Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 279Like The Octopus, too, it offers the reader a powerful mix of socialist message and
proto-fascist feeling. Everhard, for instance, proclaims himself a revolutionary
socialist and is certainly portrayed as such. But we are also told that “he was a
superman, a blond beast such as Nietzsche has described”; “in addition,” the narrative
adds, perhaps a little too late, “he was aflame with democracy.” Nearly all London’s
fiction betrays a similar fissure between a kind of idealistic socialism and a general
view of existence that is vigorously amoral. A commitment to the political and
economic jostles with celebration of the primitive, the morally indifferent power of
nature and the beauty of blond, clean-limbed heroes: Wolf Larsen in The Sea-Wolf,
for instance, is lovingly described as being of “Scandinavian stock,” “the man type,
the masculine, and almost a god in his perfectness.” It reflects London’s overwhelming
commitment to the will to power, in man, society, and nature. Even self-inflicted
death can become an expression of that will. In Martin Eden (1909), for example,
London’s most autobiographical novel, the hero commits suicide by forcing himself
to stay below the surface of the ocean, despite the struggle his body makes to persuade
him otherwise. Suicide becomes, in these terms, a triumph of the will.
Martin Eden, Wolf Larsen, and Ernest Everhard are all men of genius from humble
surroundings. Each has a touch of the rebel, the antichrist in him: Larsen, a “mighty
spirit,” who insists he would prefer “suffering in freedom to all the happiness of
servility,” is even compared to John Milton’s portrait of Lucifer. Clearly, there was a
sense in which London was presenting an idealized portrait of himself, and his rise
from a humble background, in these portraits. Born illegitimate, London grew up on
the waterfront of Oakland, received only intermittent schooling, and for much of his
youth lived on the wrong side of the law. After a spell in prison, he worked at sea.
Returning to land, he discovered communism. Enrolling in the University of
California briefly, he left to join the Klondike gold rush. Then, returning to Oakland
in 1898, he began to write about his experiences. Stories appeared in Overland
Monthly in the West and the Atlantic Monthly in the East. His first and second novels
were published in 1902; and a year later the third, The Call of the Wild, catapulted
him to fame. The “hero” of the story is a dog, Buck, who is kidnapped from his com-
fortable existence on a California estate and sold into service as a sledge dog in the
Klondike. Eventually, abandoning human society and companionship altogether,
Buck becomes leader of a pack of wolves. He has returned to nature, the primitive,
aboriginal condition of existence. “Suddenly jerked from the heart of civilisation and
flung into the heart of things primordial,” all social veneer is stripped away and he is
restored to the fundamentals of existence and the “primordial beast” lurking within
him. Buck is clearly a means for London to expose and explore the primitive bases in
all nature, including the human. His story is a story of regression but, unlike
McTeague or Vandover the Brute, a triumphant one. Moving from the warm,
“ordered,” “civilised” “Southland,” where he lives the life of “a sated aristocrat,” he
encounters the cold vastness of the “Northland,” nature in all its blank neutrality and
indifference to human and animal welfare. He grows strong from the encounter,
with the reader last seeing him in all his primal beauty – “leaping gigantic above his
fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is theGGray_c03.indd 279ray_c 03 .indd 279 8 8/1/2011 7:54:22 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 22 AM