Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  136. “Talk with Freud,” EMII.

  137. Heroes, 266.

  138. Heroes, 270. In 1930 Freud and the American diplomat William C. Bullitt would collaborate on an analysis of Woodrow Wilson, arguing that the man who wanted to make the world “safe for democracy” was controlled by a paralyzing fixation on his father and Jesus Christ (Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966]). The extent of Freud’s influence on the final version of the text is unclear.

  139. Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1916).

  140. “Talk with Freud,” EMII.

  141. Heroes, 273. Not everyone agreed that Max had in fact figured Freud out. Thanking him for a copy of Heroes I Have Known, Freud’s sister Anna Freud Bernays added that the book should have been called Heroes I Have Met, for “as far as my brother is concerned . . . you never knew him”; Anna Bernays to ME, April 5, 1942, EMII (my emphasis).

  Chapter 7. The Thinking Singer

  1. EE, “My first introduction to this country,” EEM.

  2. “Eliena’s Memories of our Homecoming,” EEM. Dates in this chapter rely on Max’s “Chronology in Europe, 1924–1927,” EEM.

  3. JF to DA, September 20, September 21, 1958, DAP.

  4. JF to DA, September 26, 1960, DAP.

  5. Pushkin, “Message to Siberia” (translated by ME), New Masses 1.5 (1926): 9. Babel, “Crossing the Zbruch” (translated by ME), New Masses 2.1 (November 1926): 14; Babel, “After the Battle” (translated by ME), New Masses 2.4 (February 1927): 14.

  6. “Sacco and Vanzetti: Anarchists and the Revolutionary Science,” New Masses 3 (October 1927): 4–7.

  7. “Karl Marx Anticipated Freud,” New Masses 3.3 (July 1927): 10–11; “Lenin Was an Engineer,” New Masses 3.7 (November 1927): 14.

  8. ME to New Masses, January 27, 1928, cc, EMII.

  9. Aaron, Writers on the Left, 317.

  10. JF to DA, September 25, 1960, DAP.

  11. “Karl Marx Anticipated Freud”; Hook, “Marx and Freud: Oil and Water,” Open Court 41 (January 1928): 10–25.

  12. Hook to ME, August 4, 1927, EMII.

  13. Hook, “The Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism, Parts I and II,” Review of Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empiro-Criticism, Journal of Philosophy 25 (March 1, 1928): 413–26, and 25 (March 15, 1928): 141–55. For Max’s reply, see Journal of Philosophy 25 (August 16, 1928): 475–76.

  14. Hook, “Marxism, Metaphysics, and Modern Science,” Modern Quarterly 4.4 (May 1928): 388–94.

  15. “As to Sidney Hook’s Morals,” Modern Quarterly 5 (November 1928–February 1929): 85–87.

  16. Hook, “As to Max Eastman’s Mentality,” Modern Quarterly 5 (November 1928–February 1929): 88–91.

  17. ME, annotated pages 363, 354, 356, 327 from Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Approach (New York: John Day, 1933), EMII.

  18. “An Interpretation of Marx: Sidney Hook’s Day-Dream of What Marx Might Have Said Had He Been a Pupil of John Dewey,” Herald Tribune, Books, Sunday, April 16, 1933.

  19. LR, 499.

  20. Venture, 398.

  21. ME to Albert and Charles Boni, February 21, 1928 (“not sent”), EMII.

  22. “Venture, by Max Eastman,” New York Times, December 11, 1927.

  23. F. Scott Fitzgerald to ME, 1928 [?], EM.

  24. Sinclair Lewis to ME, January 2, 1928, EM.

  25. Review of Venture, Paterson Call, January 7, 1928.

  26. Venture, 67, 86, 61, 81.

  27. G. Peter Winnington, Walter Fuller: The Man Who Had Ideas ([Mauborget, Switzerland]: Letterworth Press, 2014), 334.

  28. CE to ME, 1928 [?], CEP.

  29. ME to FN, June 25, 1957, NMII.

  30. ME to EE, September 21, September 22, 1929, EEM.

  31. CE to Cynthia Fuller Dehn, December 31, 1924, quoted in Winnington, Fuller, 369.

  32. Annis Young to ME, January 5, 1965, EMIIA1.

  33. EL, 57.

  34. ME to EE, February 6, 1930, EEM.

  35. EL, 508; ME to EE, February 11, 1930, EEM.

  36. See Max’s publicity flyers in EMII.

  37. ME to EE, February [?], 1930, EEM.

  38. ME to EE, February 11, 1930, EEM.

  39. ME to EE, February 24, 1930, EEM.

  40. ME to EE, February 29, 1931, EEM.

  41. EE to ME, December 31, 1928, January 1, 1929, EEM.

  42. EE to ME, February 13, 1930, EEM. Eliena was naturalized on January 19, 1931; certificate in EMII.

  43. Charmion von Wiegand, “Arrows of the Sun,” EMII.

  44. See LR, 552, and “Chronology [1927–31],” EMII.

  45. Ione Robinson, A Wall to Paint On (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), 34.

  46. ME to EE, September 20, 1929, EEM.

  47. Robinson, Wall, 33–34.

  48. See Robinson, Wall, 37; Ione Robinson to ME, August 22, 1928, EM.

  49. Ione Robinson to ME, February 5, 1929, EM.

  50. Ione Robinson to ME, February 5, 1953, EM.

  51. ME to EE, June 18, 1930, EEM.

  52. EE to ME, February 8, 1929, EEM.

  53. “Eliena Krylenko Dies at Hilltop Home at Gay Head,” Vineyard Gazette, October 12, 1956.

  54. See ME to EE, January 27, 1934, EEM.

  55. Leon Trotsky to ME (in Russian), March 11, 1931, TM.

  56. LR, 554. Boni had received $45,000 from the Post (ME to Trotsky, March [?], 1933, TM). See also Trotsky to ME, May 7, 1931, TM. Max was paid $1,928 for translating volume 1 of History; Simon and Schuster paid half that sum to Boni and covered Max’s taxes. See ME, “Chronology,” EMII, as well as Albert Boni to Simon & Schuster, Inc., November 11, 1931, cc, EMII.

  57. ME to Herbert [Solow], May 18, 1931, cc, EMII.

  58. See Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, trans. ME (1932, 1933; rpt. New York: Pathfinder, 1980), 248, and Trotsky to ME, March 22 (to ME and EE), 1932, TM. Max did suggest “polite letters” as an alternative; ME to Trotsky, April 15, 1932, cc, TM.

  59. Trotsky to ME, May 2, 1932, TM. See Trotsky, History, 248, 739.

  60. Possibly the Ukrainian-born Trotsky used the occasion to establish, playfully, his own complex connectedness to a country and culture Eliena had left behind years before him. Communication from Anna Arays, May 31, 2015.

  61. January 25, 1932, EEM. The second volume of History was due at the publisher January 15, 1932; Leon Shimkin to ME, November 17, 1931, EMII. In 1930 Eliena had helped Scribner’s with the translation of another Trotsky book, perhaps his autobiography; see EE to ME, February 1930, EEM.

  62. Trotsky, History, 498.

  63. EE to ME, February 8, 1929, EEM.

  64. Kinds of Love, 49; explanatory note in Poems of Five Decades, 101–2.

  65. Kinds of Love, 4.

  66. Kinds of Love, 19, 21, 23.

  67. Genevieve Taggard, “Soft-Phrased Webs of Verse,” Herald Tribune, May 3, 1931.

  68. Literary Mind, 157.

  69. Literary Mind, 59–62.

  70. Literary Mind, 212–13, 194, 288.

  71. Clive Bell to ME, August 25, 1932, EM.

  72. Michael March, “Page after Page,” Brooklyn Citizen, November 28, 1931.

  73. LR, 547.

  74. “Introduction,” in Marx, Capital, ed. ME, ix, x, xv.

  75. Marx, Capital, 366.

  76. Hook, review of Capital and Other Writings, edited by Max Eastman, Modern Quarterly 7 (May 1933): 248–50.

  77. Alfred Kazin’s America, ed. Ted Soltaroff (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 46.

  78. According to O’Neill, “Polemic Publishers” was Max’s own jocular creation (The Last Romantic, 145). But the series was in fact sponsored by S. L. Solon of the Modern Quarterly; see Gary Roth, Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 146.

  79. The Last Stand of Dialectic Materialism: A Study of Sidney Hook’s Marxism (New York: Polemic Publishers, 1934), 9, 16, 20, 42, 44, 46, 47. For
more on the Eastman–Hook controversy, see Christopher Phelps, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 38–44, 96–100.

  80. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940 (London: Verso, 1963), 11.

  81. Max reworked his notes from the visit for the chapter “Problems of Friendship with Trotsky,” in Great Companions, 151–69.

  82. Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933–35: Writings on Lenin, Dialectics, and Evolutionism, ed. Philip Pomper (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 112–13.

  83. “Two Impressions after Living Three Days in Trotsky’s House,” July 10, 1932, TM.

  84. Deutscher, Prophet Outcast, 21. Trotsky biographies (including Deutscher’s) assert that Trotsky had received $45,000 from the Post, forgetting that Boni had already claimed half of the fee.

  85. See ME to Trotsky, July 3, 1933, cc, TM.

  86. ME to Alfred Rosmer, November 25, 1940, cc, TM.

  87. LR, 570.

  88. Trotsky to ME, March 15, 1933, TM. See Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 3: The Triumph of the Soviets (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932), 181, and Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 3 vols. in 1, 3: 181.

  89. Artists, 17o, 129.

  90. Artists, 24, 251.

  91. Artists, 55, 59.

  92. Artists, 63, 64, 68, 71.

  93. Artists, 124.

  94. Boris Pilnyak, “Max Eastman: The Man under the Table. In Reference to Myself,” Partisan Review 1.3 (1934): 17–21.

  95. Rosa Mora, “The History of Hell,” The Independent, January 8, 1995.

  96. See “Lackey without a Uniform: Appraisal of Max Eastman by Famous Russian Critic,” Daily Worker, August 25, 1934.

  97. Babette Deutsch, “Dictatorship and the Artist: Max Eastman Attacks the Soviet Bureaucracy for Its Effort to Keep Literature in Communist Channels,” Herald Tribune, June 3, 1934.

  98. JF to DA, July 3, 1958, DAP. Since Trachtenberg was still alive then, Freeman used a pseudonym (Peter Leonov).

  99. JF to DA, April 7, 1960, DAP.

  100. JF to Josephine Herbst, June 13, 1960, copy, DAP.

  101. JF to DA, September 25, 1960, DAP.

  102. EE to ME, “Oh my darling, my beloved” [1930], EEM.

  103. EE to ME, January 25, 1932, EEM.

  104. ME to EE, [1930?], EEM.

  105. ME to EE, June 24, 1930, EEM.

  106. ME to EE, “Darling, It is four o’clock,” n.d.; Eliena answered, “Too bad you dreamt about T. S. Elliot [sic]. Next time give him po zadnitze,” i.e., “a slap on the ass” (January 25, 1932, EEM).

  107. Contract between W. Colston Leigh and the Norfolk Forum, February 27, 1934, EMII. Max met Florence Norton, his future secretary and lover, at this event, an experience that “overwhelmed” her (note by Norton on envelope).

  108. ME to EE, February 13, 1932, EEM.

  109. ME to EE, January 27, 1932, EEM.

  110. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1917), trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 155–56.

  111. ME to EE, January 13, 1933, EEM; EE to ME, January 30, 1932, EEM.

  112. ME to EE, February 2, 1932, EMII.

  113. “In a way it is highly improper,” 1932, EMII.

  114. Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America from 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1978), 200–201.

  115. ME to EE, January 24, 1934, EMII.

  116. Ruth LeSourd ’39, “The Lecturer,” Chronicle (Wells College) (December 1937): 50–51.

  117. ME to EE, February 2, 1932, EM.

  118. Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, April 16, 1932; Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Random, 2007), 251.

  119. Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2997), 252. Hurston did win a Guggenheim for 1935 / 1936 and used it to study folklife in the West Indies. As late as 1955 Hurston would write to Max for advice regarding her projected biography of Herod the Great (Hurston to ME, August 2, 1955, EM).

  120. McKay to ME, December 1, 1931, MM.

  121. McKay to ME, April 21, 1933, MM.

  122. McKay to ME, September 7, 1933, MM.

  123. McKay to ME, October 5, 1933, MM.

  124. McKay to ME, October 20, October 30, 1933, MM.

  125. Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 300–301.

  126. McKay to ME, undated, MM. Max kept Burke’s nude photos; see the collection of photographs in EMIIA1.

  127. Tillery, McKay, 162.

  128. “New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Second Department, Max Eastman, Plaintiff Against Herman Axelbank, Defendant-Appellant, and Samuel A. Malitz, Defendant,” November 1935, 10, EMII.

  129. “My Dealings with Axelbank,” EMII.

  130. Enjoyment of Laughter, 163, 248, 31.

  131. George Santayana to ME, November 20, 1936, EM.

  132. Freud to ME, November 14, 1936, EM. My translation.

  133. Walter Jerrold, ed., Bon-mots of Sydney Smith and R. Brinsley Sheridan (London: Dent, 1893), 191.

  134. Freud to ME, November 14, 1936; ME to Freud, December 27, 1936, cc, EM.

  135. Great Companions, 50, 46.

  136. “Bull in the Afternoon,” Artists, 91–92, 98, 95.

  137. ME to Archibald MacLeish, July 3, 1933, cc, EM.

  138. Archibald MacLeish to New Republic, copy, June 7, 1933; Hemingway to New Republic, copy, June 12, 1933, EM.

  139. ME to Ernest Hemingway, June 15, 1933, cc, EM.

  140. Ernest Sutherland Bates, “A Magician with Language: Max Eastman’s Essays Are Brilliant and Zestful, Though His Theories Are Open to Debate,” Herald Tribune Books, December 16, 1934.

  141. Floyd Dell to ME, [1935?], EMII.

  142. Maxwell Perkins to F. Scott Fitzgerald, May 24, 1937, copy provided to Max by Fitzgerald’s biographer, Andrew Turnbull, August 24, 1937, EMII.

  143. “Pair of Authors Go to Mat Over Hair on Chest,” Herald Tribune, August 14, 1937.

  144. “Hemingway Slaps Eastman in Face,” New York Times, August 14, 1937.

  145. Great Companions, 68.

  146. “Pair of Authors.” Hemingway was in fact thirty-eight.

  147. Michael Gilmore, “Book Annotations Document Scuffle between Ernest Hemingway and Max Eastman,” Cultural Compass, August 22, 2013. http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/culturalcompass/2013/08/22/hemingway-eastman-feud/.

  148. Telegram to ME, August 14, 1937, EM.

  149. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugen Boissevain to ME, August 18, 1937, EM.

  150. “Alain” (Daniel Brustlein), “Writer?” New Yorker, September 4, 1937.

  151. Ernest Hemingway to John Dos Passos, April 12, 1936, Hemingway, Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner, 1981), 445.

  152. LR, 592. The photograph also appears in Waldo Peirce’s scrapbook of the 1928 Key West Visit at Colby College, Maine. The same scrapbook contains a photograph of Peirce in a similar pose wearing a fig leaf, an indication that these images were part of some joke. Information provided by Erin Rhodes, Special Collections, Colby College.

  153. EE to Nikolai Bulganin (Prime Minister of the U.S.S.R.), September 3, 1956, copy, EEM.

  154. ME to DeWitt Wallace, May 26, 1941, EM.

  155. Eleanor Roosevelt, “Why I Still Believe in the Youth Congress,” Liberty 17 (April 1940): 30–32.

  156. “Stalin’s American Power,” American Mercury 53, no. 216 (December 1941): 671–80.

  157. See the folders titled “Stalin’s American Power” in EMII.

  158. “Max Eastman Sues the Daily Worker,” Socialist Appeal, May 14, 1938; “Leftist Libel,” Time, May 23, 1938; LR, 627.

  159. ME to Douglas Coulter, CBS, June 24, 1938, cc, EMII.

  160. “New Word Game,” Free Lance-Star, April 27, 1938.

  161
. “Word Game,” June 1, 1938, EMII.

  162. “Word Game,” May 18, 1938, EMII.

  163. “Word Game,” September 27, 1937, EMII.

  164. “Word Game,” April 27, 1938, EMII.

  165. “Word Game,” May 11, 1938, EMII.

  166. “Word Game,” May 18, 1938, EMII.

  167. “Word Game,” May 28, 1938, EMII.

  168. “Word Game,” June 8, 1938, EMII.

  169. “You’re as Young as You Think,” Radio Guide 7.38 (July 9, 1938): 19.

  170. Participants’ occupations: “Notes and Records of ‘AdLibbing,’” EMII.

  171. Earle McGill, Radio Directing (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1940), 203–14.

  172. [?] to ME, “Saturday, 1938,” EM. Max responded in his show on July 6, 1938, claiming he was “too modest” to quote the letter. He then pointed out that “glamour” and “grammar” had the same origin and were once used to designate the same thing—a “magic spell or enchantment that was supposed to be exercised by speaking words in a certain order” (“Word Game,” July 6, 1938, EMII).

  Chapter 8. A Test Case for the Kinsey Male

  1. LR, 620.

  2. Edna Wilson (West Palm Beach, Florida) to Columbia Broadcasting System, October 9, 1938; Marion K. Chadwick (Detroit, Michigan) to ME, October 6, 1938, EMII.

  3. Rachel Edgard (Bayonne, NJ) to Station WJZ, September 22, 1935, EMII.

  4. AE to ME, 1931 [?], AEM (“I smoke a hell of a lot”). Anstice describes symptoms of a stroke to ME, January 10, 1935, as does his wife, Lois to ME, October 3, 1935, AEM.

  5. Michigan Alumnus 44, no. 14 (February 12, 1938): 262.

  6. Canandaigua Cemetery Association to Lois Eastman, October 14, 1943, AEM.

  7. “What will trouble me most,” July 2, 1954, EMII; Kinds of Love, 33. Pushkin’s “Don Juan” lists were published by P. K. Gruber in 1923.

  8. Scudder Middleton, “Romance,” from “A Group of Poems,” Yale Review 8 (1919): 610.

  9. “I haven’t a flicker,” EMIIA1; EE to ME, January 30, 1932, EEM.

  10. ME to EE, February 13, 1932, EEM.

  11. Lillian [?] to ME, September 4, 1937, EM.

  12. In folder marked “Funny,” EM.

  13. “Afflicted with a desire,” note in folder “My Character,” EM.