To Ida, mailing these notes from Glenora was no casual affair. They had to be written fast, when the baby was down for one of his infrequent naps, for example, and she had to run them down to the station in time for the daily mail pickup. But such trips were a welcome distraction on days when picking peas in the garden and watching little Daniel trying to sit up by himself were the absolute highlights. On her envelopes she wrote, “special delivery,” wishing that this instruction would have “some occult influence on the postman” and make him carry her words faster to him.
Figure 17. Daniel Eastman, with nurse, September
2, 1913. From Cherith-Log, 1911. EMIIA2.
The picture of her marriage that emerges from the letters Ida wrote during the first summer of her son’s life differs markedly from the one Max gave his readers when he remembered those days in his autobiography. They show Ida determined to put up with the discomforts of a life that had little to offer her: the house was drafty, the neighbors annoying, and, though Max hired a girl named Laura to assist her, she was largely left to her own devices with a new baby that wasn’t always easy to take care of. A “perversely” big baby, Daniel did not feel the need to sleep during the day and seemed impervious to the temperatures that soared to ninety-eight degrees. That said, Ida was certainly proud that Max’s work on the Masses was going so well: “You have done wonders—It is because you are so sweet and just and patient and tolerant—that has gone—I think you have made them all feel some of the same spirit of mutual appreciation.”49 Max’s letters to her she celebrated as if they were the last ones she would ever get from him: “I read them first very hurriedly and then I browse in them every little while, or nibble at them like a rabbit.”50
In August 1913 Max’s first volume of poetry, Child of the Amazons, appeared. The title poem, the product of Max’s classical learning acquired at Williams, he had begun years earlier during one of the wild Glenora summers when he was romping through the woods and rowing across the lake with lovely, wild-haired Muriel Bowman. It told the story of Thyone, who had defied Amazonian law by wishing to live with her lover, shirking the “enterprise of soldiery.” Given to “languid talk,” Thyone, at least at the beginning of the poem, is a poet, not a warrior, as the Queen of the Amazons observes: “Dost / Thou hope to whirl a spear with lovelorn muscle?” The Queen asks her to consult her heart, and Thyone reconsiders, bidding farewell to “Romance, idle, sweet, and transitory” but not before reminding the Queen how she, like all other Amazons, had her baby torn from her, “a very little body like thine own,” one she had touched and loved for his dimple and “the ring of blue between his half-wide lids.” Ordered to cease her “woeful eloquence,” Thyone once again commits herself to a “life of action upon God” and resolves to prove herself “equal to the world.” Motherhood can wait:
No Amazon shall enter motherhood
Until she hath performed such deeds, and wrought
Such impact on the energetic world,
That thou canst it behold and name her thine.51
And no Max Eastman, dissatisfied as he was with his own accomplishments, should have entered fatherhood, Ida might have been tempted to add.
Certainly, the Masses was Max’s chance to have an impact on the “energetic world.” Throughout the volume, however, the alternative world of wild nature, represented especially by birds, from thrushes to meadowlarks to yellow-birds to Canada geese, is pitted against the always incomplete desires and schemes of humans. In “The Thought of Protagoras,” a philosopher, characterized as “a man born regal to the realms of thought,” is shot just as he is about to reveal the infinite Substance of which all other things are merely attributes. Max’s “cold surprise”—a phrase from “At the Aquarium”—at the sobering realities of human life underlies the entire collection, despite the fact that it ends with a rather self-consciously optimistic tribute to a hero of action, Leif Ericson: “They sing thee, O Leif the Lucky, they sing thee sublime.”52
If one bears in mind that 1913 was the year Ezra Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” appeared in Harriet Monroe’s magazine Poetry, Max’s early verse, with its labored images and “thous” and “thines,” strikes one as mired in the poetic idioms of yesteryear. The reviewers were certainly puzzled that the cofounder of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage would be writing such contrived, traditional poetry. The Wellesley professor and Socialist Vida Scudder, who had come to Max’s book fresh from supporting the striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, admitted as much right at the outset of her review of Child of the Amazons. But she went on to suggest it was a good thing there was so “little social stress” in Max’s poems. Max’s new volume would help readers understand that a radical was “a very normal person” after all. As she saw it, his poetry could only benefit her fellow fighters in the cause of women’s rights: “We rise from reading, emancipate [sic] and adventurous.”53
Those on the other side of the political spectrum also found plenty that was political in Max’s poems, although they viewed it differently. A writer for the Minneapolis Journal, for example, thought the title poem was nothing short of a call for the temporary elimination of men: “The upshot of the discussion seems to be that by the lockout method the belligerent ladies hope to bring about the perfect union of man and woman.” The reviewer concluded, in a line showing more than ordinary wit, that Max’s poetry was likely “to frighten father [i.e., men in general] half out of his wits.”54
Vida Scudder’s positive review did little to lift Max’s spirits, especially after he learned that Crystal’s former boyfriend Paul Kellogg had made her write it.55 Throughout his life Max worried that he wasn’t a real poet and that his concern with technique had pushed aside any genuine emotions he had wanted to express. The poetry notebooks he was keeping in the mid-1910s do show that Max did tone down such personal connections when he decided to publish a poem. A good example is “A Visitor,” a poem not printed until a few years later, in Max’s second volume of verse, Colors of Life (1918), and then under a new title (“A Visit”). With all the cross-outs restored, the poem depicts two human panthers mating, after the female, “hot and quiet,” has roused the male into action:
You came with your young body lithe and silent
Like a panther to my den, where I
Though powerful lay velvet in the shadows
Sleeping, and you drew me like a magnet,
Your slim muscles moving hot and quiet
In the darkness drew me, till my veins
Erect and burning woke me and I rose,
And stole upon you like a panther, and
You held me, and gave back your strength to mine.56
Was this the dream Ida couldn’t fulfill for Max—the fantasy of a strong, desirous woman who would call forth his own desires in a sexual encounter? A dream so scandalous that Max had to rewrite the poem for publication? “You came with your small tapering flame of passion” begins the revised version, in which the woman is little and snakelike, if still troublesome.
Ida’s influence is visible in these notebooks in a more unexpected way, too: as a reader, cocreator, and editor of Max’s work. For example, at the end of an untitled poem beginning “The timid morn lies quiet on the earth” we find the short but revelatory note, “Made for I. R. who supplied the first line and the feeling.”57 And another entry shows Ida correcting Max’s language. For understandable reasons, “To My Maltine with Cod-Liver Oil,” a tribute to the concoction that relieved Max from what one may assume was constipation, remained unpublished. Which, in a way, is a shame, because it points to a side of Max the poet not usually evident from the published record, namely, his capacity for humor:
Foul-smelling flask of liquid glue
I lift my lyre in praise of you!
Fish-oil and bilge of salty beer,
I give you hallelujah cheer!
Of all the galled and greasy saints,
And mangy angels, dressed in paints,
And gods o
f wry and righteous face,
Who’ve blessed my trouble-haunted race,
And given their groaning guts relief
Beyond all natural belief,
You, vile concoction, are the chief!58
The “hallelujah cheer” is a particularly appropriate and hilarious accompaniment to Max’s bowel music. Interestingly, the adjective “trouble-haunted” in line eight was Ida’s addition: she replaced Max’s ponderous “idol-hunting” with a much funnier alternative.
Child of the Amazons, in conjunction with Enjoyment of Poetry, helped establish Max as a poet-philosopher of sorts, a public authority on subjects that extended beyond the issue of universal franchise. He was now represented by William B. Feakins in New York, who printed flyers showing an impeccably dressed Max wrapped in thought, next to an endorsement from none other than Woodrow Wilson himself: “His talk on humor was the most brilliant combination of thought and humor I have ever listened to.” Blurbs on the reverse of the sheet ranged from the Buffalo Express (“He had his audience laughing almost from the outset”) to his ex-girlfriend Inez Milholland, an authentic Amazon herself (“The idea of the woman of the future is best expressed by Max Eastman in his very beautiful poem, Child of the Amazons”). Max not only had something to say, potential clients were told, but he knew how to say it so that it mattered to the general public, while also keeping them entertained.
In the fall of 1915 Max published two highly visible articles in Everybody’s Magazine in which he presented psychoanalysis as a quick and surefire method of coping with the challenges of everyday life—from failed relationships due to an excessive fixation on one’s mother, to unexpected falls, to embarrassing slips of the tongue.59 The spiffy illustrations accompanying the articles showed well-dressed people in more or less embarrassing situations, taking surprising falls, embarrassing themselves in relationships, or misspeaking in social settings, with captions touting the relief that would come from knowing the causes of such behavior: “People of neurotic constitution are just people who have never broken away, in the depth of their hearts, from the family situation. They are still dominated in all that they do and feel by a repressed love, or a repressed hate, toward mother, or father, . . . or sister, or brother—a passion which possessed them when they were little children.”60 In case Max’s readers didn’t get the point, the editors of Everybody’s Magazine included a picture of a round-cheeked, well-fed baby on the same page. “What we call a ‘nervous’ person is a grown-up infant,” suggested Max.61
Only those who had known Max for a long time would have detected an urgency in these sentences not entirely justified by the purposes of a magazine article. Certainly, everyone, as Max assured his readers, suffers from a “family complex of sorts,” and we spend our lives reliving these “old passions of childhood, to our utter undoing as grown-up and efficient human beings.” But the truth is that some of us are more liable to do this than others, namely, those among us who had been “excessively sensitive children, and were too closely adored, or too hideously nagged.”62 The fidgety, hypochondriac child of Annis Eastman was speaking about himself. But Max stopped himself before he gave away too much. Most people, he assured his readers, are not much affected by their neuroses. They’ll forget a name or an appointment (as Freud himself had admitted he occasionally would, especially when he was supposed to meet with patients he was treating for free). What a relief, then, for them to know that such slips were not due to any “supernatural powers.”63 Max’s main intent in these articles was to normalize psychoanalysis, to represent it not as a scary process by which your id gets ripped out from under the layers of censorship, but as a sensible explanation of the concealed causes of odd behavior, as the ultimate confirmation that there was nothing really wrong with you.
Max knew that psychoanalysis was more than a quick fix for the annoying goofs and gaffes of everyday life. But nowhere in these two articles does he admit that he himself had been seeking therapy because of his growing problems with Ida. Max’s analyst, Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, mentioned by name and pictured, next to a cigar-smoking Freud, in Max’s first article, had diagnosed him as suffering from the aftereffects of a lingering Oedipus complex. He attributed Max’s socialist leanings to latent hostility toward his minister-father and his problems with Ida to an unresolved incestuous desire for his sister. A “Niagara talker” to Max’s “Lake Ontario listener,” Jelliffe subjected Max to a crash course in Freudian doctrine. Max read every book by Freud and about Freud he could find. But therapy turned up no new memories of Max’s childhood, and all the fixations mentioned by Jelliffe, from fetishism to homosexuality, seemed equally plausible to him. But there was no healing pain, no revelation, and though he developed a strange, troubling affection for his round-bodied and friendly analyst—Freudian transference, as he noted with his newly acquired knowledge of psychoanalysis—nothing was accomplished.64
Max was too much interested in the women out there who he felt were waiting for him, women who wanted to receive him with open arms, to accept Jelliffe’s verdict as the truth about his inner mechanisms. Ida, not ready to give up on him, in the summer of 1914 decided to take matters into her own hands. As the world elsewhere was inching closer to war, she took a train to New York and left Max and Daniel alone in the old boathouse in Tenafly, New Jersey, where they had moved in an attempt to escape from the noise and pressures of life in Manhattan. While she was gone Max engaged in Freudian self-analysis. He filled three composition books with often self-pitying and sometimes acute reflections on his current situation, notes about dreams he had and attempts at analyzing them, and plans for getting his life back on course. Daniel doesn’t play much of a role in these entries, except as a whimpering presence in the next room.
His thoughts focused on Ida, Max alternately lamented her absence and then celebrated it, as the necessary condition for the release of his polyamory. The problem was not that Max didn’t desire Ida—several passages extol her beautiful body—but that Ida desired no one else but Max. As loose as their marriage was, Ida was still expecting Max to be there for her, to be her mate. But Max’s sense of himself as an author, as a creator, depended on being free to do what he wanted rather than being limited to his identity as a husband or as a father: “Plato celebrates the love that does not beget children, except such children as the Iliad and the Odyssey.”65
At least at this early point in his self-analysis Max was still trying to convince himself that sex wasn’t the reason he felt the way he did: “Perhaps the true sublimation of the animal hunger for me is a modern platonic one—not especially, or only, a love of ideas, but a love of the whole world, a wondering love of the whole world. I felt that Ida would be (if she would!) a friend in the world, but the world would be my lover.” Ida had deprived him socially rather than just sexually. Unlike Annis or Crystal, she did not care about other people and had, directly or indirectly, kept him away from his friends, he complained, and, “suggestible” and “pliant” as he was, he had subjected himself to her view of life.66
As he went on with his analytic navel gazing Max diagnosed himself as suffering from exhibitionism, given his “frequent dreams of bodily exposure, as well as the exposure of various forms of nobility and heroism in my soul.” Freud, in a passage about exhibitionism from Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory that would have been familiar to Max, had linked the desire to expose one’s genitals to the confused wish to make someone else do the same thing and thus to be reassured that men are men and women are women.67 Lo and behold, one of the most disconcerting dreams Max records is of a “beautiful, white-bodied woman” in a bathtub with perfect breasts and, would you believe it, a most beautiful penis. Was Max’s rampant desire to imagine women naked rooted in the haunting fear that they might not be women at all?
A bit unexpectedly, homosexuality becomes a key motif in these notebooks. In yet another dream—like the previous one omitted when Max reprinted passages from his self-analysis in his autobiography—Max and his father
are headed for a swim. They walk, accompanied by Max’s would-be lover Inez Milholland, through a village full of “curious black people” to get to a bathhouse, where, Max hopes, they will undress in each other’s presence. But in Max’s dream, the river (a “slot,” really) where Max and his father were going to swim suddenly fills with ashes: “We gave it up and went on further.” The ashes Max himself, in the analytic part of his dream re-creation, attributes to his fear of homosexuality: though he clearly desired it, he was spared the sight of his naked father.68
In another dream he reports, Max wakes up alone in a room and at first cannot, try as he might, open his eyes. Under his bed he then finds a rakish little hat with a pink and red headband that he immediately wants to wear, although he knows such headbands have been banned by the government. Not coincidentally, Ida would never fix her hats the way Max would have liked her to. Max now realizes that his desire for the inappropriate, illegal, feminine hat, of a kind his wife wouldn’t wear, coupled with his inability to open his eyes, once again points in the direction of repressed homosexuality. Just a day before, Max had met a man “who really attracted me.”69
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