head as well. He rushed, as though attempting the old shoulder trick, but at the last instant swept low to the snow and in. His teeth closed on Spitz’s left fore leg. There was a crunch of breaking bone, and the white dog faced him on three legs. Thrice he tried to knock him over, then repeated the trick and broke the right fore leg.
Anyone who has ever seen dogs fighting knows that such subtleties as “the old shoulder trick” do not occur; if the affair is not merely one of a good deal of threatening noise, then one dog just goes for the other in any way possible. When London describes what dogs do rather than what they “think”—how they look when listening, how they appear when in repose, how they pace when restless or hungry—he is very good. When he makes a primitive philosopher of the dog in the same sense in which the author is himself a primitive philosopher, the result is less convincing. One believes of Bâtard that in five years “he heard but one kind word, received but one soft stroke of a hand, and then he did not know what manner of things they we
re.” It is quite conceivable that a dog that had never received such treatment would not know how to respond. On the other hand, Buck’s mystique of racial fulfillment, his metaphysical musculature, are so plainly impossible that one is tempted to forgo passages like:He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.
Likewise, White Fang’s encounter with the Californian electric streetcars “that were to him colossal screaming lynxes” is not the product of a first-rate imagination. London merely knew that, since White Fang had lived in the Arctic and lynxes also lived there, and since lynxes sometimes make noises and streetcars also make them, he could feel justified in combining these items in a figure of speech the reader would be inclined to take as reasonable because neither reader nor lynx nor London nor streetcars could prove it was not. A moment’s reflection, however, should disclose how far-fetched the image is; the dog would simply have been bothered by the utter unfamiliarity of the machine, would simply have apprehended it as a large noise-making something, though assuredly no lynx.
White Fang was conceived as a “complete antithesis and companion piece to The Call of the Wild.” London averred that “I’m going to reverse the process. Instead of the devolution or decivilization of a dog, I’m going to give the evolution, the civilization of a dog—development of domesticity, faithfulness, love, morality, and all the amenities and virtues.” Yet, why is White Fang—more than twice as long as The Call of the Wild and a good deal more virtue-bent in the human sense of intention, a story in which the animal protagonist ends not as the leader of a pack of wild wolves but crooning his “love-growl” amidst a chorus of city women rubbing his ears and calling him the Blessed Wolf—why is it so markedly inferior to the story of reversion? Largely, I think, because the events depicted in The Call of the Wild are closer to what one wants to see happen: because we desire the basic, the “natural,” the “what is” to win and not the world of streetcars and sentimentalism that we have made. Thus, in a sense, if we accede to London’s narrative we also are approving of God and his white, mocking malevolence, his “Law” maintaining sway over all the irrelevances and over-subtleties of mechanized life. We like the author for putting the perspective in this way, and especially in a way as forthright, inexorable, exciting, and involving as he commands.