LONDON 2012

I was trolling through free download books looking for things to read on a recent long haul flight, and I ended up with Jack London’s 'Call of the Wild' – a book I read for the first time probably forty years ago – and Teddy Roosevelt’s 'The Rough Riders', a first-hand but somewhat breathless memoir of the First Volunteer Cavalry Unit and the war in Cuba in the 1890s.

Now, anyone who is well-read in the classics will know that London and Roosevelt have more in common than being adventurous types at large in the United States in the late 1800s. For a start, both of them encountered a young Scrooge McDuck, another larger than life character on the loose in America at the time.

Here’s London as a young correspondent in the Yukon during the 1890s gold rush seeing Scrooge in action up close:
















  
All images (C) Walt Disney - used here for review purposes only.
 
TR met Scrooge, not once, but three times, and was reportedly much influenced by him:

 

Scrooge even encountered the Rough Riders—although they were no match for his sister...

(If you want to know how this finishes, you’ll have to read Don Rosa’s ‘Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion’.)

But none of that is the point of this post. It turns out the TR and Jack London had a showdown of their own. This one took place in the pages of The Atlantic, New York Times and Everybody’s Magazine, during the ‘Nature fakers’ literary controversy of the early 20th century. In a nutshell, the argument was between those writers who anthropomorphised animal characters and those who preferred a more realistic natural history. Roosevelt, as a man of action who had spent his fair share of time in the outdoors, was firmly in the latter camp. Although it must be said that his relationship with animals was complex—he was famed for his hunting expeditions but also did more for the National Park system than any other President, placing an average of 84,000 acres per day under national protection during his two terms in office. When Roosevelt weighed into the debate in 1907 in Everybody's Magazine, he singled out a few authors for criticism, including Jack London for his depiction of dog fights in 'Call of the Wild' and 'White Fang'.

Anyone who has read 'Call of the Wild' lately will realise that London’s depiction of dogs is pretty unsentimental and not exactly up the Beatrix Potter end of animal stories. London was much aggrieved by being put into the ‘fluffy bunnies’ category of writing, but said nothing at the time. He responded a year later in Collier’s Magazine:

I have been guilty of writing two books about dogs. The writing of these two stories, on my part, was in truth a protest against the 'humanizing' of animals, of which it seemed to me several 'animal writers' had been profoundly guilty. Time and again, and many times, in my narratives, I wrote, speaking of my dog-heroes: 'He did not think these things; he merely did them,' etc. And I did this repeatedly, to the clogging of my narrative and in violation of my artistic canons; and I did it in order to hammer into the average human understanding that these dog-heroes of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning, but by instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning. Also, I endeavored to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research, and awoke, one day, to find myself bundled neck and crop into the camp of the nature-fakers.

Reading that, I can imagine London choking on his cornflakes when he read the Roosevelt article.

This (finally) brings us to the point of this blog. American Presidents have been aloof from pointless literary squabbles for far too long. And being a presidential election year, it’s time for action. I’m not sure what the position of the two candidates on the nature faker’s controversy is—perhaps Mitt could ask his dog about it when he next he takes him down from the roof of the car? But in any case, that’s last century’s controversy and time has moved on.

Mr Obama and Mr Romney, it’s time for you to get outraged about the declining use of the semi-colon. If you don’t, this blog will; the semi-colon demands more respect. And while you are at it, it’s time for a Presidential pardon for Jack London. So I’m launching a campaign to get that done too. I’m going to call it 'LONDON 2012'.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there seems to be an angry email from Boris Johnson in my inbox.