It didn’t really matter, in the end, what kind of argument Max made publicly or privately to justify his servitude to Wally, whether it was the chance to reach an audience of more than seventy million readers, a forum to educate his readers about the evils of communism, or, simply, the money. One thing was certain: when he began to work for the Digest his writing life took a different turn. At least initially Max was the “king’s favorite.” Wally was, he felt, in love with him. In reality, this meant researching and writing about four articles a year in the “simplified and hastily-readable style,” at once condensed and diluted, that had become Wally’s hallmark. Mathematically, this didn’t seem like much, but the psychological pressure, the sheer knowledge that Wally owned him, interfered with Max’s sense of himself as a proud individualist. Cummings humorously called his friend a “demi-prostitute.”85 But Max himself, in a letter to Florence Norton, his longest-serving secretary, identified his Digest work as what he really thought it was—“slavery.”86 Unimpressed by Max’s track record as a writer, Wally had no trouble rejecting articles Max was proud of, and he never hesitated to challenge him if he was overspending his expense account. Thus Max ultimately always complied with Wally’s expectations.
In his capacity as roving editor Max, over the years, would write about every topic under the sun, from Robert Burns to microbes in the soil. He interviewed a zoo director, a former president of the Audubon Society, the queen of Greece, and the president of Mexico. And Max’s “slavery” had many sweet aspects, too: besides giving him a modicum of financial security, working for the Digest allowed him to travel to Germany, France, Italy, Norway, Spain, and Ireland. And he did not entirely renounce his former interests. For example, after the opening fanfare of his socialism article, Max turned to a topic well familiar to him. “What We Laugh At—and Why,” published in April 1943, gave Max a chance to advertise Enjoyment of Laughter while proving he had mastered the magazine’s tone. Intended for the average reader, the article was almost entirely written in the second person (“A joke is not a thing, but a process, a trick you play on the listener’s mind”). And while there was some theorizing, Max relied on accessible imagery to make his point: “Making a joke is like swinging the listener’s mind out toward its natural home in a meaning, and just as it is about to arrive there, playfully yanking it back.”87
There was a lot of such yanking back in Max’s dealings with the Digest’s editorial staff, but none of it was playful. Writing for Wally was surprisingly hard work. It involved countless revisions, lengthy consultations with research assistants, and humiliating visits to Pleasantville.88 At the end, more often than not, the article into which Max had put so much work was rejected anyway. It just wasn’t right for the readers. But Max kept telling himself he was doing something really important.89
• • •
In the short term, the money he received from the Digest came in handy indeed. Beginning in 1928, the summer of Crystal’s final illness, Max and Eliena had been spending more and more time on Martha’s Vineyard, where they fell in love with one location especially, Scitha Hill in the Lobsterville area of Gay Head, or, as it is now known, after its old Wampanoag name, Aquinnah. Newly flush after his Word Game extravaganza, Max purchased the site for $4,300 (he paid $500, and the rest came from a banker who had heard him on the radio) and began building a new home there for Eliena and himself. Gay Head was a kind of seaside version of Croton, with the added advantage that it was even less accessible than any of Max’s previous summer residences. To ensure this remained so and in order to “preserve the view,” Max also acquired the lots around the house, amounting to ninety acres. He got the land “for a song,” according to the Eastman family lawyer. It became one of the smartest investments Max ever made—in 2001, when the property, now down to twenty-three acres, was appraised, it was estimated to be worth close to nine million dollars.90
Their new home, at 17 East Pasture Road, was in a section of the Vineyard that gave them what is still the best view on the island, shielded by scrubby trees, overlooking Menemsha Pond, and with access, albeit via a winding path and a now-crumbling boardwalk, to a private, pebbly beach. Even today the house can be reached only by a rough dirt road, made even bumpier by protruding gnarly roots, which would have kept everyone away who hadn’t been invited to visit. Nailed to a tree was a hand-painted sign, still there today, pointing guests to “East Pasture.” Max’s new paradise, rural without the work a farm required, was a leisurely reincarnation—more perfect than the Croton house ever was, rendered rugged by the ocean air—of Glenora, the utopian refuge of Max’s youth and early adulthood.
Eliena and Max replaced the original structure on the property with a house of their own design built by the local builder Roger Allen (fig. 41). The main house contained Max’s study, a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom on the ground floor with two additional bedrooms and ample storage space in the attic. When he sat at his desk, painted a rustic green, with a framed portrait of Annis on the wall and a large copy of Webster’s Dictionary on a stand right underneath it, Max would have been able to see in the distance the old fishing village of Menemsha, now infamous for having served as the backdrop for the movie Jaws.
The house was simple but functional. The wood paneling throughout the interior made it more comfortable as well as rugged looking. The walls were lined with books, some of them by friends and lovers of Max, such as Florence Deshon, whose Keats editions sat on the shelves in the living room. Somewhat incongruously for a house inhabited by two atheists, a copy of Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna Adoring the Sleeping Child, painted by Eliena at the Metropolitan Museum, hung over the mantelpiece. In 1942 Max sold his beloved Croton house to “old Doc Gross,” a local orthodontist, and he did so knowing that while he had given up one wonderful house “on top of the world” he had found another.91
Figure 41. Eliena and Frosting in front of their Vineyard house. From color transparency. 1950s. EMIIA1.
Aquinnah was one of the earliest whaling sites in the United States. Many Wampanoag still lived there, and Max would come to befriend some of them. The communist pastoral of Max’s early years, his city upon a hill, had given way to an ancient fisherman’s paradise, an island reachable only by ferry and inhabited by people who’d rather be left to their own devices. The Islander mentality suited Max and Eliena just fine. Eliena continued to work as a painter, raised chickens, planted vegetables, and, with increasing facility, typed her husband’s manuscripts. Her animals were excited when Max’s work was going well, too: she was beginning to be smothered under “personal eggs,” reported Eliena, whose hens, especially the “shiny-feathered” Rhode Island Reds she had bought, enlivened the drab Vineyard landscape in unexpected ways, like “beautiful flowers.”92 A menagerie of pets took the place of the family Max had actively avoided having. When he was traveling Max would sometimes address his letters home to one of his cats or to his large white collie, Frosting. And on those rarer occasions when Eliena was away, he would send her letters pretending to be Frosting or, again, a cat. Max’s marriage to Eliena, more or less accidentally begun and, at least by him, often only loosely adhered to, had become a success story of sorts. It gave comfort to them both.
The Eastmans built a studio for Eliena with two additional rooms, a large bedroom in the back and a smaller attic space on top, as well as a garage for their car. Eliena’s warm, engaging manner and Max’s large circle of friends ensured that she didn’t run out of commissions. In a journal passage he shared with Max after Eliena’s death, Cummings described what it was like to pose for Eliena in 1949. Sitting on a chair on the dais in her tiny studio while Eliena was painting his portrait, he would hear her muttering things, to herself as well as to him, “to make me less grim & more cheerful” and to “bring out of the posing effigy a myself.” And what he could understand was extraordinary, a small little poem in the making: “Why don’t you feel like a swallow, who comes s-woo-ping up into the sky, because she is so per-fectly
happy because everything’s wonderful & new, because it’s spring & she has her babies.” To Cummings, this was the essence of what it meant to be an artist. The artist feels “what IS”: not an abstract concept such as “spring” but a bird and then “not merely a bird but a mother & therefore all joy & all mystery.” She should have had children, observed Marion Cummings drily when he told her about Eliena’s little act. Well, responded Cummings, he couldn’t “say or gainsay.” But as an artist didn’t Eliena have children without having them? All experiences were available to her, as was apparent in her dancing, too, even in a drab structure like the Gay Head town hall. Etched in his memory was Eliena’s impersonation of a faun coming to life after swooning, which she did “with a rapt solar psychic vitality” that affected everyone in the house. “Extraordinary human being!”93
As a painter Eliena was, no doubt, a traditionalist. As if modernism had never happened, her paintings were representational, marked by vigorous brushstrokes and splashes of color to indicate plasticity. Her landscapes were bathed in sunshine. Her light handling of the brush allowed her to achieve, in her best work, almost pastel-like effects. Perhaps because she so much enjoyed being with people, her portraits often sparkle with wit and insight. A good example is a beautiful oil painting of Max, which still hangs on the wall of her old Vineyard studio (fig. 42). It gives a vivid sense of the post-middle-age Max in one of his more contemplative moods. Max’s gaze is turned inward, his head cocked at a slight angle that is echoed by his tie, creating the image of a mind in motion even when the body is at rest. Eliena’s subtle modeling of Max’s facial features with the help of dabs of color highlights the complexity of his character, one that simple outlines could never capture.
There was no inward turn for Max where American politics was concerned. From his island hill he was now launching ever more frequent attacks on what he saw as a gradual communist takeover of American media. If the Hitler–Stalin pact had presented him with an opportunity to ratchet up his campaign against totalitarianism abroad, the gradual rapprochement between Roosevelt and Stalin following the German invasion of Russia forced his attention back on what he had long criticized as the excessive American tolerance of communism. There was no detail of alleged communist infiltration that escaped his attention. And he fought back vehemently when he felt people were attacking him.
In public and private letters growing in length and often shrillness Max rejected what he regarded as the lies that had been spread about him by the “most efficient and unscrupulous propaganda machine except perhaps for Hitler’s.”94 His misguided support of Hermann Krebs, aka Jan Valtin, a Gestapo agent posing as a refugee and the author of the fraudulent autobiography Out of the Night, didn’t help his public image. Rather than defining leftist opinion, as he had once done, Max spent an extraordinary amount of time defining and defending his own position. He never tired of saying he was not anti-Russian. Rather, he was “anti-tyranny, anti-totalitarian, anti-lies, hypocrisy, assassination, and judicial murder.” At the same time, he adamantly denied being an activist, as Crystal had been: “I am, alas, truly a writer.” But he also insisted that Crystal, were she alive today, would be fighting the same fight he carried on through his writing. She would, he said, devote “every ounce of her energy” to making it known to the world that there were “upwards of 10 million slaves” dying in the concentration camps of the Soviet Union.95
Figure 42. Eliena Krylenko Eastman, Max Eastman. Oil on canvas. Eliena Eastman’s studio, Martha’s Vineyard.
Activist or not, Max was now more publicly visible than ever, doing Town Hall meetings for the radio in which he warned about the “Russian” danger. To Eliena and the other members of his little household he was a star, the knight in shining armor embarked on rescuing the world from totalitarian collapse. Dog, housekeeper plus baby, and Eliena huddled in the car to listen to Max on the radio taking on his former socialist brothers-in-arms, such as the “asinine” Dr. Laidler. Despite the nasty winds that rocked the car, the reception was good, and they could hear Max loud and clear, “almost without any static.”96 Eliena believed Max could do no wrong, and some of the people who listened to Max’s anti-Stalinist rants agreed: “Your warnings should be re-broadcast on every station,” wrote one C. E. Alamshah from Chicago.97 But for every new friend he made Max was losing dozens of old ones. “I wish you would stop writing for the Reader’s Digest and write for Max Eastman,” complained the poet Carl Sandburg. Called a renegade, a reactionary, a fascist, Max felt increasingly frazzled, though he took comfort in the fact that, as he believed, he had always stayed true to his one goal, “a fight for liberty, and especially liberty for the working-classes.” This was, he informed Sandburg, “exactly the same fight I was on the old Masses and the Liberator.”98 What used to be the Left had become a bunch of “muddle-heads and mush-heads,” he told Joe O’Carroll when he reconnected with him in 1947. “It seemed inconceivable that you would support tyranny and slave labor in the name of liberty and the triumph of the working class.” His increasing isolation had become inevitable: “So many that I trusted and believed in have made that torturous retroversion, twisting their mind, will and conscience without blanching or losing a pound of weight—indeed they are all on the plump side.” Still as trim as he had been in his Village days, Max found himself alone, as the list of those that weren’t his friends anymore kept growing: “Elizabeth Flynn, Bill Foster, Mike Gold, Bob Minor.” His former colleagues had, Max felt, “betrayed—and, alas—even refuted the revolution,” and they had done so for the comfort of clinging to something they could believe in. Being publicly denounced as a renegade was worse—and now Max was remembering the Masses trials—than “it was to be prosecuted as a traitor to my country in the old days.”99
A note Max typed in September 1944 suggests how deeply his private despair and the loss of his political bearings were intertwined, how uncomfortable it was for the ex-socialist to find himself warning his fellow countrymen about the danger coming from what he had once himself embraced. He had spent a few hours looking over his old editorials in the Masses (“futile and diffuse”), and when he went to bed afterward he had a terrible nightmare. He found himself kneeling “before a statue of some great man like Milton, tight-lipped, dressed all in black, seated with arms outstretched as though at ease on a cross. I touched the rough back pediment of the statue. ‘He even molded his own frames,’ I said. I bowed my head down on the flagstone under him and wept.” In his dream he saw Eliena coming to his rescue, as she always did in his waking life. “Malyutochka, what is it?” “I’m all right,” Max smiled, still dreaming. “Don’t worry. I’ll get up and go on.” But Eliena persisted, and so Max told her: “Eliena, I am sure I was meant to do something great. I am absolutely sure I was meant to do something great.” When Max finally woke up he was bathed in tears, “for that is not only my deepest, but my most present sorrow: I have wasted my talents.”100
9 • Max in Purgatory
While Max was clamoring for military intervention, his son Dan was washing dishes and cutting down trees at Civilian Public Service Camp #32 in West Compton, New Hampshire. As a conscientious objector, he was now sharing his life with a motley group of men that included Jehovah’s Witnesses, lawyers from New York, Harvard professors, a violinist, and an insurance salesman, “the best man so far,” as he wrote in a letter to Marion Morehouse Cummings. He felt like an “overactive member of an Eagle Scout troop.” Hard labor, to be sure, was no “mental stimulant.” He wanted to get out of camp desperately so that he might spend “every spare minute in some cozy bar or among congenial friends, or just lying on my back breathing my own air instead of gov’t air.”1 Daniel Eastman, CPS worker 002431, was released on March 3, 1942, having served almost ten months.2
Max did not know what to make of his son’s opposition to the war. As he saw it, Dan had returned home from camp with the distinct feeling that he was “superior in intelligence” to the rest of the world. Undoubtedly true, said his father in a l
etter to Dan’s mother, Ida, but “so are you and I.” Max was responding directly to an argument Ida had made previously that Dan was so pure that he should be given money just for the fact of his existence. Whenever he was angry Max’s capacity for sarcasm got the better of him, and his prose soared. But Max’s quip hid a deeper concern for a son who had never finished growing up, who was bouncing from idea to idea and from job to job and who now, in his thirties, found himself without all the things he kept saying he really wanted: a “place in the world,” a steady source of income, children. Encouraged by Cummings, who Max said knew as much about thinking “as a nightingale knows about swimming,” Dan had embarked on a quest for “literary truth” and now wanted to be a writer. The only problem: he wasn’t writing anything. Not that there was anything wrong with just living one’s life. That was indeed enough, but one had to do it well, do it greatly—which meant living it like Max did.3
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