The prestigious Einaudi series “Writers Translated by Writers” has published its nineteenth book, an unexpected gift: Jack London’s Call of the Wild, in a beautiful and meticulous translation by Gianni Celati. The book is very well-known, and precisely for this reason it reserves many surprises for the reader, or rather the rereader, regardless of age. We read a book we know differently from a new book: we already know “how it ends,” therefore we are more critical of the plot and pay more attention to the details.
Here we are immediately struck by the book’s genuineness. The très curieux Jack London, a writer long considered marginal, vernacular—in other words, a maverick within the illustrious American literary tradition—drew from his brief adventure as a gold prospector in Alaska an amazing number of experiences to relate, and he is a first-class storyteller. Nothing of what he says seems secondhand, as if written at a desk, relying on other books or the imagination. The wild world into which Jack London was plunged is decanted into his best books with the urgency and directness of real life; this is neither Verne nor Salgari1 but a man who fought to the last in a struggle for life and survival, and found in this struggle the inspiration to write.
With happy intuition, London transferred his experience to a dog, and I believe that this dog has no rival in world literature, precisely because he isn’t a literary dog. Buck, well off, master of his home on a splendid California ranch, is canine and human at the same time, like all dogs who are treated neither too badly nor too well by destiny or by their owners. He radiates dignity and respectability. More than Judge Miller’s servant, he is his equal, his companion; he has an instinctive understanding of his rights and duties. But at the turn of the century, at the time of the gold rush, all strong dogs are under threat: they have unprecedented commercial value, they can be stolen, traded, and shipped up there, where the law of clubs and fangs prevails over the laws of civilization. They will become sled dogs or they will die.
Buck, thanks to his physical and moral strength, passes the first test of deportation, an endless journey by rail and then steamboat to reach a new and hostile land: no California sunshine, but snow on the ground and in the air. He is tamed; he learns that a man wielding a club is invincible. His dignity is not defeated but is transformed as he must adjust, he must learn new and terrible things. He learns that he can’t trust anyone, and especially his companions, sled dogs who are already experienced. If he isn’t as fast as they are, his daily ration will be immediately stolen. He learns that at night the fire and the tent aren’t for him; he must learn, and does learn, to dig a hole in the snow, where his animal heat makes it possible to endure the arctic cold.
Buck must also learn the job, and here London’s tone and observations are masterly. Each of these dogs, of a hundred different breeds, yoked to the sled every day, has an individual, surprisingly credible personality. Ethologist ante litteram, London has penetrated canine psychology to truly modern depths. Rivals with one another and yet gregarious, the sled dogs “elect” a leader, the head of the pack, the first dog in the team. He must be the strongest, but also the most experienced: hauling is a kind of work that must be consented to, and Spitz, the head dog, forces and speeds up consent. He punishes those who hinder the work, he bites the stragglers, he stops fights with his undisputed authority.
Buck understands and learns, but doesn’t accept Spitz’s authority: inside himself he feels, next to the endless craving for food, the craving for leadership. On the other hand, he accepts the sled: “Though the work was hard, he found he did not particularly despise it. He was surprised at the eagerness which animated the whole team and which was communicated to him.” It is work as the last resort and the alternative to servitude; how can we not recall Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the wall that the prisoners build willingly, fighting against the frost of another Arctic? Dave and Solleks, old sled dogs, are passive and indifferent during the short hours of rest, but when they are harnessed to the sled they become “alert and active, anxious that the work go well, and fiercely irritable with whatever, by delay or confusion, retarded that work. The toil between the sled’s traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.” Work is intoxicating: the dogs’ “heart breaks when they are excluded from it.” Here, in embryo, is the intuition of the human pathology of early retirement.
Buck is different. He feels growing within himself “the dominant primordial beast,” he subtly provokes the leader of the pack and encourages indiscipline until it comes to an open challenge. This is the most brilliant page of this short book, and its harshest: on a freezing night, surrounded by the ravenous but neutral pack, Spitz and Buck confront each other, and Buck, the more cunning fighter, triumphs. The loser is devoured on the spot by his former underlings. The next morning, Buck forces himself on his human masters: he has killed the pack leader; he is the new head of the pack. He will be an even more efficient leader (a Kapo?) than Spitz, better at maintaining discipline and anticipating the dangers of the track.
Then the pack changes owners and in the spring, when the ice is most treacherous, it ends up in the hands of three inexperienced men. Hunger, exhaustion, and lashes: Buck’s dignity is offended, the dog rebels; he “knows” who should be obeyed and who shouldn’t. Subjected to a deadly beating, he is rescued by Thornton, the good pioneer, toward whom Buck develops that total, exclusive love which only dogs are capable of: and right here, in my view, the book weakens. This devotion is excessive: what happened to the “primordial beast”?
Nor is one convinced by passages permeated by half-baked echoes of Darwin. Thornton dies, struck down by Indian arrows, and Buck, his last tie with human civilization undone, listens to the call of the wild—that is, the howling of the wolves. He feels within himself, through evolution, the wolf’s blood. In spite of his different life, he approaches the pack until he becomes part of it, and in fact its leader. California, the sled, and Thornton are forgotten, and Buck’s story (this is Celati’s observation, but I believe it’s valid only after this turn of events) dissolves into legend. Buck’s blood prevails over that of the wolves to the point of changing their appearance: a new generation of wolves is born, with a canine coat. Buck has become the Phantom Dog who at night savagely tears to pieces prey and men; yet, every summer, he goes on a pilgrimage to the place where Thornton is buried—the only creature this dog who is now a wolf ever loved. Come on, this is a bit too human.
La Stampa, January 11, 1987
1. Emilio Salgari (1862–1911), an author of adventure stories that take place in exotic lands.