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International Socialism, April/May 1971

 

Jill Branston

Distorted View

 

From International Socialism, No.47, April/May 1971, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Tussy is Me
Michael Hastings
Weiderfield and Nicholson £2

‘Tussy is me’, Marx once said of his youngest daughter, Eleanor, and Michael Hastings’ ‘romance’ on their relationship starts from this remark. One did not expect the most piercing insights into the Marx family from the author of a biography of Rupert Brooke called The Handsomest Young Man in England. But the result would make Godfrey Winn attempting Tropic of Cancer seem a perfect match of author’s talent and subject matter.

At first it seems that Hastings is merely filled with trepidation at the thought of portraying Marx. Thus in the first chapter Marx speaks and acts with the furtiveness of a ventriloquist’s dummy, and his political utterances are mostly given in indirect speech. But despite the book’s emphasis on revolutionary politics as a boring and pompous sideshow, you clearly can’t write a novel on Eleanor Marx without ever dealing with them. Hastings’ own leanings are predictable, even before the moment when he has Eleanor condemn Karl’s mind for giving out ‘nothing but the view seen from his own prejudice’. Eleanor herself, of course, is blighted by her father’s exploitation of her, so that in moments of crisis she can only wonder what Emma Bovary would have done.

The book is aimed at a recognisable market. There are easy bits of sympathy for the Victorian poor among the plodding research, and a couple of demonstrations for good measure. What is clearly intended to get the tills working is the sprinkling of four letter words and the peeps at revolutionaries through their fly buttons – Leo Frankel flits through as boot fetishist, and dirty old Marx is shown to have an illegitimate son.

All this would no doubt make a titillating Ken Russell film, but as Trotsky once wrote of revolutionary art, it is ‘not at all a torn boot plus romanticism’. Neither was Eleanor Marx.

 
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