Martin Eden Read Free

knowledge and superseded all other philosophies.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