Monday, October 29, 2012
Jack Reed and Louise Bryant, 1: Star-Crossed Lovers
CHRONICLES OF CROTON'S BOHEMIA
Wait for a rainy Sunday afternoon. Off somewhere a bell will toll mournfully with a low, cheerless sound. Outside all will be gloomy and sodden. Now begin reading this sad tale of love and loss a lifetime ago.
It opens in 1915 in Portland , Oregon Willamette River
She had heard about Jack Reed long before they met. Louise had diligently sold subscriptions to The Masses, the magazine edited by Max Eastman to which Jack Reed was a contributor.
A Harvard graduate, Reed was a dashing war correspondent. In 1914, he covered Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. Villa affectionately called him "Chatito" (pug nose). Reed was a big, burly bear of a man, six feet tall, large-boned and lanky, with green eyes and a mop of curly red hair.
Reed had come home to Portland Serbia and Russia
He returned to Portland
"I have fallen in love again, and think I have found her at last. She’s two years younger than I.” [She was actually two years older.] Reed added, "She's wild and brave and straight, and graceful and lovely to look at." He admitted she was "the first person I've ever loved without mental reservations."
Louise decided she would leave her devoted husband of six years. Wearing the small bunch of violets her husband gave her, she boarded a train in Portland New York City Washington Square South Greenwich Village , but she never occupied it. Instead, she moved into his apartment.
Young and Beautiful
Roger Baldwin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union for thirty years, described her as "striking--of course young and beautiful in a very pure sort of way, not made up at all, and with a lot of courage needed to swim against the tide politically. Her hair was dark, her eyes gray-blue, Irish, changing."
Louise went to work as an assistant on The Masses. Dorothy Day, who later founded the Catholic Worker movement, also worked there. The staff, mostly male, were jealous of Louise, Day noted. "She had no right to have brains and be so pretty. They were constantly minimizing her."
Jack Reed finally made the break with Mabel Dodge. Early one evening the doorbell rang at Reed's apartment. Louise, holding a lighted candle, opened the door.
"Is Jack Reed here?" the woman caller asked.
Reed appeared and recognized Mabel Dodge. He introduced the two women.
"Reed,” Mabel said, “I came to ask you for your old typewriter, if you're not using it."
"Louise is using it," Jack told her.
"Oh, all right, I only thought. . . ." Mabel's voice trailed off. She turned and left, her curiosity satisfied about her successor to Jack’s affection.
Despite living openly with Louise, Jack Reed could not resist the temptation of an occasional affair. He admitted to five in the first 18 months of their relationship.
For her part, perhaps as retribution, she was not above an occasional dalliance. She saw painter Andrew Dasburg, who walked with a slight limp, when Jack was out of town.
When Jack and Louise went to Provincetown on Cape Cod for the summer, she succumbed to the dark Irish appeal of a rising new talent, Eugene O'Neill. After all, they were practicing free love--sexual relations without marriage or formal obligations.
To Croton
Tired of Greenwich Village ’s round of parties and radical politics and desirous of finding a place where they could get some work done, Jack and Louise went house hunting in Croton-on-Hudson. Mabel Dodge and Max Eastman had found weekend homes there. Masses artist Boardman Robinson and his wife Sally had bought a house next to Max Eastman’s.
Louise described Croton as "quiet and peaceful and happy," a place they could "work out here uninterrupted, and play in town." She told Jack, "We can't put off real work year after year." By the end of October, they had found a house for sale, a white cottage with black shutters, the same one Mabel Dodge had rented before deciding to lease Finney Farm.
Jack had always had problems with an impaired kidney. When it became obvious that major surgery would be necessary, they decided to get married. Louise insisted on secrecy because the July 7 divorce from her dentist husband would not become final for six months.
She later recalled their November 9 wedding in a memoir: "That year [1916] he suffered terribly and was ordered to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore
Marriage
Louise misremembered the name of the city, thinking it was Poughkeepsie Peekskill
"We were married at the little city hall,” Louise wrote. “The clerk, sitting in his shirt sleeves, called to someone in the other room, 'Come in here, Bill, and get another witness.' So they all stood up and mumbled a few words, we signed our names, and the clerk handed me my wedding certificate, saying, 'Hang on to this, lady, you may need it some day.'"
She gave her age as 26 but she was actually 31. He was 29. Louise’s sole insecurity was her age. She repeatedly fibbed about it.
Three days after their marriage, Jack left for Baltimore Greenwich Village 's favorite gynecologist, rotund, Polish-born Dr.
In 1917, Jack’s antiwar activities kept him away from Croton in May. Louise went to Provincetown
Reporting the War
Jack confessed to having had affairs while he was away. A blowup ensued. Louise concluded that a separation would do them both good. She decided to go toFrance
She sailed alone for Europe through submarine-infested waters on the French liner Espagne in June, while Jack remained and buried himself in work for the New York Evening Mail, which was secretly German-owned.
Louise demonstrated remarkable zeal in pursuing stories but was frustrated because the French had closed the front to female journalists and she could only gather material behind the lines. She managed to get to the front briefly. When American troops arrived, she was the only reporter present, and the soldiers greeted her with delight.
On her return to the States in August, Jack, in a white Shantung suit and Panama hat, was at the dock to meet her with surprising news: They’d both be leaving for Russia
New York City was experiencing a heat wave in August of 1917 as Jack and Louise rushed to get ready to travel to Russia to cover the impending revolution.
Shopping for clothes that would carry them through a Russian winter was especially difficult.
Louise managed to wangle new credentials from the Bell Syndicate for her to cover the revolution “from a woman’s point of view.”
A clerk at the passport office confiscated their passports. A socialist peace conference was scheduled in Stockholm and the U.S. State Department wanted to keep American radicals from attending. The downcast duo returned to the Hotel Brevoort. The next morning Louise went early to the passport office and vamped the clerk into returning the passports.
Off to Russia
They sailed on the Danish steamer New York for Christiana (Oslo ). At Halifax , Nova Scotia
Jack was carrying a number of documents sure to cause trouble--letters from American socialists to Russian counterparts plus an invitation to the upcoming peace conference in Stockholm . He hid these papers under the rug in the cabin and diverted the searches of the officers by sharing a bottle of Scotch with them.
Arrival in Norway was followed by an arduous 18-hour train trip to Stockholm , where they learned that the peace conference had been postponed.
“After we left Stockholm my own curiosity grew every hour,” Louise would later write. “As our train rushed on through the vast, untouched forests of northern Sweden I could scarcely contain myself. Soon I should see how this greatest and youngest of all democracies was learning to walk— to stretch itself— to field its strength— unshackled!”
They crossed into Finland near the Arctic Circle after a week’s delay waiting for visas. Another slow train ride south through Finland was marked by frequent stops by soldiers.
In Petrograd
Bryant found the capital, Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg ), the magnificent city designed by French and Italian architects and built by Peter the Great, “impressive, vast and solid.” Compared to its buildings, New York had “a sort of tall flimsiness.”
She wrote, “The rugged strength of Peter the Great is in all the broad streets, the mighty open spaces, the great canals curving through the city, the rows and rows of palaces and the immense façades of government buildings.”
Jack had seen the capital two years before when he covered in the Eastern front with artist and Croton neighbor Boardman Robinson and wrote excitedly to him:
“The old town has changed! Joy where there was gloom, and gloom where there was joy. We’re in the middle of things, and believe me it is thrilling. There is so much dramatic to write about that I don’t know where to begin.”
Reed’s timing of their arrival in the late summer of 1917 could not have been better. The war had been a series of disasters for the Russians. In the first year of the war Russia lost a million men. Poorly equipped and incompetently led, outmatched Russian troops were defeated in battle after battle.
By the end of 1916, czarist rule had become decidedly unpopular. Mutinies broke out at the front and in barracks back home. Strikes and mass demonstrations were widespread. Shortages, particularly of food, were common, and prices soared with the inevitable inflation.
Workers formed committees, called soviets (a Russian word meaning “council”), in factories and urban neighborhoods. Discontent was widespread.
The czar abdicated on March 15, 1917, and a provisional government under Aleksandr Kerensky was formed.
The new provisional government, unable to reach a decision about continuing the war, faced enormous obstacles. A radical putsch by conservatives was quickly defeated July, spurring those on the left seek more radical solutions.
Revolution!
Jack and Louise were present when Vladimir Lenin, who had been hiding in Finland , secretly re-entered the capital on October 23, disguised in a wig and false beard. The October Revolution was triggered by the Kerensky government’s shutdown of Bolshevik newspapers. It was over quickly in Petrograd with surprisingly little bloodshed.
Only two days, October 24 and 25, were needed to achieve the easily accomplished victory. Resistance by government troops was virtually nonexistent. A total of six men were killed in Petrograd --all insurgents.
Women's Battalion Defending the Palace in
|
On October 25, Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee proclaimed the overthrow of Kerensky’s provisional government. In contrast to Petrograd, in Moscow there was heavy resistance. The pro-Soviet forces were victors, but at an enormous cost. Of the total of 800 dead, 500 were Red Guards and soldiers.
Jack and Louise were part of a large army of correspondents from all parts of the globe eagerly seeking information about the changes taking place in the vast Russian Empire. News-gathering was no easy task.
Fearing inevitable counterrevolutionary activity, passes were issued and repeatedly checked by the many provisional government departments and committees, creating a bureaucratic nightmare.
Reed and Bryant interviewed many of the leading participants including Kerensky, Lenin and Trotsky. Louise made sure they interviewed Nadezhda Krupskaya, Nicolai Lenin’s wife, Alexandra Kollontay, the novelist and educator, Marie Spirodonova, the diminutive revolutionary heroine, and Catherine Breshkovsky, known as the “Grandmother of the Revolution.”
Reed gathered up every document, leaflet and newspaper article for reproduction in the book he would title Ten Days That Shook the World. He also translated and wrote down the words of every printed speech he acquired.
The result was a tremendously valuable combination of reportage and documentation. He intended the material to be the basis of the first volume in a massive series on Russian history.
On the other hand, Louisa’s approach was more journalistic and totally professional. She not only recorded events but interpreted and commented on them. Her dispatches painted a compelling word picture of everyday life at the eye of the revolutionary storm.
Describing a city in which the streetcars no longer ran, Louise wrote, “People walked great stretches without a murmur and the life of the city went on as usual. It would have upset New York completely, especially if it happened as in Petrograd that while the streetcars were stopped, lights and water also were turned off and it was almost impossible to get fuel to keep warm.”
Nevertheless, the Russians exhibited a remarkable calm, even keeping the theatres open. “The Nevsky after midnight was as amusing and interesting as Fifth Avenue in the afternoon. The cafés had nothing to serve but weak tea and sandwiches but they were always full.
“Men and women wear what they please. At one table would be sitting a soldier with his fur hat pulled over his ear, across from him a Red Guard in rag-tags, next a Cossack in a gold and black uniform, earrings in his ears, silver chains around his neck, or a man from the Wild Division, recruited from one of the most savage tribes in the Caucasus, wearing his sombre, flowing cape.”
Louise’s Christmas present to Reed was a poem expressing her joy at being with him. It read, in part:
It is fine to be here in the North
With you on Christmas
In a land where they really believe
In peace on earth
And miracles.
Her poem concluded with:
What I want most to tell you
Is that I love you
And I want more than anything
To have you stay strong and clear-visioned
In all this world madness . . .
You are the finest person I know
On both sides of the world
And it is a nice privilege to be your comrade.
Home Again
Jack and Louise returned to Greenwich Village three months apart and set to work assembling their notes and dispatches into books. His book was an account of Russian history in the making. Her book, Six Red Months in Russia, remains to this day an insightful picture of everyday life at every level during the early days of the revolution.
Louise’s book, based on her dispatches from Russia , appeared first. Published by George H. Doran in 1919, it was well-received by reviewers.
Jack’s voluminous work would not be published by Boni & Liveright until 1920 but would become a classic. Still in print, scholars still find it invaluable for its reportage and ample documentation.
Despite their joint successes at home, both Jack and Louise itched to return to a Russia where so much was still happening. They would journey there separately in 1920 on a final fatal adventure.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Floyd Dell: A Respectable Radical
CHRONICLES
OF CROTON’S BOHEMIA
Chicago beckoned, and Floyd arrived there in 1908, at the age of
21. He became an assistant editor on the Chicago Chicago
literary renaissance.
ToNew York
Goodbye to the Communist Party
Dell became an editor of The Liberator, the successor magazine started in 1918 by Max and Crystal Eastman. This folded in 1924, and he next joined the staff of The New Masses, published by the Communist Party.
Few read his books today. Once his novels
were immensely popular, not only for their literary merit but because they
treated love and marriage with perceptive candor. It was a time when many young
people rejected patriarchal family values and sought alternatives.
He
was self-taught writer Floyd Dell who had learned his craft in public libraries
and on newspapers. The characters in Dell's novels talked openly about the
sexual components of love. They argued about the significance of sex in
marriage. These were topics that few earlier novelists had treated with such
honesty. By today's standards, however, their language and actions were tame.
Floyd
James Dell was born in 1887 in the little Illinois town of Barry , not far from the Mississippi .
He spent his youth in Quincy ,
Illinois , a
small industrial city atop the steep bluffs of the Mississippi .
His father was a failed butcher, constantly out of work. His mother was a
country schoolteacher who encouraged her son to be a writer. In Quincy ,
young Floyd discovered the wonders of the public library and began to immerse
himself in books.
Dell's
next stop was Davenport ,
Iowa , a
large industrial city, also on the Mississippi . After a brief
stint at factory work, he joined the Socialist Party and became a reporter on Davenport
newspapers.
He
also met Margery Currey, a high school teacher eleven years his senior who
encouraged him in his writing. To show their unconventionality, they were
married by a rabbi the following year, although neither was Jewish.
Dell's
Friday book section encouraged the growth of Chicago 's
budding bohemian avant garde. His impulsive marriage gradually worsened, and
Dell succumbed to affairs with the wives of two friends. Divorce was
inevitable.
A young Floyd Dell left Chicago for New York's Greenwich Village.
To
Dell
decided to decamp to New York .
He arrived in Greenwich Village
in October 1913, just in time to participate in Mabel Dodge's
"evenings" and supporting himself by writing critical essays in
various magazines.
His
big break came when he was invited to join the editorial staff of The Masses
to bring some editorial discipline to that haphazard enterprise. Max Eastman, a
former college instructor in philosophy, had been named editor of the dry and
stodgy magazine. Dell opened its pages to talented writers, artists and
cartoonists whose work reflected the burgeoning realism in the arts.
He
also added a managing editor's expertise in planning, designing and producing a
magazine, shaping it to his and Eastman's political and literary tastes. It
became a stunning periodical with two-color lithographed covers and fine
printing for the artwork in its pages. A quality magazine costs money to
produce, and smooth-talking Max Eastman secured donations from moneyed patrons.
Dell
also acquired a reputation for having many love affairs. In January of 1918 he
bedded green-eyed, red-haired Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose poem
"Renascence" had burst like a bombshell on the literary scene. Her
previous sexual experience was limited to homosexual relationships at Vassar.
Later
that year, Dell was named a defendant in the two Masses trials in which
juries were unable to agree on a verdict. After the second trial, he met an
intriguing young woman from California named B. Marie
Gage. Unhappy with her first name, Berta, she had shortened it to an initial.
Dell
described her as "golden haired and blue-eyed." She reminded him of a
girl in Frank Norris's The Octopus, a novel that he had devoured
as a youth: "a sturdy, earth-strong girl, with hair as yellow as the ripe
wheat." B. Marie was robust and big-boned. Shy and sensitive, Dell was
slight of build—he stood five feet six inches and never weighed more than 120
pounds.
Another
Marriage
Floyd
fell in love with B. Marie at first sight. On their third meeting, he proposed
marriage. At New
York 's City Hall, they encountered
roadblocks invented by the City Clerk. This infuriated Dell, who would have no
part in the charade. They took a ferry to Jersey City , only to be stymied
there by residency requirements.
The
couple recalled that they had been invited to visit Croton-on-Hudson by Jane
Burr, described by Dell as "a writer with a very forceful
personality." Jane Burr was the pseudonym of copper heiress Rosalind Guggenheim Winslow, a 37-year-old poet and novelist whose 1916 book of poems, City
Dust, had gone through several printings.
Jane
Burr ran a sort of bed-and-breakfast in what was once Croton’s Post Inn.
Operated for many years by the McCord family, its foundation is still visible
opposite the former Holy Name of Mary School. She called it the Drowsy Saint
Inn.
Dell
later described it as "a place with pleasant rooms furnished in colonial
style, where writers roomed in the summer, and with a restaurant decorated in
the Greenwich Village
fashion with gay colors. It was not open in the winter, but Jane Burr lived
there, and asked occasional guests out to visit her."
"We
want to get married," they told her on their arrival, "and we want
you to help us."
Jane
Burr was shocked. She opposed marriage in principle, but agreed to help them.
She telephoned the town clerk in Peekskill . Although his office
was closed, she learned that the Peekskill Village Board was meeting that
evening, and the clerk would be there. Jane Burr arranged by telephone for him
to issue the marriage license.
That
evening, they got their marriage license in Peekskill
and returned to Croton to wait for Judge Decker to marry them at his home.
Judge Frank Decker operated a candy store and ice cream parlor on North Riverside Avenue .
Floyd
begged B. Marie not to make any feminist objections to anything she was asked
to promise, but to say yes to whatever question was asked. They told the judge
they wanted a simple ceremony. Judge Decker found in his book one in which they
took each other as husband and wife.
After
the ceremony, the judge asked B. Marie if she wanted a marriage certificate.
She shook her head. "Lots of people don't, nowadays," he remarked,
almost wistfully. Then it was back to the Drowsy Saint and their wedding
supper. For it, Jane Burr wangled a cake intended to be the finishing touch to
a neighbor's Sunday dinner.
The
Dells Move to Croton
Floyd
and B. Marie returned to Greenwich
Village and their Christopher Street apartment. The memory
of Croton remained with him; Dell was a small-town boy at heart. On B. Marie's
birthday in April 1919, they again took the train to Croton to visit friends.
As they walked up Mt. Airy Road
they encountered John Reed walking down with friends from Greenwich Village . His now-classic account
of the October Revolution had just been published.
Reed
announced, "This is the Mt. Airy Soviet, and we have decided that you two
are to live here in Croton." Indicating a nearby house that was for sale,
he added, "And this is the house you are to live in!"
As a
down payment, Floyd paid ten dollars to the artist and his wife who owned it. A
mortgage covered half the $3,000 price. Although money was tight, they secured
the balance by the end of the month.
When
Floyd and B. Marie returned to Croton the first weekend in May, they
immediately began work on the somewhat dilapidated building. They replaced
rotting floorboards, planted a garden, and painted everything inside and out,
spending most of the summer getting the house ready.
The
Dells continued to live in Greenwich
Village until 1921 and used the Croton house only on
weekends. It was here that Dell worked on most of his eleven novels, and
several collections of short stories, poems, essays and plays. The Dell house
at 75 Mt. Airy Road
is one of Croton's true literary landmarks.
Dell’s Literary Output
Despite
his prodigious output of books, interest in Floyd Dell today is low. Between
them, the 38 member libraries of the Westchester Library System own a total of
only seven Dell titles. In its collection of works by local authors, the Croton
Free Library has only one of Dell’s books, his 1933 autobiography Homecoming.
Whether
in essays, critical reviews, or novels, Dell drew heavily on his own experience
in everything he wrote. His first novel, Moon-Calf, appeared in 1920 and
recounted the story of Felix Fay, a thinly disguised young Floyd Dell. He
included accounts of his own family and their frequent moves, showing how Felix
Fay's character was shaped by the poverty of his own early years.
Critics
reviewed Moon-Calf enthusiastically. It went through several printings
and sold more than 40,000 copies, bringing Dell nearly $15,000. The Brooklyn
Public Library considered the book so racy it restricted its sole copy to
approved readers.
His
story of a sensitive young man who rebels against small-town respectability to
seek success in the city took its title from a 1901 science fiction story by
H.G. Wells. "I should define a 'moon-calf,'" he told a reporter from
the New York Herald in February 1921, "as an awkward young man with
a touch of intellectual lunacy."
Years
afterward Dell attributed the book's success quite as much to popular
misconceptions about it as to acceptance of its virtues. No other writer of the
1920s so successfully explored the maturation of the young and sensitive
intellectual who finds himself isolated and alone in the cities and towns of
the American Middle West.
Dell's
second novel, The Briary-Bush, appeared in 1921 and continued Felix
Fay's story in Chicago ,
where Dell scored his own early literary success. Felix falls in love with and
marries Rose-Ann Prentiss, but they soon are miserable, replicating Dell's own
unhappy first marriage.
Dell
did not complete his semi-autobiographical trilogy until 1929 with his eighth
novel, Souvenir. In it, Dell reflected about his life, and concluded,
"He could regret none of it, would not have had it different, would not
have missed a single one of the pains and insults that had hardened him and
taught him."
After
the birth of their first son, Anthony, named for Floyd’s father, the Dells
moved from Greenwich Village early in 1922 and
made Croton their permanent residence.
In An
American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics, writer Joseph
Freeman, a Croton resident and frequent guest at Dell parties, described the
Dell house in Croton as "a magic little world retaining all that was best
in the tradition of Greenwich Village . That
tradition shone from orange curtains at the windows, Nordfeldt's [Swedish-American Chicago artist Bror
Nordfeldt] portrait of Dell as a young man, the walls lined from floor to
ceiling with books."
Portrait of Floyd Dell by Swedish-American artist Bror Nordfeldt.
Goodbye to the Communist Party
Dell became an editor of The Liberator, the successor magazine started in 1918 by Max and Crystal Eastman. This folded in 1924, and he next joined the staff of The New Masses, published by the Communist Party.
Unhappy
with the magazine's policies, Dell had submitted his resignation as a
contributing editor. Gold published Dell's letter and added two pages of his
own comment scolding a Dell so corrupted by prosperity he wore a dress suit.
Dell
took his excommunication in stride. He denied wearing a dress suit except to
pose for a single publicity photo, but conceded that he liked wearing dinner
clothes.
"It
is also true," he commented, "that I like to make money, though Mike
exaggerates my prosperity. I think Mike would like to make money,
too." Gold would be less unhappy
and less full of hatred for others, Dell added, if he could admit to himself
that he wants what many others have in an insecure world.
Cartoonist
Robert Minor and his artist wife, Lydia Gibson Minor, had built a home in
Croton at 79 Mount Airy Road ,
next door to Floyd and B. Marie. Minor had been the editor of the Communist
Party newspaper The Daily Worker, and indefatigable candidate for
governor of New York , mayor of New York City and U.S. senator. The doctrinaire Minor
had many bitter arguments with Floyd over Dell's peculiar brand of radicalism.
Broadway andHollywood
Broadway and
Floyd Dell's
novel An Unmarried Father had been
published in 1927. About that time a second son was born and named Christopher
for the Greenwich Village street on which the
Dells had lived.
In this novel,
Norman Overbeck, a young man about to be married, breaks his engagement and
adopts a child he has become convinced he fathered. In the end, he accepts
responsibility and marries the unwed mother. It was received with mixed reviews
by critics confused by Dell's sudden conventionality.
Dell saw
theatrical possibilities in the story and turned it into a play script.
Broadway producer Crosby Gaige read it and referred Dell to Thomas Mitchell, a
35-year-old former reporter, stage actor and playwright. Mitchell, who would
later achieve success in Hollywood
Mitchell took Dell's wordy and unwieldy rough draft
and turned it into a risqué and funny piece of stagecraft. Retitled Little Accident and with Mitchell
playing the role of Norman Overbeck, it opened to rave reviews at New York
Little
Accident was adapted three times by Hollywood
In the depths of
the Depression, Floyd and Thomas Mitchell tried to repeat the success of Little Accident with another collaborative
effort. Cloudy with Showers, a
lighthearted treatment of the relations between the sexes, opened in September
of 1931, also at the Morosco Theater. Although it played for a respectable 71
performances with Mitchell playing the lead role, it was no solution to the
Dell family's money problems in the depths of the Depression.
Moving On
Moving On
Later novels also were
important. Dell’s favorite, Diana Stair, a big, 641-page work, revived
the popularity of the historical novel in 1932. Floyd and B. Marie rented out
their Croton house the following year and moved to Winchester , New Hampshire
The
family moved again in 1935, this time to Washington ,
D.C. Washington public
library. He retired from government service in 1947.
All
his life Floyd Dell had been a heavy cigarette smoker, preferring a brand
called Richmond Straight Cuts. As he grew older he suffered from emphysema and
a series of strokes in the mid- and late-60s and lost the sight of one eye to
glaucoma. Confounding those who had predicted the marriage wouldn't last, the
Dells celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in February 1969.
Floyd
Dell died five months later in Bethesda ,
Maryland New
Hampshire summer home.
As a
novice editor of The Masses, Max Eastman had hired Dell with the title of managing
editor to put a journalist’s stamp on the magazine. He later paid this tribute
to him: “I never knew a more reasonable or dependable person, more variously
intelligent, more agile in combining sociability with industry and I never knew
a writer who had his talents in such complete command.”
Labels: Chronicles of Croton's Bohemia
Saturday, October 06, 2012
Max Eastman: A Life of Paradoxes
CHRONICLES OF CROTON'S BOHEMIA
Mabel Dodge was one
of the first bohemians to venture north to Croton from Greenwich
Village . Next to arrive was Max Eastman, radical journalist,
prolific writer and romantic poet. Years later he would become the best known
American intellectual to move across the political spectrum from far left to
extreme right.
In 1915, Eastman
and his wife Ida Rauh were living in a sixth-floor walk-up on Charles Street Greenwich Village when Mabel Dodge invited them to spend a
week in the little white cottage she had rented on Mt. Airy Road
Eastman, a
former graduate student and instructor in philosophy at Columbia
A Converted Cider Mill
Eastman, a
country boy at heart, was attracted to a house in Croton and bought it, paying
$20 against the purchase price of $1,500. Because the previous owner had died
and the heirs were scattered, preparation of a deed took time. The agent
encouraged Max to move in; he took possession on October 6, 1915.
In his
autobiography he later described how he "bought with my own money--and my
father's--a tiny house and barn at the crest of Mt. Airy Road
Max could now
regularly visit Mabel Dodge at her cottage further along Mt. Airy Road Alexander Lane
Max’s newly
acquired house stood very close to the road, he recalled, "so that its
front steps were almost like a horse block. But you could go around to the back
porch and look down through a wild tangle of trees to the river."
The Osage Orange Tree
"Beside the
porch, and overarching it almost like a roof, was an Osage orange tree some
twenty feet high, the only one I ever saw in our part of the world. I got Philip Schnell, Croton's good-natured
carpenter, whose benignly keen smile was as satisfying as the work he did, to
make me a long oak dining table, heavy enough to live the year round outdoors
on that roofless porch.
"When
weather permitted, the porch was the dining room, and the catbirds would come
and eat butter out of the dish in front of us. Philip told me my house was the
second oldest in Croton, and showed me how strangely it was built, with yellow
clapboards outside and papered plaster walls inside, but between them a
concealed solid wall of brick.
"For further
isolation, I had him fix me up a little study in the barn. And below the Osage
orange tree I carved out from my rough acre of land an excellent tennis
court--a little short for professionals, but with plenty of room for a hot game
by first-class amateurs.”
The house, at 70 Mt. Airy Road
America’s Most Famous Radical
Max Forrester
Eastman was born in upstate New York New York ,
was assistant pastor at Elmira ’s prestigious Park Church
Max Eastman was
the imaginative and creative editor of The
Masses, a combative mix of art and politics, for five years. Founded in 1911 by Piet Vlag, a bearded
Dutchman more interested in consumer cooperatives than in social revolution or
art, and financed by Rufus Weeks, an insurance executive. Weeks soon withdrew
his backing. Lacking adequate financing, The
Masses ceased publication in August 1912.
The magazine’s desperate
editorial board sent Eastman a brief note scribbled a sheet of paper to notify
him of his appointment: "You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay," was all it said.
From the
December1912 issue to 1917, The Masses
was the focal point of everything that was alive--or irreverent--in American
culture. With Eastman as its shrewd and perceptive editor, it featured brilliant
artists and cartoonists like John Sloan, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson,
Robert Minor and Art Young, and gifted writers like John Reed, Sherwood
Anderson and Floyd Dell. Subsidized by wealthy patrons charmed by Eastman, the
magazine became a genuine force in the radical movement.
Max Forrester Eastman, the young Adonis who became
editor of The Masses.
Death of The Masses
With war
hysteria at its height in August of 1917, the New York
Simultaneously,
Eastman and six of the staff were indicted under the 1917 Espionage Act for
conspiring to obstruct the draft. Jack Reed was in Russia
and another defendant had fled to Mexico
Undaunted, Eastman
and his brainy and beautiful sister Crystal, also a Croton resident, began a
successor magazine, The Liberator, with
a first issue date of March 1918. Its circulation grew to 60,000, double that
of The Masses, but it lacked its
predecessor’s lightheartedness.
Trial of the
four remaining Masses defendants began
in April of 1918 and lasted nine days, resulting in a hung jury. A second trial
began in October, enhanced now by the colorful presence of Reed, back from Russia
With the
original attorneys unavailable, Eastman became the lead speaker for the defense.
His three-hour extemporaneous summation was masterly. Again, the result was a
hung jury. The government wisely decided to forgo a third trial. Besides, the
war was almost over, and the charges were moot.
To the Soviet Union
Divorced from
Ida Rauh in 1922, Eastman sailed to Genoa ,
Italy
Later that year
he traveled to the Soviet Union to inspect the
Bolshevism he had been praising from a distance but also in pursuit of Miss
Krylenko. In the almost two years he spent in the new nation, he became
friendly with Leon Trotsky and strongly supportive of him.
Unable to leave Russia because his passport had expired (the U.S. did not recognize the Soviet
Union ), Max married Eliena Kylenko in 1924. He described it as
"a marriage of convenience," but it would last 32 years until her
death in 1956. Her connections enabled the couple to leave for Europe , where he continued to write about the Russian
revolution.
After an absence
of five years, Max returned to America
Critics liked
its robustness; Mabel Dodge loved it because the hero, reminiscent of Jack
Reed, had a love affair with "a wise and charming woman”--a thinly
disguised character much like herself. The taste-setting New York Times Book Review called Venture “a novel of ideas that stands well above the majority.”
Max Eastman
returned to the U.S. Russia , Trotsky
would be murdered in Mexico
A series of
Eastman books in the 30s and 40s questioning communism and Marxism reflected
his disillusionment with the Russian experiment, making him a pariah and the
object of attacks from the left.
Two Literary Titans
Eastman would
have many literary and political scraps in print, but it was a physical scuffle
with Ernest Hemingway in 1937 that captured the public’s attention.
Hemingway was
unhappy with Eastman because of Max’s review of Death in the Afternoon four years earlier. Max hated bullfighting
and titled his review, "Bull in the Afternoon."
He accused
Hemingway of emphasizing his masculinity and creating "a veritable school
of fiction writers--a literary style, you might say, of wearing false hair on
the chest." Hemingway saw this as an attack on his manhood. Eastman wrote
a note to Hemingway assuring him this was not so.
About to embark
for Loyalist Spain, a still-angry Hemingway encountered Eastman in the office
of Scribner’s legendary editor Maxwell Perkins. Hemingway acknowledged him with
a friendly greeting but then demanded angrily, "What do you mean accusing
me of impotence?” He opened his shirt to reveal a hairy chest.
Eastman produced
a copy of his book Art and the Life of
Action in which the essay had been reprinted to show Hemingway he had
misread the review. Hemingway responded by shoving the book in Eastman's face.
Max was no boxer
but he could wrestle. He grabbed Ernest by the throat and threw him--or backed
him up--over Perkins's desk and pinned him with both shoulders touching the
floor. Hemingway patted Eastman's shoulder as if to signal defeat and got up.
No sooner on his feet, however, he cursed Max and challenged him to meet him
"in the ring."
Hemingway was
famous for his drunken belligerence and for sucker-punching opponents with an
unexpected blow. Eastman ignored this, and a cursing Hemingway strode from the
office.
Local newspapers
called it a split decision. The
World-Telegram and the Post gave
the nod to Eastman. The Post headline
read, "Unimportance of Being Ernest Hemingway Shown, When Eastman Unbeards
a Chest." Its story concluded with a quip: "Mr. Eastman is planning
an article to be entitled "The Enjoyment of Thrashing Ernest." The Times and Herald Tribune were in Ernest's corner.
Hemingway
claimed that Eastman, sixteen years his senior, clawed at him like a woman, and
that he had used only enough force to subdue him. Editor Perkins later
complimented Eastman for "acting magnificently" in handling the
situation.
A Generous Tribute
Still smarting
over his opponent's account of the affair, when the troubled Hemingway
committed suicide in 1961 Eastman wrote magnanimously about him:
"You can't
ask everything of one man, and I find Ernest's triumph over fear, his scorn for
the petty big-city, big-celebrity life he might have lived in New York as a
well-advertised literateur, his bold honesty in expressing his dissent from
mollycoddle standards, and the superb style in which he often expressed it--I
find these things a joy and an inspiration. I think sometimes in reading him of
Walt Whitman's great lines: 'This is no book--who touches it touches a man.’”
The
Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 put the capstone on Eastman's disillusionment with
Stalinism and Marxism. He produced two openly hostile books in 1940, Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism
and Marxism: Is It Science? Critic
Edmund Wilson hailed them as presenting "the most intelligent and
searching as well as the best-informed discussion of the implications of the
Marxist movement and the development of the Revolution in Russia
Don Juan Eastman
Eastman had been
conflicted about sex in his early years. After an affair with his sister-in-law
Rosalind Fuller while still married to Ida Rauh, he quickly made up for lost
time. Even into his seventies, he had many love affairs, sometimes carrying on
several simultaneously. He indiscreetly recorded these conquests in his memoirs
to the chagrin of partners he openly identified.
For women, a
love affair with Max followed a usual pattern: a chance meeting, avid
attention, bombardment with romantic love letters and poems, until eventual surrender.
After a brief period, Max would lose interest, grow distant and trysts would
cease. Even so, many former lovers remained on good terms with him.
A stormy and
tempestuous relationship with ambitious young movie actress Florence Deshon
ended tragically in 1922. While away from Max, Florence
openly had an affair with Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood
Max Eastman meets Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood. Both were lovers
of actress Florence Deshon.
Back in New York St. Vincent 's Hospital, Max gave her a blood transfusion,
but she could not be saved. He was so remorseful he was unable to attend her
funeral. The coroner ruled it an accidental death.
A tall,
strikingly handsome man, Max was openly vain about his looks, his swimming
ability and his skill at tennis. In Paris
Despite his many
casual affairs, Max Eastman was inherently a highly moral person, retaining the
residual Puritanism of the era and his upbringing as the son of ministers. He disliked
obscene or even risqué language in books or conversation.
Max Eastman’s Dark Side
Max was never
comfortable around children. His first wife's pregnancy was one of his
principal grievances against her. Their divorce gave her sole custody, and Max
did not see his son Daniel for 23 years. The boy grew up never knowing his
father and never forgave him for deserting him.
Daniel Eastman
married twice, but both marriages failed. By the age of 29, he had already
tried four different careers. More jobs followed. An alcoholic, he was writing
a book at the time of his death in 1969.
When Max's
widowed sister Crystal died unexpectedly of nephritis in the summer of 1928,
she left two small orphaned children. Instead of taking them in, Max selfishly
found foster homes for them.
The Eastmans Leave Croton
Max landed a job
with CBS in 1938 as the moderator of a radio show, "The Word Game."
Although it lasted only five months, the income enabled Max and Eliena to buy a
hilltop at Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard and
eventually erect a house there. They would retain their Croton home until the
early 1940s.
In 1941, his
agent suggested that he write an article about his mother for the Reader's Digest feature "My Most
Unforgettable Character." DeWitt Wallace, the magazine's publisher, liked
Eastman's piece and suggested that he write more.
Eastman wrote an
essay blandly titled "Socialism and Human Nature." When it was
published, however, the title had been changed by Digest editors to "Socialism Does Not Gibe with Human
Nature."
The article was
glowingly endorsed by Wall Street lawyer and unsuccessful 1940 Republican
presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. Even though Eastman wrote nothing he
had not written before, the liberal left reviled him as a turncoat.
Eventually, he
became a roving editor for the Digest,
writing pretty much as he pleased. Publisher DeWitt Wallace offered him an
annual retainer of $10,000 in return for a first option on anything Max might
write, plus the standard Digest fee.
Although they had no written contract and Max's article output was meager, to
his credit Wallace honored the agreement for the rest of Max's life and even
gave his widow a pension.
Eliena Eastman
developed cancer and died at their home on Martha's
Vineyard in 1956. Two years later, at 75, Max Eastman married
Yvette Szekely, a much younger woman he had met years before when she was a
teenager.
He wrote 86
books, had uncounted lovers (but failed to seduce Edna St. Vincent Millay) and
remained vigorous to the end. While wintering on the island of Barbados
