Martin’s ambition to become a writer

Martin’s ambition to become a writer begins as a response to beauty, learning, and love, then becomes the organizing purpose of his life. On the return voyage from the South Seas, he recognizes a creative power in himself and decides to turn what he has seen into writing for a wider audience. The vocation promises artistic expression and a way toward Ruth Morse, but its first tests are practical: learning how to write, judging what editors will accept, and continuing when the anticipated rewards do not arrive.

The Awakening at Sea

During eight months away, Martin studies language and literature while working at sea. He builds his vocabulary by learning twenty words a day, repeatedly practicing pronunciations and phrases until he can speak more correctly. The effort is part of a broader education: access to the captain’s Shakespeare teaches him an ear for elevated English, even as it introduces archaic forms into his speech and thought. These studies give him both a sense of how much he does not know and a growing conviction that he has unrealized abilities.

The decisive change comes when Martin thinks of the beauty of the South Seas and wishes that Ruth Morse could share it. At first, he imagines describing what he has seen to her. The impulse expands: instead of writing only for one person, he wants to recreate beauty for a broad audience. He sees himself as a writer through whom others might see, hear, and feel, and imagines taking on poetry, prose, fiction, description, and drama. Shakespeare becomes the measure of the range he dreams of reaching, not a limit on the forms he intends to attempt.

Writing, Love, and the Future

Writing immediately acquires a personal as well as artistic purpose. Martin believes literary distinction will help him win Ruth Morse, and he regards writers as greater figures than wealthy or influential men such as Mr. Butler. Fame matters less to him than proving himself worthy of Ruth Morse; his ambition is not presented as a pursuit of reputation for its own sake. On the lonely sea, he also gains a clearer view of Ruth Morse’s world and imagines that writing can give him a means of entering it.

His plans combine a long-term ideal with an immediate practical program. Once back in Oakland, he intends to write an account of the treasure-hunting voyage and sell it to a San Francisco newspaper, keeping the effort secret from Ruth Morse until she can see his name in print. He expects success to come slowly at first. Earnings from writing, he reasons, could support further study; later, once he has learned and prepared himself, he will attempt greater works. His imagined future joins literary achievement to personal transformation: he hopes for a life beyond seafaring, and even pictures a steam yacht, but the deepest promise of the work remains its connection to Ruth Morse.

Learning the Craft by Doing

Back in Oakland, Martin settles into his old room at Bernard Higginbotham’s and begins his voyage article before visiting Ruth Morse. He estimates its length by counting words in a Sunday-supplement article in the San Francisco Examiner. After completing a draft in three days, he learns from a rhetoric book that composition requires such conventions as paragraphs and quotation marks, and rewrites the piece. A newspaper’s advice to beginners then teaches him that manuscripts should be written on one side of the paper and not rolled. Each discovery forces him to revise not just his prose but his understanding of the profession he has chosen.

Martin’s early expectations are shaped by calculations about pay. Having read that first-class papers paid at least ten dollars a column, he estimates that his article might earn a hundred dollars. The sum represents more than money: he values the independence it could buy, the clothes that would make him presentable, and the increased closeness to Ruth Morse he imagines those changes will bring. In the same spirit, he writes a twenty-one-thousand-word serial using his knowledge of whaling to invent adventures for two boys. He completes it in a week and calculates its potential payment at two cents a word, imagining that the proceeds could buy clothes and reference books and pay for a servant for Gertrude and a bicycle for Marian.

The work itself becomes an education. Martin writes in daily installments of three thousand words, consulting a dictionary and rhetoric book, and spends his evenings in the reading room examining the stories, articles, and poems magazines publish. He treats the printed work of other writers as evidence of what he can learn to do, while believing that time and practice may allow him to surpass them. His ambition is therefore not simply a dream of finished books: it gives him a regimen in which reading, study, observation, and composition continually train one another.

Creative Abundance and Its Demands

Martin’s growing output reveals the difference between having an artistic impulse and mastering its form. Love poems inspired by Ruth Morse repeatedly interrupt his pearl-diving article, but he cannot capture in verse the elusive quality he recognizes in great poetry. Correct rhyme and meter do not supply the glow or exaltation he seeks. Frustrated, he returns to prose, which he finds easier to manage. The difficulty does not extinguish his ambition; it teaches him that inspiration alone cannot guarantee a successful work.

He goes on to write articles about the sea as a career, turtle-catching, and the northeast trade winds, then experiments with short fiction. After completing six stories, he sends them to magazines. He writes intensely while continuing to study and visit Ruth Morse, and finds creation itself a source of profound happiness. The contrast between his mental life and his surroundings is sharp: the stale vegetables, soapsuds, and household tensions around him seem unreal beside the realities taking shape in his imagination. He reduces his sleep to five hours in order to make room for writing, study, and library work, reluctant to stop any pursuit that might advance his education or his craft.

His ambition also keeps expanding beyond the first forms he tries. At the University of California, a visit to laboratories and a physics lecture adds to his studies; what he learns prompts him to reconsider an earlier article on the trade winds. Meanwhile, he writes short stories and experiments with verse. He spends two weeks on a blank-verse tragedy, only to have it rejected swiftly by half a dozen magazines. He then writes thirty sea poems, which he calls Sea Lyrics, completing one a day after his regular fiction work. He regards them as his best writing so far, but does not submit them: he keeps them to read aloud and memorize, hoping to share them with Ruth Morse at some future time.

Rejection and the Test of Persistence

The first encounters with the literary marketplace unsettle the financial promise Martin has attached to writing. A month after he mails it, the boys’ adventure serial comes back from the Youth’s Companion with a tactfully worded rejection. The treasure-hunters article fares no better: after waiting two weeks, Martin writes to the San Francisco Examiner editor, writes again a week later, and visits the paper in person at the end of the month. He cannot reach the editor, and the manuscript eventually returns without explanation. Other articles are held by San Francisco papers and then sent east, where magazines return them with printed rejection slips.

When his stories also come back, Martin tries to identify a correctable cause. A newspaper item says manuscripts should be typewritten, so he rents a typewriter, spends a day learning to use it, and begins typing both new work and returned manuscripts. The typed submissions still come back. Each rejection challenges his early belief that effort can be converted predictably into income, but it does not stop him writing. His money ebbs while no new money comes in, even as he continues composing and studying.

Martin’s ambition thus develops through a tension between inward certainty and outward judgment. He feels that he has a great deal to express and experiences writing as a sustained joy, yet he must learn the forms editors expect and confront rejection without knowing its full cause. The Sea Lyrics remain a private measure of what he hopes his work can become, while the returned manuscripts mark the distance between that hope and publication. At this stage, becoming a writer is both a vocation he has chosen and a discipline still under construction: he keeps learning, revising, sending work out, and writing again.