Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  Their next clandestine encounter, elaborately planned, took place in a cabin somewhere outside of Albany, and while it felt magical as it was happening, in retrospect it failed to satisfy Max. All too soon he was back in Croton again, more lonely than ever. Eliena was preoccupied with her art and spending more and more time in New York, and even Biely the cat had “a girlfriend and begs so fervently to go out at night that I yield, although it means waking up at dawn to let him in.”24 His longing had become almost impossible to bear: “I love you,” he wrote two days later, throwing caution to the wind. He wanted to start all over again, but this time without any residual panic about his undignified behavior: “I want to sit all day in the big arm chair with your head warm between my knees, and poetry, poetry, floating around me on your young voice as though thrushes carried its meaning to my ear.” He had been valiantly fighting her power over him. To him, she was Keats’s Lamia or the poet’s Belle Dame sans Merci: “Was it your youth I feared, the suggestion of my death in it?” Love had almost killed him twice, and now memories of his agonized relationships with Ida Rauh and Florence Deshon came flooding back to him: “You are desirable to me beyond words, and mysterious, and I think you have genius, and your gift of love is as precious as though the stars had stooped down to make me young. . . . Come still a little nearer to me before you go away.”25

  Creigh succeeded marvelously in keeping her desirous lover at arm’s length by reminding him how wonderful Eliena was. And she proceeded to give a more realistic version of the famous night in the Catskills that had assumed almost fantastic proportions in Max’s overactive brain: “Max, a cube as small and square as ours was with two whole people in it has room for love and that is just about all.” Max got the message, sort of. Maybe there was a lesson in his predicament, after all. He had always been afraid he had “too much brains” and not enough feeling, and loving Creigh had taught him otherwise: “That I could go out of my head over your lovely beauty of body and spirit is reassuring. It really is. I guess it is good for me . . . to have to play this role. I have played yours so many times!” But Creigh again summarized Max’s lesson a little differently, with teenage nonchalance: “Max, will you relax for me and smile?” She had never wanted to hurt him, she said. “I love you Max and I slept with you because I love you not so I could say I love you.”26

  Delighted by her unexpected declaration of love, Max allowed himself to be gripped by new fits of adult ecstasy. Creigh did love him! He lost control of his feelings: “Your words flowed over and into and all through me like an inundation of bright clear water over a garden parched in early spring.” She appeared transfigured to him, equipped with the wisdom of the ancients: “You speak almost like Plato sometimes, you sound so wise and mature and little like a school girl, much less a run-away-from-school girl.” And, in recognition of her philosophical talents, he provided his teenage Plato with the draft preface to a new anthology for Enjoyment of Poetry he had been compiling.27

  Unfortunately, Creigh’s time in Buffalo had come to an abrupt end. Her sister was getting a divorce, and Creigh needed a place to stay. Now it was Max’s turn to be offish, as he always would be when lovers came too close to the life he shared with Eliena. Creigh could certainly live with them, he said, but only if she agreed to work. Creigh was annoyed: “Your last letter was cold to a freezing point,” she answered curtly. She went on to offer some shrewd criticism of his preface to the anthology: “I read your preface and enjoyed it.” That’s it—no clarifying “very much,” “greatly” or “immensely” added. Perhaps her use of the verb “enjoy” was meant as a dig at the book’s title, Anthology for Enjoyment of Poetry. And she did not hesitate to call Max out on his use of the hackneyed metaphor of the “symphony” of poems he had assembled. Did Max have to hide behind an “old” image to justify his choices?28

  Once again the Vineyard community took Creigh in. On April 21, 1939, lying on the beach in Edgartown, Creigh wrote a long, involved letter to Max, a lyrical reflection on beauty and creativity inspired by his preface as well as the intense physical sensations caused by her reckless sunbathing: “The sun is so warm that my arm has some red splotches on it.” The Vineyard heat made Creigh bold, and she proceeded to attack Max’s philosophy head-on: “In your preface you said ‘to increase enjoyment.’ But what is enjoyment by itself?” Shouldn’t it always lead to something tangible, some action we want to take? Degas, for example, always made her want to dance.29

  The final version of Max’s preface directly responds to Creigh’s criticism. “There are people in the world,” wrote Max, “who cannot enjoy the vivid experience of an idea unless they believe in it, who cannot ride along with an action unless it goes toward their chosen ends, nor taste the flavor of a sunset or even a sandwich, unless it is linked by some specious or real wires of connection with what they adhere to or intend to do.” One need not have lived through the specific event a poem describes in order to enjoy it, just as one need not be a warrior or warmonger to appreciate a battle song. Max had sorted his poems according to the themes and tonal qualities he had found in them, not in terms of the emotional resonances they engender in readers. But he had taken at least some of Creigh’s advice. “Of course my book is not a symphony,” asserted Max, “and it is too long to be so read.”30

  At the end of April Creigh reported that her period was late, perhaps a consequence of their “social racketeering.” Her letter got Max’s attention, and not just because of her phrasing, which he found offensive. “I suspect this child of being mental but we won’t take any chances. Have you money enough for the fare here if necessary?”31

  At just about the same time, with less than perfect timing, Creigh received a long letter in which Eliena (fig. 40) took her to task for being a “lazy weakling.” It is unlikely Eliena didn’t know what was going on between her husband and the liberated waif from King’s Beach, and maybe that was why she didn’t pull any punches. Creigh was, she said, “naturally or unnaturally lazy, and that is one of your big and unbearable faults.” If Creigh didn’t confront her problem “damn soon,” there was no hope left for her: “you’ll just disintegrate.” Max would have loved her more had she decided to work for him instead of refusing to type his manuscripts because it would have made her—what a terrible prospect!—Max’s secretary rather than his “poet-friend.” Eliena, for one, had not hesitated when Max needed her: “I typed a whole book for Max when we were broke before I even understood the English words. And I typed it well.”

  Figure 40. Eliena Eastman, 1940. EMIIA1.

  The further she got wrapped up in her dismay over Creigh’s aloofness, the more venomous Eliena’s comments became. For example, as a dance instructor she had noticed Creigh’s awful posture: “Walk with your head up,” she commanded, “instead of hanging your El Greco nose down to the ground like a chicken in a stupor.” Rather than loping around with stooped shoulders, she should lift her head back, with her “laughing mouth” directed at the sky: “I saw you do it when you danced and that—more than anything else—made me like you.” Eliena’s final advice for her husband’s young lover: “Stop fancying yourself as a listless weeping willow over an artificially irrigated pool and try hard and humbly to grow and be in real fact as much of a person as you can.”32

  Eliena’s letter displays, in full force, the tigerlike fierceness Max had noticed in her virtually from the moment she had spotted him in the Imperial Palace hotel at Genoa. While Eliena was willing to share her wayward Max, there were invisible boundaries other women were not allowed to cross without waking that animal inside her. Creigh had done so, and one wonders what would have happened had Eliena learned about Creigh’s (fortunately unwarranted) pregnancy fears.

  By now Creigh’s family had caught on and whisked her away to Illinois, safely out of Max’s noxious orbit. Pressured to make plans to attend college again, she accused Max of having spoiled her for ordinary life: “Can you understand that you made me relax and love and now or soon I have to begin retea
ching myself all you have undone?” But in fact she had no regrets: “Even if you had been an insurance salesman with your lovely body you would have been aesthetic, too.” And she added a coded description of Max in ecstasy, of the moment the mouse turned into a woodchuck, as she wittily characterized it: “Your eyes closed and your head went back half groaning, all of which for some reason made my feeling so intense that even now I want to see and feel you making a paralytic effort to stretch.” In Creigh Max had found a fellow devotee to the pleasures of the flesh. Using the tolerant Sarah Greenebaum as a go-between, they continued to exchange letters.33

  It wasn’t as if Max didn’t have other problems to deal with. On May 9, 1939, Joseph Stalin, worried about the hesitancy of the Western nations to take on Hitler, fired Maxim Litvinov, Eliena’s former boss, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Mikhailovitch Molotov, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and one of Stalin’s staunchest supporters. Molotov immediately began negotiations with his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, which led to the signing of the infamous nonaggression pact on August 23 the same year. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, as it became known, paved the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland in the fall of 1939 as well as Stalin’s own annexations of parts of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Bessarabia. Before the year had ended, Max’s worst fears about Stalin’s regime had been realized. But he had seen it coming. He didn’t need the proof offered by the recent defectors, such as the former Soviet chief of European Intelligence, Walter Krivitsky, who had left France for the United States at the end of 1938 and who had been writing a series of articles exposing Stalin’s hypocrisies. He was found dead a year later in a small Washington hotel, under suspicious circumstances.

  Max had been warning the world about Stalin since 1925; recent events were just a matter of confirming his predictions. His former political allies who hadn’t seen the handwriting on the wall remained blind to the new reality of Soviet hegemony. In an open letter published in the Nation the same day the paper announced the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, 400 of the most distinguished intellectuals in the United States voiced their opposition to the “fantastic falsehood that the U.S.S.R. and the totalitarian states are basically alike,” a fascist propaganda lie directed against the forces of progress and, more specifically, against a country that had proved to be a “bulwark against war and aggression.” Only 165 signatories actually appeared under the letter, but they included the names of several people Max had regarded as friends, such as Louis Untermeyer and Jean Starr Untermeyer, along with those of well-known literary figures such as Hemingway, Klaus Mann, and William Carlos Williams.34 In Santa Fe Ida Rauh was deeply worried about these dramatic developments, though she worried less for the world than for their son. She wrote to Max, “I can’t know how seriously you are thinking or feeling about the imminence of war.” Her nights were, she said, “made horrible” by the thought that Dan might get drafted and be “driven over there like cattle for foreign slaughter.” Couldn’t he write something “passionate and clear and intellectual” against the barbarity of war, as he had done so often before? American boys should not be sacrificed to European capitalism or whatever “supremacy” they were trying to save over there.35

  But Max’s head was still full of Creigh. On her first day in Highland Park, Illinois, Creigh had come across a copy of The Sense of Humor with its dedication to Florence Deshon and experienced “a sensation I never had before,” feeling a kinship and spiritual sympathy with Max that carried her beyond the limits of their relationship. “I lived three complete lives in about five minutes. That queer sensation of knowing or thinking I understood every feeling & thought that Florence had ever had and then Eliena & then you. I can’t possibly explain it or write it for it has no words.” Powerfully touched by Creigh’s vision, Max urged her to come see him as soon as possible and to not even think about postponing: “A week, it seems, is just the longest I can believe in your existence without a word from you. How do they manage to believe in God?”36

  And they did meet. Eliena, of all people, invited Creigh to a ball game at the Heckscher Foundation on 104th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York because Max was playing on the Studs Lonigan Ball Team, a softball team headed by the novelist James T. Farrell, a good friend of Max’s.37 By then Max knew he had been permanently pushed to the sidelines. At ease among members of her own generation, where she was “so talkative and witty, so admired,” Creigh had no real use for him. Max felt abject jealousy, imagining how she would cheat on him with other men, the “abstract crass male beast,” as it were. He stayed up nights typing lengthy letters in which he lamented Creigh’s coldness. Again, the possibility of a pregnancy—there were dark hints in their letters at “an errand” that was, or then finally didn’t have to be, performed—sent him into a tailspin. And then Max found out he indeed wasn’t the responsible party. The “awfulness” of his situation dawned on him: “While I was writing you these rapturous letters and lying nights long in anguish about your silence, you were going around full of highballs and being made ardent love to, all but persuaded to marriage, and actually persuaded to give your body.” Max felt deceived and humiliated. “It brings everything so much lower than I thought it was.” At his age, what was he to do with a broken heart?38

  Creigh’s confession ended their relationship. They would occasionally see each other, in New York, for example, where Creigh came to one of Eliena’s exhibition openings. She sent Max Christmas cards as well as some of her poems. “Max, Max,” she wrote to him in April 1940, after she had seen a positive review of Max’s Stalin’s Russia in the New York Times, “where are you? . . . I want to talk to you.” In 1942 she spent time with Eliena at Max’s new house on the Vineyard.39 But Creigh’s life post-Max was not a success story. A failed first marriage, to Alfred Stern, and an unhappy second marriage, to Frederick E. Wagner, and a protracted battle with her own demons, some of them, such as her penchant for alcohol, familiar to Max from their relationship, left little room for her to develop her considerable talents as a poet or thinker. While some would be inclined to view the story of her affair with Max as more sordid than poetic, the fact remains that to Creigh the year she shared with Max remained, as her daughter put it, the highlight of her life.40 In a poem written long after her dealings with Max, titled “Half Fled,” she imagines a visit to a dying person: “To find a shriveled, cradled form / That must have blood, but blood luke-warm / And blood that’s thin and barely moves.” Upon leaving that person’s bedroom and before closing the door, she notices that “the bed / Has curved to fit the pattern of this one half fled.” She signed the gruesome text simply “Creigh” and sent it to Max.41 “Half fled” from his life as well as her own life, Creigh Collins, his “Diana down from heaven,” his blue-eyed miracle diver from King’s Beach, left no traces in the voluminous second installment of Max’s autobiography. She was seventy-four when she died, on July 22, 1994, in Lyme, New Hampshire, at the home of one of her daughters.

  By the beginning of the next year Max had reset his system and was deeply preoccupied with an aspiring but also very much married poet named Martha Ellis (“beautiful to my eyes”), originally from Mount Airy, Georgia, and now living in Atlanta.42 Martha, a thirtysomething mother and alumna of Mount Holyoke College, was, like many women before and after her, mesmerized by the white-haired, white-clad, mellow-voiced Max, whose abilities as a lover she freely evoked in letters and poems. He had transformed her world: “The mail box vibrates to my anxious tread,” she rhapsodized in a sonnet dedicated to him.43 But Max was profoundly affected, too, if for different reasons. Some of the triviality of his current existence was now painfully evident to him: “At your age,” he told Martha in a letter from Mexico, “I was being tried in the United States courts for treason to my country! I was engaged in stopping a World War—so I guess you have me there.” Life seemed to be moving past him so fast that nothing seemed so significant anymore, unless one was traveling anyway: “I just feel surp
rised. Experiences go by pretty rapidly for the most part like signs along the road—danger, dip, right curve, left curve, men working, village approaching. It all doesn’t matter very much.”44

  The affairs with Creigh and Martha, separated by little more than a year, had shown Max that his athletic approach to extramarital sex had its pitfalls. He was not prepared for situations in which he would end up falling in love and, as a result, humiliate himself. With both Martha and Creigh his proud delight in sensual pleasure inadvertently yielded to furtive arrangements for trysts in Florida, Croton, and on the Vineyard, intended to keep his escapades secret from Eliena. “I want you to know that I felt utterly desolate,” wrote Max to Martha after she had left him one night, “and I do still.” Some little “owly creature” had given a cry outside, which had reminded him of that “immeasurable moment” when Martha was still in his arms, the moment “when our romance turned into love.” As the ghost of Martha’s absence was following him around the house, “going before me into every room, even the bathroom—which shows what an illogical being he is, for we were never there together,” Max was suddenly afraid that in his love life he might have become irrelevant, too, as irrelevant as he feared he had become in the political arena: “Martha, don’t sink back completely into the routine and forget me.” And then he stopped himself. This was a letter he was writing to himself, he realized: “Oh, Martha, I forgot that I am not really writing to you! I cannot say these infinitely important things.”45 Martha had a family, and he did not—or had squandered every opportunity to have one, for the sake of an open marriage and an unconventional harem of girls as uncommitted to him as he was to them. The axis around which Martha’s “no-matter-how free-going life” revolved was “you-and-your-children-in-their-home.” If he had intended to mock Martha’s priorities, this didn’t work. He had tried to mail his letters but then couldn’t, realizing how dangerous they were. “You possess my body and my thoughts.” Maybe she should adopt an alias, such as Ellen Nellis, to whom he could mail his letters by general delivery? The full absurdity of his situation slowly sank in: “But what is the use suggesting this when I can’t send the letter in which I suggest it?” There was something disarmingly undignified about these self-revelations of a now-fifty-seven-year-old man. Max worried about not being able to write “seemly” letters to Martha, but, as Max himself knew, just about the unseemliest thing about them was the naked despair displayed in them. There was no way he could send them.46