Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  On December 15, 1916, the Masses held a fund-raising ball for itself in Tammany Hall, which was then on East Fourteenth Street. It was there that Max Eastman, the hottest of radicals today, met a girl who was also considered a hot commodity in her world, the exceedingly beautiful twenty-one-year-old movie and stage actress Florence Deshon, and fell in love. News traveled fast even in those days, especially in New York, and Max’s newfound happiness did not remain a secret for long. Ida was incensed. Unpleasant words were said, accusations leveled, fiery notes exchanged. Max’s and Ida’s letters from that unhappy period, with their misspent verbal brilliance, remind the reader of the sheer potential, the raw intellectual power that had resided in this relationship. When Max finally left Ida for good he found it necessary to tell her he had never loved her, words that crushed Ida more than any fight they had ever had.90 In an undated note, written perhaps as much as a year after the final breakup, Ida made no secret of her surprise over what had happened. All her effort, she said, all her professions of sympathy had finally proved to be insufficient. As she was groping for words to express her disappointment over Max’s behavior, she inadvertently revealed just how much she had been under his influence. “Fantastic” had been one of Max’s favorite expressions of dismay: “O Max how can you look and say such ruthless things. What has got into your mind that the whole past of effort and sympathy seems to have left you with this cold condemnation of me. How strangely fantastic of you to act as if I had wronged you and to act as if—because you had never loved me as I had loved you—you must ignore that fact and treat us as a case in a category of domestic disagreements—How strange it all is to me—.”91 Max retaliated by saying that she had produced the situation in which they now found themselves. It was all her fault! He accused Ida of not wanting to understand him, of having “shut the gates of sympathy,” a rather outlandish charge given that he had just told her he had never loved her. In a passage he then crossed out, he blamed her for ignoring Dan’s rights and predicted that their son would judge her harshly later.92

  In many ways Max’s behavior was incomprehensible. Ida was brilliant, courageous, independent, and free-spirited, the very woman he should have wanted at his side as he took on the establishment. As a lawyer, she had defended him in court when the Masses was sued for libel. As a fearless artist, with her own studio at 5 West Sixteenth Street, where models would, scandalously, pose for her in the nude, she had crossed boundaries. And as a fellow activist she defied the law by publicly distributing birth control pamphlets at a mass gathering in Union Square, “right under the noses of 50 policemen,” and gotten herself arrested.93

  Max realized that by abandoning Ida he had lost all purchase on nobility and wisdom. But he still felt compelled to take her to task for the failure of their marriage. Ida was, he charged, determined to hate him, so any reasonable attempt he’d make to defend himself was bound to fail.94 Ida categorically rejected his reading. “It is not hate, Max, that makes me feel that way,” she told him. “This is not true and never was true. I believe you of course, if you assure me again that you hate me, and you may want to think that I do you—but this is not true—your letters still fill me with amazement.”95

  Max wrote back the very next day, assuring her that his response was not fantastic. She had gone around saying, to his face as well as in the presence of his friends, that he was “absolutely selfish” and “absolutely egotistical.” This had made it easy for him to hate her. He had given her as much of himself as he could, had offered her his soul daily, but Ida had wanted more: “I always thought that the avidity with which you could drink up the blood of sacrifice and devotion and still be unsatisfied was truly terrible.” Max’s rhetorical powers now got the better of him: “Your conception of what must be given to you seems colossal and hideous, and you rise in my eyes as an unslakable monster of selfishness.” Her desire that he give up Dan was an indicator of Ida’s vampirical nature. Since she had chosen to be hard and contemptuous, it was his right to be so, too. He was enclosing a letter for Dan, to be read by him when he was grown up, “in which I tell him that, although I love him and think of him always, I have left him completely to you, because I have hurt you beyond measure, and the only thing I have that I can give you in compensation is my complete absence from your life and from your love for him.”96

  Ida’s reply came in the form of a note scratched out on a train. If she had behaved badly since their separation, it was all justified by Max’s unspeakable cruelty in telling her he had never actually loved her. With the memory of Dan’s face before her, she pleaded with Max to give her any sign that inflicting all this pain on her had really been necessary. Speaking of her “terrible sense of betrayal,” she pointed out that all the words of affection and tenderness he had found for her before their separation now seemed hollow and untrue. To add insult to injury, Max had immediately afterward embraced his new, liberated life right in front of her: “Hardly had you gone from my house than you began your life of joyous loving on my doorstep almost and even in the places where our friends and old associates were, flaunted your sense of glorious relief and utter indifference to the very places of my most intimate feeling.” If he was able to say to Dan that he had hurt her “beyond measure,” why couldn’t he say that to her face, too? Max’s callous claim that he had never loved her had made a mockery of their life together, a “terrible nightmare lacking every kind of feeling.” It was not the case that she took no responsibility for what happened: “Many gross faults I have, many weaknesses. I mean this in all humility.” But to accuse her now of self-righteousness wasn’t fair. Had she not given him all the freedom he wanted, and had she not done so entirely unselfishly? Her letter was not meant to accuse Max, only to give him—and Ida goes on to offer a memorable phrase—“some deep colors of my mind” and to tell Max exactly what her feelings were since he had never bothered to find out. And those feelings were, to be sure, complicated: “I don’t think life expresses itself clearly or simply for me.”97

  Amid all the accusations traded between his parents, a drawing by the five-year-old Daniel Eastman, sent to Max in January 1917, stands out as a poignant reminder of the real sacrifice at stake in this failed marriage (fig. 21). It is Daniel’s self-portrait as a kind of giant human sponge wearing footsies, his mouth wide open in surprise. Interestingly, Dan’s hands appear as part of his assorted facial features. Gartered and stuck into footsies and with his finlike hands glued to his face, Little Dan seems bereft of agency—an impression he would have easily gotten from his fighting parents.

  Figure 21. Daniel Eastman, self-portrait, 1917, with

  additions in green ink by Ida Rauh. EMII.

  Max believed he had atoned for all he had done to Ida by giving up any right to play a part in his son’s life. Neither he nor Ida pushed for an immediate divorce. But he still felt guilty about what he had done or, rather, failed to do for Dan. “I love you and long for you,” Max had written in the letter he wrote to Dan during the breakup, “and I have cried in the night for the sound of your voice, and your wonderful endless questions that I would answer, and for the trusting of your little hand in mine.” We don’t know much about Max’s relationship with Dan in the years after he left Ida. But an undated letter in Max’s papers offers a tantalizing clue that he remained involved in his little son’s life (fig. 22). Apparently Max had promised to deliver some books to Dan but had been unable to do so since he was sick. He referred to a mouse in his apartment—a mouse known to Dan from the time he had spent with him—and admitted he hadn’t been able to catch it either. And then Max entertained his son with a charming picture of himself, hair flowing, in hot pursuit of that mouse as it was heading for a hole in the wall. He must have known that Dan would have been receptive to stories of parental incompetence.

  Figure 22. Max Eastman to Daniel Eastman, undated. EMII.

  5 • We Were Beautiful Gods

  When Max ran into Florence Deshon on that fateful night in Tammany Hall in December 1
916, he knew instantly that there was no turning back. Florence had come to the ball with her current lover, John Fox Jr., the author of the best-selling western novel Trail of the Lonesome Pine and a donor to the magazine, but he was quickly forgotten. Equipped with abundant brown hair, large, dark, smoldering eyes, and a heart-shaped face that appeared radiant on the screen and indeed must have seemed so to Max that night, the twenty-one-year-old Florence, “a girl of the Leonardo type,” was hard to resist, for both men and women. As he danced with Florence, Max’s previous life faded away as if in a dream. Their minds and bodies flowed into each other, a “joyous overflowing of bounds.” Unbelievably, Max realized he had seen her once before, walking east on Thirty-fourth Street and holding a painted Japanese parasol over her head. She seemed to him then “by far the most beautiful being I had ever seen.” When the ball ended, Max stumbled home as if in a trance; within days he had left his family for good and moved in with the very tolerant Eugen Boissevain at 12 East Eighth Street. A month later Max turned thirty-four.1

  Florence Danks (Deshon’s original name) was born on July 19, 1893, in Tacoma, Washington, to Samuel Danks from England and Florence (“Flora”) Spitzer from Austria. An aura of mystery and obfuscation surrounds her from the beginning. Her parents were not married; when they registered their daughter’s birth, Samuel pretended he was a clerk from Denmark, while Flora, in the Pierce County registry, gave “Walter” as her last name.2 When their daughter created her own last name, she was only continuing a family habit. By 1900, the U.S. Census shows Florence, her brother Walter, and her parents living in Manhattan, on Eighth Avenue. Both parents made their living in music-related fields, Samuel as an arranger for a New York music publisher and Flora as a music teacher.3 At one point the family lived in suburban New Jersey, but by 1915 the parents seem to have broken up, Florence’s brother continuing to live with Samuel, while Flora, who would soon begin to call herself a widow, and Florence struck out on their own.

  Florence had inherited her parents’ artistic inclinations, and she was as clever as she was beautiful. When and why she took up acting is not known, but it is clear she systematically reinvented herself to fit the type Americans wanted to see on the screen: a sultry combination of ingénue and femme fatale. Her dark looks gave rise to persistent rumors, actively encouraged by Florence, that her mother was a gypsy. Perhaps a convenient way for her to hide her mother’s Jewish heritage? Her vaguely French-sounding, entirely fabricated name served only to increase her exotic appeal. When Max and Florence crossed paths she had already appeared in several films with Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn and was considered a rising star, as famous for her willfulness as for her beauty.4

  A month after the ball Max called on Florence at her apartment on East Thirty-fourth Street and made perfunctory conversation with her mother. Then, his eyes resting on Florence’s clingy silk gown, he took her out to dinner to Mouquin’s on Sixth Avenue, a longtime and very popular gathering place for artists, famous for its imported wines and authentic French kitchen. Max was so enraptured by Florence’s presence that he felt like “Pan dancing with the dryads.” Afterward he drove her in his beat-up Ford Model T, the overworked engine sounding like the Battle of Gettysburg, to his house in Croton, and it was there, later that night, that “the ideal rapture and the physical achievement of love were so blended as to be indistinguishable.”5 In other words, Max slept with Florence Deshon. And sleeping with Florence—a woman as free and liberated as Max was constrained and fenced in by years of repression, imagined illnesses, and self-doubt—to him was something akin to a religious revelation.

  In the next few weeks a flurry of notes, sometimes accompanied by bouquets of flowers, went back and forth between Max’s residence on 6 East Eighth Street and the apartment Florence shared with her mother at 49 East Thirty-fourth Street. Fortunately for Max, Florence was as taken with him as he was with her. “My love,” he told her, “I would give my soul to lie in your arms tonight.”6

  No biographer could do justice to the intensity of this relationship, manifested in many little, hurriedly written notes, alternating between longing (“I miss you so tonight I cannot sleep”), impatience (“my love, there is no hour but the hour when you come back”), gratitude (“I loved being at the opera with you”), and disappointment (“You left me so coldly today”). Two intense human beings had found each other. To Max, Florence was no awkward mother substitute, as Ida Rauh had been. She had the same capacity for enjoyment that had lain dormant in him, the same urgent need for pleasure paired with a contrary push for self-assertion. That combination would, in Florence’s case, prove lethal. Unlike Max, Florence, who had already reinvented herself several times before she met him, was reckless and not averse to taking risks, even foolish ones. Max survived their relationship, but he emerged from it a changed man. Before he met Florence he had hunted for shades of Annis and Crystal in every woman he met. After he had lost her, he would spend the rest of his adult life reliving that loss.

  When Roi Cooper Megrue’s Seven Chances, the comedy in which Deshon played the part of the lustful Florence Jones (fig. 23), went on tour to DC in February 1917, Florence saw members of the Women’s Peace Party shivering in the cold outside. They were standing on boards and straw mats because the ground was frozen solid, clutching banners demanding liberty for women. Angered by President Wilson’s lackluster support of the suffrage amendment, they had been picketing the White House for months, sometimes burning copies of the president’s speeches. Many of them were arrested and ended up in workhouses, a stark reminder to both Florence and Max that their relationship was unfolding against a backdrop of legal inequality and constant threats to people who shared their political convictions. No wonder Florence was dreaming of how she and Max, going “as fast as lightning,” would skate their problems away.7 Max didn’t hesitate, took a train, and showed up in DC, skates in hand: “Must I be with you every second?”8

  Figure 23. Florence Deshon as Florence Jones, 1916. Photograph by Jean de Strelecki. EMII.

  With the possibility of American involvement in the war looming, Max was delivering antiwar speeches at a flurry of mass meetings. But his mind was always on Florence and the next time he would see her again. He felt loved, vindicated. Poetry effortlessly flowed from his pen: “You are thinking of me—you are coming back to me—and when you come you will be all that the impossible beautiful dream of you is. And so my throat is relaxed and my breath flows quietly and I wait for you, with joy. I want you to know this, and so I let myself so into the sweet music of saying it.”9 But the outside world continued to distract him. In June 1917 the Espionage Act was passed, and the Masses became a natural target of the authorities. Designed to curb, on the eve of America’s entry into World War I, the influence of foreigners on American politics, the new legislation became a useful tool in eliminating internal dissent. One immediate consequence was renewed attention on the use of the U.S. Postal Service for the dissemination of ideas that might be considered anti-American. On July 5 the postmaster general of New York, Albert Burleson, declared the August 1917 issue of the Masses “unmailable” under the newly established law, the beginning of legal troubles for Max and his magazine that would continue through two trials. When Max protested and asked that the offensive material be identified, the postmaster refused.

  Max sought an injunction and had the great good fortune to end up before Judge Learned Hand of the New York Federal District Court. The objectionable material from the August 17 issue included Henry Glintenkamp’s “Conscription” (see fig. 19), a cartoon by Boardman Robinson (“Making the World Safe for Capitalism”) as well as an Art Young drawing of a group of businessmen making war plans while a timid representative of Congress wanted to know, “Where do I come in?,” the answer to which was, “Run along!” Also deemed offensive were an editorial by Max himself, in which he called for funds to defend Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman after their arrest for advocating that men not register for the draft, and an article by Dell ab
out conscientious objectors. No one was bothered by Max’s “The Lonely Bather,” a fairly explicit poem in which Max projected the frustrations of unfulfilled desire onto the “slim and sallow” body of a woman lying beside a stream.

  Judge Hand was not convinced. The incriminating entries were, he determined, examples of American citizens exercising their right to freedom of speech. Incensed, the postmaster general turned to a helpful judge in Windsor, Vermont, who did as asked and forbade the distribution of the August issue until an appeal of Judge Hand’s decision could be heard.10 Max was undeterred. When a massive storm raged through Croton, taking out a “glorious big elm tree” near the train station, Max ran out into the yard, tore his clothes off, and, as he told Florence, “drank it.” Let us see who shall be master. The storm “couldn’t blow me down!”11

  Max had begun traveling on behalf of the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace, a product of the First American Conference for Democracy and Terms of Peace, held in New York in May 1917. “It’s fun to travel with your expenses paid,” Max wrote to Florence, as he was enjoying the view from his open train window. He was dreaming about his speeches but even more “about you-and-me.”12

  Max’s activities were now garnering national attention. He was pleased to see how many people turned up to support his pacifist or, rather, antimilitary message (fig. 24). “I am more than ever sure ‘the people’ (whoever they are) are against the war.” A clear sign of that was the nervousness Max generated in the cops who showed up at his events. In Chicago, for example, a “hard shell” of policemen surrounded him wherever he went: “They patted me on the back and mock-arrested me when I left the building, and I noticed they were listening more attentively than anybody else.” The New York Times covered his speech, quoting his inflammatory remark, “We are not yet so excited over German atrocities that we can’t see the atrocities of our own people.” It seemed everyone was taking notice except Florence, who wasn’t writing to Max as frequently as he wished.13