Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  The Boni brothers published the book in November 1927, as bad luck would have it, the same month as Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, whose fame would eclipse Venture. Max’s novel wasn’t well served by the Bonis, who were equally lackluster in promoting Marx, Lenin, the other Eastman book they had taken on, under the title Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution. Max had expected so much more from them. After leaving Boni and Liveright, the firm he cofounded with Horace Liveright, Albert Boni had joined forces with his younger brother Charles to create an imprint that would publish innovative contemporary writers. Among their authors, apart from Wilder, were William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, and Marcel Proust in C. K. Moncrieff’s translation; in 1925 they had published the iconic anthology The New Negro. Excellent company, to be sure. The Bonis had promised Max they would make Venture their “big book of the season,” push it “as no big publisher would,” and “get behind it with all [their] force.” Yet, as Max pointed out in an angry letter to Albert that he ultimately didn’t send, the book wasn’t advertised anywhere until it had already come out. When, a few days after the official publication date, some friends of Max’s asked for a copy at Brentano’s in New York, no one there had even heard of it. Review copies weren’t sent to the places Max had recommended. It seemed particularly ironic to Max that the New Masses never received a notice about a novel set in the times of the old Masses days, “a tragedy to me and a shame to you,” he told the Boni brothers. Not even lecture agents he was hoping to work with had received copies of either Marx and Lenin or Venture.21

  Despite Max’s fears, his novel, though it didn’t become the best seller of the season, was noticed. The New York Times reviewer liked it and said it was well written. Maybe it wasn’t startlingly original and maybe it was too patently autobiographical. But he also said it stood “well above the majority” of similar novels and praised its rich texture and firm handling of characterization.22 From Delaware, where he and Zelda were renting Ellerslie, a thirty-room Greek Revival mansion, F. Scott Fitzgerald congratulated Max on his achievement, repeating some of his earlier reservations though packaged as praise: “It’s so beautifully written and tells me so much about what are to me the dim days—1910–1917—that formed so many people of the liberal side in the generation just ahead of me and in mine.” Max had made it all “real and vivid” again. “Nothing so sane on that terribly difficult subject—for it was after all a creed, a faith, in the surest and most helpless sense, has ever been written.” Note that Fitzgerald was thinking of socialism as a historical fact—one that required study but not emulation—and of Max as its documentarian. At the time, he was trying to finish Tender Is the Night, a novel set so far removed from the environment of the New Jersey silk strikers that his reaction makes immediate sense.23 Sinclair Lewis, however, didn’t like it at all. Venture had “splendid things in it, fine scenes, spirited characters,” but overall it was disappointing. Why hadn’t Max written a novel about Bill Haywood, “including his last, rather futile, superbly tragic days in Moscow”? Now there was a protagonist! But Jo Hancock got on his nerves. He reminded Lewis of a type of protagonist he himself had championed, “young gent of good family and education who ambles into literary society, vaguely discovers there is such a thing as the Labor Movement, meets and sleeps with a hell of a lot of literary or smart women, and in the end feels vaguely that maybe, b’ God, there’s something to the Labor Movement, to socialism—and you know he’ll only go on talking about it till the end of his life.” Ironically, by castigating the inauthenticity of Max’s book, Lewis had indirectly confirmed how authentic it was as a description of Max’s own personal and political dilemmas.24

  But no criticism of the book, public or private, descended to the level of the Paterson Call, which deemed Venture “one of the dullest and most bromidic books published in many a day” and, for good measure, “the sorriest stuff we ever read.” The reviewer, who also said he wouldn’t be wasting “valuable white space” on it were it not for the fact that his city was mentioned in the novel, concluded, “Now we understand why The Masses failed.” One imagines that Max, whose support of the silk strikers apparently had not been forgotten, would have been rather pleased with that review: once again he had managed to annoy the authorities of Paterson, New Jersey. He saved the newspaper clipping.25

  Would Max have embarked on a serious career as a novelist, would he have written a second novel, if the Boni brothers had lived up to their promise and made his book into a big hit? Venture is a novel of ideas, capably written but, like other examples of the genre such as Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint (1928), it lumbers from one long dialogue to the next. Max’s prose is driven less by finely imagined characters and intricate plotting than by the kind of epigrammatic succinctness he had perfected in his essays. “Selfishness is akin to candor, the natural attribute of an animal, but egotism is a special degenerate accomplishment of mankind, the mother of hypocrisy,” the narrator tells us, for example, and “The shortest road to friendship is a mutual dislike.” Predictably, given Max’s authorship, the novel takes flight whenever Max imagines sexual desire. These are, indeed, some of the most memorable moments in the novel: Jo Hancock noticing, with evident pleasure, the half-bare shoulders and muscular arms of Mary Kittredge (a character based on Jack Reed’s lover Mabel Dodge Luhan) or longing to touch the white skin, luminous “like china with lights under it,” of another one of his lovers, Muriel Paxton-Kadner.26

  If Jo Hancock couldn’t make fundamental decisions, his creator wasn’t doing much better in that department. For now, Max returned to what he knew best, giving speeches. He had spoken publicly in favor of women’s suffrage, in favor of the Bolsheviks, and against the war. But women had gained the right to vote and the war was over and the Bolsheviks seemed busy self-destructing. Max’s new subject was . . . himself and everything he had to offer. Through William Colston Leigh’s agency in New York, Max began to market himself as a “poet, social philosopher, and psychologist,” all rolled into one convenient package. Flyers featured a photograph of Max looking rugged but sophisticated, with just the hint of a tie hidden behind his leather jacket. Leigh’s business was still new at the time, but his list of clients would later include such celebrities as Eleanor Roosevelt, Clement Attlee, and Will Durant.

  As Max was trying to reinvent himself once again, Crystal was fighting for her survival, and she was losing the battle. Her life had been a series of disappointments. In April 1922 Walter Fuller, her second husband, had gone back to England to look for work. He started an occasionally successful literary agency before landing a position as managing editor for a weekly newspaper. Crystal joined him in October, her son Jeffrey and her one-year-old daughter Annis in tow. This was the second time she had followed Walter to England, and she found the experience draining. In June 1924 she returned to the United States but could not make ends meet there either, likely because her political activities had gotten her blacklisted.27 By Christmas she was at Walter’s side again. With no hope of permanent employment, she spent the summer of 1926 with Max and Eliena on the Côte d’Azur. But nothing could alleviate the periods of “real panic & despair” she suffered.28 In August 1927 she and her children were en route back to the States. Crystal took up residence at her Croton house and began work for the Nation, where she had been promised a temporary job. A month after her departure Walter had a stroke and died, and the next summer, shockingly, Crystal, too, lay dying. Max probably never realized, during these final years of his sister’s life, how troubled and then, finally, how sick she was. Her last hospital stay was at John Harvey Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, but Kellogg’s enemas couldn’t save her anymore. Crystal died on July 8, 1928, at her brother Anstice’s house in Erie, Pennsylvania. She was buried in the Eastman family plot in Canandaigua, the site of happier times. She was only forty-eight years old. For the rest of his life the only birthday Max was ever able to remember, apart from his own, was Crystal’s.
29

  Max was stunned by so much bad luck but not enough to want to burden himself with raising Crystal’s two children, even though she had appointed him their guardian. His decision to let Crystal’s friend Agnes Leach take care of them is not mentioned in his autobiography. Even the letters he sent Eliena from London, where he had gone in July 1929 to speak with the children as well as with Fuller’s family, are extraordinarily reticent about his real motivation—apart from the personal and financial burden that parental responsibilities would have meant to a man who had, by some standards, already failed to be a father to his biological son. Admittedly, Crystal’s daughter Annis did not seem to be too enthusiastic about returning to Croton with Max, threatening to “lock herself in the bath-room if I tried to take her back to America,” though the prospect of staying didn’t appeal to her either: “If I live in England, I’d have to go to Sunday School, and I don’t mind going to school, but I don’t want to go to Sunday School.” Jeff Fuller, on the other hand, was “sweet and thoughtful” and more disposed to move back to the States, where there was “more to do,” though not, as Max noted to his relief, necessarily with Max as his new foster father. Max, resting an appreciative eye on Cynthia, Crystal’s sister-in-law, “a soft golden-haired gracious princess,” was distinctly out of his element, and the legal maneuvering that his “diplomatic mission” had produced inevitably bored and overwhelmed him. He did not sleep well at night, once dreaming that his house was surrounded by wild animals, with Eliena wanting to let them all in to play with. It was another warning to him not to agree to anything that would bring new responsibilities and thus new dangers with it.30

  Was Max aware of the damage he did to Crystal’s children? For years Jeffrey and Annis had lived messy lives, with no chance to grow real roots in either England or the United States. Her verbal commitments to parenting notwithstanding—in one of her last letters, addressed to her sister-in-law Cynthia, she said she wanted nothing more than to “make a happy childhood for Jeffrey and Annis”—Crystal always seemed ready to leave rather than to settle down with her family.31 And now Max seamlessly continued the practice. “You all loved each other so much,” wrote Annis to Max in 1965, remembering the adoration and love Max and Crystal had shown each other, “that Jeff and I feel a deeper loss than death. Almost as if we had not been born properly.” Nearly forty years later, the pain had not subsided.32

  To be sure, Crystal’s death was an extremely traumatic event for Max. Gone was the person that, growing up, he had admired the most, “his angel of light,” Anstice’s “bunny girl,” the fierce warrior for workers’ and women’s rights, the uncompromising advocate for peace, the only woman he had truly loved. Likely Max felt that anything that would have reminded him of Crystal’s absence would have been too hard to bear. At least for a while, he became tongue-tied when he had to speak in public. Instead of the eloquent poet, audiences got a wooden reciter of canned sentiments from a script.

  When Max was driving home to Croton the day after Crystal’s death, he found himself passing through Canandaigua. He decided, with an aching heart, that he needed to go out to Seneca Lake and see Glenora, “our real home.” On the way there he glimpsed the Pratts’s farm, where his father had worked and Crystal and he had played when they were mere babies. It had been transformed into an inn. Max went in, took a room, and spent the night remembering specifically one incident, his earliest experience of anguish, of the fear that terrible things might and will happen to you in life. He remembered how so many decades ago he and Crystal had gone to the barn and climbed up to the corn crib to watch the pigs devour their grub below and how Crystal’s beautiful straw hat, with all those lovely flowers arranged around the brim, had fallen down through a hole in the corn crib’s floor and how the pigs then, grunting, squealing, snorting, had chewed on it and trampled it into the black mud, “until you could no longer see what it looked like.”33

  It took a while for Max to reemerge from where Crystal’s death had hurled him, “way down in the oozy green depths under the sea.”34 The bad food and anonymous hotel rooms on his lecture tours didn’t help, and, with his heart still noisily “buzzing” inside him, the speeches just wouldn’t pour out of him as effortlessly as they once did. He had never been a natural orator, merely an “actor who knows how to act the part of an orator,” and now he couldn’t find his way back into that role. Had Crystal, in death, taken some part of his mind with her?35 Max began to rely on sleeping pills and bromide, dutifully mailed by Eliena from Croton. The American landscape had changed since Max last toured it, and the stakes had become higher. Instead of random assortments of people in dance halls, abandoned warehouses, and school gymnasiums, Max now spoke at the invitation of clubs, foundations, and universities. He had vastly expanded his range of topics, offering everything from “The Art of Enjoying Poetry” to “The Russian Soul and the Bolsheviks.” An Eastman lecture, announced the flyer with great confidence, was an event not to be missed: “Max Eastman takes lecturing seriously, and it is said of him that no lecturer before the public today so delightfully combines profound thinking with stimulation and entertainment.” If earlier flyers declared that they didn’t need to reprint tributes to Max the orator, later ones pulled out all the stops, quoting everyone from the State Teachers College in Milwaukee (“Mr. Eastman is a powerful platform lecturer and very stimulating and clear in presenting his particular philosophy”) to Preserved Smith at Cornell (“You have made even Aristotle look unscientific”). Even when he was struggling for words Max cut an impressive figure at the lectern with his white hair, intense eyes, and ruddy, glowing skin.36

  Not everyone was appreciative. In Des Moines he found himself surrounded by the “gloopy” women who listened to him with no discernible reaction on their faces. No one came up to him and said, “I like your books—where are you going from here?” No one even offered him a cup of tea. After the lecture he slunk out to eat his pimiento sandwich in a gray, dull hotel lobby, and he made sure he left that town for good.37 But as the cities whizzed by—Kansas City, Fort Worth, Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans, Oklahoma City—Max gradually regained some of his former confidence, and his affliction, which he described as his lips failing to “articulate words properly,” vanished. Audiences glowed and smiled again. They asked him to read his poetry, and after he had finished in Dallas the organizer of the event came up to him and said, “Max, I’m going to love you—I love you already.” Away from the complications of the political scene of New York, Max was a big deal again: “That is the way it used to be, a kind of glow after I spoke and people lingering around in it.” These people were genial, straight, direct, more like Russians.38

  The return of his charisma made the smooth-talking Max endure even situations like the one in Oklahoma City, where he was babbling to a roomful of “oil-soaked block-heads.” The room was virtually dark because the organizers had chosen to arrange big bunches of smilax all around the lights, “which were dim as torches in a tunnel anyway, and the sad somber rays trickled out through these half-withered leaves and made everybody feel that their last hour had come.” Nobody could see Max, who, despite the fact that he was talking about humor, felt like a baker kneading with “fake energy” some hostile and inert dough. “Cruel and unusual punishment” it was, he said, and yet one senses from his letter that he also enjoyed the bizarre situation he found himself thrust into. The next day, a trip to the oil fields in the company of several millionaires, added to Max’s merry sense of detachment from this absurd experience. The highlight was the peek he got at a new well that had just begun to operate: “The earth was black-wet and shiny for a quarter of a mile where this oozy geyser puked and spit all over everybody and everything.” In the evening, at dinner, a girl made “brown eyes” at him, completing the color scheme.

  The next stops on his itinerary were Salt Lake City, Pasadena, Charleston, and Boston. Finally, like a kid in a crazy candy store, Max was having a grand time: “It’s a funny and fascinating country, Americ
a. I accept all invitations, and just trot along and ‘see’ everything they have to offer.” When he next gave his humor speech in Tulsa, it was even funnier, so funny in fact that a girl sitting in the front row collapsed with laughter. Max began to fear for her health and switched to a more serious mode for a bit until she got over it.39

  On his trips through the American heartland Max never tired of observing people, but none was more memorable than the sad, honest, blue-eyed little man in Iowa City, looking like a “decaying Bobbie Burns,” who had killed his neighbor and “told exactly when where and how he did it,” without dwelling on any extenuating circumstance, as if he were the original pragmatist and his life an experiment gone awry—no self-pity allowed. A reporter for the local college paper had dragged Max along to the trial, and now he couldn’t purge the image from his mind.40

  While Max was sweeping audiences in Oklahoma, Texas, and California off their feet, Eliena struggled to reinvent herself as a painter, waking up at night—as she reported in a letter to Max, who was lecturing in Fort Wayne, Indiana—“sobbing and crying like malenkaia,” like a little child, because “my pictures are no good.” Theodore Dreiser, one of her early sitters, seemed to agree. Peeping” at his portrait, “he did not seem to like it too much.” Eliena promised him a second chance, when she would, she told Max, make him just as ugly as he is.”41 Eliena was funny, and her capacity for finding humor in the most unlikely places and frustrating situations helped both her and Max survive. When the conductor on the train to New York chided her because she showed up late at the Harmon station, she would just laugh, and “everybody in the car looked startled as people do often when I laugh.” When she wasn’t taking the train she drove her car to and from New York, and her letters were filled with self-deprecating accounts of her driving mishaps. In February 1930 Eliena, fully at home in her adopted country, submitted her application for citizenship.42