Martin Eden by Jack London

First published: 1908

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: The turn of the twentieth century

Locale: Oakland and Berkeley, California

Principal Characters:

• Martin Eden, a sailor struggling to become a writer
• Ruth Morse, a prudish member of the genteel upper class with whom Martin falls in love
• Mrs. Morse, her equally prudish mother
• Brissenden, a friend of Martin and an intense, struggling poet
• Lizzie Connolly, a lower-class woman in love with Martin

The Novel

Alfred Kazan observed that “the greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story that he lived.” Martin Eden is London’s most autobiographical character, and the story of his rise from a waterfront tough to a celebrated writer is close to London’s own, his portrait of the artist as a young man. It begins with Martin, an uncouth sailor, rescuing Arthur Morse from a gang of muggers. When Morse takes him to his home, Martin is awed by its paintings, books, and elegance and becomes instantly enamored of Morse’s pale, ethereally beautiful sister Ruth. Her presence makes him painfully aware of his clumsy walk, his rough, slangy speech, his lack of education, and his ignorance of manners. His infatuation with her is the catalyst prompting him to overcome these handicaps, rise to her level, and win her love. Calling himself “god’s own mad lover,” he plunges wholeheartedly into educating himself, reading omnivorously and trying to become a writer. What he lacks in refinement he makes up for in animal vitality, sensitivity, and intelligence. Ruth, by contrast, seems to him all spirit, and he elevates her to a pedestal as a saint. Only gradually does he become aware of her limitations. Though she is a college graduate, her education is shallow, her refinement superficial, her politics extremely conservative. She finds Martin’s robust love for life both magnetic and threatening, and when he shows her the stories he has written, uncompromisingly realistic tales of the adventurous world he has known, she is shocked by what she considers their vulgarity. Struggling to win her and to express his artistic vision, Martin writes prodigiously, only to have everything rejected by the genteel magazines. To support himself, he gets a job in a laundry only to find himself worn out as a “work beast.” By the time he makes a breakthrough and becomes a sudden celebrity as an author, he has become a disillusioned pessimist. All the work the publishers cannot get enough of had been rejected previously, and his fame and fortune seem absurdly meaningless. Ruth had rejected him; now, when she comes crawling back, he rejects her. At the end, sunk in profound depression, he jumps overboard from an ocean liner and drowns himself.

The Characters

Martin Eden is Jack London’s self-portrait; an early edition of the novel with a picture of Martin as a frontispiece gives him the face of Jack London. Like Martin, London came from an impoverished and adventurous background. The illegitimate son of a wandering fortune-teller, London spent his childhood in poverty in Oakland, California; as a teenager he became a waterfront tough, an oyster pirate, a member of the fish patrol, and a common seaman on a sealing schooner in the Bering Sea and the islands off Japan. Later, he became a hobo, was imprisoned for vagrancy, and prospected in the Yukon and Klondike gold rush. When he meets Ruth Morse, Martin Eden knows far more of the world than she, but he lacks book knowledge, and her refined though limited knowledge of literature at first makes him feel inferior. He fears making a fool of himself in her presence and her set, but later, when he becomes confident of his powers, he walks among them like a prince among jackals. At first he is overflowing with vitality, and as he begins to flex his intellectual muscles, he finds learning and writing to be the greatest adventure of all. Yet the more he develops intellectually and artistically, the more he sees through the pretense and sham of the Morses and of genteel society, and his knowledge, which at first seems liberating, leads him to despair.

Ruth is based upon London’s early romance with Mabel Applegarth in San Francisco. For a while, the reader sees her as Eden does, as an etherialized beauty in a pre-Raphaelite painting, with himself as her would-be courtly lover. Yet readers quickly learn that Ruth is a snob who condemns Martin’s “horrid slang,” that she has less literary perception than Martin, that she is a squeamish prude who reacts with revulsion to the grim realism of Martin’s stories, that she is a conservative whose ideal role model is the dull, self-made plutocrat Mr. Butler, and that she is frigid. Ruth makes Martin ashamed of having known women in his past, but at twenty-four years old, she has never been kissed nor felt any sexual attraction to men. A third of the way through the book, she is still not on a first-name basis with Martin. Totally out of tune with him and out of sympathy with his aims, she is the last person who should be his critic. Her mother shares her views; they want respectability, not truth. For honesty and vitality, Martin would be much better off with Lizzie Connolly, a vibrant Irish working-class woman, but though he respects her, he has progressed too far to return to her level. Instead, he spends much of the latter part of the book in political and artistic arguments with his male cronies, particularly the poet Brissenden, who has struggled like himself to break into print and who commits suicide just when his poem “Ephemera” is published to great acclaim.

Critical Context

Published in 1908, Martin Eden came exactly in the middle of London’s literary career (1900-1916), during which he published an extraordinary fifty books. It is the first book he wrote after his ill-fated voyage to the South Seas aboard his yacht the Snark, and it reflects the illness and depression he brought home with him. At the same time, it is, in the words of Maxwell Geismar, “[o]ne of the angry books in American literature, very much in the manner of Richard Wright’s Black Boy.” Much of the anger is directed at the bourgeoisie, who scorn Martin Eden for his low-class origins while wrapping themselves in an genteel snobbery, and this aspect of the novel is the crux of the relationship between the Morse family and Martin. Yet Martin Eden relates to Eden’s major novels as well. Many of them deal with education—the education of Buck the dog into the ways of survival in the Arctic in The Call of the Wild (1903); the education of White Fang into similar strategies of survival in White Fang (1906); the education of the sheltered and effete poet Humphrey Van Weyden in the ways of the sea, seamanship, and self-assertion while he is being transformed from a physical weakling into a self-reliant superman in The Sea-Wolf (1904); and the education of Martin Eden in literature, philosophy, writing, and the speech and manners of the genteel class, even while he learns to jettison his admiration for that class and dismiss it with contempt. Like London’s Klondike narratives and The Sea Wolf, Martin Eden also presents a Darwinian superman; Martin is both physically tough and intellectually superior to anyone else in the novel, but except for a brutal fistfight in a flashback sequence in the slums, the ordeal in which Martin proves himself is his unrelenting struggle to educate himself and to become established as a writer in the face of endless rejection.

London was ambivalent about the superman. He seemed to embody the concept himself, with his rugged athleticism, his immense capacity for life and adventure, his acute intellect, and his literary artistry, but alcoholism, gluttony, and a complex of debilitating illnesses that struck him during the disastrous voyage of the Snark shattered his once-vigorous and seemingly invincible constitution, and he died at the age of forty, possibly, like Martin Eden, a suicide. London was influenced by the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and the superman philsophy of Nietzsche, but he rejected them and became an ardent socialist in response to the poverty of his own childhood, his awareness of the cruelty of cutthroat capitalism, and his observations both at home and abroad of the oppression of the poor. He reported these in The People of the Abyss (1903), his study of the London slums, and in his futuristic novel The Iron Heel (1907), in which socialist rebels fight a tyrannical oligarchy.

Bibliography

Foner, Philip S. Jack London: American Rebel. Rev. ed. New York: Citadel Press, 1964. A study of London as social critic, with a socialistic bias.

Geismar, Maxwell. Rebels and Ancestors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953. An analysis of London’s angry criticism of social and economic injustice.

Kershaw, Alex. Jack London: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. A narrative of London’s life and times.

Labor, Earle. Jack London. New York: Twayne, 1974. A concise introduction to London’s life and works.

Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956. An analysis of London’s place among such naturalistic writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser.