The Call of the Colonial: Jack London's <i>Martin Eden</i>

Jack London's novel Martin Eden was not a commercial success when it appeared in 1909, perhaps because it was before its time. Now it stands as his finest and most authentic statement on class and artistic identity. Martin Eden maintains a place alongside notable early twentieth-century British and American autobiographical novels of the emerging male artist— among them D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Theodore Dreiser's The ‘Genius,‘ Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, and William Faulkner's Mosquitoes. Showing its originality, Martin Eden predates all of these Künstlerromane – novels that draw on biographical detail to portray the young artist. Further, Martin Eden is one of first American novels to challenge the Horatio Alger myth, standing alongside turn-of-the-century novels by Dreiser, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, and Harold Frederic. These works and others undercut this rags-to-riches story and share a fascination with failure. Martin Eden is the first American novel to portray a social-climbing poor white male who rises to commercial “success” only to self-destruct. Indeed, Martin Eden is the template for the modern American male protagonist who vaults upward but falls to pieces; notable instances of this genre are Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Norman Mailer's The American Dream. After years of self-education and feverish apprentice writing, young Martin Eden soars from the slums to celebrity status as a bestselling author. But he falls victim to a severely split consciousness that puts him at war with himself. In an existential panic Martin abandons art and the city altogether. He answers the call of the colonial by seeking to reinvent himself as an adventurer in the South Seas. But on his voyage to Tahiti he gives up his quest and drops overboard in mid-ocean. This is his weary end, the last in a series of self-defeating choices during his identity crisis. London's novel is told by an omniscient narrator, who introduces us to a jaunty, unemployed sailor from Oakland who is “almost twenty-one” years old (London, Martin Eden 57). On the ferry Martin Eden wins a fistfight to protect an upper-class man, Arthur Morse, from being mugged. For his bravery, Martin is rewarded with a dinner invitation to the Morse mansion in Oakland. Martin does not realize that he is meant to provide the evening's entertainment, telling nautical stories and transporting the idle rich on his “flood of rough eloquence, enthusiasm, and power” (52). London treats this opening-scene dinner party as a voyage of discovery; Martin is bedazzled by the “new world” of bourgeois leisure and plenty he encounters in the Morse home. He also is enchanted by Arthur's sister Ruth, a university student who embodies the genteel cultural values of the house she inhabits. After this life-changing evening Martin feels inadequate and becomes dissatisfied with his scruffy North Oakland and Berkeley neighborhoods. He experiences severe dislocation and is never “at home” again in the novel (Reesman 217). He vows to shed his working-class identity, signified by his sunburn and callouses. He will seek to rise intellectually and become worthy of Ruth by becoming a successful author. He burns through his huge resources of vitality and willpower while pounding out stories and compiling a stack of rejected manuscripts. When acclaim and royalties come after two years of poverty and overwork, they arrive too late. He has become disgusted by the market-driven mechanisms of publication, the fickle tastes of the book-buying public, and the conventional values of his Ruth and her society circle. Martin understands that “It was the bourgeoisie that bought his books and poured gold into his money-sack,” but his self-satisfied readers “could not possibly appreciate or comprehend what he had written” (Martin Eden 441-2). Martin is dismayed to find himself commodified by publishing machinery that markets him as a proletarian prodigy who rose from deckhand to famous writer. These market forces ignore his intrinsic worth but soar with his “appreciation in value” as a bestselling author (Martin Eden 460). He also resents that his own Horatio Alger life story is used to validate the laissez-faire myth of American economic and social fluidity. Even though he has two bestsellers at once, Martin is unimpressed by his success. He vows to abandon both art and America for the tropics; “the South Seas were calling to him” and promising a life of imperial adventure in the islands (Martin Eden, 420). Martin answers the call of the colonial in the last winter of his life and sails for Tahiti, which promises that he “will be rejuvenated and revitalized once in the edenic setting of the South Sea Island” (Kim 14). Martin has been to Polynesia before in his former identity as “Mart Eden, the sailor” (Martin Eden 453). Now he will return with a newly-constructed identity—not the author, but a swashbuckling Edwardian treasure hunter. He is in search of indigenous resources such as pearls to extract from Pacific waters on the sleek schooner he intends to purchase. He fantasizes that this eroticized vessel will be a lithe, witch-like, female talisman (Martin Eden 420)—an implied rejection of the rigid western sexual morality that suppresses female sensuality and constricts male desire. In his gendered ambitions Martin resembles other white adventurers in London's South Sea writings, such as David Sheldon, the slaveholding copra planter in Adventure (1911). This was the action novel that Jack London wrote after Martin Eden, beginning in 1908. Adventure hails “Euro-American racial dominance and entrepreneurial daring in the tropics” (Castille, “Adventure,” 333) and salvages the colonial dream that perished with Martin Eden in mid-Pacific. Dave seeks to become a South Seas trader and supply commodities for an expanding, globalized market—much as Martin Eden himself has been exploited to supply the bourgeois literary marketplace. Both Martin Eden and Adventure are literary products of the cruise of the Snark. In 1907, Jack London, his wife Charmian and a small crew had left Oakland on what was intended to be an around-the-world voyage, beginning with a transit of the Pacific Ocean. London was a 31-year-old celebrity author who kept a sharp eye on the literary marketplace. Much as the hard Yukon Northland had defined London's identity and early writing career, now the vast tropical Pacific would serve as the site of his self-dramatization and literary production. Again he would impose his iron will and employ his superb body to master the overwhelming natural forces surrounding him. He would then turn his physical achievements into texts for commercial distribution and monetize his costly voyage on the Snark, his custom-built craft. However, because of illness, breakdown and malaise, he abandoned the cruise in December 1908 in the British Solomon Islands, barely a third of the way around the globe. Jack London, who had promoted himself as a perfect evolutionary specimen, was a very sick man. He was suffering from rotting teeth, malarial fevers, diarrhea, an ulcerated rectum, yaws (a bacterial disease that causes lesions), and another frightening ailment that thickened parts of his skin with silvery white scale (which he feared might be leprosy). London himself had endured racial decline and inferiority in the Melanesian Pacific, where he had succumbed to “the very forces of ‘natural selection’ ironically and actually represented by his deteriorating white skin” (Phillips 91). He was only 32 years old, and he was humiliated by his physical degeneration in the green hell of Melanesia. Even worse than his ailments was the cure. He treated himself and his crew with a highly toxic mercury-chloride salt, applied to deep, open sores. Giving up the cruise, the Londons took a steamer from Guadalcanal to Sydney. There, Jack had rectal surgery and received arsenic treatments for his mysterious skin disease, diagnosed as severe psoriasis, which causes swathes of skin to peel off. At the hospital he also was given opium for pain relief; this was the start of his drug dependency, which was severe by the time of his death. Also, the mercury and arsenic “medical” treatments he received almost certainly damaged his renal system. Chronic uremia led to kidney and heart failure, bringing on his early death in 1916 at age 40 (Sinclair 157, 246; Reesman 110). Despite his collapse on the Snark—and the collapse of his self-concept as an Aryan superman—the voyage was a success for text-production. London gathered material for a great deal of non-fiction, including his bestselling travel book The Cruise of the Snark (1911). He also wrote some of his best fiction during and after the voyage, much of it based on his “encounter” experiences with indigenous peoples. London had toyed for years with a “struggling writer” novel (Watson, “Composition,” 402) before he began Martin Eden in the summer of 1907 in Honolulu; he continued it while he sailed the Snark to French Polynesia. To settle some business affairs in California, he and Charmian took a steamship from Tahiti to San Francisco and back. London worked on Martin Eden during this voyage, and he finished it in late February 1908 in Pape'ete, Tahiti, where the Snark was docked. London was 32, and the biographical identification that he felt with title character is apparent; Martin Eden's initials spell “ME.” The manuscript had several working names, including the ambiguous title “Success.” Before publication by Macmillan in1909, London settled on the title Martin Eden. While the book was in press, the Snark left Tahiti and voyaged westward. London and his crew eventually sailed into Melanesia and the Coral Sea region, where the Snark voyage ended in physical and mental breakdown. He lay on a coral beach where the coconuts grew down to the mellow-sounding surf. 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