Martin Eden (2 page)

The novel, London always insisted, was also an attack on individualism. “Being unaware of the needs of others, of the whole human collective need, Martin Eden lived only for himself, fought only for himself, and, if you please, died for himself.” He died because of his lack of faith in men. London, however, claimed to have faith in men. He was a socialist and not an individualist. And so he lived.

Unfortunately, London's character was nearer Martin Eden's than he allowed. His individualism and Nietzschean belief in the strength of the will were usually more apparent than his faith in socialism. To reconcile his beliefs in the survival of the fittest and in the aristocracy of the intellect with his compassion for his fellow workers was a task as difficult as driving forty horses abreast. Martin Eden was more consistent, living and dying an individualist, ignoring the decadent poet Brissenden, who praised socialism as the answer to the death wish.

After leaving Berkeley, London joined the Klondike gold rush, a vain quest that he equated with Martin Eden's treasure hunt in the South Seas. He returned, married his first wife, Bess Maddern, and began to make some literary progress. After the success of his short Klondike stories,
The Call of the Wild
(1903) and
The Sea-Wolf
(1904) gave him an international reputation almost as sudden and spectacular as Martin Eden's. Disillusioned with fame, he retreated from Oakland to a ranch at Glen Ellen, where he hoped to counteract the rape of the American earth by restoring the virgin soil and making a paradise from the land looted by the greed of the pioneers.

By 1906, London's reaction to overwork and notoriety—experiences that drove Martin Eden to commit suicide—plunged him into long periods of disgust. He summed it up in his drinking confession, the novel
John Barleycorn:

The way out of disgust was love of the people and escape. In 1906, London married Charmian Kittredge, made a lecture tour of the United States preaching revolutionary socialism, and set off on a self-designed ketch called the
Snark
to sail round the world. He had bought too much land at Glen Ellen and had ruined himself building the boat. His captain was incompetent, the ketch was inefficient, and London found himself navigating the vessel with Charmian as his true “mate-woman.” Only his iron determination—and the need to earn a large income to pay for the voyage and the ranch in California—kept him writing a thousand words a day in any weather.

The book he wrote on the voyage was
Martin Eden.
He was only thirty-one years of age, yet he had already achieved too much too soon. His mental energy seemed to him at times to be mental sickness. He had lamed his splendid body and began to suffer from bowel diseases. The voyage of the
Snark
was meant to reassert his physical dominance, but it ended in his physical collapse. By the time the
Snark
reached Hawaii, London had to fire his captain for allowing the sails, ropes, and decking to rot in the sun. Penniless, he had to beg an advance from his publisher to refit the ketch; he beat two thousand miles in variable winds on the Pacific Traverse to the Marquesas, where Gauguin had found his own disillusion and death. There London rented the clubhouse where his boyhood idol Robert Louis Stevenson had stayed and set out for Melville's paradise of Happar. Tuberculosis, leprosy, and elephantiasis had decimated Melville's noble warriors. The survivors were mostly freaks and monsters.

More disillusion was to come. There was a financial panic in the United States. London's checks were being returned by the banks; the mortgages on his properties were threatened with foreclosure. His teeth, which were in terrible shape (unlike Martin Eden's), were giving him incessant pain. He booked a passage back to California on the
Mariposa
so he could finish the novel and use the proceeds to pay his debts.

London's sense of disgust and despair, his physical pain, and his pressing financial problems all help to explain why he pushed his hero through the porthole of a boat that he was taking back to California. Charmian's diary reveals London's state of mind while he was finishing
Martin Eden
on the voyage home: “Jack is sick sometimes, mentally, or he wouldn't do as he does. This reflection helps me through some hopeless, loveless times—seldom, thank God.” London's disgust and self-destructive urges at that time were transferred to Martin Eden, but not fully explained. The result is that Eden's sudden suicide by drowning appears not inevitable but willful—the self-dramatization of a spoiled youth, not the necessary action of a strong man. The published work was an immediate failure with the critics and the public—but has had long-term success as the parable that London always intended it to be, the parable of an individualist who had to die, “not because of his lack of faith in God, but because of his lack of faith in men.”

Had London not been in a temporary slough of disgust, he might have let Martin Eden continue his South Seas voyage as originally intended, even if in the end he was still to drown splendidly in the surf. But the book was long enough, the finish fitting, if depressing. It suited the dark side of London: preoccupied with the struggle of all life against death, the “Noseless One,” he was prodigal with his own energies and physique, excessive in his eating and drinking, driven to die unwillingly at forty from a drug overdose, his body no longer capable of responding to the demands his dominant will put upon it. As a young man he had once tried suicide by drowning—and that is the end he wished for Martin Eden, an end when death no longer hurts, and at the instant of knowing the mind ceases to know.

Unlike Socrates, who only knew that he knew nothing, and spent his life inquiring, both Martin Eden and Jack London though they knew everything and therefore died from a surfeit of boredom. Satisfaction kills the cat, curiosity brings it back. “Work performed” was the ceaseless maggot in Martin Eden's mind that led him to world-weariness and self-destruction. He had worked too hard and wanted to perform no more. To the self-taught American at the turn of this century, the facile world view of Herbert Spencer comprehended all knowledge and superseded all other philosophies. The paradox was never clear to London or to his surrogate hero: If evolution and Social Darwinism explained everything, thought could evolve no further, and the Social Darwinist would become bigoted and reactionary.

Although the action of
Martin Eden
takes place primarily on land, the novel itself is dominated by the sea. At the beginning, Martin Eden heaves in, the quintessential sailor, terrified that his sway and gait and shoulders will destroy the bourgeois furniture around him. He is literally at sea in the Morses' genteel parlor. He sees an oil painting of a schooner in a storm, approaches it, and finds it only an illusion, a trick picture. He does not heed the warning that this new world will trick him. He holds the guests captive at dinner with his vehemence about life afloat and provokes in Ruth the desire to put her lily-white vampire hands about his rough neck and absorb its vigor into her frailty.

Martin Eden himself is a fluid organism, swiftly adaptable, ready to be channeled, like any flow. Ruth first shows her desire for him by leaning against him, the master of a sailboat, at the tiller; and she first shows her jealousy when he recalls a shipwreck and the love of a leper princess. It is the sailor's diseases he might have caught from port whores that make marriage with him impossible for Ruth; he has played much with pitch, Mrs. Morse thinks, and the children will be unclean. When he cannot pay for his education, Martin Eden considers returning to the sea; but as the city enfeebles him, the sea's lure becomes more dreamlike and literary, the siren call of South Sea maidens and tropical beaches. His Lucifer figure, Brissenden, urges him to go before the city rots him, but he will not. In his memories of his past, which crosscut the narrative, the images of his life in the forecastle give way to images of himself as the hoodlum gang leader, the Cheese-Face he might have become, the Cheese-Face he had to destroy in himself before he went to sea or took to books. His successful novel, worthy of Conrad, is a sea-novel called
Overdue.
Finally, when he does return to the sea as a first-class passenger on the
Mariposa,
it is to die. He has left his own class and found it impossible to join a new one. The forecastle is brutish, the petty officers truly petty, the captain a snob interested only in reputation. So he chooses to drown, quoting his favorite stanza from Swinburne, the poet whom the sailor read first in the overstuffed Morse parlor, the poet whose verse seduces him to plunge into the depths to terminate his ennui. He has had too much of living. He knows that dead men rise up never. So, like the weariest river, he winds his way safely to sea, and darkness.

Set against the theme of the sea is Moloch, the machine that eats up men and women, hope and vitality, youth and age. It is the machines of the cannery that roughen Lizzie Connolly's hands and make her, in his eyes, unfit for Martin Eden's love; Ruth's hands are soft, for she has never had to work and so is superior in culture. The magazine editors seem to run a machine that takes in manuscripts, puts them through cogs, inserts a rejection slip, and spits them out. When Martin is forced to work in a laundry with Joe, the washing machines make of him an intelligent machine, a rapidly exhausted machine, a machine that will wear out and be discarded. “Fancy starch” is the nightmare that machines make of Martin's romantic love—and the seventy miles to Oakland that Martin has to cover on his mechanical wheels. When he sets up a simple laundry machine for Maria Silva, he loses his status in her eyes; he is a manual worker, not a writer. In his fever soon afterward, he confuses the laundry and the literary machine, so that Joe starches manuscripts, while he mangles checks in the wringer. His ancient typewriter, his Blickensdorfer, is a necessity if his writing is to be read and accepted; when it is pawned, he cannot write. And lastly, when he beats the literary machine and makes a fortune, he sets up Maria in a dairy, Joe in a laundry, his brothers-in-law in commerce, so that they can make ordinary lives out of their automatic existences, while Martin, weary of work performed, goes down to the sea to rest forever.

The chief quality of the novel lies in London's recapturing of his relentless toil to gain literary fame. London first wanted to call the book
Success,
or
Star-dust;
he knew the lure of fame for him and Martin Eden. He often used to belittle his own artistry and skill with words, presenting himself as a blacksmith of literature rather than a wordsmith of style and grace. “Don't loaf and invite inspiration,” he advised the aspiring writer, “light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.” The secret was to work all the time. Martin Eden's obsessive and incessant concentration has inspired tens of thousands of young writers, even if few of them have won the recognition that Eden both desired and rejected.

The secondary quality of the novel lies in London's awareness of the difficulty of changing social classes. Martin Eden (a Biblical name suggesting struggle and innocence) adores Ruth (another Biblical name, suggesting love and waiting) and is adored by Lizzie. He should love Lizzie, who comes from his own class, and make her happy, but by the time he has become acceptable to Ruth's class, he despises it, yet cannot return to Lizzie. If London had dwelt more on the emotional aspects of the hopeless struggle to change classes rather than on the philosophical questions, if he had concentrated on the love triangle rather than on his recollections of the bohemian and radical “Crowd” at San Francisco, the one weakness of the novel would have been avoided. For the long chats about evolution and the superman and socialism have dated. The need to write autobiography overcame London's talent as a novelist, and his urge to display his hard-won erudition triumphed over his feeling for his characters. To illustrate the class war, another confrontation between Ruth and Lizzie would have been worth more than ten sophomoric debates between Eden and Brissenden and the Oakland socialists.

Brissenden was modeled on George Sterling, the “Greek” who provided the most intense male friendship in London's life. Sterling was a minor romantic poet who admired and envied London's profligate vigor and natural genius, and, above all, his international success. Brissenden is an idealized portrait of Sterling, and his manner of speaking provokes the worst writing in the novel, the poet's mawkish effusions about beauty and corruption. Sterling did tend to write and talk like a man who had swallowed Swinburne whole and Rossetti undigested. “Beauty hurts you,” Brissenden declares to Martin Eden. “It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that does not heal, a knife of flame. Why should you palter with magazines? Let beauty be your end. Why should you mint beauty into gold?” Such gossamer gallimaufry is as much “Ephemera” as Brissenden's posthumous masterpiece, but is unfortunately preserved forever in
Martin Eden.
The thorns in the text that prick the reader are the simple truths, such as Ruth's perception of poverty as an unpleasant condition of existence, or Lizzie's piercing comment, “Something's wrong with your think-machine.”

As Earle Labor has pointed out,
Martin Eden
is a
Bildungsroman,
a novel about the necessary education of a young man from a state of ignorance and innocence through the trials of knowledge to a condition of dark awareness. Rousseau and Goethe, Melville and D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Wolfe and Thomas Mann have all written novels in this tradition. As London was a selfmythologizing hero in so much of his writing, many of his fifty books contribute to a continuing
Bildungsroman. Martin Eden
particularly does so. Part of London's education was to escape from Sterling and the “Crowd,” a group of self-conscious young writers and artists and debaters who had first met at Coppa's restaurant in San Francisco and who formed a colony at Carmel, characterized by daily hedonism and occasional suicide, abalone-diving and criticism of all but themselves. Martin Eden grows bored with the “Crowd” and chooses a watery death rather than listen to it. In a later novel,
The Valley of the Moon,
which eulogizes flight from the city to the land rather than to the sea, London parodies the false Eden of the Carmel colony, where intellectuals played at Thoreau in safe suburban woods. For London, the true Eden lay in the ranch at Glen Ellen.