The New York World article referred to Max as a “professor of Philosophy at Columbia,” but that was wishful thinking at best. In truth, Max was unemployed. “I reckon you’ll have to work for a living when you get back,” Crystal had observed, somewhat acidly, in a letter sent to him while he was still traveling.24 But Max was more interested in finishing his book on poetry. To that end, he rented—from what funds was unclear—a small farmhouse in Waterford, Connecticut, as a summer retreat. It was there that Sam came to visit him. Even he was impressed by how remote the couple’s new home was, reachable only via a narrow road with mullein, yarrow, and chokecherry growing wild beside it. The 150-year-old house was right next to an inlet opening up to the wide, endless ocean: “Here they were living by themselves cozy as kittens in a basket, not a house in sight barring the spiritualist camp across the inlet.” Max had already built his own diving tower, from where, when the tide was in, he could jump headfirst into ten or twelve feet of water.25
While Max was out at the inlet diving or working on his book, Ida was, “rather unexpectedly,” producing a baby. In his recollection of that summer, Max almost made a show of his indifference toward fatherhood, expressing, among other things, his hope that, as a consequence of the new addition, his duties as a husband might be lessened: “I dreamed fitfully, as many a fondly expectant father has, that a fine, bouncing baby, by diverting a portion of its mother’s libido, might make me less precisely a husband.”26 But Ida’s love for Max, despite her growing awareness that her husband’s commitment to her was a lackluster one, remained undiminished. In a touching little poem written during the summer at Waterford, when she was carrying Max’s child, she surrounded her husband with an almost mythical aura. His deep mind contained, she wrote, all that makes up souls in other, conventional people. Her Max is an almost primeval force, striding on toward a future she fears might not include her. Max’s extracurricular interests in all women not his wife are represented by the smiles he plants in the hearts of all those ready to receive them. Left behind are the truth-seekers, the ponderers, the fearful ones—in other words, people like Ida Rauh:
Sending swift smiles deep into hearts of those who
Have a waiting Eye to catch the beams of light
A heart that searches for the vibrant truth,
Look toward me twice so I may be assured
That you and I are more than passers-by.27
Perhaps Max was flattered by the image of his alter ego moving so confidently forward on the road of life. He obviously liked the poem, so much so that he copied it and stuffed it in an envelope marked with the words: “Ida’s Love.” If Max’s marriage was destined to fail, it was not for want of effort on Ida’s part.
While he was at Waterford Max received an invitation to become the new editor of the Masses, a bolt out of the blue. “No pay,” the note said, written in brush by the artist John Sloan. The founder of the magazine, the Dutchman Piet Vlag, had moved to Florida and left it in the hands of an outstanding group of artists and writers, including Sloan and Art Young, Charles and Alison Beach Winter, and Maurice Becker as well as Louis Untermeyer, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Inez Haynes Gillmore. Max wasn’t too excited about the “yellow” version of socialism and do-goodism the Masses seemed to espouse. But he couldn’t help but be impressed by the fact that the magazine was cooperatively owned. He probably also realized it would take his mind off his other problems as he was reluctantly sliding into married life. And even as a boy he had admired Young, combing through the comic weeklies to find drawings by him. Appropriately, it was Young who, after a dinner with Max at a Turkish restaurant on Lexington Avenue, had identified Max to his colleagues as a likely prospect for the position of editor.28 Here, finally, was Max’s chance to embrace a life of action rather than continuing to marinate in his own stale poetic juices; here was his invitation to become a “full-sized man.”29
Max was proud that his editorship led to a reinvention of the magazine, in intent as well as design. The Masses had been “a mild voice speaking mainly for the cooperative,” he wrote in an autobiographical fragment. “I transformed it into a voice of the revolutionary class struggle.”30 This wasn’t too far from the truth. Max’s first editorial in the first issue under his leadership trumpeted a “radical change of policy” and asked for the cooperation of readers: “We are going to make THE MASSES a popular Socialist magazine—a magazine of pictures and lively writing.” The plan was to stay out of fractious political debates (“We are opposed to the dogmatic spirit which creates and sustains these disputes”) and instead to exemplify what other magazines only preach: “Life as a whole from a Socialist standpoint.”31 The fusion of illustration and text, of fact, fiction, and poetry, made the Masses the embodiment of a better, more exciting future, a utopian one perhaps, but one that was just within reach.
The bohemian journalist John (“Jack”) Reed, soon to be arrested for his work with the silk strikers of Paterson, New Jersey, joined the staff and spurred Max on to an even more radical redefinition of the magazine’s politics. The Masses would be, announced Max in the second issue, “a revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with no dividends to pay; a free magazine; frank, arrogant, impertinent, searching for the true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a moneymaking press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers.”32 If one listened closely, there were overtones of Whitman in this description: the poet sauntering through his city, speaking the password primeval, allowing the “dumb words” of the masses to resonate through him. Conventional magazine art, Max explained in a little book he called Journalism Versus Art, was “business art,” focused on knowledge, not on experience, upon “ease of recognition” rather than on the more difficult process of making their individual vision available to the viewer. The same was true of magazine writing, produced so that its author may make a living and not so he and his readers may live and embrace life. His publication was different. To him, the Masses would herald precisely the “deeper change” in magazine culture Max felt ought to happen: it offered a place for the “best talents of the country” to come together and present their individual perspectives on life, politics, and culture, free from the pressures of an “insanely competitive market.”33
Over the next few years, editing the Masses would take up all Max’s time. “Mr. Eastman is not robust physically,” warned the veteran publisher E. W. Scripps, in a note to Max’s patroness, the California millionaire and supporter of radical causes Kate Crane Gartz. “His nervous system is such that it should not and cannot safely be submitted to the strains inevitably attendant on such a business as the publication of ‘The Masses.’” Calling Max a maker of the “finest literature,” he cautioned that his “excellencies and his finest qualities are just those which unfit him for the task he has imposed upon himself.”34 But that statement was spectacularly untrue. Max as an editor was an inspired choice, for several reasons. It was his ear for linguistic nuance, his insistence on rigorous artistic standards as well as beauty of execution, his considerable charisma, the aura of inscrutability he cultivated (no one could ever be entirely sure what he thought), and the none-too-trivial fact that he was himself beautiful that made him so well-suited to reconcile the many diverse interests that had attached themselves to the magazine and to be an effective fund-raiser with wealthy, left-leaning donors.35
Gone was the mediocre mix of kindly feeling and genteel socialism that had characterized the previous Masses. Every issue offered an explosive mix of good writing and art. Some of the names, including Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, Art Young, George Bellows, and Boardman Robinson, have weathered the vicissitudes of literary and artistic fashion, while others are forgotten, often unjustifiably so. The rambling book reviews of the magazine’s managing editor Floyd Dell, the sharp commentary of the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, the fiery, in-your-face artic
les of John Reed against war (“And you, gentle reader, will be the first to get shot”) helped create a publication unlike anything Americans had seen before.36
Inevitably, Max’s writing changed, too, although he did stay true to his aversion to dogma. In a March 1913 column for the Masses he staged a conversation between himself and an unknown acquaintance riding with him on the subway who wanted to know what he was: A Party Member? A Syndicalist? A Direct Actionist? A Sabotist? A Laborist? Industrialist? Anarchist? Invariably his answer was, “O no!” He was, he said at the end of the little article, a “Get-offist,” which he defined as someone who was “going to get off at this station.”37 But invariably, too, he had to take positions both in and beyond the magazine, positions that went beyond a noble support for letting women take part in the democratic process. There was no getting off at the next station when matters of life and death, such as workers’ rights or a looming European war, were about to be discussed. In May 1913 Max addressed the striking silk workers in Paterson as “the most important people in the world” and declared categorically that “the people who wear the silk have got to work just as hard as those people that make it.”38 It was his hope that the struggle for women’s rights and labor rights could be merged. A year later, at a meeting in Cooper Union, when asked to define what feminism was to him, he reiterated his support for workers, distancing himself from what he called the “Middle Class Idealists.” There was, he said, “more real feminism in Paterson, New Jersey last spring than all New York and Greenwich Village put together ever dreamed of.”39
Personally, Max’s life was getting more complicated, too. Daniel Eastman’s birth on September 6, 1912, in a New York hospital, bewildered rather than exhilarated his father. An unpublished poetic sketch comments on Max’s jaundiced view of procreation and presents a Darwinian view of underwater life in which things perish almost as soon as they get born. Once again Max is descending into the world of slimy, fishy things to find analogies for his confusion:
The net brings up, how long and languidly
A million vivid quiverings of life.
Keen-finned and gleaming like a steely knife,
All colors, green and silver of the sea,
All forms of skill and eagerness to be,—
Who die and wither of the very breath
That sounds your pity of their lavish death
While they are leaping starlike to be free.
Like the fish, humans live to die, obliterated by their irrelevance among the thousands of births that have happened right before and will happen after theirs:
They die and wither, but the aged sea,
Insane old salty womb of mystery,
Is pregnant with a million million more,
Whom she will suckle in her oozy floor,
Whom she will vomit on a heedless shore,
As we were vomitted [sic] in days of yore.40
The ocean described in this poem was not Whitman’s ancient crone rocking the cradle, humming words both seductive and beautiful, but the primal ooze uselessly spitting out one slimy thing after another.41 The existence of his son mystified him, and although Max learned to become a somewhat better father than contemporaries and biographers have given him credit for, his embrace of parenthood remained lackluster throughout his life. Never convinced, in the words of the Philip Larkin poem, that “he should be added to,” Max inwardly rebelled against the religious implications of fatherhood, the biblical “begat” and “begetting” that ascribed to sex a teleological purpose, a justification that superseded the mere pleasure of the act.42 The irony of Max’s life was that he would continue to stumble into the very arrangements he professed to despise: marriage, fatherhood, writing for money.
Perhaps more important for Max was another birth that took place a few months later, in June 1913, the publication of his first book, Enjoyment of Poetry, one of his most enduringly successful titles. The enjoyment of poetry Max wanted to impart was, first and foremost, his own enjoyment of it. Distancing himself from the scholars of poetry, Max said he wanted to restore poetry to its central place in everyday life. Poetry was not practical: “A man in the pressure of affairs bent upon taking life poetically, is like a mule trying to browse while he is driven.” But that didn’t mean that poetry exists in a distant realm, entirely removed from our daily concerns. Max was adamantly opposed to the barriers scholars had erected between ordinary readers and poetry as an elitist discourse. Instead of classifying images as metaphors or metonymies, he distinguished between figures that merely illuminate and those that move us away from the subject of the comparison and push us in new directions. “I am poured out like water” (Psalm 22:14) was an example of the former, while “The Lord is my shepherd” served Max as an example of the latter, because here the Lord is almost forgotten in the pastoral idyll. While poetry does not ask us to change our life, it enhances and heightens it. It allows us, wrote Max, to experience emotions for their own sake, something the ancient writers understood better than the moderns who are so eager to produce important works that they risk being misunderstood by their readers. Not so Virgil or Theocritus: “We take delight in this free-hearted poetry as we might in the rippling of a stream where it spreads out among little stones.” Poetry is the poet’s gesture toward the world. It gives presence and power and physical reality to ideas and yet also points beyond them, at something that lies outside the “poet’s chamber.” True poetry runs “along the verge of infinity.”43
While Max was willing to grant poems their music—their physical, tangible reality—he did not want to make poetry into an event by itself, an experience superior to the lower-level experience it is supposed to portray. If you wish to compose poetry, let the words flow the way the waves do, remembering that each word, made new by you, enters alive and vivid into the stream that constitutes the enjoyment of poetry—of the poetry of life, that is. The rapturous last pages of Max’s book combine Whitmanian fervor with an earnestness that must have come naturally to the lapsed son of a minister: “The poet, the restorer, is the prophet of a greater thing than faith. All creeds and theories serve him, for he goes behind them all, and imparts by a straighter line from his mind to yours the spirit of bounteous living.” Awakening readers to the untapped reservoir of joy inside them is Max’s avowed goal: “A world laughs and bleeds for us all the time”—the world of poetry—“but our response in this meteoric theatre we suffer to be drugged with business and decorum.” The final paragraph of the book, which celebrates man’s return “to his rights as an animal,” was a riff on the praise Whitman, in “Song of Myself,” had lavished on the animals that do not “whine about their condition” and do not weep for their sins or “lie awake at night . . . discussing their duty to God.”44
Crystal was utterly absorbed in the book, she told Max, and she found herself thinking about it even when she was not actively reading it: “It makes me cry not to be a poet.” Hearing Max hold forth on poetry was like going back to school again. She was crazy about his ideas and wondered how he could have kept them to himself for so long: “I think you’re probably the first poet with a really analytical mind. That’s why you can take poetry & explain it with the result that the explanation instead of taking the life out of the poetry—puts life into it.” Unlike other writers on poetry Max had written a book that appealed to the reader’s intelligence as well as to his or her more visceral impulses. Crystal was now finding poetry everywhere and, most important, wanted to write it herself. Max was “a great boy, as Anstice would say.”45
In Glen Allen, California, Jack London showed himself similarly energized. There was none of the usual balderdash in Enjoyment, none of the “absurd notions about poetry” he had encountered elsewhere. What he had found in Max’s Enjoyment was good common sense as well as “delicacy and distinction.”46 Generations of readers agreed. In 1961 the book was in its twenty-fifth printing and had been, as Max boasted in an interview, selling “at the rate of about one every two days for almost 50 ye
ars.”47
Staying behind in Glenora, taking care of her infant son while Max was in the city putting his magazine together, Ida tried to persuade herself she was made for the role of the stay-at-home mother. But things were harder than she expected. Some letters from those early weeks when she was trying to adjust to her new life have survived: small sheets filled with her large scrawl, folded into tiny envelopes that would have just fit into her hand as she carried them to the train station to be dispatched. So there she was, on a warm morning in late June, wistfully watching from her porch as Max left for the city, scanning the fields for signs of him for as long as she could, even though it was only hay she was able to see: “I went to the side of the porch where the wisteria is growing and between the tops of the vines I could see a stretch of the road, first about opposite Henderson’s, and there you were, and then I thought I could see a piece beyond again but no it was just the field, yellow with hay and not the road at all.” The so-called pleasures of the country life could not reconcile her to the fact that she felt abandoned by him: “I miss you, miss you, miss you, miss you, miss you. Last night just after you went, Glenora seemed bare and ugly—truly it did. It was an absolutely new aspect, just for a few minutes and then minutes lapped over again in the past and it was the same again only awful empty.” Hers was not the Glenora of the carefree summer revels Max had known since his young adulthood. Too small to be company, Daniel had not “voiced any heroic sentiment yet for me to repeat” (fig. 17). Ida found herself imagining all the places Max went to in the city: “Please write about everywhere you go—so I can follow you about with my mind’s eye and don’t be rash or careless.” Composing her little notes, sometimes several a day, gave her a vicarious sense of participating in Max’s “other” life. By making her accounts intentionally “stupid” she hoped to force him to be similarly literal in his writing and tell her everything he did while he was away: “I only want to tell you everything as it happens, so that you will do the same. . . . I have the same feeling one has waiting for a train—patience and a feeling of forced self-control because it won’t help to hurry events if you fret. Anyway don’t stay longer than you have to.”48
Max Eastman Page 13