Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  Various trips enlivened Max’s writing routine. On a trip to Corsica the small seaplane on which he was traveling crashed, and Max and the pilot had to wait for hours before they were rescued from where they were drifting in the Atlantic Ocean. The French destroyer that scooped them up had been alerted—by the pilot’s carrier pigeon. Less exciting though more satisfying was Max’s time in Munich, where, not normally given to drinking, he discovered the delights of German beer: “Such a thing I never tasted in my life.—It is indescribable—cooling and exciting, liquid and thick. I taste it yet, and it is an hour since I drank it.”111

  Max and Eliena also explored Austria, dropping in on a somewhat surprised Stefan Zweig in Salzburg. But the constant Austrian rain couldn’t but discourage these devoted worshipers of the sun. Max was miserable. Remembering his long-standing desire to meet the idol of his Greenwich Village years, he wrote to Freud and asked for a meeting. Freud rebuffed him. “I know your name,” he responded, in perfect, if formal English, on his stationery with “Prof. Dr. Freud” engraved in the upper left corner, “and I am very sorry that you turned up at a time especially unfavourable.”112 Ailing from the surgeries his jaw cancer had required, Freud had just endured the celebrations of his seventieth birthday and had been ordered to rest by his doctors. His lack of interest certainly didn’t add to Max’s comfort level in Austria. He escaped to France.

  Left behind in St. Gilgen, Eliena wrote a letter to her “golden one,” describing in a postscript written in Russian how she watched the fish in the Wolfgangsee fight for their survival: “The big fish waited until the little ones dragged a piece of bread under the water, and then it ripped it away from them—but it never went after the bread when it was floating on the water.” A situation that, in its futility, was very much like Russian communism. She also used the time to sit down and read the manuscript of the novel Max had begun in Sochi: “I read your Jo Hancock last night and O I love it and it seems to me simply wonderful. It is beautifully written and it is alive and interesting and I want you to stop hanging around with all other things and go ahead. It is entirely different to read it without copying on the typewriter. I love it and I am sure it will be the great book.”113 Eliena struck up a friendship with Stefan Zweig’s wife, Friderike, whose knowledge of music, French, and Freud impressed her. She tried to teach her the rudiments of the Russian language and picked up some German in exchange.114

  Back in Antibes, which was hopping with famous and not-so-famous expatriates, F. Scott Fitzgerald was also reading Max’s novel. Max wasn’t a huge fan of The Great Gatsby, which he found too deliberately artsy and immersed in the problems of the past. Imagine Max’s surprise, then, when Fitzgerald in turn called his manuscript a record of a bygone era of “liberal enthusiasm.”115 Max suddenly realized how long he had been gone from his own country, how much he, too, had become a relic of another time. When Eliena returned from Austria, Fitzgerald discovered he liked her much better than Max’s book. “When you smile, everybody smiles,” he told her. “When you come to the room, the room is lighted.” Zelda, he added, thought so too. On which Eliena, with her characteristic dry wit, commented, “Too bad he was drunk.”116

  In his autobiography Max claimed he was present when Fitzgerald praised Eliena, but that wasn’t true. He was in fact in Paris, where he was working with the well-known anti-Stalinist Boris Souvarine on the publication of the full text of Lenin’s “Testament.” A copy of the original, still in the possession of Lenin’s wife, had been smuggled out to Paris so that Max, who now enjoyed some credibility as an expert on Russian affairs, could make it available and vouch for its authenticity. Most detective novels would pale in comparison with the conspiratorial effort that went into the publication of Lenin’s text. Max was able to wangle $1,000 out of the New York Times for the exclusive right to print the document that would once and for all refute Trotsky’s claim that he had made it all up. Souvarine, to whom Max had offered half of the payment, helped with the translation, and now they were both worried that the copy of the manuscript, which was headed to New York on the Mauretania, would not arrive on time. The full text appeared in the New York Times on October 18, 1926, with commentary by Max and a prophetic concluding statement: “If Stalin’s policies ultimately and fully prevail, the landlords and the new bourgeoisie will prevail, the workers will be sold out once again, the Russian revolution will have a ‘bourgeois’ revolution after all.” Trotsky was the last hope of the international Left: “If the course indicated by Trotsky is adopted, the possibility still exists of creating in Russia the first Worker’s Republic.”117

  But that was not all Max did in Paris. He was the life of the party wherever he went. At the house of some enticing krasavitza (“beauty”) he created a new game that required each person to say, with absolute honesty, four things he or she thought about each of the other guests: their best and their worst physical trait as well as their best and their worst trait of character. Max got, he admitted, “some pretty hard knocks” for his character but also “quite astonishing praise of my physique.” Max left the party feeling “like a handsome but worthless worm.”118 Eliena hated the game, which she felt was not very nice. Why would anyone force people to say nasty things about one another? “You never can get over that afterwards, and you can not help disliking a person, or being self-conscious with a person afterwards, if she or he happened to say something bad about you, or good either.” She, for one, was too “damn intellegent [sic]” to say her real opinion to anyone’s face.” As far as the criticism was concerned, Max was perfect, no improvements needed: “Nothing can be changed in you, otherwise you will not be you, and you will be imperfect. That’s what I think, and that’s what I know. And who doesn’t want to agree with me can be knocked out in four rounds.” People had the most ridiculous impressions of Max’s character but “seem to all agree with me about your physique.” Precisely because of that, there was an easy solution: “Just go and kiss the girl that doesn’t think nice things about you, and she will change her mind.” In the same letter she told Max not to hurry back if he had found “a real krasavitza” over there.119

  There is some evidence, however, that Max was more than a little worried about his character at the time. As he was putting the finishing touches on his novel he drafted a series of autobiographically tinged stories, at least one of which he shared with Hemingway, who was then living in Paris, too. One of the few American writers of note never to have been included in the pages of the Masses or the Liberator, Hemingway was already famous for his terse, tightly narrated collection In Our Time, a book that deeply impressed Max, who was thinking of asking Eliena to translate it into Russian. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises followed in 1926, a “lean, hard, athletic” book, according to the New York Times.120 In creating his wounded hero Jake Barnes, Hemingway had defined an entire generation. But Max didn’t really seem to belong to it. An expatriate among expatriates—for he had come to France not from the United States but from Moscow, shaped not by the war but by his resistance to it—he was an instant outsider, and the characters he was fashioning in stories, clueless in ways that went beyond modernist disorientation, reflected that sense.

  There was Paul, for example, the hapless American expatriate featured in Max’s “Something French.”121 Paul’s “narrow” conception of “personal excitement” nearly leads him to rape a young French girl who has reluctantly attached herself to him, since no one else has shown any interest in her. Taking the girl to Paris, Paul vacillates between vague feelings of paternal responsibility and an equally undefined sexual urge to possess her. He pulls himself back from the brink, and the sobering moment of insight, when it comes to Paul, chilling in its clarity, shows priapic Max from a different side: “He realized now that outside of his imagination there had not been one mutual moment, one true communication of feeling between them.” The characters in “Something French” are so forlorn, adrift in a world that obviously gets by just fine without them, that one finishes the story
entirely without that sense of tragic dignity that distinguishes Hemingway’s best characters.

  It is not clear if Hemingway read “Something French,” but he responded positively to another one of Max’s stories, “The Sunrise Club,” although the actual words of praise he offered, at least the way Max remembered them, seem somewhat less than fulsome: “I’m not saying I like it because I like you.”122 “The Sunrise Club” features a quack doctor of the kind Max had gotten to know only too well when he was seeking help for his back pain. The aptly named Dr. Bloodney of Bronxville, New York, is the proud progenitor of a book titled Physical Culture and Hypnotism, illustrated with photographs of mesmerized subjects so close to the state of nature that it cannot be sold publicly. Dreaming of becoming a famous scientist, Bloodney reinvents himself as the prophet of Nakedness and founds the Sunrise Club for the Better Understanding of Nakedness, a nudist club. His great insight is that modesty is a function of ugliness. Proof of his theory, which the narrator tells us is as momentous as Newton’s discovery of gravity, rests mostly on freckled, slim-bodied, blue-eyed Pearl Minkowsky from Bronxville, a stenographer with luminous golden skin and golden hair and so beautiful she makes the other clothes-shedding members of the club look like “plants grown in a cellar.” The complementary example is portly Mrs. James Gerbson Smith, a New Thought Healer who looks as if “she were carrying herself in a bag.” When the inevitable happens and the police disrupt the first public meeting of the Sunrise Club, Mrs. Smith escapes, “crashing through the underwood like a great white moose,” while Dr. Bloodney and Pearl Minkowsky are put in jail and tried for obscenity.

  Dr. Bloodney, now widely known as “the supreme bestial pervert and prophet of whoredom in all history,” sits through his trial sad-lipped and motionless, looking a bit, as Max tells us, “like a little church door that has been closed.” He is sentenced to one year in prison, while freckled Pearl Minkowsky gets off with a lecture from the judge. Physical Culture and Hypnotism, however, with its risqué photographs, becomes an instant underground best seller. “The story Ernest Hemingway praised in Paris,” Max wrote on his typescript. “It was written before ‘nudist colonies’ were heard of.” Max’s story is funny, sarcastic, and complex in the ways it subtly plays with the reader’s expectations. Bloodney is a quack, to be sure, and his main supporter a ditzy stenographer at Wanamaker’s, but both rise to silent greatness at the end, martyrs to the cause of free self-expression—unlikely heroes to be sure, but sometimes that is all you have.

  The more scholarly product of Max’s Parisian endeavors, Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution, had come out in a British edition in May. An American edition as well as French and Spanish translations followed later. Emboldened by his new, self-created status as the analyst of an entire political movement, Max mailed a copy of the book, a reminder of what he had to offer, to none other than Freud himself. His years in Russia had demonstrated to Max the shortcomings of dialectical materialism, which he still believed were the fault not of the Bolsheviks but of the Marxian system itself. History, Max had found, “is no one thing or process, except as it is made so by the interests of the historian; it has no one cause, either within or without the consciousness of men, which explains it all; it does not advance by a process of dialectic contradiction and the negation of the negation.” Marxism conceals, whereas psychoanalysis reveals. What was needed was not a new metaphysics, but a scientific look at the behavior of those who only think they are acting scientifically, a “psychoanalysis of the social and political mind.” Freud’s theory could supply what materialism couldn’t: a cold hard look at the motivations of human thought and behavior, which would be of great help in the grand project of “social engineering” that Lenin had initiated and that Stalin was threatening to undo: a true revolution devoid of party idolatry and other traces of religious thinking, a revolution that was a purpose and not a belief.123

  Freud read the book and sent him a letter that was, by Freud’s standards, appreciative, although he was also careful to remind him that he was, after all, Professor Freud. And he probably remembered, too, how Max had torn him apart in The Sense of Humor. Nevertheless, he had, he said, enjoyed Marx, Lenin much more than Max’s previous books. He felt his analysis was important, perhaps even correct (“bedeutsam, vielleicht auch richtig”), though he also said his dislike for all philosophy and political parties prevented him from fully understanding Max’s views. “I could not have tolerated your great Lenin for more than ten minutes.”124 Max was excited nevertheless and did what all authors do when they are praised by someone they admire: he asked for permission to quote from said letter. Freud shot back an ill-tempered note, in English: “I will thank you for not mentioning any of the remarks in my letter in public.” And he added another sentence that attributed Max’s lapse to his Americanness: “I seem thus far to have failed to accustom myself to the American life forms.”125

  In March 1927 the stars were finally aligning. Max was in Vienna again, staying with the radical poet Hugo Sonnenschein in the Josefstadt district. He had been feeling “very lonesome and not very conquering in my mood,” but, as luck would have it, Freud now had time for his American admirer. “I can see you Friday at 3h 30 pm,” said Freud’s postcard, treasured by Max in the decades afterward.126 “See Freud tomorrow,” Max telegraphed back to Eliena in Paris. “Happy Love—Max.”127 On Friday, March 25, Max made sure he arrived in time for his appointment. He was not a little nervous as he was walking past the massive old houses that lined the sloping street. He was finally going to see his “Father Confessor,” the man who had been of such tremendous importance to his personal and intellectual life for so long.128 When he had ascended the stairs to Professor Freud’s book-filled practice on the mezzanine, he found a man who showed no sign of being diminished by the terrible illness that had, over the course of the past year, cost him half his jaw. It had made it necessary for him to wear a terrifying contraption—known as “the monster” to him and his daughter Anna—to fill the hole that multiple cancer surgeries had left at the back of his mouth.129 It’s fun to imagine the six-foot Eastman hulking over the thinner, shorter Freud. Freud was fully alert, at his caustic best. This was the “obscene Doctor Freud,” “the cleanest man on two continents,” as the cynical capitalist George Forbes calls him in Max’s novel, Venture: “He digs under the talk. Digs under the mind. He puts words to a new use.”130

  Despite constant pain, Freud had remained relentlessly productive. Just the year before, he had published a book that some, including his biographer Ernest Jones, regard as one of his best, The Question of Lay Analysis, an accessibly written dialogue between himself and a so-called Impartial Person, which was intended to illustrate Freud’s opinion that psychoanalysis, if it were to have widespread effect, would need to be embraced by people outside the medical field. Max, who had undertaken an exhaustive self-analysis in 1914, had the necessary credentials here. There was considerable urgency behind Freud’s plea. He was overwhelmed by the grueling schedule he kept at Berggasse 19, where his day usually began at eight and ended at nine at night, with barely two hours for lunch.131 Faced with the dramatic spread of neurosis in modern life, society was clamoring for a cure—a cure that should and could no longer be provided by doctors like Freud himself. Was he thinking of a “new kind of Salvation Army”? his interlocutor, the Impartial Person, asked. “Why not?” was Freud’s reply.132 Perhaps not unexpectedly, Freud’s thoroughly democratic view of psychoanalysis was roundly rejected in the United States, where analysts were struggling to assert themselves against the hegemony of academic psychiatry and had no interest in diminishing their reputation by allowing nonmedical practitioners into the fold. In the fall of 1926 the American Medical Association, still small at the time but gaining in influence, issued a warning to American doctors not to cooperate with lay analysts.133 That warning galled Freud, who, ever since his 1909 visit to Clark University in Worcester, had thought of American culture as disappointingly superficial. Max wou
ld find out later, from Jones’s biography, that Freud referred to his chronic intestinal disorder as “my American indigestion.”134

  When Max visited him at Berggasse 19, Freud’s feelings about America and the Americans were thus not particularly warm ones. Indeed, Freud wasted no time. “What do you want?” he asked. Max’s answer, the way he remembered it later, was as lame as it was untruthful: “Not a thing.”135 For the main thing Max had wanted had already happened: he was finally here, walking across Freud’s soft rugs and admiring the artwork on the walls. Freud was “smaller than I expected,” Max scribbled in a small notebook, “slender-limbed and [with] something softer about him than you expect—tenderer, perhaps, or more feminine. . . . Greatness involves delicacy.” He had a unique way of “moving about with his head and hands, oddly, looking up at the ceiling and closing his eyes, making funny little faces when he is trying to think of a word, or clarifying an idea, laughing a sudden and very sweet smiling laugh when something pleases him, and that with his head thrown back in an oddly childlike way.”136

  Max was so fascinated by Freud’s appearance that his mind began to drift. But Freud was an excellent listener and would never let a conversation go astray. Max wasn’t ready for such rigor. In a panic, he made the unfortunate decision to challenge Freud on his use of the phrase “the Unconscious,” which to his mind still had remnants of metaphysical thinking stuck to it. Why didn’t you say “brain states?” he asked. Freud, sensing he was being criticized, responded that the Unconscious was merely a concept, not a thing. Was Max a behaviorist? Referring to the work of the founding father of behaviorism, Freud added tartly, “According to your John B. Watson, even consciousness doesn’t exist.” But that was, continued Freud, nonsense: “Consciousness exists quite obviously and everywhere—except perhaps in America.” Now there was that laugh again.137