Authors: Francis Wheen
Karl Marx (44 page)
On the way back from Harrogate he had spent a day in Manchester being examined by Engels’s friend Dr Eduard Gumpert, who found ‘a certain elongation of the liver’ for which the only known cure was a trip to the fashionable Bohemian spa-town of Carlsbad. Since this entailed travelling through Germany, where he would probably be arrested as a subversive, Marx thought it impossible. But then an idea struck him: an émigré who had lived in England for more than a year was entitled to British citizenship and, therefore, the full protection of Her Britannic Majesty against foreign border-guards. After submitting an application to the Home Office, together with affidavits from four Hampstead neighbours testifying to his ‘good character’, he and Eleanor set off for Germany on 15 August 1874 in the belief that the certificate of naturalisation would be forwarded within a few days. On 26 August, however, the Home Secretary wrote to inform Marx’s solicitor that his application had been turned down. No reason was given; but a confidential letter sent from Scotland Yard to the Home Office on 17 August, now to be found in the Public Record Office, reveals all:
With reference to the above I beg to report that he is the notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society, and the advocate of Communistic principles. He has not been loyal to his own King and Country.
The referees Messrs ‘Seton’, ‘Matheson’, ‘Manning’ and
‘Adcock’ are all British born subjects, and respectable householders. The statements made by them with reference to the time they have known the applicant are correct.
W. Reimers, Sergeant
F. Williamson, Supt.
As it happened, Marx reached Carlsbad without requiring the assistance of Queen Victoria and her plenipotentiaries – possibly because he was accompanied by Eleanor, a British subject from birth. But he remained wary, registering at the Hotel Germania as ‘Mr Charles Marx, private gentleman’ in the hope that no one would guess his identity. Although the local police saw through this disguise at once, after a month of continuous surveillance they were forced to admit that he gave ‘cause for no suspicion’ – hardly surprising, since his health regime left no time for fomenting revolution among the palsied inmates and their physicians. ‘
We are both living in strict accordance with the rules
,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘We go to our respective springs at six every morning, where I have to drink seven glasses. Between each two glasses there has to be a break of fifteen minutes during which one marches up and down. After the last glass, an hour’s walk and, finally, coffee. Another cold glass in the evenings before bed.’ In the afternoons they explored the wooded granite foothills of the Schlossberg, where other patients were scandalised by the sight of Eleanor puffing away incessantly at her cigarettes.
All those mineral-water sluicings may have done wonders for Marx’s liver but they gave him a foul temper – not helped by the arrival of Ludwig and Gertrud Kugelmann, who installed themselves in an adjoining room. Of late he had been increasingly irritated by the doltishness and indiscretion of this self-appointed disciple; now, through the thin hotel walls, he was kept awake by the din of Herr Kugelmann berating his wife. ‘
My patience came to an end
finally when he inflicted his family scenes on me,’ Marx reported. ‘The fact is that this arch-pedant, this pettifogging
bourgeois philistine has got the idea that his wife is unable to understand him, to comprehend his Faustian nature with its aspirations to a higher world outlook, and he torments the woman, who is his superior in every respect, in the most repulsive manner.’ He moved to a bedroom on a higher floor and never spoke to Dr Kugelmann again.
One might expect Marx to have been bored out of his wits with the shallow, narrow society of health resorts, but he soon became an
aficionado
. There were further vacations at Carlsbad in 1875 and 1876; after that, when Germany’s new anti-socialist laws made the journey too perilous, he transferred his affections to the insuperably bourgeois Isle of Wight, favoured watering-hole of Queen Victoria and Lord Tennyson. Wherever he went, fellow guests were amazed to find that the terrifying communistic bogeyman was in fact the life and soul of the house party. During his 1875 visit to Carlsbad a Viennese newspaper described him as the most popular raconteur in town:
He always has to hand the
mot juste
, the striking simile
, the suddenly illuminating joke. If you share his society accompanied by a woman of evident wit – women and children are the best
agents provocateurs
in conversation and, because they appreciate the general only in relationship to the personal, constantly summon one into the cosy arbour of personal encounters – then Marx will bestow on you with full hands the rich and well-ordered treasure of his memories. He then prefers to direct his steps back into past days when romanticism was singing its last free woodland song, when … Heine brought poems into his study with the ink still wet.
Tellingly, the same newspaper recorded that ‘Marx is now sixty-three years old’; in fact he was fifty-seven. Three years later, an interviewer from the
Chicago Tribune
noted that ‘he must be over seventy years of age’. Though still working on the next two volumes of
Capital
when his doctors permitted, it was as if he had
tacitly accepted defeat and settled down to benign anecdotage, content to observe and reminisce. The years of passionate engagement – pamphlets and petitions, meetings and manoeuvres – were over.
With the two older daughters married and settled elsewhere in Hampstead, the villa on Maitland Park Road had become too spacious for the requirements of his shrunken
ménage
. In March 1875 the remaining members of the household – Karl, Jenny, Eleanor, Helene – moved a hundred yards down the street to number 44, a four-storey terraced property which was slightly smaller and far cheaper. He stayed there for the rest of his life.
As he grew older, Marx’s domestic habits became more regular and temperate. He no longer had the stamina for pub-crawls up the Tottenham Court Road, epic chess games or all-night sessions at his desk. Rising at a conventional hour he would read
The Times
over breakfast, just like any other middle-class gent, and then retire to his study for the day. At dusk he put on his black cloak and soft felt hat (looking, as Eleanor said, ‘for all the world like a conspirators’ chorus’) and strolled through the streets of London for an hour or so. He was very short-sighted by now: on his return from these excursions he sometimes returned to a neighbouring front door by mistake, discovering his error only when the key didn’t fit.
Sundays were devoted to the family: a roast-beef lunch (cooked to perfection by Helene) followed by long walks over the Heath with Laura, Jennychen and her sons. August Bebel, one of the founders of German Social Democracy, was ‘
pleasantly surprised to see with what warmth and affection
Marx, who was described everywhere in those days as the worst misanthrope, could play with his grandchildren and what love the latter showed for their grandfather’. When little Edgar Longuet was eighteen months old he was caught biting at a raw kidney which he thought was a piece of chocolate – and which he continued to chew despite the mistake. Marx promptly nicknamed the lad ‘Wolf’, though this
was later amended to ‘Mr Tea’ because of his insatiable thirst.
Except on Sunday, callers were discouraged during the hours of daylight, but since Marx’s doctor (and indeed his wife) had banned him from working in the evenings he was happy to play the genial host at dinner, dispensing wine and anecdotes to foreign pilgrims who came to make the great man’s acquaintance. ‘
He was most affable
,’ the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Morozov reported. ‘I did not notice in him any of the moroseness or unapproachableness that somebody had spoken to me about.’
Everyone who visited Maitland Park Road made the same startling discovery: under that leonine mane was a playful, purring pussy-cat. ‘
He spoke in the quietly detached tones of a patriarch
, quite the opposite of the picture I had formed of him,’ the German journalist Eduard Bernstein reported. ‘From descriptions that originated, I must admit, from his enemies, I had expected to meet a fairly morose and very irritable old gentleman; yet now I saw opposite me a white-haired man whose laughing dark eyes spoke of friendship and whose words contained much that was mild. When a few days later I expressed to Engels my surprise at having found Marx so very different from expectations, he asserted, “Well, Marx can nevertheless get most awfully stormy”.’
Another German socialist, Karl Kautsky, arrived at Maitland Park Road almost catatonic with anxiety, having heard plenty of stories about these tempests. He was terrified of making a fool of himself like the young Heinrich Heine – who, on meeting Goethe, was so intimidated that he could think of nothing better to talk about than the delicious sweet plums that could be found on the road from Jena to Weimar. But Marx wasn’t nearly so distant or forbidding as old Goethe: he received Kautsky with a friendly smile and asked if he took after his mother, the popular novelist Minna Kautsky. Not at all, Kautsky replied cheerfully – little guessing that Marx, who had taken an instant dislike to this bumptious youth, was silently congratulating Frau Kautsky on her good fortune. ‘
Whatever Marx might have thought of me
,’ Kautsky wrote many years later, ‘he nowhere betrayed the slightest
sign of ill-will. I left him highly satisfied.’ Since Marx privately considered Karl Kautsky to be a ‘small-minded mediocrity’, his forbearance proves how much the Jupiter Tonans had mellowed.
He no longer bothered to correct libels or inaccuracies from his enemies. ‘
If I denied everything that has been said and written of me
,’ he told an American interviewer in 1879, ‘I would require a score of secretaries.’ A tendentious ‘biography’ issued by a publisher in Haarlem was loftily ignored. ‘
I do not reply to pinpricks
,’ he explained, when invited by a Dutch journal to review this slipshod portrait. ‘In my younger days I sometimes did some hard hitting, but wisdom comes with age, at least in so far as one avoids useless dissipation of force.’ Age conferred eminence, too: even the English, who had ignored the giant in their midst for thirty years (when not blackguarding him as an assassin), now began to show a certain curiosity and respect. In 1879 no less a figure than Crown Princess Victoria, daughter of the English Queen and wife of the future German Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm, asked a senior Liberal politician what he knew of this Marx fellow. The MP, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, had to plead ignorance but promised to invite the ‘Red Terrorist Doctor’ to lunch and report back.
To judge by Sir Mountstuart’s subsequent letter to the Princess, Marx was on his best behaviour throughout their three-hour meeting in the ornate dining-room of the Devonshire Club, St James’s:
He is a short, rather small man
with grey hair and beard which contrast strangely with a still dark moustache. The face is somewhat round, the forehead well shaped and filled up – the eye rather hard but the whole expression rather pleasant than not, by no means that of a gentleman who is in the habit of eating babies in their cradles – which is I daresay the view which the Police takes of him.
His talk was that of a well-informed, nay learned man – much interested in comparative grammar which had led him
into the Old Slavonic and other out-of-the-way studies and was varied by many quaint turns and little bits of dry humour …
Having exhausted the conversational possibilities of Slavonic grammar, Marx turned to politics. He expected a ‘great and not distant crash’ in Russia, starting with reforms from above and culminating in the collapse of Tsarism; there would then be a revolt against ‘the existing military system’ in Germany. When Grant Duff suggested that the rulers of Europe might forestall revolution by agreeing to reduce their spending on armaments, thus lightening the economic burden on their people, Marx assured him that ‘all sorts of fears and jealousies’ would make this impossible. ‘The burden will grow worse and worse as science advances,’ he predicted, ‘for the improvements in the art of destruction will keep pace with its advance and every year more and more will have to be devoted to costly engines of war.’ Very well, Grant Duff conceded, but even if a revolution did occur it would not necessarily realise all the dreams and plans of the communists. ‘Doubtless,’ Marx replied, ‘but all great movements are slow. It would merely be a step to better things as your Revolution of 1688 was.’
Touché
!
Although unaware that his comments would be written down, Marx had enough caution and common sense to sidestep the little traps laid by his wily interrogator. As Sir Mountstuart told the Princess:
In the course of conversation Karl Marx spoke several times both of your Imperial Highness and of the Crown Prince and invariably with due respect and propriety. Even in the case of eminent individuals of whom he by no means spoke with respect there was no trace of bitterness or savagery – plenty of acrid and dissolvent criticism but nothing of the Marat tone.
Of the horrible things that have been connected with the International he spoke as any respectable man would have done …
Altogether my impression of Marx, allowing for his being at the opposite pole of opinion from oneself, was not at all unfavourable and I would gladly meet him again. It will not be he who, whether he wishes it or not, will turn the world upside down.
In gloomier moments, Marx himself sometimes feared as much.
He found an exact description of his anxieties
in Balzac’s novel
The Unknown Masterpiece
, the story of a brilliant artist so obsessive in his perfectionism that he spends many years refining and retouching the portrait of a courtesan to achieve ‘the most complete representation of reality’. When he shows the masterpiece to his friends, all they can see is a formless mass of colour and random lines: ‘Nothing! Nothing! After ten years of work …’ He hurls the worthless canvas on to the flames – ‘the fire of Prometheus’ – and dies that very night.