A Good Read--With a Caveat

When I first began to enjoy reading, my grandparents were good about giving me some good books to read, feeding an appetite for the written word that only grew with time. Some of the books I vividly recall their giving me were Gentle Ben, I'll Trade You an Elk, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and many volumes of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books series.

But the book they gave me that has a connection with this date in history was The Call of the Wild by Jack London.

On this date, Jack London sailed for the Klondike region of northwestern Canada, where he hoped to join the ranks of the gold seekers and strike it rich. This was just the latest in a series of spontaneous job decisions he had made during his short life. Having dropped out of school at the age of 14, he bounced from job to job over the next few years. He was an oyster pirate, a worker for the California Fish Patrol, and a sailor in the Pacific. But he stuck to nothing. None of those jobs interested him for long. (To his credit, he did later return to finish high school and actually attended one year at Berkeley.)

He went to the Klondike to get rich, but he never did. He did, however, "discover" himself there. He began to write and found his life's passion in that effort. He eventually wrote more than fifty books and hundreds of articles and short stories. In fact, he was a pioneer in commercial fiction and became well known in the publishing world.

While he was in the Klondike, he also began reading extensively, including John Milton's Paradise Lost and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Unfortunately, the latter work influenced the rest of his life more dramatically than did the former work.

London became a socialist, an evolutionist, a labor agitator, and an animal rights activist. He wrote of those themes in "The People of the Abyss" (1903), "War of the Classes" (1905), and "The Iron Heel" (1908).

But the influence of Darwin on his writing came out most clearly in his two most famous books, The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). Although London found no gold nuggets in the ground or the streams of the Klondike, those two works could be called his gold nuggets in the stream of English literature.

It was in those two works, however, that London's evolutionary beliefs came out loudly and clearly. They promoted naturalism, primitivism, and the "survival of the fittest." (I've often wondered if he also imbibed another aspect of Darwinism that is revealed in the full title of the man's book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.)

But such symbolism, imagery, and philosophical nuances went undetected by a young boy enraptured by the narrative. To him, it was the story that mattered. It was only when the boy became the young adult that he began to see beyond the story to the underlying life view, and red flags went up everywhere. Nonetheless, both books remain excellent stories, and London was indeed a great storyteller.

If you haven't yet read The Call of the Wild or White Fang, they're worth the effort. Just be aware of the caveat, and enjoy the story.