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The Call of the Wild
I’ve never read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. But tonight I happened to see the 1972 movie of it starring Charlton Heston, on a video cassette in such poor shape maybe a quarter of the dialog was understandable. A crude, almost amateurishly made film, yet something about it, some primitive quality, held me to it, and in the end it was quite moving. It conveys that same sense of the Yukon and the Klondike that you get from Robert Service’s great poems, a primal land, beyond everything familiar, where the excitement of just being alive is such that you’re equally ready to strike it rich or die trying. I was on a river trip on the Tatshenshini River in the Yukon and British Columbia about 15 years ago, and Service’s poems capture the feeling of that land, and so, in an unexpected way, does this movie—which by the way was made in Norway. I just found this at the Robert Service website:
“The only society I like,” he once said, “is that which is rough and tough—and the tougher the better. That’s where you get down to bedrock and meet human people.” He found that kind of society in the Yukon gold rush, and he immortalized it. Jed W. writes:
You’ve got to read the book. When I was a kid, it was my favorite and I probably read it seven or eight times. It’s a great yarn, simply and powerfully written offering a window on a place and time by someone who was there. The attitudes, mores and behavior are almost from another planet and we could use a little of it today.Thucydides writes:
I was glad to see your piece on London’s Call of the Wild and Robert Service’s poetry. During the ’90s, I did some expedition dog-mushing north of Bettles, AK, in the Gates of the Arctic. Being out in winter was hard work. Modern equipment and clothing helps enormously, but there is still a very thin line between being just fine, and being in deep trouble when you are traveling and camping at temperatures down to -35 degrees F. Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 23, 2008 01:01 AM | Send Email entry |