Max and Eliena were sleeping in separate beds by then, “wide apart,” as Charmion von Wiegand, one of Max’s lovers at the time, asserted in an unpublished story. But Eliena’s need for Max had not lessened, and even Charmion couldn’t but admire this energetic little Russian woman (called Arga in her story), this fiercely determined nomad who had made Max, not any particular country or place in the world, her home: “With Arga, her anxiety and inner fear at the remote possibility of his loss was like a wound that never healed.” Spinning a fine web of possession around him, Eliena was holding Max bound to her as best she could.43
Max tried to break free at least once. In the summer of 1930, just having returned from a lecture trip to California during which he had reconnected with his old college friend Sid Wood (and perhaps even more so with Sid’s “two alluring daughters”), he sequestered himself in Gay Head near Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard, where he hunkered down in an old sheep barn Eliena and he had discovered the year before. There he engaged in some more self-analysis, writing down his “inmost thoughts, dreams, and wishful emotions,” as he had done earlier when he felt he was drifting away from Ida. This time the result was more positive, even though he never touched, he felt afterward, the real reason for his short-lived rebellion. Then and on many future occasions Eliena’s fine web proved too resilient for him to escape.44
One of Eliena’s early fans was the aspiring painter Ione Robinson (fig. 36), a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who had left her native Oregon and was now working as an assistant to the artist and illustrator Rockwell Kent, helping him with his work on an edition of Candide. She also helped Eliena with her painting. Eliena was a willing student, eager to soak up all the things Ione had picked up in the desultory training she had had at the Academy of Arts in Philadelphia and the Student Art League. Ione was impressed. Writing to her mother from Croton, where she was staying with the Eastmans, Ione declared that Eliena had “so much enthusiasm, and such facility in her work, that I am positive she will accomplish something.”45
Figure 36. Ione Robinson. EMIIA1.
In the mornings Ione and Eliena worked together; in the afternoons they swam in the Hudson or played tennis. Max, at the age of forty-five, took the opportunity to put into practice his free love philosophy again and began an affair with Ione, who was captivated, as so many women would be after her, by Max’s “seize the day” philosophy of love: “Don’t kiss anybody you don’t want to—and kiss everybody you do want to (if you can)—this is the first and great commandment.”46 Max helped her extract herself from the clutches of Kent, who was a stern taskmaster and whose work as a painter, with its “cold, hard lines,” she didn’t even like all that much.47 Finally, Max and Eliena drove her to Montreal, where she boarded the S.S. Montrose to France with a ticket Max had helped her obtain. “I love and I miss you,” she wrote after Max had said good-bye to her, “so much of my thought is of you, of your gentleness and lovingness. I close my eyes and can see you near me.”48
Distance made Ione’s heart grow even fonder. Months later, after she had set up a studio in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur, she was longing for American bathrooms, American coffee, American toast—and Max Eastman: “Loving you when you are so far away makes you like my God, something beautiful that I saw and loved,—then it was taken away! Pooh!” Living alone in a strange country, with no real mastery of French, she felt that if Max only said the word, she would return home: “I have to see you! Or I’ll jump in the sea!” And she appended a nude drawing of herself, arms extended, that gave voice to her feelings.49
Even if Max’s and Ione’s love didn’t last, their friendship did. After her return a few months later Max introduced her to George Biddle, who then wrote a letter of introduction to the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Two months later Robinson was living in the photographer Tina Modotti’s house in Mexico City and helping Rivera with his National Palace frescoes. Yet another month later she found herself in a new relationship with a man who had come to Mexico to work for TASS, the Russian news agency, and who would turn into one of Max’s archenemies, Joe Freeman. However much the circumstances of Ione’s life changed, Max remained the friend she would turn to in times of need. As late as 1953 Ione, now the mother of a one-year-old son by a man she barely knew and living, once again, in Mexico, wrote to Max to ask for $200 since she couldn’t feed herself or the child. Max wired her $50.50
Money was perennially in short supply in the Eastman household in those days, and it would remain so for the rest of Max’s life. But in the 1930s Max actually had, perhaps for the first time in his life, some real income from his lecturing and writing. It helped that, in June 1930, he was able to sell his parents’ cottage in Glenora (his share of the sale was $200).51 Eliena, too, was doing what she could. She took up teaching Russian in Manhattan, to full classes, as she proudly informed Max.52 In Russia she had studied with Mikhail Mordkin, the partner of Anna Pavlova, and in February 1930 she began to offer dancing lessons for couples. Later she would teach interpretive dance to children on Martha’s Vineyard.53 There was no limit to her creativity: at one point she even took on a job as a live-in minder of an alcoholic young man named Morgan Worthy at 400 East Fiftieth Street.54
Then there was the translation work. Together, Max and Eliena produced English versions of two Trotsky works: first, of The Real Situation in Russia and then, for the Boni brothers, the much more demanding nine-hundred-page History of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky, in his Turkish exile, was elated when he heard about History. Three previous translators had produced shoddy work. But Max was ideally fitted for the task since he combined knowledge of Russian with a deep familiarity with Russian history and literature. At first Trotsky couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw Albert Boni’s telegram: How could Max Eastman have decided to take upon himself such an enormous burden? “Evidently only so that you could save the book from complete death,” he wrote. Max’s commitment to “save his book from ruin” was evidence of his friendship, and Trotsky was worried only that Max wouldn’t be paid enough.55
Under pressure from Trotsky, Boni, who had already kept half of a fee the Saturday Evening Post had paid to Trotsky for the serial rights, sold the translation rights to Simon and Schuster, and Max received one cent per word plus 10 percent of Trotsky’s fees and royalties.56 Max was relieved. Communicating with Boni had been like “signaling through a fog.”57
Initially, Trotsky kept his distance. When the first installments of History were serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, he praised Max, writing, “I sense a fine translation,” though in fact Max had mostly revised the work of his predecessors. It was only after the first volume came out in 1932 that he started to quibble. Here is a good example: in his often savagely funny chapter on the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies Trotsky had described one of the members, Nikolai Avksentiev, as a teacher of “belles lettres” at a ladies’ seminary. “That is really all you can say about him.” Max, in his translation, called Avksentiev a “teacher of language,” which ruined the joke and made him seem less pretentious than Trotsky needed him to be in order to reinforce his point that nothing good can come from a system in which the leaders separate themselves from the actual workers.58
While Max did not change this passage when History was reprinted, he made sure he consulted the author about nuances of meaning as he was plowing through volumes two and three of Trotsky’s massive work. Trotsky responded chattily to Max’s queries, with a dry wit that showed how comfortable he had become with Max’s work.59 He loved the fact that Eliena was an integral part of the work, too, and alluded to her “Ukrainian” roots—a joke, as Eliena well knew: although the ending “-ko,” as in Krylenko, is typical of surnames that are originally Ukrainian, Eliena’s family was originally from Smolensk.60 Eliena was always involved, from the first tentative drafts of Max’s manuscript to the fair copy. She was Max’s typist, native informant, copy editor, and proofreader. Before the second volume went off to the press, Al
bert Glotzer, who had served as Trotsky’s guard in Turkey, Glotzer’s wife, Bertha, and Eliena were sitting around Max’s table reading “the thing,” as Eliena reported, “till Bertha’s eyes began to look in different directions and Glotzer thought he is again on the boat with Trotsky.”61
Trotsky included a warm endorsement of Max’s efforts in his introduction to volumes two and three. His American translator had, he said, “brought to his work not only a creative gift of style, but also the carefulness of a friend.”62 Such words were balm for Max’s wounded political soul. Isolated from both the Bolsheviks in Russia and his old socialist buddies in the States, he found a sense of belonging in his new relationship with Trotsky. Maybe he was still a force to be reckoned with. Even the skeptical Joe Freeman, despite their political disagreements, seemed to believe the charismatic Max might yet again emerge as “the God Almighty . . . of all the thinking radical youth,” in Eliena’s no doubt somewhat exaggerated version of a conversation she had with Joe.63
In April 1931 Scribner’s published Max’s first collection of poetry since 1918, Kinds of Love, in which he combined works written during the previous decade with poems written and published earlier. The book’s salmon-colored dust jacket characterized Max’s ideal reader as “interested in the liberal thought of our time,” an adjective that would come to haunt him over the next three decades. His poetry had assumed a new economy and clarity of expression that put him fully at odds with prevailing literary fashions, especially modernism. In “Egrets,” collected in Kinds of Love, he recalled seeing photographs of these birds at the house of James Judson Carroll, a lumber industry executive, ornithologist, and organizer of the Houston Forum. Being Max, he found his mind wandering from the sinuous forms of the birds to the elegantly formed limbs of his host’s daughter, forbidden fruit for Max since she was about to be married. After channeling his obvious longing into the more acceptable form of wedding advice, Max ended his tribute by encouraging the daughter (he sent her the poem!) to hold on to the primal wildness he had seen in her: “Give love which is the giving art, / But give the wild will never.”64
Max’s new poetry seems less eager to impress, more concentrated, more dependent on occasions or driven by definite purposes than ever before. In his sonnet “Modernist Poetry,” for example, he sought to capture the challenge his old friend, natural science, had brought to literature. No more tunes, no more color in an age dominated by electricity and mathematical equations. But wait, thoughtfulness was not quite dead yet. Max certainly wanted to be perceived as a “thinking singer,” as an intellectual not afraid to wear the colorful garments of the poet. He was a writer who got things done but done beautifully:
Shall not some Goethe of a greater dawn
Pick up this early bright cast coat of song
And wear it strongly though his thought is strong,
Confusing not the doing with the dress?65
The poem that perhaps best epitomizes the conflict between conventional form and less-than-ordinary subject matter was “Swamp Maple,” a longish poem written in ballad stanzas, featuring the adulterer Abdiel, torn between the vow he made to one woman, his “dark love” (named Laura in a later version of the poem), and the desire he feels for another one, a mermaid-like, lithe-limbed, cheerful girl named Elaine. When Abdiel returns to Laura after a night spent with Elaine, Max evokes an image of betrayed domesticity with the guilty conscience of the experienced philanderer: “Her little house was sleeping like a picture / Of all that books had told him could be sweet. / Blue asters bobbed and nodded by her window; / Her gray soft cat came winding round his feet.” He tries to make love to Laura but fails: “In his lips he tasted his dissembling. / He could not. He slid weakly from her bed.” Much to his surprise, Laura not only knows what he has done but accepts him the way he is. The maple turns red in both spring and autumn, she says, and adds,
“The kinds of love are many as the berries
That autumn hangs like lanterns on each vine;
Shall we not gather, while the winter tarries,
Some sweet sharp-colored berries, yours and mine?”66
This was Max’s philosophy of love pressed into the cramped space of four lines—not revolutionary as poetry but certainly provocative as a recipe for marital success (as least as far as the man’s wishes are concerned). His ex-lover Genevieve Taggard, in reviewing Kinds of Love, was entranced. “Swamp Maple” was Max’s best work so far, she wrote in a review for the Herald Tribune. The poem was “so fresh and natural that one rubs one’s eyes” in wonder. It is easily the highlight in a volume that captures the changes in mood with such subtlety they seemed like light and shadow falling over grass.67
The companion volume to Max’s Kinds of Love was The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science, published by Scribner’s in October 1931. It offered a full-throated defense of Max the poet, who was writing sonnets and rhyming “song” and “strong” at a time when most poets around him had abandoned fixed forms and followed the seductions of free verse. It also took Max back to his early fascination with science. Max wanted to warn his literary friends that science was poised to assume all the importance—the right to speak about the world’s problems—that had once been the prerogative of religion and more recently that of literature. Modernism was a retreat from the onslaught of science, helplessness cloaked in unintelligible language. People no longer wanted to know “the best that has been thought” but what had been “found out to be true.” But the poets were unavailable to help: “Where our parents consulted the poets for direct guidance in the unmanageable crises of their lives, we consult the . . . psychoanalyst.” Poetry, at its best, was more than mere talk, more than the chatter of fragments shored up against the poet’s ruin. It was the enrichment, in vibrant, living colors, of that which is true, which for Max was another way of saying that in poetry substance mattered more than linguistic gimmickry.68
The Literary Mind was a crabby book, fueled by Max’s contempt for literary experiment. He did not shy away from mockery, and he did not spare his friends either. One particularly convenient target was E. E. Cummings’s poetry, specifically “Among / these / red / pieces of / day” from Cummings’s volume is 5 (1926). Resetting it first as prose, Max then reprinted the original version with the note that this is how the poem looked “after an attack of punctuation.” Somewhat backhandedly, he also corrected an Italian error in Cummings’s poem, changing “il trene” to “il treno,” hoping it was “an orthographic mistake” and not part of the author’s “lyrical inspiration.” Max pointed out that the poem had no title—“It just jumps at you like a robber out of the brush and says, ‘Listen or run!’”—and that one could not really say what it was about unless one had inside information, as Max, in fact, did: “I happen to be in a position to explain that it has to do with a ride on an Italian railroad train.” He added a tongue-in-cheek paraphrase of the poem, taking Cummings’s images as literally as possible: “It is evening, and the sun is just setting over the mountains—the day, that is, is breaking to pieces and the pieces are red. And the poet also is going to pieces in a manner of speaking.” At the end of the poem, all was dark, or maybe “the poet is dead, or something.” The poem was an experience alright but an expensive one “because you have to hire a couple of detectives and have the poet shadowed for a month or two until you catch him in a temporary fit of common sense and get him to admit what it is he is talking about.” Punctuation and typography in Cummings’s poem—all those hyphens between letters, the erratic commas and the blank spaces, the line breaks in the middle of words—served to make an obscure poem even more obscure.
Max then moved in for the kill when he quoted the critic Paul Rosenfeld’s observation that Cummings’s typographical idiosyncrasies had the purpose of marking the acceleration and deceleration of his melodic lines. Really? Just give the poem to two readers and lock them in separate soundproof chambers and have them recite the poem. Would they produce identical curves if recorded by a machine
and transcribed on paper? Hardly. Rosenfeld’s defense of Cummings’s word salad was either bogus science or “literarious nonsense.”69
However, The Literary Mind cannot simply be reduced to a visceral antimodern assault. Indeed, Max showed himself to be very au courant with recent developments in science. Invoking Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, he saw science rapidly moving into all those fields hitherto reserved to literature. What was necessary, according to Max, was a theory of poetry that regarded it as a part of the flux of life itself. The prototype of the poet, he said provocatively, quoting from Herbert Spencer Jennings’s Behavior of the Lower Organisms, was the flatworm, since he or she reacts, as the flatworm does, “to almost all mechanical stimuli, whether weak or strong . . . turning toward the point stimulated.” At the end of The Literary Mind, Max advocated that all English Departments be closed and made into a branch of the Department of Psychology, since psychology alone could explain literature. But it was psychology regarded as a social science rather than as a science of the individual mind, since the social forces that shape a literary work were so much more important than the “motives of the individual which cause it.” Max was straining after scientific terminology: works of literature are caused, not written.70
The Literary Mind revealed the extraordinary balancing acts Max was performing during those years. While his aesthetic taste gravitated to the tried and true, as a political thinker he was pushing boundaries, questioning orthodoxies. He faced the additional challenge of having to avoid the impression that his poetry was antimodernist the same way the Stalinists were antimodernists and sworn enemies of any literary experimentation that didn’t deliver clear-cut messages. He was mightily pleased and relieved, then, when the British art critic Clive Bell, a great supporter of abstract, nonrepresentational art, loved his book, calling it “by far the best piece of literary criticism . . . that has appeared in English in my time.”71
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