Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  Fortunately for Max other reviewers were more excited. Alan Pryce-Jones, writing in the Herald Tribune, noted some of the book’s faults—“too ardent a romanticism, too nervy a self-importance, too little discipline, too little confidence”—but then pointed out that Max himself had freely confessed to all of them. To Pryce-Jones, the total picture was an “endearing” one. He was especially touched by Max’s account of his marriage: “Although quite a hopeless lover, Eastman was a better husband than most.”63 In a similar vein Jessie Kitching, the reviewer for the New York Post, while conceding that the book was perhaps “over-wordy,” basked in Max’s “flashes of wit, wisdom and revelation.”64 But the critic who probably best understood Max’s intentions was Joseph Slater, a professor at Colgate University. In the Saturday Review he recalled Max’s earlier autobiographical volume, Enjoyment of Living, and offered collective words of praise for both books. They were, he said, the great novel he never wrote: a “rich and dramatic” bildungsroman but also a Rabelaisian romp, “discursive, gossipy, unbuttoned,” an entertaining account of a wild life, not invalidated by its conventional, Reader’s Digest-y ending.65 Wasn’t that how a good bildungsroman was supposed to end—with the hero’s self inevitably diminished, taken down a few notches by life’s circumstances, but replaced by the narrator’s superior insight and ability to recall all that led to the present moment?

  Yet, as especially the negative reviews of his new book showed, Max’s life had in some ways always resisted all such attempts to fit it into a neat story line. For what the reviewers really objected to wasn’t the book itself but the life that it was about. A former socialist wasn’t supposed to end up on DeWitt Wallace’s payroll. And if he did, he had to be shallow, vulgar, confused. Thus, in a sense the dénouement of Max’s life wasn’t a conventional one at all: the male suffragette, the leftist critic of modernist experimentation, the erudite intellectual writing articles for magazines typically found in podiatrists’ waiting rooms had not lost his ability to puzzle the critics.

  Max’s final book, or at least the last to appear in his lifetime, was Seven Kinds of Goodness, published in 1967 by Horizon Press, an exploration of what it means to live the good life. Again, some of the essays had first appeared, in shorter form, in Reader’s Digest. But collected in a book, they assumed new significance, opening yet another window into Max’s life. Once again he was grappling with the idea that morality and religion were necessarily connected. As prayer and religious ritual were losing their importance in public life, the time had come to revive the idea of individual morality, the code by which Max had organized his own life. The communists had thrown their half of the world into utter confusion by substituting historic necessity for any concept of morality: “Apparently it has not occurred to any of them that, on those grounds, once the proletarian society is achieved, . . . no standards of honorable and good conduct, will have any validity at all.” But in the modern world those who had been brought up to believe that moral standards had been set up by God were similarly disoriented. Hence Max’s descent into what the great moral lawgivers in history had thought about the matter of the good life.

  Max’s quick portraits of Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Mohammed, Socrates, Plato, and Jesus show he was still a master of the caustic epigram and witty aperçu: “It is said of Socrates that he stood thinking in a portico all of one night. The same thing is reported of Gotama except that he had the forethought to sit down.” Buddha would have, he observed, made a “good bookkeeper, for he loved to arrange things in neat little lists, with numbers attached to it: the four noble truths, the eight-fold path to salvation,” and so forth. And Plato “went so far as to say that the idea of beauty is more fun to be with . . . than a beautiful person.” An admirer of athletic prowess and perhaps a former athlete himself, Plato “would not have known what to make of the long, frail, languid, ineffectual saints that populate most of our church windows.”66

  For all that he had learned from them, Max found his seven teachers wanting in different ways. They were, he concluded, internally divided, self-contradictory, given to savage fits of violence—and all because they could not entirely let go of the supernatural. Among the seven, Buddha, who had told his disciples to accept as truth only what their experience and “thorough investigation” had told them they could (was Max remembering his old pragmatist days?), and Confucius, who thought the ills of the world could be cured without crying to the gods for help, came closest to Max’s own vision of goodness. Moses, while he was mindful of God, presided over mass terror and massacres; only when he had nearly forgotten about God did he find himself capable of offering useful moral advice. Socrates went nowhere without his little private God, like a dove, sitting on his shoulder and, despite his insistence on the everyday logical use of the mind, could not let go of his belief in the immortality of the soul. And Jesus and Mohammed alike shrank from the delights of sex.

  Max’s own stakes in the book are clearest in the chapter on Jesus, where he remembers his religious upbringing and being forced to learn the beatitudes by heart: “Even now those vividly arresting words lie beaten down like a racetrack through my mind.” That was not his mother’s fault: “My mother, who was not responsible for this Sabbath-day exercise, loved Jesus with an unorthodox yet fervent love; and I loved my mother. I learned from her to think of Jesus as in all respects, though not a divine, yet an ultimate teacher of the wisdom of life.” He found it hard to forgive Jesus for his condemnation of “the least flicker of extramarital desire in a man” (that one spoke to Max personally) but praised him for having given a new poetic expression to the idea of “humbleness about oneself.”67

  Max ended his book—did he know it was going to be his last one?—with a moving tribute to his past: “Coming from a tribe of Christian ministers, I have always felt the temptation to compose a sermon.” But his was a different kind of sermon, based not on a biblical verse but on Robert Herrick’s very secular encouragement to “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”68 Max the renegade preacher felt compelled to dispense with faith as well as with hope, that “heavenly decoy.” Instead, he offered his readers something less spiritual in their place: growth. “To grow continually without growing old—that is affirmative, dramatic, difficult.” This was the old Max Eastman, resisting his own inevitable decline, tending, as his father once did, too, his garden to the end, but free of the sexual guilt that had paralyzed Sam Eastman. “A man who knows himself and knows the world, whatever his attitude to the mystery of the universal, needs no God and no Sunday-school-teacher to tell him to be good. If he preserves, together with mindfulness, courage, sympathy, temperance, justice, and the art of inquiry, the gift nature gave him of growth, he will live well, and with good luck will live happily; and when his time comes to fall to the ground with the sparrow, he will know that he has made a jewel of the accident of his being.” Note the biblical language, a reference to the fall of the sparrow that does not happen without God’s will (Matthew 10:29), that slips into Max’s rejection of religion. Max had remained a minister’s son—or, rather, the son of two ministers!—to the end.69

  When the Poetry Society of America asked Max to speak at their annual dinner in July 1966 he readily accepted and impressed everyone. “That great throbbing sweetheart of a bygone Greenwich Village” hadn’t lost his touch, exulted Pat Smith, who covered the event for the World Telegram. Guests in the Versailles Suite at New York’s Astor Hotel had been fidgeting on the edge of their chairs after having to endure a lecture by Professor John Gassner called “The Lack of Poetry in Modern Drama.” Salvador Dalí, wearing a flowing necktie and scarf, was in attendance and read one of his poems in Spanish, which sounded like Morse code to the audience. They couldn’t wait for Max to begin: “Nearly all the 300 members . . . were old enough to recall when Eastman was considered by the New York literati of the ’20s as the handsomest man in the world.”

  And Max didn’t disappoint: “The big, good-looking man rose to his full height of 6 feet 3 inche
s, took the podium and ran his fingers through a heavy head of flowing white hair.” (The infatuated reporter had grown Max by a full three inches!) A young actress named Scottie MacGregor, later known for her work in Little House on the Prairie, whispered, “Good heavens. They say he must be 80, but it can’t be.” Max was eighty-three. “They asked me to speak on 20th century poetry,” declared Max. “But, my feelings on 20th century poetry are not the kindest.” Applause burst through the crowd. Max continued to explain, in “a quavering, but lusty voice,” that good poetry had died with the French symbolist movement, in the aftermath of which poems became “puzzles, things to decipher.” They had stopped being enjoyable. The room rocked with agreement. Many might have remembered plowing through the notes accompanying The Waste Land. “I trust,” intoned Max, that “within the next generation, poetry will change back to art, and away from the metered blur that it is today.” He ended his talk, timed to be no longer than ten minutes, by “reviewing several episodes in his well-chronicled romantic years, drawing laughter with nearly every phrase.” The poet-critic-lover was done.70

  A close friend and protégé of Max’s during these last years was the young novelist Nicholas (“Nick”) Delbanco. He was Carly Simon’s boyfriend, and while Max was certainly receptive to Carly’s extraordinary beauty, he took a more than casual interest in Delbanco, whose talents he recognized. Max’s sense of craftsmanship was still impeccable. When Nick read, or rather chanted, to him passages from his novel-in-progress—lavishly resonant lines composed in a fine frenzy, smoldering with the “ecstasy of self-congratulation”—Max, who hadn’t forgotten his reservations about literary hermeticism, gently brought him back to the ground. What does it all mean? he asked. And after Nick volunteered a more mundane paraphrase of what he had just read, Max suggested, “Why don’t you write it down”?

  Nick would occasionally stay with Max at East Pasture Road, remembering later, with lyrical precision, the rather magical atmosphere of the place: “The morning would be glorious: that crystalline light, those sizable skies, the pine trees somehow greener against the sere scrub oak.” As Nick, after a morning of working on his novel, would dash toward the pond, Max would already be in the water, beckoning to him, his white hair fluttering in the wind like the feathers of a snowy egret. Nicholas Delbanco went on to become a distinguished novelist and widely admired teacher of a new generation of writers. But in his memory that scene on the Vineyard beach repeats itself again and again, even decades later, “in perfect clarity”: the young man on the shore, the old man in the water, waving at him, a kind of reversal of the final moments in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, with Max calling his friend to embrace life, a beginning, not an end.71

  But in reality time was running out for Max. In January 1967, during a winter vacation in sunny Barbados, the famous swimmer almost drowned. Despite the rough sea, Max had gone for a swim when Yvette realized he “wasn’t making it.” The current was too strong, and Yvette had to call for help.72 A few months later, however, Max and Yvette were en route to Paris again and then on to Nice and London. On the inside at least, Max was as restless as he had always been. And he was still living from day to day. When his nephew Samuel Ewer Eastman, Anstice’s son, asked him for a loan, Max explained that he couldn’t really help him: “I’m 84, almost 85, years old, and I have no securities and no life insurance, nothing to leave Yvette but a lot of vacant land and a very small sum of money in the savings bank.” Yvette would need whatever he had, and what he had was close to nothing. He was as short of cash as he had been in his old Village days.73

  His son Dan, now a practicing psychologist, had become a part of Max’s life more than he had ever been before (fig. 51). “There must be a lot of conflicting emotions towards such an inadequate parent as I have been,” admitted Max. But he was now ready to treat Dan as an equal: “I vastly enjoy your wit and charm and speculative intelligence and rich stores of knowledge, and so does Yvette.” Dan’s new wife, Marie Jo, was so lovely that Max instantly wanted to see more of his son: “But the fact that you never respond by calling us or coming of your own accord makes me feel that you don’t inwardly like being with us.”74 But Dan was keeping busy, though not only with his work. His mother, Ida, had just broken her hip, “the fourth major medical crisis in the last eight years.” Since Dan was the one who was ultimately responsible for everything that was done for her, “you can imagine that I am just about as fed up with it as she is.” Ironically, Dan had been working on creating a life that at least outwardly resembled his father’s. He was building a house for Marie Jo that was, “like yours,” on a hill. In Warwick, New York, there was no ocean in sight, but one had magnificent views of the mountains wherever one looked. “No more New York City! I tried it for thirty years!” He was also trying his hand at being an author, without much immediate success.75 Max read Dan’s manuscript “with excited admiration,” especially a chapter on determinism in science. He returned the manuscript to Dan with suggestions for revision. Any traces of Dan’s book, like the tracks of the author himself, have faded.76

  Max was now experiencing a medical crisis of his own. “Max depressed,” Yvette noted in her journal: “I don’t quite know how to help and do everything else.”77 He was struggling with the beginnings of Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis he seems to have shared with only a few close friends. One sign of Max’s newly fragile self was that it didn’t take much to move him to tears. When, at the end of April 1968, he saw the new Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy movie about interracial dating Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, his sobs of “joyous pain” interrupted the movie. Known as the pseudobulbar affect, such outbursts are often associated with Parkinson’s. Not that Max wasn’t genuinely moved. He said he hadn’t been so affected by a public performance since as a child he had heard his mother pray. In the movie the white-haired Tracy, who was dead within two weeks after the filming was completed, looks like a shorter, chubbier, more professorial version of Max. Marked by death—Hepburn was said to have cried real tears during her lover’s final speech—Tracy would have reminded Max of himself, with the exception of the intense paternal feelings expressed by Tracy’s character.78

  Figure 51. Father and Son (Max and Daniel Eastman). Photograph by Charles Neider, 1957. Inscription by Max Eastman. EMIIA1. By permission of Susan Neider.

  Max was also having panic attacks that made it difficult for him to sleep comfortably. He would wake up in the middle of the night terrified by the idea that he would not “wake up as Max tomorrow morning.” Sue Sekey and Yvette did their best to comfort him when this happened, but Max’s anxiety was so profound that nothing seemed to help. It was, wrote Sue in her journal, “saddening, nearly unbearable.” Max was failing, there could be no doubt. And what a sad sight he was at the breakfast table, wearing a sweater over his pajamas, unshaven, his hands, mouth, and voice trembling. Suddenly he had become an old man. But at least occasionally, inadequately buoyed by the antidepressant Tofranil, “for moral and good feeling,” he could be found working fitfully at his desk.79

  There was indeed some unfinished business Max felt he had to attend to. In the 1930s he had almost completed a translation of a dozen chapters written by the exiled Trotsky on the life of the young Lenin, a fragment of a full-scale, ultimately abandoned biography Trotsky had undertaken in an attempt to rescue his former idol from the clutches of the Stalinists. But then Max’s copy of the manuscript suddenly vanished from his barn-study at Croton. “It had been stolen and destroyed,” Max wrote, suspecting some kind of Stalinist foul play.80 Mysteriously, it showed up some twenty years later at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Houghton sent him a copy; like the return of the repressed, it was now back on his desk. Florence Crowther, Max’s agent, discovered that there was a decades-old contract between Doubleday and Trotsky and that Max had already been paid $600 for work he had never finished. It seemed appropriate that he was now returning to it. His career as a critic of Marxism had begun with a biography of the young Trotsky, and it w
as now to end with Trotsky’s biography of the young Lenin.81

  It was nearly too late, though. After a hospital stay Max had trouble walking and wasn’t getting far even on crutches or with a walker.82 The famous Maxian charisma lingered on despite the mounting physical impediments. To Rosalinde Fuller, he was as attractive as ever. “Darling First Love,” she wrote, celebrating the arrival of his letter: “I tore it open and held it against my body—It was part of you and now it looks rumpled like people after making love . . . that sweet exciting disorder.” It transported her back to nights lying naked in the sand dunes with Max beside her, hearing the seagulls pass over her with the “sighing feathery sounds their wings make.” Carried away by the memory, she imagined herself putting her arms all the way around his wheelchair so that she could “hold you and kiss your lovely mouth.” With Max in it, any wheelchair would look like a throne, asserted Margarita Dobert, another infatuated friend. Dobert, a travel writer who had undertaken a “one-woman safari” through Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Mali equipped with nothing but a map, an air mattress, and three dresses, quoted one of Max’s poems back to him: “Give the wild will never.”83

  And Max didn’t, not yet at least (fig. 52). Undeterred by his physical impairments, he again felt the pull of warmer climates. In February 1969 Yvette and Max left New York, as they had done several times before, for his beloved Barbados, to rest and bask in the sun. He was scheduled to start a new, experimental treatment for Parkinson’s after his return.84 Sue arrived on March 5 to keep Yvette company and, presumably, also help her take care of Max. A successful interior designer in New York, she was also a passionate writer of journals, and she left a detailed, atmospherically rich account of what became the last month of Max’s life. Once again Max had surrounded himself with beautiful things. Enjoying the ride from the airport to Max’s rented summer home, Sue took in, with appreciation, the bursts of red and white hibiscus, bougainvillea, and poinsettia in the gardens all around her, and she loved the shimmering ocean directly behind the house. Max was using a wheelchair, but he and Yvette were tanned and looked much younger than their years. Yet Sue noticed the constant, low-level bickering that was going on between the two, and Yvette complained to her that she was starved for meaningful conversation.85