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Jack London: An American Classic with Elizabeth Stice · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide water dog, strong of muscle and with warm long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because men groping in the Arctic darkness had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs with strong muscles by which to toil and furry coats to protect them from the frost.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: So wrote the American novelist Jack London in opening what may be his most famous novel today, Call of the Wild.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Published in 1903, it is set during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: But London was not a one-hit wonder.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: During his short life, he published numerous short stories, many of them set in the Klondike Gold Rush.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I still remember from my childhood reading about men who would walk outside and test the temperature by spitting.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: If the spit turned to ice by the time it hit the ground, you knew it was a cold day.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Not sure what you were supposed to do with that information.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe pile on more layers.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he also published a number of other novels, including White Fang, The Sea Wolf, and the dystopian novel The Iron Heel.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Neo Orthodoxy.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: And today I'm really excited to talk about Jack London as an American classic with Elizabeth Stice.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: She is professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University, where she also serves as the assistant director of the Frederick M.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Supper Honors Program.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: She is the author of Empire Between the Lines, Imperial Culture in British and French trench newspapers of World War I.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you can find her essays and articles all over the place, including Mere Orthodoxy, Front Porch Republic, Christianity Today, Comment, and many, many more.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: So Elizabeth, thank you for taking the time.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: So this is kind of an this is going to be a kind of different conversation perhaps from some, because usually we pick a particular novel, but today we're focusing on a particular author just as a whole.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll refer to a variety of his works as we talk.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: But first, the question: what is a classic?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I've thought about this because I I knew you were going to ask me this.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't have a perfect answer for this, but I think a couple things.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: So one would be readability, like the ability to reread it and still enjoy it and get something from it.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's an important part of being a classic.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the other thing that makes for me a book stand the test of time would be the way it addresses deeper questions and deeper issues.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe helps you even ask some of those questions, doesn't necessarily answer them all, but ask the big questions about life.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think Jack London's books do both of those things.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I really like this that really good classics ask difficult questions.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: They might not have all the answers, but at least they tell us which questions matter.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: So on a related note, you read extremely widely, and especially in the classics, but really you just read extremely widely.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: So before we get specifically into Jack London, I was wondering if you could tell us about your reading habits and reading routine.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I do read, I read a lot, I would say.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess I do read pretty widely.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: So how I read widely is I just read the things that interest me.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, I also read things for for work that are relevant for teaching or that I need to read for certain research in history.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I also, if something interests me, I'll just pick it up.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's one way that I end up being pretty widely read.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I've mentioned this to you before, but I kind of have a practice where maybe there's something I have to read for a review or for a class, and then I'll read another book sort of as like a reward between.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's actually where a lot of Jack London fits in.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of between other books.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have to read him for anything, but I enjoy reading to reading him.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not going to get into the whole audiobook debate, but I will say Jack London is great on audiobook.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: They're really good listens.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's that's there too.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: So that's part of it.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: I have a a minimum, I always read at least four books per month, and I've been doing that for a number of years.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing is just this the thing that everybody says, which is just if you have a book on hand, it's a lot easier to read a lot of books.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: So trying to carry a book with me a lot of the time.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think those are kind of my secrets.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: I know you run a lot also.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Do you ever listen to audiobooks while running?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: I I will read a book while walking on the treadmill.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds dangerous.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you're walking, it's not that bad.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't walk that fast on the treadmill.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: But if I'm running, I usually just do music.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's fair.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's talk about Jack London.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: So for those who might have heard his name, or maybe not even that, but just need a basic introduction.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like what who was he?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of writer and what makes him still worth reading today?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I think Jack London is also, I think he would just be an interesting person, even if he wasn't a great writer.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think he is a great writer, but he's also just an interesting person.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And born at, I think, one of the really interesting time periods, so right at the end of the 19th century.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: So born in 1876, and then he dies quite young.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: He dies in 1916.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he's he's out west, he's in California.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: He does go up to the Klondike a little bit.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: He also sails, he sails out to Hawaii, he kind of sails partway around the world at different points.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: So he travels, he goes out to sea uh for on a, I think a whaling ship for a bit.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: So he's he's just this kind of young adventurer, and he talks about that in his nonfiction books a lot.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: He's someone who seeks, quote, the adventure path.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's sort of how he he thinks of it.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he's very, to me, it's like a classic American character and an American type.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it's this young man who's like filled with energy and has to seek out danger and excitement and thrills.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: And he definitely is that guy.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: One of my favorites is John Barleycorn, which is his account of his alcoholism.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly enough.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: But he when he's describing his youth, at one point he's an oyster pirate outside in California.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: So he's breaking the law, illegally harvesting oysters, and he's on a ship called the Razzle Dazzle.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's his boat that he owns, and he's doing that.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: He's only 15 or 16.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: So he's another one of those people who sort of leaves home early, does a lot of things, but he also, his family doesn't have a lot of money.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: They live on a farm for a little bit when he's young.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: He's out at sea, he's out on the bay.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: He spends a bit of time tramping.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: He's a hobo riding the rails, goes all the way to the east, comes back.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: He works, he works in a factory for a bit, so he's familiar firsthand with industrial labor, and that's a big theme within his work, the way the uh the bottom tenth, the lower tenth are really oppressed by the upper classes.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Then he becomes this total autodidact, this completely self-taught person, and then a famous novelist.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then he's still seeking adventure while he's doing that.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's when he ends up, he builds this boat, the snark, and they sail and all kinds of things.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So he's he's just one of those people who's always up to something.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think doesn't fit really easily into his his society.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: There are people like him that he hangs out with, but he's he doesn't fit easily into a lot of the boxes that he's in.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: He becomes this prominent socialist, all kinds of things.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's just a really interesting, uh dynamic person.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: A true rebel.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think so.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also funny, um, as you were talking, I was uh thinking off the top of my head, there's so many uh of these 19th century American classic writers whose education, quote unquote, came from sailing or just like living a really adventurous life.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Reminded of Mark Twain, for instance.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, and you think about Mel.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: See.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I know there was an article out maybe, I don't know, uh what whatever time this comes out, six months ago, we'll say, from whenever this is out, or eight months ago.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it was talking about the end of the adventurous writers.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: So somebody like Tom McGwane is probably one of the last American writers who maybe has a real claim to the kind of traditional masculinity of you know, like riding horses and fishing and things like that.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like that that kind of died out as we hit this new century.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have a lot of figures like that.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Hunter S.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thompson, I think, was a wild man and a writer, I would say.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I don't know.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: We have a little bit less, maybe worldly experience.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Even JD Salinger, I think he was at D-Day.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't think of him as this wildly adventurous figure, but he had some real life experiences too.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a good reminder that to write um really deep fiction, you have to have real life experiences.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps a lot of writers don't today.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a podcast for Christians reading classics.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: And London was not a Christian, though.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: So what would you say to Christians who approach his works and find some morally compromised individuals, or even like the work you mentioned on uh alcoholism?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I think he's not a Christian.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: He definitely would not say that he is, and I think he's pretty dismissive of Christianity.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're looking for that, you will not be thrilled with Jack London.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, I think he gives us a really good sense of humanity and what humans are like.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: So part of what I love about that book, John Barleycorn, is he's he's not happy to be an alcoholic at all.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it opens up with him saying he doesn't really believe in women having the right to vote, but he's gonna vote in favor of it because he believes women will put prohibition through.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what men like him need, and he doesn't count on men to do it.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: So you see this this frustration he has with his own, his own weakness.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then the book is really very, very much his account of kind of how he ended up here, and it records a lot of the different social pressures he was under to drink at different points.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't start off liking alcohol at all, but he realized this is kind of what men do.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: We go to the bar, he buys a drink, I buy a drink, we say nice things about each other, this is how people bond, this is how respect is earned.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And he talks, so I think he's really good at identifying how society shapes us to act in certain ways or pushes us in certain directions.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's relevant for us, even if he's not a Christian, he's really good at at showing that.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he does that in his fiction as well.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: But in John Barleycorn, it's very personal, kind of how he ends up here.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's that's really helpful.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing is I find really interesting about him is on the one hand, he's this uh socialist who really has a bleeding heart for the poor because he comes from the poor.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he he writes very much about his own experiences being poor, you know, working those those terrible days and getting, you know, nothing, nothing in pay, and basically having no mental energy left to do anything either.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I think he helps helps you develop more sympathy for people who are in those positions, which I think a lot of a lot of us in this century and in America, and as Christians are often not really we're not reading a lot of those things firsthand or having a sense of what those experiences might be like.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a sympathy there.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also very interesting to me because on the one hand, he's he's this, but then he's also very he also has this kind of social Darwinist edge in some of his work.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a real tension that's playing out there between him believing that certain people are stronger and probably should triumph, but then also very much thinking the poor should not be left behind, and it's not right that they should be crushed by the by the strong.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so that that tension is there, playing out in a really interesting way.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's very easy sometimes for Christians to think of people who are very openly non-Christian as being very simplistic or like, oh, they just think this.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you can't read Jack London and come away thinking he's not a complicated person, and realizing that there are ways in which people might be very sympathetic to Christianity, but also conflicted about it at the same time.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, I don't know, I get frustrated with apologetics that just focuses on what people are getting wrong.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like you think this, but you're wrong.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's this.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think in many cases, the people who are most openly hostile to Christianity, there's something that they're seeking that we probably actually know something about.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think about the people who one of their frustrations with Christianity is they feel like there's a lack of justice or belief in justice.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, let me tell you about this guy, God, because he actually cares a lot about justice.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a way in which maybe he can bring about a justice that you can't even comprehend, much less achieve.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the only real hope is is there.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think he helps identify the ways in which we see some of that yearning, even in people who might be hostile.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: There are things that a lot of people want that maybe we know something about.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: And there's so much of pursuit of something better.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like the characters uh London writes about are always looking for something, that that thing that they feel like they should be able to grasp.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just out of their out of their reach.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um could we talk a little bit about the Klondike Gold Rush?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's exactly so.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: He's uh he's concerned about the poor, and here he is in this age where gold has been discovered and everyone rushes northward, and of course, it affects even the dogs, as we learn in the novel Call of the Wild, um, which tells the story of the Klondike Gold Rush through the perspective really of dogs who are affected, no less than humans.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, what do we make of all of this?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: And what did uh London make of this?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because this was really formative for his life.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, and he has his own brief experience up north where they don't really make any money.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: He goes up with his brother-in-law and they don't they don't really get anywhere.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's that's a pretty that's most people's Klondike experience, honestly, is to either not survive and not make any money, or survive but not make any money.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Very few people really got rich.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's there's yeah, kind of the realistic expectations about about rushes.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, we see gold rushes of different varieties all the time.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're seeing an AI rush right now.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's been a tech boom.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: We know there was like a real estate rush right before the real estate crash, all these types of things.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: So there's there's something about, you know, modern capitalism, as everybody's always talking about, that this kind of boom and bust cycle.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we see that in his books in a way which we might not see in a book from the 1600s, 1700s.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So he's close enough to us to kind of understand that type of thing.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that sense of people just trying to get lucky and strike it rich and getting into things they don't really understand.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the Klondike being very dangerous.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you pointed out, um, you know, you spit and maybe it turns to ice before it hits the ground.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's not really a place for amateurs, you know, who don't really know any, especially in many cases coming from the cities, thinking, well, I'm a poor person in this city, but I'm gonna go to the Klondike and get rich.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, what do you know about survival, you know, in these really harsh conditions where the roads aren't real?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: And have you ever managed dogs before?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, do you know how to lead a dog team?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know what that means?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: The answer is no.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people don't do well.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, and the I recently read his his biography by Earl Labor, and he said one of the advantages that Jack London had was his time at sea.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So he was used to harsh conditions, and he was also used to confined quarters because there's points at which, when you're up in Alaska and the Yukon, you can't you can't really go outside that much.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: You're all kind of trapped in a little cabin together, and that his his seafaring experience prepared him to be to be around other people.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think the other thing that's interesting to me for his Klondike tales, especially in Call of the Wild, you have he has a strong sense of there's some more primal human nature, something more basic.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: The character of Buck the Dog, he always he starts to hear the Call of the Wild.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: He starts to hear something, he's not sure what it is.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's calling him back to some earlier existence, something more basic.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And in the end, I mean, not really spoiler because the book's been out for over 100 years.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: He goes off to live with the wolves.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: But he has, he starts seeing visions of uh like an earlier, earlier form of evolution human being.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's like a hairy man by a fire, and he's like, I don't know when this was, but I remember it.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I think London had that sense of himself too, that there's some more basic primal form of existence.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's part of why he's on the adventure path, something more elemental.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: But that high society is in his time especially very refined, very focused on manners.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's a right and wrong way to do things.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: People don't talk about real things.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: They talk, you know, very much on the surface of things.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's very frustrating to him.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: But I would say that's, I mean, you're always hearing different people talking about masculinity, bringing up exactly that issue.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Has society feminized us or weakened us?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Or is it focusing so much on refinement and not on like the real things or developing strength?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that comes up in a lot of his books in a way that's intriguing to a lot of readers.
• 18:32
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• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's also the question that it seems like he's wrestling with is it good for you to do this as a man?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: Do you really need to go to the Klondike or have some sort of crazy, uh barely survivable, or maybe for some not survivable adventure, to um to grow up and become a full-fledged member of society?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where a lot of people misunderstand him.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: They just see the adventure path and they just see Buck, you know, living out his best life eventually up north in the frozen tundra.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: But really, he's even very critical of that.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: So his book, The Seawolf, you have a very refined man who ends up on a ship with a horrible captain whose job is to basically try to turn him into a Nietzsche and Ubermansch.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that captain is revealed to be horrible.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: The book does not affirm that character at all, even though that's like the most extreme version of something that maybe we would even say Buck is doing a little bit.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then even his book, Martin Eden, which is fiction but it's very biographical, that character is a lot like him.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: And many people see it as affirming of that character, but he actually thought it was not affirming of that character because that character ends up striking off very much on his own.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he actually believes that that extreme of individualism, which is isolation, which is lack of companionship with others, is actually harmful.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: So he he actually thinks there's a line at which you go too far in trying to turn into, you know, something stronger, something more basic, something less sensitive.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: He actually thinks you should have connections with other people and affection and love and some sensitivity, but he does, he thinks maybe a lot of people aren't really where they should be on that spectrum.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: And his own life bears this out.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, after his initial experiments, sailing and going to the Yukon, and of course, like the oyster pirates piracy, um, he seems to spend the rest of his life kind of living more in civilization, not always living the most civilized life, but living it in civilization.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you see that his, I mean, he's married twice.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: His first marriage is really not successful at all.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he does have two children from it who he loves, but they were not, they were not well suited, and he really didn't marry her necessarily out of love.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: That was sort of another experiment he was running.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: He said he was gonna marry someone for practical reasons and not just for affection and romance.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then he found that he did fall in love soon after with someone else.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um but his second his second marriage was much happier.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: And again, that sense of not not that isolation.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't necessarily, I would say, like tame him, as people say.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: They still, I mean, she was with him on that cruise of the snark when they decided to sail off into the Pacific, but he Does start to, you know, try to build a house.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he also takes care of a lot of other people, which people don't realize.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think he has, again, such a strong individualist streak.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: We just see him in that way.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: But for most of his adult life, he's supporting his mother, he's supporting siblings.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's doing a lot of things like that, which definitely do tie him to civilization, even if he's not always in town.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's always involved in the lives of other people in pretty meaningful ways.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we've touched on several of his works already, but would you walk us through a few of your favorites of Jack London's works?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: And especially if you think there's one that you would especially recommend for a first-time reader, where should we start?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sometimes it's hard to say.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can't go wrong with a classic, like Call the Wild or What If.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think those are those are probably the most famous for a reason.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And his ability to write through the eyes of an animal in a way which is moving both when you're young and when you're an adult, I think is pretty powerful.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think I read Jack London as a child and thought, like, this is good stuff.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the last couple of years, I sort of started rereading him.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, actually, this is this is really good stuff.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And um, it's it's not just for children at all.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's there's a lot of things happening in these books and they're operating on a lot deeper level.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he was one of those writers, maybe similar to Amy Tan, who said, I wasn't necessarily trying to put all of these things into a story about dogs, but now that you pointed out, I guess there are all these things in this story about dogs.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's you can't go wrong with White Fang.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: But then I really think a lot of his other things that I've enjoyed are the more autobiographical things.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: So John Barleycorn, which I mentioned, it's really good.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I I mean you don't have that many honest books by people about alcoholism, I think, which are sort of how I ended up here.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of wish I wasn't here, but also there were a lot of thrills along the way.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not, it's not just a like, you know, join the cold water army, stop drinking book.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: But it's very, it's just a really interesting tale of his life.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: He has a really interesting life.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: I really enjoy Martin Eden, even though it's it can be very sad, and that's the one another one's very autobiographical, but it's fictional, about a young man who wants to be a writer, but who has to work at a factory and the friendships, and he falls in love with a society girl and it doesn't work out and all this kind of thing.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: But I I think those I guess part of it is as a historian, getting getting into the life of someone in that time period and what that might look like.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: And in all of his books, there's a lot of other books.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: He he's such a huge reader.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: He was one of those people who I think he only slept like four or five hours a night most of his adult life.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: So he he was, I mean, you should interview him if you could about how do you read so much.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: So he was very famous for always reading, and so he's he's constantly encountering new ideas and new books, and that comes up in a lot of his things.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, let's see.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: I also honestly, one I really like, which I don't know that this would always make the list, but he wrote uh stories of Hawaii.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think because I used to live in Hawaii, I really appreciate that one.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: But he's just really good at at portraying humans.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there are quite a few in there that are pretty powerful.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean, not totally absent some of the racism of his day.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: I will say that.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you pick up stories of Hawaii, or really kind of any of his books, there's always a little bit of that.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: But there are others, like in that one, there's a story called Koolau the Leper in the stories of Hawaii.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you know, there's a leper colony in Hawaii on the island of Molokai.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: I did not know that.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it only shut down in the middle of the 20th century.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's so few people living there.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: So before, I guess now they call it Hansen's disease.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: They don't say leprosy, but before it was curable, they had a practice in Hawaii of basically if if you're found to have if the public health department finds that you have it, they take you from your family and they just take you to this little tiny bit of moleque and drop you off there.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they don't even drop you off in a nice way, like they throw you off the boat and they used to like swim ashore.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's really horrible.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then they never see their family again, right?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: They're just they're just stuck on this leper colony forever.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, Father Damien, this famous Belgian priest, he recently became a saint.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: He was there for years.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: He went there to serve, uh and some nuns also, knowing that eventually he would get it.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a very tragic thing to be caught and to be forcibly taken to a place like that.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Jack London doesn't experience it, but he sees he actually visited the leper colony uh with his wife, Charmian.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he writes really uh movingly about it.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: So here's like an opening line from that story, Ko'ol the leper.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because we are sick, they take away our liberty.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: We have obeyed the law, we have done no wrong, and yet they would put us in prison.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Molokai is a prison, that you know.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it kind of goes on from there.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: He's just, I think, really good at capturing different parts of the angst of the human experience and the dignity of these people who've they've done nothing wrong.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're just sick.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: And yet they're gonna be rounded up by authorities and then basically abandoned in this place.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: And they take people of all ages.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they took like four-year-olds, five-year-olds, you could be a grandmother.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't, it doesn't matter if they if they find that you have it, they're gonna send you there.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you don't have a lot of moving stories by people who are, especially not from Hawaii, picking up on something like that and drawing attention to it.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: That is striking.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it um and it brings to light his interest in justice that we also see um in so many of the other stories.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: And especially the dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, I found it uh really moving.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I that's that's an I think that's another thing that has impressed me about rediscovering Jack London as an adult.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think when I was a child, I was only familiar with maybe with The Call of the Wild and White Fang, which makes sense.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why I would read The Iron Heel when I was like 10.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't really into dystopian socialist works at that time.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: But as an adult, kind of realizing the range of his work is part of what's made him more impressive to me, is thinking, oh, actually, he's written a lot of different types of things and also a lot of different themes.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, that one in which he thinks there's this, there's a future, there's gonna be this socialist revolt.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: He has, I think he has a lot of hope for the workers of the world, you know, really, to be treated better in the future and for them to resist the oppressors and things like that.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, and it's he never kind of gives gives that up.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: At one point, he was a pretty fiery socialist speaker uh in California, and he would get invited to things as like the boy socialist, because I think he was 18 or 19.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: He would give public speeches in favor of socialism.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: So that was definitely part of his his fame.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: But that's the kind of thing that's been lost as maybe we haven't been reading him as consistently over time.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: And now we think, like, oh yeah, he wrote those books about those dogs, right?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: You think actually there's a whole there's a whole socialist side to him that's very real that we often don't really think about.
• 29:33
  unknown: Oops.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's because the dogs are so relatable, man's best friend and all of that.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I hate to play to stereotype, but let's talk a little bit more about those dogs because he is doing something really unusual there too.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: Usually, um, I was thinking how, because I read so much with my kids, and so many of their books have animal protagonists.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: All of the kids' classics, you know, you think of The Velveteen Rabbit, Peter, uh, Peter Rabbit, speaking of, you know, a lot of rabbits.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's uh yeah.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: And here you have uh, and there's certainly dogs as well, uh, in so many of these like kids' early childhood books.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: And yet here we have dog novels that are really serious, they are for adults.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: So what is London doing here, focusing on canine protagonists in Call of the Wild and White Fang, which some people have said they're basically like mirror opposites of each other.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think a few things.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: So uh Earl Labor in that biography of Jack London, he mentions there's a seriousness with which Jack London treats animals that you don't see in a lot of other writers who he takes them seriously as their own characters.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: I really like how at the beginning of The Call of the Wild, Buck, you know, his whole sense of identity has to do with the people around him and his place in this society.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: But by the time we get to the end of the novel, he doesn't really need people anymore.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's maybe because so many of us who are reading these novels, we see uh animals as pets primarily.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like all the dogs that I know, like they all belong to somebody, and their job is to like hang out and be friendly.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, but the idea that these animals would have some identity or destiny that's not just tied to hanging out with us and making us feel good about ourselves, he really sort of sees animals in that way, and it's almost like an animal that doesn't have that sense of bigger purpose has lost its dignity.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't, you know, I mean, the Velveteen Rabbit, the whole way the animal becomes real and gets its dignity is through being loved by a child.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: And in this, it's like, well, it's fine to be loved by a child, but if that's your only identity, then that's that's not that much.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very, it's very different in that way.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a seriousness with which he takes animals, a way of respecting them as their own creatures.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think the character of Buck, I like how he thinks about humans.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some of them he doesn't respect at all, some of them he fears, and then there's one that he comes to really, really love, but it has to be earned.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's yeah, you just normally the animals are more one-dimensional or a little easier to win over.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: And Buck kind of has to be won over.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: He's treated with a level of dignity that I think a lot of the others don't get.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think also the other thing there is that whole, again, that sense of there's the veneer of civilization, but there's a stronger creature underneath.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so the dogs do come from wolves at some point, and Buck, I guess, is closer, closer to wolf than some other other breeds.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so the sense that there is this below the surface, this more primal self that's just kind of waiting to be tapped into.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: And there are these great descriptions of how Buck he doesn't start off like overweight or anything, but by the end, there's a description of, you know, when people pet him, it's all muscle.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's one scene even where it says, you know, I think John Thornton's like red sand along Buck's back, and there's basically like sparks coming up from his fur because he's like so alive.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: I just think, like, yeah, he's like really actualized here.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um Yeah, and I don't think that's not happening with a lot of other animal characters in books.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the character development that the dogs get perhaps more character development than the humans in the dog novels.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: And those, yeah, for sure.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: So one final question that I always ask.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: What classic do you wish you had written and why?
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: I would say any of them.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, I don't know.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great question.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: I would say I if I had written any of the Jack Lyndon books, I would be pretty thrilled with that.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think for sure.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: If I had written Call of the Wild, I think that would be thrilling.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think if I had lived the kind of life that would allow me to write some of his more autobiographical books, then I would be thrilled to have written any of those as well.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um maybe all-time books I would have loved to have written.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: I would say maybe Anna Karinina.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can't go wrong with that one.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's every time I've read it, it's just been so moving.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there's so many passages that are just so powerful.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: If I had been able to write that, that would be really something.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yet again, the tribute to powerful books that we relate to them still.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, what are you looking forward to teaching this fall?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: Which books are you teaching?
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so this fall I'm teaching a historical methods class, and we use the John Fia book in there why study history.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that's always great.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm teaching our honors class, uh, World of Polis and Covenant, so Old Testament and Ancient Greece, and we read a lot of we read a lot of things in there.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then also I'm teaching, I'm teaching World of Reason and Revolt, which is kind of our enlightenment and romanticism class.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: I would say that class I always enjoy when we get to Sorrows of Young Worther because the students always have very strong reactions to that.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: They usually don't like any of the characters, but in very strong ways.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that's always fun.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think for the World of Polis and Covenant.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Last year I did the Iliad, but this year I'm going back to the Odyssey.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: We kind of only have time for one or the other, so I'm eager to get back to the Odyssey.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's gonna be great timing with the movie coming out and all.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: This does seem to be the summer of the Odyssey.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: Several books on it, and the movie, and yeah.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Elizabeth, thank you for sharing a little bit of your life lived with a lot of books, and especially Jack London.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for having me.