Northland Stories
Penguin; $10.95
The Sea-Wolf and Other Stories
Penguin; $9.95
Martin Eden
Modern Library; $13.95
The Iron Hell
Lawrence Hill; $12.95
You've read "The Call of the Wild." Maybe you've read it more than once and you love it. Now you want to read more Jack London. You're in luck. There's loads of London to read - at least two dozen books in fact. But what to read next? Here are a few modest suggestions.
If you want to read more stories in which dogs appear, try the short story "Batard" which was published before "The Call of the Wild," or try "White Fang," which came after it and which describes a wild dog who becomes a civilized pup. There are also the tales that London wrote about Alaska that are collected in "Northland Stories" - stories about snow and silence, red men and white men, life and death and love and loss, stories that show London building his literary muscles.
There's lots of love in "The Sea Wolf" (1904). And there's lots of attention paid to Wolf Larsen, the diabolical sea captain who is perhaps London's most immortal human character. Two other well-drawn characters join Larsen: Humphrey Van Weyden, a bookworm and a sissy who evolves into a strong, self-reliant seaman; and Maude Brewster, a beautiful refined writer who becomes the love of Humphrey's life. "The Sea Wolf" begins close to home, in Mill Valley, and takes readers to the far-reaches of Asia. Part "Moby Dick" and part "Robinson Crusoe," it is perhaps the most romantic of London's books, and it provides the happiest of romantic endings - a kiss that never seems to end.
Romance can be found in almost all of London's books. It's in "Martin Eden," (1909) which describes the rags-to-riches tale of a writer named Martin Eden who finds that there is no paradise in the life of wealth, success and fame. Like most of London's other manly heroes, Eden is in love with himself, and with a woman whose name, in this case, is Ruth Morse. He's also in love with books, ideas and with the life of the mind. "Martin Eden" ends as unhappily as "The Sea Wolf" ends happily - with Martin Eden's suicide at sea, and London describes his death as though he were in love with death itself. "Colors and radiances surrounded him and bathed him and pervaded him," London writes of Eden, as he begins to die in the depths of the Pacific. "What was that? It seemed a lighthouse; but it was inside his brain - a flashing bright, white light."
The writing is so vivid it almost makes you think that London took psychedelic drugs. He didn't, of course. He did, however, alter his mind in many ways. He did it with alcohol, with morphine - to kill the physical pain he experienced - and with extreme states of consciousness, including a kind of high he experienced as an extremist and a revolutionary in love with righteous revolution.
If "Martin Eden" has autobiographical elements, so does "The Iron Heel," (1908) London's futuristic political novel about the coming of a dictatorship to America. Told in the first person by Avis Cunningham, a bright, beautiful Berkeley woman who falls in love with a working class revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, "The Iron Hell" is still alarming, still bone-chilling. London describes an America in which democracy is dead. An oligarchy has taken power and it runs the farms, the banks, the universities and the mass media. There are mass arrests of radical leaders. There's an underground network of revolutionaries. There are conspirators, terrorists, and there is torture and bloody slaughter in the streets of San Francisco, and all over the country.
While America falls apart and while her husband languishes in prison, Avis hides in the hills of Sonoma County and writes her memoir. "The Iron Heel" ends in mid-sentence, as though the author herself has been interrupted by force in the very act of writing. What actually happens to Avis, and what happens to her husband Ernest Everhard isn't clear. Their lives and their deaths are shrouded in mystery, much as London's own life and death is still shrouded in mystery, though he died nearly 100 years ago, and though his biography has been written time and again.
There's lots more London that's worth reading - including "John Barleycorn," which is about his own bout with alcoholism. If you have time to read only one story, I'd suggest "To Build a Fire," a concise tale that shows London's literary craftsmanship and artistry at its best. Fire was, of course, as central to Jack London as water and air and earth. No one appreciated the power of fire as keenly as he did. For nearly his whole life, he was a man on fire. And his books have set readers on fire from Glen Ellen and Mill Valley to Baghdad and beyond. Give them half a chance and they're likely to set you on fire, too.