“Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on.” — White Fang, by Jack London

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” — Jack London

Jack London was born on this day, January 12, 1876.

London was a magazine writer who achieved world-wide fame during his lifetime. Best-known for The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and To Build a Fire, he had a robust and busy career as a reporter and activist. Some of the more pointed activist stuff does not time-travel as well as his most famous works, but it all provides a great portrait of the fights of the Left – with others and with each other – during that era. He was a unionizer. He wrote a lot about class war. He spent his years as a teenager bumming around, pan-handling, working on ships (he traveled as far away as Japan), working in canneries. He did attend high school but he was essentially self-educated, and a voracious reader. He wrote for the high school newspaper about living through typhoons off the coast of Japan (not the usual school paper essay topic). He was determined to attend Berkeley and after busting his ass on the entrance exams, he got in.

But London always kept a foot in the wild side of life. While attending Berkeley, he hung out in saloons frequented by sailors and pirates and rough trade. These were his people. He would end up writing about all of them.

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He grew up not knowing who his father was. His mother had been living with a man prior to his birth, but all records (of any kind) were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, so whether or not the two made it legal is still not known. London, while at Berkeley, wrote to this dude who had been living with his mother – the man was an astrologer, then living in Chicago), and inquired if he might be his father. The man replied bluntly that it was impossible since 1. he was impotent, and 2. Your mama “got around,” son. The trauma of this event can be felt in what followed: London quit school and headed to the Klondike, following the gold rush of the 1890s.

“Like Peter Pan, he never grew up, and he lived his own stories with such intensity that he ended by believing them himself.” — Ford Madox Ford on Jack London, 1916

Although his time in the Klondike was extremely important, in terms of the books that would make him famous, the books we still read today, it also destroyed his health. He developed scurvy (a condition causing long-lasting effects on him). His career as a magazine writer started for real after he left the Klondike. He became involved in politics and activism. Like many people who grew up poor, he did not have grandiose ideas about his writing. His writing was his work, it was a way to make money, an escape from the drudgery of office work or the brutality of manual labor. London “came up” during the Golden Age of Magazines, and he benefited from the better/faster printing technologies, wider circulation, clear mailing routes, all of the developments exploding in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Because of all of these factors, London’s work reached a mass audience in a way it might not have even 20 years earlier. He made a great living.

He died at home. Some think his death was a suicide. He had been suffering with unbearable pain from kidney stones.

The epitaph he chose for his gravestone is the first part of Psalm 118:22:

The Stone the Builders Rejected

(The second part of the Psalm, not on the tombstone, is “has become the capstone”. Much food for thought here in the choice of epitaph, and the choice of omission. I also love that London, a writer til the end, EDITED the quote he wanted to use.)

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I read The Iron Heel last year, part of my deep dive into tyrannical dystopias in literature. It’s a chilling portrayal of how a multi-tentacled gigantic political system called The Oligarchy (i.e. “The Iron Heel”) took over the world for centuries, through a combination of politics, violence, and rapacious capitalism. London was more prophetic than could be understood at its time of publication in 1908. In reading it, I realized that The Iron Heel is the real inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, although her book is most often compared to Orwell’s 1984. But in Handmaid’s Tale, she uses the exact same “device” London usees in his book: a manuscript is found centuries after The Iron Heel has fallen, and it is an eyewitness first-person account of the events and how the Oligarchy affected the people. The Iron Heel is a bit of a slog at points, but it is an incredibly detailed portrait of Leftist thinking at that time. It’s real agitprop. The book is eerily prescient in so many ways. One example is he has the Germans pulling off a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.)

“I read a wide range of books. I read The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf one week, and then Peyton Place the next week, and then a week later The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read. When I read The Sea-Wolf, I didn’t understand that it was Jack London’s critique of Nietzsche, and when I read McTeague, I didn’t know that was naturalism, that it was Frank Norris saying, You can never win, the system always beats you. But I did understand them on another level.” – Stephen King

The Call of the Wild was one of those books I was forced to read in 8th grade, and – unlike some of the other books on the syllabus – I fell in love with it instantly. Call of the Wild captured my imagination. I remember the reading experience vividly. I remember being afraid of the wildness of the wolves and wanting Buck to go back home where he could be safe and warm. But then I also remember thinking: Running free through the snow and howling at the moon sounds amazing, and he is doing what he knows best. But still: the transformation Buck has to go through, from a domestic pet to a wild pack-dog (and not just the wild pack-dog, but the leader of the pack) was fascinating to me. I was 12 years old, and I clicked with it. (Kudos, London.) I kept thinking, as I read it, as each chapter went on, “It’s not too late for someone to save him … someone needs to swoop down and save Buck … he can still go back!” But eventually there comes a point of no return.

It’s a brilliant book.

You begin to realize that the journey of the book is not how Buck is removed from his comfortable life and transformed. The journey of the book is that Buck becomes himself, his true self. The tame Buck in the beginning was the lie. His domestic days were an unnatural respite: being wild is who he really is. And it’s not just about who he really is: it’s a cellular memory of his own species, the deep course of understanding within him that “This is the way we wolves are.” By the end of the book it is impossible to imagine Buck lying curled up in front of a fire. Buck has not “reverted”. He has inhabited his true destiny. He is not conscious, at least not in the way human beings are conscious. He does not reflect. But he knows that the sound of the pack calls something up in him, something older than anything he has ever known.

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In the late 70s, there was a Charlie Brown TV special called What a Nightmare, Charlie Brown! This was a different sort of Charlie Brown than the other seasonal specials, and it didn’t get much play. Snoopy is the sole star. Charlie Brown appears only briefly. In What a Nightmare, Charlie Brown, Snoopy is, like Buck, taken from his cozy dog house and thrust into the wild life of a Klondike sled dog. Snoopy, like Buck, must learn to fight for his food (or he won’t eat), he must learn to dominate the other dogs, because “playing well with others” means you starve or die. Reminder: this was a special for CHILDREN. The whole thing is deeply disturbing to our ideas of Snoopy. (There’s a clip below. Watch how he transforms in it. Look how big his teeth get, how huge his mouth gets when he roars). It’s disturbing on every possible level. It is a nightmare. God, I love the 70s. I am proud my earliest memories come from that decade. It was an era that was not afraid to freak out the children.

I watched this thing when I was 7, 8 years old. I didn’t know that what I was watching was an homage to Jack London’s book. I was in 3rd grade. All I knew was that Snoopy had huge fangs and he was starving and cold and far from home and it WAS a “nightmare.”

A couple of years later, when I was much more sophisticated (i.e.: 12 years old), I read Call of the Wild and felt like the smartest person who had ever LIVED because I made the connection in my head: “OMG, that Charlie Brown movie was actually Call of the Wild!!” It was one of those moments of brain-growth, where you realize adults know something you don’t, that there are worlds of connections and references out there that you have no access to yet … but you will someday, if you learn enough, grow enough, read enough. I discovered Call of the Wild for the first time, but making “the Snoopy connection” in my head was far more important. Because making connections like that is part of developing a critical mindset, an aware mindset, an awareness of the threads running through the culture. Making that connection – more so than any ponderous Foreword to the book, written by a scholar – let me know What a Big Deal the Book Was. Damn, if the Peanuts animated special references it, then it MUST be a famous book!

Here is one of my favorite excerpts from Call of the Wild.

EXCERPT FROM The Call of the Wild by Jack London

They made Sixty Miles, which is a fifty-mile run, on the first day; and the second day saw them booming up the Yukon well on their way to Pelly. But such splendid running was achieved not without great trouble and vexation on the part of Francois. The insidious revolt led by Buck had destroyed the solidarity of the team. It no longer was as one dog leaping in the traces. The encouragement Buck gave the rebels led them into all kinds of petty misdemeanors. No more was Spitz a leader greatly to be feared. The old awe departed, and they grew equal to challenging his authority. Pike robbed him of half a fish one night, and gulped it down under the protection of Buck. Another night Dub and Joe fought Spitz and made him forego the punishment they deserved. And even Billie, the good-natured, was less good-natured, and whined not half so placatingly as in former days. Buck never came near Spitz without snarling and bristling menacingly. In fact, his conduct approached that of a bully, and he was given to swaggering up and down before Spitz’s very nose.

The breaking down of discipline likewise affected the dogs in their relations with one another. They quarrelled and bickered more than ever among themselves, till at times the camp was a howling bedlam. Dave and Sol-leks alone were unaltered, though they were made irritable by the unending squabbling. Francois swore strange barbarous oaths, and stamped the snow in futile rage, and tore his hair. His lash was always singing among the dogs, but it was of small avail. Directly his back was turned they were at it again. He backed up Spitz with his whip, while Buck backed up the remainder of the team. Francois knew he was behind all the trouble, and Buck knew he knew; but Buck was too clever ever again to be caught red-handed. He worked faithfully in the harness, for the toil had become a delight to him; yet it was a greater delight slyly to precipitate a fight amongst his mates and tangle the traces.

At the mouth of the Tahkeena, one night after supper, Dub turned up a snowshoe rabbit, blundered it, and missed. In a second the whole team was in full cry. A hundred yards away was a camp of the Northwest Police, with fifty dogs, huskies all, who joined the chase. The rabbit sped down the river, turned off into a small creek, up the frozen bed of which it held steadily. It ran lightly on the surface of the snow, while the dogs ploughed through by main strength. Buck led the pack, sixty strong, around bend after bend, but he could not gain. He lay down low to the race, whining eagerly, his splendid body flashing forward, leap by leap, in the wan white moonlight. And leap by leap, like some pale frost wraith, the snowshoe rabbit flashed on ahead.

All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the bloodlust, the joy to kill – all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. 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 and 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.

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23 Responses to “Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on.” — White Fang, by Jack London

  1. Doc Horton says:

    I went through a ‘dog book’ spell when I was 10 and 11 wherein every dog book ever written by man or woman was read by me. London’s (Call of the Wild and White Fang) were definite contenders for most thrilling.

  2. sheila says:

    I have to read White Fang again – it’s been years.

  3. Desirae says:

    It is so weird seeing Snoopy act like an actual dog. Almost uncanny valley.

    Was it White Fang where the dog team falls through the ice? And the dog named (I think) Demon goes down snapping at the air like he’s trying to fight it? That image burned itself on the back of my eyeballs when I was a kid.

    • sheila says:

      Desirae – the uncanny Snoopy valley. hahaha I know!

      I love the moment when he has freaked the other wolves out so much that he goes to take a drink of water by himself, and they all lie there, still, and their eyes watch his every movement.

      I don’t remember White Fang – that sounds terrifying and awesome – maybe Doc Horton can answer it. I must read that one again – maybe after I finish Wolf Hall (which is INCREDIBLE).

  4. Lyrie says:

    Funny, I was contemplating re-reading White Fang and The Call of The Wild just yesterday. I remember reading them as a child – I must have been 8 or 9. I don’t remember much, except loving the stories and being completely enthralled. And crying, once or twice – not surprising considering what Desirae describes. Amazing they let children so young read those stories!
    I think London is also responsible for the fascination I still have for the Great White North.

    • sheila says:

      Lyrie – I love that you have a memory of reading them as a child. It’s funny, right – the world deputed is so brutal, and yet maybe because they’re animal stories – a kid can slip right into them. I had the same fascination and identification. He’s such an amazing writer.

  5. Dan says:

    //God bless the 1970s. For freaking out the children.//

    Yes, so true. Rikki Tikki Tavi terrified me, the animated version of the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe made me sob – thanks 70s animators.

    It’s been decades since I read either Call of the Wild or White Fang, but my memory is that White Fang was bleaker – anyone else have this impression?

    • sheila says:

      Dan – haha, I know – I mean, watching that Call of the Wild Snoopy is STILL disturbing to me. What the HELL.

      I love it though.

      My memory is that White Fang is bleaker – only because at least in Call of the Wild Buck is released into his true self, and he belongs to a group, and that also sets him free. There’s a feeling that things are set aright in Call of the Wild. I ended up not re-reading White Fang as I said above a couple years ago or whenever this post went up … too many books, so little time.

      But now it’s back in my mind, so we’ll see how it goes.

  6. Dan says:

    My mom recently got the kids a DVD of old-school Peanuts specials – you’ll no doubt be astonished to learn Call of the Wild Snoopy was not included.

    //too many books, so little time//

    Word. I have a bunch of books I want to go back and re-read and feel conflicted about it, which is probably stupid but I’m unable to stop myself thinking of new books that won’t get read if I circle back for the old ones. Clearly I have issues.

    • sheila says:

      Dan – Thank goodness Call of the Wild Snoopy is on Youtube.

      I have those same issues with books.

      I’ve been doing more re-reading lately – and I’ve really enjoyed it!

      But it’s always a struggle. Too many books come out every day! Maybe they all suck, but I can’t keep up!

  7. Sea Wolf doesn’t get enough love

  8. Clary says:

    Hi Sheila
    Thank you for the best sentence I have read in a while: The Stone the Builders Rejected and the next line of the psalm. It comes at the right moment for me.

    I also disagree with the notion of sanitized stories for children. Better if the stories are illustrated by Arthur Rakham!

    What a great writer Jack London is. The story To Build a Fire made such an impression on me, I actually felt the cold and the nice sopor it induces. With the book The Call of the Wild I’m reminded of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874), from the book The Aleph. It’s about a young man who breaks the law and it’s sent to the Army as a correctional. He then, conforms to what is expected, till the night when he confronts a bandit. By the way, this is the quote at the begining:
    I’m looking for the face I had
    Before the world was made.
    Yeats: The Winding Stair.
    This is an excerpt:
    In 1869 he was appointed sergeant of the rural police. He had corrected the past; at that time he must have considered himself happy, though deeply he was not. (It was waiting for him, secret in the future, a lucid fundamental night: the night she finally saw his own face, the night he finally heard his name, well understood, that night exhausted his story, or rather, a moment of that night, an act of that night, because acts are our symbol.) Any destiny, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment: the moment in which a man knows, once and for all, who he is.

  9. Jessie says:

    I loved reading this and I love this timing! My current bedtime book is a collection of London’s fantasy/sci-fi short fiction. The selection ranges from high school across his whole career. He’s way ahead of the curve. The most terrifying one so far is of a sailor (hmm) who meets his estranged father (hmmmmmmmmmmmm), a chemical scientist pursuing the secret of true resurrection. They enter into an “agreement” where the narrator is killed repeatedly (experimentally, via poison, drowning, etc) and brought back to life. It is really horrific. It’s great!

    White Fang was the one I read over and over and over and over again as a kid/teen. I feel like I don’t even really know yet how much I learned from that book. It haunts me in a lot of ways. Like, the idea of forgetting yourself — which is of course part of the core themes of transformation and shaped clay but appears in particular in a sequence where WF is terrorised by the puppy pack and, in getting them back, “forgets himself” in the chase enough to get trapped. A mysterious phrase for me, when I was 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. And then one day I was 12 and it clicked. Much like with your Snoopy realisation — I’ll always remember that click and the new horizons of self-understanding (and fright) it brought me! And I was just thinking the other day about how scary the character of Beauty Smith is! This picture of him in my copy (by John Glover), in the chapter called “The Mad God,” was one of the most nightmarish images of my childhood. I always felt like the end, as much as it’s happy, was never quite a true or honest ending.

    What is going ON with that Snoopy clip?!?! Jesus! The music, the way Snoopy shifts and doesn’t come back. The dogfight is so realistic — fast and messy and contains that other Great White North (I’m there with you, Lyrie!) horror of the dogs fighting in the traces.

    (The word traces, along with gee and haw and Klondike and chechaquo and she-wolf and lobo and more, are at this point talismanic words for me — also a consequence of one of the other great dog books of my childhood (there are several), Smoky, Sledge Dog of Alaska, an exceedingly obscure book by a ghost named Jack Landru, which is sadly not from the dog’s point of view but does feature two handsome and driven youths, Lance and Melvin, either of whom could have been my eternal boyfriend, or each other’s eternal boyfriend. Oh dear, I think I am going to have to reread it tonight).

    • sheila says:

      Jessie – wow, this is so great!

      // They enter into an “agreement” where the narrator is killed repeatedly (experimentally, via poison, drowning, etc) and brought back to life. It is really horrific. It’s great! //

      I must read this. Yes – really ahead of the curve! The Iron Heel is too – I am not an expert on dystopian literature, but pretty sure this is a super early example, and really prophetic of the entire 20th century and beyond!

      Loved your memory on White Fang, and the impact it had on you. It’s incredible how these things we read when we’re kids – and how they worm their way into our consciousness. We start to put things together, realize things – our boundaries expand. And sometimes it’s not a pleasant thing!! My experience of Call of the Wild was not pleasant. It was upsetting. And I LOVED it.

      and Jeez, yes, Snoopy: the fact that this was even put out there – the fact that someone was like “Let’s completely trash Snoopy’s entire personality and turn him into something scary” – and the powers that be were like, “Totes, let’s do that, totes cool” says everything about growing up in the 70s. It’s hysterical to me. Because that shit is traumatic!! Snoopy being attacked and rolling around with a wolf, gnarling and biting? Oh my God.

      and thank you for your perspective on these other Klondike dog books!!

      // does feature two handsome and driven youths, Lance and Melvin, either of whom could have been my eternal boyfriend, or each other’s eternal boyfriend //
      hahahahaha

      Okay I must read this.

      • Jessie says:

        Okay I must read this.
        :-D I actually did end up reading it again, with intense delight – it is a decidedly Boy’s Own story (it may even have seen its first printing in the magazine), direct and heartfelt and, like always, it made me cry at the end haha. Gets me every time!

        really prophetic of the entire 20th century and beyond!
        Last night’s London story, The Enemy of All The World also has that in-the-future-looking-back frame — a cosmopolitan worldwide disarmament is achieved inadvertently through the actions of a tragic-backstory genius supervillain and 95% of it felt like it could have been a post-war golden-age comic book. It’s been a cool other side of London for me, I’m loving it.

  10. Regina Bartkoff says:

    Sheila!

    You, of course, did not disappoint with your writings on The Call of the Wild and here on the one and only Jack London!
    I also love this from The Call of the Wild, I won’t write the whole thing but it starts,
    “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the solider, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf cry…
    Go Buck!!
    Reading it as I’m beyond even middle age now, it calls up so much.
    Once, way back in the early 80’s on The LES I looked out the window on a very cold bitter night, and a pack of over 20 dogs, at least, came running down the block. I was astonished! I watched them go, careening down the block. They did look like they were laughing and having fun! I never forgot them and what became of them. I think they probably all came to a bad end, but for that moment they looked all the way alive! Reminding me now how young and wild and wolf-like I was then too.
    There’s a great short story by Jack London in a book called Revolution.
    The Night Born.
    A woman slinging hash and dealing with abusive husbands and bosses heads out on her own up to Alaska and through many adventures and setbacks becomes the Chief of a whole Indian tribe. It’s told through the eyes of a man now old and full of regret and how he met her up there and could have stayed with her but went back to safe living. I always wanted to make a film of this, as it was obviously written for me, haha, didn’t, and I’m trying to get my daughter to do it now! I just did it in acting class a lot. Such a great story and fabulous role.
    The Snoopy story. So hilarious!!!

  11. The quote with which you lead off this post is used to great effect in the newest James Bond film! That shows something of London’s reach, I think.

    I need to read more London. I’ve only read CALL OF THE WILD, and it’s been more than twenty years for that one. Time to track down my Library of America edition….

    • sheila says:

      wow, no way in re: James Bond. That’s so cool!!

      Read White Fang!! I re-read that one a couple years ago and it cast almost as strong a spell as Call of the Wild.

      • Well, two years later, I’m a few chapters into WHITE FANG. The She-wolf just had a litter. One thing about London is that he’s unafraid to show how a single miscalculation on one’s part can lead quickly to death in the wilderness…the one guy in the first couple chapters who gives in to anger that they’re losing all their dogs so he runs off after the wolves, runs out of ammo immediately, and…that’s that for him. I still remember my surprise when I read “To Build a Fire” in grade school that the guy didn’t make it in that story….

        • sheila says:

          Your memory is so amazing – that you can find your way back to a post and pick up the conversation – I am so impressed!!

          I so remember that moment, actually. and also the circle of glowing eyes in the shadows just beyond the fire – coming closer – I think that’s White Fang, too.

  12. Shawn says:

    Rest in peace, beautiful Lisa Marie…

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