Engels said that Marx himself was now effectively dead – a harsh observation which nevertheless had a horrible truth. During Jenny’s last days, exhausted by sleeplessness and lack of exercise, he contracted the illness that eventually snatched him away. Though his German editor chose this inopportune moment to request a new edition of Capital, work was out of the question. On doctor’s advice he tried the ‘warm climate and dry air’ of the Isle of Wight for two weeks, accompanied by Eleanor – only to suffer gales, rain and sub-zero temperatures. The bronchial catarrh actually worsened, thanks to ‘the caprices of the weather’, and a local doctor had to give him a respirator to wear while out walking on the front at Ventnor.
Eleanor, still not eating or sleeping properly, veered between morose silence and outbursts of ‘an alarmingly hysterical nature’. Her yearning for a career on the stage had now become an almost physical need: until this hunger could be satisfied she would not feed her other appetites either. The day of their return from Ventnor, 16 January 1882, coincided with Eleanor’s twenty-seventh birthday, a painful reminder that her best years were being sacrificed on the altar of family duty. Marx knew that he had to set her free. ‘As for future plans,’ he wrote to Engels on 12 January, ‘the first consideration must be to relieve Tussy of her role as my companion … The girl is under such mental pressure that it is undermining her health. Neither travelling, nor change of climate, nor physicians can do anything in this case.’
For Marx himself, however, a change of climate was urgently necessary: there could be no remission from his catarrh – ‘this accursed English disease’ – without fleeing the accursed English winter that had exacerbated it. Since Italy was barred to him (a man had recently been arrested in Milan merely for having the name Marx) he decided to leave Europe for the first time in his life, sailing to Algeria on 18 February.
Thus began a year of ceaseless wandering: three months in Algiers, a month in Monte Carlo, three months with the Longuets at Argenteuil, a month in the Swiss resort of Vevey. With comical consistency, his arrival in each of these places precipitated torrential rain and thunderstorms, even if the sun had been blazing for weeks beforehand. He returned to London in October but the damp and cold immediately forced him away to Ventnor again, where he remained until January 1883. In the 1840s he had been buffeted around the capitals of Europe by the gusts of revolution and reaction; now he became a nomad once more, driven only by a prickle in his bronchial tubes. History was repeating itself, this time as a rather tedious farce. In Algiers he seldom bothered to read the newspapers, preferring to visit the botanical gardens, chat to fellow hotel guests or simply to gaze out to sea. What use were his materialism and dialectics now? In a letter to Laura he recounted a local Arab fable which seemed all too applicable to his own situation:
A ferryman is ready and waiting, with his small boat, on the tempestuous waters of a river. A philosopher, wishing to get to the other side, climbs aboard. There ensues the following dialogue:
PHILOSOPHER: Do you know anything of history, ferryman?
FERRYMAN: No!
PHILOSOPHER: Then you’ve wasted half your life! Have you
studied mathematics?
FERRYMAN: No!
PHILOSOPHER: Then you’ve wasted more than half your life.
Hardly were these words out of the philosopher’s mouth when the wind capsized the boat, precipitating both ferryman and philosopher into the water. Whereupon,
FERRYMAN shouts: Can you swim?
PHILOSOPHER: No!
FERRYMAN: Then you’ve wasted your whole life.
In outward appearance he was still a formidable figure: an Englishwoman who met Marx at about this time remembered him as ‘a big man in every way, with a very large head and hair rather like “shock-headed Peter’s” way of wearing his’. Or, perhaps, like Samson in John Milton’s poem, with ‘bristles rang’d like those that ridge the back/Of chaf’t wild Boars, or ruffl’d Porcupines’. But during the last years of his life, enfeebled by pleurisy and bronchitis, he could no longer summon the strength to smite the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Finally accepting that his power had vanished, he offered up his precious fleece to an Algerian barber. ‘I have done away with my prophet’s beard and my crowning glory,’ he wrote to Engels on 28 April 1882.
Eyeless in Gaza; hairless in Algiers. A bald, clean-shaven Karl Marx is almost impossible to imagine – and he made sure that posterity would never see him thus. Before the symbolic shearing he had himself photographed, hirsute and twinkle-eyed, to remind his daughters of the man they knew. It is the last picture we have: a genial Jupiter, an intellectual Father Christmas. As he joked, ‘I am still putting a good face on things.’ And so he was, at least to his family. The pleurisy was stubbornly resistant to treatment, and while he was in Monte Carlo a local specialist confirmed that the bronchitis was now chronic; but all this was kept from his daughters. ‘What I write and tell the children is the truth, but not the whole truth,’ he explained. ‘What’s the point of alarming them?’
Jennychen, meanwhile, was keeping a secret of her own from him: she had cancer of the bladder. Heavily pregnant and exhausted by looking after her four lively boys, she somehow managed to hide her agony while Marx was at Argenteuil in the summer of 1882 – helped, no doubt, by the arrival of Eleanor and Helene. Little Johnny Longuet had been running wild since moving to France (‘grown naughty out of boredom’, Marx deduced) and when Eleanor returned to London in mid-August she took the six-year-old tearaway with her, promising to supervise his education and discipline for the next few months. So much for her hopes of escaping the slavery of duty: from father’s nursemaid to nephew’s governess in less than a year. Yet in fact this new responsibility brought Eleanor great joy, and before long she thought of Johnny as ‘my boy’. His brothers Edgar and Harry went on holiday with their father to Calvados at the end of August, leaving Jennychen with only the infant Marcel. But she was still exhausted, and in constant pain. After giving birth to a baby girl (christened Jenny, known as Mémé) she finally confessed the truth about her bladder disease in a letter to Eleanor: ‘To no one in the world would I wish the tortures I have undergone now since eight months, they are indescribable and the nursing added thereto makes life a hell to me.’ She added a strict injunction that Moor must not be told. But a summer spent under the same roof had given plenty of clues that something was badly wrong. From his winter quarters on the Isle of Wight he sent out regular appeals for news of ‘poor Jennychen’ and her baby. ‘It distresses me,’ he told Eleanor in November. ‘I fear that this burden is more than she can bear.’
Marx himself could do nothing to ease the burden. For much of December he was confined to his lodgings at 1 St Boniface Gardens, Ventnor, with a traccheal catarrh – though at least the pleurisy and bronchitis were now in abeyance. (‘This, then, is most encouraging, considering that most of my contemporaries, I mean fellows of the same age, just now kick the bucket in gratifying numbers.’) On 5 January 1883 he learned from the Lafargues that Jennychen’s illness was now critical; the next morning he awoke with such a violent coughing fit that he thought he was suffocating. Were the two events by any chance related? He asked the local doctor, a friendly young Yorkshireman called James Williamson, if mental anguish could somehow ‘touch the movements of the mucus’.
Jenny Longuet died at five o’clock in the afternoon of 11 January, aged thirty-eight. Eleanor left for Ventnor as soon as she heard the news:
I have lived many a sad hour, but none so sad as that. I felt that I was bringing my father his death sentence. I racked my brain all the long anxious way to find how I could break the news to him. But I did not need to, my face gave me away. Moor said at once, ‘Our Jennychen is dead.’ Then he urged me to go to Paris at once and help with the children. I wanted to stay with him but he brooked no resistance. I had hardly been half an hour at Ventnor when I set out again on the sad journey back to London. From there I left for Paris. I was doing what Moor wanted me to do for the
sake of the children.
I shall not say anything more about my return home. I can only think with a shudder of that time, the anguish, the torment. But enough of that. I came back and Moor returned home, to die.
Before leaving Ventnor, Marx scribbled a note to Dr Williamson, explaining his hasty departure. ‘Please, dear Doctor, send your bill to 41 Maitland Park, London, NW. I regret that I had not the time of taking leave from you. Indeed I find some relief in a grim headache. Physical pain is the only “stunner” of mental pain.’ As far as we know, it was the last letter he ever wrote. Marx attached a photograph of himself as a memento, inscribed in a shaky hand ‘with the [sic] wishes for a happy new year’.
As Eleanor knew, her father had gone home to die. Racked by laryngitis, bronchitis, insomnia and night sweats, he was too weak even to read the Victorian novels which had often brought solace in such moments. He stared into space or occasionally browsed through publishers’ catalogues while warming his feet in a mustard-bath. Helene Demuth tried to revive his spirits by inventing exotic new dishes for supper, but Marx preferred a diet of his own devising – a daily pint of milk (which he had always detested previously) fortified with generous slugs of rum and brandy. By February he had an abscess in the lung and retreated to bed. Engels noted on 7 March that Marx’s health ‘is still not really making the progress it should. If it were two months from now, the warmth and air would do their work but as it is there’s a north-east wind, a storm almost, with flurries of snow, so how can a man expect to cure himself of a long-standing case of bronchitis!’ When Engels went to the house on Wednesday 14 March at about 2.30 p.m., his usual time for visiting, Lenchen came downstairs to tell him that Marx was ‘half-asleep’ in his favourite armchair next to the fire. By the time they entered the bedroom, only a minute or two later, he was dead. ‘Mankind is shorter by a head,’ Engels wrote to a comrade in America, ‘and by the most remarkable head of our time.’
Karl Marx was buried on 17 March 1883 in a remote corner of Highgate cemetery, in the plot where his wife had been laid fifteen months earlier. Only eleven mourners attended the funeral. In a graveside oration, Engels described him as a revolutionary genius who had become the most hated and calumniated man of his time, predicting that ‘his name and work will endure through the ages’. Socialist newspapers in France, Russia and America printed eulogies under similarly fulsome headlines – ‘The Workingmen’s Best Friend and Greatest Teacher’, ‘A Misfortune for Humanity’, ‘His Memory Will Live Long After Kings Are Forgotten’, ‘One of the Noblest Men to Walk the Earth’. But in the country where he had lived for more than half of his sixty-five years, his passing went almost unnoticed. ‘The death is announced of Dr Karl Marx, the German Socialist,’ the London Daily News reported. ‘He had lived to see the portions of his theories which once terrified Emperors and Chancellors die out … English working men would not care to be identified with these principles.’ The Times carried a single-paragraph obituary with an error in every sentence, claiming that he had been born in Cologne and emigrated to France at the age of twenty. Only the Pall Mall Gazette guessed that he might be remembered: ‘Capital, unfinished as it is, will beget a host of smaller books, and exercise a growing influence on men of all classes who think earnestly on social questions.’
What epitaph would he have chosen for himself? While holidaying at Ramsgate in the summer of 1880 Marx had met the American journalist John Swinton, who was writing a series on ‘travels in France and England’ for the New York Sun. Swinton watched the old patriarch playing on the beach with his grandchildren (‘not less finely than Victor Hugo does Karl Marx understand the art of being a grandfather’) and then, at dusk, was granted an interview. As he reported:
The talk was of the world, and of man, and of time, and of ideas, as our glasses tinkled over the sea. The railway train waits for no man, and night is at hand. Over the thought of the babblement and rack of the age and ages, over the talk of the day and the scenes of the evening, arose in my mind one question touching upon the final law of being, for which I would seek answer from this sage. Going down to the depths of language and rising to the height of emphasis, during an interspace of silence, I interrupted the revolutionist and philosopher in these fateful words: ‘What is?’
And it seemed as though his mind were inverted for a moment while he looked upon the roaring sea in front and the restless multitude upon the beach. ‘What is?’ I had inquired, to which in deep and solemn tone, he replied: ‘Struggle!’ At first it seemed as though I had heard the echo of despair; but peradventure it was the law of life.
POSTSCRIPT 1:
Consequences
Karl Marx died stateless and intestate. His estate was assessed at £250, largely based on the value of furniture and books in 41 Maitland Park Road. These, together with his vast collection of letters and notebooks, passed into Engels’s keeping – as did Helene Demuth, who was employed as the housekeeper at 122 Regent’s Park Road until her death from bowel cancer on 4 November 1890.
Engels devoted himself to collating the notes and manuscripts for Capital. Volume II was published (in Germany) in July 1885, Volume III in November 1894. The first official English translation (1887) sold badly, but a pirated English-language edition which appeared in New York three years later exhausted its print run of 5,000 copies almost at once – possibly because the publisher sent a circular to Wall Street bankers claiming that the book revealed ‘how to accumulate capital’. Engels died of cancer of the oesophagus on 5 August, 1895. About eighty people attended the funeral at Woking crematorium; Eleanor Marx and three friends then travelled to Eastbourne, took a rowing boat six miles out from Beachy Head and consigned his ashes to the sea.
After Engels’s death, the task of sorting and storing Marx’s papers fell to Eleanor Marx and her lover, Edward Aveling. Although astonishingly ugly and notoriously unreliable, Aveling was also a silver-tongued charmer who ‘needed but half an hour’s start of the handsomest man in London’ to seduce a woman. He and Eleanor lived together openly, but since most of their friends were actors, freethinkers and other bohemian types no one was unduly scandalised. What did shock many guests was how appallingly he treated her: the novelist Olive Schreiner described Aveling as a ‘ruffian’; William Morris thought him a ‘disreputable dog’. Eleanor discovered how right they were in March 1898, when she learned that he had secretly married a twenty-two-year-old actress the previous summer. Aveling’s solution to the crisis was to propose a suicide pact. Eleanor duly wrote a tender note of farewell and swallowed the prussic acid which he provided. Aveling, needless to say, never intended to keep his side of the bargain: as soon as she had taken the lethal dose he left the house. Though not charged with murder, he undoubtedly killed her.
Laura and Paul Lafargue lived outside Paris, mostly on the money they had sponged from Engels. In November 1911, when he was sixty-nine and she sixty-six, they decided that there was nothing left to live for and committed suicide together. The main speaker at their joint funeral was a representative of the Russian communists, one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who said that the ideas of Laura’s father would be triumphantly realised sooner than anyone guessed.
Four of Marx’s children predeceased him, and the two survivors both killed themselves. The only member of the family to escape the curse was Freddy Demuth, who lived and worked quietly in east London. He died of cardiac failure on 28 January 1929, aged seventy-seven. To the end, neither he nor anyone else suspected that Freddy might be a son of the man whose face and name were, by then, known throughout the world.
POSTSCRIPT 2:
Confessions
All three Marx daughters loved the Victorian parlour game ‘Confessions’ – nowadays often known as the Proust Questionnaire – and in the mid-1860s invited their father to submit himself to interrogation. Here are his answers:
Your favourite virtue:
Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man:
Strength
Your favou
rite virtue in woman:
Weakness
Your chief characteristic:
Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness:
To fight
Your idea of misery:
Submission
The vice you excuse most:
Gullibility
The vice you detest most:
Servility
Your aversion:
Martin Tupper
[popular Victorian author]
Favourite occupation:
Book-worming
Favourite poet:
Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer:
Diderot
Favourite hero:
Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine:
Gretchen
Favourite flower:
Daphne
Favourite colour:
Red
Favourite name:
Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish:
Fish
Favourite maxim:
Nihil humani a me alienum puto
[Nothing human is alien to me]
Favourite motto:
De omnibus dubitandum
Karl Marx Page 40