By February 1958 Yvette Szekely would show up every morning at Max’s apartment to make breakfast for him. “She does so with a joy that is completely contagious,” noted Max, surprised not only by her dedication but also by his own eager responsiveness to it. After breakfast, Yvette would make his bed and straighten everything else in the apartment. Like him, Yvette, who had just given up smoking (as Max noted with pleasure), was full of vigor. “I enjoy her companionship more, not less, than I thought I would.” Four times a week the faithful Eula Daniel, now one of Max’s closest friends, came by to cook him dinner and do his laundry. Max paid her $35 a week. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Sundays, he dined out with friends.17 Life was going on.
What helped, too, was that another specter from his past came back and paid him a not altogether unwelcome visit, and it looked very much like his old antagonist Sidney Hook. Max had, of course, long divested himself of all his ties with Karl Marx, attributing the failure of communism no longer to its flawed practitioners but to its ideological progenitor. But he had never confronted, at least not in any fundamental way, his own debt to John Dewey, the pragmatist father he shared with Hook. An essay by Hook in the New Leader reignited the competition between Dewey’s two favorite students that had lain dormant since the 1930s.18 The essay’s ostensible subject was Lincoln, but Hook had grander ambitions. Lincoln was a pragmatist, Hook declared, finding in Lincoln’s preference for action over interpretation an anticipation of Dewey’s instrumentalism, in much the same way that Marx had anticipated Dewey. The latter was well-trodden ground for Hook, but he was now returning to it with a new perspective, that of the anti-Stalinist. It irked Max to no end that Hook’s Marxism had emerged from all their earlier squabbles relatively intact, as if Max had never exposed it as the ersatz religion it was, and that he was now acting all scientific about it. Max responded angrily in the September issue of the New Leader, ridiculing Hook’s Lincoln analysis but then moving on to weightier issues. For, as Max had now realized, he himself was no longer a pragmatist. Max insisted he was still Dewey’s true intellectual son, but a son who had seen his father without his clothes. In his definitions of pragmatism, Dewey had invariably confused the true method with the truth itself, the thinking with the purpose of the thought. A successful experiment yields not the truth but merely evidence of it—to mistake one for the other is ideology.
Of course, Hook wasn’t going to take Max’s counteroffensive sitting down, and a tit for tat unfolded that finally exasperated also the editors of the New Leader. “Here we present,” sighed the editors, in a comment box preceding Max’s answer to Hook’s answer to Max’s critique, “what is positively the last installment of a controversy which nearly led us to change our name to The Epistemological Leader.”19
But Max now had a new problem. In his dealings with Hook he was eager to shed the label of the pragmatist, as pragmatism itself was yet another pseudoscientific method—like Marx’s—that suggested practicality whereas in reality it was based on acts of faith, too. But among his new conservative friends, Dewey was anathema, and Max, for reasons that weren’t just emotional ones, felt he had to defend his former teacher. A few months after his skirmishes with Hook, Max published an article in National Review in which he lauded rather than rejected Dewey: “I find myself now in the company of a group who call themselves libertarian conservatives. Many of them cherish religious notions which I regard as primitive mythology, and which I think diminish their influence.” The commitment of Max’s new friends to “limited government, individualism, and a free market as the basis of other freedoms” made Max’s association with them well-nigh inevitable. If only they didn’t dislike Dewey so much: “He is regarded as the fountain-source of every horror from teenage delinquency to the confiscatory taxes of the Welfare State. Indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if a good proportion of the younger recruits to this banner think of John Dewey as the man who introduced socialism into the United States.”
Max’s John Dewey was different—the Walt Whitman of philosophy, a poet in anything but his writing style, a benevolent father who would give his due to all the members of his intellectual family. Dewey’s thought lacked “keen edges,” Max admitted, and his theory of “progressive education,” the idea that kids can and should have fun in school, might have produced some spoiled brats unworthy of the confidence placed in their innate desires to free themselves from the shackles of their teacher’s expectations. But that didn’t mean Dewey was being ridiculous when he said that disciplining a child was justified only when the experience of punishment taught him or her to do things deliberately rather than merely as the result of a stern command issued by an “irrelevant ogre” of a pedagogue. When Max saw himself confronted with the authoritarian hard-liners among his new allies, Dewey’s softness suddenly seemed appealing: “Those who imagine they are dancing at the funeral of another wild radical, will be surprised, if they open a book and read a few lines actually written by him, to see how moderate he was, how cautious, how bent on conserving as well as multiplying the finest values of life in a free society.”20
Dewey was Max Eastman as Max Eastman would have very much wanted to be—but in a world where humans were humans and not, as Max now knew them to be, animals.21 Max lived in the real world, and therefore he now felt closer to men like Jim Burnham, who saw the redemption of Western society in Machiavellian realism rather than in some soft ideal of human perfectibility. There was yet another option, and that one became more and more attractive to Max as he was entering his twilight years: like Voltaire’s Candide he would cultivate his own garden, even as the world around him was going to shreds. And Max’s garden was on Martha’s Vineyard, a rocky, pebbly, windswept paradise.
On March 23, 1958, Max and Yvette were married—in the casual manner that had by then virtually become routine for Max (fig. 47). There was no public announcement and no celebration. In fact, there was barely even a ceremony. External circumstances had dictated that the move be made, Max explained, somewhat sheepishly, to Florence—so much so that “my inner resistance to committing myself to any woman doesn’t get much free play in my mind.” He picked as unromantic a place for the wedding as he could think of, the village of Wappingers Falls near Poughkeepsie, in part because of its unappealing name. It was, he declared proudly, “one of the ugliest towns I ever passed through.” Eula drove them there, after meeting them at the train station in Harmon. The town clerk was sick, replaced by a young woman enveloped in massive blobs of fat. She had to call her boss all the time for instructions because she did not know how to complete the license. The next day an elderly judge indifferently pronounced Max and Yvette husband and wife. When the ceremony was over, Yvette, Eula, and Max went for daiquiris and dinner and drove over to Hyde Park to take a look at the Roosevelt estate. Max ended his day by falling asleep in the back seat of the car.
When he told Florence, she was aghast. Max could not understand why. There was nothing sudden about his marriage. He pointed out that he had been living with Yvette for two months now: “I’m perfectly serene and unquestioning about it—a state I’ve rarely been in about anything but intellectual problems before.” Maybe his age and the realization that there was no time left for any “alternative enticements” had something to do with that serenity. “But I also love Yvette; everybody does who knows her.” She was devoted and generous, and with Eula about to leave him—she needed better-paying work for the fall and winter—Yvette stood ready to take charge of his life.22
Figure 47. Max and Yvette in Max’s Impala convertible, 1958. From color transparency. EMIIA1.
Otherwise, Max carried on the way he had before his marriage. A delightful surprise was a visit from his actress-lover-friend Rosalinde Fuller, “vivacious and full of zeal for life’s adventure” as ever—and without the need for a companion that had, once again, led Max into matrimony. She spent the evening with Max, and one can assume they picked up right where they had left off the last time. They had dinner at Longchamps with Crystal
’s daughter Annis and her husband, Charles Young, and Rosalinde gave a well-received performance of her one-woman show. The “impresarios” in the audience were impressed and Rosalinde got what she wanted, an invitation to return next year for a tour. Rosalinde was “amazingly young looking,” a living example of how one could defy biology. “Too bad you and I weren’t built that way, as the whole animal kingdom and the vegetables, too, would have been if I had been the Creator,” Max said to Florence, a somewhat backhanded remark which nevertheless affords a glimpse of Max’s utopia: a place of continued sexual pleasure in which all living things are equal, all wishes are gratified, nothing decays, the resources are infinite, and no one needs to feel guilty about anything at all.23
If Rosalinde carried herself with the utmost confidence, Max was having a hard time accepting that he was not similarly ageless. He continued to fuss about his weight and tried out various ways to get it under control, including the antidepressant Dexamyl. At one point he had the entire household—himself, Yvette, and their maid—dieting on Metrecal, a kind of flavored shake made from powder that had become popular in the 1960s and, Max believed, helped him bring down his weight from 203 to 190 pounds.24 He simply could not bear to think of himself as old. The very idea, he said, seemed incongruous to him.25 People told him he was still good-looking, he proudly told Florence Norton a few weeks after his seventy-sixth birthday. He wryly added, “By not looking at the glass at the wrong time of day I try to believe it.”26
At times Max found it hard to believe he had gotten married again. His “gamophobia”—yes, there was a word for it!—was almost like a religion to him: something that belonged to the better, more interesting part of him. He hated the barbaric custom of applying the man’s name to the woman: “Against that, my revolt is absolute and fanatical,” he said in a conversation over coffee at his house with Yvette, Ruth Pinchot, and another couple just a few weeks after his marriage. “Why should a man who loves a woman as herself want to express it by pasting his name on her—an act of childish egotism, indifference to poetry, and execrable bad taste!” He cringed when he heard Yvette introduced as Mrs. Eastman. Of course, he had married Yvette for not entirely unselfish reasons: he knew she would take care of him for the remainder of his life. At the same time, marriage had not entirely been a business transaction for either Max or Yvette. In fact, Yvette’s income, had she continued to work, would have significantly improved Max’s perennially precarious financial situation. And, depending on one’s point of view, Yvette’s decision to reject the stability her job had offered for the semibohemian uncertainties of life with an elderly writer who had successfully avoided permanent employment all his life, was either stupid or heroic.27
Max was grateful to her, so grateful, in fact, that he did something he’d rarely done before—he began to plan for the future and, even more astonishingly, for a future in which he knew he’d play no part. Now that Eliena was gone, his own death had become more real to him than ever before. “Yvette is so good to me, so utterly given to caring for me and keeping me happy so long as I live, that I want to make her as happy afterward as I can.”28 One way in which he could make that happen, he felt, was by requesting that Florence Norton end her quasi-ownership of The Brink so that he could again directly profit from renting it. Florence reacted angrily. But Max felt he was entitled to do with The Brink as he saw fit, since he had been taking care of the repairs and dealt with the tenants. The situation was complicated by the fact that Yvette was just as jealous of their “loving friendship” as Eliena had been, “more humbly perhaps, but just as implacably.”29
Jealousy or not, Yvette was indeed good for Max. It helped that, in her midforties, she still had a stunningly beautiful body, a fact Max celebrated in a series of nude photographs, taken with a rented Yashica, photographs their lab on the Vineyard did not want to develop.30 Lying on the sand, her face turned away from the viewer, arms crossed behind her head, one leg raised and slightly drawn back, Yvette, in Max’s photographs, seems like a chthonic goddess, the ripples of her body replicating the patterns in the sand around her. Compositionally, even the crumpled clothes under Yvette’s head make sense, as does the little towel on which her body rests. Yvette was Max’s demotic Venus, an old man’s fantasy made manifest—just watch the sunlight dancing on the sand and playing over Yvette’s body in the photograph (fig. 48).
Figure 48. Y [Yvette]. Photograph by Max Eastman, September 1958. EMII.
And Max, too, was good for Yvette (fig. 49). On a note he kept in his wallet, Yvette rhapsodized about their relationship: “Loving you and being involved with things that are yours, I feel alive and shining, and since I feel that way I look that way and act that way and the change givers in subway stations smile when they hand me tokens. Like Whitman I find myself celebrating myself and they all cheer.”31 Since she had herself been one of Max’s occasional lovers, Yvette knew about the power of his erotic instincts. But she also knew that time was on her side. In his late seventies and contained, for at least half the year, on their remote Vineyard property, Max would find it harder to play the part of the Lothario. Not that he gave up on this side of his life entirely. While the “Norton woman,” as Yvette angrily called her, was fading into the background, others, notably Rosalinde Fuller, remained, if only as indistinct shadows in the wings. Yvette was worried about them, and not knowing where else to turn she occasionally shared her “tortured jealousy” with her half sister Suzanne Sekey, who advised her not to think too much of it.32
Figure 49. Max on the beach, ca. 1958. EMII.
The book Max was working on then, Great Companions, slated for publication by Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy in spring 1959, was based on previously published biographical portraits of the “greatest people of his time,” from Leon Trotsky to Pablo Casals. It ended, touchingly, with a tribute to Annis Ford, previously published, like two of the other articles, in Reader’s Digest. Max thought Wally would be excited about the exposure the Digest was getting and couldn’t believe his eyes when Wally sent him a note in which he threatened to cut his salary because Max seemed to be more interested in publishing books than in putting his nose to the grindstone at the Digest.33 Max struck back, defending his record: “The simple truth, Wally, is that I’ve been working more continuously for RD this last year than ever before—although most people who have passed their 76th birthday have retired on a pension and are not working at all.” Max complained that his pieces got turned down too often, which had given Wally the misleading impression that he wasn’t writing enough for him. He pointed out that he had already reduced his expense account after a similar complaint the year before. Max ended the letter by almost begging Wally to give him another chance: “Couldn’t we let it ride as it is for a couple of years more, and check the results together at that time?”34 Wallace relented: “Please pardon me for having written too impulsively.” He also ordered that Max’s pending essays on Socrates and Alexander the Great be printed.35
Max hated writing for Wally’s magazine. He disliked “jamming” complex thoughts into “a too small can of mixed sweets,” and he was embarrassed by the way he’d had to beg him for another chance. Maybe, he said to Florence, he should just call it quits. He could rent out the big house on the Vineyard and move into a hut on the property with a sign over it: “Max Eastman, Realtor and Idealist”? But Max was, in fact, a realist, too realistic to give up a job that allowed him to travel whenever and wherever he wanted. He knew he needed Wally’s money.36
But his troubles with the Digest were far from over. In August 1960 Wally sent back his beautifully crafted essay on the city of Florence because he wanted Max to focus precisely on what Max had chosen to omit, extensive discussion of the history of the Renaissance. Wally also sent $500 as a “guaranty payment” on the fee Max hadn’t yet earned, but that did not appease Max at all.37 In its original form Max’s essay was a beautiful reverie on le temps perdu, but without any sign of wistfulness. What Max had tried to do was capture the almost ero
tic experience of lounging on a square in modern Florence, say, the Piazza della Signoria, and letting the present fade into a vision of the past, when life moved more slowly and there was time for friendship, for, in a Maxian phrase, the enjoyment of living: “You can substitute the pretty red-painted wheels of mule-drawn carts for the fat black super-tires of sightseeing buses; the jewel colored velvets and glistening furs of the rich merchants for the sport-shirted, camera-laden shoulders of tired tourists. You can blot out the roaring vespas and the girl in the drip-dry dress sitting at a café table wiring a postcard to her family in Kansas.” Instead of the boisterous youth-hostelers snapping pictures of each other while sitting astride the nymphs and satyrs of the Fontana del Nettuno, close your eyes and imagine a different scene (and, as you are doing this, listen to Max’s prose caressing the bodies of those ancient Florentines as they walk again before his enchanted inner eye). Imagine “two dignified maidens stepping along in long slim-flowing satin gowns. A jewel-studded silken braid outlines their bosoms, which are lifted high and cradle a jeweled crucifix,—or perhaps it is only a pagan medallion or some precious stone. Their elaborate coiffures, dyed blonde, are strung up and tied and anchored with ropes of pearls.” Behind them, in the lingering trail of their sweet, heavy perfume, trudge brown-hooded monks with shaven heads and bare feet and, behind those, boys in leather aprons “horse-playing and swearing” as they make their way to the dyers’ or carpenters’ or stonecutters’ shops where they are apprenticed. But perhaps they were not walking anywhere; perhaps they had spent the day amid paintings, panels, inlaid tables, and other treasures, at the studio of Raphael’s friend Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. And look closely, there walks Master Raphael himself, “a warm-eyed young man with sweet shapely features, who will look almost feminine to you as he passes clad in a rich purple tunic with auburn hair hanging down, so neatly combed, to his shoulders.” Or, for that matter, you would see Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent, dark and angular, chanting his own ballads at the head of a procession of excited citizens. The Florentines were lovers of beauty and devotees of violence—just look at Donatello’s statue of Judith right ahead of you: clutching the stringy hair of Holofernes, she is aiming her sword for the fatal blow.
Max Eastman Page 45