«Martin Eden», against the chimeras of individualism

The story takes place more than a hundred years ago in the United States. The class struggle is raging, and Jack London throws the ugliness of the world right in our faces through a brilliant love story. Martin Eden is worth checking out in its recent audio version.

Fight or die. It was by following this philosophy that Martin Eden—a laborer, galley slave, sailor, and laundryman—decided to educate himself. Out of love, too. He wants to climb the social ladder to win over a woman: Ruth Morse, a member of the petty bourgeoisie who gradually reveals herself to be just as uninteresting as all the other dreary characters of her social class.

It all begins with an encounter. Something vaguely romantic: a gruff, clumsy, animal-like sailor with calloused hands who falls in love with a beautiful young maiden «from high society.» She is naive, blushing, and has soft skin. So on one side, we have Martin Eden, a working-class man, and on the other, Ruth Morse, a woman from the lower middle class. He uses slang; she speaks in poetry. He lives in a small room he rents from his sister. She lives in her parents’ house, who have become wealthy from an annuity. The story takes place at the turn of the 19th^th and XX^th century: So it’s a good old-fashioned story of impossible love, and Jack London plays on that to get us where he wants us to be.

That was what [Martin Eden] was: a dog sleeping in the sun. Noble and magnificent visions appeared to him, and all he could do was whimper and bark at Ruth. But he would no longer sleep in the sun. Standing, his eyes wide open, he would struggle, work, and suffer, waiting for the day when, with his tongue loosened and his eyes wide open, he would be able to share his intellectual riches with her.

To Martin, everything about Ruth is dazzling and enchanting: her culture, her manners, her way of thinking. Since he knows full well that he’s no Prince Charming, he decides to educate himself in order to win her over. He teaches himself, goes to the public library, and spends his days studying, squandering the meager fortune he earned during a few months at sea. Ruth helps him. The exchanges in which she corrects his rough, working-man’s language are a delight to the ear—at least when you approach the text, as I did, through an audiobook.

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Little by little, Ruth begins to feel something else. She realizes that the bad boy is turning her on; it feels like love, like desire. These thoughts disgust her a little. This is a far cry from sexual liberation. But above all, this relationship is a bit awkward because it’s so lopsided. «He [Martin Eden] amuses me, I think, like a bulldog»: that’s what she says to her mother one day. There you have it—the delicate young woman sees the gruff man as a little puppy in need of training. Martin is a charitable endeavor.

The sheep-like banality of the bourgeoisie

And yet, after a few months of studying grammar and poring over the dictionary, Martin Eden—who is, on several levels, the alter ego by Jack London—begins to write: poetry, short stories, and a few philosophical-poetic essays. At first, this endeavor has no real literary ambitions. In reality, Martin mainly wants to make money. For the materialistic, penniless laborer realizes full well that writing for magazines pays far better than toiling on a ship for months on end. Except that he struggles to get published. A blind rage then takes hold of him. You could call it sheer determination: «You’ll give those publishers a run for their money, even if it takes you eleven years. You can’t stop now. You have to keep going. It’s a merciless struggle.»

While there are few financial benefits, intellectually, he soon surpasses his mistress. This is where the story takes a more complex turn: Martin Eden begins to feel a total revulsion for the social class to which Ruth belongs: «I’m struck by the fact that those who aren’t complete idiots are boring.» The characters who pass through the Morse family’s living room are, one after another, parrots without any ideas of their own; dogmatic Republicans; Musicians devoid of any sensitivity. Or, quite simply, boring little bureaucrats. The barrage of adjectives echoes in my ears as a listener, just as loudly as Eden’s illusions shatter.

«The world, the heights to which [Martin Eden] had aspired, the people he had dreamed of becoming the equal of—all of them disappointed him. […] He had no idea that remarkable people are like great solitary eagles soaring high in the azure sky, above the earth and its sheep-like banality.»

At this point, we’re more or less halfway through the book. The petty bourgeoisie gets a rough deal in Jack London’s writing. And despite their enduring love, even Ruth gets thoroughly torn apart. Martin is still just as poor—if not even poorer—but he has kindled several sparks of intellectual curiosity: philosophy and politics.

Art as an End in Itself

Given the depth of the book, it would be a real shame to reduce these 400 pages to a love story. While Martin’s relationship with Ruth undeniably lifts him up, it is his encounter with another character that fully reveals him: the poet Russ Brissenden. In many ways, he seems to be the voice of truth—or at least, the truth that Jack London wishes to whisper to us. Brissenden, too, feels revulsion toward his own caste of hypocrites, «stomachs guided by intellectual and artistic prejudices.».

In fact, this social class feeds on the silly, superficial stories printed in the pages of the magazines in which Martin is desperately trying to get published. «Love beauty for its own sake and leave the magazines alone. […] Why stay in these unhealthy, rotten housing projects? You’re killing yourselves trying to prostitute beauty, and that’s all. […] You must be a slave only to beauty,» the poet advises our hero one day. And this resonates with him. For while writing does have a financial motive—at least at first—it quickly becomes a visceral need as well: Martin can no longer stop himself from writing certain stories—«the joy of creating.».

Art has become an end in itself. It stands in opposition to the unanimous, codified bourgeois culture. «I will not subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of the public,» he retorts to his beloved when she assures him that he is incapable of understanding an opera: he lacks education in the matter, she claims. He rejects this culture, which serves solely as a social glue among the guests at a high-society party, overlooking the intrinsic aesthetic value it might hold.

Taking the Right Side in the Social Struggle

Finally, politics plays an extremely important role in the second half of the book. While Ruth is a conservative with firmly established morals, Martin is a radical rule-breaker. At first glance, one might consider him a typical leftist, anarchist, or socialist—just as Jack London was. And yet, it’s not that simple: Martin Eden is not Jack London. Compared to his author, Martin Eden is even a somewhat diabolical double who finds himself on the wrong side of the social divide.

For our fictional character, society as a whole is enslaved. Enslaved by weakness. The only ones who aren’t are «the millionaires and their conscious lackeys. At least they know which way the wind blows and why.» Father Morse—like many of his kind—is an «unconscious lackey.» A man who thinks he holds power and advocates for equality while remaining subordinate to his masters, the capitalists. In short, people who advocate for a certain degree of regulation to cover up their own shortcomings.

«Through a process of autosuggestion, you convince yourself that you believe in the system of competition and the supremacy of the strongest, and at the same time, you [encourage], more and more, all measures capable of diminishing the power of the strongest [over the weakest].» Martin Eden’s language becomes increasingly caustic, precise, and accusatory: it feels to me as though I am vividly witnessing a speech, sitting in the front row of a political assembly.

For his part, Martin completely rejects the principle of equality; this is why he defines himself as anti-socialist: «I believe that the race is won by the fastest, that life belongs to the strongest.» Martin Eden is an individualist. He believes in the theory of evolution, which could be crudely summarized as «either you’re strong, or you adapt to survive, or you die.» Martin is the very embodiment of the self-made man, the embodiment of the idea that «where there’s a will, there’s a way,» no matter where you come from. In fact, he swears by Herbert Spencer’s theories (which are similar to Darwinism).

While Martin Eden and Jack London may resemble one another, share a history, and meet a similar end, it is in their relationship to the individual that the greatest difference lies. This 1909 story reads like a cry of despair: even the toughest of sailors—capable of climbing the ranks, delivering impassioned speeches, and even achieving success in the eyes of society—is, in fact, a slave to his own weakness. Without awareness of this human frailty—and without finding a collective (socialist, according to Jack London) organization capable of addressing it—every human being risks losing themselves. That is exactly what he told me Martin Eden, because it is this narrow-minded individualism that will cause him to sink. Deep into the abyss.

Write to the author: diana-alice.ramsauer@leregardlibre.com

Jack London
Martin Eden
Text read by Denis Podalydès
Translated by Francis Kerline
Audiolib Editions
2019

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