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The average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil
(p323)

***

Jack London himself was a working class guy who got the audacious idea he wanted to be a writer, and by sheer Stakhanovite mind-over-matter vein-popping sleep-denying force he did so. His stand-in here, our Martin, does just the same. So here is the story of how a working class guy who drops all his aitches and does not know which fork to use to eat soup, and knocks over his girlfriend’s mother’s doilies with the lurchings of his sailorboy shoulders becomes the toast of literary America. This means that we get about 250 pages in which the same thing happens over and over again :

Eating only three dried apricots per day and living in a single nasty room ("those potatoes are rotting. Smell them, damn you, smell them") with a bicycle suspended above his bed, Martin writes like a madman all day except for the hours he reads philosophy and poetry. He cuts his sleep down to four hours and resents every moment of unconsciousness. What is he writing? Love poetry, sociophilosophical essays, adventure stories, jokes, doggerel verse, you name it. Out it pours. He mails it all off to any one of 200 magazines and waits for the inevitable rejection letters, which arrive daily. Occasionally he sells a joke or a comic poem for two dollars. Now he can eat four dried apricots today! And he can get his suit out of the pawnshop so he can go and visit his posh girlfriend whose family regard him as something the cat dragged in. There, she swoons against his bulging thighs while giving him tips on grammar. Meanwhile he pounds Spencerian knowledge into her father, accusing him of every crime known to the bourgeois. You fatuous worm! He says. I will crush your kind with the heel of my boot, when I have redeemed it from the pawnshop. I will not even notice your bleeding corpse. My how amusing you are, Martin, says the father, meanwhile passing a note to the mother which says WE MUST KILL HIM TOMORROW. Oh Martin, your neck is like a bullock, sighs Ruth, the ethereal daughter.

I admit this stuff gets a little bit tiresome for 250 pages but there’s no denying the intensity of Jack’s prose �� his style is like a guy trapped in a cave desperately scrabbling at the wall of solid rock to reach daylight. It ain’t pretty but it’s intense, even if it does get more than a little eyerolling at times. It becomes very clear that Jack London thought that Jack London was a hell of a fellow, brawny and brainy ("he was himself possessed of unusual brain vigor") and handsome and charming the little birds right out of the sky. All girls swoon when he hoves into view. Oooh those bulging biceps.

By the way, it has to be acknowledged that Jack London can come out with some of the worst sentences I’ve read in a long time -

Her penetrative virginity exalted and disguised his own emotions, elevating his thoughts to a star-cool chastity

…summer lingered, fading and fainting among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys, spinning a shroud of haze from waning powers and sated raptures, dying with the calm content of having lived and lived well.

he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable connotations.

But I must say I mostly loved this oddly compelling 500 page howl of anguish, for that’s what it is. Jack London seems to be engaged in nothing more than self-love and aggrandizement for three quarters of Martin Eden, but then the direction of travel skews wildly and his hero reveals himself to be nothing more than an unpleasant kind of Nietzschean protofascist. Maybe Jack was at war with himself here. Something was up with Jack, for sure!

Nobody liked this novel at the time, they wanted more dog stories.

FURTHER READING :

Hunger by Knut Hamsun and New Grub Street by George Gissing for guys starving themselves while they try to make it as a writer;

and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes for another guy who starts off knowing nothing and very quickly appears to know like almost everything �� Charlie is given a brain enhancing drug in that book but Martin, being Jack, doesn’t need no drug, just three dried apricots a day.

SOUNDTRACK

Get a Job by The Silhouettes



Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetish before which they fell down and worshipped.

Superman by REM



Martin’s trick of visioning was active as ever. His brain was a most accessible storehouse of remembered fact and fancy, and its contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his inspection. Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin’s mind immediately presented associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily expressed themselves to him in vision. It was sheerly automatic, and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living present

Success by Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks (vocal : Maryanne Price)



Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he flashed, comet-like, through the world of literature, and he was more amused than interested by the stir he was making

Shark Attack by The Wailing Souls



Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the tired eyes of a sick person. During every conscious moment life blazed in a raw glare around him and upon him. It hurt. It hurt intolerably.