Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  Here, as elsewhere in the book, the studied formality of Max’s poetic language, poured into the inflexible mold of fixed poetic forms, contrasts oddly with the undercurrent of real emotion seething below the surface.35 In a poem with the Elizabethan-sounding title of “A Praiseful Complaint” we get an agonized Max bemoaning his lover’s elusiveness. A coldhearted dominatrix despite her “crimson lips” and “burning fingertips,” Florence wields her elusiveness over him like a whip and recoils from his naked passion like a plant, tendrils furled (Max is obviously not afraid of mixing his metaphors when necessary). Rather than just Max, she wants “all the world” as her mate. Arguably the most successful poem in the collection is “X Rays,” where Max, for once, finds an objective correlative for the overflow of emotion that makes some of the other poems almost a little embarrassing to read. The occasion for “X Rays” is unknown. Did Florence have an X-ray taken with Max present? Did Max merely imagine the scene? No matter, the metaphor finally allows Max to separate the lover from the poet, and with great success. Countering fears about the invasiveness of X-rays, the machine makes Florence seem more naked than just naked: a virginal, vivid skeleton in the green light, startled into an intense purity, stripped of the flesh Max so desires, a “naked and pale . . . wonder,” a slim-hipped, exquisitely boned spectacle, luminous, fragile, and self-sufficient against the dark screen of Max’s life.36

  Max’s erotic fantasy, “Sweet Lovely Night,” did not make it into Colors of Life, though Max reworked it for a private manuscript he titled “To My Love,” intended as a New Year’s gift for Florence. Among the poems in this little booklet are several unpublished ones, notably “A Telegram,” which is in many ways the most charming, unaffected love poem Max ever wrote. It tells of a cold, wintery Christmas day he spent in Croton when the sky was “a cold grey metal” and the ponds were as frozen as Max’s mood. But all of this changed, and sleep came easily to him, as “breasts to a thirsting baby,” after Florence sent him a telegram, “five sweet words” that helped him find peace because they were “words that remembered.”37

  Colors of Life came equipped with a preface in which Max admitted that the struggle for the future of the world occupied his thoughts but not his heart. Life was greater than revolution, he exclaimed, and “life is what I love.” Unabashedly, he revealed where his real interests lay: “Though I love life for all men and women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the cruel system of these times, I love it also for myself. And its essence—the essence of life—is variety and specific depth. It can not be found in the monotonous consecration of a general principle.” Anyone who would later accuse Max of unpredictability had obviously not read these sentences. The remainder of the preface was devoted to Max’s battle with Whitman, whose allegedly artless celebration of life Max sought to unmask as in reality more self-conscious and artificial than his own stiffly formalist verse. Whitman’s poetry was, he argued, little more than the willful extension of the very private form of the love letter—“too individual” to be intended for public consumption—into the shared realm of poetry. Whitman wasn’t playful and in fact had less direct access to nature than, say, the Greeks, who, content in their “sun-loved” world, would have never been able to understand what Whitman, with his contrived chants to the body electric, was trying to accomplish.38

  Once again reviewers were confused by the lack of revolutionary fervor in Max’s poetry. In her magazine, Poetry, Harriet Monroe mocked Max’s “shocked conservatism.” And in the pages of Max’s own Liberator, Floyd Dell wrote that he couldn’t believe these poems had been written by the same man who had sat next to him in the courtroom as they were being tried for espionage. But such critiques depended on a partial reading of Max’s new poems, which, despite their formal conventionality, talked about sexual attraction in ways that violated social decorum.39 The iconoclastic Los Angeles photographer Edward Weston, for one, who was then embarked on his own exploration of light, form, and beauty, understood Max’s intentions. He took his copy of Colors of Life, given to him by Max himself, and heavily marked the passage about the Greeks not requiring any cosmic preparation to be able to enjoy life for what it is.40

  In February 1919 Max departed for the West Coast to gather funds for the Liberator. He left Florence behind in Croton, where she lay awake at night and tried to make the time pass faster by playing their favorite songs on the Victrola, reading Plato’s Dialogues (“they remind me of you”), and driving his car “all over.”41 The Masses trials had made Max’s name a household word wherever he went, and his relationship with the beautiful Florence was no longer a secret either. When he arrived in Hollywood, Max’s reputation had preceded him, to the extent that he began to worry that he might be the reason Florence had not been able to score a major movie deal yet. The director Cecil B. De-Mille, for example, “an ugly fat fool,” had been rather nasty to him. A “screaming patriot,” he believed everything the papers had said about Max. But not all Hollywood types were so intractable. Another director, D. W. Griffith, often regarded as the inventor of Hollywood, expressed admiration for Max’s activities: “You are a braver man than I am,” he said to Max. “I take my hat off to you.” He also admitted that he never really believed in his own propaganda film, Hearts of the World (1918). War was, said Griffith, equally atrocious on both sides. “He seemed to have a real liking for me—which as usual in such cases I pretended to reciprocate. I urged him to do a picture of the history of the class struggle, and I’m going to send him the Communist Manifesto and that book we’ve talked about reading, ‘The Ancient Lowly.’”42 Max also met Charlie Chaplin, already “the most famous man in the world.” Chaplin had asked to be introduced to the young socialist firebrand. They went for a walk, and Max impressed Chaplin by hitting the top of an evergreen tree with a green apple as if he had never done anything else in his life—a gesture so perfect in its random, understated, casually masculine bravado that it was bound to have an effect on the man Max would later characterize as an eternal child driven by the need to be the boss. On his way back Max stopped to give a speech in San Francisco, after which a “smoldering,” blue-eyed beauty from Russia, Vera Zaliasnik, introduced herself to him. The meeting was a prelude to several sessions of passionate lovemaking, perhaps made more intense by Max’s knowledge that Vera, besides being the girlfriend of the Masses contributor Robert Minor, had once killed a man (she was fourteen and he had sexually assaulted her). For all his dedication to nonexclusive, free love relationships, Max did not share news of this amorous detour with Florence.43

  Meeting Chaplin in Hollywood reinforced Max’s intention to finish writing the book on humor that had been on his mind for a long time. After his return he spent mornings in his barn in Croton poring over his notes, and thoughts of the book accompanied him even on the days he had to be in New York putting the next issue of the Liberator together: “Tomorrow and Monday—my book again,” he informed Florence. “Tuesday we make up the magazine, maybe Wednesday—then toward the end of the week the deep dive for a masterpiece!”44 Florence was off doing new things, too. She had accepted an engagement in another Megrue comedy, Among the Girls, with Percy Knight in the lead, a Scottish-born actor and notorious drunk who drove her crazy: “I am very disappointed in him,” Florence wrote from DC. “I can never tell how my scenes with him will go, he is just as liable to kill them as not, and not through meanness, but just inability.” Her attitude toward acting was every bit as professional as Max’s toward his writing. Working with the shiftless Percy had reminded her that “nobody can arrive any where no matter how great their natural talent if they don’t work seriously.” After each performance Percy would get drunk with the chorus girls, while Florence worried about how her scenes with him would turn out the next day.45 When the company was in Boston, at the Park Square Theatre, Florence reported that she had to walk the streets at night “threateningly” carrying a big stick in her hand. “The men here ought to be all shot at sunrise, they are so tou
gh,” she opined. “But they all shy away when they see the stick and by the time we land home our anger has turned to fits of laughing to see them all react the same way.”46

  Despite Knight’s unpredictability, the tour was a success, and Florence’s letters once again sparkled with the wit that had first attracted Max to her; perhaps they also had an influence on his evolving book on humor.47 His days were now taken up by writing and by thinking about when he would next see Florence. At night, he went to sleep holding her letters in his hand.48

  With Florence away, Max spent most of his time in his Croton house, traveling to the city only when Liberator business demanded it. He cashed in some bonds to bail George Andreytchine out of prison, a Bulgarian-Russian immigrant with a penchant for getting himself in trouble and who was nicknamed “the human torch.”49 Max offered him a temporary refuge at his Croton house: “Things are getting so hot that it is exciting.”50 Money remained scarce, but life on Mount Airy Road seemed like an everlasting party. For dinner he would invite Floyd Dell and his much taller, larger, and louder wife “B. Marie” or his other neighbors, Jack Reed and Louise Bryant. He didn’t seem to mind that Jack had withdrawn his name from the editorial page of the Liberator in protest over what he saw as the magazine’s continuing kowtowing to the Wilson government.51 He also spent much time on the tennis court, playing singles or doubles with other radical friends, the lawyer Dudley Field Malone and the artist Boardman Robinson. Nothing seemed an obstacle, and Max was not averse to playing a game of tennis in the rain at midnight: “It was good to play and my ‘members’ feel limbered up and better reconciled to their membership.”52 And yet he missed Florence: “Much smoke and ashes and lively unimportant talking, but there is no gay pleasure in those things without you.”53

  Inspired by his new confidence in his body and its powers and openly desirous of Florence, Max included an erotic, even pornographic fantasy in his letter, which was plainly intended to arouse her. The beginning sets the scene:

  I love you. I want you. Darling if you were here now—the yellow lights are shining just in the dark edge of twilight, and we would soon pull the curtains and lock the door, and all the sweet quiet little house would be ours, and I would stand before you and kiss you and put my hands in your hair, and then I would try to unfasten your dress and you would help me, and your clothes would slip down, and you would laugh and put your arms around me, and I would take my clothes off too, and then I would fix the bed for you, and we would slip in there together, shivering a little at the cold sheets but warm in the touch of each other.

  From there, Max gives free rein to his feverish imagination. One wonders where, in an age still under the shadow of that tireless guardian of American morality, Anthony Comstock, he got the courage to send this through the mails:

  My lips would cling to your lips quivering, beloved; until your thighs throbbed under me, and all the warm color and wonder of your beautiful lips thirsted to receive me, and every nerve and muscle of my being stood full of the fierce will to thrust in to the deeps of you. And then for madness I would leave your kiss and creep down to bury my lips and sensitive tongue in the hot salt flame of the folds of your body, and you would find my body too, and those sweet delicate lips of your love would burn against the very intimate essence of myself, until we could bear no longer any separation, and with your eyes closed and your lips curved intensely and your white thighs open, you would lie one second til I seized and clung to you all one, and my hot muscle plunged up through you to the inmost thirsting nerve, and we were lost, lost, lost in madness of each other’s life.

  The passage is unusual in its explicitness, allowing us to reconstruct the specific sexual acts from the descriptions given. And though it is certainly written from the man’s perspective, Max’s emphasis is on the mutuality of the pleasure he and Florence would enjoy if they only could be together now. More than anything, Max’s letter vividly illustrates what had increasingly become important to Max: the right to do with one’s body what one wanted, unencumbered by social convention or rules imposed by the state. Sexual liberation, for Max, had become inseparable from political liberation.54

  In his humor manuscript Max freely acknowledged his debt to Sigmund Freud. But he also took him to task for still perpetuating the idea that sex was a furtive, subterranean thing. Freud had forced people, complained Max, “to confess that their bodies are great surging tanks full of lust and suppressed carnal hungers” and to look at all we produce in our waking hours—thoughts, poems, works of art—as covers for such unacceptable desires. But what if there was nothing to confess? In Freud’s view the most hilarious, casual jokes, once the analyst has had his or her way with them, “declare themselves as fundamentally sexual.” What bothered Max was less Freud’s theory as such—and certainly not the idea that sex makes us do things that, on the surface, don’t appear sexual—but his rhetoric that still seemed beholden to the idea that lust is something that must be revealed, confessed, dragged out into the open light of day as if it were a criminal that needed to be punished. Freud had lifted “a great incubus of shame from the shoulders of humanity,” but in explaining to us how our minds always worked, he had not addressed the question if ever they could work differently, too. Max was looking forward to a time when sex would assume its role among the many factors that make up, as he wonderfully described it, “the companionable variety of nature.”55

  Thus, if Max was thinking about sex when he was writing to Florence, that didn’t mean he was always thinking about it but that sex was what was on his mind at that particular time. Florence certainly got the message. “I loved your letter,” she replied from Boston. “I read it over and over. I can almost feel your sweet body close to mine, you write so vividly. . . . I must see you, I must touch you and hear you, if I am to live.”56 In Max’s view Florence and he were “beautiful gods,” living in a space entirely of their own making, newly consecrated each time Florence was able to travel back to Croton.57 The world revolved around them: Max the unafraid moral conscience of a nation rocked by the recent war and the ongoing revolutionary developments in Russia; Florence the epitome of beauty and grace, harbinger of a new society in which sexual relationships were no longer constrained by the heavy burden of American Protestantism that, for so long, had loomed over Max’s life. Max felt invulnerable. When a secret State Department message was leaked regarding American support for anti-Bolshevik coalitions in Russia, Max, his voice strong with moral outrage, read it out loud in Madison Square Garden.58

  Max must have been surprised, then, when Florence rejected the narrative he had been sketching out for both of them. Accepting an offer from Samuel Goldwyn, she departed New York for Hollywood in July, leaving Max howling with loneliness. Despite the subject of his work in progress, a sense of humor was not what sustained him as he tried to cope with his abandonment. For months at a time theirs became a relationship conducted chiefly through letters and telegrams, a realm in which Max, master of the well-placed word and subtle phrase, should have had the upper hand. That this was not so is one of the remarkable features of their correspondence. While Max reflected on his loneliness, describing how he would dash around in his Ford “crying like a baby,” how he would open the closet in his house at Croton to sniff Florence’s lingering scent in the clothes she had left behind, and how he had moved his bed into the barn so he wouldn’t have to face his empty house, Florence typically talked more about her environment, the people she met, the plans she had for her career.59

  Yet being separated from Max was hard for her, too. She was “steeped in melancholy,” she wrote from the train to Los Angeles. “You are so beautiful to look at and to touch.” The reading she had brought along for the ride seemed hardly suitable to lift her spirits: Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.60 Once in Hollywood, she added a biography of Milton to her reading list because the poet, in his desire for perfection, reminded her so much of Max. But she was already in love with Hollywood (“the sun shines so beautifully”),
and she adored her new dressing room at the Goldwyn studios in Culver City.61 She had taken a room at the Hotel Alexandria, which boasted the city’s most fabulous ballroom and was really the place to be in downtown Los Angeles, frequented by the rich and the beautiful and those who wanted to be seen as such: silent movie stars, Hollywood moguls, and the inevitable hangers-on. It was in the lobby of the Alexandria, during the exact same month Florence was living there, that Chaplin, whose infant son had just died, met the four-year-old child performer Jackie Coogan, the child star in The Kid, still considered one of his finest films.62

  Max’s letters to Hollywood overflowed with unfocused desire. The green ink he preferred made them seem almost feminine, but the words leap out boldly at the reader, yearning to be more than words. They become a way of touching her, as Florence realized: “I sighed for you to be really there so I could feel your sweet touch.”63 While Florence seemed to grab whatever was handy—a pencil Max left behind, a scrap of hotel letterhead—to pour out her emotions, unfiltered, onto the sheet in front of her, Max’s letters are those of an editor: the lines are straight, the words correctly spelled, and new paragraphs helpfully indented. More often than not Max would cover both the front and the back of his sheets so as not to waste paper, as Florence was apt to do. Emotionally, though, Max came across as more unrestrained, ranging from abject declarations of misery to orgasmic displays of joy to blatant expressions of neediness and the desire to exert control over Florence. He warned her not to let go of her “beautiful gipsy color on the screen” in exchange for some generic Hollywood ideal of perfection. In a 137-word telegram Max elaborated: “I WORRY CONTINUALLY ABOUT YOUR CHANGING THE MAKE UP YOU USED IN JAFFERY AND AUCTION BLOCK YOUR COLOR WAS EVERYTHING IN THOSE PICTURES THEIR SUCCESS HAS BROUGHT YOU THIS OPPORTUNITY WHY TAMPER WITH ONE OF THE CHIEF ELEMENTS OF THIS SUCCESS?”64