Karl Marx (28 page)

Manifestly not: Marx was writing only a few years after the appointment as poet laureate of Alfred Tennyson, whose ‘Ulysses’ had become one of the most popular verses of the age. Why, then, did the aesthetics of ancient Greece remain not only a source of pleasure but also the standard or model to which many Victorian artists and writers aspired?

An excellent question – but Marx’s brief answer scarcely did justice to it. Though no man can become a child, he wrote, ‘does he not enjoy the artless ways of the child, and must he not strive to reproduce its truth on a higher plane?’ Similarly, ‘why should the childhood of human society, where it had attained its most beautiful development, not exert an eternal charm as an age that will never return?’ Perhaps he was thinking of his own games of leap-frog and giddy-up with the girls on Hampstead Heath: inside that thirty-nine-year-old body, prematurely decaying and crumbling, there was a teenager wildly signalling to be let out. Sometimes, as he watched the children disporting themselves, he yearned to be able to turn somersaults or cartwheels, to clear his mind of the accumulated muck and misery.

The biggest headache of all was what he called ‘the economic shit’. As long ago as 1845 he had claimed that his treatise on political economy was almost finished, and over the next thirteen years he repeated and embellished the lie so often that his friends’ expectations were raised to an impossible pitch. To judge by the time taken, they reasoned, it must indeed be an explosive
magnum opus
that would dissolve the baseless edifices of capitalism – the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself – leaving not a rack behind. The regular bulletins from London to Manchester kept up the pretence of splendid progress. ‘I have completely demolished the theory of profit as hitherto propounded,’ he wrote triumphantly to Engels in January 1858. In truth, all he had to show for those long days in
the British Museum and even longer nights at his desk was a tottering pile of unpublishable notebooks, filled with random scribble.

The arrival later that month of Ferdinand Lassalle’s new book on the philosophy of Heraclitus – a huge two-volume doorstopper – made him even more conscious of his own inability to deliver the goods. How could Lassalle, the self-appointed leader of German socialism, have found the time to finish such a substantial theoretical tome? Marx dealt with his own guilty conscience by belittling Lassalle’s achievement, assuring Engels that the Heraclitus book was ‘a very silly concoction’. True, it had a tremendous show of learning – but ‘
provided one has the time and money
and, like Mr Lassalle, can have Bonn University Library delivered
ad libitum
to one’s home, it is easy enough to assemble such an array of quotations. One can see what an amazing swell the fellow himself thinks he is … Every other word a howler, but set forth with remarkable pretentiousness.’

Lassalle was seven years Marx’s junior, and although they had much in common – both bourgeois German Jews weaned on Heine and Hegel, with a weakness for aristocratic women – the contrast in their fortunes was painfully acute. While he was still a philosophy student Lassalle had taken up the cudgels on behalf of the Countess von Hatzfeldt, who was fighting a celebrated divorce action. She seemed an unlikely heroine of the socialist cause, but for this ambitious young barrack-room lawyer her plight demonstrated the larcenous villainy of the upper classes: the Count had effectively stolen his wife’s dowry, and under German law at the time she had little chance of retrieving it. Lassalle hurled himself into the case with a fine disregard for legal niceties – suborning witnesses, stealing documents – until, after ten years and dozens of lawsuits, the exhausted husband handed over the loot. Lassalle’s share of the spoils set him up for life: he installed himself in a palatial Berlin residence, furnished in the most exotic and expensive style; his box at the opera was next to that of the King, and no less grand. Even Bismarck came to pay homage,
recognising a fellow Man of Destiny when he saw one.

Unsurprisingly, some of the workers whom Lassalle claimed to represent were deeply mistrustful of his intentions – and troubled by Marx’s apparent support for him. In the spring of 1856 the Düsseldorf communists sent an emissary to London, one Gustav Lewy, in the hope of persuading Marx to break off relations: for a whole week Lewy regaled his host with stories of Lassalle’s skulduggery, opportunism and dictatorial ambitions. ‘
He [Lassalle] seems to see himself quite differently
from the way we see him,’ Marx wrote to Engels immediately afterwards. ‘The whole thing made a distinct impression on myself and Freiligrath, however prejudiced in Lassalle’s favour and mistrustful of workers’ tittle-tattle I may have been. I told Lewy that it was, of course, impossible to reach any conclusion on the strength of a report from one side only.’

It was most unusual for Marx to give anyone the benefit of the doubt; but Lassalle was not just anyone. His fearlessness and enthusiasm had greatly impressed Marx at their first encounter, in Germany during the ’48 revolution, and though their friendship since then had been purely epistolary he had heard nothing to make him revise his opinion. Perhaps it was true, as Lewy warned, that Lassalle was a tyrant-in-waiting, a dangerous megalomaniac who would happily trample on the workers and form alliances with Prussian absolutism in his feverish quest for power; if so, however, he had never mentioned it in his letters. Even at the height of his fame, Lassalle remained loyal to his indigent chum in London – praising his ideas, encouraging him to get on with his book, sending occasional donations. Should one disown such a generous benefactor merely because of workers’ tittle-tattle? Marx’s only advice to Lewy and the communists of Düsseldorf was that ‘they should continue to keep an eye on the man but for the time being avoid any public row’.

By the spring of 1858 he had another reason for avoiding ‘any public row’, since Lassalle was now offering to arrange a contract for him with a Berlin publisher, Franz Duncker (whose wife
happened to be Lassalle’s mistress). While sneering at the Heraclitus book in his private correspondence with Engels, Marx delivered a strikingly different verdict to the author: ‘
I carefully perused your Heraclitus
. Your reconstruction of the system from the scattered fragments I regard as brilliant, nor was I any less impressed by the perspicacity of your polemic … It is incomprehensible to me, by the by, how you found the time in the midst of all your other work to acquire so much Greek philology.’ Having paid these disingenuous respects, he went on to describe the structure of his own masterpiece.

The work I am presently concerned with
is a Critique of Economic Categories or, if you like, a critical exposé of the system of bourgeois economy … The whole is divided into six books: 1. On Capital (contains a few introductory chapters). 2. On Landed Property. 3. On Wage Labour. 4. On the State. 5. International Trade. 6. World Market.

Marx wanted it issued in instalments. The first volume – on capital, competition and credit – would be ready for the printers in May, followed by the second within a few months, and so on.

This was a tight series of deadlines; and, as often happened when he found himself under pressure to deliver the goods, his body rebelled. ‘I’ve been so ill with my bilious complaint this week that I am incapable of thinking, reading, writing or, indeed, of anything,’ he wrote to Engels on 2 April. ‘My indisposition is disastrous, for I can’t begin working on the thing for Duncker until I’m better and my fingers regain their vigour and grasp.’ For the rest of the month he was unable to work at all. ‘Never before have I had such a violent attaque of liver trouble and for some time there was a fear that it might be sclerosis of the liver … Whenever I sit down and write for a couple of hours I have to lie quite fallow for a couple of days.’

It was a familiar lament. ‘
Alas, we are so used to these excuses
for the non-completion of the work!’ Engels commented many
years later, after rereading some of Marx’s old letters. ‘Whenever the state of his health made it impossible for him to go on with it, this impossibility preyed heavily on his mind, and he was only too glad if he could only find out some theoretical excuse why the work should not then be completed.’ This assumes that it was his health which sabotaged his work, but one could argue that cause and effect were the other way round. Though Marx’s many ailments over the years were real enough, there was undoubtedly a psychosomatic influence. As he admitted, ‘
my sickness always originates in the mind
’.

In the summer of 1851, when starting his regular column for the
New York Daily Tribune
, he fell ill immediately and begged Engels to take over. A few months later, when asked for a contribution to Weydemeyer’s newspaper
Die Revolution
, he took to his bed for a week. In the summer of 1857, when poverty forced him to take on hack work for the American
Cyclopaedia
, he was out of action for three weeks with liver trouble. Now that Lassalle and Duncker were demanding his economic manuscript, anyone who knew Marx would have guessed the consequence. Jenny, for one, was not at all surprised by the sudden bilious bother. In April 1858, at a time when Marx himself was too ill even to write a letter, she told Engels that ‘
the worsening of his condition is largely attributable
to mental unrest and agitation which now, of course, after the conclusion of the contract with the publisher are greater than ever and increasing daily, since he finds it impossible to bring the thing to a close’. Soon afterwards he spent a week in Manchester, where Engels prescribed his favourite remedy of energetic equestrianism. ‘
Moor has been out riding
for two hours today,’ Engels revealed in a medical bulletin to Jenny Marx, ‘and feels so well after it that he’s waxing quite enthusiastic about the thing.’ But as soon as he returned to his desk in Grafton Terrace all the old anxieties descended again.

Marx was an incorrigible fidget, forever breaking off to search for one more fragment of evidence, or pacing up and down his study while brooding on how to improve his argument. (A strip of
carpet between the door and window became threadbare from these exertions, as clearly defined as a track across a meadow.) Back in August 1846, when his ‘economic shit’ was already overdue for delivery to another German publisher, he had explained the delay thus: ‘
Since the all but completed manuscript of the first volume
of my book has been lying idle for so long, I shall not have it published without revising it yet again, both as regards matter and style. It goes without saying that a writer who works continuously cannot, at the end of six months, publish word for word what he wrote six months earlier.’ Many authors will know this syndrome – the dread of letting one’s ship finally slide down the slipway, the irresistible need to splash on another coat of paint or add a few more rivets. In that summer of 1846 he had thought it would take about four months to apply the finishing touches: ‘The revised version of the first volume will be ready for publication at the end of November. The second volume, of a more historical nature, will be able to follow soon after it.’

More than a decade later, Marx’s great ark was still in dry dock. ‘
Now let me tell you how my political economy is coming on
,’ he wrote to Lassalle at the end of February 1858. ‘I have in fact been at work on the final stages for some months. But the thing is proceeding very slowly because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects to which one has devoted years of study than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further.’ So long as there was one source unconsulted, one treatise unread – as there always would be – he could not let go.

And, of course, there was the unending struggle against those other notorious enemies of promise – illness, poverty and domestic duty. Eleanor went down with whooping cough; Jenny was ‘a nervous wreck’; the butcher, the pawnbroker and the tallyman were all clamouring for payment. As Marx joked grimly, ‘
I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about “money” when so short
of the stuff.’ Trapped in a quagmire of vexations, he wrote almost nothing throughout the summer. At the end of September he
claimed that the manuscript would be ready for dispatch ‘in two weeks’, but a month later he admitted that ‘
it will be weeks before I am able to send it
’. Everything seemed to conspire against him: the world economic crisis, so cheerfully expected, had fizzled out all too soon and Marx’s ‘very bad humour’ at this turn of events had its predictable physical consequence – ‘
the most appalling toothache
and ulcers all over my mouth’.

By the middle of November, six months after the deadline, the publisher in Berlin began to wonder if the book was anything more than a chimera. With heroic chutzpah, Marx explained to Lassalle that the procrastination ‘merely signified the endeavour to give him [Duncker] the best value for his money’. How so?

All that I was concerned with was the form
. But to me the style of everything I wrote seemed tainted with liver trouble. And I have a twofold motive for not allowing this work to be spoiled on medical grounds:

1. It is the product of fifteen years of research, i.e. the best years of my life.

2. In it an important view of social relations is scientifically expounded for the first time. Hence I owe it to the Party that the thing shouldn’t be disfigured by the kind of heavy, wooden style proper to a disordered liver …

I shall have finished about four weeks from now, having only just begun the actual writing.

Only just begun! This must have come as quite a shock to Lassalle and Duncker, who had been told back in February that the text was in its ‘final stages’. Still, if the work was as weighty and profound as Marx maintained, no doubt it would be worth the wait.