Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  The title of Max’s autobiography-in-progress reflected precisely what Max felt his son obviously lacked, Enjoyment of Living. Ironically, Max the great life-enjoyer now needed Dan’s help, since his editor at Harper’s feared legal reprisals, especially from Ida. Dan obliged, read his father’s manuscript, and, to Max’s relief, saw “nothing that he thinks injurious to his mother in it.”4 What a convoluted situation this was: Max found himself relying on the opinion of the son in whose life he had played a marginal role as his justification for saying uncomfortable things about the wife he had abandoned. Max showed the manuscript to others and then wrote to Ida, reassuring her that “comparative strangers” also thought she was a “fine and noble character” in the book. Ida replied, caustically, that she wasn’t a fine and noble character even in her own eyes: “Why not refer to our marriage, (if you feel you must refer to it) as an experiment which did not result in a permanent relationship? Is it necessary to justify yourself to the public or to justify me?” Ida remembered the terms of their original marriage contract better than Max did. The magnanimity of her letter is striking. Referring to Dan’s struggles, for example, she did not place blame on Max entirely, as would have been easy for her to do: “He has problems, partly but not entirely due I think to certain elements in his childhood years, and also to the confusion in my own life. What more is there to say?”5

  As he was working on his autobiography Max lumbered into a close, agonizingly intense relationship with his secretary, Florence Norton, a young, fresh-faced woman with dark, shoulder-length hair and beautiful white teeth, whom he had met during one of his lecture tours in Norfolk, Virginia, almost ten years earlier (fig. 43). The daughter of a minister who headed a large rescue mission in Norfolk, Florence was twenty-five when their paths crossed again, and almost painfully thin (her lack of appetite became a constant topic in their correspondence). Living in New York City, penniless and embroiled in a rocky relationship with a man from Switzerland, Florence one day showed up during a gathering at the house of Max’s neighbor Doris Stevens and promptly fell for Max. He gave her some work to type and promised to help her get over her unreliable boyfriend, a task he seems to have taken so seriously that he got her pregnant. Norton’s journal shows that Max didn’t take the news well. When she asked for his help, Max provided a doctor’s address but otherwise became “hysterical” and essentially abandoned her. Florence underwent a painful, nauseating abortion, without anesthesia, while Max kept out of sight in Croton.6

  Figure 43. Max Eastman and Florence Norton.

  From color transparency, 1950s. EMIIA1.

  Five years later, however, she was working for Max once again, this time paid out of Reader’s Digest funds. Now a student at Columbia, she typed Max’s letters and manuscripts when she wasn’t attending classes, helping him with his autobiography as well as Reader’s Digest assignments. Typically, Max would dictate a first draft of an essay or a chapter and then revise Florence’s typescript by hand, leaving it to her to produce the cleaned-up version. He set her up with a room in the same building on West Thirteenth Street, where he and Eliena had taken an apartment, as well as with a small house, The Brink, close to his own on the Vineyard.7 During Florence’s off-hours, when circumstances allowed and Max was able to slip away from Eliena’s side, he went down to be, as Florence decorously put it in her journal, “friendly” with her. In addition to her secretarial duties Florence went shopping for the Eastmans, took care of their pets, gave them rides to the airport, and looked after their apartment when they were gone.

  Florence’s journals give us an intimate look at Max’s unconventional and often vexed life during those years, a time when other men of similar age begin to settle down. Serenity would not have been a desirable state of mind for Max if he had been able to choose. But Florence’s journals also reveal the terrible price Eliena, racked by feelings of humiliation and outbursts of jealousy, paid for continuing to stand by her husband. One of the chilliest entries in Florence’s journal captures her view of Eliena entering the elevator in Max’s building, headed for the airport and then on to DC, where she was going to help Max with some research at the Library of Congress. Her head wrapped in an unbecoming scarf, Eliena looked forlorn and pathetic like a child. “The tragedy is that she is not a child.” While childlikeness was becoming in girls under twenty, observed Florence mercilessly, it was a bore in anyone older.8

  In one form or another Max’s relationship with Florence, which he kept carefully hidden from public view, lasted for more than two decades. It would be wrong to assume that Florence was merely the victim in this arrangement. Max provided her with much-needed income and a place to stay, and it was her association with him that later helped her get jobs as an assistant editor at Reader’s Digest and as managing editor of the Freeman and the American Mercury.9 She was powerfully attracted to him. Her journal entries from the 1940s evoke the fresh smell of his hair, his bronze skin, his tenderness, his timeless beauty. He was the “mountain whose beauty and majesty” she admired from the “valley” of her existence. “Max came down fragrant with sunshine and fresh wind-blown air,” she noted after Max had just returned to New York from the Vineyard. After dropping him off at the airport for one of his frequent trips to the Vineyard, she gushed, “Max looked extremely beautiful when I left him.” He was Apollo reincarnated, his body “exquisite in its proportions,” “strong and delicate in its beauty,” while his head, with its “wonderful defiant-free-casual tilt,” looked resplendent against the blue sky.10 Indeed, Max had a lot to offer Florence, apart from money, which was never lavish, and sex, which often left her sadder than she was before. There are touching entries in her diaries that describe the intellectual excitement he generated in her, descriptions of mornings in New York when she would sally forth to her Columbia classes with “glowing thoughts of Max.” Max edited her term papers, engaged her in intellectual discussions, and appreciated her advice on his writing. He was the first person in her life to make her really care about thinking, she said, “and because thinking is the highest attainment and limitless in its potentialities, this seems to me a wondrous thing he has done for me. I felt—I do yet—that he has the priceless gift of the teacher in this esteem he has for thinking, and I wondered how great a teacher he might have been if he could have stayed as he is and remained a professor.” Being with Max was not a one-way street, then: “I thought, too, how few people in my life have added something important like this to the development and growth of my self, and that he is the first man who gave me this something.”11

  Through Max she met interesting people, not only his new political allies but also musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin, the latter a kind of younger version of Max, like him possessed of “beauty of body, intellect, curiosity, and love of health and physical vitality.” She promptly fell in love with Menuhin. Her diary records magical moments on the Vineyard, “the shining quiet stretches of water all around us.” During Heifetz’s visit to the Vineyard, listening to records chosen by him while sitting outside under the stars, wrapped in a big blanket, Florence would sit with Max’s head resting on her shoulder and felt transformed: “In the melodic darkness he seemed to me very young, a soft-haired boy, and I rather the older one, partly the parent.”12

  But such intimate moments were offset by others in which Florence insisted on her independence. Sexually active before she had met Max, she was ill-suited for the role of the compliant mistress. And while she realized and was often despondent about her dependent role in Max’s life, she never lost her wit even if her other senses were clouded by the centripetal force of Max’s beauty: “I love you and admire you and think you are a wonderful writer—especially on the subject of Max!” Sarcastically, she referred to Max’s cottage on the Vineyard as the “Big House.” Frequent fights, sometimes over trivialities, sometimes over money, were regularly followed by furtive lovemaking in the middle of the night, after which things seemed fine, until the next eruption. Add to that Eliena’s
frustration, which she would vent when Max was not around, and one gets a sense of the daily chaos surrounding Max. No serenity for him and really not much “enjoyment of living” either. Florence summarized the deadly triangle of the Eastman household and the options before them succinctly: “We three are full of passions; we can weed them or not, be animals or civilized.” It seems, though, that instead they all opted for a state of permanent in-betweenness, in which bouts of anger and passion alternated with periods of pretending that all was fine. It would have been hard for outsiders to understand the emotional arrangements that had to be made, by everyone involved, so that Florence would be able to attend one of Eliena’s popular dance classes in the morning and then sleep with Eliena’s husband at night.13

  Max himself was not sure how to account for his feelings toward Florence, finding himself gripped once again by the “throat-parching turmoils and agonies of adolescence.” Weren’t those hormonal bursts of longing supposed to die down “to a seemly calm at about the age of twenty-three or -four”? In a fragment that somehow ended up among Florence’s papers, Max launched a frantic attempt at self-analysis, as he had done before when faced with a crisis that refused to go away. He began by offering a sobering assessment of his ridiculous situation: “I am sixty-five years old, and for five years I have been growing, with interludes of short duration, more and more in love with my secretary, Florence.” Even more urgently than with Creigh he was looking for what he had lost or what he feared he was about to lose. Florence Norton was Florence Wyckoff, Crystal Eastman, and Florence Deshon all wrapped into one: “Florence is brown-eyed; her skin is rosey dark. She is the color of my sister, the color of my first Florence (no, it was my second!) whom I loved in utter rapture for the eternal span of a year and a half. Her hair is the same brown and grows so beautifully on her body that I think of those shaded parts of her as a worshipper of his shrine with the god’s presence.” Max’s complicated desire for this new Florence made him, as he admitted, “insanely jealous,” not only physically but also mentally: “I have never been able to, and I have since adolescence fervently determined not to, separate body and spirit in any experience, no matter how trivial or how sublime.” Now he was facing the inevitable decline of his virility, and while he wanted Florence for himself, she obviously had no intention of restricting herself to Max.14

  In that same document, hastily typed on yellow paper, with many passages crossed or x’ed out, he confronted his situation with both despair and self-irony: “The decline of my rather abnormal drive to make love to any and every attractive girl has been a dreadful thing to me, a loss of some sustained and sure value in life.” A drive that had remained strong, Max went on, inadvertently switching to the present tense, “because I am attractive enough, and humble enough in my adoration of beauty, so that it is not very often frustrated if I set out to satisfy it.” But satisfaction had never been the point of Max’s quest. Rather, it had been the “continual upspringing lusty desire that kept me happy” when, for example, he would sit “in a café window, or at a little table on the sidewalk in Paris watching the girls go by,” in ecstasy over the very fact that he was filled with such “powerful and never-failing” longing for physical contact. Now, in his beginning old age, just thinking about Florence was not enough; his desire needed her presence, “if not her touch,” to be aroused: “I rarely awake in the night in my own lonely bed filled with erotic desire as I used to.” Of all the things that had befallen him in life, this apparent loss of his libido was the worst, the one that was the most difficult to bear. Old men simply weren’t explorers: “Don’t you see the sadness in the eyes of all old men—even those who chirp ‘It doesn’t matter how old you are, you’re as old as you think you are’—trying to cover with this sparrow song the symphony of gloom in their hearts”? Max did try to talk himself into believing that his ongoing affair with Florence, because of the professional advantages it had brought him (“No writer ever had a more perfect friend,” he said), had left his love for Eliena, his “co-partner in everything I own,” basically intact. But he knew that was not the case, and rather than confronting the problem he ended by attributing Eliena’s hostility to menopausal depression, a passing phase, then.

  But his relationship with Florence was not about to end. In September 1945 she was pregnant again. Aborting that child felt terrible this time. Max was being sweet to her now, not as callous as the last time. After her return from New York, where she had undergone the operation, Florence’s nights were haunted by dreams. In a particularly memorable one Eliena had adopted a golden-haired, blue-eyed baby and allowed her to hold it in her arms, a “wonderful feeling.” But the days weren’t much easier to get through. On the Columbia campus Florence picked up a wounded pigeon, fussing over it as if it were a rare species, and even carried it to the zoology lab—all “because I need a baby so.” Had it not been for “Eliena’s opposition to me and to it,” she would have never given up Max’s child. Even Max admitted to having been “very sad thinking of the baby and how lovely it would have been.” But he returned to Eliena again, playing the devoted husband and shunning Florence, “for he cannot be the knight in attendance upon more than one lady at a time.” But maybe he was being nice to Eliena just so that he could keep Florence? Florence liked to think so, and yet she also keenly felt her “apartness” from him.15

  Evidently Florence’s portfolio encompassed so much more than typing for Max (and loving him, to boot). When Claude McKay suffered a stroke in the winter of 1943 it was Florence who went to visit him in Milford, Connecticut, where he was recuperating in a cabin Max and others had managed to secure for him. McKay was deeply grateful that Max had sent her, writing to him, “You gave me a new lease of life.”16 Again through Florence, Max subsequently got him out of the YMCA in New York into an apartment on Long Island, but the room was too cold and the stove leaked. Now Claude turned around and declared that Miss Norton had “no understanding of the Negro world.”17

  Never easy to take care of, Claude was now severely depressed, and his mental state exacerbated his physical decline. A few years earlier the publisher Dutton had enlisted Max’s help in whipping Claude’s novel-in-progress, tentatively titled God’s Black Sheep, into presentable form.18 The story played among radical “Aframericans” (McKay’s preferred term) and even involved a Comintern agent being hurled from a Harlem roof. Max had read the first few chapters and offered advice, but Claude chafed under the arrangement and simply went ahead and finished the book. John Macrae at Dutton was not amused: “You have failed to take advantage of Mr. Max Eastman’s valuable and competent aid. I regret GOD’S BLACK SHEEP is so bad and so poor that I cannot offer you any hope of its being revised in a satisfactory way to meet what I believe a novel by you must be.” Claude was crushed.19

  “Battered, ready for the scrap heap,” without a predictable income and effective medical care, McKay found it difficult to write.20 Ultimately he sought relief in the arms of the Roman Catholic Church, a move that sincerely disappointed Max: if he had successfully resisted Stalin, why now warp his mind for the Catholics?21 When, four years later, Selma Burke sent a telegram to tell Max that Claude had died of heart failure in a Chicago hospital, Eliena coldly observed that he had “stopped living years ago.” But Max was still holding on to his earlier image of the shining Prince of the Revolution, the only black man among the Bolsheviks: “Poor Claude! It is hard to imagine him dying!”22 For McKay’s Selected Poems, published in 1953, Max provided a biographical note in which he praised his dead friend as “that rarest of earth’s wonders, the true-born lyric poet.” The selection ended with McKay’s “Courage,” a poem in which McKay described himself longing for “undisturbed and friendly rest,” grasping the “understanding hands” of a friend, drinking his “share of ardent love and life.”23

  But Max himself felt his “beautiful life”—which is what Claude had so admired about him when they first met—slipping away from him. A trip to Cuba in early 1946 brought him face to f
ace with his nemesis Hemingway again, who had also not been spared by the ravages of time. They had run into him by accident at the Bar Florida in Havana, where the Eastmans had gone to cash a check and had stuck around watching the delicate-handed barkeeper mix daiquiris. “Hello, Ernest,” Max said when he recognized Hemingway and extended his hand. But he also quickly calculated what he would do if Hemingway decided to hit him: “He’s in a perfect position to be tackled and thrown through the door on the sidewalk.” Hemingway did not do him the favor: “Hello, Max,” he responded quietly. The two men talked, cordially, and when Eliena joined them, Max said, as if they were at a cocktail party and nothing had ever happened between them, “You remember Eliena, Ernest?” Eliena couldn’t believe this fussy, “top-heavy,” soft-spoken man with eyes as brown and expressionless as a beetle’s peering at her through small steel-rimmed glasses was the same “blood-lusty he-man” she had known in Paris. He looked like an overweight English professor on vacation; when someone tried to take his picture Papa fumbled with his glasses, took them off, and then smiled: “Now I look more like I used to.”24

  At the time, Hemingway was struggling to regain his footing in life and as a writer, scarred by his traumatic war experiences and a series of personal disasters, including a severe car accident. Max’s life, by contrast, was proceeding as mundanely as possible. There seemed to be no end to the stream of words coming out of him, in long letters to friends and foes, political essays, and public talks, at the New School on Stalin’s foreign policy, in Grand Rapids on laughter, and about himself at his parents’ former Park Church in Elmira. His bank account was constantly overdrawn, while the writing he really wanted to do was frequently interrupted by Reader’s Digest articles, which he could never be really sure would be accepted. He was afraid he was squandering his life. Officially, Florence was not sympathetic to his outbursts of self-pity. Max “worried me with his talk of it now being too late to do anything great,” she wrote. Her spirit rose against such “negative and defeatist” talk. Max was speaking as if he had only ten years to live instead of looking forward to all the work he would still be able to do. He was in excellent health, and Florence seemed personally offended that he would “entertain so consistently this idea that his life is over. It is over if he has ceased to look forward to the next day and year as a chance to write better.” Yet on other days she knew Max had a point: “Almost since his return from Cuba Max has had to devote his efforts to writing for Reader’s Digest and to petty and troublesome, or depressing and time-consuming problems of one kind or another. . . . He is not happy this way, and the days go by with none of the writing he wants done—done.”25