Karl Marx (30 page)

When Marx was in this sort of mood there was no stopping him – more’s the pity. Joseph Moses Levy, the
Telegraph
’s editor, was subjected to many pages of heavy-handed and anti-Semitic taunts for changing the spelling of his surname from ‘Levi’.

Levy is determined to be an Anglo-Saxon. Therefore, at least once a month, he attacks the unEnglish policies of Mr Disraeli, for Disraeli, ‘the Asiatic mystery’, is, unlike the
Telegraph
, not an
Anglo-Saxon by descent. But what does it profit Levy to attack Mr D’Israeli and to change ‘I’ into ‘y’, when Mother Nature has inscribed his origins in the clearest possible way right in the middle of his face. The nose of the mysterious stranger of Slawkenbergius (see
Tristram Shandy
) who had got the finest nose from the promontory of noses was just a nine days’ wonder in Strasbourg, whereas Levy’s nose provides conversation throughout the year in the City of London … Indeed the great skill of Levy’s nose consists in its ability to titillate with a rotten smell, to sniff it out a hundred miles away and to attract it. Thus Levy’s nose serves the
Daily Telegraph
as elephant’s trunk, antenna, lighthouse and telegraph.

Pretty rich coming from a man whose own rabbinical forebears were also called Levi, a name dropped purely to assimilate themselves into Prussian society.

No publisher in Germany would touch the book, and so Marx had
Herr Vogt
printed in London after a whip-round to cover the production costs: Lassalle and the Countess von Hatzfeldt provided £12, another £12 came from the wine merchant Sigismund Borkheim, an old ally from the ’48 uprising; and Engels sent a fiver. Anyone reading the book today will feel that these well-wishers might have performed a more useful service if they had dissuaded him from wasting so much time on this nonsense; but apparently the madness was contagious. Engels praised
Herr Vogt
as ‘the best polemical work you have ever written’, superior even to
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
; Jenny, who transcribed the manuscript, found it a source of ‘endless glee and delight’. As usual, Marx expected to cause a sensation and become the sole topic of conversation throughout Germany, if not the whole of Europe; as usual, he was disappointed.
Herr Vogt
made its entrance on 1 December 1860 with as little fanfare or applause as the
Critical Economy
.

He consoled himself in traditional fashion. ‘
A circumstance that has been of great help to me
was having an appalling
toothache,’ he wrote to Engels in publication week. ‘The day before yesterday, I had a tooth pulled out. While the fellow (Gabriel, he’s called) did, in fact, pull out the root, after causing me great physical pains, he left in a splinter. So, the whole of my face is sore and swollen, and my throat half closed up. This physical pressure contributes much to the disablement of thought and hence to one’s powers of abstraction for, as Hegel says, pure thought or pure being or
nothingness
is one and the same thing.’

This mental anaesthetic was more necessary than ever; quite apart from his disappointment at the failure of
Herr Vogt
, he was also numbing his grief at the condition of his wife, who had succumbed to smallpox a couple of weeks earlier. While Karl and Helene nursed the invalid, the girls went off to stay with the Liebknechts for a month – though sometimes they returned to stand forlornly outside the window, so that she could at least catch a glimpse of them from her sick-bed. ‘The poor children are very scared,’ Marx told Engels. The physician, Dr Allen, said that if Jenny hadn’t been twice vaccinated she would not have pulled through, and her own account in a letter to Louise Weydemeyer confirms that it was touch and go:

I became hourly more ill
, the smallpox assuming horrifying proportions. My sufferings were great, very great. Severe, burning pains in the face, complete inability to sleep, and mortal anxiety in regard to Karl, who was nursing me with the utmost tenderness, finally the loss of all my outer faculties while my inner faculty – consciousness – remained unclouded throughout. All the time, I lay by an open window so that the cold November air must blow in me. And all the while hell’s fire in the hearth and ice on my burning lips, between which a few drops of claret were poured now and then. I was barely able to swallow, my hearing grew ever fainter and, finally, my eyes closed up and I did not know whether I might not remain shrouded in perpetual night.

When the three children were at last allowed to return home, on Christmas Eve, they wept at the sight of their beloved mother. Five weeks earlier she had been a well-preserved woman of forty-six, without a grey hair on her head, who ‘didn’t look too bad alongside my blooming daughters’. Now her face was disfigured by scars and a dark purple-red tinge. She saw herself as a rhinoceros or hippopotamus ‘which belonged in a zoological garden rather than in the ranks of the Caucasian race’. Meanwhile her husband, anxious and exhausted, was once again suffering tortures from his liver; and then there was the problem of how to pay the hefty medical bills, especially as he had been unable to work for more than a month. The only pleasure in an otherwise miserable Christmas was Engels’s gift of a few bottles of port, which Jenny found a most effective medicine. But even this pick-me-up was denied to Karl, whose doctor had imposed a strict diet of lemonade and castor oil. ‘
I am as tormented as Job
,’ he moaned, ‘though not as God-fearing.’

By all the laws of aerodynamics the bumble-bee should be unable to fly. Marx had a similar gravity-defying talent: just when he seemed certain to crash under his weight of woes, news arrived from Germany which kept him airborne. On 12 January 1861 the new Prussian King, Wilhelm I, celebrated his coronation by declaring an amnesty for political émigrés, thus raising the hope that Marx could regain his long-lost citizenship; one week later Lassalle proposed that Marx and Engels return home to edit a new ‘party organ’ modelled on the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
.

Though Marx had no faith in the project, guessing that ‘the tide in Germany hasn’t risen high enough yet to bear our ship’, he was nevertheless tempted – especially when he learned that the newspaper would be backed by 300,000 thalers from the Countess von Hatzfeldt’s fortune. Now that the
New York Daily Tribune
had more or less abandoned him because of the American Civil War, he needed an income of some kind more desperately than ever. At the very least, Lassalle’s proposition justified some
on-the-spot reconnaissance. Travelling with a false passport and money borrowed from Lassalle, he set off for Germany at the end of February – stopping en route at Zaltbommel in the Netherlands, where he squeezed £160 out of his rich uncle Lion Philips as an advance against the inheritance that would be due to him under Henriette Marx’s will when that redoutable old buzzard finally fell off her perch.

Lassalle and the Countess entertained Marx regally during his month-long visit to Berlin – thus showing how little they understood his character, since the last thing an anti-monarchist wants is to be treated like royalty. One evening they took him to see a new comedy, full of Prussian self-glorification, which disgusted him. The next night he was at the opera-house, forced to endure three hours of ballet (‘deadly dull’), sitting in a private box only a few feet away from King Wilhelm himself. At a dinner in his honour, attended by a swarm of Berlin celebrities, Marx was stuck next to the literary editor Ludmilla Assing (‘the most ugly creature I ever saw in my life’), who flirted with him throughout the meal – ‘
eternally smiling and grinning
, always speaking poetical prose, constantly trying to say something extraordinary, playing at false enthusiasm, and spitting at her auditor during the trances of her ecstasies’.

After a month of Lassalle’s excruciating hospitality, Marx was screaming with boredom. ‘I am treated as a kind of lion and am forced to see a great many professional “wits”, both male and female,’ he wrote to the German poet Carl Siebel, a friend of Engels. ‘It’s awful.’ The only reason for prolonging the ordeal was that he still awaited a decision on his application for citizenship, which Lassalle had delivered in person to the chief of the Prussian police. The reply came on 10 April. Since Marx had given up his rights as a Prussian subject voluntarily in 1845, the Police Presidium ‘can only regard you as a foreigner’. He was thus ineligible for the royal amnesty.

The Countess pleaded with him to stay for yet more dinners and
divertissements
. ‘This, then, is the thanks for the friendship we
have shown you,’ she chided, ‘that you leave Berlin as soon as your business will permit?’ But he couldn’t abide the place any longer: the prevalence of men in uniform and ardent bluestockings made him exceedingly uncomfortable. Germany, he decided, was a beautiful country only if you didn’t have to live there. ‘
If I were quite free
, and if, besides, I were not bothered by something you may call “political conscience”, I should never leave England for Germany, and still less for Prussia, and least of all for that ghastly Berlin.’ Jenny, too, was vehemently opposed to any more uprooting. During his absence she confided to Engels that ‘
I myself feel small longing for the fatherland
, for “dear”, beloved, trusty Germany, that
mater dolorosa
of poets – and as for the girls! The idea of leaving the country of their precious Shakespeare appals them; they’ve become English to the marrow and cling like limpets to the soil of England.’ Besides, she had no wish to see her little darlings fall under the influence of the giddy, gilded ‘Hatzfeldt circle’.

Marx himself was rather fond of the Countess – ‘
a very distinguished lady, no bluestocking
, of great natural intellect, much vivacity, deeply interested in the revolutionary movement, and of an aristocratic
laissez aller
very superior to the pedantic grimaces of professional “clever women”’ – even if she did wear far too much make-up to conceal the ravages of age and decay. For him, the clinching argument against taking a job in Berlin was his unwillingness to be a colleague or neighbour of Ferdinand Lassalle. In more than a decade of regular correspondence he had somehow failed to detect the man’s vanity, pomposity and incipient megalomania, but after a month under the same roof he understood why the Düsseldorf communists had tried to warn him off. In letters to Engels, Lassalle was now dubbed ‘Lazarus’, ‘Baron Izzy’ or ‘the Jewish nigger’. This last epithet began as a piece of whimsy: though Lassalle was certainly dark – as was Marx – he had no Negro ancestry. But Marx repeated the joke so often that he came to believe its essential veracity: ‘
It is now quite plain to me
– as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows
also testify – that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’s flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandfather interbred with a nigger),’ he wrote. ‘Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also niggerlike.’ As with his comments about the amazing nose of Mr Levy, editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, one can only assume that it seemed funny at the time.

The German trip was not wholly unprofitable: before leaving the country Marx spent two days in Trier with his mother, who rewarded this rare effort at filial solicitude by cancelling several of his ancient debts. He thus returned to London on 29 April with £160 in cash from Uncle Lion and a pocketful of torn-up IOUs. By the middle of June, however, he was sponging off Engels once again. ‘
The fact that I have already spent what I brought back
with me will not surprise you,’ he wrote, ‘since, besides the debts which occasioned the trip, nothing has been coming in for nearly four months, while school and doctor alone ate up nearly £40.’ He was soon back in the old routine of subterfuges and emergency measures. Whenever the landlord came to collect the rent Jenny would send him off empty-handed, explaining that Karl was away on business – while in fact he was cowering in his upstairs study. More and more household effects were sent to the pop-shop, including the children’s clothes ‘right down to their boots and shoes’. Through the winter of 1861–2 Jennychen was continuously ill: Marx deduced that at the age of seventeen she ‘is now already old enough to feel the full strain and also the stigma of our circumstances, and I think this is one of the main causes of her physical indisposition’. Engels immediately sent his patent restorative for ‘weak blood’ – eight bottles of claret, four of hock and two of sherry – which lifted her spirits but did nothing for her weak and emaciated body.

The mood in the Marx household became even more forlorn during the summer of 1862 while the rest of London was
en fête
for the second Great Exhibition, a fanfaronade of mid-Victorian pride and achievement. ‘
Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves
, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable,’ he wrote. ‘I feel all the more sorry for the unfortunate children in that all of this is happening during the Exhibition season, when their friends are having fun, whereas they themselves live in dread lest someone should come and see them and realise what a mess they are in … No one comes to see me, and I’m glad of it.’

He spoke too soon. Three weeks later who should turn up on his doorstep but ‘Baron Izzy’ Lassalle, in town to inspect the industrial marvels on display in Hyde Park. It was a hideously inopportune moment, but Marx felt duty-bound to make some show of returning the hospitality he had accepted – if not enjoyed – in Berlin the previous year. Everything not actually nailed or bolted down was taken to the pawnbroker, and for the next three weeks Lassalle played the part of the guest from hell – eating and drinking like a starved glutton while holding forth about his limitless talents and ambitions. Though he knew that Marx’s income from the
New York Daily Tribune
had dried up, Lassalle seemed astonishingly insensitive to the family’s plight: he boasted of losing £100 on a rash stock-market speculation as if it were nothing, and spent more than a pound a day on cabs and cigars without offering a penny to his hosts. Instead he had the insolence to ask Karl and Jenny if they would mind handing over one of their teenage daughters to
la
Hatzfeldt as a ‘companion’ – i.e. a glorified maidservant.