The Call of the Wild and White Fang - Jack London [146]
—November 1903
Comments on White Fang
THE NATION
This is the kind of thing Jack London does best. In this atmosphere he wears neither his street swagger nor his more distressing company manners. As a biographer of wild animals he has hardly an equal. A generation ago this remark would have meant little, but what with Mr. Kipling, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Thompson-Seton, the Rev. Mr. Long, and the rest, the field of natural letters, as it might be called, has become conspicuous. It is the “pathetic” consideration which gives such books their hold upon us; we like to speculate as to the relations or analogies between beast-kind and mankind. Perhaps we do not believe that a stag is capable of soulful love, or a moose of consecutive thought, or a cuckoo of deliberately teaching its offspring to suck eggs; at least we take our disbelief seriously.
Mr. London has not, so far as we know, entered into any controversy, but he has written several books which present feral nature as something distinctly apart from human nature. “White Fang” complements “The Call of the Wild” in showing how readily wild animals may submit themselves to human rule, and how naturally domestic animals may revert to freedom. These dogs and wolves do not talk or think humanly. Instinct impels them and the discipline of experience teaches them what to avoid and what to seek. “Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite. But the cub did not think in man-fashion. He did not look at things with wide vision. He was single-purposed and had but one thought or desire at a time.” Three-parts wolf, the cub grows up to become in the end the willing slave of a man who has bestowed upon it such love as a human being may allow an inferior. Being a brute, its experience is brutal, a continuous performance of dog-fights, with no sparing of bloody detail. But, indeed, squeamishness would be out of place here, for if the writer dwells on the savagery of the creature’s experience, it is that he may emphasize its fitness. He believes that wild beasts get quite as much pleasure as pain out of the life which they are intended to live. It is under the white man’s brutality that White Fang is nearly driven to madness.
—November 1906
Comments on Jack London
H. L. MENCKEN
The quasi-science of genealogy, as it is practiced in the United States, is directed almost exclusively toward establishing aristocratic descents for nobodies. That is to say, it records and glorifies decay. Its typical masterpiece is the discovery that the wife of some obscure county judge is the grandchild, infinitely removed, of Mary Queen of Scots, or that the blood of Geoffrey of Monmouth flows in the veins of a Philadelphia stockbroker. How much more profitably its professors might be employed in tracing the lineage of truly salient and distinguished men! For example, the late Jack London. Where did he get his hot artistic passion, his delicate feeling for form and color, his extraordinary skill with words? The man, in truth, was an instinctive artist of a high order, and if ignorance often corrupted his art, it only made the fact of his inborn mastery the more remarkable. No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in “The Call of the Wild,” or in parts of “John Barleycorn,” or in such short stories as “The Sea Farmer” and “Samuel.” Here, indeed, are all the elements of sound fiction: clear thinking, a sense of character, the dramatic instinct, and, above all, the adept putting together of words—words charming and slyly significant, words arranged, in a French phrase, for the respiration and the ear. You will never convince me that this aesthetic sensitiveness, so rare, so precious, so distinctively aristocratic, burst into a bio-genetic flower on a San Francisco sand-lot. There must have been some intrusion of an alien and superior strain, some pianissimo fillup from above; there was obviously a great deal more to the thing than a routine hatching in low life. Perhaps the explanation is to be sought in a Jewish smear. Jews were not few in the California of a generation ago, and one of them, at least, attained to a certain high, if transient, fame with the pen. Moreover, the name, London, has a Jewish smack; the Jews like to call themselves after great cities. I have, indeed, heard this possibility of an Old Testament descent put into an actual rumor. Stranger genealogies are not unknown in sea-ports....