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  MAX EASTMAN

  Published with assistance from the foundation established

  in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788,

  Yale College.

  Frontispiece: Max Eastman in 1918. Author’s collection.

  Copyright © 2017 by Christoph Irmscher. All rights

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  Set in Scala type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954486

  ISBN 978-0-300-22256-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British

  Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

  Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Julia and Nick

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Faun with a Typewriter

  Chapter 1. The Devil at Park Church

  Chapter 2. Dearest of All Lovers

  Chapter 3. A Village Apollo

  Chapter 4. The Flea from Tangier

  Chapter 5. We Were Beautiful Gods

  Chapter 6. Malyutochka

  Chapter 7. The Thinking Singer

  Chapter 8. A Test Case for the Kinsey Male

  Chapter 9. Max in Purgatory

  Chapter 10. Realtor and Realist

  Note on Sources

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  MAX EASTMAN

  Introduction • Faun with a Typewriter

  Max Eastman was, for quite some time, one of the most widely known American writers both at home and abroad. He was admired and loved, loathed and lambasted. Joseph Stalin called him a “gangster of the pen,” a characterization quite at odds with the man even casual acquaintances found irresistibly charming in person. Once a well-known radical, the Prince of Greenwich Village, he later in life became an advocate for anti-left causes and a frequent contributor on the payroll of Reader’s Digest. With his handsome, perennially tanned face, topped by a shock of prematurely white hair and hazel eyes that some described as golden, he looked less like a political pundit than an actor of some distinction, a man more intent on looking good than on being good (fig. 1).1

  When he was well into his eighties, a teenage Carly Simon, the daughter of the cofounder of Simon and Schuster and soon to become famous in her own right, thought Max was the most beautiful man she had ever met.2 Patrician in bearing and looks, he had a voice to match his face: tremulous, neither too high nor too low, a voice that would invariably pronounce “literature” as “litetyoor” and “poetry” as “poitree,” and “Marxism” as “Maaksism.”

  Max didn’t fit the part of the stereotypical writer. With him, there were no frayed shirt collars, no cracked or bent reading glasses, no scuffed shoes, no two-day stubble. In a casual portrait taken in Hawaii in 1965, a sweater-clad Max appears hunched over his small typewriter, index fingers hovering over the keys, a clear devotee of the hunt-and-peck method (fig. 2).3 His head slightly cocked, he stares directly at us, a languid faun, pressed into benevolence by old age. “I am not a hard worker,” he claimed in an interview, “but a regular one,” a statement that deliberately downplays his extraordinary productivity.4

  Figure 1. Max Eastman, 1950s. EMIIA1.

  Figure 2. Max Eastman, ca. 1965. EMII.

  Over the course of five decades Max published more than a dozen books of political and cultural analysis, two doorstop-sized volumes of autobiography, four books of translations, five collections of poetry, one novel, and an untold number of essays in magazines and newspapers. He coproduced the first talking documentary about the downfall of the tsar, Tsar to Lenin, released in 1937. And he lectured everywhere in the United States from Fargo, North Dakota, to Houston, Texas, on topics ranging from “the enjoyment of poetry” to “the changing attitude toward sex in modern literature.” For a few months in 1938 he acted as the host of a radio show called Word Game, popular with listeners interested in unusual words, grammar, and pronunciation problems.

  Max was loved by many women, and he loved many of them in return, not infrequently at the same time. Women enjoyed looking at him, and they evoked his beauty in lyrical prose, in letters to him, in poems, and in stories. Max was not immune to such praise. He proudly reported that John Barrymore, the most prominent member of a dynasty of good-looking actors, had once overheard someone ask which one of the two, Barrymore or Eastman, “was the better-looking and loved the most women,” a question, he said, that “puts me in a very high class.”5 One of Max’s many lovers, the brilliant painter, critic, and writer Charmion von Wiegand, dedicated a story to him, “Arrows of the Sun,” which was at least in part a tribute to the sheer beauty of a man named Jude (Max’s alias in the story). Charmion’s narrator, Esther, dwells on Max’s body as if it were a work of art: “His face was turned away from her but she could see his strong, clear profile—the high forehead with the waving mass of white hair, the well-defined imperious nose, the sensuous delicate lips and the strong shaped chin—a face in which the bones were very firm and ample, but the expression gentle, tender, self-indulgent. How beautiful he seemed!” Jude / Max moves through Charmion’s story as if his sole purpose in life were to enjoy himself, a realization that leaves Esther frustrated with unfulfilled desire.6 “I have the gift of leisure and of life,” Max had rhymed in an unpublished poem likely written when he was in his early thirties. “I stand unbaffled as Old Buddha stands / Or move slow-footed o’er the battle-sands.” Languid, soft, slow-footed, unsurprised by life, and relishing its opportunities, Max gave women the sense that being with him would be the pinnacle of their lives. When he died, Time magazine referred to him as a “lusty lion of the left.”7

  But such leisureliness was a pose. In the photograph taken in Hawaii, the stack of airmail envelopes on Max’s right, behind the unlit cigarillo, also reminds us that he was one of the best-connected political writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Max knew everybody, and everybody knew him. And he wrote to everybody—long letters, brimming with detail and, as he got older and the political situation in the United States and the world more worrisome, bristling with irritation. And everybody wrote to him. Once you had met Max, he was hard to forget. Six feet tall or maybe even a bit taller, an incorrigible worshiper of the sun’s warmth, he took pride in his tanned skin, the subject of many a line in his letters to friends and lovers. On more than one occasion, when he was younger and his hair still black, people mistook him for a Mexican. A persistent rumor had it that he was Jewish.8 And while he was not athletic (and his weight became a small worry once he had passed middle age), he played tennis and, later, badminton with graceful abandon and remained fit well into his seventies. Ted Daniel, the son of the Eastmans’ housekeeper Eula, remembers how he was trying to keep up with the seventy-something-year-old Max as the latter was surveying the boundaries of his extensive property on Martha’s Vineyard and how he kept saying to him in his sing-songy voice, “You can do it, Ted. You can do it.”9

  Max certainly showed that one “can do it.” His literary archive, still largely unprocessed, comprises over eighty boxes of
letters, drafts, journals, and newspaper clippings. Two years before his death, writing to a doctoral student interested in his work, Max said that “it would require a revolution, or a military invasion for someone to go through all my files and shelvesful of documents and papers.”10 Max wrote constantly and saved most everything he wrote, even scribbled-on envelopes and random “while-you-were-out” notes. He collected women at an even faster rate, and after he had parted ways with them he would keep their letters, photographs, and the poems he had written about them or they had written about him. “Don’t you know,” he wrote to his secretary and on-again, off-again lover Florence Norton, a few weeks after his seventy-third birthday, “I preserve in separate files and packages every shred of paper that bears a sentiment about every girl I ever loved even if she’s dead and gone, and that they are piled up in my attic in such quantities that the fire insurance company has warned me of the danger if my house catches fire?”11 Max was a King Bluebeard of the erotic archive, though the dead bodies hidden in Max’s apartment were love notes.

  Not surprisingly, Max made quite a few enemies. Even some of his friends were appalled by his unabashed taste for the finer things in life—good food and extensive travel, summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard and later on Barbados, his tennis court, the private secretary paid out of Reader’s Digest funds. His previous biographer, William O’Neill, declared his affection for Max, only to accuse him later of selfishness and to admit that his book had “frequently made note of Eastman’s failings.”12 But there was no sharper critic of Max than Max himself. In a draft poem from his 1915 sketchbook, titled “Myself,” Max compared himself to water, which “takes the shape it touches / And the color it beholds.” Since he was infinitely variable, like water, people would find in him what they wanted to see: “All creatures play in it, / And love and love themselves / In its too yielding sympathy.”13

  At one time or another in his long life Max would self-identify as a philosopher, poet, psychologist, novelist, and editor. The son of two progressive Congregationalist ministers and the grandson of another minister, he studied with John Dewey at Columbia University in New York and promptly rejected the religious roots of his youth in favor of science, or at least a faith in the ability of science to predict and produce outcomes that would lead to the betterment of society. Radicalized by his brilliant activist sister Crystal Eastman and his first wife, the feminist Ida Rauh, he abandoned his academic career, supported women’s suffrage, became a socialist, and threw himself into editing the magazine the Masses, one of the period’s most important outlets for radical writing and art. Crystal was instrumental in the creation of New York State’s first Workers’ Compensation Law, helped write the 1923 Equal Rights Amendment, and cofounded the Civil Liberties Bureau, which grew into the American Civil Liberties Union. After the Masses was shut down by the authorities Max and Crystal jointly edited the Liberator, where they published some of the most visible writers and artists of the day.

  A prolonged stay in Soviet Russia in the 1920s planted the seeds of Max’s close relationship with Lenin’s heir apparent, Leon Trotsky, whom he continued to defend as he became disenchanted with party communism. In the final decades of his life he embraced an idiosyncratic form of antistatism and became an advocate of free-market economy. Even then, however, Max resisted all attempts to label him, especially by his new right-wing friends. He died in Barbados in 1969, still holding on to his dream of a “sweetly reasonable world,” a phrase from Max’s only novel, Venture (1927).14

  Max Eastman’s life didn’t follow neat narrative lines. An opponent of marriage as an institution, he married three times but cheerfully continued his extramarital pursuits, a habit his tolerant second wife, Eliena, referred to as “seizures.” Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s term for their more extreme erotic investments was “contingent love affairs.”15 But Max’s many affairs had nothing of the manipulative intensity of Sartre’s liaisons with young admirers; in fact, Max’s longest-lasting relationship was with a woman only a bit younger than he was, the actress and singer Rosalinde Fuller (and Crystal Eastman’s sister-in-law). Yet there’s no doubt Max’s domestic arrangements disconcerted even some of his friends. When Max left his first wife, Ida, he relinquished all parental rights to his son, Daniel. Unpublished letters show that he stayed in touch with Daniel and later tried to help him find work, but the fact remains that Max’s son did grow up without a father; we know he did not have a happy life. Similarly, after Max’s beloved sister Crystal succumbed to nephritis in 1928, Max’s primary concern was to divest himself of any custodial involvement in her orphaned children’s lives. In the political arena Max’s renunciation of the socialist politics that had dominated most of the first half of his life in favor of some fuzzy libertarian-atheist advocacy of free-market economy left many of his former friends angry. It also gave Max a sense of being hounded by Stalin’s henchmen, strengthening his desire to lecture his fellow countrymen and -women about their uninformed tolerance of communist infiltration.

  The 1950s were probably the darkest period of Max’s life. While his former leftist friends could not forgive him for his apparent warmongering and betrayal of their cause, his newfound allies on the Right had a hard time forgetting his past as a Bolshevik. “A lot of people are still angry with Max,” a well-known labor historian told me abruptly when I first spoke to him about my plans to write a new biography of Max. And this, for better or worse, has become the image associated with Max—that of a libidinous turncoat, someone who exchanged the radical views of his youth for the more comforting falsehoods of right-wing punditry. Max certainly wasn’t the only writer in recent memory to have undergone a conversion from Left to Right. Contemporaries such as the journalist James Burnham and the writer Arthur Koestler come to mind, as does, more recently, the pundit and professional atheist Christopher Hitchens. But if Koestler sought refuge in parapsychology and alternative modes of consciousness and Hitchens shouted his boozy support for military intervention in Iraq over the Washington rooftops, the contours of the supposedly new Max were less distinct.

  He was a writer, first and foremost, and he hated any form of dependency. Apart from his first tentative years as an instructor at Columbia University he never held an academic appointment or, for that matter, worked at any other job that would have required him to interrupt, for significant periods of time, his writing or public speaking. His only consistent income came in later years, when Reader’s Digest made him a roving editor, a misleading designation in that Max had little influence on editorial decisions. But even as he was trying to conform to the expectations of his Digest editors, the unabridged, unedited Max demanded to be let out.

  The major work of the last three decades of Max’s life was his autobiography, published in two volumes in 1947 and 1966, as Enjoyment of Living and Love and Revolution. Here Max speaks to us unrestrainedly, unashamedly, with an iconoclastic boldness that reminded some reviewers of Rousseau and others—since so much of his retrospective revelations concerned his sheer irrepressible sexual desires—of that Midwestern Professor of Desire Alfred Kinsey. To his friend, the writer Edmund Wilson, Max meant multiple things: he was the irritable professor whose class we cannot afford to miss as well as the wild poet dancing through the summer rain, his mind “flicker[ing] electrically with bright perception.” In his prose he was a superb stylist, a master of the short, crisp, pithy declarative sentence. And his poems, though he preferred traditional forms, sparkle with latent erotic energy, with a pagan delight in the pleasures of nature and the human body flashing up behind his recherché rhymes and conventional images.16

  Eastman was not an Eastmanian, his friend Daniel Aaron observed after I had shown him a first draft of this book.17 And this hits the nail right on the head. Max Eastman spent the first half of his life trying to fit himself into larger frameworks: Christianity (provided, somewhat unorthodoxly, by his mother); feminism (promoted even more unconventionally by his sister); and then socialism (advocate
d by his uncompromising first wife). When each ideology appeared to fit Max into prescribed patterns of institutional behavior—of the church, the party, or any other organization—he balked. Max spent the second half of his life looking for an ideological home while trying to defend himself against those who seemed to know exactly what he was thinking and where he belonged.

  It doesn’t cheapen the aims of this biography or the ambitions of its subject to describe what follows as a story largely about sex and communism. Max, who struggled with repression throughout his adolescence and early adulthood, forever afterward held sacred people’s right to do with their bodies what they please. And he felt passionately about communism even after he had rejected it in disgust over Stalin’s betrayal of the world revolutionary movement.18 We often think of the history of American progressivism as a history of failures, as a series of promises not kept, hopes betrayed, strikes broken, and unions busted. And yet, as Michael Kazin has suggested, the United States is a better and fairer country today because of the battles fought by the courageous men and women of the past.19 For many years, Max, perhaps the most glamorous among the revolutionaries, was at the forefront of these fights. He campaigned for women’s rights when other men wouldn’t, exposed the fallacies of American nationalism even as American troops were being sent to the battlefields of Europe, and practiced an enlightened approach to sexual mores long before Kinsey provided the scientific evidence that heterosexual marriage was not the gold standard of sexual pleasure. When it came to reproductive rights, Max never changed his views and never yielded an inch to his critics.

  “A poet lives—that is the primary thing,” declares Jo Hancock, the aptly named, chronically indecisive protagonist of Venture.20 Life mattered to Max, which meant he lived it as if every minute of it mattered, and I have striven to write this book as if every page, indeed every word of it, matters. To Max, there was unbearable pathos and heartbreak in each moment of joy, he once said, in a note found among his papers in which he also tried to explain why he often cried for no apparent reason.21 Max also believed in candor, and he paid a high price for it. I have made this book a candid one, too, since I am convinced that Max wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, and I have at times allowed myself to become swept up in the momentum of all he thought and did. But what has stayed with me through it all is the memory of an afternoon spent in the apartment of Max’s widow, Yvette Eastman, who was then one hundred years old. Still beautiful and showing that sparkle in her eyes that had captivated generations of men, Yvette was having trouble figuring out exactly where she was—a confusion to which anyone of her age is fully entitled. Nevertheless, she graciously signed her own book, Dearest Wilding, a sprightly memoir of her relationship with Theodore Dreiser, who had preceded Max as her lover. When I told Yvette about my interest in Max, she steadied herself and said, very distinctly, although the words no longer came easily to her: “Max . . . was a very special person.” Her cat Sgubi, sitting right next to her on a small side table, an infinitely dignified, appropriately large-sized reincarnation of the many cats Max had loved so much, seemed to agree, carefully watching the hand I had extended toward him, warning me not to come too close.