Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  A traitor to some, Max was a hero to others, and writing for the Digest ensured that his opinions had a national and even international reach. As horrifying as it was, a letter from an East German reader, Werner Stecher, attests to Max’s growing fame as a “red baiter.” Stecher had been sentenced to jail time for distributing a typed translation of Max’s Reader’s Digest article “The Truth about Russia’s 14,000,000 Slaves” and had been released only after years of abuse, with half his teeth missing.80 The people to whom Max felt closest now were a gallery of free-market advocates, right-wingers, and libertarians with often widely divergent views. In a letter to Dell he mentioned Wilhelm Röpke, William Henry Chamberlin, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Voigt, and the ex-communist Bertram Wolfe as his new models. These were, he told a skeptical Dell, “the most poised and wisest writers on current political questions in the world.” Max diligently read the books and articles his new conservative friends published, but, as he soon realized, he fit somewhat uneasily into that new conservative mold. His trying out of many different labels over the decades since Stalin’s Russia, from radical to radical conservative to libertarian conservative, was an indication of a basic discomfort he felt about defining his life as having gone from one extreme to another. He didn’t feel he was a turncoat, only that terms such as “left” and right” or, for that matter, “liberal” and “conservative,” had lost their meaning.81

  In addition, his atheism made him an immediate outsider even among his new allies. When William Buckley, barely twenty-six years old and on his way to becoming the new wunderkind of American conservatism, published his book God and Man at Yale, Max praised the young author’s “arrant intellectual courage” only to compare it to throwing a handful of chalk at a teacher who had his back turned to the class. Buckley, a practicing Catholic, had dragged God into a discussion that should have been an entirely secular one: “I fail to see why God cannot take care of Himself at Yale.” Max had no doubt that economics students at Yale were being indoctrinated. But the answer was not to gather the alumni and put pressure on the faculty to “narrow the sphere of academic freedom.” Max didn’t like to have his own opinions restricted, and he wasn’t going to propose limits on someone else’s.82

  To Max, the realization that a collective paradise was not attainable did not mean we weren’t each of us entitled to our own personal slice of heaven on earth. It had taken him a long time to get to that particular insight, though, in a letter to the poet Sara Bard Field, he asserted that, really, he had never, from the beginning, wanted anything more than his freedom, the freedom to do and think what he wanted to do and think.83 The “state-ownership wagon” wasn’t going his way; he had accepted that. But that was fine: “I care more about the freedom for the body and soul of man than I do about what is called ‘social justice,’” he told Field. Like Diogenes, the Greek philosopher he celebrated in an early poem, all that the sun-loving Max desired for himself was that no one—“no God or King”—stand between himself and the light. And on the Vineyard Max had everything he had asked for in that poem, a “weedy meadow,” a hill, and, most important, the sun.84

  And yet he was no Diogenes, content to stay inside his barrel. His new political alliances made him more visible than he had been since his glory days as a male suffragette. More and more of Max’s time was consumed with writing letters to those who challenged or misunderstood him. He was, he told Floyd in June 1954, “absolutely afflicted with the thought of all the things I want and need to write, and the decline in my small energy and the swift sliding away of time.” Floyd, who had gone the opposite route, withdrawing “from political consideration into an ivory tower,” thought Max’s real problem was his “foolish and reprehensible” views. That stung. Max shot back: “It seems to me you can’t properly descend from an ivory tower and pass out condescending epithets, as from a moral and intellectual mentor, to those who are working in the field with ardor and energy.” He angrily called Floyd “a professional script-writer for the hypertrophied bureaucratic state,” a remark aimed at Floyd’s work for the U.S. Information Service since 1935. As far as Floyd’s characterization of his conservatism as an aberration was concerned, Max caustically pointed out that these “are so precisely the words Gogol would put in the lips of a welfare state chinovnik retired on a pension, if he were satirizing him. . . . I wonder how you can utter them without at least a slight smile at yourself.”85 And he hurled back at Floyd an observation his friend himself had made long ago in reference to the old Masses: “It would remind you of something you seem to have forgotten. . . . ‘No two of us thought quite alike. But none of us said exactly what the morning papers were saying.’” Whatever he had done in recent years was motivated by nothing else but “the terrible parody of civilization” into which Stalin and his henchmen had turned Russia. When Floyd implied there was something pathological behind his anti-communism, Max snapped back, “I am curious to know, however, what makes you think I am not ‘now free to use my whole mind on the subject.’” But since Floyd insisted, fine: “If this refers to some presumed psychological inhibition, it’s ok by me. Knowing that I am afflicted with all the neuroses, and all but one of two of the more extreme psychoses (about which I am only doubtful), I welcome and usually agree with all the different kinds of psychoanalysis that come my way. But I can’t help wondering if you are so remote from the circles in which I move that you give any credit at all to the Communist myth that I have ‘sold out’ to the Reader’s Digest.”86

  Floyd, of course, was not far off the mark. In his public pronouncements Max had become shriller, more unforgiving than ever. When he wrote about Stalinism all his humor was gone. In the same issue of the Freeman in which Henry Hazlitt, the editor, declared red-baiting to be necessary and redefined the frantic ferreting out of suspected communists by Joe McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee as “permitting” communists to testify, Max declared American society to be infected by hordes of unrepentant communists and “their fringe of accomplices, dupes, and fellow-travelers.” Not even “once-honest liberals” had proved to be immune to the power of Stalin’s brainwashing. Now that Stalin was gone it was time to remember that the root of the evil he embodied was not the system he forged but the philosophy that had created it, a philosophy that had spawned “delinquent liberals in all lands.” Max was not above repeating the old canard that communists are unmanly cowards who will dissemble and deceive when possible. Had he really forgotten the hundreds of people whose lives were permanently changed by their enforced testimony before McCarthy’s tribunal or by governmental blacklisting? After all, those directly affected included former friends of Max’s such as Charlie Chaplin and Louis Untermeyer.

  According to Max, the one thing wrong with McCarthyism was McCarthy himself. The senator was, he told Floyd, “a misbehaved and sloppy-minded person functioning in a place where the prime demand was for a well-behaved and extremely accurate and exact mind.” But Max’s jaundiced view of McCarthy would not have seemed particularly perceptive or contrarian after Joseph Nye Welch had, on June 9, 1954, the thirtieth day of what would become known as the Army–McCarthy hearings, publicly accused him of having “no sense of decency.” Indeed, Max went on to offer a kind of defense of McCarthy: “I think the idea that he is a ‘menace’ or that he has done any more harm to the prestige or reputation of innocent people than any through-going congressional investigation inevitably does is a myth.” One of the reasons the “liberals” were so “hysterically” propagating that myth was that they were probably not so innocent after all.87

  But the hysteria was partly Max’s own. In September 1954 Harper and Brothers published an anthology of his poetry, five decades worth of it, everything he had written in a poetic vein that did not have some major flaw, as he explained in his foreword. Most people had forgotten Max was a poet, too. And yet poetry was the means by which he was able to communicate the need for “clear and distinct ideas” more effectively than in his political writing, wher
e he often might have “failed to think things through.” Max’s volume contained the highlights of his poetic career, from the unabashedly Keatsian “To a Tawny Thrush” to his most recent work, the gloomy “Too Many People,” which evokes an ecological wasteland caused by human exploitation:

  This hungry fungus, man, has spread his drab

  Compactions, and is spreading, till the space

  Made rich by nature for his ease and grace

  Is petrified as fruit is by a scab.88

  In the New York Times the elderly Irish poet Oliver St. John Gogarty, a fixture in New York bars, called Max a “poet of very great stature” and compared him to Catullus. Yet Gogarty spent more time on Max’s photograph on the jacket, in which he detected the ridges on the forehead that indicate genius, than on the actual poems. Max’s decision to provide explanatory notes puzzled Gogarty, who felt them to be limiting (“it is like a personal photograph in which the universal is narrowed down to the particular”).89 By contrast, the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times liked the notes; they were, he thought, illuminating and amounted to something like a “history of ideas in America during the past 40 years.”90 No one seems to have looked at Max’s foreword, where he explained whom he really had in mind when he composed his prose commentary: Dante, the author of the most touching of all love poems, the Vita nuova. And while Max hurried to assure his readers that his experience of love had been fundamentally different from that of Dante, who worshiped his Beatrice from a distance, they shared the same “impulse toward social communion.”91 The latter phrase, more than anything in Max’s work in the fifties, explains what motivated him throughout his life: in all he did, Max’s great fear was that he might be talking only to himself.

  On February 28, 1955, Bill Buckley invited Max to join the new editorial board of National Review, the final seal of approval on his metamorphosis from Village radical to conservative pundit. But that appointment did little to alleviate his anxieties about his proper political place or about his search for “communion” with readers. He wasn’t really a Buckleyan conservative, and the simplifications of Buckley’s writers annoyed him. To Hamilton Long he complained that “the crude way in which the National Review uses the word ‘liberal’ to name everything they don’t like distresses me and also seems to be unwise.” After everything that had happened it still wasn’t easy for Max to embrace the “coming defeat of communism,” the title of a 1949 book by the ex-Trotskyite James Burnham, which Max was asked to condense for Reader’s Digest. Burnham, a cofounder of National Review, would not have shared Max’s worries. He was a former Catholic schoolboy, and although he had lost his faith, his thinking was still shaped by the theology he had imbibed during adolescence, including his dark view of the necessarily imperfect state of the world, in which all solutions could only be “temporary and partial.”92 While the Burnhamites might have seen the end of communism as a welcome opportunity to advance their own conservative agendas, Max’s life was so intertwined with the history of the Soviet experiment that he couldn’t much rejoice. As the ex-editor of the Masses, the only artsy socialist magazine the United States had ever had, and as the coeditor of the no-less-influential Liberator, he had not only had a front row seat from which to view the political developments that had now become discredited, he had helped shape them.

  Max’s small new book, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, published by Devin-Adair in the spring of 1955, was intended to remind the American reading public of all Max had done and seen over his long career and to explain, to them and to himself, where he was now. The little volume was essentially a collection of stray pieces from Reader’s Digest, the Freeman, and American Mercury, but combined they amounted to a ringing indictment of state interference. Socialists had, wrote Max, imposed their tastes and interests upon “the masses of mankind” out of a misguided, “soft-headed” (and ultimately religious) sense that there ought to be “peace in a brotherly society” so that all caste and class struggles may cease. “A false and undeliberated conception of what man is lies at the bottom of the whole bubble-castle of socialist theory.” In reality, men, driven by the ownership instinct and by their need to acquire and exchange property, will always divide into groups with conflicting interests. All one could do was to keep them in a state of equilibrium. And the way to accomplish that was to make sure the government stayed out of people’s affairs.93

  One obvious problem with Max’s theory: if humans long, by their very nature, for property and if, on top of that, they want nothing more than to be left alone, how can a political system—or, rather, the absence of a political system—guarantee the peaceful coexistence, in the same space, of such fully entitled individuals? The very idea of an instinctive drive for property seems to run counter to any hope for equilibrium. And if Max was no longer a socialist, what was he? Not a libertarian, to be sure. Libertarians were inclined to “lock themselves in a closet with the abstract truth.” Not so Max, the scientific, hardheaded observer of human folly, capable of doing what he always had done since he had emerged from John Dewey’s classroom at Columbia: facing the facts. Max felt he was now a radical conservative, a label he defended in an interview with the New-York World Telegram and Sun. Speaking to a reporter in a “big sun-lit room in his W. 13th St. apartment,” Max also identified himself as a Malthusian, a believer in birth control as the route to a better future: “More Goods and Fewer People is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity’s march into the future.” But saying such things didn’t mean he was a reactionary, he insisted: “To call me a rightist makes me sick.” The problem was that those who believe in the basic freedoms of the individual were on the Right now, whatever that meant.94 Predictably, reviewers on the Left didn’t buy any of this. D. H., writing for the American Socialist, ridiculed what he thought was Max’s bizarre defense of capitalism and pointed out that while Max seemed really concerned about political freedom in Soviet Russia, he had shown next to no sympathy for those on the American Left who were now suffering denial of their civil liberties. In that, he wasn’t alone, unfortunately: “Not a single renegade from socialism who went over to the capitalists out of worries about freedom has yet been known to offer his services to those who are denied freedom in his own land.”95

  This is not to say Max was continually ranting about the sins of the Stalinist American Left. An extended trip to Europe in the spring of 1955, again on the payroll of Reader’s Digest, allowed him to pay a visit to his former friend and rival Chaplin in his sumptuous château at Vevey: “He knows how to take care of himself, I must say, under the capitalist system!” Chaplin had lost his former good looks, as Max noted, perhaps with some satisfaction. His white hair and dark eyebrows and eyelashes made his eyes look smaller than they were. But the men were immeasurably pleased to see each other, and Max and Eliena promised another visit.96 Seeing Chaplin again, after such a long time, inevitably reminded Max of his own mortality. He wasn’t her Apollo anymore, he informed Florence. “I am not even my full self. My life, my chance for adventure, is in the past. It will soon be as though it had never been.”97 His plans for Digest articles included an article about Elba as well as a portrait of the collector and art historian Bernard Berenson, as well as a major piece about Norway, where he was headed in mid-June 1955. The Norwegians celebrated Max, and Max celebrated Norway, as a country where the dreaded “statism” seemed on the wane and individual freedom was still being respected. Eliena was with him, but he missed Florence: “Sometimes the longing for you—to be with you at the Brink as it used to be when you wrote beautiful poems to me, or over on the beach naked in the hot sun with Frosting—in Athens climbing the steps to the Parthenon—is almost unbearable!”98

  From Norway he went to Ireland, where he set himself up in the village of Enniskerry, County Wicklow, writing at a desk overlooking the ocean. He was using a Volkswagen, a horrible but reliable “short-nosed Nazi machine,” to get around; his schedule included visits with the prime minister as well as
the lord mayor of Dublin and Éamon de Valera, the controversial former leader of the Irish fight for independence. He liked Ireland and the Irish. Unlike the people of other nations he had visited, the Irish smiled for the sake of communication: they were the only people he had ever met who would use a smile as a form of speech. For a man of his sinful nature, the Irish girls had much to offer as they were passing him on their bicycles, showing one pretty calf after the other, “in a tantalizing brief and quick succession,” their hair blowing back ravishingly in the wind. The landscape provided the appropriate setting for such encounters. Black and velvety, the mountains of Connemara seemed like a passageway into some supernatural realm, a world of ecstasy and mystery. The old faun wasn’t done just yet.99