Word: eastman
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LOVE AND REVOLUTION, by Max Eastman. An adventure-filled autobiography by the first of the Red-struck young U.S. intellectuals to comprehend the terrors and cruelties of Stalin's Russia. Eastman's only regret at 82 is that he didn't crowd even more into his life...
...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...
...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...