And a fantasy it was. Not everyone was always at peace out there. “One seems much nearer the sky up here,” wrote Annis in the log on July 7, 1901, and then went on to explain that such closeness afforded her insights into her own self that weren’t always comfortable. Consider her tribute to Seneca Lake, in the form of a sonnet written straight into the logbook: “Sheer rising cliffs and vine-clad hills embrace / The yielding body of the restless lake. / And even her expressions changing take / The hue of clouds that float above her face.” Remarkably, the lake is pictured as a woman charged with the task of satisfying her environment: “Her tiniest ripples in a laughing race / Forever vainly seek to climb, and slake / The thirst of hills above—as vainly break / Her wildest waves, wind lashed in furious chase.” The sestet spells out the comparison between the female lake and the female poet and hints at deeper longings present in both:
Mirror of thine environment, like me,
Art weary of it? Wind and rain and sun
And clouds, all bind their fickle moods on thee—
Thy hopeless strife, like mine, will ne’er be won,
Yet in us both, we dare not dream how deep,
Unruffled, unconquerable currents sleep.42
But such feelings were not to be indulged. By sheer force of personality as well as explicit reminders in letters and conversation, Annis left no doubt in her children’s minds as to the things an Eastman should and shouldn’t do. In one of her letters to Max, Annis defined religion as “man’s sense” that “the universe is more than an anthill.”43 Inevitably, Annis’s moralism, her rejection of bodily pleasure in favor of spiritual self-transcendence, became a tremendous problem for Max, who would spend his adolescence and early adulthood alternating between physical exuberance and periods when he was too sick to leave the house. While Anstice removed himself from Annis’s direct influence, becoming first a fearless athlete and then a rather indifferent Princeton student, the more delicately formed Max succumbed to Mamsey’s regimen, in which his precarious health dictated what he could and couldn’t do: “Can you imagine where I am now?” he wrote to Crystal in May 1899. “All the rest of the family have gone to church, but I am too ‘feeble,’ you know. Dr. Stuart prescribes that I sit around and eat and sleep all I can, and not exert myself even in amusing myself. Strange as it may seem I find that prescription very easy to carry out.” At least he had been able to avoid church. In Max’s impressionable imagination, Annis had replaced God with her own dominant presence. Whatever guilt he felt was related to Annis. Caught between his mother’s controlling love and helpless admiration for his more daring siblings, Max drifted into semi-invalidism, settling for a life in which he did not have to act on his impulses because his health wouldn’t allow him to do so.44
In the fall of 1898 Max left Elmira to attend Mercersburg Academy, an elite preparatory school in Pennsylvania, ninety miles northwest of Washington, D.C., which was associated with the Reformed Church. William Mann Irvine, the visionary principal of Mercersburg, had come to Elmira to recruit suitable boys for his fledgling school. The Eastmans were offered special “minister’s terms.”45 Even so, Mercersburg was a stretch for Max’s family, and not only in financial terms. Annis’s letters to Max are filled with laments over his absence. “I hope you are happy and hopeful and know that I love you so much,” she scribbled on a note she slipped into his luggage.46 His going away had paralyzed her, she said dramatically, so much so that all they’d left to do was sit around the house and wait for Max’s letters to arrive. “We devoured your letter last night and felt hungry when we got through.”47
When Annis was in a more practical mood, she would remind her Max to be frugal. Don’t put cookies or nails in your pockets, she would admonish him, since his best suit had to last till Christmas at least. On other occasions she worried about his diet, telling him to sleep more instead of having breakfast (“What would it cost extra for you to room alone”?) and to go for walks every day. She sent peaches, grapes, and watermelons as well as newspapers, along with malted milk tablets for “ease of digestion” and underwear and shirts she had ironed herself. Max in turn gave her a green fern for Christmas. The little plant sent Annis into fits of ecstasy: “It smiled up at me and opened out all its little hands and promised to try to live till June. . . . It will be a daily comforter speaking of you and your thoughtful love and understanding of me.”48
Not all the teachers at Mercersburg were top-notch, but Max, after some initial troubles, went on to achieve the highest academic distinctions of any student in the history of Mercersburg, however short, an average of 97.49 His mother had been relentless, reminding him, at the slightest evidence of slacking, that his outstanding academic performance sustained her and that, given Anstice’s “don’t care attitude,” she depended on Max just as much as he depended on her. Max complied. Although, much to Annis’s regret, he gave up his violin playing, he studied Greek, Latin, and French, and he was soon tutoring other boys. He read Virgil and regularly shared his writing with Annis.50 He also began to hone his skills as a debater—one topic was whether telephone and telegraph and the railroads should be run by the government or not51—and participated in mock trials. Annis began to send him suggestions for speakers and speeches he should study to become a better orator: Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, a passage from a Ben Jonson play. When Max was chosen as the valedictorian of his class and found himself in need of examples of “unrewarded heroism,” Annis didn’t have to think long and gave him her favorite one: Jesus. Max also delivered the class prophecy, a tongue-in-cheek prediction of what the future held for them, an exercise he dispatched with bravado and that he would remember for the rest of his life as one of the most joyful moments he ever experienced.52
A group photo taken during Max’s Mercersburg days shows him among the members of his track team (fig. 5). His dark, brooding face is turned toward the camera, while his left leg is wedged awkwardly between the two classmates in front of him. Annis worried about the periods of despair Max experienced while away at his boarding school. One of the original reasons she had sent him away or, rather, why she had agreed to have him sent away was that she had her own bouts of depression and that, around her, Max was, in her opinion, too susceptible to similar afflictions. Melancholy was her “fatal gift” to him, but it was, she assured him, not an incurable illness: “Don’t yield an inch to that spirit of despair, darling. If ever a life was worth living yours is.” Max had a fine mind and a healthy body, she reminded him. He was “swimming in seas of love” and would be just fine if he remembered only one thing: chew your food!53
Figure 5. The Mercersburg Academy Track Team. Max is in the second row, far left. “Album in College.” EMII.
Max had expected to go from Mercersburg to Princeton.54 Imagine his surprise when Annis told him, in a tone that brooked no dissent, “You are to go to Williams in the fall.” A family friend from Canandaigua, Mrs. Thompson, had offered to pay his expenses at Williams College, and Annis was taking no chances. As a present for graduating from the academy, Max was allowed to visit Anstice at Princeton, getting a glimpse of the college where he wasn’t going to be allowed to study. “Unrewarded Heroism” suddenly had become a topic that seemed to characterize Max’s own life.55
2 • Dearest of All Lovers
In 1899 Max, Crystal, and their cousin Adra Ash were enjoying their summer vacation on the family farm in Glenora. They had gone to a nearby glen to swim. Crystal found Adra beautiful and made no secret of her attraction to her when she saw her naked. And she didn’t hesitate to share that fact with her mother: “She was so beautiful to look at.” She had never seen anything prettier than when “she was standing there with the water dripping from her hair, and red cheeks and sparkling eyes, and to crown all her dimples and fetching smiles.” If she had been a man, said Crystal, “I should have lost my heart then and there by just looking at her and having her smile at me. And she was so utterly unconscious of it, that is where the charm came in.”
; Ironically, walking back from the glen, Adra and Crystal came across two men who were bathing in the nude, too, and here Crystal’s reaction wasn’t a positive one: “It disgusted me for the rest of the day, and does yet. I think it is an outrage, and that’s mild.” At the same time, she knew those men could have been her brothers, too: “I know it isn’t right. It was dreadful enough just for Adra and me together but just suppose I had been up there with a man? I never shall feel like going up there again, I am afraid, with anyone. Adra said she felt like shooting those men, and my feelings were similar. When I told her that all the boys did it without a thought, she said she couldn’t hate her cousins, but she hated all other men and boys.”1
Crystal’s reaction, taking up an entire paragraph in her letter, seems exaggerated. No doubt she was genuinely shocked. But the episode of the nude bathers (so reminiscent of a scene in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”) also helped her justify her rather ambivalent sexual position in the letter. The impropriety of the nude men spoiling the landscape of the glen for her and Adra (and potentially for other visitors, too) made her manifest desire for her cousin’s beautiful body seem respectable. While she wasn’t like those irresponsible male bathers, she knew what it meant to be and to feel like a man. And so, apparently, did Adra, who wanted to shoot the nude offenders, a feeling endorsed by Crystal. It’s an extraordinary sign of the unconventional relationship she had with Annis that Crystal was able to share these complicated emotions with her: she was confident Annis would understand both her desire for her cousin as well as her outrage over inappropriate male behavior.
The rest of Crystal’s letter was chatty—she had finished Pride and Prejudice (which she liked very much), had gone out to buy butter with Max (whom she also liked very much), and she missed her mother dreadfully (obviously she liked her, too). Crystal’s letter conveys a sense of the difficult balance between radicalism and propriety the Eastman children felt required to maintain and the complex ways in which they reimagined their sexuality.
After that memorable summer in Glenora, Crystal began college at Vassar, an experience in which she allowed Max to take part, at least vicariously, through the many letters she sent to her “dear, dear boy” at Mercersburg (fig. 6). Founded in 1869, Vassar had quickly emerged as one of the colleges of choice for the daughters of the Protestant elite. Contemporary accounts say little about academics and much about parties and other social events. And Crystal did enjoy these extracurricular activities, sharing vivid images of life at a girls’ college with Max: “It is impossible for me to tell you about it in the least bit of a way. My first impression when I went over to the campus and in to the college buildings, was an overwhelming but pleasing sense of an endless amount of girls. The first night I was here, I went over to chapel, and enjoyed the sight of the girls meeting each other after the summer. It was one of the most fascinating scenes I ever saw. These dear pretty girls grabbing each other and hugging and kissing frantically.”2
If Max hadn’t picked up on the innuendo, if he hadn’t understood that Crystal was imagining him looking at these girls and putting herself in his place, Crystal was ready to spell it out for him: “You would have enjoyed watching them, I think, only you would have been crazy to do the grabbing etc. yourself, instead of letting another girl do it. I know you.” This was a deliberately sexualized scene. Pretending to understand his desires, Crystal used her letter to arouse Max, all under the cover of her role as voyeur: “Of course I was a mere spectator, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Some of the girls are tall and stunning.” While she was like Max, she was, after all, unlike the girls they were both watching and, at least in their imaginations, grabbing: “Why for size I am nowhere beside lots of them.” For good measure, just in case Max would find it hard to get excited over girls in groups, she switched to a close-up of a beautiful roommate of hers: “She is a brunette, with sparkling eyes, good features, pretty black hair and the most beautiful complexion and coloring I have ever seen. I wish you could see her.” Or how about any of the other girls she got to be with every day? “There are lots of nice and interesting girls here, but no other real beauty in the house.” Do write, she reminded Max.3
Figure 6. Crystal Eastman. Crystal Eastman Papers.
Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,
Harvard University.
From then on Crystal’s letters from Vassar would contain regular updates, for Max’s benefit, about the girls she favored, among them, for example, Lucy: “If only she liked me as much as I like her. My cup of bliss would be brimming for a while.” Lucy had walked over in the rain without a coat, and when Crystal saw her, her “beautiful hair” was “all wet and curly,” with “little sparkles of rain” on it, while her eyes were aglow and “scintillating.” She was “a sight to see,” and it seemed important to Crystal that Max see that sight, too. “When I like people I like them awfully.”4 A highlight in these shareable fantasies came when Crystal attended a Vassar ball in male attire, which, given the lack of available boys, was a perfectly acceptable practice. Decked out in a three-inch collar and a borrowed dress suit, she showed up with her “fiancée,” Miss Janice, on her arm. Mentioning a college mate of hers who had seen Max’s picture and instantly fallen in love with him, she delightedly painted an image of compulsively cross-dressing Vassar for Max: “There were about 50 or 60 girls last night who wore dress-suits. Very few of them were rented.” Rather than presenting herself as the object of Max’s wishes, she put herself in his place, desiring what she imagines he would.5
Such gender fluidity yielded some extraordinary results. When Crystal, exceptionally, went to one of these balls as who she really was, she found out that, paradoxically, even more effort was required: “Think of it! You see I didn’t have time to get together a man’s costume. Everyone said I looked grand.” She had an immense pompadour “and two little pieces of black court plaster on my face, and a low necked thing off the shoulders. I am going to have a dress made that way someday.” A girl named Clara was her man, and, as she was walking with her, Crystal suddenly found herself switching back to a boy’s point of view: “I kept patting her because it made me think of you boys. We had flash lights taken. I’ll send you one if they are good.” But then Crystal changed gears again. Having impersonated a boy like Max, patting women because it’s what the boys do, she nimbly switched back to the role of lustful girl: “The only trouble is that where I see so many sham men around I do so long for a real one. Oh dear!”6
When Max arrived at Williams College in the fall of 1900, he saw nothing but men, or rather boys who wanted to pass as such. “Williams is great,” he reported to Crystal, shortly after his arrival on campus. But the entrance exams dampened this enthusiasm quite a bit: while he was “hot stuff” in Latin and Greek, he failed questions in English, one of which had the prompt “Write on Dryden’s religious life.” In the end he did respectably enough, “enough to let them know that I wasn’t so dumb as I might be.”7 In his dorm room he kept Crystal’s photograph over his desk: “I look up and love you every minute.”8
Nestled in the Berkshires, with the famous purple hills for a background (at dusk they looked like great big hulks standing up into the darkening sky),9 Williams College was a congenial enough environment for someone like Max, whose interests, despite his successes at Mercersburg, weren’t exclusively academic ones. He threw himself into collegiate life, participating in Freshman Rush, which consisted in swiping a sweater from the sophomores and trying to hold on to it as they tried to get it back, and joining the exclusive fraternity-cum-literary society, St. Anthony Hall, also known as Delta Psi. He was prominently involved in stealing a donkey from a Williams faculty member so that the freshman class president could ride on it—an activity that was criminal by anyone’s standards since it included breaking and entering, vandalism, cruelty to animals, and likely a number of other offenses. The reader feels sorry mostly for the scared little donkey, which had never asked to be part of the prank. “We got to the Prof
s barn and founded it locked tight. It was only about 50 feet from the home and the back windows were open, with people in the rooms. We got an old piece of iron and pried open the door. It was a door that wasn’t meant to be opened, and there were leaves piled up against it about five feet high with boards nailed up back of them. I climbed in over these first and there was the little ass up in a corner scared to death.” There was no way out of the barn that wouldn’t have involved breaking down a door, so Max and his friends decided to lift the donkey up and move it out the way they had come in, a maneuver that was not an unqualified success. “We got him four feet up on them and it made him stand almost straight up in the air. . . . We pulled the boards off or broke them and then pitched away the leaves (and all this within about fifty feet of the house). Then we had the ass out and gave him to the Senior who was waiting for him.” Max barely made it home that night, but, as he was glad to report, excelled in his first three periods in the morning, Greek, English, and German.10
As casual as Max seems in his letter to Crystal, his private journal tells a slightly different story, that of someone who felt almost driven to show his capacity for naughtiness. “When they come together, and push, and sweat, and swear, and lose their tempers, then, although I always put on a bold bad look and act as though I were ready to eat the first man I meet, I really feel much more like lying back and laughing at the whole thing.” He spectacularly failed his hazing experience, which involved posing as a corpse while his roommate delivered a funeral oration over his body and another freshman, by squeezing out a wet sponge, wept copious tears over him. During his mock funeral, Max, aka “our most noted and illustrious statesman and friend, who has but recently taken the light of his presence from among us,” couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. Regrettably, wrote Max, making fun of his apparent inability to stay in character, that smile escaped and became a living thing: “And I had to spend the rest of the evening chasing it in and out among chairs, desks, and tables, under beds and back of bureaus, out of the campus and through the dormitories, in the vain attempt to catch it and drown it in a wash-bowl full of water which I carried for the purpose.” A great occasion for Max the budding humorist to flex his muscles.11
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