I just finished reading Jack London’s Martin Eden, and my brain is a bit on fire. If you are an aspiring writer, then you should definitely read it. If you are a spouse or relative of an aspiring writer, then you should probably read it, too.

Martin Eden is a bit of a Pygmalion story, if Galatea turned out to be a better sculptor than her creator.

The titular character begins as an uneducated sailor (and brawler), who by chance becomes acquainted with a bourgeois family and falls in love with the beautiful, and educated, Ruth Morse. At 24, Ruth is three years older than Martin, and finishing her studies to become a Bachelor of Arts. Ruth, with a maternal sort of pity (although, for some reason she is also obsessed with wanting to touch his muscular, sun-burned neck), gives him some grammar pointers and lends him a grammar guide before he ships out to sea again. This is the beginning of an autodidactic journey which unlocks his hitherto unrealized mental potential and eventually leads him far past Ruth and her family in intellectual ability. When he returns eight months later, his grammar and diction have improved, and he’s decided he’d like to write, in order to share the things he’s seen with Ruth. And what better way to surprise her than to have his story published in the newspaper?

He did not know how long an article he should write, but he counted the words in a double-page article in the Sunday supplement of the San Francisco Examiner, and guided himself by that. Three days, at white heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, … he learned from a rhetoric he picked up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs and quotation marks. … When he had copied the article a second time and rolled it up carefully, he read in a newspaper an item on hints to beginners, and discovered the iron law that manuscripts should never be rolled and that they should be written on one side of the paper. He had violated the law on both counts. Also, he learned from the item that first-class papers paid a minimum of ten dollars a column. So, while he copied the manuscript a third time, he consoled himself by multiplying ten columns by ten dollars. … One hundred dollars in three days! It would have taken him three months or longer on the sea to earn a similar amount.

When he sends off the manuscript on Friday, he assumes it will naturally be printed the following Sunday, and on Sunday afternoon he will go and surprise Ruth. Because that’s how it works, right?

***Spoiler alert!!!***

The San Francisco Examiner does not publish his article.

But Martin continues in his happy daydream, that writing three thousand words a day will earn earn him two months’ wages on the sea, and he’ll have so much money he’ll have to hire servants for his sisters just to spend it all.

When he tells Ruth what’s he’s been up to, though, “she did not think much of his plan.”

“You see,” she said frankly, “writing must be a trade, like anything else. Not that I know anything about it, of course. I only bring common judgement to bear. You couldn’t hope to be a blacksmith without spending three years at learning the trade–or is it five years! Now writers are so much better paid than blacksmiths that there must be ever so many more men who would like to write, who–try to write.”

Ruth suggests he go to school and get a solid education, but Martin decides to spend his time reading and processing at his own speed, which is tremendous. He sleeps five hours a night and spends the other nineteen hours reading and writing every day. Eventually Ruth, pleased with how she has molded him from a wild man into a civilized man, feels she has fallen in love with him. Plus, he still has that alluringly powerful neck. They get engaged, and she begins to push him to get a job. Martin, though is obstinate, and gives her a little speech that replicates almost word for word a conversation I had with my taller half earlier this year.

“Give me time, dear,” he pleaded. “The hack-work is only makeshift, and I don’t take it seriously. Give me two years. I shall succeed in that time, and the editors will be glad to buy my good work. I know what I’m saying; I have faith in myself. I know what I have in me; I know what literature is, now; I know the average rot that is poured out by a lot of little men; and I know that at the end of two years I shall be on the highroad to success. …”

She remained silent; her disappointment was apparent.

“Well?” he asked.

“I had hoped and planned other wise. I had thought, and I still think, that the best thing for you would be to study shorthand–you already know type-writing–and go into father’s office. You have a good mind, and I am confident you can succeed as a lawyer.”

Of course, it’s another year before he makes a single penny off his writing, and he learns that few, if any, publications are willing to pay ten dollars a column. Indeed, some are unwilling to pay at all. In a scene that will no doubt be highly gratifying to many an unpaid writer or freelancer, Martin visits the office of one publication and literally shakes down the editor and business manager until they produce $4.95 against the $5.00 he is owed.

The novel is full of little scenes to make writers go “Yes! That’s how it is!”, but what struck me most were Martin’s ruminations at the end of the book. At this point, his work has taken off and he’s become a sensation, but not before losing his engagement with Ruth and repeatedly pawning everything he owns.

He puzzled the harder. He remembered the days of his desperate starvation when no one invited him to dinner. That was the time he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine. That was the paradox of it. When he wanted dinners, no one gave them to him, and now that he could buy a hundred dinners and was losing his appetite, dinners were thrust upon him right and left. But why? There was no justice in it, no merit on his part. He was no different. All the work he had done was even at that time work performed. Mr. and Mrs. Morse had condemned him for an idler and a shirk and through Ruth had urged that he take a clerk’s position in an office. Furthermore, they had been aware of his work performed. Manuscript after manuscript of his had been turned over to them by Ruth. They had read them. It was the very same work that had put his name in all the papers, and, it was his name being in all the papers that led them to invite him.”

Like any good work, there are many themes that can be read in it, but one message that I see in Martin Eden, that I want to pass on, is this: Support the artists you know while they’re in the midst of the creative process. That’s when they need it most and receive it least. After everything is published, on exhibition, printed, installed, or sold, it is already work performed.

No one — not his fiance, not her family, not his own family — believes in Martin Eden while he is creating his work, and by the time he is publicly recognized, he has trouble believing that any of the praise he receives is sincere.

***Spoiler alert!!!!***

The novel ends somewhat tragically. You can visit your local bookstore or library, or download Martin Eden in a variety of formats from Project Gutenberg and see for yourself. I recommend it.