Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  In a note Max penned on the anniversary of Crystal’s birthday he caught himself asking his long-dead sister for advice: “Crystal . . . what do you think I should do?” He was “teeming” with things he wanted to write, he said, and yet financial necessity forced him constantly to do other stuff. Writing for Wally beat the alternative—growing old dully and drearily as a professional pundit on the lecture circuit. “But as time grows short and I see that I am not going to fulfill myself, it becomes harder and harder to do, thus taking more and more time, and giving me a feeling that I am trapped, I am beleaguered.” How he wished he could consult with her!26

  Despite Reader’s Digest, Max’s life was a financial roller coaster, and Max and Eliena lived hand to mouth.27 He was plunged into the deepest valley of despond whenever, “after all the work and sacrifice of time,” Reader’s Digest decided not to take an article.28 Some of the most tedious work he did for the Digest consisted in condensing other people’s books, such as Leopold Schwarzschild’s anti-Marxian diatribe The Red Prussian in early 1948. His visits to Wally’s office were reminders of his serfdom, his dependence on the decisions of an editor whose views of what would interest the millions of Digest readers were sharply different from Max’s. In a long response to Wally written in March 1948 Max, defending himself against the accusation that he wasn’t devoting enough time to the magazine, listed some of the recent work he had done for the Digest: nine articles, paraphrases, and translations in 1944, all of them paid for, accepted, or published; eight in 1946, five of which were paid for or published; eleven articles or condensations in 1947, five of which had been accepted or published. “I don’t really see,” he wrote to Wally, “how I could put much more effort into my job than I did all of 1947 and so far in 1948.”29

  Max’s volatile financial arrangements, which left him and Eliena subject to any “changes of tide,” as Florence put it, contrasted oddly with their less-than-frugal lifestyle—the cook they kept, the two cars, the dinners and cocktail parties at West Thirteenth Street, the flights to the Vineyard, their annual vacations in the sun. Sometimes Florence had to drive them because their own car had no gas in the tank. On most days, the household seemed to be teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, with Max’s charisma as the only guarantee of sorts that kept it from collapse. At a time when other people retired from work Max was running back and forth between two women, assuring his girlfriend of his love while also flaunting, when she was present, his continuing intimacy with his wife. Max had, as Florence accurately observed, not even begun to figure himself out: “Has he—a thinker, a student of philosophy—at 65 learned so little about himself?”30 He seemed utterly lost.

  • • •

  In March 1948 Enjoyment of Living appeared. One of the earliest reviews called Max’s autobiography “iconoclastic” and “as outspoken and self-analytical as any I have ever read.” But the reviewer also cautioned that a better title would have been Prologue to Enjoyment of Living, since—apart from Max’s tremendous “lust for life and all it has to offer, in love, in work”—there was indeed little evidence offered that Max had in reality enjoyed what had been happening to him. That said, there was no better source of insights into left-wingish life in New York as it once was: “A tremendous tome, which will be avidly read by all who have been a part—or even on the fringe—of the world which was Eastman’s.”31

  Enjoyment of Living was widely noticed; Max certainly couldn’t complain. From the Nashville Tennessean to the Lynchburg Advance to the Schenectady Union Star, the critics weighed in. No doubt the rumored sexual explicitness of the book was an additional incentive. The time seemed ripe for a book like Max’s that didn’t aim for the shock value of pornography or obscure the author’s intimate life behind the screen of fiction. In January 1948, just two months before Max’s book came out, Alfred Kinsey and his team in Bloomington, Indiana, had published the first of two volumes on human sexuality, based on more than a decade’s worth of collecting thousands of sexual histories, first of students and then of ordinary Americans. “There seems to be no question,” Kinsey and his collaborators had written, “but that the human male would be promiscuous in his choice of sexual partners throughout the whole of his life if there were no social restrictions.” Their work was meant to tear the veil of secrecy from activities that were only natural. “One may wonder what scientific knowledge we would have of digestive functions if the primary taboos in our society concerned food and feeding.”32 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male became a New York Times best seller.

  The burly, bow-tie-wearing, good-looking midwestern college professor and the handsome, freewheeling, white-suited Max Eastman had a few things in common. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, a decade after Max, Kinsey suffered through an intensely religious upbringing, the influence of which he was never quite able to shed. In the more traditional Kinsey household, the father wielded all the power, but both Kinsey and Max Eastman came to know firsthand what Kinsey’s biographer called “the tremendous and terrible power of religion in human affairs.”33 Both experienced an agonizing, long period of sexual dormancy and celebrated the release from repression with a no-holds-barred celebration of sexual desire. Kinsey’s two volumes on human sexuality (the sequel on female sexuality came out a few years later) were a paean to the uncontrollable, anarchic nature of sex, a power so massive it might, in orgasm, throw or toss one’s body over a distance of several feet. No wonder society had imposed all sorts of rules, marriage among them, to restrict its anarchic impact, and no wonder, either, that reviewers of Max’s autobiography turned to Kinsey to help them understand Max’s impulse to confess all he had or hadn’t done. Calling Max’s book “perhaps the most outspoken autobiography since Rousseau’s confessions,” Sterling North said it bolstered the Kinsey report “concerning the early age at which a child may have his first erotic imaginings.”34 Mary McGrory, in the Washington Sunday Star, claimed Max’s irrepressible “urge to tell all” reached its peak in the passages about his marriage to Ida—tediously pointless perhaps to everyday readers though pure gold to Dr. Kinsey. Not so, interjected Charles Lawrence, who predicted that the Kinsey Report would take care of all insinuations that Max had been guilty of bad taste in sharing so much about his desires.35 In the Saturday Review Granville Hicks, the biographer of John Reed, invoked Kinsey without naming him when he called Enjoyment of Living “an interesting contribution to our knowledge of sexual behavior in the human male.” Next to Hicks’s review, in a sidebar, appeared the photograph of a bespectacled, bookish-looking man, a lawyer named Morris L. Ernst of Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst and a former member of President Truman’s Civil Rights Committee. Under the headline “My Current Reading,” Counselor Ernst listed both Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior and Max’s Enjoyment of Living. Everyone was talking about Kinsey, but only Max talked like Kinsey.36

  Max apparently never met Kinsey, though some of his friends, notably Edmund Wilson, did. After he had shed the straightjacket imposed on him by his upbringing and unsatisfying early relationships, Max’s extraordinary defiance of the rules of sexual propriety in his personal life as well as in his writing can certainly be seen in the context of the sexual odyssey his biographer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy found sketched out in Kinsey’s two volumes, an episodic, picaresque journey toward guiltless gratification that shocked and mesmerized contemporary readers. One interesting issue addressed in Kinsey’s report was the absence of “adequate” data about extramarital affairs, which had been especially hard to collect. Sex in marriage was the most extensive of all sexual activities of the human animal, but it was also, according to Kinsey, the most boring one: “So much of it is stereotyped and restricted to . . . age-old patterns,” amounting to a severe diminishment of the variation of which we are capable.37 Max had, for all we know, mostly heterosexual interests—men entered into the radius of his activities as colleagues and competitors but, apart from those early dreams during self-analysis, rarely as objects of sexual attraction. After his college friendship with Sidn
ey Wood he seems not to have had very many close friendships with men. He continued to be most at ease with women, including those he hadn’t slept with, such as his secretary and much-admired editor, Peggy Halsey. Kinsey mattered to Max not primarily because of the spectrum of sexual practices he had outlined but because he had, as Max put it in a note found among his papers, broken down the public’s resistance to knowing, or admitting to, the facts of life. Kinsey was a scientist and almost comically exact and devoid of emotion when he reported his findings. He was the anti-Freud, the empiricist who had liberated sex from the stigma of pathology.38

  It had taken Max considerable courage to disclose what one reviewer labeled his “30-Year Adolescence.”39 In the months before Enjoyment of Living was published he would lie awake at night, drenched in sweat, afraid of his daring in “putting down so exactly what my sexual experience had been.”40 Through the tell-all revelations in his book, Max had deflected attention away from his political views on to his personal life. Max the man had pushed aside Max the writer as well as Max the political commentator. But Enjoyment of Living did not appear on the best-seller lists, and reviews were somewhat mixed, a fact Florence, in her journal, attributed to the literary establishment’s hostility toward Max: “Are they so unable to recognize—or admit—that there lives a man who can write rings around them?”41

  But in other ways Max’s strategy worked. If people weren’t buying the book, they at least had become interested again in the man who had written it. When the journalist L. L. Stevenson went to see him, he had expected to find a “mama’s boy” but instead encountered a physically fit, tanned man, an athlete in every respect, on the tennis court as well as at the writing desk. Max was still keeping a rigorous schedule, rising at the crack of dawn to share breakfast with his wife and, after a brisk walk, spending half his day working in a makeshift shack on his Vineyard property. “A man who gets a fat belly often gets a fat head,” Max’s wife summarized his philosophy to Stevenson, who was duly impressed with Max: “He watches his diet carefully and follows a physical regimen that would floor many another man in this age group—vigorous swimming, badminton, tennis and three daily walks.” As an author, he was exacting, detail-oriented, making his “intellectual secretary” (Florence Norton) type and retype his manuscripts, adding numerous corrections, leaving each page of a draft “scrambled, scratched and rewritten until it looks like a henyard after a rainstorm” (fig. 44). Enjoyment of Living ran to one thousand pages in typescript, which the long-suffering Norton had to retype five times. Concluded Stevenson: “Probably not since Thomas Wolfe has there been a more determined re-writer of his own output.” There was no mention of Florence’s real role in Max’s life.42

  Figure 44. Max at work, with (likely) Florence Norton holding the page, ca. 1948. EMIIA1.

  The New York Post magazine ran a full-page spread about him along with a large photograph featuring the white-haired Max stroking a white, somewhat crazed-looking cat by the name of Silver Leaf. The author, Mary Braggiotti, gushed about the “aura of perpetual youth” that emanated from Max, his beautiful, ruddy face and “dramatic eyes,” offset by his shock of abundant white hair. With his attractive, also white-haired Russian wife and surrounded by white-furred animals, he was quite the sight. For her interview Braggiotti caught up with him and Silver Leaf at his West Thirteenth Street apartment, where she listened with fascination as Max assured her that, his affiliation with Reader’s Digest notwithstanding, he had never written and would never think of writing a line he didn’t like. Max was unstoppable and put on quite a show for the interviewer. About his departure from Columbia: “‘I satisfied my scorn for academic instruction,’ smiled Eastman, stroking Silver Leaf and puffing on his cigaret [sic] through a holder, ‘by never presenting my thesis in printed form.’” About his politics: he was never a member of the Communist Party (a half truth), though he had studied at the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow (true only in a technical sense; he had consulted the library there), and he had not been a Trotskyite either. For now, he was a “radical democrat.” And Russian he now spoke so well he was able to think in the language. And then there was his work ethic: the early rising, the constant tinkering with his manuscripts, the swimming at the beach, his natural asceticism. Sorrel soup, prepared by his Russian wife, was Max’s favorite dish, and milk his drink of choice. Alcohol depressed him. His preferred reading was his dictionary, and he loved playing word games with his wife. He was fastidious about his haircuts, and while he didn’t worry about his clothes he loved buying outfits for his wife. Asked why he liked white animals, the confirmed atheist gave a quizzical answer: “A white animal . . . is kind of a mystic in motion—silent, like God.”43

  Floyd Dell, Max’s former comrade at arms, wasn’t buying any of that. To him, the Maxian charm had run its course. Throughout his review of Enjoyment of Living in the Herald Tribune, Floyd deliberately used the past tense. “He had much missionary zeal,” said Floyd, “but he was lazy and a poet.” The obvious question was, of course, how poetic laziness could have produced a six-hundred-page book. Floyd regarded Max’s success, especially as editor of the Masses, as being largely unearned, a function less of personality than of propitious circumstances and good looks: “The socialism of that time was becoming less doctrinaire, the liberals were sympathetic to some socialist ideas, and a friendly relationship existed between various groups that might be called progressive. It was in this atmosphere that Max Eastman had political prominence and promise.” In appearance Max was much like a member of the ruling class, an artistic version of Anthony Eden, the conservative British politician, and so he had an easy time extracting money from rich people. When it came to evaluating Max’s book, Floyd avoided any commitment: “Its candor is extreme, and there will be no doubt two minds about it.”44

  Other reviewers were less circumspect. Orville Prescott, one of the main critics at the New York Times, had not enjoyed reading about Max’s life, and he suspected Max had not enjoyed living it. Pointing out that most adults forget the erotic entanglements of their youth, Prescott complained that Max remembered his own love life “with an enthusiasm proper only to the psychiatrist’s office.” He found Max’s book too detailed and too boring: “‘What of it?’ one asks. ‘Why do you insist on telling all this?’” Max could not have gotten a worse reviewer: Prescott, who would immortalize himself by finding Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita “dull, dull, dull,” was widely known for his conservatism, especially in sexual matters.45

  Such carping angered John Abbot Clark, a critic at the Chicago Tribune, who took it upon himself to respond to Max’s critics in the form of a Whitmanesque poem: “Poetry-enjoyer for America,” he addressed Max, reminding readers of the author’s brilliant first book, still in print. Max was a “Laugh-maker” (a reference to the two books on humor Max had written), a “Lover of Life, / Player with Metaphors and the Nation’s Stalin-handler / Stormy, husky, brawling, / Critic of the Big-Shoulders.” Clark’s Max was the Max depicted on the dust jacket of Enjoyment of Laughter, baring his white teeth in merriment, as if Hemingway had never socked him with a book, laughing as if his and our survival depended upon it.46 Another creative response, though differently slanted, came in the New Yorker in the form of a parody of Max’s writing by Wolcott Gibbs. His re-creation of Max’s panting persona captures Max’s priapic confidence that an affair with him would leave any woman utterly transformed: “I was secretly and tremblingly desirous of observing her magnificent body in action, so one afternoon I took her down to the gymnasium in Cooperstown, where in those days men and women sometimes wrestled together. . . . Clare was insatiable when aroused and the experience in the gymnasium had taught her something she hadn’t known about herself before.”47 Through the humor, however, one still gets glimpses of the liberating impact of Max’s prose: a celebration of the beauty and desires of women in language that Kinsey’s team—the volume on female sexuality had not yet come out—was still struggling to develop.

  Inevitably
, some readers finished the book believing Max was really a clinical case, if not a particularly unusual one. A popular advice columnist for the Washington Post, Mary Haworth, whose real name was Mary Elizabeth Reardon, invoked him when she tried to explain the male psyche to a female reader with the initials L. S. who was confused about her longtime boyfriend John’s reluctance to propose to her. Misquoting the title of Max’s new book as Years of Enjoyment, Haworth commended Max for having illuminated “the dual attitude of masculine nature to the opposite sex.” Driven by both sexual desire and the need for romantic partnership, John had used L. S. to satisfy the former without deeming her a qualified candidate for the latter. “Man’s Attitude Not Devotional,” concluded Haworth.48