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NY Times September 23, 2011
At Home With Karl Marx
By SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
LOVE AND CAPITAL
Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution
By Mary Gabriel
Illustrated. 707 pp. Little, Brown Company. $35.
“I first encountered the Marx family story in the back of a London
magazine,” Mary Gabriel writes in the opening line of her intimate
account of Karl Marx and his family. It is not a reassuring start for
the reader, particularly when the publisher promises a book that
uncovers “the unyielding love that bound together a man and woman in the
midst of history’s whirlwind.” Gabriel should try to have whoever came
up with that one fired.
The history of Marx the man, father, husband and journalist is dramatic
enough to require no overwriting, and indeed “Love and Capital” is a
huge, often gripping book. It gives an entertaining and balanced
portrait of Marx, Engels, their colorful milieu of exiles, freaks and
revolutionaries, and the little-known Marx family, dominated by Karl’s
political obsession. It also details illicit love affairs, the deaths of
children and financial struggles, all based on vast research and
narrated with empathetic passion. At the same time, it is too long by
200 pages and often undermined by flagrantly purple throbbings, minor
mistakes and portentous overegging.
In the prologue we learn that London “signaled like a beacon in the
black and roiling North Sea waters”; for us English pedants, the city
stands on the Thames. One sentence ploddingly reads: “In rooms
throughout England, men of vision were similarly hard at work.” Marx is
described as “a man-child,” whose mind is “as hard and brilliant as a
diamond.” Emperor Napoleon III, a shrewd politician whose career may
have ended in disaster but who managed to dominate France and to some
extent Europe for 20 years, is said by Gabriel to have had “the placid
face of a dimwit.”
Gabriel, the author of a biography of Victoria Woodhull, argues that
Marx’s private life is especially relevant now, because in 2008 “as I
moved from research to writing, belief in the infallibility” of
capitalism “began to waver,” making Marx’s analysis seem “more prescient
and compelling.” But this is surely an argument for a new work on
Marxism, not on his private life. No one should disagree with Plutarch’s
view that personality matters in history, but Gabriel writes in her
introduction that without the women in Marx’s life, “there would have
been no Karl Marx, and without Karl Marx the world would not be as we
know it.” Is that really true? Did the Dickensian facts of Marx’s family
life, no matter how delicious, change the world?
In fact, “Love and Capital” is enjoyable not so much because of any
brisk analysis of Marxist theory that it provides or its endless catalog
of political feuding, but because of the details of family life and
family politics that Gabriel offers up — her vivid portrait of a
struggling, obsessional bohemian intellectual in the capitals of
mid-19th-century Europe.
Gabriel’s heroine is certainly Marx’s wife, a beautiful aristocrat. As
the author puts it: “Jenny von Westphalen was the most desirable young
woman in Trier,” so well connected that her brother later became
Prussian interior minister even while Marx was planning the downfall of
the reactionary kingdoms of Europe.
Jenny remains her own person as she copes with the mountainous
selfishness and self-regard of her husband. When they have sex before
they actually marry, she writes to him: “I can feel no regret. When I
shut my eyes very tightly, I can see your blessed smiling eyes. . . . Oh
Karl . . . I am happy and overjoyed. . . . Each happy hour I lived
through again.” Marx may have been brooding, wild, intolerant and
implacable in his political feuds, treating enemies with contempt, but
as Gabriel describes him, he also loved dancing, luxury and gossip, and
was attractive to women and men alike. Even when he was immersed in the
interminable arcane economics of Marxism, he managed to maintain a
quality of wisdom and modernity: he wisely commented that “children must
bring up their parents,” and he valued Christianity — that opium of the
people — because it taught adults to love children.
Jenny always supported him: “Do not suppose that I am bowed down by
these petty sufferings. . . . I am among the happiest and most favored
few in that my beloved husband, the mainstay of my life, is still at my
side.” And so we follow the couple from Cologne to Paris to Brussels,
back and forth until they find their final home in the attics of London
and then immortal rest in Highgate Cemetery.
The marriage may have been happy and passionate, but it was cursed by
the tragedies of infant mortality, financial
