Destitute and without prospects, Claude was not looking forward to his renewed encounter with American racism. But Max stood ready to help. He continued to support his friend over the following months as Claude tried to scrape enough money together to survive in Harlem, a difficult undertaking for someone whose previous books hadn’t sold. As Claude hatched and discarded a variety of plans, including launching a new magazine, Max continued to give him advice as well as money for new clothes.125 Characteristically, Max’s unwavering devotion to his friend in need did not keep him from beginning an affair with McKay’s girlfriend, the gorgeous sculptor Selma Burke. When he retrieved one of his nude photographs of himself from Claude’s apartment on West 63rd Street, tensions came to a boil: “It seems to me that if you had a sudden feeling of prudery and caution over a naked picture that you brought across the seas to present to me as a gift, all you needed to do was to ask me to remove it from the wall or return it to you.” Claude was livid: “Think you that I would care to keep your picture or use it in any way that was objectionable to you? . . . Would you have liked anyone to go to your home in Croton and do this?”126 But as they had done before, the friends reconciled quickly. By now a passionate anticommunist, Claude readily joined Max in denouncing Stalinism, surprising even the FBI with the vehemence of his opposition.127
Regardless of what Max was accomplishing in other areas of his life, much of the first half of the decade was overshadowed by his difficult collaboration with the director Herman Axelbank on the documentary that became Tsar to Lenin. The Russian-born Axelbank had come to him in 1929 with extraordinary film material that showed key moments in the Russian revolution. Max was captivated, signed a contract, and soon was doing more work for Axelbank than he had expected. He bought a Moviola, a film-editing device, and began splicing the film together in Croton. He supplied the narration as well as many of the additional images and film clips Axelbank incorporated into his documentary, with an estimated value of over $5,000. He also supported Axelbank during the protracted production process, ultimately paying him a total of $12,000, which he claimed he had to borrow from other sources.128 And yet the movie seemed to be getting no closer to completion.
Axelbank was a colorful character, a man whose egotism matched Max’s, and their collaboration soon became tense. After first considering him an idealistic moron, Max decided he was a crook: “I felt I was working with a mental cripple, but one who had at least seen a vision. I now think that Axelbank is a schemer, whose racket consists of playing the role of a crack-brained and irresponsible idealist.”129 The result of their struggles, one of the greatest political documentaries of the twentieth century, was released only after lengthy legal proceedings and then generated only more controversy. When Tsar to Lenin premiered at the New York Filmarte Theater on March 6, 1937, pro-Stalinists picketed the place.
Axelbank’s and Eastman’s film offers a stunning visual history of the Russian revolution, from the mounting anger over the pampered lives of the tsar’s family and Russia’s entry into the First World War to the tsar’s abdication under pressure from the rebelling masses and the emergence of Lenin and Trotsky. Tsar to Lenin deftly fuses astonishing, unfamiliar visual material, much of which Max claimed he had assembled, into an unforgettable visual narrative about an event that changed the course of world history. One sequence shows a very small-looking tsarevich being served with lumps of sugar on a plate, which he then feeds to his horse, an unforgettable image of conspicuous consumption. Snippets of film taken with the tsar’s own camera show the Russian ruler unsuccessfully encouraging members of his entourage to engage in a game of tag with him or swimming naked in a river and lifting himself up into a boat, providing viewers with a full and uncensored view of the royal butt. These clips are juxtaposed with images of the grinding poverty in which most of the Russian population lived while their clueless rulers were amusing themselves. But the most remarkable thing about Tsar to Lenin is Max’s narration, delivered consistently at fever pitch, with a concentration that makes it clear that watching this film is no entertainment. Some of Max’s comments have an epigrammatic, even poetic quality. For example, as viewers are being treated to a glimpse of the tall, handsome Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich Romanov, Max remarks, “He would have been the tsar if this were a fairy story.” After a cut to Nicholas II standing idly in a field, he adds, “Real tsars are not so imposing.” The lethal consequences of the tsar’s military incompetence are brought home dramatically when Max describes how the bodies of soldiers “were lying, like piles of rubbish outside the hospitals too crowded to contain them, wounded and dying with no clothes on their backs.” As Max pronounces the words, spitting out the hard consonants—“piles of rubbish,” hospital,” “crowded,” “contain,” “clothes,” “backs”—they seem to slam into each other, the violence of the images echoed by the aggressiveness of Max’s enunciation. Max is capable of sweetness, too, though often with deeply ironical results. When he describes Alexander Kerensky’s initial success, for example, Max’s narration wraps itself around the images shown, subtly directing the audience to their proper understanding until we know that, indeed, nothing is well. Here is Max’s softly alliterative comment when we see Kerensky being feted by the crowds: “Ladies of leisure pelted him with flowers.” Contrast with that Max’s admiration for Lenin’s “sheer force of will, personality, and cold reason.” Here is Max’s original “social engineer” himself, fearlessly addressing the crowds, despite the fact that he is, as Max stresses, no longer well himself: a man who believed, as Max believed, too, that “facts are stubborn things.” In a similar vein, Trotsky’s military skill, freeing Soviet Russia from the stranglehold of multiple foreign nations as well as from counterrevolutionary interventions staged by Admiral Kolchak and General Yudenich, is dramatically illustrated in several sets of images that show soldiers advancing and then fleeing and then reuniting, not as enemies but as Russians or, more simply, as human beings.
In a memorable clip, Kolchak is shown not quite knowing what to do with a pair of geese handed to him as a gift by a local farmer, an amusing scene that seems less benign when juxtaposed with the executions of Red Army soldiers by Kolchak’s men. Max shows one of the condemned laughing at his executioners, a laughter he keeps up through five rounds of executions until his turn arrives. “The Red soldier is still laughing,” warns Max. The fearless man’s laughter anticipates the happy ending of all these struggles, shouted into the microphone by Max: “All of Russia is now a Soviet Republic!” And a happy ending it would have been were it not for a brief appearance, just a few minutes before the film ends, of Comrade Stalin’s dark profile. “Who could have known?” asks Max.
His political work did not prevent Max from pursuing his long-standing interest in the philosophy and psychology of laughter. His earlier book on the subject, The Sense of Humor, despite moments of levity, had been ponderous, cerebral, philosophical—in short, as Max now thought, not suited for making the subject accessible to a wider audience. His new book, Enjoyment of Laughter, published in October 1936, was a restatement of his theory but with much funnier examples. Freud shows up, too, as a “famous psychologist in Europe,” and Max quotes his casual remark about the “Missgeburt” America, along with the common prejudice that America lacks depth. But Max’s entire book is actually a polemic against the notion that such depth would or should be the hallmark of culture. Laughter, to Max, is “playful fun,” even when it involves hostility (of the kind Max had felt during his visit to Freud in 1927). Three chapters explicitly deal with Freud, and in them Max represents himself as being on a mission to rescue sex jokes from a too-serious “theory that puts them in a false light.” Jokes about sex are, says Max, about . . . sex: “They are easy to make and no special theory is needed to explain them.” Freud himself was, Max recalled, “a jolly laugher” and capable of finding things funny the way children would, who, as a rule, do not require that “comic things should mask a serious thought, or tap a deeper reservoir of fe
eling.” Max’s alleged familiarity with the behaviors and needs of children is startling, given his own spotty parental record; yet the concept of the child at play is one of the foundations of his theory, which faults all previous efforts to understand humor with having taken it “too seriously.”130 The dust jacket of the volume featured Max, his white shirt unbuttoned, laughing uproariously, flashing two rows of perfect teeth at the reader.
Enjoyment of Laughter was a popular success. Not all readers were impressed, though. The philosopher George Santayana, for example, in thanking Max for his copy of the book, could not help mentioning he found the jokes ghastly: “I am not able to share the happy experience that inspires you to write it.”131 And Freud was not a fan either, although for a different reason. “Dear Mr. Eastman,” wrote Freud and then immediately switched to German, as he went on to tell Max about something he had accidentally found on page 263 of his new book. Had he been less in awe of Freud, Max could have pointed out that in psychoanalytic theory there is no room for accidents; maybe Freud had looked himself up in the book’s index? No matter, what Freud had found on page 263 was a joke attributed to him that he, in turn, had allegedly gotten from Heinrich Heine: “An unhappy man was advised by a friend to take a wife, and his reply was, whose?” But there was a problem with that quotation, and Freud addressed it head-on: “Now I don’t know if the joke is Heine’s—it’s rather unlikely—but I am sure I have never and nowhere quoted it.”132 Freud was right: the joke was not Heine’s but a version of a crack made by the father of the British playwright Richard Sheridan.133
Max hurried to have Simon and Schuster remove the error and sent Freud a copy of the revised edition. “Dear Dr. Freud,” he wrote on December 27, 1936. “I have believed for so long that I got that story on page 263 out of your book that I can’t say now where or how or why I made the mistake. Could it possibly be an English joke which Dr. Brill inserted in his translation of your book? At any rate, I have corrected the page.” Max’s hope was that such efficient damage control would positively affect Freud’s image of America: “This will give you an example at least of the high speed of American culture, and I hope it will remove the obstacle to your saying something a little more profoundly critical of my book.” Freud did not deliver. At the bottom of the carbon copy of that letter a disappointed Max left a note in pencil, “No answer!” With his note and subsequent silence Freud had thwarted Max’s precarious attempt, begun more than a decade before, to best him.134
In retrospect, it seems Max never left out a chance to take issue with Freud’s theory of sexual repression. He was protesting altogether too much against a view that, from the biographer’s point of view at least, would indeed help make sense of Max’s life. When Hemingway shared with him his guilt over ogling the girls in the dance halls of Paris, admitting that he always came home from his nights on Montmartre “disgusted with myself,” and asked Max if he felt so too, Max snapped back, “No, I don’t, Ernest. I enjoy lustful feelings, and what’s more I don’t think you’re talking real.” A sense of competitive masculinity, a question as to who was the better man and lover, had lurked in the background of Max’s relationship with Hemingway ever since they spent time together in Genoa. At the time, Hemingway was, in Max’s view, merely an “alert and vivid-minded journalist,” a well-mannered but otherwise unremarkable man with a fine set of teeth.135 Over the years, however, Hemingway had, unexpectedly, succeeded in what Max never accomplished: freed from the shackles of having to earn money as a hired hack, he had become an artist, someone who had succeeded in weaving his life experiences into his fiction. The tension Max felt whenever he read Hemingway erupted in a review he wrote of Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway’s account of the tradition of Spanish bullfighting, a book that challenged the genre of journalism by making the brutal ritual a cipher for Hemingway’s very personal search for meaning in life and nature.
“Bull in the Afternoon,” published in June 1933 in the New Republic, is one of Max’s masterpieces. Effortlessly, he mixes genuine admiration for Hemingway (his honesty, toughness, and, yes, courage, a “courage rarer than that of toreros”) with a scathing critique of his male posturing, his adolescent idealizing of violence. Max offered some of his best writing in a passage in which he imagined the suffering of the bull, “this beautiful creature . . . gorgeously equipped with power for wild life, trapped in a ring where his power is nothing.” And he poured his contempt on the bullfighters, “these spryer and more flexible monkeys,” who hunt the bull till he sinks down, “leadlike into his tracks, lacking the mere strength of muscle to lift his vast head, panting, gasping, gurgling, his mouth too little and the tiny black tongue hanging out too far to give him breath, and faint falsetto cries of anguish, altogether lost baby-like now and not bull-like, coming out of him.” In a passage that would come to haunt Max later, he likened writing that derived pleasure from such senseless bloodshed—writing like Hemingway’s, in other words—to the “wearing of false hair on the chest.”136 To Papa Hemingway’s supporters this was blasphemy. “I don’t know when I have written anything that I have heard more about from various sources than that article,” sighed Max.137 Not bothering to read Max’s review carefully, Hemingway’s defenders engaged in the kind of public posturing and muscle flexing that ironically confirmed Max’s concerns. In a letter to the New Republic, for example, Archibald MacLeish rejected what he saw as Max’s psychoanalyzing of Hemingway—the suggestion that any ostentatious display of virility in literature must be caused by a lack thereof in life—as “scurrilous” and attested to having seen Hemingway behave courageously “once at sea, once in the mountains, and once on a Spanish street.” Hemingway chimed in from Cuba and challenged Max to put his speculations in writing: “Here they would be read (aloud) with much enjoyment (our amusements are simple).”138 In response, Max emphatically denied he had ever implied Hemingway was impotent, “although I have long been familiar with the news that I am—and gymnastic enough to be syphilitic at the same time,” and reminisced about the time he had first laid eyes on him: “He had just been blown out of a bathroom by an exploding gas-heater” and “arrived half-way down the hall with a smile on his face like a man on a toboggan.” Somewhat less helpfully, Max, in his personal note of apology to Hemingway, reiterated his criticism: “I suppose it is fresh to psycho-analyse a man by way of literary criticism, especially one whom you esteem as a friend, but I think there is plenty of cruelty in the world without your helping it along.”139 Hemingway never forgave him.
The following year Max included the review in his collection Art and the Life of Action. The book received generally positive reviews. Writing in the Herald Tribune, Ernest Sutherland Bates loved it. If Max really believed art had no tangible effects, his own style of writing—translucent, vigorous, trenchant, and, yes, effective—disproved his theory. It was hard to imagine that a reader with any appreciation for literary craftsmanship would not readily submit to the persuasive magic of Max’s language.140 His former collaborator Floyd Dell, too, despite the fact that one of the chapters attacked his own book, Love in the Machine Age, felt Max had come into his own as a critic. Ignoring Max’s attacks on his philosophy of normative heterosexuality, Floyd was pleased to see that his friend was no longer relegating art to the “function of a cocktail.” The rest was subject for a later conversation. Incidentally, Floyd liked his “essay on Hemingway and bullfighting better—much better—than I like Hemingway on bull-fighting. In fact, I think you made literature out of the disgusting and embarrassing spectacle of Hemingway with his tongue hanging out as he watches the torture of a bull.” Overall, Floyd was more sympathetic to Max’s view of art than Max might have expected: “I quite agree with you about art needing to stand up on its hind legs and feel a self-respecting independence from political utility.”141
The most forceful response to the book came three years later. On August 17, 1937, Max was visiting his editor Maxwell Perkins’s office, discussing a new edition of Enjoyment of Poetry, when He
mingway sauntered in.142 He was not in a particularly generous mood: his marriage with Pauline Pfeiffer was on the rocks, and he was about to return to Spain, where the civil war he had been covering had reinforced his contempt for literary refinement. Opening his shirt, he encouraged Max to assess the authenticity of his chest hair, while he mocked Max’s chest, which was, remarked Perkins, as “bare as a bald man’s head.” Then everything went haywire. Seeing the well-fed, white-clad, good-looking Max, tanned from tennis and hours spent napping on the beach, Hemingway erupted. The way Max remembered it, Hemingway was crude and aggressive. “What did you say I was sexually impotent for?” he snarled. Conveniently, a copy of Art and the Life of Action was sitting on Perkins’s desk. Max attempted to point out a passage—a positive one, we might imagine—that he thought would clarify that he had never wanted to trash Hemingway. But Hemingway, muttering and swearing, zeroed in on a different passage, and a particularly good one it was, too: “Some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity.” This was Max at his best, the use of the plural “evidences” giving the line a rhythmic lilt: “évi / dénces of / réd-blooded/ máscu/línity.”143
An altercation ensued, during which Max, as both parties agreed, got “socked” on the nose with his own book. Everything was happening very fast after that. Max charged at Hemingway. Books and other stuff from Perkins’s desk went flying to the ground. Convinced that the much younger Hemingway was going to kill his friend, Perkins rushed in to help. By the time he had reached the two men they were both on the floor. Max was on top, although Perkins felt this was by accident only. But Max would later tell everyone who cared to listen that he had been the winner. Recognizing the disadvantage imposed on him by age and lack of physical fitness (“I would have kissed the carpet in a fist fight with Ernest Hemingway”), he claimed he had used a wrestling move to throw Hemingway on his back over Max Perkins’s desk. Hemingway assured the Times no such thing had taken place, that Max instead had taken his slap “like a woman.” He went on to challenge Max to meet him in a locked room and read to him his review in there, with “all legal rights waived”; the Hemingway equivalent to challenging his adversary to a duel. There is one detail, however, that does make Max’s account credible: he did know how to wrestle. His work with the Lower Eastside boys’ club had finally paid off.144
Max Eastman Page 33