biography – Eleanor Marx
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Has anybody read it yet? A bit pricey, yet though.The Telegraph review seems very sympathetic from a feminist angle. Also a bit of a who-dunnit, in regards her death.
It was Radio 4 book of the week. Sadly doesn't seem to be online any more.http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b042j8y1
It’s a good read.There’s little new to add since Yvonne Kapp’s ground-breaking mammoth two-volume bestseller of the 1970s, but the tale is well told.Eleanor’s tale is the story of one born into the generation after, forever in the shadow of the generation before, but striving to find its own way.Dad prolonged her adolescent infatuation-cum-engagement to Communard Lissagaray, almost two decades older than his precious daughter, but a god in her estimation because a literary Communard. Of course, dad assiduously helped Eleanor translate Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune of 1871, the start of a long line of her excellent literary-first translations that include many Ibsen plays and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.On dad’s death she moved in with still-married Edward Aveling, in a free liaison in which each blossomed as intellectual partner in the early socialist movement, under Engels’s guidance and supported unstintingly by Engels’s money—he’d do anything for Marx’s kids, which their lay-about husbands willingly sponged on.As Engels lay dying, speechless through throat cancer, Eleanor extracted from his faltering handwriting on a slate, the shocking fact that dear “cousin” Freddy Demuth, the out-of-wedlock son of the family’s life-long maid, Helene Demuth, was not as Eleanor believed Engels’s illegitimate son, but Marx’s. Poor innocent “wronged” Freddy became her close suffering companion.[Terrell Carver, in Marx myths, disputes Marx’s paternity, but the evidence for it seems overwhelming to me. In any case, apart from Hal Draper’s myth, all the myths on the Marx myths website are bunkum.]Following Engels’s death, key members of her own generation now felt at liberty to question the validity of her father’s works, and her very close companion Eduard Bernstein openly broached revisionism—bringing Marx up to date and user-friendly—using not dissimilar persuasion to what is being offered today on this site.Meanwhile her husband was gravely ill, but had secretly married and moved in with a young stage actress, dropping in on Eleanor whenever he needed her boundless love and understanding, as well as a top-up from Engels’s financial legacy to Eleanor, which he eventually snaffled and then, on his own demise, became the property of the actress who had already ignominiously displaced the trusting Eleanor, of his free socialist liaison, in legal marriage.For socialists unfamiliar with the Marx household and with daughter Eleanor, this is a fascinating read.
Reference to Freddy Demuth reminded me that back in the 1960s, Lewis Feuer, a US philosopher and editor of "Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy" (pub. 1959), met with his Soviet counterparts in Moscow where he revealed to them the story of Freddy being the illegitimate son of Marx. I think Feuer came across the Demuth-Marx story while searching the Marx archives held at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Anyway, when his Soviet counterparts heard this they were of course quite shocked, not having known this before, until one Soviet responded : "Well, as Marx said – nihil humani a me alienum puto'" – which means "nothing human is alien to me" – the response given by Marx to the questionnaire ("Confessions") submitted to him by his daughters when asked for his favourite maxim (Francis Wheen gives all Marx's responses to this questionnaire in his Marx biography). BTW, it's worth mentioning that the first biography of Eleanor Marx was written by the Japanese Marx scholar, Chushichi Tsuzuki, "The Life of Eleanor Marx 1855-1898: A socialist tragedy" (pub.1967). Still worth reading IMO.
Thanks, Peter. I wasn’t aware that Lewis Feuer re-discovered Freddy’s story.The Social Democrats, Bernstein, and Kautsky, whose not necessarily reliable or unbiased ex-wife is the [gleeful] prime source of the story, were all too painfully aware of it, and of its potential political damage, and in the political and social climate of the times, naturally preferred to let sleeping dogs lie.But Marx’s fleeting liaison with Jenny’s life-long personal domestic-companion since adolescence, and governess of the means of production of the Marx household, and then of Engels’s household—all this in the days before modern domestic appliances—is totally understandable in the close cramped conditions of the Soho flat, and Jenny’s absence, and Marx, with his self-acknowledged Pater familias [i.e. sexual] needs.That the domestic fracas was patched over between Marx, Jenny and Lenchen, speaks volumes about their dependent circumstance and their deep relationships—of course, Carver sees it as speaking against Marx’s fling. That all three had poor “wronged” Freddy as constant reminder, only adds to the poignancy of the situation for all four of them.And Eleanor always assumed that Engels was Freddy’s dad. Yet he was remote in Manchester, and the last person in the world to invade Marx’s household sexual province, and with almost nil opportunity to do so, and whose household Helene moved into after Marx’s death, presumably without bringing their supposed joint offspring back into his rightful domestic fold.As always, Engels it seems took on “reponsibility”, and reluctantly “agreed” to carry the intra-Marx-family can over the matter. Eleanor had naturally been previously cold towards Engels over his presumed paternity yet embarrasingly overt indifference towards his supposed son Freddy, something Engels demonstrably never showed towards Marx’s legitimate offspring.Freddy’s case was simply fraught with too much Marxian pain. Today’s indiscretions are stored out there on the cloud, in Facebook, tweets and emails. The 19th century hoped to consign its indiscretions to the lounge-room fireplace.The proof of Marx’s paternity of Freddy remains circumstantial. And the naming of the boy “Freddy”, unmistakably after Engels, raises all sorts of doubtful and dubious questions, especially if as the evidence points that he was Marx’s son. The issue may never be “solved” to everyone’s satisfaction.Yep, Engels truly was most expert in the world to write authoritatively on “The Origin of the Family”, though silent until the end on Marx’s own.It’s a pity that Freddy never joined the SPGB. I often wonder if Eleanor might have, had she lived another 20 years to her dad’s age.I consider that to be a distinct possibility, which indeed would have been the sort of unbeatable endorsement of the SPGB that the folks seeking outside-of-the-party endorsers can never hope to obtain.Eleanor’s death is a truly great tragedy. Had she lived on, she might have sunk into irretrievable personal and political depression. On the other hand…Her story is certainly is an interesting case study of one side of the difficulty of promulgating Marxian socialism.
Having written so confidently about Freddy’s parentage, and dismissing Terrell Carver’s account (from my memory of it, which I too hastily dismissed at the time, having read it with my mind already made up by Kapp, and others) because the opposing view had just been reinforced by a lightening read of Rachel Holmes’s new book, which also follows most recent Marx biographers in imputing the siring of Freddy to Marx, I thought I should revisit Carver’s account at http://marxmyths.org/terrell-carver/article.htmI have just re-read it, unblinkered by the new established tradition, and am no longer quite so certain. Carver has done an excellent job in laying out the opposing case. I recommend Carver’s account as a “corrective” for anyone interested in the case of Freddy.
At the risk of thrashing-to-death a minor issue…I stumbled by chance upon Eduard Bernstein’s article, of 30 July 1898“What Drove Eleanor Marx to Suicide”It is available athttp://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1898/07/death-eleanor.htmThis article was written while Bernstein was thinking out his “revisionist” letter to the German Social Democratic Party, which he presented two months later, and subsequently published as “Evolutionary Socialism.
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