Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  Wherever there was trouble at Williams, Max was to be found, too, and his freshman journal and the letters to Crystal from his first two years there are filled with gleeful reports on his exploits. Once, for example, he visited a country school during the daytime and had himself introduced as a delegate from South Carolina studying public education in Massachusetts. Another prank involved taking a horse from a farmer’s barn during the night, leading it around in circles, and then tying it up in front of the farmer’s house, after setting off a firecracker to attract the sleeping man’s attention. Or the boys would interrupt choir practice in country churches by loudly singing serenades outside. A pretty waitress became the occasion for the theft of a drumstick and chicken sandwich from the kitchen of a North Adams restaurant.

  At the beginning of his second semester Max got himself into serious trouble by participating in a staged kidnapping of a fellow student—all in good fun, he insisted. The whole college and many townspeople had spent the night looking for the perpetrators of that brazen act. Somewhat fictionalized, the episode shows up in Max’s novel, Venture.12 Max was, he calmly informed Crystal, one of the villains, and more than that: “I was the chief of the villainous gang.”13 The pleasure Max derived from these pranks came not from doing them but from running away afterward, with heart pounding, temples throbbing, and adrenaline pumping through his veins. To him, the likelihood of discovery, the chance of him, Max Eastman, Reverend Annis Eastman’s son, being found out and exposed as a worthless scoundrel was infinitely more exciting than the deed itself.14

  More immediately productive perhaps were the stump speeches Max gave for the Williams Republican Club, presided over by his friend Sidney Wood. His first experience, at East Greenbush, just outside of Albany, was so compelling that a district attorney came up to him afterward to shake his hand. Max soon began to dream of a bright future as a public speaker: “Wasn’t that a great experience—to get up before this roomful of rubes and spout forth far fetched figures and absurd similes after the fashion of the regulation ‘stump speaker’?”15 That Max would get such accolades for some of the most absurd nonsense ever spoken was close to a life-changing event for him. One key rhetorical moment from his performance he conveyed to his journal. It consisted of contrasting “our heroic forefathers” with the “hordes of ignorant barbarians who prefer to wallow in the filth and gore of fruitless war rather than to come forth from their state of uncivilized stagnation and learn to govern and be governed.” Max had discovered the power of words.16

  Although they were one hundred miles or more apart from each other, Max and Crystal seemed closer than ever. In their letters they continued their role-play, a mix of semi-incestuous yearnings and juvenile hyperbole. Verbally at least they made love to each other, Crystal, the older one, a little more expertly than Max, but both were delighted by their ability to make the words on the page say what they wanted without saying it too openly. Crystal, who displayed a Williams College flag in her dorm room window at Vassar, would skip her Greek class to write to Max (fig. 7). And her brother would in turn read her letters “instead of the Bible” during morning services in church.17

  Figure 7. Crystal Eastman in her dorm room at Vassar. “Album in

  College.” EMII.

  Whether or not writing to Crystal helped him discover his talent, Max began to think of himself as a literary figure. A poem he had written about Mount Greylock caught the attention of the poetry editor of the Williams College literary magazine, and his journal gave him endless pleasure: “It’s great to write something every night. There is no pleasure in the world like the pleasure of writing things—no matter how poor they are.” The pages of his journal now became cluttered with poetic sketches, many of them influenced by the authors he was reading at the time, among them Tennyson and the rapturous, florid Sidney Lanier, who offered just the right combination of chivalry and prudery. However, even at the time, Max viewed these efforts with a degree of irony. One of his sketches began by painting a rather vague image of “the mighty majesty of rolling waves that moan and crash and roar and wildly dash themselves to spray in music to the soul that deeply mourns, or that rejoices with wild restless joy.” Such indecisiveness wasn’t tolerable, so the waves say to the hapless poet: “Choose! The thrill thou feelest in our . . . inspiring presence, will surely rouse thee from thy doubtful stupor.” And as if the alternatives weren’t clear, Max elaborated: “Either thou must shout and leap and run for joy. Or thou must weep and tear thy hair in grief.” His sketch, commented Max, had started out “with the admirable intention of becoming a poem,” but, due to all that mist generated by the wild waves, had failed. Yet it was not in vain that Max spilled all that ink. “Mount Greylock” was published, and in the spring of 1902 Max became the editor of the Williams annual, the Gulielmensian, or “Gul,” as it was affectionately known.18

  But Max wasn’t always posing. Beside the naughty Max and Max the literary gadfly, a new Max emerged, one that took pleasure in his body’s infinite capacity for enjoyment. Along with the more private pleasures of writing, Max, for example, discovered the joys of skiing and ecstatically described them to Crystal: “I am spending all my spare time skeeing. There is no fun in the world like flying down a long hill for half a mile, standing up, and going so fast that you cant breathe. And when you fall you fly forever. . . . I slid right through the snow on level ground, with nothing but momentum to propell [sic] me, and utterly unable to stop, for forty feet. A little dive of ten feet without leaving a track is a matter of everyday occurrence” (fig. 8).19 Meanwhile, Crystal poured her own desire for ecstasy and sensual gratification into her singing: “My longing to sing is sometimes almost more than I can stand.” It made her feel all “queer inside.”20

  In his second year at Williams Max was taking advanced French and German, physics, biology, English, and elocution. He was running track, going faster in a quarter-mile race than his brother Anstice had ever gone, finishing in less than fifty-five seconds. Ralph Erskine, a classmate, would remember later how Max seemed to be better than everybody else at virtually everything he undertook. He ran faster, shouted more loudly when he gave speeches, tossed stones farther, and once threw a javelin at him with more strength and accuracy than Erskine would have been able to: “My one desire in life for the next five minutes was to brain you with a club.” Not having bothered to do his homework, Max would immerse himself in Antigone or Faust fifteen minutes before class, amid all the noise a roomful of college students inevitably generated, and would then deliver the most beautiful translations imaginable.21

  Figure 8. “Jump! (Max—at College).” “Album in College.” EMII.

  And yet, in his letters to Crystal Max reported feeling melancholy at times. He missed his sister. Her photograph was right over his desk at his dorm, next to pictures of Cleopatra and Gustave Flaubert’s seductive princess Salammbô. Crystal’s would-be boyfriends were fair game between the siblings: “Oh what fools these mortal men seem to be when they are infatuated,” observed Max about a suitor named Mr. Rawlings. “Do his letters speak lovingly of moonlit nights on the placid lake, or are they matter-of-fact?” Maybe Max should have a little summer affair too? He had been reading the novel Graustark, the first of a series of extremely popular novels by George Barr McCutcheon, set in an imaginary kingdom, a novel that had given him a taste for adventure and romance. “I begin to think it would be a good thing for me to cut loose next summer and get up a romance of my own. How I do long for adventures after I read a novel like that! Life doesn’t seem worthwhile without them. But alas! You have to have money.”22

  Instead of adventure, however, Max was headed for the infirmary. A fever he had caught turned into bronchitis, a situation that stymied the college doctor, who gave him, Max said, “some capsules of white dust” that accomplished nothing at all.23 After two weeks in the infirmary Max was “negotiating for sympathy from all my friends and relatives,” writing copious letters, propped up by pillows. Now he really wanted Crystal t
o come and visit: “I would get out of bed now and take you driving first thing, and call it the greatest event of the year.” For what else was there to look forward to? “College is composed mostly of dopes.”24 But Crystal never came, and Max did not have enough money to travel home, so he spent Thanksgiving in the company of the “ancestors and descendants” of the head nurse of the Williams College infirmary, the “funniest Thanksgiving dinner in the history of the family.”25

  The next year Max moved into private housing on Hoxsey Street in Williamstown, where he finally had a room of his own: “It is a nice English family with some dear little white-haired kids—old enough so I don’t hate ’em—and terribly neat and clean. I feel like a property owner when I stalk around my room—also like a hermit. I am so glad to be alone again.” His college work was still not marked by much dedication. He made such a show of reading the Rubáiyát during lectures on Greek philosophy that the professor threatened to send him home: “I said ‘Well’ and smiled as if I would be perfectly willing [and] then promised to be good next time.”26

  Max became so popular that his class chose him as the orator for the traditional March 13 celebration, a position that required the usual college fanfare, including sequestration in his room while being guarded by the class president and four football players, so that he would not be kidnapped by the freshman class before he had the chance to give his speech. “You can imagine how conducive it was to the development of a speech to have four men in the room all the time smoking and roughhousing.” When the moment came, Max was accompanied outside by a dozen other students and introduced by the president of the senior class. Max spoke from the top of a carriage with students from the whole college to the left by a blazing bonfire and people from Williamstown and North Adams assembled on a steep hill to the right. Williams College had turned into Max’s city upon a hill, and he enjoyed the power he had as a speaker. Talking to his fellow students and the citizens of Williamstown was different from stumping for the Republicans: “It was so thrilling a situation that it went way beyond the point of stage-fright. O it was great! I felt as if my voice could reach to the end of the earth. It was the greatest success I ever had, I think. Afterward when each class gathered together by the embers and gave a cheer for the other 3 classes, mine carried me on their shoulders. Of course everybody is worked up to a great state of excitement by the smokes that precede the speeches, so that it is the greatest opportunity for a speech that ever could be.” Max’s only disappointment: the freshman speaker was a failure. His voice so was weak no one could hear him. Max had wanted better competition. Nevertheless, he relished the sense of importance his guards and his vast audience were giving him. “There is nothing in the world that can be compared to making a speech!”27

  Max was on top of the world. When Annis visited him at Williams in April, she worried that he had lost his humility. Afterward, she sent him a note reminding him that he needed a “vital” religion, one that came from the heart, not the brain, an “experimental faith” that would give his life meaning: “To know God as a friend. Have you ever tried it? Do you pray?” Next on her list was worry about Max’s posture: “Gain and keep an erect carriage. Hold your head high—you can do that even if your heart is low—and look straight into everyone’s face,” even when sitting at a table.28

  Crystal, traveling by train to meet Max in Williamstown just a little later, was less worried about Max than about herself, or rather about the feelings she had for her brother, which had become more intense than ever. Men lacked finesse, she wrote in her journal, in fact all men did, except for Max: “I don’t believe there is a feeling in the world too refined and imagined for him to appreciate.” It was Max’s femininity that made him so unique: “I think it’s the highest compliment you can pay a man,” observed Crystal, “to say that he has the finesse of feeling and sympathy of a woman.” If she ever were to marry a man, he would have to be like Max, exactly like him. She’d rather have a penniless philosopher for a husband and be forced to earn her living herself than bore herself to death with “a practical man” lacking those finer traits. “No amount of worldly disappointment and poverty could be as soul-destroying as to discover a poverty of finer feeling and appreciativeness in the man you must live with all your life, and whose children would be yours also.”29

  Max wouldn’t have liked to hear Crystal say such things about him. He was neither a boy in need of maternal instruction nor a man who would rather be a woman. Barely a month after Crystal’s visit, Max escaped. He joined Sidney Wood, the accomplice of his freshman pranks, in a crazy journey out West, first to Idaho and then on to the Sierra Nevada, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Flagstaff, and, finally, San Francisco. The ostensible purpose was to make money, but it turns out that neither Max nor Sid was quite equipped for the jobs they took on. If Max did not keep a regular journal during the trip, he wrote down his impressions after his return, fusing them into a text that was half fiction, half autobiography and must have given him the clearest sense yet of his potential as a writer. He would later quote some passages from that 1902 notebook in the first volume of his autobiography, Enjoyment of Living. But he omitted the dramatic beginning. As soon as they had arrived in Chicago, and with a great deal of ceremony, Max and Sid divested themselves of their college attire, the “emblems of respectability” that stifled them, their collars and neckties, their starched shirts and creased pants, stowing them away in their suitcases: “We put on in their places black cotton shirts, jumpers, overalls, and a red bandanna.”30 What follows is a tribute to the magical properties of the bandanna, with Max pretending to be a member of the working class, a role that even later in life he could never fulfill without a certain degree of self-consciousness or theatricality. The bandanna, Max explained, became his friend, and the prose poem in praise of the bandanna he offered reads as if an advertising agency had commissioned it:

  There is something peculiar about a bandanna, something almost magical, so that I don’t think a laborer could live without one. It is not because it may be a suit-case, or a pillow, or a hat, or a neck-tie, or a glove, or a towel, as the need arises; nor even because it is always cool and soothing to the brow and plenty large enough for its own peculiar use. But there is something else about it, something that goes with its being red, some strange quality, so that it becomes a dear friend, and he is glad when he can feel it in his pocket. Surely nobody ever felt so about a white handkerchief, and surely he never could about a blue one! I wonder who discovered red bandannas—for I cannot feel that they were invented.

  In Chicago Max and Sid went to the stockyards. They were “watching every bloody operation, beginning with the taking off of their skins, until finally there was only a row of tongues left.” After signing with an employment agency, Max and Sid took a train bound for Nevada. Nothing in Max’s life had prepared him for his two memorable travel companions, the Boss and the Captain, whom he described with a satirical skill honed on his reading of Mark Twain. Instead of luggage, each man carried a dirty bundle fashioned out of newspapers. Max developed a clinical interest in the more dangerous looking of the two: “The Boss was coarse and low in appearance and speech, and he had seemingly just one idea—that in San Francisco if you don’t cheat everybody will cheat you.” He was coming from Hoboken, New Jersey, where his family resided, and he pointed out that if any of his relatives ever decided to come live in San Francisco, he would be obliged to cheat on them too and rob them before they could take away his things. Max was surprised that such a troglodyte had family somewhere: “It was pathetic, and something more than pathetic, to think of him as stopping after twelve years of such living among men as he described in San Francisco and taking the long journey home with his earnings.”

  Traveling across the Great Plains, having opened the window so he could feel the air and watch the clouds and the sunset, Max experienced a moment of self-conscious Emersonian transcendence: “I thought of home and the world and myself and a thousand things but it was not my tho
ughts but my emotions, my mood that I enjoyed, not my mind, but my frame of mind. The picture is the same in a black frame as in a gilt frame, and yet how different it is! My heart was great, and full of love, and I grew, in those hours.” In between raptures, Max read his “Spanish Self-Taught” book. He slept well, even though they were traveling in the lowest class and could not lie down to rest. He had truly begun the worker’s life.

  Max and Sid got off in Ogden, Utah. The jobs in Nevada were forgotten, and they found themselves headed instead to Salt Lake City, where they went for a dip in the Great Salt Lake—“You feel so much like a bopper that you expect to be jerked under in a minute”—and saw their first authentic Indians. On the way back to Ogden the train ran over an old man who was crossing the tracks with a staff and a dinner pail in his hand. As they started moving again, Max saw the old man’s body under a blanket. This was the first dead body he had ever seen, and it had a powerful effect on him.

  Back in Ogden, they signed on for jobs in Los Angeles. En route to California, Max was temporarily separated from Sid, an unexpectedly exhilarating experience. Stranded in Reno, Nevada, without a cent in his pocket, hoping to find a hotel room he didn’t have to pay for right away, Max got a taste of Bret Harte’s West. Nine out of ten stores in town were liquor stores, and there seemed to be more prairie dogs than people. As he was bargaining with the hotel keeper, the latter stepped out to prevent two men from engaging in fisticuffs outside. Max enjoyed his first glimpse of frontier life: “The drunkard wanted to fight with a man with a long red moustache, and the man with the moustache was all ready, and neither could see why they shouldn’t begin. The Innkeeper didn’t try to tell him it wasn’t considered proper to fight on the street, or that anybody would object or interfere, he simply convinced him that he was too drunk to put up a good fight and it wasn’t worth while.” Max also enjoyed the view he had from the train going through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The winding lakes, banks full of green pine trees, blue gorges, “a great wideness and loftiness.” And he liked the waving cornfields once he was headed to California. Somewhat randomly, Max and Sid got off in Lowell, California, an unincorporated community on the Southern Pacific Railroad no longer in existence today, where everyone promised them work “in the fruit” but no one would give them any. When they finally made it to their destination, a construction camp in Chatsworth Park in the San Fernando Valley, they discovered it was really little more than a black hole: a tunnel, in other words. They chose to seek employment in a nearby stone quarry instead. Putting chains on rocks and hauling them was not a natural fit for Annis Eastman’s son: “Four men must carry the largest chain, and it is an enormous effort to lift it to one’s shoulder, and you cannot imagine how those big links dig down into your shoulder, and hook into your collar bone.” When they asked the superintendent how long the job would last, he told them, “a good deal longer than we would.” The sleeping arrangements at the quarry horrified Max. It didn’t help that a Mexican laborer was carried out in a box dripping blood just before they came. But Max found it gratifying that the Mexican workers thought he was one of their own, thanks to his dark looks. He told them, “Mi padre es Mejicano y mi madre Americana,” a lie that, from then on, led to his being called “cuñado” (brother-in-law) by the Mexican workers.