He was seized with the acute feeling that he didn’t belong there: “My love of the proletarian dictatorship is exactly equaled by my horror at the proletarian table manners,” he wrote acidly, after unhappily turning down food in the dining room of a local sanatorium because everyone around him was eating and talking at the same time. To Max, the noisy eaters around him sounded like so many electric ceiling fans gone out of control.62 After an abortive attempt to buy some raspberries in the market (too expensive!), he sat down and vented his frustration in Russian verse:
Without Eliena, without berries,
Without each of these delights,
There is nothing left for Max here,
There is only “Trotsky’s Life!”
Max added, “I am so lonely and tired, good for absolutely nothing. I am languishing. I am lying on the bed, and I do not know where I am, or why.”63 There were minor irritations. For example, no one in town seemed to know how to properly roast coffee beans. But they loomed large in his mind, and he found himself dreaming of a “plentiful and perfect life” for both himself and Eliena in Sochi. His mastery of Russian was improving, though the finer points of Russian grammar still eluded him. In an encounter both funny and poignant, he found himself chatting up a woman who proved to be a deaf-mute. Drenched in sweat, shrieking Russian phrases at her, he was wondering why she wouldn’t respond to him, as an interested audience gathered around them, curious how long it would take that slow-witted, stubborn American to figure out the problem.64
Max reached the pinnacle of despair when he ignored the mysterious suggestion made by one of Trotsky’s couriers that he board a certain train to Moscow “biez platno” (for free), only to find out later that Trotsky—and a Trotsky willing to talk!—would have been on it. To make matters worse, he learned that Eliena, whom he, if he had only taken that accursed train, could have easily visited in the Russian capital, had come down with malaria: “Why couldn’t that fool tell me or ask Trotsky’s permission to tell me that he was going to Moscow?”65 Guilt-ridden and despondent about his ability to complete his Trotsky biography, he began to pelt Eliena with missives reminding her to take her quinine: “If you should be sick, then I should die.”66 He was now writing notes to her several times a day. She was his lover-friend, his “mother-child,” and, perhaps the most off-putting epithet, his “brown baby-slave.” He addressed her as his liagushka (лягушка, or frog), his “funny Elena,” while referring to himself, in his all-time favorite fantasy of wished-for relief from adult responsibility, as “half-grown.” He was Eliena’s “egoistic, impatient, impolite, nasty, shrieking . . . infant.”67
Once he was back in his old digs in Sochi, Max rallied. This was, he realized, a writer’s paradise. The flea population had diminished since his last stay, and here he was, in a warm, beautiful place, with direct access to the railroad, but far away from the carpings of his colleagues and the political shenanigans in Moscow. He was ecstatically happy about the “velvety and wild” sea and basked in the sun that was “loving all the animals and birds and the race of man.”68 Thanks to regular swims in the sea Max was in better shape than ever. He felt transformed: wonderful and young and strong and “very handsome,” as he concluded after a peek into his little mirror, and he didn’t mind anymore that Albert, who had set up camp outside of Sochi, had better clothes.69 Conveniently, his landlady’s friend, the almond-eyed Gipsey, proved to be more than forthcoming, too, as did the girl who came in to clean up his room, experiences he freely shared with Eliena: “Gipsey very much wanted to seduce me, and I said, ‘very well.’ . . . This was yesterday evening (Wednesday), but today when I reported this news to my Liza, she said, ‘That’s something of a pity’ so sweetly that I repented, and also told her ‘very well.’”70 Although Gipsey was, in her own assessment, “entirely without sexual passion,” she seemed eager to please Max, who in turn was, he unashamedly told Eliena, “learning to demand of her what I want just as though I had a right to it.”71 It is hard to tell whether these passages were descriptions of actual events or merely intended to entice Eliena away from Moscow. Either way, it was obvious he missed her.
Max was now hard at work on his novel, which gave him so much more pleasure than that infernal Trotsky biography. “Darling, my love, I have written one chapter of my novel! I have no other thought and no other literary interest now but that novel. It is going to be rich and exciting and wise and wonderful. You must come and help me. Do you still think you would like to be my secretary?” It was high time for her to leave “nice fat young Litvinov” behind and come to work for him.72 “You told me not too long ago that I was just as important as Litvinov.—Not the biggest compliment I ever received, but I remembered it just the same.”73 His manuscript was progressing faster than he had expected: “I believe in it absolutely almost all the time. I realize it so vividly myself that I believe other people must also.” Still, Max was being careful. Don’t tell anyone I am writing a novel, he warned Eliena: “I don’t want people waiting for it the way they did for my humor book.” The novel had become his all-consuming purpose in life, and finishing it, “without ever stopping,” a matter of life or death. “I want to do something with all my heart once before I die,” exclaimed Max, a little dramatically: “I don’t know what I will be or what I will do after this book, I only know that I will defy every expectation, and betray every duty that people think I have, in order to finish it.” He was ready to offer Eliena a contract as a secretary, but without any emotional entanglements “or agreement and responsibility between us even for one minute.”74
Eliena did come, but Max, falling back into a pattern of behavior that at this point would have seemed numbingly familiar even to him, found he liked her much better when she was away. Infinitely understanding, Eliena went back to Moscow. She returned once more in December, but by mid-January she realized Max needed solitude and left again. Soon, Max’s private troubles paled in comparison with the political ones. On January 23, 1924, shouts of “Monsieur Max! Monsieur Max!” interrupted his work. Gipsey stormed into this room to tell him, with some elation, that Lenin was dead. Upset with her behavior, Max became uncharacteristically violent. He grabbed Gipsey and threw her out of the room: “And you greet this rumor with open arms,” he exclaimed. “I despise you! I despise you!” Outside, the sea was “silent as a pool,” and Max walked around town with sadness in his heart, unable to think or speak, flabbergasted that the world around him went on living as if the greatest man in history hadn’t just died.75 In Moscow Eliena was among those who paid their respects to the dead Lenin, and she went away feeling “quite sick.”76
As it was for hundreds of thousands of mourners, Lenin’s death was a key event for Max. Throughout the meanderings of his political career Max never significantly wavered in his admiration of the leader of the Bolshevik revolution, even after he had long given up on communism. Lenin was a “very great man,” he told Harry Schwartz of the New York Times in 1963, the one man he had known who was able to be both an “ardent rebel” and a “patient adjuster and teacher,” driven by practicality. Lenin had always refused to make a “divinity” out of communism: “Had his premises been scientific, he would have been a social and political engineer par excellence.”77
When news of Lenin’s death reached him, Trotsky was in Tbilisi. He had been ill for most of the winter, after catching cold during a hunt in the marsh country north of Moscow—a wish come true for his rival Stalin, who was busy securing his right to the throne. Stalin advised Trotsky it would be impossible for him to reach Moscow in time for Lenin’s funeral, and so Trotsky went on to the coast, to Sukhumi, about ninety miles east of Sochi. When Lenin was buried and radio stations all over the republic broadcast messages asking listeners to stand up, Trotsky hunkered down, wrapped in blankets, on the terrace of his luxury hotel.78
In Sochi it was snowing, snowing, snowing. The entire town was now covered by a white, heavy, wet blanket of snow. Max felt lonelier than he had ever been before. There w
ere no new letters from Eliena, and he feared his own letters weren’t reaching her either. “I feel . . . as if I cannot survive here,” he told Eliena. The situation was made worse by Eliena’s hints that she might be pregnant. “I thought that maybe you would say something about the baby in your telegram? No baby?”79
At least he was working again. He was reading Moby-Dick and writing an essay that threatened to become much larger, “The Wisdom of Lenin,” perhaps the germ of Since Lenin Died, the book Max would publish a year later. “There is no more important book in the world today,” Max observed immodestly.80 When Trotsky told him by telegram that he could not see him (“in view of my illness, better later in Moscow”), the news came as a great relief to Max, who took it as a sign from on high he didn’t have to finish his biography and could settle for a snapshot of his early life.81
In his personal life Max saw himself trapped in a vicious circle where he both wanted to be independent and needed someone to take care of him. At the age of forty-one Max felt entirely unprepared to face life’s challenges on his own. “There is only one way to get peace, only one way to get my head clear, and that is to leave you forever,” he wrote to Eliena in a letter he ultimately decided not to send. He claimed, paradoxically, “I could never do that alone. I could never do that except by falling in love with somebody else.” He had, it seemed to him, two alternatives: “One is to struggle towards clearness and creative joy alone, where my obstacle is this dreadful grief accompanied with dim-mindedness and strained feelings in my head. The other is to struggle for it with you, where the obstacle is that emotional coldness accompanied by the same dim-mindedness and strained feelings.” He was, alternately, a yearning infant or a rebelling man, or maybe both at the same time: an impossible conflict and one that was going to harm his writing. His only hope consisted of going to Vienna “and asking Freud to recommend me a psycho-analyst.” Apparently, Max never expected that the great Freud himself would have time to take him on as a patient. A touchingly domestic image of Eliena mending his pajamas rose before Max’s inner eye. He now felt that being with Eliena was really the better of the two options. Besides, Moscow was closer to Freud.82
Once he was in Moscow Max took full advantage of the resources of the Library of the Marx–Engels Institute, where he made the mistake of reading Lenin’s Materialism and Empiro-Criticism, which he found to be joyless to a sobering degree (“a political harangue”).83 He attended the Thirteenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party and watched first Trotsky mount a lackluster, unconvincing defense of his position and then Stalin and Zinoviev dance on the dead body of Trotsky’s vanished influence. But Max’s major achievement during those months in Moscow was finishing his book about Trotsky, which he had now wisely limited to the revolutionary’s early years.
Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth (1925) is a peculiar work, marked by a quiet and largely unrecognized brilliance. In form and style Max’s book is a self-conscious, literary effort to capture some of the qualities of a man who was himself quite a literary person. Max disavowed the American edition, published in New York by the Greenberg brothers. New to publishing, the Greenbergs had been none too careful about seeking their author’s final approval for the text they sent to the printer. Max made sure that the British edition, released a year later under the new Faber and Gwyer imprint (where T. S. Eliot was working as an editor), was without the idiosyncrasies that were, from a literary point of view, one of the highlights of the first printing. In the original American text the repertoire of styles Max employs is remarkable. In the early chapters about Trotsky’s childhood, for example, he appears to imitate the language of children’s books: “And here there were comfortable chairs,” the narrator tells us about the hut, with its “fat brown roof,” in which Trotsky grew up, “a table, an immense square stove, and on top of the stove a great big sleepy-eyed cat.” Outside, the Ukrainian landscape looks as if we had accidentally burst into the middle of a Russian fairy tale: “It is all snowy white outside, and the drifts curve half way upon the low windows, and it is all warm inside, and tender and friendly and unworried.” Max’s syntax is often deliberately clunky, with the object following after the adverbial phrase, as in this sentence about young Trotsky: “He was printing with his pen a little magazine.” Such grammatical idiosyncrasies create a deliberately foreignizing effect, offset, in other passages, by a direct, familiar, even colloquial tone: “What you see in his blue eyes is goodness,” writes Max about Trotsky. “His mouth is sensuous and happy in its curve; and there is always the readiness for a social dimple in his cheek.”84
Throughout this short book Max is able to draw for us, with a few quick strokes of the pen, the key settings in which Trotsky’s political evolution takes place, from the school in Odessa to his mentor Franz Shvigovsky’s garden in Nikolayev to Trotsky’s jail cell and his exile in the Siberian village of Ust-Kut. Like the dimples in Trotsky’s face, Max’s prose is capable of hardening into “iron ruts,” especially when he confronts those who, from the secure position of exile, attack Trotsky. The biographer’s special ire is reserved for those who, for tendentious or personal reasons, malign Trotsky in print, as did one of his former fellow revolutionaries: “If a worm could snarl,” declares Max, “it would make a noise like Doctor Zif’s book.” Max’s own language, concrete, earthy, direct, with a distinct preference given to Anglo-Saxon words, reflects the continuing influence of Whitman, as when Max informs us that young Trotsky’s tongue was “full of the brag of its extreme opinions.” Memorable vignettes of characters or scenes in Trotsky’s life occur in every chapter. What reader could forget the watery-eyed, bewhiskered police inspector in Verkholensk who can be seen peering, every night around ten, through the slightly lifted trapdoor in Trotsky’s attic—that is, until Trotsky vigorously aims his boot in the direction of the policeman’s self-important face. The inspector never showed up again.85
There is a fair amount of humor in the book, too, leavening the drier passages dealing with Trotsky’s political development. Again, Max seems to model his writing after Trotsky’s, whose own wit shines through in the excerpts Max inserts: “It was not Neyman but his salary that made the speech,” Trotsky is quoted as having said about an engineer who tried to discourage his workers from rebelling. When Trotsky admits his “verses are bad,” Max follows suit: “And his critical judgment, I may add, is very good.” A highlight is Max’s characterization of the corrupt prison guard in Kherson whose face carries “the expression of Christian benevolence with a market value of ten gold rubles”—paid for, naturally, by Trotsky’s mother—as he delivers tea, a pillow, and a blanket, and “some good things to eat” to his prisoner. Such humor may turn into cutting irony when Max’s own political opinions color his prose. This, for example, is his comment on Trotsky’s taking on the postmaster of Ust-Kut for refusing to hand him his mail: “Trotsky is one of those unreasonable beings who never give up the idea that things are supposed to be just.”86
Max’s overall aim in the book was to illustrate Trotsky’s development from a “littérateur” to a “social engineer,” or Bolshevik, a role he knew his readers would have some trouble comprehending. Thus, whatever passing familiarity with Trotsky this biography generates inevitably collides with a contrary impulse that insists on Trotsky’s strangeness: “He has, to be sure, a faculty of burning absorption in problems of mere truth which you and I, chilly Anglo-Saxons, might fail to understand.” Max is not, he admits, “a really conscientious biographer,” and he has no interest in judging Trotsky for the ways in which he has arranged his romantic life: “Natalia Ivanovna is not Trotsky’s wife, if you have a perfectly legal American mind, for Trotsky was never divorced from Alexandra Lvovna.” And Alexandra, “to sum up a number of things that are not the business of a contemporary biographer,” defies American popular expectations by having remained Trotsky’s friend. Max’s own lingering disappointment with Trotsky shines through only occasionally. For instance, Trotsky is, he admits, not a good liste
ner, and he lacks a clear sense of the feelings of other people. A brilliant orator and thinker, a charismatic commander and inspirer, Trotsky is “not great as a leader of men.”87
That said, Trotsky’s weaknesses are not unfamiliar to Max: the battle Trotsky had to fight within himself was Max’s own. Trotsky started out as a follower of Plato, that first communist, as it were. Ideas were more interesting and real to him than things. For an intellectual of that “static” type, and Max would definitely have been thinking of himself as he wrote these words, ideas become “a kind of daily companion and redeemer of our world, consoling us with an extreme ‘belief’ about its future and yet leaving us free to patch it up in little ways less disturbing and more ready to our hand.” Believing, in this manner, in an idea meant getting stuck on it. It meant resisting those who would undertake to put it into action and thus disturb one’s inner equilibrium.
But, noted Max with relief, Trotsky had left that phase behind. He was no Menshevik, a reference to the members of the reformist faction of the Russian socialist movement. A true Bolshevik, he was a scientist of the revolution and a staunch believer in the need for immediate change: “Trotsky means action down to the last letter of every word that comes out of his mouth.” Appropriately, Max’s book ends not with a glimpse at the current situation in Russia but with Lenin designating Trotsky as the man in whom he had the utmost confidence when faced with the prospect of his death. On the last page of Max’s book Trotsky had not yet failed to step up to the task for which history had prepared him. Everything was still possible.88
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