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This apparently careless luxuriance was contrived quite deliberately. Both Marx and Engels understood the power of the hirsute, as they proved in a sneering aside half-way through their pamphlet on the poet and critic Gottfried Kinkel, written in 1852:

London provided the much venerated man with a new, complex arena
in which to receive even greater acclaim. He did not hesitate: he would have to be the new lion of the season. With this in mind he refrained for the time being from all political activity and withdrew into the seclusion of his home in order to grow a beard, without which no prophet can succeed.

Perhaps for the same reason, Marx grew a set of whiskers at university and cultivated them with pride throughout his adulthood
until he was as woolly as a flock of sheep. (A Prussian spy in London, reporting to his Berlin masters in 1852, thought it significant that ‘he does not shave at all’.)

Friedrich Engels, too, seems to have formulated a political theory of facial hair at an early age. ‘
Last Sunday we had a moustache evening
,’ the nineteen-year-old Engels wrote to his sister in October 1840. ‘I had sent out a circular to all moustache-capable young men that it was finally time to horrify all philistines, and that that could not be done better than by wearing moustaches. Everyone with the courage to defy philistinism and wear a moustache should therefore sign. I had soon collected a dozen moustaches, and then the 25th of October, when our moustaches would be a month old, was fixed as the day for a common moustache jubilee.’ This pogonophiles’ party, held in the cellar of Bremen town hall, concluded with a defiant toast:

Philistines shirk the burden of bristle

By shaving their faces as clean as a whistle.

We are not philistines, so we

Can let our mustachios flourish free.

Though the growth later spread over his cheeks and chin, Engels’s wispy beard was no match for the magnificent Marxist plumage. The image of Karl Marx familiar from countless posters, revolutionary banners and heroic busts – and the famous headstone in Highgate cemetery – would lose much of its iconic resonance without that frizzy aureole.

Marx was no great orator – he had a slight lisp, and the gruff Rhenish accent often led to misunderstandings – but the mere presence of this bristling boar was enough to inspire and intimidate. The historian Karl Friedrich Köppen, a
habitué
of the Doctors’ Club, found himself paralysed whenever he was in Marx’s company. ‘Once again I now have thoughts of my own,’ he wrote soon after his fearsome friend had left Berlin in 1841, ‘ideas that I have (so to speak) produced myself, whereas all my
earlier ones came from some distance away, namely from the Schützenstrasse [where Marx lived]. Now I can really work once more, and I am pleased to be walking around amongst complete idiots without feeling that I am one myself …’ After reading an article by Bruno Bauer on the politics of Christianity, Köppen told Marx that ‘
I subjected this idea to police-examination
and asked to see its passport, whereupon I observed that it too emanates from the Schützenstrasse. So you see, you are an absolute storehouse of ideas, a complete factory or (to use the Berlin slang) you have the brain of a swot.’

When Marx started working for the
Rheinische Zeitung
, colleagues noticed that his restless intellectual impetuosity also manifested itself in an endearing absent-mindedness. The journalist Karl Heinzen loved to watch Marx sitting in a tavern, gazing myopically at a newspaper over his morning coffee, ‘
and then suddenly going to another table
and reaching for papers that were just not available; or when he ran to the censor to protest about the cutting out of an article and then, instead of the article in question, stuffed into his pocket some other newspaper or even a handkerchief and hared off’.

Equally attractive, to those with strong stomachs, was Marx’s taste for revelry and rough-housing. Heinzen describes one evening when he had to lead Marx home after several bottles of wine:

As soon as I was in the house, he shut the doors, hid the key and jeered comically at me that I was his prisoner. He asked me to follow him up into his study. On arrival I sat myself down on the sofa to see what on earth this marvellous crank would get up to. He immediately forgot that I was there, sat down astride a chair with his head leaning forward against the back, and began to declaim in a strong singing tone which was half mournful and half mocking, ‘Poor lieutenant, poor lieutenant! Poor lieutenant, poor lieutenant!’ This lament concerned a Prussian lieutenant whom he ‘corrupted’ by teaching him the Hegelian philosophy …

After he had lamented the lieutenant for a while, he started up and suddenly discovered that I was in the room. He came over to me, gave me to understand that he had me in his power, and, with a malice that recalled an imp rather than the intended devil, he began to attack me with threats and cuffs. I begged him to spare me that sort of thing, because it went against the grain to pay him back in the same coin. When he did not stop I gave him a serious warning that I would deal with him in a way which he would certainly feel and when that too did no good I saw myself compelled to dispatch him into the corner of the room. When he got up I said that I found his personality boring and asked him to open the front door. Now it was his turn to be triumphant. ‘Go home then, strong man,’ he mocked, and added a most comical smirk. It was as though he was chanting the words from Faust, ‘There is one imprisoned inside …’ At least, the sentiment was similar, although his unsuccessful imitation of Mephistopheles made the situation comic in the extreme. In the end I warned him that if he would not open the door for me, then I would get it open myself and he would have to pay for the damage. Since he only answered with mocking sneers, I went down, tore the front door off its lock and called out to him from the street that he should shut the house up to prevent the entry of thieves. Dumb with amazement that I had escaped from his spell, he leaned out of the window and goggled at me with his small eyes like a wet goblin.

The sequel is all too predictable: a few years later, Marx denounced Heinzen as a loutish philistine (‘flat, bombastic, bragging, thrasonical’) and was in turn condemned by his sometime prisoner as ‘an untrustworthy egoist’. Engels then entered the lists, calling Heinzen ‘
the most stupid person of the century
’ and threatening to box his ears; Heinzen replied that he could not be intimidated by ‘a frivolous dilettante’. And so, interminably, on. Even as late as 1860, after emigrating to the United States, Heinzen still nursed
his grudge – describing Marx in one article as a cross between a cat and an ape, a sophist, a mere dialectician, a liar and an intriguer, noted for his yellow dirty complexion, black dishevelled hair, small eyes possessed by ‘a spirit of wicked fire’, snubby nose, unusually thick lower lip, a head that suggested anything but nobility or idealism and a body always dressed in dirty linen.

Marx was often accused of being an intellectual bully, especially by those who felt the full force of his invective. (One of his tirades against Karl Heinzen, published in 1847, runs to nearly thirty pages.) He undoubtedly delighted in his talent for inflicting verbal violence. His style, as a friend noted admiringly, is what the
stylus
originally was in the hands of the Romans – a sharp-pointed steel pencil for writing and for stabbing. ‘
The style is the dagger used for a well-aimed thrust
at the heart.’ Heinzen thought it not so much a dagger as a full battery of artillery – logic, dialectics, learning – used to annihilate anyone who would not see eye to eye with him. Marx, he said, wanted ‘to break windowpanes with cannon’. Nevertheless, the charge of bullying cannot be upheld. Marx was no coward, tormenting only those who wouldn’t retaliate: his choice of victims reveals a courageous recklessness which explains why he spent most of his adult life in exile and political isolation.

For proof, one need look no further than his first article for the
Rheinische Zeitung
, published in May 1842, in which he delivered a withering exegesis of the Rhine Provincial Assembly’s debates on freedom of the press. Naturally he criticised the oppressive intolerance of Prussian absolutism and its lickspittles; this was brave enough, if unsurprising. But, with an exasperated cry of ‘God save me from my friends!’, he was even more scathing about the feeble-mindedness of the liberal opposition. Whereas the enemies of press freedom were driven by a pathological emotion which lent feeling and conviction to their absurd arguments, ‘the
defenders
of the press in this Assembly have on the whole
no real relation
to what they are defending. They have never come to know freedom of the press as a
vital need
. For them, it is a matter
of the head, in which the heart plays no part.’ Quoting Goethe – who had said that a painter can succeed only with a type of feminine beauty which he has loved in at least one living being – Marx suggested that freedom of the press also has its beauty, which one must have loved in order to defend it. But the so-called liberals in the Assembly seemed to lead complete and contented lives even while the press was in fetters.

Having made enemies of both the government and the opposition, he was soon turning against his own confrères as well. Georg Jung, a successful Cologne lawyer involved in the
Rheinische Zeitung
, thought him ‘a devil of a revolutionary’, and the radical young Turks on the staff had high hopes when Marx was appointed to the editor’s chair in October 1842. They were to be disappointed. He set out his editorial policy in the form of a reply to the
Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung
, which had accused its rival of flirting with communism:

The
Rheinische Zeitung
, which does not even admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even
theoretical reality
, and therefore can still less desire their
practical realisation
, or even consider it possible, will subject these ideas to thoroughgoing criticism … Such writings as those of Leroux, Considérant, and above all the sharp-witted work by Proudhon, cannot be criticised on the basis of superficial flashes of thought, but only after long and profound study.

No doubt he had half an eye on the censor – and on the paper’s shareholders, bourgeois capitalists to a man. But he meant it all the same. Marx disliked the posturing of colleagues such as the tipsy Rutenberg (who was still working in the office, though his job consisted mainly of inserting punctuation marks) and Moses Hess. He was even more irritated by the antics of the Young Hegelian pranksters in Berlin, now calling themselves ‘The Free’, who lived up to the name by freely criticising everything – the state, the Church, the family – and advocating ostentatious
libertinism as a political duty. He regarded them as tiresome, frivolous self-publicists. ‘Rowdiness and blackguardism must be loudly and resolutely repudiated in a period which demands serious, manly and sober-minded persons for the achievement of its lofty aims,’ he told his readers.

There was, of course, an element of hypocrisy here: as his Cologne drinking companions testify, he was not always either serious or sober, and the solemn disapproval of attention-grabbing stunts came a little oddly from a man who, only a few months earlier, had been clattering through the streets of Bonn astride a donkey. But the assumption of editorial responsibility had concentrated his mind wonderfully: juvenile japes were no longer acceptable. The most persistent nuisance was Eduard Meyen, leader of the licentious Berlin clique, who submitted ‘heaps of scribblings, pregnant with revolutionising the world and empty of ideas’. During the weak, undiscriminating stewardship of Rutenberg, Meyen and his gang had come to regard
the
Rheinische Zeitung
as their private playground. But the new editor made it clear that he would no longer permit them to drench the newspaper in a watery torrent of verbiage. ‘
I regard it as inappropriate
, indeed even immoral, to smuggle communist and socialist doctrines, hence a new world outlook, into incidental theatrical criticisms etc.,’ he wrote. ‘I demand a quite different and more thorough discussion of communism, if it should be discussed at all.’

Marx’s own ability to discuss communism was hampered by the fact that he knew nothing about it. His years of academic study had taught him all the philosophy, theology and law that he was ever likely to need, but in politics and economics he was still a novice. ‘
As editor of the
Rheinische Zeitung
,
’ he admitted many years later, ‘I experienced for the first time the embarrassment of having to take part in discussions on so-called material interests.’

His first venture into this unexplored territory was a long critique of the new law dealing with thefts of wood from private forests. By ancient custom, peasants had been allowed to gather
fallen branches for fuel, but now anyone who picked up the merest twig could expect a prison sentence. More outrageously still, the offender would have to pay the forest-owner the value of the wood, such value to be assessed by the forester himself. This legalised larceny forced Marx to think, for the first time, about the questions of class, private property and the state. It also allowed him to exercise his talent for demolishing a thoughtless argument with its own logic. Reporting a comment by one of the knightly halfwits in the provincial assembly – ‘It is precisely because the pilfering of wood is not regarded as theft that it occurs so often – he let rip with a characteristic
reductio ad absurdum
: ‘
By analogy with this, the legislator would have to draw the conclusion
: It is because a box on the ear is not regarded as a murder that it has become so frequent. It should be decreed therefore that a box on the ear is murder.’

BOOK: Karl Marx
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