Max in Purgatory

Infatuated with his secretary Florence Norton, Eastman completes the first volume of his tell-all autobiography, Enjoyment of Living, a testament to his prodigious erotic energies that leads critics to compare him with sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Trips for Reader’s Digest lead him to Italy, Greece, Norway, and Ireland. Now a vocal anticommunist, Max condemns McCarthy but not the idea behind McCarthyism and joins the editorial board of William Buckley’s National Review. After being diagnosed with cancer, Eliena Krylenko Eastman dies on October 9, 1956, at their Martha’s Vineyard home, leaving Max “in the shadows,” as a mutual friend observed.

A Village Apollo

After a return of his mysterious backache, Max Eastman seeks a cure at Dr. Gehring’s sanatorium in Maine, where he falls for the beautiful Swedish maid/nurse Anna Carlson. He joins Crystal in New York, studies philosophy with John Dewey at Columbia University, and begins to teach as an associate instructor. During summers spent at Glenora he perfects his diving technique but cannot rid himself of his sexual inhibitions. In two searching essays he celebrates Walt Whitman as a sexual healer, learning to reject his mother’s insistence on spiritual purity. Moving in with Crystal, Max becomes interested in woman’s suffrage and helps found the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage in New York. Max becomes a sought-after and well-paid speaker at suffrage events, reinventing himself as a “man suffragette.” Dewey accepts one of Max’s essays on Plato in lieu of a dissertation. Plato’s struggle to reconcile his enjoyment of beauty with morality is a metaphor for Max’s own inner conflict; he never submits his dissertation. The painful death of Annis Ford Eastman in 1910 leaves Max and Crystal bereft.

The Devil at Park Church

This chapter discusses Max Eastman’s upbringing in Elmira, NY, as the son of two progressive Congregationalist ministers and specifically the influence of his mother, Annis Ford Eastman, and of his sister, Crystal Eastman. Other formative factors in Eastman’s childhood and youth include his sexual awakening, the time spent with his family in the alternative community of Glenora, NY, and his schooling at Mercersburg Academy, Pennsylvania, where, despite a tendency toward melancholy inherited from his mother, he excels academically.

The Thinking Singer

After his return to the United States in 1927, Max Eastman finds himself isolated from his former radical friends. A controversy with Sidney Hook over his interpretation of Marxism increases his depression, as does the lackluster response to his novel, Venture. Crystal Eastman’s untimely death in 1928 nearly ends Max’s career as a professional lecturer, but Eliena’s devotion to their marriage sustains him. Max’s translation of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution reinvigorates his friendship with the exiled leader, although during Max’s visit to Prinkipo Island the men nearly come to blows over their different interpretations of dialectic materialism. Max publishes more poetry, a book on literature and science, an edition of Marx’s writings, and Artists in Uniform, a critique of the totalitarian takeover of literature in the Soviet Union. He collaborates on the innovative documentary Tsar to Lenin, while Enjoyment of Laughter, his second book on humor, becomes a best-seller. Max’s scathing review of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon leads to a well-publicized fistfight between the two men. Worried about the Soviet infiltration of American life, Max is keeping lists of suspected communists in the U.S. and acts as the host of the popular radio show Word Game.

We Were Beautiful Gods

This chapter is devoted to Max Eastman’s tempestuous relationship with the radical actress Florence Deshon (Florence Danks, 1893–1922). On behalf of the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Terms of Peace, Max lectures at great personal risk to large audiences across the nation against American involvement in World War I. Along with fellow contributors to The Masses, he survives two trials for obstructing the military recruitment effort and founds The Liberator, with Crystal as co-editor. He pays tribute to Deshon in a second volume of poetry, Colors of Life (1918), lives with her in Croton, and, after her move to Hollywood, bombards her with love letters. During a visit he introduces her to Charlie Chaplin as well as to Margrethe Mather, who takes significant photographs of Deshon and Max. Florence has an affair with Chaplin, while Max takes up with the dancer Lisa Duncan. Frustrated with Hollywood and Max, Deshon returns to New York, where she dies, likely by her own hand, on February 4, 1922. Max’s book on The Sense of Humor is dedicated to Deshon and evokes her memorable smile.

The Flea from Tangier

Max Eastman secretly marries the brilliant activist and artist Ida Rauh (1877–1970), who introduces him to socialism. A honeymoon trip takes the couple to Europe, where an annoying flea Max picks up in Tangier serves as a metaphor for his continuing sexual frustrations. He is asked to assume editorship of The Masses, which he reinvents as a cutting-edge forum for politically motivated art and writing. His son Daniel is born in 1912, to his father’s surprise and mystification. Max publishes Enjoyment of Poetry, his most enduringly successful book, as well as his first volume of poetry, Child of the Amazons. Max’s marital problems engender his interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. Dissatisfied with his analyst, Dr. Jelliffe, Max embarks on a course of self-analysis, diagnosing himself with “unsublimated heterosexual lust.” He acquires a small house in Croton-on Hudson, where he becomes the unofficial leader of a flourishing socialist commune. His increasing skepticism of Woodrow Wilson’s commitment to peace helps radicalize his writing. After meeting the beautiful actress Florence Deshon at a fund-raiser for The Masses, he leaves Ida Rauh, relinquishing his parental rights.

Dearest of All Lovers

Drawing on mostly unpublished letters, this chapter details the intimate, near-incestuous relationship between Crystal Eastman and Max Eastman, which became more intense when they were separated (Max at Williams College; Crystal at Vassar). Crystal uses her letters to Max for sexual innuendo. Max’s popularity in college, his pranks, his daring trip, with a friend, to California and Utah, and early recognition as a poet cannot prevent an episode of depression and invalidism, compelling him to take a leave of absence before he graduates in 1905.

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 ...

A Test Case for the Kinsey Male

Max Eastman’s increasing conservatism does not lead to self-imposed restrictions on his love life. Among his lovers the young Creigh Collins, an aspiring poet and fellow devotee to physical pleasure, stands out. The Hitler-Stalin pact seals Max’s rejection of communist ideas and drives his advocacy for American involvement in World War II. In the protagonist of his long poem, Lot’s Wife (1942), heavily criticized by Edmund Wilson, Max paints a picture of the archetypal tyrant, Hitler and Stalin rolled into one terrifying package. To the consternation of his former leftist friends, Max joins Reader’s Digest as a “roving editor,” celebrating his new association with an essay on why socialism does not “jibe” with human nature. Buoyed by this new source of income, Max and Eliena build a home on Martha’s Vineyard.

Malyutochka

In 1922, Max Eastman travels to Europe to take part in the Genoa Conference, where he meets his future wife, Eliena Krylenko, sister to Nikolai Krylenko, later Stalin’s Commissar of Justice. A prolonged stay in Moscow, where Max tours the Kremlin and attends the Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International, leads to his gradual disenchantment with Bolshevism, though not with Trotsky, whose biography he writes. Living in Sochi on the Black Sea, Max perfects his command of Russian and begins work on a novel. He develops his concept of “social engineering” against Stalin’s attempt to make a religion out of the Communist Party. After marrying Eliena, Max leaves Moscow and lives on the Côte d’Azur and in Paris, implementing his free love philosophy and completing books on Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. After he publishes Lenin’s “Testament,” with its criticism of Stalin, Trotsky disavows him. In Vienna he meets Freud, who encourages him to write a book about “America the miscarriage.”