Karl Marx (48 page)

After Engels’s death, the task of sorting and storing Marx’s papers fell to Eleanor Marx and her lover, Edward Aveling. Although astonishingly ugly and notoriously unreliable, Aveling was also a silver-tongued charmer who ‘needed but half an hour’s start of the handsomest man in London’ to seduce a woman. He and Eleanor lived together openly, but since most of their friends
were actors, freethinkers and other bohemian types no one was unduly scandalised. What did shock many guests was how appallingly he treated her: the novelist Olive Schreiner described Aveling as a ‘ruffian’; William Morris thought him a ‘disreputable dog’. Eleanor discovered how right they were in March 1898, when she learned that he had secretly married a twenty-two-year-old actress the previous summer. Aveling’s solution to the crisis was to propose a suicide pact. Eleanor duly wrote a tender note of farewell and swallowed the prussic acid which he provided. Aveling, needless to say, never intended to keep his side of the bargain: as soon as she had taken the lethal dose he left the house. Though not charged with murder, he undoubtedly killed her.

Laura and Paul Lafargue lived outside Paris, mostly on the money they had sponged from Engels. In November 1911, when he was sixty-nine and she sixty-six, they decided that there was nothing left to live for and committed suicide together. The main speaker at their joint funeral was a representative of the Russian communists, one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who said that the ideas of Laura’s father would be triumphantly realised sooner than anyone guessed.

Four of Marx’s children predeceased him, and the two survivors both killed themselves. The only member of the family to escape the curse was Freddy Demuth, who lived and worked quietly in east London. He died of cardiac failure on 28 January 1929, aged seventy-seven. To the end, neither he nor anyone else suspected that Freddy might be a son of the man whose face and name were, by then, known throughout the world.

All three Marx daughters loved the Victorian parlour game ‘Confessions’ – nowadays often known as the Proust Questionnaire – and in the mid-1860s invited their father to submit himself to interrogation. Here are his answers:

During his visit to Germany in 1867, while waiting for the proof-sheets of
Capital
, Karl Marx attended a party given by the chess master Gustav R. L. Neumann. A record survives of one game he played that night, against a man called Meyer.

In the endnotes that follow, I have used the following abbreviations:

Details of other textual sources are given in the notes themselves.

Page numbers are given below to locate references in the text, rather than note numbers.

1 The Outsider

page

7.
‘
Blessed is he …
’ Letter from KM to FE, 21 June 1854.

8.
‘
He was a unique, an unrivalled storyteller …
’ From ‘Karl Marx’ by Eleanor Marx,
RME
, p. 251.

8.
‘
She could not countenance her brother …
’ From ‘Meetings with Marx’ by Maxim Kovalevsky in
RME
, p. 299.

9.
‘
We cannot always attain …
’
MECW
, Vol. 1, p. 4.

9.
‘
The sons had been rabbis for centuries …
’ Eleanor Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht in
Mohr und General: Erinnerungen an Marx und Engels
(Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1965).

9.
‘
Within its walls it is burdened …
’ Goethe’s
French Campaign
, quoted in
Karl
Marx: Man and Fighter
by Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen (Methuen, London, 1936; revised edition published by Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973).

11.
‘
To the Prussian state, the members of its established religion …
’ From ‘The Baptism of Karl Marx’ by Eugene Kamenka,
The Hibbert Journal
, Vol. LVI (1958), pp. 340–51.

12.
‘
Allow me to note …
’ Letter from Henriette Marx to KM, 29 November 1835.

12.
‘
I am being dunned …
’ Letter from KM to FE, 8 January 1863.

14.
‘
I found the position of good Herr Wyttenbach …
’ Letter from Heinrich Marx to KM, 18 November 1835.

14.
‘
Herr Loers has taken it ill …
’ Letter from Heinrich Marx to KM, 18 November 1835.

14.
‘
Social reforms are never carried out …
’ From ‘Speech of Dr Marx on Protection, Free Trade, and the Working Classes’,
Northern Star
, 9 October 1847.

14.
‘
Nine lecture courses seem to me rather a lot …
’ Letter from Heinrich Marx to KM, 18–25 November 1835.

15.
‘
Youthful sins in any enjoyment …
’ Letter from Heinrich Marx to KM, early 1836.

15.
‘
You must avoid everything that could make things worse …
’ Letter from Henriette Marx to KM, early 1836.

15.
‘
He has incurred a punishment …
’ Certificate of Release from Bonn University, 22 August 1836,
MECW
, Vol.
I
, pp. 657–8.

16.
‘
Is duelling then so closely interwoven with philosophy?
’ Letter from Heinrich Marx to KM, about May/June 1836.

17.
‘
Every day and on every side I am asked …
’ Letter from KM to Jenny Marx, 15 December 1863.

19.
‘
His respect for Shakespeare was boundless …
’ From ‘Reminiscences of Marx’ by Paul Lafargue,
RME
, p. 74.

19.
‘
The children are constantly reading Shakespeare …
’ Letter from KM to FE, 10 April 1856.

20.
‘
in a perpetual flurry of allusions …
’ From
Karl Marx and World Literature
by S. S. Prawer (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 209.

20.
‘
There you are before me, large as life …
’ Letter from KM to Jenny Marx, 21 June 1856.

21.
‘
The mystificatory side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago …
’ Afterword to second German edition of
Capital, MECW
, Vol. 35, p. 9.

22.
‘
Words I teach all mixed up …
’ From ‘On Hegel’ by Karl Marx,
MECW
, Vol. 1, p. 576.

23.
‘
the new immoralists who twist their words …
’ Letter from Heinrich Marx to KM, 9 December 1837.

24.
‘
diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling …
’ Letter from KM to Heinrich Marx, 10–11 November 1837.

26.
‘
Hegel remarks somewhere …
’ From the original 1852 text of
The Eighteenth Brumaire, MECW
, Vol. 11, p. 103.

28.
‘
God’s grief!!!
’ Letter from Heinrich Marx to KM, 9 December 1837.

29.
‘
It should redound to the honour of Prussia …
’ Letter from Heinrich Marx to KM, 2 March 1837.

2 The Little Wild Boar

31.
‘
If Marx, Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach come together …
’ Letter from Georg Jung to Arnold Ruge,
Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe
, I i (2), p. 261

32.
‘
As long as a single drop of blood pulses …
’ From
The Early Texts
by Karl Marx (Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 13.

33.
‘
My little heart is so full …
’ Letter from Jenny von Westphalen to KM, 10 August 1841.

34.
‘
In a few days I have to go to Cologne …
’ Letter from KM to Arnold Ruge, 20 March 1842.

34.
‘
I have abandoned my plan to settle in Cologne …
’ Letter from KM to Arnold Ruge, 27 April 1842.

34.
‘
How glad I am that you are happy …
’ Letter from Jenny von Westphalen to KM, 10 August 1841.

35.
‘
Since every true philosophy is the intellectual quintessence of its time …
’ Article in
Rheinische Zeitung
, 14 July 1842, translated in
MECW
, Vol. 1, p. 195.

36.
‘
who think freedom is honoured by being placed in the starry firmament …
’ Article in
Rheinische Zeitung
, 19 May 1842, translated in
MECW
, Vol. 1, p. 172.

36.
‘
He is a phenomenon …
’ From
Briefwechsel by
Moses Hess, ed. E. Silberner (The Hague, 1959), translated in
KMIR
, pp. 2–3.

37.
‘
Who runs up next with wild impetuosity?
’ From ‘The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible’, published as an anonymous pamphlet in December 1842, translated in
MECW
, Vol. 2, p. 336.

37.
‘
It is easy to overlook the obvious …
’ A lone exception is the great American scholar Hal Draper, who included an amusing endnote on ‘Marx and Pilosity’ in
Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume II: The Politics of Social Classes
(Monthly Review Press, New York and London, 1978).

38.
‘
London provided the much venerated man with a new, complex arena …
’ From
Great Men of the Exile
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, translated in
The Cologne Communist Trial
(Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1971), p. 166.