Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

2 4 6 K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

is now at its worst pitch.... I sit here and almost weep my eyes out and can find no help. My head is disintegrating. For a week I have kept my strength up and now I can no more...

In spite of all their difficulties, their basic sympathy and love for each other continued. While staying with Engels in Manchester in 1852, Marx wrote to her:

Dear Heart,

Your letter delighted me very much. You need never be embarrassed to tell me everything. If you, poor darling, have to go through the bitter reality, it is no more than reasonable than I should at least share

the suffering in spirit? I hope you will get another £5 this week, or at latest by Monday.154

From Manchester again in 1856 he wrote to Jenny (who was in Trier) a letter remarkable both for its sentiments and language and for its being one of the very few surviving from Marx to his wife. The letter is long and the following are some excerpts:

My dearest darling,

. . . I have the living image of you in front of me, I hold you in my arms, kiss you from head to foot, fall before you on my knees and sigh 'Madam, I love you'. And I love you in fact more than the Moor of Venice ever loved. The false and corrupt world conceives of all men's characters as false and corrupt. Who of my many slanderers and snaketonged enemies has ever accused me of having a vocation to play the principal role of lover in a second-class theatre? And yet it is true. Had the wretches had enough wit, they would have painted 'the relationships of production and exchange' on one side and myself at your feet on the other. 'Look to this picture and to that', they would have written beneath. But they are stupid wretches and stupid will they remain in saeculum saeculorum....

But love - not of Feuerbachian man, not of Moleschott's metabolisms, not of the proletariat, but love of one's darling, namely you, makes a man into a man again. In fact there are many women in the world, and some of them are beautiful. But where can I find another face in which every trait, even every wrinkle brings back the greatest and sweetest memories of my life. Even my infinite sorrows, my irreplaceable losses I can read on your sweet countenance, and I kiss my sorrows away when I kiss your sweet face. 'Buried in your arms, awoken by your kisses' - that is, in your arms and by your kisses, and the Brahmins and Pythagoreans can keep their doctrine of reincarnation and Christianity its doctrine of resurrection.155

For both Marx and Jenny the final and hardest blow that they suffered in Dean Street was the death, at the age of eight, of their only son in

April 1855. Edgar, whom they had nicknamed 'Musch' or 'little fly' was 'very gifted, but ailing from the day of his birth - a genuine, true child of sorrow this boy with the magnificent eyes and promising head that was, however, made too large for the weak body'.156 His final illness - a sort of consumption - lasted all through March. By the beginning of April it seemed to be fatal and Marx wrote on the sixth to Engels: 'Poor Musch is no more. He went to sleep (literally) in my arms today between five and six.' Liebknecht described the scene:

the mother silendy weeping, bent over the dead child, Lenchen sobbing beside her, Marx in a terrible agitation vehemendy, almost angrily, rejecting all consolation, the two girls clinging to their mother crying quiedy, the mother clasping them convulsively as if to hold them and defend them against Death that had robbed her of her boy.157

In spite of a holiday in Manchester and the new prospects opened up by Jenny's inheritance, the sorrow remained. At the end of July, Marx wrote to Lassalle:

Bacon says that really important men have so many relations with nature and the world that they recover easily from every loss. I do not belong to these important men. The death of my child has deeply shaken my heart and mind and I still feel the loss as freshly as on the first day. My poor wife is also completely broken down.158

Years later Marx still found a visit to the Soho area a shattering experience.159

Difficulties did not prevent Marx from holding what amounted to an open house:

You are received in the most friendly way [wrote one visitor] and cordially offered pipes and tobacco and whatever else there may happen to be; and eventually a spirited and agreeable conversation arises to make amends for all the domestic deficiencies, and this makes the discomfort tolerable. Finally you grow accustomed to the company, and find it interesting and original.160

No relations of either family seem to have come to the rooms in Dean Street - with the exception of Marx's sister Louise together with the Dutchman she had just married in Trier. But there was a constant stream of other visitors; Harney and his wife, Ernest Jones, Freiligrath and his wife, and Wilhelm Wolff were all regular visitors. The most frequent was a group of young men whose company Marx liked and encouraged. One of this group was Ernst Dronke, a founder-member of the Communist League who had also worked on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-, he occasionally helped Marx with his secretarial work, but later went into commerce

and retired from active politics. Another was Conrad Schramm who fought a duel with Willich - though Marx quarrelled with him in 1851 over Schramm's unwillingness to hand over the Communist League's papers and lost touch when he emigrated to America soon afterwards. A more frequent - at rimes almost daily - visitor was Wilhelm Liebknecht, the young philology student who had fought in the Baden uprising of 1849 and escaped to England via Switzerland. He had a profound, if timid, admiration for Jenny (his own mother had died when he was three) and loved to run errands for her, look after the children and generally absorb Marx's ideas with much greater docility than he was later to show in the 1860s and 1870s as leader of the German Social Democrats. Finally there was Wilhelm Pieper, a young man in his middle twenties who had studied languages in Germany and in the early 1850s stayed with Marx sometimes for weeks on end (when he was not consorting with prostitutes or being employed as a tutor.) He acted as Marx's secretary for a time and translated The Poverty of Philosophy into execrable English. He was tacdess enough to get on Jenny's nerves, and even to reduce Karl Blind's wife to tears during a discussion on Feuerbach in Marx's room. Marx referred to him as his 'doctrinaire echo', regretted his schoolmasterish tone and was pained by his attempts at playing 'modern' music. In spite of all this, he fed Pieper, housed him, helped him recover from illness, got Engels to lend him money and on several occasions even lent him some himself. However unwilling Marx might have been to accept intellectual or party-political opposition, in his relations with these younger friends he was usually amused, tolerant and even generous.

In his personal relationships Marx could exercise great tact and generosity. He would excuse the shortcomings of his friends to Engels and advise Weydemeyer on how to handle Freiligrath or Wolff. He showed great consideration for the wife of his friend Roland Daniels, one of the defendants in the Cologne trial, organised letters to her from Daniels's friends in England and on his death in 1855 wrote her a most moving tribute.161 He even pawned Jenny's last coat to help Eccarius when he was ill.

The man whose friendship Marx valued most was, of course, Friedrich Engels. For the twenty years following his departure from London in late 1850, Marx and Engels kept up a regular correspondence, writing on the average every other day Although this correspondence constitutes by far the most important source for any account of Marx's life during these years, it is not complete: the letters were sifted after Engels' death to remove any (for example those concerning Frederick Demuth) which might embarrass family or friends. Thus the almost total absence in the surviving Marx-Engels correspondence of anything indicating a warm

friendship between the two men may be attributable partly to this later sifting and partly also to the fact that both correspondents (particularly in the early 1850s) suspected that the authorities were intercepting their letters.

Engels' move to Manchester in 1850 meant taking up where he had left off eight years previously. The split in the Communist League and the failure of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Revue removed his chief reason for remaining in London; he had to earn his living; and his mother, to whom he was very attached, urged on him at least an outward reconciliation with his father. There was no representative of the Engels family in the Manchester branch of the firm of Ermen and Engels, and his father agreed to his acting in the family's interests there. The father's consent was reluctant at first, but it turned to enthusiasm after plans to send his son either to Calcutta or to America had failed, and after Engels had demonstrated in his reports back to Barmen his capacity to handle business. Early in 1851 his situation became more permanent, though some difficulties still remained:

the problem is [he wrote to Marx], to have an official position as representative of my father vis-a-vis the Ermens, and yet have no official position inside the firm here entailing an obligation to work and a salary from the firm. However, I hope to achieve it; my business letters have enchanted my father and he considers my remaining here a great sacrifice on my part.162

When his father came over to Britain in July 1851 the matter was settled to the satisfaction of both: Engels was to stay in Manchester for at least three years. He later reckoned to have made more than £230 in his first year there. His father, during his annual inspection the following year, drew up a new contract with his partners that provided his son with an increasing proportion of the profits, and by the end of the decade Engels' income was over £1000 a year. Engels was, as Marx remarked, 'very exact'163 in matters of money and this money enabled him to act as Dutch uncle to the entire 'Marx party'. Dronke received money from him, so did Pieper; Liebknecht was fitted out, at Engels' expense, with a new set of clothes in which to apply for a tutorship. But the lion's share went to Marx: in some years Engels seems to have given him more than he spent on himself. These sums of money - sometimes sent in postal orders, sometimes in £1 or £5 notes cut in half and sent in separate letters - often saved the unworldly Marx from complete disaster. 'Karl was frightfully happy', wrote Jenny on one occasion, 'when he heard the fateful double knock of the postman. "There's Frederic, £2, saved!" he cried

out."64 As a result Engels found it difficult to make ends meet and wrote to Marx in 1853:

Reorganisation of my personal expenses becomes urgent, and in a week or two I will move into cheaper lodgings and take to weaker drinks....

In the previous year, thank God, I got through half of my father's profits in the firm here. As soon as the arrival of my old man approaches, I will move into fine lodgings, produce fine cigars, wine, etc., so that we can create an impression. That's life.1"

Although, as Engels had found previously, the centre of English free trade afforded a good vantage point from which to view economic developments, he would have preferred to be elsewhere. Harney declared that he would sooner be hanged in London than live in Manchester and Engels often complained of his loneliness and boredom. In spite of a plan early in 1852 to move to New Brighton with the entire Marx family, and another scheme in 1854 to m o v e to London as military correspondent of the Daily News, he remained a prisoner in Manchester for twenty years. Several communist friends came to visit him: Weerth who travelled widely for his firm, Dronke who established himself in Bradford, and above all Marx who came once or even twice a year - sometimes for weeks on end. He was also able to renew his life with Mary Burns, though concern for 'respectability' prevented his living with her. His work for the Ermen and Engels business did not keep him from matters of more importance to himself: after a full day's work in his office he would regularly study languages, military science (hence his nickname 'General'), and write articles in Marx's stead.

Engels had a character that was in many ways the exact opposite of Marx's: he was warm, optimistic, well balanced, full of joie de vivre, and enjoyed the reputation of having a fine taste in all that concerned wine and women. Towards his friends he was loyal, patient and unselfish; and intellectually he had a quick, clear mind, and an ability to simplify - sometimes oversimplify - deep and complex questions. In all his surviving correspondence with Marx, Engels only once seems to have reproached Marx - the occasion being Marx's cold reception of the news of Mary Burns's death. The whole correspondence is remarkably unemotional. Although Marx was sometimes angry at Engels' silences, there is only one really abusive letter: Marx had quarrelled with Wilhelm Wolff (nicknamed 'Lupus') over a book that Wolff claimed Marx had borrowed from him and not returned. When Engels' communications became a little less frequent, Marx implied that Engels was putting him in second place to Wolff and Dronke:

At least that is the method that you, since the arrival of Mr Lupus