Brissenden

Brissenden is Martin Eden’s friend, literary confidant, and sharp critic of commercial publishing. He recognizes the magazines’ capacity to exploit or degrade serious work, but Martin resists his warning and submits Brissenden’s poem, Ephemera, for publication. Brissenden’s suicide and the ridicule that follows the poem’s appearance turn that disagreement into a lasting wound: Martin comes to see that his friend had understood the literary marketplace better than he did.

Identity and Intellectual Circle

Brissenden moves among intellectually combative acquaintances and describes them with an unsparing eye. On the way to their rooms, he tells Martin about Strawn-Hamilton, a onetime Spencerian drawn toward materialistic monism, and Norton, who holds to spirit alone. He plans to try to convert the former to monism, while observing that Norton can debate Kreis on equal terms. The account presents Brissenden not simply as a participant in abstract argument but as a lively mapmaker of competing positions and personalities.

His portrait of Kreis is especially revealing of Brissenden’s own skepticism about respectable social distinctions. Kreis, he says, was dismissed from a university, has earned his living by any means available, and has even worked as a street fakir. Brissenden calls him unscrupulous, but argues that the difference between Kreis and the bourgeoisie is that Kreis robs without illusion. Though Kreis can discuss Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kant, Brissenden says that monism is what he truly cares about, with Haeckel as its central authority. The anecdote’s wit rests on its distinction between intellectual talk and actual conviction—a distinction Brissenden is adept at drawing.

Friendship and Literary Counsel

Brissenden’s relationship with Martin combines intimacy with forceful counsel. He advises and commands Martin against sending Ephemera to a magazine, reflecting his pronounced distrust of periodicals. Martin nevertheless mails the poem, hoping that acceptance by a prestigious magazine will help him persuade Brissenden to consent to publication. Martin’s plan is to secure the offer first and argue for permission afterward. The decision exposes a conflict between Martin’s confidence in recognition through the established literary channels and Brissenden’s conviction that those channels cannot be trusted with the poem.

The disagreement does not mean Martin intends to publish the poem without Brissenden’s consent. His immediate aim is to obtain an acceptance as leverage for a later appeal, but the act of submission already crosses the boundary Brissenden had drawn. Brissenden’s opposition is described as more than a passing preference: his prejudice against magazines is a pronounced mania. Yet the later treatment of Ephemera gives his warning a force Martin could not appreciate when he mailed it. Their friendship thus carries a painful asymmetry: Brissenden sees the danger clearly, while Martin believes he can negotiate with it.

Death and Martin’s Response

Brissenden dies by suicide, shooting himself through the head. Martin learns that Brissenden was found dead in bed and immediately asks whether he has been buried. He is told that the body has instead been shipped east after the inquest, with lawyers engaged by Brissenden’s family handling the arrangements. The report reaches Martin as a stark fact, not a gradual farewell; his question about the burial is the first response recorded in the scene.

Later, confronted with a magazine’s treatment of Ephemera, Martin murmurs that it was a good thing Brissenden had died. The remark is followed by the recognition that Brissenden would never have forgiven him. Martin is too numb to summon anger at the poem’s cheap and vulgar reception. He takes a box that once held typewriter paper, removes eleven of Brissenden’s poems, tears them lengthwise and crosswise, and drops them into the wastebasket. He then sits staring blankly. The destruction is a concrete, irreversible act of grief; it follows the thought of Brissenden’s judgment but does not undo the earlier submission of Ephemera.

Literary Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Ephemera becomes the occasion for public ridicule. Ministers preach against it, and one minister is expelled for heresy after defending much of its content. Comic verse-writers and cartoonists seize on the poem, while society-weekly jokes turn its lines into a measure of supposed violence and self-destruction. The poem’s reception demonstrates the distance between the work’s seriousness and the audience’s appetite for mockery.

Martin does not respond with laughter or rage. Instead, the poem’s reception brings him to a sad recognition: Brissenden had been right about the magazines, and Martin had spent arduous, futile years discovering it for himself. This reversal connects Brissenden’s private warning to Martin’s broader disillusionment with literary recognition. The magazines and the public become, in Martin’s judgment, a small part of the collapse of his world, but Brissenden’s absence gives that failure its intimate cost. Brissenden remains significant not only as the friend Martin has lost, but as the critic whose judgment Martin understands fully only after there is no longer a chance to answer him.