The Sea Wolf

 “Wolf – ‘Tis what he is. He’s not black-hearted like some men. “Tis no heart he has at all,” Jack London, “The Sea Wolf” (1904)

Most famous for the adventure novels “The Call of the Wild” and “White Fang,” one about a dog that is forced to call on its primordial instincts to survive and the latter about a domesticated wolf-dog rescued from a brutal owner who saves his new master from death, Jack London (1876-1916) lived an amazingly full and prolific life in his too brief time on Earth. Sailor, tramp, would-be Klondike prospector, and member of Jacob Coxey’s “Army” that marched on Washington, D.C., during the Depression of the 1890s, he was a socialist, a naturalist, and a best-selling author of short stories and novels, many based on his own adventures. London went by the nickname Wolf, wrote about wolves with reverence as noble creatures of nature, and named the title character in “The Sea Wolf” Wolf Larson.

Though familiar with the author’s nonfiction indictment of capitalist America, “The People of the Abyss,” I can’t recall ever reading a Jack London novel. After learning that London was Susan Sontag’s favorite writer as a child and coming across references to him in Jess Walter’s “The Cold Millions,” I checked out “The Sea Wolf” at Chesterton library. Combining, as critic John L. Cobbs noted, frenzied action and philosophical ruminations, like most of London’s books, “The Sea Wolf” pits idealistic sailor Van Weyden against rugged individualist Captain Wolf Larsen, whom Cobbs sees as representing the dark side of the author’s alter ego. Though in the end good triumphs over evil, the fortuitous denouement owes as much to good fortune – luck – as individual accomplishment. Like his literary contemporaries Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, London grappled with the question of whether free will was possible given the implacable forces of modern life.

“The Sea Wolf” contained a dozen beautiful illustrations by W. J. Aylward, who was born in Milwaukee, honed his craft at Chicago’s Art Institute, illustrated Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” was a highly respected combat artist during World War I, and outlived London by 40 years.