Karl Marx

by Francis Wheen

  That other incriminating letter, from Nechayev to the hapless Lyubavin, had the desired effect when Marx showed it to delegates at the Hague. On the last day of the congress, by a majority of twenty-seven votes to seven, they agreed that Bakunin should be expelled from the association.

  The International went into rapid decline after the relocation to New York and formally dissolved itself in 1876. Michael Bakunin died in the same year. Nechayev, his beloved Boy, was deported from Switzerland to Russia in the autumn of 1872, convicted of murder and sent to the St Peter and Paul Fortress – where, after ten years of solitary confinement in a damp dungeon, he died at the age of thirty-five. Marx outlived them all.

  12

  The Shaven Porcupine

  Paradox, irony and contradiction, the animating spirits of Marx’s work, were also the impish trinity that shaped his own life. He would, one guesses, have applauded Ralph Waldo Emerson’s defiant creed: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.’

  It is no surprise, then, that a man who was perpetually skint throughout his working career should find financial security only when he abandoned the struggle to earn a living. In the summer of 1870 Engels sold his partnership in the family business to one of the Ermen brothers, and with the proceeds he was able to guarantee his improvident friend a pension of £350 a year. ‘I am quite knocked down by your too great kindness,’ Marx gasped. For two decades Engels had been the breadwinner for an extended tribe of dependants – the Burns sisters, the Marx family, Helene Demuth – while also writing and campaigning energetically for his political cause. He had never once complained. As Jenny Marx said, ‘He is always healthy, vigorous, cheerful and in good spirits, and he thoroughly relishes his beer (especially when it’s the Viennese variety)’. Accompanied by Lizzy Burns and her simple-minded niece Mary Ellen (‘Pumps’) – yet another waif for whom he had assumed responsibility – Engels moved down to London, taking a lease on a handsome town house at 122 Regent’s Park Road.

  Not all the ironies of destiny were so benign. The years of strife in the International had left Marx with a violent allergy to French socialists, which he had hoped to cure by resigning from the General Council; now fate inflicted two of these chafing irritants on him as sons-in-law. On 2 October 1872, a couple of weeks after the Hague congress, Jennychen married Charles Longuet in a civil ceremony at St Pancras register office.

  The bride’s mother, who did not always share Karl’s more extreme prejudices, certainly endorsed this one. Almost everything about the French set her teeth on edge – their hauteur, their élan, their savoir faire, their idées fixes, their grandes passions and quite probably a certain je ne sais quoi as well. ‘Longuet is a very gifted man,’ she wrote to Liebknecht when the engagement was announced, ‘and he is good, honest and decent … On the other hand I cannot contemplate their union without great uneasiness and would really have preferred if Jenny’s choice had fallen (for a change) on an Englishman or German, instead of a Frenchman, who of course possesses all the charming qualities of his nation, but is not free of their foibles and inadequacies.’

  Sure enough, Longuet proved to be a sullen, selfish and hectoring brute who condemned his wife to a treadmill of ceaseless housework. ‘Though I drudge like a nigger,’ she told her sister Eleanor, ‘he never does anything but scream at me and grumble every minute he is in the house.’ For Karl Marx, the only consolations of this miserable marriage were the arrival of grandchildren – five boys, of whom one died young – and the fact that Longuet had a regular income as a lecturer at London University which kept Jennychen fed and housed. (Two years before the wedding, when the Marx family finances plummeted to a hellish new nadir, she had been reduced to seeking work as a governess.)

  Laura’s husband, by contrast, seemed a hopeless case. Paul Lafargue renounced his medical ambitions because the deaths of their three children had shattered his faith in doctors; he embarked instead on a career in business, buying the patent rights to a ‘new process’ for photo-engraving. This implausible enterprise was hobbled from the start by constant quarrels with his partner, the Communard refugee Benjamin Constant Le Moussu, and to save the family’s honour Marx felt obliged to buy out Lafargue’s stake (financed, one need hardly add, by good old Engels). Marx himself then fell out with Le Moussu over the ownership of the patent. Rather than suffer the embarrassment and expense of going to court, they submitted the dispute to private arbitration by a left-wing barrister, Frederic Harrison. In his memoirs he recalled:

  Before they gave evidence I required them in due form to be sworn on the Bible, as the law then required for legal testimony. This filled both of them with horror. Karl Marx protested that he would never so degrade himself. Le Moussu said that no man should ever accuse him of such an act of meanness. For half an hour they argued and protested, each refusing to be sworn first in the presence of the other. At last I obtained a compromise, that the witnesses should simultaneously ‘touch the book’, without uttering a word. Both seemed to me to shrink from the pollution of handling the sacred volume, much as Mephistopheles in the Opera shrinks from the Cross. When they got to argue the case, the ingenious Le Moussu won, for Karl Marx floundered about in utter confusion.

  The débâcle fortified Marx’s conviction that, beneath their ‘French fiddlededeee’, Parisian socialists were all liars and rascals. Le Moussu immediately joined his private bestiary of scallywags, damned as an embezzler ‘who cheated me and others out of significant sums of money and who then resorted to infamous slanders in order to whitewash his character and present himself as an innocent whose beautiful soul has gone unappreciated’. But Marx’s wrath was soon redirected against Paul Lafargue, the incompetent oaf who had got him into this mess. Quite apart from their personal ‘foibles and indequacies’, both Lafargue and Longuet were political flibbertigibbets who refused to heed the countless sermons and tutorials from their exasperated father-in-law. ‘Longuet as the last Proudhonist and Lafargue as the last Bakuninist!’ he complained to Engels. ‘May the devil take them!’

  To lose two daughters to Frenchmen might be regarded as a misfortune; to lose a third would be unthinkably careless. So one can imagine the horrified reaction when Eleanor fell in love with the dashing Hippolyte Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, who at thirty-four was exactly twice her age. It was Lissagaray’s misfortune to arrive at Modena Villas when the Gallic wars against Lafargue and Longuet had already begun; in other circumstances he might have seemed quite acceptable. ‘With one exception, all the books on the Commune that have hitherto appeared are mere trash. That one exception to the general rule is Lissagaray’s work,’ Jennychen told the Kugelmanns in 1871, apparently echoing her father’s opinion. When Lissagaray published a fuller History of the Commune a few years later, Marx even helped Eleanor to prepare an English translation. Nevertheless, the man was indubitably French: his pomaded quiff, supercilious smirk and careless flamboyance all seemed to betoken a fickle individualist, and the onus was on Lissagaray to show that he could become a responsible husband. ‘I asked nothing of him,’ Marx wrote to Engels, ‘but that he should provide proof instead of words that he was better than his reputation and that there was some good reason to rely on him … The damned nuisance is that I must be very circumspect and indulgent because of the child.’

  Not so: for long periods he forbade ‘Tussy’ to see ‘Lissa’ at all, while the more truly circumspect and indulgent Jenny Marx connived at their secret assignations. But these snatched meetings merely aggravated the pain of separation. In May 1873 Eleanor took a teaching post at a ladies’ seminary in Brighton, hoping to escape from Marx’s baleful glare (and perhaps her financial dependence); by September she was back home in a state of nervous collapse. If forced to choose between her father and her lover she could not defy the gravitational pull of filial devotion – but why should such a choice be imposed? A letter she left on his desk a few mon
ths later revealed both her agony and her undiminished obedience:

  My dearest Moor,

  I am going to ask you something, but first I want you to promise me that you will not be very angry. I want to know, dear Moor, when I may see L. again. It is so very hard never to see him. I have been doing my best to be patient, but it is so difficult and I don’t feel as if I could be much longer. I do not expect you to say that he can come here. I should not even wish it, but could I not, now and then, go for a little walk with him? …

  When I was so very ill at Brighton (during a time when I fainted two or three times a day), L. came to see me, and each time left me stronger and happier; and more able to bear the rather heavy load left on my shoulders. [Marx was entirely unaware of these visits.] It is so long since I saw him and I am beginning to feel so very miserable notwithstanding all my efforts to keep up, for I have tried hard to be merry and cheerful. I cannot much longer …

  At any rate, dearest Moor, if I may not see him now, could you not say when I may. It would be something to look forward to, and if the time were not so indefinite it would be less wearisome to wait.

  My dearest Moor, please don’t be angry with me for writing this, but forgive me for being selfish enough to worry you again.

  Your

  Tussy

  Marx refused to yield.

  Eleanor tried to divert herself by keeping busy, just as her father always had. She enrolled for acting classes with a Mrs Vezin, in the hope of realising childhood fantasies of a stage career; she joined the New Shakespeare Society and the Browning Society, two of the many groups founded by the socialist teacher Frederick James Furnivall; like Marx before her, she discovered the warm sanctuary of the British Museum, where she undertook freelance research and translations for Furnivall. (It was while working in the reading room that she met a young Irishman named George Bernard Shaw, newly arrived in England, who became a firm friend.) Years later, after giving a recitation at the annual meeting of the Browning Society in June 1882, she wrote excitedly to Jennychen,

  The place was crowded – and as all sorts of ‘literary’ and other ‘swells’ were there I felt ridiculously nervous but went on capitally. Mrs Sutherland Orr (the sister of Frederick Leighton, the president of the Royal Academy) wants to take me to see Browning and recite his own poems to him! I have been asked to go this afternoon to a ‘crush’ at Lady Wilde’s. She is the mother of that very limp and nasty young man, Oscar Wilde, who has been making such a d—d ass of himself in America. As the son has not yet returned and the mother is nice I may go … What a fine thing enthusiasm is!

  The exclamation marks, like the name-dropping awe with which she mentions the ‘swells’, are worthy of Charles Pooter himself.

  Though enthusiasm brought some joy and consolation it could not entirely distract her from the Lissagaray impasse. What most grieved Eleanor was that Jenny, who never understood her, should be so sweetly sympathetic while the beloved Moor seemed oblivious to her sacrifice – even though ‘our natures were so exactly alike’. As many visitors remarked, there was a startling physical resemblance too: a broad, low forehead above dark bright eyes and a prominent nose. Draw a beard on Eleanor’s photograph and you have the very image of the young Karl Marx. ‘I unfortunately only inherited my father’s nose,’ she joked, ‘and not his genius.’ When comparing his daughters Marx would acknowledge that ‘Jenny is most like me, but Tussy is me’. Following his example, she sought to calm her nerves with chain-smoking, a habit common enough among literary gents but rare and shocking for a well-educated Victorian girl still in her teens.

  Even their ailments achieved a gruesome synchronicity. Tussy’s depression manifested itself in headaches, insomnia, biliousness and almost all the other symptoms (except carbuncles) which Marx knew so well. ‘What neither Papa nor the doctors nor anyone will understand,’ she complained, ‘is that it is chiefly mental worry that affects me’ – a strange lapse for the man who had himself once admitted that ‘my sickness always originates in the mind’. For much of the 1870s this pair of wheezing semi-invalids traipsed around the spas of Europe in search of a cure, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were making each other ill. In August 1873, when Tussy was having her fainting fits in Brighton, Marx wrote to a comrade in St Petersburg, ‘I have since months suffered severely, and found myself, for some time, even in a dangerous state of illness, consequent upon overwork. My head was so seriously affected that a paralytic strike was to be apprehended …’ Two weeks later, while drinking a spoonful of raspberry vinegar in the belief that it might do him good, he had a terrible choking fit: ‘My face went quite black, etc. Another second or so and I would have departed this life.’ After Tussy’s return to London he began to brood on ‘the serious possibility of my succumbing to apoplexy’. At first his doctor thought he might have had a stroke, but the diagnosis was then revised to nervous exhaustion. On 24 November, much to Jenny Marx’s relief, father and daughter left London to take the waters at Harrogate.

  Both of them enjoyed their three weeks of rest and mineral baths, though Marx did his tortured brain no favours by reading Saint-Beuve, an author he had always disliked. ‘If the man has become so famous in France,’ he wrote to Engels, ‘it must be because he is in every respect the most classical incarnation of French vanité … strutting about in a romantic disguise and newly minted idioms.’ Hardly the ideal book to take his mind off that other strutting Frenchman for whom his daughter was pining. But he seemed cheerful enough, even when his return to Modena Villas for Christmas was accompanied by an outbreak of carbuncles and a spate of newspaper gossip about his health. ‘I myself allow the English papers to announce my death from time to time, without showing any sign of life,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a farthing for the public, and, if my occasional illness is exaggerated, it at least has the advantage that it spares me all sorts of requests (theoretical and otherwise) from unknown people in every corner of the earth.’

  On the way back from Harrogate he had spent a day in Manchester being examined by Engels’s friend Dr Eduard Gumpert, who found ‘a certain elongation of the liver’ for which the only known cure was a trip to the fashionable Bohemian spa-town of Carlsbad. Since this entailed travelling through Germany, where he would probably be arrested as a subversive, Marx thought it impossible. But then an idea struck him: an émigré who had lived in England for more than a year was entitled to British citizenship and, therefore, the full protection of Her Britannic Majesty against foreign border-guards. After submitting an application to the Home Office, together with affidavits from four Hampstead neighbours testifying to his ‘good character’, he and Eleanor set off for Germany on 15 August 1874 in the belief that the certificate of naturalisation would be forwarded within a few days. On 26 August, however, the Home Secretary wrote to inform Marx’s solicitor that his application had been turned down. No reason was given; but a confidential letter sent from Scotland Yard to the Home Office on 17 August, now to be found in the Public Record Office, reveals all:

  Carl Marx – Naturalisation

  With reference to the above I beg to report that he is the notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society, and the advocate of Communistic principles. He has not been loyal to his own King and Country.

  The referees Messrs ‘Seton’, ‘Matheson’, ‘Manning’ and ‘Adcock’ are all British born subjects, and respectable householders. The statements made by them with reference to the time they have known the applicant are correct.

  W. Reimers, Sergeant

  F. Williamson, Supt.

  As it happened, Marx reached Carlsbad without requiring the assistance of Queen Victoria and her plenipotentiaries – possibly because he was accompanied by Eleanor, a British subject from birth. But he remained wary, registering at the Hotel Germania as ‘Mr Charles Marx, private gentleman’ in the hope that no one would guess his identity. Although the local police saw through this disguise at once, after a month of continuous surveillance they were
forced to admit that he gave ‘cause for no suspicion’ – hardly surprising, since his health regime left no time for fomenting revolution among the palsied inmates and their physicians. ‘We are both living in strict accordance with the rules,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘We go to our respective springs at six every morning, where I have to drink seven glasses. Between each two glasses there has to be a break of fifteen minutes during which one marches up and down. After the last glass, an hour’s walk and, finally, coffee. Another cold glass in the evenings before bed.’ In the afternoons they explored the wooded granite foothills of the Schlossberg, where other patients were scandalised by the sight of Eleanor puffing away incessantly at her cigarettes.

  All those mineral-water sluicings may have done wonders for Marx’s liver but they gave him a foul temper – not helped by the arrival of Ludwig and Gertrud Kugelmann, who installed themselves in an adjoining room. Of late he had been increasingly irritated by the doltishness and indiscretion of this self-appointed disciple; now, through the thin hotel walls, he was kept awake by the din of Herr Kugelmann berating his wife. ‘My patience came to an end finally when he inflicted his family scenes on me,’ Marx reported. ‘The fact is that this arch-pedant, this pettifogging bourgeois philistine has got the idea that his wife is unable to understand him, to comprehend his Faustian nature with its aspirations to a higher world outlook, and he torments the woman, who is his superior in every respect, in the most repulsive manner.’ He moved to a bedroom on a higher floor and never spoke to Dr Kugelmann again.