Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  The literary “battle of the ages” was widely covered in the papers.145 The Herald Tribune noted that while Max was older, both he and Hemingway were in the “heavyweight category.” That said, Max would have been pleased to see he was trimmer than his younger antagonist:

  Hemingway

  Age: 39

  Height: 6 feet

  Weight: 197 pounds

  Eastman

  Age: 54

  Height: 6 feet

  Weight: 180 pounds146

  The accounts of the fight differ, but there is independent confirmation of one other detail: the book Hemingway used, now kept at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which features, on the flyleaf, a clumsy drawing of a paw with the resonantly poetic inscription, “This is the book I ruined on Max (the Prick) Eastman’s nose, I severely hope that he rots forever in a hell of his own digging. Ernest Hemingway.” It seems Hem had nicked the book from Perkins’s office. His besmirched masculinity (when he talked to the Times he sported a bruise on his forehead that he claimed had not been caused by Max) required that he document his accomplishment for posterity.147

  Max’s friends and supporters rallied to his defense. In a telegram to him a group of ladies, the Ladies of Kings Beach on the Vineyard, felt the need to reassure Max that “you have got hair on your chest.”148 Millay and Boissevain told him he had seemed “dignified and lovely” throughout the entire unpleasant episode.149 Some less generous observers thought the Hemingway–Eastman scuffle was a mere publicity stunt, hyped by Max to counteract his declining relevance in a changing world. One thing is sure: Max “the Prick” had gotten his point across. In September, the New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a rather unhappy-looking man at a physical being diagnosed as a writer merely because of the fluff on his chest.150

  In the decades that followed, Max almost obsessively revisited the scene, seeking reassurances from others who had seen or heard what had happened—men who were now old, like Max, too—that Hemingway had not had the upper hand in their scuffle. What was at stake was more than literary criticism or Max’s right to say what he wanted about a fellow writer. As Hemingway went from one well-publicized risky adventure to the next, Max continued to insist on his own version of masculinity that involved not loud displays of virility but a deliberate celebration of the human body and its infinite capacity for pleasure.

  As it turned out, Max was not the only one with a grudge against Hem. Decades after the battle in Perkins’s office a mutual friend of the two men, the painter Waldo Peirce, presented Max with a surprise gift. In the 1920s Peirce had been Hemingway’s fishing buddy in Florida, and on one of those occasions Peirce persuaded Hemingway to pose for his camera wearing nothing but a kind of turtle shell or sponge on his head and the butt-rest of a fishing rod covering his privates (fig. 38). Waldo, despite his rough exterior, was a devoted family man, a “domesticated . . . cow,” as Hemingway unkindly called him in a letter to John Dos Passos, and it’s possible Peirce saw sharing the photograph with Max as an opportunity to get back at Hem.151 He inscribed it on the back: “The great Pescador hiding his light under a but[sic]-rest.” When he got the picture, Max, with evident satisfaction, noted the near-absence of chest fur. And he published it in the second volume of his autobiography, accompanied by the sarcastic caption, “Hemingway in the twenties.” By then Hemingway had been dead for three years.

  Whether Max or his publisher balked, we don’t know. But in the published version of the photograph Hem is wearing a pair of dainty swimming trunks. No matter, Max had finally won the battle.152

  Figure 38. The Great Pescador. Ernest Hemingway on the Marquesas Keys, 1928. Photograph by Waldo Peirce. EMII.

  When Max engaged in fisticuffs with Hemingway in Maxwell Perkins’s office, he was actually in the middle of a profound personal as well as political crisis. He had staked a large part of his adult life on the supposition that there was something that art—which Max understood comprehensively as poetry, writing, oratory—could accomplish or save and on the hope that thereby he would be able to save himself, too. Through all the permutations of his political views one hope had remained the same for Max: that the reforms he advocated as a pragmatist, feminist, socialist, and defender of the Bolsheviks and then of Trotsky would result in greater freedom for the individual to do exactly what he or she wanted. As Stalin began to issue one decree after another, limiting the rights of women, imposing a code of conduct for students in schools, and replacing internationalism with a jingoistic defense of the fatherland, Max became increasingly convinced the problem was inherent in Marxism itself and could not simply be fixed by a different mode of interpretation, one that got rid of the vestiges of Hegelian metaphysics. What had happened to the hope, memorably expressed by Friedrich Engels, that as a result of the realization of socialism “the interference of the state power in social relations” would become utterly superfluous? Marx/Engels had been confident that the state, as a political entity, would not even have to be abolished but would simply “wither away” and become a museum artifact, like the spinning wheel and the prehistoric axe. It dawned on Max that any revolution involving some organized, collective effort to do away with state power would end up reestablishing something that would, in turn, look very much like yet another and perhaps even worse form of state power. And communist Russia had in fact, at least in Max’s estimation, become worse than the tsar’s regime. He had the personal experience to back this up. Under Stalin’s rule Eliena’s entire family, including her sisters Olga Drauden, Vera Krylenko, and Sophia Meyer, along with their children, and her other brother, the mining engineer Vladimir Krylenko, vanished. Olga was the last to be in touch with Eliena, in 1935. Since then, silence.153

  In January 1937 Max published an article in Harper’s, “The End of Socialism in Russia,” which summarized his new thinking. Published as a small book just a month later, it confirmed that Max’s issue with communism was no longer limited to Stalinism. Taking all those “liberal scholars and littérateurs” to task who were still defending Stalin, Max shifted his attention gradually away from what was happening in Russia—since there was nothing to be fixed there anyway—to what, under the influence of Stalin’s propaganda machine, was happening at home in the United States. The Prince of the Village became the Cassandra of Gotham. In a letter to the receptive DeWitt Wallace, the editor of Reader’s Digest, Max plaintively spoke of “the enormous circle of Partial Dupes and Total Innocents” surrounding the inner core of fellow travelers. “This circle includes many of the biggest men in the country,” Max wrote, “capitalists, bankers, newspaper publishers, mayors, senators, congressmen, presidential candidates of two parties. It is practically interminable, and it extends the influence of Stalin’s Holding Company, and its money-raising effectiveness, I should say, to some 25 or 30 million Americans.” In Max’s pessimistic view nearly one-fourth of Americans were under Stalin’s influence, whether they knew it or not, and their institutions were, too, from the Consolidated Tribes of the North American Indians to the editorial staff of Ralph Ingersoll’s PM Magazine.154

  Stalin’s “American power,” Max lamented later that year in the American Mercury, extended to labor leaders, businessmen, movie actors, parsons, government officials, socialites, college professors, and publishers. Even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had been hoodwinked “into giving aid indirectly to a foreign dictator” when she welcomed former members of the Stalin-controlled American Youth Congress to a White House picnic.155 Max singled out the League of American Writers (which he said should be called the League of Writers for the Defense of the Soviet Union and the Substitution of Totalitarian Party Dictatorship for the American System of Government) and the APM (American Peace Mobilization, later the American People’s Mobilization) as extensions of Stalin’s propaganda machine. “These organizations have a rank and file membership of millions who are equally innocent of the real purposes behind them.” Max believed he had identified a vast “communist conspiracy to destroy American
democracy,” fueled by people’s manic conviction that there was a better system of government, a kind of superdemocracy, on the other side of the planet. And then he named names, in eerie anticipation of the witch hunts of the 1950s. Did he not realize his own name calling was the first step of the kind of paranoia Stalin wanted to induce in America? Watch out for any cause that had the names of known fellow travelers associated with it, he told his readers. Guilty by suspicion were, to name a few names that still resonate today, Franz Boas, Margaret Bourke-White, Erskine Caldwell, Theodore Dreiser, Lion Feuchtwanger, Dashiell Hammett, Rockwell Kent, Paul Robeson, and George Seldes. “It may be that none of these people belong to the Communist Party,” Max warned, “but wherever their names are played up in a political ‘cause,’ you may suspect that a party nucleus is at work in the underground.”156

  While working on this essay Max began keeping lists, folders, and binders full of names. First, there were just handwritten notes regarding fellow travelers, but soon he was collecting entire portfolios from sources like the former TASS correspondent and fellow apostate Eugene Lyons and from information given to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Everyone and everything was fair game, even the clarinetist Benny Goodman, whose Carnegie Hall concert with Paul Robeson in April 1941 had attracted Max’s attention since it was funded by the American–Russian Institute.157

  Deeply involved in his own game of name calling, Max had zero tolerance for those who called him names. In May 1938 he sued the Daily Worker as well as its editor, Clarence Hathaway, and Earl Browder, the general secretary of the Communist Party, for calling him a “spy for the British government” and an “agent of the German and Japanese secret services.” (They had also called him a “bandit and notorious swindler.”) Max claimed a ludicrous $250,000 in damages. “Browder is trying to assassinate my character because he cannot assassinate me,” Max observed. But before the trial could take place Browder had been jailed for passport fraud, and Hathaway had gone into hiding. Max settled out of court for a paltry $1,500. But money had never been the issue. Keeping in public view, by whatever means possible, was Max’s ticket to survival. Stalin’s killers would not go after someone who had been front-page news.158

  As his stock as a political pundit was falling, Max became more successful as a kind of general purpose intellectual. In 1938 he hosted, for a period of five months, a weekly radio show called Word Game for CBS, which at least in part seems to have been intended as a plug for Webster’s Dictionary. In his autobiography Max claimed his pay was $400, but a letter to Douglas Coulter at CBS in his papers reveals that he likely did not receive more than $100—not enough, as Max claimed, to compensate him for all he did and certainly not enough to cover his travel expenses. He had been hired, he pointed out, as “master of ceremonies, conductor, and coordinator of a variety program” but had instead become a “radio personality,” expected to mix, during every live show, expert advice on linguistic questions with the ability to crack jokes at a moment’s notice. Word Game required both extensive preparation and considerable improvisational skills, and the latter didn’t come easily to someone who thought of himself as primarily a writer.159

  A more intellectually challenging reinvention of the old-fashioned spelling bee, the program, broadcast each Wednesday at 9 p.m., brought together a team of five randomly chosen guests who were tested on their knowledge of the meaning, pronunciation, and finer nuances of the usage of words. “We all like to talk all the time—or at least as often as we can get anybody to listen,” Max was quoted as saying. “Words are what we talk with. The contest is to see whether we know what we are talking about.”160 The show, conducted before a live audience of two hundred or more, started out with definitions and moved from there to spelling, grammar, and slang and, finally, to the popular parlor word game known as “Guggenheim,” after which it ended with the announcement of the winner. Max was particularly creative in compiling lists of slang phrases—among my favorites are “caress the canvas” (get knocked down in a prize fight) and “lens louse,” a motion picture actor who insists on getting into the foreground of a scene161—and he acquired a nearly endless supply of Guggenheim questions. Among the examples in the scripts are “Name a snake beginning with a G” and “Name a Russian composer beginning with an A,” and the first to answer would be declared a winner (the answers to these two questions were “garter snake” and “Anton Arensky”).

  During the broadcast it was Max’s task to keep things light and entertaining. He was a suave, self-deprecating, witty moderator, clearly enjoying the presence of a large audience without caring too much that they weren’t there because of him. After each show he was on an emotional high for hours. This was his bailiwick. As a writer, he knew words intimately; in one segment of the show he joked that his main qualification for the job was that he had written several books, all of which contained words. And, as a proven expert on humor, he also knew how to be humorous.162 Thus, he explained the origin of the verb “ham”—so called because of the preference of actors for acting the role of Hamlet and for acting it in a certain way—with the following epigrammatic definition: “The choice of term . . . was influenced by the fact that the front end of Hamlet happens to coincide with the rear end of a hog.” And while he seemed to relish the role of the knowledgeable professor, he also had no problem admitting that some of his knowledge had been acquired only very recently. For example, here is Max’s explanation, from the same show, of why “dictionary” should be pronounced “dictione˘ry” and not “diction’ry” or “dictiona-ry”: “You have to avoid saying it as though it rhymed with ‘A long long way to Tipperary,’ and yet also avoid saying it as though you were the British Prime minister.” A very delicate matter, Max said, and he added, with a touch of self-mockery: “Now let’s see how long it takes me to forget it.”163

  The ultimate authority on the show was Webster’s New International Dictionary, second edition. Max had no intention of casting himself in the role of the English language tsar, and he pointed out with pleasure that his contestants were normal human beings, too: “I hope the contestants won’t mind my calling them ‘average.’ Anyway, they’re people. I can see that plainly.” Since winning was not the point, all participants received a prize. The one with the highest score would get the large, unabridged Webster’s and the runner-up a leather-bound regular edition, while the others would leave the studio with a copy of the collegiate version.164

  As he had done with his lectures Max carefully wrote out his remarks in advance of each show. But there remained enough room, and need, for ad-libbing, especially when Max directly engaged with the contestants. And, inevitably, this is where sometimes things went wrong, as when Max once asked for a “more . . . firmer” answer and then had to defend himself against listeners who wrote in to criticize him: “I started to say a ‘more firm’ and changed it to ‘firmer.’ That was not a grammatical error but a slip for the brain.”165 But as Max became more comfortable, he responded more confidently to his listeners. When someone criticized him for his preferred pronunciation of “perémptory” over “péremptory,” he retaliated, “Webster gives both and if he didn’t I wouldn’t say péremptory—I’d declare a boycott and decline to use the word until it came to reason. The same to those critics who want me to say poinant instead of poignant.”166 And listen to his apology for having slighted the Monongahela River: “In the game of Guggenheim last week, we hurt the feelings of the Monongahela River, which writes in to inform us that it not only is a river, but is the busiest river in the world, rivaled only by the Panama canal in the amount of tonnage carried.” And he finished with a reference to situations in which people mistook him for the founder of the Eastman Kodak company: “I apologize to the Monongahela, whom I have known all my life, and I beg everybody to remember that in those last few seconds of our word game I am trying to think so fast that if you said Max Eastman, I wouldn’t know whether it was a mountain chain or a camera.”167

  Max also in
cluded actual jokes, such as the one about the Italian who, during his immigration interview in Oklahoma City, was asked by the judge what he thought of polygamy. When it became obvious he didn’t know what the word meant, the judge tried to help the hopeful immigrant: “Let me ask this question. Benito, what do you think of the idea of having two, or three, or perhaps four wives?” Responded Benito: “I think pretty good, Judge. What do you think?” The judge admitted Benito to American citizenship without any further questions since he so obviously had a sense of humor. Max offered the story after a listener had expressed doubts about Max’s definition of “polygamy” as “having multiple wives and husbands,” which Max insisted was technically correct.168

  Why did Max spend so much time on Word Game, drafting or dictating scripts, collecting words and phrases, researching etymologies, answering a pile of inquiries from admiring or skeptical readers? He did get paid, of course, but what was more important to him than any financial incentive was the renewed sense of relevance the show bestowed upon him. The warm reception of Enjoyment of Laughter had given Max a taste of stardom, and Word Game allowed him to experience that feeling on a continuous basis. In July 1938 Radio Guide ran a full-page photo essay about him, celebrating Max the “genial . . . radio star,” under the enticing headline “You’re as Young as You Think.”169 The photographs, taken by Bert Lawson, showed a white-clad, white-haired, smiling Max in Croton, consulting the dictionary and relaxing in his garden. Max mattered again, and he saved the letters in which people told him his show was one of the highlights of their week, even when those same people went on to tell him he had erred.