Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  There was some hope, though. Somewhat puzzlingly she informed Max, “The only art is that of photography.”91 That sentiment did not come from nowhere. Through Max, Florence had met the photographer Margrethe Mather, seven years older than Florence and originally from Salt Lake City, a “slim, quietly magnetic girl, snub-nosed, grey-eyed, with this-way and that-way floating ash-blond hair.” She struck up a friendship with Mather that likely became more than that. At least temporarily Florence also shared her apartment with Mather, who was a bit of a waif, too. Like Florence, she had changed her name: born Emma Caroline Youngren, the daughter of Danish converts to Mormonism, she chose for herself the last name of a man for whom her aunt worked as a housekeeper. Mather, who was by inclination a lesbian, though she was also embroiled in a torturous relationship with the married Edward Weston, fell in love with Florence and took more photographs of her than of anybody else in her career. Max instantly knew something was afoot: “Don’t love Margaret too much,” he warned Florence. “I have no other home but where you are.”92

  Into this volatile situation ambled Charlie Chaplin. He had dinner with Florence on Christmas Eve and gave her a box of lovely, handmade handkerchiefs as well as, more important, a small role in his new film, A Day’s Pleasure, where she was seen in the now-famous Los Angeles traffic jam. Driving her own Ford onto the set, Florence got, in her own account, caught between two cars and cried out to the traffic policeman, presumably the same one who, in the version we know, ends up in the manhole, “Are you going to let them kill me?” But she got no sympathy from the copper. “Keep out of the way can’t you, was all he said.”93

  Chaplin made sure Florence did not keep out of his way. He is “always very sweet to me,” she told Max.94 Soon he was a fixture at 6220 De Longpre. Florence gave him Max’s Colors of Life as a gift, perhaps as a reminder to both of them not to go any further. “He was so happy to get it.” Then she revealed that she had been to Chaplin’s projection room to see The Kid: “It is wonderful wonderful. I cried and laughed and smiled and was so worried some of the terrible policemen in the picture would get him. It was the most exciting thing I ever saw.”95

  This was a good time to distract Chaplin. Although he was already separated from her, Mildred Harris had refused to grant him a divorce, and the production of The Kid had cost him a half million dollars. No wonder Charlie wanted to get away from it all, a proposal Florence readily embraced: “As soon as he finishes this picture he asked me if I wouldn’t take a trip in his car.” They felt, she wrote, “the wanderlust very strongly and were flying all over the world at a great rate.” While Max was hunkering down in Croton and tinkering with the Liberator, which by now seemed more like an albatross around his neck than a harbinger of freedom, Chaplin was promising Max’s girlfriend car rides “all over the world.” Evidently, Florence wanted to make Max jealous; disarmingly, she even disclosed why: “I fear in each letter I receive that you will describe somebody you have fallen in love with.” Max took the bait. He was frightened about Charlie, he told her. “Do you think he is as nice as I am?”96

  Max never revealed much about the ménage à trois in which he, Florence, and Charlie found themselves, except to say that “a lot of unusual emotions were given a place in the sun.”97 But it didn’t take Florence long to realize that Chaplin wasn’t too unlike the character he played on screen: “Charlie ever speaks of going away,” she complained to Max, “but it all depends on the picture he is making, and at the rate he is working, he will never finish it.” He was vain and easily jealous of others, like the brilliant French comedian Max Linder, whom Florence met at Charlie’s studio, a “smart little fellow.” Afraid to be upstaged by Linder, Charlie ran for his dressing room, pulled off his hat, and roughed up his hair, a look he knew would make him appear charming: “So he caught a fleeting vision of himself in the mirror and all was well in the world again.” If anyone needed psychoanalysis, decided Florence, it was Chaplin, who seemed incapable of disentangling himself from his domestic nightmare yet couldn’t stop talking about it: “I know I am naughty, but I become tired of Charlie’s troubles. He stays in that frightful situation at his home, and his powerlessness to move wears me out.”98

  Meanwhile, Florence’s professional situation had steadily worsened. By Hollywood standards she had not worked much, and so it must not have come as a complete surprise to her when Cliff Robertson, Goldwyn’s studio manager, took it upon himself to tell her she was no longer wanted.99 Her career at a standstill, and the man she still cared most about far away, Florence drove her Ford to a Hollywood airfield, perhaps the Aerodrome owned by Chaplin’s half brother Syd on Crescent and Wiltshire Boulevards, and convinced a pilot to take her flying. “Don’t be jealous,” she told Max, as if she wanted him to be. Suited up and wearing goggles, Florence loved being high up in the air, seeing the world the way a bird would, reduced to happy insignificance. There were the tiny houses, reminders of the boxed-in life she wanted to leave behind. Florence’s cleverness is evident in how she plays with the word “adventure,” using it as a description of her flying experience—and an adventure it certainly was—as well as of the way she now viewed her future with Max. “Only come if it is an adventure.” And she mapped out the kind of communications she wanted to have with him, words exchanged on the go, in scribbled notes, telegrams, in automobiles going full speed to some unknown destination: “Let us have conversations together as if we were riding in the Ford.” Florence was signaling to Max that she wanted to be spontaneous, on the move, unpredictable. While Max strove to fix her in place—as his gypsy girl, pining away in California, immune to the fatal attractions of Hollywood, yet still successful as an actress—she told him not to come and visit for the wrong reasons. She needed to find herself first.100

  Days later Goldwyn ended Florence’s contract, confirming what she had feared. Speaking about herself in the third person, she offered an unsparing view of herself and announced she was not coming back to join Max in his socialist utopia on Mount Airy:

  I who began the race for success so well equipped, now stand completely stripped with no vision before my eyes but one of mediocrity. I cannot force it. I cannot give up all my bright hopes. I would die first. Utter utter despair fills my heart. It is my self I have to live with always, it was my self I wanted to love, how can I care about this dark girl, she is no longer lovely to me, no longer beautiful. Do not think I mean I did not love you. That is not so, but I cannot be happy with you unless I am happy about my self. You understand that don’t you. I am not coming back to the little house on the hill. I have given up that dream completely. I cannot go back.101

  But back she went, or at least she was hoping to. Within days she had landed a new job in New York, working, for $350 a week, with the French director Maurice Tourneur.102

  She had barely put the letter in the mail when she heard that Max had become otherwise preoccupied. Disaster had struck. She telegraphed Max immediately regarding the “RUMOURS WHICH HAD HURT MY HEART.” Max telegraphed back: “I WOULD TELL YOU IF SUCH A THING WERE TRUE, YOU KNOW THAT DONT YOU” and then supplied the following self-assessment, enhanced by a hilarious misunderstanding that must have happened at the Western Union office, where the clerk obviously was not familiar with Wordsworth’s poetry: “AM LONELY AS A CLOWN.”103 Had Max been responsible for the mistake, what a Freudian slip this would have been—the very kind of linguistic mishap that would have been great material for his work on humor. But no amount of self-pity could have helped Max out of the situation he himself had created. He finally had to confess that he had done what Florence had always feared he would and begun a relationship with another woman, Lisa Duncan (fig. 26), one of the “Isadorables,” the six German-born pupils of Isadora Duncan whom the famous dancer had formally adopted so she could import them to the United States.104

  Figure 26. “A picture of the little brown sandals. And Lisa swimming like mad!” Lisa Duncan in Venice, 1920. EM.

  Max had been helplessly attracted to
all of them. On stage, the Duncan girls were a whirlwind of muscular legs, bare feet, and flowing garments. But Lisa was the one he had fallen in love with. When Florence confronted him, Max at first made a clumsy move to pretend that nothing catastrophic had happened and praised the article about her he had seen in Picture-Play: “Your portraits . . . are rich and gypsy—warm and beautiful as the world’s desire.” But if Max had hoped he could thus maintain what he now called his friendship with Florence as well as continue to enjoy the new sexual high to which his relationship with Lisa had brought him, he was wrong: “I do not care if you are in love with Lisa,” Florence fired back. “I feel like one who has walked and trotted and run a long way, and now I can rest.”105 The damage was done.

  But Lisa, younger than Max by fifteen years and at the beginning of her dancing career, had even less reason than Max to commit to a relationship. She had just emerged from one, in fact, with a man she called Arnold, presumably the photographer Arnold Genthe. By mid-April she was in Philadelphia, and two months later she had left the country, along with the other Isadorables. Her letters to Max were almost orgasmic in their intensity and liberated even from the mild constraints imposed by English grammar: “My lips durst for your sweet delirious kisses—my body trembles with the memory of you—my heart longs for our cruel unkind love. . . . Max don’t you remember our kisses—madness—passion—my shyly whispered trembling words—my tears—my love—my complete happily-pining All.”106

  He had evidently not told Florence the truth when he claimed, in the sheepish letter he had sent when she found out, that he never desecrated their shared memories at Croton, since Lisa explicitly thanked him for what she had experienced there. “All my heart is with you in the little gaycoloured leaves, on the green hill—where I experienced the most exquisite wildest ecstasy of love,” wrote Lisa while already on her way to Europe with the rest of Isadora’s troupe. During the transatlantic passage even the ocean reminded her of Max. Its undulating colors and flowing waves offered her an image of their shared, wildly flowing love, as she stated in a rhapsodic letter written to Max in her native language.107

  Lisa’s letters kept coming, from Paris, Versailles, Venice, and Athens, written in her big, scrawly, virtually illegible handwriting, conjuring the “aching sweet memory” of Max and, soon enough, the new, liberating experience of dancing under the hot sun of Greece, all beauty and music, which made her “dizzily happy” and which she felt Max needed to share, too.108 From there, as well as later on from Paris, she sent encouragements to Max to come and visit her: “We could read and play to-gether and will speak French.”109 Isadora’s demands on her and the other members of the group were inhuman. But unlike Florence Deshon, Lisa Duncan was completely happy in her art. She wanted to “expand and breathe freely,” which seemed to be especially easy in Greece, “where the air is so light that one just wants to fly-fly-fly.”110 If she couldn’t have Max with her, well, then, she would dance him into existence: “There are moments when you seem so very near to me and that is when I dance—the memory of those starry nights and your warm sweet kisses comes to life again and with their tender influence and ecstatic joy I move—love—and live. . . . I love you most when I dance—when you are infinitely more closer [sic] to me than even in your wildest sweetest embrace.”111

  One of Max’s best poems, “To Lisa in Summer,” catches some of the excitement Lisa had generated in him. It is quite a feat to evoke a liquid, flowing world of sexual excitement in the stiff mold of a Petrarchan sonnet, but this is precisely what Max does. Lisa is absent, a memory only, but to Max—who represents himself doing what he loved to do so much: swimming, diving, bathing—she is present everywhere in nature, in the waves that touch him, the flowers, birds, and leaping butterflies, the wind. The poem consecrates Lisa’s memory, turning nature into an altar to her beauty, an icon of grace, cool, deep, silver, still:

  All things that move are memories of you,

  The waves that linger glimmering and slim

  Along my body when I dive and swim,

  The daisies bathing with me in the dew,

  The nimble swallows in the limpid blue,

  The leaping butterflies above the trim

  Wild yellow lilies dancing in the brim

  Of winds that are but naked motion too.

  There is no wing or willow in this place

  So swift or slender it can bend and bless

  But in remembrance of your kindling grace,

  And even the deep cool waiting water knows

  How liquid is the depth of your repose,

  How silver still a pool your quietness.112

  More than forty years after their fateful first encounter, Max, who had lost touch with her, located Lisa again. Living in poverty in communist Dresden, she was delighted to hear from Max: “Your letter made me shed sweet tears.” Whatever had changed, she was still, she told Max, entranced by the “ecstasy of a pose,” and she had never stopped dancing. “Your memory is very precious to me,” she added, and revealed that she had been reading “To Lisa in Summer” to herself over the decades to sustain her “in moments of doubts or disappointments.”113

  Left behind by leaping, flying, laughing Lisa, Max found himself crawling back to Florence only to discover she had moved on, too. “Just talk to me as though we were riding in the Ford,” he pleaded, appealing to their shared enthusiasm for cars.114 He faulted his upbringing and his marriage—“I was bound falsely and outrageously by my relations to Ida”—and said they simply had met too soon after he left Ida: “Just twenty-five days after I escaped from her, love conquered me, putting down in pain and cruelty the terrible rebellion in my soul.” And now the rebel had arisen again, rearing his ugly head.115 Florence said nothing, except for a short note sent almost ten days after Max’s letter, in which she reiterated that she wanted love, not friendship.116 Sitting at his desk in Croton, Max filled half a notebook with scrawls, using his characteristic green ink. He deplored Florence’s coldness, her alleged contempt for him, her tossing him off as if he were a dead dog.117

  But Florence was not well. Feeling worse and worse during the first weeks of summer, she ended up in bed at her house, cared for by a nurse. She was lonely and scared. Chaplin, still running away from his wife, Mildred, had left town. When Max found out, he urged her to come to Croton.118 He wired money and saw to it that the preferred physician of Greenwich Village dwellers, the infinitely tolerant Dr. Lorber, examined her when she came out. Lorber diagnosed an abortive pregnancy and had the dead fetus—Charlie’s child, Max assumed—removed. As soon as Chaplin heard the news, he also found his way to Croton, where he checked into the Tumbleweed Inn and did his best to complicate whatever rekindling of intimacy seemed to have taken place between the star-crossed ex-lovers. Instead of fiery passion, however, their love merely flashed and then sputtered on. Although she was grateful for what he had done for her, Florence would not allow Max to dissuade her from returning to California. After her departure, a restless Max went to watch Florence’s last movie, The Twins of Suffering Creek, at the Village Theatre on 8th Avenue and became foolishly proud of Florence when a big fat man next to him burst into tears during one of her scenes.119 The tears were really his tears, tears about what he had come to, as he told Florence in one of his green-inked, smudged notes.120 “I once was your lover and now am nothing,” he wrote.Desperate for any kind of reaction from her, he even sat down and calculated the money she owed him ($400).121

  In November Florence mailed him a series of portraits Margrethe had taken of her. But Max found the photographs artificial, devoid of the “light that shines in your eyes”: beautiful pictures but not pictures of Florence’s beauty.122 The problem wasn’t Margrethe’s. The life had gone out not of Florence’s eyes but of her relationship with Max. On November 30, 1920, she cut off much of her brunette, very fine hair that Max had liked so much and sent a shock of it to him in New York—stuffed, without an accompanying note, into an envelope from the Friday Morning Club,
a suffragist association founded in April 1891 by Caroline Seymour Severance, the first president of the New England Women’s Club in Boston and a friend of Susan B. Anthony. This was not a Victorian-style memento of her love for him but an assertion of her independence, especially given the fact that Max had always tried to control her appearance, down to the very makeup he thought she should use. She had bobbed the hair he liked so much, and she wanted Max to know what she had done.123

  Max did come out to visit Florence once again, at the end of February 1921. Crystal, plagued by ill health, had permanently left the Liberator, and Max had passed on his daily editorial responsibilities to a team of editors willing to take turns, Floyd Dell, Bob Minor, and Claude McKay, and he was finally free to work on his book. But things went badly wrong once he was in Hollywood. Words were exchanged—Florence said he was “depriving her of life” without giving anything in return to her—and Max found himself out on the street: “I know there is nothing left I can do for you but take my terrible self out of the way of your beautiful brave life. I am trying in tears and agony to pick up my things.” An “ocean of blackness,” wrote Max, in a melodramatic, self-pitying note he left in her mailbox, encompassed him.124 He left Hollywood for good on June 7.