Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  I really cannot think that he, a musician, could be responsible for the ‘comic songs’ sung. I am perfectly certain Comrade Reuss would never dream of having such songs sung at one of his own concerts, and I do not think he would say that was ‘good enough’ for mere Socialists, which he would not judge ‘good enough’ for a bourgeois audience.

  Tussy says that she feels utterly ashamed that the League should ask people to come and be inflicted with dull vulgarity. She cites the audience’s great enjoyment of the readings from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and other good quality comedy as evidence of their appreciation of genuine fun, but deplores the low-grade ‘comic effusions’:

  I like fun – any fun no matter how rough so it be wholesome – as well as any, but I fail to see fun in pure (or impure) and simple vulgarity. Brainless middle class cads may like this sort of thing: I don’t believe working men who have a real sense of humour do . . . I know, alas! that we can’t pretend to give grand Concerts: but let what we do give at least be of such a kind that we need not be ashamed of it, and do not let us say ‘anything will do’ for an audience because it is a poor and working-class one.35

  Eleanor championed good education and art as everyone’s entitlement. No one should talk down to another, in culture or in politics. She regularly objected to bread-and-circuses mentality, acting swiftly to try and root out and expose it when it appeared within the fraternal leadership. Eleanor was by dint of birth of the radical political elite, but she did not have an elite education. She knew the extent to which the majority of people were dependent upon the opportunities provided by public culture and entertainment to develop their artistic knowledge, pleasure and education.

  In November 1884 Eleanor and Edward collaborated with Bax, Morris and (new Fabian) GBS to put on a fundraising ‘Art Evening’ of entertainment at the Neumeyer Hall in Bloomsbury. Shaw played an opening Mendelssohn duet with Katherine Ina, Aveling recited from Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy and Morris read from his own poetic reworking of The Passing of Brynhild. The programme also included Fabian and amateur actress Theodora Wright reading from Eliot’s Adam Bede, and an overlong recital of Schumann’s Carnival by Bax that sent most of the audience to sleep before the interval.

  The rest of the evening’s programme was given over to Eleanor and Edward’s performance of In Honour Bound, a dramatic piece by a young playwright called Sydney Grundy. Lenchen, who was in the audience – as she was at all Tussy’s performances – reported to the General when she got home that the short play was a rather stylistically conventional piece that told ‘more or less their own history’.36 Telling, this compulsion of Eleanor’s to try and represent – explain publicly – her relationship with Edward, as if she sensed the concern and disapproval of others and as if she was defending Edward from the allegations of financial malpractice. Unseeing faith led her to think that others misunderstood who Edward Aveling really was, rather than realise her own self-delusional misunderstanding of the man with whom she thought she shared her life.

  At the end of January 1885 Eleanor, Edward and GBS again performed together at a fundraiser held at the Ladbroke Hall in Notting Hill. After a first half of music and recital, the second half of the programme featured Eleanor, Shaw and Edward taking the leads in a three-act play entitled Alone, co-written by John Simpson and Herman Merivale.

  Whilst getting up these amateur fundraiser performances in public halls around London, the Leaguers also took to open-air platforms for the more serious business of taking the fight for free speech to the streets. In good-humoured rivalry, the new Socialist League vied with the SDF over who could keep open the most open-air pitches in London.37 In order to draw good crowds, great attention was paid by both sides to programming these free speech events: good quality speakers, regularity, relevant topics of interest to the public were essential. Persistent hecklers and a police presence were a bonus. Open-air propaganda was vital for drumming up public support and debate and Eleanor, her colleagues quickly realised, was a gifted outdoor speaker with an ability to draw large, attentive crowds.

  As movement and momentum grew, so too did state interference. Dod Street in Limehouse, an old open-air site used for centuries by radicals and religious sects and now favoured by the SDF, became a focus of police harassment. Several SDF speakers were prosecuted for obstruction. One of these, Jack Williams, refused to pay his fine and was sentenced to a month’s hard labour. The League formally offered its support to the SDF and other radical organisations followed suit, including the Fabian Society, represented on this issue by Annie Besant. On 20 September 1885 a mass gathering at Dod Street moved a resolution protesting over the prosecutions against free speech. Eleanor was one of the twenty-seven speakers, ‘greatly applauded’ when she declared herself sure that this large assembly ‘would show the upper classes an example in the way of orderly conduct’.38 But as she spoke, police moved stealthily along the side of the street. Just as the meeting was closed and the crowds were dispersing, the police unexpectedly attacked, seizing banners, arresting banner-bearers and several other protesters, including William Morris.

  The following day, the eight detained were brought before Magistrate Saunders in the Thames Police Court, charged with obstruction or resisting arrest. Eleanor appeared as a witness for the defence, asserting the rights of free speech and stating that she intended to go to and speak at further meetings. Saunders reprimanded her for ‘impertinence’; Eleanor brushed him off and stated that of the many meetings in which she had participated, this had been one of the most orderly and quiet. The police, she said, had acted with great brutality without provocation.

  Saunders’s summing-up dished out sentences of hard labour and steep fines on all the defendants. Havoc broke out at these draconian sentences, spectators shouting ‘Shame’ from the gallery. The police suddenly charged at the people in court. Edward reported that the police ‘commenced an assault on all and sundry’, and that Eleanor and Morris were singled out for a particularly brutal thumping. The punch-up ended with Morris being re-arrested and Eleanor, who joined in the fighting, nevertheless appalled by the use of physical violence in the court.

  In July Commonweal started running advertisements for a summer series of ‘free evenings for the people’. Eleanor and Edward appeared on the bill of all these nights that Morris usually introduced with his prologue, Socialists at Play. Come autumn, Tussy suggested the Leaguers also put together a programme of free events and entertainment for children.

  She dreamed of being able to go and see Laura and the family in Paris for Christmas but she couldn’t afford it. Consolation for this disappointment arrived in the welcome form of her nine-year-old nephew Johnny Longuet, son of her dead sister Jennychen. It had taken Tussy nearly two years to persuade his father Charles to let him come for an extended visit and she was delighted. Prompted by having Johnny in her care, Tussy planned a Christmas that the motherless little boy could enjoy with hundreds of other children. She wrote to the League’s council with her proposal for the Christmas tree fund and a festival of light, reminding them that the origin of the Christmas festival pre-dated Christianity: ‘the beautiful old Pagan feast that celebrated the birth of light . . . is not Socialism the real “new birth” and with its light will not the old darkness of the earth disappear?’39

  Eleanor loved having Johnny staying with them at Great Russell Street but Edward showed no interest in the boy. He was irritated at no longer being the centre of Eleanor’s attention. The General and Lenchen, now both sixty-five (having been born just a month apart in 1820), thoroughly enjoyed Johnny’s visits to Regent’s Park Road. Just as he had done with Tussy as a child, the General gave Johnny lots of books to read and took him for long talking walks. Aunt Tussy established a routine of daily washing, school, homework and early nights with bedtime reading, none of which Johnny had at home.

  ‘We cannot too soon make children understand that Socialism means happiness,’40 Eleanor told the League council when describing her Christmas fest
ival. Out of context this sounds a little absurd and very ideological, but when read in the context of Tussy’s simultaneous preoccupation with Ibsen’s new play A Doll’s House, it makes startlingly good sense. Simultaneous to becoming treasurer of the ‘Tree Committee’ and working on the children’s light festival and Christmas party, Tussy was deeply immersed in organising the first performed reading of A Doll’s House in England.

  By agreement of all, Eleanor was to take the lead role as Nora Helmer and Edward would play her husband, Torvald Helmer. Famously, the play opens with a Christmas tree as the consummate symbol of Nora’s lightness of being and the unbearable heaviness of financial hardship in her foundering marriage.

  Nora enters in her outdoor winter coat, humming a tune and in high spirits, laden with parcels:

  Nora: Hide the Christmas Tree carefully, Helen. Be sure the children do not see it till this evening, when it is dressed.42

  Nora is summoned by Torvald, who calls her his ‘little squirrel’, ‘lark twittering’, ‘featherhead’, caging her firmly within flighty feminine diminutives before their conversation begins. A minute later husband and wife are engaged in a seemingly light-hearted marital argument about the need to economise. Torvald reprimands Nora for being spendthrift. She retorts that the children should have light and happiness for Christmas:

  Helmer: That is like a woman! But seriously, Nora, you know what I think about that. No debt, no borrowing. There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.42

  Eleanor and Edward had recently started drafting their treatise on the woman question from a socialist point of view. These words that Torvald says to Nora found their way into this pioneering work.

  On 26 December a group of London children who would otherwise have been without Christmas celebrations enjoyed a festival of food, light and fun at 13 Farringdon Hall, all raised on donations. The event was oversubscribed but, despite logistical pressures, Tussy was resolved that it was all worthwhile, ‘the fact that some 200 little ones enjoyed themselves is quite enough satisfaction.’43

  Nora Helmer would have agreed.

  15

  Nora Helmer, Emma Bovary and ‘The Woman Question’

  ‘Laziness is the root of all evil,’ said Tussy frequently.1 In this regard, she seemed to practise what she preached. Within the twelve months between the summers of 1885 and 1886 Tussy started and finished the first English translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; revised a new edition of Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune; put on the first performance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in England; championed the programming of art and education in the Socialist League; produced a body of journalistic work on prostitution and sex slavery; became a ghostwriter and finally completed the English translation of the first volume of Capital with Samuel Moore, Engels, Aveling, Lafargue and Longuet. If this were not sufficient, she and Edward completed and published ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’.

  Novelist and Francophile George Moore commissioned Eleanor to translate Madame Bovary for the radical English publisher Henry Vizetelly in the summer of 1885.2 She started in the autumn and delivered it to the publisher complete with introduction in May 1886. The original publication of the novel in France thirty years earlier had been the occasion of an obscenity trial at which Flaubert was acquitted. The dauntless Vizetelly published Flaubert, Maupassant, Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe in Britain, running the twin risks of commercial flops and prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. A few years later, in 1888, Vizetelly was to be tried for obscenity for publishing three Zola novels and served a three-month sentence in Holloway Prison. He died shortly afterwards.

  Famously, it took Flaubert a large part of his life to produce Madame Bovary; innumerable years of gestation and then five years writing at the rate of approximately a page a week. Eleanor had just shy of six months to produce her complete translation and she was unable to devote all her time to it. In her introduction, Tussy identifies three possible methods of translation: ‘genius’, ‘hack’ and ‘conscientious worker’. She puts herself in the last category, and then adumbrates ‘the weaknesses, shortcomings, the failures of my work’:3

  . . . but at least . . . I have neither suppressed nor added a line, a word . . . My work . . . I know is . . . pale and feeble by the side of the original . . . But . . . I do not regret having done this work; it is the best I could do.

  Having declared comprehensively its ‘faults’, Tussy concludes her introduction with satisfaction: ‘Yet if it induces some readers to go to that original, if it helps to make known to those who cannot study this work of one of the greatest French novelists after Balzac, I am content.’4 She was just pleased to get it done, as she wrote to Laura in April 1886: ‘I have (Lord be praised!) finished my translation of Madame Bovary. It has been work!’5 Work indeed to translate a novel where the lead character does not open her mouth to speak, to her dog, until the seventh chapter: ‘Pourquoi, mon Dieu! Me suis-je mariée?’ A question Eleanor might well have asked her own pets, now numbering several cats and a dog.

  Tussy’s challenge was to translate, to a tight deadline, a writer who himself spent whole days – sometimes weeks – seeking a single word to get the right one, and whose masterpiece is structured through ironic cliché, banality and romantic convention. Then there was the question of how to translate le style indirect libre – free indirect speech – in a way that made this radical new style of writing aesthetically meaningful to English readers.

  The character of Emma Bovary haunted Tussy. ‘But for her surroundings,’ she wrote in her introduction, ‘she would be a monster and an impossibility.’ Tussy is thoughtfully ambivalent about her assessment of Emma: ‘She is foolish, but there is a certain nobleness about her too. She is never mercenary.’6 Of course, Tussy would never judge harshly a person who gave her last sou to a blind beggar. Emma’s problem of self-deception and falsification of her personality fascinated Tussy:

  Her life is idle, useless. And this strong woman feels there must be something to do – and she dreams. Life is so unreal to her that she marries Bovary thinking she loves him . . . She does her best to love ‘this poor wretch.’ In all literature there is perhaps nothing more pathetic than her hopeless effort to ‘make herself in love.’ And even after she has been false, how she yearns to go back to him, to something real, to a healthier, better love than she has known.7

  We can only imagine what Olive thought when she read this introduction and reflected on Tussy’s parallel self-delusion about her failing relationship with Edward, in which she felt inescapably trapped. Madame Bovary was an echo chamber in Tussy’s life. Flaubert famously identified himself with his novel’s heroine – ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ The construction uncannily mirrors Karl Marx’s dictum, ‘Tussy is me.’8

  The critical reception of Eleanor’s translation when it was published in August 1886 was, as ever, varied. Some reviewers forgot their objectivity on sight of her surname; others gave vent to their anti-French xenophobia. The Saturday Review referred contemptuously to ‘Mrs Aveling’s friends in France’,9 a jibe at both Tussy’s family and her well-known socialist internationalism. The Athenaeum summarised her effort as done ‘with more zeal than discretion’.10 In the twentieth century Vladimir Nabokov fulminated at excessive length about Eleanor’s version, as he did about all the others, but then chose hers as his set text when teaching the novel – perhaps an acknowledgement of Eleanor’s hope that her work helped to make a great French writer accessible to those unable to read it in the original. And for many years it remained the only English version available.

  Writer William Sharp was amongst significant critics who judged Eleanor to have done a highly creditable job. Reviewing her translation in the Academy, Sharp reminded readers that Flaubert was a ‘pre-eminently . . . untranslatable writer’,11 and praised Eleanor for producing a ‘translation that is at once faithful and entirely natural’.12

  Tussy did
most of the work on Madame Bovary and Lissagaray’s History of the Commune in a house she and Edward rented temporarily in Kingston-upon-Thames. They first went to Kingston the previous December, in 1885, leaving Johnny Longuet behind to spend the rest of the holiday at Regent’s Park Road. Lenchen and the General were surprised that Tussy left her Johnny behind – she’d fought with her brother-in-law Charles for two years to get him to agree to her nephew’s visit. The reason emerged over the next few months: Edward didn’t want the boy around any longer. Tussy remonstrated. They fought and Edward threatened to leave her; Tussy sadly relented, and Johnny was sent to Uncle Engels and Lenchen. Children had become a vexed subject between Eleanor and Edward, as she confided to Olive. Edward didn’t feel ready to have children. Tussy did. Children, Edward reassured her, would happen – like their legal marriage – in the future.

  ‘We get more work done here really than in London, and get some fresh air besides,’13 Tussy wrote of Kingston. Her revision of Lissagaray’s History of the Commune, by now acknowledged as the definitive eyewitness account of this period of French history, was deftly done. She still had a good rapport with Lissa and understood intimately his relationship to his book. Lissa’s lifework, which remains to this day the ur text of French Communard history, was the place where he tried to come to terms with his trauma at the failure of the Commune and his own role in the killing.

  In so many understandable ways Lissa could never quite move beyond those fifteen minutes of fear and horror alone on the last barricade, as his ammunition ran out and he was left, finally, with only a bayonet to defend himself. Lissa was a formidable soldier of the Commune but had the courage and honesty to speak the truth about all sides. He clearly highlighted the errors of his party and exposed the fatal weaknesses and failures of the revolution whilst supporting its aims.