White Fang by Jack London

Source of book: I own this, but we listened to an audiobook from the library.

 

Believe it or not, my first experience of Jack London - other than reading “To Build a Fire” for school, was White Fang, not The Call of the Wild. 

 

This is actually a pattern with me. I prefer to read an author’s less famous work first, rather than start with the one everyone knows. Whether this would work for everyone is unclear, but I find that I like getting a feeling for how an author writes by experiencing a book that has less built-up baggage around it. Perhaps not coincidentally, I also tend to prefer the less famous works of many authors. (See, for example, my love for Tender is the Night over The Great Gatsby.) At the time I first read them, I did prefer White Fang to The Call of the Wild, although by a small margin. This may be because White Fang is longer, and thus allows London more space to explore his themes. 

 

In any case, The Call of the Wild was reasonably popular when we listened to it a few years ago, and I thought we might give this one a shot. It certainly led to some interesting discussions. 

 

Jack London lived and wrote at a time when our conception of the universe and origins of life had been recently and rapidly upset by advances in science. The earth turned out to be far older than we thought, and life clearly had changed over time. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection changed the way people thought about nature, and about themselves. 

 

Looking back now, after nearly 200 years post Darwin, it is easy to see that writers like London got some things right about evolution, and some things very wrong. We associate London with the phrase “nature red in tooth and claw” - and with good reason. However, the line was actually by Tennyson, in his long poem of grief over the death of his friend, In Memoriam. Here is the stanza:

 

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation's final law

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek'd against his creed

 

This view of nature - and evolution - looked at the struggle for survival, survival of the fittest, as this bloody, constant battle. Ironically, this view owes a lot more to the Victorian cult of individuality (see: “Invictus” for one of so many examples) than to the actual evidence of nature. By looking at natural selection as an individual struggle, Western Victorians (and often us, their intellectual heirs) interpreted what they saw as a vicious struggle between members of the same species to be the ones to live and reproduce, and ignored (until more recently) the strong evidence of symbiotic evolution, inter and intraspecies cooperation, and group survival rather than individual competition. 

 

I mention this because White Fang contains plenty of the bad beliefs that early Social Darwinists held when it came to wolves. 

Let me start by giving the basic plot. White Fang is a hybrid between wolf and dog. He starts out as the sole surviving pup of a litter borne by a half wolf half dog mother, who, as we find out, was owned then abandoned by an indigenous tribe. She returns to civilization with her pup, and White Fang is named and domesticated. After some time with the tribe, he is sold to a vicious white man somewhere in Alaska, who uses him in a dog fighting and gambling ring. After nearly losing to a bulldog (who he does not understand how to fight), he is finally rescued by a kind man, who wins his trust and eventually his love. 

 

This is, of course, the opposite of The Call of the Wild. Rather than “dog goes feral,” this is “wolf goes civilized.” There are other parallels too, though. London’s belief in a vicious natural world was balanced by his strong belief that humans were capable of so much more. Only humans have the understanding to be senselessly cruel and violent. And only humans can truly give love. This isn’t strictly accurate, as we have come to understand more about the natural world. But it is a good starting point for the ideas that London explores. 

 

An interesting choice is that London tells most of the story from White Fang’s perspective - we get to experience humanity from the eyes of a dog-wolf. I think this is one of the reasons I liked the book as a kid - the different perspective allows London to say things about humans that he couldn’t have a human say. 

 

In this book, there are essentially three kinds of men. The evil man is Beauty Smith, whose cruelty toward White Fang is painful to listen to. He is that particular sort of man who is just rotten and hateful to the core. The good man is Weedon Scott, White Fang’s last owner, who wins him over with love, and awakes in him a nature he did not know he had. In between is Gray Beaver, who is indifferent. He is at least consistent, even if we would consider his behavior animal abuse now, and he inspires White Fang’s respect and loyalty, if not exactly love. 

 

London explores these different kinds of men, but he also does so with the idea of nurture being more important than nature. Beauty Smith (and the other villain, Jim Hall, the violent convict) are who they are not because of some inborn evil nature, but because they too suffered abuse as children. This idea was controversial at the time, but the evidence is strong for a connection. It isn’t the whole story, of course. Not everyone who suffers abuse turns vicious, although they do suffer damage. But changing the environment does change the man. One of the reasons we have been able to reduce violence so much in our time is that we have changed both the culture and the economic realities. Fewer kids go hungry, and we no longer accept child abuse as “normal.” We have a long way to go, but we have made some progress. 

 

White Fang too changes as his circumstances change. This is how he is eventually able to switch from a fear-based relationship with mankind to one based on love and affection. 

 

Now, about what the book gets wrong. London saw the wolfpack as cooperative only by necessity. Thus, among the males particularly, there is a constant struggle to become the “alpha wolf.” This turns deadly often, and the wolves kill each other with impunity. This is not accurate, as we have learned. Wolf packs are tied together very much like other social animals - including humans - by bonds of affection and respect and cooperation, not relentless competition. And likewise, the “alpha wolf” turns out to be a myth, and based on the behaviors of wolves in captivity, not in the wild. This would be a mere unfortunate mistake if it were not for the fact that our popular culture clings to the idea of “alpha males” and the idea that toxic masculinity is the only “natural” form, and this has caused serious social harm. 

 

I’m not blaming London for being of his time on this issue. More concerning is his casual racism, particularly toward indigenous peoples. There are some pretty offensive stereotypes in the book, although London at least was aware that his prejudices were potentially based on bias, not evidence. These were the sorts of conversations we had about the book. 

 

What I think is the best thing to take away from the book, though, is the idea that kindness changes everything. London wrote graphically about violence and killing and heartless nature, but he also was a strong advocate against cruelty to animals. For all his racial prejudice, his cold hate is reserved for the white men who abuse animals. London was known to be gentle and kind to his own pets, and in his time, helped further the cause of humane treatment of all creatures. Nature may have been red in tooth and claw for him, but he believed humanity had a responsibility to transcend mere nature. 

 

***

 

I do want to say a bit about the audiobook. Jonathan Kent read it, and he was fine. But there were a couple of significant issues with the book, from Tantor Audio. The first is that discs two and three were mislabeled. Since it had been a while since I read it, I missed that a section was missing when we went on to the third disc thinking it was the second. This was in part because the break was between the opening sequence before White Fang is born, and the story of his life. I forgot all the stuff about the mating of his parents, and the early famine, and so on. So, we ended up listening to the story a bit out of sequence. 

 

The second issue was one that irritated me even more. The volume on the recording was inconsistent, and thus required constant fiddling with the stereo, which I hate to have to do while I am towing a trailer on winding mountain roads. This is more than the more common problem of insufficient compression, making the reader’s dynamic range too obvious. This was literal variation in the overall volume level beyond the difference in reading volume. Whoever did the sound really mailed it in, or was just plain incompetent. It seems like this would be a basic quality control issue. Fortunately, the story is a lot better than this recording. I would try to find it from a different company, and definitely beware of the many abridged editions out there. This book isn’t that long, and certainly doesn’t need to be abridged.