Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  6 • Malyutochka

  Still reeling from the shock of Florence’s death, Max, in April 1922, left the United States for the medieval city of Genoa. At the initiative of Prime Minister Lloyd George of Britain, the representatives of more than thirty-five countries had gathered in the old Palazzo San Giorgio to figure out a way forward for the world after the devastations caused by World War I. What was at stake was the relationship between the newly formed Bolshevik regime in Russia and the Western, capitalist countries. Max was not the only writer who had shown up in Genoa. Hemingway was there, too, equipped with “the most beautiful row of teeth I ever saw in man, woman, or child,” as well as the notorious writer Frank Harris, now in his dotage, who had just published his notorious pornographic autobiography, My Lives and Loves. “Every wild man of the decade was there who could get there,” observed Max.1 Who knew economics could be so sexy? This was the first time that Max, after writing so many articles about them, came face to face with real Bolsheviks. At the age of thirty-nine he had divested himself of most of the responsibilities others entering middle age have accumulated, and he was eager for new adventures.

  Before he left for Europe, Max, at the urging of the IWW organizer and communist activist Jim Cannon, had joined the Workers Party of America, the legal organization established by the Communist Party of America. At the time, he was convinced this was a true party for workers, not part of a larger international communist network. At least that is what he told the FBI later.2 He also hoped being a card-carrying communist would help him make connections abroad more easily. His “not very lofty motive” relieved the conscience of the proud “Get-offist”: since he wasn’t serious about being a member, joining the Workers Party didn’t really count. He placed the card in his suitcase and then forgot it was there. Or so he claimed. “My reputation as editor of the Masses and the Liberator—John Reed’s editor—was credential enough with the Bolshevik leaders.” More immediately useful was the document from the New York World that made Max a special correspondent and gave him direct access to the conference, though it seems he did very little journalistic work. His one semiofficial task, other than compiling reports for the Liberator, came when, briefly, he filled in for a British journalist dispatched to the conference, George Slocombe of the London Daily Herald, who had impressed Max with his red, “dagger-shaped” beard. Other than that, Max was content to be a hanger-on and to help out when needed, as he did when the Russian foreign minister Georgy Chicherin needed a lengthy French document translated. Max soon found out that his French was not nearly as good as he had thought. But at least he had managed to wheedle his way into the Imperial Hotel in Santa Margherita, about twenty miles down the coast from Genoa, where the Russian delegation was staying.3

  It was there he met, on a later visit, the woman who would share his life for more than three decades. On the balcony on the hotel’s second floor (fig. 30), Max had watched the sculptor Jo Davidson at work on a bust of the Russian diplomat Maxim Litvinov. Bored with the proceedings, Max was leaning against the balustrade when a rose fluttered down and landed at his feet, thrown from the floor above where the secretaries with their typewriters were staying. Max wasn’t sure which of the four girls whose heads he had seen peeking out of a window above him was responsible for the rose. When one of the girls—“not exactly pretty” but cheerful, sturdy, muscular—came skipping down the stairs, Slocombe introduced her to Max. She was Eliena Krylenko, the sister of Nikolai Vassilyevich Krylenko, who was as well established and well connected a member of the new Bolshevik power structure as one could imagine: the former head of the Red Army, he was now in charge of the Prosecuting Collegium of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Soviet Republic. Later he would serve as the commissar of justice, or chief prosecutor, for Russia and then the entire USSR. A fiend at the chessboard, he became the mastermind behind the expansion of Russian chess into a national, state-sponsored propaganda machine. When Max began to take an interest in Eliena, he was, whether he immediately realized it or not, truly entering the inner circle of Bolshevik power.4

  Figure 30. Albergo Palazzo Imperiale, Santa Margherita. “Where Eliena and I met in 1922.” Green arrow drawn by Max. Undated postcard by Fotoedizioni Brunner & C. Como. EMII.

  Twelve years younger than Max, Elena (later Eliena) was born on May 4, 1895, in Lublin, Poland, which was then occupied by the Russians.5 Her father, Vasilii Abramovich Krylenko, had been a narodnik, a member of the Russian socialist group that placed their hope for the liberalization of Russia on the peasantry and their willingness to rise up against the ruling classes. The narodniki were fiercely persecuted by the authorities, and it is likely his political convictions as well as the needs of an ever-increasing family forced the elder Krylenko to accept a position as a chinovnik, a minor government official, in distant Poland.6 A naturalist and poet who always carried a worn copy of Goethe’s Faust in his breast pocket, Krylenko senior was not well suited for a life as inspector of liquor taxes. But he was a gentle and peaceful man, a father who had taught his children to be averse to anything “brutal, crude, ugly, cocksure or stupid.” He had a large, comprehensive library, and in the afternoons he would read Mark Twain or the Iliad to his children. It wasn’t a coincidence that they were, at least the way Eliena remembered it, the only Russian family in town the Poles respected. She was convinced that her early years in Lublin, “where the old ghetto still stands,” played a part in turning her into the tolerant, socially conscious person she became as an adult: “a humanitarian, a rebel, a fighter against oppression of an individual by another individual, of a nation by a nation,” free of any narrow sense of nationalism or chauvinism.7

  Tragically, her parents’ marriage was not a happy one. Older than her husband, Eliena’s mother was consumed by jealousy, instilling in her daughter a lifelong aversion to relationships based on force rather than mutual trust. As a punitive measure Vasilii Krylenko was eventually transferred to a godforsaken small town eighty miles from the nearest train station. The loneliness of the place, reinforced by a natural inclination to melancholy and the precarious state of his marriage, led him to take his own life. Miraculously, Eliena emerged from these difficult family circumstances with a sunny temperament that impressed everyone who knew her. Unlike her brother Nikolai and sister Olga, she never became a Bolshevik. Neither red nor white, she described herself as “an onlooker and a skeptical critic of both sides,” certain only about the joy she felt when the tsarist regime was overthrown.8 Energetic, cheerful, blond, and ready to forgive, she was the opposite of Florence Deshon in almost every respect. A lawyer by training, like Ida Rauh, she had similar Slavic features but a much stronger, more athletic build. Walking next to the six-foot Max, Eliena, who was barely over five feet tall, had to jump and skip “trying to fit my short steps with his long stride.”9

  The writer Lillian Mowrer, whose husband, Edgar, was covering the Genoa conference for the Chicago Daily News, remembered her as looking like one of “Giotto’s emphatic little angels with her long, narrow eyes, high cheek-bones and short, curly hair.”10 And the painter Ione Robinson, who met Eliena in 1927 just after her arrival in the States and subsequently became her art teacher, remarked, “I have often wondered how anyone who has been through so much revolution can be so gay.” She was especially charmed by her astonishing ability to laugh and speak at the same time.11

  Eliena was in Genoa because she was in charge of the staff of Maxim Litvinov, one of the most colorful figures of the Bolshevik revolution and a kind of roving ambassador for the new system. She also worked as his personal secretary. As Max found out, she had been the one behind the rose-toss, even if she had not carried it out herself. Max was intrigued. The next evening he found her outside sitting under a kumquat tree, eating kumquats and crying over the breakup of a relationship. “These tears are not for you,” she declared, and Max was enchanted by this combination of vulnerability and cockiness. They shared kumquats and spent the night sitting on the Ligurian shore watching th
e waves.12 Although Max was attracted to her—in a note typed later he described her as “not sensual but sexually alert”—he evidently did not think of their “emotional relation,” a term he used in his autobiography, as something that would endure.13

  Eliena became his malyutochka, his sweetheart, useful to him in multiple ways—as a secretary, manager of his finances, housekeeper, fellow artist, and mostly tolerant companion. And he became useful to her in one most tangible respect: he helped her survive. Eliena’s entire family perished under Stalin, including her powerful brother Nikolai, who had gone on record saying that in order to impress the masses it was important to execute not only the guilty but also the innocent. He certainly lived up to his promise, sending thousands to their deaths. But the revolution eats its own children, as it certainly did in his case: in 1938 he was removed from his post as commissioner of justice of the Soviet Republic, arrested, and forced to confess to engaging in anti-Soviet activities. On July 29, 1838, in a swift trial that lasted about as long as many of those he had himself overseen, namely, twenty minutes, he adamantly disputed what he had confessed, thus presumably hastening his execution. Once Nikolai had defended his tribunal’s order to execute Admiral Shchastny despite the Bolshevik opposition to capital punishment by declaring that the admiral was being not executed but shot. Now he himself was—shot.14

  “No threat or torture ever made you speak,” intoned his sister Eliena, who had obviously been misinformed, in a poem (incredibly, a sonnet!) written in October 1950. Eliena and her brother shared more than the same determined jawline: they were tough people and not easily intimidated. But Eliena was right that, regardless of what Stalin’s executioners could and would have done to him, Nikolai had inflicted his own worst punishment upon himself:

  By thoughts more sharp than torture you were shamed,

  By your rash deed that could not be repealed,

  The folly of your brave great life revealed.

  You could not cringe—too deep was your defeat.

  You died in silence, stricken, bruised and defamed

  By your own error, not by their deceit.15

  From Genoa Max traveled on to France, where he sampled the pleasures of the French countryside and the delights of Parisian nightlife. He conversed with Anatole France and engaged in another affair in Paris. It was in Paris that he met the writer Albert Rhys Williams, who had observed the October revolution firsthand and would remain a lifelong convert to communism, unwavering in his support even of Stalin. With Albert as his travel companion, Max finally set off for Moscow, the actual destination of his trip. He later included a detailed account of his journey into postrevolutionary Russia in the second volume of his autobiography, Love and Revolution, but the journal he kept during these first months provides a more intimate look at his experiences unfiltered by hindsight.16

  Albert and Max stopped in Berlin first, where they obtained the necessary papers at the Russian embassy. Traveling to Russia from Germany was an experience in its own right. The Germans had been neat, focused, orderly. Their crops were flourishing, and wherever Max went, someone—men, women, and children—was always at work. How different things were as they got closer to the Russian border. In Lithuania, as their luggage was being inspected, Max and Albert took a little walk through a village where everyone seemed to be asleep, including a fellow with a switch who had been given the task of keeping a pig out of a yard and who was now dozing under a tree, overwhelmed by the magnitude of his responsibility, while the pig was rooting around freely. From time to time the man would wake up and wave the switch perfunctorily, whereupon the pig would take off, presumably just waiting for the moment when the ineffectual watchman had succumbed to sleep again. Max saw this as emblematic of the Slavic mentality in general. If Germany was the hardworking, virtuous brother, Russia was “the lazy poetic philosophizing never do well who gets wonderful ideas, may do great things if he ever gets to work.”17

  In Riga, Latvia, waiting for their connection to Moscow, Albert and Max made a trip to the beach, where Max, with obvious pleasure, watched the beautiful, healthy, strong women in their comical, umbrella-shaped bathing suits. It was here, too, that Max began his study of Russian in earnest. Dictionary in hand and never one to settle for modesty, he celebrated this new phase in his life as a linguist by translating a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, “The Mountain,” or “Utyos,” an exercise in which he involved his fellow passengers. He was so proud of his crowd-translated poem that he published it later in Kinds of Love.18 Back on the train, a comfortably equipped one, with beds in the compartments, big windows, and tea served “every little while,” Max continued to work on his language skills. His first complete sentence, “I want milk,” was a complete success: “I got it, rich, clear, creamy, warm, from the cow.” Not at all like Italy, where there was no milk to be found. Max was enjoying the signs that life in Russia wouldn’t be so bad after all: the beautiful women, the posh train, the leisurely lifestyle, the fresh milk. On April 25 a red guard at the border, blond and blue-eyed like fellow socialist Mike Gold back home, pulled out a piece of white bread to demonstrate the luxuries that awaited them in Russia. Max relished the experience: the red guards in their long coats lined up beside the train, the young, intelligent-looking young man who came through the train to check their passports, the strains of the International being sung by the passengers.19

  There was more singing and more poetry the next day in the village where they disembarked to await the arrival of the train from Moscow. Max was pleased to see the “soft sweet ragged poetic-looking” people on their way to work, noting especially the girls carrying railroad ties. So much for Russian laziness. He noted, too, how fair they all seemed, perhaps inadvertently revealing his American bias, as if he expected physical labor to be done by the darker-skinned. He loved these firm-bodied men and women, the kids hunting for berries in the hedge, the lavender potato blossoms, the cows in the meadows, even the clouds in the sky, and he probably never realized that, writing these lines in the diary, he was already producing social realist kitsch. At night the peasants sat by the lake, enjoying the view—all of them poets in the making.20

  His arrival in Moscow was less pleasant. The only person to meet them at the train was Jim Cannon of the Workers Party, who took them over to the vermin-infested Hotel Lux, where hulking Bill Haywood, the founder of the IWW and recent fugitive from American justice, also lived. Max counted forty-eight bedbugs his first night in the Russian capital. After his paeans to proletarian productivity, he lapsed into laziness himself, joining other expats for breakfast and dinner, going for walks in the park, and enjoying the architecture. “I have only one purpose in the world—namely to take my time.”21 Through Albert’s connections they secured more upscale accommodations in the house of a former “sugar-king” now used for visiting diplomats. Max realized his new abode was “incongruous” and “not suitable,” but he did not decline the offer either. In Love and Revolution, he later created the impression that everything but the beds and chairs had been carried off, but his journal says otherwise. The “expensive-looking” house was in an incredibly convenient location, and the interior was lavish, with pictures on the walls, stained glass, carved wood, and furniture tastefully arranged throughout the house. “The comfort is ravishing.”22

  Moscow, with its deep blue and golden domes and the green and gray-red towers of the Kremlin, was more appealing than any European city Max had known, and the flamboyant, extravagant colors and unique clustered design of St. Basil’s Cathedral, in Max’s opinion, made all futurist art seem “green and provincial.” It was as if Max had fallen asleep and woken up in some surreal dream, a fairy tale straight from The Nutcracker, were it not for the signs of political upheaval around him. The only thing Max couldn’t stand about Moscow was the constant ringing of church bells, all with different chimes, as annoying as a gang of boys who had been let loose in a well-furnished kitchen and were trying to see how many different kinds of noise they could make. “I am
told they bang them a little oftener and harder since the revolution.” From an architectural point of view, though, Max had to admit that the many, many churches added considerably to the attractiveness of the city. As the sun was setting and the moon was rising, the delicate crosses flashed in the light, and the gleaming gold domes began to shimmer like rare flowers that were about to unfold their petals. Moscow appeared lovelier than any other city, most certainly “lovelier in the variety of color and form than Paris.”23

  It was a ravishingly metropolitan, easygoing place, too. There was so much to see! Max admired the kind, sleek, well-behaved cab horses whose equally kind and humorous drivers constantly fed them treats. In Germany, Max remembered, drivers cursed and whipped their horses. Moscow had the smoothest-running streetcars he had ever ridden, and, in the market, one could buy the best-looking vegetables in the world. He found not a trace of snobbishness in the Russian people, who wore what they wanted (no one was expected to don a hat, for example). The red guards, rather than marching with Teutonic precision, walked leisurely, with “leonine grace,” using a slow farmer’s step that would take them where they wanted, to the beat of their “strong masculine shouting songs.” The good-natured traffic policeman, his rifle strung across his back, had nothing to do since the streets were so wide. Even the beggars in their dust-colored rags seemed young and hopeful, their wonderful faces radiating contentment. The people he met were eager to speak Russian with him. They seemed “interested, alive, talkative, healthy, never tired.” And all the buildings carried signs identifying them as belonging to the people. Max was in a trance.24