Karl Marx (46 page)

Hyndman himself was an exception to this rule – as to every other rule. A product of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, a sometime batsman for Sussex County Cricket Club, he was said to have adopted socialism ‘
out of spite against the world because he was not included in the Cambridge eleven
’. (There is more than a trace of him in P. G. Wodehouse’s character Psmith, who converted to Marxism when he was expelled from Eton and thus deprived of the honour of playing cricket against Harrow at Lord’s; thereafter he addressed everyone as ‘Comrade’.) Hyndman never shed the trappings of his class, often appearing before left-wing audiences in a frock-coat and silk top hat. His politics, too, were
de haut en bas
: the proletariat could not be freed by the workers themselves but only by ‘those who are born into a different position and are trained to use their faculties in early life’. And yet he convinced himself (if no one else) that he was the reddest and hottest radical in town. ‘I could not carry on,’ he said, ‘unless I expected the revolution at ten o’clock next Monday morning.’ Early in 1880, after reading a French translation of
Capital
, he bombarded the author with so many extravagant tributes that Marx eventually agreed to see him.

‘
Our method of talking was peculiar
,’ Hyndman wrote of their first meeting at 41 Maitland Park Road. ‘Marx had a habit when at all interested in the discussion of walking actively up and down the room, as if he were pacing the deck of a schooner for exercise.
I had acquired, on my long voyages, the same tendency to pacing to and fro when my mind was much occupied. Consequently, master and student could have been seen walking up and down on opposite sides of the table for two or three hours in succession, engaged in discussing the affairs of the past and present.’ Although Hyndman claimed that he was ‘eager to learn’, according to Marx it was the Old Etonian who did most of the talking.

Having gained his entrée, and knowing that Marx’s doctor forbade him to work in the evenings, Hyndman acquired the habit of turning up at Maitland Park Road uninvited after dinner. Everyone in the household found this intensely tiresome – especially on the nights when a group of Eleanor’s friends, the Dogberry Club, would gather in the drawing-room to recite a Shakespeare play. Marx adored these performances and always insisted on playing games of charades and dumb crambo afterwards (‘
laughing when anything struck him as particularly comic
,’ one Dogberry-ite recalled, ‘until the tears ran down his cheeks’); but Hyndman had no compunction about barging in and treating the assembled company to his views on Mr Gladstone. As Marx wrote to Jennychen after one such occasion:

We were invaded by Hyndman and his wife
, both of whom have too much staying-power. I quite like the wife on account of her brusque, unconventional and determined manner of thinking and speaking, but it’s amusing to see how admiringly she hangs on the lips of her complacent chatterbox of a husband! Mama grew so weary (it was close on half past ten at night) that she withdrew.

The inevitable rupture occurred in June 1881 when Hyndman published his socialist manifesto
England For All
, in which Marx was astonished to find two chapters that had been largely plagiarised from
Capital
without permission. A note in the preface admitted that ‘for the ideas and much of the matter contained in Chapters II and III, I am indebted to the work of a great thinker
and original writer, which will, I trust, shortly be made accessible to the majority of my countrymen’. Marx thought this wholly inadequate. Why could Hyndman not acknowledge
Capital
and its author by name? His lame explanation was that the English had ‘a horror of socialism’ and ‘a dread of being taught by a foreigner’. As Marx pointed out, however, the book was unlikely to assuage that horror by evoking ‘the demon of Socialism’ on page eighty-six, and even the densest English reader could guess from the preface that the anonymous thinker must be foreign. It was larceny, pure and simple – compounded by the insertion of idiotic mistakes in the few paragraphs that were not directly lifted from
Capital
. Hyndman was banished from Maitland Park Road. In his memoirs, written thirty years later, he babbled about Marx’s enthusiasm for new ideas, adding, ‘nor was he much concerned about the wholesale plagiarisms from himself of which he might have reasonably complained’. Like so many men of his class, Hyndman had all the sensitivity of an anaesthetised rhinoceros.

Happily, no sooner had Marx fallen out with one English disciple than he acquired another – though this time he took the precaution of never actually meeting the man, for fear of being stuck with another complacent chatterbox.
Ernest Belfort Bax, born in 1854
, came from a middle-class family of mackintosh manufacturers and devout Christians, but had been radicalised by the Paris Commune while still a schoolboy. In 1879 the highbrow monthly
Modern Thought
began publishing his long series of articles on the intellectual leaders of the age, including assessments of Schopenhauer, Wagner and (in 1881) Marx. Having studied Hegelian philosophy in Germany, Bax was the only English socialist of his generation to accept that dialectic was the inner dynamic of life. He described
Capital
as a book ‘that embodies the working out of a doctrine in economy comparable in its revolutionary character and wide-reaching importance to the Copernican system in astronomy, or the law of gravitation in Mechanics generally’.

Marx was thrilled: at last he had found a John Bull who
understood him. ‘
Now this is the first publication of that kind
which is pervaded by a real enthusiasm for the new ideas themselves and boldly stands up against British philistinism,’ he wrote to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, an old ’48 veteran now living in the United States. Better still,
Modern Thought
posted placards announcing the article on the walls of London’s West End. When he read Bax’s comments to his ailing wife, she cheered up at once.

Plagiarism and boorishness were undoubtedly the main reasons for Hyndman’s expulsion from the inner circle, but he may have been right to suspect that Jenny’s lingering illness had ruffled Marx’s temper and ‘disposed him to see the worst side of things’. In the summer of 1880 Karl was so worried by Jenny’s deterioration that he took her up to Manchester for a consultation with his friend Dr Eduard Gumpert, who decided that she was suffering from a serious liver complaint. A long spell of
dolce far niente
was prescribed, preferably at the seaside, and so the entire tribe departed for a holiday in Ramsgate – Engels, Karl and Jenny, Laura and Paul Lafargue, Jenny and Charles Longuet, plus their children Jean, Henri and Edgar. ‘
The visit is proving especially beneficial to Marx
, who, I hope, will be completely refreshed,’ Engels wrote to a communist in Geneva. ‘His wife has unfortunately been ailing for some time, but is as cheerful as could be expected.’

Not cheerful at all, in other words. Dissatisfied with Dr Gumpert’s diagnosis, Marx encouraged her to seek a second opinion from a specialist in Carlsbad, Dr Ferdinand Fleckles – who, since he had never met Jenny, asked for a detailed account of her state. ‘What has made my condition worse recently perhaps,’ she told him, after listing the physical symptoms, ‘is a great anxiety which weighs heavily upon us “old ones”.’ Now that the French government had declared an amnesty for political refugees, she pointed out, there was nothing to stop her son-in-law Longuet from returning to Paris, thus effectively robbing an old lady of her daughter and grandchildren. ‘
Dear, good Doctor,
I should so like to live a little longer. How strange it is that the nearer the whole thing draws to an end, the more one clings to this “vale of tears”.’ Though Marx never saw this letter he understood her mortal terrors well enough: after a month of idleness in Ramsgate, he reported that Jenny’s illness ‘has suddenly been aggravated to a degree which menaces to tend to a
fatal
termination’.

Marx himself felt slightly more chipper after the rest-cure, but any improvement was soon undone by a wet and freezing winter which ‘blessed me with a perpetual cold and coughing, interfering with sleep, etc.,’ as he informed a correspondent in St Petersburg, explaining why he could scarcely answer his mail let alone make any progress on the remaining volumes of
Capital
. ‘
The worst is that Mrs Marx’s state becomes daily more dangerous
notwithstanding my resort to the most celebrated medical men of London, and I have besides a host of domestic troubles.’ One of these was the sudden removal of Jennychen and her sons to Paris, where Charles Longuet had been appointed editor of Georges Clemenceau’s radical daily newspaper,
La Justice
. ‘You understand how painful – in the present state of Mrs Marx – this separation must be. For her and myself our grandchildren, three little boys, were inexhaustible sources of enjoyment, of life.’ Sometimes, hearing children’s voices in the street, he would rush to the front window, momentarily forgetting that the beloved youngsters were now on the other side of the Channel. He felt another pang walking through Maitland Park one day when the park-keeper stopped him to ask what had become of little ‘Johnny’, a.k.a. Jean Longuet. Worse still was missing the arrival of his grandson Marcel, born at the Longuets’ new home in Argenteuil in April 1881. Hence, perhaps, the rather grumpy tone of his congratulatory message: ‘I am of course charged by Mama and Tussy … to wish you all possible good things, but I do not see that “wishes” are good for anything except the glossing over of one’s own powerlessness.’ Still, at least it was a boy. Though Jenny Marx had expected and hoped for a granddaughter, ‘
for my own
part I prefer the “manly” sex for children born at this turning point of history. They have before them the most revolutionary period men have ever had to pass through. The bad thing now is to be “old” so as to be only able to foresee instead of seeing.’

Both he and his wife were feeling as ancient as Methuselah. Karl took Turkish baths to loosen his rheumatically stiff leg; Jenny retired to bed for days on end, becoming ever more emaciated. Now and again, her pain miraculously disappeared and she felt strong enough to go for walks or even visit the theatre, but Marx knew that there could be no recovery. Jenny had cancer. ‘
Between ourselves, my wife’s illness is, alas, incurable
,’ he wrote in June 1881 to his old friend Sorge. ‘In a few days’ time I shall be taking her to the seaside at Eastbourne.’ While there she was obliged to use a Bath chair – ‘a thing that I, the pedestrian
par excellence
, should have regarded as beneath my dignity a few months ago’.

After two weeks on the south coast Jenny was strong enough to set off on a cross-Channel expedition with Karl to visit their new grandson, but by the time they reached Argenteuil she had severe diarrhoea. Their hostess was none too sprightly either. ‘
Jennychen’s asthma is bad
,’ Marx wrote to Engels, ‘the house being a very draughty one. The child is heroic, as always.’ News then arrived from England that Tussy had been struck down by some dire if unspecified illness, and Marx hastened back to London alone to see what the matter was. He found her in a state of ‘utter nervous dejection’ that would nowadays be classified as anorexia. ‘
She has been eating next to nothing for weeks
,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘Donkin [the doctor] says there’s no organic trouble, heart sound, lungs sound, etc.; fundamentally the whole condition is attributable to a perfect derangement of action of stomach which has become unaccustomed to food (and she has made matters worse by drinking a great deal of tea; he at once forbade her all tea) and a dangerously overwrought nervous system.’

Jenny Marx returned a couple of weeks later, escorted by the indefatigable Helene Demuth, and immediately took to her bed. At the beginning of October, Marx felt certain that her illness
was ‘
drawing closer to its consummation
’. Marx himself was bedridden with bronchitis but perked up no end on learning that the German Social Democrats had won twelve seats in the Reichstag. ‘
If any one outside event has contributed
to putting Marx more or less to rights again,’ Engels wrote to Eduard Bernstein at the end of November, ‘then it is the elections. Never has a proletariat conducted itself so magnificently … In Germany, after three years of unprecedented persecution and unrelenting pressure, during which any form of public organisation and even communication was a sheer impossibility, our lads have returned, not only in all their former strength, but actually stronger than before.’

Jenny Marx died on 2 December 1881. For the last three weeks she and her husband couldn’t even see each other: his bronchitis had been complicated by pleurisy and he was confined to a neighbouring bedroom, unable to move. In her last words, spoken in English, she called out across the landing, ‘Karl, my strength is ebbing …’ Marx was forbidden by his doctor to attend the funeral, held three days later in an unconsecrated corner of Highgate cemetery. He consoled himself with the memory of Jenny’s rebuke to a nurse on the day before her death, apropos some neglected formality: ‘
We are no such
external
people!
’ The other distraction from grief was his own wretched condition, which required him to anoint the chest and neck with iodine several times a day. ‘There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain,’ he wrote. ‘Set the end of the world on the one hand against a man with acute toothache on the other.’

Engels said that Marx himself was now effectively dead – a harsh observation which nevertheless had a horrible truth. During Jenny’s last days, exhausted by sleeplessness and lack of exercise, he contracted the illness that eventually snatched him away. Though his German editor chose this inopportune moment to request a new edition of
Capital
, work was out of the question. On doctor’s advice he tried the ‘warm climate and dry air’ of the
Isle of Wight for two weeks, accompanied by Eleanor – only to suffer gales, rain and sub-zero temperatures. The bronchial catarrh actually worsened, thanks to ‘the caprices of the weather’, and a local doctor had to give him a respirator to wear while out walking on the front at Ventnor.