Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  Word Game, a strenuously apolitical program in which democracy was less a concept than a word to be spelled, gave Max a sense of control over his life at a time when, politically and personally, he was at sea. It became a model of sorts for later shows, such as the BBC’s My Word and Says You on National Public Radio. Unlike these programs, Max’s show did not rely on a regular cast of qualified panelists, and it never aspired to their level of intellectual or even literary sophistication. The democratic nature of the program—the participants included a fireman, a mailman, a secretary, a dentist, a proofreader, a lawyer, a biology teacher, and a translator working for a bank—appealed to Max’s own egalitarian sensibilities.170 Max quickly adapted his voice to the needs of a radio broadcast and proved so adept as a host that he became the subject of several appreciative pages in a handbook on radio directing.171 The show also made Max a popular culture icon, the recipient of fan letters such as the one sent to him, in the form of a poem, by a “Southern Gal.” “I done seen yore picture in the Time Magazine,” began the letter writer, affecting a redneck accent, and then offered the following observation:

  Dear Mr. Eastman:

  I think you

  With such fine look, plus Glamour—,

  Are wasting scads of precious time

  In paying court to—GRAMMAR.

  And in case Max didn’t get it, the letter writer proposed the following paraphrase: “Doggonit! you’re beautiful!”172

  8 • A Test Case for the Kinsey Male

  Word Game provided a respite from Max’s political troubles. And brief it proved to be. On September 21, 1938, during a severe hurricane, Max gave his last performance as a game show host in an empty studio, with Eliena doing her best to supply the required laughs. As his show came to an end, the announcer interrupted the broadcast to inform listeners that Hitler had occupied Sudetenland, that the hurricane had wiped the village of Menemsha on the Vineyard off the face of the earth, and that Max Eastman would no longer be hosting Word Game, in that order.1 From New Jersey to Florida Max’s fans protested vigorously and inundated the network with angry letters. Reactions ranged from the plaintive (“I regret that you have taken off the air my favorite program”) to the admonitory (“You can’t disappoint your listeners that way”).2 One intrepid listener resorted to poetry to express her feelings—someone else’s poetry, that is. Borrowing freely from the beginning of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” she versified, “Tell me not in mournful numbers / Max Eastman will appear no more / He, of voice so suave and mellow / Must be held again, I Trow.” Max’s boss was unimpressed. In his autobiography Max revealed that he had failed to attract a sponsor.3

  As Max watched his political identity, once so expansive he could think of himself both as a pleasure-seeking aesthete and the austere engineer for a better, socialist future, narrow down to a place where he often felt he had his back against a wall, he continued to anger the philistines by expanding the range of his erotic investments. A relentless, capable lover who awakened hitherto unknown feelings in women (not a few letters offer explicit comments on his erotic technique), Max rarely made any promises and even more rarely looked back. His political world shrunken to the size of his country cottage or to a sheet in his typewriter, Max’s overactive erotic life took on dimensions that would have seemed unmanageable to lesser men.

  Max now was the last one left of the outrageous Eastman children. Anstice died after suffering a heart attack on December 28, 1937, at the age of fifty-nine. A heavy smoker and a devotee of hard liquor, unlike his more careful brother, he had had warnings before, including two strokes, one in December 1934 and another in October 1935.4 A respectable chief surgeon at Hamot Hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, Anstice, or Peter, as family members usually called him, had publicly long officially gone by the name of Ford Eastman, M.D., as if he wanted to be liberated from his eccentric first name and therefore any reminders of his unusual mother.5 Ford Eastman was the name, too, under which he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Canandaigua—but in the same plot as his sister Crystal, his brother Morgan, and his parents, Annis and Samuel.6

  It was up to Max now to carry the family flag, and he seemed determined to make the most of the decades he had left. A seemingly ageless Casanova of the No-Longer Left, Max had permanently said good-bye to his Greenwich Village hope that the political world would magically coalesce around his needs for individual self-realization. But he continued to insist on the right to do what he wanted with his body, and he almost felt obliged to dispense his zest for life as freely as possible. His correspondence files bulge with letters from women, some of whom have left only their first names to posterity, among them Marie, Lillian, Rada, Creigh, Martha, Amy, and, inevitably, a series of Florences. One of Max’s heroes, the Russian poet Pushkin, had kept lists of the women in his life, those he had loved as well as those he had wanted to love. But Max was too classy for that: “I am too romantic ever to have ‘kept count’ of my love affairs, or listed the girls,” Max wrote in a private note. “Love even in its lighter forms always seemed sacred to me—perhaps that is a reason for my success—and each one must have its isolated existence, integral and inviolate.” To put it more unkindly, Max was a great compartmentalizer. One of Max’s many girlfriends told him about a dream she’d had in which all the girls of the neighborhood were discussing Max’s infidelities. She defended him. “No, it’s not true,” she said, “when he is making love to one of us he never thinks of the others.” Mercurial Max himself had adopted a similar defense, which he articulated most succinctly in a poem, “The Swallow,” collected in Kinds of Love. That bird was in the habit of merely dipping into the water of a river or pond without immersing itself in it, a perfect metaphor for Max’s dealings with women: “I love the deeps but love not deeply.” He would assure each of his lovers that she was unique even if only in the moment he loved her: “Be not sad because you’ve won me, / And we briefly intertwine, / For no other hand is on me / When your hand is warm in mine.”7

  Eliena had long accepted Max’s unconquerable libidinal urges, taking comfort in the fact that he would always return to her. Cheered on by her relieved husband, she even engaged in some modest experimentation of her own, thus doing her part to turn the Eastman household into an entirely unscientific version of Alfred Kinsey’s lab. As it happened, one of her extramarital partners was the poet Scudder Middleton, the perpetrator of such lines as “our hearts are music-makers in the clouds” and rumored to be one of the handsomest men in the Village.8 To Max, he would have been more familiar as one of Florence Deshon’s former lovers. Now shrunken into post-middle-age timidity, he was no threat to Max, who liked to imagine Eliena coming and going in Scudder’s Waverly apartment. Eliena tried to joke about the time she spent with Scudder, but she sounded strained when she told Max that Scudder wanted to take her out for St. Patrick’s Day (“as I have an Irish accent”) while also worrying if he had enough money to pay for it.9 Max was delighted when Scudder boasted that he enjoyed making love to Eliena “more than any other girl he had loved,” and he eagerly assured Eliena he was fine with her affair: “My darling love,” he wrote to her, “I haven’t a single quiver of anything but joy in your feelings about Scudder and your being with him. It makes our love so much more four-square and perfect for me, and I hope you love him.” As long as her feelings for him hadn’t changed, whatever Eliena did was fine with him.10 To encourage transparency Max sometimes even shared the letters of current girlfriends with her.

  If the political Max had undergone a transformation, Max the lover still seemed stuck in his Greenwich Village days, inviting but ultimately avoiding confrontation with the authorities. “I’d always thought that you were . . . sort of in love with a lot of girls,” wrote a girl named Lillian, who had just been unceremoniously dumped and wanted to know why: “You liked me more than ever until that detective came in—or was it that unsatisfactory session in the car that changed your feelings?” She would sure appreciate it if Max “could go into a little
bit of self-analysis for me.”11 As Lillian must have already known, Max was emphatically not a family man. He freely acknowledged and made fun of his weakness for women, women younger than him, women his age, women conventionally considered beautiful and those who were not. Max liked them all. A joke he enjoyed so much that he wrote it down twice tells the story of the robin that built a nest and fixed it up with beautiful, colored ribbons and fancy feathers. When a blue jay came along and congratulated her on her taste, he noticed a hole in the middle of the nest. Asked the blue jay, “But why did you put the hole in the middle of the nest?” Answered the robin, “Well, you see, I don’t like children, but I do enjoy the mating season.”12 Max was a bit like that lustful robin—an artist in the world of sexual gratification, equipped with libidinal energies that sometimes astonished himself. Even more amazing was the almost methodical nature of his pursuit—and his openness about it, both of which, in the late forties, regularly encouraged reviewers to invoke Alfred Kinsey’s sex research as an appropriate context in which to view and understand Max’s exploits.

  While he might not have undertaken the kind of self-analysis Lillian wanted him to or at least not with the result she clearly wished for, Max knew that his sexual appetites transgressed the limits of ordinary bourgeois morality. In a personal note he once described himself as “afflicted with a desire to mate or devour the universe” and then, self-mockingly, pointed out there were limits, though perhaps not moral ones. His thirst for experience would, he admitted, even lead him to run after girls he did not particularly desire. “My penis, balking or behaving enigmatically, apprises me of the difference and shames me of my foully omnivorous thirst.” So, there.13

  There were potential legal problems, too. As Lillian’s reference to the detective demonstrates, Max’s extramarital experimentation was not risk free. In the thirties and forties the Mann Act, originally intended to prohibit the transport of women across state lines for “immoral purposes,” was being used more broadly to police all kinds of morally unacceptable behavior. Despite such dangers, it seems women entered into affairs with Max willingly and knowingly. Some of them appreciated Max’s fame, whereas others responded warmly to his capabilities as a lover, absent in their husbands and previous partners, or to his legendary beauty. Apart from the inevitable flashes of anger that would erupt when Max declared the end of a relationship, there were usually signs of genuine affection in the letters they sent to Max even after a relationship had ended.

  In ways perhaps difficult to understand today, Max’s lovers accepted his presence in their lives, however fleeting, as a gift. One woman, known only as Marie, clipped his name from newspapers, adding “Dear” before it and arranging the cutouts in such a way that they formed a pair of lips before she mailed her collage to him. Even the frustrated Lillian admitted she was surprised their relationship had lasted as long as it did. In 1942 one Florence Southard wrote about how “terribly appealing” Max, with his hair “all soft and wild over your forehead,” seemed to her. And, overwhelmed by “so much physical beauty,” she transitioned to describing, fairly explicitly, how sleeping with Max had liberated her, connecting her with her own “secret depths” and, afterward, rendering her “incoherent trying to tell you.” Max had taught her to give up “a certain puritanical fear of bodies and the things bodies do.” Ms. Southard was “more than certain that you will have to be the father of one of my children,” a resolution she does not seem to have kept: the Utica Daily Press, on June 10, 1946, records her wedding to one William E. Richardson. But even if many of Max’s lovers eventually receded into obscurity, it seems at least some of them carried their memory of him with them for the rest of their lives.14

  These armies of other women notwithstanding, it was Eliena alone who offered Max the certainty and security he needed, and she took pleasure in her role. Max was “her lonely giant,” she declared in a note penned in February 1938, when they were staying at Mrs. Gartz’s vacation home in Palos Verdes, California. He was the rock on which her life rested. As her imagination took over and her language became lyrical, her image of Max assumed mythic proportions: “You stand alone, above and outside all that noisy swarm of self-deceived conceited patterned pigmeys [sic]—estranged from them, aloof, alone—doomed to aloneness by your size, your mind’s magnificence, your courage, honesty, and even of truth relentless and unyielding.”15

  On a few occasions, however, Max’s erotic economics got off-kilter, in ways he never expected. One of these was his affair with the much younger Creigh Collins (later, Creigh Stern). A recent high school graduate and excellent swimmer, Creigh, “hard and self-contained,” found a way of conquering what Max called his “inner citadel.”16

  He met Creigh on a hot August day in 1938 on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard. Lean, athletic, and self-confident, the blue-eyed eighteen-year-old made a big impression on Max, who, at age fifty-six, was just beginning to worry about the fading of his powers. “Because you dared divingly,” began a poem he dedicated to her, right away, “I will make you a little poem.” Max’s tribute to the amazing Creigh, later published under the title “Unsheathed,” goes on to describe the arrival of a special kind of flying fish on King’s Beach:

  Bluer than ocean

  More than moon silver,

  Knife-blade blue and seen-through silver,

  Winged, finned,

  Sheer through air and water,

  Stark naked of the past and future,

  Came to King’s beach one day a flying fish.

  Days after that cool swift-given unsheathed wonder,

  Bathing on King’s beach seemed

  Hallowed more than by god

  By Nature’s bold free daring to be.17

  Harriet Creigh Collins was not like other girls her age. A graduate of the progressive Francis Parker School in Chicago (which had merged with a school founded by Max’s teacher Dewey), she had chosen to go by her unusual family name over her less exciting given name. Creigh had lost her father early, and one of her teachers at the Parker School, Sarah Greenebaum, had taken her under her wing and invited her to the Vineyard, where Sarah regularly spent her summers hobnobbing with other progressives.18

  Eliena was instantly worried when she met the young girl, fearing that her radiant presence would put in jeopardy her and Max’s open-marriage arrangement, in which confidences about extramarital affairs were normally shared like any other news. A poem she wrote a few months after Creigh had shown up in their lives describes her arrival in terms of sheer terror, as a home invasion rather than the beginning of a friendship: “We were silent as a frightened mouse / Who stays dead-still behind the pantry-shelves— / Afraid to let you into our perfect house, / Afraid that we might love you more than ourselves.”19 It is true Creigh didn’t fit the mold of Max’s previous lovers. Apart from the enormous age difference, she had nothing of the dark, mysterious aura of Ida or the intense vulnerability of Florence Deshon or the funny sturdiness of Eliena Krylenko. A high school yearbook from the year she met Max shows a determined-looking young woman with prominent eyebrows, a high forehead, her head slightly tilted back, as if in a deliberate attempt to avoid looking too pretty for the camera. The still somewhat adolescent roundness of the face is offset by the steely look of her eyes. But the surprisingly full lips offer a hint of the capacity for enjoyment that would have appealed to Max (fig. 39).

  Figure 39. Creigh Collins, 1938. From the Parker Record. Courtesy of The Francis Parker School and the Chicago History Museum.

  Liberated by her education, Creigh readily responded to Max’s obvious desire for her: “I am there / I am there / Always there,” she intoned in a poem she wrote for him at the beginning of their relationship.20 The risk of discovery—the Mann Act was very much on their minds—added spice to their affair, especially after Creigh had quit Wheaton College, where she was a very indifferent student, and moved to Buffalo to join her sister’s family “to try . . . to get back a decent perspective on life.” Her mother’s death a few week
s later seems to have made her connection with Max even stronger. Max’s longing for her was now so intense he couldn’t sleep. Dreaming about her on his “little blue couch,” presumably the place their love had been consummated, he completed a sonnet he had begun earlier: “It still has the form of a sentence in the ‘future conditional,’ but is filled up with astonishing fact.”21 The poem, originally titled “Prayer,” appeared in his Poems of Five Decades under the title “Animal” but without any explanatory notes. And indeed no explanation seemed necessary for the wish the speaker directed at his lover, his “Diana down from heaven”:

  Could you from this most envied poise descend,

  Moved by some force in me I know not of,

  To mix with me and be to me a woman,

  Diana down from heaven could not lend

  More ecstasy, or fill my faltering human

  Heart’s hunger with a more celestial love.22

  Max knew, of course, that the love he was hoping to extract from this earthy, insistently physical girl was hardly “celestial,” a fact reflected in the excited enjambments linking the poem’s last three lines.

  In February 1939 Max and Eliena left Croton for their annual winter vacation in the sun. Creigh had taken Max’s two cats to her sister’s house in Buffalo, apparently without asking anyone for permission. Her sister’s shock was outdone only by that of the Eastman cats: “Yesterday was spent following them around the house with a pail of water, scrub brush, and kitchen soap. I found that Peggy’s most fragrant deoderant [sic] as a finishing touch was also helpful.” In Florida Max was pining not for his cats but for Creigh, pelting her with notes in which he sent his “sun-warmed love” and worried that Creigh was forgetting him. Creigh responded to Max’s anguished missives by threatening to “cut the wires” if he didn’t relax. And she recommended what Max should do in order to properly think of her: “One of your days, Max, run, run, run down the beach until everything is out of sight then find the water and race the breakers. When you collapse on the sand think about me.” But Max seemed on a quest to make a fool of himself, assuring Creigh he felt younger than ever and ready for another meeting with her. In reality, he was just a middle-aged male scribbling furtive notes on the window sill of a post office in Sarasota, Florida, to a girl one-third his age. Only a small part of him realized how silly this whole thing was.23