Mohr was Freddy’s father. Not Engels.
Tussy’s immediate and total psychological resistance to this revelation was a measure of the blow. Her denial was swift and easy: the cause of the revelation was Louise Freyberger. Lies, more lies. It had to be. Tussy seized on their enmity to dismiss the news as more Freebooting calumny against the Marx family. Sam took her hand, and gently, with reluctance, handed her the statement he had witnessed, signed in his presence by Engels.
Sam explained how Louise, encouraged by Bebel, her husband and others, challenged Engels to reveal the truth about Freddy’s parenthood. Inveigling was always her mode. Why should Engels die with his name besmirched by the accusation that he had abandoned a son to foster parents and given him none of the opportunities his great wealth could buy? Surely Freddy deserved to have the truth known about him and to take his rightful place as one of Marx’s children – his only son. Louise assured Engels she had only his and Freddy’s best interests at heart. But her intentions were irrelevant. Amongst Engels’s last thoughts was the knowledge that Louise had outmanoeuvred him and would reveal the secret. The story was out and he had to respond.
Aveling, standing behind Eleanor’s chair, looked on with interest.
Eleanor went immediately to London and straight to the General’s bedside. The story was a gross lie and she would hear Engels say so himself. But it was too late. By the time she arrived the General could no longer speak. His throat swollen, in agonising pain, Engels answered Tussy’s question by writing on a slate, with great effort, in the affirmative. Both beyond the power of speech, they stared at each other, mute with grief and tears. All Engels could do was confirm the truth. He couldn’t tell her anything more.
This was Tussy’s last meeting with the General – her second father and only remaining parent. She left in shock and returned to Kent. The next day Engels became unconscious. Two nights later, on the evening of 5 August, he died. To Louise’s credit she wrote immediately to Tussy that night, telling her that she had left his room briefly, ‘was not away for 5 minutes, and when I came back, all was over.’57 But all was very far from over.
Tussy and Edward joined the mourners at the Waterloo Necropolis on the morning of Saturday 10 August. Following the General’s instruction, his funeral was private and attended only by personal friends, ‘or such political representatives as were also his personal friends’.58 Eleanor wrote many of the eighty or so invitations. Amongst the short speeches, Aveling and Lafargue gave tributes. Eleanor and Laura did not give eulogies. Nor did Freddy Demuth, who stood with Tussy, Johnny Longuet and the Lafargues as the hearse steam train bearing Engels’s simple coffin pulled out of Waterloo’s platform number 1. This single track owned by the London and South Western Railway ran to the single destination of Brookwood Cemetery and the Woking Crematorium, where Engels was cremated.
No one knows what passed between Tussy, Freddy and Laura that day or in the weeks following. If Louise Freyberger hadn’t forced the situation, Engels might well have taken the secret of Freddy’s paternity to his grave. Some said he wanted to clear his name of the imputation that he had abandoned the son he fathered with Helen Demuth in their youthful Soho heydays. Others believed that he was angry with Marx for saddling him with the lie. Both claims are persuasive but entirely misjudge Engels’s lifework and his love for Marx and all his family. If Jenny, Karl and Helen had kept the secret, so could he. Engels never deviated from his dedication to Marx, in life or death, or from his belief that true greatness belonged to Marx alone.
He was completely wrong of course. Without Friedrich Engels, there would have been no Karl Marx, and vice versa. This was the true intellectual and economic dialectic, as Marx well knew. Looked at from this perspective, both were father to the ideas of Marxism. Besides the magnitude of sharing this creation, what was the difficulty with exchanging responsibility for the awkward paternity of a son? Men who were great friends did it all the time. The fatal error made by both benign patriarchs was to imagine that their concealment of Freddy’s true paternity would protect their daughters – Eleanor, Laura and Jenny.
Simultaneously, Tussy lost both Engels and her idealisation of her father. It was the fact of not knowing, not the deed, that stunned her. If Freddy’s paternity had not been kept a secret, it would just have been a part of who her father Karl Marx was. Instead, Tussy was confronted by one of the tattiest clichés in the misunderstanding of morality: the truth brushed under the carpet.
On the morning of 27 August Tussy, Bernstein, Lessner and Aveling boarded the train to Eastbourne with the urn containing Engels’s ashes. They hired a rowing boat and pilot and, in accordance with the General’s wishes, rowed some miles out to sea from Beachy Head and released his ashes to the wind and the waves.
Tussy stepped ashore to a life where the past now seemed another country. She’d lost two fathers and gained a half-brother.
22
The Den
In answer to the request that she write an obituary of Engels for the French journal Devenir Social, Eleanor swiftly revised the memoir she’d written for his seventieth birthday and sent it off. In consultation with Laura, she made arrangements with Engels’s lawyer, Arthur Wilson Crosse, to work through innumerable matters of financial administration that were pending after the probate of the General’s will was granted on 28 August.
After Engels died, Eleanor and Laura issued a public call for Marx’s correspondence. They adopted the public letter form used by the sons of Darwin and Ernest Jones, which Tussy said was ‘the best for England’. She sent the letter to all the British papers and to the Press Association. It was published in almost every country in the world, in many languages:
May we appeal through your columns to all those who may have any correspondence of Karl Marx? We are anxious to get as complete a collection of our father’s letters as possible with a view to publication. Any letters or documents that may be sent will, of course, be taken the utmost care of, and if the senders wish it, returned as soon as they have been copied. We should carry out any instruction that the possessors and senders of the letters might give us as to the omission of any passage they might desire not to have published.1
Eleanor then steamed up to Burnley for a few days to honour a long-standing engagement to give three lectures. Tussy spent much time meeting, speaking and lecturing around Lancashire in 1895 and the years following. Lancashire was a heartland of progressive union organisation, a reaction to what Germans called ‘Manchesterismus’ – the free-trade orthodoxy of Victorian Britain.2 Manchester was also known as Cottonopolis, reflecting the dominance of the cotton textile industry in Lancashire. In Yorkshire, wool production dominated, but the county also had more collieries. Male workers predominated in coal mining, women and children in the textile industry. Consequently, Lancashire had a proportionately higher number of women and children in the workforce than Yorkshire. The Lancashire women textile workers were radical and organised and as a result Tussy was in demand in the county.
Tussy’s reputation now rode ahead of her. She wrote to William Diack teasing him about his admission that he’d been nervous about meeting her: ‘You said you were afraid of me. I didn’t know I had such a formidable reputation . . . ([James] Leatham said he expected an “intellectual iceberg”, and seemed relieved to find I wasn’t an iceberg, or intellectual.)’3 She imprinted on Diack with the intensity experienced by so many others who met her: ‘I can see again in my mind’s eye her slightly Jewish cast of features, and her fine dark eyes glowing with the enthusiasm of perfervid faith.’4 Her lectures, he said, were ‘as sound in the “fundamentals” as the Rocks of Rubislaw themselves’.5
The Burnley lecture series was followed soon after by a week-long speaking tour around Scotland, accompanied by Aveling, where they addressed SDF and ILP branches in Edinburgh, Dundee, Glasgow, Blantyre and Greenock. ‘Edinburgh is assuredly, with the possible exception of Prague, the most beautiful town I have seen (the ville lumière included).’6 The day o
f their return Tussy sent off a hasty note in shortform to Louise:
What h u d abt the bk cases etc. Are they with u? Or h u, as WA suggested transferred Ø to country? In former case I’ll get Ø moved at once; v. latter, let me know & wht 2 pay & who 2=Cr or who.7
Her urgent mail to Louise about the bookcases was just one of hundreds of disputatious notes and letters flying between them since probate was granted on the General’s will. Louise sent letters to Eleanor on matters so diverse as the inadequacy of her receipt for the handing-over of Marx’s manuscripts, accusing her of failing to return the originals of letters she had been commissioned to type and, crucially, asking what she was to do about Eleanor’s third of the General’s wine collection? Should it be forwarded to the country, stored at the wine merchant’s cellars or sold outright? Eleanor must pay for transporation and/or storage.
Six days later, Ludwig wrote to Tussy informing her that she would greatly oblige himself and his wife by removing immediately ‘from our house . . . those articles which belong to you, viz. one armchair, three bookshelves, one bookcase, one newspaper shelf and seven framed photos and drawings’. If she couldn’t do this at once, Ludwig went on, they would deposit the items listed in her name at the Regent’s Park depository, at her expense.8 The armchair in question was the one Mohr had died in that Engels inherited. Now it was hers. Tussy had no space for this stuff in the tiny cottage at Orpington. Grumbling to Laura that Dr Freebooter now proved himself the ‘unmitigated cad’ she’d always thought him to be, she told her, ‘I’m having them stored until we find a house.’9
She’d been living there for barely two months but Green Street Green wasn’t working. It is ‘very pleasant’, Tussy told Karl Kautsky, but Orpington was ‘too far away from everyone and everything’,10 and the cottage damp and uninsulated. The rift with the Freebooters had drawn Eleanor and Kautsky back into their old intimacy and both welcomed the renewal of a friendship they had missed. She wanted to live closer to London, in ‘some convenient suburb’, but also daydreamed of building a commune of old friends. As she mused to Kautsky, ‘I have a grand scheme for you and the Bernsteins & ourselves to . . . live near one another.’11
Tussy and Edward ‘trudged mile upon mile’12 house-hunting. ‘We find that all the nice houses are either let or too dear and the “noble residences” we go to see are more often than not in some unspeakable slum.’13 Spoken like a true aspirant petit bourgeois. Often when a small house seemed suitable it turned out to be cheap and nastily built, ‘Or else a railway train ran through the garden’14 – or it was practically inaccessible from London. ‘Rents here,’ she complained to Laura, ‘are something fearful’:
If, however, we can find any really nice place, Crosse strongly advises buying instead of paying rent. Sometimes I feel like investing in a caravan (like Dr Gordon Stables) and living gipsy-like, anywhere.15
It’s a relief to catch this flash of Tussy’s nomadic gypsy disposition reasserting itself after all the snobby kvetching about nasty neighbourhoods and unspeakable slums. Dr Gordon Stables in his Leaves from the Log of a Gentleman Gipsy: in Wayside Camp and Caravan, published in 1891, recommended caravans as offering ‘the most healthful and fascinating of all modes of travel’. Stables wrote on a range of subjects, including dog-breeding, and health and happiness for wives – Tussy’s reference is an interesting insight into her browsing of popular books and magazines.
Arthur Wilson Crosse was the London lawyer who dealt with the probate of the General’s will, in consequence of which Eleanor took him on as her legal adviser. It took Crosse to point out to Tussy that with her portion of the capital legacy bequeathed by Engels she could now afford to buy her own house. Laura had worked this out immediately and was already looking for houses to buy in the suburbs of Paris, suited to Lafargue’s political profile and their desire for gardening and small-scale domestic farming. After death duties, distribution of bequests and all the other usual disbursements, Eleanor and Laura inherited approximately £7,645 each, a third of which they received on trust for Jenny’s children. This left them with a phenomenal £5,000 apiece.16 Everyone understood that the bulk of this legacy was to pay for Tussy and Laura’s time to archive the Nachlass, publish their father’s manuscripts and, in Tussy’s case, manage all aspects of his literary estate. Engels expected that Aveling and Lafargue would also contribute to this endeavour, their intellectual labours financially supported by his legacy. It was more money than Tussy had ever commanded. Managed judiciously, it was an inheritance sufficient to form the basis of her – and Edward’s – financial security for the rest of their lives. As the General intended, it would enable Eleanor to give up her British Museum hack work and clear her desk for the full-time work of transcribing, ordering, editing and publishing her father’s letters, papers and manuscripts.
No one understood the nature of capital better than Eleanor. She’d been weaned on its workings. Her father’s Great Book on the subject had been the formative foundational scripture of her childhood, alongside the Shakespeare family bible. Her parents, radical Forty-Eighters shaking off the shackles of their social upbringing, had no truck with accumulating their own capital. Fortunately, they had Engels who was willing to get his hands dirty doing that for them. They spent everything that ever came to them and never saved or invested. Property ownership never occurred to them. But Tussy was English and fathered by Engels as much as Marx. She didn’t go shopping for new clothes or shoes or handbags, or on extravagant spending sprees in new department stores buying the latest in furniture and interior design, eating at expensive, flashy restaurants and going on holidays and to European opera houses – all of which the Freebooters did conspicuously. Tussy looked for a house to buy, gave up her poorly paid freelance work and banked the rest until she had time to think and plan out its management properly. Edward, however, got what he asked for and, considering the money shared, she kept no account on him.
Alongside adjusting to the opportunity of private property ownership Tussy and Laura, much to their shared ironic amusement, had to make decisions about the selling of stocks and securities for the first time in their lives, in order to turn holdings into cash for the four Longuet children. Both Sam Moore and Crosse advised that liquidating to cash would be safer than transferring the holdings, as the Freybergers were raising objections and obstructing estimates of asset values on all of Engels’s bequests. The Duke and Duchess Freebooter, as Tussy now called them, were on a spree.
Whilst savagely arguing with Hermann Engels over whether he would be permitted to keep £300 of his brother’s money in Germany, the Duchess threw out all of the furniture Engels had bought them less than two years earlier for the new house and spent more than £300 on new furniture. They are ‘launching out in grand style’, Tussy told her sister, and ‘speak only with contempt’ of the General and what they made him pay.17
The legal arguments and pettifogging over Engels’s estate, of which Louise received the bulk as main beneficiary, was interminable. Moreover, although it was Louise who forced the issue of Freddy Demuth’s true paternity, claiming she felt so sorry for him, she made no provision whatsoever or acts of simple generosity – emotional or material – to alleviate Freddy’s exposure. As soon as Engels died, her apparently solicitous friendship for Freddy and Harry evaporated and they were never again invited to the house. Engels’s close friends and comrades, like Bernstein, were dismissed in similar fashion.
Tussy shared financial responsibility for her Longuet nephews and niece with Laura but the administration of publishers’ royalties, trust deeds and everything else related to Marx’s literary remains fell to her. As the General had taught her (these habits certainly did not come from her father), Tussy executed all this paperwork and accounting with prompt efficiency. She also took the precaution of muscling her way into the new Fort Freebooter on Regent’s Park Road and packing up Marx’s papers in two large chests that she took immediately by cab to the safe depository in Chancery Lane. Here they were
stored in a strongroom, locked with bespoke keys held only by Eleanor. The plan was that Laura would come over as soon as possible to start helping her sort and transcribe them.
Eleanor’s lecturing and touring commitments for the rest of 1895 took her on another trip around Lancashire towns, as well as Aberdeen, Bristol, Crewe and Lincoln. She kept her journalism going whilst on the road. At the invitation of George Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, Tussy had become the British correspondent for the liberal-leaning Russian journal Russkoye Bogatstvo – Russian Wealth. She thoroughly enjoyed contributing reports on Britain, covering political parties, social life and new trends in literature, arts and science. Her lively, concise and informative reportages included wide-ranging pieces on the Tories and the Liberal Unionists, the Factory Acts, unemployment, the May Day demonstration, current data on alcoholism, London poverty, the Oscar Wilde trial, and Clementina Black’s suffragette political novel The Agitator. She wrote also about the London County Council and the London School Boards and a mischievous piece on the lives and loves of her old sparring partner Annie Besant.
By early November, Laura had discovered and bought a house at auction. Situated at 20 Grande-Rue, Draveil (Seine-et-Oise), it was derelict and in need of massive renovation but boasted thirty rooms, outbuildings, an orange grove and a garden that stretched right into the fôret de Sénart. Tussy was still pounding the streets, finding ‘all the nice houses are too dear, and all the cheap ones are shoddy in shoddy neighbourhoods.’18 Just as she was feeling most glum about her fruitless house-hunting, she found her heart’s desire. It was the address that caught her eye and made her trek to the suburbs of south-east London. She joked with Laura: ‘the house we are about to buy . . . (Edward swears this is my only reason for buying it) is in JEWS Walk, Sydenham.’19
Eleanor Marx Page 44
