Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

then as they are now. Behind us some friends. Then the main body of the army: Marx with his wife and some Sunday guest requiring special attention. And behind these Lenchen with the hungriest of the guests who helped her carry the basket.

After the meal they 'produced the Sunday papers they had bought on the road, and now began the reading and discussing of politics - while the children, who rapidly found playmates, played hide and seek behind the heather bushes'. There followed games and donkey-riding at which Marx amused the company 'by his more than primitive art of riding and by the fanatical zeal with which he affirmed his skill in this art'.130 They returned, with the children and Lenchen bringing up the rear, singing patriotic German songs and reciting Dante or Shakespeare.

Marx also liked to go out occasionally in the evenings.

Sometimes [wrote Liebknecht] it even happened that we relapsed into our old student's pranks. One evening Edgar Bauer, acquainted with Marx from their Berlin time and then not yet his personal enemy in spite of the 'Holy Family', had come to town from his hermitage in Highgate for the purpose of 'making a beer trip'. The problem was to 'take something' in every saloon between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road - making the 'something' a very difficult task, even by confining yourself to a minimum considering the enormous number of saloons in that part of the city. But we went to work undaunted and managed to reach the end of Tottenham Court Road without accident. There loud singing issued from a public house; we entered and learned that a club of Odd Fellows were celebrating a festival.'131

Many toasts were exchanged, but when Liebknecht began to claim superior political intelligence for the Germans and Bauer alluded to English cant, 'fists were brandished in the air and we were sensible enough to choose the better part of valour and managed to effect, not wholly without difficulty, a passably dignified retreat'. However, the evening was not finished:

. . . 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 student's 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, 2 o'clock in the morning and the streets were deserted in consequence. 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 countersignals 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 activity 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 running through an alley - a back yard between two

streets - whence we came behind the policemen who lost the trail. Now we were safe.132

When Engels was in London staying with Marx, the two of them used to go out together; once Engels wrote to Jenny apologising for having led her husband astray, and was informed that Marx's 'nocturnal wanderings' had brought him such a chill that he had had to stay in bed for a week.

Life in the three rooms in Dean Street was extremely irregular. The following vivid description, which seems to be largely accurate, was written by a Prussian government spy in 1852:

As father and husband, Marx, in spite of his wild and resdess character, is the gendest and mildest of men. Marx lives in one of the worst, therefore one of the cheapest quarters of London. He occupies two rooms. The one looking out on the street is the salon, and the bedroom is at the back. In the whole apartment there is not one clean and solid piece of furniture. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, with a half inch of dust over everything and the greatest disorder everywhere. In the middle of the salon there is a large old-fashioned table covered with an oilcloth, and on it there lie manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children's toys, the rags and tatters of his wife's sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash - in a word, everything topsyturvy, and all on the same table. A seller of second-hand goods would be ashamed to give away such a remarkable collection of odds and ends.

When you enter Marx's room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water so much that for a moment you seem to be groping about in a cavern, but gradually, as you grow accustomed to the fog, you can make out certain objects which distinguish themselves from the surrounding haze. Everything is dirty, and covered with dust, so that to sit down becomes a thoroughly dangerous business. Here is a chair with only three legs, on another chair the children are playing at cooking - this chair happens to have four legs. This is the one which is offered to the visitor, but the children's cooking has not been wiped away; and if you sit down, you risk a pair of trousers.133

Family accommodation was so restricted that when Franziska was born in the spring of 1851, she had to be given to a nurse, there being so little room in the house. A year later, she died.

At Easter, 1852 [wrote Jenny], our little Franziska had a severe bronchitis. For three days she was between life and death. She suffered terribly. When she died we left her lifeless little body in the back room, went into the front room and made our beds on the floor. Our three living children lay down by us and we all wept for the little angel whose livid, lifeless body was in the next room. Our beloved child's death occurred at the time of the hardest privations, our German friends being unable to help us just then. Ernest Jones, who paid us long and frequent visits about that time, promised to help us but he was unable to bring us anything. . . . Anguish in my heart, I hurried to a French emigrant who lived not far away and used to come to see us, and begged him to help us in our terrible necessity. He immediately gave me two pounds with the most friendly sympathy. That money was used to pay for the coffin in which my child now rests in peace. She had no cradle when she came into the world and for a long time was

refused a last resting place. With what heavy hearts we saw her carried to her grave.134

In such circumstances it is not surprising that Jenny's physical and moral resources were quickly dissipated. In 1852, in many ways the worst of the Dean Street years, Jenny was frequently confined to bed, emaciated, coughing and, on doctor's orders, drinking a lot of port. Engels had tried to raise money to get her a holiday in the country but by the autumn she was in bed for days on end taking a spoonful of brandy hourly. Two years later she was again ill but cared for herself on the grounds that the doctor's prescription had only served to make her worse.

Since Jenny acted as his secretary, these illnesses hindered Marx in his work. Indeed, she participated to the full in all of Marx's activities. She attended meetings as an observer for him, picked out newspaper articles that she thought might interest him and looked after publishing details when he was away. She was at her most useful when acting as his secretary, writing letters, producing fair copies of his articles for newspapers (his handwriting being illegible) and keeping careful records of the dispatch of his journalism. She was proud of her role as secretary and wrote later: 'The memory of the days I spent in his little study copying his scrawled articles is among the happiest of my life.'135 In financial matters, too, Jenny was active: she wrote innumerable begging letters, dealt with the creditors who besieged the house and even, in August 1850, 'desperate at the prospect of a fifth child and the future'136 undertook a trip alone to Marx's uncle, a businessman in Holland. However, the recent revolutionary upheavals had not been good for trade and the old man was in no mood to help his eccentric nephew, so Jenny returned empty-handed.

Temperamentally, she was very unpredictable and liable to go to extremes. Marx wrote to her: 'I know how infinitely mercurial you are

K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

and how the least bit of good news gives you new life.'137 'jMercurial' was his favourite word in describing Jenny's character; but with the passage of years she found it increasingly difficult not to be submerged by her oppressive surroundings. In the summer of 1850 Marx wrote to Weydemeyer: 'You must not take amiss the excited letters of my wife. She is

in November 1850 Jenny was quite 'beside herself and 'dangerously overwrought'. The following year Marx described her as being ill 'more from bourgeois than physical causes'. A few months later he wrote to Engels:

Floods of tears the whole night long tire my patience and make me angry.... I feel pity for my wife. Most of the pressure falls on her and basically she is right. Industry must be more productive than marriage. In spite of everything you remember that by nature I am not at all patient and even a litde hard so that from time to time my equanimity disappears.139

In 1854 Marx spoke of 'the dangerous condition of my wife';140 the same year she retreated to bed 'partly from anger because good Dr Freund bombarded us once again with dunning letters'.141 The following year 'for a week my wife has been more ill with nervous excitement than ever before'.142

Of course, much of the housework was taken over by Helene Demuth. Liebknecht wrote of her at this time: '27 years old, and while no beauty, she was nice looking with rather pleasing features. She had no lack of admirers and could have made a good match again and again.' She was in many ways the lynchpin of the Marx household: 'Lenchen was the dictator but Mrs Marx was the mistress. And Marx submitted as meekly as a lamb to that dictatorship.'143

'In the early summer of 1851', Jenny wrote in her autobiography, 'an event occurred that I do not wish to relate here in detail, although it greatly contributed to an increase in our worries, both personal and others.'144 This event was the birth of Marx's illegitimate son Frederick; the mother was Helene Demuth. This fact was kept so well concealed and the surviving papers of the Marx family were so carefully sifted to eliminate all references to it that only the recent chance discovery of a letter brought it to light.145 This letter, addressed to August Bebel, was written by Louise Freyberger (the first wife of Karl Kautsky) who had kept house for Engels on the death of Helene Demuth to whom she had been very close. According to her, Engels had accepted paternity for Frederick and thus 'saved Marx from a difficult domestic conflict.' But

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he gave Louise Freyberger the right to reveal the truth should he be accused of treating his 'son' shabbily. He even told the story to a distraught Eleanor on his deathbed, writing it on a slate as he had lost his voice. The secret was confined to the (Marx) family and one or two friends. The son was immediately sent to foster parents and had no contact at all with the Marx household, though he resumed contact with his mother after Marx's death. Louise Freyberger wrote:

He came regularly every week to visit her; curiously enough, however, he never came in through the front door but always through the kitchen, and only when I came to General and he continued his visits, did I make sure that he had all the rights of a visitor . . .

For Marx separation from his wife, who was terribly jealous, was always before his eyes: he did not love the boy; he did not dare to do anything for him, the scandal would have been too great; he was sent as paying guest to a Mrs Louis (I think that is how she writes her name) and he took his name too from his foster-mother, and only after Nimm's146 death adopted the name of Demuth.147

There is no doubt of the general credibility of this letter. The certificate of Frederick Demuth's birth in June 1851 is conserved in Somerset House; the space for the name of the father is left blank; the name of the mother is given as Helene Demuth and the place of birth as 28 Dean Street. Although so few details of this episode survive, it seems that the necessity of preserving appearances and the fear of the inevitable rumours only served to increase the strain on Jenny's nerves. Five weeks after the birth, and the day following its registration, Marx wrote to Weydemeyer concerning 'the unspeakable infamies that my enemies are spreading about me' and continued: ' . . . my wife is ill, and she has to endure the most unpleasant bourgeois poverty from morning to night. Her nervous system is undermined, and she gets none the better because every day some idiotic talebearers bring her all the vaporings of the democratic cesspools. The tactlessness of these people is sometimes colossal."48

Marx described himself as having 'a hard nature';149 and Jenny wrote of him in 1850: 'he has never, even at the most terrible moments, lost his confidence in the future or his cheerful good humour'.1S0 But his correspondence with Engels shows that he did not always accept his troubles with so much serenity. In 1852 he wrote: 'When I see the sufferings of my wife and my own powerlessness I could rush into the devil's jaws."si And two years later: 'I became wild from time to time that there is no end to the muck.'152 One undated letter from Jenny to Marx in Manchester gives a glimpse of the state of mind to which she was sometimes reduced: 'Meanwhile I sit here and go to pieces. Karl, it