Karl Marx (2 page)

‘
I found the position of good Herr Wyttenbach
extremely painful,’ Heinrich told his son after attending Loers’s installation ceremony. ‘I could have wept at the offence to this man, whose only failing is to be much too kind-hearted. I did my best to show the high regard I have for him and, among other things, I told him how devoted you are to him …’ But when Marx proved his devotion by refusing to speak to the conservative interloper, he earned a paternal scolding. ‘
Herr Loers has taken it ill
that you did not pay him a farewell visit,’ Heinrich wrote after Karl’s matriculation in 1835. ‘You and Clemens [another boy] were the only ones … I had to have recourse to a white lie and tell him we were there while he was away.’ Here is the authentic voice of Heinrich Marx, angry but timid, unhappy but obedient, forever letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, like the cat in the adage.

His son, by contrast, always preferred to imitate the action of a tiger. ‘
Social reforms
,’ Karl Marx wrote, when warning the working class not to expect any philanthropy from capitalism, ‘are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.’ One could argue that he embodied this principle. Though his intellectual power seldom faltered, the body which sustained this tremendous creative fecundity was a very feeble vessel indeed. It was almost as if he decided to test on himself what he advocated for the proletariat, by defying his physical limitations and seeking out the strength of his own weakness.

Even in the full vigour of youth – before poverty, sleeplessness, bad diet, heavy drinking and constant smoking had taken their inevitable toll – he was a fragile specimen. ‘
Nine lecture courses seem to me rather a lot
and I would not like you to do more than your body and mind can bear,’ Heinrich Marx advised, soon after his seventeen-year-old son started at Bonn University in 1835. ‘In providing really vigorous and healthy nourishment for your mind, do not forget that in this miserable world it is always accompanied by the body, which determines the well-being of the whole machine. A sickly scholar is the most unfortunate being on earth.
Therefore, do not study more than your health can bear.’ Karl took no notice, then or ever: in later years he often toiled through the night, fuelled by cheap ale and foul cigars.

With his usual rash candour, the lad replied that he was indeed in poor health – thus provoking another earnest sermon from his Polonius of a father. ‘
Youthful sins in any enjoyment
that is immoderate or even harmful in itself meet with frightful punishment. We have a sad example here in Herr Günster. True, in his case there is no question of vice, but smoking and drinking have worked havoc with his already weak chest and he will hardly live until the summer.’ His mother, fretful as ever, added her own list of commandments: ‘
You must avoid everything that could make things worse
, you must not get over-heated, not drink a lot of wine or coffee, and not eat anything pungent, a lot of pepper or other spices. You must not smoke any tobacco, not stay up too long in the evening, and rise early. Be careful also not to catch cold and, dear Carl, do not dance until you are quite well again.’ Frau Marx, one can safely say, was no skylark.

Shortly after his eighteenth birthday Marx was excused military service because of his weak chest, though he may well have exaggerated his condition. (The suspicion of lead-swinging is strengthened by a letter from his father advising him on how to dodge the draft: ‘Dear Karl, If you can, arrange to be given good certificates by competent and well-known physicians there, you can do it with a good conscience … But to be consistent with your conscience, do not smoke too much.’) The supposed disability certainly didn’t harm his enjoyment of student high jinks. An official ‘Certificate of Release’ issued after Marx’s year at Bonn University, while praising his academic achievements (‘excellent diligence and attention’), noted that ‘
he has incurred a punishment
of one day’s detention for disturbing the peace by rowdiness and drunkenness at night … Subsequently, he was accused of having carried prohibited weapons in Cologne. The investigation is still pending. He has not been suspected of participation in any forbidden association among the students.’

The university authorities didn’t know the half of it. True, the Poets’ Club – which he joined in his first term – was not a ‘forbidden association’, but neither was it quite so innocent as the name suggested: the discussion of poetry and rhetoric was a cover for more seditious talk. ‘Your little circle appeals to me, as you may well believe, much more than alehouse gatherings,’ Heinrich Marx wrote, happily imagining his boy improving the shining hour with earnest literary debate.

As it happened, Marx was no stranger to alehouses either. He was a co-president of the Trier Tavern Club, a society of about thirty university students from his home town whose main ambition was to get drunk as frequently and riotously as possible: it was after one of their revels that young Karl found himself detained for twenty-four hours, though the imprisonment did not prevent his chums from bringing him yet more booze and packs of playing cards to ease his sentence. During 1836 there was a series of fights in pubs between the Trier gang and a posse of young bloods from the Borussia Korps, who would force the student layabouts to kneel and swear allegiance to the Prussian aristocracy. Marx bought a pistol to defend himself against these humiliations, and when he visited Cologne in April the ‘prohibited weapon’ was discovered during a police search. It was only a begging letter from Heinrich Marx to a judge in Cologne which persuaded the authorities not to press charges. Two months later, after yet another fracas with the Borussia Korps, Marx accepted a challenge to a duel. The outcome of this contest between a short-sighted swot and a trained soldier was all too predictable, and he was lucky to get away with nothing worse than a small wound above his left eye. ‘
Is duelling then so closely interwoven with philosophy?
’ his father asked despairingly. ‘Do not let this inclination, and if not inclination, this craze, take root. You could in the end deprive yourself and your parents of the finest hopes that life offers.’

After a year of ‘wild rampaging in Bonn’, Heinrich Marx was only too pleased to let his son transfer to the University of Berlin,
where there would be fewer extra-curricular temptations. ‘There is no question here of drinking, duelling and pleasant communal outings,’ the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach had observed while studying there ten years earlier. ‘In no other university can you find such a passion for work … Compared to this temple of work, the other universities are like public houses.’ No wonder Heinrich was so eager to sign the necessary form consenting to the move. ‘I not only grant my son Karl Marx permission, but it is my will that he should enter the University of Berlin next term for the purpose of continuing there his studies of Law …’

Any hopes that the wayward youth could now concentrate on his studies without distraction were quickly dashed: Karl Marx had fallen in love.

The one schoolfriend from Trier with whom Marx maintained any connection in adult life was Edgar von Westphalen, an amiable chump and dilettante with revolutionary inclinations. This enduring friendship had nothing to do with Edgar’s qualities but everything to do with his sister, the lovely Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von Westphalen, known to all as Jenny, who became the first and only Mrs Karl Marx.

She was quite a catch. Revisiting his home town many years later, Karl wrote fondly to Jenny, ‘
Every day and on every side I am asked
about the
quondam
“most beautiful girl in Trier” and the “queen of the ball”. It’s damned pleasant for a man, when his wife lives on like this as an “enchanted princess” in the imagination of a whole town.’ It may seem surprising that a twenty-two-year-old princess of the Prussian ruling class – the daughter of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen – should have fallen for a bourgeois Jewish scallywag four years her junior, rather than some dashing grandee with a braided uniform and a private income; but Jenny was an intelligent, free-thinking girl who found Marx’s intellectual swagger irresistible. After ditching her official fiancé, a respectable young second lieutenant, she became engaged to Karl in the summer vacation of 1836. He was so proud that he
couldn’t stop himself from boasting to his parents, but the news was kept from Jenny’s family for almost a year.

The reasons for this long concealment are obvious enough at first glance. Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a senior official of the Royal Prussian Provincial Government, was a man of doubly aristocratic lineage: his father had been Chief of the General Staff during the Seven Years’ War and his Scottish mother, Anne Wishart, was descended from the Earls of Argyll. Such a thoroughbred magnifico would scarcely wish his daughter to saddle herself with the untitled descendant of a long line of rabbis.

On closer inspection, however, the secrecy is more puzzling; for von Westphalen was neither a snob nor a reactionary. After a conventional upper-class marriage which had produced four conventional upper-class children – one of whom, Ferdinand, later became a fiendishly oppressive Minister of the Interior in the Prussian government – the Baron was now married to Caroline Heubel, a plain, decent daughter of the German middle class, who was the mother of Jenny and Edgar. (His first wife, Lisette Veltheim, had died in 1807.) No longer obliged to put on airs and graces or fuss about his social status, Baron Ludwig had relaxed into his more natural character – cultured, liberal and benign. As a Protestant in a Catholic city, he may have felt himself to be something of an outsider; certainly, he sympathised with life’s outcasts. In official reports to Berlin he drew attention to the ‘great and growing poverty’ of the lower classes in Trier, though without proposing any cause or cure. He was an almost perfect specimen of the well-meaning liberal conservative, distressed by the privations of the poor but enjoying his own amplitude of life.

Rather like Heinrich Marx, in fact. The two men met soon after von Westphalen was posted to Trier in 1816 and discovered that they had much in common, including a love of literature and Enlightenment philosophy. Though they were unquestioning monarchists and patriots, both argued –
sotto voce
and with the utmost politeness – for some mild reforms that might temper the excesses of Prussian absolutism. Like Heinrich Marx, Ludwig
von Westphalen joined the Casino Club and was therefore treated with wary suspicion by his superiors in Berlin.

The two wives had nothing in common at all. Caroline von Westphalen was a lively and generous hostess, forever organising poetry readings or musical soirées; Henriette Marx was narrow-minded, inarticulate and socially awkward. To the Marx children, the von Westphalens’ house on Neustrasse was a haven of light and life. Sophie Marx and Jenny von Westphalen were intimate friends for most of their childhood: when the five-year-old Jenny first set eyes on her future husband, he was still a babe-in-arms. Like her brother, who was one year older than Karl, Jenny soon fell under the spell of this dark-eyed, domineering infant (‘he was a terrible tyrant’) and never escaped.

The Baron, too, began to notice their precocious playmate. Unlike his own son, Edgar, the Marx boy had a hunger for knowledge and a quick intelligence with which to digest it. On long walks together, the old man would recite long passages from Homer and Shakespeare to his young companion. Marx came to know much of Shakespeare by heart – and used it to good effect, salting and peppering his adult writings with apt quotations and analogies from the plays. ‘
His respect for Shakespeare was boundless
: he made a detailed study of his works and knew even the least important of his characters,’ Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue recalled. ‘His whole family had a real cult for the great English dramatist; his three daughters knew many of his works by heart. When after 1848 he wanted to perfect his knowledge of English, which he could already read, he sought out and classified all Shakespeare’s original expressions.’

In later life Marx relived those happy hours with von Westphalen by declaiming scenes from Shakespeare – as well as Dante and Goethe – while leading his family up to Hampstead Heath for Sunday picnics. ‘
The children are constantly reading Shakespeare
,’ he reported to Engels, with immense paternal pride, in 1856. At the age of twelve, Marx’s daughter Jenny compared his former secretary Wilhelm Pieper with Benedick from
Much
Ado About Nothing
– whereupon her eleven-year-old sister, Laura, pointed out that Benedick was a wit but Pieper was merely a clown, ‘and a cheap clown too’. During the long years of exile in London, Marx’s only forays into English culture were occasional outings to watch the leading Shakespearean actors Salvini and Irving. It is no coincidence that one of the Marx children, Eleanor, went on the stage and another, little Jenny, yearned to do likewise. As Professor S. S. Prawer has commented, anyone in Marx’s household was obliged to live ‘
in a perpetual flurry of allusions
to English literature’. There was a quotation for every occasion – to flatten a political enemy, to enliven a dry economic text, to heighten a family joke, or to authenticate an intense emotion. In a love-letter to his wife, written thirteen years after their wedding, Marx revealed once again the Baron von Westphalen’s enduring influence:

There you are before me, large as life
, and I lift you up in my arms and I kiss you all over from top to toe, and I fall on my knees before you and cry: ‘Madame, I love you.’ And love you I do, with a love greater than was ever felt by the Moor of Venice … Who of my many calumniators and venomous-tongued enemies has ever reproached me with being called upon to play the romantic lead in a second-rate theatre? And yet it is true. Had the scoundrels possessed the wit, they would have depicted ‘the productive and social relations’ on one side and, on the other, myself at your feet. Beneath it they would have written: ‘Look to this picture and to that.’