Philip Castille
San Francisco and back in early 1908, when she wrote in her diaries that
her husband was depressed, drinking too much, and neglecting to work on
the manuscript of Martin Eden (Watson, Novels, 270n8). Withdrawn in his
stateroom on the Mariposa
with the rough sailors in the forecastle nor the well-heeled guests alongside
him at the captain’s table. His life remains a paradox that resists solution.
depressed beyond words. He reads Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine,”
a depiction of the blighted netherworld, the antithesis of the lush Garden of
Eden. No doubt Martin savors the irony, as it was Ruth who introduced him to
verses turn Martin’s thoughts to suicide. London’s point is plain: Eden is
now a dead garden. Martin is a desensitized Adam whose former vitality has
withered: his original sin is his lifelessness. Not even Martin’s fantasies of
Polynesia’s hanging gardens, glimmering bays, and eroticized women can
rouse him from his torpor. He stumbles from his bunk and stares down at the
water.
through the porthole. He is burned out, exhausted, beat -- a forerunner of the
Beat Generation, another innovation of Martin Eden. He hangs by his arms
from land. Predatory ahi
sea is like an anesthetic, calming him, pulling him under. He turns his back
on the world, dives deep, and swims down as hard as he can. After his long
descent, his lungs explode in a long-pent phosphorescent burst. Suddenly, he
an intense white light. Martin tumbles deeper while the light fades, as though
he is “falling down a vast and interminable stairway.” His head erupts in a
dream goes black, and he blanks out forever. London’s conclusion to Martin
Eden
(Kingman 184).
Martin’s suicide is orgasmic but solitary; his naked body is “a white
statue” plunging through “a milky froth of water” (Martin Eden 480-81). Thus,
only alone can he experience the sexual release “that he withholds from Ruth”
in San Francisco (DeGuzmán and López, 116). Martin once regarded her as
full moon, the huge seas glinting coldly in the moonlight” (Martin Eden 281).
So Martin’s long dive is also a simulation of sexual union with Ruth, rolling in
Martin Eden 482).
But this is not the ecstatic male experience he had expected to attain in the
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