Back in the States on September 14—Eliena arrived a few weeks later by boat, along with the luggage—Max, his skin a “polished caramel color,” was feeling on top of the world. Florence, however, was not doing well. Emaciated to the point of starvation, she seemed more troubled than ever. No doubt the situation with Max and Eliena and the responsibility she still had for his literary and financial affairs had taken its toll on her, so much so that even Max began to notice. He recommended that she monitor her calorie intake and write down the exact times, the nature of the food, the amount of her “feedings,” until she had reached her daily total. No longer her lover, he was now her “brooding parent.”100
At the beginning of the year Max and Eliena were off again, this time to Pacific Palisades, California, where they enjoyed the hospitality of the eccentric millionaire Huntington Hartford in the artist colony he had founded at Rustic Canyon. Hartford’s conservative taste in art—he hated the abstract expressionists as well as T. S. Eliot—perfectly matched Max’s own. A particular joy came in April 1956 when Max received word he had been included in a new edition of American Men of Science. He was proud of what he saw as his critique of I. A. Richards’s psychological theories in Enjoyment of Poetry, his two books on the psychology of laughter, as well as his definitive refutation of Marxism as a scientific theory.101 Finally, a corroboration of the quest on which he had embarked ever since his Columbia days!
That month, however, Eliena began to experience abdominal discomfort, and his nephew Peter Eastman, the newly appointed head surgeon at Kaiser Medical Center in Long Beach, California, ordered X-rays. A fibroid tumor was found.102 They hastily returned to the Vineyard. Tom Filer, an aspiring writer from California, moved into Max’s writing cabin to help take care of Eliena. Eula Daniel was called in to help with the housework.103 Eliena bore the inevitable hospital stays with the mixture of toughness and optimism that had so often proved a source of strength. “Well, they got me here flat on my back again,” she wrote to Tom Filer, from Beth David Hospital. “I guess for the time being it’s a proper place for me—‘let’s face it!’” The room was cool and pleasant and sunny, and she liked watching the “plethora of types and faces that move in and out of the room in steady succession.” They were her entertainment, comfort, and, occasionally, a welcome source of irritation.104
Max recalled that, in better days, when Eliena was sleeping soundly at night and he, unable to forget whatever worried him, lay awake next to her, he would occasionally see a flicker of sorrow travel across her sleeping face. Normally, Eliena approached sleep the same way she tackled everything else in her life, with fierce determination, as a “thing to be done.” But in those slacker moments, which Max had come to fear, the corners of her mouth were pointing down, as if she wanted to communicate some “absolute and most bitter grief.” Not knowing what to do, Max turned away.105 Now, in the final weeks before her death, Max never left her side.
Of all the people he had known, Eliena was, he said in a note typed right after she had died, “the most perfectly equipped for living in this world” (fig. 46). And now he realized she was equipped for dying, too. Max marveled at the courage with which she bore, uncomplainingly, the devastation of her once so capable body, grown “misshapen almost beyond recognition” after she couldn’t eat anymore and fluid had accumulated in her legs and feet: “Only once, when her arms and chest were bared, she looked down and said, laughing: ‘I’m getting worse than Gandhi.’”106
As she had done before when healthy, Eliena once again managed to bring father and son together. In a smudged, perhaps tear-stained note written about a month before Eliena’s death, Dan Eastman thanked Max for keeping him in the loop. “It makes me feel a part of a family with you and Eliena,” Dan wrote. He was beginning to look more and more like his father as he was aging, too. Then he lamented his own helplessness: “It is a bitter thing to realize that I cannot do more than send my love to you, and Eliena.”107 Incidentally, Dan had just completed what his father had left unfinished. In 1956 he acquired his doctorate in psychology from Columbia, with a thesis titled “Self-Acceptance and Marital Happiness.”108
Figure 46. Eliena with a tame bittern, on Martha’s Vineyard, ca. 1949. EMIIA1.
As Eliena got closer to the end, a professional nurse, Gertrude Kingsbury, nicknamed Turk for unknown reasons, had to be brought in. Tactful as well as skilled, she knew when to consult the doctor and when to stay away. Eliena faced death the way she had faced life, without fear or apparent bitterness. Her last worry was all about Max: “The fact of disappearing into a state of permanent unconsciousness never frightened or appalled me. What hurts is the thought of playing such a dirty trick on Max.” And indeed her death would leave Max howling with loneliness, feeling “such anguish as I could never believe existed in this world.”109 Now Max had to face life without the woman who, despite his many “seizures,” had, more than anyone, his own family included, given him the stability he needed. Max, the “murky-souled craver of infinitudes,” suddenly found himself confronted with the finality of death—and with a renewed sense of admiration for his partner of more than thirty years, who embraced such finality without hesitation.
Eliena died on Tuesday, October 9, 1956, in Max’s arms, after collapsing on her way to the bathroom. Max had managed to say good-bye to her first, though at the moment he hadn’t realized that that was what he was doing: “I leaned down with my arm around Eliena and my lips against her cheek,” he remembered. “‘I love you so very much,’ I murmured, and she answered: ‘I am so very glad you do.’” Those were Eliena’s final words to Max.110 It’s hard to think of a sentence that would have better matched the way she lived her life. Her trademark mix of reserve and exuberance had sustained her as her life meandered its way from Lublin, Poland, to law school in Leningrad and then from Moscow, the domain of her fiery Bolshevik brother, to the vineyards of southern France and finally to the rocky beaches of Gay Head. As a final tribute to her, Max did something astonishingly Victorian: he cut off a strand of her white-blond hair and put it in an envelope. “Eliena’s Hair when she died—,” he wrote on it, his words trailing off on the paper.111
It was outside her Gay Head home that Eliena Krylenko Eastman was laid to rest. In a message for her “Gay Head Friends,” printed after her death in the Vineyard Gazette, she had expressed her joy that she would be buried there: “I have felt happy and at peace ever since Max agreed that East Pasture is to be the place of my rest, and that he is not going to leave me and our home here. Now I can feel that I am just stepping aside on the shore, joining the others that landed ahead of me.” From her perch on Scitha Hill she would be able to watch her neighbors go scalloping in winter on a bright sunny day.112 A plaque installed there in her memory bears words written, in better days, by Max, lines as quick and to the point as Eliena had been too: “Nimble with laughter, loving to be, / Courage quick and as quick a skill, / Pride that contains humility, / Love that adoring is thinking still— / Most men love in a girl some star, / I love you for the things you are.”113 It seems characteristic—and at the same time fitting, given their unconventional relationship—that Max would take leave of Eliena with this understated declaration of love, a tribute to someone as complicated and multifaceted as he, someone who had enjoyed life to the fullest, perhaps more so than the author of Enjoyment of Living, despite his many protestations to the contrary, ever could. Left behind, Max was “in the shadows,” as his old friend Ruth Pickering Pinchot observed, who also asked him, mercilessly, if “feelings of guilt or inadequacy in your relation with Eliena” were at least part of the cause for the pain that would just not go away.114 Years later, in the summer of 1962, Max happened to come across a sheet torn from Eliena’s desk calendar. On Wednesday, May 9, 1945, she had written, “I left Max in Florence’s care, resentful of course.” And she continued her thoughts in the form of a poem, trying to capture her sense of abandonment: “A sparkling laughing stream whose rapid course / Has been impeded by a fallen t
ree / Will swell its waters to its lowest shore / And seek another channel for its force; / And so do I in my despondency / Look for new gods to worship and adore.” But if she did go looking for new gods, it seems she never found one to replace Max. Flooded with guilt, Max left a brief note on Eliena’s old journal page: “How this cuts my heart today . . . I never dreamed I could suffer such remorse.”115
10 • Realtor and Realist
For the first time in almost half a century Max, at the age of seventy-four, was without anyone to keep him company. Florence had become tired of waiting for Max and was now married to Guy Ponce de Leon, a shady descendant of the famous Spanish explorer and a self-declared writer. Her marriage naturally limited her availability to Max, who felt he could no longer talk freely to her even in his letters. “I am going to be bereaved all over again,” he wailed.1 It turned out that Guy was no good, either as a husband or as an author. But Max could not have known that during the long, awful winter of 1956–57, when he found himself utterly alone. It was at that time that Yvette Szekely—vivacious, funny, free-spirited, with a gift for words that matched his and a slim, flexible body that would have reminded him of Florence Deshon—reentered Max’s life. And she did so with full force.
Born on October 12, 1912, in Budapest, the outgoing, cosmopolitan Yvette was the daughter of the Hungarian politician and intellectual Artur Székely and a Swiss-French woman named Marthe Meylan, whom her father quickly abandoned (he asked Marthe to relinquish her child to him). Later, when her marriage to Artur was falling apart, her stepmother, Margaret, took Yvette and her half sister Suzanne to New York, where she supported herself as a designer of ladies’ underwear and by writing for magazines back in Hungary. Among the writers Margaret interviewed was Theodore Dreiser, who seduced the then seventeen-year-old Yvette, the beginning of a long relationship Yvette recalled in her memoir Dearest Wilding. At one of her mother’s dinner parties in early January 1931, she met Max, who was deeply impressed with the “lithe and dark-haired,” “dark-eyelashed” girl with the interesting cosmopolitan background.2 A pen he left behind in Yvette’s room brought her to where Max probably wanted her—his apartment at 39 Grove Street, where Max followed Dreiser’s example and became Yvette’s lover, too. They stayed in touch over the next two decades, as friends and occasional lovers, exchanging notes that reveled in the possibilities of a fuller relationship.3 Max continued to inhabit Yvette’s dreams: “Two weeks ago I dreamed that you had ‘just arrived from Europe’—and thought in my dream—‘oh that’s why I haven’t seen him in so long!’ Which is to say in waking that I’d like to—very much.” Come for dinner, Max, or for tea or a drink, she said, and “let me look at your beautiful head.”4
By February 1957 Yvette was in Max’s dreams, too. He had gone back to Rustic Canyon, the last place Eliena and he had enjoyed a few months of undisturbed happiness. And it was there that Eliena came back to him, if only in a dream, of the kind that continues to haunt one’s waking life. Max dreamed he was having a nightmare when, still in his dream, he heard Eliena calling out his name. Gasping and squirming, he wanted to alert Yvette, who was—still in the same dream—lying next to him. Max was puzzled by what he had dreamed, and he shared his confusion about Yvette’s appearance in his dream with Florence: “I’ve known her off and on for so long. I suppose that’s how she got into the dream.”5
But Yvette ultimately also got into Max’s life. She had been working for the New York Department of Welfare on Fifty-seventh Street, most recently as the director of a very successful Senior Citizen Center in Brooklyn, and among the perks of her job were regular paychecks, salary increases, and a pension, due to her when she turned fifty. She had a boyfriend in Woodstock, the painter Bernard Steffen.6 And she seemed ready to put all that aside for the privilege of helping Max get back on his feet. “She wanted to come absolutely, and never made me feel it was a sacrifice,” Max explained to Florence, who was, of course, upset.7
Financially, Max had very little to offer Yvette. Things had looked promising for a while: he was able to sell Rosebank, one of his Vineyard properties, and, in the spring of 1957, an unexpected opportunity arose when David Randall, who had been appointed head of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Indiana University, asked him if he was interested in selling his papers. Randall had just been negotiating with Upton Sinclair about his papers, “with high hopes of success,” and Sinclair had recommended he approach Max, too. Randall wanted the Lilly Library, as Indiana University’s Special Collections would be named, to be the “finest collection of literary and source material—in first editions, manuscripts, etc.—of any library between the coasts.” He offered Max $15,000 for his archives, a large sum that, accounting for inflation, would be the equivalent of $127,000 in today’s money, with $4,500 due at signing and the rest to be paid in two equal installments in July 1958 and July 1959. This loose arrangement would give Max enough time to sort his papers, an important provision given that he was still working on the second volume of his autobiography. Randall assured him he had no intention of enforcing timely delivery of what he had paid for.8
But by April 1958 much of Max’s money was gone again.9 To make matters worse, his island citadel was under siege. Nude bathing, Max’s abiding passion (he would regularly encourage his visitors to shed their clothes, too),10 had become more difficult even in Max’s little corner of the Vineyard. A new paved road had come within just a hundred yards of Max’s private jungle, and when he had people over for swimming parties he felt as if they were holding “obsequies for a dying paradise.” The Gay Head selectmen drove the knife in even further when they put ads in a Boston newspaper to “advertise the wonderful ‘seclusion’ to be found out there.” Max felt that was “a case of killing by slow torture the goose that lays the golden egg.”11
He tried to evoke some of the glorious Vineyard past by writing down a story told by his Wampanoag friend Amos Peters Smalley. A former whaler born in Gay Head, Smalley in 1902 had killed a ninety-foot white whale—possibly Melville’s Moby-Dick—as he was sailing south of the Azores. To Max, Amos Smalley was a modern embodiment of Melville’s Tashtego, the “unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of Martha’s Vineyard,” a symbol of Islander perseverance.12 The notion that someone from Gay Head had such a direct link to Melville’s great novel pleased Max immensely. He was even more ecstatic when the Digest awarded a prize to Amos and agreed to publish Max’s story in its June 1957 issue. But joy gave way to embarrassment when Max learned that Amos was expected to share the $2,500 prize money with him. Max’s hatred of the “Prisonville” machinery of the Digest was instantly revived. The “infantile fribble” Wally was promoting bothered him more than ever, as did the religious undertones of much of what Wally published, about the effectiveness of prayer, divine intervention, and so forth. When Max had asked Wally to read the manuscript of Enjoyment of Living, the only concern he had was about Max’s use of the phrase “by God”; he obliged his boss and replaced it with the less instantly blasphemous “by heck.”13
In addition, Max found he was having trouble staying at the East Pasture house. Eliena’s presence was felt everywhere. Walking around his property, revisiting “all the things and places we made and loved together,” he thought it would be nearly impossible for him to go on living there: “A glance at the rose-garden, the studio, the little garden along the wall, those old chicken-houses, anything and everything in the house—one glance, one lifting of my eyes, destroys my wish to be myself to continue my life. If I’m not in tears all the time, it’s only because my eyelids are tired and my soul is tired of sorrow.” He wasn’t sure what to do. Maybe he would have to remain holed up in his little room at 8 West Thirteenth Street, though the only reason he had been able to manage there over the winter was that he was looking forward to being back up at Gay Head again. Maybe he should share the Vineyard house. His friend Charles Neider, a Twain scholar nearly forty years younger than Max and newly married, came to mind, an
d Max was thinking of asking the couple to move into Florence’s vacant home, The Brink: “Maybe that would make it new and different enough and make me feel not so totally alone with the awful, awful fact of Eliena’s non-existence.”14
Max returned to New York, dragging with him two suitcases full of Eliena’s clothes and other things from her bureau, which he simply passed on to Yvette when she came for dinner—a “kind of treason,” to be sure, but one that Eliena herself would not have hesitated to commit: “I have to remind myself how realistically firm and brave Eliena was about things like that.” He threw a party for the Neiders, the Cummingses, Yvette, and Eula at his house, went to dinner with Yvette, and forced himself to look ahead. But his thoughts kept going back to the “awful nothingness” into which Eliena, “with all her vigorous gaiety and boundless interest in life,” had stepped so suddenly, so abruptly, so finally.15 Normally not one given to self-medication, Max was now preparing cocktails at home, not for guests but for himself: “I was sitting here wishing that I had company for dinner . . . and suddenly I said to myself, ‘Well it doesn’t take ten to drink an old-fashioned,’ and there I was in the kitchen conversing with Satan while I prepared it.” Physically, he was as well as ever in his life. Apart from an old hernia, his body—heart, lungs, joints, nerves, prostate—was in fine shape. His doctor told him he had ten or fifteen more years to live—news that both elated and depressed him. It seemed that only yesterday he’d had his entire life ahead of him. But now? “Dreadfully, desperately lonesome,” he found himself staring at a void, trying to regain his balance, the serenity that people had once attributed to his father. Or maybe, knowing what he now did about Sam’s loneliness, that serenity had just been “a power of insensibility”?16
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