Karl Marx Page 23
Marx’s hand-wringing at the ‘unfortunate’ gender of his new baby should not, therefore, be taken as evidence of misogyny or paternal coldness. He was simply facing the social and economic facts: since middle-class girls couldn’t be expected to earn a living or fend for themselves, Eleanor would be one more financial burden on an already overdrawn exchequer.
Even so, there can be no doubt that Edgar – the impish, round-faced Colonel Musch – was the favourite. A sickly lad, whose huge head seemed far too heavy for his feeble body, he was nevertheless an inexhaustible source of drollery and high spirits. When his parents lapsed into despondency, he could always cheer them up by singing nonsensical ditties – or the Marseillaise, for that matter – with tremendous feeling and at the top of his voice. After giving the boy a fine travelling bag as a fifth-birthday present, Marx’s secretary Wilhelm Pieper regretted the impulsive gift and threatened to take it back. ‘Moor, I’ve hiddened it well,’ Musch confided to his papa, ‘and if Pieper asks for it, I’ll tell him I’ve given it to a poor man.’
Marx adored this cunning little slyboots, ‘a friend who was more dear to me personally than any other’. The order of precedence is confirmed by a letter to Engels on 3 March 1855, in which he listed the various ailments that were turning their apartment into a cottage hospital: Edgar had been laid low by some kind of gastric fever; Karl himself was confined to bed with a frightful cough; Jenny had a painful and irritating whitlow on one of her fingers; baby Eleanor was perilously frail and growing weaker every day. ‘This,’ he said of Edgar’s illness, ‘is the worst of all.’ A surprising judgement, since Eleanor’s very life appeared to be threatened whereas Edgar was making ‘rapid strides towards convalescence’ within a few days.
But the remission was horribly brief. When Edgar took a serious turn for the worse at the end of March, the doctor diagnosed consumption and warned that there was no hope of recovery. ‘Though my heart is bleeding and my head afire, I must, of course, retain my composure,’ Marx wrote. ‘Never for one moment throughout his illness has the child been untrue to his own good-natured, and at the same time independent, self.’ Edgar died in his father’s arms shortly before six o’clock on the morning of 6 April. It was Good Friday, the grimmest day in the Christian calendar, and so the boy’s passing was marked by solemn peals of church bells. Wilhelm Liebknecht arrived at Dean Street soon afterwards to find Jenny sobbing quietly over the corpse while Laura and Jennychen clung feverishly to her skirt as if to defend themselves against the malign force that had robbed them of their brothers and sister. Marx, almost out of his wits, was angrily and violently resisting any condolence.
The funeral took place two days later at the Whitefield Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road, already the final resting place of Fawkesy and Franziska. During the short coach journey to the graveyard Liebknecht stroked Marx’s forehead and tried, rather fatuously, to remind him of how many people still loved him – his wife, his daughters, his friends. ‘You can’t give my boy back to me!’ Marx howled, burying his head in his hands. As the coffin was being lowered into the earth he stepped forward, and for a moment the other mourners thought he might hurl himself in after it. Liebknecht stuck out a restraining arm, just in case.
Marx could hardly bring himself to return to Dean Street, which seemed unbearably desolate without its court jester. ‘I’ve already had my share of bad luck,’ he told Engels, ‘but only now do I know what real unhappiness is. I feel broken down.’ For several days afterwards, he was ‘fortunate enough’ to have such splitting headaches that he could neither think nor hear nor see. One of the few things that sustained him was the friendship of Engels, who invited Karl and Jenny to spend a few days in Manchester for a change of scene from the accursed apartment in Soho. (Years later, long after he had moved out of the district, Marx said that ‘the region round Soho Square still sends a shiver down my spine if I happen to be anywhere near there’.) But as soon as they were back in London the old marks of Edgar’s presence – his books, his toys – plunged them into deeper grief. ‘Bacon says that really important people have so many relations to nature and the world, so many objects of interest, that they easily get over any loss,’ he wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle three months later. ‘I am not one of those important people. The death of my child has shattered me to the very core and I feel the loss as keenly as on the first day. My poor wife is also completely broken down.’
From July until September the family decamped to the south London suburb of Camberwell, where the German émigré Peter Imandt had offered the use of his apartment while he was away in Scotland. Though they were glad enough to keep away from Dean Street, the main reason for the change of address was to hide from the many creditors who were closing in again – especially that avenging fury Dr Freund, now threatening legal action over the unpaid medical bills. In mid-September, when Freund discovered his whereabouts, Marx had to execute another quick getaway – inspired, or so he claimed, by the hasty tactical retreat of the Russian troops from the south end of Sebastopol the previous week, following their defeat by the French at the Battle of the Chernaya. ‘I have been compelled by force supérieure to evacuate the southern side without, however, blowing everything up behind me,’ he informed Engels in a battlefront dispatch from Camberwell. ‘Indeed, my garrison will remain quietly here, whither I also propose to return in a week or so. In other words, I am obliged to withdraw to Manchester for a few days and shall arrive there tomorrow evening. I shall have to stay there incognito, so don’t let anyone know about my presence.’
Two days after reading this letter Engels sent the New York Daily Tribune a long article on ‘Crimean Prospects’ – under Marx’s name, as usual – in which he justified the Russians’ apparently unnecessary flight from southern Sebastopol. ‘Resistance in a besieged place is of itself demoralising in the long run,’ he argued. ‘It implies hardships, want of rest, sickness, and the presence, not of that acute danger which braces, but of that chronic danger which must ultimately relax the mind … It is not astonishing that this demoralisation should at last seize the garrison; it is astonishing that it had not done so long before.’ It’s hard to believe that Engels composed this tactical assessment without at least half an eye on his own weary and beleaguered ally.
During the spring of 1855, between Eleanor’s birth and Musch’s death, there was one item of family news that gave Marx unalloyed pleasure. ‘Yesterday we were informed of a VERY HAPPY EVENT,’ he wrote on 8 March. ‘The death of my wife’s uncle, aged ninety.’ He had no particular grudge against Heinrich Georg von Westphalen, a harmless lawyer and historian, except that the old boy’s longevity had delayed the redistribution of his considerable wealth. For the previous few years this indestructible uncle had been referred to in the Marx household as ‘the inheritance-thwarter’. Jenny’s legacy of about £100 arrived at the end of the year, and in the summer of 1856 she received another £120 following the death of her mother. On this occasion even Marx was tactful enough not to rejoice openly, especially as Jenny had been at the Baroness’s bedside in Trier during the final days. ‘She seems greatly affected by the old lady’s death,’ he observed, in tones of slight surprise.
These two windfalls at last gave him the wherewithal to escape from the ‘old hole’ in Soho. After tramping the streets for two weeks in search of more salubrious lodgings he settled on an unfurnished four-storey house at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town, not far from Hampstead Heath. The annual rent of £36 was cheap for north London – probably because, as Marx explained to Engels, this end of Hampstead remained ‘somewhat unfinished’. More than somewhat: the street was neither paved nor lit, and the immediate neighbourhood was a huge and muddy building site. The land had been green fields until the 1840s, but the coming of the railway transformed London’s rural outskirts into a suburban girdle of speculative developments for middle-class commuters. As with today’s ‘executive estates’ in even further-flung suburbs, the architectural style was a riotous hybrid of whimsical flour
ishes – quoins and coping-stones, arched windows and rococo balconies.
The house at Grafton Terrace was officially classified as ‘third-class’ by the Metropolitan Building Office. Still, Marx thought it ‘very nice’. Jenny revelled in the forgotten delights of domestic comfort and hired Helene Demuth’s stepsister, Marianne Creuz, to help with the extra chores. ‘It is indeed a princely dwelling compared with the holes we lived in before,’ she told a friend, ‘and although it was furnished from top to bottom for little more than £40 (in which second-hand rubbish played a leading role), I felt quite grand at first in our snug parlour.’ After redeeming her Argyll linen and silver from ‘Uncle’s’ – the pawnshop – she took great pleasure in laying out damask napkins at the dinner table. There were more intimate celebrations, too: only a few weeks after her arrival at Grafton Terrace, Jenny found herself pregnant for the seventh time.
The three children loved their new middle-class life. Jennychen and Laura, now aged twelve and eleven, transferred to the South Hampstead College for Ladies and were soon winning prizes in every subject. The two-year-old Eleanor – nicknamed Tussy, to rhyme with pussy – established herself as a mini-châtelaine, keeping open house for any children who wished to drop by. In fine weather she would eat her tea sitting on the front doorstep, gadding off between mouthfuls to join in the street games. Such was her fame that most neighbours referred to the whole Marx family simply as ‘the Tussies’.
Even the back garden, though little more than a few square yards of grass and gravel, was a delicious novelty. One of Eleanor’s earliest childhood memories was of Marx carrying her on his shoulder round the garden in Grafton Terrace, and putting convolvulus flowers in her brown curls.
Moor was admittedly a splendid horse. In earlier days – I cannot remember them, but have heard tell of them – my sisters and little brother – whose death just after my own birth was a lifelong grief to my parents – would ‘harness’ Moor to chairs which they ‘mounted’, and that he had to pull … Personally – perhaps because I had no sisters of my own age – I preferred Moor as a riding-horse. Seated on his shoulder, holding tight to his great mane of hair, then black with but a hint of grey, I have had magnificent rides round our little garden, and over the fields – now built over – that surrounded our house.
On Sundays the Marxes and any visiting friends would stroll over to nearby Hampstead Heath for a picnic, often their only substantial meal of the week. In spite of her tiny budget Lenchen usually managed to conjure up a large joint of veal, supplemented by bread, cheese, shrimps and periwinkles bought from vendors on the heath and flagons of beer from the local pub, Jack Straw’s Castle. After lunch the children played hide-and-seek among the gorse bushes while the adults snoozed or read the Sunday papers – but as so often happens on family outings, the reluctant papa would soon be dragged from his postprandial torpor by squealing youngsters. ‘Let’s see who can bring the most down!’ the daughters yelled one day, pointing at a chestnut tree laden with ripe nuts, and for the next hour or two Marx maintained a ceaseless bombardment until the tree was entirely bare. He was unable to move his right arm for a week afterwards.
Sometimes they ventured further afield to the green meadows and hills beyond Highgate, seeking out wild forget-me-nots and hyacinths while blithely ignoring the ‘No Trespassing’ signs. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who went on several of these expeditions, was amazed to see how many spring flowers grew in the dank English climate. ‘We looked down from our fragrant Asphodel meadows proudly upon the world,’ he wrote, ‘the mighty boundless city of the world which lay before us in its vastness, shrouded in the ugly mystery of the fog.’ On the walk home, Marx led his daughters in renditions of German folk-songs and Negro spirituals, or recited long passages from Shakespeare and Dante. ‘We really thought that we were living in a magic castle,’ Jenny Marx sighed. But the magic depended on financial legerdemain. It was at this time, fittingly enough, that Marx began amusing little Eleanor with his tales of Hans Röckle, the hard-up magician ‘who could never meet his obligations either to the devil or the butcher, and was therefore – much against the grain – constantly obliged to sell his toys to the devil’. Jenny’s inheritance had all gone on paying off debts and setting up house. One by one, the new pieces of furniture and the precious old linen found their way back to the pop-shop.
‘The clouds gathering over the money market are sombre indeed,’ Engels wrote in the very week of the move to Grafton Terrace. ‘This time there’ll be a day of wrath such as has never been seen before: the whole of Europe’s industry in ruins, all markets over-stocked (already nothing more is being shipped to India), all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree. I, too, believe that it will all come to pass in 1857, and when I heard you were again buying furniture I promptly declared the thing to be a dead certainty and offered to take bets on it. Adieu for today; cordial regards to your wife and children …’ A rather tactless joke in the circumstances. No sooner was Marx installed in the magic castle than he realised, to his horror, that there was no money for the rent. ‘So here I am,’ he wrote to Engels in January 1857, ‘without any prospects and with growing domestic liabilities, completely stranded in a house into which I have put what little cash I possessed and where it is impossible to scrape along from day to day as we did in Dean Street. I am utterly at a loss what to do, being, indeed, in a more desperate situation than five years ago. I thought I had tasted the bitterest dregs of life. Mais non! And the worst of it is that this is no mere passing crisis. I cannot see how I am to extricate myself.’
Engels was flabbergasted: ‘I had believed that everything was going splendidly at last – you in a decent house and the whole business settled, and now it turns out that everything’s in doubt …’ He promised to send £5 every month, plus extra one-off payments whenever needed. ‘Even if it means my facing the new financial year with a load of debts, no matter. I only wish you had told me about the business a fortnight earlier.’ For, as he confessed guiltily, he had just bought a splendid new hunter with some Christmas money from his father. ‘I’m exceedingly vexed that I should be keeping a horse here while you and your family are down on your luck in London.’
It was Jenny Marx who felt the misfortune most painfully. Her husband could withdraw into his study, where books and newspapers formed an impregnable barricade; the girls had the consoling distraction of new friends and a busy school timetable. But Jenny was marooned. She missed her long walks through the bustling streets of the West End, the meetings, the clubs and pubs, the conversations with fellow Germans who shared the misery of exile:
Our attractive little house, though it was like a palace for us in comparison with the places we had lived in before, was not easy to get to. There was no smooth road leading to it, building was going on all around, one had to pick one’s way over heaps of rubbish and in rainy weather the sticky red soil caked to one’s boots so that it was a tiring struggle and with heavy feet that one reached our house. And then it was dark in those wild districts, so that rather than have to tackle the dark, the rubbish, the clay and the heaps of stones one preferred to spend the evenings by a warm fire. I was very unwell that winter and was always surrounded with stacks of medicine bottles …
On 7 July her new baby was stillborn, but she could hardly muster the energy to mourn. ‘One day,’ she found, ‘was just like any other …’ Her only involvement in the world beyond 9 Grafton Terrace came from copying out Karl’s twice-weekly article for the Daily Tribune. Then even this lifeline was cut. Noticing that the newspaper was using fewer and fewer of his contributions – and, of course, he was paid only for what was printed – Marx went on strike. ‘It’s truly nauseating that one should be condemned to count it a blessing when taken aboard by a blotting-paper vendor such as this,’ he raged. He saw himself as a pauper in the workhouse, crushing up bones and boiling them into soup.
His threat to transfer allegiance to some other paper wor
ked – but only up to a point. The Tribune’s editor, Charles Dana, said that in future he would pay for one column a week, whether or not it was published. ‘They are in effect cutting me down by one half,’ Marx complained. ‘However, I shall agree to it and must agree to it.’ As a sop, Dana added that he was compiling a New American Cyclopaedia and wondered if Marx would like to write the entries on great generals and the history of warfare. Though it was Grub Street hack work of the dullest kind, Marx was in no position to refuse a fee of $2 per page.
The self-styled General Engels was happy to take on most of the labour – it would, he said, give him something to do in the evenings – and started on the first batch at once: Abensberg, Actium, Adjutant, Alma, Ammunition, Army, Artillery … But then an attack of glandular fever laid him low. For the rest of the summer he was effectively hors de combat while recuperating in the felicitously named Lancashire resort of Waterloo. This left Marx with the ticklish problem of explaining to Dana why the supply had suddenly dried up. ‘What am I to tell him?’ he wailed. ‘I can’t plead sickness, since I am continuing to send articles to the Tribune. It’s a very awkward case.’ He stalled for time by pretending that a parcel of manuscripts had been lost in the post.