by Jack London
Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast were taken off. It was a gala day. All Sierra Vista was gathered around. The master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his love-growl. The master’s wife called him the Blessed Wolf, which name was taken up with acclaim and all the women called him the Blessed Wolf.
He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down from weakness. He had lain so long that his muscles had lost their cunning, and all the strength had gone out of them. He felt a little shame because of his weakness, as though, forsooth, he were failing the gods in the service he owed them. Because of this he made heroic efforts to arise, and at last he stood on his four legs, tottering and swaying back and forth.
“The Blessed Wolf!” chorused the women.
Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
“Out of your own mouths be it,” he said. “Just as I contended right along. No mere dog could have done what he did. He’s a wolf.”
“A Blessed Wolf,” amended the Judge’s wife.
“Yes, Blessed Wolf,” agreed the Judge. “And henceforth that shall be my name for him.”
“He’ll have to learn to walk again,” said the surgeon; “so he might as well start in right now. It won’t hurt him. Take him outside.”
And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him and tending on him. He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn he lay down and rested for a while.
Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming into White Fang’s muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge through them. The stables were reached, and there in the doorway lay Collie, a half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.
White Fang looked on with a wondering eye. Collie snarled warningly at him, and he was careful to keep his distance. The master with his toe helped one sprawling puppy toward him. He bristled suspiciously, but the master warned him that all was well. Collie, clasped in the arms of one of the women, watched him jealously and with a snarl warned him that all was not well.
The puppy sprawled in front of him. He cocked his ears and watched it curiously. Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little tongue of the puppy on his jowl. White Fang’s tongue went out, he knew not why, and he licked the puppy’s face.
Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the performance. He was surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way. Then his weakness asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked, his head on one side, as he watched the puppy. The other puppies came sprawling toward him, to Collie’s great disgust; and he gravely permitted them to clamber and tumble over him. At first, amid the applause of the gods, he betrayed a trifle of his old self-consciousness and awkwardness. This passed away as the puppies’ antics and mauling continued, and he lay with half-shut, patient eyes, drowsing in the sun.
A Note on Jack London’s Life and Works
Jack London was born on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, the only child of a spiritualist and music teacher, Flora Wellman. His father was probably a wandering astrologer called William Henry Chaney. His mother was soon married to a widower and Civil War veteran, John London, who had two young daughters with him, Eliza and Ida. Flora’s son was given his stepfather’s name, John Griffith London.
Jack London’s boyhood was spent in Oakland and on small farms near San Francisco Bay. His parents’ schemes for making money failed and the family returned to live in a succession of poorhouses in Oakland. To earn a few dollars, Jack worked as a newsboy and in a skittle alley, and later in a cannery. He had an early love of books and of sailing in a skiff on the bay. By the age of fifteen, he was a delinquent and an oyster pirate—a time which he was to romanticize in a book for boys, The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902). He also briefly joined the side of the law against his old comrades and later wrote of his adventures in Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905).
In 1893, he set off for a seven-month sealing voyage on the schooner Sophia Sutherland. This hard life among sailors engaged in a bloody task gave him the experience to write and publish his first story, about a typhoon off Japan—and the material for his best novel about the struggle of men against nature and each other, The Sea-Wolf (1904).
The next year, 1894, he joined Kelly’s detachment of Coxey’s Army of the unemployed, which tried to march on Washington. His experiences as a Road Kid and a vagrant are recounted in The Road (1907), the forerunner of the work of Dos Passos and Kerouac. The thirty days he spent in jail in the Erie County Penitentiary marked him all his life. He became determined to use his brains to keep out of the degradation forced on the jobless.
He returned to high school in Oakland, became a radical, joined the Socialist Labor Party, and spent one semester at the University of California at Berkeley. He fell deeply under the influence of Spencer’s social Darwinism and also Marxism, as preached by the Oakland socialists and the circle gathering round Anna Strunsky, one of his early loves.
In 1897, Jack London went on the Klondike Gold Rush, caught scurvy, and returned to California after a two-thousand-mile voyage down the Yukon River. He applied himself to writing as a profession, nearly starving and working incessantly. A partly autobiographical account of these harsh years can be found in his novel Martin Eden (1909).
His Klondike stories soon attracted attention. After publishing his first three collections of them, The Son of the Wolf (1900), The God of His Fathers (1901), and Children of the Frost (1902), he found himself famous. If his first novel, A Daughter of the Snows, was a failure, The Call of the Wild (1903) was his masterpiece as a short novel and gave him international recognition, enhanced by another collection of Alaskan stories, The Faith of Men (1904).
In 1900, he had married Elizabeth (Bess) Maddern, mainly for biological reasons, as he declared in his collaboration with Anna Strunsky, The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903). His wife bore him two daughters, Joan and Becky. In 1902, he fell in love with Anna Strunsky, but lost her when he left for London, where he wrote his emotional account of the poor in the East End, The People of the Abyss. Reconciled with his wife on his return, he soon left her for the older Charmian Kittredge, an emancipated and courageous Californian.
In 1904, he became a correspondent for the Hearst newspapers in the Russo-Japanese war, and recognized the threat of Asia to the world dominance of Europe. The Russian revolution of 1905 inflamed his radicalism, so that he gave a series of socialist lectures, later published in two important collections of essays, War of the Classes and Revolution. His divorce and his instant remarriage, to Charmian Kittredge, put him even more in the news.
He continued to write intensively, inventing the American boxing novel in The Game (1905), recreating primitive existence in Before Adam (1907), and continuing to mine his lucrative Klondike vein with Moon-Face and Love of Life and Other Stories. His greatest success after The Sea-Wolf was another short novel, White Fang (1906), which told the story of a wild dog tamed by civilization, the reverse of The Call of the Wild. Yet his most original contribution was The Iron Heel (1908), a chilling prophecy of the Fascist period to come.
At the peak of his influence and powers, Jack London decided to build his own sailing boat, the Snark, and to cruise round the world with Charmian as his “mate.” The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 doubled the costs and delayed the start of the voyage, so that Jack was nearly bankrupt when he sailed to Hawaii, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, and the Solomon Islands. The two-year voyage, interrupted by a short return home to rescue his finances, was a saga of accidents and diseases ending in the complete collapse of Jack’s health. He abandoned the Snark and started some disastrous arsenic treatments in Australia, which damaged his nerves and kidneys. He sailed back to California in 1909. It was the first public defeat of a man who had created the image of a superman and now was trapped within it.
During the last seven years of his life, Jack lived in deteriorating health and devoted his energies to developing his ranch near Glen Ellen in Northern California and to buil
ding his stone “Wolf House.” Always short of money for his increasing expenses, he lived a disciplined life, writing every day. He returned to the profitable theme of Alaska in Lost Face and Burning Daylight (1910) and Smoke Bellew (1912). His long sea voyage produced the autobiographical The Cruise of the Snark and, between 1911 and 1913, a succession of Pacific stories and novels: When God Laughs, Adventure, South Sea Tales, A Son of the Sun, and The House of Pride. If the quality of his work deteriorated with his health, yet his style and professionalism kept him popular and respected.
In 1912, he sailed round Cape Horn on the Dirigo, the basis of his grisly novel The Mutiny of the Elsinore. Charmian miscarried for the second time, removing any chance of his having a male child. He had quarreled with his first wife and two daughters, and his last misfortune was to lose the completed Wolf House by fire. His story of his own problems with alcohol, John Barleycorn (1913), showed his writing and his self-awareness at their best, while his new devotion to the land and life on his ranch was portrayed in two novels, The Valley of the Moon (1913) and The Little Lady of he Big House (1916). His life at Glen Ellen had truly become the center of his existence, devotedly run by Charmian and his stepsister Eliza, who acted as his ranch manager.
Some of his best short stories were written in his declining years, particularly those in The Strength of the Strong (1914), which contains “South of the Slot,” “The Dream of Debs,” “The Sea Farmer,” and “Samuel.” Other collections of stories were The Night Born and The Turtles of Tasman. He continued his boxing novels with The Abysmal Brute and his science fiction with The Scarlet Plague (1915) and the haunting The Red One (1918). Yet his most extraordinary feat of imagination was his novel of prison life and time travel, The Star Rover (1915).
His physical condition was made even worse by a severe attack of dysentery while he was reporting the Mexican Revolution in 1914. Hardly alive and existing on huge quantities of fluid and pain-killing drugs, Jack spent the last two years of his life becoming conscious of the many contradictions of his character. His animal novels Jerry of the Islands and Michael, Brother of Jerry were run-of-the-mill, but his psychological stories, after his reading of Freud and Jung, proved to be some of his finer work, published in On the Makaloa Mat (1919). His notes for a projected novel on his dead Shire stallion and for “Farthest Distant: The Last Novel of Them All” promised great works to come.
Unfortunately, long stays in Hawaii could not help his internal maladies and increasing sense of disgust with life. He resigned from the Socialist Party in 1916 and shortly afterward took an overdose of the drugs prescribed for his kidney and bladder problems. He had done this many times before, but this time his weakened body could not take the strain. He lapsed into a coma and died on November 22, 1916.
He died at the age of forty. He had written more than fifty books in twenty years and had lived nine lives. He was the archetype of the American hero who tried to live what he wrote. He was also the Californian Pilgrim, in search of the new at all costs, as if life would go on forever. He made himself a myth in his own time and for ours.
ANDREW SINCLAIR
For a full life of Jack London, see my own Jack: A Biography of Jack London (New York, London and Paris, 1977).
Selected Bibliography
BOOKS
Kingman, R. A Pictorial Life of Jack London. Crown: New York, 1979.
Labor, E. Jack London. Twayne: New York, 1974.
London, C. K. The Book of Jack London, 2 vols. Century: New York, 1921.
London, J. Jack London, and His Times: An Unconventional Biography . University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1968.
McClintock, J. I. White Logic: Jack London’s Short Stories. Wolf House: Grand Rapids, Mich., 1975.
Ownbey, R. W., ed. Jack London: Essays in Criticism. Peregrine Smith: Layton, Utah, 1978.
Sherman, J. Jack London: A Reference Guide. G. K. Hall Boston, 1977.
Sinclair, A. Jack: A Biography of Jack London. Harper and Row: New York, 1977.
Stone, I. Sailor on Horseback. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1938.
Walcutt, C. C. Jack London. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1966.
Walker, D. L., ed. Jack London: No Mentor But Myself: A Collection of Articles, Essays, Reviews, and Letters on Writing and Writers. Kennikat: Port Washington, N.Y., 1979.
Walker, D. L., ed., The Fiction of Jack London: A Chronological Bibliography. Tex Western: El Paso, Tex., 1972.
Walker, F. Jack London and the Klondike. Huntington Li brary: San Marino, Calif., 1966.
ARTICLES
Benoit, R. “Jack London’s The Call of the Wild,” American Quarterly XX (1968).
Etulain, R. “The Lives of Jack London,” Western American Literature XI (1976).
Flink, A. “Call of the Wild: Jack London’s Catharsis,” Jack London Newsletter XI (1978).
Geismar, M. “Jack London: The Short Cut,” in Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel, 1890-1915. Boston, 1953.
Labor, E. Introduction to Great Short Works of Jack London. New York, 1970.
Noto, S. “Jack London’s Dawson: Past and Present,” The Pacific Historian XXIV (1980).
Pattee, F. L. “The Prophet of the Last Frontier,” in Sidelights on American Literature. New York, 1922.
Peterson, C. T. “Jack London’s Alaskan Stories,” American Book Collector IX (1959).
Shivers, A. S. “The Romantic in Jack London,” Alaska Review I (1963).
Walcutt, C. C. “Jack London: Blond Beasts and Supermen,” in American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Minneapolis, 1956.
Wilcox, E. “Le Milieu, Le Moment, La Race: Literary Naturalism in White Fang,” Jack London Newsletter III (1970).
A. comprehensive checklist of critical writings about London’s works has been compiled by H. L. Lachtman for the Jack London special number of Modern Fiction Studies XXII (1976).
READ MORE IN PENGUIN
In every comer of the world, on every subject under the sun, Penguin represents quality and variety—the very best in publishing today.
For complete information about books available from Penguin —including Puffins, Penguin Classics and Arkana—and how to order them, write to us at the appropriate address below. Please note that for copyright reasons the selection of books varies from country to country.
In the United Kingdom: Please write to Dept. EP, Penguin Books Ltd, Bath Road, Harmondsworth, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 ODA
In the United States: Please write to Consumer Sales, Penguin Putnam Inc., P.O. Box 12289 Dept. B, Newark, New Jersey 07101-5289. VISA and MasterCard holders call 1-800-788-6262 to order Penguin titles
In Canada: Please write to Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2
In Australia: Please write to Penguin Books Australia Ltd, P.O. Box 257, Ringwood, Victoria 3134
In New Zealand: Please write to Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, North Shore Mail Centre, Auckland 10
In India: Please write to Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110017
In the Netherlands: Please write to Penguin Books Netherlands bv, Postbus 3507, NL-1001 AH Amsterdam
In Germany: Please write to Penguin Books Deutschland GmbH, Metzlerstrasse 26, 60594 Frankfurt am Main
In Spain: Please write to Penguin Books S. A., Bravo Murillo 19, 1° B, 28015 Madrid
In Italy: Please write to Penguin Italia s.r.l., Via Benedetto Croce 2, 20094 Corsico, Milano
In France: Please write to Penguin France, Le Carré Wilson, 62 rue Benjamin Baillaud, 31500 Toulouse
In Japan: Please write to Penguin Books Japan Ltd, Kaneko Building, 2-3-25 Koraku, Bunkyo-Ku, Tokyo 112
In South Africa: Please write to Penguin Books South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Private Bag X14, Parkview, 2122 Johannesburg