Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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Koppen unchanged: the drinking session with Koppen did him 'a power of good''01 and Koppen presented him with his two-volume study on the Buddha. Marx also visited old friends in the Rhineland and spent two days with his mother. She interested him with her 'subtle esprit and indestructible stability of character'102 - and she cancelled some of his old debts into the bargain. Marx defined his attitude towards a return to Germany as follows: 'Germany is so fine a country that one is better living outside its boundaries. I for my part, if I were quite free and not burdened with something that you might call "political conscience", would never leave England for Germany, still less for Prussia and least of all for this frightful Berlin with its dust and culture and over-clever people.'103 And Jenny's views were even sharper: 'My wife is particularly against a move to Berlin', Marx informed his uncle, 'since she does not wish our daughters to be introduced to the Hatzfeld circle, and it would be difficult to keep them away from it."04

The whole family was, however, enchanted by the gifts from Lassalle that Marx brought back with him. There was an atlas for Engels and cloaks for the girls and for Jenny, who strutted up and down so proudly in hers that Eleanor called after her: 'Just like a peacock!' Jenny was grateful for other reasons, too, as 'anything like this makes an impression on the philistines of the neighbourhood and earns us respect and credit'.105

On his return to London Marx failed to pursue any co-operation with I .assalle. He was too busy working on his 'Economics' and trying to spin out his meagre earnings from journalism: the New York Daily Tribune had anyway cut Marx's quota of articles by half owing to the Civil War and most of what Marx wrote was for the Viennese paper Die Presse which praised his contributions highly but only printed - and paid for - one out of every four or five. Many of these articles dealt with the American Civil War. Unlike Engels, Marx was confident that the North, being industrially more developed, would win in the end in spite of early setbacks.106 'In this struggle', he wrote in the Tribune, 'the highest form that the self-government of a people has so far attained is giving battle to the lowest and most shameful form of human slavery yet seen in the annals of history.'107 Marx was particularly pleased that the English working class, although their interests were damaged by the blockade of the south, were staunchly opposed to intervention.

In July of the following year Lassalle reciprocated by visiting London at a time when Marx had just returned from several weeks' refuge in Manchester to find a mass of debts. Lassalle stayed in the Marx household for three weeks and spent a lot of time at the International Exhibition. The strain that he imposed on Marx's finances, working time and nerves made him extremely bitter. 'In order to preserve a certain facade', Marx

wrote to Engels, 'my wife had to take to the pawn-brokers everything that was not actually nailed down.'108 It was all the more galling, therefore, that Lassalle had just thrown away almost £100 in speculation and to see him spend more than £i daily just on cabs and cigars. Marx was even more riled when Lassalle offered to obtain the protection of a London Jewish banker for him and take one of his daughters as a 'companion' to the countess. Marx wanted nothing more than to get on with his 'Economics', but Lassalle coolly assumed that since the lack of a market for his articles meant that he had 'no job' and was only doing 'theoretical' work, then Marx had all the time in the world to kill with him.109 As annoying as Lassalle's flamboyant display of wealth was his boastfulness. In Marx's view he had changed much since the previous year in Berlin. Lassalle's success had turned his head and 'he is now not only confirmed as the greatest scholar, profoundest thinker, a genius in research, etc.; he is also Don Juan and a revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu. And there is also his continual chatter in an unnatural falsetto voice, his ugly demonstrative gestures and didactic tone.'110 And it must indeed have been difficult for Marx to tolerate long the company of a man who could, with complete self-assurance, begin a speech with the words: 'Working men! Before I leave for the Spas of Switzerland . . A f t e r three weeks of this Marx gave vent to his pent-up frustration in a letter to Engels: 'It is now quite clear to me that, as shown by the shape of his head and the growth of his hair, that he is descended from the negroes who joined the flight of Moses from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on his father's side were crossed with a nigger). This union of Jew and German on a negro foundation was bound to produce something out of the ordinary. The importunity of the fellow is also negroid.'112 Jenny's comment on Lassalle's visit is also worth quoting as her touch is a little lighter than Marx's:

In July 1862 we had a visit from Ferdinand Lassalle. He was almost crushed under the weight of the fame he had achieved as a scholar, thinker, poet and politician. The laurel wreath was fresh on his Olympian brow and ambrosian head or rather on his stiff bristling Negro hair. He had just victoriously ended the Italian campaign - a new political coup was being contrived by the great man of action - and fierce battles were going on in his soul. There were still fields of science that he had not explored! Egyptology lay fallow: 'Should I astonish the world as an Egyptologist or show my versatility as a man of action, as a politician, as a fighter, or as a soldier?' It was a splendid dilemma. He wavered between the thoughts and sentiments of his heart and often expressed that struggle in really stentorian accents. As on the wings of the wind he swept through our rooms, perorating so loudly, gesticulat-

ing and raising his voice to such a pitch that our neighbours were scared by the terrible shouting and asked us what was the matter. It was the inner struggle of the 'great' man bursting forth in shrill discords.1"

()n the day of Lassalle's departure the landlord, tax collector and most of the shopkeepers all threatened Marx with immediate reprisals if he did not pay his debts. Lassalle noticed that something was amiss and lent Marx £15 until the end of the year and anything more that Marx might require, provided that Engels would guarantee the loan. Marx drew a cheque for £60 on Lassalle. However, Lassalle wished first to be assured that Engels was in agreement and this angered Marx so much that he returned a very rough answer for which he half apologised in November: 'I think that the substance of our friendship is strong enough to stand such a shock. I confess to you quite unequivocally that, as a man sitting on a volcano, I allow circumstances to dominate me in a manner unfitting for a rational animal. But in any case it was ungenerous of you to turn this state of mind, in which I would as soon have put a bullet through my head, against me like some prosecutor in a law court. So I hope that "in spite of everything" our old relationship can continue untroubled.'114 Thereafter the correspondence ceased though Lassalle continued to send Marx his numerous publications.

In April 1864 Lassalle stated that he had not written to Marx for two years as their relationship was strained 'for financial reasons'. Marx, however, attributed the break to Lassalle's political views - with greater reason. In the early 1860s the prosperity of Germany produced strong liberal forces that considerably diminished the strength of the reaction that had dominated the country throughout the 1850s. This opposition was brought to a head by the refusal of the Landtag to vote the budget necessary for a reform of the army, a refusal which led to elections in May 1862. Lassalle campaigned hard and the radicals had considerable success. During his stay in London Lassalle wished to obtain Marx's backing for his programme of universal suffrage and state aid to workers' co-operatives. Combined with his radicalism Lassalle remained in many respects an Old Hegelian with an Old Hegelian's view of the state; he had never been through the traumatically secularising experience of the Young Hegelians. Thus his proposals could never be acceptable to Marx who summed up his attitude to them in two letters written after Lassalle's death.115 Most importantly, Marx considered that any reliance on state aid would enfeeble the proletariat's struggle for political supremacy. Lassalle's ideas, according to Marx, were not based on any coherent economic theory and involved a compromise with feudalism 'whereas in the nature

of things, the working class must be genuinely "revolutionary" '."6 Lassalle, however, who was in many ways in closer contact with the situation in Germany than was Marx, might with justice have claimed that Marx overestimated the revolutionary potential of the Prussian bourgeoisie and that his own programme represented the only way forward for the working-class movement. Marx was equally opposed to the idea of universal suffrage in Germany: Lassalle had learnt none of the lessons of the manipulation of this political device in France by Louis Napoleon. He also claimed that Lassalle did not base himself enough on previous working-class movements in Germany (though in fact many of his collaborators were former members of the Communist League);117 and that Lassalle had no international dimension to his political agitation. This last observation was certainly justified: Lassalle had never lived outside Germany and both his theory and his practice were strictly limited to German conditions.

Even after his visit to London, Lassalle still hankered after the idea of editing a newspaper in co-operation with Marx. But Marx's criticisms became even more pronounced during Lassalle's last year of feverish political activity. In May 1863 Lassalle's agitation culminated in a request from the Leipzig workers to attend a conference where the Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein (General Union of German Workers), the first effective German socialist party, was formed. Eleven days before the conference Lassalle had had an interview with Bismarck with whom he had already been in secret negotiation. Although Lassalle claimed that he was 'eating cherries with Bismarck, but Bismarck was getting only the stones', Lassalle did not live long enough for it to be clear whether he was right.118 Marx himself very quickly came to the conclusion that Lassalle had sold out to Bismarck and complained even more strongly of his plagiarising the Communist Manifesto and Wage Labour and Capital. But Lassalle's sudden death intervened: on 28 August 1864 he was mortally wounded in a duel by a Wallachian Count, the fiance of Helen von Donniges, a seventeen-year-old girl to whom Lassalle had got himself engaged barely four weeks before. Engels received the news fairly coolly; Marx showed more humanity. He wrote:

Lassalle's misfortune has been going damnably round in my head these last days. He was after all one of the old stock and the enemy of our enemies. Also the thing came so surprisingly that it is difficult to believe that so noisy, stirring, pushing a man is now as dead as a mouse and must shut his mouth altogether. About the cause of his death you are quite right. It is one of the many tacdessnesses which he performed in his life. For all that, I'm sorry that our relationship was troubled during the last years, of course through his fault. . . .

The devil knows, the crowd is getting ever smaller and no new blood is being added.'1'

And to the countess, he wrote:

You will understand how the quite unforeseen news of Lassalle's death has astonished, shocked and shattered me. He was one of those for whom I had a great affection.... Be convinced that no one can feel deeper grief than I at his being torn away. And above all I feel for you. I know what the departed was to you, what his loss means to you. Rejoice over one thing. He died young, in triumph, like Achilles.120

Although Marx was obviously over-generous here to his own past sentiments, yet his relationship to Lassalle was ambivalent, resentment and hate always being tempered by a grudging admiration.

IV. L I F E I N G R A F T O N T E R R A C E

The years 1860-63 had marked a fresh - but final - low in Marx's domestic affairs. He touched the depth of 'bourgeois misery' and could manage no more in three years than research on the historical portions of his 'Economics'. In 1864, however, the situation changed: two legacies gave the Marx household enough security for Marx to be able to devote himself to the spread of the First International (which had been founded just four weeks after Lassalle's death) and also to start drafting the vital chapters of his 'Economics' on capital.

As Marx had foreseen, the poverty that the family experienced in Grafton Terrace was in many ways worse than that of Dean Street. The building had, according to Jenny, 'the four characteristics the English like in a house: airy, sunny, dry, and built in gravelly soil';121 and on a fine day there was a clear view right down to St Paul's. But the Marxes lived a very isolated life as their house was, initially, very difficult of access: building was going on all round, there was no made-up road leading to it, and in rainy weather the sticky red soil turned into a quagmire. This particularly affected Jenny who wrote that

it was a long time before I could get used to the complete solitude. I often missed the long walks I had been in the habit of making in the crowded West-End streets, the meetings, the clubs and our favourite public-house and homely conversations which had so often helped me to forget the worries of life for a time. Luckily I still had the article for the Tribune to copy out twice a week and that kept me in touch with world events.122

Even worse, there were more appearances to be kept up and expenditure

2 9 6 K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

much increased particularly with the elder children going to school - a 'ladies seminary'125 - and having private lessons in French, Italian, drawing and music. A piano, too, had to be rented. From 1857 there was a second servant, Helene Demuth's younger sister, Marianne, who stayed until her death in 1862. Marx was as resolved as ever 'to pursue my aim through thick and thin and not let bourgeois society turn me into a moneymaking machine',124 but was often rather naively surprised at the financial difficulties that his attitude entailed. In 1859 he hoped to double his revenue by an offer that Lassalle had negotiated on his behalf to write for the Wiener Presse and announced to Engels that he would bother him no more for money. Jenny - who was always much more hard-headed about money - warned him that he could count on £2 a week maximum and should not believe Engels with his airy talk of £10. The following September his affairs were in a crisis. Engels, who was being prosecuted for assaulting someone in a pub with his umbrella, had to find about £50 to settle the case and Marx turned to Lassalle, assuring him that he would be able to recoup from the royalties of the Critique of Political Economy. At the end of the year things were so bad that Jenny had to write secretly to her brother Ferdinand, with whom she had kept on fairly friendly terms, though all she gained was a feeling that she had compromised her principles as he refused her request, saying that he had only his pension to live on. The year i860 was slightly better, as Engels' financial position was improving and he was able to sent Marx £100 in a lump sum. But a lot of money went on the quarrel with Karl Vogt and by the end of the year Engels was having to borrow money to bail Marx out, though his own income was diminished by the American Civil War.

In February 1861 Marx decided, on his way to see Lassalle in Berlin, to visit his uncle in Holland and try to anticipate his inheritance. This trip was preceded by two weeks in which Marx spent his whole time in avoiding 'the complete break up of the house'.125 He could only keep sane by reading in the evenings Appian on the Roman Civil War. His favourite figure was Spartacus, 'the finest fellow produced by the whole of classical history... a real representative of the ancient proletariat'. This admiration was matched by a complete contempt for Pompey, 'a

pure louse of a man', into whose character Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost had some real insights.126 By the summer the £160 that he had got

from his uncle was gone. He felt the situation to be 'in every respect unsettled' and was reading Thucydides to shake off his ill humour. 'At least these ancients remain for ever new', he remarked to Lassalle.127 In the autumn he renewed his correspondence with the New York Daily Tribune and at last obtained terms that enabled him to start writing for the Wiener Presse. This work for New York and Vienna would give him

enough to live on, he considered, but his debts still amounted to £100. 'It is astonishing', he remarked naively to Engels, 'how lack of income together with debts that are never completely cleared blows up the old shit in spite of all assistance in minor matters."28

The year 1862 marked the nadir of Marx's fortunes. He had to pretend not to have returned from a trip to Manchester in order to avoid creditors, and Jenny even tried to sell his books. In such circumstances Lassalle's visit in July could only be excruciating. Lassalle had come to the rescue with £60 but by the autumn Marx was thinking of taking a job in a railway office. He went as far as getting an interview but was turned down owing to his appalling handwriting.129 In January 1863 he wrote to Kngels that the recent trouble had

at last brought my wife to agree to a suggestion that I made a long time ago and which, with all its inconveniences, is not only the sole solution, but is also preferable to the life of the last three years, and particularly the last, as well as restoring our self-esteem.

I will write to all my creditors (with the exception of the landlord) and say that, if they do not leave me in peace I will declare myself bankrupt.. . . My two eldest daughters will get positions as governesses through the Cunningham family. Lenchen will enter another service and I, with my wife and Tussy, will go and live in the same City Model Lodging House in which red Wolff and his family lived previously.130

It is not clear how serious Marx really was, but Engels read the letter as a cry for help and responded immediately by borrowing £100 at great risk to himself. Marx still had to go off to the British Museum to avoid his creditors, but in the summer Ernst Dronke lent Engels £250 for Marx, which lasted until December when he received the telegram that presaged substantial relief: his mother was dead.

Borrowing the money from Engels, Marx rushed to Trier, but the administrative measures concerning the execution of the will took so long that Marx left to visit his uncle in Zaltbommel. During the week he spent in Trier, he wrote to Jenny, he went back to the old house of the Westphalens 'that was of more interest to me than all the Roman antiquities because it reminds me of the happiest time of my youth and housed my greatest treasure. Moreover, I was asked daily, left and right, after the former "prettiest girl in Trier" and the "queen of the ball". It is damned pleasant for a man when his wife lives on like that in the imagination of a whole city as an "enchanted princess"."" Most of the money (of which Marx's share was about £1000) was in the hands of Marx's uncle who was the executor of the will as well as being his chief creditor. Here also the legal processes were long but Marx only had time to visit two of his aunts

in Frankfurt before he was struck down by a monster carbuncle which kept him in Zaltbommel for six weeks nursed by his uncle and cousin Antoinette Philips. Engels meanwhile paid the bills for Grafton Terrace. Marx considered the stay in Holland as 'one of the happiest episodes of my life',1 " and returned to London on 19 February, after visits to more relations in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in possession of the residue of the money left him by his mother: some additional money was sent later as a result of the sale of objects in Trier.

In early May 1864 Marx obtained another windfall. On 9 May Wilhelm

Wolff died. Marx felt that he had lost 'one of our few friends and fellow fighters, a man in the best sense of the word'.133 Marx was at his bedside

during the days before his death and gave a brief speech at his graveside. As one of the executors of Wolff's will he stayed on in Manchester for some days and was as surprised as anyone when it was discovered that Wolff had painstakingly accumulated a small fortune and left the bulk of it - £843 and some £50 worth of effects - to Marx. This put a stop to begging letters to Engels - for just over one year.

These continued financial disasters weighed upon the whole household, but most of all on the sensitive and houseproud Jenny whose health became seriously undermined. In late 1856 she was again pregnant (at the age of forty-two) and needed the doctor's attention throughout the nine months during which her nervous state neared what Marx described as 'catastrophe'.134 The child was born dead. The following year Jenny went to Ramsgate with Lenchen and the children for several weeks to recuperate and this eventually became an annual occurrence: the Marx family had great faith in the health of sea air, and at one time or another visited practically every resort on the south-east coast. In Ramsgate Jenny had, so Marx informed Engels, 'made acquaintance with refined and, horribile dictu, intelligent English ladies. After the experience of bad society, or none at all, for years on end, the society of her equals seems to suit her.'135 With her health, Jenny's optimism also declined: at the end of 1858, when she had no money for the Christmas festivities and was busy copying out the Critique of Political Economy, she informed Marx that 'after all the misery that she would have had to endure, it would be even worse in the revolution and she would experience the pleasure of seeing all the present-day humbugs again celebrate their triumphs'.136

In November i860, the year that Marx spent in his fruitless campaign against Karl Vogt, Jenny contracted the disease that was to mark a watershed in her life. Hardly had she finished copying the manuscript of Herr Vogt, than she was struck down by a fever. Diagnosis was delayed as Jenny refused at first to call a doctor. After two visits the 'very nasty nervous fever' was declared to be smallpox contracted in spite of a double vacci-

nation. The children had to go and stay with the Liebknechts for several weeks - they would not go to a boarding school 'because of the religious rites'.137 Marx hired a nurse to look after Jenny, who had lost the use of her senses. She wrote later: 'I lay constantly by the open window so that the cold November air would blow over me, while there was a raging fire in the stove and burning ice on my lips, and I was given drops of claret from time to time. I could hardly swallow, my hearing was getting weaker, and finally my eyes closed, so that I did not know whether I would remain enveloped in eternal night.'138 In these circumstances Marx could only preserve his 'quietness of mind' by absorbing himself in the study of mathematics.

Eventually the crisis passed and by Christmas the children were allowed back in the house. But the illness had after-effects: Jenny remained fairly deaf and her skin was marked with red pocks that took a long time to heal. In March of the following year she wrote to Louise Weydemeyer that before her illness she 'had had no grey hair and my teeth and figure were good, and therefore people used to class me among well-preserved women. But that was all a thing of the past now and I seemed to myself now a kind of cross between a rhinoceros and hippopotamus whose place was in the zoo rather than among the members of the Caucasian race.'139 Her nervous state also continued to frighten the doctor particularly in times of financial trouble.

Marx found that his financial difficulties and Jenny's increasing irritability made family life very difficult. By the end of December 1857 when he was well into the Grundrisse, Jenny reported the return of his 'freshness and cheerfulness'140 which he had lost with the death of Edgar. But two months later he declared to Engels: 'There is no greater stupidity than for people of general aspirations to marry and so surrender themselves to the small miseries of domestic and private life.'141 The life in Grafton Terrace was a very isolated one, with only the Freiligraths as close friends and very few family visitors, and Marx felt that Engels was the only person he could talk to frankly as at home he had to play the role of a silent stoic. This was necessary to combat Jenny's increasing pessimism. Marx's own health was seriously suffering: he continually complained to Engels that his liver bothered him for weeks on end (his father had died from a liver complaint) and he consumed enormous quantities of medicine to heal the toothache, headaches and disorders of his eyes and nerves. The boils were to follow shortly.

After Jenny's illness domestic troubles were aggravated. Marx tried to keep bad news from Jenny as 'such news always induces a sort of paroxysm'.142 The year 1862 he could only wish to the devil since 'such a lousy life is not worth while living'.143 Jenny's feelings were much the same:

'My wife tells me every day that she wishes she were in the grave with the children and I really cannot blame her.'144 In January 1863, as a result of pressing money problems and Jenny's reaction to them, there occurred the only serious quarrel between Marx and Engels. On 6 January Mary Burns died. She had been living with Engels for nearly twenty years and he regarded her as his wife. On hearing of her death Marx wrote simply that 'the news of Mary's death both surprised and shocked me very much. She was very good-natured, witty and devoted to you', and then continued immediately to give Engels a lengthy description of his financial troubles.145 Engels replied after a few days: 'You will find it natural that my own trouble and your frosty reception of it made it positively impossible for me to answer you earlier. All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have shown me on this occasion, which was bound to touch me very nearly, more sympathy and friendship than I could expect. You found the moment suitable to enforce the superiority of your cold thought processes.'146 Marx waited ten days before replying:

I thought it good to let some time pass before I answered you. Your situation on the one hand and mine on the other made it difficult to take a 'cool' look at the situation.

It was very wrong of me to write you the letter, and I regretted it as soon as it was posted. But it did not happen out of heartlessness. My wife and children will bear me witness that when your letter came (it was early in the morning) I was as much shattered as by the death of one of those nearest to me. But when I wrote to you in the evening, it was under the impression of very desperate conditions. I had the landlord's broker in the house, the butcher protesting at my cheque, shortage of coals and food, and little Jenny in bed. In such circumstances, I can generally save myself only by cynicism.147

This in turn led to a quarrel between Marx and Jenny. Marx had written in the same letter of excuse to Engels that 'what made me particularly wild was the fact that my wife believed that I had not sufficiently accurately communicated the true state of affairs to you'.148 Marx considered that Jenny had forced him into a false position with regard to Engels.

I can now tell you without further ceremony [he wrote to Engels] that, in spite of all the pressure I have endured during the last weeks, nothing burdened me - even relatively speaking - as much as this fear that our friendship should now break up. I repeatedly told my wife that nothing in the whole mess was important to me compared with the fact that, owing to our lousy bourgeois situation and her eccentric excitement, I was not in a position to comfort you at such a time, but only to burden you with my private needs.

Consequendy domestic peace was much disturbed and the poor