The Dog Beneath the Skin

JACK LONDON'S TALES OF ADVENTURE (53 I pp.)--Edifed by Irving Shepard--Hanover House ($4.95).

Jack London, who is the most popular and widely translated U.S. author in Russia and Iron Curtain countries (according to UNESCO), first became famous just after the turn of the century with three stories--two about dogs and one about a man. They closely resembled each other. Buck was a Saint Bernard and the dog in all the world least likely ever to be drawn by James Thurber, who found life too tame on the trail in The Call of the Wild and joined a wolf pack. White Fang told of a wolf that left Alaska to become civilized in California. The Sea Wolf told of a more or less human character called Larsen, the savage master of a Pacific sealer who could not decide whether he belonged in or out of human society.

London's stories, first read by a generation that was to enter World War I, had a recurring theme: man could revert to barbarism or adapt to civilization. Much of the fascination of London's work and life lay in the fact that he could never decide, for himself or for his characters, which footprints of what gigantic hound to follow--the wolf of the wilderness or the Saint Bernard of civilization.

London peopled a whole world with semibarbarians--bucko mates on tramp steamers, sealers in the North Pacific. Seattle waterfront toughs, stiffs riding the rods of Western freight cars--all larger than life, and, because of that, something less than real. This scissors-and-paste collection of his work (with the important dogs missing) is a valuable book for U.S. readers -who have begun to forget London's parables of violence, partly because they see the realities of violence all over the world.

Trail of Superman. London's stories grew directly out of his life. He was born (1876) in rowdy, brawling San Francisco, the illegitimate son of an itinerant Irish astrologer. His mother, abandoned by the stargazer, shot herself (the injury proved slight), and then married John London, a decent man who couldn't stick to any trade and therefore was glamorized by young Jack as "a soldier, trapper, backwoodsman and wanderer." Anyone with such a background might be excused for thinking human nature too complicated to figure out, and London's works--18 novels, 20 collections of short stories, seven nonfiction books, three plays and a mass of journalism--were to deal with simpler people in a simpler world. He followed his own star-snarled destiny where it led, left his stepfather's shabby Oakland home to become an oyster pirate and precocious boozer in his teens. He drank enough redeye before he was 20 to make Lost Weekend seem like a short beer.

One story in this book, Bonin Islands, about a fight between Pacific sealers and island natives, evokes a youthful, innocent hunger for strange places and, at the same time, a kind of mindless, hallucinatory quality. Yet it tells of real events that happened when young London, at 16, shipped on a sealer to the islands. After three years of kicking about the Pacific, he returned to the U.S. and, thirsting for knowledge, enrolled as a freshman at Oakland High School. The student literary journal, Aegis, published his Bonin Islands story, and its stay-at-home readers must have been awed by his breezy voice of experience ("Ah! Life was life then!"). In short order, Student London took off for the Klondike and packed 8,000 Ibs. across the Chilkoot Pass. This weight included the works of Darwin, Spencer, Marx and Milton.

He dragged this burden through all his brief life. In succeeding years he bummed round the West, sailed on his own ketch through the South Seas, worked as a war correspondent when wars were available and marched with "Kelley's Army" (a Western version of Coxey's Army). Somewhere along the line he added Nietzsche to his intellectual portage. In all he wrote, the notion of Superman was muddled with the Utopian apocalypse of Marx --in about the same proportions in which history for the next two generations would muddle Fascism and Communism.

Sailor on Horseback. He wrote continuously and like a madman, with the lack of self-criticism of the self-educated. Yet he was a generous man of near-genius. He had the kind of gallant foolishness that he himself perfectly summed up by describing himself as a "sailor on horseback"--a quality both lovable and exasperating. He called himself a socialist (though no known socialist state would have given him leg room). When his books did well, he built himself a thoroughly unsocialist, ranch-style castle in California's Valley of the Moon (it burned down before he could move in). He died at 40, probably a suicide during a fit of depression.

A quick view of this fantastic life and a wide sampling of his work are given in this volume. Included are biographical notes, an album of photographs and excerpts from essays and novels, many autobiographical, e.g., Martin Eden, in which London saw himself as a "rough, uneducated sailor" who ends a suicide. There are also remarkably evocative eyewitness accounts (the San Francisco earthquake, a typhoon off Japan) and 25 short stories, some of them little known. Among the best: Jan, the Unrepentant, a hilarious yarn in which some trappers prepare to hang a suspected murderer, and The Law of Life, about an Eskimo abandoned in the icy wilderness with only a few sticks of firewood between him and death.

The Russians, no doubt, admire London for his quaintly archaic socialism. Despite his limitations, Americans can still read him for other reasons--a raw vitality and a real storytelling gift.

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