1 • The Devil at Park Church
Max Forrester Eastman was born in Canandaigua, New York, on January 4, 1883—the result of a mistake, as he later asserted, almost proudly, right at the beginning of the first volume of his autobiography: “If my mother had known what I know,” wrote Max, a lifelong supporter of women’s reproductive rights, “I would never have been born.” But his mother, Annis, welcomed him into her life nevertheless. He was, she told Max later, “the lovingest baby I ever saw—and the prettiest.”1
Annis Ford, from Peoria, Illinois, who then still went by her quaint middle name, Bertha, was the daughter of George W. Ford, a gunsmith and raging alcoholic, whose temper problems overshadowed her childhood and that of her four sisters. She escaped her abusive parent and dreary Peoria, with its “muddy stream of water,” to study at Oberlin College.2 Later on, during a period of despair, of which there were many in her life, she would say she was made from the mud of the Mississippi Valley: “I can never rise higher than my source.”3 Annis had wanted to be a teacher. But that changed when she met Samuel Elijah Eastman, a Civil War veteran of old New England stock. Handsome, lean, with a finely chiseled face, Sam seemed reassuringly devout. But he also had an independent streak that was powerfully appealing. His hardscrabble youth—his father had eked out a living as a minister in rural Lawrence County, New York, in charge of a congregation that never scraped together more than a few hundred dollars a year to pay him—had taught him early on to rely on what nature could provide. By the age of thirteen Samuel had planted a quarter of an acre near his home with peas and potatoes, which he sold in the nearby village of Ogdensburg. Money remained scarce in the Eastman family, though not for lack of industry. Max enjoyed telling the story that Sam once asked their remote relative, George Eastman of Eastman Kodak fame, to support a seminary of which he was a trustee and got turned down.4
When Annis Ford’s and Sam Eastman’s paths crossed, Sam was getting ready to attend seminary in Andover, Massachusetts. Annis quit Oberlin and began teaching school in Erie, Pennsylvania. They stayed in touch through frequent letters: pages and pages of laments about their being separated from each other, along with religious sentiments and reminders to each other to be steadfast in their faith. Annis and Sam were no ordinary couple. The usual gender roles seemed inverted in their relationship: while Annis was outgoing and extroverted, Sam, who had returned from the war with a withered lung, appeared withdrawn and uncomfortable around strangers. But when it came to expressing his love for Annis, Sam became quite the poet, resorting to odd organic metaphors that made him sound like a pious version of Whitman: “I know you love me & you know I love you and we are in each other’s lives with separation impossible. All the fibers of our being are intergrown. The rootlets are all woven together into a perfect whole without the least defect.” Sam imagined moonlit nights when he would kiss Annis “until every nerve in my lips was atremble with the rapture of holy love.” But the emphasis in that scene was on holiness, not happiness. Unabashed about her rather more concrete desire for intimacy, Annis responded to Sam’s fantasies by describing one of her own: falling asleep in his arms with his head resting on her breasts. She would wake up—and he would be gone: “O Love, you did not stay.” If Annis’s love was holy, it was physical, too. In the same letter she made Sam promise never to leave her alone, ever.5
Briefly at least, Annis and Sam discussed plans to relocate to the West Coast and start a church there, maybe in Santa Barbara, a prospect that frightened Sam more than it did his bride: “There would be few luxuries, even few conveniences. . . . Would it not be better to stop somewhere nearer friends for the first few years?” And so Annis followed Samuel, after they got married in Peoria on August 28, 1875, to his first ministerial appointment in Swampscott, Massachusetts, and then to subsequent postings in Newport, Kentucky, and Marlboro, Massachusetts, and, finally, to an old village in Ontario County, New York—“lazy, leaf-abounding village” Canandaigua, as Max affectionately remembered it.6 Annis bore Sam four children: Morgan Stehley Eastman, born in Swampscott in 1877; Anstice Ford Eastman, born in Newport in 1878; and then Crystal Catherine and Max Forrester Eastman, born two years apart from each other in 1881 and 1883, Crystal in Marlboro and Max in Canandaigua. At least initially, Annis embraced her role as the minister’s wife: “It’s beautiful to have such opportunities of helping people and helping the minister,” she wrote to a friend back in Peoria. Her new life was exciting, and she vowed to “build a stairway of love right over” all the unfamiliar obstacles of housekeeping and escape by it when necessary.7 When their new servant drank, an uncomfortable reminder of her father’s lack of self-control, she went right ahead and founded a local temperance society: “This is a reform much needed here as in every other place. . . . Do you realize how the world would be lifted up if universal temperance reigned?” The picture of her everyday life she painted for the benefit of her Peoria friend was as cheerful as she could make it. On any given day, while Sam worked on his sermons in his study, Annis was contentedly moving through the rooms of her light-filled home taking care of her plants: “I have a heliotrope and geranium in bloom and a happy little pink oxalis. Wish you could see them. Our house is flooded with sunshine all day so my plants do well.”8
No amount of domestic care, however, could prevent the disaster that soon befell her family. On July 25, 1884, the seven-year-old Morgan, the oldest Eastman child, succumbed to scarlet fever, an event that cast a permanent shadow over the lives of Annis and Sam and their surviving children. Crystal was infected, too, but survived the illness, though she remained in precarious health for the rest of her short life. Sam and Annis struggled on, through “hard storms” and “rough seas,” hoping for that Indian summer of their lives when “the air is pure and sweet and golden.” But that time never came. In the Eastman family, money was perennially tight. Modeling a practice that would later on become very familiar to her son, Annis was an expert at staggering payments, buying meat and milk first before taking care of coal and the dentist. “I wish I could be delivered from thinking about the pecuniary side of things.”9 As Sam’s condition worsened (often he would come home ashen-faced, weak, barely able to move), Annis accepted a job as a teacher at the Granger Place School in Canandaigua, keeping Anstice with her, and sent Max and Crystal off to join their invalid father on his farm in the country. Having assisted Sam with his sermons, she began preaching herself, first at a small church in Brockton, near Ithaca, with such apparent success that she was ordained a fully vested minister in 1889. She took over a parish in West Bloomfield, thirteen miles west of Canandaigua. They got, Annis’s youngest son said later, “more brains and eloquence for their money than they could have in a man.”10
Max was eleven when the Reverend Thomas Beecher, a half brother of the famous Henry Ward Beecher, invited the Eastmans to join him as assistant ministers at his progressive Park Church in Elmira, New York, about seventy miles south of Canandaigua. Reverend Beecher, a skillful cricket player as well as a man of science, was a different kind of preacher. He liked beer and baseball, target shooting, and carpentry. Working hard to shed the Calvinist influence of his father, Lyman, he had created a church that was more a community center than a house of worship, one equipped with billiard tables, a free public library, a dance hall, and a children’s “Romp Room.” The members of the Langdon family, living across the street from the church, were among Beecher’s most generous supporters, and when Mark Twain, who had married Olivia Langdon in 1868, visited Elmira, young Max Eastman found him free of any hauteur. Julia Beecher, Olivia Langdon’s Sunday school teacher, a granddaughter of the stern lexicographer Noah Webster, was the creator of the “Beecher baby doll,” an idea that had occurred to her as she was mending an old stocking. Close to a thousand rag dolls she produced, with all profits going to the Park Church. The “indiscriminate fury” she brought to her daily tasks made her a natural enemy of “mid-Victorian” junk of all kinds. Max would remember her as a moral as well as an ae
sthetic rebel: sitting next to her mother, she would read out loud, “with an expression of grim and yet joyful determination in her gentle features,” Whitman’s scandalous celebration of homosexual love, the Calamus poems from Leaves of Grass.11
While Annis officially shared her Elmira appointment with Sam, the latter’s subdued temperament increasingly sidelined him. As a minister, Max’s father never fit conventional expectations, but for different reasons than Annis. Adult company made him nervous, but he was a great favorite with the children of the Park Church. Years later Marion S. Bryan of Elmira remembered how Reverend Eastman would join them in the church’s romp room and entice them to a game in which blindfolded kids would take a stick to a bag filled with candy hanging from a chandelier in the middle of the room (a “piñata,” in current party parlance). They would hit the bag until a shower of hard candy rained down on them: “The children all seemed to know what was expected of them for they shouted and sprang forth after the glittering fragments. How your father enjoyed this. He would stand back and his face would beam all over and he would laugh and laugh.”12
Reverend Beecher died on March 14, 1900. To Annis’s tear-filled eyes, nature acknowledged his death by covering Elmira with a blanket of pure white snow, as if it “rejoiced at the passing of a great soul.” The congregation elected Mr. and Mrs. Eastman to succeed him as co-ministers. From the beginning Annis saw her appointment as a step forward not so much for herself as for the women who would come after her: “It will make the way easier for some better one who will come after me—for Crystal or some other beautiful girl who ought to be a minister.”13
As Annis began to take over more and more of his ministerial duties, Sam faded into the background, spending an increasing amount of time on a succession of farms, first closer to home, then more than thirty miles away, at a farm in Glenora on Lake Seneca, where he cultivated a cherry orchard, tended to sundry livestock, and planted a grove of pine trees. His cottage he named Cherith, after the brook near which the prophet Elijah (Samuel’s middle name!) hid from the wicked Jezebel, waiting for the food that ravens would bring him (Kings 17:3). There was much indeed that appeared hidden, secretive, inaccessible to others about Sam. To Max, his father seemed remote, distant even from his God. What he passed on to his children, more by example than by precept, was a childlike love of nature, a joyful, pagan delight in small things growing and flourishing: themes that recur in Max’s poetry, too. And he left Max with a permanent unease about standard definitions of masculinity. His son remembered a short, awkward poem about a little flower that Sam had composed and loved to recite in company. “Pretty little aster!,” it began. “Can’t you grow a little faster?”14
As gentle as Sam seemed, his son was always a little afraid of him. Reverend Eastman despised all “self-conscious literariness,” perhaps one of the chief reasons for the emotional distance between him and his writer-son.15 Sam followed his own rules; what things looked like inside him one could only guess. In a later sonnet dedicated to his taciturn father, Eastman imagined him impatiently rising with the sun, after a fitful night of sleep (regarded as “penance” rather than relaxation), to toil in his field, where he will “fill / And flood the soil with Summer for a while.”16 Religion offered no reliable consolation to the elder Eastman. “Dad wasn’t square with himself,” observed Anstice, looking back on his childhood.17
Annis, by contrast, seemed more firmly rooted in reality. In Venture the mother of the protagonist, Jo Hancock, is described as being stout, with heavy breasts and a round nose and an enormous mouth—an exaggeration of Annis’s physical presence, though perhaps not by much. For someone so invested in the life of the soul, Annis (“Babe,” “Mamma,” or “Mamsey” to her adoring son) seemed afflicted with an insistently solid body. Surviving photographs show a round-faced woman with a prominent nose and a high forehead, her abundant hair done up in a loose, untidy bun, her eyes wide open (fig. 3). She seems intense, alert, focused. Leaning forward as her husband, characteristically, tilts backward, she seems full of curiosity about what the world has to offer her. As if aware of her strong physical presence, Annis throughout her life sought for ways to deny her body its right to an independent existence, even as it acted up in various ways. Many letters to Max are filled with reports about her chronic constipation.18 Renouncing regular meals, depriving herself of rest, experimenting with all sorts of home remedies, she resolved to “live inwardly,” as she described her plan to Max: “I have seemed to win a peace and a power to do better things and to shake off evil propensities—and to face reality—in a way I haven’t known before.” Not one to ever be content, she immediately interrupted herself: “Is there nothing which answers to my need and really helps me?”19
Figure 3. Samuel and Annis Eastman. EM.
If Annis was smart, versatile, and witty, Sam was silent, worried, intense. The Eastmans’ marriage was a puzzle, perhaps even to Sam and Annis themselves. The romantic—if religiously inflected—fantasies of their courtship had long yielded to more pragmatic arrangements. Sam found fulfillment in his farming, Annis in her intellectual pursuits. Soon she would prefer Whitman’s poetry to the Bible. The romance had gone, and so had the theology. “I do appreciate you,” Annis pointedly told her husband in one of her letters, substituting gratitude for companionship for a declaration of love. But even this companionship was one often in letter only, with Sam choosing his agricultural work at Glenora over his pastoral duties at Park Church.20
Annis’s strong emotional needs, the full extent of which might have been unknown even to herself, found an outlet in her relationship with her children, whom she treated as if they were friends or even lovers. “O to hear her come singing home,” she wrote about Crystal, “to see the radiance and feel the warmth of her and know that she is mine!” And when Crystal was away, missing her became just another reminder of her “blessedness” in having such a daughter. Max was the recipient of similar declarations of boundless love, reminders that the bonds between the Eastmans made them different from the rest of the world. “I’m afraid I’d starve to death if you were my only child,” Annis told Max once when she was frustrated that he had not written to her for a while, “and you must remember that I love you just as much as tho you were.” Of all the good and blessed things in her life, she said, the best by far was, she told Max, “knowing you—and being loved by you.”21
If she was forgiving in her private relationships, Annis appeared determined and uncompromising in her public work. People were surprised by the steely assertiveness that was hidden inside her compact body. And they were awed by her intellect: Annis was widely read and had a deep interest in science (later shared by her son, who would make it his mission to expose the “scientific” fallacies of Marxism) as well as philosophy and psychology. She was capable of delivering an entire sermon on a Whitman poem.22
But she also had a lighter side, which was not always visible in public. Annis excelled at imitating other people’s mannerisms of speech and could be hilariously funny at times. Much of her capacity for humor she reserved for private communications: “Mr. MacNaughton our fat tenor,” she wrote to her children after a particularly trying service, “got up and yelled to some angels ever bright and fair to take him unto their care—he yelled it over and over again but they never took a bit of notice as far as I could see—The idea of an angel taking care of Mr. MacNaughton got onto my nerves so that I felt naughty when it came time to preach.”23
Annis did not spare herself either in the quirky vignettes from the life of her congregation that she shared with her children. A memorable story in a letter written to Max (he was at his preparatory school in Pennsylvania at the time) reveals both the often-precarious ideological position in which Annis found herself even in a relatively liberal congregation and the reasons her parishioners loved her so much. Without ceding an inch of her convictions, even in the presence of the powerful Reverend Beecher, she would readily make fun of her own theological preconceptions. In this story
, Annis had led a teachers’ meeting at the Park Church (Papa was, predictably, at the farm). The topic of discussion was the devil, and Annis, when called upon to express her views, frankly said she had no use for him: “All the evil in me I felt responsible for,” she said and added she couldn’t imagine having to deal with two supreme powers. But Reverend Beecher, in closing the meeting, despite his well-publicized progressive views, reaffirmed his own faith in the devil, and thus reassured, if perhaps still a tad confused, the teachers dispersed, “good natured and happy,” Annis said. When Annis was back in her quarters, a parishioner, Mr. Slee, came up and reported that the lecture room where the meeting had taken place was full of smoke. Annis went down to investigate and “sure enough the air was blue and sulphurous and brimstony so that one immediately began to cough.” A search of the building yielded no clues as to the origin of the smoke. The fire department was called, by which time a sizable crowd had formed outside the church. But there was no fire anywhere. “So we all think it must have been his Satanic majesty himself come to prove his existence. It’s a good joke on me.” That was the kind of story Annis could be sure her son would enjoy. They both knew the real devil of Park Church lived somewhere else—in Annis’s quick, agile, rebellious mind. And as Annis’s son would figure out in the years to come, his own demon resided in his beautiful body, too, a constant threat to whatever home he would construct for himself in his mind.24
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