Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Having seen Jennychen recently, Mohr and Möhme also knew that she’d been having her own health problems that wouldn’t be helped by a long journey. Tussy assured Jennychen that she and Lenchen had a great deal of support: ‘Engels is of a kindness and devotion that baffle description. Truly there is not another like him in the world – in spite of his little weaknesses.’16 Family friend Madame Lormier wrote offering to come and help, and Tussy’s friend Clementina sat up with Möhme to let Tussy and Lenchen get some sleep. ‘Isn’t it kind of people to take such an interest?’17

  Starting her theatrical coaching, continuing her work at the British Museum, regular correspondence; all these melted into the shadows. Tussy kept going, stamina being one of her strong points when looking after others rather than herself. She was relieved when Laura arrived from Paris. Where Tussy colluded with her father in shielding Jennychen from the truth about the health of their parents, Laura was characteristically frank and brusque:

  Möhme is slowly growing worse. She can scarcely be thinner or weaker than she is, but her spirits are undying. You do wrong to fret so much about her separation from her grandchildren. At this time of day their presence here could do very little for her: she is unhappily too far gone to derive much comfort from the prattle and the pretty naughtiness of children.18

  Undercurrents of the animosity Laura felt towards Tussy surface during these troubled times. What was probably Möhme’s last letter failed to reach Jennychen: ‘It had cost her such an effort to write and she had put so much into it to which she looked for an answer from you that the loss of the letter is irremediable.’19 With sisterly spite, Laura implied that Tussy, ‘into whose hands it was placed before being put into an envelope’, was responsible for forgetting to post this important ‘last letter’.20

  Nevertheless Laura’s extra pair of hands gave Tussy respite to look again to her own recovery. She took a course of iron prescribed by Dr Donkin and followed his orders to go more regularly for Turkish baths and get out more. Laura returned to France as soon as Marx was sufficiently improved to be up and out of bed for a few hours a day.

  James Murray, general editor of the Oxford New English Dictionary, had contracted Tussy to do some work on the project just as Marx fell ill. A part-time maidservant, Sarah, was now taken on to help Lenchen, and on the days Sarah came to Maitland Park Road Tussy was able to grab two or three hours’ work in the Museum, working at great speed, and enjoying the walk there and back. She was grateful to Murray for waiting until she could resume work for the dictionary. ‘You don’t know how many people – most far better qualified to do the work than I am – try to get what I’ve been doing, and if I once give it up I may whistle for something else.’21

  By November Möhme barely rose from her couch in the front room; ‘in the small room next to it Mohr was also confined to his bed,’ Tussy recalled, sorrowful to see ‘these two, so much accustomed to one another, so closely allied to each other’, no longer in each other’s company as much as they wished to be.22 Towards the end of November, Marx rallied. Tussy remembered very clearly the last time her parents were able to be together:

  Never shall I forget the morning when he felt strong enough to go into dear mother’s room. They were young once more together – she a loving girl and he an adoring youth who together entered on their life – not an old man wrecked by sickness and a dying old woman who took leave of each other for life.23

  Jenny Marx died on Friday 2 December 1881, with her husband, Tussy and Lenchen by her side. In her last hour she said many things, but they could not hear them. The last intelligible word she spoke was to Marx – ‘good’. The General came immediately. When they were alone, he said to Tussy, ‘Mohr is dead too.’ She ‘resented’ these words, but recognised, ‘it was really so’.24

  Tussy and Lenchen washed Möhme’s body and laid her out. Visitors came to say goodbye over the weekend. Through the midwinter chill of the Sunday night, Tussy kept lamplit vigil with her mother. In the silence of the dark hours, she wrote to her eldest sister as she gazed on their mother’s corpse:

  Oh! Jenny, she looks so beautiful now. Dollie when she saw her said her face was quite transfigured – her brow was absolutely smooth – just as if some gentle hand had smoothed away every line and furrow, while the lovely hair seems to form a sort of glory round her head. Tomorrow her funeral will be. I do dread it – but of course Papa cannot go. He must not yet leave the house, and I am glad of this in every way.25

  Tussy enclosed a lock of her mother’s glory in this requiem letter: ‘It is as soft and beautiful as a girl’s.’26

  Möhme was buried at Highgate Cemetery on 5 December, near to her grandson Charles Longuet, in what Marx described as the section of the damned (unconsecrated).27 The General delivered the eulogy and, in accordance with Jenny’s wishes, there was no priest. A few days before she died the nurse had asked her ‘if anything ceremonial had been neglected?’ Möhme fixed the nurse with a steely look. There will be no ceremony, she answered, ‘We are no such external people.’28

  ‘If ever there was a woman whose greatest happiness lay in making others happy, this was she,’29 said the General at her graveside. Letters of condolence streamed in from around the world, in chorus with their homage to this spirit of selflessness. Former friends and comrades now estranged or outright enemies put aside hostilities and sent their condolences as well. ‘In her,’ wrote a bitter opponent to his once-friend Marx, ‘nature has destroyed its own masterpiece, for in my whole life I have never encountered another such spirited and amiable woman.’30 Library, deeply shaken, wrote to Marx celebrating Jenny’s ‘gallantry’: ‘that I did not lose myself in London, body and soul, I owe in great measure to her.’31

  Marx reflected on these expressions of appreciation of ‘Möhmchen’s spirit of truthfulness and deep sensitivity, rarely found in such conventional communications. I explain it on the ground that everything about her was natural and genuine, artless and unaffected; hence the impression she made on third persons as vital and luminous.’32 Jenny von Westphalen and Karl Marx were the loves of each other’s lives. Marx and Lenchen had lost their best friend.

  On 29 December, instructed by Dr Donkin, Tussy and Marx set out for Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. It was colder than London and rained continually. Marx’s health prevented him from venturing out. They had comfortable rooms, a soothing view of the sea and hills33 and the landlady was a good cook, but both Tussy and Marx were sick and raw with grief. Sleep eluded her, and she was loath to try again the ‘various drugs’ she had taken recently; as she revealed to Jennychen: ‘it is not much better, after all, than dram-drinking, and is almost if not quite as injurious.’34

  Tussy felt too ill to read, write or do anything and, she admitted to Jennychen, ‘seeing how anxious I am to be able to look after Papa . . . was terribly afraid of breaking down altogether’,35 as she had done before. Marx was anxious and scolding by turns, as well he might be. He wanted to buck her up; she felt guilty, ‘as if I “indulged” in being ill at the expense of my family’.36 Jennychen wished that Laura had gone with their father instead, as he needed a more even-tempered companion. Acutely ill and without childcare, Jennychen couldn’t come herself.

  Worried by the tone of Tussy’s letters, Clementina Black, Ernest Radford and Dollie Maitland discussed how they could help her. Ernest rushed to Maitland Park Road and begged Lenchen to go to Ventnor – but she couldn’t abandon the house and pets. Instead well-intentioned Dollie turned up uninvited. Ungrateful and annoyed by the intervention, Tussy dismissed the assistance: ‘I wished they had let me alone.’37 Bored, Dollie tried to gossip with Marx. ‘She tells Papa that she believes me to be secretly married and a lot of other cock and bull stories, that do far more honour to her imagination than her veracity.’38 Marx of course instantly shared this with Tussy, who was disappointed by Dollie’s meddling. More distressing to Marx were Dollie’s lurid descriptions of Tussy’s ‘horrible’ hysterical symptoms at night, about which he wrot
e anxiously to Engels.39 In fact Tussy was perfectly aware of the nature of her disorder:

  What neither Papa nor the doctors nor anyone will understand is that it is chiefly mental worry that affects me. Papa talks about me having ‘rest’ and ‘getting strong’ before I try anything and won’t see that ‘rest’ is the last thing I need – and that I should be more likely to ‘get strong’ if I have some definite plan and work than to go on waiting and waiting.40

  Deferral of starting her theatrical training, inaction, self-sacrifice to her family, lack of her own money and, above all, the recognition through grief that her mother’s true talents were ultimately unrealised; all these were the cause of Tussy’s nervous symptoms: ‘I am not young enough to lose more time in waiting – and if I cannot do this soon it will be no use to try at all.’41

  Dollie’s seeming inopportuneness was perhaps more calculating than Tussy admitted. Her freethinking friends had a shrewd understanding of her feelings about her overlong engagement to the now absent Lissagaray. On the eve of her twenty-seventh birthday Tussy wrote an explanatory letter to Jennychen:

  For a long time I have tried to make up my mind to break off my engagement. I could not bring myself to do it – he has been very good, and gentle, and patient with me – but I have done it now. Not only that the burden had become too heavy – I had other reasons (I can’t write them – it would take so long, but when I see you I will tell you) – and so at last I screwed my courage to the sticking place.42

  Perhaps not the most tactful of her Shakespearean allusions.

  Tussy stressed that Lissa was blameless and asked Jennychen to try and see him sometimes and treat him kindly as a family friend. For herself, Tussy hoped she and Lissa would continue the best of friends – there’s a repetitious fiddling on this string of friendship that suggests deep guilt on Tussy’s part for the break-up. Though it was ‘a terrible struggle’, Tussy was certain the decision was right: ‘. . . we must each of us, after all, live our own life – and much and hard as I have tried I could not crush out my desire to try something.’43 She was optimistic that there was still time for her; on account of her lifelong intimacy with cats, she believed that she had nine lives instead of one.

  Tussy was galvanised by the death of her mother. She’d reached the limit of her endurance of living her life for other people, and had made the stark realisation that her time could now be wholly consumed by looking after her father, much as she loved him. Where the letters of condolence praising Möhme for her exemplary selflessness were gentle consolation for Marx, they appalled and depressed Tussy, spurring her to choose uncertain independence over the loving subjection of marriage. She made herself an inventory of good resolutions for her twenty-seventh birthday and felt that if she kept but half of them for the coming years she would do well:

  I mean to try hard by dint of hard work to make something more and better of my life than it has heretofore been. After all work is the chief thing. To me at least it is a necessity. That’s why I love even my dull Museum drudgery. You see I’m not clever enough to live a purely intellectual life, nor am I dull enough to be content to sit down and do nothing.44

  Marx and Engels knew that she wasn’t, in fact, dull enough to live a purely intellectual life. Tussy needed action and to put ideas to the practical test. She longed to be able to make all this understandable to her adored father – ‘How I love him no-one can know’ – but struggled with her guilt over a sense of abandoning him in his grief: ‘I can’t explain to him.’45 Jennychen took the hint, and wrote to their father directly on Tussy’s behalf, informing him clearly of the situation.

  With the mediation of her elder sister, Marx came to understand Tussy’s problem. He expressed his conviction to Engels that no medicine, change of scene or air could cure her sickness; as he now realised, what he could do for her was support and enable her ‘to do as she wishes and let go through her theatrical lessons at Madame Jung’ – his wry moniker for Elizabeth Vezin, formerly Mrs Young. Marx would not ‘for anything in the world wish that the child should imagine herself to be sacrificed on the family altar in the form of the “nurse” of an old man’.46 And it was easier for him to stand down now that he knew that Tussy was no longer going to sacrifice her future to another man. The end of Tussy’s engagement to Lissagaray was to everyone’s satisfaction. Tussy of course could not admit for a moment that her father had been right all along; he was loving enough not to say I told you so.

  Laura and Paul had never liked Lissa, and Jennychen, who now heartily regretted her own marriage, thought Tussy had made the right decision: ‘these Frenchmen at the best of times make pitiable husbands.’47

  Tussy’s new life resolutions got off to a flying start. On the day of her birthday she and Marx headed home so she could give a recital in London. Her performances of Pied Piper and Thomas Hood’s Bridge of Sighs – the tragedy of a homeless young woman who loses hope and drowns herself – were a triumph. ‘I must tell you that I got on capitally on Tuesday and was “called” after the Pied Piper but as that is very long – it takes 25 minutes to do and I only bowed and would not take an encore – but after the Bridge of Sighs I had to take one and did.’48 Best of all, she earned a handsome £2 for her performance.

  In February Tussy and Marx went to visit Jennychen and the grandchildren in Argenteuil, from where Marx went on to Algiers after a week – alone. On the day Tussy returned to London Lissa gallantly called at the Longuets and asked if he could please see her off at Gare St Lazare that evening. They had dinner at a station bistro. Lissa expressed his heartbreak and regret but understood he could not hold her and did not try to change her mind. They parted friends. Tussy had acted for the best, Jennychen said, and had ‘a narrow escape’ from marrying a man who, she was sure, would never have made her happy. She didn’t miss the opportunity to harp on her old theme: ‘French husbands are not worth much at the best of times – and at the worst – well, the less said the better.’49 She sounded just like their mother.

  Whatever Tussy’s feelings about the end of her affair with Lissa when her train pulled away from Gare St Lazare that evening, any chance to brood was prevented by a colourful fellow passenger in the ‘dames seules’ compartment who distracted her for the journey home.50 She asked to borrow a corkscrew from Tussy, who didn’t happen to have one to hand. Her travelling companion then proceeded to gouge out the cork from her brandy bottle with a pair of manicure scissors, downing the whole contents tumbler by tumbler. As the train didn’t stop between Rouen and Dieppe, the sot heartily ‘relieved herself’ in the carriage – leading Tussy to vow she would never again travel in a ladies-only compartment.

  Back home, Eleanor energetically embraced her new freedom. She was busy once again with the New Shakespeare Society and devilling at the British Museum doing research and bibliographic work for Furnivall. At last, her eagerly anticipated training with Elizabeth Vezin began. She went to the theatre at every opportunity, queuing for cheap tickets to sit in the gods, studying intently the performances of women actors. She loved the new Romeo and Juliet at the Lyceum: ‘I have never seen a Shakespearean play so satisfactorily played “all round”.’51 But she was very disappointed by Ellen Terry’s Juliet, ‘charming in the early scenes – comedy scenes to say – Ellen Terry gets weaker and weaker as the tragic element appears till in the potion scene she collapses altogether.’52 The question of how to perform Juliet was of great interest to Tussy, ‘as since my return from Paris I’ve been grinding at Juliet with Mrs Vezin. She seems extremely pleased with it – and says, despite my absolute ignorance of stage business she would like me to try it publicly.’53

  But was it Ellen Terry or the absurdity of an adult woman at the height of her powers having to play a star-crossed pubescent teenager in love that so disappointed Tussy? Her criticisms of Terry reveal the accuracy of Vezin’s observation on her absolute ignorance of the stage business – she didn’t yet understand the challenges of being ‘an actress’. Of having to act out subor
dination and secondary roles on stage as well as living them, daily, off-stage; of being visibly silenced on stage by the greater parts for male actors whilst having to make do with being given silly lines, madness, machinations and clichés to perform. On stage and off, man’s role was hero or busy villain; woman’s, sweet server or some variant of deranged or power-hungry lunatic. Ellen Terry understood her position perfectly well, famously remarking, ‘ “And one man in his time plays many parts.” (And so does a woman!)’ Terry knew what Tussy would discover: though many and varied, they were rarely the best parts.

  Had they the opportunity to discuss Terry’s career, Virginia Woolf might have explained to Eleanor that Terry was often subverting her roles and their ‘silly words’, gathering to her the resentful compliance of the women in her audience, who could detect the whispered presence of forbidden, bigger, stronger roles in their real lives. It was Ellen Terry who inspired Woolf’s portrait of Edith Craig in Between the Acts:

  ‘What a small part I’ve had to play! But you’ve made me feel I could have played . . . Cleopatra!’ ‘I might have been – Cleopatra,’ Miss Le Trobe [Edith Craig] repeated, ‘You’ve stirred in me my unacted part, she meant.’54