This was Max, the novelist manqué, at his best, writing at a fever pitch, his every word evoking the ecstasy of immediate experience. These weren’t idle ruminations either: no one familiar with the glorious Florentine past would have trouble understanding their courageous resistance against the Fascists and the Nazis.38
Not much of Max’s draft was left when the essay eventually was published, several years later, in Reader’s Digest.39 Instead of Max’s sinuous sentences, readers found dry lists, the paratactic banalities of the guidebook prose: “Here Dante lived, the great poet of the Middle Ages, who stands beside Homer and Shakespeare in the praise of posterity. . . . Here Boccaccio lived. . . . Still another immortal Florentine was Giotto.” And the anticlimactic conclusion: “A final and very practical thing to be said of the beauties to be seen in Florence is that they are all near together.” This wasn’t even good writing—just note the piling on of passive constructions or that bête noir of copy editors, the use of “thing” as the subject of a sentence. If Max believed that his desire to earn a living had never really interfered with his more literary pursuits, he was telling himself what he wanted to believe.
In an unusually strained metaphor he compared the different tracks of his writing to a “troika” of horses, with the challenge of keeping the two darker horses (his political writing in the service of the “cause of freedom” and his writing for money) from interfering with the “white stallion” of his creative life. Writing for money was his “roan horse,” and Wally had never put him in a situation, he said unconvincingly, where the “craft of writing timely articles for an average of some sixty million readers” had corrupted “my art of writing as I think writing should be done.” That confident assertion, contained in a draft of the final chapter of his autobiography-in-progress, was scrapped from the printed version, where Max did concede he had found “signs of pressure” on his style, if perhaps not on his thought, in the articles he had written for the Digest.40
But the lusty lion of the Left hadn’t lost all of his teeth yet. In the introduction to a new edition of Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Max now proudly called himself a “libertarian conservative,” revising his earlier skepticism about that label. Just being “conservative” seemed unacceptable, since it suggested that “one’s whole program is to ‘sit tight’ on what we happen to have.” He now liked the activist sound of “libertarian”—an improvement over the wishy-washy “liberal”—and the suggestion that one would take such action boldly and not through “tight-knit secret societies and rabid crackpot organizations whose super-patriotism suggests the beginning of a counter-tyranny rather than an effort to defend and enlarge the freedoms that we have.” Additionally, libertarianism was a thoroughly secular concept. Being a libertarian conservative meant that one wasn’t a “reactionary obscurantist” but a defender of hard-won freedoms, among them the freedom not only to worship but also not to worship, a right enjoyed by all those “who can find no evidence on human events of the reign of a benign Deity.” That is what the preacher’s son still cared about: “I must make clear that it is downright liberty of individual thought and action in this world, and not some community of belief about another world, that in calling my views conservative I mean to defend.”41 The source of such liberty was not God, as Barry Goldwater had said in his “Statement of American Principles,” a text that annoyed Max to no end, but life itself—the only God at whose altar Max would worship.42 Recall his 1918 preface to Colors of Life: “Life is older than liberty. . . . And life is what I love.”43
For Max was not an agnostic, as John P. Diggins has asserted, perhaps in an attempt to still be able to claim him for the National Review camp, but an unabashed atheist, and what he saw as Buckley’s persistent conflation of anticommunism and Christianity angered him as much as Goldwater’s vision of the divine purpose of free-market economy.44 Some aspects of Buckley certainly appealed to Max, the ocean-yacht racing, for example, or the easy way he had with words: Buckley once said that “the socialized state” was to “justice, order, freedom what the Marquis de Sade is to love” and announced that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. And he was a milk drinker. But this was also the man who believed that there were limits to the free exchange of ideas and that the ultimate meaning of the human experience resided in God.45
In 1962 Max sent Buckley an essay titled “A Question to the National Review,” in which he seized the bull by the horns. “Whether or not this has any relation to its vastly increased circulation or not, it seems to me that the National Review is becoming more and more explicitly a religious magazine.” Max went on to clarify: “I mean a magazine devoted to the defense and propagation of religion in general, and the Christian religion in particular.” As examples of the rhetoric he found objectionable Max cited several passages from recent National Review articles, notably senior editor Frank S. Meyer’s contention, in the January 30, 1962, issue, that it was the main task of the conservative to defend the “Christian understanding of the nature and destiny of man, which is the foundation of Western civilization.”46 He was similarly put off by L. Brent Bozell’s statement, in the April 24, 1962, issue, that it was “our commission . . . to plant in history the ideals and the standard contained in Christian truth—and to build institutions and foster mores that will help sustain these ideals: in short to build a Christian civilization.”47 To Max, this was sheer hubris. The struggle against communism and a controlling superstate here at home was a worldwide effort, not one carried out by a handful of Catholics in America. “To regard it as a Christian struggle seems to me parochial and self-defeating.” Buddha and Confucius, in his modest opinion, had been wiser than Jesus “in their attempt to work out a guiding set of precepts for a good life in this world without the concept of God, or the appeal to any super-natural authority.” Freedom must be defended but not “with the bigotry instinctive in those who believe themselves backed by an inside knowledge of the will of God.”48
Buckley did not want to print Max’s note. Somewhat lamely, he defended himself by pointing out that signed articles did not represent the views of the magazine and that therefore Max’s critique had missed its target.49 But that only delayed Max’s departure from National Review, which finally took place in January 1964, when Buckley did publish a sort of farewell from Max, in which he asked, “Am I a Conservative?”50 The answer: if being a conservative required turning the clock back to the Middle Ages, well, then he wasn’t one. A note among Max’s drafts related to his problems with National Review yields what is perhaps a more appropriate self-description, though it would seem deeply ironic to anyone for whom HUAC was still a vivid memory. He was, reflected Max, “a fellow traveler of the conservatives,” but one who had found “the going a little rough at times.”51 Add to Max’s atheism his continuing—if now severely qualified—admiration for Lenin, and one understands how difficult it would be simply to put Max into the National Review camp. In February 1965 Max was in Honolulu, en route to Japan (his first trip to the Far East), where he gave an interview to KNDI radio as part of their series “Personality of the Week.”52 The interviewer asked him how he felt about Stalin’s body being removed from Lenin’s tomb, and Max replied that Stalin’s condemnation of him as a “crook and gangster of the pen” had been the “chief honor” and the “high point” of his life. But Lenin he still defended. “Ruthless” Lenin was and a zealot, but he had integrity: “He would do anything which he was sure would lead to the liberation of the working class.”53
The hankering for a world outside the political zoo of human life led Max to become more seriously interested in animals (fig. 50). He had always been a keen birdwatcher and had devoured C. Lloyd Morgan’s Animal Life and Intelligence (1891) while still in college, but now he was undertaking a systematic study of the subject, stacking his desk with popular books on zoology and the behavior of wild animals.54 The more disenchanted Max became
with human society and the forms of collective organization that ideologues, from the Far Left to the Far Right, had tried to impose on it in order to make it more than a random accumulation of individuals with different incomes, different interests, and different ideals, the more he felt drawn to animals. As Whitman had said, they don’t lie awake at night and “weep for their sins,” and they do not make you sick “discussing their duty to God.”55
There is evidence in his papers that Max was planning to do a book about animal behavior, comprising several of his Digest pieces as well as some new essays. One of those, on the “father instinct” among animals, hit close to home. “So much has been said about the mother instinct as the model of altruism and the foundation of all morality in the evolution of man that it seems fair to say a few mild words about the father instinct.” Drawing on his experiences with pigeons he had kept as a boy, Max pointed out that nature was full of examples of “share and share-alike arrangements.” Among pigeons, the father’s devotion to his children seemed “quite as mysteriously generous as the mother’s.” With certain species of marine animals, too, the father was the main provider. An extreme example was the seahorse, where the male of the species carries a pouch in which the female deposits her eggs. Once they are hatched, the father takes care of them full time. Max cited copious other examples to reinforce the case he wants to make for male parental “gentleness”: the male ostrich sits on the eggs to protect them; the male beaver lives in a separate burrow where he can monitor the dam and thus the safety of his family; the gorilla father decides when it’s bedtime for his little ones and builds his nest nearest the ground so he can best protect them; the Emperor King penguin is solely responsible for keeping “his” egg warm in subzero temperatures and never eats a thing while he is doing that.
Figure 50. Max and Brandy. EMIIA1.
Was Max indeed so oblivious to his own near-absence in his son’s life? Or was he reliving—through the lens of animal psychology—his own days as a male suffragette?56 Max wanted to call his new book How Human Are Animals?, after an essay he had written for the Saturday Review about courtship rituals in the animal world, which Max had found to be every bit as passionate as those of humans, without the element of sinfulness injected into them. Swans are monogamous, but in a book by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz he had read the tale of a male swan that rejected the advances of a determined female when she approached him close to the nest where his mate was sitting. Later that same day the male was seen on the other side of the lake making love to precisely the female he had rejected earlier, “without more ado.” If social conventions and gender roles were fluid among animals, they nevertheless had a well-developed sense of property, marking their territory with songs, special scents, or, if need be, violent action. “It was nature, not man, who invented the delight of owning a little piece of this planet we camp on.”57
Animals are driven by pleasure, not by the categorical imperative, and in “Love Among the Insects,” first published in Audubon Magazine in May 1963 and then in condensed form in Wally’s magazine, Max gently pushed the boundaries of propriety at the Digest by describing, with relish, the mating rituals among crickets. Seduced by the male’s energetic scraping, the female climbs on the male’s back, where she feeds on the secretions of a special gland, which, Max explains, may be the animal equivalent of the “gift of a box of chocolates” in the world of human dating. The final union, a vigorous exchange of “singing and nudging, giving and receiving,” goes on for quite a while. The reason for that, apart from the obvious purpose of procreation: to make things as pleasurable as possible for both parties. Max approved. Even when the male gets eaten in the process, as happens with the praying mantis, this is, as Max sees it, but a noble sacrifice in the service of sensual delight: “He surrenders his life to love and posterity without a quiver of hesitation.” The grayling butterfly sprays perfume on the sensitive antennae of his inamorata, and the female moth attracts suitors, sometimes as many as fifty at a time, by dispersing, weather conditions permitting, her scent in all directions. And the dance of the male mayflies has but one purpose—getting the females to join them so they can fly away together, in pairs, to mate. Bowing, curtsying, kissing, snuggling, fondling, embracing, giving presents, seducing with perfume, serenading, dancing, and rubbing noses, animals make and mate their way through their brief lives. Concluded Max: “It remains a mystery why the slender demoiselle dragonflies link themselves together and fly around in tandem for hours before mating, and why they continue in this position long afterward, the male bringing the female along behind him as though on a flying bicycle-built-for-two, until she has laid her eggs on the leaf or stem of some plant growing in the water.”58
Love and Revolution, the second volume of Max’s autobiography, appeared on January 4, 1965, Max’s eighty-second birthday, under the imprint of Random House. It had taken much effort to get a publisher interested in the book, and the final form of the manuscript owed much to the advice of Max’s friend Dan Aaron.59 The unabashed delight Max took in his own life, including his sexual escapades, spread out over almost seven hundred pages, was bound to alienate as well as intrigue. But nothing could have prepared Max for the demolition job performed by George Lichtheim in the New York Review of Books. A German-born historian of Marxism, Lichtheim was known for his wit as well as his intellectual arrogance, both of which were on full display in his review. He wasn’t put off by Max’s tales of sexual conquest. What bothered him was the “staggering banality” of Max’s political and philosophical views and the “insipidity of his poetic tastes.” As Lichtheim saw it, Max simply wasn’t smart enough. He was “the Frank Harris of Socialism,” Lichtheim quipped, in a backhanded reference to the author of the semipornographic My Love and Lives (1922–27). Max’s ideological commitments had never been serious ones. He became an “indoor Marxman” only after his girlfriend Ida Rauh had explained communism to him in three easy steps: “There is no evidence, despite his professions to the contrary and an enthusiastic endorsement from Edmund Wilson, that he ever went deeper into the subject.” Paired with Licht-heim’s condescension came his obvious anti-Americanism. Max had been able to speak so freely about subjects he knew nothing about because Americans didn’t suffer from the same inhibitions as their more refined European counterparts. And, to be sure, Max Eastman was “one of the least inhibited specimens ever to make an appearance between two hard covers.”60
One wonders why the editors of the New York Review of Books had allowed such a blatant ad hominem attack—ironically shaped by the same lack of deeper engagement with the subject of its critique that the reviewer had identified in Max’s writing—to be published in their pages. Max wondered, too. Sensing he would feel hurt, the editor Barbara Epstein sent Max a note: “I was terribly upset. But it will probably sell a lot of copies of your book. It does give it a lot of attention.” She would happily print his letter if Max wanted to respond. A deeply disappointed Max wrote back to say that, no, he didn’t want to respond to those “five long columns of sneers and insults.” What Mr. Lichtheim had delivered was not a review “but a spitting on the author.” If Epstein, who apparently had no respect for him either, really felt that this character assassination posing as a book review would sell any copies of Love and Revolution, she was mistaken. “I am sad to see you do this, not only because it concerns me and my book, but because in a civilized society such unrestrained effluvia of political and personal hate posing as intellectual and literary criticism ought not to be published at all.”61 Clearly, Max had forgotten some of his own gloves-off polemics against Eliot, James Joyce, and even his friend Cummings.
Norman Podhoretz, the newly minted editor of Commentary and not yet the conservative polemicist he is remembered as today, hadn’t forgotten. In Book News he wondered why, after reading so much about Max, he felt so little respect for him. In many ways Max’s was the quintessential American story: “The beautiful son of two Congregational ministers, the brilliant protégé of John Dew
ey, the famous young poet and polemicist and orator (and lover), the center of that rollicking upsurge in the Greenwich Village of the ‘teens against bourgeois morals and capitalist values, the early supporter of Trotsky against Stalin—could such a person in any other country in the world end his years in the masthead of such a publication as Reader’s Digest?” The problem, for Podhoretz, was the “streak of vulgarity” in Max, as manifested especially in his stubborn rejection of modernism in literature. This resistance had made him, curiously, very much like the Stalinists he opposed. In a period when Wilson and other leftists were defending Eliot and Joyce against the charge of “unintelligibility” leveled by American middlebrow critics and when the label of “bourgeois decadence” was freely applied to the modernists by Communist Party hacks, Max had unaccountably joined that assault. In Podhoretz’s eyes, the result of Max’s confused allegiances was plainly evident in Love and Revolution: self-indulgence and a fondness for cliché, in terms of both substance and style. Ironically, Podhoretz was complaining about some of the same flaws in Max that, three decades earlier, had bothered Max about Trotsky: Max was a boor.62
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