Earlier that year, he had, after dropping out of the University of California, worked fourteen-hour days in a steam laundry. At eighteen he had shoveled coal in a power plant, sometimes on eighteen-hour shifts. At fifteen, when his father was injured and couldn’t work, he had put in twelve-hour days in a cannery at ten cents an hour. At that moment, in high summer, in the spruce scent of the air on a ridge above a fjordlike Alaskan bay, he must have felt that he had been transformed, even with the pack on his back, from a beast of burden into a much more splendid kind of animal. [...]

London was a romantic; it was his special gift as a writer to make life seem vivid and intense. He had had a dreary childhood and a difficult youth, and they filled him with a sense—which it is another of the gifts of his fiction to convey—that there were great things in the world and great things inside him, and that there was something wrong with a society that beat the sense of grandeur out of other people, or wore it away. To freeze one of those moments on the mountain is to see the immediate appeal of his work: life as a grand struggle, masculine, openhanded, and best attacked head-on. Out of this sensibility, quick, generous, and responsive, and out of his prodigal, half-formed gifts and immense determination he made real art and forged his huge success. [...]

that the grand struggle for existence is a dream, a meaningless bubble in the meaningless weirs of the evolution of matter

[...] London was the best-known American socialist of his time, and though he had run for mayor of Oakland on the Socialist ticket, and contributed financially to the party, and was about to publish a book called Revolution, he was coming under attack from his compatriots for his high living. He was particularly sensitive to criticism of Martin Eden, and he defended the book to the novelist Upton Sinclair: “Martin Eden is an individualist, I am a socialist. That is why I continue to live, and that is the reason why Martin Eden died.” Sinclair, writing about the book, noted that reviewers had not grasped London’s point, if that was his point: “It is easy to understand the befuddlement of critics; for he had shown such sympathy with the hard-driving individualist that it would hardly occur to anyone that the character was meant to be a warning and a reproach.”

It is true that there is no reproach in the novel; London had got too deep into his subject to be passing out moral judgments. There is, however, a warning, and it comes from Brissenden in the thirty-eighth chapter, when Martin is on the verge of literary success: “ ‘I’d like to see you a socialist before I’m gone. It will give you a sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you.’ ”

Brissenden, it turns out, is exactly right. The time of disappointment comes and Martin can find no sanction for his existence in his individualism. London is careful to underline this again on shipboard. Finding he has no use for the other people in first class—he knows exactly why their shirts look so white and crisp—and finding that he hardly recognizes the world of the crew, he stumbles onto an intellectually inclined quartermaster who tries to prod him “with socialist propaganda,” but at this point Martin is too far gone.

The writing in these last pages, London’s rendering of Martin’s sickness with the bright white light of existence, is brilliant, the numbness of it truly terrible: “He slept much. After breakfast he sought out his deck chair with a magazine he never finished. The printed pages tired him. He puzzled that men found so much to write about, and, puzzling, dozed in his chair. When the gong awoke him for luncheon, he was irritated that he must awaken. There was no satisfaction in being awake.” It is like the freezing numbness of his chilling late story “To Build a Fire.” He wrote about this sickness also in John Barleycorn: “I had read too much positive science”—he means Spencer—“and lived too much positive science,” and he attributed his condition to “the savage interpretation of biological fact.”