280 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900song of the pack.” A comparison with earlier American texts inscribing a return to
nature and the natural, like Walden and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is
perhaps instructive. Thoreau and Twain, in their separate ways, saw nature as a
fundamentally moral agency: the source of a humanly sympathetic, ethically sound
life. Man, in their work, returns to nature as a means of moral instruction and
regeneration. For London, however, nature is what Wolf Larsen calls it in The Sea-
Wo l f, “unmoral”: it is pure precisely because it is primitive, existing apart from
human judgment. His characters, human or otherwise, return to it and learn there
a truth that is determinately unhuman: that life is a matter of neither emotion nor
ethics but “the call of the wild,” “ruthless struggle.”
That truth is also learned in The Sea-Wolf, a novel that deserves a place with The
Call of the Wild, The Iron Heel, and Martin Eden as one of London’s major works.
Here, it is a man who is suddenly removed from civilized society. In the fog on San
Francisco Bay, two ferry boats collide and Humphrey Van Weyden, the narrator, is
thrown overboard. He is saved by a sealing schooner, the Ghost, whose captain, Wolf
Larsen, presses him into service. The character of Van Weyden is suggested by his
interests. He is a critic who has written an essay on Poe and is planning another essay
entitled “The Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.” Clearly, London intends
the reader to regard Van Weyden as not only effete but suffering from a dangerous
delusion: that human beings are capable of free will, determining their fate. The
accident that propels Van Weyden out of society is plainly symbolic of the chance
rhythms that govern all human existence. The fog, too, is a symbol. It is, the reader
is told, “like the gray shadow of infinite mystery brooding over the whirling speck of
earth.” “Men, mere motes of light and sparkle” simply ride “their steeds of wood and
steel through the heart of the mystery,” at the mercy of forces beyond their control,
as Van Weyden is when he is cast overboard. Van Weyden is first consigned to the
water, the “mighty rhythm” of which offers a paradigm of the mighty rhythms ruling
all things. He is then drawn into a new life on a ship the name of which suggests an
afterlife, another form of existence, where he is given “new” clothes, a new name –
“Hump” – and a new job as a cabin boy. In his “new and elemental environment” in
which, he reveals, “force, nothing but force obtained,” Van Weyden receives an
education into the realities of power from Larsen. The lesson is learned from Larsen’s
instruction and example and, not least, from the sheer brute magnificence of his
appearance: in terms of physique he is, we are told, like one of “our tree-dwelling
prototypes” while he has a voice “as rough and harsh and frank as the sea itself.”
Gradually, Van Weyden changes. “It seemed to me that my innocence of the realities
of life had been complete indeed,” he now confesses. “I was no longer Humphrey
Van Weyden. I was Hump.” His muscles grow strong and hard; and his mind grows
accustomed to the daily fact of brutality.
London did try to temper the harsh message of The Sea-Wolf by introducing
another castaway, a woman called Maude Brewster. A poet and a “delicate, ethereal
creature,” Maude is clearly intended to embody a more humane philosophy: to offer
Van Weyden, and the reader, an alternative to the predatory principles of Larsen.
But the episodes involving Maude are easily the weakest element in the book.GGray_c03.indd 280ray_c 03 .indd 280 8 8/1/2011 7:54:22 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 22 AM