Max’s portrait of the flamboyant Vladimir Mayakovsky, “a great standing coarse-stemmed swamp-watered weed,” was similarly effective. Loud, brash, “avid of the strong blows of life,” Mayakovsky was singularly unsuited to doing what the party wanted him to do, which was to “get on the job and sing the right tune.” Rather than sacrifice his independence, which he valiantly tried to do for a while, Mayakovsky ended up sacrificing himself, a “love boat / smashed against mores,” as he characterized himself in the poem he left on the table before he died.92 Max evoked other lives and careers touched by the foul breath of Soviet bureaucracy: Yevgeny Zamyatin pushed into exile; Isaac Babel threatened into silence; Valentin Katayev scared into becoming a supporter of the five-year plan. But the most humiliating, least heroic story was that of the novelist Boris Pilnyak, who had once said a writer ought to occupy himself only with his manuscripts and was now singing the praises of the Soviet system whenever possible, most recently on a tour through the United States, chaperoned by that “pure but diplomatic priest of Stalinism in the field of culture, Joseph Freeman.”93 Pilnyak answered Max’s charges lamely and ineffectively in the pages of the newly founded Partisan Review. “Revolutions are not made with white gloves,” he said. And he added, cryptically, “A man . . . standing on his head will see everything upside-down.”94 Pilnyak was shot, unceremoniously, four years later, after a trial that lasted fifteen minutes. His last words to the court: “I have so much work to do.”95
Artists in Uniform, though not the book of a Trotskyist, is still very much an endorsement of Trotsky’s ideas, and Max anticipated that orthodox Stalinists would find it to be counterrevolutionary. He was not disappointed. An old friend from Max’s Moscow days, Karl Radek, who was himself fighting for his personal and political survival, denounced Max in Izvestia as a lackey of the bourgeoisie, precisely the same charge to which he would himself confess just a few years later before he was killed. Radek resorted to invective and irony, stating that the flippancy which Max had displayed toward “the greatest thinkers of mankind” (Marx and Stalin, one may assume) was “typical of a little dog to whom a piece of Michelangelo’s sculpture is nothing but a stone to be used for certain needs.” Max had pissed on Marxian theory, in other words. Somewhat contradictorily, though, Radek also wrote that the Soviets shouldn’t underestimate people like Max, as garbage-filled as their heads might be.96
Those who actually read Max’s book were confused by what, or rather whom, it had been intended for. What did the sad fate of Yesenin and the quirky habits of Mayakovsky matter to American readers? In the Herald Tribune the poet Babette Deutsch felt Max had missed a chance to articulate his message as clearly and relevantly as possible: “The fear is that he speaks either to those who will not listen or to the few who are in agreement with him, while some may overhear who are bound to misinterpret his message and turn it to purposes of their own. If the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, it should be handled in unambiguous fashion.”97
Word to the wise. The problem was, of course, that Max himself was struggling to understand where he was headed. That was, certainly, the most charitable explanation Joe Freeman was able to come up with when he heard that Max had attacked him personally in his new book. Freeman was in bed when he got the news, his voice gone after he had spent the night arguing with Alexander Trachtenberg, the Communist Party’s cultural commissar, about the need to leave the writers alone. Trachtenberg wouldn’t have any of it and proceeded to call Freeman—the way Joe remembered it later—a “rotten liberal.” And now Max was maligning him as Stalin’s tool!98 If only Max had bothered to ask around, people would have told him that Joe Freeman was not a Communist hack. When working for TASS he had written an ironic jingle popular with his colleagues: “Never, never shall I moan a / Simple lyric from the heart. / I’ll devote my new Corona / To the proletarian art.”99 It was hard for Freeman not to think the entire book was really about him. Thirty years later the wound was still fresh when Max became one of the main topics of a series of monstrously long and slightly paranoid letters Freeman wrote to Smith College professor Dan Aaron, who was collecting material for his magisterial account of American writers and communism, Writers on the Left. Freeman was still racking his brain as to what might have caused Max’s evident hatred of him. Was it that oldest of reasons, a rivalry for women? Freeman’s first wife was Ione Robinson, whom he left in 1932 to marry Charmion von Wiegand; both women had been Max’s lovers.100 Whatever the reason, the dazzling Max, who had once hovered over Freeman’s own political coming-of-age, had become his enemy. Freeman was still telling himself and Dan Aaron, his new father confessor, he had never had anything but noble feelings for Max: “I am trying to save him from destroying the image of what he was when he was young, daring, magnanimous and wonderful.”101 Freeman’s panicky soul searching shows how important Max had remained to a generation of leftist critics, even after he had unceremoniously left their fold.
Over the years, despite its historical density and Max’s tendency to overgeneralize, Artists in Uniform has retained a measure of popularity. Fans of the book have included some unlikely folk, among them a son of Slovakian immigrants to the United States, Andrew Warhola, better known as Andy Warhol. Andy wore a uniform of sorts, courtesy of Brooks Brothers. But whoever saw him up close—tie permanently askew, the collar points of his shirt rolled up, his navy blazer glistening with use, his shoes scuffed and untied, the bizarre, ill-fitting toupee perched uneasily on his head—realized that he was in fact subverting the dress code: an artist on the cusp of shedding his uniform but holding on to it for now so that others might recognize the uniforms they are wearing (fig. 37).
Figure 37. Andy Warhol’s copy of Artists in Uniform. Author’s collection.
Max’s uncanny productivity during this decade was the direct result of the stability his relationship with Eliena gave him. The love she offered him was unequivocal, unquestioning, unaffected by his many absences when he was on the lecture circuit and likely also pursuing other women. Sometime during 1930, when Max was away on one of his trips, she penned a little note in which she described how she felt when she got one of Max’s telegrams. She was trying to think of all the “beautiful words” that came to mind when she thought of him, “all the words that mean joy, and life, and laughter,” and she wanted to write a poem for him, “a poem about a brook in the snow, cold and transparent and running swift and sure, dark and clear, with the snow white and silent around it. Or about a pond in a moon light, when the woods are dark and quiet and the ice is glistening and smooth.” A telegram he sent her had made her “incredibly happy,” and it had also destroyed any aspirations to happiness the telephone girl in Ossining might have harbored, Eliena mischievously suggested: “Oh, my beloved there are not many people in the world as happy as I am. I know this girl in Ossining wished she would get your telegram and not I. I know that her life is ruined because she will never find you, and there is not one like you in the world . . . Ia tak strashno liubliu tebia [I love you so very much].”102 Then modest Eliena got a little naughty. In the mornings she wanted to climb on top of Max and kiss his face, eyes, neck, and laugh and smother (zadushit) him till he would throw her off. However, most of the time she had nothing but a pillow to play with, “nobody to say moia maliutochka, moia zolotaia” (my sweetheart, my treasure).103
Max responded in kind, sending fulsome declarations of love to the “loveliest laughing darling strong graceful clever devoted delightful friend anybody ever had.”104 With Eliena at his side and audiences eager for his wisdom, Max felt he was done with psychoanalysis: “I don’t want to waste this summer waiting for Dr. Brill to restore my soul. I am going to try very hard with your help to establish a little cult of myself.”105 When he was on the road Eliena willingly listened to his tales of seedy hotel rooms, terrible food, train cars so shaky he had trouble writing, and dreams so transparent no analyst was needed to interpret them for her. In one of them Max saw himself lying on his back, snorting at T. S. Eli
ot.106
Max’s salary for these appearances was not at all bad, given the circumstances. For a lecture on a “literary subject” (“The Art of Enjoying Poetry”), given at the Norfolk Forum in Virginia, the oldest publicly subscribed speakers’ series in the United States, he was to receive $200, about $3,600 in today’s money.107 More than once on these occasions Max felt out of place, but his sense of humor and his desperate need for cash helped him through such moments of potential crisis: “I wish you could have heard me explaining Marxism and Lenin’s party dictatorship to the regular weekly ‘Convocation’ of the University of Minnesota. Nobody seems to understand how I got in there, and I’m sure I don’t.”108 But Max knew what he was doing on the podium, and he especially enjoyed those events at which there was standing room only, which reminded him of his glory days as an itinerant agitator. He had been a grand success, he proudly informed Eliena about his lecture titled “The Future of Liberalism” in Houston. Seventeen or eighteen hundred people had come, and up to three hundred were standing in the back. “It is great fun to speak to a crowded hall, and the speech is really one of the best I’ve made.” In Dallas, his next stop, they had to turn people away. What he called his “scared lamb” condition had now evaporated completely: “Well the great black SPEECH that hung over me like a cloud for weeks is over. I woke up this morning a poet and a person with leisure to look around—or rather I didn’t wake up, for I hardly went to sleep at all, I was so excited.” Lest he got overconfident, however, an old friend came for a visit during the night after the lecture:
When I did go to sleep Sigmund Freud started chasing aeroplanes around the sky in a blimp. You and I were on a steamer in mid-ocean, and got off in a small boat to see better what Freud was going to do, for he was frightfully angry at these aeroplanes. He finally turned around and drove right across the deck of our steamer, taking off the smoke-stack and the mast, and as we soon realized breaking the whole ship squarely in two and turning it over. I woke up wondering whether we could pick up a passenger or two in our small boat before they all swamped us, wondering if we would have the nerve to row away and let them drown.109
Freud as a lethal force, and Max as the well-intentioned savior of humankind? The imagery is classically Freudian: consider the planes, the phallic smokestack, and the mast, broken by Freud flying kamikaze attacks in his equally phallic blimp. The ship, in Freudian dream analysis, as “a hollow space” capable of being filled, is associated with female genitals, whereas planes symbolize phallic penetration.110 In Max’s dream Freud’s monstrous flying machine wreaks destruction on everything and threatens Max and Eliena in their makeshift boat, too small to save anybody but themselves from drowning. What a marvelous dream, opined Eliena, his main cheerleader and confidence restorer.111
But Max wasn’t sure what he was doing. In his speeches he would still denounce America and religion “forty ways” and defend Russia and Lenin as “the only way out,” and his audiences, consisting of the intellectual elite in whatever town he happened to be in, would applaud him “to the roof.”112 But what right did he really have to speak for communism in the first place? “I represent the official or Stalin communists just about the way a bear represents a bee’s nest,” he joked in a speech in which he also said very clearly that the scientific communism he wanted was not found in the documents of any party or existing organization.113 But he was still willing to take risks. For as long as he invoked the term “communism” in association with his views during his lectures, for as long as he blamed the government for the fact that twelve million people were out of work and even more were living like beggars on handouts, and for as long as he publicly advocated the transformation of capitalist society into another system not dependent on the fluctuations of the market, the authorities were taking notice. If the Depression and New Deal had made audiences more sympathetic to left-wing causes, communists and their alleged sympathizers nevertheless found themselves the targets of persecution all over the nation. The Fish committee, created in 1930 by the fervent anticommunist senator Hamilton Fish Jr., had begun its insidious work of investigating all groups and individuals suspected of advising or advocating the overthrow of the United States government by means of riots, strikes, or sabotage.114 When Max was in Memphis in 1934 a man had just been jailed, he was told, merely for inquiring after the location of the communist headquarters in town. And now, since Max had said in interviews that he was a communist, the “poor little man” who had arranged his lecture at the Institute of Culture was shaking in his boots.115
As a lecturer Max was the consummate professional. He left nothing to chance: from the first draft to the written-out text he had memorized, from the smallest joke to the funny anecdote that had an audience of several hundred in stitches, all had been carefully prepared. Max’s striking outward appearance helped: the white hair, the ruddy, young-looking face, his trim, fit physique. There was a barely veiled sexual undercurrent to his lecturing. That wasn’t lost even on a sophomore at Wells College, Ruth LeSourd ’39, where Max lectured in 1937. She gushed about her experience in the Chronicle, the college magazine. What stood out about Max first and foremost was the voice, which to her sounded like that of a minister reading the rolling cadences of a psalm. Just when she thought Max was merely putting on a show, albeit a very good one (“He has probably done it hundreds of times before, and can turn it on and off at will”), Max turned and seemed to smile right in her direction: “My doubts fled.” He meant what he said, and, more important, he meant her. Under Max’s steady hazel eyes, Ruth LeSourd’s resistance melted. She became so enthralled with Max that “I often found myself losing track of what he was saying.” Even Max’s gestures were intoxicating, no mere add-ons but part of the complete Eastman Experience itself. For example, when Max explained that the function of poetry was to “cherish and communicate experience,” he cupped his hands as if he were guarding a tiny glowing flame: “One could see that he did cherish experience, as a collector prizes a noble fire.” Max had just been lecturing about how one should, yes, cherish the aesthetic possibilities of life; now he was modeling such an experience for them.116
But of course these events were performances, and the incessant speech making, with all the other efforts it required, wore Max out. His real mission in life was, he told Eliena, the writing of “great truth and poetry.” Talking about communism and Russia and the future of the working class, and doing so not as an agitator but as a paid speaker before audiences that were distinctly not working class, felt “a little bit dirty and unpleasant.”117
A distinct advantage of Max’s new fame as a noncommunist communist was that he could help other people, preferably equally maladjusted ones. There was the novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, for example, an unconventional thinker in her own right, who met Max in 1932 and thought he was simply brilliant.118 Max repaid her admiration by writing a supportive letter for Hurston’s 1934 application for a Guggenheim grant. Hurston’s intention was to study indigenous religious practices in Nigeria and on the Gold Coast. But Max’s recommendation was the only positive one coming from the all-white group of referees Hurston had listed, which also included Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Carl Van Vechten. While Benedict bluntly said Hurston had “neither temperament nor the training” to succeed and Boas criticized his former student for having journalistic rather than scientific inclinations, Max unequivocally praised Hurston’s “general intelligence, her social maturity and exquisite tact and good judgment.” He, for one, found the scope of her project “captivating.” Hurston did not get the grant.119
This was not the only occasion in Max’s life when he stood by someone others had abandoned. On February 1, 1934, Claude McKay, after more than a decade in self-imposed exile, returned to New York on the SS Magallanes from Cádiz. Max had never lost touch with his friend. Over the years he had patiently listened to tales of Claude’s medical woes and literary struggles. He had responded to desperate requests for money, dispatched, with alarmi
ng regularity, from France, Berlin, and, eventually, Morocco, where McKay had rented a house.120 He sent money as well as the three “gorgeously bound” volumes of his translation of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution.121 Gratefully, Claude kept a photograph of Max and Eliena close by, a reminder of Max’s beautiful life—but apparently a nude one, surprising the Arabs, who didn’t think the portrait was civilized.122
By 1933 McKay’s financial situation had become dire. He had no warm clothes, was ill, and felt utterly lost, as he told Max. “No one has sent me a penny but you.”123 Max made some inquiries and had a hand in arranging a meeting with an American consul in Morocco, who laughingly observed that Max was not the best reference to have for a prospective immigrant but nevertheless arranged for a visa. Max wired funds for Claude’s transatlantic passage.124
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