This “Martin Eden” is assuredly one of Jack London’s greatest works; he put his real soul into it, and the fact that it was so little known and read, must have been of evil significance to him. It taught him that if an American writer wants to earn a living with his pen—especially an extravagant living—it is necessary that he should avoid dealing in any true and vital way with the theme of sex. Either he must write over and over again the dream of primitive and perfect mating, a phenomenon unreal and unconvincing to people who are not primitive, but who have intellects as well as bodies to mate; or else, if he deals with modern life, he must give us details of the splendid and devastating passions of the prosperous—the kind of perfumed poison now all the rage. One saw the beginning of that in “The Little Lady of the Big House,” and I count this book the most sinister sign in the life of Jack London. A man can hardly have a thirty-six thousand dollar a year contract with the Hearst magazines and still keep his soul alive!
I would say to myself, mournfully, that America had “got” Jack London, just as it “got” Mark Twain! But then something would happen to show me that I had given up hope too soon. Jack had a mind which worked unceasingly, and impelled him irresistibly; he had a love of truth that was a passion, a hatred of injustice that burned volcanic fires. He was a deeply sad man, a bitterly, cruelly suffering man, and no one could tell what new vision he would forge in the heat of his genius. If I write of him here severely it is because I believe in the rigid truth, which he himself preached; but I would not leave anyone with the idea that I do not appreciate his greatness, both as a writer and a man.
There were many among his friends and mine who gave him up. He went to Hawaii, and the “smart set” there made a lion of him, and he condescended to refer appreciatively to their “sweet little charities” on behalf of the races they were exploiting. He went to Mexico, and fell under the spell of the efficiency of oil engineers, and wrote for “Collier’s Weekly” a series of articles which caused radicals to break out in rage. Jack was a boy to the end, and must make new discoveries and have new enthusiasms. If a naval officer took him over a battleship, he would perceive that it was a marvelous and thrilling machine; but then in the quiet hours of the night he would see the pitiful white faces of the stokers, to whom as a guest of an officer he had not been introduced!
Yes, for he had been in the place of these stokers, and their feelings had been stamped upon his soul. He might set up to be a country gentleman, and fall into a fury with his “hands” for their stupidity and incompetence; but if you said to him, “How about the class war?” instantly he would be there with his mind. “Yes, of course, I know how they feel; if I were in their place I would never do a stroke of work I did not have to.” It is a stressful thing to have an imagination, and to see many sides of life at once!
Jack had a divine pity, he had wept over the East End of London as Jesus wept over Jerusalem. For years afterwards the memories of this stunted and debased population haunted him beyond all peace; the pictures he wrote of them in “The People of the Abyss” will be read by posterity with horror and incredulity, and recognized as among the most powerful products of his pen. Those, with his vivid and intensely felt Socialist essays, constitute him one of the great revolutionary figures of our history. I know that he kept a spark of that sacred fire burning to the very end, for a little over a year before his death I tried him with the bulky manuscript of “The Cry for Justice.” The preface he wrote for it is one of the finest things he ever did, and some of it will be carved upon his monument:
It is so simple a remedy, merely service. Not one ignoble thought or act is demanded of any one of all men and women in the world to make fair the world. The call is for nobility of thinking, nobility of doing. The call is for service, and such is the wholesomeness of it, he who serves all best serves himself.
That is what life had taught him at the end. But it was not easy for him to learn such a lesson, for he had an imperious nature, fierce in its demands, and never entirely to be tamed. The struggle between individualism and Socialism was going on in his whole being all the time. In the copy of “Martin Eden” which he sent me he wrote: “One of my motifs in this book was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled for so far not a single reviewer has discovered it.” After reading the book I replied that it was easy to understand the befuddlement of the critics; for he had shown such sympathy with his hard-driving individualist hero that it would hardly occur to anyone to take the character as a warning and a reproach.
You feel that same thing in all his books—in “The Sea Wolf,” and especially in “The Mutiny of the Elsinore”; the Nietzschean world-conqueror has conquered London’s imagination, in spite of his reason and his conscience. If I have written here with cruel frankness about the personal tragedies of his life, it is because I would not have posterity continue in the misunderstanding of which he complained in the case of “Martin Eden.” No, do not make that mistake about his life and its meaning; most certainly it is not a glorification of the red-blooded superman, trampling all things under his feet, gratifying his imperious desires. Rather is it a demonstration of the fact that the world-conquering superman, trampling all things under his feet and gratifying all his desires, commits suicide by swallowing laudanum at the age of forty, because pleasure and wealth and fame have turned to ashes on his lips. Jack’s friends say that the cause was a desire for two women at the same time; but I don’t believe that a mature, intellectual man will kill himself for such a reason, unless his moral forces have been sapped by years of self-indulgence.
It was the “Martin Eden” ending, which had haunted Jack London all his life, and which in the end he made a reality. What a shame, and what a tragedy to our literature, that capitalist America, the philosophy of individualist greed and selfishness, should have stolen away the soul of this man, with all his supreme and priceless gifts! He had seen so clearly our vision of fellowship and social justice—how clearly, let him tell you in his own words, the last words he wrote upon ethical matters:
He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of service, will serve truth to confute liars and make them truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will perish; will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not beautiful. And he who is strong will serve the weak that they may become strong. He will devote his strength not to the debasement and defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity for them to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and beasts.