Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  Not that Max would have shared these impressions with readers back home. In a note sent back to the Liberator, he applauded the “hard-handed, iron-minded men” that were now in charge in Soviet Russia, and Bukharin especially received praise for his “big voice,” his trenchant wit, and the subtlety of his political analysis.47 There is a reason for Max’s circumspect reporting. More than most, Max realized the obstacles a genuine radical movement faced back home. Denigrating the only available model would serve no good purpose. In the back of his Russian journal he sketched out some ideas for the future of the American Left written under the influence of the Fourth Congress. A revolution of the kind that had swept through Russia couldn’t happen in the United States because people had attempted to organize it. “We have formed a party of revolutionary action when no revolutionary action is possible, so like a machine with no work to do, it destroys itself. It will continue to destroy itself.” The movement in the United States needed diversity, not homogeneity; Max cited the shutting down of William Foster’s Farmer-Labor Party as a disastrous move on the part of the Communist Party. The premises of the Third International that the breakdown of capitalism was imminent and that the movement had entered the phase of revolutionary action simply did not apply in the United States. The revolution had never even begun, while the counterrevolution was alive and thriving: “They have reached the stage of the guillotine while we were still in the stage of desultory propaganda! They have killed the I.W.W. They have killed the Communist parties.” Capitalism was not breaking down in America. “The task in America is not action, is not even organization of action—the task is elementary education,” Max explained.

  Unlike the Europeans, ordinary Americans had witnessed the war only from a distance. In the European countries the war had, arguably, catalyzed revolutionary action. In the United States the work of the Second International still had to be done. Never having experienced the war, Americans had never really experienced the patriotic story of winning it. Business was flourishing in the United States, and the working class had other things to worry about than revolution. And here Max embarked on a sharp analysis of the American character, pointing out that the “extraordinary brutality” of American life had reinforced the solidity of the American capitalist class. He went on to offer a trenchant list of bullet points, in which he displayed once again the combination of brilliance and sarcasm he had honed during his years editing the Masses and the Liberator:

  1.Other nations are a mixture of all human types. The Americans were bred from a single type—the type that “leaves home.”

  2.We burn a negro at the stake for the delight of a mob every 4 days.

  3.We sentence our agitators to as many years as the other nations do months. We are as brutal in peace as they were in war.

  The United States had lived through its own accidental uprising, a bourgeois revolution before there was a distinct bourgeoisie and even a proletariat, an upheaval that had produced “very real freedom and democracy,” a successful revolution that had taken place in the past, so that no more revolutions were needed. The importation of foreign or slave labor had perpetuated among American workers the illusion that such freedom and democracy had been extended to them, too, that they were part of a nation of “sovereign citizens.” The working-class movement in America was dominated by “collectivist” foreign professors or, in the case of the IWW (“a wonderful flying squadron of rebels”), by foreign or migrant workers. And the American Federation of Labor, unlike other such associations in the world, endorsed capitalism both politically and practically. “There never was a great native working-class socialist organization in America,” Max concluded his devastating analysis. When he reworked these notes to submit them to Leon Trotsky, he added that the only way to give the handful of true communists working in the United States a chance was to limit the influence of Slavic immigrants on the movement: “The demand of the Third International for an artificial unity is preventing the growth of an American communist movement.”48

  Naturally, Max was also thinking about his friend McKay as he was jotting down his angry notes. He was aware of Claude’s recent departure from the Liberator, under less than ideal circumstances. In fact, the falling-out between Claude and Mike Gold, Max’s anointed successor at the helm of Max’s former magazine, was one of the reasons Max’s former protégé had fled to Russia in the first place. But there were other reasons, too, and Claude took advantage of their reunion in Petrograd to lay them out in vivid detail. He added that he wanted to address them in a book on the situation of Negroes in the United States the Bolsheviks had asked him to write. Claude, the only black man on the Liberator’s editorial board, thought it was self-evident that the future of African Americans would have to be at the center of the class struggle. But no one would agree with him, and no one appeared willing to give race the kind of prominence in the magazine that the proportion of blacks among American workers demanded. Although he was no longer the editor, Max immediately felt he had to defend his magazine. What exactly, he asked, would be the point of alienating the mostly white readers of the Liberator by putting the race problem front and center in the magazine? Approach the subscribers carefully, and they will be more likely to support you. But Claude refused to accept Max’s insidiously practical argument, pointing out that the real problem lay with the magazine’s editors, not with its readers. They had never really discussed race, had they? He remembered a rather telling incident involving Max and himself. Looking for a place to eat on Sixth Avenue, Max and Claude had ended up in a rather seedy establishment. After casting an astonished look around, Max told Claude, “If I were a negro, I couldn’t be anything but a revolutionist.”49

  Claude decided that Max, despite their long-standing friendship, was really an opportunist, someone who was always “in search of the safe path and never striking out for the new if there are any signs of danger ahead.” He pooh-poohed Max’s “romantic notions” about the communist dictatorship, particularly the belief that the successful Bolshevik revolution would automatically end racial and sexual discrimination. Was there really no more anti-Semitism in Russia? Did Max truly believe that the communist leaders could “by a single stroke change the minds of all the fossil-minded, stereotyped and manikin wrecks of humanity that have been warped by hundreds of years of bourgeois traditions and education?”50

  What was at stake in this exchange was not just the situation of blacks in America. On a more personal level, Claude’s letters were objections to his friend’s patronizing tone, to his assumption that McKay was a willful child in need of parental guidance. “This everlastingly infectious smile of mine” had kept the real Claude hidden from Max.51 On some level Max certainly realized their friendship was in jeopardy; hence his decision to include a grainy photograph of a beaming Claude with his report on the angry Russian response to the Curzon Ultimatum, the British demand that the Soviet government scale back its activities in areas close to the British Empire (fig. 32). He wanted to remind the Liberator staff and the magazine’s readers of a man that some of them would have rather forgotten. At the same time, by deciding to feature McKay with his trademark broad, and, yes, infectious grin, visible even in a blurry newsprint picture, he had inadvertently confirmed his friend’s suspicions: Max did not really know much about him.

  Figure 32. Claude McKay in Moscow. From Max Eastman, “Moscow’s Answer,” The Liberator 6.7 (July 1923): 23, EMII.

  Incidentally, Claude did not mention his problems with the Liberator when he published Негры в Америке (The Negroes in America) later that year, and Max in turn kept their exchange out of his autobiography.52 It is obvious that, quite apart from the serious political concerns he had, the bisexual McKay wanted to be loved by his friend. As their correspondence in subsequent years showed, Max did respond, though never as fully as McKay might have hoped.

  It was at the Fourth Congress in Petrograd that Max finally saw Lenin, if only from afar: “a granite mountain of sincerity.”53
And it was there, too, that Max summoned the courage to approach Trotsky, the regime’s war minister, the beginning of the most consequential political relationship of his life. He found Trotsky gracious and quite unlike the cartoons he himself had published in the Liberator. The Russian leader turned out to be most interested in the situation of communism in the United States and pledged his support for a homegrown American workers’ movement. Max, in turn, pledged his support for Trotsky and promised to write an account of his life. Max stood out in Moscow, not so much as a foreigner but as a foreigner among foreigners. He was different from the rest: George Grosz, the German artist, during his visit to Moscow remembered vividly Max’s beautiful, red-soled boots and the fact that his handsome nose was constantly buried in an English–Russian dictionary. And this difference was precisely Max’s ticket to the inner circles of Russian power, which now, as well as in his capacity as Trotsky’s biographer, stood open to him.54

  Eliena found Max a room in Moscow, and it was here Max and she began living together, more by habit than as the result of a deliberate decision. Eliena’s unselfish generosity was an ideal complement to Max’s innate egotism; even the story of Max’s relationship with the infinitely forthcoming Nina of Yalta did not faze her: “I don’t want to possess you.” In his autobiography Max qualified his description by adding that Eliena was so forgiving only to those she loved. Her flashes of anger, the hardening of her blue-gray eyes into undisguised hatred would be experienced by many of Max’s extramarital lovers in later years.55 Older and more experienced than she, his hair turning white, but equipped with a taste for adventure as well as deep appreciation for her sense of humor, Max was the perfect lover for Eliena, a youthful substitute for the father she was still mourning. What’s more, he came from a country that had long interested her. Eliena had been familiar with Mark Twain ever since her beloved father read Huckleberry Finn to her, and one can only imagine the effect Max’s explanation that he had not only read but also personally known Mark Twain would have had on her.

  In April 1923 Max attended the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party. The ablest brains of the establishment were discussing ways in which to make a socialized economy profitable for their citizens, and while the debates confirmed Max’s belief in the seriousness of the Bolsheviks, they also intensified his desire to get out of Moscow. In addition, work on his Trotsky biography had been complicated by the fact that he was now also planning to write a novel. He needed time away from the rulers and wanted to experience life among the ruled. Albert recommended Sochi on the Black Sea, Eliena convinced Litvinov that Max as well as the party needed her services, and Max purchased tickets for the train and the trip by steamboat down the Volga in search of the next chapter of his Russian adventure.56

  Sochi was not as established and storied a resort as Yalta. But the discovery of the curative power of the mineral springs during the last tsar’s regime had turned it into a destination of sorts for the middle classes and especially for Jewish tourists, who were not allowed in the Imperial spas. Bathhouses, dachas, and modest inns sprouted along the coast of the Black Sea. In 1919 Lenin nationalized all resorts in an attempt to make them accessible to workers, peasants, and members of the Red Army. Private clinics and villas were transformed into sanatoria, catering to patients with conditions ranging from eczema and digestive disorders to syphilis. Max, Albert, and Eliena arrived in Sochi during a time of unprecedented growth, when the number of patients in search of cures increased from a few dozen in 1920 to several thousands in 1925.57

  Max and Eliena, who had no money at all, lived in the front room of a sparsely furnished cottage they shared with the landlady and her two lady friends, Ruzha and a girl Max nicknamed Gipsey. “They killed ’em all,” the landlady said when asked where the men were. She didn’t miss the tsar, but the Bolsheviks had turned out to be much worse: “I want to be free and do what I like and I was free before and did what I liked. Now I’m not.” One of her friends interjected that, though she was not a communist, it seemed pretty clear to her they had arrived at “a certain page in history, and we’ve got to live it.” The “Bolsh” had done some terrible things, but conditions hadn’t been great before; nobody with a minimum of social consciousness could have been satisfied. But the landlady was not happy: “I hate the Bolsheviks that’s all; they are murderers.” Max had obviously advanced considerably in his ability to understand idiomatic Russian. Now he was no longer translating Lermontov; he was transcribing phrases from the conversations he was having with ordinary people, people who would say things like “Russia is the rubbish hole of the world” and “The Bolsh took you by the neck; that’s all.”58

  The pages of his journal were beginning to be populated with creatures so real that one wonders if Max invented them. There is the little man with the face of a monkey, for example, who tells him he is a monarchist and then immediately corrects himself: “No, I’ll tell you I’m a party communist.” Max asks him if he is afraid. No, says the man, he’s not afraid, but he’d rather die: “I don’t see anything in life right now. If you can’t live comme il faut, I don’t see any use living.” What did he mean by comme il faut? Well, says the man, “I want to have good meals served to me and good clothes, and 2 servants, and be free to go and come. I don’t want to live the way a soviet tells me to. I want to be free.” But, responds Max, shouldn’t those two servants then have a right to have two servants as well? Things aren’t that simple, after all. Well, says Monkey-face, “I’m not political you see, and I’ve just told you my feelings, they aren’t what you want after all. I want to go away from Russia.” Adds Max, in his journal, “All of them want to go away from Russia.”59

  It was in Sochi, too, that Max met a cousin of the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, living in the most abject poverty imaginable, a shadow of his former self, surrounded by his exquisitely mannered, beautiful, emaciated wife, his partially paralyzed daughter, his mother-in-law, her sister, and a granddaughter. Franz Xaver Winterhalter, a painter popular with the royals of Europe, had painted Rimsky-Korsakov’s mother, Madame Barbe de Rimsky-Korsakov, a legendary beauty (the portrait was, and still is, in the Louvre). Rimsky-Korsakov spoke English like a native, and Max was struck by the contrast between the family’s aristocratic manners and their torn clothes and dirty surroundings. Their little granddaughter, about five years old, played with the family’s sickly looking cats and rabbits. These people had owned estates in Russia and Nice, had been friends with the Vanderbilts and the duchess of Marlborough. He didn’t mind the loss of his lands and servants, said Rimsky-Korsakov: “That’s all humbug, I’m glad to be done with it.” Their house had no windows, no carpets, and no water, and the tea they drank was made from chestnuts. Without friends they would be starving. Would the whole world become socialist? “Somehow we live.” In his autobiography, at the end of a more fully imagined account of the afternoon he spent with the Rimsky-Korsakovs, Max added he was glad he had “no fixed system of ideas” in his head that would have prevented him from admiring this once and, as far as he was concerned, still noble family.60

  • • •

  In August 1923 Max was summoned to Kislovodsk, a spa city in the northern Caucasus, where Trotsky was recovering from the mysterious illness that had removed him—tragically, as Max would come to realize—from any influence of Moscow politics. At about the same time, Eliena went back to her job with Litvinov in Moscow. Max’s time in Kislovodsk, where, incidentally, he could have seen the five-year-old Alexander Solzhenitsyn running around in the streets, was a huge disappointment. Max’s ego had just gotten a huge boost by the news that Scribner’s had sent him a check for $500 in royalties from sales of The Sense of Humor. But Trotsky, too busy to see him, treated him as if he didn’t exist. Max did, much to his surprise, run into Isadora Duncan, an encounter that made his Caucasus experience even more surreal than it already was. Isadora, accompanied by Irma, had just emerged from her unhappy, brief marriage with Sergei Yesenin, known for both his poetry and
his drunken excesses. Max took them to lunch but afterward escaped. Although he was badly in need of company, he disliked her penchant for lecturing. And he did not want to be reminded of his former involvement with Isadora and her girls, preferring instead to wallow in loneliness and depression, a “depression do smierti” (unto death), as he wrote to the now-absent Eliena in the characteristic mix of English and Russian phrases he adopted whenever he was too tired or too frustrated to write in Russian.61