The posthumous publication and public mockery of “Ephemera”

The posthumous publication of Brissenden’s poem Ephemera becomes both a literary sensation and a spectacle of public mockery. The Parthenon presents the poem with elaborate visual honors, then surrounds it with contradictory judgments and commercial self-promotion; newspapers, poets, ministers, and humorists turn it into a national controversy. For Martin Eden, who had hoped Brissenden might have lived to see the poem appear, the result confirms his friend’s contempt for the literary marketplace and deepens his sense of loss.

Publication and Presentation

Martin first notices an unopened magazine that arrived in the morning mail while sitting in a state of near-numbness. The torn wrapper brings The Parthenon back into view: he recognizes it as the August issue and realizes it must contain Ephemera. His immediate thought is that Brissenden should have been there to see it, making the issue’s appearance inseparable from the absence it commemorates.

The poem receives a conspicuously grand presentation. The Parthenon gives it a decorated headpiece and elaborate margins, placing Brissenden’s photograph on one side and a photograph of Sir John Value, the British Ambassador, on the other. The editorial material uses Value’s assertion that America has no poets as a pointed contrast with the decision to publish the poem. It also invokes Cartwright Bruce, described as America’s greatest critic, whose assessment elevates Ephemera to the greatest poem written in America. The issue thus frames the poem through opposing authorities before readers encounter the work itself.

The editor’s foreword complicates that confident promotion. Rather than settle the poem’s merits, it says the magazine has not made up its mind and may never do so; it describes repeated reading, puzzlement at the words and their arrangement, and uncertainty about how Brissenden joined them together. The poem is consequently advertised as both a potential masterpiece and an object the magazine professes not to understand. That hesitation does not restrain the publication: the elaborate presentation and celebrity endorsements make uncertainty part of the spectacle surrounding the work.

Martin’s First Response

Martin’s reaction is marked by weary irony rather than excitement. As the magazine slips from his hands to the floor, he remarks that Brissenden’s death may have spared him from seeing the treatment of his poem. The publication’s cheapness and vulgarity disgust Martin, but his own response has been blunted by exhaustion: he notices that he is not very disgusted, wishes he could become angry, and finds himself without the energy to do so. The issue arrives in the midst of a larger personal collapse, so even indignation seems beyond reach.

He understands the magazine’s handling of Ephemera as an instance of the bourgeois culture Brissenden had condemned. Martin addresses the dead friend in thought and acknowledges that Brissenden would never have forgiven him. He then takes a box that once held typewriter paper and removes eleven poems Brissenden had written. He tears the poems lengthwise and crosswise and drops them into the wastebasket. The act is deliberate but languid, and it ends not in relief or renewed anger but in Martin sitting on the edge of the bed and staring blankly ahead. The public appearance of one poem is followed, in private, by the destruction of these other manuscripts.

Public Controversy

Ephemera quickly becomes a hit, though its popularity takes the form of argument over whether it is poetry at all. Local newspapers publish sustained criticism, facetious editorials, and letters from subscribers. Helen Della Delmar, presented by the press as the leading woman poet in the United States, argues publicly that Brissenden was no poet and denies him a place beside Pegasus. She also writes two poems directed at him: one mocks him, and the other parodies his work.

The Parthenon celebrates the commotion its own publication has caused, mocks Sir John Value, and exploits Brissenden’s death for commercial gain. A newspaper claiming a circulation of half a million prints a poem by Helen Della Delmar that ridicules Brissenden, followed by her parody. Another paper rebukes her, arguing that one great poet should treat another with respect, while also suggesting that her response shows a fascination with the poem and that she might one day attempt to write like its author. The dispute therefore supplies fresh publicity even when commentators present themselves as defending or discrediting the work.

The controversy spreads beyond literary reviews. Ministers preach sermons against Ephemera, and one minister who supports too much of its content is expelled for heresy. Comic writers and cartoonists make it a subject of ridicule; society-weekly columns invent jokes about the poem’s supposed effects on readers. The work circulates widely, but its circulation brings neither a stable critical judgment nor a shared understanding of what it means. Praise, denunciation, parody, religious objection, and jokes all become parts of the same public event.

Aftermath and Significance

Martin does not join the laughter, and he does not answer the mockery with anger. What he feels is profound sadness. In the collapse of his own world, with love at its highest point, the disturbance around magazines and the public seems comparatively small; nevertheless, the treatment of Brissenden confirms Martin’s judgment of the industry. He reflects that Brissenden had understood the magazines and that Martin spent arduous, futile years learning the same lesson for himself. The publication does not simply disappoint him as an artistic event: it makes visible the commercial machinery through which literary work is promoted, contested, and consumed.

The Parthenon later sends Martin a check for three hundred and fifty dollars. He turns it over to the local lawyer handling Brissenden’s affairs for his family, takes a receipt, and gives a note for the hundred dollars Brissenden had lent him. This practical settlement follows the public spectacle with an account of obligation and repayment. The episode’s central contrast remains unresolved: a poem once entrusted to the literary world becomes famous through the very forms of publicity Brissenden despised, while Martin’s private response is to destroy the other poems he has kept. Ephemera survives in print and public debate; the remaining manuscripts do not.