Karl Marx (36 page)

A year earlier he had told Engels that the draft required only a few ‘finishing touches’, which would be done by September 1865. ‘I am working like a horse at the moment.’ His friends had heard many such hopeful forecasts over the years, but this time he really did seem to be in the final furlongs – even if the spavined old nag was proceeding at a limping trot rather than full gallop. Through the summer of 1865 he was vomiting every day (‘in consequence of the hot weather and related biliousness’), and a sudden influx of house guests provided further unwelcome distraction. Jenny’s buffoonish brother, Edgar von Westphalen, came to stay for six months, drinking the wine cellar dry and ‘pondering the needs of his stomach from morn till night’; other visitors included Marx’s brother-in-law from South Africa, a niece from Maastricht and the Freiligrath family. This was the price he paid for moving to a house with spare rooms, but it was a price he could ill afford. ‘
For two months I have been living solely on the pawnshop
,’ he fretted. ‘A queue of creditors has been hammering on my door, becoming more and more unendurable every day.’ And yet, at the still point in the centre of this whirlwind, his masterpiece was nearing completion. By the end of 1865
Capital
was a manuscript of 1,200 pages, a baroque mess of ink-blots and crossings-out and squiggles. On New Year’s Day 1866 he sat down to make a fair copy and polish the style – ‘licking the infant clean after long birth pangs’. But then the carbuncles returned. On doctor’s orders he was
banished to Margate for a month, where he did little except bathe in the sea, swallow arsenic three times a day and feel thoroughly sorry for himself. ‘I can sing with the Miller of the Dee: “I care for nobody and nobody cares for me”.’ At the end of his sea cure the carbuncles had gone – only to be replaced by rheumatism and toothache. Then the old liver trouble returned for an encore. Even on days when he was fit to work some new misfortune usually descended, as when his stationer refused to supply any more paper until the last batch had been paid for.

With exquisitely bad timing, Paul Lafargue chose this un-propitious moment to ask for the hand of the twenty-year-old Laura Marx in marriage. The Creole medical student, having met Marx through the International, had transferred his attention to the old man’s green-eyed daughter and begun wooing her with an enthusiasm which Karl thought most indecorous. Lafargue was suspect anyway, not only for Proudhonist tendencies but also because of his exotic Franco-Spanish-Indian-African ancestry, which to his prospective father-in-law suggested a certain genetic flightiness. As soon as writing paper could be found Marx sent the overzealous suitor a letter of which any Victorian paterfamilias would have been proud.

My dear Lafargue
,

Allow me to make the following observations:

1. If you wish to continue your relations with my daughter, you will have to give up your present manner of ‘courting’. You know full well that no engagement has been entered into, that as yet everything is undecided. And even if she were formally betrothed to you, you should not forget that this is a matter of long duration. The practice of excessive intimacy is especially inappropriate since the two lovers will be living at the same place for a necessarily prolonged period of severe testing and purgatory … To my mind, true love expresses itself in reticence, modesty and even the shyness of the lover towards his object of veneration, and certainly not in giving free rein to
one’s passion and in premature demonstrations of familiarity. If you should urge your Creole temperament in your defence, it is my duty to interpose my sound reason between your temperament and my daughter. If in her presence you are incapable of loving her in a manner in keeping with the London latitude, you will have to resign yourself to loving her from a distance.

In fact it was Marx and not Lafargue who attributed this ardour – and almost everything else – to the ‘Creole temperament’. As late as November 1882 he was still going on about it, telling Engels that ‘
Lafargue has the blemish customarily found in the negro tribe
–
no sense of shame
, by which I mean shame about making a fool of oneself.’

Before consenting to the marriage, Marx required a full account of the young man’s prospects. ‘
You know that I have sacrificed my whole fortune
to the revolutionary struggle,’ he wrote to Lafargue. ‘I do not regret it. Quite the contrary. If I had to live my life over again, I would do the same. I would not marry, however. As far as it lies within my power, I wish to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother’s life was wrecked … You must have achieved something in life before thinking of marriage, and a long period of testing is required of you and Laura.’ Not that long, as it turned out: Laura Marx’s engagement to Paul Lafargue was announced in September 1866, only a month after Marx dispatched his letter, and they were married in St Pancras register office on 2 April 1868. Her father, rather unromantically, described the union as ‘
a great relief for the entire household
, since Lafargue is as good as living with us, which perceptibly increases expenses’.
At the wedding lunch Engels cracked so many jokes
about the bride that she burst into tears.

Lacking the vivacity of Jennychen and Eleanor, Laura never enjoyed being the centre of attention. (‘
As I am in the habit of keeping in the background,
I am very apt to be overlooked and
forgotten.’) Of all the Marx girls she was probably the most like Jenny Marx: while her sisters dreamed of careers on the stage, Laura’s only ambition was to be a good wife. Her first child, Charles Etienne (nicknamed ‘Schnapps’), was born on 1 January 1869, almost exactly nine months after the wedding, followed over the next two years by a daughter and another son. All died in infancy. There was, it seemed, no escaping those reefs on which her mother’s life had been wrecked. ‘
In all these struggles we women have the harder part
to bear,’ Jenny Marx wrote, mourning the loss of her grandchildren, ‘because it is the lesser one. A man draws strength from his struggle with the world outside, and is invigorated by the sight of the enemy, be their number legion. We remain sitting at home, darning socks.’

The house at 1 Modena Villas has long since crumbled into dust, but Paul Lafargue left an evocative description of the chaotic upstairs den in which Marx worked. It should gladden the hearts of untidy authors everywhere:

Opposite the window and on either side of the fireplace
the walls were lined with bookcases filled with books and stacked up to the ceiling with newspapers and manuscripts. Opposite the fireplace on one side of the window were two tables piled up with papers, books and newspapers; in the middle of the room, well in the light, stood a small, plain desk (three foot by two) and a wooden armchair; between the armchair and the bookcase, opposite the window, was a leather sofa on which Marx used to lie down for a rest from time to time. On the mantelpiece were more books, cigars, matches, tobacco boxes, paperweights and photographs of Marx’s daughters and wife, Wilhelm Wolff and Friedrich Engels …

He never allowed anybody to put his books or papers in order – or rather in disorder. The disorder in which they lay was only apparent, everything was really in its intended place so that it was easy for him to lay his hand on the book or notebook he needed. Even during conversations he often paused to show in the book a quotation or figure he had just mentioned. He and his study were one: the books and papers in it were as much under his control as his own limbs.

This is almost identical to the report written by a Prussian police spy twelve years earlier, describing the disorderly front room in Dean Street, Soho – ‘manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children’s toys, and rags and tatters of his wife’s sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash – in a word, everything topsy-turvy.’ His working habits hadn’t changed at all: he still got through hundreds of matches relighting the pipes and cigars that he had forgotten to finish. ‘
Capital
,’ he told Lafargue, ‘will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it.’

His inability to afford decent Havanas inspired a bizarre flight of economic fancy when he noticed a tobacconist in Holborn selling cigars with the slogan ‘the more you smoke the more you save’, which were even cheaper and nastier than his usual cut-price cheroots. By switching to the new brand, he told friends, he would save one shilling and sixpence a box, and consequently if he forced himself to smoke enough of them he might one day be able to live on his ‘savings’. The theory was tested with such lung-rasping commitment that eventually the family doctor had to intervene, ordering the wheezing patient to find some other way of enriching himself.

Marx was plagued by his usual physical ailments through the winter of 1866–7 but even they could no longer thwart his determination to finish Volume One of
Capital
. He wrote the last few pages of Volume One standing at his desk when an eruption of boils around the rump made sitting too painful. (Arsenic, the usual anaesthetic, ‘dulls my mind too much and I needed to keep my wits about me’.) Engels’s experienced eye immediately spotted certain passages in the text ‘where the carbuncles have left their mark’, and Marx agreed that the fever in his groin might have given the prose a rather livid hue. ‘At all events, I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day,’ he cursed. ‘
What swine they are!
’

Nevertheless, after twenty years of gestation the egg was finally
hatched. ‘I had resolved not to write to you until I could announce completion of the book,’ he told Engels on 2 April 1867, ‘which is now the case.’ A week later he set off for Hamburg to deliver the manuscript to Meissner, the publisher, after first sending the inevitable begging letter to Engels so that he could reclaim his clothes and watch from the pawnbroker. ‘
I can also hardly leave my family in their present situation,
they being
sans sou
and the creditors becoming more brazen each day. Finally, before I forget, all the money that I could afford to spend on Laura’s champagne treatment has gone the way of all flesh. She now needs red wine, of better quality than I can command.
Voilà la situation
.’ As ever, Engels was equal to
la situation
: seven five-pound notes were posted to London forthwith.

Having seen off both his carbuncles and his
Capital
, Marx left England feeling ‘as voraciously fit as 500 hogs’: even a ghastly fifty-two-hour voyage buffeted by gales and rain couldn’t dampen his high spirits. ‘With all that riff-raff being seasick and falling about to left and right of us, it would all have become
ennuyant
in time, if a certain nucleus had not held firm,’ he reported. The nucleus included a London cattle-dealer (‘a true John Bull, bovine in every respect’), a German explorer who had been roaming eastern Peru for fifteen years, and a deeply pious old lady with a Hanoverian accent. ‘
What was keeping this beautiful creature so spellbound
in these inimical circumstances? Why did she not withdraw to the ladies’ chamber? Our savage German was regaling us with an enthusiastic account of the sexual depravities of savages.’

Marx delivered his precious cargo to Meissner, who sent it off for typesetting with a view to publication by the end of May. For the next month the elated author lodged with Dr Ludwig Kugelmann in Hanover so that he could be on hand to check the proof-sheets. ‘Kugelmann is a doctor of great eminence in his special field, which is gynaecology,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘Kugelmann is secondly a fanatical supporter (and for my taste excessively Westphalian in his admiration) of our ideas and the
two of us personally. He sometimes bores me with his enthusiasm …’ Though the two men hadn’t met before, Kugelmann had been sending him fan mail for several years. He had a more comprehensive collection of the works of Marx and Engels than they did themselves: while staying in the house Marx came upon
The Holy Family
, which he hadn’t seen since his own copy went astray soon after publication.

In spite of Kugelmann’s suffocating adulation, Marx wrote, ‘
he
understands
, and he is a really
excellent man
,
unaffected by qualms, capable of making sacrifices, and, most important of all,
convinced
. He has a charming little wife [Gertruda] and an eight-year-old daughter [Franziska] who is positively sweet.’ Marx immediately awarded them nicknames, a sure sign of approval: Mrs K. became ‘Madame la Comtesse’ because of her social grace and insistence on good manners, while her husband was dubbed ‘Wenzel’ after two old Bohemian rulers of contrasting reputations. ‘My father was very outspoken in his sympathies and antipathies,’ Franziska Kugelmann recalled, ‘and Marx would call him the good or the bad Wenzel according to his attitude.’ If the doctor started discussing politics in the presence of Franziska and Madame la Comtesse, Marx would silence him at once: ‘That is not for young ladies, we’ll speak of that later.’ Instead, the frolicsome sage entertained his hostess with jokes, literary anecdotes and folk-songs. The only time he lost his temper was when a visitor asked who would clean the shoes under communism. ‘You should,’ Marx retorted crossly. Frau Kugelmann quickly saved the day with a tease, commenting that she couldn’t imagine Herr Marx in a truly egalitarian society since his tastes and habits were so thoroughly aristocratic. ‘Neither can I,’ he agreed. ‘These times will come, but we must be away by then.’ He was immensely flattered when the Kugelmanns pointed out his resemblance to a bust of Zeus in their hall – the powerful head, the abundant hair, the Olympian brow, the authoritative yet kind expression.

It was not only the Kugelmanns who lionised Marx while he was in Hanover. ‘The standing the two of us enjoy in Germany,’
he wrote to Engels, ‘particularly among the “educated” officials, is of an altogether different order from what we imagined. Thus e.g. the director of the statistical bureau here, Merkel, visited me and told me he had been studying questions of money for years to no avail, and I had immediately clarified the matter once and for all.’ He was invited to dinner by the head of the local railway company, who thanked Dr Marx profusely for ‘doing me such an honour’. More flattering still was the arrival of an emissary from Bismarck, who announced that the Chancellor wished ‘to make use of you and your great talents in the interests of the German people’. Rudolf von Bennigsen, chairman of the right-wing National Liberal Party, turned up in person to pay his respects.

No wonder Marx was so chirpy. He was in excellent health, with no carbuncle daring to show its ugly face and not even a trace of liver trouble in spite of boozy dinner parties every night. The sleepless years of sickness, squalor and obscurity were consigned to the dustbin of history. ‘I always had the feeling,’ Engels wrote on 27 April, ‘that that damn book, which you have been carrying for so long, was at the bottom of all your misfortune, and you would and could never extricate yourself until you had got it off your back.’ A delay at the printers meant that he didn’t receive the proofs until 5 May, his forty-ninth birthday; but even this inconvenience, which would usually have provoked foul temper for a day or two, couldn’t cloud his sunny mood. ‘I hope and confidently believe that in the space of a year I shall be made,’ he predicted, ‘in the sense that I shall be able to fundamentally rectify my financial affairs and at last stand on my own feet again.’
Again
? There had never been a moment in his adult life when Marx didn’t need hand-outs. As he admitted in a letter to Engels, ‘Without you I would never have been able to bring the work to a conclusion, and I can assure you it always weighed like a nightmare on my conscience that you were allowing your fine energies to be squandered and to rust in commerce, chiefly for my sake, and, into the bargain, you had to share all my
petites misères
as well.’ Only a few sentences later, however, angst and despondency
began their nagging chorus once more. The publisher expected delivery of Volumes Two and Three before the end of the year; his creditors in London were waiting to pounce as soon as he returned; ‘
and then the torments of family life
, the domestic conflicts, the constant harassment, instead of settling down to work refreshed and free of care’.

The torments of a middle-class Londoner are not quite the same as those of the truly destitute. His first request to Engels after returning to London was for several cases of claret and Rhenish wine, since ‘
my children are obliged to invite some other girls for dancing
on 2 July, as they have been unable to invite anyone for the whole of this year, to respond to invitations, and are therefore about to lose caste’. Where once he had struggled to find a few pence for bread and newspapers, now his domestic necessities were those of a suburbanite anxious to keep up appearances. He was ‘exceedingly vexed’ to learn that the poet Freiligrath, having lost his managerial job with the London branch of a Swiss bank, now lived off the proceeds of a subscription fund raised by admirers in Britain, America and Germany which allowed him to entertain in grand style. The best cure for vexation was to send his children away for a summer holiday in Bordeaux (financed by Engels, of course) so that he could scribble without interruption at the proof-sheets of
Capital
. Early word of mouth among those who had glimpsed parts of the work led him to hope that on the morning after publication his name and fame would resound throughout Europe. Johann Georg Eccarius told friends that ‘the Prophet Himself is just now having the quintessence of all wisdom published’.

After weeks of revising and correcting, Marx finished the last proof of Volume One in the early hours of 16 August and dashed off a heartfelt note of thanks to his sponsor. ‘
So,
this volume is finished
. I owe it to
you
alone
that it was possible! Without your self-sacrifice for me I could not possibly have managed the immense labour demanded by the three volumes. I embrace you, full of thanks …
Salut
, my dear, valued friend.’

Exactly a century after its publication, the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson boasted that he had never read
Capital
. ‘
I only got as far as page two
– that’s where the footnote is nearly a page long. I felt that two sentences of main text and a page of footnotes were too much.’ Wilson had a first-class degree in politics, philosophy and economics, but he guessed that his profession of ignorance would endear him to the educated middle classes – who, particularly in Britain and America, are often perversely proud of their refusal to engage with Marx. Hence the mad circular argument one hears from people who haven’t ventured even as far as page two. ‘
Capital
is all hooey.’ And how do you know it’s hooey? ‘Because it’s not worth reading.’

A rather more sophisticated objection to the book, put by the philosopher Karl Popper, is that one cannot tell whether or not Marx was writing nonsense, since his ‘iron laws’ of capitalist development are no more than unconditional historical prophecies, as vague and slippery as the quatrains of Nostradamus. Unlike proper scientific hypotheses, they cannot be either proved or – the crucial Popperian test – falsified. ‘Ordinary predictions in science are conditional,’ Popper argues. ‘They assert that certain changes (say, of the temperature of water in a kettle) will be accompanied by other changes (say, the boiling of the water).’ Actually, it would be easy to subject Marx’s economic assertions to a similar experiment by studying what has happened in practice during the past century or so. As capitalism matured, he predicted, we would see periodic recessions, an ever-growing dependence on technology and the growth of huge, quasi-monopolistic corporations, spreading their sticky tentacles all over the world in search of new markets to exploit. If none of this had happened, we might be forced to agree that the old boy was talking poppycock. The boom – bust cycles of Western economies in the twentieth century, like the globe-girdling dominance of Bill Gates’s Microsoft, suggest otherwise.