Dewey was in his late forties then, a careless dresser, his unkempt hair a perfect match for his torn clothing, and completely uninterested in the usual trappings of professorial authority: an unconventional figure even at Columbia. Like Max, the Vermont-born Dewey was the son of Congregationalists. A lanky, intense, painfully repressed boy as he was growing up, he was saved from a life of religious boredom and Sunday school teaching by discovering science. At Columbia, Dewey ranged freely across various fields, logic, education, psychology, science, and politics, developing his ideas as he was talking, giving each of his students the feeling that they mattered. Dewey thought best when there was noise around him. Filled with multiple fully entitled children, one of them an adopted boy from Italy, the Dewey household was an image of the egalitarianism the Eastmans, for all their outrageousness, had never achieved. According to Max, Dewey embodied in his life and attitudes what Whitman had done in a book, namely, “the essence of democracy.”29 Max also began to work as an assistant to Dickinson S. Miller, a former student of William James and perhaps the most idiosyncratic philosopher on the Columbia faculty. Part of Max’s work with Miller consisted in taking him out in a canoe on the Hudson every day, for the sake of the philosopher’s health.30 He was flooded with papers to correct, although this wasn’t a problem for Annis’s son, equipped with a “mental deftness” he had inherited from her and that enabled him to read any kind of handwriting with dispatch.31
The pay for the instructorship was meager, around $500 a year, so Max still had to borrow money from Crystal, who was really not in a position to be generous. But she simply couldn’t say no to Max, who remained “the one I wanted to marry always.”32 He seemed to be growing “more beautiful to look at” by the day, and he surrounded himself with so many girls that Crystal found it hard to keep track of them.33 It was hard not to be envious of that gorgeous boy with the perfect skin and face full of “light and animation,” and oh so perfectly unself-conscious about it all.34 “Lovely to look upon,” Max had not learned how to be careful with the limited financial resources he had, unlike Crystal, who appreciated how fortunate she was to have Annis as her mother: “Oh, the unhappy people who do not have you for a mother!”35
Crystal was now closer to Max than ever. To Annis she said this was the greatest year of her life.36 From about that time stems a short passionate note to Max, thanking him for some unknown favor: “Oh, thank you, my mind and heart are most distracted with vague and conflicting longings and sudden desires. But, with all of me, poor and uncertain as I am, I know that I love you. I thank God for you as I thank God for the sun and wind, for the mountains and the sea,—for all the songs of birds, for green fields,—for moonlight and the wonderful stars; because as it is with all these,—you are very near my soul.” Max was making her life “full and rich and joyous”; life without him had become difficult to imagine. Crystal was so full of happiness that she went out to the beach one afternoon and made a fire, “fantastic and beautiful with all sorts of queer things burning.” Whenever she broke up with her lovers, she knew there would always be Max, standing bareheaded in the sunshine, looking handsome, smiling, prompting Crystal to say out loud: “Ah, here is a Man!” Crystal knew she was a “queer one” when it came to men, as she told Annis.37 Max was her god, her savior, and she saw nothing amiss in comparing him to Jesus Christ, another young man who had chosen “thoughts and words” as his profession, as she thought Max would do, rather than a more sedate, respectable way of life.38
Max’s teaching further helped in the self-confidence department. He took to it like a fish to water. “I gave a great lecture Monday,” he reported home, boasting that in order to deliver it he had needed only “a note or two on the desk.” He had read Whitman to them, “as the culmination and ideal attitude to nature and natural science.”39 Being able to work again was a fantastic feeling. “I am going to lecture the heads off of my class this morning.” Quoting Mary Baker Eddy (whom he had been reading recently) on “holy inspiration,” he declared, “I am About to Combust!”40 He looked good and felt good. The students liked his candor. Once during one of his classes, when he was attempting to expound Aristotelian syllogisms to his undergraduates with the help of blackboard diagrams, a hand shot up in the back of the room: “Professor, what’s the use of all this?” Max put down his chalk, drew a long breath, and answered: “I’m ashamed to say it nets me only five hundred dollars a year.” He felt, he said, much better after that. And so did his sophomores. Incidentally, the student who had asked the question was Joseph O’Mahoney, who would serve four terms as a senator for Wyoming in the U.S. Senate, a New Dealer and fierce opponent of big business.41
Max was also attending lectures on socialism at the Rand School, taking weekend trips to Croton-on-Hudson and elsewhere, and when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show came to town he went to see it.42 Dewey would become the kind of father to him he never had—interested in his ideas, without wanting to influence him—a true pragmatist. Max worked in an office next to Dewey, with the door open between the two. Sundays he dined at Dewey’s house, and then they would spend most of the afternoon and sometimes the evening together. Max also helped Dewey, never known to be a dazzling stylist, with his writing, improving both style and clarity in the ethics textbooks Dewey was preparing with his former Chicago colleague James Tufts. If the famously dull Dewey wrote a quotable sentence, a possibility Max questioned, and it appears in his 1908 textbook on Ethics, it is possible that Max had lent a hand.43
Max spent the summer of 1907 at Glenora working on his plan to get published by a major magazine. Looking for suitable topics, he focused on his recent medical adventures. The result was “The New Art of Healing,” an essay in which he contrasted the charlatans of Christian Science and the faux magicians of the “New Thought” school with “suggestive therapeutics,” as practiced by Dr. Gehring, an approach that relied on “fixing an idea” in the patient’s mind and thus effecting a cure of his or her physical ailment. In this method the patient relinquished herself to the doctor, not out of weakness but as an “act of will.” The strongest patients were the best ones, observed Max, who had learned his lesson well: “A great deal of alleged physical suffering is primarily mental.” That didn’t mean these afflictions weren’t real. But they did not result from any physical infirmity, and there was no pill that could cure them. Instead of leaving these wretched sufferers shuddering under the noxious influence of a misconception, exposed to “a thousand house-grown maladies of the imagination,” the doctor trained in suggestive therapeutics would try to replace the wrong idea with the right one. Max’s essay is marked by both personal urgency and a delight in the force of epigram: “The chief value of many pills lies in the satisfaction of taking them.” And, in a closing gesture aimed at those who had already been helped by the new science, Max encouraged patients to speak up: “So long as the unprejudiced are cowards we are wholly damned by prejudice.” To his delight, the Atlantic Monthly accepted the piece and ran it the next year.44
There was no lack of women who were interested in relationships with Max, but, paralyzed by a nagging sense of inadequacy, Max made a mess of one potential relationship after another. In the summer of 1907 he read Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” with Florence Wyckoff, a lumber merchant’s daughter and his riding buddy during the long summer weeks he spent at Glenora. He came as close to her as anyone could, riding next to her during long trips, but he never touched her, though decades later he would still remember her satiny skin.45 Not for him Whitman’s famous “adhesiveness.” Annis sensed that not everything was right with her son: “With all my joy in you I do not love the feeling of sadness about you and when that exists I’m pretty sure there is reason. You seemed to lack buoyancy—and your face was sad.” She suspected that Max’s melancholy was connected to Florence (“Are you at peace with yourself about Florence?”), although she quickly shifted to more organic reasons for his hangdog appearance (“indigestion malaria or just weariness”). Trust God, sh
e advised, “but watch yourself a little more.” On the envelope of Annis’s letter, Max much later, when he was reviewing the correspondence from those years, noted the real reason for his malaise: “The problem of sexual intercourse.”46 Filled with desire, he was too afraid to act upon it, too afraid to fail if he did.
The summers he spent at Glenora would have offered lots of opportunities for Max to divest himself of his inhibitions. The logbooks for those weeks record an endless cycle of swims, hikes, house repairs, picnics, canoe paddles, porch parties, baseball games, concerts, naps, and huddles around the fireplace, punctuated by the arrivals and departures of summer residents and their guests, the Langdons, McDowells, and Pickerings, and the wistful saying of good-byes at the end of the season. Even Anstice was not immune to the special atmosphere at Glenora, the mix of athletic competitiveness and drowsy laissez-faire that made city life seem so far away. After a rather secular Sunday morning service conducted by Max himself (the topic was Emerson on heroism), Anstice contributed a rare entry to the family log, made even more peculiar by the touches of poetry he added: Max’s sermon had “crystallized the whole life of the summer into a jewel which we shall carry with us, our most precious memory, and an unending inspiration.”47
Figure 9. “Mooley” (Muriel Bowman) at
Glenora, 1909. Cherith-Log, 1909. EMIIA2.
Surrounded by powerful women not afraid to flaunt their joy in life and to (sometimes literally) let their hair down, such as the “Amazon” Muriel (“Mooley”) Bowman, Max did feel instantly rejuvenated whenever he returned to Glenora (figs. 9, 10). “Oh the wild joys of living,” he intoned in one of his many ecstatic logbook entries, “the leaping from rock up to rock, / The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock / Of the plunge in a pool’s living water!”48 Inspired by the Australian swimming champion Annette Kellerman, Max discovered the joys of diving. Soon “natatory festivals” became the main preoccupation of the Glenora folks: “Mary and Muriel each turn a flipper amid cheers,” Max noted on July 24, 1909, “and the ‘standing-sitting dive’ (in loving memory of Annette Kellerman) gives the spring-board a chance to get back at us.”49
Figure 10. Max Eastman at Glenora. Cherith-Log, 1909. EMIIA2.
Max’s signature dive was the Flying Dutchman, a combination of front spring and one-half backward somersault.50 But he also pioneered a jump called “the running-dream-dive-from both feet,” an innovative athletic feat that won him the admiration of all. “Nothing permanent in this world but swimming parties,” the philosopher wrote smugly in the logbook (fig. 11).51 He went from sporting dark sweaters and white shirts and looking, according to Crystal, like a cross of Hamlet and Lord Byron to walking the trails in whatever garments he pleased. “It’s a good thing the trees are growing tall around Cherith—for the Cherithites are coming about as near the Simple Life as it is possible to get,” opined a still somewhat baffled old friend, Ruth Pickering, on July 8, 1908. “Each morning when I see Max he has discarded some article of clothing which he has decided is positively unnecessary.” He was now strolling around wearing khaki trousers, which, by the old Max’s standards, would have been close to being naked. Interestingly, Ruth, the abiding object of Max’s furtive desires during those years, could be seen around Glenora chopping wood in her bathing suit.52
Figure 11. “All In,” August 11, 1909. Cherith-Log, 1909. EMIIA2.
Sam and Annis Eastman viewed this paradise of whirling, wheeling, flying, diving, swimming, and, more troublingly, skimpily clothed bodies—one they had originally helped create—with mounting skepticism. Sam especially was perturbed by so much freedom: “Grand fight in the afternoon on going back to nature precipitated by Dad,” Max noted in the log. Crystal and Adra, who had by then gotten past their earlier reservations about nudity, had been sitting in the parlor in their bathing suits, and Sam took exception to their appearance. They were, he decided, “too bare.” The self-appointed apostles of nakedness shot back, and a verbal skirmish ensued that didn’t end until Annis, brilliant but bedraggled, returned from Elmira amid a rainstorm and wanted to know what was going on. “You started it,” complained Max, pointing at Reverend Eastman. “I made one solitary remark,” answered Sam, defensively. “That’s all the Lord made at the beginning of the world,” interjected Annis, who disapproved of loudness even more than nudity. “And look at all the trouble he caused,” concluded Crystal. However, Annis herself was not in favor of the “skin-craze” either, as she freely admitted two weeks later when the family was again “angryin’,” the Eastman word for fighting. Again, Dad had brought on the debate, this time by arguing against tea and beer, which provoked Baldwin Mann, Adra’s husband, into proclaiming, loudly, his support for Anheuser Busch.53
There is no doubt these summers did a lot of good things for Max. But they also instilled a lifelong sense of frustration in him: he was so near the forbidden fruit yet unable to pick it. Max wanted to have fun, but he was also enough of a Puritan to be haunted by the feeling, injected into him by his painfully repressed father, that one maybe shouldn’t be having fun at all. Max’s constant desire to be elsewhere, doing something else, with somebody else, with anybody else, would prove to be a source of never-ending agony, to both him and the people around him.
It was not easy for Max to define the exact kind of liberation he craved. Ever since Miss Julia Beecher had read Whitman’s “Calamus” poems to him when he was a mere child, Whitman had hovered over Max’s life like the shadow of an ancestor one would rather forget. Whitman’s promise of spiritual fulfillment was sanctioned by Max’s own mother, who based an entire sermon on a passage from Leaves of Grass that made spiritual health contingent on finding God not in some faraway transcendent realm but all around us: “I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four and each moment then / In the faces of the men and women I see God.”54 Max’s copy of The Wound-Dresser, a compilation of Whitman’s essays and letters about the Civil War he acquired in June 1908, is heavily marked, at least at the beginning, especially next to a passage about the “magnetic touch” of mothers and their healing influence.55
The idea of healing was prominent in the two essays on Whitman Max undertook to write in July of that year, working for three to four hours a day on them. In “Walt Whitman’s Art” he took issue with a statement the Scottish metaphysician William Hamilton had inscribed on the wall of his classroom at Edinburgh University: “In the world there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.” Max considered that aphorism entirely “unserviceable” because it negated “our bodies and the gods around us.” Max wanted—and it is clear he was speaking mostly for himself here—to “open the doors of our senses and go out through them.” Max’s essay is less analysis than poetic invocation: “Perhaps the wisest mind is the child’s. Once we were not indifferent to the morning. We did not wake at the greeting last night’s proposition in commerce or logic, but at the smile of the sun. The stuff of our thoughts was not sentence and numbers, but grass and apples and brown honey.” Whitman had kindled Max’s dormant pagan sensibility, prompting him to imagine himself dancing “in the dew with naked feet.” Poetry was the adult’s return ticket to childhood and the urban person’s reminder that the country exists. “The universe does not exist in the abstract, nor in general, nor in any classification, but in concrete and heterogeneous detail.” Thus, Whitman’s poet was a master of many perspectives: he sees the world of adults with the eyes of a child, and the world of the city with the eyes of the “countryman.”
These were two perspectives Max thought he was well equipped to understand. From his higher vantage point he felt able to judge not only the way Whitman judged others but also Whitman himself and to separate the wheat from the chaff. Max described his method of reading Leaves of Grass as a “thrashing out” and “winnowing out” of Whitman. His essay was not about Whitman, but a document of his own intuitive understanding of the poet, a record of how he had felt his way into Whitman’s poetic universe
, his “divine and barbaric fore-showing of wonderful material.” And such foreshowing was what Max aimed for in his work, too, by demonstrating to his readers, rather than merely explaining to them, the difference between poetry and prose: “Prose is telling people what you have in mind, poetry is putting it into their minds.” The point of Whitman’s poetry, as Max understood it, was not to tell readers that the poet had crossed Brooklyn Ferry but that he had experienced crossing it. In Max’s idiosyncratic terms, Whitman’s poetry creates a character, not an idea. It works by direction—selecting a part or an attribute of the thing to be represented, such as the “malformed limbs” the surgeon in Leaves of Grass amputates and drops into a barrel—or by indirection, association by resemblance, as happens in Whitman’s “Passage to India,” where the speaker invokes the “temples fairer than lilies.” Poetry embodies the ideals of the spirit in the life of the senses. As in trigonometry, it allows us to take measure of the unknown through the things we know and thus to “nail our diagram to the stars.”
But Max also knew that his own sensibilities were quite different from Whitman’s. He didn’t like Whitman’s famous catalogues, “so many pages full of words,” which, he felt, turned the poem into a kind of drunken dictionary. Nature does not make lists, and it does not keep books. Still, gems gleamed out of the unrefined ore of Whitman’s writing with a luster that made it difficult to reject him, as “persons of soaped and sweetened culture” are apt to do. Half prose and half poetry, Whitman’s work was much like Whitman himself: “His book has a rank flavor like the presence of a man.”56
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