The Cheerful Radical

LOVE & REVOLUTION by Max Eastman. 665 pages. Random House. $8.95.

In the first three decades of this century, all sorts of Americans were calling for revolution, but they meant quite different things by it. Some wanted revenge on a society that had neglected them; others, exasperated by the tortuous process of democracy, wanted an authoritarian master who would correct all injustice. Max Eastman simply wanted everybody to be as happy as he was.

Eastman was a most improbable radical. Homegrown, hearty and ebullient, nurtured on the Concord philosophers, Eastman castigated society without hating it. Abolish capitalism, yes, and reconstitute society--but good-naturedly, if you please.

Now Eastman has written his autobiography; it is long, racy, candid and vain. It has the egalitarian earnestness of a Tom Paine, the lighthearted sexual adventurousness of a Casanova, the self-preoccupation of a Cellini. The book is also an important document, because Eastman, who observed the early Bolsheviks closely in Russia, was prematurely antiCommunist. In time a whole generation of American radicals would repeat his disillusionment and break with the Communist Party.

Crusading Pacifist. Born and brought up in conservative upstate New York, Eastman could trace his ancestry to Mayflower days. Both his parents were Congregational ministers. But as he describes his childhood in an earlier book, Enjoyment of Living, he became imbued with the notion that all repressions must be cast off and life lived with absolute freedom. Settling in New York City, he was made editor in 1912 of the influential radical magazine, the Masses, set about upgrading the dowdy journal with incendiary proposals for revolutionizing the American way of life (some of the proposals, like women's suffrage, have long since been adopted). When World War I broke out, Eastman became a crusading pacifist, ridiculing Woodrow Wilson's heavy wartime censorship. "You can't even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage," he charged.

In 1917 the Government banned the Masses from the mails. Eastman promptly launched a new magazine, the Liberator, with much the same staff. The Wilson Administration then indicted Eastman and three of his staffers under the wartime Espionage Act. Others had been sentenced to as much as 30 years for violation of the act, but thanks to astute lawyers, powerful friends and a fiery speech by Eastman on freedom of speech, two trials ended in hung juries.

Though he loved the masses, Eastman did not neglect individuals. "To me lust is sacred." he writes, "sexual embraces nearer to a Holy Communion than a profane indulgence--a partaking, so to speak, of the blood and body of Nature." He partook generously. Leaving his wife and child, he moved in with a comely actress, Florence Deshon, whose temperament was much like his: she had once caused a near-riot in a theater by refusing to rise for the Star Spangled Banner. The affair was a stormy one; as Eastman torridly tells it, heaven-shattering passion alternated with earth-shaking rage.

During one separation, Florence hooked up with Charlie Chaplin. Thereafter, Eastman had to share Florence with Charlie, though he tried to be enlightened about it all. Finally Florence informed Eastman that she would marry only Charlie, though she assured him: "I would have a child by you before I married him." She never had to make good on the pledge. In 1922, discouraged over her movie career, Florence committed suicide.

Piercing Terror. Eastman was only a part-time revolutionary. While editing the Liberator, he wrote poetry and worked on a scientific study of humor. "I am a very scattered person," he admits, who abhors a "monotonous consecration to a single principle." By 1921 he had a suspicion that Soviet Russia was not for him, and the next year he went to Russia to get a closer look. He was first disillusioned on the Paris train to Moscow. The youthful proletarian porter hinted that he wanted a tip: "This hurt my feelings deeply. There was no tipping in my Utopia; no such indecent exposure of class relations was tolerable." What he saw elsewhere in Russia did not reassure him, and when his hero Lenin died early in 1924, he was on the verge of a mental breakdown. He had bouts of "sheer piercing terror," which could only be relieved by placing a sack of ice over his heart. But Russian women cheered him up. Eliena Krylenko, the saucy secretary of Maxim Litvinov, shared his bed and taught him Russian.

Attending the 13th Communist Party Congress in Moscow in 1924, Eastman witnessed the humiliation of Trotsky by the Stalinists. "In God's name," he implored the temporizing Trotsky, "why don't you peel off your coat and roll up your sleeves and sail in and clean them up? If you don't make it now, you'll never make it." After the Congress, Eastman decided to leave Russia and asked Eliena to go with him. In order to secure a passport, Eliena had to marry Eastman. It was against both their principles, but they went through with it.

Back in New York, Eastman found himself a pariah among his radical friends for writing a book criticizing Stalin. All through the 1920s, and '30s. he fought a lonely battle against Stalinism, while translating Trotsky's works into English. "It saddens me now," he says, "to see how much of my life force was expended in ephemeral polemics with minds controlled by the Kremlin."

Writing for Millions. To many readers, Eastman's autobiography may come as a startling voice from the past. The battles of the Red Decade have been forgotten, and Eastman himself gave up radicalism for respectability as long ago as 1942 when he joined the Reader's Digest as a "roving editor." "I might be, from the standpoint of pure esthetics, a demiprostitute," he writes, "but I have thought of it as teaching when writing for these millions." Nowadays, at 82, he does nothing more shocking than some nude bathing on the isolated beaches of Martha's Vineyard, where he spends his summers.

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