Karl Marx (31 page)

‘The fellow has wasted my time,’ Marx noted during the third week of this ordeal, ‘and, what is more, the dolt opined that, since I was not engaged upon any “business” just now, but merely upon a “theoretical work”, I might just as well kill time with him!’ The whole family had to escort Lassalle on sightseeing tours of London – and further afield, to Windsor and Virginia Water – while listening to his interminable self-aggrandising monologues.
Looking at the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, he turned to Marx and asked. ‘What do you think? Should I spend six months making my mark as an Egyptologist?’ Had Marx not been so infuriated by the way ‘this parvenu flaunted his moneybags’, he might have found it all quite amusing. ‘
Since I last saw him a year ago he’s gone quite mad
,’ he told Engels. ‘He is now indisputably not only the greatest scholar, the profoundest thinker, the most brilliant man of science, and so forth, but also and in addition, Don Juan
cum
revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu. Add to this the incessant chatter in a high falsetto voice, the unaesthetic, histrionic gestures, the dogmatic tone!’ One day Lassalle disclosed the ‘profound secret’ that the Italian liberators Mazzini and Garibaldi, like the government of Prussia, were pawns directed by his guiding hand. Unable to contain themselves, Karl and Jenny began teasing him about these Napoleonic fantasies – whereupon the German messiah lost his temper, screaming that Marx was too ‘abstract’ to comprehend the realities of politics. After Lassalle had gone to bed, Marx disappeared into his study to write another letter to Engels mocking his guest’s ‘niggerlike’ characteristics.

Jenny’s account of the Lassalle invasion has rather less rancour and more humour:

He was almost crushed under the weight of the fame
he had achieved as scholar, thinker, poet and politician. The laurel wreath was fresh on his Olympian brow and ambrosian head or rather on his stiff bristling Negro hair. He had just victoriously ended the Italian campaign – a new political
coup
was being contrived by the great men of action – and fierce battles were going on in his soul. There were still fields of science that he had not explored! Egyptology lay fallow: ‘Should I astonish the world as an Egyptologist or show my versatility as a man of action, as a politician, as a fighter, or as a soldier?’ It was a splendid dilemma. He wavered between the thoughts and sentiments of his heart and often expressed that struggle in really stentorian accents. As on the wings of wind he swept
through our rooms, perorating so loudly, gesticulating and raising his voice to such a pitch that our neighbours were scared by the terrible shouting and asked what was the matter. It was the inner struggle of the ‘great’ man bursting forth in shrill discords.

It was only when he was leaving, on 4 August, that Lassalle acknowledged the Marxes’ predicament – as he could hardly fail to, since the landlord and a posse of other creditors had chosen this moment to batter on the front door, loudly threatening to send in bailiffs. Even then his generosity was pretty strained. He offered Marx £15, but only as a short-term loan and then only subject to a promise from Engels that he would guarantee it.

Over the next couple of months Lassalle made such a fuss about this minor transaction – insisting on ‘signed bonds’ from Engels, haggling over the repayment date – that Marx regretted ever taking the money. After a thoroughly ill-tempered exchange of letters, however, he offered a semi-apology. ‘
Is there to be an outright split between us
because of this? … I trust that, despite everything, our old relationship will continue untroubled.’ He was a man sitting on a powder-barrel, a despairing wretch who would like nothing better than to blow his brains out: was this not enough to excuse his thoughtless ingratitude?

Lassalle never replied. Though he blamed ‘financial reasons’ for the end of the friendship, the two men’s political differences would have caused a rupture soon enough. Lassalle had an Old Hegelian respect for the might of the Prussian state, and was now advocating co-operation between the old
Junker
ruling class (represented by Bismarck) and the new industrial proletariat (represented, naturally, by himself) to thwart the political aspirations of the rising liberal bourgeoisie. In June 1863, two weeks after founding the General German Workers’ Association, Lassalle wrote to the Iron Chancellor, bragging about the absolute power he had over his members, ‘
which perhaps you’d have to envy me!
But this miniature picture will plainly convince you how
true it is that the working class feels instinctively inclined to dictatorship if it can first be rightfully convinced that such will be exercised in its interests, and how very much it would therefore be inclined, as I recently told you, in spite of all republican sentiments – or perhaps on those very grounds – to see in the Crown the natural bearer of the social dictatorship, in contrast to the egoism of bourgeois society.’ (This letter gives the lie to a claim by one of Marx’s biographers, Fritz J. Raddatz, that ‘the notorious “conspiracy” with Bismarck never took place’.) What the workers required was not a monarchy created by the bourgeoisie, like that of Louis Philippe in France, but ‘a monarchy that still stands as kneaded out of its original dough, leaning upon the hilt of the sword …’

One wonders if the Prussian King would have been flattered by this bizarre image of a sabre-rattling
baguette
. Probably not: in spite of this gushing allegiance, Lassalle actually envisaged a ruling triumvirate of King Wilhelm, Bismarck and himself, and once the middle classes had been forcibly cut down to size he would have no further use for his two partners. His dictatorial scheme, which has been well described as ‘social Caesarism’, was anathema to Marx – and all the more annoying because its rhetoric included much ‘brazen plagiarism’ from the
Communist Manifesto
to which Lassalle had added his own reactionary, self-serving embellishments. He was the Master, the Redeemer, the Hero on Horseback. Even at the age of twenty, in a ‘Manifesto of War Against the World’, his melodramatic egoism had been uncontainable: ‘Alike to me are all means; nothing is so sacred that I shunned it; and I have won the right of the tiger, the right to tear to pieces … Insofar as I have power over the mind of a person, I will abuse it without mercy … From head to toe I am nothing but Will.’ If he hadn’t existed, Nietzsche would have invented him.

That was the spirit in which he lived – and died. In 1864 Lassalle became infatuated with a Titian-haired young beauty called Helene von Dönniges who was already engaged to one Janko von Rakowitz, a Wallachian prince. The aggrieved fiancé
challenged the Superhero to a duel and shot him fatally in the stomach. It was observed that Lassalle did not even lift his pistol, but smiled enigmatically as his rival took aim. Had he come to believe in his own invincibility? Or had he decided that a romantic and premature death would guarantee immortal fame? It was all a great mystery. As Engels commented, ‘
Such a thing could only happen to Lassalle,
with his strange and altogether unique mixture of frivolity and sentimentality, Jewishness and chivalry.’ The news distressed Marx more than he might have expected. Whatever else he might have been, Lassalle was ‘the foe of our foes’, one of the old guard of
quarante-huitards
. ‘
Heaven knows, our ranks are being steadily depleted
, and there are no reinforcements in sight.’ To the Countess von Hatzfeldt he offered the consolation that at least ‘
he died young, at a time of triumph
, as an Achilles’.

This was a generous tribute in the circumstances. Two years earlier Marx had nearly bankrupted himself while entertaining Lassalle at Grafton Terrace; he had been repaid with tetchiness, mistrust and ultimately silence. Since that visit – and partly because of it, Marx suspected – the family finances had gone from bad to worse. In August 1862, a few days after Lassalle left London, Marx travelled to Zaltbommel in the hope of arranging another loan from Lion Philips only to find that his uncle was away. He then proceeded to Trier, but his mother refused to give him anything. At Christmas that year Jenny Marx tried working her charm on Monsieur Abarbanel, a French banker of their acquaintance, with even more disastrous results. Her ferry to Boulogne nearly sank in a storm; the train taking her to Abarbanel’s house was two hours late; when she finally arrived it turned out that the banker had just been paralysed by a stroke which left him helpless and confined to bed. While returning to London empty-handed, she endured yet more mishaps: a bus in which she was travelling turned over, and then her London cab crashed into another vehicle, losing a wheel. After making her way back to Grafton Terrace on foot, accompanied by two boys carrying her luggage, she learned that Marianne Creuz, Helene
Demuth’s stepsister, had died of a heart attack two hours earlier. Imagine the scene: one maid dead in the front room, another howling in grief, a mud-spattered and exhausted wife – and the master of the house wondering where on earth he could find £7.10 in cash to pay the undertakers. Marx allowed himself a bleak laugh at this tragicomic tableau: ‘
A fine Christmas show
for the poor children.’

For once, however, grotesque misfortune did not have the usual debilitating effect on his health and productivity. Those Lassallean sneers at ‘theory’ had been the goad he needed to finish the book which had been so catastrophically interrupted by the feud with Vogt. ‘
If only I knew how to start some sort of business!
’ he wrote to Engels in a low moment soon after Lassalle’s trip to London. ‘All theory, dear friend, is grey, and only business green. Unfortunately, I have come to realise this too late.’ It was at about this time that Marx applied for a clerical job on the railways but was rejected because of his poor handwriting. No matter: he could still put his pen to good use, as long as Jenny was there to transcribe the scrawl into something a typesetter could recognise. With few journalistic commissions to distract him, he started writing the next instalment of his critical economy.

‘
It is a curious and not unmeaning circumstance
that the country where Karl Marx is least known is that in which he has for the last thirty years lived and worked,’ the economist John Rae commented in the
Contemporary Review
of October 1881, two years before Marx’s death. ‘His word has gone into all the earth and evoked in some quarters echoes which governments will neither let live nor let die; but here, where it was pronounced, its sound has scarcely been heard.’ When Engels sent a detailed analysis of
Capital
to the liberal
Fortnightly Review
in 1869, the editorial board returned it with a brief note explaining that it was ‘
too scientific for the English
Review-
reader
’. A few years later, at a lecture delivered by an English economist on the ‘harmony of interests’, a socialist in the audience questioned the blithe assumption that
all classes of society had the same interests, backing his scepticism with references to
Capital
. ‘I know of no such work,’ the speaker retorted.

Almost none of Marx’s major works was translated into English during his lifetime and the most important exception, the
Communist Manifesto
, was available only to the handful of Chartists who subscribed to George Julian Harney’s
Red Republican
in November 1850. Ten months later, however, a copy turned up belatedly at
The Times
, which hastened to warn its readers of ‘
cheap publications containing the wildest and most anarchical doctrines
… in which religion and morality are perverted and scoffed at, and every rule of conduct which experience has sanctioned, and on which the very existence of society depends, openly assailed’. There followed two extracts from the
Manifesto
– though the source went unacknowledged, since
The Times
was ‘not anxious to give it circulation by naming its writers, or the works of which it is composed’. The Tory politician John Wilson Croker tried to prolong the red-scare by penning a lurid denunciation of ‘Revolutionary Literature’ (complete with the same quotations from the
Manifesto
) in the
Quarterly Review
of September 1851. But nobody else seemed inclined to join in. The
Communist Manifesto
disappeared from view in England until Samuel Moore issued his new translation in 1888, five years after its author’s death.

John Rae may have thought it ‘curious’ that the English paid so little attention to the presence of this old mole burrowing away in the very heart of London, but in fact it was entirely reasonable. How could they have heard of him? After falling out with the radical Harney and the crackpot Urquhart, Marx lost his lines of communication to English workers and intellectuals. The journalism with which he supported his family during the 1850s appeared in the
New York Tribune
. To the British public he was all but invisible, spending his days at the museum and his evenings in the company of fellow Germans.
In May 1869 he joined the Royal Society
for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures &
Commerce, which had become famous for its involvement in the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, but there is no evidence that he attended any lectures or used the library. He may have been put off by his experience at the Society’s summer party, a ‘
Conversazione
’ held at the South Kensington Museum on 1 July 1869. Jennychen, his escort for the evening, sent a full report to Engels:

Of all dreary concerns a
conversazione
is certainly the dreariest.
What genius the English have for the inventing of melancholy pleasures! Fancy a crowd of some 7,000 in full evening dress, wedged in so closely as to be unable either to move about or to sit down in the chairs, and they were few and far between, a few imperturbable dowagers had taken by storm … Nothing was to be seen but silks, satins, brocades and laces, and these too on the ugliest of pegs – on women, vulgar, coarse-featured, dull-eyed, and either short and stumpy or tall and lank. Of the much talked-of beauty of the English aristocracy there wasn’t a trace. We saw only two passably pretty girls. Among the men there was a sprinkling of interesting faces, the owners of which were probably artists, but the great majority consisted of insipid-looking ‘Dundrearys’ and parsons all run to fat.