Max Eastman
Page 38
At first blush, the story Max had chosen for the poem, based on Genesis 13, 18, and 19 and set in the plains of ancient Jordan, was as remote as anything from Max’s experience. The biblical Lot, Abraham’s nephew and one of the ancestors of Jesus, was a wandering herdsman originally from Chaldea who had ended up in Sodom. Chosen by God’s angels, he became the only one to survive a conflagration visited on Sodom by God himself after righteous men could not be found in the entire city. In Max’s version, however, Lot is a religious terrorist and misogynist, an uncouth, scheming tyrant who abuses his wife and daughters and, by dint of force and the police, oppresses his fellow citizens. Max had wanted, he explained to his publicist at Harper’s, Ramona Herdman, “to bring these old Biblical characters down out of their stained-glass window sanctity and velvety elegance and make them live the coarse rough life they actually lived.” He added, “I grew up in a church, you know.”66
In reimagining the story of Lot, Max took on not only his own religious upbringing but also the legacy of patriarchy he had battled since his adolescence. Yes, the circumstances of Lot’s life were as different from his own or that of his contemporaries as one could only imagine:
My friends who read your Bibles in Elmira,
That ample valley, orchard-like, with trees
All cloudy brimming, birds and bees
And blossoms in the leafiness of these,
Or you in still more ample Canandaigua—
More Bible-reading too, there comes the thought,
For there my father, not my mother, taught—
You can not know what “city” meant to Lot.
Yet the point of Max’s poem is precisely that Pastor Eastman’s Canandaigua and Lot’s Sodom are not so distant from each other, that when it comes to bigotry and zealousness the two are part of a continuum of intolerance. As much as the Bible-reading citizens of New York State might like to forget, theirs was a desert religion, born in the same unforgiving landscape where Lot ruled the citizens by “divine behest, / His judgments harsh, his proclamations loud, / His cowing down the crowd.” Their God was Lot’s, too, a “Hill Billy God,” as Max acidly observed, come down to the valley to wreak havoc on human health and happiness.67
The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock quipped—and Max proudly used the sentiment as a blurb for the book—that it was questionable whether Max’s poem should be put in the hands of anyone under seventy. “But I am seventy-two,” he added.68 One thing was sure: Lot’s Wife was not suitable reading material for minors. There is a lot of sex in the poem, though none of it joyful. Max had written a poem not just about the desert but of the desert, a place where men’s and women’s desires appear magnified by the stark landscape. In his poetic preface Max evoked his old master Whitman, who had wanted to write a poem as vibrant and candid as the earth itself yet had veiled it in a “slacking vapor.” Max’s approach was going to be very different. Formal innovation, to him, was not a goal in itself. His end rhymes and irregular iambic pentameters throw into bold relief a story that brims with illicit sex and violence. A hypocrite, Lot publicly condemns sinfulness but secretly relishes it: “Lot knew deep down in him that cities are sin; / He deeper knew them gorgeous to live in.” Every night he mounts his thin, pale wife, her sagging, thickly blue-veined body worn down by his “faithfulness,” as Max observes sarcastically. Lot possesses his wife, but he does not, as Max makes clear from the beginning, own her:
A smell would waft against her, or a tune,
And weakly like a weak rope she would give,
And vow still, still before she died to live;
But she would gasp and stagger from that sin,
And drive it back and drive it down and in.
She fed him forty years of help and hate;
He wallowed in it blandly and all ate.69
Max accomplishes something quite difficult here: mimicking Lot’s point of view, re-creating the predatory way he would look at a woman, he allows the woman’s perspective to emerge from under the layers of male domination. Lot’s daughters, for example, are described as “agate smooth and cool,” one being golden and “all curves, gleamy and sleek” while the other one is “bronze down to her bones” and “slim and slender like a whip.” Objects of men’s desires—and, as Max scandalously suggests, their father’s secret lust, too—the daughters don’t get the chance to be agents of their own desires. “I would be clean if looking were a brook,” one of his daughters observes. At the brutal climax of the poem Lot’s wife turns away from him, metaphorically as well as literally. Fleeing from the burning Sodom, swollen with his importance as the chosen ambassador of God’s wrath, Lot commands his wife not to look back. But she defies him and, in a powerful speech that sums up some of Max’s own most cherished beliefs, delivers Max’s version of the Sermon on the Mount: “Life’s first commandment is that we should live it, / And life is jealous of all meaner gods.” The real price one has to pay for not living one’s life to the fullest is not biblical but one exacted by Life itself, the one God Max reveres. For that, Lot kills her, in front of their horrified daughters.70
Max’s story ends with Lot’s daughters, deprived of the right to live their lives the way they want, getting ready to take back what their father wrested from them, by the only means available to them. They drug him so he will be tempted to act out his secret fantasy and have sex with them because they know his guilt over the incest will kill him.
• • •
In Lot’s Wife Max’s diction is not the smoothly flowing language of the classical epic, but that’s his intention. His images are often exaggerated, and his rhymes numbingly predictable (“terror” / “error”), recherché (“this” / “parenthesis”), or cartoonish to the point of being humorous (“torture” / “orchard”). Sometimes they are almost painfully imperfect (“insectlike” / “oblique”). Commented Wilson, after he had taken a first look, “Your rhymes are not much alike at all.” Max honestly thought Lot’s Wife was the best poem he had ever written, and he was hurt when Wilson treated him as if he were a mere novice. When Wilson claimed he had found lots of “metrically impossible” lines and “stop-gap phrases,” Max challenged him to make his objections more concrete, so Wilson penciled his comments (sometimes several a page) on the galleys. Wilson also asked a friend of his, the now-forgotten Harvard poet Theodore (“Ted”) Spencer, for his views. The marked-up copy went back to Max and has survived: a record of exchanges often acerbic, with Wilson adopting a hectoring tone and Max responding defiantly. This was not Pound, “il miglior fabbro,” offering advice to a brilliant peer, as had been the case with Eliot’s Waste Land. Rather, it was Wilson the schoolmaster scolding a questionably talented student that he had no “ear for verse.”71
On a single galley sheet, for example, Wilson marked several end rhymes, such as “Elmira,” corresponding to “Canandaigua” a few lines down, and “body” / “lobby,” and noted, in pencil, that they made him feel as if he had bitten into “lumps of solder in canned French peas.”72 Delayed rhymes, multiple rhymes, and off-rhymes were hard to handle in any poem, and if they were done at all, this had to happen consistently. “You don’t seem to have paid any attention to what you were doing with them.” On another page Wilson objected to the rhyme “cup” / “up” and called it banal (the “cup” was Max’s metaphor for the concentrated excitement of city life, held in one place). Max lost his patience. “What does it mean to say a ‘rhyme’ is banal? All rhymes are banal,” he wrote next to Wilson’s comment. Somehow Wilson seemed to be on a personal crusade against him. In a few instances he was plain wrong and didn’t really know how certain words were pronounced. The line “Our priest of Baal climbs an empty vat,” for example, would seem metrically irregular only to those who thought “Baal” had just one syllable: “Bunny, you don’t know how to pronounce Baal! With all your pedagogery!” However, because he feared other readers might have the same problem, Max changed the line anyway, to “Our priestly eagle climbs an empty vat.”73
Max found Wilson’s and Spencer’s criticisms harder to take than the predictable pans the poem received in the mainstream press. The Nation called it “a vulgar performance,” suitable for inclusion in the pages of Hearst’s Sunday American.75 The Washington Post lamented that none of Max’s characters seemed to be able to rise from the muck their author had placed them in, especially Lot’s wife, who, despite bouts of rebellion, chose to become “an obelisk of sodium chloride on the forsaken desert of Palestine” rather than turning around her pigheaded husband.76
Yet some critics actually understood the poem. For example, Max was delighted by a review in the New York Times written by John Chamberlain, who attributed the provocative explicitness of the poem to Max’s temperament, which was bound to rub certain readers, especially the ascetic radicals among them, the wrong way. Max’s “mournful companions” had never been able to reconcile a “passionate interest in Lenin with an equally passionate delight in swimming at a Black Sea beach resort.” Rebelling against a philosophy “which would put artists into uniform and banish simple pleasure in food, exercise and sun to the sky where you get pie when you die,” Max had turned a crude biblical story into something more at home in the world of Hellenic paganism.77 And Max’s friends at the Vineyard Gazette, while admitting the “toxicity” of this material, compared the poem’s cleansing effect on the reader to something that would have been instantly familiar to all Islanders, including, of course, Max himself: “It is a little like stepping gingerly into cold sea water, and then discovering the bracing qualities of a swim on a spring or autumn day.”78
Confusingly, though, most reviewers seemed to express their view of Max’s poem by not writing about it. In the New Leader Hendrik Willem van Loon named the elephant in the room. Van Loon, for one, had liked Lot’s Wife, “one of the most outstanding works of literary perfection of our time,” a poem he would not swap “for a dozen MacLeishes or Eliots.” But other reviewers were apparently afraid readers would buy the book and then complain to their bosses about Max’s immorality. And so they probably had said to themselves, “Suppose we put it aside and tell ourselves that we have not yet found anyone entirely suitable for this difficult job. As it is, the market is being flooded with new books. We can always claim that they come first. By and by, Max Eastman’s Lot will be old stuff and then we can tell him that it is too late now to do anything about his work.” And thus one of the finest pieces of literary craftsmanship had been sunk, consigned to oblivion by souls too timid for their jobs.79
Neither Wilson nor the critics had understood the contemporary significance of Max’s poem. Its chief character was the epitome of the tyrant, Hitler and Stalin rolled into one terrifying package. Lot exemplified Stalin’s misogyny, his treatment of women as machines producing cannon fodder, and his hillbilly roots—he is a mere “boarder” or “immigrant” in the city he sought to dominate—hinted at the modest origins of the Georgian-born Joseph Stalin and the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler. Even after the Hitler–Stalin alliance had collapsed and Germany had invaded Russia, Max held fast to his belief that Hitler and Stalin were two sides of the same coin, that defeating one meant containing the other one, too. The pact had reinforced his sense that the United States had a responsibility to stem the tide of totalitarianism, even if that meant violence. In July 1941 the Rand School Press, the printing outlet of the socialist Tamiment Institute, published, as a stapled little pamphlet, Max’s Letter to Americans, in which Max was as unambiguous as anyone could have wanted him to be about the American need for intervention. The former antimilitarist had come a long way: “If Hitler wins this war totalitarianism will triumph over democracy throughout the world.” Max saw the current political situation as a war between two ways of life, democracy and totalitarianism, a choice so stark it hadn’t been seen before in history, not in the wars fought between Babylon and Judah, Egypt and Assyria, or Athens and Sparta. He supported his argument with a listing of twenty-one chief traits of totalitarianism. Condensing it into one sentence, the New York Times immediately picked up Max’s message: “A study of this list should convince even the most confirmed non-interventionist where our interest and our duty lie.”80
At just about the same time, Max’s official and final break with the American Left occurred, too—as the result of an accident. Max had no money. And he had lost his following among American readers. Even though Stalin’s Russia had been translated into three languages, sales were sluggish, and his royalties barely exceeded the advance he had collected. Desperate about his lack of income, Max had sent, at the suggestion of his agent, an uncontroversial biographical essay about his mother to Reader’s Digest, hoping it would qualify for their rubric “My Most Unforgettable Character.” Max the linguist hated the label—how could anything be “most unforgettable”? Either you forget it or you don’t—but he sent the piece anyway. Within two days DeWitt “Wally” Wallace, the founder and editor in chief of the Digest, called him up. He was impressed. They met, and Wally instantly asked him to write a series of essays to be called “The Art of Life.” Max, remembering his literary beginnings, dug up his old piece “On the Folly of Growing Up,” published long ago in the Christian Register, and sent it to the Digest’s offices in Pleasantville, New York. Wally liked it but wanted something more practical. Max reworked it, made it worse, and it was rejected. Desperate for income, Max proposed a series about “Men with Ideas.” That proposition appealed to Wally, and he offered him the position of “roving editor”: an annual retainer or “pension” of $10,000 with an expense account in exchange for getting the first option on anything Max wrote, and separate payment for each article that was accepted. “I don’t know what writer, who had been struggling along making his living with lectures and finding it harder and harder to do, would have turned down such a millennial offer,” Max wrote later. And while the promised “pension” was, after Wally’s initial burst of enthusiasm had subsided, quickly forgotten, Max’s payment for articles could be substantial if Wally liked them, up to $5,000 apiece.81
The essay that ultimately cemented Max’s association with Wally’s magazine was not about great men and their good ideas. Instead, it dealt with what Max was now convinced had been a very bad idea from the beginning. Chatting with Wally, Max casually mentioned he had just written something expressing his new views on socialism. Wally, a dyed-in-the-wool anticommunist, jumped at the opportunity and accepted the piece, along with the article about Annis. In “Socialism and Human Nature,” Max, relying on his reading of Freud, argued that visions of an earthly paradise ignored basic human drives—Freud’s “id,” which so appropriately resonated with the American pronoun “it.” Wally made the rather clever editorial decision to publish both of Max’s articles in the same issue, with Max’s tribute to Annis immediately preceding his put-down of socialism. Thus, the earlier, softer piece set the stage for the attack that followed by presenting Max and, by implication, his political opinions as the product of his mother’s sage counsel. “Be an individual,” the reader learned Annis had taught her son. “Conformity with the crowd is beautiful until it involves sacrifice of a principle.” And: “It is much more important to stand
up straight than to understand Latin.” There was only one problem. While Max had seen proofs of the socialism article, he had not been told about the new title the magazine had invented: “Socialism Doesn’t Jibe with Human Nature.” And he did not know about the endorsement they had solicited from Wendell Willkie, the presidential candidate of the Republican Party.82 These editorial decisions, more than anything Max had said or written before, finalized his rupture with his former comrades. While many of them had long seen Max headed for the “imperialist war camp,” Max’s defection to Reader’s Digest added a strange twist to that story. The devotee of the exhilarating freedom afforded by the enjoyment of poetry had become a hired hack. Agreeing to write for Wally meant making a pact with the devil, if an affable, immaculately dressed one, a preacher’s kid, just as Max had been one.83
Wally, a hard drinker, was relentless, direct, crude. His Reader’s Digest empire, which he ran jointly with his wife, Lila, was based on the simple idea that Americans mostly didn’t like to read and that, if they did, they wanted to do so without being distracted by unnecessary detail, complicated arguments, or an author’s idiosyncratic style. Wally’s pocket-sized magazine mixed inspirational tales about the lives of the great with human interest stories, useful information on such topics as “Is Your Child’s School Safe from Fire?,” self-help articles, and conservative propaganda, all leavened with jokes, anecdotes, and uplifting quotations, the kinds of fillers that became a Reader’s Digest trademark. If articles were drawn from other publications, Wally and his editors worked to simplify them; if the piece was produced in-house, the staff edited it. The result was, in the words of Richard Lingeman, “the magazine equivalent of Campbell’s condensed tomato soup.” Not all about Reader’s Digest was bad news, though. The series “Life in These United States,” a perhaps inadvertent Whitman echo, gave voice to heartwarming, funny, and strange stories from the lives of ordinary readers. Max would have liked Wally’s somewhat relaxed approach to a topic of perennial interest to him, namely, human sexuality. Reader’s Digest advocated birth control, though within the confines of marriage, and specialized in sometimes humorous advice on relationships and even what was decorously referred to as lovemaking.84