Sea Wolf by Jack London

Fourth report in my summer reading of “ocean fiction,” novels in which the ocean is more than just backdrop, but an actual character.  Suggestions welcome for further reading.

It’s hard to know which character in Jack London’s Sea Wolf we should hate and fear more -  ship captain Wolf Larsen, or the ocean itself.  Both personify danger and destruction, both seem without feeling or compassion.  They roil and rage, kill and maim the crew, are unpredictable, yet full of surprises from their depth.  One of them has to win, and in the end, guess which it is?  Time and tide wait for no man. 

But it’s quite a fight.  I was exhausted after finishing it.  Hell, I was exhausted after every page. 

In each of my summer reading ocean novels the ocean character has personified danger and mystery (Manhattan Beach – diving deep, Essex Serpent – murky fen shores, Old Man and the Sea - I fought the sea and the sea won.)  But I was still hungry for a sort of old-fashioned high seas adventure story, so I picked Sea Wolf.  I surely got that.   But I was surprised at all the philosophy and religion on the stormy seas as well.  

When I told my husband that I had just started to read Sea Wolf, he said, Oh yes, they made a movie about it with Edward G Robinson as the hated sea captain, and with Ida Lupino.  Ida Lupino?  There’s a woman in the story?  Don’t tell me anymore, I said, but I couldn’t help wonder when the female character was going to show up on the high seas.  Turns out it’s not until almost 2/3 of the way through the book, and for many critics the book flounders from then on.  Just keep the macho men debating the meaning of life and trying to stay alive. 

But I am getting ahead of myself.  The narrator is a gentleman scholar named Humphry Van Weyden, who is rescued from a deadly San Francisco Bay foggy ferry accident by a seal hunting schooner bound for Japan.  The vile and vital captain, Wolf Larsen, refuses to return our hero to shore.  For weeks at sea he dominates and derides him, forcing this overeducated and unskilled gentleman to be first a cabin boy and then a ship mate.

Author Jack London was, like Wolf Larsen, a self educated adventurer from poverty and a dysfunctional family.  London was already a success when this book was published in 1904, especially from his Klondike adventure tale, Call of the Wild.   He went on to great fame and fortune, adventure travel and political writing, drinking, death at age 40.   He had worked on trawlers himself, and as a pirate, so his descriptions of sailing pre-GPS and automated rigging are vivid and as far as I can tell, accurate.  As are the accounts of the bludgeoning of seals, and the cynical assessment, even by the hunters, that the slaughter is an unnecessary waste simply for rich vain women in Europe.

Wolf Larsen delights in making cruel fun of our weak narrator, but when he finds out he is a scholar, Wolf demands they debate immortality and immorality, quoting Milton, Spenser, and Darwin between throwing crew members overboard.  Wolf seems to have no morals, cares nothing about his crew, kills a few of them, sails them into danger, sadistically taunts and maims them.  Van Heyden tries to maintain his faith in humanity and meaning, but in his fight for simple survival he becomes a bit hardened and cynical like Wolf.

Maud Brewster shows up in the story as another shipwreck rescue, near Japan’s shore, but likewise held hostage by Wolf.   She is almost too perfect a salvation for our hero Humphry Van Heyden, they turn out to know each other’s work as scholars and critics and poets, and she can hold her own against both male thinkers.  But boys will be boys, wolves will be wolves, and both men fall for her.  Humphry the gentleman represses his true feelings painfully and unrealistically until the very last page, but Wolf of course tries to rape her, and that motivates the two literary types to manage their own escape from the ship (aptly named The Ghost) and manage to land on a deserted island in the Aleutians.

It becomes a Robinson Crusoe type tale as they struggle to rebuild their damaged boat and get out of there by winter.  Ambrose Bierce said of the novel, "The great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen... the hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime... The love element, with its absurd suppressions, and impossible proprieties, is awful.”  London is quoted as saying he added in that part of the story because he knew people would like it, he said there is nothing wrong with giving readers what they want.  One could argue that the only way London could get past the inevitable cruelty of the ocean, and of “man,” is to introduce a love interest, and at least she is intelligent and capable.  (In the movie versions Maud, Ida Lupino, is transformed into a dopey con woman – Hollywood doesn’t do intelligent capable women.)

Romantic that I am, I liked having Maud come on the scene, and I was pretty sure they would make it, which they do.  But Wolf shows up at the very end and almost thwarts their escape. His whole crew has abandon him and he is dying but still manages almost to destroy their ship by fire.  Even facing death he doesn’t change, he never says I was wrong, I’m sorry.  Like the ocean, he is relentless, immoral, amoral, bent to take down everything with him.

Also like the ocean, there is no real ending to the tale, besides Wolf’s death.  We do not know if Maud and Humphry can become hopeful poets again or if the sea has scoured them of morality.  Surely they are wiser.  And much better sailors.  But I must admit, it is Wolf Larsen’s character that lingers in my memory.  He makes me cringe and despair, but I can’t let him go.  I almost hated to see him die.  Almost.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter