Karl Marx (32 page)

Her father relieved the tedium by getting squiffy and giggling ostentatiously at a notice that had been handed to all guests, headed ‘Mobbing of Distinguished Persons’, which asked that royal patrons and other eminences should be allowed to walk about unmolested ‘like any private person’. As Jennychen vowed, ‘they won’t catch us there a second time’.

Marx’s encounters with the natives were almost always disastrous, especially if he had a few drinks inside him. One night he set off with Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht for a drunken jaunt up the Tottenham Court Road, intending to have at least one glass of beer in every pub between Oxford Street and the Hampstead Road. Since the route included no fewer than
eighteen pubs, by the time they reached the last port of call he was ready for a rumpus. A group of Oddfellows, enjoying a quiet dinner, found themselves accosted by this drunken trio and taunted about the feebleness of English culture. No country but Germany, Marx declared, could have produced such masters as Beethoven, Mozart, Handel and Haydn; snobbish, cant-ridden England was fit only for philistines. This was too much even for the mild-mannered Oddfellows. ‘Damned foreigners!’ one growled, while several others clenched their fists. Choosing the better part of valour, the German roisterers fled outside. Liebknecht takes up the story:

Now we had enough of our ‘beer trip’
for the time being, and in order to cool our heated blood, we started on a double-quick march, until Edgar Bauer stumbled over a heap of paving stones. ‘Hurrah, an idea!’ And in memory of mad students’ pranks he picked up a stone, and Clash! Clatter! a gas lantern went flying into splinters. Nonsense is contagious – Marx and I did not stay behind, and we broke four or five street lamps – it was, perhaps, two o’clock in the morning and the streets were deserted … But the noise nevertheless attracted the attention of a policeman who with quick resolution gave the signal to his colleagues on the same beat. And immediately counter-signals were given. The position became critical. Happily, we took in the situation at a glance; and happily we knew the locality. We raced ahead, three or four policemen some distance behind us. Marx showed an agility that I should not have attributed to him. And after the wild chase had lasted some minutes, we succeeded in turning into a side street and there through an alley – a back yard between two streets – whence we came behind the policemen who lost the trail. Now we were safe. They did not have our description and we arrived at our homes without further adventures.

While strolling through the London streets Marx would often
pause to stroke the hair of some young urchin or ragamuffin sitting in a doorway, and to slip a halfpenny into its little hand. But experience taught him that British adults do not take kindly to strangers with alien accents. Riding up Tottenham Court Road on an omnibus one day, he and Liebknecht noticed a large crowd outside a gin palace and heard a piercing female voice call out ‘Murder! Murder!’ Though Liebknecht tried to restrain him, Marx leaped off the bus and shoved his way into the throng. Alas, the woman was merely a drunken wife enjoying a noisy argument with her husband; and Marx’s arrival at the scene instantly reunited the couple, who turned their anger on the interfering busybody. ‘The crowd closed more and more around us,’ Liebknecht reported, ‘and assumed a threatening attitude against the “damned foreigners”. Especially the woman went full of rage for Marx and concentrated her efforts on his magnificent shining black beard. I endeavoured to soothe the storm – in vain. Had not two strong constables made their appearance in time, we should have had to pay dearly for our philanthropic attempt at intervention.’ Thereafter, Liebknecht noticed, Marx was ‘a little more cautious’ in his encounters with the London proletariat.

Not that he minded. As the historian Kirk Willis has pointed out, ‘
by 1860 Marx was not interested in acquiring English disciples
or propagandists, for he had another project under way which was much more important – the intellectual destruction of classical political economy’. For the next four years he again took refuge in the anonymity of the British Museum’s reading room, preparing for his final assault on capitalism. ‘
I myself, by the by, am working away hard
and, strange to say, my grey matter is functioning better in the midst of the surrounding
misère
than it has done for years,’ he told Engels in June 1862, adding that he had hit upon ‘one or two pleasing and surprising novelties’ in his analysis. Between 1861 and 1863 he filled more than 1,500 pages. ‘I am expanding this volume,’ he explained, ‘since those German scoundrels estimate the value of a book in terms of its cubic capacity.’

Theoretical problems which had formerly defeated him were suddenly as clear and invigorating as a glass of gin. Take the question of agricultural rents – or this ‘shitty rent business’ as he preferred to call it. ‘I had long harboured misgivings as to the absolute correctness of Ricardo’s theory, and have at length got to the bottom of the swindle.’ Ricardo had simply confused value and cost price. In mid-Victorian England, the prices of agricultural products were higher than their actual value (i.e. the labour time embodied in them), and the landlord pocketed the difference in the form of higher rent. Under socialism, however, this surplus would be redistributed for the benefit of the workers. Thus, even if the market price remained the same, the value of the goods – their ‘social character’ – would change utterly.

He was so pleased with this progress that sometimes optimism got the better of him – as when a doctor from Hanover, Ludwig Kugelmann, wrote at the end of 1862, enquiring when the sequel to
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
could be expected. ‘
I was delighted to see from your letter
how warm an interest is taken by you and your friends in my critique of political economy,’ Marx replied at once. ‘The second part has now at last been finished, i.e. save for the fair copy and the final polishing before it goes to press.’ He concluded with a suggestion that ‘you could write to me occasionally about the situation at home’. Thus began a friendly correspondence that continued for more than ten years, until Marx suddenly decided that he wanted nothing more to do with this ‘hair-splitting philistine’.

The manuscript was nowhere near completion, of course: plenty more carpentry was needed before it would be ready for ‘final polishing’. Even so, this was at least the raw timber from which he built the great baroque masterpiece that finally emerged in 1867. The cumbersome working title –
A Contribution to the Critique of Critical Economy, Volume II
– was now abandoned. By some inverse logic, big books deserved short names. And so, as he revealed for the first time in that letter to Kugelmann, ‘it will appear on its own under the title
Capital
’.

Jenny Marx could never quite share her husband’s fondness for Friedrich Engels. She was grateful for his largesse, of course, just as she appreciated the intellectual companionship and encouragement he gave Karl. She was touched, too, by his interest in the children, who adored their avuncular ‘General’. To Jenny, however, he always remained Mr Engels. An unshockable woman in many ways, happy to contemplate violent revolution and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, she still had enough middle-class propriety – or prudery – to be scandalised by the idea of a man and woman living together out of wedlock, especially when the woman concerned was an illiterate ‘factory girl’.

Engels had met Mary Burns on his first visit to Manchester in 1842, while he was collecting material for
The Condition of the Working Classes in England
, and they soon became lovers. Though largely uneducated, this lively redhead of proletarian Irish stock taught Engels at least as much as she learned from him. As with her sister Lydia, who eventually joined them in a
ménage à trois
, he admired her ‘passionate feeling for her class, which was inborn, [and] was worth infinitely more to me and had stood by me in all critical moments more strongly than all the aesthetic niceyniceness and wiseacreism of the “eddicated” and “senty-mental” daughters of the bourgeoisie could have done’.

The affair was renewed when Engels and Marx came over in 1845; he then paid for Mary to come and visit him in Brussels for a while. After resigning himself to a life of vile commerce in
Manchester, Engels set her up in a little house near his own, and by the end of the 1850s they were living together. On the rare occasions when Jenny Marx was forced to acknowledge Mary’s existence she referred to her as ‘your wife’, though in fact the relationship was never legally solemnised. The addition of Lydia (‘Lizzy’) to the household was an even greater affront to Frau Marx’s puritanical sensibilities. But Engels didn’t give a damn.

His devotion to Mary Burns also caused the only
froideur
in his otherwise warm and uninterrupted partnership with Karl Marx. Although Marx had no objection to his friend’s unorthodox domestic set-up (in fact it gave him a certain amount of vicarious titillation), out of deference to Jenny he tended to underestimate the importance of the Burns sisters – and never more disastrously than when he received this short, ghastly note from Engels, dated 7 January 1863:

Dear Moor,

Mary is dead. Last night she went to bed early and, when Lizzy wanted to go to bed shortly before midnight, she found she had already died. Quite suddenly. Heart failure or an apoplectic stroke. I wasn’t told till this morning; on Monday evening she was still quite well. I simply can’t convey what I feel. The poor girl loved me with all her heart.

Your

FE

Marx replied the following day. ‘The news of Mary’s death surprised no less than it dismayed me. She was so good-natured, witty and closely attached to you.’ So far so good; but this was merely the cue for a lengthy recitation of his own woes. ‘The devil alone knows why nothing but ill luck should dog everyone in our circle just now. I no longer know which way to turn either …’ Attempts to raise money in France and Germany had come to naught, no one would let him buy anything on credit, he was
being dunned for the school fees and the rent, it was impossible to get on with work. After plenty more in this vein, Marx briefly remembered himself. ‘It is dreadfully selfish of me to tell you about these
horreurs
at this time,’ he conceded. ‘But it’s a homeopathic remedy. One calamity is a distraction from the other. And, in the final count, what else can I do?’ Well, he could have tried offering his condolences rather more tactfully, for a start. In mitigation one must allow that Marx was in a truly calamitous predicament: the children hadn’t been back to school since Christmas, partly because the bill for the previous term was still unpaid but also because their only presentable clothes and shoes were in hock. Even his parting thought had more to do with his own troubles than Engels’s loss: ‘Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life? You can see what strange notions come into the heads of “civilised men” under the pressure of certain circumstances.
Salut
.’

Engels read all this with anger and amazement. How dare Marx go on about money at such a time – especially when he knew that Engels himself had been feeling the pinch lately because of a slump in the price of cotton? He held his silence for five days before sending an icy acknowledgement. His letters usually began ‘Dear Moor’, but such informality would no longer do:

Dear Marx,

You will find it quite in order that, this time, my own misfortune and the frosty view you took of it should have made it positively impossible for me to reply to you any sooner. All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have on this occasion, which in all conscience must needs affect me deeply, given me proof of greater sympathy and friendship than I could have looked for. You thought it a fit moment to assert the superiority of your ‘dispassionate turn of mind’. So be it, then!

There was nothing dispassionate about Marx’s turn of mind now.
For the next three weeks sour recriminations flew back and forth across the kitchen table at Grafton Terrace, as Jenny blamed Karl for not alerting Engels to their wretched state of affairs earlier and he blamed her for assuming that they could always rely on subventions from Manchester. (‘The poor woman had to suffer for something of which she was in fact innocent, for women are wont to ask for the impossible,’ Marx said afterwards, rather ungallantly. ‘Women are funny creatures, even those endowed with much intelligence.’) After many a long argument they agreed that Karl should have himself declared insolvent in the bankruptcy court. Jennychen and Laura would find employment as governesses, Lenchen would enter service elsewhere, while little Tussy and her parents would move into the City Model Lodging House, a refuge for the destitute.

Did he really have any such intention, or was this self-inflicted martyrdom just a ruse to win Engels’s sympathy? Hard to say. But there is no doubting the sincerity of his contrition:

It was very wrong of me to write you that letter
, and I regretted it as soon as it had gone off. However, what happened was in no sense due to heartlessness. As my wife and children will testify, I was as shattered when your letter arrived (first thing in the morning) as if my nearest and dearest had died. But, when I wrote to you in the evening, I did so under the pressure of circumstances that were desperate in the extreme. The landlord had put a broker in my house, the butcher had protested a bill, coal and provisions were in short supply, and little Jenny was confined to bed. Generally, under such circumstances, my only recourse is to cynicism.

Though the self-laceration was still mixed in with a ladleful of self-pity, this constitutes the only sincere apology Marx ever gave anyone in his life.

Engels, with his usual generosity, recognised Marx’s penitence at once. ‘Dear Moor,’ he wrote, resuming the old affectionate greeting:

Thank you for being so candid
. You yourself have now realised what sort of impression your last letter but one made on me. One can’t live with a woman for years on end without being fearfully affected by her death. I felt as though with her I was burying the last vestige of my youth. When your letter arrived she had not been buried. That letter, I tell you, obsessed me for a whole week; I couldn’t get it out of my head. Never mind. Your last letter made up for it and I’m glad that, in losing Mary, I didn’t also lose my oldest and best friend.

The estrangement was not mentioned again: without further ado Engels applied himself to the task of rescuing the Marx family from bankruptcy. Unable to borrow money, he simply filched a £100 cheque from the in-tray at Ermen & Engels which he then endorsed in Marx’s favour. ‘It is an exceedingly daring move on my part,’ he acknowledged, ‘but the risk must be taken.’ Another £250 followed a few months later to keep Marx afloat through the summer – which was just as well, since a plague of carbuncles made work almost impossible.

That November a telegram arrived from Trier announcing the death of Henriette Marx at the age of seventy-five. She had predicted her end with suspicious accuracy – 4 p.m. on 30 November, the very hour and day of her fiftieth wedding anniversary – but no one seems to have paused to wonder if the old girl assisted her own passage into oblivion. Karl’s only comment on hearing the news was predictably cool: ‘
Fate laid claim to one of our family
. I myself have already had one foot in the grave. Circumstances being what they were, I, presumably, was needed more than my mater.’ Engels sent off a tenner to pay for the journey to Trier but offered no word of condolence: he knew Marx well enough to realise that bogus regrets would cause more offence than none at all.

The execution of the will dragged on for several months, and once all the advances and loans from Uncle Lion had been discounted Marx was left with little more than £100. Still, it was
enough to justify a spree. In his contempt for bourgeois financial prudence Marx practised what he preached: if there was no cash in the house he survived by ducking and diving, bluffing and juggling; but whenever he did get his hands on a fistful of sterling he spent recklessly, with no thought for the morrow. The Marxes had moved to Grafton Terrace in 1856 on the strength of Jenny’s small inheritance from Caroline von Westphalen, although they must have known that the house was beyond their means. Now the folly was repeated. In March 1864, as soon as the first payment from Henriette’s legacy arrived, they took a three-year lease on a spacious detached mansion at 1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park. The new address was only about 200 yards from Grafton Terrace but a world away in style and status – the sort of residence favoured by well-to-do doctors and lawyers, with a large garden, a ‘charming conservatory’ and enough space for each girl to have her own bedroom. A room on the first floor overlooking the park was commandeered by Marx as his study.

The annual rent for Modena Villas was £65, almost twice that of Grafton Terrace. Quite how Marx expected to pay for all this luxury is a mystery: as so often, however, his Micawberish faith was vindicated. On 9 May 1864 Wilhelm ‘Lupus’ Wolff died of meningitis, bequeathing ‘
all my books furniture and effects
debts and moneys owning to me and all the residue of my personal estate and also all real and leasehold estates of which I may die seized possessed or entitled or of which I may have power to dispose by this my Will unto and to the use of the said Karl Marx’. Wolff was one of the few old campaigners from the 1840s who never wavered in his allegiance to Marx and Engels. He worked with them in Brussels on the Communist Correspondence Committee, in Paris at the 1848 revolution and in Cologne when Marx was editing the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
. From 1853 he lived quietly in Manchester, earning his living as a language teacher and relying largely on Engels to keep him up to date with political news. ‘I don’t believe anyone in Manchester can have been so
universally beloved as our poor little friend,’ Karl wrote to Jenny after delivering the funeral oration, during which he broke down several times.

As executors of the will, Marx and Engels were amazed to discover that modest old Lupus had accumulated a small fortune through hard work and thrift. Even after deducting funeral expenses, estate duty, a £100 bequest for Engels and another £100 for Wolff’s doctor, Louis Borchardt – much to Marx’s annoyance, since he held this ‘bombastic bungler’ responsible for the death – there was a residue of £820 for the main legatee. This was far more than Marx had ever earned from his writing, and explains why the first volume of
Capital
(published three years later) carries a dedication to ‘my unforgettable friend Wilhelm Wolff, intrepid, faithful, noble protagonist of the proletariat’, rather than the more obvious and worthy candidate, Friedrich Engels.

The Marxes wasted no time in spending their windfall. Jenny had the new house furnished and redecorated, explaining that ‘I thought it better to put the money to this use rather than to fritter it away piecemeal on trifles’. Pets were bought for the children (three dogs, two cats, two birds) and named after Karl’s favourite tipples, including Whisky and Toddy. In July he took the family on vacation to Ramsgate for three weeks, though the eruption of a malignant carbuncle just above the penis rather spoiled the fun, leaving him confined to bed at their guest-house in a misanthropic sulk. ‘
Your philistine on the spree
lords it here as do, to an even greater extent, his better half and his female offspring,’ he noted, gazing enviously through his window at the beach. ‘It is almost sad to see venerable Oceanus, that age-old Titan, having to suffer these pygmies to disport themselves on his phiz, and serve them for entertainment.’ The boils had replaced the bailiffs as his main source of irritation. Mostly, however, he dispatched them with the same careless contempt. That autumn he held a grand ball at Modena Villas for Jennychen and Laura, who had spent many years declining invitations to parties for fear that they would be
unable to reciprocate. Fifty of their young friends were entertained until four in the morning, and so much food was left over that little Tussy was allowed to have an impromptu tea-party for local children the following day.

Writing to Lion Philips in the summer of 1864, Marx revealed an even more remarkable detail of his prosperous new way of life:

I have, which will surprise you not a little, been speculating
– partly in American funds, but more especially in English stocks, which are springing up like mushrooms this year (in furtherance of every imaginable and unimaginable joint stock enterprise), are forced up to a quite unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse. In this way, I have made over £400 and, now that the complexity of the political situation affords greater scope, I shall begin all over again. It’s a type of operation that makes small demands on one’s time, and it’s worth while running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his money.