Max did graduate from Williams in the spring of 1905. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, too. Theodore Roosevelt was in the audience during Max’s graduation. The event was made even sweeter by the fact that Max had won the oratorical contest with a speech on Giordano Bruno, whom he celebrated for having chosen philosophy over the church, heresy over religious orthodoxy. Although the subject of his speech had been suggested to him by the brilliant Asa H. Morton, professor of Romance languages at Williams, a man who had introduced him to Dante as well as Claude Monet, Max would later claim he had learned but little in college. In 1915, when asked to contribute to the Decennial Record of the Class of 1905, Max defined his current occupation as “writing and lecturing on social problems” and added, with a mixture of irony and condescension, “My education, which began in nineteen hundred and five, is progressing rapidly, and I can report excellent prospects of knowing what it’s all about when I get through.”55
3 • A Village Apollo
With college done and all barriers removed between him and the fulfillment of his desires Max promptly balked, and his health collapsed once more. His persistent backache became his career. But at least he was now getting published, too. An essay he composed during this period of prolonged prostration, “On the Folly of Growing Up,” shows that some of the major elements of Max’s style were already in place. Max begins with a commonplace idea (that the young constantly are put in their place by the elders) and then sends it through the wringer of a loosely dialectic method, with a few luminous epigrams thrown in along the way (“Most people have had too much experience to be wise”), before ending on a provocative, if not entirely unexpected, note: let’s grow old without growing old. Hidden beneath the surface of the smooth rhetoric and wrapped in a tissue of references ranging from Aristotle and Empedocles to Saint Benedict, buried among sentences that sound as if quoted from somewhere else, although they probably weren’t, was Max’s plea—the plea of the youngest child in the Eastman household—to be left alone: “We have a superstition prevailing in our homes that the first thing to do upon the appearance of a child is to bring it up.” And: “There is no use in being born unless you are willing to make an honest effort not to grow up.” Max’s essay reveals an almost frighteningly mature voice: while the paratactic piling on of pronouncements seems to be modeled on Emerson, Max’s biting irony and penchant for learned metaphor (“The Senate must be templed upon the Acropolis”) are entirely his own: a kind of narcissistic Erasmus of the modern age, praising folly as the new smart.1
Max’s essay, published with some delay in the Christian Register, was a plea for the beauty of arrested development, and he certainly did his best to honor his own injunctions. As his classmates fanned out in search of employment or graduate training, Max hung around Williamstown, spending time with an invalid minister, John Denison, and developing a close friendship with a literate spinster of New England pedigree, Miss Suzie Hopkins. Another product of these months of genteel laissez-faire was an essay in which Max sought to define the nature of poetry. Published in the North American Review under the title “The Poet’s Mind,” the essay is a curious mixture of Emersonian grandstanding and aestheticist snobbishness. It also marks the official beginning of Max’s long, complicated love affair with Walt Whitman.
Max’s argument was that traditional explanations of poetry had failed: it could be defined neither by its subject matter—hadn’t Whitman shown that there were no limits to the things poets could write about?—nor by its mode, which, in Max’s understanding, was a poem’s meter. A more helpful approach to understanding poetry was to recognize the difference between processes in our mind, between logical thinking and the type of thinking in which the imagination dominates. The former was prose, and the latter was poetry. “Last April,” says the prosaic mind. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” says the poet, aka Walt Whitman. Consider, for example, this sentence, which sounds as if it had been taken from one of Annis’s sermons: “Let there be a junction between your ideals and your daily life.” As we think about what the sentence might mean, “something light touches upon something drab-colored, or a vagueness from heaven swims over the picture of yourself in practical costume.” Why, then, not choose a better, more poetic phrase right away? “Hitch your wagon to a star.” The new sentence gives thought its own natural, visionary form rather than merely putting it into words. The goal of poetry was not to explain life but to make it manifest: “It was not abstract ideas of health and beauty and lightness, but visible Apollo, who moulded Greek life.”2
But Apollo did not rule over Williamstown. In Max’s case, the concrete manifestation of the “junction” between mind and body was his lack of health or, more concretely, his ever-worsening back pain. In late January he found himself in Dr. Charles Oliver Sahler’s New Thought Sanitarium in Kingston-on-the-Hudson. Sahler had been a general practice physician in the Catskills when he discovered the power of mental suggestion. Now he was running a facility for all kinds of nervous wrecks, although he drew the line at actual insanity. While Sahler’s therapeutic plan included assorted baths, “Turkish, Russian, and Electric,” as he advertised, the main preoccupation of the patients at the “Sahler San” seems to have been to do nothing at all.3 Max quickly lost faith in the doctor’s system, which after an initial treatment was limited to one of Sahler’s assistants laying her hand on his forehead. His decision not to quit was probably related to the presence of two bewitching girls among the sanitarium staff, Rosanna and Charlotte, who inhabited a cottage in a nearby valley. Romping around with them, in that half-desiring, half-shy-virginal way that made young Max forever popular with the girls while it also effectively prevented him from consummating any of his affairs, he found out that he had hypnotic powers himself, as he bragged in a letter to Annis.4
In May 1906 Max, anticipating a full recovery, was back in Williamstown again, with a new zest for life that made him turn down an offer by one of his former Williams College professors, Henry Loomis Nelson, that he become his teaching assistant—a proposition he dismissed even more loftily because it confirmed his idea of what “a scholar ought not to be, a man for whom his subject was never more palpable than paper.”5 He didn’t want money, he didn’t want a wife, he didn’t want dignity, he informed his mother. Max hankered for activity and even contemplated going west again, inviting his worried mother to come along: “We can raise everything from ginseng to the devil out there. There’s so much room.” In the meantime Max stayed by himself at Glenora, eating raw food (one of his mother’s ideas), reading Whitman and other books his mother handed him out of the window of her train car while rejecting her suggestion that she could join him at the cottage: “I am conscious of your caring so much about my being sick.” Max talked himself into being “unspeakably happy,” but it turned out he really wasn’t. A note, written later on one of the envelopes from that time, sums up the experience: “I gave up and ran home to mother June 15.”6
As Max seemed forever stuck in late adolescence, Crystal dove into adult life in New York City, dating men, sometimes several at a time, as if this were an athletic exercise, letting them come close to her and then keeping them at arm’s length, just as they were about to claim the prize. And then she would write Max or Annis to let them know what had or hadn’t happened. Paul Kellogg, a journalist and editor of Charities magazine, was one of the most persistent. In September 1906, after spending a day with Kellogg on a deserted Coney Island beach, Crystal reported back to Elmira: “The water was great. After that my hair was wet and we walked way up the beach to a place where there are no pavilions and no houses, while my hair blew dry in the wind.” Just before they left, “the moon came out clear and we ran and danced close to the waves on the long brown beach.” Crystal was so in love with life that her boyfriend lost all excitement for her: “I guess I am not in love with him. I’m half sorry and half glad . . . I’d love to be in love with somebody someday, hard so there wouldn’t be any doubt about it.” Ostensibly
more adjusted than Max, Crystal was experiencing a similar kind of loneliness as he did.7
In October 1906 Max checked into Dr. John George Gehring’s sanitarium for the treatment of nervous disorders in Bethel, Maine, to seek help for his constantly ailing back. Reverend Denison, Max’s Williamstown mentor, had discussed his case with Gehring, who had agreed to treat Max for free, on an outpatient basis.8 This was not an ordinary hospital. Known as the “Harvard of the North” after its prominent clientele, Gehring’s clinic even became the subject of a novel, The Master of the Inn, which first appeared in Scribner’s in 1907 and came from the pen of Robert Herrick, a former patient. Gehring, who had a degree from Case Western and had also done some postgraduate work in neurology in Berlin, was a kindly man perennially enveloped in cigar smoke who lived in constant fear of his powerful wife, Marian. His method was simple: let the sick work as hard as they can and get physically strong again, and then all mental problems will vanish. Max, who did not live at the clinic but rented a room in town, had to agree to a regimen of outdoor activities, such as chopping or sawing wood, interrupted by fixed periods of nap time, which the doctor progressively shortened as Max became less and less aware of his pain. He told Max that his back trouble was a mental obsession and that the less he thought about it the better he would get.9 By November Max was able to work again, if only for two hours a day.10 Crystal was radiant with happiness over the news: “Oh, if you knew how that thought sends me out thro’ the dreary streets with a happy smiling face. . . . There is nothing I wouldn’t do for that adorable man, your doctor. He can have my heart and hand for the asking, to say nothing of my brain, purse, and influence.”11
What might have helped more than the doctor’s regimen, however, was the presence in Bethel of Miss Anna Carlson, a “peach of a girl,” as he told Crystal.12 Swedish, blond, strong, and slim, she worked for the Gehrings as a combination maid and nurse and left an indelible impression on Max. Anna’s letters to Max have survived, bundles of them, written with a smudgy pen on small, yellowish bifolds of paper in large, confident handwriting. Some of them were in Swedish, a language Max picked up in passing during his infatuation with Anna. (Max the lover would always serve as an inspiration to Max the linguist; this is precisely how he would begin his study of Russian a decade later.) In his autobiography, Max remembered Anna fondly, if somewhat casually. The letters, however, don’t seen incidental at all, and neither does the fact that someone had evidently attempted to burn them.
The truth is that Anna and Max were infatuated with each other, to a degree that made Mrs. Gehring nervous. On a hastily penciled, folded-up sheet of paper from sometime in 1906 Max reported to Anna, “Mrs G. saw us start off yesterday afternoon & that we were on the way to the woods—she said so to the Dr—who presently saw us come back.” Max was taken to task for his behavior, but more because of what such surreptitious escapes into the woods would have looked like to other people than because of what had actually happened. Anna responded, on the same sheet, that the Gehrings were often “inconsistent” and that she found herself “in strange positions” with them. Most of Anna’s letters date from the time after Max’s departure from Bethel, but if they are to be trusted, Anna’s therapeutic value to him must have been tremendous: “Dear unconventional,” “big-souled” Max was her “Hero Maximus” or “hero prophet.”13 At the same time, it seems Max also helped Anna, most specifically by encouraging her and her brother Gothard to leave the Gehring household and strike out for themselves in Boston.
In his autobiography Max recalls that Anna was too good a girl to agree to what Max, not a good boy in his own hopeful thinking, clearly wanted from her. But she certainly knew how to string him along, dangling the prospect of gratification before him, never ever taking it quite away from him but never letting him get any closer either. Anna was no Annis, and that was enough to keep Max going. In her letters she re-created for his benefit and excitement, one may presume, their near-intimate encounters in the woods: “And off we are over the dam, running over holes and stones and then tumble down in a breathless heap on the other side—‘Oh dear there goes my hair’—‘it’s no use I can never keep it up’—‘eight minutes?’ ‘oh bother, wait, one pin more, there!’ And we’re off again. ‘Mercy, it’s getting dark, no, I don’t know that path well enough—I wouldn’t dare take it’—so back to our old log and the starting place and now we’re at the shack.” And she would end suggestively, “It was exciting and fun wasn’t it?”14
The hints—the tumble, the flowing hair, the dark path almost, yet not quite, taken—would have been enough to rope wayward Max back into a relationship he otherwise might have quit. Anna’s letters preserved her lifeline to Max, who, as it turned out, was far from cured and was suffering some of the same symptoms again. In her missives that seemed to grow inexorably longer, Anna dwelled mostly on her own problems, bewailing her lot and the abuse she was suffering from Mrs. Gehring, and thus kept Max at bay. When Max made demands on her, he was swiftly and artfully rejected: “Let us pray for that Christ-spirit that maketh us to live noblest and that will give us the peace of having done that which is good in the eyes of the Lord,” the implication being that what Max wanted them to do was not so good.15 Anna continued her role-play, in which Max was alternately naughty boy, wise prophet, or a stern substitute “daddy” shaking his “hoary locks” at her and “commanding” her to do things, until she had moved to Boston, where she no longer needed him: “Perhaps I . . . have been practicing a little inconstancy,” she taunted him in her last letter. One outcome was clear: Max could never go back to Dr. Gehring again. “Mrs. Gehring is so ‘set against’ you on my account . . . that she will make it impossible for you to ever be helped by the Dr. again.”16
In helping Anna Carlson shake off her shackles, Max had tried out the role Crystal had so far assumed in his life, and that fact did prove to have some therapeutic value at last. Although his back pain lingered, Max now felt emotionally well enough to join Crystal in New York: “You are a wonderful sister and I think about you half the time. I want to live with you.”17 His arrival, long delayed, changed his sister’s life, as she had hoped. When Max told her of his intention to come to New York, she was ecstatic: “Your news came like a sudden great light into my life. My head is whirling with it now, and yet I am so peacefully glad.” All he had to do was come with enough money for a month, and her lovers would take care of him: Dr. Vladimir Simkhovitch, a recent acquisition of hers from Greenwich House who “would raise heaven and earth to get me what I want,” or the indefatigable Paul, “with his newspaper and editorial acquaintances,” would help him get on his feet. The prospect of living with Max again was a “dream of joy.” Crystal disliked her roommate, Madeleine Doty.18
Delighted to be able to introduce Max to her friends and the city, she first put him up at Greenwich House and then found a room elsewhere for him, small but clean and neat and cheap and with “good air.”19 Crystal threw herself into this new, joint life with the beloved, much-missed brother, who soon seemed to be spending more time at 12 Charles Street, the apartment Crystal shared with Doty, than anywhere else. Dr. Simkhovitch took them out to the theater: “We laughed a great deal and had a silly good time. It solves a good many things to have Max here.” At the bottom of her letter to Annis, Crystal scribbled, “The sun shines at last.”20 For Max, too, Crystal was “the centre and hub upon which my life turns.”21 He loved and wanted her so much that a moment of unanticipated solitude almost crushed him: “My heart was just comfortless and empty.”22 Although they initially maintained separate quarters, Max and Crystal were always together, sharing meals, laughs, and friends. Slowly Max was getting better; he was able to sit for longer periods of time, and when he had to lie down it seemed in line with family tradition: “All the Eastmans, you know, are natural sprawlers.”23 Even then, New York would have seemed big to a boy from Elmira. Between 1900 and 1910 the population of Manhattan grew by 50 percent. Over two million people lived in the city, about
half of them foreign-born. At night Max fell asleep amid the cacophony of all the usual New York noises, the streetcars, cat fights, drunken brawls, and random songs that could be heard at any time, night and day.24
Back in Elmira, Annis, the “foolish little girl,” as her daughter called her, carried on her minister’s life, pushing forward with church reforms, delivering progressive sermons, and writing letters to her children that reminded them why Mamsey was “the most interesting person” they had ever known.25 She also continued to do the laundry for both siblings; on rare occasions she sent some cash.26 The Eastman children really were, Crystal admitted in a moment of introspection, noncontributors, “the poorest ‘props’ considering our age and sex and ‘eddication.’”27 But things were beginning to look up for Max. Dr. Simkhovitch, who taught economic history, helped him get a position as a teaching assistant in the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Columbia University. Max’s class was “The Principles of Science,” a topic about which he knew absolutely nothing. Professor John Dewey, who had come to Columbia from Chicago just three years earlier, didn’t care. To him it mattered not what Max knew about a subject but that he wanted to know something about it—perhaps Max’s first introduction to an important pragmatist principle, namely, that knowledge arises from the adaptation of the human organism to its environment.28
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