The Sea Wolf (1904)
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dryrot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them
I shall use my time.
-Jack London
Here's an interesting, though little considered, thought for you: with the obvious exception of Karl Marx, whom a Colgate University professor of mine described as a hemorrhoid ridden little failure of a man who assumed that because he could not succeed in a capitalist society that success was impossible, virtually every renowned author of the Left, by definition, disproves his own theories. I mean, if the capitalist deck is truly stacked against the poor and birth, not ability, determines social position, then how the heck did people like Upton Sinclair and Jack London and H.G. Wells and Richard Wright and their ilk become so stinking rich and famous. Of course their dirty little secret is that they succeeded because they were more talented than others. Now if these folks were willing to suck it up and acknowledge that fact and base their philosophy on the intellectually honest basis that some people just don't have what it takes so it's up to society to provide for them, then it would be possible to respect them. Instead, by steadfastly maintaining that societal inequities are the result of external factors, they make themselves sound kind of silly. Perhaps no author has ever embodied this contradiction more blatantly that Jack London. In fact, his own life and his writings stand in such stark contradiction to his militant socialism as to offer the appearance of incipient schizophrenia.
Jack London was born into poverty, abandoned by his father, quit school as a teen and worked at a variety of menial tasks before he became a writer. So did poverty, fatherlessness, lack of education, etc. trap him in a life of poverty? Well, actually he became the highest paid writer in the United States and remains one of the most popular American authors to this day. Oops! So much for Marx... While London was an avowed Socialist, his writings are perhaps the supreme literary reflection of Social Darwinism--the theory that people who succeed in society do so not because of privilege but because of superior ability. In his most famous work, The Call of the Wild (see Orrin's review), a sled dog returns to nature and the thin veneer of domestication is quickly stripped away; he rapidly reverts to savagery, becoming the prototypical Alpha male. The Sea Wolf recapitulates this story in human terms for anyone who missed the point.
Humphrey van Weyden is an effete young man of privilege who ends up stranded aboard a sealing ship under the tyrannical control of Wolf Larsen (get it? Wolf). Humphrey represents civilized man:
As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself
and my situation. It was unparalleled,
undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar
and a dilettante, if you please, in things
artistic and literary, should be lying here on a
Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner. Cabin-boy! I had
never done any hard manual labor, or scullion labor,
in my life. I had lived a placid, uneventful,
sedentary existence all my days -- the life of a
scholar and a recluse on an assured and comfortable
income. Violent life and athletic sports had never
appealed to me. I had always been a book-worm;
so my sisters and father had called me during my
childhood. I had gone camping but once in my
life, and then I left the party almost at its start
and returned to the comforts and conveniences of a
roof. And here I was, with dreary and endless vistas
before me of table-setting, potato-peeling, and
dish-washing. And I was not strong. The doctors
had always said that I had a remarkable
constitution, but I had never developed it or my
body through exercise. My muscles were small and
soft, like a woman's, or so the doctors had said
time and again in the course of their attempts to
persuade me to go in for physical-culture fads.
But I had preferred to use my head, rather than my
body; and here I was, in no fit condition for the
rough life in prospect.
Larsen is the very embodiment of man in the state of nature--brutal, virile, amoral:
Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchway,
and savagely chewing the end of a cigar, was
the man whose casual glance had rescued me from
the sea. His height was probably five feet ten
inches, or ten and a half; but my first impression,
or feel of the man, was not of this, but of his
strength. And yet, while he was of massive build,
with broad shoulders and deep chest, I could not
characterize his strength as massive. It was what
might be termed a sinewy, knotty strength, of the
kind we ascribe to lean and wiry men, but which,
in him, because of his heavy build, partook more
of the enlarged gorilla order. Not that in appearance
he seemed in the least gorilla-like. What I am
striving to express is this strength itself, more
as a thing apart from his physical semblance. It was
a strength we are wont to associate with things
primitive, with wild animals, and the creatures we
imagine our tree- dwelling prototypes to have been
-- a strength savage, ferocious, alive in itself,
the essence of life in that it is the potency of
motion, the elemental stuff itself out of which the
many forms of life have been molded; in short, that
which writhes in the body of a snake when the
head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead,
or which lingers in a shapeless lump of
turtle-meat and recoils and quivers from the prod
of a finger.
Larsen challenges Humphrey's artificial world view with an elemental philosophy of survival of the fittest:
"What do you believe, then?" I countered.
"I believe that life is a mess," he answered promptly.
"It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves
and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a
hundred years, but that in the end will cease to
move. The big eat the little that they may continue
to move, the strong eat the weak that they may
retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and
move the longest, that is all. What do you make of
those things?"
He swept his arm in an impatient gesture toward a
number of the sailors who were working on
some kind of rope stuff amidships.
"They move; so does the jellyfish move. They move
in order to eat in order that they may keep
moving. There you have it. They live for their belly's
sake, and the belly is for their sake. It's a
circle; you get nowhere. Neither do they. In the
end they come to a standstill. They move no more.
They are dead."
"They have dreams," I interrupted, "radiant, flashing dreams -- "
"Of grub," he concluded sententiously.
"And of more -- "
"Grub. Of a larger appetite and more luck in satisfying
it." His voice sounded harsh. There was no
levity in it. "For look you, they dream of making
lucky voyages which will bring them more
money, of becoming the mates of ships, of finding
fortunes -- in short, of being in a better position
for preying on their fellows, of having all night
in, good grub, and somebody else to do the dirty
work. You and I are just like them. There
is no difference, except that we have eaten more and
better. I am eating them now, and you, too. But
in the past you have eaten more than I have. You
have slept in soft beds, and worn fine clothes,
and eaten good meals. Who made those beds? and
those clothes? and those meals? Not you. You never
made anything in your own sweat. You live on
an income which your father earned. You are like
a frigate bird swooping down upon the boobies
and robbing them of the fish they have caught. You
are one with a crowd of men who have made
what they call a government, who are masters of
all the other men, and who eat the food the other
men get and would like to eat themselves. You wear
the warm clothes. They made the clothes, but
they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or
business agent who handles your money, for a job."
"But that is beside the matter," I cried.
"Not at all." He was speaking rapidly, now, and his
eyes were flashing. "It is piggishness, and it is
life. Of what use or sense is an immortality of
piggishness? What is the end? What is it all about?
You have made no food. Yet the food you have eaten
or wasted might have saved the lives of a
score of wretches who made the food but did not
eat it. What immortal end did you serve? Or did
they? Consider yourself and me. What does your boasted
immortality amount to when your life
runs foul of mine? You would like to go back to
the land, which is a favorable place for your kind
of piggishness. It is a whim of mine to keep you
aboard this ship, where my piggishness flourishes.
And keep you I will. I may make or break you. You
may die to-day, this week, or next month. I
could kill you now, with a blow of my fist, for
you are a miserable weakling. But if we are
immortal, what is the reason for this? To be piggish
as you and I have been all our lives does not
seem to be just the thing for immortals to be doing.
Again, what's it all about? Why have I kept you
here?"
"Because you are stronger," I managed to blurt out.
"But why stronger?" he went on at once with his perpetual
queries. "Because I am a bigger bit of
the ferment than you? Don't you see? Don't you see?"
"But the hopelessness of it," I protested.
"I agree with you," he answered. "Then why move at
all, since moving is living? Without moving
and being part of the yeast there would be no hopelessness.
But, -- and there it is, -- we want to
live and move, though we have no reason to, because
it happens that it is the nature of life to live
and move, to want to live and move. If it were not
for this, life would be dead. It is because of this
life that is in you that you dream of your immortality.
The life that is in you is alive and wants to
go on being alive forever. Bah! An eternity of piggishness!"
So does London condemn Larsen's atavistic beliefs? He does present him as a beastly creature, but he is also a heroic figure, to be admired in many ways. As when he analyzes Milton's Paradise Lost:
If ever Wolf Larsen attained the summit of living,
he attained it then. From time to time I forsook
my own thoughts to follow him, and I followed in
amaze, mastered for the moment by his
remarkable intellect, under the spell of his passion,
for he was preaching the passion of revolt. It
was inevitable that Milton's Lucifer should be instanced,
and the keenness with which Wolf Larsen
analyzed and depicted the character was a revelation
of his stifled genius. It reminded me of Taine,
yet I knew the man had never heard of that brilliant
though dangerous thinker.
"He led a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God's
thunderbolts," Wolf Larsen was saying.
"Hurled into hell, he was unbeaten. A third of God's
angels he had led with him, and straightway he
incited man to rebel against God, and gained for
himself and hell the major portion of all the
generations of man. Why was he beaten out of heaven?
Because he was less brave than God? less
proud? less aspiring? No! A thousand times no! God
was more powerful, as he said, Whom
thunder hath made greater. But Lucifer was a free
spirit. To serve was to suffocate. He preferred
suffering in freedom to all the happiness of a comfortable
servility. He did not care to serve God.
He cared to serve nothing. He was no figurehead.
He stood on his own legs. He was an individual."
"The first anarchist," Maud laughed, rising and preparing to withdraw to her state-room.
"Then it is good to be an anarchist!" he cried. He,
too, had risen, and he stood facing her, where
she had paused at the door of her room, as he went
on:
"`Here at least
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy; will not drive us hence;
Here we may reign secure; and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.'"
It was the defiant cry of a mighty spirit. The cabin
still rang with his voice, as he stood there,
swaying, his bronzed face shining, his head up and
dominant, and his eyes, golden and masculine,
intensely masculine and insistently soft, flashing
upon Maud at the door.
Again that unnamable and unmistakable terror was
in her eyes, and she said, almost in a whisper,
"You are Lucifer."
London is at least ambivalent about Larsen, perhaps even admiring.
And does Humphrey survive by forcing Larsen to become more civilized, more of a social creature? Not! Humphrey himself becomes more of a primal man. After he and Maud, a woman likewise stranded with Larsen, escape to an island with a seal rookery, they are forced to survive by their own wits and will. At one point, they determine to roof their hut with sealskins and face the daunting task of killing a seal, fending off repeated attacks by enormous bulls. When Maud confesses her fear, Humphrey feels the beast surge within himself:
"I'm dreadfully afraid!"
And I was not. Though the novelty had not yet worn
off, the peaceful comportment of the seals
had quieted my alarm. Maud was trembling.
"I'm afraid, and I'm not afraid," she chattered with shaking jaws. "It's my miserable body, not I."
"It's all right, it's all right," I reassured her,
my arm passing instinctively and protectingly around
her.
I shall never forget, in that moment, how instantly
conscious became of my manhood. The
primitive deeps of my nature stirred. I felt myself
masculine, the protector of the weak, the fighting
male. And, best of all, I felt myself the protector
of my loved one. She leaned against me, so light
and lily-frail, and as her trembling eased away
it seemed as though I became aware of prodigious
strength. I felt myself a match for the most ferocious
bull in the herd, and I know, had such a bull
charged upon me, that I should have met it unflinchingly
and quite coolly, and I know that I should
have killed it.
"I am all right, now," she said, looking up at me gratefully. "Let us go on."
And that the strength in me had quieted her and given
her confidence, filled me with an exultant
joy. The youth of the race seemed burgeoning
in me, over-civilized man that I was, and I lived for
myself the old hunting days and forest nights of
my remote and forgotten ancestry. I had much for
which to thank Wolf Larsen, was my thought as we
went along the path between the jostling
harems.
Thrust back into the maw of Nature, the milquetoasty Humphrey of yore disappears. When Larsen's wrecked ship washes up on the shore, the new Humphrey boldly sets out on a course which would have been unimaginable months earlier:
"It's too bad the Ghost has lost her masts. Why,
we could sail away in her. Don't you think we
could, Humphrey?"
I sprang excitedly to my feet.
"I wonder, I wonder," I repeated, pacing up and down.
Maud's eyes were shining with anticipation as they
followed me. She had such faith in me! And the
thought of it was so much added power. I remembered
Michelet's "To man, woman is as the earth
was to her legendary son; he has but to fall down
and kiss her breast and he is strong again." For
the first time I knew the wonderful truth of his
words. Why, I was living them. Maud was all this
to me, an unfailing source of strength and courage.
I had but to look at her, or think of her, and be
strong again.
"It can be done, it can be done," I was thinking
and asserting aloud. "What men have done, I can
do; and if they have never done this before, still
I can do it."
This assertion of confidence in his own ability, an ability equal to or superior to that of any other man is pretty hard to square with the Socialist politics of doing for others because societal impediments prevent them from doing for themselves. It is instead consistent with the conservative belief that man requires freedom in order that all men achieve their full potential, even recognizing the uncomfortable fact that many men will achieve little because they are simply less talented than their fellow men.
In the end, as Humphrey takes over from Wolf Larsen--as he becomes the Alpha male and takes over the pack--it is impossible to interpret this as anything less than a triumph and it is hard to read anything other than admiration in London's tone:
"What are you doing down there?" he demanded. "Trying to scuttle my ship for me?"
"Quite the opposite; I'm repairing her," was my answer.
"But what in thunder are you repairing?" There was puzzlement in his voice.
"Why, I'm getting everything ready for restepping
the masts," replied easily, as though it were the
simplest project imaginable.
"It seems as though you're standing on your own legs
at last, Hump," we heard him say; and then
for some time he was silent.
"But I say, Hump," he called down, "you can't do it."
"Oh, yes, I can," I retorted. "I'm doing it now."
"But this is my vessel, my particular property. What if forbid you?"
"You forget," I replied. "You are no longer the biggest
bit of the ferment. You were, once, and able
to eat me, as you were pleased to phrase it; but
there has been a diminishing, and I am now able to
eat you. The yeast has grown stale."
The Socialism that London espoused in the political arena is little
more than the belief that Man would be best served if all the yeast was
stale, in order that no man rise above another. It would allow the
State to make motzah of the species, leveling unequal peoples into a flat,
bland Saltine of humanity. It is impossible to believe that the Jack
London who lived and wrote as he did, truly hoped for this vision to become
reality. Regardless, his novels make a compelling case for the opposite
position, for individual greatness and excellence. By cleverly cloaking
his conservative message in a liberal wrapper, he has virtually guaranteed
himself a permanent place in the Western Canon. Survival of the fittest
indeed…
(Reviewed:15-Jan-00)
Grade: (A-)
