Martin Eden Read Free Page A

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