Rearranging Max Eastman’s Library
In his well-known essay “Unpacking My Library” (1931), Walter Benjamin asks us to join him as he is pulling his 2,000 books out of the boxes he has just opened, “the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper.” He encourages us to share his mood of intense anticipation as he navigates “piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness.” The point of Benjamin’s essay is not to celebrate his collection or its treasures but to acknowledge the joy of book ownership in general, a feeling as intimate, according to Benjamin, as any human relationship.
/ Max Eastman’s study during the library reshuffle /
Unpacking someone else’s library is a pleasure of an entirely different sort. And, in the case I will write about here, rearranging someone else’s books would seem to put you at several removes from the intimacy Benjamin writes about, with a taste of the illicit added to the undertaking, akin to reading someone else’s journals without permission.
Personal libraries, especially those assembled over a long time, inevitably reveal much about their owners: their likes and dislikes, their hopes and fears, their past lives (“wait — how old was she then?”), the friendships they maintained (“look who signed that book!”). Such libraries, it would seem, give away the owner’s secrets — we might come across someone else’s books that were never returned; letters tucked away between the pages and then forgotten; the inscriptions written by former lovers; the adults-only books with lurid covers hidden behind the Encyclopedia Britannica. I still remember how stunned I was when I helped sort the library of a younger, single colleague who had suddenly died and came across an entire row of baby books, recently purchased.
/ A pile of Eastman’s radical reading /
In Packing My Library (2018), a gently mournful response to Benjamin, the Argentinian author Alberto Manguel recalls how he unpacked the vast library he once owned. To him, unpacking books was a creative act, a reassembling, into new contexts, of the memories he associated with each book as they end up in new locations, on new shelves, next to other books. Now, with his library gone, what remains is the memory of these memories. The joy of ownership is a past pleasure, though one that no one can take away. When you handle someone else’s books, those memories won’t be yours, and what you encounter in them — a cryptic inscription, a half-illegible note, a frayed subway ticket—is likely misleading or even false: maybe the ticket belonged to someone else and the book you’re holding is there only because someone else left it behind, not because the library’s owner liked it.
***
When I was recently asked to reorder the library of the poet and editor Max Eastman at his former summer home at 17 East Pasture Road in Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard, I had, I told myself, every right to be there. I was, after all, Eastman’s most recent biographer. In my Eastman: A Life, published in 2017 by Yale University Press, I had sought to capture the extraordinary, adventurous life of a man once considered the “Prince of Greenwich Village.” The son of two progressive ministers (his mother was the first ordained female minister in the state of New York), Max Eastman grew up surrounded by people with strong views about social justice and civil rights. Following in his mother’s footsteps and with his sister Crystal as his ally, he began campaigning for women’s suffrage and became one of the most sought-after speakers at suffragist rallies.
At Columbia University, Eastman studied with John Dewey and briefly taught for him, too, the only formal job he ever held. He left without submitting his dissertation on Plato (though he had finished it), discovered Marxism, and went on to edit two of the most important radical magazines of the era, The Masses and The Liberator, which got him and his collaborators dragged to court for treason. A prolonged stay in Soviet Russia convinced Eastman that communism was just another form of metaphysics, in which the party had assumed the role God had played in other political systems.
/ Max Eastman (right) and W. Somerset Maugham in Aquinnah (photographer unknown) /
Through his 1924 marriage to Eliena Krylenko, Eastman became the brother-in-law of Nikolai Krylenko, the former commander of the Red Army and later Stalin’s minister of justice. Fluent in Russian, Eastman translated Trotsky, and remained, for more than four decades, one of the most active commentators on Russian affairs in the United States, veering more toward the right the older he got. Eastman wrote poetry and essays, produced and narrated the political documentary Tsar to Lenin (1937), created and hosted one of the first successful radio quiz shows, and blazed a trail for nudist beachgoers everywhere by parading naked on the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard. From his Aquinnah home, which he now shared with his third wife, the former social worker Yvette Székely, he continued to attack what he believed to be the American indifference to Russian totalitarianism. A life-long sun-seeker, Eastman died in Barbados on March 25, 1969.
His East Pasture house is still saturated with memories of this life, his simple green writing desk, typewriter, and dictionary, the inevitable tchotchkes on the shelf, souvenirs from travel to Mexico or Cuba, as well as a small unframed drawing by a friend, the illustrator Edward Lupper (1936-2016), “Portrait of the Max Mouse, for his namesake Max Eastman.” It is a magical place, as if decades hadn’t passed since the house was filled with visitors such as the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, ACLU co-founder Robert Baldwin, and — not a surprise, given Eastman’s shift to conservatism — National Review editor William Buckley.
Sitting on top of a hill overlooking Menemsha Pond, Eastman’s summer residence looks as if it had sprung from a fairy tale. During the day, its wood-paneled rooms are filled with a steady stream of light. In the distance, the water of the ocean glitters, and the tiny fishing boats at anchor add to a general impression of unreality, as if the various elements of the view had conspired to arrange themselves into a postcard. Even overcast days have a kind of mysticalbeauty here, as house and hill appear wrapped in a soft mist that makes the scrub oaks seem like an army of souls waiting to be released from sleep. When you step outside onto the terrace, you can taste the salty air and smell the sun-warmed grass — no wonder that Eastman thought of this place as his kingdom on a hill, the only paradise that he, a proud, lifelong atheist, would accept.
/ 17 East Pasture Road, Aquinnah MA /
Nine years ago, the house and property came to Indiana University as part of a bequest from Eastman’s widow Yvette, along with scores of boxes filled with Eastman’s and Yvette’s manuscripts, completing, and significantly extending the collection which the first librarian of the Lilly Library at Indiana University, David Randall, acquired in 1957 from Eastman himself.
I had traveled to the house once before, in 2014, when Eastman’s literary executor, Breon Mitchell, and I removed boxes of manuscripts and books, mostly first editions, and sent them to the Lilly Library. Meanwhile, Indiana University’s Office of Capital Planning (a title that former socialist Eastman would have relished) renovated the property and added a sizable annex. And no Benjaminian connoisseur but rather professional movers packed, stored, and later unpacked Eastman’s library of approximately 4,000 books, placing the books back randomly on the shelves. For example, I found three volumes of Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Dialogues in three different rooms in the house; the fourth volume never materialized. My task, funded by a grant from Indiana University’s Arts and Humanities Council, was straightforward: to create some kind of order that would render this collection usable again for faculty members staying there for fellowships or research leaves, while also sorting out items that shouldn’t be there (rare first and inscribed editions, for example) and would be better housed at the climate-controlled Lilly Library.
My library reshuffle took more than five days. What I created was, of course, no longer Eastman’s library but, inevitably, my version of it. There is a sense of loss connected with making a private collection public. But as I will show below, Eastman never approached his books searching for the revelations collectors like Alberto Manguel derive from theirs. Eastman didn’t really collect books; he acquired them so that he could argue with them. Books, for Eastman, weren’t “breathing creatures” ready to share his “bed and board” (Manguel’s phrase). Rather, they seemed constant provocations to him, often annoying stand-ins for authors he quarreled with, incitements to fierce debate.
From 1942, when the house was built, to a few months before his death in 1969, Eastman spent the warmer months of the year at East Pasture Road. After his death, Yvette came to stay there by herself, often in the company of guests and family visitors. She outlived her husband by fifty-five years, during which time she added scores of her own books. Nevertheless, the library as a whole still unmistakably represents his preferences, notably in the heavy emphasis on poetry and non-fiction.
I devoted an entire wall of Eastman’s former study to poetry, honoring both his own work as a poet and explicator of poetry, which began with his first, well-received book, Enjoyment of Poetry (1913). I then filled the remaining shelves in that room with dictionaries and books related to his favorite areas of study: philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and the Greek and Roman classics. Eastman’s political books and books on Russia, as well as his own works, ended up on two shelves in the living room. American and British fiction, books on science, and travel books I placed in the main bedroom and the guest bedroom. I was amazed to discover that the development and transformation of Eastman’s political beliefs, from the kind of exuberant, often erotically charged socialism of his early years to the cantankerous conservatism that marked his final two decades, was directly reflected in the books I found at the house, and I tried to honor that discovery in my rearrangements. For example, right under the shelf of Trotsky-related materials the visitor will now find the collected works of conservative thinkers such as William Henry Chamberlin, Henry Stuart Hazlitt, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises.
But I make the work sound easier than it was. What I thought would be a quick reshelving job turned into a journey with twists and turns as I lingered over particular books, only to get distracted, seconds later, by others. An added challenge: many of Eastman’s books are in bad shape now, certainly because of age (with the backstrips falling off or entirely gone, pages crumbling to bits as I turned them), but also because of rough use. Eastman thought nothing of dog-earing a page or two to mark his place. Sometimes he even ripped out a page or two.
But the poor condition these books were in also made them come alive for me. Eastman left his notes all over their pages, in ink or thick pencil, occasionally using an editor’s blue pencil, as if they hadn’t yet been published. He had a habit, continued by Yvette when she added her own books, of gluing photographs of authors into their books. Judging from the poor quality of these paste-ins, he had clipped them from newspaper articles or publisher’s catalogues. For Eastman, books were associated with people; it mattered to him what their authors had looked like. Turning the pages of Eastman’s books, reading his notes, one feels as if one were eavesdropping on a conversation that is still unfinished today.
/ Dog-eared page from book in Eastman’s library: Thomas Beecher, Our Seven Churches (1871) /
Eastman’s library was very much a working library. He liked or, more often, disliked books for what they had to say. Their beauty didn’t matter to him. Eastman’s notes show little or no restraint: he used the endpapers for lists of page references, comments, or snippets of his own poetry, and he added often rude marginal comments, followed by exclamation marks. His lack of respect for the authors is palpable, often in amusing ways. For example, he altered the title page of Emil Ludwig’s biography Schliemann: The Story of a Goldseeker (1932), by changing the “of” to “by” — an unclassy dig at the author himself, a popular biographer able to generate a steady income from his writing the way Eastman never could.
/ Eastman’s handiwork /
On occasion, Eastman used his books as notepads. A good example is one of the earlier books in the library, a first edition of Jack London’s novelistic reckoning with alcoholism, John Barleycorn (1913), which Eastman, according to an autograph note on the first free endpaper, had bought while he was on the road, in “Cincinnati, November 21, 1913.” On the verso of the rear free endpaper, he jotted down a list of expenses (“sleeping car 2.50”; “meals 3.00”) and, on the rear pastedown, some interesting words he had come across in the novel and perhaps wanted to preserve for future use: “titubations”; “stertorous”; “Berserker’s eye”; “accolade.”
Similarly mundane notes materialize, decades later, in Eastman’s copy of Logan Pearsall Smith’s On Reading Shakespeare (1933), into which he copied a list of Shakespeare plays, from Macbeth to Twelfth Night, he and Yvette had read together after breakfast, “summer of 1959.” Amusingly, Yvette added, instead of the usual pasted-in author photo, a caricature of Logan Pearsall Smith’s richly bearded face, signing with her initials, “YS” (for Yvette Székely).
On rare occasions, Eastman used his books for longer ruminations. The earliest of these is a long paragraph on the writing of history, scribbled onto the front free endpaper of British military historian Charles Oman’s A History of England (1903). It is impossible to determine when Eastman composed this reflection, but the pontificatory tone, along with the book’s publication date, suggests that this was from the early 1900s, written either during his last year at Williams College or shortly thereafter. In his note, Eastman distinguishes between “two kinds of historians,” those who love the drama of world history and treat writing about it as an art, and those who reduce everything “to the average” and make of it a science: a defense, in other words, of the historian as artist and advocate of excellence, rather than chronicler of the mundane. That view echoes the Whitman-inspired exuberance of Eastman’s early poetry. In the preface to his second collection of poems, The Colors of Life (1918), for example, Eastman vigorously praised the “poetry that has life for its subject” and remains free of the need to prove a point: “Life is older than liberty. It is greater than revolution…. And Life is what I love…. And its essence—the essence of life—is variety and specific depth.” It’s an open question whether Eastman’s comment in A History of England was intended as a critique of Oman’s writing, which is actually far from workmanlike and doesn’t shy away from value judgments. Writing about his own country’s reaction to the American Civil War, for example, Osman feels free to call British support for the Southerners “unworthy” and “illogical.”
Eastman was on more familiar terrain with a poetic fragment, a tribute of sorts to the British poet Rupert Brooke, which he left on the front pastedown of Waldo R. Browne’s compilation The Rolling Earth: Outdoor Scenes and Thoughts from the Writings of Walt Whitman (1912). W. B. Yeats had called Rupert Brooke “the handsomest young man in England,” a description that must have appealed to Eastman, who was proud of his own good looks. What likely didn’t appeal to him, given his peace-campaigning at the time, was Brooke’s militant patriotism, as manifested in the poet’s famous sonnet, “The Soldier”: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.” Ironically, when Brooke died on April 23, 1915, on a ship on the Aegean Sea, it was not from injuries sustained in the war but from a mosquito bite gone bad. Eastman’s poem, or snippet of a poem, alludes to that irony but also lambastes the conventional literary environment which had shaped Brooke’s unacceptable political views:
I do regret your death
Good-hearted and good looking boy
But more I pity that your final breath
Was drawn to other self-conceited
Petty and contemptible
Rhymes England’s bigotry
/ Draft of poem “To Rupert Brooke” in Eastman’s copy of The Rolling Earth /
As a former philosophy student, Eastman never quite shed John Dewey’s influence. He combined an idiosyncratic, anti-institutional version of pragmatism with a deep-seated hostility to metaphysical thinking and a fierce defense of the rights of the individual. What his contemporaries deplored as Eastman’s rightward turn was in fact the logical outcome of beliefs he had held since his youth. Unsurprisingly, the most belligerent annotations occur in his philosophy books.
What tends to draw Eastman’s ire are declarations made with the same kind of confidence that he liked to claim for himself. In his heavily annotated copy of biologist-philosopher Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1901), for example, he vigorously disagrees with Haeckel’s attempt to question the concept of free will: “We know now,” writes Haeckel, “that each act of the will is as fatally determined by the organization of the individual and as dependent on the momentary condition of his environment as every other psychic activity.” Eastman is unconvinced: “What confidence of knowledge,” he wrote at the bottom of the page. Likewise, he quickly grows impatient with Logic for the Millions (1947), by A. E. Mander, whose attempts at logical reasoning raise his hackles. He ridicules the author’s contention that, since we know about cause and effect, we can also say that “everything that happens, is for something” and that this “something” will become clearer later: “The outcome of it all—whatever that is to be—will be an essential part of the complete ‘explanation’ of it all.” Utter balderdash, at least to Eastman, who uses his blue pencil to emphasize his disagreement. If we believe in cause and effect, “we at least know that there won’t be any ‘outcome,’” because things will go on forever.
Any kind of evasiveness angers Eastman. In his copy of The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (1901), he disapproves of Spinoza’s cagey response to the question as to why there are imperfections in the world: “The laws of God’s nature are so vast,” Spinoza had written, “as to suffice for the production of everything conceivable.” Eastman will have none of that: “What an answer really! That of a madman.” He regularly gets upset when self-appointed experts appear to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes. A. A. Brill’s Freud’s Contribution to Psychiatry (1944), for example, elicits marginal frowns throughout. Brill felt it necessary to mention that in his own psychoanalytic work he had become “convinced the average person is as ignorant of the mental forces behind his thoughts and actions as is a traveler of the motive powers that propel the airplane, motorcar, or train that hurries him to some appointed place.” Eastman, the author of the anti-Freudian treatise The Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), disliked the folksy comparison, which to him only masked the author’s disrespect for ordinary people. In the margin of the page, he snorts, “foolish extremism + faulty illustration.”
Even Albert Einstein wasn’t safe from Eastman’s carping, as shown in the responses to Lincoln Barnett’s The Universe and Dr. Einstein (1948). The famous physicist’s ventures into philosophical and spiritual terrain irritate Eastman to no end. This is not to say that Lincoln Barnett gets a free pass. For example, when Barnett laments that the modern college graduate “does not know that Relativity, over and above its scientific import, comprises a major philosophical system which augments and illumines the reflections of the great epistemologists — Locke, Berkeley and Hume,” Eastman the philosopher asks, rhetorically: “Is it science or philosophy? — That’s just the question.” The implication is that it’s definitely not philosophy. And when Barnett includes a direct quote from Einstein—“The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science”—Eastman scoffs: “what a soft and self-deceiving mind.” One can almost feel the pleasure he is taking in his dismissal; his best takedowns are short and precise. Consider his views of another scientist’s ventures into philosophy: Robert J. Oppenheimer’s Science and the Common Understanding (1954), to Eastman, is “a book of banalities,” filled with scientific explanations that are “obfuscations.” Come to think of it, Eastman concludes, he should have stayed away from the business of writing altogether: “He may know how to make an atom bomb but he doesn’t know how to write a book.”
***
Given that Eastman’s marginalia were unlikely to be seen by anyone else, it’s remarkable how much effort and anger he poured into them. Yet this was a conversation he was having not just with himself but with the authors, too, who were present to him via their works and were, in his mind, talking back to him. In his library, Eastman continued the political fights he waged in public— on behalf of the common reader, against literary obscurity, attacking what he called, in an important essay published in The Freeman in 1954, “non-communicative art.”
Eastman’s favorite literary targets were his modernist contemporaries. In his library, Pound’s Selected Poems (1949) received a generous helping of penciled-in complaints, beginning with T. S. Eliot’s introduction. Eastman detested Eliot’s defense of Ezra Pound’s “originality” and especially the argument that Pound’s bookishness had made him more, not less, of an authentic poet. “When we look into the matter,” wrote Eliot, “we find that the poet who is really ‘derivative’ is the poet who mistakes literature for life, and very often the reason he makes that mistake is that—he has not read enough.” Extensive reading as the gateway to originality? Eastman couldn’t let such smugness stand and snapped back (the rhyme was intentional): “priggish (and British!).” The remark was additionally funny given that no one in this exchange was in fact British—not Eliot, not Pound, and not Eastman, their critic. As if to add further proof that he, too, could act the part of the scholar, Eastman put his pencil to work and, paging through the edition, corrected some errors in Pound’s poetry, such as the line from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” III: “The pianola ‘replaces’ / Sappho’s barbitos.” “Barbiton,” he wrote in the margin. (Both versions are, in fact, correct).
Other Eastman comments target writers for their cluelessness or their hypocrisy. In Gay Wilson Allen’s The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (1955), was delighted to find a critique of Walt Whitman’s macho posturing in Leaves of Grass: ”Such parading of the poet’s ‘roughness’ and sensuality cannot help arousing our suspicion.” And aroused Eastman’s suspicion was. In the margin he left the comment: “of Hemingway.” Eastman had known Hemingway had been friends in Paris in the 1920s, when Eastman shared drafts of stories with him. Their relationship soured as Eastman watched Hemingway becoming increasingly successful, for the wrong reasons, as he believed. In his 1933 essay “Bull in the Afternoon,” published in the New Republic, he likened Heminway’s pseudo-masculine braggadocio to the “wearing of false hair on the chest.” Then, on August 17, 1937, a chance encounter between Eastman and Hemingway at editor Maxwell Perkins’s office, turned into physical confrontation, a wrestling match that, depending on whom you listened to afterwards, was won by either Hemingway or Eastman. As it happens, two critical works on Hemingway — Philip Young’s Ernest Hemingway (1952) and Charles A. Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (1954) — are among the most marked-up books in Eastman’s library, their endpapers densely littered with notes. Eastman liked to keep track of how he was talked about in connection with his favorite antagonist, as the note on the front pastedown of Young’s book reveals: “12: the chest hair—M. E.”
/ Detail from the front free endpaper (verso) of Eastman’s copy of Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway /
If Eastman’s marginalia seemed intended to keep an author at arm’s length, to provide a record of his disagreements, things sometimes took a different turn. A good example in his library is his engagement with art historian Bernard Berenson’s autobiography Sketch for a Self-Portrait (1949). Eastman’s notes started out in the usual way, with a snide remark, commenting on a passage in which Berenson coyly explains that Harvard University initially declined to buy his Drawings of the Florentine Painters only to acquire it later at a higher price. This was, Berenson commented, “no satisfaction to me.” Eastman didn’t believe him: “Oh yes, it must have been.” But, as he kept reading it, Berenson’s book grew on him. When Berenson reveals his desire to stay away from any collective action (“I cannot take part in any ritual, whether religious, civic, or merely social”), one can picture Eastman nodding. “Moi aussi,” he chimes in. And when Berenson laments that growing old means sacrificing a youthful sense of leisure, “youth’s most blessed possession,” since now there was no longer any time to waste, Eastman concurs: “Yes, wholly true of me.”
Incidentally, evidence that Berenson, too, thought of Eastman as “simpatico” comes from another item in Eastman’slibrary, a presentation copy of Berenson’s Del Caravaggio, sent from Florence: “To Max Eastman with sympathy and friendship,” inscribed at the Villa I Tatti on April 18, 1951. Indeed, Berenson would be the guiding spirit behind Eastman’s condemnation of “non-communicative art”: Eastman’s 1954 Freeman essay begins with a reference to Berenson’s critique of the “solemn puerilities” in abstract art.
Sometimes Eastman’s books appeared to comment on him, rather than the other way around, and then even he was at a loss for words. His library contains a well-used copy of Genevieve Taggard’s volume of poems, For Eager Lovers (1922), with no notes added, only two check marks next to poems, along with the inevitable pasted-in portrait. Looking at the small, tattered book, I really felt as if I were intruding, but my biographer’s curiosity prevailed. Eastman and Taggard were, briefly, lovers in 1920, in San Francisco—a brief affair that didn’t significantly interrupt Eastman’s ongoing liaison with the Hollywood actress Florence Deshon. (Taggard and Eastman later had a massive falling out, in part over her fierce loyalty to Stalin). In Eastman’s copy of For Eager Lovers, the first mark shows up next to Taggard’s poem “The Quiet Woman,” which is, ironically, a rather unquiet rant:
I will defy you down until my death
With cold body, indrawn breath;
Terrible and cruel I will move with you
Like a surly tiger. If you knew
Why I am shaken, if fond you could see
All the caged arrogance in me,
You would not lean so boyishly, so bold,
To kiss my body, quivering and cold.
/ Genevieve Taggard’s portrait in Eastman’s copy of For Eager Lovers /
Eastman would have realized that Taggard’s reference to that that bold boyish body poised for a kiss was to him, and that the coldness Taggard attributes to herself in the poem is her way of warding off, retroactively, the predatory power he had over her. The second poem to earn Eastman’s check mark, “Angular,” alludes to Eastman’s compulsive philandering: “Other hearts have broken gracefully, for your sake,” a fate that the speaker, presenting herself as not interested and deliberately unerotic and awkward, seeks to avoid as she crosses her arms defensively over her “empty” chest. The portrait Eastman glued in emphasizes Taggard’s physical and metaphorical angularity. He signed his name right over it. Did he want to emphasize who owned whom? Or am I now guilty of doing what I was worried about at the beginning of this essay — turning accidental notes into clues, scribbles into statements of fact?
***
The books gathered at East Pasture Road weren’t exclusively Eastman’s, of course. Each library, states Alberto Manguel, is a “composite of many others,” in an intangible sense, since behind its shelves linger the shades of previous collections, of past libraries the collector had owned or used. But in the case of Eastman’s library, Manguel’s statement is true in a literal sense: Eastman’s library is inhabited, to this day, by the ghosts of family members, lovers, wives, and ancestors.
One of the oldest books in the library is Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, a volume that was, according to the inscription, given to Eastman’s maternal aunt Fanny (“Fannie”) Ford (1847-?)) on December 25th, 1872, by a “Mrs. J. D. Stickler.” Other books belonged to his parents. These volumes weren’t just dead weight on Eastman’s shelves. His mother Annis was a minister at the progressive Park Church in Elmira, New York, which was founded by the Reverend Thomas Beecher, a half-brother of the more famous Henry Ward Beecher. Before Annis began her ministry, on January 20, 1893, as she noted on the second free front endpaper, she obtained the Reverend Beecher’s comparative study of Christian churches, Our Seven Churches (1870). Right underneath his mother’s inscription, Eastman explained that he tackled Annis’s volume more than forty years later, on March 24, 1937, perhaps as he was beginning to do research for his autobiography, Enjoyment of Living (1948).
Another part of Eastman’s “composite” library were the books of the actress Florence Deshon (1893-1922), Eastman’s on-again, off-again lover from 1917 to 1921, a beautiful, irresistibly tragic figure. Her letters to Eastman (which I co-edited, with Cooper Graham, in Love and Loss in Hollywood, 2020), radiate keen intelligence and a deep passion for knowledge, and I was excited to find about a dozen of Deshon’s books in Eastman’s library, which I had missed on my earlier visit. Inscriptions in her books usually carry, beside her name, the initials “M. E.,” presumably because Eastman had given or lent them to her.
Among these books was a disintegrating edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which Deshon used to preserve some dried flowers. Again, it’s tempting to speculate that Deshon marked certain sonnets, sometimes adding a “Yes” at the top of the page, because they mirrored her feelings about her torturous affair with Eastman: “My love is as a fever, longing still” (CXLVII); “Being your slave, what should I do but tend / Upon the hours and times of your desire?” (LVIII). Did she add an emphatic “No” next to sonnet XXXV (“No more be grieved at that which thou hast done”) because it offended her sense that Eastman ought to feel sorry for the pain he had caused her? And did she mark sonnet CXXXI with a pressed flower — a sprig of white-flowered forget-me-not (though it’s difficult to tell for sure)—because she read the poem’s praise of blackness (“Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place”) as a comment on her own dark appearance? (Eastman liked to refer to Deshon as his “gipsy.”) Marginalia, especially when they are so minimal, are apt to lead one astray. Still, there’s a certain pleasure in trying to disentangle a mystery that so stubbornly wants to remain one.
/ Florence Deshon’s edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with a preface and glossary by Israel Gollancz (1897) /
Eastman must have retrieved Deshon’s books, as well as the letters he had sent her, from her New York apartment after she died, likely by her own hand, on February 4, 1922. In the miserable last months of her life, fired from her glamorous Hollywood job, abandoned by Charlie Chaplin (her lover post-Eastman), adrift in New York City, Deshon was diligently reading literary critic Van Wyck Brooks’s The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920). She wanted to be able to hold her own in her ongoing correspondence with Eastman, who was then finishing his book The Sense of Humor, and she was hopeful Brooks might tell her a few things about satire. As Eastman’s letters from those weeks prove, he wasn’t particularly receptive to Deshon’s ideas. But she was undaunted. She didn’t like Brooks’s book very much, and she didn’t particularly like Mark Twain either, at least not the way Brooks represented him. Next to a sentence stating, about Twain, that “nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything,” Deshon wrote, acidly, “If that is true, that is the real trouble.”
Deshon was the reason that Eastman, in 1917, left his wife, the activist Ida Rauh (1877-1970), abandoning also his very young son Dan. Poignantly, Eastman’s library also contains about a dozen books formerly owned by Dan. Throughout his life, Dan kept longing for something he only got in small doses: the love and attention of his father. A Columbia-trained psychologist and incorrigible alcoholic, Dan survived him by only a half year. A marginal note, on the front free endpaper of one of Dan’s books, The Best Known Works of Anton Chekhov (1929), reads like a comment on his own short life: “As in most Chekhov stories,” writes Dan, “the characters have desires but no relations.”
/ Dan Eastman’s notes in The Best-Known Works of Anton Chekhov /
If Max and Dan eventually reconciled, this would have been due to Eliena’s efforts. She regularly invited Dan to dinners at the Vineyard house, where she raised chickens, bred dogs, taught dance lessons to local children, and painted portraits in her studio, a beautiful A-Frame that Indiana University later decided to demolish. After Eliena died, aged 61, on October 9, 1956, she was buried, as she had wished, right on the hill behind the main house, in full view of the sea she loved so much. Her presence in the house continues through her art on the walls, mostly landscapes drawn in pastel colors and bordering on abstraction, a kind of Impressionism painted with an Expressionist’s brush. There are no books in the library with Eliena’s annotations, but a dedication to her in How to Raise a Dog (1938), illustrated by James Thurber, reveals a bit of her feistiness, appreciated by all who met her: “For Elieana [sic] — the original title of this book was Biches and Sons of Biches [sic]. I wish we had the courage to use it. To my favorite horse-shoe flinger premier danseuse and designer of glamorous carrots. From M.L.S.” “MLS” was Max L. Schuster, the co-founder of Simon & Schuster; the reference to the designer carrots remains a mystery.
/ Eliena in her studio, Undated self-portrait, ink, watercolor, pencil, Eastman House, Martha’s Vineyard /
Yvette, whom Eastman married in 1958, continued to use the house as her summer residence until a few years before her death on January 13, 2014, at age 101. The books that belong to her, with their colorful dust jackets, stand out on Eastman’s shelves. If her husband’s taste ran toward non-fiction, Yvette preferred novels and memoirs. Butwhen it came to annotating books, she was a kindred spirit. For example, she was bothered to no end by Margaret Howe Freydberg’s Growing Up in Old Age (1998), a book given to her by the author. A relentlessly positive thinker, Yvette had a big problem with Freydberg’s thesis that growing old is like finding yourself in a foreign country “at an age when your capacities for adaptation to foreignness are diminished.” Yvette struggled to thank Freydberg properly,as evidenced by three notes left in her copy of the book. Complimenting “Peggy” on “many amazing Truths,” she admitted that she had remained “a stranger to others,” i.e., not so amazing ones, with which she simply couldn’t identify. One of Yvette’s notes, written to herself, reveals what she really thought of Growing Up in Old Age: “Inspires self searching for things I don’t think I really want to know about myself.”
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A larger-than-life figure, Max Eastman continues to dominate his former house long after his death. If he is remembered mostly by literary historians today, in his library — a microcosm of the views he held and the relationships he had — he still rules supreme. When I was almost done, a tiny, handmade book, about half its pages still blank, fell into my hands. I looked inside and realized that this was a poetic tribute Yvette had begun to compile for her husband.
/ Yvette Eastman’s tribute to Max /
Several of these poems must have first appeared in local newspapers; only one of them is actually good. “In March to Max,” Yvette laments that Eastman (now buried, like Eliena, outside, under a large boulder overlooking the ocean) is no longer around to hear the sounds of spring, “these life-insisting things.” In another, less successful poem from the same booklet, “October Memo,” Yvette imagines her dead husband, “the haunting phantasm of you,” filtering back into her house again, on the wings of Bach’s music (to which she has been listening). Having spent a week looking through Eastman’s books, I can say, with the same confidence that Eastman displayed when he battled with his authors, that he never left his house — he is still arguing with his library.