“Max Eastman, A Life”
By Christoph Irmscher | Yale University Press
448 pages $40.00
Interested in twentieth-century history and politics, intellectual history, and literature? If yes, this biography of Max Eastman (1883 – 1969), radical activist and public wise man, may be for you.
Christoph Irmscher, Provost Professor of English at Indiana University, is Eastman’s nonpareil biographer. Irmscher earlier wrote “Longfellow Redux” and “Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science”, named Editor’s Choice of the “New York Times Book Review” in 2013.
Who was Max Eastman?
According to his biographer, he was “a prolific writer, radical, and public intellectual who helped shape the twentieth century.” Irmscher was given access to the Eastman family archive, allowing him to research little-known aspects of the “famously handsome and charismatic radical.” The Eastman trove, still largely unprocessed, contains a literary archive of over 80 boxes of letters, drafts, journals, and newspaper clippings.
What about Eastman’s family and education? A persistent rumor had it that he was Jewish, Irmscher writes. Not so. Eastman, one of four children, was born in Canandaigua, New York, the son of two progressive Congregationalist ministers. He graduated from Williams College and completed his doctoral work in philosophy under John Dewey (1859 – 1952), professor of pragmatic philosophy at Columbia University.
Irmscher tells us that Eastman rejected the religious roots of his youth and replaced it with science. He “was radicalized by his brilliant activist sister, Crystal Eastman, and his first wife, the feminist Ida Rauh, abandoning his academic career, and became a socialist.”
A teenage Carly Simon, who met Eastman when he was in his eighties, “thought Max was the most beautiful man she had ever met…With his handsome, perennially tanned face… and hazel eyes that some described as golden, he looked less like a political pundit than an actor of some distinction…more intent on looking good than on being good.” Joseph Stalin called him a “gangster of the pen”, a characterization at war with his irresistible charm by all who met him.
We’re told Eastman was patrician in bearing and looks, with a memorable voice that matched his face, neither too high nor low, and which would pronounce “literature” as “litetyoor” and “poetry” as “poitree,” and “Marxism” as “Maaksism.”
Max Eastman’s literary output was prolific. He edited two of the most important modernist magazines, “The Masses”, and “The Liberator”, as well as published books on poetry and laughter, and campaigned for women’s suffrage, sexual freedom, and peace.
He could only hunt-and-peck the keys on his typewriter, noting, “I am not a hard worker, but a regular one.” What an understatement! In over fifty years Eastman published more than a dozen books of political and cultural analysis, two volumes of autobiography, and an untold number of essays in magazines and newspapers.
In his spare time, he co-produced the first talking documentary about the downfall of the tsar, “Tsar to Lenin”, and lectured everywhere on poetry and sex in modern literature. He even hosted a radio show in 1938 called “Word Game”, popular with listeners interested in unusual words, grammar, and pronunciation problems, all this info, thanks to the digging of the author.
At this point, the reader wonders if Eastman had any time left for other things in life. In fact, he did.
To wit: “Max was loved by many women, and he loved many of them in return, not infrequently at the same time.” Women, says our author, loved to look at him, write prose and poems and stories to him. “Max was not immune to such praise. He collected women at an even faster rate…he kept their letters, photographs, and the poems he had written about them or they had written about him, says Irmscher.
Eastman reported that John Barrymore, the actor, once overheard someone ask, which one of the two, Eastman or Barrymore, “was the better-looking and loved the most women,” a question, he said, “puts me in a very high class.”
Irmscher writes, “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.” The biographer thinks such leisureliness was a pose. Perhaps; Eastman seems to have made a game of it all his life.
By now you’ve figured out that Max Eastman’s life didn’t follow neat narrative lines. Our author points out that Max was an opponent of marriage as an institution but married three times while cheerfully continuing his extramarital pursuits. His tolerant second wife, Eliena, referred to them as “seizures.” (Earlier, leaving his first wife meant he gave up all parental right to his son, Daniel.)
In addition, a prolonged stay in Soviet Russian in the 1920s, we are told, 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.
By the 1950s, people on both ends of the spectrum were angry with Max. Leftists couldn’t 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”, our author tells us.
First and foremost, Max was a writer. But in much that he did, he seemed a beautiful vessel who went where his winds of intuition took him. He seemed without an anchor, at least to me.
In fact, he compared himself to water in a sketchbook entitled “Myself” as a young man in 1915.
He wrote that “water takes the shape it touches/ And 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.”
Eastman too, knew his strength and weaknesses: he was a great talent “infinitely variable.”
Michael D. Langan is the Culture Critic of NBC-2.com This piece was published in The Buffalo News four years ago.
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