Karl Marx (43 page)

At the end of the three-day marathon it was clear that the anarchists were heavily outnumbered. Some delegates, unable to stay away from work any longer, then returned home without waiting for the actual debates and votes; others wandered off in search of more stimulating congress in the local brothels.

‘
At last we have had a real session of the International congress
,’ the newspaper
Le Français
reported after the doors had opened to the public on the evening of 5 September, ‘with a crowd ten times greater than the hall could accommodate, with applause and interruptions and pushing and jostling and tumultuous cries, and personal attacks and extremely radical but nevertheless extremely conflicting declarations of opinion, with recriminations, denunciations, protests, calls to order, and finally a closure of the session, if not of the discussion, which at past ten o’clock, in a tropical heat and amid inexpressible confusion, imposed itself by the force of things.’ Although he was trying to make himself inconspicuous by sitting discreetly behind Engels, no one doubted that the gentleman farmer was running the show. In the very first debate, on extending the powers of the General Council, a delegate from New York argued that the International needed a strong head ‘with plenty of brains’. There was laughter in the hall as all eyes turned simultaneously to Marx. The motion was carried by thirty-two votes to six, with sixteen abstentions.

When the result was announced, Engels suddenly rose from his chair and asked for permission to ‘make a communication to the congress’. In view of the International’s manifest disunity and the unlikelihood of ever reconciling the French with the Spaniards
or the English with the Germans, he and Marx wished to propose that the home of the General Council should be moved to New York.

Unable to believe what they had heard, the delegates sat in numbed silence for a minute or two. As an English observer wrote, ‘
It was a
coup d’état
, and each one looked to his neighbour to break the spell.’ Europe was the cradle of the new revolutionary movement, as the Paris Communards had shown little more than a year before: how could the International nurture and educate its infant from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean? Engels’s tribute to the superior ‘capacity and zeal’ of organised labour in the United States was particularly unconvincing, since everyone knew that for the past couple of years the International’s American section had been preoccupied with the struggle against Victoria Woodhull and her crackpot cult. True, an all-American General Council might suffer from fewer quarrels between Proudhonists, Blanquists and Communists, but it would also lack the mighty brain of Karl Marx. Some of his bitterest enemies thoroughly approved of the idea for this very reason, just as many allies felt obliged to vote against. ‘His personal supervision and direction are absolutely essential,’ one distraught Marxist pleaded. Another said that they might as well transfer the HQ to the moon as to New York. Thanks to the anarchists’ block vote, however, Marx and Engels got their way: twenty-six votes for, twenty-three against, and six abstentions.

By exiling the International to America, Marx had deliberately condemned it to death. ‘The star of the Commune has already passed its not very elevated meridian altitude,’ the
Spectator
commented on 14 September, ‘and, unless it be in Russia, we shall hardly ever see it so high again.’ So why did he do it? Marxian scholars have treated the question as an insoluble riddle, but there is no great mystery: he was simply exhausted by the effort of holding the warring tribes together. One or two comrades had already been let in on the secret. ‘
I am so overworked
,’ he wrote to a Russian friend three months before the congress, ‘and in fact
so much interfered with in my theoretical studies, that, after September, I shall withdraw from the
commercial concern
[a code-phrase for the General Council] which, at this moment, weighs principally on my own shoulders, and which, as you know, has its ramifications all over the world. But moderation in all things, and I can no longer afford – for some time at least – to combine two sorts of business of so very different a character.’ In a letter to the Belgian socialist César de Paepe, dated 28 May 1872, he sounded even more demob happy: ‘
I can hardly wait for the next congress
. It will be the end of my slavery. After that I shall become a free man again; I shall accept no more administrative functions any more …’ Marx knew that without his commanding presence the General Council would disintegrate anyway and might do serious damage to communism before expiring. Far better to put the wounded beast out of its misery.

After the New York decision, the subsequent debates at the Hague congress could only be something of an anti-climax. But Marx had prepared one more
coup de théâtre
with which to quit the public stage. Two weeks before travelling to Holland he had obtained a document from St Petersburg which seemed to prove that Michael Bakunin was a homicidal maniac. This he now produced, thus igniting a final bonfire of the vanities.

Back in the winter of 1869, short of money as usual, Bakunin had accepted 300 roubles from a publisher’s agent called Lyubavin to translate
Capital
into Russian. It would be hard to think of anyone less suited to the task: quite apart from being an incorrigible procrastinator, he was unlikely to do anything that would enhance Marx’s reputation. But Lyubavin apparently knew nothing of this, and after a few months he sent a gentle reminder that the manuscript was now due. By way of reply, in February 1870 he received a terrifying letter from Bakunin’s rabid attack-dog, young Sergei Nechayev, who claimed to be acting on behalf of a secret ‘bureau’ of revolutionary assassins. After denouncing Lyubavin as a parasite and extortioner who sought to prevent Bakunin from ‘working for the supremely important cause of the
Russian people’ by forcing him on to the literary treadmill, Nechayev ordered the publisher to tear up the contract and let Bakunin keep the money – or else.

Recognising with whom you are dealing, you will therefore do everything necessary to avoid the regrettable possibility that we may have to address ourselves to you
a second time in a less civilised way
… We are always rigorously punctual, and we have calculated the exact day on which you will receive this letter. You, in turn, should be no less punctual in submitting to these demands, so that we shall not be placed under the necessity of having recourse to extreme measures which will prove a trifle more severe … It depends entirely on you whether our relations become more amicable and a firmer understanding is created between us or whether our relationship takes a more unpleasant course.

I have the honour to be, Sir, yours truly …

As a clue as to the nature of his ‘extreme measures’, Nechayev embellished the writing paper with a crest featuring a pistol, an axe and a dagger.

This is not a technique one would recommend to an author who has missed his deadline. Bakunin later maintained that he was unaware of the letter, just as he had no idea that Nechayev was wanted for the murder of a student in St Petersburg: as soon as he discovered the ghastly truth, in the spring of 1870, he disowned his bloodthirsty associate at once. His plea of innocence has been accepted by historians and biographers ever since, but it is no more reliable than anything else emanating from this world-class fantasist.

The truth resides in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where in 1966 Professor Michael Confino discovered a long letter from Bakunin to Nechayev dated 2 June 1870 – that is,
after
the father of anarchism had supposedly disinherited his delinquent son. Far from repudiating him, Bakunin proposed
that they continue to plot and scheme together, the only proviso being that ‘Boy’ (as he fondly called Nechayev) should be more discriminating in his choice of victims. ‘This simple law,’ he wrote, ‘
must be the basis of our activity
: truth, honesty, mutual trust between all Brothers and towards any man who is capable of becoming and whom you would wish to become a Brother; lies, cunning, entanglement, and, if necessary, violence towards enemies.’ So much for Bakunin’s repudiation of ‘gangsterism’.

That other incriminating letter, from Nechayev to the hapless Lyubavin, had the desired effect when Marx showed it to delegates at the Hague. On the last day of the congress, by a majority of twenty-seven votes to seven, they agreed that Bakunin should be expelled from the association.

The International went into rapid decline after the relocation to New York and formally dissolved itself in 1876. Michael Bakunin died in the same year. Nechayev, his beloved Boy, was deported from Switzerland to Russia in the autumn of 1872, convicted of murder and sent to the St Peter and Paul Fortress – where, after ten years of solitary confinement in a damp dungeon, he died at the age of thirty-five. Marx outlived them all.

Paradox, irony and contradiction, the animating spirits of Marx’s work, were also the impish trinity that shaped his own life. He would, one guesses, have applauded Ralph Waldo Emerson’s defiant creed: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.’

It is no surprise, then, that a man who was perpetually skint throughout his working career should find financial security only when he abandoned the struggle to earn a living. In the summer of 1870 Engels sold his partnership in the family business to one of the Ermen brothers, and with the proceeds he was able to guarantee his improvident friend a pension of £350 a year. ‘I am quite knocked down by your too great kindness,’ Marx gasped. For two decades Engels had been the breadwinner for an extended tribe of dependants – the Burns sisters, the Marx family, Helene Demuth – while also writing and campaigning energetically for his political cause. He had never once complained. As Jenny Marx said, ‘
He is always healthy, vigorous, cheerful
and in good spirits, and he thoroughly relishes his beer (especially when it’s the Viennese variety)’. Accompanied by Lizzy Burns and her simple-minded niece Mary Ellen (‘Pumps’) – yet another waif for whom he had assumed responsibility – Engels moved down to London, taking a lease on a handsome town house at 122 Regent’s Park Road.

Not all the ironies of destiny were so benign. The years of
strife in the International had left Marx with a violent allergy to French socialists, which he had hoped to cure by resigning from the General Council; now fate inflicted two of these chafing irritants on him as sons-in-law. On 2 October 1872, a couple of weeks after the Hague congress, Jennychen married Charles Longuet in a civil ceremony at St Pancras register office.

The bride’s mother, who did not always share Karl’s more extreme prejudices, certainly endorsed this one. Almost everything about the French set her teeth on edge – their
hauteur
, their
élan
, their
savoir faire
, their
idées fixes
, their
grandes passions
and quite probably a certain
je ne sais quoi
as well. ‘
Longuet is a very gifted man
,’ she wrote to Liebknecht when the engagement was announced, ‘and he is good, honest and decent … On the other hand I cannot contemplate their union without great uneasiness and would really have preferred if Jenny’s choice had fallen (for a change) on an Englishman or German, instead of a Frenchman, who of course possesses all the charming qualities of his nation, but is not free of their foibles and inadequacies.’

Sure enough, Longuet proved to be a sullen, selfish and hectoring brute who condemned his wife to a treadmill of ceaseless housework. ‘
Though I drudge like a nigger
,’ she told her sister Eleanor, ‘he never does anything but scream at me and grumble every minute he is in the house.’ For Karl Marx, the only consolations of this miserable marriage were the arrival of grandchildren – five boys, of whom one died young – and the fact that Longuet had a regular income as a lecturer at London University which kept Jennychen fed and housed. (Two years before the wedding, when the Marx family finances plummeted to a hellish new nadir, she had been reduced to seeking work as a governess.)

Laura’s husband, by contrast, seemed a hopeless case. Paul Lafargue renounced his medical ambitions because the deaths of their three children had shattered his faith in doctors; he embarked instead on a career in business, buying the patent rights to a ‘new process’ for photo-engraving. This implausible enterprise was
hobbled from the start by constant quarrels with his partner, the Communard refugee Benjamin Constant Le Moussu, and to save the family’s honour Marx felt obliged to buy out Lafargue’s stake (financed, one need hardly add, by good old Engels). Marx himself then fell out with Le Moussu over the ownership of the patent. Rather than suffer the embarrassment and expense of going to court, they submitted the dispute to private arbitration by a left-wing barrister, Frederic Harrison. In his memoirs he recalled:

Before they gave evidence
I required them in due form to be sworn on the Bible, as the law then required for legal testimony. This filled both of them with horror. Karl Marx protested that he would never so degrade himself. Le Moussu said that no man should ever accuse him of such an act of meanness. For half an hour they argued and protested, each refusing to be sworn first in the presence of the other. At last I obtained a compromise, that the witnesses should simultaneously ‘touch the book’, without uttering a word. Both seemed to me to shrink from the pollution of handling the sacred volume, much as Mephistopheles in the Opera shrinks from the Cross. When they got to argue the case, the ingenious Le Moussu won, for Karl Marx floundered about in utter confusion.

The débâcle fortified Marx’s conviction that, beneath their ‘French fiddlededeee’, Parisian socialists were all liars and rascals. Le Moussu immediately joined his private bestiary of scallywags, damned as an embezzler ‘
who cheated me and others
out of significant sums of money and who then resorted to infamous slanders in order to whitewash his character and present himself as an innocent whose beautiful soul has gone unappreciated’. But Marx’s wrath was soon redirected against Paul Lafargue, the incompetent oaf who had got him into this mess. Quite apart from their personal ‘foibles and indequacies’, both Lafargue and Longuet were political flibbertigibbets who refused to heed the countless sermons and tutorials from their exasperated father-in-law.
‘
Longuet as the last Proudhonist and Lafargue as the last Bakuninist!
’ he complained to Engels. ‘May the devil take them!’

To lose two daughters to Frenchmen might be regarded as a misfortune; to lose a third would be unthinkably careless. So one can imagine the horrified reaction when Eleanor fell in love with the dashing Hippolyte Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, who at thirty-four was exactly twice her age. It was Lissagaray’s misfortune to arrive at Modena Villas when the Gallic wars against Lafargue and Longuet had already begun; in other circumstances he might have seemed quite acceptable. ‘
With one exception, all the books on the Commune
that have hitherto appeared are mere trash. That one exception to the general rule is Lissagaray’s work,’ Jennychen told the Kugelmanns in 1871, apparently echoing her father’s opinion. When Lissagaray published a fuller
History of the Commune
a few years later, Marx even helped Eleanor to prepare an English translation. Nevertheless, the man was indubitably French: his pomaded quiff, supercilious smirk and careless flamboyance all seemed to betoken a fickle individualist, and the onus was on Lissagaray to show that he could become a responsible husband. ‘
I asked nothing of him
,’ Marx wrote to Engels, ‘but that he should provide proof instead of words that he was better than his reputation and that there was some good reason to rely on him … The damned nuisance is that I must be very circumspect and indulgent because of the child.’

Not so: for long periods he forbade ‘Tussy’ to see ‘Lissa’ at all, while the more truly circumspect and indulgent Jenny Marx connived at their secret assignations. But these snatched meetings merely aggravated the pain of separation. In May 1873 Eleanor took a teaching post at a ladies’ seminary in Brighton, hoping to escape from Marx’s baleful glare (and perhaps her financial dependence); by September she was back home in a state of nervous collapse. If forced to choose between her father and her lover she could not defy the gravitational pull of filial devotion – but why should such a choice be imposed? A letter she left on his
desk a few months later revealed both her agony and her undiminished obedience:

My dearest Moor,

I am going to ask you something, but first I want you to promise me that you will not be very angry. I want to know, dear Moor, when I may see L. again. It is so
very
hard
never
to see him. I have been doing my best to be patient, but it is so difficult and I don’t feel as if I could be much longer. I do not expect you to say that he can come here. I should not even wish it, but could I not, now and then, go for a little walk with him? …

When I was so very ill at Brighton (during a time when I fainted two or three times a day), L. came to see me, and each time left me stronger and happier; and more able to bear the rather heavy load left on my shoulders. [Marx was entirely unaware of these visits.] It is
so
long since I saw him and I am beginning to feel so very miserable notwithstanding all my efforts to keep up, for I have tried hard to be merry and cheerful. I cannot much longer …

At any rate, dearest Moor, if I may not see him now, could you not say
when
I may. It would be something to look forward to, and if the time were not so indefinite it would be less wearisome to wait.

My dearest Moor, please don’t be angry with me for writing this, but forgive me for being selfish enough to worry you again.

Your

Tussy

Marx refused to yield.

Eleanor tried to divert herself by keeping busy, just as her father always had. She enrolled for acting classes with a Mrs Vezin, in the hope of realising childhood fantasies of a stage career; she joined the New Shakespeare Society and the Browning Society, two of the many groups founded by the socialist teacher
Frederick James Furnivall; like Marx before her, she discovered the warm sanctuary of the British Museum, where she undertook freelance research and translations for Furnivall. (It was while working in the reading room that she met a young Irishman named George Bernard Shaw, newly arrived in England, who became a firm friend.) Years later, after giving a recitation at the annual meeting of the Browning Society in June 1882, she wrote excitedly to Jennychen,

The place was crowded
– and as all sorts of ‘literary’ and other ‘swells’ were there I felt ridiculously nervous but went on capitally. Mrs Sutherland Orr (the sister of Frederick Leighton, the president of the Royal Academy) wants to take me to see Browning and recite his own poems to him! I have been asked to go this afternoon to a ‘crush’ at Lady Wilde’s. She is the mother of that very limp and nasty young man, Oscar Wilde, who has been making such a d—d ass of himself in America. As the son has not yet returned and the mother is nice I may go … What a fine thing enthusiasm is!

The exclamation marks, like the name-dropping awe with which she mentions the ‘swells’, are worthy of Charles Pooter himself.

Though enthusiasm brought some joy and consolation it could not entirely distract her from the Lissagaray
impasse
. What most grieved Eleanor was that Jenny, who never understood her, should be so sweetly sympathetic while the beloved Moor seemed oblivious to her sacrifice – even though ‘our natures were so exactly alike’. As many visitors remarked, there was a startling physical resemblance too: a broad, low forehead above dark bright eyes and a prominent nose. Draw a beard on Eleanor’s photograph and you have the very image of the young Karl Marx. ‘
I unfortunately only inherited my father’s nose
,’ she joked, ‘and not his genius.’ When comparing his daughters Marx would acknowledge that ‘Jenny is most like me, but Tussy
is
me’. Following his example, she sought to calm her nerves with chain-smoking,
a habit common enough among literary gents but rare and shocking for a well-educated Victorian girl still in her teens.

Even their ailments achieved a gruesome synchronicity. Tussy’s depression manifested itself in headaches, insomnia, biliousness and almost all the other symptoms (except carbuncles) which Marx knew so well. ‘
What neither Papa nor the doctors nor anyone will understand
,’ she complained, ‘is that it is chiefly
mental worry
that affects me’ – a strange lapse for the man who had himself once admitted that ‘my sickness always originates in the mind’. For much of the 1870s this pair of wheezing semi-invalids traipsed around the spas of Europe in search of a cure, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were making each other ill. In August 1873, when Tussy was having her fainting fits in Brighton, Marx wrote to a comrade in St Petersburg, ‘
I have since months suffered severely
, and found myself, for some time, even in a dangerous state of illness, consequent upon overwork. My head was so seriously affected that a paralytic strike was to be apprehended …’ Two weeks later, while drinking a spoonful of raspberry vinegar in the belief that it might do him good, he had a terrible choking fit: ‘
My face went quite black
, etc. Another second or so and I would have departed this life.’ After Tussy’s return to London he began to brood on ‘
the serious possibility of my succumbing to apoplexy
’. At first his doctor thought he might have had a stroke, but the diagnosis was then revised to nervous exhaustion. On 24 November, much to Jenny Marx’s relief, father and daughter left London to take the waters at Harrogate.

Both of them enjoyed their three weeks of rest and mineral baths, though Marx did his tortured brain no favours by reading Saint-Beuve, an author he had always disliked. ‘If the man has become so famous in France,’ he wrote to Engels, ‘it must be because he is in every respect the most classical incarnation of French
vanité
… strutting about in a romantic disguise and newly minted idioms.’ Hardly the ideal book to take his mind off that other strutting Frenchman for whom his daughter was pining. But he seemed cheerful enough, even when his return to Modena
Villas for Christmas was accompanied by an outbreak of carbuncles and a spate of newspaper gossip about his health. ‘
I myself allow the English papers to announce my death from time to time
, without showing any sign of life,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a farthing for the public, and, if my occasional illness is exaggerated, it at least has the advantage that it spares me all sorts of requests (theoretical and otherwise) from unknown people in every corner of the earth.’