Marx's Lust

...But it is quite impossible to imagine Darwin writing in these terms about an incidental associate of an unfavorable critic, and difficult to sustain Marx's claim of being a scientist in the face of such infantile and graceless polemics...

...But Padover must also let us know that while Jenny, his wife, a baroness and her husband's social superior, clung to him affectionately, he was busy in the kitchen knocking up their housekeeper...

...But it may help to explain the otherwise impenetrable obscurantism with which Marx and his followers concealed the nature of the good society to come...

...the Marxian ideas have been covered in Padover's other books...

...By suggesting that the transition to a more humane world was made inevitable by a scientific reading of history, Marx relieved socialists and other reformers of their previous burden of having to set a convincing example of pietistic humanitarianism...

...Many years ago a boarding school headmaster prepared me for Saul Pa-dover's "intimate" book about the life of Karl Marx.* My headmaster was talking about Vanity Fair...

...This passage, it should be remembered, was not written by a gossip columnist in a high school newspaper, nor by Julius Streicher warming up in Der Sturmer, The author is a university-trained Ph.D., commenting on someone else's comments on his scholarly treatise...

...Vogt published in a Swiss newspaper a discussion of Marx's Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekono-mie that Marx found libelous...

...An obscure Swiss teacher, one Vogt, provided Marx with what Padover calls a "specific target for his rage...

...He raged at the Prussian state when he was an undergraduate, and at his mother because of her alleged stinginess...

...Among these incidental targets was Joseph Moses Levy, the publisher of the London Daily Telegraph, about whom Marx wrote and published the following inspiring words: Levy's nose constitutes a year's talk in the City of London...

...suaded Engels, the one friend with whom he did not feud, to spend the rest of his life pretending to be the father of their illegitimate son, Demuth...

...All the while his father kept sending him letters so Polonius-like in their instructions to the student abroad as to justify the long-held Teutonic belief that Hamlet is a German play...

...He had a way with ladies, and prided himself on his mastery of the arts of parlor seduction with an arch coyness that curdles on the printed page...

...But Marx could make no claim to suffering on that account...

...Just as it is tempting to wonder about the source of Marx's own rage against his world, so it is hard to resist speculation about the source of the rage in others who vibrated in harmony with the notes he struck...

...Not unreasonably, they ascribed this to discrimination against themselves and to the peculiar and disreputable tendency of the capitalist world to call on unworthy talents in its leaders...

...Nor is Marx's rage to be accounted for by the humiliation inflicted on him when he had to cadge his living from wealthier relatives...

...No doubt many socialists carried in their minds a personal vision of the better world-a vision that later took them from one faction to another of the Communist movements that claimed to be pursuing the true scientific socialist doctrine...

...The rage of Marx-an unattached intellectual who found no suitable place for himself-communicated directly, and continues to communicate, with a long line of lusters after position and power, who could not even admit that lust to themselves and perhaps did not even perceive its existence...

...Others have been less circumspect...

...Nothing more dramatically suggests the touchstone of shared rage that unites Marx with his followers, and with those who shared his nihilistic dedication to the destruction of an order they considered corrupt thair the rhetoric in which Marx expressed his contempt for those who did not share his views...

...Deep love persisted between his wife and him through the long tragic chronicle of their poverty, the deaths of their children, and, finally, the death of his most beloved grandson...

...Padover graciously spares us Freudian speculations as to the roots of his personality structure...

...he suffers liver crises...

...In any case, Padover's book offers lifetime immunity against the disease of believing that those who profess to be working for a better world necessarily inhabit a higher moral plane than those who confess to be working only for their own satisfaction...

...Padover suggests that, in personal affairs, Marx's most attractive quality was his devotion to his children...

...In fact, the anti-Vogt book offended several of Marx's own followers, including one Feiligrath, who told him that his conflict with Vogt was "deplorable...

...Naturally, when Karl went to the University, he conducted himself like the wastrel son of precisely the kind of aristocrats who were untainted with Jewishness...

...it preceded those difficulties...

...He danced attendance on German ladies while ostensibly waiting for the proofs of the first volume of Das Kapital to come from the printer, and then, to compound adultery with the worse crime of braggadocio, he wrote notes about the object of his fancy to his daughter in London...

...He per* Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, McGraw-Hill, $18.95...

...Marx, the child of converts from Judaism, wrote anti-Semitic passages that transfer (O happy analytic word...

...for analysts the neurotic dimples on Marx's unconscious were deep enough to bathe in...

...Padover cites a splendid example of it...

...despite his enmity toward colleagues, relatives, patrons, and publishers, he grovels for charity from them...

...He never worked in a factory in his life, and scarcely encountered true working people until the founding of the International Working Men's Association...

...Rather, there seems to have been a spirit in the time that stimulated rage in people of intellectual ability and expressive talent who found that the destruction of the precapitalist economic order did not give them the opportunity for power they felt it should...

...But it seems doubtful that anyone could pursue Marxian socialism throughout a lifetime unless he was animated more by the joy of destroying the old order than by the hope of producing a better one...

...One can therefore say without exaggeration that Levy writes his newspaper with his nose...

...Most of Marx's followers wanted everyone else to believe that they were moved to join the movement he founded by their rejection of the cruelties, oppression, and exploitation of the capitalist world...

...He was a coarse, self-congratulatory, improvident, faithless, petty, tyrannical, ugly man...

...They have served more as models of virtue than petty examples of outraged pride, not only for the Communist press, but for the official organs of other movements dedicated to the eradication of their adversaries...

...The great art of Levy's nose in reality consists of cosying up to foul odor, to smell it hundreds of miles away and bring it forth...

...Marx's response was to describe Feiligrath as a "fat Philistine" until the two men stopped speaking altogether...

...Some may indeed have been particularly victimized by the cruelties so widespread during the initial phases of capitalist accumulation...

...He had devised an intellectual system for changing the world that provided a truly splendid rationalization and extenuation for personal aggression...

...In fact, Padover gives the reader little of Das Kapital, and the Marx we see is monumental primarily in his unpleasantness...

...She may have said brilliant things, my headmaster continued, but never in the reader's presence...

...from a third...

...Thus Levy's nose now serves The Dailv Telegraph as an elephant snout, insect palp, lighthouse and telegraph...

...While innocents could continue to believe that social improvement and the release of mankind's energies and talents, crabbed and distorted under capitalism, were the goals of the Marxian revolution, Marx himself sought the venting of destructive, personal rage...

...That lust for power played a central part in Marx's character does not, of course, impugn the validity of his critique of capitalist society, or destroy the pertinence of his political analyses of, say, French politics...

...I n no sense is this book a history of Marx's thinking...

...But what Padover wants us to understand is that Marx's personal bloodiness made his economics effective...

...Even there, we are assured by Padover, most of the workers were service tradesmen and artisans from the specialized higher orders of the working class...

...the evils perpetrated by the entire class of capitalists to the special sub-class of Jewish capitalists...

...By calling the present volume an "intimate" biography Padover does not mean to ask us into the Marx bedroom to be entertained or titillated...

...The major political effect of his rage was to inspire in others a vibration in harmony with the notes he struck rhetorically...

...In further apparent contradiction to all of the foregoing, this historian-economist-journalist-revolutionary theoretician who raged against the world he lived in was very much attracted to its luminaries, the rich and powerful...

...He is afflicted with boils, carbuncles, and furuncles...

...Padover tells us that Marx wrote one of the greatest economics studies ever written, that he bowled over the people he met by personal presence, and that he wowed audiences by his overpowering, Zeus-like appearance...

...indeed, he was reared in comfortable circumstances as the son of a generally accepted lawyer in the pleasant German city of Trier...

...and,one can only surmise from the attention Padover pays to his unre-touched portrait that the warts were as important to Marx's ability to change the world as were his theories...

...For these others, it was possible to believe in a theory of social improvement that did not describe in any detail the better world that Marxism assumed must follow the abolition of private property...

...he raged at his colleagues, at his relatives, and at Louis Napoleon...

...Perhaps, also, their failure to define the socialist paradise is what allowed them to become the victims of that new order when it finally came into existence...

...cause he has had to pawn his last suit...

...Subsequently, he suffered a nervous breakdown, switched to another university, and finally took his Ph.D...

...Thackeray, he said, repeatedly tells us that Becky Sharp was a brilliant conversationalist, but never lets us hear why he thought so...

...Rage, not directed at any particular person, or at any specific injustice and deprivation, was Marx's primary emotion...

...He is so suspicious and paranoid that he feuds with all but one of his colleagues and proves himself incapable of keeping alive any of the journals or organizations he helped to found...

...Perhaps they were afraid to reveal to themselves how the prospective better world would actually satisfy the urge for power that was frustrated under capitalism...

...The writer claims to have put the study of social history on a scientific basis, and to have unlocked the secrets of the evolution from one form of economic development to another...

...But if Feiligrath and some others were offended by Marx's literary manners, many other followers of Marx must have found them acceptable and even gratifying...

...He, Marx, felt close enough to Darwin in spirit to suggest to the naturalist that he would dedicate the second volume of Das Kapital to him, an honor that Darwin declined...

...It long preceded his theories of capital development and class warfare, and of the dissolution of the state when it would no longer be needed to defend property rights...

...He followed their affairs in great detail in the newspapers that chronicled the social order that he explicitly disavowed...

...Instead of simply ignoring Vogt, or responding with a letter to the newspaper, Marx published a 300-page volume attacking Vogt and a lot of other people who were only indirectly connected with him or with his position...

...He is himself so slovenly and careless that there are times when he cannot leave his miserable London lodgings beRoger Starr is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times...

...So it is with Padover and Marx...