Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  The one clear thinker and scientific student whose popularity in the Secularist Party almost equals Mr Bradlaugh’s – Dr Edward Aveling, has joined the ranks of the Socialists, & Mrs Besant does me the honour to make me responsible for this. I am very proud of Dr Aveling’s friendship for myself, but I hope I need not tell you that his conversion to Socialism is due to a study of my Father’s book & not to me.17

  This was entertaining humbug. Edward Aveling’s ‘study’ was most earthily of Tussy and not of transcendent socialism. The spat between Tussy and Annie was a good old-fashioned catfight: Edward had abandoned Annie’s romantic affections for Tussy’s, and spurned Annie was cross. Writing to her sister, Tussy heartily expresses her wish that she could deal with the matter in a masculine rather than feminine manner. She thinks ‘Mrs Besant’s chaste style’ utterly absurd, and as to Bradlaugh, ‘I’ve more than once of late wished like Beatrice that “I were a man”; and that I could inflict on Mr Bradlaugh the sound thrashing he deserves.’18

  The rambunctious verbal punch-up between Tussy and Annie was amusing as long as it lasted – which was not long at all. The following year Annie met Shaw and the two began a love affair, the consummation of which was Annie’s political conversion to socialism and sporting reconciliation with Eleanor. Their argument over who shared Edward’s bed was long outlasted by their shared feminist bond.

  On the whole Tussy’s family and friendships stood the test of her free-love union with Aveling. Although Laura didn’t know him, she wanted to be supportive of Tussy and her desires. In the years following their father’s death, the two sisters progressively drew closer, as their frequent correspondence shows. Tussy’s separation from Lissagaray had removed him as a sore point between her and the Lafargues. They suffered together in losing their eldest sister. Laura, initially upset in the aftermath of Marx’s death by Eleanor’s position as their father’s legal executor, had been brought round by Engels’s patient clarifications and mediation. The two sisters were now friends again.

  ‘Everyone almost has been far kinder than I ever expected,’19 Tussy admitted to Laura about the announcement of her free union with Aveling. Initially, Tussy encountered almost no objection to her cohabitation with a still-married man. It was only when people got to meet and know Edward Aveling better that their doubts were raised about the wisdom of her choice.

  At five o’clock on the morning of 8 July 1884, Eleanor and Edward left London by train for Derbyshire and what the General laughingly called ‘honeymoon No. 1’. They booked into the Nelson Arms in the village of Middleton, just outside of Wirksworth, as Mrs and Mrs Marx-Aveling. Tussy had suggested to Olive Schreiner that she and Henry join them on a ‘joint honeymoon’, and Olive had already arrived and was staying a mile away at a farmhouse at Bole Hill. Henry was due to arrive a week later.

  The joint honeymoon-holiday in the Peak District symbolised an experiment in sexual freedom and quest for the answers to ‘the woman question’. It turned out, of course, to be a comic mise en scène of the anticipated idyll.

  When Eleanor and Edward arrived they went to see Olive in her bright little four-room cottage on the side of a hill overlooking Wirksworth. Olive expected to see Tussy joyous and ebullient at the brand new beginning of her ‘marriage’. However, the instant they left, Olive wrote to Henry, ‘Dr Aveling and Miss Marx have just come to see me. She is now to be called Mrs Aveling. I was glad to see her face. I love her. But she looks so miserable.’20 By the following week, Olive’s observations had hardened into an unshakeable dislike for Edward:

  I am beginning to have such a horror of Aveling . . . To say I dislike him doesn’t express it at all, I have a fear, a horror of him when I am near. Every time I see him this shrinking grows stronger . . . I love her, but he makes me so unhappy. He is so selfish, but that doesn’t account for the feeling of dread . . . I had it when I first saw him. I fought it down for Eleanor’s sake, but here it is stronger than ever.21

  Henry’s responses were more prosaic. He found Edward an agree­able companion, if a little boorish. He recalled later, ‘Aveling’s complications with women, however, became clear to us at an early stage.’22 Henry, ever the sociologist, noticed that Edward was self-consciously watchful of his place in the group, especially when Tussy and Olive locked in a powerful mental embrace that left the men temporarily forgotten. Henry enjoyed sitting back and watching the lightshow between these two inspiring women, but their easy intimacy made Edward jealous. Though sexually confident, Aveling was emotionally insecure and an egoist, and thus, Henry observed, uneasy when not the centre of attention. By comparison, Henry’s response to Eleanor was of unqualified delight and admiration. The worst he could find to say of her, amusingly, was that she had unfeminine body odour:

  Eleanor was then in full physical, mental and emotional maturity, a vigorous and radiant personality. It is perhaps a bodily trait of her powerful personality that I have never known a woman who on a long summer’s day ramble diffused so potent an axillary fragrance. She was none the less always a delightful personality, intelligent, eager, full of enjoyment, whatever the moods and melancholy she may privately have been subject to. The alleged resemblance in mind and body to her famous father certainly included no trace of his dogmatic and domineering temper.23

  It being a honeymoon, sexual desire and satisfaction were priorities. Olive and Henry had some knotty issues to untie in this regard, but for Tussy and Edward sex was an aspect of their relationship that came very easily, and frequently. Eleanor and Olive chatted freely together about all aspects of their sexuality and bodily functions – and how they connected to their mental and emotional lives. They discussed their sexual desire, periods, premenstrual tension, the effects of their monthly cycle on their work and moods, and wondered about the equivalents in their men. Olive shared these discussions with Henry:

  Speaking of the effect sexual feeling has on the mind, it is very clearly proved in the case of women. I must make more inquiries amongst other women, my friends who will have noticed and been able to analyse their feelings . . . Of course one may easily exaggerate what I have been talking about, but there is no doubt there is some truth in it . . . With myself while I am unwell every month my feelings are particularly sensitive and strong. A little word that would not pain me at another time causes me acute agony. I cannot help feeling, and a little word of tenderness is so precious to me. (Especially the man who loves you ought to be tender with you then.) The time of greatest and most wonderful mental activity is just after, and perhaps the last two days of the time, too. Eleanor . . . the only woman I have spoken to on the subject feels much the same.24

  Inspired by her frank conversation with Eleanor, Olive decided to address these subjects with some of her other intimate women friends and asked Henry to ask his sister Louie how she felt about them. ‘I should like to know the man’s side of the question too. I should think the relationship (between the power of the purely physical-sexual and the power of the mental-sexual) must be almost as close . . . Do you carefully observe . . . the interaction of your manly upon your mental nature?’25 Henry, who was deeply interested in the psychology of sex, observed the relationship between Olive and Eleanor closely, and thought about all their questions.

  Those who knew her often observed Olive’s acute sensitivity to the emotions and behaviour of other people. She was possessed of an extraordinary ability to accurately size up and assess another individual. She felt personalities viscerally. A footloose colonial brought up unshackled by the constraints of English imperial politeness, Olive was also unversed in the dissimulating conventions of nice behaviour.

  Eleanor told Olive and Henry that the reason Edward did not marry her was simply because he couldn’t. Once she’d spent some time in his company, Olive became sceptical of Edward’s story. She tried to caution Tussy, as did Edward’s own brother Frederick, who had always disliked him, but at this preliminary stage of lovestruck infatuation Tussy paid no heed.

  Olive’s attitu
de was different. Like Eleanor, she enjoyed and was very interested in sex and curious about love. Unlike Eleanor, she clearly perceived marriage to be an oppressive social institution. Both women had been bethrothed at the age of seventeen, then thought better of it and got disengaged. At twenty-three, Olive said that unless someone were to ‘absorb me and make me lose myself utterly . . . I should never marry. In fact I am married now, to my books! I love them better every day, and find them more satisfying. I would not change lots with anyone in the world, and my old sorrows look very foolish to me now.’26 Had Tussy been less optimistic about human relationships at this stage of her life, she too would have seen that her books and writing were already her most faithful and supportive intimates.

  One evening on their Peak District honeymoon, Tussy arranged a reading of part of Ibsen’s Ghosts. Written in 1881, Ghosts was first performed by a Danish touring company in Chicago in May 1882. Its performance was banned throughout most of Europe, including England. Henrietta Francis Lord was working on her translation and Tussy, who was fascinated by the new drama of Ibsen, got hold of a part of the as yet unpublished manuscript version. Edward read the play. He had a good voice and read with much power of dramatic expression. ‘It is one of the most wonderful and great things that has long, long been written,’27 wrote Olive.

  Ghosts terrified the Scandinavian press when it was published in December 1881. Every day Ibsen received letters decrying it. He was accused of blasphemy, freethinking and nihilism. The play called forth howls from camps of what Ibsen called the ‘stagnationists’ and ‘so-called Liberals’, appalled by his attack on conventional morality:

  They say that the book preaches Nihilism. Not at all. It is not concerned to preach anything whatsoever. It merely points to the ferment of Nihilism going on under the surface, at home as elsewhere . . . It may well be, that the play is in several respects rather daring. But it seemed to me that the time had come for moving some boundary posts.28

  Ibsen was modest. The play didn’t just move some boundary posts; it completely relocated the field of engagement.

  There are uncanny resonances between Ibsen’s Ghosts and the emotional underworld of Eleanor and Edward’s free-love union. Helen Alving is the anti-heroine of the drama. The name Helen shares its semantic root with Eleanor, and Alving is Aveling minus a vowel. In the disastrous marriage plot, Captain Alving is damaged goods before Helen marries him. There’s a brief period of hope for redemption and new beginnings, but when the revenants of the past return, all fails. Helen tolerates Alving’s serial philandering, lies and venality as a disease for which he is not morally respon­sible. She becomes a woman who stays in a marriage in order to try and make a bad man good. She suppresses the call of her own desires. When Helen hears disembodied voices coming from the dining room she thinks they are ghosts but she can’t hear what they are saying.

  For Eleanor in love, Ibsen’s Ghosts, performed so well by Edward on their Peak District honeymoon, were just fascinating theatrical shades. But Olive heard something else in Aveling’s consummate reading and it haunted her.

  Unexpectedly, Eleanor and Edward suddenly cut the holiday short and returned to London early, pleading demands of work. Henry heard that Edward, who lived extravagantly at the Nelson Arms, freely ordering food and drinks, ‘had quietly decamped without settling the bill’.29 Olive’s feelings of ‘horror’ and ‘dread’ of Aveling returned stronger than ever. ‘I have an “intuition” that they are in trouble,’30 she wrote.

  Olive’s ‘intuition’ always proved correct.

  13

  Proof Against Illusions

  ‘Is that your husband?’ blurted out the incredulous Max Beer to Tussy when first introduced to Edward Aveling at the Communist Club in London.

  Beer, who defined himself as a socialist Jew, had heard about Eleanor’s open marriage and was curious to meet her spouse. Shortly after his arrival in London in 1894, Beer gave a lecture at the German Workers’ Educational Society, known also as the Communist Club, at 49 Tottenham Court Road to a hall crowded with Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Scandinavians and Jewish working people from Whitechapel.

  Beer didn’t know that in the adjoining room Eleanor and Edward were holding a meeting of the executive of the Bloomsbury Socialist Society. After his lecture Eleanor appeared and introduced herself and Edward. Beer was elated to find himself unexpectedly face to face with the daughter of Karl Marx. He recalls that there was certainly no reason whatever for him to stand in awe before Eleanor Marx, who he described as ‘a middle-aged lady of great charm, radiating intelligence and loving-kindness’:

  None the less, I did stand on that evening in awe before her. Moreover, I felt that she ought to have married some very great man, and not Aveling, who my intuition told me, was a low comedian, and looked it, so I blurted out to her in German: ‘Is that your husband?’ But he, after all, had English manners, and said quite cheerfully, ‘Comrade, let us go with Eleanor to the Horse Shoe and have a glass of English ale.’1

  Beer found the English ale as unpalatable as Dr Aveling, describing it as tasting like ‘some nasty medicine’.2 Like Olive Schreiner’s, Beer’s intuition prompted immediate feelings of foreboding about Aveling from the moment he met him.

  There must have been people other than Tussy who liked Edward, but apart from Engels their reports are lost to the historical record. The General respected Edward on Tussy’s account, and was affectionate towards his foibles. ‘The fact is,’ he explained to Bernstein, ‘Aveling has a lawful wife whom he cannot get rid of de jure although he has for years been rid of her de facto.’3

  Aveling had a self-conscious demeanour that provoked extreme reactions.4 George Bernard Shaw, who considered himself physically unattractive, wrote of his sometime rival, ‘Though no woman seemed able to resist him, he was short, with the face and eyes of a lizard, and no physical charm except a voice like a euphonium.’5 Karl Kautsky found Aveling simply ‘repulsive’, but stomached his aversion for Eleanor’s sake.6 Henry Hyndman shared GBS’s amazement at Edward’s desirability for women: ‘Aveling was one of those men, who have an attraction for women quite inexplicable to the male sex . . . ugly and repulsive to some extent, as he looked, he needed but half an hour’s start of the handsomest man in London.’7 Hyndman, who worked extensively with him politically, tried to allay his unease about Aveling’s true nature by telling himself that ‘nobody can be as bad as Aveling looks’.8

  Not all women, as is evident from Olive’s reaction, found Edward attractive. Like Shaw, Eleanor’s friend May Morris sensed something reptilian about Edward, describing him as ‘a little lizard of a man’.9 To his own brother Frederick, Edward was just a liar and ‘unprincipled windbag’10. The dubious impression created by these negative descriptions of Edward’s appearance seem to imply that had he been better-looking people would have been more tolerant of his appalling behaviour.

  Campaigns mounted against his secular activism, vilification by ideological opponents and public calumny created an aura of victimisation around Edward that prompted Tussy and the General’s instinctive tendencies to succour the underdog. But it was the General’s limitations in being able to manage the different impact that sexual freedom had on men and women in practice and not just in theory that let Tussy down most where she needed a guardian and mentor. All three believed in free love. Engels could afford it. Aveling borrowed interest-free from women to fund it. For Eleanor, a woman, free love was the most expensive form of love in which she could possibly have chosen to invest.

  Eleanor was a confirmed atheist and freethinker. If only she’d noticed that unconditional love and the faith it requires are too much like the requirements for believing in an unverifiable god. GBS saw this clearly and directly in relation to the dynamic between Eleanor and Edward. In 1906 Shaw wrote The Doctor’s Dilemma, a play exploring the problem of criminal genius and featuring the figure of an unscrupulous artist-philosopher. He used Aveling as one of the models for Louis Dubedat, a gifted moral degener
ate loved by a loyal wife (so she believes), Jennifer, based on Tussy. Jennifer protects and supports Dubedat, longs to bring charm and happiness into his life, defends him from hostile opinion and financial scandal, and hopes to save him from fatal illness. She cannot see that her ‘husband’ is a womanizer, bigamist, extortionist and fraud. Shaw argued that genius should not excuse reckless dishonesty and selfishness, but on the other hand understood that heroism and villainy are never simple matters of conformity or non-conformity to law and custom. Dubedat is reptilian when it comes to money, sex and women, yet his defence is that he is made so because he disregards the conventional morality of a hypocritical society. Like Tussy, Jennifer defends her man, unable to see that he’s just a good old-fashioned cad and scoundrel.11

  In June 1885, less than a year after their Derbyshire honeymoon, Eleanor confided to Olive her realisation of her illusions about Edward. With only cats and cigarettes for company at Great Russell Street, Tussy wrote to Olive:

  Edward is dining with Quilter and went off in the highest of spirits because several ladies are to be there (and it just occurs to me you may be one! How odd that would be!) and I am alone, and while in some sense I am relieved to be alone, it is also very terrible; I can’t help thinking and remembering, and then the solitude is more than I can bear.

  I would give anything just now to be near you. You can always help me . . . The constant strain of appearing the same when nothing is the same, the constant effort not to break down, becomes intolerable. How natures like Edward’s . . . are to be envied, who in an hour forget anything. If you had seen him, for example, today, going about like a happy child with never a sorrow in his life, you would have marvelled.12