Enormous Trifle

ENJOYMENT OF LIVING (603 pp.)--Max Eastman--Harper ($5).

Max Eastman, once a violently articulate Socialist and now a Reader's Digest "roving editor," has written about enjoyment in a way that takes most of the joy out of it.

Enjoyment of Living, which the jacket calls "the candid story of an exciting life," covers only his first 33 years (he is now 64). The excitement is largely buried under Eastman's incessant self:analysis (of his character, his personality, his libido), which makes up a good half of the book. The candor will strike many readers as needless bad taste.

"Something Should Happen." His father was a Congregational minister in upstate New York, his mother was a friend of Mark Twain (she wrote his funeral elegy) and one of the first women ordained in the Congregational Church. A forceful and free-thinking person (she once sincerely assured her congregation "that if they could find a spiritual up lift elsewhere, there was no reason for coming to church"), Mrs. Eastman spent her last, vigorous year learning to swim, undergoing a Freudian analysis and deciding to leave her church. Her advice to her son, to "live out of yourself persistently," helped him decide at an early age "to live a life in which something should happen besides birth, death, disease and marriage."

His overall grade of 99 plus was the best ever made at Mercersburg Academy. In spite of some undetermined ailment that kept him in & out of the infirmary, he got through Williams College with a record that led Columbia University's famed Philosopher John Dewey to take him on as a teaching assistant. He took a walk with Psychologist William James, remembers just one comment: "I have a brother [Henry] who writes novels, and he used to be a very good writer, too, but since he got lazy and began dictating, his style has become groping and repetitious. I for one am no longer able to read a word he writes."

Violence & Scorn. When Eastman joined the Socialist Party in 1911, he published a letter in the party newspaper "denouncing respectability, defending violence, and declaring my scorn of 'the good or bad opinion of everybody in the world but the whole fighting proletariat.'" He became editor of The Masses (a Socialist forerunner of the now defunct Communist New Masses).

The Masses--of which Editor Eastman was, "from an operational point of view . . . the whole thing"--turned out to be one of the most stimulating intellectual influences of its time. But literary and political historians will find little in Enjoyment of Living to give them an inside view of that magazine. Nor, indeed, will they find much information about any kind of American life--except Max Eastman's own. There is endless talk of his sexual and mental characteristics--an often maudlin study which is not so much a matter of enjoyment as an involved, embarrassing account of the continuous trials & errors of an uncertain and mentally harried intellectual. The book carries Eastman from his unwanted birth ("a gloom in a minister's family") to the night when, already married and a father, but "still diffident and inexpert at the art of unfamiliar love," he found his dream girl.

In a moment of extreme candor, Author Eastman admits: "I had been a poet, now I would be a pianist, next year a philosopher, then orator, agitator, reformer . . . and what in the end but a trifler? . . . Although I do nothing, I always talk politics like a man of action, and that makes it necessary at least to go on talking."

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