Jack London- The Call of the Wild, White Fang & Other Stories

The Call of the Wild, White Fang & Other Stories

Oxford World's Classics

Jack London

1998 (Collected)

“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.” 

The inebriated autobiography of John Barleycorn (1913) was an... interesting way to introduce myself to the work of perhaps the strongest name in American literature. Its increasingly bleak and seemingly honest nature had the effect of humanizing and quantifying the writing style and moral basis of Jack London, whose large body of work and immense reputation had previously seemed slightly off-putting without a good jumping-in point. With the ice broken, the next step to properly exploring London's work was quite clearly to read the subject of this review; a widely-found collection of by-far his two most famous works and a few short stories.

Jack London

To quickly review the short stories by essentially not reviewing them; I unfortunately didn't pay too much attention to them, and their proximity to the two classics put them into further obscurity. They undoubtedly make the book seem better value to those buying it, but I honestly feel that the effects of the collection's headliners made them seem so inconsequential that they would have been better served elsewhere in another collection.With that said, I say all of this in hindsight, as prior to diving in I really didn't know if I was going to enjoy any of this. It took the efforts of the first key work in this collection, The Call of the Wild (1903) to fully draw me in to the true powers of Jack London's fictional portrayals of the wild and the wolf.

I have to admit I was cynical about the maximum potential of a supposedly classic novella written with a dog (or a wolf if you prefer) as the central character, but I think that cynicism came from modern experiences with popular culture, specifically the unbearably cliched over-personification of animals as funny-looking humans (all of which whom are themselves unbearable racial or regional stereotypes). I should've assumed so beforehand, but London's style is far more Paul Auster's Timbuktu (1999) than your average Dreamworks borefest.

First edition cover

At only half the size of its more famous companion piece, The Call of the Wild is a fairly straightforward, truncated coming-of-age tale, where the immensely strong and powerful dog Buck survives a bucket-load of hardship and mistreatment to eventually find his true calling as a wolf in his ancestral forest surroundings. It's a simple and almost believable plot that requires a careful balance of typical narrative fiction tricks and techniques combined with enough authorial restraint to create the reader's suspense of disbelief. Personally I found Buck to be a little too strong, independent and basically perfect to fully immerse myself in his story, since it felt to a certain extent like a wish fulfillment fantasy, if not only for the reader but for London himself, who seems to marvel in the evocative power of nature.

In that sense I could see why it might not be considered by some to be a true American classic in the same respect that much more complicated novels by the likes of Hemingway are, but I do believe that stylistically it's absolutely top-notch work. London's ability to take a character with essentially no inner monologue besides that of instinct and then make him a figure that I cared about was no doubt entirely due to his select prose, resembling a high-class folktale of classic Americana ilk, like a Washington Irving story.

Though Call of the Wild was very good, I found White Fang (1906) to be exceptional, simply because it took the aspects I most enjoyed about Wild and gave them twice the space to fully form. Though the two are generally distinguished through their key plot points of returning to and then from nature, the emotional resonance of them are the same in that the antagonists are essentially finding their true selves. Most crucially, the increased time London spends on depicting the youth and development of White Fang compared to Buck is mostly spent on emphasizing the harsh cruelty of life, both in the wild and the world of man.

As a result, White Fang is a much harsher tale, surprisingly so I found. White Fang himself is warped into a hateful, unloved creature, thanks to a series of realistically-cruel humans and rival dogs, making his eventual redemption that much more rewarding for the reader than that of the much stronger Buck. Towards the end of the novel a couple of the set pieces are perhaps a little too cliched in a Hollywood sense, but I think without some sort of feel-good factor the earlier events of the story would've been unpleasantly pointless.

While neither of these iconic works has enough scope in total to really be compared to far more complicated twentieth-century US classics, London's pure writing talent evidently ranks alongside the very best, as his powerful, clear and evocative descriptions of an extremely difficult subject to realistically portray make White Fang a genuine classic, with The Call of the Wild at least a classic novella. While I don't expect to find anything else by London that's as good, my respect for his writing ability has grown exponentially and it won't be long until I pick up more of his books.

Jack London- John Barleycorn

John Barleycorn

Jack London

1913

“The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the ‘kick’.”

It took me a while to get around to reading a Jack London book, but it was inevitable following the pattern of my reading habits for a long while- probably a decade, actually. I've always known that London is considered as one of the elite peers of American literature, one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, up there with Hemmingway, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald as authors who shaped the Western art form for all to follow- in a fashion bridging the gap between the classical US authors of the 19th century who were still heavily influenced by Victorian literature, and the outragous post-World War II hippies and beatniks who fill so much of my time now. I bought two charity-shop copies of London books in quick succession, leaving me with the choice of what to tackle first.

One of these was a Penguin Classics collection of some of London's most famous and most successful shorter stories (including White Fang and The Call of the Wild- the former of which I oddly remember seeing an animated children's TV series, many years ago), the stories that primarily made his name and stand out the most on a fairly-packed bibliography. The other one was a much different prospect; the controversial autobiographical work John Barleycorn. Truth be told, the back cover blurb sold me immediately, since rather than promise stories about a bunch of wolves and whatnot, it promised 'the first intelligent literary treatise on alcohol in American Literature' (Oxford World's Classics edition), with London writing in detail about his massive consumption of alcohol during his younger days; with the name John Barleycorn from the old US folk song used to represent alcohol as a familiar acquaintance.

I've always been interested in quality literature permeated by chemically altered states, and I genuinely think that the best US fiction of the second half of the last century revolved around the influence of certain such texts, by Bukowski, Kerouac, Burroughs et al, and, with that in mind, John Barleycorn read to me like an incredibly important influence; the similarities to Bukowski's novels primarily jumping to mind in terms of the construction of the story, its pacing, characterisation and chronology. London forsakes much of a sense of typical storytelling structure through his constant introspective analysis regarding the physical and mental effects that his huge alcohol intake had upon him. The real people he describes meeting during his youthful days working on the ocean and docks seem to be heavily styled to emphasize their wildness, (reminding me most of On the Road) , which is fun to read, but as a counterpoint he refrains from following an obvious chronological narrative, instead perhaps assuming that the reader is familiar with his life and career already.

Unfortunately I can't actually say I enjoyed the overall effect of London's style for this book, and it actually took me much longer to finish it than it usually does for a 200-page piece. I found that the lack of detail about his life a whole at the time, and his rather straightforward presentation of his younger character prevented me from caring enough about him to want to read on. I also found his musings on John Barleycorn (a nickname that became a drag to read so often) to be repetitive, detached from emotion, and lacking in much of a revelatory impact to conclude things. London's general prose skills are clearly exceptional, written in the Americanised English that always reminds me, through Hemmingway to Steinbeck, of Charles Dickins. It did come across as dry to me though, especially with a lack of story to drive it.

I seem to be criticising the book quite a bit here, but I think that has a lot to do with my own personal biases coming into play. I was looking for London to be another great storyteller for me to indulge in, but I chose a book that focuses on being self-analytical without giving much in the way of further context. Hopefully I'll enjoy London's short fiction a lot more, and it'll put John Barleycorn in a more interesting light. As a taster of London's skills, it was interesting, if a little disappointing, but not off-putting.