11 - The Play of Hope and Despair

Summary

Like poetry and art, fiction of the Lyric Years also got caught up in the play of hope and despair. In his early correspondence, describing his day-by-day struggles to get his fiction published in Eastern Coast magazines and by Eastern Coast publishers, Jack London complains, as Pound had, about the cost of postage as well as rejections. Later he began to flaunt his great success with macho swagger and then to analyze it with growing ambivalence, fearful that he had paid for it in the coin of corrupting compromise. In Martin Eden (1909), he confronts his writer-hero’s confused ambitions and locatesties between them and the ambitions of his nation: “In the moment of that thought,” he says of Martin Eden, “the desperateness of his situation dawned upon him. He saw, clear eyed, that he was in the Valley of the Shadow. All the life that was in him was fading, fainting, making toward death.”

Martin Eden is the story of a writer whose life bears striking resemblances to London’s own. One part of the significance of Martin Eden lies in the persistence with which it suggests that, despite its doctrine of impersonality, modern art often revolves around the interplay between artist and protagonist and between artist and work. Like London in his fiction, Gertrude Stein in hers, and Ernest Hemingway in his, Martin Eden treats everything that happens to him – poverty and wealth, obscurity and fame, neglect and celebrity, adventure and boredom, injury and good fortune, health and disease – as things that are somehow alien to him and yet are his own idea.