Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  That, however, was a feeling Max no longer shared. His decision to go home was set. Yet implementing it proved difficult, since Max, a persona non grata in his own country, had no valid passport. To complicate things even further, Eliena had, years ago, by carrying a letter for her anarchist sister Sophia, managed to get herself on the blacklist of the GPU, the Russian secret service. When she applied for a diplomatic passport that would help her leave Russia, she was told that her only chance of obtaining such a document was to be willing to accept more such letters and send them on to the secret service. A sympathetic Litvinov advised her to agree: “You don’t have to do it, you know.” But Max quickly realized that while such a piece of paper would get Eliena out of the country it would not allow her to stay abroad unless a way could be found to have her added to Max’s passport, if and when he finally got one. On June 3, 1924, Max and Eliena were married. While Max hunted down the required witnesses, Eliena had gone home to pack: “I suppose I am the only man in history that ever got married without a bride.”89

  Max and Eliena arrived in Folkestone, England, armed with an impressive looking but useless temporary document issued by the British trade representative in Moscow, who probably hadn’t even been authorized to sign such a thing. With the help of U.S. Senator Robert La Follette’s son, “Young Bob,” he secured a regular passport, whereupon Max and Eliena relocated to Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera, a sun-warmed, lush Mediterranean paradise, a Sochi without the communists. Max’s hope was that, surrounded by pine trees, fine-grained sand beaches, and spectacular ocean views, he would be able to finish the various projects he had begun in Sochi. They moved into a pension called Martha, where Max commenced his writing regime and Eliena, although still shaky in her command of English, typed his manuscripts and washed his shirts in a well. A hard man to keep on the porch, Max soon embarked on a trip to Paris, ostensibly to seek treatment for a bad case of sciatica he had developed, leaving Eliena at home trying to make the best of a hopeless situation: “Every woman in the dining room tries to ask me some question,” she wrote to Max in Paris, “and they all speak so low, and are so far from me, and I do not expect this sudden question or some other invitation for a talk, that I can only say ‘what.’” Realizing she shouldn’t say, “What?” but “Pardon?,” Eliena is too busy to catch the next question, and again “What?” slips out of her lips before she can stop it. Now, yet another lady weighs in and repeats the question. Eliena’s response would be instantly familiar to anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language out of a textbook: “I dimly understand that it is something about my being alone, and how it must be dull. I smile to both old ladies and say, ‘O, yes, it is very dull, but it is such beautiful weather.’” There were no further questions.90

  In France, Max formally inaugurated the experiment in free love that was going to preoccupy him for the rest of his life. While poor Eliena, recalling her jealous mother, did her best to keep her part of the deal, allowing herself to be kissed at a party and accepting a ride from a man “so slim and beautiful” that her desire was “quite contradictory to my words,” she would inevitably forget to act the libertine and incautiously tell Max she loved him. Max was not amused. “I will not say ‘love’ again,” she apologized. In Juan-les-Pins every day was the same, she told Max in Paris. They were flowing by, she wrote, “like a water in the river; every moment new but always the same, making the same noise around the little stone.” Eliena played tennis, went for bicycle rides, and waited for her husband to return, though she would tell him she didn’t.91 Max’s Paris excursion had meanwhile changed from a medical mission (the doctor told him that he was a rather “mild case”) to a trip down the halls of past erotic exploits. “I love Lisa and I always will,” Max told Eliena after reconnecting with the dancer Lisa Duncan. “It is sweet to find her still so exquisite, composed, and tender and slowly wise.” If Eliena had had any doubts how serious Max was about his open-marriage concept, there was the proof. “It was a joy to be so loved so well,” chirped Max after spending time with Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband, Eugen Boissevain: “They are darlings together.” Everybody was excited by how tanned and healthy Max seemed. “Look at him! Isn’t he beautiful?” exclaimed Ganna Walska, the Polish opera singer and new owner of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.92

  Max did return to Eliena, but it became quickly apparent that some radical changes were needed and that Max wasn’t the one who would be making them. He did have some income, a “trickle” of royalty checks from his Enjoyment of Poetry, even less money from his Sense of Humor, and an advance for the American rights to his Trotsky biography. But that was not enough to live on. In December 1924 Eliena took action. She left Juan-les-Pins and went to Paris herself, where she had found a position as a secretary at the Russian embassy. “How terribly hard it is for you to take up that kind of work after our life here,” sighed Max in Juan-les-Pins and redoubled his efforts to bed a “bushy-haired” French tennis partner he had his eyes on (he was successful).93 Not that Max was lazy: following his well-established routine of getting up in the morning and beginning to write come what may, he worked assiduously. But when Eliena unexpectedly sent a large check, Max was just fine with that, too: “Beloved, I just got your telegram your love, love, and the enormous sum of five hundred francs! O my darling, how I love to have you feed and clothe me! I am just like a little selfish animal. And I love you with all my heart and soul and stomach and warm cozy skin, which I have just dressed in a new big thick suit of underwear!”94 In Paris Eliena pointed out that that was only half of what she was due to receive for two weeks’ work at the embassy: “Am I not your molodetzt? Am I not your little zhabochka?” (freely translated, “Am I not doing a good job for you? Am I not your little frog”?).95

  Newly flush, Max ambled over to the Château des Enfants, a villa owned by the eccentric leftist photographer George Davison, who had formerly worked as a manager for the British branch of Kodak, where he became the largest shareholder after George Eastman himself, the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company. Was Max tickled by this connection to his remote relative? The man who liked to refer to his lovers as children wholeheartedly embraced the notion of a house dedicated to the idea of permanently arrested development and had no problem partaking of Davison’s famous hospitality. The Château des Enfants served as an open house for many sorts of washed-up artistic existences and anarchists from all over the world. It helped that the cliffs behind Davison’s house were about twelve feet high, towering over a deep blue ocean perfect for swimming and diving.

  On Christmas Eve twenty-nine guests from ten nations had assembled at the house, and things quickly got out of hand. Max danced till five in the morning, no doubt working on his romance with “Bushy Hair,” who had told him she was the daughter of a marquis, inspiring a fantasy in which Max acted the part of the seedy “Bolshevik Agent” and she that of a besieged, virginal aristocrat. She loved what Max told her about his open marital arrangements and, Max reported to Eliena, said “she would like to take your place when you go away, and then go away when you come back.” But not to worry, he added, “I love you with all my heart. (And I love my five hundred francs, and I wear it next to my heart all the time.)”96

  Was that the reason Eliena sought out one of her former lovers in Paris? Except that for her, things didn’t go as smoothly as they had for Max. Her former lover (perhaps the man she was crying over when Max met her in Genoa?) was a beautiful boy with daring, sad eyes but now, to her horror, marked by disease. Tears ran from her eyes. Eliena also went to see Max’s Lisa Duncan, which did not go well. Yes, conceded Max, she was “really very hard to talk to.” Max had never deceived Eliena about his intentions regarding their marriage, but throughout the three decades they spent together it seems the open-marriage concept worked much better for him than for her. Alone in Paris, fending off the advances of Max’s friend George Slocombe, she was preoccupied either with what was going on in Russia or with what Max was doing in southeastern
France. The attempts to discredit Trotsky that filled the pages of Pravda made her heart beat so hard that she thought it would jump out of her chest.97

  As liberated as Eliena was in some ways, when it came to matters of sexuality she often balked. She even had a preferred term for going to the bathroom, which she called using the Lloyd George, a disparaging reference to the British prime minister.98 When the French Ministry of Agriculture sent a kind of mobile cinema around the countryside to show the peasants how to work scientifically on their fields, Eliena felt very uncomfortable, not only because she was watching the film surrounded by farmers who had eaten a lot of garlic but also because of the subject matter, which appeared neprilichny (improper) to her: “They started showing how to transfer female organs of wheat unto the male organs of it.” She added, probably only half-jokingly, that she was “awfully shocked” and had to run home.99

  Figures 33 and 34. Eliena and Max in Antibes, ca. 1924. EMIIA1.

  Her longing for Max, however, made her bold (figs. 33, 34). Alone in Paris, she was constantly thinking about how he would touch her. “Oh I love you, I love you. My passion to [sic] you is as great as my love,” she scribbled on a piece of paper. “Why it doesn’t go away, in spite of two years we are together, why you always make my blood flow violently when I see or feel a hint of passion in you, why you always make my flesh alive by only the touch of your darling hand or body. Oh I love you, I am crying now.” Here she was, using the dreaded word again. Eliena carried that little note with her for two weeks. But then she sent it anyway, admitting, in a sentence she added, that such talk was “neprilichny.” Would he please return the note to her once he had read it? But Eliena’s declaration of love, the description of her blood flowing at the mere suggestion of a reciprocal feeling in Max, in all its rawness survives her self-mocking postscript.100 And Max, despite his antics, despite the aloofness hinted at in Eliena’s note, always knew what he had in her, too.

  Thanks to Eliena’s new income Max was able to join her in Paris and to work on the book that would best express his shock over what he saw as Stalin’s hijacking of the Russian revolution. Since Lenin Died, published in 1925 by the Labour Publishing Company in London and subsequently by Boni and Liveright in New York, picks up where Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth had ended. A small volume, it went a long way toward establishing Max as a voice in debates about the future of communism. It also warned loyal fans of Bolshevism that Max was going to be trouble. From the first page of his book Max set himself up as the person most suitable to explain Russia to the uncomprehending rest of the world. And he wasted no time either in defining the divisions that would come to haunt Russia for the next few decades and to name the culprit behind that division, the Communist Party of Russia: “Nothing that has happened in Russia has been so misunderstood by the entire Western world as the crisis in the Communist Party which has thrown into a silenced opposition men like Trotsky, Rakovsky, Radek, Antonov, Pitiakov, Krestinsky, Preobrazhensky, and many more of the intimate friends and aides of Lenin, and concentrated the whole ruling power in the hands of a group dominated by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev.”101 As an opening sentence, this was nothing short of brilliant. The phrase “silenced opposition” demonstrated Max’s skill as a writer, as did the two lists he created, the first containing the many names of those that had been forced into dissent, the second, of those actually in charge, citing only three names, an effective illustration of the power that was supposed to belong to the people remaining in the hands of a few party leaders. The name-dropping, ranging from the familiar to the unfamiliar and almost unpronounceable, at least for most Western readers, spoke to Max’s expertise.

  As the book progresses, Stalin emerges as Max’s main adversary. It was he who, assisted by the Politburo, branded Trotsky an “enemy of Leninism,” even though Lenin had so clearly designated him a successor. Stalin had purposely misrepresented Trotsky’s motives. Trotsky had never wanted the old Bolshevik leadership to relinquish power; instead he advocated the gradual introduction of actual proletarians into the party, a vision Stalin ridiculed by admitting, in a deliberately absurd move, two hundred thousand workers at once. Max, for his part, mocks the Communist Party establishment as a “gang of mediocre bad boys” determined to make the world “an impossible place for mature people.” People might object that his book was more concerned with the moral character of the revolutionaries than with the fate of the revolution and that his book might be altogether “too personal.” But Max won’t have any of that: “I have but little interest in personal indignation.”102 Wherever he can, Max insists it is not he who is on a personal vendetta but the Soviet bureaucracy. They are the ones using Marxian ideas as “weapons in a personal fight,” a fight that has taken them further and further away from the ideals of Lenin. Listen to Max’s description of Lenin, a man he had met only once: “Nobody who has not seen Lenin or read his books can possibly imagine the force of that man’s will, and his intellectual authority. It was a phenomenon like Niagara, which the strongest men could not merely stand by and watch.” As a father figure, Lenin was almost too powerful, leaving behind a large family of childlike orphans. Among these, Trotsky alone had the capacity to act and think independently. As Leninism became canonized (a development Trotsky described as fatal) and the Communist Party transformed into a church, the task had fallen to Trotsky to keep alive “the thinking of Lenin after his brain is dead and embalmed.” Trotsky, rightly, was concerned with concrete situations and the solutions of concrete problems, but now he found himself opposed by “abstract dogmatists.” And he was unprepared for that. To Max, Trotsky was a hero, but, unfortunately, a flawed one, an imperfect son, not equipped to take the reins from the Ur-father Lenin, whose only and most powerful weapon had been “the simple device of saying all he thought.” When it mattered, when, after Lenin’s death, everyone was waiting for a word from him, Trotsky had remained silent. Max said he himself had observed, with great irritation, a reluctance on Trotsky’s part to “explain himself.” Max clearly saw himself as being on a mission to make Trotsky speak and, failing that, to speak for him—as the more responsible spiritual son of Lenin, the strong, outspoken father he himself had never had.103

  Scattered throughout the book were references to Lenin’s “Testament,” a document Lenin’s wife had presented to the Party Congress, in which he advocated the removal of Stalin as secretary of the party and praised Trotsky as the outstanding member of the Central Committee. That letter had been locked away and, were it not for Max’s efforts, would have been permanently lost to the world.104

  As Max was wrestling with problems of paternal succession in Russian communism, his own father, after catching a cold during an automobile ride, fell ill. Samuel Eastman had left Elmira in December 1924 for Daytona, Florida, where he had built himself a small house. By February 7, 1925, the elder Eastman was dead. He was seventy-eight years old, and he slipped away as quietly as he had lived. Max’s reaction is not reported. Years later, when he began writing the story of his family, Max found out how miserable his father’s last years had been. His cousin Adra had, reluctantly and on many occasions, opened her home to “Uncle Sam,” who was in love with her: “I’ve had many a difficult situation to handle with him,” she told Max. “I doubt if anyone knows as much as I how sexually starved he was.” For years, she had kept Sam’s behavior a secret.105

  Moscow’s response to Max’s new book came swiftly, in the form of a telegram sent by Georgy Chicherin ordering Eliena back to Moscow. She declined and promptly lost her job at the embassy, though she was allowed to keep her diplomatic passport. Max had hoped to force Trotsky into speaking up, and indeed he did, though hardly the way Max had expected. In various newspapers he denied that Max’s book had any theoretical or political importance, denounced his absurd and subjective conclusions, disputed the existence of Lenin’s “Testament,” and accused him of aiding the enemies of communism. Pro-Stalinist Western papers quickly reprinted Trotsky’s statements, so
lidifying Max’s newly acquired reputation as a counterrevolutionary.106 The fact that L’Humanité published two divergent versions of Trotsky’s refutation (the later one was supposed to be “le texte définitive”) suggested that Trotsky had agonized over this statement. But that was cold comfort to Max, who was busy defending himself in letters sent to publications in England, France, and the United States.107 Max Eastman was a liar, exclaimed C. M. Roebuck in a review of Max’s book for the Workers Monthly. Roebuck, who was in reality Andrew Rothstein, the press liaison of the Soviet embassy in London, took Max to task for his “distortions and untruths,” which would do nothing but smooth the way for an eventual military attack by the West on Soviet Russia.

  Chillingly, he added that a book like Max’s should serve as a warning to Trotsky himself to “give up [his] futile policy and buckle to again.” Max was a bourgeois coward. Unfortunately, there were many others like Max who, after having wandered into the Communist Party by mistake, suddenly discovered that its aim was to lead the workers to revolt against capitalism rather than providing an “opera stage where individual heroes hack at one another with paper swords.” Would Max really want to be remembered as having inspired disagreement with the only party that really fought the battles of the workers?108 Amid the barrage of negative criticism Max was able to take heart, however, from comments sent to him by Claude McKay, the only one of his former leftist friends in the States who seemed to have liked the book: “Whatever happens to Trotsky this little book of yours will live. . . . An electric thrill runs through it from beginning to end.”109

  Sam Eastman had left Max some money, which, along with Eliena’s savings and Max’s earnings from royalties, allowed them to move back to Juan-les-Pins and join the ranks of the cheerful exiles at the Château des Enfants. Since Max had nothing to lose, he redoubled his efforts to complete his wide-ranging assault on the foundations of dialectical materialism, a project he now felt more liberated to undertake. Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution, the most scholarly book he had ever written, with over forty pages of “Notes and References,” preoccupied him for the rest of the year. It required additional trips to Paris, where he was still grudgingly allowed to use the library of the Russian embassy, although the works of Lenin strangely always seemed to be locked up when Max came to consult them, and “nobody ever knows where the key is.”110