The Call of the Wild and Selected Stories (27 page)

The narrative, with a kind of unrelenting rhythm and weather of its own, matches these life-threatening rigors of the Alaskan wilderness with the harsh social hierarchies of the men and animals who struggle to survive there, pursuing their various forms of daily bread or future wealth in an atmosphere of greed and lawlessness. Buck, through no volition of his own, is caught in this extreme environment, both physical and social. He must adapt or perish, and the story leads you through his awakening understanding of himself, his new world and his place in it. Though ultimately this harsh environment does bring out the best in certain characters, including Buck and John Thornton, reading the book as an adult can bring to mind all the darkest horrors of human behavior. With a breath as cold and chilling as the Alaskan winter itself, it lays out not just the unforgiving commands and dangers of pioneering life in the northern wilderness but also the morally challenging and often desperate situation of the people drawn to the Klondike in their search for riches, adventure or a more elemental life. As in the story “Love of Life,” people are frequently stripped down to mere survival machines; all the easy moral maxims of social life are tested—and most found wanting—in this ferocious landscape. This sometimes seems to be one of London's driving motives, as though his calling is to remind everyone of the chill below the warmth of our cozy social conventions. At the center of this are the harsh life of a sled dog and the literally dog-eat-dog hierarchy of the pack Buck must learn to negotiate. As Buck thinks to himself upon observing the friendly dog Curly's death by pack attack, “So that was the way. No fair play.”

So why has the book been so durably appealing to so many readers, young and old?

When you mention
The Call of the Wild
to someone who read it as a child or young adult, it's not cruelty or violence or frostbite or sunless noons the person recalls—it's Buck: his endurance, his strength, his ultimate discovery of self, all in the midst of an ultimate challenge. It's a tale of almost mythic power. On this reading, suffering through Buck's hardships with the knowledge that it would only get worse, I found myself resisting the bleakness of the story. And yet, as Buck hardens and perseveres, coming horribly close to death, something of an almost tragic splendor comes into the story. When he finally meets Thornton and experiences love, developing a unique and iconic relationship with him, the fact that he will need to travel on, even past this, becomes somehow, not just bearable, but inevitable—and satisfying in its honoring of what love and loss mean in life. The story breaks you down, beats you about the psychic head and shoulders, and squeezes you through the eye of an emotional needle, where, somehow, on the other side, you find yourself in a sere but serene territory of acceptance and calm regarding life's troubles and challenges, satis factions and losses. In the course of the story Buck has become
himself
, capable of negotiating all of life's by-ways. While the story has its simplistic and sentimental side, it is this accomplished arc that makes it so powerful and gives it mythic weight.

The Call of the Wild
depicts a classic hero's journey, following Buck as he develops an adaptive flexibility that allows him victory over the kind of elemental catastrophes that can befall all creatures. What magnetizes readers is the alchemy of transformation. The big, indomitable dog at the heart of this tale stands for all adventurers and pioneers who make it through a fierce tempering process and take on a largeness beyond the ordinary, becoming legendary. Buck and the story of his unquenchable will embody the essence of heroism, the victory of the spirit against all odds, and the discovery of the deepest drives at the heart of the self.

And London doesn't make it easy for us. We have to work our way through various darknesses. This, too, is characteristic of stories and books with enduring appeal.

Buck is not “nice.” Very early in the story he discovers the necessity of an unstinting attention, not just to survival, but to winning all fights, to the negotiation of the pack's hierarchy, to cunning and manipulation and theft, to the skills of the hunt and the pleasures of a blood instinct. Consider how he brings down the bull moose, slowly harassing it to death, keeping it from food and water, ruthlessly and relentlessly pursuing it till he makes it into his kill. But he is not a creature
merely
of instinct. He has and makes choices. In the latter part of the story, he chooses Thornton over his call to wildness so long as Thornton is alive, and though he would gladly kill any man who threatened Thornton, he controls himself in the presence of the unwelcome fondling and noodling of both people and other canines when it is right to do so. The morality and honor of both survival and identity—the mixed and often conflicted nature of self—are presented with some complexity both here and in London's book
The Sea-Wolf
, which is about a similar conflict between the necessities of civilization and survival in a wilderness.

Apparently young readers know, perhaps with a keenness special to their age, that the world is full of violence, both hidden and overt. Like the brothers Grimm, London tapped into a universally appealing narrative stream of timeless elements and character types—stories in far-off lands full of bellow and danger, peopled with villains and fools and allies at play in a world of hard realities, where the successful hero (always, of course, representing the child reader) finds a key to success, hard won. This tapping of elemental forces—forces that only unwelcome trouble and the gravest struggle can bring to the surface—is the same theme that makes comic book superheroes enter children's imaginations so forcefully. The slowly dreamed, gradually unearthed wildness that Buck discovers inside himself is a magnetic, almost magical prowess that functions like the enhanced powers superheroes discover in themselves. After all, Buck can “break out” and pull a sled loaded with a thousand pounds. This is a superhero feat, a legendary moment. This slowly discovered strength—based on the will to survive, an experience of love, and the tapping of an atavistic wildness—provides the elemental key, the fundamental quality, the ancient wisdom that will unlock Buck's “true” self and reveal its assets. And for this kind of discovery, terrible and dangerous struggle is required, along with the loss of the ordinary and cosseted life of ease in which Buck begins his life.

Children, of course, identify with animals (this does not cease when you grow up, though it is less often admitted). Kipling, Aesop's fables,
The Lion King
—the many books and films for children that feature animal characters all attest to this. The elemental and “wild” forces within—anger, competition, jealousy, violent impulses, conflicts between love and selfish needs—are pictured as part of the external landscape in many of these tales. This wilderness both within and without is where
The Call of the Wild
takes place. It is aptly named, for perhaps we all wish to discover, or rediscover, within ourselves some bedrock quality capable of guiding us through the wilds, human and natural, of the world we inhabit.

In any case Buck's wildness, emerging slowly throughout the narrative, is the real gold discovered in the book. It comes to mean that he fits with more and more ease and pleasure into the wild world of the Klondike. In the end he is completely at home and at one with the rhythms, ferocity and grandeur of the setting itself, in complete harmony with his world.

The book, which is one of London's three best long works (
The Call of the Wild
,
Martin Eden
and
The Sea-Wolf
) has a strong engine; it takes right off and does not stop till it reaches its destination, in a forward motion that is not unlike the forced travel as a sled dog that Buck has to endure. It is a combination adventure tale and psychological thriller, at once setting out a vividly described physical journey and a psychological, social, almost biological journey on Buck's part. This journey takes him from a half-asleep and rather torpid civilized state through drastically tempering trials and finally into an almost tragic experience of love, loss and freedom. It is written in a muscular, often poetic prose that does not shy away from the hard, bitter or ugly but also has a lyric, spare musicality occasionally comparable to Kipling's wonderful trance fables. Like Kipling's, London's writing enhances the book's kinship with myth and parable.

London's ability to write vivid, economical and concrete descriptions that launch the reader into an almost sensate experience of the story's action is on full display here, as it is in “To Build a Fire” (where our fingers freeze and our hopes ebb right along with the doomed protagonist). The energy and speed with which London lodges you squarely in the snow, sends you into Buck's hunger or fury or locates you in the almost maddening beauty of the springtime burgeoning cruelly around the starving sled dogs, make a kind of reading vertigo that tips you forward into the tale, full speed ahead. At his best, London's ability to depict the natural world and its creatures in action is brilliant, and he is at his best here. London was describing a terrain and way of life he was intimately acquainted with, having spent a life-changing season in the Klondike himself, and he describes, with knife-edge vividness, a place whose physical settings and social realities deeply engaged him and made him, as he said, “think.”

The fact that the story combines the fascinations of a splendid travelogue and a narrative of both physical and psychological hardening makes it particularly appealing to children and young adults. All children face the necessity of schooling themselves to live within the social rules of their cultures, a hard task in which certain “primitive” and very intense emotions must be contained. Perhaps one of the deep appeals of this book is the glimpse it gives of a different, more atavistic set of parameters: the intuitive drives and dreams of the deep self London refers to when he writes about Buck's dreaming by the fire, remembering and re-creating his alternative path. Buck's life sets forth a basic struggle familiar to all children: the conflict between the comforts and niceties of civilization (where the rule is honor and forbearance) and the wilderness of the beast, within and without (where the rule is survival and cunning). And it gives this wilderness—the one within and the one without—its due, in all its splendor, scope and cost. Competition, dominance, jealousy, conflict—it's all there, along with skill, cunning, strength and perseverance, the characteristics that serve to bring Buck into his own, both as sled dog leader and, eventually, as a wild creature returning to his wilderness home. In its guise as a story of transformation, the book tells a tale—germane to all of us, child and grown-up alike—of the journey in which we find our “true” or essential selves and mine our deepest capacities. A gold quite different from the one miners were seeking in the Klondike.

A central aspect of this book's appeal is its idea of wildness. As a people inhabiting a very large country containing, at least until recently, large tracts of very sparsely populated land and with our history of pioneering and our strong romantic relationship to the idea of the wilderness as part of our national identity, Americans find the idea of wildness itself an electrifying theme. We have a notion of the wild's beneficent effect on the character and the soul that has been carried forward in our literature and poetry to this day. How to relate to the vast spaces that exist beyond and apart from us and that turn us, like other creatures, back toward our animal natures is a constantly sounding undertow in
The Call of the Wild
. In fact, one deep question at the heart of this book is how to be the animals we are in a way that expresses our human natures, as Buck finds how to be the animal he is in a way that expresses his dog-wolf nature. This brings us to London's meditations on competence. Like London's
The Sea-Wolf
, although with a great deal less philosophizing, or like many of the stories in this volume, this book considers what it is to be a competent human being. It presents various scenarios of men competing for a place in the Alaskan wilderness, using the skills and wit that belong to them—or failing, catastrophically, to understand the realities of the wilderness and arriving unprepared for the rigors they will face, misusing the creatures and tools available to them. This can be fatal. (London himself barely survived his stint in the Klondike.)

The book is a paean to competence, both human and canine. The most vivid contrast here is between the threesome Hal, Charlie and Mercedes and John Thornton, all at one time Buck's masters. The comic ineptitude of the caravan Hal, Charlie and Mercedes make up would be a charming and amusing set piece were it not for the brutal no-exit degradation of the dogs' lives and the gathering sense of the doom that will come upon them all as the ill-prepared trio pursues various forms of silliness, bad judgment and ignorance in their trek. Like Dickens and Mark Twain, London is acutely aware of the underbelly of darkness in all that is bright and amusing. Through the beauties of the burgeoning springtime, lovingly described by London, the starving dogs and the self-involved and idiotic threesome move toward a fatal confrontation with the changing weather. Here, where the frozen rivers are highways, warmth can be as fatal as cold. Though London's depiction of these three characters is spot-on and often funny, both Buck and the reader know the same thing: we are headed for disaster. Just before Thornton's intervention to keep Hal from beating Buck to death, Buck has lain down and given up partly because he recognizes intuitively that the fatal ineptitude of his present owners is reaching critical mass. When, in one of the book's most vivid moments, the ice breaks and the whole caravan—the ill-fated dogs, the sled loaded with goods and their unregenerate owners—is swallowed up by the river, it is another proof of the implacability of survival's rules.