How Wild Is the Call?

This evening, Joyce and I will head out to see the latest film version of The Call of the Wild. (Yes, there have been numerous others--one with Clark Gable and Loretta Young in 1935.)

Those of you who know me well--especially my former students at Harmon Middle School in Aurora, Ohio--know that, for me, this will not be just any old film. For, you see, I taught that novel to my 8th graders for nearly fifteen years. (I also had students read it, later, at Western Reserve Academy, where I taught high school juniors after my retirement from  public school in January 1997--but it was an "outside reading," and we didn't really get into it with anything like the detail my classes did back at Harmon.)

I had been away from Harmon for four years when I returned to end my public-school career there in the fall of 1982. In our literature anthology, Exploring Literature, there was Wild, at the end of the volume, serving as the example of the "novel" genre.

I had never read the book. I had read other works by Jack London (Martin Eden and The Sea-Wolf), but I'd read only the old Classics Illustrated comic-book version of the novel--novella, actually: It's quite short.

I did not know, starting to teach it, that the anthology editors had made some cuts and alterations, leaving out the moments when Buck begins to have his ancestral dreams--cave men and all. (This must have been a move to appease those who believe in more religious stories about the age of the earth?)

I was wildly ignorant about the background of the novella--the Klondike Gold Rush, the Yukon Territory. To me, all of that was just, you know, "up in the North." Alaska, Yukon--it's all the same, isn't it?

No.

I've always hated my own ignorance about what I was teaching, so I set out to remedy it with Jack London and Wild.

And so ...

• I read all fifty of his books.
• I read every biography about him.
• I read all the histories of the Klondike Gold Rush.
• In the summer of 1990 I was chosen to participate in a six-week seminar on London and his work at Sonoma State University (in Rohnert Park, California)--sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our teacher was Dr. Earle Labor, the world's authority on London and his work, and it was under his kind tutelage that I began to plan a new annotated edition of Wild. It came out in 1995, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, who also issued a paperback edition of the novel (fewer annotations and pictures and maps). In 1997 Scholastic Press published my YA bio of London. Little did I know that a writer named J. K. Rowling (know her?) would later publish her Harry Potter novels with Scholastic! Her books sold a wee bit better than mine.

Best of all--I traveled all over Jack London-land: from California to the Yukon (twice); I even hiked the Chilkoot Trail, the trail over the Alaska mountains into the Yukon Territory, the trail that figures so preeminently in Wild.

Oh, and the libraries and archives I visited! From Yale to Berkeley.

I guess you could say I OD'd on London and his book, and by the time it was all over (in 1997), I was absolutely saturated. And by then, I'd gotten interested in another writer, Mary Shelley, and she consumed another decade (or so) of my life.

I ain't got no more decades to devote, so I have smaller ambitions now--ones that don't require much (if any) travel--except in my head.

So ... off to the movies we'll go tonight. I am not so naive as to think the film will follow the novella with near-religious adherence--no movie does that--or really can do that. Each is a different medium with different narrative techniques in its toolkit.

And ... I have seen some of the trailers, and I know that Buck is a CGI dog ... and I've noticed some odd details about the terrain and the "look" of the characters and their implements.

I'm also guessing (based only on the trailers) that the filmmakers are aiming this version at children? (Could be wrong--we'll see.)

And I'll end by saying that one of the big surprises I had when I read the book for the first time in the spring of 1983: This is no children's book.

MORE IN BLOG TOMORROW