Martin Eden

“He was used to the harsh callousness of factory girls and working women. Well he knew why their hands were rough; but this hand of hers…It was soft because she had never used it to work with. The gulf yawned between her and him at the awesome thought of a person who did not have to work for a living. He suddenly saw the aristocracy of the people who did not labor.”

Early on, Martin is already conscious of the physical differences that class imposes on one’s body. His own body, powerful, scarred, and sun-bronzed by his life at sea, starkly contrasts with that of Ruth, who has never seen a day of hard labor in her life. The hands of Martin’s family members, calloused and damaged by lives of hard labor, likewise emphasize class differences.

“She knew her Browning, but it had never sunk into her that it was an awkward thing to play with souls. As her interest in Martin increased, the remodeling of his life became a passion with her.”

As Ruth’s interest in Martin grows, she begins to derive a sense of satisfaction from “remolding” Martin’s life through education. She doesn’t consider the impact this may have on him, including that this education could alienate him from his former life and identity.

“‘You can bet he was,’ Martin proclaimed. ‘Three dollars a week, an’ four dollars a week, an’ a young boy cookin’ for himself on an oil-burner an’ layin’ up money, workin’ all day an’ studyin’ all night, just workin’ an’ never playin’, never havin’ a good time, an’ never learnin’ how to have a good time—of course his thirty thousand came along too late.’”

Martin balks at Ruth’s story of Mr. Butler’s early austerity in life and consequent inability to enjoy his good fortune. However, Mr. Butler’s life later becomes an ironic model for Martin’s when he finally achieves fame and fortune. In addition, this passage is a good example of Martin’s “improper” English vernacular, for which Ruth chides him.

“Clearly, and for the first time, he saw Ruth and her world. It was all visualized in his mind as a concrete thing which he could take up in his two hands and turn around and about and examine. There was much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he saw it as a whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to master it. To write! The thought was fire in him.”

Once the idea of writing takes hold in Martin, it becomes the great, all-consuming passion of his life. His early foray into education has at last given him the vocabulary to capture the beauty of his inner thoughts, and he wishes to use writing to get Ruth to see the world as he does. He never considers that she might be unable to relate to what he writes.

“When he had copied the article a second time and rolled it up carefully, he read in a newspaper an item on hints to beginners, and discovered the iron law that manuscripts should never be rolled and that they should be written on one side of the paper. He had violated the law on both counts. Also, he learned from the item that first-class papers paid a minimum of ten dollars a column. So, while he copied the manuscript a third time, he consoled himself by multiplying ten columns by ten dollars. The product was always the same, one hundred dollars, and he decided that that was better than seafaring. If it hadn’t been for his blunders, he would have finished the article in three days. One hundred dollars in three days! It would have taken him three months and longer on the sea to earn a similar amount.”

This passage illustrates Martin’s naivete in regard to the difficulties of making a living through writing. Because he has had no formal education or guidance in the field, Martin must learn everything through laborious trial and error. However, his self-confidence drives him to succeed and never give up, even at the point that an ordinary person would have done so.

“Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong?”

The chance encounter between Ruth and Lizzie leaves Martin shaken. His intelligence makes him more self-aware than most men; he can recognize that his education is causing him to rise above his expected station in life. He begins to feel alienated from his own class—which Lizzie represents—but he knows he doesn’t yet fit in with Ruth’s class.

“Saints in heaven—how could they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime—ah, that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while.”

“The Pots” offends Ruth’s romantic ideals of literature, as well as the dogmatic, mainstream view of what qualifies as an appropriate literary subject, as her formal university education impressed upon her. Martin, however, has lived to see beauty through “mud-dripping eyes” and recognizes that beauty and good can arise from abjection.

“All that was god-like in him was blotted out. The spur of ambition was blunted; he had no vitality with which to feel the prod of it. He was dead. His soul seemed dead. He was a beast, a work-beast.”

The arduous labor at the laundry robs Martin of not only his sense of self and fiery spirit but also his basic humanity. Through such passages, the novel highlights the degradation of the working class through lives of bestial labor. When one is too exhausted to even think, one has no chance for study, self-improvement, appreciation of beauty, or even love.

“In truth, they were children together, so far as love was concerned, and they were as naive and immature in the expression of their love as a pair of children, and this despite the fact that she was crammed with a university education and that his head was full of scientific philosophy and the hard facts of life.”

Martin and Ruth’s love highlights the contrast in their backgrounds and social positions. Both of them have been educated; Ruth has her college degree, and Martin has his Spencerian scientific principles, as well as a lifetime of real-world experience. The novel uses the metaphor of children to describe their ignorance in the ways of love: Neither of them has the experience or the knowledge to properly navigate their new feelings.

“You worship at the shrine of the established.”

Martin expresses his vexation at Ruth’s adherence to the commonplace, established views of literature, criticism, and taste. He believes that this prevents her from seeing beyond her own biases; it prevents her—and the editors that reject his work—from seeing the value in his writing, which goes beyond normal conventions. She misses or misunderstands the strength in Martin’s ideas.

“Poverty, to Ruth, was a word signifying a not-nice condition of existence. That was her total knowledge on the subject. She knew Martin was poor, and his condition she associated in her mind with the boyhood of Abraham Lincoln, of Mr. Butler, and of other men who had become successes. Also, while aware that poverty was anything but delectable, she had a comfortable middle-class feeling that poverty was salutary, that it was a sharp spur that urged on to success all men who were not degraded and hopeless drudges. So that her knowledge that Martin was so poor that he had pawned his watch and overcoat did not disturb her. She even considered it the hopeful side of the situation, believing that sooner or later it would arouse him and compel him to abandon his writing.”

Ruth’s sheltered life leads her to consider poverty only on a theoretical level; she can’t comprehend the debasement of the working class. Drawing on the ideals of the Protestant work ethic, Ruth believes that Martin’s poverty will eventually spur him to become the type of man she idealizes, like Mr. Butler. When she’s exposed to actual poverty, however, she’s disgusted and disdainful.

“But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness of mediocrity. What characterized them was the clumsiness of too great strength—the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he crushes butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a war-club.”

Martin’s fundamental problem has always been that he’s too strong. He needs help and practice in focusing his raw, almost elemental perception of the world to make it palatable to others. This is perhaps why Ruth finds his writing offensive: It’s too brutal and untamed by ordinary convention; his greatness is unrestrained.

“As for myself, I am an individualist. I believe the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. Such is the lesson I have learned from biology, or at least think I have learned. As I said, I am an individualist, and individualism is the hereditary and eternal foe of socialism.”

After Mr. Morse antagonizes Martin by accusing him of being a socialist, Martin lashes out. His fierce adherence to individualism and social Darwinism over socialism ironically contrasts with his working-class upbringing. He considers himself superior to the poor and the bourgeoisie alike.

“‘Love Beauty for its own sake,’ was his counsel, ‘and leave the magazines alone. Back to your ships and your sea—that’s my advice to you, Martin Eden. What do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men? You are cutting your throat every day you waste in them trying to prostitute beauty to the needs of magazinedom. What was it you quoted me the other day?—Oh, yes, “Man, the latest of the ephemera.” Well, what do you, the latest of the ephemera, want with fame? If you got it, it would be poison to you. You are too simple, too elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper on such pap. I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines. Beauty is the only master to serve. Serve her and damn the multitude!’”

Brissenden echoes many of Martin’s own views on literature. Even though Martin is bogged down in the pursuit of fame, he still believes in the importance of creating beauty for beauty’s sake rather than for mercenary means. To some extent, Brissenden may know Martin better than he knows himself: His prediction that fame will poison Martin proves true.

“The books were alive in these men. They talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its very features worked with excitement. Now and again other men joined in, and all followed the discussion with cigarettes going out in their hands and with alert, intent faces.”

The bohemians to whom Brissenden introduces Martin represent a depth of intellectual life that Martin has never before experienced. Rather than the shallow platitudes of the college-educated bourgeoisie who congregate at the Morse house, these men (and Mary, the one woman in the group) embody philosophy, applying their ideals to real life in the same way that Martin does.

“When I was a trifle younger,—a few months younger,—I believed the same thing. You see, the ideas of you and yours had impressed me. But merchants and traders are cowardly rulers at best; they grunt and grub all their days in the trough of money-getting, and I have swung back to aristocracy, if you please. I am the only individualist in this room. I look to the state for nothing. I look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the state from its own rotten futility.”

Drawn from the principles of evolution to the works of Spencer, Martin’s intellectual journey has caused him to adhere to the principles of social Darwinism and Nietzschean individualism. His own intellectual strength, in his view, puts him above socialists and conservatives alike. Consequently, he believes himself like the Nietzschean overman, like the “man on the horse,” who needs nothing but his own strength to succeed.

“As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I’ll tell you. It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won’t stand for it. They’re too many, and willy-nilly they’ll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can’t get away from them, and you’ll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It’s not a nice mess, I’ll allow. But it’s been a-brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don’t like the crowd, but what’s a poor chap to do? We can’t have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule.”

Martin can’t fathom why an iconoclastic individual like Brissenden is a socialist. Brissenden has a different perspective on life than Martin, being of the upper class but also close to death because of tuberculosis. Brissenden’s views on socialism are actually closer to London’s views than Martin’s aberrant individualism.

“But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. ‘If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself,’ she wrote. ‘But it was not to be. Your past life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late.’”

Ruth breaks off her engagement with Martin after a junior reporter’s slanderous article about Martin threatens to damage Ruth’s (and the Morse family’s) reputation. This is the clearest indication that Ruth’s concept of love isn’t like Martin’s. Martin would give up the whole world for Ruth, but her love is limited by established social conventions.

“At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden’s room, and hurried down again. The room was empty. All luggage was gone.

‘Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?’ he asked the clerk, who looked at him curiously for a moment.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ he asked.

Martin shook his head.

‘Why, the papers were full of it. He was found dead in bed. Suicide. Shot himself through the head.’

‘Is he buried yet?’ Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one else’s voice, from a long way off, asking the question.

‘No. The body was shipped East after the inquest. Lawyers engaged by his people saw to the arrangements.’”

Brissenden’s suicide and Ruth’s ending of their engagement brings on a period of emotional numbness in Martin’s life. Brissenden was the one person who truly understood Martin, the one person who believed in his talents and the merit of his work, so Brissenden’s death marks the beginning of Martin’s decline and foreshadows his own suicide at the novel’s end.

“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 it to pieces—a wolf-rabble that fawned on him instead of fanging him. Fawn or fang, it was all a matter of chance. One thing he knew with absolute certitude: ‘Ephemera’ was infinitely greater than anything he had done. It was infinitely greater than anything he had in him. It was a poem of centuries. Then the tribute the mob paid him was a sorry tribute indeed, for that same mob had wallowed ‘Ephemera’ into the mire. He sighed heavily and with satisfaction. He was glad the last manuscript was sold and that he would soon be done with it all.”

Martin’s fame proves to him that Brissenden’s ideas about fame and beauty were correct. Martin becomes popular purely by chance; the public could have just as easily ignored or derided “The Shame of the Sun,” like they’d pulled “Ephemera” into the muck of gossip and sensation. Martin’s ideals of individualism essentially fail him because his success was always contingent on public recognition of his brilliance.

“He desired to be valued for himself, or for his work, which, after all, was an expression of himself. That was the way Lizzie valued him. The work, with her, did not even count. She valued him, himself. That was the way Jimmy, the plumber, and all the old gang valued him. That had been proved often enough in the days when he ran with them; it had been proved that Sunday at Shell Mound Park. His work could go hang. What they liked, and were willing to scrap for, was just Mart Eden, one of the bunch and a pretty good guy.”

Mr. Morse, Bernard Higgenbotham, and others who rejected Martin while he performed the work that later made him famous now flock to him because of his newfound fame. The only people capable of valuing Martin as a person are those who either ignore or can’t comprehend his work. Martin is completely alienated from society.

“He drove along the path of relentless logic to the conclusion that he was nobody, nothing. Mart Eden, the hoodlum, and Mart Eden, the sailor, had been real, had been he; but Martin Eden! the famous writer, did not exist. Martin Eden, the famous writer, was a vapor that had arisen in the mob-mind and by the mob-mind had been thrust into the corporeal being of Mart Eden, the hoodlum and sailor. But it couldn’t fool him. He was not that sun-myth that the mob was worshipping and sacrificing dinners to. He knew better.”

Martin’s belief in individualism fails him as he realizes that on a social level, he no longer exists. He isn’t valued for who he is as a person but for his fame and his money, gained only through the caprices of mass consensus, which he always detested. The version of Martin that other people now see is a myth, a creation of their own, incorrect perception of him.

“‘And now you want to renew our love. You want us to be married. You want me. And yet, listen—if my books had not been noticed, I’d nevertheless have been just what I am now. And you would have stayed away. It is all those damned books—’

‘Don’t swear,’ she interrupted.

Her reproof startled him. He broke into a harsh laugh.

‘That’s it,’ he said, ‘at a high moment, when what seems your life’s happiness is at stake, you are afraid of life in the same old way—afraid of life and a healthy oath.’”

Ruth’s correcting Martin’s swearing negates any claims she makes about having changed as a person. Ruth is as much a product of her upbringing as she accuses Martin of being, but she’s unable to realize this about herself or, even at this critical moment, to see beyond her own prejudices. Ruth is a spoiled child and has damaged Martin’s faith in love, and he calls her out on her adherence to a life of privilege and conditioning, helping her realize it now that it’s too late.