Jack London — The Call of the Wild
By: Steve Newman Writer
Tags: Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Books, History, Books And Authors

With the release of the new film version of Jack London’s masterpiece, The Call of the Wild — starring Harrison Ford — was the San Francisco born novelist a prototype Hemingway?

Jack London. Image: The New York Times

Although Ernest Hemingway thought of himself, when a young man, as a rough neck hustler ready to draw a knife when mixing with hoods in Chicago, and riding with hobos on the rails. He was nothing of the sort of course, whereas the youthful Jack London was, according to literary historian, Van Wyck Brooks, something of a water-front hoodlum already, and handy with both gun and knife. Apparently you didn’t mix with London unless you were even handier with the hardware.

John Griffith London (originally Chaney) was born on January 12th, 1876, in San Francisco. His father, William Chaney, was, unlike Hemingway’s father, no doctor, but a wandering astrologer and something of a snake oil salesman who left home before the boy’s birth, never to return.

Pregnant, and with no support, John’s mother, Flora Wellman, tried to shoot herself with a pistol, but failed. And although not badly injured, Flora was considered ‘deranged’ by the authorities with the consequence that John was fostered out to an African-American, Virginia Prentiss, a former slave who became one of the most positive influences in Jack London’s life.

Late in 1876, and now recovered, Flora married John London, a disabled Civil War veteran, and with baby John now returned to her, the family moved to Oakland, just around the Bay from San Francisco.

John quickly became Jack and initially did reasonably well at school but then became something of a juvenile delinquent, often finding himself in trouble with the police, which may, in part, have been due to a negative relationship with his step-father, and the strong denial by William Chaney that he was Jack’s father.

Flora was a serious spiritualist who came from a wealthy family, but still found it necessary to give piano lessons (Hemingway’s mother, Grace, gave singing lessons) to make ends meet. Her father had disowned her when he remarried and moved away, leaving the teenage Flora to fend for herself as a pianist working in bars.

Marrying John London probably saved her life, but did Jack few favours, although it has to be said that the ever growing and strutting gun-totting son did try hard to help: initially by selling newspapers, and later by working long shifts at Hickmott’s Cannery.

But for Jack home-life must have become unbearable, and as a restless lad who wanted adventure, which he found in petty crime and gang swagger. But there was something else: he wanted to become a writer. But that last wish would have to wait for a bit.

Out one day walking along the bay Jack London stole a boat (some reports say he bought it) and repeatedly raided the many oyster-beds out in the bay. It was a bad idea (he was no expert with a boat), and it wasn’t long before he was caught and thrown in prison.

And it was in prison where Jack London discovered the works of Rudyard Kipling and a few other writers. His appetite for literature was set alight, not least by reading Melville’s Moby Dick, which resulted, on his release, in signing on as a deck-hand on the Sophie Sutherland, a sealer headed for Japan. Aboard that ship, when the seals were hauled in, Jack’s knife skills came in very handy indeed. On his return to San Francisco with no other sealers or whalers available, and no other work to be had, Jack, as Van Wyck Brooks has written:

“ … travelled as a hobo to Washington, riding the rails and sleeping in box-cars…[then, after finding Washington no better than anywhere else, he]…contrived to spend a semester at the University of California [paid for by a bar owner he knew and had probably worked for]…for he was as avid for knowledge as he was for life.”

But things were pretty bad in the mid-1890s in California too: little work and a good deal of social unrest. London had to get away and did what he’d done before (as many others were now doing) and take off tramping the surrounding country looking for work (and ending-up in jail again for vagrancy); and when he did eventually sign-on as a deck hand on a whaler, he managed to follow in Herman Melville’s wake.

Then, in 1897, he heard about the Klondike gold-rush and headed north to Alaska by steamer (no doubt working his passage) where, along with thousands of others, he trudged through the snow to the Klondike River where he found gold.

But the gold he found there was not mineral but literary, as Brooks describes in The Confident Years:

“ On his return voyage [from Alaska] Jack London began to plan the stories that presently made him famous as the ‘Kipling of the Klondike,’ though he wrote later of other scenes and many other types, Mexican prizefighters, Chinese, Hawaiians, and what not. In his Alaskan stories he sounded the note of the ‘strenuous life’ that [Teddy] Roosevelt had struck in a speech one year before him, the theme that life is a struggle for survival in a world that is cruel and grim but in which the fighting will has a chance to triumph.”

And it is London’s early stories where we find the “ Kiplingesgue swagger”, with scenes of violence, and violent death, and the “…conflict of man with the ‘white silence’ [snow], and the savagery of nature,” which is certainly also part of Hemingway’s early Nick Adams stories, which have a certain feel of those London stories, but with a touch more elegance, with the savagery often seen in hindsight, Hemingway was nevertheless thereafter linked to London as a literary descendent, and it can be argued that without Jack London, and Hemingway’s reading of him as a schoolboy and after, Hemingway may not have become the writer he did, or a writer at all.

But as Malcolm Cowley wrote in the 1950s, Hemingway was much more than a naturalistic descendent of Jack London (and Theodore Dreiser), and much more akin to those “…haunted and nocturnal writers…” who dealt in symbols and the inner world and was therefore able to endow his heroes with a “…curious and almost supernatural value…” which was, as Cowley wrote was at the heart of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea.

Within two years of his return from the Klondike Jack London had published his first book of short stories, and by the end of 1903 he had published The Call of the Wild, making him very rich indeed.

Rich, or otherwise, London fell for the teachings of Marx, and the writings of Nietzsche and Darwin. Like many another writer he wanted to change the world. What he did do is make the world, our world, a fuller and more interesting place.

As the Norton Anthology of American Literature states, the best of London’s work was done by 1910, that he had written too much too fast, with too little concern for style. But that was his style of course, a style that captures the life he led, both as a swaggering, tough looking, gun-slinging youth on the prowl along the Californian seafront, and watching, and suffering with, the thousands of no hope gold prospectors dying in the snows of the Klondike.

London’s writing is hard and clear, with no punches pulled. No one had read stuff like this before. It would be the same when Hemingway put pen to paper less than twenty years later.

Jack London died in 1916, supposedly from a gastrointestinal type of uraemia, which to many suggests suicide, which, if true, is something else he had in common with Hemingway.

We are the better for having known them both.

Was Jack London a prototype Ernest Hemingway? Yes.

Image: 20th Century Fox

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