Brissenden takes Martin to meet working-class intellectuals

Brissenden takes Martin Eden toward a gathering of working-class intellectuals in San Francisco, presenting the meeting as an answer to Martin’s intellectual loneliness. The journey is also a tour of sharply contrasting lives: Brissenden describes men whose education and philosophical convictions coexist with poverty, precarious work, or homelessness. The passage establishes the purpose and social character of the introduction, though its evidence ends while the two are still on their way to Kreis’s rooms.

The Journey to the Working-Class District

The episode begins one January evening after Brissenden and Martin have dined together in San Francisco. At the Ferry Building, as they are returning to Oakland, Brissenden suddenly decides to show Martin what he calls the real dirt. He turns and runs across the waterfront, his overcoat flapping as Martin strains to keep pace. The abrupt change of direction gives the invitation its own momentum: Martin is not led into an orderly salon but pulled into an excursion whose destination and purpose he has yet to understand.

At a wholesale liquor store, Brissenden buys two gallon demijohns of old port. When they board a Mission Street car, Martin follows carrying several quart bottles of whiskey. The provisions make their journey physically cumbersome as well as socially unusual: Brissenden refuses Martin’s attempt to take the demijohns, and continues to carry them himself. Martin, meanwhile, wonders what the promised destination will show him. His passing thought of how Ruth would view him in this company brings the excursion into contact with his other social world, without changing its course.

They get off and head into the working-class ghetto south of Market Street. Brissenden allows that the people they seek may not be there, in which case Martin will miss what he has been searching for. He names that object as men of intelligence, specifically people who have read books. Martin has been reading and, as Brissenden understands it, found himself alone; the proposed gathering is meant to offer him companions whose intellectual interests match his own. The trip therefore answers a problem of belonging, not simply a desire to inspect poverty.

The Company Brissenden Promises

Brissenden distinguishes these prospective companions from the men Martin had been keeping company with in a trader’s den. He says he is not personally interested in their perpetual philosophical discussions, yet insists that Martin will find them genuine intelligences rather than bourgeois people. He also warns that they can talk at length about almost any subject. The contrast turns on both class and conversation: the men Brissenden is taking Martin to meet are socially marginal, but their capacity for sustained intellectual debate is precisely what makes them valuable to him.

As they walk, Brissenden hopes that Norton will be present. He describes Norton as a Harvard-educated idealist with a prodigious memory, whose idealism led him toward philosophical anarchism. Norton’s family cast him off; his father is a railroad president and a multimillionaire, while Norton himself is starving in San Francisco and edits an anarchist newspaper for twenty-five dollars a month. The account sets educational and cultural distinction beside material deprivation. Norton’s situation also makes the intended gathering more than a meeting of people with similar incomes: it brings together intellectual commitment and sharply different routes into poverty.

Brissenden next describes Strawn-Hamilton, whom Martin will know as Hamilton. Hamilton comes from old Southern stock and is trying, with little success, to clerk in a socialist cooperative store for six dollars a week. Brissenden calls him a tramp and a confirmed hobo. He recalls seeing Hamilton sit on a bench all day without eating, then refuse an invitation to a restaurant two blocks away because going there would be too much trouble, asking instead for a package of cigarettes. The concrete anecdote makes Hamilton’s poverty and inertia more vivid than a label alone. It also complicates the prospect of an intellectual circle: its members may share books and argument without sharing the habits or needs that usually organize social life.

Philosophical Differences and the Meeting’s Purpose

Hamilton was a Spencerian like Martin until Kreis turned him toward materialistic monism. Brissenden says he hopes to start Hamilton on monism, while describing Norton as another monist who affirms only spirit. Kreis, by contrast, can give both men all the argument they want. These brief descriptions show that the gathering is not held together by a single doctrine. Its members’ positions are contested, and Brissenden expects that disagreement itself will animate their company. For Martin, who has pursued knowledge largely on his own, their conversation promises not agreement but intellectually serious exchange.

Martin asks who Kreis is, and Brissenden explains that they are going to Kreis’s rooms. Kreis was once a professor but was dismissed from a university. Brissenden describes him as exceptionally quick-minded and says he has made his living in whatever way he could, including working as a street fakir when desperate. He characterizes Kreis as unscrupulous, willing to do anything, and contrasts him with the bourgeoisie by saying that Kreis robs without illusion. Kreis will talk about Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, or other thinkers, but Brissenden says his deepest concern is monism and that an attack on Haeckel is the surest way to insult him. The description closes the passage with a portrait of intellect shaped by instability: Kreis’s philosophical devotion sits alongside a history of dismissal and desperate, irregular work. The two men are headed to his rooms, but the evidence here records Brissenden’s promise and introductions rather than the gathering itself.