Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  His Satanic Majesty was able to cause little damage that night, and he certainly couldn’t silence Annis Eastman. In countless, outspoken sermons she tried to direct her parishioners to a path of independence from calcified doctrine and outdated traditions. While Reverend Beecher had kept out of theological discussions, Annis made the adoption of a simpler, liberal creed her first priority, despite resistance from some of her parishioners. Adopted on February 17, 1907, the creed celebrated God as revealed in nature and “human experience” and Jesus Christ as the “Embodiment of the Spirit of God in the soul of man, and our Divine Teacher and Guide.”25 As his mother was losing heart in the struggle with her congregation, Max sent supportive letters: “As it is in your nature that you must serve the advance guard, you will have to see people turn away frowning; just as there are those who serve the rear-guard (unequivocally) have to see people turn away toward you. It is only the double-voiced who can preach to everybody in a period of transition.”26 Double-voiced, Annis was not. One of her regrets later in life was that she had never been disciplined enough to become a writer, that, while perhaps she wouldn’t have achieved “great things” in literature, she hadn’t even worked hard enough to become another Margaret Sangster or Amelia Barr, the former a poet and frequent contributor to the Ladies’ Home Companion, the latter a popular British-born novelist and perpetrator of such titles as The Maid of Maiden Lane and The Belle of Bowling Green. “I might have earned a good living and lived a richer life in ever so many ways if I had held myself to what I felt was my work.”27 But, although Annis wrote copiously and fluently, the spoken word was her medium. The notes she kept have survived, piles of pages covered with her nearly illegible scrawl, the sentences punctured by dashes and abbreviations, her pencil, often in need of sharpening, trying to keep up with all she wanted to say.

  Annis’s sermons reveal the source of Max’s own skills as an orator, but they also point us to some of the problems that would haunt him in his later life. In “Man’s Place in Nature,” for example, from a series of Lenten sermons, Annis affirmed the importance and truth of science and, above all, evolution. An appreciation for science, she told her parishioners, will place us in a “more reasonable” relationship with God. It will help us understand the origin of the beauty of the natural world, the grandeur and nobility of the human character, and the awesome, boundless miracle of life itself: “This we have—we are alive,” concludes Annis. Her son’s lifelong ambition to be admired not just as a writer but as a scientist—or at least as someone who has made contributions to science—is foreshadowed here, as is his irrepressible delight in the pleasures life has to offer. The earth was, explained Annis, “only one of many planets warmed by the sun, and the sun only one of a myriad of similar suns.” All of which was reason enough to keep our minds turned toward the Infinite, the all-pervading Universal Intelligence.28

  But Annis’s professed joy in the limitless possibilities of life was not intended as an encouragement to seize the day and follow one’s desires. Living, for her, was hard work. An ardent feminist and supporter of women’s suffrage, she was filled with the hope that she would be able to vote before she died (she wasn’t).29 However, one of her great worries was that giving women the right to vote would substitute some quick political gains for spiritual progress. In a long sermon titled “Men and Reform,” given to the Railroad YMCA in town, she insisted that the “day of woman’s awakening” had come, that all doors be opened to the “dignity power and grace of womanhood” and that all men, even the most masculine of them, be supportive of such a development. The situation of women could be reformed only if men were willing to reform themselves. It would be fatal if society ended up being divided into idealist women and materialist men. Annis’s argument, invoking as it does a sinful world in dire need of being saved, doesn’t seem particularly progressive today, a feminist version perhaps of Booker T. Washington’s hope that uplift-by-education will fix racial disparities (Booker T., “mild, soft-spoken, unpretentious, and yet princely,” did indeed spend a night at his parents’ house, one of Max’s most vivid memories). Nevertheless, her interest in the spiritual improvement of men as a condition for the emancipation of women would have ruffled some feathers at the time.30

  If corruptible men were one of the main obstacles in the path toward a more equitable world, what better place to start God’s work than in the education of a young boy? One can easily imagine the impact Annis’s preaching of moral purity would have had on the adolescent Max. For all of his mother’s progressivism, in matters of religious education she was unrelenting. With Sunday school, family prayers, church services, and meetings of his youth group, the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor, Max got “too familiar with the sound of the Bible,” as he recalled in one of his suffragist speeches. The result was the opposite of what Annis had intended: “I believe I finally became at the age of 15 completely impervious to the meaning of a scriptural quotation as the back of an alligator is to a hail storm.” And yet years later he still knew his way around scripture: “I could recite the 3 chapters of the Sermon on the Mount in 8 minutes and 42 seconds, coming in with a lead of 6 verses on my older brother, often giving him a handicap of 3 beatitudes.”31

  Elmira, New York, named, depending on whom you trust, after the daughter of a tavern keeper or after the daughter of a general in the War of 1812, was already an important transportation hub when the Eastmans arrived. Crisscrossed by several railroad lines, it was also the site of an important reform prison headed by the legendary Zebulon Brockway, who believed that a prison should offer spiritual guidance to the prisoner and that the purpose of a jail term was rehabilitation rather than punishment. Neither too large nor too small, Elmira, which sported a population of just a bit above thirty thousand in 1890 (about 17 percent of whom were born abroad), was the perfect setting for Annis’s evolving blend of feminism and moral uplift.32

  To the citizens of Elmira, the Eastman children, daring, dark, their good looks enhanced by their ruddy skin, seemed more than “a little outrageous,” Max recalled. But, then, so were their parents: “We were all a little outrageous—all disposed to kick over the decorums and try to get at the heart of things in public as in private.”33 Big, brawny Anstice, for example, the oldest, who shared the initials A.F.E. with his mother, had a well-deserved reputation for militancy. He loved to spear frogs and was capable of driving a nail into a pole head first. Full of energy and aggression, he came across as ready to “pounce on you.”34 By contrast, Max, although he too grew up outdoors, was a chronically nervous, high-strung child subject to all sorts of terrors and phobias. But he also became preternaturally attuned to the compensatory pleasures his body could afford him. With Max, the first stirrings of sexual desire took “the form of an intense wish to go into the bedroom where a little brown-haired playmate slept beside my sister, and kiss her in her most secret place. This desire was private to me, and furtive, unrelated to our daytime play, a thing I burned with after I had gone to bed. It seems simple enough now, and my only remorse is that I lacked the dash to do it.” Priapic Max was born. Note the dual impact of Max’s retrospective account of the event: while acutely aware that, given the prevailing standards of middle-class respectability, such longing must seek the cover of darkness to have its way, his guilt was limited to his failure to act on his impulses.35

  Both Anstice and Max were expected to work on the family farm in Glenora during the summer, and it is during one of those summers that a rare photograph showing both of them was taken (fig. 4). Anstice is obviously acting a part, that of the headless muscleman all set to eclipse his cerebral brother: Anstice’s brawn versus Max’s brain. His shoulders are scrunched up high, while his hat is drawn down over his face. He looks bigger than his brother, brutish almost. By contrast, Max’s arms dangle slackly on either side of a body that looks as limp as Anstice’s appears to be taut. While Max is still facing the camera, his body appears to be turning away from it, as if he were afraid to be trapp
ed into rigidity.

  But Max was no wilting wallflower either. One of his first surviving letters to Crystal reports on his exploits as a cyclist. Max, a student at the Elmira Free Academy, was fourteen then, and Crystal, who was attending the Granger Place School, a preparatory school for girls in Canandaigua, was about to turn sixteen. The letter begins rather melodramatically: “I had a terrible accident today.” Now that Max had her attention, he proceeded more slowly. In fact, one gets the impression he had written the letter primarily to hone his budding writerly skills. He had spent the morning trying to sell his old bike, without success. So Max and his friend Frank Easton decided to take it for a spin up Gray Street—two boys on one bike, one on the handlebars, the other on the seat. Just after they had crossed Columbia, Frank started getting “wobbly.” Swaying back forth on the handlebars, Max was beginning to wobble, too. What follows is a richly comical vignette describing an act worthy of circus clowns: “Pretty soon I swayed a little too far forward and went off with my feet sticking out to-wards the pedals. I slide off and the thing that sticks out in front to hold the lamp caught me by the seat of the pants and my nose began to rub the front tire.” Frank then regained his balance and they were back going up the street. But the drama was not over yet: “Pretty soon I got tired of my position and tried to get off. But some way in getting off my trousers got torn up half way down the leg up to the suspender buttons with two or three slits torn at right angles;—Of course I hit on the ground in a perfectly proper attitude and was perfectly comfortable when I got up and tried to get home. I shall have to wear long pants to school day after tomorrow.”

  Figure 4. “Anstice and I when working on the farm.” “Album in College.” EMII.

  The Eastmans were accomplished cyclists. Annis, in fact, would comfortably ride her own “wheel” for seven miles in one day, as Max reminded Crystal in the same letter. But somehow trouble would follow Max around when he was on his bike. When he was taking his apparently unsellable bike to school, he came up behind two Elmira girls, Emily Dexter and Bertha Long. The problem was the cracks in the sidewalk. He was getting closer to the girls when all of a sudden, in Max’s own words, “a hand reached out from behind and gave me a push—as is shown in the illustration.” Here Max inserted a picture of a giant, detached hand pushing him forward. Thus propelled by forces beyond his control, Max had no choice but to insert himself between the two ladies: “As you might imagine it was a close gauge.” Once again he came close to falling off: “I lost my balance and began to fall some way but I balanced up again and I saw that if I ever fell it would cause an awful spill, so instead of letting her rip I gave a great jump up into the air.” Holding on to the handlebars, Max nevertheless managed a graceful landing on the sidewalk, “right side up.” Collecting himself, he got back on his bike and caught up with “the Girls” and told them it had all been an accident.36

  Sifting his correspondence later in life, Max, who had in the interim established himself as an authority on laughter, penciled a note on the envelope of that letter: “Example young humor.” But the episode also shows quite a few things about Max’s character: the combination of recklessness, circumspection, and sheer luck. Rather than taking a fall, he keeps his balance for as long as possible. A reader familiar with Max’s future erotic exploits would be more than tempted to attach some symbolic importance to the fact that Max’s balance-keeping involves two girls.

  Really, though, the one girl he wanted to impress more than anybody else was Crystal. For her, he switched easily from the role of loving brother to rascal, and it was for her he wanted to stress his bad-boy credentials. In the same letter, after sharing how wild he was at Thanksgiving and Christmas, he detailed for her a very un-Christmas-like activity he pursued, again with the famous Frank at his side and with a prop supplied by Anstice. “Frank and I went up the river with A’s revolver and shot at a target he has up there.” This was not the first time Max had tried his hand at shooting: “We stood the regulation distance—10 paces, and at first we did not hit it at all but finally I just mad [sic] half a hole on the outside edge, which is red then I got one of the white and then on the black which is the Bulls eye. Then Frank got one on the Bulls eye and then one on the white and then I got another one on the white.” The future pacifist apparently knew how to handle a gun: “I got 45 and he got 30.”37

  Max’s previous biographer has suggested that Max and Crystal had an incestuous relationship, but such a label only inadequately captures the elaborate games both played, especially when they were separated. Not content with being known as a crack shot and irrepressible prankster, Max wanted Crystal to understand he was quite a success with the girls of Elmira, too. At the end of the day, though, he was still his Mama’s boy, so much so that Annis, along with her benefactress Mrs. Beecher, controlled even his choice of dance partners: “I promised Miss Beecher I’d dance with a Wall Flower and promised Mama I’d dance with another. So I struck a happy medium and danced with three,” he cheerfully informed Crystal.38

  Thus, the brilliant Annis Ford Eastman, without using much force or forceful words, retained her hold over her children. On the rare occasions when punishments were administered, a rationale was given, as when, for example, Annis grabbed Max and bit into his shoulder, a gesture so surprising in its animality that he looked at her in sheer terror. “I just wanted you to know what it felt like . . . when you bit Crystal’s arm yesterday,” explained Annis. But normally any kind of violence was shunned in the Eastman family: “It is important if you want to know me, to understand that I come of people who were very gentle with each other,” wrote Max late in life. “Children were not spoiled in the Eastman family, but they were more than adequately appreciated. Home life was tender and a little utopian, so that by contrast the world, when you stepped into it, seemed rough and harsh.”39

  Annis did her best to disabuse them of any sense that there were innate differences between boys and girls, a message eagerly embraced by Crystal, whose tomboyish behavior Annis praised in her sermon to the seasoned YMCA Railroaders: “I went out into a shed one day when my children were little,” she reported, “and found my small daughter climbing about overhead on some beams in what seemed to be a very dangerous position—I said—‘Why my dear—what are you doing!’ Well she said. ‘Brother said I couldn’t do this—so I’m doing it!’” While the anecdote was meant to illustrate, to an audience of skeptical men, that the days in which only boys did reckless things were over, it also let them know that Annis, a modern mother, would leave her little children to their own devices rather than scold them for taking risks. Note, too, her reaction to finding Crystal in this precarious situation: instead of telling her to get down right away, Annis first and foremost wanted to know why she was doing what she was doing.40

  Annis’s utopian ideas found a perfect manifestation in the alternative community at Glenora, the site of the Eastman farm. The logbooks from the summers spent at Cherith have survived, several hefty volumes bound in green. Most of the entries are by Crystal and Max or Annis, interspersed with notes from visitors and, occasionally, contributions by Reverend Eastman himself. Starting with the second volume, photographs glued onto the now-brittle pages of the logbooks carry some of the narrative. A few of these show Annis and Sam, but the vast majority are of lovely, athletic, tanned young people sitting on rocks or diving into the water from a springboard, their beautiful, slim bodies flying through the sky, arched in the summer sun, a blur on their rapid descent down. Max, strong and healthy, his skin darkened by the sun, looks as if he enjoyed the attention paid to him. The girls wear their hair down and seem as capable and muscular as the men.

  The labor of the Cherithites was usually shared, without any special consideration for gender. Men would work as housecleaners, just as the girls could be found doing carpentry. While Sam was felling trees and towing the logs to the sawmill, others were pulling weeds, planting vines, or tending to the beds of sweet peas and nasturtiums. The poetry Max left in the logb
ooks was mostly bad—in one particularly egregious example, Max wrote about the music of the woods, played by Pan on a reed that once was a nymph—whereas Annis is often more successful in capturing the magic of the place, the warm, windless days when the whole landscape seems to stand still, the shiny lake, the scent of honeysuckle, the sounds of katydids around the cottage, the fields brimming with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, the baskets of peaches and Catawba grapes ready for eating. At Glenora, Crystal, too, found great pleasure, but some of it came from watching Max at work, commemorating one night in early September 1901, shortly before their departure from Cherith, when he was outside in the moonlight digging a ditch: “I hung out of my window and conversed with him till I fell asleep in the act.” Cherith was an unreal world of unlimited freedom, a fantasy collectively produced by the various voices represented in the logbooks, as floatingly unreal as the pageants in a Shakespeare play.41