The Years of Max Eastman

In The Improper Bohemians: Greenwich Village in its Heyday (Dutton, $5.00), Allen Churchill offers a slick summation of the careers of two veterans of the old Village “Mabel Dodge Evenings” of 1913. Of Walter Lippmann, he says: “In his late sixties… with renewed sharpness and liberalism, Lippmann has returned to the spirit of Mabel Dodge days.” To which Mr. Churchill adds, with just a hint of smugness: “In contrast, Max Eastman’s life parabola since the Masses has led him to the conservative Reader’s Digest and to… the reactionary National Review.”

The superficiality of Mr. Churchill’s judgment is of a piece with his book, which glides, entertainingly enough, over the surface of a half-century of intellectual history. For, as Max Eastman’s own Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends (Farrar, $4.75) proves, lives are seldom “parabolic” matters insofar as their spirits or essences are concerned. It is not men that change, it is institutions. The truth is that Walter Lippmann has never cared particularly for freedom except as a hypostatized concept. Max Eastman, on the other hand, has freedom and individualism in his bones. The two men have remained precisely where they were in 1913. What has happened in forty-five years of wars, revolutions and economic upheavals, is that the isms which Mr. Eastman once supported have shifted practical ground. Where socialism once held out a false promise of freedom, it has now become a tissue of arbitrary restraints even where it is practiced in its mildest forms.

JC

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John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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In The Improper Bohemians: Greenwich Village in its Heyday (Dutton, $5.00), Allen Churchill offers a slick summation of the careers of two veterans of the old Village “Mabel Dodge Evenings” of 1913. Of Walter Lippmann, he says: “In his late sixties… with renewed sharpness and liberalism, Lippmann has returned to the spirit of Mabel Dodge days.” To which Mr. Churchill adds, with just a hint of smugness: “In contrast, Max Eastman’s life parabola since the Masses has led him to the conservative Reader’s Digest and to… the reactionary National Review.”

The superficiality of Mr. Churchill’s judgment is of a piece with his book, which glides, entertainingly enough, over the surface of a half-century of intellectual history. For, as Max Eastman’s own Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends (Farrar, $4.75) proves, lives are seldom “parabolic” matters insofar as their spirits or essences are concerned. It is not men that change, it is institutions. The truth is that Walter Lippmann has never cared particularly for freedom except as a hypostatized concept. Max Eastman, on the other hand, has freedom and individualism in his bones. The two men have remained precisely where they were in 1913. What has happened in forty-five years of wars, revolutions and economic upheavals, is that the isms which Mr. Eastman once supported have shifted practical ground. Where socialism once held out a false promise of freedom, it has now become a tissue of arbitrary restraints even where it is practiced in its mildest forms.