Martin Eden Read Free Page B

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.
    First published as a book in 1909, Martin Eden was too early for its audience. The myth of individual success through hard work still dominated American culture. Horatio Alger inspired, whereas Jack London depressed. The revolutionary idea that hard work and success were self-defeating in an unlovely mechanical society was unpalatable, both to radicals and to Republicans. London had been liked by the left wing for his socialist views, yet Martin Eden’s ambition seemed an attack on socialism, a glorification of the Nietzschean hero and man on horseback. Although London might protest that the novel was an attack on individualism, not socialism, he had made it so autobiographical that his radical readers could not distinguish him from his leading character. He might be conscious that his socialist sympathies separated him from Martin Eden, but by confusing the facts of his own rise to fame with his hero’s, he risked condemnation as an apostate. There was already a contradiction between his life-style and his political professions. As Mark Twain commented, if Jack London got the kind of society he wanted, he would have to call out the militia to collect his royalties. Many of London’s socialist comrades took Martin Eden to be the testament of the man who had deserted the cause by sailing away on the Snark, and by becoming a rancher. One of them wrote to him, wishing him the same fate as Martin Eden’s: “When you swallow the last mouthful of salt chuck you can hold before sinking, remember that we at least protested.”
    To established critics, Martin Eden also seemed a failure. It denigrated capitalism and self-improvement and ambition without providing any alternatives. London had been known for his celebration of man’s struggle for survival, his will to live in the bleakest of conditions. Now, confused with the hero of his book, London seemed to preach futility and deny the elemental and archetypal force of the message in his previous books about nature, the Klondike, and the sea. Martin Eden was universally condemned, and London’s reputation sank, until the publication in 1910 of a vigorous, optimistic Klondike adventure story, Burning Daylight, which did not preach a thing, but entertained. As the reviewer in The Bookman declared, it was a pleasure to see London return to using his power as a storyteller, after passing through “the sad phase of unrest out of which Martin Eden grew—it’s certainly sad to have one’s emotions take such unpleasant forms.”
    Ironically, contemporary reviews of Martin Eden confirmed the disgust London felt for readers and reviewers, expressed in this passage about his hero:
    His intrinsic beauty and power meant nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were acclaiming him and buying his books. He was the fad of the hour, the adventurer who had stormed Parnassus while the gods nodded. The hundreds of thousands read him and acclaimed him with the same brute non-understanding with which they had flung themselves on Brissenden’s “Ephemera” and torn