Copyright © 2004 Louis Suárez-Potts

 

Tramp Desires

Martin Eden (1907) is a story in which a young man goes from being a pure and beautiful sailor to an indigent, working-class writer possessed of uncanny intelligence if no money (and thus no women) to an enormously famous and rich and admired writer who must, almost literally, fend off the women. But if on the one hand the story is about the entry into bourgeois identity it is equally about an exit into a bohemianism that repudiates the bourgeois mechanisms of production and desire. This paper examines that intertwined play as figured in Martin's extraordinary success as a writer. The problem with such a success, I argue, is precisely that it installs Martin within a feminizing economy of desire. Opposed to that feminine economy is the more masculine but hardly productive economy of the tramp and bohemian.

The novel that is, fetishizes the male body; and it antagonizes as well as seduces that body with productive mechanical correlations. It thus articulates a distinctively Rooseveltian masculine aesthetic of the male body beautiful in an age of mechanical reproduction.

Falling in Love: The Image

In a signal act that situates Martin within the precincts of the bourgeoisie, Ruth's brother Arthur calls Martin "Mr. Eden." The masculine and vocal interpellation into bourgeois domesticity, as Donald Pease has pointed out, is at first more "thrilling" because it abstracts him from his working class milieu: a milieu in which was always referred to as ""Eden' or "Martin Eden' or just "Martin'" (7) and a milieu that was anything but domestic and bourgeois. In contrast then to his visions of his former life that flit through his consciousness upon being called "Mr," there is the vision of Ruth Morse, who is hardly different at first glance than any of the other accoutrements of the bourgeois household. But upon closer look Martin sees her to be the apotheosis of the scene, and like a "pale gold flower upon a slender stem," a "sublimated beauty" who "might well be sung by that chap Swinburne" whom Martin happened to start reading as he waited for Ruth (8). Ruth presents herself to Martin's raptured gaze as a literary figure of beauty embodied. Watching her speak of Swinburne (whose sexually significant, and notorious work brackets the novel), Martin

forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for--ay, and die for. The books were true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them. She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread themselves before him, whereon loosened vague, gigantic figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for women's sake--for a pale woman, a flower of gold. And through the swaying, palpitant vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman, sitting there and talking of literature and art. He listened as well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze, or of the fact that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was shining in his eyes.

(11-12)

In this introduction to the feminine aesthetic, vision is emphasized, to the near exclusion of the aural, of the spoken: it hardly matters what she says, Martin is more enchanted by the "palpitant vision" before him. It's a vision--Ruth--that unites and sexualizes the domain of the aesthetic for Martin under the ordering figure of a romantically envisioned love, prompted as much by Swinbourne as by Ruth's predictable appearance. Heterosexual desire invests this vision, drives it; or, to put it another way, as much as he is interpellated into the bourgeois world he is also interpellated into the mechanism of heterosexual, productive desire by Ruth's vision.

Falling in Love: The Sound

Martin's meeting with the socialist-aesthete Russ Brissenden provides a turning point in the novel. In a manner that repeats his earlier inauguration into the aesthetics of Love with Ruth, Martin thinks, upon actually speaking to Brissenden (not just seeing--the first impression is hardly favorable; what counts here is the sound and effect of the words): "Here was the best the books had to offer coming true. Here was an intelligence, a living man, for him to look up to. "I am down in the dirt at your feet,' Martin repeated to himself again and again" (237). Martin's meeting with Brissenden marks other strategic differences, similarities: we are supposed to compare. In a series of scenes that appose and oppose the differences between the visual and the oral, between seeing and talking, London presents the "aristocratic" (238) bohemian, misogynistic and effete Brissenden as an antidote to Ruth's bourgeois and totally visual aesthetics. As with Ruth, Brissenden is figured as the stuff books are made of; but unlike Ruth, Brissenden at first seems to Martin unattractive, mainly because he is "anaemic and feather-brained" and thus effeminate (235). If the first vision of Ruth signaled an introduction into the aesthetic premised, as Donald Pease has argued, upon the expunging of Martin's materiality, the first talk with Brissenden goes beyond the unfavorable first impression (garnered in the Morse's rooms) insists upon Martin's materiality.

That insistence begins in the masculine bar they go to after the middle-brow salon at Ruth's parents', "the Grotto, where Brissenden and he lounged in capacious leather chairs, and drank Scotch and soda" (237). The drinking is significant, as is the bar, for several reasons. Not only does the name of the bar invoke Martin's mariner history, and suggest a sexual intimacy, it is the first bout of drinking he has had since the laundry in a "public bar." Moreover it signifies the presence of a distinctly masculine desire rejects the society of Ruth, who disdains the fluids that bind men via the mouth in the text: tobacco smoke, drink, ejaculated curses.

In contrast, possessed of the "flaming uncontrol of genius," "Living language flowed from [Brissenden]" (237)--a language that comes from his lips; indeed, in this extraordinarily, rapturous paragraph describing Martin's and Brissenden's first talk (Martin's falling in love with Brissenden), it is Brissenden's "thin lips" that are again and again the (sexual) focus of Martin's attention and seem both to embody the mechanical-- "His thin lips, like the dies of a machine, stamped out phrases that cut and stung"--as much as the poetic, "the thin lips shaped soft beauty, reverberant of the mystery and inscrutableness of life" (237). Initially effeminate, but then it seems ascetic, possibly degenerate, and certainly a "lunger" (238), Brissenden very much appeals to Martin, who reads his face and excitedly leaps to the conclusions that Brissenden is student of "biology," a "disciple of Spencer" (237-238).

But Brissenden isn't a believer in the necessity of the Nietzschean superman; indeed, as he informs Martin later (and his politics sound a lot like London's), he's a "Socialist" who sees "socialism as inevitable." But that's about all we hear of Brissenden's socialism; and what really comes across is a sad fatalism in the inevitability of governmental mediocrity. Fatalism characterizes London's accounts of tramps, and so it's not surprising to learn that in an early version of the novel London makes Brissenden a "tramp, a philosopher." If in the novel Brissenden is no longer a tramp, he nevertheless espouses the tramp ethic, the tramp aesthetic. None of this dampens Martin's exalted regard of Brissenden nor his headlong rush into being in the dirt at Brissenden's feet. To a great degree, Martin is again guilty of romancing the real to make it unreal of doing to Brissenden what he did to Ruth.

Mistaking the conventional aesthetic for the "real dirt," Martin chases after Ruth; but he finds much greater emotional, intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction with Russ Brissenden and the community of intellectuals--the "real dirt" to whom Brissenden introduces. Comprised of elements from both the disaffected upper class intellectuals and politically engage¹ working class intellectuals, and sympathetically showcasing the only intellectual woman in the novel, the "real dirt" provide Martin and the reader with a forceful alternative to the hegemonic system Martin despises. ""You have given me a glimpse of fairyland,' Martin said on the ferry-boat. "It makes life worth while to meet people like that'" (268). We recall that London had elsewhere used "fairyland" to refer to trampland, and used it in his essay to describe a place at once nearby, mysterious and exciting. Repeating the sound fairy, so that it covers not only the "fairyland" itself but also the boat used to get there, London in this instance doesn't quite imply a certain homosexuality as suggest a fabulous field of desire that Martin can have access to, via Brissenden. But in a stunning act of betrayal--a betrayal that, in the moral economy of the novel ultimately signals Brissenden's death, and clarifies the force of thinking of Brissenden as embodying the mechanical, Martin forecloses the possibility of enjoying the fairyland as a resident.

The betrayal consists of Martin "market[ing]" for Brissenden his "swan song," the poem "Ephemera," which Martin describes as something "that transcends genius" (259). It's a betrayal because Brissenden emphatically does not want Martin to "market" it. Amid Martin's effusive praise and conclusive desire ("Let me market it for you" [259]), Brissenden resolutely resists sharing the poem with the magazines. But not with Martin: "It's mine; I made it, and I've shared it with you." (259)

To Martin's complaint that he is being "selfish," and that the "function of beauty is joy-making" (259), Brissenden replies, pointedly, ""I'm not selfish.' Brissenden grinned soberly in the way he had when pleased by the thing his thin lips were about to shape. "I'm as unselfish as a famished hog'" (259). Of course he's selfish; but then he's also desiring it. It's Brissenden's thing, what defines for him his great desire. In fact, he's consumed by his desire for his work, a desire that makes his gesture of sharing with Martin all the more intimate and powerful.

By sharing the work--a defining thing of lifelong desire--only with Martin, Brissenden establishes the erotic, intellectual and aesthetic significance of the work: a vehicle of secret communication, a written extension of the langue inconnue the speech "incommunicable to ordinary mortals." Everyone else, especially the editors Brissenden hates (260), would not only not understand it, but would tarnish what there is there with their understanding and with their manufacture of the reified, mechanized, substitute Brissenden. And in fact, that's what happens. News of its publication comes on the same day that he learns of Brissenden's suicide (290) And Brissenden was right: the poem is brought out in an edition "the cheapness and vulgarity [of which] was nauseating" to Martin because it focuses on the images not the substance of the work (293); what's more, it sets off a series of manqué versions of itself, foreshadowing the way in which the market consumes Martin's own identity as a writer. The market is not so much merely bad (Brissenden, after all gives Martin advice on how to market his own works; 259), as simply not the place for the things of intimacy, which when situated in the money economy of the market, the economy, that is, of images, lose the substance--the real dirt--that makes it valuable.

For these reasons, then Martin loses his admittance to the fairyland of the real dirt, or place where neither money nor discursive institutions (colleges, salons) count for anything. Loses because having betrayed not just Brissenden but also his own interest in critiquing the sociomechanic, he cannot return to the fairyland; as it were, the keys are lost to him. He tries, once, to return:

Once he made a trip to San Francisco to look up the real dirt. But at the last moment, as he stepped into the upstairs entrance, he recoiled, and turned and fled through the swarming ghetto. He was frightened at the thought of hearing philosophy discussed, and he fled furtively, for fear that some of the real dirt might chance along and recognize him.

(295)

The measure of his being outside the fairyland figured by Brissenden's real dirt is Martin's fear at hearing "philosophy discussed"; it is not, as Scott Derrick has recently argued, a fear of his own "homoeroticism" (Derrick, 133). That's not Martin's fear; rather, he runs because he has sold out, betrayed, the man who seemed to offer him a reality. And he betrayed him by giving in exchange precisely what Ruth promised: mechanical unreality.

The Market Machine

At the end of Martin Eden, Martin gains all the wealth, love, and admiration he has longed for since the very beginning. But success is precisely the problem that plagues Martin at the end of the book: In moving from a veritable tramp poverty and despised anonymity to respectable bourgeoisity he comes to realize that "His intrinsic beauty and power meant nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were acclaiming him and buying his books" (317). Instead of liking him for his "intrinsic" qualities, people like him because others like him.

His dismay over the nature of fame includes more than a disgust with the bourgeois consumption of the aesthetic; as he says to Ruth, "But worst of all, it makes me question Love, sacred Love. Is love so gross a thing that it must feed upon publication and public notice?" (332). As becomes clear (even to Martin) by the end of the book, what Martin loved was not Ruth but her aesthetic value, which, in Martin Eden, means her capacity to embody desire.

But more interestingly, Martin's success as a writer means that when he became successful he entered into the machinery of the literary, of the bourgeoisie. In the novel, in an image that is repeated throughout the work, the literary market is famously figured as a machine, in which there are no living editors, typesetters, pressmen, only "wheels and cogs and oil-cups--a clever mechanism operated by automatons" (172).

The literary market is as much a machine as the washing machines at Shelley Springs where he briefly works; and if the washing machines at Shelley Springs force Martin to prosthetize himself, so too the literary market compels him to mechanize his productions, in order to sell his short, mechanically plotted stories. Both reduce Martin's vaunted individuality to something mechanically instrumental and serial; in both cases, that is, he's reified, and becomes object not subject.

To sum up, if we can align on one side tramping, materiality and a homosocial desire, on the other we can place the market, mechanical, and heterosocial desire. The former category produces and consumes little; the latter produces and consumes, and in the logic of the novel, the things it produces and consumes are the images abstracted from the material "real." Thus, in replacing the "real" Martin with his commodified market image, the market parallels the logic of the instrumental that replaces persons with prosthetics: mechanical substitutes.