Note that Max refers to the making of suffrage speeches as a business. In part this is certainly what it was for him. However, what sounds like cockiness and even laziness in Max’s speeches was really a tool, and an effective one at that: watching Max perform circles around that which needn’t even be said and which never needed to have been said in the first place, listeners initially not convinced would finally be overwhelmed by the realization of how outdated their objections were. Max lent his handsome face, youthful appearance, intellectual authority, and oratorical skills to a cause that, in part because of him, dominated the newspapers. And audiences, for the most part, loved their Max, the Columbia “professor” turned suffragette, a “hen cock” if ever there was one.
Which is not to say Max wasn’t deeply impressed by those who did have new things to say. After Inez, Max’s would-be girlfriend, died on November 25, 1916, of a blood-related illness, Max wrote a touching tribute to her “flashing and heroic beauty” for the Masses, in which he tacitly acknowledged the limitations of his own position. “There was,” he wrote, “something almost superhuman in the way this young and beautiful girl passed among all the classes and kinds of people, sowing and reaping the joys of life, and yet never losing her self, never shaping or coloring her true nature and her true purpose and belief for a smooth half hour with anybody.” Not afraid to make people uncomfortable, she also knew how to be happy and to make others happy. “If everyone of us who believe were possessed of that drastic courage she had to make our belief known and felt in our words and acts always, how much more quickly we should win the world.”106
The fact that all-too-human Max made money with his lecturing did not bother him greatly. He even quipped rather shamelessly, “As long as the women don’t get their votes I’m all right!” But Inez’s example wasn’t lost on him. He did care about the women whose cause he had joined. Working with them, the “finest in the land,” gave him the confidence that the “prophets of democracy” had not erred about this country and that one didn’t have to be a “one-eyed jackass” to want political change.107 But it is also clear that his new job mattered to him personally. Max wanted to live “without froth and sentimentality, like a big river,” and stumping for a glorious cause gave him a glimpse of such a big life. If being a gym instructor had made him feel like a man among men, Max’s work on behalf of the league permitted him to display his more feminine side and yet seem sufficiently masculine and assertive, “brave enough,” as the Buffalo Courier asserted, to “help the women in a cause that is generally unpopular among men.”108 Max was a “man suffragette,” as the New York Daily Tribune dubbed him, and he was good at it, he told Annis: “I answered questions in Baltimore, and O I just had a flow of wit and wonder that would astonish you! We laughed and enjoyed each other for an hour and a quarter—15 or 1800 [of] us. I will tell you the whole tale—the whole de-tale—when you come!” Obviously, he was so much more now than just Annis’s apprentice.109 “I am doing something that I believe in and care about in my healthiest moods,” he wrote to Annis. “Please back me up.”110
Academically, things were looking up for Max, too. Much to his surprise his professors had accepted his long Plato essay in lieu of a dissertation. Max wasn’t about to dispute their decision: “I guess I shall pull thro’ in my usual way.” And that “usual way” was to rely on past achievements.111 Max’s final exam took place on May 17, an occasion he did not remember too fondly afterward. He had passed his exam and survived Halley’s comet, he reported.112 And as if the fact that he had survived the procedure were more important than being allowed to flaunt his degree, he never filed his dissertation. Technically, Dr. Max Eastman never got his Ph.D.113
Max’s essay-turned-dissertation, first titled “The Quality of Plato” and then “The Paradox of Plato,” was a little under seventy pages long in typescript. While Max’s ideas might not be entirely original, the form in which he pre-sents them is unusual, beginning with a short preamble in which he lays out his goal. And it is not an academic one: “This essay aims to reproduce, in a medium of modern words and ideas, the flavor of Platonic discourse, and the procedure of Platonic thought.” Max wants to promote, he explains, “a free and human understanding” of Plato’s philosophy and help those “who find it difficult to attain, without special education, the high pleasure of reading Plato.” Note that Max is already imagining himself as speaking to a wider audience.
The Plato he recovers is a bit like Max’s Whitman but even more like Max himself: his senses wide awake to the beauty that surrounds him, he can never forget about the larger moral framework either. But if Max is haunted by the moral values that had been instilled in him when he was a child, Plato was devoted to them. “A lover and advocate of immediate values,” eager to “linger and behold and recklessly enjoy the innumerable things that he likes,” Plato would at the same time always think about the consequences of his behavior and then perhaps end up condemning the very thing he likes. Max’s criticism of Plato is muted but effective: while Plato denounces all imitative art as inferior to philosophy, his Republic is itself a supreme example of literary art. Plato made fun of poetry, and yet the Republic, in its beauty, smiles at his efforts to contain art: “No image-breaking morality appears in its plan, nor in the infinite pains taken to make it a true and natural dialogue.” In fact, observes Max, Plato makes of philosophy a work of art.114
Rather than criticizing Plato, Max wants to make him his spiritual brother, subject to the same warring impulses that were tearing Max apart. And as Plato had done with his Republic, Max strives to make his dissertation a work of art, too, illustrating the conflicting tendencies in Plato’s thought instead of merely explaining them. Max takes his cue from the two dialogues that exemplify the opposing sides of Plato’s battle: the Gorgias, according to which the pleasant needs to be pursued for the sake of the good, and the Protagoras, in which the good is only meaningful dependent on the pleasure it generates or the pain it avoids. Then Max constructs a dialogue between the two books, as if they were two people talking. If his theory were right, asks Gorgias, would not all things be valuable that satisfy “the will of a baboon”? Bring in whatever animal you like, responds Protagoras, coolly. Desire is what introduces value into the world. Even stones have needs: they “desire to get near the earth, and the only time you need be afraid of them is when you get between them and what they desire.” Human beings are at once minds and bodies, angels and baboons. Plato’s failure to keep the angel separate from the baboon mirrors our own confusion, which is why he is ultimately not convincing, “just as we are never quite convinced by the world, which genially and eternally continues to lay before us its variety and disorder.” Plato had not found the key to the world; what’s more, he knew, “in his heart,” that it couldn’t be found.
Hence Max’s redefinition of the point of philosophical inquiry. If we consider philosophy a journey, an ongoing conversation that never resolves anything at all, even a doctoral thesis like Max’s “does not need to be apologized for,” especially if it, Max adds wittily, “gave its author no pain in the birth” and does “no injury to anyone else.” Traditionally, philosophers have focused on following their original scheme, avoiding all intellectual detours and coercing “every remark that is made” into conformity with their argument. Which is precisely what Max won’t do. Just a few pages later, he abandons all pretense of an argument and launches into a fable in which some hypothetical observer looks down on the world as it once was, big and scary, with the elements raging. From the vantage point of his steep mountain, the man sees little creatures running around in it and using the mechanisms of their minds to combat the elements or, for that matter, to think up something like God or a “Divine Science.” From the observer’s mountaintop all ideas look the same—they are facts, like the weather. And if anyone should ask who that observer might be, why, says Max, he is one of those creatures too, as we all are, “running after the things we want, and blown one way or another by the wind.�
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Max’s dissertation thus carried in itself the seeds of its own destruction as an academic enterprise. But it was precisely that move that insured the writer’s survival: “For if there is anyone whom the relentless flux of things and opinions in this world, will shipwreck and overwhelm, it is he who essays to pass through it with his mind intent upon abstractions and his body drawn up into his mind.” Max, for one, hoped he would find a way of drawing his body out of his mind.116
As Max the male suffragette was taking off in new directions, Annis (fig. 14) worked to reassert her bond with him. “You are too much like me to shine steadily,” she told him, with perhaps just a hint of malice. She, for one, could never be a “propagandist,” since she was “always more than half convinced that I have no case.” Did Max have one? Absent an abiding light in their lives, a distinct hope for a distinctly better future, what choice did Max and she have but to finish their jobs “until the bell rings for letting out?”117
Figure 14. Annis Ford Eastman, 1908. Cherith-Log, 1904–1908. EMIIA2.
Whether she knew it or not, the bell was about to ring for her. The year before, after years of digestive troubles and increasing problems with her circulation, she had subjected herself to a painful operation carried out by Dr. A. W. Booth of Elmira. Weeks of home care by nurses followed. The procedure left her feeling, as she noted with characteristic self-irony, “like a pancake that has risen too high and fallen.”118 Now, in January 1910, the operation had to be repeated, this time at the Arnold Ogden Hospital in Elmira. Anstice, who was working as a doctor at New York City Hospital on Blackwell’s Island, a hospital for prisoners and the poor, was involved from the beginning. If the surgery was easier than the previous one, Annis now underwent a more difficult convalescence—nights racked with pain and days spent lying down. “Every few hours they do some hurting thing to me,” she complained about her nurses.119 During her ordeal she drew inspiration from reading Helen Keller, a person “with no sensations to speak of” who had overcome the limitations of her body.120
Annis’s health remained precarious afterward. By April 1910 she was sick again, too sick to officiate at Mark Twain’s funeral in April. In accordance with Twain’s wishes, the simple ceremony at the Elmira estate of the Langdons had consisted of nothing but Samuel Eastman’s address and a brief prayer. “We are here to weep with those that weep,” said Sam and went on to invoke the kinds of ties that had become so precarious in his own life, asking the assembled mourners of Twain “to give thanks with those whose own he was in the sacred bonds of human kinship and family affection.”121 Max made light of Annis’s affliction, expressing his relief that she had given up her mad desire to walk upright: “Parenthetically, I can’t refrain from wondering if God, with all the images he had before him, could possibly have chosen to be a biped. I don’t see how anybody but a fool could really want to stand on his hind legs. It makes me doubt the whole story.” The subtext was that Annis, being ill, had joined the circle of all those who spend their lives lying mostly on their backs, a group of which the ailing Max had become a member years ago. In reality, though, Max was broken-hearted that Annis had missed her opportunity to celebrate a truly great man, someone from the days when heroes counted for something and not everyone was bent on showing “social consciousness.” Max himself was a “grief-stricken baby” over Twain’s death: “I loved him so.”122
In one of her last long letters to Max a mortified Annis reported that she had misplaced Max’s Plato essay-turned-dissertation, which she had been planning to read. “I have not the ms. of your thesis!” What an awful blow to her as well as Max! “It convinces me that I am not fit for affairs anymore. I must find a little hole somewhere and creep into it.” Would Max have to write it over or else lose his degree? “Just think of your having to remember such a thing as that about me all my life!” Annis complained about “the mountain of blue tension” that was weighing on her. Dimly she was aware of a “real thing” that was coming her way.123
On October 22, 1910, a heartbreakingly beautiful day, that thing came, and it was terrifyingly real.124 Annis suffered a stroke, and her dramatic death struggle—not that she had lost her son’s manuscript, which in any case turned up within a week—stuck with Max for a lifetime. For forty-eight hours Annis fought to stay alive, making sounds Max remembered as “loud and raucous and resistless as the detonations of an airplane motor.”125 It seemed to Max that few bodies would have fought so hard for survival as Annis’s did. The woman who had spent her life as a minister trying to control her body, to forget that she even had one, in death had become nothing but body, a pumping, sputtering, noisy machine. The tireless suffragette Annis Ford Eastman, perhaps one of the smartest American women of her time and certainly in the state of New York, died—and this is precisely what she had feared—before she had been allowed to vote.126
Annis’s death left the family stricken. The most direct, most moving statement came, many months after the event, not from Max but from Crystal: “All these days since it happened,” she wrote to Max, “I have thought of Mamma and realized that she is dead almost every hour.”127 She was longing for Max to be with her. But sorrow is a lonely business. In a pattern of behavior that would repeat itself again and again when people close to him died, Max did not know just what to say about his own feelings.
Annis’s miserable end threw into turmoil Crystal’s plans for the future, which included getting married to a handsome insurance salesman named Wallace Benedict from Milwaukee, “Bennie” for short. Suddenly, staying with Max seemed more important. “Getting back to N.Y. and living with you was the hope I fed my drooping spirits on—not Milwaukee and the married state,” she wrote. But Max insisted she give marriage a try—if she couldn’t stand it, she’d know it was not because of him, a suggestion Crystal said gave her “humorous courage.” Perhaps, said Crystal, virtually admitting the true nature of their relationship even as she made fun of it, “after we’ve both experimented around for a few years—we may end up living together again. That’s a delightful alternative to the story book end—‘and they lived happily together forever after.’”128
4 • The Flea from Tangier
Seven months after Annis’s traumatic death, on May 5, 1911, Crystal did marry Wallace Benedict. Although her father had been expecting it, the wedding hit him “awfully hard.” Samuel Eastman was, as Max heard, “feeling blue” about having been left out. Max reassured him by saying he had extended “a family blessing” to them, the last vestige of the religious routines of his childhood. But he himself had an even bigger surprise in store for “Daddie.”1
Crystal had introduced Ida Rauh to Max in 1907. Six years older than Max, Ida was a determined, fearless woman with a big, triangular face, penetrating eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a full head of dark hair. Physically she was quite the opposite of Max’s mother. Her friends thought she resembled the lions outside the New York Public Library.2 She wore, as the writer Robert (“Bob”) Carleton Brown remembered, the first horn-rimmed glasses ever glimpsed in Greenwich Village.3 Trained as a lawyer, Ida had been the secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, an organization intended to educate women about the benefits of trade union membership. It was Ida, not Dewey, who introduced Max to the writings of Marx and Engels, perhaps in the hope that dialectical materialism offered a way out of the dislike of philosophical systems he had formed under Dewey. Max later insisted that even then he recognized the quasi-religious nature behind Marx’s and Engels’s confidence that the future would unfold the way they wanted it to: “I found them cloudy and couched in an idiom alien to my kind.” (His kind: the Columbia “professor” of philosophy.) Although Marx and Engels called their doctrine scientific socialism, they obviously did not know what science was. But what he liked about their approach was that it offered a method for revolutionary change. As a hypothesis to be verified in action, socialism made sense.4
Before he got any further in his study of Marxism, Max verified another hypothesi
s in action by marrying Ida. He later speculated on the effects that his early “psychological impotence,” the crippling performance anxiety he felt whenever he was with a girl, might have had on his life.5 There is indeed reason to believe that at the time of his wedding Max was, at least technically, a virgin.6 That was both good and bad—good in the sense that years of repression had finally, finally come to an end; bad in that Ida unwittingly and ultimately to her detriment opened a whole new world of sexual satisfaction to him, from which, at least for Max, there was no turning back. They were married in Paterson, New Jersey, on May 4, 1911. Max did not mention the wedding to anybody, especially not his father. The morning after the ceremony, he regretted his decision. He felt the course of his life had been irrevocably altered: “I had lost, in marrying Ida, my irrational joy in life.”7 The horror over the mistake he had made overshadowed the trip to Europe, a kind of honeymoon, on which the couple almost immediately embarked, boarding the Königin Louise for Gibraltar on May 6.
Max did everything to hide the fact that he was now married. The note written on the eve of his departure for Europe, while he was still in New York, is remarkably evasive and refers only to Crystal’s recent union with Bennie. “There was nothing for them to do, but get married,” Max wrote to Sam and tried to console him. “I hope you caught a little of the spirit of love and youth and simplicity of purpose with which they went and did it. I am so happy over them. I sail away joyfully—though with lingering and always returning sadness, as you know.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “Ida is going on the same boat with me, so you can think I will not be weeping—Max.” Crystal, now in Milwaukee, did suspect that her beloved brother had taken the plunge, too, although she wasn’t sure: “Of course it doesn’t make a difference, but it would have been fun to know.” The new “strange wives and husbands” weren’t going to pull them apart anyway. Crystal was imagining some utopian free-for-all where they could all live together, according to “some Seneca Lake plan with a few children playing around.” If she was thinking of the Seneca Lake prophetess Jemima Wilkinson, she probably didn’t realize that the latter’s plan had included complete sexual abstinence.8
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