Bound for Europe, Max seemed determined to treat the fact of his marriage as entirely incidental. En route to Gibraltar he took refuge in marathon sleeping (“I haven’t had a thought or made a voluntary motion since we started”) and got some perverse satisfaction out of the fact that he hadn’t seen any whales, though everyone else had: “I missed the whale. Of course, I missed the whale,” he told Sam in a letter sent from Gibraltar. “I was asleep. Everybody else saw him. And nobody wants to talk to me anymore. That’s one good thing about missing a whale.” He included the descriptions of scenery he thought Sam would have expected (the Azores looked, he wrote, more “like magnified lichens on an old log than real vegetation”) and closed his letter with another reference to sleep: “With which apt description of the natural scenery I lapse into my normal state of somnolent disregard for everything I came to see.”9 No mention of Ida.
That changed once Max got to Tangier, that mad mix of all the cultures in the world, a city both Mediterranean and distinctly African, where the painter Eugène Delacroix had once discovered a symphony of colors that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. On letterhead of the Hotel Cavilla in Morocco, a place Crystal would stay at just two years later, Max shared the news with Sam: “You will not be surprised now that Ida and I are married” (fig. 15). He had written to Crystal and Anstice, too. However, he warned Sam, “I don’t even want to think of it as ‘settling down’ and all the rest of the ideas I don’t like.” Ida regarded their marriage as casually as he did and was going to keep her name “in all relations in which it is possible.” Sam was welcome to think of them as “crazy birds.” But Ida and he were very happy.10 Sam was so shaken by Crystal’s wedding that he took Max’s news calmly, though with a certain degree of bewilderment: why on earth did his two younger children insist on not being married even though they were? But then he resigned himself, said Crystal, to “not understanding.”11
Figure 15. Hotel Cavilla, Tangier. “Doesn’t that make you feel homesick, old boy?” From postcard sent by Crystal Eastman to Max Eastman, March 18, 1913. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
Max’s happiness with Ida remained an assertion rather than a self-evident fact. Tangier proved to be a strange backdrop for their torturous honeymoon. “No imagination would paint the colors, no imagination could add” to the sights and sounds one saw and heard in this city. It seemed as if one had stepped right into scenes from the Bible: “Moses holds the stirrup for you, and Elijah beats your mule from behind.” At night Max lay awake listening to the city. Once he got up and pocketed a small gun—where he got it he doesn’t mention—and lost himself in the streets: “You can imagine the excitement, parting those cowled figures that resented me,” he wrote to his father, “much more excitement than the situation called for really.” But could Sam imagine it? Max described how, in a state of nervous ecstasy, he pushed his way past the veiled bodies that thronged Tangier even at night. His blood rushing and his heart beating to the accompaniment of drums, the wailing tunes, he found his way to a rooftop garden somewhere, full of fragrance and beauty. A nightingale was singing, while in the city below the muezzins on their minarets began chanting their adhan, or call to prayer. At home, Ida was asleep.12
The longest of Max’s letters from abroad, as it turns out, dealt with—a flea. Writing from Sorrento on June 19, 1911, in a long epistle that looked more like a draft of a short story than an actual letter, Max recounted his travels not with Ida but with a pesky insect he had “taken in” at Tangier. When he first saw the flea, it was in the middle of the night, and Max, who claimed he had never seen or dealt with such an animal, was convinced he had killed it: “I squeezed him between my fingers until he was flat, and then I set him on a smooth board in the floor and rolled him. I didn’t bury him. I just left him there when he was dead and went back to bed.” Imagine, then, Max’s surprise the next morning when he woke up and, glancing at the board, “just to make sure of my night’s work,” found the flea gone. As Max was just about to learn, to his infinite dismay, endeavoring to kill a flea was an incentive to the animal rather than a deterrent: “He likes you all the better for it.”
Over the next few days Max’s personal flea survived multiple other attempts on its life, such as the application of ammonia; being talked at in a frantic voice (“they will never hear you out”); and the violent shaking out of the window of “every rag and scrap of goods that I or the room possessed.” Nothing worked. The resilient flea followed Max across the Mediterranean to Naples and now to Sorrento, where Max spotted it sitting on the mattress, getting ready for his day’s work: “I peeled off my coat and dove into that mattress like a dog after a wood-chuck, tore through a large pile of bed-clothes and pillows, wiped the spring, scoured the bed-stead, moved the bed away and scrutinized about ten square feet of floor, tearing up the carpet as I went—But no good. He was just gone.” When Max got ready to put his coat on again, there the flea was, sitting on his lapel! Max tiptoed back to the window, and, with a jubilant shout, “snapped the thing way out in the open air clear of the house about six times the way you would snap a whip. Then I brought it back, with a sigh of almost divine satisfaction and laid it over the back of a chair.” As Max’s coattails came into view, so did the flea, apparently unharmed. Max dangled the coat out the window again, holding it upside down, at arm’s length, and slowly unfolding it as he continued to shake it, as vigorously as he could. For just a moment Max thought he got a glimpse of the flea as it was tumbling out of the coat. But experience had taught him not only to double-check but also to shed his clothes: “That, by the way, is the only way an experienced sportsman will go flea-hunting—naked. It’s the only safe way and the only profitable way. It’s the only way you can be sure whether you’re hunting him or he’s hunting you.”
A careful inspection of body and room yielded no signs of the wretched flea. Max got dressed, putting on a new set of clothes. But as he was just about ready to tie his shoes, the flea reappeared, sitting on his pant leg as if it had always been there: “For a moment I couldn’t move. I just looked at him. And he jumped.” The flea was gone. But was it? As Max resumed his shoe tying, there the flea sat, in exactly the same spot! Resigned to accepting it into his life, Max went to dinner, joining a “highly attractive and respectable” family from Naples that had arrived the week before. And lo and behold, something unbelievable happened. When the dinner was done, the flea was gone, too. “While writing this I feel alone for the first time in a month.” Far be it from him to pry into the affairs of that highly respectable family from Naples. But the moral of the flea story was clear: “There is only one way in this world to get rid of a flea—Be sociable!”13
Nowhere in the story, one of the most extensive, self-contained ones ever told in Max’s letters, is there any mention of Ida, and the resolution it offers (Max’s jubilant embrace of solitude after a month of enforced companionship) is hardly what one would expect from a newlywed. The reader is tempted to attach a different moral to the tale of the flea that made Max’s travels so miserable. If the point of sociability is the sharing of vermin, then being alone (as opposed to being married?) emerges as the supreme goal of one’s life. Max’s flea story is the opposite of John Donne’s tongue-in-cheek tribute to the flea swollen “with one blood made of two,” a place “where we almost, yea more than married are.”14
Another text about animals conceived during Max’s Italian sojourn, the sonnet “At the Aquarium,” offers a different glimpse of his complicated inner state. In Naples, Max and Ida visited the Stazione Zoologica, the public aquarium created by the German zoologist Anton Dohrn, and were impressed by the large tanks filled with water pumped in from the bay. Illuminated only by the sunlight streaming in from above, the Stazione’s aquaria were lined with volcanic rock from Mount Vesuvius. In this dusklike setting visitors would look straight at the fish, at eye level, as if they were in fact with them at the bottom of the sea. The first two lines of the poem Max composed o
n the spot, at the Stazione, whereas the rest of the sonnet came to him when he was back in New York in a room he had rented, apart from his family, so he could concentrate on his poetry. There he tranquilly recollected the emotion he once had in Naples, staring through the glass at a world he found surprisingly similar to his own. Despite the nod to Wordsworth, this was hardly a sublime experience:
Serene the silver fishes glide,
Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed;
As through the agèd deeps of ocean,
They glide with wan and wavy motion!
They have no pathway where they go,
They flow like water to and fro.
They watch with never winking eyes,
They watch with staring, cold surprise,
The level people in the air,
The people peering, peering there,
Who wander also to and fro,
And know not why or where they go,
Yet have a wonder in their eyes,
Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.15
The poem’s overriding sensation is coldness. Its serenity comes from the absence of emotion, an effect achieved by making the reader view the world as a fish would, which, like water, goes where it must, not where it wants to go. The “wonder[ing]” eyes in the final couplet are those of the people, not of the fish, but at that point identities are so blurred it doesn’t really matter. Where humans, from the point of view of the fish, look surprisingly like fish, all that is left for us to feel is, indeed, a “pale and cold surprise.” It is no longer clear who is inside or outside the tank. The glass of the aquarium wall becomes a mirror of sorts. The “wonder” conjured by Max’s sonnet has nothing wonderful about it, as the speaker is asking a question that he fears the fish have already answered. “At the Aquarium” became Max’s most reprinted poem.
With fleas and fish as his companions, Max found little pleasure in the usual pursuits of the tourist. In Florence he paid dutiful tribute to the “greatness of the great pictures” he saw, but what really excited him was the fresh milk he was able to drink there. Not for him the sparkling wine of the Italians, who were, incidentally, ignorant enough to boil their milk as soon as it came out of the cow. “O for a beaker full of the warm cow!” That was, Max joked, his “hymn for about two months, as Ida will more than testify.” Here, finally, Ida shows up in his correspondence, if only parenthetically. And just as Max asserted—much to his father’s delight—his rural credentials (“I’m really a country clod”), he mentioned Ida’s artistic inclinations, which were “to surpass the books.” But Ida’s artistic bent was, he observed not without malice, more than offset by her “fanatical devotion to the five-cent moving picture show.” They virtually hadn’t skipped “a single available cinematograph since we struck Naples,” and now they knew all the latest popular dramas in Europe. It appears that Max was very much trying to represent himself as one of Twain’s innocents abroad. The landscapes of Italy, including the “famous lakes” (Como, Lugano, Maggiore), weren’t really beautiful—where, oh where were the meadows and “amiable trees” he knew from home? It was all “scene-painting” to him, no reason to linger anywhere. “It is nowhere the big rough natural pure earth with reality of life in it.” Venice they skipped. And after visiting Milan, he felt ever more drawn to Glenora.
Sam had done Max a particular favor by addressing a letter to both of them (“Dear Max, dear Ida too”), making him hopeful his father would finally come around to his view of the marriage question. “Dad, maybe you’ll understand me better if I say that I straight out disbelieve in and dislike marriage, the whole idea, significance, consequence, and specific result of it.” What he wanted was friendship, and no artificial ceremony could generate that or, for that matter, ensure that love would last if it wasn’t meant to be. In one of his letters Sam had mistakenly assumed they had gotten married at Sorrento—but what did it matter? As long as one could laugh about such things and make fun of the irrelevance of such rituals, there was hope, “for it is laughter or disgust with me.” Max ended his letter by asking his father not to forget to water his garden: “I don’t want Glenora to be all dried up when Ida comes! Please pour on water!”16
All in all, Max’s reports from what he strenuously avoided calling his honeymoon leave the reader with a more than ambivalent picture of his marriage-that-wasn’t-one. The enforced looseness of their arrangement had backfired almost as soon as it had been accomplished, and Max seemed set on not enjoying Europe—whether he was out, revolver in his pocket, courting danger in Tangier, killing a flea in Sorrento, or spurning Italian wine in Florence. While Ida, restricted to a cameo appearance in Max’s letters home, discovered the delights of early European cinema, Max hankered after the meadows and cows of Glenora. Having alienated his father by not including him in his marriage plans, he now was doing his best to assure him of his continuing loyalty to the pastures of home, as if his marriage had never happened. The happiness their casual marriage bond was supposed to ensure was conspicuously absent from Max’s letters, smothered by all the defensive rhetoric Max employed to justify something he had claimed needed no justification. If the idea of marriage disgusted or amused him, why engage in it at all? Max was about to find out that mere resistance against an institution didn’t do away with the power of that institution itself, as long as one adhered to its rituals.
On the way back from Europe, Max’s insomnia came back. He was wandering the deck at night, the reluctant prodigal son returning to a father who had never much wanted to be included yet felt left out when he really wasn’t.
After their return, the young couple set up residence in Glenora, where Ida embarked on a new career as a sculptor. She transformed a leaky shed, affectionately christened Barneycastle for reasons long lost to history, into a studio of sorts and was soon gathering local children around her as potential models. Somewhat to Max’s surprise and Sam’s delight Ida appeared to embrace the challenges of the rural life and was not above hauling groceries from the train station in a wheelbarrow. Her slips and one-piece bathing suits brought the sophistication of Village life to rural New York (fig. 16). At the same time, given her willingness to lend a hand whenever necessary, no one could accuse her of haughtiness.17
Crystal and her insurance salesman husband Bennie came for a couple of weeks. Crystal had found a modicum of fulfillment in working for women’s rights in Wisconsin, but she had continued to “ache” for Max, his place in her heart not getting smaller but bigger “as I go on learning things.”18 The visit was a great success from the perspective of Crystal herself, who found it “as completely happy a time as I have ever had.” Wasn’t it great that the four of them all got along so well?19 Perhaps Crystal was telling herself and Max these things hoping that the mere act of saying them would somehow make them true. Perhaps she was also relieved to see Max married and therefore rendered forever inaccessible to her. In a letter written a month later she spoke of her “half-sad yearnings” for Max, her wish that she’d done more for him when they were still living together—coded language, perhaps?20 As Ida was still trying to fit in, Max was increasingly getting distracted by the ghosts of his past and, more particularly, by the enticing figure of Ruth Pickering. Max was proud that he was still the smartest kid in the neighborhood, able to beat everyone around him at Twenty Questions. His new brother-in-law was especially impressed when Max was able to guess, in eighteen questions, the word “fourscore” from Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech. Noted Bennie: “That’s going some.”21
Figure 16. Ida Rauh, 1911. Cherith-Log, 1911. EMIIA2.
After Ida and Max established themselves in their first joint New York apartment, they put her name first on the mailbox, as Ida Rauh, not Mrs. Eastman. Their unconventional union unleashed a storm of prurient curiosity and public comments in the press, from the New York World to the Elmira Star-Gazette, which quoted the pastor of Elmira’s First Methodist Church with the plea that “every man’s hand be raised” against “the entrance of this serpent
of lust and falsehood.” Sam Eastman, who had moved beyond his initial disappointment over having been left out of the marital plans of his younger children, tried to help Max by preaching a sermon advocating the complete equality of men and women, pointing out that if one took the Bible literally, one would have to assume that God had recommended polygamy as the way for men and women to live together.22
According to the World, Ida viewed their marriage-that-wasn’t-one as a mere “placating of convention.” If they hadn’t done it, it would have hindered their work. “It seems to me that the world should be interested in the work people are doing, what they are, not whether they are bound by a legal tie or not, but as people choose to interest themselves in that tie, we are willing to conform and satisfy them.” When asked if hers was a trial marriage, Ida responded tartly that everything in life was a trial. If the reporter meant, however, that there was a time limit for it, “I should answer, decidedly not.” She simply wanted to be with Max, and he with her, and to live “naturally” together. Max, who was also interviewed for the article, pointed out that Ida (“my wife,” he called her) works “just as regularly at the Women’s Trade Union League for the things she is interested in as she did before her marriage.” When the reporter asked whether or not that conflicted with her duties at home, Max asserted that if men were able to carry on their work without being charged with neglecting their homes, women should enjoy the same right. And Ida left the reporter with a memorable image: “Women were not born with pans tied around their necks and a sign that it was their destiny to wash them.”23
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