Max Eastman

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Max Eastman Page 9

by Christoph Irmscher


  But was there enough of that man in Whitman’s poetry? In his second essay on the poet, “Whitman’s Morals,” Max celebrated Whitman’s obvious sanity and balance, the fact that he was the “moral engineer” for the people around him as well as for the nation, including the Civil War wounded he tended to.57 Yes, he had a demonic side too: he was irresponsible, selfish, insincere. His candor and love would, at a moment’s notice, turn into self-deception and egotism. But that was precisely what made him human. Disliking him meant disliking the person next to you: “Know that your distaste for these pages is your distaste for the man next to you.” What some readers hated about the good gray poet Max in fact admired: that he was “as certain about the universe as a boy with an orange.” In his “cosmic bravado,” Whitman made no attempt to fit the evil he recognized in himself into a larger moral philosophy that would preach the eternal perfection of all things in the mind of God. The road to the Divine begins with an acceptance of the importance of our instincts: “Man will ride to heaven on an animal,” Max exclaimed. The “house of culture” was not “set on stilts.” At this point in the essay, Max was talking more to himself than to his imaginary audience. From his mother’s letters we know Max had kept a picture of Father Time on the wall of his room at school.58 Now the vision of Time running after us, cracking his whip, resurfaces as Max celebrates Whitman’s optimistic rejection of any kind of philosophical pessimism. “We have the power to choose between these attitudes.” To Max, Whitman’s poetry rises above the many creeds of the time that offer hope for salvation. “There is wildness in it, for it is the return of man to his rights as an animal.” Max wasn’t yet riding to salvation on the back of an animal. But Whitman had at least allowed him to dream about doing so. Against his mother’s vision of Whitman the spiritual guide, he set his own version of the poet as the prophet of sexual healing. Nevertheless, Whitman’s open road still seemed closed to Max, except for occasional glimpses: closed by his own shyness and by a debilitating fear of sexual failure.

  Max proudly offered both Whitman essays to Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of Century magazine, because he had known the poet. Gilder was shocked. “We are a family magazine,” he told Max, quickly placing the manuscripts back in his hand “as though I had handed him a turtle.”59

  Religion and philosophy “may prove well in lecture-rooms,” Whitman had chanted as he was traversing the wide-open landscapes of his America, “yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.”60 But associate instructor Max Eastman was hopelessly stuck in the lecture rooms of Columbia, with no end in sight. By contrast, Crystal had ventured out into real life, and with a vengeance. In the fall of 1907, after passing her law exams at New York University, Crystal moved to Pittsburgh, where she worked as an investigator for the Russell Sage Foundation, examining the death certificates of workers. The so-called Pittsburgh Survey, directed by Crystal’s discarded lover Paul Kellogg, was one of the most wide-ranging investigations of working-class life in the modern city ever undertaken. Crystal threw herself into workers’ compensation law and the stories of those victimized by corporate greed. But no excitement could make up for Max’s absence. “I am so homesick for a word from you,” she complained. “Aren’t you going to write me soon?”61

  Crystal still needed Max to hold her hand when life got too exciting for her, and she kept thinking, with more than a touch of jealousy, of his girls, especially when they happened to be the ones she had had her eye on, too: “I want to jump on a train and drag you from Alice Barrow’s clutches instanter. She is the one I told you about, you know,—my great enthusiasm. Isn’t she wonderful?” What a curious situation: Max and she were competing for the same girl, but at the same time Crystal was also competing, with that girl, for Max’s affection: “Oh, I know you’ll like her better than you do me!” She also just had to tell him about the picnic she would go on, an “all day picnic in the woods with two girls and their recently acquired husbands. The husbands, Jim and John, are both very fond of me and I of them.” And, like a true lover, she kissed the little feather Max had included with one of his letters: “Did this little blue and black feather flutter into your hand from a bird that was flying over Morningside Heights? It is a sweet feather, and I am kissing it.”62

  Crystal’s new responsibilities did not diminish her sense that Max was superior to her. He had the gift of the gab, the power to make others care—a future preacher, maybe, or, more likely, a writer: someone people would listen to. She told him so in a letter written from Jacob’s Creek, the site of the worst mining accident in Pennsylvania history, the Darr disaster, which killed 239 men and boys on December 19, 1907. “It is strange to think of a little village in which there are almost two hundred and fifty families in mourning.” While Max buried his head in philosophy books, Crystal was inspecting bridges, wire plants, and railroad yards to help workers in the fight for their rights, and she nevertheless felt inadequate: “It’s hard to be the stupid member of such a brilliant family.”63 But at least they were both making money now, though it wasn’t enough yet. “It’s time we cut loose from the apron strings,” declared Crystal, even if this meant walking into the future “hand in hand in poverty.”64 But if Crystal was ready to cut those strings, Max was not. He still had his laundry done by Annis, and it seems he was a tough customer: “Please try to think of some way to fold, or do up my shirts, so that collars won’t get wrinkled and double back funny in the journey.”65

  Word of Crystal’s legal expertise reached the governor of New York, Charles Evans Hughes, who appointed her to serve, as the only female member, on his Employers’ Liability Commission. Returning to New York City in the fall of 1908, Crystal had suddenly become the most visible and the most overtly radical of the Eastman siblings. “Now I pick you for the illustrious one,” griped Max. Should he now give up all his own aspirations to greatness and settle down with her in “governmental luxury”?66

  Well, not quite: Max and Crystal moved into a fourth-floor apartment on Eleventh Street, with two bedrooms, two living rooms, and a kitchen, for $33 a month. “No elevator, but good legs on the both of us,” Max reassured his mother. They liked the neighborhood, a “respectable quiet peaceable home-going house-cleaning neighborhood of general Americans.” And they acquired new furniture, including, for Max, a worm-eaten desk for $2.50 and a couch-bed with a hair mattress for $15.67

  Living and working together proved beneficial for both of them. Max’s teaching commitments at Columbia left all but one of his mornings and Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday entirely free for his writing and gave him time for other things too, such as swimming.68 Newly excited about his prospects, he registered for a doctoral degree at Columbia, with a thesis—yet to be written, of course—titled “The Sense of Humor.”69 His intention was to address the “science of laughter laughingly,” a tall order for someone so early in his career.70 No wonder the project for many years remained what it was then—a good idea. Years later he returned to it. In 1922 Max published The Sense of Humor, followed, in 1935, by the best-selling Enjoyment of Laughter. It could be said that Max kept on writing, for over twenty years, the dissertation he never even started.

  In addition to his academic duties Max took on the coaching of a boys’ athletic club on the Lower East Side, in one of the rougher areas of town. His letters tell of his efforts to impress youngsters who were physically much stronger than he was but didn’t know the wrestling moves Max had somehow acquired. The club was sponsored by the Hamilton-Madison Settlement House, and a compelling reason Max took on the new job was the fact that it was paid. But he also liked the challenge, the opportunity it gave him to bolster his rumpled sense of masculinity. “It was the only job I ever tackled harder than teaching logic to sophomores.”71 Hamilton House had begun running clubs for boys and girls around 1902 with the aim of getting the offspring of impoverished immigrants off the streets. Max found a gymnasium he could use and seems to have done everything else right, espec
ially when he set out to organize the club, making the boys elect their own president and a treasurer. There were some bumps in the road, as he reported to Mamsey. During a particularly tumultuous meeting “the chairman poked the secretary under the ear and almost knocked him out of office!” But this wasn’t anything Max couldn’t master: “I took the chair—after an hour of roughhouse—and held them down to an orderly meeting for another hour.”72

  Max enjoyed the validation New York seemed to give his desire to be more than a bookworm. The city and its surroundings certainly had much to offer, from the octopus in Battery Park, unfortunately already dead by the time Max got around to visiting it, to spectacles such as the car races on Long Island, and, in October 1909, Wilbur and Orville Wright’s madcap flight from Governor’s Island to the Statue of Liberty. The swimmer Annette Kellerman, dubbed the most “perfect woman in the world” by a Harvard professor thanks to the assumed similarity of her proportions to those of the Venus de Milo, joined the Eastman siblings for lunch. After the meal, Max offered to teach Kellerman how to skate.73

  Max also tried his hand at performing. The British actor and director Ben Greet, whose troupe was impressing Americans that season with Shakespeare plays, had invited him to be one of the Wise Men in a miracle play (only three rehearsals, sighed Max). In a more momentous development, the photographer Alice Boughton asked Max to pose, alongside the professional actor Walter Hampden, in a variety of biblical scenes she was taking for Good Housekeeping (figs. 12, 13). Max’s classically handsome dark looks provided an effective contrast with the hirsute Hampden’s Jesus, lending an unexpected air of authenticity to these supposedly Mediterranean scenes. Max the recovering invalid and refugee from religious morality must have relished the challenge to play a character awakened to new life by divine healing. Appearing as one of the blind men from Matthew 9:27–30 and as the man with the withered hand from Mark 3:3–5, Max played the part he knew best: that of the gorgeous, passive, imperiled male, alone or almost alone but at the center of attention, while a family dressed in rags watches from the sidelines, their faces frozen in an expression that reflects their wonder at and distance from what is about to befall Max.

  In many ways Crystal’s and Max’s joint life was a parody of a marriage. It absolved them of the obligations that came with real marriage or any kind of romantic partnership and allowed them to cultivate their neuroses on their own. But the arrangement gave each of them a modicum of economic security: one was likely to have some money if the other didn’t. Most important, they could have fun together.

  Figures 12 and 13. Alice Boughton, The Healing Miracles of Jesus the Christ (1909). Source: Boughton, “The Healing Miracles of Jesus the Christ: Studies in Artistic Photography. Illustrating Scenes from the New Testament. Posed for by Walter Hampden and Others.” Good Housekeeping, December 1909.

  Their letters are full of intimate details from their shared life: Crystal coming home to Max drying his hair in the bathroom; Max nursing Crystal through one of her fevers; both of them going out, either jointly or separately, to theater performances or for a tennis match. One evening, on a whim the siblings invited everyone they came across to dinner at a little Jewish restaurant on Sixth Avenue. Max arrived with four men and two girls, while Crystal came with a man and a girl. “Practically none of them had seen each other before,” Max wrote, “and it was the funniest jolliest thing now.” After dinner the group adjourned to the room of one of the girls. By then Max and Crystal had gone on to a suffrage meeting, heavily attended by Vassar girls. Apparently they rejoined the party later and “fooled around the fire for the rest of the evening.”74

  In October 1909 Crystal and Max moved to 118 Waverly Place. They went about the move, including the selection and placement of the furniture, like any married couple would. The place was expensive: $20 for each of them, not counting the $15 they hoped to receive from a yet-to-be-found boarder. But the rooms were so fine that Max and Crystal couldn’t resist. The bond between them was stronger than ever, despite fits of envy, especially on Max’s part. Max once defined the basis of their intimacy as a form of “emotional richness” that found no outlet in traditional romance. The reasons for their dissatisfaction with conventional love relationships were slightly different ones. In Crystal’s case, the “man-thing” she craved rarely went with the kind of character her intellect demanded from a man. Put more crudely, Crystal wanted both refinement and sex from a man, and that was impossible. As for Max, he was just a “sauce-pan full of superficial sex feelings,” a drifter without the power of concentration Crystal had. As both Max and Crystal realized, they were just right for each other. “Free, equal, unpitied by each other,” they were able to make the best of their shared frustrations, enjoying the “richness of outer life” the city had to offer them.75 In a hilarious poem drafted at the time, Max reflected on the fate of a “suffragette hen,” a “female cock,” made more domestic by the infusion of blood “from a more domestic stock,” until she was filled with the “peace of saints above” and renounced her disposition to roam around the landscape. Max rejected such a fate for himself:

  But as for me, I’d rather be

  A poulet to eternity

  And die in lonesome liberty,

  Without begetting,

  Than lose my own identity

  For the salve of setting.76

  A proud chicken (“poulet”) rather than a rooster, he didn’t need (yes, that was the rhyme he opted for) a booster, preferring the fake domesticity of Waverly Place to the responsibilities of adult life, or what Annis, in a rare moment of overt criticism, defined as her ideal, a “life of doing things.”77

  Small wonder that Max, in his daytime existence as a philosophy student at Columbia, opted for an equally unconventional approach to the field. Systematic study was not his thing. He took and passed his exam in German philosophy after barely getting beyond the letter A in his encyclopedia, and he found reading Schopenhauer in the original less than energizing.78 But then he also had little patience for traditional metaphysics. Under the guidance of Dewey, Max developed a version of pragmatism that accepts life as it is and finds purpose in the things that immediately surround us. “If pragmatism means anything,” he wrote, “it means to lay ‘Reality at large’ in the lap of the metaphysicians and go about your business. If the pragmatist will not let Reality with a large ‘R’ alone, his troubles will never cease.” To Max, the pragmatic hypothesis is “an interpretation of human thinking as science finds it” and as it would appear to a “dispassionate mind.” The systems we develop as humans are entirely random, the products of our struggle for survival. They become systems only because we study them as such: “The beautiful technique of [man’s] arbitrary endeavors becomes itself arbitrarily an object of endeavor. That is, he [man] likes great systems of ideas with a certain coherence, and he uses the same technique in attaining these systems and quarreling over them that he did in attaining and quarreling over food.”79 Understanding such arbitrariness, to Max, was the hallmark of “modern and scientific attitude.” For the pragmatist, religion, philosophy, all attempts to attach lasting significance to life are thus efforts comparable to procuring dinner for the family. Pragmatism was, he concluded, no “sugar-plum” theory but a serious, iconoclastic endeavor, the business of strong souls. It was a philosophy that remained in touch with the demands of daily life, privileging immediate experience over abstract morality—philosophy for the plain man, Max’s version of a “life of doing things.”80 Some of these ideas found their way into a long paper on Plato’s philosophy that Max began to draft in November 1908 for the Philosophy Club at Columbia he had helped found.81

  There was more than a note of wishful thinking in Max’s new philosophy. Looking at Max’s notes from his Columbia years, one gets the sense that his philosophical training was intended as a means of sorting through and then dumping the religious baggage Annis had left him with. The Greeks didn’t have churches, Max reminded Annis. “Perhaps churches aren’t the final
resting place of great minds and hearts.”82 That Max’s escape was happening as Annis, too, was discarding her own theological baggage seems richly ironical: she had started reading Thales and Heraclitus two years earlier. She had been taking summer classes at Harvard for several years, where she also heard Santayana and James lecture.83 Poor Max. Wherever he found himself in life, Annis had either been keeping up with him or was several steps ahead.

  A page of proposed exam questions gives us an inkling of how interconnected such philosophical issues were with Max’s own life: “I. Distinguish 2 uses of the word empirical. II. If all knowledge derives from experience, what is the use of deduction as a priori reasoning? III. Give outline showing the rise of scientific induction. IV. 2 Reasons why astronomy was the first science. V. Define Miracle.” One can imagine the answers he would have expected for the final question. In his lecture notes he offered a succinct, memorable definition of theology: “What could be deduced from what somebody said.” The “modern spirit,” by contrast, was “the finding of facts.”84

  Such finding of facts had been Crystal’s business, too. She was now working the evidence she had gathered as an investigator into a book, Work-Accidents and the Law. “If adequate investigation reveals,” she wrote, with the withering irony her brother had mastered, too, “that most work-accidents happen because workmen are fools . . . then there is no warrant for direct interference by society in the hope of preventing them.” But if proper investigation showed that a considerable portion of accidents was due to insufficient concern for the safety of workmen on the part of their employers, then intervention in some form was surely warranted.85 Crystal’s book went on to document numerous individual cases of workplace injury and death combined with a look at the subsequent impoverishment of their families, thereby establishing irrefutable links between the callousness of the rich and the disenfranchisement of the poor and rooting in real life what for Max still was philosophical play.

 

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