Martin’s delayed literary breakthrough and sudden fame

Martin Eden’s delayed literary breakthrough arrives only after he has ceased to expect it: work rejected for years begins selling, and The Shame of the Sun becomes a publishing sensation. The reversal brings him money and public recognition, but not the elation he once imagined. Its central irony is that success comes after Martin has abandoned the struggle for it, and that the acclaim seems to him to measure fashion and circumstance more than artistic understanding.

Rejection, reversal, and payment

For two years Martin’s submissions had met persistent rejection, and nothing of his work had been published. Then, just as he had given up the fight, acceptances began arriving. The Millennium sent a check for $300 for Adventure, while Warren’s Monthly bought his Hawaiian story Wiki-Wiki for $250. The Northern Review accepted his essay The Cradle of Beauty, and Mackintosh’s Magazine took The Palmist, the poem he had written to his sister Marian. Editors and readers had returned from their summer vacations, and manuscripts were moving quickly; Martin could not explain why work so long refused had suddenly become acceptable.

The first payments changed his immediate circumstances. The Millennium check covered his obligations: even including the pawnshop debt and its usurious interest, he owed less than $100. After settling his debts and repaying the $100 note Brissenden had lent him, Martin still had more than $100. He ordered a suit from a tailor and began eating in the town’s best cafés, though he continued to sleep in his small room at Maria’s. The neighborhood children, who had called him a hobo and a tramp from the woodshed roofs and back fences, stopped doing so when they saw his new clothes. The change in how they treated him makes the material signs of his altered status visible before literary fame has fully taken shape.

The sudden acceptance also taught Martin something about the market. Adventure, a work one-fourth as long as The Shame of the Sun, earned twice as much as the book was projected to bring in: the publisher had declined an advance and doubted the book would sell 1,000 copies. At a retail price of $1 and a 15 percent royalty, that sale would yield $150. Martin offered to sell his rights in the book for $100, but Singletree, Darnley & Co. refused to take the risk. Meanwhile, paid acceptances on other stories relieved his need for immediate cash, and he opened a bank account with several hundred dollars in it.

When Overdue reached Meredith-Lowell Company after rejection elsewhere, Martin asked for a $500 advance, recalling that Gertrude had once given him $5 and resolving to repay her many times over. The publisher sent the requested check and a contract by return mail. Martin cashed it into five-dollar gold pieces and telephoned Gertrude that he wanted to see her. The advance marks a sharp reversal from the precarious period when a small loan from his sister had mattered so greatly.

The book and the making of a sensation

The Shame of the Sun appeared in October. When Martin cut the cords around the express package and saw the publisher’s six complimentary copies spill onto the table, he felt a heavy sadness rather than triumph. He imagined how delighted he would have been only a few months earlier, but the book’s arrival now scarcely quickened his pulse. Its possible earnings mattered more to him than its status as his first published book, and even money held little attraction.

He carried a copy to Maria in the kitchen and explained that he had written it in the room where he lodged, with some of her vegetable soup going into its making. He gave it to her as a remembrance. His purpose was to make her happy and to repay, in some measure, her longstanding faith in him—not to boast of his achievement. Maria placed the book on top of the family Bible in the front room. Though she could not understand its argument, she regarded every line as great; the book became, for her, a sacred token of friendship that softened the memory of her lodger’s years as a laundryman.

The reviews arriving through a clipping bureau confirmed that the book was making a hit, but Martin read them with the same emotional distance with which he had received the book itself. Its commercial prospects could help him keep promises, assist Lizzie, and save enough to build the grass-walled house he imagined. The publishing response, however, soon exceeded even the reviewers’ notice. Singletree, Darnley & Co. had cautiously printed 1,500 copies; the first reviews led them to start a second edition twice that size, followed by an order for a third edition of 5,000. A London firm arranged an English edition by cable, while French, German, and Scandinavian translations were reported in progress.

The book’s argument against the Maeterlinck school set off a broad controversy. Saleeby and Haeckel defended it, while Crookes and Wallace opposed it; Sir Oliver Lodge tried to formulate a compromise compatible with his own cosmic theories. Maeterlinck’s followers rallied to mysticism, Chesterton drew laughter with purportedly nonpartisan essays, and George Bernard Shaw’s forceful intervention nearly swept the controversy and its participants aside. The debate gave the book a public arena larger than Martin’s own literary reputation could have created. The publishers reported that more than 40,000 copies had already sold in the United States and Canada, with a new edition of 20,000 on the presses. They had spent $5,000 advertising it and offered Martin 20 percent royalties on his next book, an advance of $5,000, and discussion of a ten-year arrangement for the exclusive book publication of his work.

Fame, publicity, and the altered value of work

As Martin’s books drew attention, newspapers set out to answer the public’s curiosity about him. Although he had declined to provide biographical material to his publishers, reporters in Oakland found people willing to supply it. Newspapers circulated accounts of what he had and had not done, illustrated with snapshots and photographs; a local photographer who had taken his picture had copyrighted it and placed it on the market. Martin initially resisted publicity because of his disgust with magazines and bourgeois society, but eventually allowed interviews, discussed literature and philosophy, and accepted invitations from the very social world he had once opposed. He even forgave the cub reporter who had portrayed him as a socialist radical and granted him an interview with posed photographs.

The success changed how established people received him. Judge Blount, who had previously encountered Martin at the Morses’ without inviting him to dinner, later invited him despite Martin’s memory of having insulted him and been treated contemptuously. Martin wondered what had changed: he was still the same person, and the writing had already been completed when Blount shared the prevailing disdain for his intellect and his reading of Spencer. The difference, Martin concluded, was that the work had appeared between book covers. Its accomplishment had not changed; its public and commercial status had. The invitation thus sharpened his suspicion that recognition attached to a socially legible token of achievement rather than to the work’s intrinsic value.

The two books produced different forms of success. Overdue, rushed onto the market during the height of Martin’s popularity, surpassed The Shame of the Sun in sales. For weeks Martin had two books at the top of the best-seller list. Fiction readers embraced Overdue, while readers drawn to The Shame of the Sun also responded to the sea-story, seeing in it a mastery that joined criticism and creation. Money and fame arrived in a sudden rush, yet Martin was more amused than interested by the commotion.

The limits of acclaim

Martin came to believe that The Shame of the Sun, rather than the body of writing he had labored to produce, had caused the landslide. Those stories and other works had been repeatedly rejected; without the book’s unlikely success and the controversy it generated, he reasoned, there would have been no comparable surge of favor. Even the publishers, experienced in their trade, had initially doubted whether the book would sell. Its success seemed to him an unexplained reversal of expectation, not proof that the literary world had at last learned to recognize his work consistently.

His doubts extended from the publishers to the readers. The bourgeoisie bought his books and filled his money sack, but Martin could not see how it could understand what he had written. He thought the crowd acclaimed him with the same brute incomprehension with which it had seized upon and then torn apart Brissenden’s Ephemera. The difference between the crowd’s reception of the two works seemed to him especially decisive: Ephemera was, in his judgment, immeasurably greater than anything he had written, yet it had been received as an object of public frenzy rather than sustained understanding. Whether the crowd fawned on a writer or attacked him appeared to depend on chance.

This delayed breakthrough therefore reverses Martin’s fortunes without restoring his faith in literary recognition. The book that had once seemed unlikely to find a publisher becomes a bestseller, generates international editions and translations, and opens the way to further contracts. Yet the acclaim reaches him after his desire for it has ebbed, while the fame it bestows seems to confirm the gap between public reputation and artistic worth. Glad that his last manuscript has been sold and that he will soon be finished with the work, Martin receives success not as a final vindication but as a late, unsettling demonstration of how little recognition guarantees understanding.