Grove Koger
Today’s entry from my “Sea Fever” series is about the most famous novel by American writer Jack London, who was born in San Francisco on January 12, 1876, and died on November 22, 1916.
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The Sea-Wolf.New York: Macmillan, 1904
Born poor and illegitimate, Jack London nevertheless became one of the bestselling writers of his time. He packed a multitude of experiences into his forty years, and the meteoric trajectory of his rise to fame, quick deterioration, and early death seems quintessentially American.
As a youth, London raided oyster beds from his own sloop, the Razzle Dazzle, but soon switched sides and went over to the California Fish Patrol. Then he signed aboard the three-masted sealing schooner Sophia Sutherland when he was seventeen for a voyage to the North Pacific. The most immediate literary result was his “Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan,” which took first prize in a contest sponsored by the San Francisco Morning Call. However, the finest fruit of those seven months was The Sea-Wolf.
The creature of London’s title is Wolf Larsen, captain of the Ghost. Extraordinarily strong, prodigiously intelligent, brutally selfish, Larsen is a Nietzchean superman cursed with the bitter knowledge of his own mortality. When the Ghost picks up effete Humphrey Van Weyden after a collision in San Francisco Bay, Larsen refuses to return the youth to land, forcing him instead to sign on as a cabin boy on a sealing voyage to the Bering Sea. Under Larsen’s cruel tutelage, Van Weyden grows to manhood, while Larsen himself, apparently suffering from a brain tumor, succumbs to madness and physical paralysis.
Fast-paced, vividly realized, and informed by London’s firsthand knowledge of shipboard life, The Sea Wolf is one of the most readable of those books we call “classic.” It’s a pity, then, that London chose to introduce a second, and highly unlikely, castaway into the company of the Ghost—young poet Maud Brewster. The character was inspired by Charmian London, whom London had met in 1900 and who became his second wife in 1905. Theirs was a full-blooded romance, but little of their ardor can be glimpsed in The Sea-Wolf. Much of the blame goes to the editor of the Century magazine, who had accepted the novel for serialization but was concerned that Van Weyden and Brewster observe the proprieties. The rest of the blame rests on London’s shoulders. Despite his socialist sympathies, he was eager for success, and promised the editor that he would include nothing “offensive.” The resulting romance is the stuff of the conventional popular fiction of the time, and is treated with noticeably less realism and intensity than the other elements of the novel.
If you don’t have a copy of The Sea-Wolf, look for Matthew J. Bruccoli’s 1964 Houghton Mifflin edition. The version in the Library of America volume Novels & Stories (1982) contains notes by Donald Pizer and a text based on Bruccoli’s. There have been a number of biographies of Jack London, including Jay Williams’ Author under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London, 1893-1902 (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and Author under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London, 1902-1907 (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Williams has also edited The Oxford Handbook of Jack London (Oxford University Press, 2017.
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The dramatic illustrations in today’s post are by W. J. Aylward and are from the first edition.
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For a discussion of London’s Cruise of the “Snark,” see my post for January 12, 2020, at https://wordpress.com/post/worldenoughblog.wordpress.com/1870.
World Enough 