THE OTHER GREAT AMERICAN DREAM: TO WRITE OUT FOR THE TERRITORY

Author: By Edward Hoagland

Date: SUNDAY, April 19, 1998

Page: N4

Section: Books

Jack London first won our hearts when we were kids and read about his wolf dogs, White Fang and Buck, novelized in the Far Northwest -- much in the same way that his literary hero Rudyard Kipling had won Jack's with Mowgli's wolf pack, and Shere Khan the tiger, Bagheera the panther, Baloo the bear, Hathi the elephant, and Kaa the python, in ``The Jungle Book,'' which was published in 1894 (having been written in Brattleboro, Vt.), nine years before ``The Call of the Wild.'' Critics may underrate Kipling and London as simplistic or politically passe at their own peril, because both authors' physical daring, international bent, sympathy for the underdog, and love of nature weigh deeply with many people. And if you find yourself like me, at 64, on a ferryboat on the Brahmaputra River in India, and later the same year making your ninth visit to Alaska, you're going to recognize once again that these guys could write!

Jack London resembles another generous-hearted spendthrift American who traveled just as precariously, captured a central public event, and died even younger. In Stephen Crane's case, ``The Red Badge of Courage'' memorializes the Civil War, not the Klondike Gold Rush. But Crane also wrote our first novel of the life of a prostitute, ``Maggie: A Girl of the Streets'' (1893), as Jack did our first boxing novel, ``The Game'' (1905), and Crane covered the Greco-Turkish and Spanish-American wars as a newsman. Jack was not an artist of the stature of his fellow seaman Melville, not a rhapsodist as imperishable as Twain on the Mississippi, or a naturalist-radical as potent an inspiration as Henry David Thoreau. London did help considerably to radicalize other writers, however, with books like ``Martin Eden'' and ``The Iron Heel.'' So did the much longer-lived Theodore Dreiser, who like Jack was often a clumsy stylist (though London added romance to Dreiser's brew). Frank Norris was another kindred spirit in this regard.

Crane, London, Dreiser, and Norris are touching folk, as we look back, along with their softer-edged, still popular contemporaries, Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson. But let's, too, award Jack London -- because of his extraordinary energy and reckless zest for wandering -- an honorary membership in the great corps and cadre of American explorers: William Bartram, John James Audubon, Lewis and Clark, John C. Fremont, Josiah Gregg, George Catlin, John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, and John Muir. All wrote books that remain fun to read. Bartram and Audubon we remember for their portraits of the Southeast; Powell and Gregg for the Southwest; King and Muir for the High Sierras; and Lewis and Clark, as well as Catlin and Fremont, for traveling across the Great Plains into the Rocky Mountains.

The canon of the genre should also include a lesser-known gem, Osborne Russell's ``Journal of a Trapper.'' Russell was a Maine farm boy, born in 1814, who first went to sea, then joined the Northwest Fur Trapping and Trading Company in the old-growth forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Later he became a judge and legislator in the Oregon Territory, and finally a miner and riverboat operator during the California Gold Rush. But in between, during the years 1834-'43, he worked for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, the American Fur Company, and the Hudson's Bay Company, with such flamboyant figures as Nathaniel Wyeth, Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, and Joseph Meek, trapping beaver around the headwaters of the Snake and Yellowstone rivers, in the heart of the Rockies.

Meek came after Lewis and Clark, of course, but just on the heels of Catlin and just before Fremont, scribbling his vivid journal -- incomparable for what it is, and still, in the University of Nebraska edition, rather innocent of punctuation or paragraphing, as indeed it ought to be. (``Reader,'' he begins, ``if you are in search of the travels of a Classical and Scientific tourist, please to lay this volume down, and pass on, for this simply informs you what a Trapper has seen and experienced . . . among the wild regions of the Rocky Mountains . . . chiefly educated in Nature's School under that rigid tutor experience.'')

Jack London was of a later generation, but wouldn't have known Russell's book because it lay lost in an attic until 1914. Marx and Nietzsche influenced him more than any explorer. As an autodidact, he was self-created, but so in a sense are we all. And like Thoreau, from a different angle, he made unrespectable activity seem plausible and admirable to a young writer like me -- an Ivy Leaguer riding a railroad flatcar under the moonlight across the Midwest in 1951. I, too, later published a boxing novel, and a frontier journal, and a novel about the wilderness of the Northwest (incorporating as characters, incidentally, some of my favorite dogs). But one doesn't write about subjects like boxing or settings such as the deep woods because Hemingway or Jack London did: rather, for the same reasons they did -- an elemental relevance.

The appeal of a talented, decent, frenetic man, tirelessly groping for what to think and do, while burning the candle at both ends, is why we like Orwell, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, and on and on (B. Traven, Nelson Algren, Jack Kerouac) -- not to mention some authors not quite so decent, like Hemingway, Mailer, and Ambrose Bierce. Admiration for courage and empathy for the underdog, yet a fascination with evil -- Conrad, Dickens, London, and Faulkner share this with us. And the skein of early reading that gels formativelyin a young writer may be as hard to reconstruct as the makeup of a swirl of wild geese you saw flying overhead while lying on your back in the grass as a kid. It might include ``The Story of Dr. Dolittle'' and ``The Circus of Dr. Lao,'' as well as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London, and peripatetic geniuses of literature, like Homer, Cervantes, Chaucer, Rabelais, Fielding, and Swift.

The pell-mell, risky, devoted life. What better aim might one wish for?