Martin Eden / Jack London’s ”Splendid Dream”

Martin Eden: Jack London’s ”Splendid Dream”

by Sam S. Baskett
May 5, 2019

Vividly embodying as it does the tangled strands of Jack London’s personal, cultural, intellectual and artistic experience, Martin Eden remains a readable, affecting work sufficiently complex to invite continued critical attention. The results of this attention, however, have been inconclusive. Some critics, pointing to the novel’s undeniable vitality, rank it as London’s best. Others, citing equally evident weaknesses of structure, expression, characterization and tone, all but dismiss it. Moreover, there are widely varying interpretations of the conclusion. What, indeed, are the implications of the abrupt suicide of the protagonist, the youthful, attractive, intelligent, sensitive, vital, successful — and autobiographical — hero? How does this action relate to the rest of the novel and to the author’s attitude toward the function of the novelist? Or, to put the question more radically, did London in fact really see the novel through, shaping his own raw experience into a coherent artistic expression?

Martin Eden: Jack London’s Poem Of The Mind

by Sam S. Baskett

November 4, 2019

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice.
—“Of Modern Poetry,” Wallace Stevens

When Martin Eden says, ‘‘My desire to write is the most vital thing in me,”¹ he is merely giving ‘‘impassioned voice” to what has been apparent from the first pages of his story. The combined effect of his thoughts, utterances, and actions is to emphasize that in this autobiographical characterization Jack London has intended nothing less than a kind of a portrait of the artist. Surprisingly enough, no one has yet offered an extensive reading of Martin Eden in these terms, as if neither the character nor the author is quite to be trusted with what he is rather obviously saying. Even sympathetic critics have tended to subordinate Martin’s struggle to become an artist to other aspects of his life. Earle Labor, after noting that the fiction is ‘‘drawn largely from London’s own formative ordeal as a writer,” offers a stimulating discussion of Martin not as a writer but as the universal youth seeking an education and condemned to pay for it, as an archetypal American male and as a projection of London’s youthful vitality.² Franklin Walker does set out to solve the ‘‘puzzle” of the successful writer killing himself in despair. His analysis of ‘‘one of London’s best books,” a book that possesses ‘‘more vitality today than when it was first published,” is indeed perceptive, but it moves away from an examination of Martin as a strikingly successful writer who found that success “increasingly hollow” to a more general conclusion: Martin despairs because of “the discovery that he was going nowhere and the deadly realization that he had lost his interest in life.”³