Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910-1945 by Steven Biel

Author:Steven Biel [Biel, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780814712320
Google: wTjSaGQ5yj4C
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 1995-02-15T01:06:59+00:00

2.

The effort to give coherence and social meaning to unconventional private behavior produced some remarkable connections between love lives and intellectual lives, and for a few critics who tried to explain their behavior, the problems of modern love became synonymous with the dilemma of the modern intellect. Facing a crisis in his marriage to Ida Rauh in 1914, Max Eastman first went through psychoanalysis with the New York Freudian Smith Ely Jelliffe and then a summer of intensive self-analysis in Provincetown. Rauh’s departure left Eastman with “a real upspringing in solitude of the old enthusiasm for the free realization of all life,” which had been his “religion” before marriage. Monogamy, he decided, was an obstacle to this free realization and stood in opposition to his “love of ideas” and “love of the whole world.” He may have shared, this notion with his friend John Reed, who made a plea to Louise Bryant for free expression without stating whether his release from “repression” would take sexual or sublimated form. Reed simply said that “no one I love has ever been able to let me express myself fully, freely, and trust that expression.” Eastman wrestled with the possibility that he was constructing elaborate intellectual justifications for hedonism but managed to convince himself that his resistance to monogamy had a greater purpose than unrestricted sexual pleasure. At the beginning of August, he stated this possibility: “I am not happy with Ida because I want to be free to satisfy other sexual desires. There! I have said it. Now the question remains: is it the essential truth?” Two days later came the answer: “no, it is not.”15 After he and Rauh separated in 1916, Eastman entered into an extended relationship with the actress Florence Deshon, who left him for Hollywood in 1920, became involved with their friend Charlie Chaplin, and committed suicide in 1922.

Eastman continued to have affairs during his second marriage, to the Russian artist Eliena Krylenko, sister of the Bolshevik commissar of justice. At work on a novel and a biography of Trotsky in the Soviet Union in 1923–24, he suffered a breakdown over his writing and his commitment to Eliena, two problems which he explicitly linked together. “O yes I am mad,” he wrote her in January 1924. “I am so mad and so weak…a little desperate quivering heart-broken child.” But now, he believed, the conflict between commitment and intellectual independence was not as simple as it been with other women. In previous cases, the solution to what he variously called his “demon,” his “complex,” and his “divided condition” had been “my going gradually away, and finally getting in love with somebody else, and doing it again.” It had been evident that “those loves were not helpful to my work, to my egotism, which is the real force in me.” With Eliena, however, the split between monogamy and creative freedom was not clear. “There is no conflict between you and my writing” Max told her. “You both fight on the same

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.