One wonders how Max found time to do any writing. But he did: in March 1940 Norton published his most ambitious political work to date, Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism. Running to roughly 270 pages, the book was too long to be an essay. Yet it had none of the dullness and long-windedness of the academic monograph. It was also deeply autobiographical. For the real theme of Stalin’s Russia was not Stalin or Russia or what he called the Bolshevik fiasco (though Max had much to say about all these topics), but Max’s realization—painful, torturous, gut-wrenching—that he was no longer a socialist. The crisis mentioned in the book’s title was Max’s own. After reasserting what he had already said elsewhere, namely, that Stalin had lost any right to call his politics socialist, he was left wondering whether or not the term “socialism” itself had survived its abuse at the hands of that “mountebank-Marxist.” The answer was self-evident: thanks to Stalin, socialism had come to mean not the liberation of the working class but a “general surrender to some authoritative concept of the collective good.” Max was done with Trotsky, too: “Those surrounding Trotsky accept the basic principles of totalitarian gang-rule, the one-party tyranny and immoralism in the cause of power, but promise that in a sufficiently advanced country, and provided the gang has the right leaders and a genuine proletarian policy, there will still emerge, even though like a rabbit out of a hat, the society of the free and equal.” So much for dialectic materialism.47 A few years before, he had gotten unexpected support for this view from his own son, Dan. A Cornell graduate, Dan had worked first as a science teacher and then as an investigator for the ACLU before, in Max’s words, “becoming, being, and ceasing to be, a Trotskyist.” In a statement coauthored with his then girlfriend Eleanora (Maya) Deren, later well known as a maker of experimental films, and presented to a gathering of American Trotskyists, Dan had argued that the USSR had reverted to a precapitalist economy and succumbed to a form of “industrial feudalism”—a view that, like Max’s, contradicted Trotsky’s prognosis of the transitional nature of Stalinism.48
Max felt that if one had to wait for a hat trick to see a truly classless society implemented, and even then only under the right circumstances, it was truly time to look elsewhere for a solution. And if the developments in Stalin’s Russia, like the collectivization of property and government ownership of industry, could not be separated from the results they produced (“a nation of informers, spies, hypocrites, lickspittles and mass murderers”), then Max would have to find a new name for whatever dreams of an egalitarian society he had left.49
The specter of those brutally executed during Stalin’s recent purges hovers behind every page of Max’s book. His brother-in-law—and what a strange thing that connection must have been for Max—had been among those who died, murdered like an animal, the way he, in his heyday as Stalin’s willing chief prosecutor, had had so many others killed. The inglorious end of the Bolshevik dream was Max’s very personal nightmare, too: “The Russian revolution is perhaps the greatest tragedy in human history, terrible in the breadth of its impact, terrible in the depth of its significance, terrible in its personal details. Other revolutionary martyrs have been permitted a heroic death; the heroes of the Russian revolution have been shot like dogs in the cellar.” The old feminist Max couldn’t help but notice, too, what had happened to women under Stalin’s rule. Was it a coincidence that totalitarian regimes were always run by men, leaving to women the business of breeding?50
With considerable bitterness Max on several occasions evoked Marx’s promise, which seemed vapid to him now, that after the success of the revolution the state and all its organizations would simply fade away. Clearly that hadn’t happened in Russia, where ordinary people were now worse off than under the tsar. Instead of Kingdom Come, Stalin, that mountebank Marxist, had given the Russian a monstrous, blood-smeared “Iron Heel of a thing,” spawned in the inner circles of Hell. The Hitler–Stalin pact had confirmed the “vital union of two profoundly similar regimes.” It had also removed any doubts Max might have had regarding the supposedly scientific nature of Marxism as a tool for social analysis. If Max had previously presented Stalinism as an ideological corruption of Lenin’s hard-nosed, unmetaphysical version of social engineering, he now recognized that Lenin was part of the system. Whatever he was, Lenin was not a scientist. If he had conducted the revolution as an experiment, he would have realized that coercing the working class into cooperation destroyed the value of the experiment. Even Lenin’s critics, such as the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg, who had faulted Lenin for not allowing sufficient room for the democracy of the masses in his system, were blind to the fatal flaw in Lenin’s and, for that matter, Marx’s thought. The expectation that the proletariat, once freed, would inevitably take “socialist measures” was nothing but a hypothesis. What if it didn’t want to? Marx might have thought that the class struggle was a “dialectical tame beast” he could ride effortlessly into the Shangri-La of a cooperative commonwealth, but in fact he “had a wild leviathan by its tail.”51
But Max wasn’t willing to allow failure, his own, Marx’s, Lenin’s, or Trotsky’s, to have the last word. The idea had been wrong, the methods had been mistaken, but the struggle itself, the struggle for some idea greater than the status quo, the struggle for the hope of a society better than the one we know, had not been wrong. “I find myself, in view of these facts, not only urging a more careful definition of the aims we have in view, but in my own mind falling back upon a thought with which, long before the Russian revolution gave such body to our hopes, I entered the socialist movement: that to participate in a struggle for those large aims, whether they be achieved or not, is to live a good life.” There it was, Max’s aim: living a life worth living. And if this uncharacteristically long, syntactically tortuous sentence hadn’t yet done enough work for him, Max restated the basic idea in terms that blurred the political and personal: “To struggle toward aims that you know may or may not be realized, and find a part of your satisfaction in the superior keenness of a life edged and tempered by such struggle, seems a fair mixture of motives.” Not just fair, perhaps even beautiful.52
In the final chapters of Stalin’s Russia Max went on to sketch out his own dream for a better, reasonable, equal, humane society, one in which it would be possible, through cooperative effort, compromise, and common sense, to live a keen life. As incompatible as the desire for individual liberty and the needs of the collective might seem, Max in 1940 still hoped that some kind of adjustment or equilibrium between the two could be reached by all those who want to “join hands.” What was necessary for such an adjustment was, above all, an unflinching willingness among all involved to face the facts of life, “a cool-purposed and relentlessly hard-visioned, but not bigoted, brutal or cynical condition of mind”—in short, a mind very much like that of Max Eastman. With considerable relief Max noted he was still a radical, if that term meant substituting “for an imported revolutionary metaphysics the attitude of experimental science.” What the New Deal had achieved only in “desultory spasms” had to be transformed into a permanent adjustment suited for a society no longer based, as even the Bolshevik workers’ paradise was, on the religious and, specifically, Christian model of the family as the basic unit of society. What was needed was “a movement of hard minds.” Max imagined an army of clear-thinking, unsentimental activists working for a better future, people who would coolly dismiss, as the socialists once did, the obsolete moral and rationalistic creeds of the past but who were also fully aware, as the socialists had never been, of the fundamental errors in the Marxist faith. Here in the United States one could still find the ideal conditions for a truly democratic experiment—a radical one, in Max’s opinion—and that was the most precious thing left to humankind.53
The hardness Max mentioned so frequently is, obviously, the firm, steely resolve he desired for himself. For, as he admitted in a moment of moving candor, it was difficult for a man to say that the cause for which he has given his life has failed. Bu
t there was one thing he was sure about. If the people around him had not gotten used to the emptiness of sky above them, he had. After he had rid himself of the Christian God of his childhood, and now of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, too, Max Eastman could confidently say about himself that he needed no clay gods.54
Max’s book inspired a lively debate in the newspapers and magazines. The journalist Eugene Lyons, a recovering Marxist like Max, said that reading Stalin’s Russia was like watching a devout Christian suddenly reexamining the basic tenets of his faith. He noted that Max wasn’t a Trotskyist anymore either, if ever he had been one. Stalin’s Russia left not “a shred of the amoralism common to all the totalitarians, from Lenin down to Stalin, Trotsky and Hitler.”55 Applause came also from John Chamberlain, a former member of the Dewey commission, officially the Committee of Inquiry into Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, which was chaired by John Dewey and in 1937 exonerated Trotsky of all the charges leveled against him by the Soviet regime. Chamberlain had just begun his own journey toward the political Right and said he was impressed by the scientific rigor Max had brought to his analysis: “Other intellectuals behave these days like bereft and inconsolable prophets: they wail and pound their breasts and cry to the firmament that Jehovah has deserted them.” Max, however, instead of licking his spiritual wounds, had taken his defeat, the shattering of his ideals, as a man or, rather, a scientist, should, by immediately thinking about a way forward.56
The more critical voices, however, prevailed. The delicious irony of Max’s new position dawned on Michael Florinsky, an economics professor at Columbia, who reviewed the book for the New York Times. Max was rejecting Trotsky—the same man he had made popular through his “admirable translations”! If you were a believer in Stalin, then the only possible reaction to books like Max’s was wistfulness, the sad hope that “somewhere in the background angels hover over Stalin.” Max’s new proposal for a “scientific radical party” seemed as utopian to Florinsky as Marx’s obsolete scheme: “But perhaps a utopian quality and an element of vagueness are essential ingredients of any comprehensive scheme for the salvation of mankind.”57
The Nation, too, disagreed with Max’s analysis of the shortcomings of Marxism: if socialism had failed, it was not due to Hegel and bad metaphysics. Marx simply had not understood the impact economic change has on human beings.58 And the Labor politician Harold Laski complained that Max’s critique of Stalinism had ignored the economic backwardness of Russia at the time of the revolution. Difficulties were bound to arise. According to Laski, Max’s final call for equilibrium was an expression more of his temperamental longings than of sober political thinking.59
A few readers, while not accepting all of Max’s analysis, agreed with its general tenor. Elias Tartak, in the New Leader, while he regretted that Max had paid no attention to the more “elastic” Marx to be found in the correspondence with Friedrich Engels, welcomed the book’s general argument. Stalin’s Russia was a much-needed, “bold and dexterously written call to men of liberal and Socialist good will to look at Russia, then at Marx, and think, think hard.” It should be read and discussed.60 And in the Los Angeles Times Max’s friend from the old Hollywood days, Paul Jordan-Smith, supported his claim that Stalin was indeed worse than Hitler. The Moscow trials had driven everybody but the “lunatic fringe” away from the party. Max had reminded everyone it wasn’t too late yet for a return to honest thinking and truth telling, a return, in a word, “to the integrities.”61
Or was it? A few months after the publication of Stalin’s Russia, on August 20, 1940, Stalin caught up with Leon Trotsky. The blow dealt to Trotsky’s head—fittingly as he was reading—by Stalin’s assassin Ramón Mercader was, in a sense, a blow also to all attempts to find anything salvageable in the tradition of revolutionary thought Max had worked so hard to keep alive. Max’s friend Edmund Wilson, although he took note of Stalin’s purges, still wasn’t ready to dispatch the Bolsheviks, especially not Lenin, that “most selfless of great men.” In September 1940 he published his response to the revolutionary tradition, which he called, evocatively, To the Finland Station. As the title suggested, communism still hadn’t arrived. The book begins with one of the progenitors of bourgeois revolutionary thought, Jules Michelet, groping for the principles of a new science of history, and it ends with Lenin making history as he is arriving from Finland at that shabby little train station in St. Petersburg, ahead of the October Revolution, making speeches, filling his audience with “turmoil and terror.” Wilson’s final sentence, a quotation from Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, strikes the reader as ironic given that it comes at the end of a book that was almost five hundred pages long: “Everything was understood without words.” Compared to Max’s withering analysis of Russian communism, Wilson’s still seemed upbeat, forward looking, eager to find meaning in a past that for Max now was nothing but misguided, built on shaky ground.62
Just a year later Wilson recanted somewhat, arguing in a short essay that Marxism had in fact reached a point of near eclipse. Marx and Engels, coming out of authoritarian Germany, naturally had imagined socialism in authoritarian terms, too, and Stalin and Trotsky, coming out of an autocracy, inevitably perpetuated what they, in turn, had known, a dictatorship. If this is a weaker argument than Max’s, the conclusion of Wilson’s piece was taken straight from the final pages of Stalin’s Russia. Wilson claimed that in order to maintain what is laudable in Marxism—the need to get rid of class privilege based on the accident of birth and wealth—common sense and an “unsleeping exercise of reason and instinct” were needed. Marxist dogma, especially dialectical materialism, was passé, a creed like many others but not Holy Writ. But who wouldn’t want to agree with the goal shared by all men and women of good hope, a goal all genuine Marxists had been striving for, “a society which will be homogeneous and cooperative as our commercial society is not, and directed, to the best of their ability, by the conscious and creative effort of its members”? Whether Wilson remembered this or not, these had been Max Eastman’s concepts: cooperation, compromise, common sense. In 1950 Wilson reused this piece as the afterword for a new edition of To the Finland Station. Now the timing was right, and his book became a success. The year before, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania had founded the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or Comecon, the most visible expression of Stalin’s desire to achieve domination in Central Europe. The postwar divisions of Europe were in place, and Americans were taking notice, too. Max’s book, however, was forgotten.63
Max’s preoccupation with the topic of totalitarianism found its way also into a very different work, a long poem titled Lot’s Wife on which he had been working since his visit to the Holy Land in the summer of 1932. In 1938, after Harper agreed to publish the poem, Max returned to it with renewed energy, and as he was putting the finishing touches on the manuscript he shared a set of proofs with Wilson, hoping for some additional encouragement.
Lot’s Wife is an often bawdy retelling of Lot’s escape from Sodom, delivered in a self-consciously folksy idiom Max had crafted for the occasion. Max had intended the work to be a turning point in his development as a poet, and he was dejected when neither his peers nor ordinary readers responded to it the way he had hoped. Praised by some friends and colleagues, among them E. E. Cummings (“your book delights me”), Granville Hicks (“a lot of fun to read”), and Edna St. Vincent Millay (“THE BEST THING YOU EVER DID”), the poem was roundly rejected by many others. To Max’s great disappointment Wilson hated it and sent Max pages and pages of pedantic corrections. And Marianne Moore—to borrow a phrase from one of her most famous poems—“too, disliked” it. In a note to Max’s publicist she offered to return her copy if the publisher felt its value had not been “impaired by” her reluctant handling of it.64
Max was willing to concede that as a poet he had some catching up to do. “My poetry has always been weak and too fluid because I divided myself into a poet and thinker,” he admitte
d to Wilson. “I divided myself up as the Hebrews divide the week, with poetry the Sabbath.” His mother had instilled the love of poetry in him, but she had also taught him to regard it as a special thing, “made out of pure feelings purified as though in prayer.” Max always worried that this reverence for poetry, as manifested in his preference for fixed forms and meter, had made his forays into the genre sound stilted, removed from real life, self-consciously artsy rather than intuitive. And although he had theorized about humor, his poetry was mostly not funny. But in Lot’s Wife he felt he had achieved the satirical fluidity that had eluded him previously. He had poured himself into these lines, he told Wilson, while also taking care to protect “the integrity and essential proportions of the stream.”65 Wilson, smarting perhaps from having had to play second fiddle to Max in all matters Russian for such a long time, was not convinced.
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