Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  Freud was surprisingly well informed about American psychology, even asking Max whether he had read William Bayard Hale’s The Story of a Style, a psychoanalytically informed study of Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric. Max did know the book and started to talk about the reasons people like Wilson would simply stop thinking and support a war. “Why?” asked Freud. Now Max was prepared: “You know why people stop thinking. It’s because their thoughts would lead them where they don’t want to go.” Freud laughed his little old man’s laugh and immediately redirected the conversation to Max’s support of the Russian communists. Max defended Bolshevism as the “trying out of an hypothesis,” which satisfied Freud the scientist, if in a purely abstract way. For he was, said Freud, “nothing” politically and had no interest in a better future. Come to think of it, the present bothered him, too, and there was nothing that was at present more annoying than the United States. Why on earth did he hate America so much? Max demanded. Now Freud was on a roll. “I don’t hate it,” he said. “I regret it.” He threw back his head and laughed uproariously.138

  Freud had, Max discerned, made a joke, and one that fulfilled his own, higher definition of wit, the intellectual species of humor.139 “Regret,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, implies “sorrow, remorse, or repentance due to reflection on something one has done or omitted to do.” One can regret an action but not a country. Freud knew, of course, that he’d had nothing to do with making America into the ludicrous thing he thought it was now. He went on to offer another take on the subject: America was, he said, a “bad experiment conducted by Providence.” Amused by his own cleverness, he added, “I think it must have been Providence. I at least should hate to be held responsible for it.” When Max asked him “in what way” America had gone bad, Freud exclaimed, “Oh the prudery, hypocrisy, the national lack of independence, there is no independence of thought in America, is there?” And he encouraged Max to write a book about that “miscarriage” of civilization, the “Missgeburt” America. “This book would make you immortal.” The meeting had ended.140

  As Max stumbled down the well-worn stairs of Berggasse 19, he felt flattered and clobbered at the same time. In his mind Freud’s previous, ambivalent praise of his book (“important, perhaps even correct”) mixed uneasily with Freud’s uncanny, satyrlike laugh. But he had not, he decided, come out a loser in this debate. Speaking with Max, Sigmund, with all his self-indulgent wit, had inadvertently unmasked himself. He was no longer an untouchable hero, an idol to be worshiped, the father no one needed. “For was it not to deliver mankind from just that kind of displaced emotion that this hero of self-knowledge was born into the world?” As his unorthodox disciple, the layman Max had reminded Dr. Freud of his original purpose in life. In the process, Max had rediscovered his own purpose. At least for now.141

  7 • The Thinking Singer

  Max’s return to the United States was not a triumphant one. He was in his early forties now. Still dashingly handsome, he knew some of his youthful charm had rubbed off. He would still turn heads wherever he appeared, but now his body was beginning to catch up with his white hair. He had no position to come back to, no audiences eager for his thoughts. Most important, he had compromised some of his credibility with the American Left. His support for Lenin, vociferous opposition to Stalin, and endorsement of Trotsky (without receiving, as he had hoped he would, Trotsky’s endorsement in turn) did not translate into an easily identifiable political position. Was he still a Bolshevik or not? That he was now married to Nikolai Krylenko’s sister did not help clarify things.

  Eliena, by contrast, was excited. To her, America was the land of boundless opportunity, even though it wasn’t exactly a blank slate, filtered since childhood through the eyes of Huck Finn and, as she spelled his name, Tom Soyer: “I saw with my child’s inner eyes America’s countryside, its people, and joined the far-away American boys in their so fantastic . . . adventures. That story lived with me through my life, through two wars, revolution, famine.” When Max and she later drove through Hannibal, Missouri, it was Eliena who showed Max where Judge Thatcher had lived and where McDougal’s cave was. She was, she told Max, American before she had even come to America.1

  Eliena eagerly embraced living in New York City, where they took apartments, first at 44 West Seventy-first Street, in the Lincoln Square neighborhood, and then in the Village at 501 Barrow Street and, finally, 39 Grove Street. And she loved the little house in Croton, where she enjoyed the company of artists like George Biddle, who hosted sketching parties at his house, and of Max’s old friends, including Ruth Pickering (now Pinchot). All by herself she attacked the weeds and clumps of high grass in the backyard—she was as strong as a bull, one of the neighbors said admiringly—and saw to it that the tennis court was repaired, this time with the help of the neighbors, each of whom contributed $10, in exchange for the right to use the court in perpetuity afterward. While Max himself struggled to fit in, it seems Eliena picked up Max’s life where he had left it before he departed for Russia. She also made sure that Dan, Max’s long-neglected son, had a good time when he came to visit for six weeks during her first American summer, “a beautiful and gay and very bright boy of 14,” as she noted cheerfully. At the end of Dan’s stay they all drove to Austerlitz, New York, where Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugen Boissevain had recently bought Steepletop, a rambling estate close to the Massachusetts state line. Money was in short supply during those days, but the Croton grocer, Mr. Harmon, captivated by Eliena’s charm, often went for months without getting paid. During her second summer in Croton Eliena oversaw the construction of an addition to the house known as the “yellow room.” After years of living in hotels and rental rooms, she was taking ownership, of Max as well as of Max’s house and his friends (fig. 35).2

  Figure 35. Eliena Eastman, left, and Marion Morehouse (later Cummings) in Croton. EMII.

  Max had a much harder time getting used to his new old life. When he entered his barn he found that mice had eaten most of his papers. “It was very, very sad,” noted Eliena. They bought a used convertible in Ossining, but Max had some difficulty readjusting to American traffic rules and soon found himself going the wrong way on one-way streets. No one, including Max himself, was sure what or who he was. A writer without readers whose last bona fide literary work had come out a decade ago, an editor without a magazine to edit, he was now known mostly as a self-taught political pundit. And while his bohemian friends were largely uninterested in politics, at least the way Eliena remembered it, his former political allies had moved on without him. Max’s Trotsky biography had been published in an American version he disavowed, and the Masses was now the New Masses, a “free revolutionary magazine” edited by, among others, Mike Gold and Joseph (“Joe”) Freeman.

  Max couldn’t very well complain. Maybe it wasn’t true, as Freeman would claim later, that Max alone was responsible for turning over the Liberator “to the monsters of the Kremlin.” But the way Freeman remembered it, Max had left written instructions that if the Liberator ran into trouble they should transfer the magazine, rather than letting it die, to the Communist Party.3 No one could have predicted then that it would reemerge as the Communist Party’s main theoretical mouthpiece. Nothing liberating was left: first retitled the Workers Monthly, Max’s and Crystal’s magazine was now known as, simply, the Communist. Freeman did try, valiantly, to create a new magazine that would fill the vacuum left by the old Liberator’s demise. The New Masses was supposed to carry on what the Masses and the Liberator had done so well, that is, present an interesting, provocative mix of politics and culture, without letting the former dominate the latter. It was going to be, as Freeman stated in a prospectus he wrote, a “medium of expression . . . for the new creative forces now taking shape in America.”4 He had secured financial support from the Garland Fund, also known as the American Fund for Public Service, a left-leaning philanthropic organization established in 1922 by Charles Garland, the son of a Wall Street stockbroker. With Freeman and E
gmont (“Eggie”) Arens as editors and some additional funding from the wealthy prolabor crime writer Rex Stout, who provided the office furniture, the new magazine was launched. All seemed well at first. Max’s name appeared on the masthead as a “contributing editor,” and he did indeed contribute a few items, among them translations of Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel, while he was still in Europe.5 After his return he went to a few editorial meetings and even became a member of the executive editorial board. His impassioned response to the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti appeared in the October issue of the New Masses, perhaps with more than a note of wistfulness resonating behind his admiration for two people whose lives had mattered: “Unlike many martyrdoms, the death of Sacco and Vanzetti was of very great use to the cause they loved.”6

  But it appears that Max was far from happy that he had been so effortlessly replaced. And his political affinity to Trotsky made him a welcome target among pro-Bolshevik intellectuals in America. When he published excerpts from Marx, Lenin (which was not yet available in the United States) in the New Masses, his ideological departure from the party line had become a matter of public record.7 Dissatisfied with his marginal position but unwilling to commit more time and effort, Max resigned on January 7, 1928. Instead of the New Masses, the magazine should be called the Yellow Masses, charged Max, “to denote the lack of intellectual force and courage.”8

  There are different versions of what really brought about the rift. Perhaps it happened over the rejection of Max’s plan to write an article on Trotsky’s expulsion.9 “I know of nobody who at one time did not have something rejected by NM,” Freeman pointed out later. Even Mike and Floyd and Freeman himself had pieces turned down, and the editors had wanted to keep the new magazine free of political grandstanding. “Hell hath no fury like a vain author rejected,” Freeman wrote to Dan Aaron.10 But Max had a different explanation: the New Masses was pro-communist, plain and simple. Stout came to the same conclusion, incidentally, and withdrew, too.

  The most hard-hitting response to Max’s new theories came not from within the New Masses but from another student of John Dewey’s, Sidney Hook. Widely considered Dewey’s favorite student, Hook was twenty years younger than Max. He had just completed and, unlike Max, submitted his doctoral thesis. While not an orthodox communist, he took exception to Max’s suggestion that Marx needed to be saved from his own philosophy. Hook’s attacks on Max, which grew more intemperate as Max’s responses, too, became sharper, began in a journal fittingly called Open Court. While Max had argued that Marx had anticipated Freud, Hook, who was not a fan of psychoanalysis, felt that Marx, as someone who had demonstrated the efficacy of ideas in the class struggle, should more properly be regarded as a precursor to Dewey. In Hook’s reading, Marx saw ideas as “instruments” in the process of furthering class interests, a phrase that would have delighted the pragmatist.11

  Predictably, Max wasn’t happy with Hook’s interpretation. The fact that Hook continued to regard him as a potential ally “in purifying Marxism of its deadly dogmatism and devitalizing orthodoxy” did not pacify him at all.12 Hook repeated his charges in the Journal of Philosophy, and when Max, in a letter to the editor, vigorously protested, he reiterated them in a full-length review of Marx, Lenin for Modern Quarterly, in which he openly ridiculed Max, accusing him of having “bungled” a great subject, the magnitude of which had, apparently, “dwarfed” him.13 “Marxism,” Hook wrote, “is not so much a petrified set of bloodless abstractions as a fighting philosophy of the underdog—a flexible method of organizational struggle in the bitter class warfare of industrial society.” Max had not understood either Hegel’s or Marx’s departure from Hegelian dialectic; his view of communism was clouded by his obsession with Freud. Marxism was about social forces, not individual psychology. Hook mocked Max’s “emasculated instrumentalism,” his “childlike” fear of metaphysics, and his ignorance of Hegel, for which he should be punished by having to read the Phänomenologie des Geistes.14

  There were more skirmishes after this essay, culminating in Max’s assertion that Hook himself had wanted to write a book much like Marx, Lenin and must have felt “keen disappointment” when Max had beaten him to the finish line.15 Hook responded mockingly by saying that if his views on Marx were as different from Max’s as Max had claimed, why would he not welcome the publication of Marx, Lenin so that he could show how “false” Max’s position was? In a way, though, Max was right. Both men essentially wanted the same thing, namely, to close the gap between philosophy and social action, Hook by redefining it, Max by eliminating it entirely.

  There were many cheap shots in these exchanges, Max accusing Hook of vanity and unscholarly behavior as well as moral and intellectual libel, while Hook focused on Max’s deception, lack of erudition, and failure to understand formal logic.16 The controversy deeply scarred Max. When Hook, in 1933, published his book, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, Max ripped out many of the pages and littered the margins with scathing remarks: “again it means nothing” next to a passage explaining the dialectic as the interacting parts of a developing whole; “surprising that it should be discovered by S. Hook 70 years after his death” next to a sentence excoriating the “common failure to appreciate the nature of Marx’s dialectical method”; and “Poor Marx!” scribbled on a page where Hook recommends that Marx’s method be separated from specific results.17 Max also wrote a formal review of Hook’s book for the Herald Tribune, in which he called Hook’s conflation of dialectical materialism with Dewey’s version of pragmatism “as false and fantastic as it is historically improbable.” While the motives of the socialist and the pragmatist might be similar, the differences in terms of “concrete belief” were insurmountable. In the Marxian scheme the philosopher had to be convinced his program of action will be fulfilled. For the Deweyite, such a quest for certainty was the last remnant of a barbarous faith, the product of a bygone era. In his single-minded determination to turn Marx into a Deweyite, Hook had to tear down one of the central pillars of the temple of Marxism, the belief in “historic determinism.” Max exclaimed, “He does this by mere arbitrary dictum—by telling you ‘what Marx really means when he speaks of the historic inevitability of communism.’” And what Marx meant, in Sidney Hook’s myopic reading, was not that communism was inevitable but that it was possible, an alternative worth striving for, one that one may help to “make true” just by believing in it. Communism optional? Max thought the very idea was risible. If Marx said inevitable when he meant possible, then everything was up for grabs. The snide subtitle of Max’s review said it all: “Sidney Hook’s Day-Dream of What Marx Might Have Said Had He Been a Pupil of John Dewey.”18

  Hook and Max later reconciled after Hook, too, turned against the Soviet version of communism. Nevertheless, the damage was done. When Max, as an old man, remembered that fight—for that’s what it really was, a fight in which both men seemed determined to draw blood, a struggle no less lethal for being fought in the quarterlies and newspapers—the experience still seemed so close and painful to him that, in an autobiography otherwise rich with narrative tangents and irrelevant detail, he decided not to discuss it: “It struck me like a bolt—not from the blue, for there was no blue, but from the dead gray weight of fog that hung over my intellectual life in those lonely days.”19

  Some of Max’s identity problems were reflected in the hero of Max’s novel, Venture, a book left unfinished for years after he had first begun working on it in his dingy little room in Sochi. The novel’s protagonist, the rather transparently named Jo Hancock, a college dropout and poet of modest ability, bore many features of Max himself, as Sinclair Lewis accurately perceived, mixed in with the muscularity and adventurousness of John Reed. And while Jo shared some features with other young men exposed to radical ideas—such as Hal Warner in Upton Sinclair’s King Coal (1917) and Billy in Ernest Poole’s The Harbor (1915)—Max’s novel follows its own course by presenting Jo as really invested in two or perhaps three worlds
: that of capitalist entrepreneurship, where he is quite successful, labor activism, and, last but not least, poetry. Jo’s clever business idea—to deliver freshly roasted coffee via milk wagons to grocery stores all over New York, a “smooth-running New Yorker’s utopia,” a dream of a delightfully caffeinated city opening their wallets to him—is progressive enough to make it not entirely unbelievable that, in his other life, he would fall under the influence of the IWW organizer Bill Haywood and join and support the silk strikers of Paterson, New Jersey. Neither George Forbes, a Nietzschean businessman who encourages Jo’s capitalist aspirations, nor the leaders of the strike know about the extent of Jo’s double life. Rather than relieving the reader of the ambiguities the novel has created around Jo, its ending reinforces them. Jo’s friends in Paterson discover that he is a bourgeois, his main investor pulls out, and his business fails before it even gets started. Jo’s love interest in the novel is Vera, the daughter of one of the strike leaders, a proletarian, Russian version of Florence Deshon with a sprinkling of Eliena’s wholesomeness and her gray eyes and prominent cheekbones. After Jo owns up to Forbes, Vera bestows a soft kiss upon him. But even that doesn’t yet release Jo from the prison of indecision he has created for himself, as the novel’s last sentence indicates: “He thought that perhaps real life can be lived after all—if you only make a few fundamental decisions.”20