The Divine Fire (1904) and Martin Eden (1909)

115 THE DIVINE FIRE (1904) AND MARTIN EDEN (1909)1 By T.E.M. Boll (University of Pennsylvania) On September 21, I905 Jack London mailed a note he had written the day before at Glen Ellen to May Sinclair, in care of Henry Holt & Co, Publishers, New York City. The note arrived at Madison Square Post Office in New York on September 25, and went out the next day, readdressed at Henry Holt's to 13 Chrlstchurch Rd., Hampstead, London. From there it went to the home of a member of the firm of Constable's, C. Kyllmann, at Ruan Lodge, Clarendon Road, Watford, Herts, and on to May Sinclair's new home at 13 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington, W. London wrote: The Divine Fire - it is colossal! I have read every line of it, and re-read many lines of it. I take my hat off to you. I sit in the dust at your feet. Jack London London's Martin Eden tells the story of a young sailor who lives in Berkeley, California. The chance of his being on a ferryboat when drunken hoodlums rough up a lawyer's son and his vigorous intervention lead to his being invited to Arthur Morse's home and to his meeting Arthur's sister, Ruth, a student at the University of California at Berkeley. Martin Eden Is handsome, strong, without a formal education, but he has an interest in literature and a craving to ascend from his common sailor's rank to the heavenly plateau on which gracious, learned people like the Morses think and speak their rational, beautiful thoughts. Ruth is shocked by Eden's mispronouncing the name of the poet whose work he had first caught sight of in her home: Swineburne. She corrects him then and assumes his training In the social graces. Eden's power of self-delusion transforms the strictly materialistic Ruth into a divine angel of beauty for whose sake he studies hard to become a thinker and a writer whose fame will win him honor in Ruth's eyes and in the eyes of the society which she had entered by birth. His courtship wakens her womanhood and wins him her agreement to marry him. Eden supports his literary ambitions to become philosopher, poet, and writer of fiction with a rationale that is a kind of pan-biology , a belief in the relatedness of all nature, a vision of the wholeness of life. He explains It to Professor Caldwell: "Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology, from the ground up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the vitalized inorganic right on up to the widest aesthetic and sociological generalizations."2 "It Is biology In Its largest aspects .... the biological factor, the very stuff out of which has been spun the fabric of all the arts, the warp and woof of all 116 human actions and achievements ..3 Ruth Is never sympathetic with Eden's literary ambition for Its cultural values. She urges him to start studying for the law in her father's office, so that he may earn a proper livelihood. When his manuscripts continue to be returned to him, the family obliges the consenting Ruth to break her engagement to a foolish writer who can't sell his writings. The turning of his fortune that makes his manuscripts sell and that makes editors and publishers beg for more, causes the family to engage In some playacting . Ruth pretends to defy her family and to throw herself back into Martin's arms. But by now Martin has discovered Ruth's shallowness and he sees through her playacting. He sells all he has written, and then drowns his disillusionment in Ruth and in Ruth's society by giving his body to the Pacific Ocean. The poet hero of May Sinclair's The Divine Fire is a man of common Cockney birth, the son of a second-hand bookseller in London. He is fully aware of the fact that his only access to the society for which he is intellectually qualified through his self-taught mastery of Greek and English literatures is by way of the tradesmen 's entrance. Savage Keith Hickman meets Lucia Harden...