Karl Marx (20 page)

At a meeting held the day before yesterday at which I assisted and over which Wolff and Marx presided, I heard one of the orators call out ‘The Moon Calf [Queen Victoria] will likewise not escape its destiny. The English steel wares are the best, the axes cut particularly sharply here, and the guillotine awaits every Crowned Head.’ Thus the murder of the Queen of England is proclaimed by Germans a few hundred yards only from Buckingham Palace … Before the close of the meeting Marx told his audience that they might be perfectly tranquil, their men were everywhere at their posts. The eventful moment was approaching and infallible measures are taken so that not one of the European crowned executioners can escape.

An earlier biographer of Karl Marx has claimed that ‘
this report is oddly convincing
’. In fact, it is manifestly absurd – as the British government of the time recognised. Although the Prussian Minister of the Interior forwarded the dispatch to London, Lord
Palmerston consigned it to the Foreign Office files where it remains to this day. As far as one can tell, he did not even bother to alert Scotland Yard. When the Austrian ambassador in London complained to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, that Marx and his fellow members of the Communist League were discussing regicide, he was rewarded with a brief, supercilious lecture on the nature of liberal democracy: ‘Under our laws, mere discussion of regicide, so long as it does not concern the Queen of England and so long as there is no definite plan, does not constitute sufficient grounds for the arrest of the conspirators.’ A plot to assassinate Queen Victoria was precisely the sort of pointless stunt that Marx abhorred. He despised those revolutionaries who preferred flamboyant gestures to the dull but necessary process of preparing for the economic crisis which would precipitate the victory of the proletariat. Indeed, it was his very doggedness on this point that destroyed the Communist League in London, as the more impatient committee members chafed at his insistence that they must bide their time.

The leader of the malcontents was August Willich, Engels’s old military commander from the ’49 campaign in Baden, who had been making a thorough nuisance of himself since joining the German diaspora in England. ‘He would come to visit me,’ Jenny Marx wrote many years later, ‘because he wanted to pursue the worm that lives in every marriage and lure it out.’ Almost everything about Willich was calculated to irritate Marx – his posturing and preening, his colourful clothes, his noisy attention seeking. By the summer of 1850 he was openly denouncing Jenny’s husband as a ‘reactionary’. Marx, never one to miss an opportunity for vituperation, retaliated by dismissing him as an ‘uneducated, four-times cuckolded jackass’. At a riotous meeting of the League’s central committee on 1 September, Willich challenged Marx to a duel.

As Willich was a crack shot who could hit the ace of hearts at twenty paces, Marx had enough sense to refuse; but his eager lieutenant Conrad Schramm, who had never fired a pistol in his
life, picked up the gauntlet at once and departed with Willich to Antwerp – duels being illegal in Britain – for a final reckoning. Karl and Jenny feared the worst, especially when they heard that that Willich was taking Emmanuel Barthélemy as his second. Barthélemy, a fierce-eyed muscular ruffian, had been convicted of murdering a policeman at the age of seventeen and still wore on his shoulder the indelible brand of a galley convict. Having fled to London only a few weeks earlier, after escaping from a French prison, he had already been heard to say that ‘
traîtres
’ such as Marx and his cronies should be killed. Given his prowess with pistol and sabre, as demonstrated at the salon in Rathbone Place, this was no idle threat.

What hope did the bold but feeble Schramm have against the formidable expertise of Willich and Barthélemy? On the appointed day, Marx and Jenny sat miserably in their rooms with Wilhelm Liebknecht, counting the minutes until their young comrade died. The next evening Barthélemy himself came to the door and announced in a sepulchral voice that ‘
Schramm a une balle dans la tète
!’ Bowing stiffly, he then left without another word.

‘Of course, we gave up Schramm for lost,’ Liebknecht wrote. ‘The next day, while we were just talking about him sadly, the door is opened and in comes with a bandaged head but gaily laughing the sadly mourned one and relates that he had received a glancing shot which had stunned him – when he recovered consciousness, he was alone on the sea coast with his second and his physician.’ Assuming that the wound was fatal, Willich and Barthélemy had caught the next steamer back from Ostend.

Thus ended Marx’s dream of running the Communist League from England. At its final meeting, on 15 September 1850, he proposed that the Central Committee should be transferred to Cologne since the bickering London agitators were incapable of providing leadership of any kind. A fair point – except that the Communists of Cologne had quite enough problems of their own. The Prussian government had redoubled its persecution of subversives since the attempted assassination of King Frederick
William IV, and by the summer of 1851 all eleven members of the Cologne Central Committee were in jail awaiting trial on conspiracy charges. Poor old Marx, who had looked forward to a well-earned respite from the Communist League, found himself reluctantly dragged back into its affairs as he began to lobby and protest on behalf of the German ‘conspirators’. It was not mere altruism: to his fury, he had been fingered by the prosecutor as the evil genius behind the bloodthirsty schemes and
coups
of which the defendants were accused. He worked day and night, setting up defence committees, raising funds, scribbling indignant letters to the newspapers. ‘
A complete office has now been set up in our house
,’ Jenny told a friend. ‘Two or three people are writing, others running errands, others scraping pennies together so that the writers may continue to exist and prove the old world of officialdom guilty of the most outrageous scandal. And in between whiles my three merry children sing and whistle, often to be harshly told off by their papa. What a bustle!’

Seven of the eleven defendants were imprisoned. The Communist League was dead, and many years were to pass before Marx joined any other organisation. Understandably weary of Committees and Societies and Leagues, which demanded so much and achieved so little, he retreated into the British Museum reading room, ten minutes’ walk from Dean Street, and applied himself to the ambitious task of producing a comprehensive, systematic explanation of political economy – the monumental project which was to become
Capital
.

At the end of 1850 – after six wretched months at 64 Dean Street – Karl and Jenny Marx found a more permanent home a hundred yards up the road, in two rooms on the top floor of number 28. Today the building is an expensive restaurant presided over by the modish chef Marco-Pierre White; a small blue plaque on the front, affixed by the defunct Greater London Council, records that ‘Karl Marx 1818–1883 lived here 1851–56’. This is the only official monument to his thirty-four years in England, a country
which has never known whether to feel pride or shame at its connection with the father of proletarian revolution. Appropriately enough, the dates on the sign are inaccurate.

The
annus horribilis
was nearly over, but it had a few more cruelties to inflict. Two weeks before the Marxes moved into 28 Dean Street their little gunpowder plotter, Heinrich Guido ‘Fawksey’, died suddenly after a fit of convulsions. ‘
A few minutes before, he was laughing and joking
,’ Marx told Engels. ‘You can imagine what it is like here. Your absence at this particular moment makes us feel very lonely.’ Jenny was quite distraught, ‘in a dangerous state of excitation and exhaustion’, while Karl expressed his grief in characteristic style by denouncing the perfidy of his comrades. The main target this time was Conrad Schramm, that erstwhile Hotspur who had risked his life only a few weeks earlier to defend Marx’s honour.

‘
For two whole days
, 19 and 20 November, he never showed his face in our house,’ Marx raged, ‘then came for a moment and immediately disappeared again after one or two fatuous remarks. He had volunteered to accompany us on the day of the funeral; he arrived a minute or two before the appointed hour, said not a word about the funeral, but told my wife that he had to hurry away so as not to be late for a meal with his brother.’ Schramm thus joined an ever-lengthening list of traitors. Rudolf Schramm, Conrad’s brother, was already on it, having had the effrontery to organise a meeting of Germans in London without inviting associates of Marx and Engels.

Another of these outcasts was Eduard von Müller-Tellering, a former correspondent for the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
who was known as ‘a first-class brawler’ but met his match when he tried to pick a fight with Marx. As so often with these internecine vendettas, the original
casus belli
was laughably petty. Tellering asked Engels, at very short notice, for a ticket to a ball organised by the German Workers’ Educational Society; Engels, explaining that the application was too late, couldn’t resist pointing out that Tellering had never attended any meetings of the Society, nor
even collected his membership card – ‘and only the day before yesterday an individual in a similar situation was expelled from the society’. Taking the hint, the Society’s ‘court of honour’, presided over by Willich, rescinded Tellering’s membership. He replied with a volley of libellous attacks on the Marx – Engels clique – or, as it was often called by now, the Marx Party.

At this point the party leader himself entered the fray. ‘
For the letter you wrote yesterday
to the Workers’ Society, I would send you a challenge, were you still capable of giving satisfaction,’ Marx thundered. ‘I await you on a different field to strip you of the hypocritical mask of revolutionary fanaticism behind which you have so far skilfully contrived to hide your petty interests, your envy, your unassuaged vanity and your angry discontent over the world’s lack of appreciation for your great genius – a lack of appreciation that began with your failure to pass your examination.’ It was Marx who had encouraged Tellering’s journalistic ambitions and had recommended him to the Society; it was now Marx who consigned the unworthy servant to the outer darkness. After one final, flailing counter-strike – a pamphlet of hysterical anti-Semitic insults – Tellering emigrated to the United States and was never heard of again.

Marx revelled in conflict and was always alert to any slight, real or imagined. Tellering and Rudolf Schramm were ‘those wretches’; the leaders of the Democratic Association – a rival group to the German Workers’ Educational Society – were ‘charlatans and swindlers’; another group of newly arrived refugees was ‘a fresh swarm of democratic scallywags’. If these wretches and scallywags were so negligible, one might well ask, why couldn’t he ignore them? When libelled in print by an obscure politician in Switzerland named Karl Vogt, did he really have to compose a 200-page polemic –
Herr Vogt
– by way of reply? Marx was not alone in disliking the vain and boastful revolutionary poet Gottfried Kinkel, but no one else thought it necessary to subject Kinkel’s absurdities to a hundred closely printed pages of scabrous mockery, published under the sarcastic title
The Great Men of the
Exile
. Whenever well-wishers suggested that a lion should not waste his time fighting with dung-beetles, Marx would reply that the merciless exposure of utopian charlatans was nothing less than his revolutionary duty: ‘Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against our self-styled friends than against our declared enemies.’

Besides, he enjoyed the sport. One need only read some of the incidental pen portraits in
The Great Men of the Exile
to see what pleasure he took in skewering them. Rudolf Schramm: ‘A rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little mannikin whose life motto came from
Rameau’s Nephew
: “I would rather be an impudent windbag than nothing at all.”’ Gustav Struve: ‘At the very first glimpse of his leathery appearance, his protuberant eyes with their sly, stupid expression, the matt gleam on his bald pate and his half Slav, half Kalmuck features one cannot doubt that one is in the presence of an unusual man …’ Arnold Ruge: ‘It cannot be said that this noble man commends himself by his notably handsome exterior; Paris acquaintances were wont to sum up his Pomeranian-Slav features with the word “ferret-face” … Ruge stands in the German revolution like the notices seen at the corner of certain streets: It is permitted to pass water here.’

Far from dissipating his vigour, these wild jeremiads actually seemed to renew it. The volcanic rage that erupted over obscure deviationists or dullards was the same fiery passion that illuminated his exposures of capitalism and its contradictions. To work at his best, Marx needed to keep himself in a state of seething fury – whether at the endless domestic disasters that beset him, at his wretched ill health or at the halfwits who dared to challenge his superior wisdom. While writing
Capital
, he vowed that the bourgeois would have good reason to remember the carbuncles which caused him such pain and kept his temper foul. The Vogts and the Kinkels served the same purpose – not so much butterflies upon a wheel as festering boils on the bum.

His living conditions might have been expressly designed to keep him from lapsing into contentment. The furniture and
fittings in the two-room apartment were all broken, tattered or torn, with a half-inch of dust over everything. In the middle of the front living-room, overlooking Dean Street, was a big table covered with an oilcloth on which lay Marx’s manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children’s toys, rags and scraps from his wife’s sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes and a thick veneer of tobacco ash. Even finding somewhere to sit was fraught with peril. ‘Here is a chair with only three legs, on another chair the children have been playing at cooking – this chair happens to have four legs,’ a guest reported. ‘This is the one which is offered to the visitor, but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away; and if you sit down, you risk a pair of trousers.’