Yet Max’s frankness had a restorative effect on others, who read Enjoyment of Living as the story of a man who successfully overcame debilitating personal timidity.49 The many personal letters Max received from friends and strangers confirmed he was reaching people on a level other than the literary one. Even Floyd Dell was much more gracious off the record. He did tell Max he didn’t like his present politics. Capitalism, he insisted, had failed much more spectacularly than communism ever could. But he liked what and how Max had written about his personal life: “Well, you were a queer fellow, much queerer than I knew—but what a delightful tale you make of it.” Max was genuinely moved by Floyd’s letter: “I have received more brickbats from the philistines than I can say I honestly enjoyed.”50 Upton Sinclair, too, liked the volume, although he said he was surprised to read about Max’s many uncertainties, “for you always managed to impress me as an extraordinarily serene and well-balanced person.” Max’s honesty about his different states of mind he found heartening: “Personally, I always count that as a useful service—that is, of course, if I happen to be interested in the person who is telling me.”51
And that is precisely what Max had always wanted to be—an interesting person, someone who had learned to be himself, a useful model for others learning how to be themselves, too, but not a character in a cautionary tale. Fifteen years after the publication of Enjoyment of Living, a California woman named Alfreda Lindholdt wrote to Max to thank him for allowing her to face her own difficult emotions “without fear or favor.” She had recognized herself in Max’s self-analysis, and his “incomparable sentences” had imprinted themselves forever on her mind.52
Larger than life on paper as well as in public, Max in private, to those who knew him intimately, seemed fearful, anxious, paralyzed by entanglements that had gone beyond anything he felt he could control. When Max and Florence took a trip to Florence’s hometown, Norfolk, they stopped in Camden, New Jersey, and noted how spacious Walt Whitman’s home was. “We had imagined it humbler and more cramped,” remarked Florence.53 Next to the good gray poet, Max’s life seemed so little, so much more circumscribed. Harper’s never recovered more than half of the advance it had extended to Max for Enjoyment of Living, and he now feared he had revealed entirely too much about himself for nothing and certainly without reaping the hoped-for financial benefits. Why on earth had he performed this “really wanton attack . . . on my quite glorious reputation as a great and all-conquering lover”? He had told the world he hadn’t slept with a girl until pretty late in his young life, and the world didn’t care enough to buy his book.54
Though noticeably frayed around the edges, the famous Eastman charisma still worked, pulling those who found themselves in Max’s orbit ever closer toward him. Even the Eastmans’ former housekeeper from the Croton days, an African American woman of great resilience and dignity, was not immune to it. In an undated note Eula Daniel talked about holding Max’s picture to her heart and crying as she is imagining herself in his arms: “I do wish I didn’t idolize you so but I guess it’s not your fault. I think tho if you didn’t care anymore and would not be my friend I’d die.”55
Max added to the complications in his life by falling in love with a young woman named June Johnson, whom he met during an outing with Florence in the Shawangunk Ridge, “our young and altogether charming find,” as Florence referred to her, with studied casualness, in her journal.56 Still hurting from the lackluster reception of his book, Max was casting his net wider again, and June’s unabashed admiration suited him well. “You are not . . . sixty-five,” she wrote him. “You are my age which is ageless and timeless. We are as old as we wish to be, you and I, so we’ll be sometimes adolescent, sometimes sixty-five, but most of the time we’ll be either not yet born or millions of years old. You and I—we move in big strides and wide swings and are concerned with details only on occasion.”57 June was inviting him to be her “co-traveller in the empyrean,” as Max delightedly noted, and he was willing to accept the invitation, at least momentarily forgetting his involvement with Florence.58 His new lover was studying modern dance in the private residential dance program at the New Hampshire farm of the wealthy dance patron Barbara Mettler. Pride in one’s body and physical fitness had always held tremendous appeal to Max, and with June he once again proved too weak to resist. In one of his letters to June he called himself a “many-willed, murky-souled craver of infinitudes.”59 This was an unanticipated twist: Florence now found herself competing not only with her lover’s wife but also with a potentially expanding army of other possible lovers.
It was quite ironic, then, that Max was so wholly unprepared for Florence assuming similar rights for herself. When he discovered that she had taken a lover, too, Max was crushed. “You hold me in bondage but you will not cherish me,” Max wrote upon hearing that Florence had invited her lover to the very room where they worked together. “You are a deadly danger to me.” And: “You are destroying me and I can not save myself, for I love you. You are the only one I love.” Try as he might, he could not do without her. Lying on the beach in Venice, Florida, where the Eastmans had gone in their annual quest for warmth, he reimagined the rays of the sun on his body, he told Florence, “as your warm lips kissing me.” Florence’s “genius for ecstasy” had transformed him, an experience he could describe but not understand: “Like the name of the living God,” it had seemed too dangerous to him to even mention it. Arguably, Max was thinking not about religion but about sex.60
Early in 1949 Florence left for Europe, officially in order to work for Reader’s Digest but really at Max’s insistence. Almost immediately Max moved his study up to the eighth floor. But absence made his heart grow fonder—or, in Florence’s case, it reinvigorated her desire for him. “I have no emotion whatsoever about the prospect of bearing any child but yours,” she wrote to him. The paeans to Max’s beauty Florence mailed from Paris and Rome are comical in their rhetorical excessiveness. Fanned by Mediterranean winds and fired up by the hot Italian sun, she imagined Max, a Greek god descended from the skies specifically to have his way with her, inseminating her between the pillars of the Acropolis. Such passionate billets-doux alternated with bizarre notes addressed from “Mamma Florence” to her cat Minkie, made even weirder by the replies Max composed in which he in turn posed as Florence’s cat and his dog Frosting. “Maybe we should stay separated,” Florence observed, “we love each other more that way.”61 At the end of April Max arrived in Rome, and together they took off for Greece. He stayed for a month. The God had become real “in that almost white Greek sun.” Florence was even willing to overlook that Max didn’t mean her but that other, more perfect Florence from his Village past when, admiring the pouting mouth of the Thyiad in the museum of Delphi, he remarked, “Her beauty is rather like my Florence’s.” Unlike Florence Deshon’s love, hers was unconditional: “I have never known a companion, man or girl, that could anywhere near be what he is. He’s always fun to go places with, to sit with, to ride, to talk, to swim, to picnic with. And besides I am always so proud because of his beauty. It’s as though he shed an aura around him, and even I, who possess no beauty, shine forth a little in its wondrous light.”62
Now that the Reader’s Digest empire has crumbled it is hard to imagine the power that name commanded abroad during these postwar years. Max had access to the highest levels of government in Greece. He was excited to be back in the birthplace of philosophy, the country of Plato, the subject of his Columbia dissertation, but he did not have enough time to enjoy the experience. Wherever he went he was received like an ambassador of sorts. He had cocktails and lunch with the former prime minister Georgios Papandreou and, separately, lunch with the foreign minister and meetings with the current premier and the Greek queen, Frederica. Impressed by Frederica’s beauty, he forgot all his democratic sympathies and described her gushingly as a lovely girl who knew her subjects better than anybody else and defended the homeless and hungry children of Greece against the communist bandits that s
till haunted the mountains.63 He and Florence saw Delphi, Epidaurus, the ruins of Mycenae, and the plain of Marathon. At the prison in Ioannina he interviewed the members of the Greek communist party, the KKE, who had been arrested during the Greek civil war. When he arrived in Crete the mayor of Iraklion and the prefect of the province received him, and he got a personal tour of the palace of King Minos.64
Before she left for Europe Florence declared in her journal that Max had finally made a “definitive choice.” But he hadn’t. If anything, Max’s month-long European visit confirmed that he didn’t want to choose. June had receded into the past, and he loved Florence, but he wasn’t ready to give up Eliena. Florence was frustrated. “He holds back what he thinks,” she wrote, “then explodes with part of it at an inopportune moment.” And that was how Eliena, who realized Florence wouldn’t just vanish into thin air, behaved, too.65
And so the trio’s unconventional, torturous life at West Thirteenth Street and at East Pasture Road continued, now punctuated by more frequent periods of travel, which sometimes involved the entire household. From January to July 1951 the Eastmans were in Europe, Max to gather material for more Reader’s Digest articles, Eliena to pursue her painting. They bought a car they named Minxie and visited friends, among them Arthur Koestler in Paris and the race car driver and aspiring writer Hans Ruesch in Naples. While in Paris Max had dinner with George (“Yuri”) Annenkov, who stared at him and then threw up his hands: “Why you haven’t changed in a single line since I made your portrait twenty-five years ago!” After which Annenkov kept staring at Max as though he were made out of wax. Max was pleased.66
But there were more serious, introspective moments, too. In Rome, as Eliena and he were strolling through the garden of the Villa Borghese, a work by the contemporary sculptor Giovanni Nicolini impressed Max deeply. The Fontana della famiglia dei satiri made Max think of his relationship with Florence, minus the offspring, of course: a naked girl and a satyr stand laughing, with hands locked and pulling against each other, while their baby is sitting in the hands of its parents eating a bunch of grapes (fig. 45). “The whole thing is utterly joyous,” he wrote to Florence, “the animal and the human, physical and spiritual, joining together—only pretending to struggle apart—in beautiful exuberant laughter.” Max also liked the motto that was engraved, between the heads of four gargoyles, on the fountain’s base: “Fons canit vitae laudem murmure suo,” a line by the poet Raffaello Santarelli. “This fountain, with its murmuring, sings its hymn to life.” Max might have given up writing poetry, as he said in the same letter (“I haven’t the equilibrium”), but that didn’t mean he’d lost his sense for it. Nicolini’s sculpture of the frolicking satyrs suggested how he and Florence should live with each other: free, unencumbered, taking a pagan delight in sheer life in a world unrestricted by Eliena’s demands and Reader’s Digest deadlines. Coincidentally, the features of the lusty satyr uncannily resembled Max’s own: the full head of hair, the strong nose and large ears. Did the grape-eating youngster remind him of his and Florence’s unborn children? Here was the family he never had, through no one’s fault but his own.67
Figure 45. Max and Eliena at the Fontana della famiglia
dei satiri, Rome, 1951. EMIIA1.
Leaving Eliena behind in Italy for two months, where she would sketch and paint, Max left for Switzerland and Germany. When he came back to the United States, Florence in turn had already departed for Europe, where the Eastmans’ car was waiting for her. Back on the Vineyard after his “summer of much sunshine,” Max had to grapple with his mounting debts.68 He had Florence’s cottage rebuilt and hired a local man to kill the poison ivy, for $16 an hour! Meanwhile he was staggering payments on electricity, plumbing, and carpentering. More and more he depended on Eliena’s income, as she returned from her solo time in Italy with new pictures as well as new energy. She was keeping track of the rental income from the cottages on their property, “tending to leaks and things,” taught dance lessons (“in succession, an hour each, twice a week”) that would enroll as many as fifty-eight students, raised more chickens, and generated even more money from portrait painting ($5,000 for a recent commission). Every day or two she was bringing a check home, and he didn’t even have to lift a finger, Max reported. He was chafing under the “slavery” imposed on him by Reader’s Digest, but Eliena seemed excited about her life. She had found her place in life, whereas Max still had not.69
In a dream he had around that time, he was attending a Christmas party at the Reader’s Digest, where he had been assigned the task of making a snowman in the image of Barclay Acheson, Wally’s unimpressive brother-in-law. Max’s snowman was not very good, and when he showed up with it for the planned holiday ride in a tally-ho coach, the other editors told him Wally had already asked someone else. Max threw his snowman down in anger, breaking it into pieces, and exclaimed, “To hell with you and your magazine!” If only he’d had the strength in real life to make such a move. As it was, Max, when writing for Wally, always had that “namby-pamby, Pollyannaish, Sunday School Herald flavor of the Digest” in his mouth. What he forced himself to produce for Wally was ephemeral, quick to evaporate, like snow.70
Florence was now working as a managing editor at the American Mercury, originally H. L. Mencken’s creation, which was then beginning its fateful tilt to the right. But she hadn’t given up on her wish to discuss “the more important matters of life,” a coded reference to the future of their relationship, a conversation Max did not want to have. The future troubled him, too, he said, but he’d rather talk about it some other time. Or perhaps not at all. He clarified his evasiveness in a subsequent letter: “I was trying to say something that would make you feel free-moving, and not forced into anything even by expectation.” Florence had said she didn’t “dare think” where their love might lead them. Max’s answer to the problem: don’t think at all. “I must admit I don’t think much about it. I just lie back waitingly in the flux of events, happy in the sureness and unfailingness of my love for you.”71
Max’s casual dismissal of Florence’s concern was a recipe for trouble. And trouble did erupt the next year, when Max had moved his rocky ménage à trois to Europe again, and Eliena asked that her husband take her—and only her—to Spain. Florence was upset and threatened, after they had returned, she was going to seek “a new equilibrium.” Max wailed that she was his “last love” and, the old paganism flaring up in him again, “my last deep absolute friendship to sanctify the earth with.” He was sorry for his “brutish, ungallant and altogether uneducated folly.”72
Nothing happened, of course, and things went on as before. During the summers at the Vineyard they enjoyed the “jewel-like days” close to the ocean and their sheltered access to the beach, which allowed—Max’s abiding passion—nude bathing.73 When it got too cold on the Vineyard the Eastmans returned to their apartment on West Thirteenth Street, often for only short periods of time, before taking off again, for Europe or to warmer regions, such as Mexico or the Caribbean.
Eliena continued to manage the rental income from their Vineyard properties, keeping a watchful eye over all expenses. No tenant got away with anything; a letter survives in which she is instructing their local agent to “make sure that if the tenants order oil for the furnace, or electric bulbs, or to cut grass or fix the road, they pay cash.”74 Max in turn did what he could to further Eliena’s artistic career. For example, in the summer of 1953 he helped pay for her trip to Paris, where she exhibited her work in a gallery. He missed her while she was gone but apparently not so badly that he wouldn’t console himself with Florence: “Florence came up for last week and we had a very sweet and happy time together, but when she was gone and I felt lonely, I was lonely for you. This is an experimental scientific verification of what I tried to tell you all winter.”75 Being with Florence was one of his “seizures,” the code word he and Eliena used for his extramarital affairs, and Eliena had assured him that, despite his escapades, she would continue to love him as s
he had done from the very beginning.76 Max liked his women strong, but he recoiled when they came on too strong, and that was the case especially when they threatened the one thing that kept him sane: his life with Eliena.
There had never been a sharp dividing line between Max’s personal and political lives. To him, the Cold War was anything but cold. With the same red-hot passion he brought to his love affairs he excoriated the American tolerance of totalitarianism whenever he had an opportunity. Persuaded by James Burnham’s argument in Struggle for the World (1947), Max was in disbelief about the attempts by American politicians to appease Soviet Russia, which would, as he saw it, cede more than half of the world to the Stalinists. All around him were organizations that acted as mere fronts for the takeover of American democracy plotted by the Russian “slave state”: the National Council for the Arts, Sciences and Professions; the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee; the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship; the Voice of Freedom Committee; the Civil Rights Congress. American democracy seemed under attack wherever one looked. If his friends lent their names in support of any efforts Max had identified as fronts for Stalinist Russia, Max was unbending in his criticism. “You can’t support Demosthenes and ally yourself with the Macedonian party,” he lectured Louis Untermeyer in 1950.77
As he had done for several years now, Max insisted his basic values had never changed, merely the urgency with which he felt called upon to defend them. But that wasn’t in fact true. The same man who in 1914 had railed against the anarchists because they would say no for the sake of saying no instead of working, with creative vision, toward some great end, now was cultivating mainly his own garden, vowing to inflict revenge on all those encroaching on his private property.78 In an unpublished essay Max, who was registered to vote on the Vineyard, not in New York City, explained how reluctant he had become to vote at all. Democracy was the best of all forms of government, he conceded, but there was no guarantee that a majority would have better judgment than the minority. Government was a matter of chance, and in reality the choice one faced was not between different systems of government but between government and no government, between doing something and doing nothing. No one’s vote makes a difference, and when faced with the question of waiting for election day on the Vineyard in the fall, when the winds were fiercely cold and there was “no little moisture in the leaves,” Max thought there was no logical reason he shouldn’t just close up his house early and go back to New York. There was, of course, Kant’s categorical imperative, the injunction “to act that if your action were generalized the result would meet your approval,” but then he was also categorically against anything categorical. He was, said Max, a “rank individualist,” even an anarchist, “if it weren’t so manifestly foolish to be one.” He was someone to whom contact with any government was distasteful, even the one that, at least symbolically, would grant him the right to govern himself: “I don’t like to vote! Maybe that’s all I am saying.”79
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