Figure 52. Max Eastman, undated. EMIIA1.
On March 18, what turned out to be the last day of his conscious life, Max watched some television and then lamented that he had wasted his life. Yvette and Sue vehemently disagreed and asked him why on earth he would think that. Max replied that he should not have spent “those many years in politics.” He refused his routine nighttime snack and said he just wanted to go to bed, even though nights were usually far from comfortable for him then and he would often wake up feeling cold and in pain.
The next morning Yvette couldn’t rouse him. Sue rushed in to help and was devastated by what she saw: oblivious to the world, Max was lying in bed, making strange gurgling sounds. He had lost control of his bodily functions. In desperation Yvette and Sue hoisted his big body into the wheelchair and fastened him with a bed sheet only to be told by the doctor, who had meanwhile arrived, that they should put him back in bed again. Like his mother, he had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. And like Annis, too, Max fought against death with all he had left. What Max had feared the most—that one day he wouldn’t wake up as Max—had happened. Max was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Bridgetown, where the nurses scrupulously avoided saying prayers over him. It was only then that Yvette broke down: “How terrible not to even say goodbye.” She called Dan in New York, who did not offer to come down, and Max’s nephew Peter in California, who arrived a day later.
For eleven years Yvette and Max had never really been apart, and it seemed impossible that Max had now abandoned her, leaving behind nothing but this massive body pointlessly struggling to survive on its own, inert except for the labored breathing that sounded more and more like a bellows as the days went by. Ironically, Max was still beautiful. His legs were thin again, like those of a young man, freed from their burden of carrying his ailing body.
To Yvette, it seemed as if Max, in death, had allowed himself to be drawn into the script he had first described in his poem “Epitaph,” written some three decades earlier:
Now life has had her fill of me,
Death, less cruel, has me in her bed.
Yet think not I came lustingly,
Or by her mother-tender touches led.
She dragged me to her bosom drugged,
She forced her peace like gas into my face.
I lie, torn fainting from the pains I hugged,
Frigid forever in her kind embrace.86
Death was the lover to end all lovers, Max’s terrible, final mistress—a dealer in drugs and sedatives, not the mother of beauty. Characteristically, Max had imagined it, or rather her, as the end of his famous capacity of giving and receiving pleasure.
Max had seen Florence, Crystal, and Eliena die, but when his own death finally came, on March 26, 1969, at 1 a.m. in room 108 of St. Joseph’s Hospital, he was alone. He had asked that his body be cremated. Dan brutally suggested Yvette simply get the body burned in Trinidad. But she would hear none of that. Reader’s Digest sent $2,500. There was no word from Dan or his nephew Jeff or his niece Annis. What goes around comes around.
On April 2, when Max’s body was to be transferred to the States for cremation and burial, their flight was delayed—as if Max wasn’t ready to leave just yet: “My fantasy is,” wrote Sue, “that Max is not conceding to death and that this flight delay is a further ruse.” But then Sue, seated on the plane, was looking out the window, and she saw the great, long, raw wooden box traveling up the belt. It was a shock to realize that Max, or something that had once belonged to Max, was in there. It seems likely Max, deeply antimetaphysical as he was, would have enjoyed the manner of his departure from the only world be believed in, and likely, too, he would have relished even what happened to his ashes. Due to some bureaucratic mix-up they were delivered to Yvette by regular mail, with additional postage due and signature required. Sue became overwhelmed by “the thought of Max, the person reduced to a box of ashes and the horror of the delivery by ordinary, everyday mail.” Cremation might be the sanest way to dispose of a body but seeing this residue was another matter, “the most brutal expression of the end,” she felt. “I recall Max of bones and blood and muscle and nerves and mind, a moving, thinking, talkative person now DUST.” What Max once was now lived on only “in print and the minds of friends.” For the next few months what was left of the Max of bones and blood and muscle—and there was more of him even now than of most other people, since he had been so big in life—remained locked in a file cabinet at 8 West Thirteenth Street.
In a lighter moment Yvette told Sue that the next time she married it would be for money. Did Onassis have a brother? But the truth was that Max had left her well provided for—so well, in fact, that Max’s son, who was now drinking heavily, found it difficult to be around “the bitch,” as he would refer to Yvette. Dan did inherit some of Max’s property on the Vineyard, about ten acres, and Yvette suspected he had been nice to his father only for the sake of the land. Now that he didn’t have to pretend anymore Dan felt free to announce that he “hated Max’s guts” and wasn’t even going to attend the memorial. Ironically, the few surviving photographs show that Dan, as he was aging, too, was beginning to look more and more like a younger, stockier version of his father.87
In the end Dan did show up for the memorial. Standing next to Jeff Fuller, he did not make a scene, and he did not embarrass Yvette, who sat through the proceedings clutching a small spray of lily of the valley. The ceremony took place on May 19 at the Williams Club, a private club at 24 East Thirty-ninth Street in Manhattan open to the alumni of Williams College. There was standing room only. Dick Green, the Eastmans’ lawyer, acted as master of ceremonies. Roger Baldwin spoke, a neighbor on the Vineyard and one of Max’s and Crystal’s allies when they were still on the Left, a cofounder, with Crystal and others, of what later became the ACLU. Baldwin, clearly moved and speaking partly extemporaneously, recalled his long friendship with Max, untroubled by their later political disagreements, buoyed by a common delight in life and the pleasures it had offered them. He evoked the many causes to which Max had contributed, from women’s suffrage to antimilitarism, and graciously honored Dan Eastman as well as Fuller and their work for the ACLU. From the other end of the spectrum, there was Hobart (“Hobe”) Lewis from the Reader’s Digest, who had taken the reins of the magazine after Wally’s retirement in 1965. Perhaps nervous to be speaking to an audience he suspected to be rather on the highbrow side, he’d cobbled together excerpts from Max’s articles for the Digest and, at least according to Sue, went on for far too long. Marie Bullock, the president of the American Academy of Poets, paid tribute to Max the poet. Then the actress and theater director Margaret Webster, the first woman to direct at the Met and another neighbor of Max’s on the Vineyard, and the poet and editor John Hall Wheelock read a dozen of Max’s poems, among them “Epitaph,” “Lisa in Summer,” and the obligatory “At the Aquarium.” Despite the fact that Webster, who had spent a significant part of her career in England, lent an unexpected Shakespearean lilt to Max’s lines, making them sound even more formal than they were, Sue thought these poems had never sounded so thrilling. Wheelock closed with Max’s version of the Ten Commandments, as delivered by Lot’s wife: “To yourself for life’s sake, speak the truth,” a commandment Max had, for all his flaws, always honored. The ceremony ended with the reading of a fond note that Leon Edel, the acclaimed biographer of Henry James, had sent from Hawaii. Afterward, a small group went to have dinner at Del Pezzo’s restaurant on Forty-seventh Street. Dan did not join them.
By all accounts addicted to alcohol, Daniel Eastman died within six months of his father after suffering a heart attack while talking on the phone, long distance, with his mother.88 That is one version. Current family members continue to believe that Dan, who had been in a “bad way psychologically” after Max’s death, in fact committed suicide.89 In his will he left his father’s land to a barmaid he had spent time with in the Village: a final gesture of anger directed against Max and, presumably, also Yvette. Frant
ic about this unexpected development, Yvette invited the woman out to the Vineyard. She arrived wearing high heels and a tight, sexy dress and was entirely unprepared for how rural things were out there. Obviously, Dan had wanted to alienate the family, but it’s hard not to imagine how pleased Max would have been with such a lovely looking visitor, never mind why she had come. Yvette offered the woman some cash, and the new would-be resident readily relinquished her claim and made a hasty exit back to more familiar territory.90
• • •
On August 3, 1969, Max’s ashes were interred at East Pasture Road. Again, Roger Baldwin spoke. Again, poems were read, and each person in attendance shoveled a scoop of earth into the hole.91 And there Max still lies, a rocky ledge behind him, his grave overlooking the improbably blue, improbably still waters of Menemsha Pond. It was Yvette who selected the inscription for the plaque that was laid into the rock: “Max Eastman / Poet-Philosopher / For whom life was / a celebration / and a joyous affirmation of freedom.” He was the last of the outrageous Eastman children to die, more than four decades after Crystal and three after Anstice, who had seemed so much stronger than everybody else.
Writing to express his condolences to Yvette, Max’s former editor William Buckley, who, like others of his conservative friends, was never entirely comfortable with Max’s atheism, expressed the hope that dear old Max, “notwithstanding his stubbornness,” was now “off enjoying the Elysian fields.”92 It is tempting to imagine Max dancing there in the buff, or insisting that he be allowed to. Jungle Beach, the place on Martha’s Vineyard where he did so in life (when he wasn’t sunbathing on his own pebbly lot), eventually stopped being a haven for nudists. It enjoyed a brief boom period after Max’s death, with, by one account, hundreds of nudists hiking a mile to shed their clothes there, long-haired hippies as well as respectable families. But then a syndicate headed by the former defense secretary and president of the World Bank Robert McNamara bought the land, cordoned off private areas, and eventually instituted patrols to curb such excesses.93 They weren’t able to eliminate them entirely, but today Jungle Beach seems a shadow of what it once was. Characteristically, Max didn’t like being called a nudist—this was a word only philistines would use, since it implied there was something wrong with being naked.94 But regardless of the terminology, among those on the Vineyard who like to shed their clothes Max is still remembered, without any equivocation, as a great hero, a god during a time when the island wasn’t yet the playground of the rich and people still loved their bodies. “He was a rascal and a rake,” remembers one longtime Vineyard resident, now in his late seventies. Not only was he always naked, he always had three or four naked women with him. “He was a great believer in life. How can you believe in life if you’re all clothed?”95 And thus Max Eastman lives on, in the memory of some, a modern God Pan, though more handsome and with soft hands, parting the bushes, stepping out onto the warm sand and into the glowing sun.96
NOTE ON SOURCES
This book relies on rich archival and, in most cases, unpublished sources. Since most of the Eastman papers at the Lilly Library are not processed and still in the original folders, with titles provided by Max or Yvette Eastman, my citations refer to sources by the name of the collection only. Readers desiring more guidance to specific materials are welcome to get in touch with me at www.christophirmscher.com. My transcriptions scrupulously follow the original manuscripts, except for obvious mistakes and idiosyncrasies that disrupt the flow of reading. Additions I have made for clarity are indicated by square brackets. Where available, I have silently substituted postmarks for missing dates on letters. Carbon copies are indicated by “cc”; copies made by Max or others are listed as “copy.”
Max Eastman was prodigiously productive, and no bibliography can hope to do full justice to his output. Archie Henderson has been maintaining a bibliography of Eastman-related archival collections, which is available on my home page.
For their generosity and cooperation I am grateful to the following estates and their representatives: Carol Leadenham, Hoover Institution Archives, for permission to quote from Joseph Freeman’s letters (copyright Stanford University); Diana Lachatanere as the Representative of the Works of Claude McKay, for permission to quote from the poems and letters of Claude McKay; Chris Hyman and Catherine Stern for allowing me use of the letters and poems of Creigh Collins Stern; and Breon Mitchell, literary executor for the Yvette and Max Eastman Estate, for permission to quote from the published and unpublished works, letters, and journals of Max Eastman, Eliena Eastman, and Yvette Eastman. Material from the papers of Max, Eliena, and Yvette Eastman also appears courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington. W. W. Norton has given me permission to quote from Max Eastman’s Stalin’s Russia.
All translations from the Russian are by Anna Arays. ALA-LC Romanization has been used for Russian words throughout the text, with the exception of proper names with standardized spellings.
NOTES
The following abbreviations appear in the notes. All books, articles (other than those published in newspapers), and poems listed without an author are by Max Eastman.
Persons
AE
Anstice Eastman
AFE
Annis Ford Eastman
CC
Creigh Collins
CE
Crystal Eastman
DA
Daniel Aaron
DE
Daniel Eastman
EE
Eliena Eastman
FD
Florence Deshon
FN
Florence Norton
IR
Ida Rauh
JF
Joseph Freeman
ME
Max Eastman
SEE
Samuel Elijah Eastman
YE
Yvette Eastman
Collections
AEM
Anstice Eastman Mss. (Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
CEP
Crystal Eastman Papers (Schlesinger Library, Harvard University)
DAP
Daniel Aaron Papers (Houghton Library, Harvard University)
DM
Deshon Mss. (Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
EEM
Eliena Eastman Mss. (Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
EM
Eastman Mss. (Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
EMII
Eastman Mss. II (Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
EMIIA1
Eastman Mss. II, Addition 1: Vineyard Collection (Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington)
EMIIA2
Eastman Mss. II, Addition 2: New York Collection (Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
Houghton
Houghton Library, Harvard University
Lilly
Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington
MM
Claude McKay Mss. (Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
Schlesinger
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
TM
Trotsky Mss. (Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington)
Books
EL
Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living
LR
Max Eastman, Love and Revolution
Major Works by Max Eastman Cited in the Notes
Enjoyment of Poetry. New York: Scribner’s, 1913. Expanded edition (with Other Essays in Aesthetics), 1939.
Child of the Amazons and Other Poems. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913.
Journalism Versus Art. New York: Knopf, 1916.
Colors of Life: Poems and Songs and Sonnets. New York: Knopf, 1918.
The Sense of Humor. New York: Scribner’s, 1922.
Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth. New York: Greenberg, 1925 (American edition); London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926 (British edition).
Sin
ce Lenin Died. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925.
Marx, Lenin: The Science of Revolution. London: Allen and Unwin, 1926 (British edition). New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1927 (American edition).
Venture. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1927.
Trotsky, Leon. The Real Situation in Russia. Translated by Max Eastman. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928.
Kinds of Love: Poems by Max Eastman. New York: Scribner’s, 1931.
The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science. New York: Scribner’s, 1931.
Capital, The Communist Manifesto, and Other Writings by Karl Marx. Edited, with an introduction, by Max Eastman. New York: Modern Library, 1932.
Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932 (vol. 1); 1933 (vols. 2 and 3). Later published by the University of Michigan Press in one volume (1935).
Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism. New York: Knopf, 1934.
Art and the Life of Action with Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1934.
The Last Stand of Dialectic Materialism: A Study of Sidney Hook’s Marxism. New York: Polemic Publishers, 1934.
Max Eastman Page 48