'Call' remains wildly popular

Jack London's most celebrated novel, "The Call of the Wild" (Scholastic, 192 pages, $3.99, paperback) is a stew of themes and motifs and sometimes clashing political and social concepts. It is also, above and beyond that, a thumping good tale brilliantly told, else it would not have been for 100 years one of the most popular books ever written by an American.

"The Call of the Wild" was first published in the Saturday Evening Post from June 20 to July 18, 1903, and almost simultaneously in book form by Macmillan. London's seventh book, it was an immediate critical and commercial success, and set him on the road to becoming, by some accounts, the 20th century's most widely read American author.

The story is quickly encapsulated: Buck, a half-St. Bernard, half- "Scotch shepherd" dog, is stolen from his comfortable home in California's Santa Clara Valley and shipped to the Klondike to work as a sled dog during the gold rush. (The only date mentioned in the story is "the fall of 1897.") Abused by men and challenged by other dogs, he learns to fight back and eventually becomes the lead dog on a team after killing the vicious old leader, Spitz.

His first owners, two French-Canadian mail couriers, are capable and considerate dog handlers, and Buck exults at making the 600-mile run between Skagway and Dawson. But they sell the team to another man, who overloads the sled and exhausts the dogs. He in turn sells the team to three totally inexperienced and inept Americans (symbols of useless civilization), whose incompetence brings about their deaths.

Buck, however, is saved by a miner, John Thornton. They enjoy an idyllic life together, wandering and hunting, until Buck comes back to camp one day to find John dead, slain by Indians.

Enraged, Buck attacks and kills some of the Indians and drives off the others. His last link to humanity thus broken, he takes to the wilds, becoming leader of a wolf pack, but returns each year to the site of John's death to howl in mourning for the only man he ever loved and accepted as master.

All of this is told in 32,000 words by an unseen narrator who relates Buck's thoughts and feelings while describing his ascent to mastery and atavistic return to the wild. It is no wonder that students and teachers love the book, the former because it has a hero they can love and cheer for, the latter because it bristles with symbols and themes that provide handles for discussion. To pick but three:

-- Buck's reversion from a cultured civilization where "he had learned to trust in men he knew" to the wild, where men and dogs "were savages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of club and fang." When John cuts Buck out of the sled traces after saving him from the three Americans, he in effect is freeing him from the last ties to civilization.

-- The quest for mastery and domination. From the time Buck battles to become lead dog to the time, answering a call from deep within himself (and from the forest), he takes over the wolf pack, his No. 1 consideration is, well, the necessity of being No. 1.

-- The survival of the fittest, the Social Darwinist notion that suffuses the book. "Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law."

More than a little of this is, on the face of it, ludicrous -- most noticeably Buck's thought processes -- "He had a vague feeling of impending doom" -- and his morality. Buck's first theft of food, London writes, "marked . . . the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence." It is saved from ludicrousness by the bravery of a dog we want to prevail, and by the honesty and speed of the narration.

Not everything is hard, cold and brutal. There is the mutual love of John and Buck, for example, and Buck's concern for his fellow sled dogs. And, though those who would laugh at the death of Little Nell might not think so, the suffering and death of Dave, a plucky and loyal dog, are quite affecting.

A lot of it is autobiography. London was an admirer of the writings of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, among others, without bothering about their irreconcilable differences. After all, London himself was a socialist who, after the success of this book, lived in luxury.

None of it is preachy or overt. London simply poured everything of himself into this, a book that almost seemed to write itself. And if the Nietzschean Superman collided with the socialist good fellow, and if survival of the fittest somehow existed side by side with concern for your fellow creature, well, that's the messy way life is. Otherwise, it would not make such good telling.

Jack London facts

-- Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney on Jan. 12, 1876, in San Francisco, the illegitimate son of Flora Wellman, and William H. Chaney, who abandoned mother and child. London acquired his surname from his stepfather, John London, whom his mother married Sept. 7 of that year; he died of uremia on Nov. 22, 1916.

-- London spent a year (1897-98) in the Klondike. As a gold miner he was spectacularly unsuccessful -- he came close to death from scurvy. But he struck it rich by mining the experience for "The Call of the Wild" and many other writings.

-- When he sat down to write "The Call of the Wild" in December 1902, London planned a short story of between 4,000 and 5,000 words, but right from the first it got away from him. He wrote speedily, out of his unconscious, and about five weeks later ended up with 32,000 words, perhaps one-third the length of a typical novel.

-- While writing "The Call of the Wild," London never thought it would be anything more than perhaps a superior version of "dog stories" he had written before. Thus he sold the book rights to Macmillan for $2,000 and serial rights to the Saturday Evening Post for $960, the total compensation he received for print versions of his novel.

-- It is impossible to count the number of copies of the book that have been printed, in the United States and worldwide, in the century since it was first published. Several U.S. editions are available now. One reference says the book has been translated into more than 80 languages.

-- There have been at least seven film versions of the novel, including two silents and one in 1935 with Clark Gable as well as three TV movies.

Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a free-lance writer and reviewer for several publications and a frequent contributor to the Deseret Morning News.

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