The Literary Mind angered even those of Max’s readers who had so far accepted or even welcomed his turn against the Russian government. “I think Eastman has come out of the battle scarred and his vision gone blind,” declared the Brooklyn Citizen mercilessly.72 At a time when Max couldn’t say for sure where his real audience was and why his books didn’t sell, it was an enlightened decision on his part to agree to edit a selection of Karl Marx’s writings, including excerpts from Das Kapital, for the publisher Bennett Cerf’s Modern Library. For decades the small volume would pay him between $200 and $500 a year. A similar volume on Lenin, also promised to Modern Library, never materialized, but Cerf generously allowed Max to keep his advance for that collection, too.73
In the first part of the Marx volume Max offered snippets from Marx’s writings envisioning a future society, while the second part was dedicated to Marx’s analysis of the past and the present situation and consisted mostly of sections from Das Kapital. A final section was called “The Method and the Call to Action” and included, among other texts, The Communist Manifesto. In his introduction Max rehearsed again some of his now-familiar arguments about Marxism, which was, he claimed, so alien to the Anglo-Saxon mind because of his indebtedness to German metaphysics. While Marx had done a service to science by insisting that the world was matter and not spirit, he had never let go of the arrogant philosopher’s assumption that the world was sympathetic to his ideas: “He retained . . . the philosophic method and habit of thought,” lamented Max. Enter Max’s own and, of course, “non-philosophic” conception of Marxism, as a “system of social and political engineering.” All one had to do was separate the engineer from the philosopher and la voilà! . . . a Marx for our time. The selections from Das Kapital showed Marx the engineer completing “the scientific task set by his apparently utopian aims—the task of finding out how the existing system of wealth production might be changed in such a way as to make these utopian aims possible of attainment.” Note how Max avoids saying “necessary.” No more reading one’s own interests into the facts of history, a fallacy evident even in the first sentence of the Manifesto.74
To illustrate what he felt was the true Marxian method, stripped of the language of historic necessity, Max included a text he had translated himself: Marx’s “Address of the Central Authority to the Communist League” from April 1850. In that speech Marx was talking to German workers in precisely the language of the engineer, discussing in very practical terms what the workers must do to prevent the republican petty bourgeoisie, whose ideal was a German federative republic, from permanently thwarting the fufillment of their class interests. “The workers,” said Marx, “naturally cannot as yet, at the commencement of their movement, propose any directly communist measures.” However, they could, for example, mount concerted attacks on private property by pushing for the concentration of factories as well as railroads and other means of transportation in the hands of the state.75
Max’s edition brought Sidney Hook out of the woodwork again. His animosity toward Max undiminished, he now accused him of elitism, arguing that his science of revolution required a separation of the engineers from the common people. Max was advocating not the “dictatorship of the proletariat” but a “dictatorship over the proletariat.”76 After one more round of Eastman snapping at Hook and Hook hissing back at Eastman, V. F. Calverton, the editor of Modern Quarterly, officially ended the debate. Max did make an attempt to challenge Hook to a public debate, with Dewey on the panel as well, but the clever Dewey responded, with disarming frankness, that he did not know Marx well enough to feel up to the task. Word on the street was that Hook had killed the older, lazier Eastman. Max’s self-characterization as a sensualist had worked almost too well: “Distracted from the strict practice of philosophy by poetry, travel, Freudianism, friendship, and other pleasures of the sense,” Max didn’t stand a chance against Hook, opined the literary critic Alfred Kazin.77
But Max was not done yet. A pamphlet, The Last Stand of Dialectic Materialism: A Study of Sidney Hook’s Marxism, published through the imprint Polemic Publishers in 1934, reads in part like the Last Stand of Max Eastman.78 Few people paid attention to it, but those who did would have encountered Max in full possession of his philosophical powers. Apart from a few personal gibes—Hook believed, said Max, that “Marx knew all that man can know” and was suffering from a “Talmudistic infatuation with the mind of Karl Marx”—Max proceeded carefully. He began by reasserting his belief that Marx himself had wanted to leave philosophy behind. Hadn’t he said, in his Theses on Feuerbach, that, while philosophers had interpreted the world in various ways, “the thing is to change it”? Hook’s defense of dialectical materialism works only by reducing the method’s applicability to social history and by waiving the requirement that it follow the triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. “Seeing that [dialectical materialism] in its crude nineteenth-century form will no longer stand up—you can no longer pretend that the world itself is with dialectic necessity achieving the aims of the revolution—he transforms it into a twentieth-century philosophy.” But Dewey’s instrumentalism had no fixed goals, no predetermined outcomes. In his philosophy, the truth and its working out in practice were one and the same thing: the process determined the result. In one aspect, though, Dewey’s theory was painfully like Marx’s. It, too, depended on some kind of “friendly cooperation between the objective world and the mind of man,” which, in Max’s understanding was animism, a “thin remnant,” maybe, “wishing to vanish altogether,” but nevertheless a reason for being cautious with Dewey, too. Ironically, what Dewey had preached, absolute skepticism regarding every idea “that lays claim to general truth,” could be used to question his own philosophy, too.79
• • •
Max’s aggressive disgust with Marxian dialectics spilled over also into his relationship with Trotsky. In June 1932 Max and Eliena took a boat to France, where they bought a car and made their way through the Mediterranean, spending a few days on Mallorca, where Max reconnected with his former lover and sometime nemesis Genevieve Taggard. In Milan they boarded the train for Istanbul. Within days they were on the deserted Prinkipo Island in the sea of Marmara, where they joined Trotsky and Natalia Ivanovna, who had found a temporary refuge from Stalin’s persecutors in a crumbling villa that had once belonged to some pasha.80 Max, who was working on the third volume of Trotsky’s History, had high hopes for the visit. They stayed for almost two weeks, but things did not go well. Max found Trotsky unpredictable, childlike, and petty, especially in financial matters. Trotsky was not able to take lightly Max’s philosophical differences. While Trotsky was not, in Max’s estimation, vindictive, he appeared surprisingly vulnerable to Max, a combination that seemed more dangerous than simple vanity.81
What put Max off even more was Trotsky’s lack of appreciation for anything beautiful. The house was dramatically situated. The island, Max noted, displaying his poetic talents, lay down beside the blue sea like some “prehistoric animal drinking,” and yet there was no furniture on the balconies so that anyone could enjoy the view. Perhaps Max did not know that a year earlier there had been a fire in Trotsky’s house that destroyed most of his library, a logical reason for the bareness he noticed. Things and people did not matter much to Trotsky, who lived in a world that consisted mostly of himself and who was unprepared to discuss, rather than merely restate, his ideas. Max repeated the argument he had been making since 1927 that dialectics was a form of animism, a “metaphysical contraption” and nothing more, theology, in other words, but not science. Trotsky turned beet red, and his throat was throbbing. Natalya became so worried she remained by Trotsky’s side, “silent and austere,” until Max gave up: “Well, let’s lay aside this subject.” But to Max this subject was of crucial and personal relevance, and Trotsky’s intransigence bothered him deeply.
Trotsky’s notebooks from those years prove that he understood Max’s position only too well. Max had rejected Marx’s statement that Hegel had tu
rned philosophy “on its head,” and in order to refute him Trotsky listed example after example of how science itself had worked dialectically, presumably in the hope that these instances would prove the scientific nature of the dialectic method itself. Galileo did not repudiate the “interdependence between the movements of the sun and the earth” but turned it on its head, just as Darwin did not reject the adaption of organs to environment earlier biologists had found but turned the concept on its head. Evolution and the translation of quantity into quality was Trotsky’s master metaphor for social change, the process through which tensions, increasing slowly over decades, might erupt in a violent explosion, in the shape of class struggle and civil war.82 Perhaps it would have been more effective for Trotsky to describe Max’s repudiation of dialectics as yet another attempt to turn a concept on its head, but the truth is that Max agitated and angered him beyond measure, paralyzing his ability to argue: “He was almost hysterical—was actually gasping for breath—when he found himself unable to overpower me with the usual clichés within which the idea of dialectic evolution is defended,” wrote Max eight days after he had left Prinkipo.83
But the real falling out between Max and Trotsky happened over something comparatively trivial. Trotsky’s household, consisting not only of himself but also of a vast entourage of fans, aides, and secretaries, was expensive, costing him about $15,000 a year. Although his income from royalties was considerable—thanks to Max’s services, for example, he had received over $20,000 for the serialization of his History in the Saturday Evening Post—Trotsky constantly worried about money.84 Max had been acting as an unofficial liaison between Trotsky and the literary agent George Bye, who saw to it that Trotsky’s articles were well placed and well compensated. Bye agreed to charge 10 percent for his services, while Max usually received 15 percent for his translations, an arrangement Max regarded as fair since he had done, as he put it, a “mountain of unpaid work” for Trotsky, too. But the system was not perfect. Once, when Max was traveling, his translation was delayed by a few weeks, so that the article Trotsky had written was no longer timely. In addition, Trotsky had given an interview about the subject of the piece, thus further reducing its value to the press. In the end the New York Times paid only $100 for it. Trotsky was furious and decided he would henceforward approach Bye directly, eliminating the apparently unreliable Max as middleman as well as translator but without telling him.
Max found out about the situation when he saw a letter from Bye on Trotsky’s desk. He confronted Trotsky, who reacted angrily. Max claimed to be secretly relieved. The Trotsky articles had proved to be a constant interruption of his busy writing schedule. That he went on to describe the incident in such detail, however—in Great Companions as well as in the second volume of his autobiography—suggests he was more than a little hurt by Trotsky’s cavalier dismissal of his services. Nonetheless, he continued to help, for example, by putting Trotsky in touch, a year later, with the well-connected agent Maxim Lieber.85
Another incident further complicated the situation. Sometime after their conversation about Bye, Trotsky pulled out a letter from a woman in Ohio who had inquired if he knew anything about her relatives in Russia. Trotsky asked Max if he knew who the woman was. Max said he did not, whereupon Trotsky announced, “I guess there is no use answering.” Max agreed and crumpled up the letter and was about to throw it out when Trotsky stopped him. “Is that the way you treat your correspondence?” he asked. “What kind of a man are you?” The next day, when Max brought up the subject of Bye again and warned him that if he went with commercial translators the publication of his articles in the American press would likely take more time, Trotsky snapped at him: “I prefer not to send my articles to a man who grabs up his correspondence and throws it in the wastebasket!” A few years earlier, in 1925, Max had said Trotsky was a great man if not a great politician. When he left Prinkipo at the end of July 1932 he was no longer sure that even the “great man” designation still applied. He had come to dislike and distrust Trotsky, he told the French Trotskyist Alfred Romer.86 It was a good thing he and Eliena were now headed for Palestine, where the “plump and healthy happiness” of the Jews at home in their own promised land, spending their days as if “just to be alive was a picnic,” gave Max a feeling that not all dreams were destined to die.87
In retrospect it seems that two extremely vulnerable men had come together at a particularly bad time in each other’s lives. Upset about not being given his due by the one man who still allowed him to retain his faith in a better world, Max was unable to understand Trotsky. And Trotsky, deprived of direct political power and fearful of being obliterated by his enemies and the forces of history, could not understand him. Instead, as Max saw it, he redirected his anger toward those who were in the best position to help him. Since Trotsky had not let him “finish a single phrase” when they discussed dialectical materialism in Prinkipo, Max took to letter writing to convince him he was mistaken—until Trotsky snapped and declared that philosophical arguments could not be carried on by mail. “I will not stand for such a thing: I have too great a volume of actual political correspondence.”
As far as Trotsky was concerned, the gloves were off now, and he went on to berate Max for translation mistakes—“gaps” and “obvious misunderstandings”—he had found while casually paging through the published volumes of his History of the Russian Revolution. One hilarious example occurs in volume 3, chapter 43, where Trotsky is describing the efforts of the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov to persuade the workers at the Putilov machine-building plant in St. Petersburg not to engage in revolutionary activities. The workers kept interrupting him, and as rain was drizzling down on all of them Sukhanov finally gave up. Commented Trotsky, in Max’s translation: “Under that impatient October sky the poor Left Democrats, even as described in their own writings, look like wet hens.” Trotsky pointed out that Max had inadvertently confused “neprivetlivyi” (неприветливый, or “bleak,” “inhospitable”) with “neterpelivyi” (нетерпеливый, or “impatient”). Acidly, Trotsky added, “In what sense is it possible for the October sky to be ‘impatient’?” That stung. And while Max rejected other Trotsky criticisms, scribbling “not a mistake” in the margins of Trotsky’s letter, this one he fixed, at least sort of. In 1957, when the University of Michigan Press reprinted all three parts of Trotsky’s History bound into one massive volume, Max exchanged “impatient” for “ungracious,” retaining the personification Trotsky had disliked while acknowledging what Trotsky had originally meant to indicate, namely, that something as trivial as bad weather had discouraged those hapless Mensheviks.88
But Max wasn’t ready to give up on Trotsky yet. In what was probably the most passionate book he wrote during this decade, Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism, he characterized Trotsky as Russia’s “greatest living historian, essayist, and critic” and praised him for believing that “art must make its own way and by its own means.”89 The title of the book, released by Scribner’s in May 1934, a year after Hitler had assumed power in Germany, was nothing if not inspired: it conjured a vision of columns of mindless, marching soldiers, with any trace of individuality driven out of them by the whip of totalitarianism.
Max’s bête noir in the book was the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, the organizing force behind the international congress of revolutionary artists that had taken place in Kharkov, Ukraine, in November 1930. The program of art for communism’s sake that was formulated in Kharkov had—that much was certain!—a disastrous impact on artistic life in the Soviet Union, and it seemed poised to have a similarly noxious effect on American literary culture. A case in point was the fawning response of the editors of the New Masses to the directives from Kharkov. Meekly, they had rushed to embrace a verdict on their efforts that essentially told them they were incompetent. Wrote Max, “I know of nothing in the sad history of the dwindling dignity of the literary mind to equal this sad picture of political (and financia
l) abjection parading as leadership in the creation of a new culture.” While the roots of this wholesale oppression of the creative spirit lay in Marxian thought itself, there were some shining exceptions to the rule—Lenin and, of course, Trotsky. In an appendix Max included a lengthy exploration of Lenin’s views on art and culture written by Vyacheslav Polonsky, the disgraced editor of the journal Press and Revolution, translated by Max himself. According to Polonsky, Lenin’s pronouncements on communist art, or art for the Communist Party, applied only to art that aspired to carry on the work of the Communist Party. Everyone else was free to write and say everything they wanted, “without the slightest limitation.” Case closed.90
Max’s Artists in Uniform is so rich in extraneous detail, so saturated with Max’s knowledge of Russian literary and political affairs, that it seems he had lost sight of its American target audience. In fact, the book’s real strength lay not in Max’s political commentary, as acute as it often was, but in his deeply moving portraits of writers who suffered under the Soviet regime. Perhaps the most heartbreaking of these is Max’s chapter on Sergei Yesenin, who, from 1922 to 1923, was the husband of Isadora Duncan. To Duncan, everything was a dramatic gesture, wrote Max, and she was as helpful as a whirlwind after a hurricane to her wild poet-husband. In a society that expected him to follow the “bureaucratic boss rule,” Yesenin, chanter of the sensual love and the beauties of the Russian landscape, was lost. Max imagined how Yesenin had sat down with a pile of monstrous textbooks, struggling in vain to grasp the principles of Hegelian–Marxist dialectics, and how he had sought oblivion in the beautifully shaped arms of the dramatic Duncan: “To Yesenin, the bewildered singer, wavering between those ponderous text-books from which he learned nothing but that he was useless in the new world being born, and the drunken Moscow tavern where all sorts of friendly and loose-thinking creatures, more like the old farm animals, loved him when he fed them with his songs—to him this glorious whirlwind seemed like a godsend.” After one of Isadora’s sublimely vapid gestures, Yesenin’s Marxist tormentors suddenly looked small again. This was Max writing at the height of his powers. A single adjective like “loose-thinking” and the specter of Yesenin’s inebriated fans mindlessly feeding on his songs in a dark taproom accomplish more than pages of dense analysis. Ultimately Duncan was not enough for Yesenin, just as she would soon prove to be not enough for herself anymore. Max’s chapter ends with Yesenin’s botched suicide in a Leningrad hotel, where he was found hanging from a steam pipe, his wrists slashed, for good measure. “He had had some trouble making himself die.”91
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