The Sea Wolf (1904)

My reactions to reading this novel in 1991. Some spoilers follow.

A very enjoyable novel to read -- for about the first half. Brutal, brilliant, relentlessly Darwinian Wolf Larsen, captain of the Ghost, is one of fiction’s great characters. His utter reasoned, selfishness, malicious ruthlessness, and passion for life’s struggle are charismatic. Brutal he may be (and London explicitly compares him to Milton’s Lucifer) but, like Humphrey van Weyden and Maud Brewster, we are fascinated by him, his body, mind, and the soul he would deny. Larsen stands as an eloquent exponent of the pure Darwinian struggle where a man is rewarded by elation for living, for moving. He owes only himself gratification (“piggishness” as Larsen calls it) and knows he must live by preying on other life. But, unlike van Weyden, he makes no distinction between man and the rest of life. Man struggles and preys and is as amoral as any other animal. This great story of dramatized philosophical conflict between Larsen and “sissy” van Weyden’s bookish (Larsen is impressively versed in many matters), civilized, spiritual values is compelling.

Then the character of Maud Brewster is introduced and the novel degenerates. It is not enough that, through contrived coincidence, Brewster and van Weyden know each other. They have to develop a sappily described romance. Granted their demeanor may have seemed natural to London, and Gilligan's introduction indicates his displeasure, but he says London’s personal life was often filled with such nonsense. Brewster is Larsen’s antithesis. This is explicitly stated, and London does an implicit contrast between Larsen’s finely developed body and Brewster’s perceived fraility. Larsen's materialism is compared with Brewster's spirituality. But the dialogue and romantic description is overblown to modern ears. I think London could have portrayed the same events in less grating, shorter ways.

Gilligan is also right in seeing this as sort of a brutal, adult Captain Courageous where Larsen, in his own words, teaches van Weyden to stand “on his own legs”. Unlike Gilligan, I don’t have any particular problems with van Weyden transforming from scrawny, pretensious, bookish, isolated, pampered literary critic to hardened, practical man of the sea who has seen man’s brutality and accepted a bit of the vista Larsen has shown of life. He is willing to revert to the primitive in protecting his “woman”.

This savagery of the animal kingdom shows up elsewhere in the novel. Leach’s constant challenges to Larsen seem like a young pup challenging the alpha wolf of a pack. Van Weyden’s protectiveness of Brewster is mirrored in the seal bulls protecting their harem. But Brewster is annoying. I kept hoping Wolf would throw her over the side or somehow shut her up. And both van Weyden and Brewster refuse, being the sensitive, civilized, literary types they are, to gun Larsen down. A shortcoming that Larsen himself berates and mocks. He mocks van Weyden’s squimishness, his inability to act out of self-interest to preserve his interest, to forsake morality and convention for self-gain, to forsake, I suppose, government for anarchy (Larsen, towards the novel’s end, calls himself an anarchist).

I find the conflict for van Weyden’s soul between Larsen and Brewster interesting in terms of London’s own values. To an atheist, materialist Larsen represents a view of life’s struggle, its self-contained value apart from notions of immortality and soul and life’s unfairness towards those less fortunate and the tragedy of brilliance like Larsen’s wasted due to the circumstances its born into. Larsen is unswayed by Brewster sentimental, spiritual arguments right up to the end, even though his body is imprisoning him and the essential quality of life for him -- movement -- is being taken. To London, Brewster’s caring, her gentleness, even towards Larsen, must temper the Darwinian universe and make it a better place for man, but he personally rejected her and van Weyden’s religious values. A brilliant character in Larsen that transcends the book’s faults -- including the Ghost coincidentally showing up on Endeavor Island or the obvious symbology in Larsen’s illness.

I'll quickly forgive incredible plot-lines if something else redeems a novel -- interesting characters, good sentences, snappy dialog. Here, London moves solidly towards redemption, with excellent passages about the handling of sailing ships and insight into the lives of isolated men doing difficult, demanding work. But he doesn't get there.

Humphrey Van Weyden, a "man of letters" is shipwrecked and picked up by the sealing schooner Ghost with the brutal (but smart and beautiful) Wolf Larson as master, headed off to the sealing grounds in the North Pacific. Van Weyden is made cabin-boy, then mate (with no sailing experience and without objection from the crew), from which position in a couple of months he learns everything he needs to know to later re-fit a beached and de-masted wrecked ship and sail it out of a small cove on a lee shore. Then Maude Brewster, a poet beloved (in her poetry) by Van Weyden is also picked up by the Ghost, also a victim of shipwreck. They escape the Ghost on one of the hunting boats and are shipwrecked on a small island deserted except for thousands of seals. Then the Ghost, with only Larson, now blind, on board, wrecks in the same small cove Brewster and Van Weyden have settled in. While Larson slowly dies, Van Weyden and Maude refit the ship and sail it off, declaring their love just before they are picked up by a mail boat.

Uh huh.

It's worth reading, for the yarn and for some of the dialog (not, though, the philosophical discussions) -- I'm sure that like me, everyone thrills to cries of "Boat Ho!" and "Stand by that jib with Johnson and Oofty! The rest of you tail aft to the mainsheet! Lively now! or I’ll sail you all into Kingdom Come! Understand?" And there's this appreciation of being at sea in a storm: "And oh, the marvel of it! the marvel of it! That tiny men should live and breathe and work, and drive so frail a contrivance of wood and cloth through so tremendous an elemental strife."

London covered the intellectual matter better in Martin Eden, I think, but whereas that's a better story, this one is better told. ( )

Caution: The Sea Wolf is full of examples of man's inhumanity to man. If you are easily upset by callous disregard of the health and safety of others, you will not enjoy this book. Further, the book describes many of the worst abuses of the ways that seals were hunted for their fur.

On the surface, The Sea Wolf is a story about seal hunting expeditions to the Bering Sea. Beneath the surface, this book is an allegory about the nature of a human's life.

In The Sea-Wolf, London's most gripping novel, Humphrey Van Weyden is rescued from the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay by a demonic sea captain and introduced to fates far worse that death. Through this story London recalls his own adventures on a sealing vessel at the age of seventeen. ( )

The story opens with a collision of a ferry with another ship during a foggy night in the middle of the bay of San Francisco. One of the passengers, the literary man Humphrey Van Weyden finds himself in the cold water fighting for his life. Seconds before drowning, he is pulled into a rescue boat. He recovers on board of an outbound sailing-ship, a seal-hunting schooner plunging through the waves en route to the Northern Pacific. The surprised Van Weyden expects and demands to be brought back to shore. But he soon enough understands that he is on board of a floating hell, ruled by captain Larsen, a brutal, yet highly intelligent skipper. The captain known under his nickname Wolf is a terrible figure terrorizing his men and using his exceptional physical strength to knock down every hint of protest. Larsen has picked drowning Van Weyden out of the water for the simple reason to replace a sailor who has drunk himself to death. The survivor's protests are rapidly smothered. Van Weyden, an academic intellectual, is totally unprepared for the harsh life on board. The work, the people, the life around him, are simply too hard for him. Larsen, however is interested in him and amuses himself with a social experiment: can he “educate” the fad to survive on the ship. Wolf advices him and occasionally helps him to survive in a world, Van Weyden, in an earlier life, could not even imagine.

Read full review at :

http://macumbeira-macumbeira.blogspot.com/2011/03/whats-wrong-with-ol-jack.html

A gentlemen is taken aboard a schooner full of seal hunters captained by a much-feared and revered Wolf Larsen who kidnaps him who replace a fallen crew member. It is a wonderfully told tale although I must admit that, having only a minimal amount of nautical experience, I found some of the more detailed sailing terminology a bit confusing. Fans of Mr London's other notable works will certainly not be disappointed by this one. ( )