The self-dramatizing Nietzschean is always very much present. In the canine battle scenes, for example, London analyzes with an almost absurd and quite human confidence the various “tactics” employed by the participants.

But Buck possessed a quality that made for greatness—imagination. He fought by instinct, but he could fight by head as well. He rushed, as though attempting the old shoulder trick, but at the last instant swept low to the snow and in. His teeth closed on Spitz’s left fore leg. There was a crunch of breaking bone, and the white dog faced him on three legs. Thrice he tried to knock him over, then repeated the trick and broke the right fore leg.

Anyone who has ever seen dogs fighting knows that such subtleties as “the old shoulder trick” do not occur; if the affair is not merely one of a good deal of threatening noise, then one dog just goes for the other in any way possible. When London describes what dogs do rather than what they “think”—how they look when listening, how they appear when in repose, how they pace when restless or hungry—he is very good. When he makes a primitive philosopher of the dog in the same sense in which the author is himself a primitive philosopher, the result is less convincing. One believes of Bâtard that in five years “he heard but one kind word, received but one soft stroke of a hand, and then he did not know what manner of things they were.” It is quite conceivable that a dog that had never received such treatment would not know how to respond. On the other hand, Buck’s mystique of racial fulfillment, his metaphysical musculature, are so plainly impossible that one is tempted to forgo passages like:

He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

Likewise, White Fang’s encounter with the Californian electric streetcars “that were to him colossal screaming lynxes” is not the product of a first-rate imagination. London merely knew that, since White Fang had lived in the Arctic and lynxes also lived there, and since lynxes sometimes make noises and streetcars also make them, he could feel justified in combining these items in a figure of speech the reader would be inclined to take as reasonable because neither reader nor lynx nor London nor streetcars could prove it was not. A moment’s reflection, however, should disclose how far-fetched the image is; the dog would simply have been bothered by the utter unfamiliarity of the machine, would simply have apprehended it as a large noise-making something, though assuredly no lynx.

White Fang was conceived as a “complete antithesis and companion piece to The Call of the Wild.” London averred that “I’m going to reverse the process. Instead of the devolution or decivilization of a dog, I’m going to give the evolution, the civilization of a dog—development of domesticity, faithfulness, love, morality, and all the amenities and virtues.” Yet, why is White Fang—more than twice as long as The Call of the Wild and a good deal more virtue-bent in the human sense of intention, a story in which the animal protagonist ends not as the leader of a pack of wild wolves but crooning his “love-growl” amidst a chorus of city women rubbing his ears and calling him the Blessed Wolf—why is it so markedly inferior to the story of reversion? Largely, I think, because the events depicted in The Call of the Wild are closer to what one wants to see happen: because we desire the basic, the “natural,” the “what is” to win and not the world of streetcars and sentimentalism that we have made. Thus, in a sense, if we accede to London’s narrative we also are approving of God and his white, mocking malevolence, his “Law” maintaining sway over all the irrelevances and over-subtleties of mechanized life. We like the author for putting the perspective in this way, and especially in a way as forthright, inexorable, exciting, and involving as he commands.

The key to London’s effectiveness is to be found in his complete absorption in the world he evokes. The author is in and committed to his creations to a degree very nearly unparalleled in the composition of fiction. The resulting go-for-broke, event-intoxicated, headlong wild-Irish prose-fury completely overrides a great many stylistic lapses and crudities that would ordinarily cause readers to smile. As Orwell notes, “the texture of the writing is poor, the phrases are worn and obvious, and the dialogue is erratic.”

True, but it is nonetheless also true that London has at his best the ability to involve the reader in his story so thoroughly that nothing matters but what happens; in this sense he is basic indeed. His primary concern is action, with no pause to allow the savoring of verbal nuances or subtleties of insight. “La vérité, c‘est dans la nuance,” said Flaubert. London would have left that notion behind in the dog blood crystallizing on the ice floe, the eddying plume of a miner’s frozen breath. His style is in presenting what is, and that only. As a writer London is at his most compelling in “presentational immediacy”; the more the passage relates to the nerves and feelings of the body, the more effective it is.

As he turned to go on, he spat speculatively. There was a sharp, explosive crackle that startled him. He spat again. And again, in the air, before it could fall to the snow, the spittle crackled. He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle had crackled in the air.

He is an artist of violent action, exemplifying what the American poet Allen Tate meant when he said: “I think of my poems as commentaries on those human situations from which there is no escape.” Once caught in London’s swirling, desperate, life-and-death violence, the reader has no escape either, for it is a vision of exceptional and crucial vitality. London’s most characteristic tales have the graphic power of the best cinema, and I for one hope that the film medium has not exhausted such possibilities as the latest adaptations assayed seem to encourage.