Karl Marx Page 28
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Marx replied the following day. ‘The news of Mary’s death surprised no less than it dismayed me. She was so good-natured, witty and closely attached to you.’ So far so good; but this was merely the cue for a lengthy recitation of his own woes. ‘The devil alone knows why nothing but ill luck should dog everyone in our circle just now. I no longer know which way to turn either …’ Attempts to raise money in France and Germany had come to naught, no one would let him buy anything on credit, he was being dunned for the school fees and the rent, it was impossible to get on with work. After plenty more in this vein, Marx briefly remembered himself. ‘It is dreadfully selfish of me to tell you about these horreurs at this time,’ he conceded. ‘But it’s a homeopathic remedy. One calamity is a distraction from the other. And, in the final count, what else can I do?’ Well, he could have tried offering his condolences rather more tactfully, for a start. In mitigation one must allow that Marx was in a truly calamitous predicament: the children hadn’t been back to school since Christmas, partly because the bill for the previous term was still unpaid but also because their only presentable clothes and shoes were in hock. Even his parting thought had more to do with his own troubles than Engels’s loss: ‘Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life? You can see what strange notions come into the heads of “civilised men” under the pressure of certain circumstances. Salut.’
Engels read all this with anger and amazement. How dare Marx go on about money at such a time – especially when he knew that Engels himself had been feeling the pinch lately because of a slump in the price of cotton? He held his silence for five days before sending an icy acknowledgement. His letters usually began ‘Dear Moor’, but such informality would no longer do:
Dear Marx,
You will find it quite in order that, this time, my own misfortune and the frosty view you took of it should have made it positively impossible for me to reply to you any sooner. All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have on this occasion, which in all conscience must needs affect me deeply, given me proof of greater sympathy and friendship than I could have looked for. You thought it a fit moment to assert the superiority of your ‘dispassionate turn of mind’. So be it, then!
There was nothing dispassionate about Marx’s turn of mind now. For the next three weeks sour recriminations flew back and forth across the kitchen table at Grafton Terrace, as Jenny blamed Karl for not alerting Engels to their wretched state of affairs earlier and he blamed her for assuming that they could always rely on subventions from Manchester. (‘The poor woman had to suffer for something of which she was in fact innocent, for women are wont to ask for the impossible,’ Marx said afterwards, rather ungallantly. ‘Women are funny creatures, even those endowed with much intelligence.’) After many a long argument they agreed that Karl should have himself declared insolvent in the bankruptcy court. Jennychen and Laura would find employment as governesses, Lenchen would enter service elsewhere, while little Tussy and her parents would move into the City Model Lodging House, a refuge for the destitute.
Did he really have any such intention, or was this self-inflicted martyrdom just a ruse to win Engels’s sympathy? Hard to say. But there is no doubting the sincerity of his contrition:
It was very wrong of me to write you that letter, and I regretted it as soon as it had gone off. However, what happened was in no sense due to heartlessness. As my wife and children will testify, I was as shattered when your letter arrived (first thing in the morning) as if my nearest and dearest had died. But, when I wrote to you in the evening, I did so under the pressure of circumstances that were desperate in the extreme. The landlord had put a broker in my house, the butcher had protested a bill, coal and provisions were in short supply, and little Jenny was confined to bed. Generally, under such circumstances, my only recourse is to cynicism.
Though the self-laceration was still mixed in with a ladleful of self-pity, this constitutes the only sincere apology Marx ever gave anyone in his life.
Engels, with his usual generosity, recognised Marx’s penitence at once. ‘Dear Moor,’ he wrote, resuming the old affectionate greeting:
Thank you for being so candid. You yourself have now realised what sort of impression your last letter but one made on me. One can’t live with a woman for years on end without being fearfully affected by her death. I felt as though with her I was burying the last vestige of my youth. When your letter arrived she had not been buried. That letter, I tell you, obsessed me for a whole week; I couldn’t get it out of my head. Never mind. Your last letter made up for it and I’m glad that, in losing Mary, I didn’t also lose my oldest and best friend.
The estrangement was not mentioned again: without further ado Engels applied himself to the task of rescuing the Marx family from bankruptcy. Unable to borrow money, he simply filched a £100 cheque from the in-tray at Ermen & Engels which he then endorsed in Marx’s favour. ‘It is an exceedingly daring move on my part,’ he acknowledged, ‘but the risk must be taken.’ Another £250 followed a few months later to keep Marx afloat through the summer – which was just as well, since a plague of carbuncles made work almost impossible.
That November a telegram arrived from Trier announcing the death of Henriette Marx at the age of seventy-five. She had predicted her end with suspicious accuracy – 4 p.m. on 30 November, the very hour and day of her fiftieth wedding anniversary – but no one seems to have paused to wonder if the old girl assisted her own passage into oblivion. Karl’s only comment on hearing the news was predictably cool: ‘Fate laid claim to one of our family. I myself have already had one foot in the grave. Circumstances being what they were, I, presumably, was needed more than my mater.’ Engels sent off a tenner to pay for the journey to Trier but offered no word of condolence: he knew Marx well enough to realise that bogus regrets would cause more offence than none at all.
The execution of the will dragged on for several months, and once all the advances and loans from Uncle Lion had been discounted Marx was left with little more than £100. Still, it was enough to justify a spree. In his contempt for bourgeois financial prudence Marx practised what he preached: if there was no cash in the house he survived by ducking and diving, bluffing and juggling; but whenever he did get his hands on a fistful of sterling he spent recklessly, with no thought for the morrow. The Marxes had moved to Grafton Terrace in 1856 on the strength of Jenny’s small inheritance from Caroline von Westphalen, although they must have known that the house was beyond their means. Now the folly was repeated. In March 1864, as soon as the first payment from Henriette’s legacy arrived, they took a three-year lease on a spacious detached mansion at 1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park. The new address was only about 200 yards from Grafton Terrace but a world away in style and status – the sort of residence favoured by well-to-do doctors and lawyers, with a large garden, a ‘charming conservatory’ and enough space for each girl to have her own bedroom. A room on the first floor overlooking the park was commandeered by Marx as his study.
The annual rent for Modena Villas was £65, almost twice that of Grafton Terrace. Quite how Marx expected to pay for all this luxury is a mystery: as so often, however, his Micawberish faith was vindicated. On 9 May 1864 Wilhelm ‘Lupus’ Wolff died of meningitis, bequeathing ‘all my books furniture and effects debts and moneys owning to me and all the residue of my personal estate and also all real and leasehold estates of which I may die seized possessed or entitled or of which I may have power to dispose by this my Will unto and to the use of the said Karl Marx’. Wolff was one of the few old campaigners from the 1840s who never wavered in his allegiance to Marx and Engels. He worked with them in Brussels on the Communist Correspondence Committee, in Paris at the 1848 revolution and in Cologne when Marx was editing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. From 1853 he lived quietly in Manchester, earning his living as a language teacher and relying largely on Engels to keep him up to date
with political news. ‘I don’t believe anyone in Manchester can have been so universally beloved as our poor little friend,’ Karl wrote to Jenny after delivering the funeral oration, during which he broke down several times.
As executors of the will, Marx and Engels were amazed to discover that modest old Lupus had accumulated a small fortune through hard work and thrift. Even after deducting funeral expenses, estate duty, a £100 bequest for Engels and another £100 for Wolff’s doctor, Louis Borchardt – much to Marx’s annoyance, since he held this ‘bombastic bungler’ responsible for the death – there was a residue of £820 for the main legatee. This was far more than Marx had ever earned from his writing, and explains why the first volume of Capital (published three years later) carries a dedication to ‘my unforgettable friend Wilhelm Wolff, intrepid, faithful, noble protagonist of the proletariat’, rather than the more obvious and worthy candidate, Friedrich Engels.
The Marxes wasted no time in spending their windfall. Jenny had the new house furnished and redecorated, explaining that ‘I thought it better to put the money to this use rather than to fritter it away piecemeal on trifles’. Pets were bought for the children (three dogs, two cats, two birds) and named after Karl’s favourite tipples, including Whisky and Toddy. In July he took the family on vacation to Ramsgate for three weeks, though the eruption of a malignant carbuncle just above the penis rather spoiled the fun, leaving him confined to bed at their guest-house in a misanthropic sulk. ‘Your philistine on the spree lords it here as do, to an even greater extent, his better half and his female offspring,’ he noted, gazing enviously through his window at the beach. ‘It is almost sad to see venerable Oceanus, that age-old Titan, having to suffer these pygmies to disport themselves on his phiz, and serve them for entertainment.’ The boils had replaced the bailiffs as his main source of irritation. Mostly, however, he dispatched them with the same careless contempt. That autumn he held a grand ball at Modena Villas for Jennychen and Laura, who had spent many years declining invitations to parties for fear that they would be unable to reciprocate. Fifty of their young friends were entertained until four in the morning, and so much food was left over that little Tussy was allowed to have an impromptu tea-party for local children the following day.
Writing to Lion Philips in the summer of 1864, Marx revealed an even more remarkable detail of his prosperous new way of life:
I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating – partly in American funds, but more especially in English stocks, which are springing up like mushrooms this year (in furtherance of every imaginable and unimaginable joint stock enterprise), are forced up to a quite unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse. In this way, I have made over £400 and, now that the complexity of the political situation affords greater scope, I shall begin all over again. It’s a type of operation that makes small demands on one’s time, and it’s worth while running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his money.
Since there is no hard evidence of these transactions, some scholars have assumed that Marx simply invented the story to impress his businesslike uncle. But it may be true. He certainly kept a close eye on share prices, and while badgering Engels for the next payment from Lupus’s estate he mentioned that ‘had I had the money during the past ten days, I’d have made a killing on the Stock Exchange here. The time has come again when, with wit and very little money, it’s possible to make money in London.’
Playing the markets, hosting dinner-dances, walking his dogs in the park: Marx was in severe danger of becoming respectable. One day a curious document arrived, announcing that he had been elected, without his knowledge, to the municipal sinecure of ‘Constable of the Vestry of St Pancras’. Engels thought this hilarious: ‘Salut, ô connétable de Saint Pancrace! Now you should get yourself a worthy outfit: a red nightshirt, white nightcap, down-at-heel slippers, white pants, a long clay pipe and a pot of porter.’ But Marx boycotted the swearing-in, quoting the advice of an Irish neighbour that ‘I should tell them that I was a foreigner and that they should kiss me on the arse’.
Ever since the split in the Communist League he had been a resolute non-joiner, spurning any committee or party that tried to recruit him. ‘I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves,’ he had told Engels as long ago as February 1851, and it would certainly take more than St Pancras philistines to entice him out of this long hibernation. Nevertheless, after thirteen years of ‘authentic isolation’ (if not exactly peace and quiet) Marx did now feel ready to emerge. The first hint of a new mood can be seen in his enthusiastic reaction to the 1863 uprising in Poland against Tsarist oppression. ‘What do you think of the Polish business?’ he asked Engels on 13 February. ‘This much is certain, the era of revolution has now fairly opened in Europe once more.’ Four days later he decided that Prussia’s intervention on behalf of the Tsar against the Polish insurgents ‘impels us to speak’. At that stage he was thinking merely of a pamphlet or manifesto – and indeed he published a short ‘Proclamation on Poland’ in November. Little did he imagine that within another twelve months he would be the de facto leader of the first mass movement of the international working classes.
Marx’s adult life has a tidal rhythm of advance and retreat, in which foaming surges forward are followed by a long withdrawing roar. This alternation of involvement and isolation was largely beyond his control, dictated as it was by accident and circumstance – illness, exile, domestic disaster, political reverses, fractured friendships. But it can also be seen as a wilful experiment in reconciling the demands of theory and practice, private contemplation and social engagement. Like many writers he was a kind of gregarious loner, yearning for a bit of solitude in which he could get down to work without interruption yet also craving the stimulus of action and argument. And he felt the dilemma more keenly than most, since the estrangement of individuals from society was one of his preoccupying obsessions.
In a schoolboy essay from 1835, brimming with the facile certitude of a seventeen-year-old who has just bought his first razor, the problem was eliminated as briskly as youthful stubble. ‘The chief guide which must direct us in the choice of a profession is the welfare of mankind and our own perfection,’ he wrote. ‘It should not be thought that these two interests could be in conflict.’ And why not? Because human nature was so constituted that individuals reached the zenith of perfection when devoting themselves to others. Someone who works only for himself ‘may perhaps become a famous man of learning, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never be a perfect, truly great man’. History acclaims only those people who have ennobled themselves by enriching their tribe, and ‘religion itself teaches us that the ideal being whom all strive to copy sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind … Who would dare to set at naught such judgements?’
Marx himself would, as it happened. After realising that religion was no cure for alienation but merely an opiate to dull the pain, he was forced to look elsewhere for wholeness – first in the grand unifying self-consciousness of Hegelian philosophy, and then in historical materialism. But there was no escape from the old theological argument about faith versus works: it simply assumed a secular form, as theory versus practice or words versus deeds. ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it,’ he declared in 1845, as if abolishing the division of labour by a stroke of his pen: in future everyone would be both philosopher and soldier, just as we should all tend our sheep in the morning, paint a picture in the afternoon and go fishing in the evening. Aglow with existentialist fervour, Marx had no patience in those days with the ivory-tower mentality. In a little-known article from 1847 he derided the Belgian journalist Adolphe Bartels, who had taken fright at the activities of revolutionary German émigrés in Brussels:
M. Adolphe Bartels claims that public life is finished for him. Indeed, he has withdrawn into private life and does not mean to leave it; he limits himself, each time some public e
vent occurs, to hurling protests and proclaiming loudly that he believes he is his own master, that the movement has been made without him, M. Bartels, and in spite of him, M. Bartels, and that he has the right to refuse it his supreme sanction. It will be agreed that this is just as much a way of participating in public life as any other, and that by all those declarations, proclamations and protestations the public man hides behind the humble appearance of the private individual. This is the way in which the unappreciated and misunderstood genius reveals himself.
Within a few years, however, Marx came to believe that a misunderstood genius such as himself might well participate in public life by dashing off protests and proclamations from the solitude of his desk. To everything there was a season: a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time of war, and a time of peace. Or, to mix references, why imitate the action of the tiger when the blast of war has fallen silent?
Hence the striking contrast between his sardonic swipe at Bartels and the autobiographical preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), where he confessed that the closure of the Rheinische Zeitung in 1843 had given him a longed-for opportunity ‘to withdraw from the public stage into the study’, which he ‘eagerly seized’. That preface was written during a far longer withdrawal from public business – an abstinence which he showed no great desire to break, even though German newspapers sometimes chided him for inactivity. In 1857 a group of New York revolutionaries wrote begging him to resurrect the old Communist League in London; he took more than a year to answer, and then only to point out that ‘since 1852 I had not been associated with any association and was firmly convinced that my theoretical studies were of greater use to the working class than my meddling with associations which had now had their day on the Continent’. As he told Ferdinand Freiligrath in February 1860, ‘whereas you are a poet, I am a critic and for me the experiences of 1849–52 were quite enough. The “League”, like the société des saisons in Paris and a hundred other societies, was simply an episode in the history of a party that is everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern society.’ This organic metaphor is a most apt description of how the International Working Men’s Association emerged into the daylight, four years later.