The Sea Wolf

Humphrey Van Weyden, a literary intellectual, a man who, by his own admission, “had known life only in its intellectual phases,” is shipwrecked near the California coast and drifts out to sea. He is rescued by the seal-hunting crew of a schooner called the Ghost and enters the world of its captain, Wolf Larsen. And Larsen’s world, by contrast, is life in its physical phases. He tells Van Weyden,

This body was made for use. These muscles were made to grip, and tear, and destroy living things that get between me and life. But have you thought of the other living things? They, too, have muscles, of one kind and another, made to grip, and tear, and destroy; and when they come between me and life, I outgrip them, outtear them, outdestroy them.

To Larsen, no organism has a right to survive unless it can grip, tear, and destroy a living for itself out of its environment. And he bases his rule of the Ghost on that principle. He gives Van Weyden the chance to earn his life. And The Sea Wolf is the story of Van Weyden’s success.

The traditional conception of man is of a rational animal. And in The Sea Wolf, these two characteristics—rationality and animality—are separated and personified in the opposing figures of Humphrey Van Weyden and Wolf Larsen. Of course, neither is limited strictly by the characteristic he personifies: Van Weyden amply demonstrates his fitness to survive in an untrammelled state of nature, and one of Wolf Larsen’s most fascinating traits is the erudition and intellectual rigor with which he defends his view that only brute force is valuable in the service of life. Still, the world of the Ghost is a fundamentally non-rational world, one governed by force and animal passion, even in such necessarily intellectual activities as argument:

Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation. They proved that a seal pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the opposing man’s judgement, common sense, nationality, or past history. Rebuttal was precisely similar.

Humphrey Van Weyden enters this world with a respect for the rationality of man and leaves it with a respect for his animality. He begins, physically inept, with only his intelligence to guide him, at the bottom of Wolf Larsen’s world, as the Ghost’s cabin boy. He ends as master of the vessel and a better man for having learned that he is neither an instinctmanipulated body, nor a pure, rational consciousness, but an integrated organism who can live successfully only as a unit, both rational and animal.

The Sea Wolf is a novel of ideas, but it is not a novel of intellectual debates among characters who hold different points of view. It is an adventure story whose events expertly embody its theme and show the reader the consequences both of ivory tower intellectuality and of mindless brutishness. Finally, it provides a glimpse of what men and women can achieve when they master both the physical and intellectual phases of existence. And, as such a glimpse, it is a joy to read.

Reviewed by Jeff Riggenbach / Fiction (366 Pages) / BFL Price $5.95