Booknotes

FRANCIS WHEEN, AUTHOR, "KARL MARX: A LIFE": Well, I'd always been reasonably interested in Karl Marx, but I suppose what really fired it was the assumption in the early 1990s that he was now not worth bothering with. At the end of the Cold War, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, all that some--end-of-history stuff, we got all that great Hegelian argument from Fukuyama, and the assumption was that he was now dead and buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. I thought, on the other hand, this was the ideal moment to dig him up, because he'd been buried long before under all those awful Stalinist monoliths that were created in his honor, and that he hadn't had much of a look in for a long time. And now that all that had gone, we might be able to get back to Marx himself, rather than the kind of caricature or all the icon or whatever that he'd become.

WHEEN: From Germany, from the Rhineland, a place called Trier. And his parents were Jewish. His mother was Dutch, in fact, but her move to Germany--and both his parents came from a very long line of rabbis. Marx's uncle was a Jew. His--was a rabbi. His grandfather was a rabbi and so on. But just before Marx was born, his father converted to Christianity, mainly a marriage of convenience because, as a Jew, he was kind of a second-class citizen and not allowed to practice in the professions. And he wanted to be a lawyer, so the father then became a Lutheran Christian. So by the time Marx was born, his father was technically a Christian. So Marx himself was sort of a Jew, but then again sort of not and sort of a Christian, but then again not really 'cause his father wasn't actually a practicing Christian any more than he'd been a practicing Jew.

So he was, from the outset, I--slightly one removed from society. I mean, they were a respectable middle-class family. His father was quite wealthy. He had vineyards--Moselle vineyards and things. And they--and when he could practice as a lawyer, he made even more money. They moved into a rather large house. But at the same time, although they were respectful, middle-class citizens, because of the Jewish background and the anti-Jewish laws at the time, he was always slightly an outsider, which I suppose may explain why he was so interested in ideas of alienation and estrangement because he did feel alienated from an early age. He didn't feel part of this society that he lived in, in Trier.

WHEEN: That one is a painting, I believe ...(unintelligible).

WHEEN: 1860, he was in London. He stayed in London for most of his life, not just his adult life, but most of his life. He moved to London at the end of the 1840s, having been thrown out of most other countries in Western Europe. I mean, he was buffeted around. He left Germany, renounced his German citizenship when he moved to Paris in 1844; decided that Germany had nothing more to offer him. Then he got thrown out of Paris, went back to--went to Belgium for a while, got chucked out of there. He went back to Germany at the time of the 1848 revolutions, then he was thrown out of Germany.

He ran a newspaper there briefly, but was closed down by the authorities. He was expelled again, went to Paris, got expelled, and ended up in London, which was the last place willing to take political refugees. And so it was full of them. I mean, Italians--Matcini lived in London for quite a while--Germans, French, they all tended to fetch up in England, this sort of revolutionary flotsam and jetsam, because it was the only sanctuary left. So he--as I say, he went there at the end of the 1840s, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, turned up in 1849 and stayed there till he died in 1883. So he was in England for 34 years. Never became remotely English in any way.

He didn't really mix very much with the English, with a few exceptions. He saw far more of his fellow German exiles and French exiles, but I suppose he was literally an alien. He was a stateless person from 1844 onward. So from the age of 26, he had no states, no passports. It was the kind of embodiment of alienation, quite literally.

WHEEN: Well, about three years ago, I think, was when I first decided I wanted to do it, and it was sparked partly in a spirit of perversity. It was almost an accident that I did it, I suppose, because my publisher in London was badgering me to write a book for her, and I was trying to fend her off. And eventually I said to her, `The only book I want to write at the moment is the life of Karl Marx.' And I assumed that she would reel back screaming and then say, `No, no, no, most unpopular, unfashionable subject on Earth.' And instead she was very keen and said, `Great. Write. Do it. How soon can you get on with it?' So I was--I was quite pleased because I did want to do it.

On the other hand, I was surprised because I thought no one was interested in Marx anymore. But it was a great challenge. I thought, this is great, I can dig the old boy up and perhaps persuade people that he's worth taking an interest in; that he is, whether you agree with him or not, a serious and major figure and also an interesting and human figure, I mean, full of human failings, his--you know, everyday life full of disasters and tragedies as well as a fair amount of comedy.

WHEEN: That's in Highgate Cemetery in north London, where he fetched up, where he was buried, along with his wife and housekeeper and one of his children. And there is that sort of great, rather grim monument that was put up. That's not the original burial place. He was originally buried at the other end of Highgate Cemetery in a rather obscure, unconsecrated corner. And then in the 1940s, the British Communist Party decided they wanted to move him to a more prominent bit of the cemetery and build this great bust, this monument, because visiting Communists quite often wanted to go and see it, and there was nothing to see; there wasn't even a gravestone in those days.

And I found in the public record office in London lots of home office files just on the subject of moving Marx's tomb, moving his coffin. And all these senior civil servants were saying, `Well, it must be done at the dead of night because otherwise it could provoke some sort of disturbance.' So it was only allowed to be done on condition that they moved the grave at, I think, 3:00 in the morning, 'cause they thought otherwise, there might be riots and demonstrations against it. In fact, I don't think anyone noticed.

But anyway, then it was moved to where it is now, near the entrance, with that enormous great thing where, for years and years, any visitor from the Soviet Union, or indeed North Korea or China, would be obliged to go and have their picture taken. And to this day, you still see visiting tourists making the pilgrimage, the few remaining Marxists left in the world trudge up there.

WHEEN: Well, he's a--he's--yes, he is one of the few surviving American Marxists. He's a very great guy called Ike Nahum. And I met him a few years ago when I started work on the book. I went to Trier, to Marx's birthplace, the house where he was born, which is now a museum. And almost the only other person there was this American, and we kept bumping into each other in the various rooms. And after a while, he turned to me and introduced himself and said, `Well, I think we've seen all this. Why don't we go for a drink?' So we then spent the rest of the day in a bar, having a very long conversation about all sorts of things.

And he turned out to be this veteran Marxist trade unionist from New York who is an engineer on Amtrak, on the railroad, and a fantastically well-read one as well. I mean, he'd read all 50 volumes of "The Collected Works of Marx and Engels," as well as having read, you know, all sorts of other things. He's a great Wosshead Diodite. He's currently working his way through every book ever written on the American Civil War, I think. And he--I was surprised to learn that there was anyone left in America who would actually own up to being a Marxist, but there are a few of them scattered about.

WHEEN: Well, it's very hard to say, because I think--I mean, I tend not to use the word `Marxist' if I can help it, mainly because it's become almost meaningless because there are 57 varieties of Marxism, from Stalinism to Trotskyism to Maoism and Marxism, Leninism and so on and so on. And I think it's become so broad as to be almost meaningless if someone says--I mean, Ike says he's a Marxist, but you then, when someone says that, have to spend several hours discovering precisely what they mean by it.

So I tend to avoid the word, and I also think it's been slightly debased by the attachments it's gained. I mean, Marx himself, I think, guessed this was coming. Even in his lifetime, there was a French political party which he didn't approve of, and they got in touch with him and said, `Mr. Marx, you'll be delighted to hear that we now call ourselves a Marxist party.' And he said, `Well, in that case, I at least am not a Marxist.'

So I think even before he died, he was aware that disciples, self-styled disciples, might be the bane of his life and certainly of his death, because then, of course, after his death in the 20th century, you had any number of people appointing themselves as his spokesperson, if you like, from Stalin to Kim Il Sung to whoever. And each of them claimed to be the true keeper of the faith, and they can't all have been telling the truth, and I suspect that none of them was because, actually, if you look at Marx's general approach to life and his attitudes, it's hard to believe that he would have had much time for any of them, I mean, and certainly in the Soviet Union, given that Marx was just congenitally argumentative, critical of everything. In the Soviet Union, where argument and criticism were not really encouraged, he would have lasted about five minutes before they threw him into the Gulag, I should think.

WHEEN: Well, I think it's had a huge impact. I mean, I think you could reasonably say it's one of the most, if not the most, influential political pamphlet in history. And it is just a pamphlet, which is one of its strengths. It's very readable, very short; you can read the thing in half an hour. And it's written in fairly lively, accessible language. Vigorous pamphleteering is not obscure and impenetrable, as some people accuse "Das Kapital" of being. I mean, this is something anyone can read, so even people who've never read anything else by Marx quite often turn out to have read that at some stage.

And it is a--a very lively piece of work. I think it holds up very well. And it's also surprisingly contemporary and modern when you read it now with 21st century eyes. It's full of stuff there which reads like an exact description of what's going on in the world, about what would now be called globalization. I mean, the same people who tend to dismiss Marx and say he has nothing of interest to tell us now, as often as not, are the same sort of whiz-kid, modernized pundits who talk about the third way and say, `Yeah, globalization, that's the thing.' Then you read "The Communist Manifesto" and it's absolutely full of globalization, all about how the increasing pace of communications and developments in technology will create this global market which will tend to be dominated by the dominant economic forces.

And you have a world where--well, I mean, a couple of years ago, I was in China, in Beijing, which is the capital of a supposedly Communist state, a market Leninist, I think it's called these days. And there in Beijing, you walk down the street, you see McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, Chase Manhattan and so on. And even the hotel where I was staying--which was quite a cheap hotel; it wasn't a very grand place, 'cause I was paying my own way--even in this cheap hotel in Beijing, there on the desk was a computer and there on the screen was Microsoft Windows. So even at the heart of the supposedly Communist world, there's no getting away from Bill Gates.

And also--I mean, he also--I mean, Marx--one of Marx's many other points was the tendency of capitalism towards monopoly, left to itself, you know, that on the whole, in spite of all the talk about competition and the market, that the dominant figures in that market would tend to try to squeeze out the other competition and create a monopoly for themselves, a natural and untenable--and lo and behold, it's now official; the US courts have decreed that this is the case with the best-known capitalist of them all, old Bill Gates again.

WHEEN: 1818.

WHEEN: 1883.

WHEEN: He married only once. He married a beautiful Prussian aristocrat called Jenny von Westphalen. Her father was a baron. She was also descended from Scottish aristocracy, the dukes of Argyll, the earls of Argyll, so very grand, upper-class Prussian family.

WHEEN: There she is, yes. And she was the belle of the ball in Trier, you know, the princess of the town, had lots of suitors. But Marx--or Marx's father and her father became friends--they were quite near neighbors--so Marx knew her from very early youth. I mean, he was a baby when he first met his future wife, and she was actually a friend of his older sister, so he knew her all his life, really. And they fell in love, and she abandoned her fiance, who was a--you know, an army officer, a suitable fiance, and threw in her lot with Karl Marx, and thereby condemned herself to a life of tremendous poverty and grind and disaster and tragedy and exile and so on. And I mean, she was depressed for a lot of the time during their marriage, as well she might have been.

But at the same time, she was intensely devoted to him and fiercely loyal, I mean, really tigerishly protective. She never suggested that she would have done anything else, had she known what lay in store. And if anyone was ever rude about her husband or criticized him, she would defend him even more vigorously than he would defend himself, which is saying something.

WHEEN: Hah! Well, it depends how you define children because there was an extra child out of wedlock who was born to the housekeeper, Helena Demuth, one of the more amazing aspects of the Marx story, because they were living at the time in two rooms in Soho in the center of London with this rather large household of--of husband, wife, children, housekeeper, all crammed into the two rooms. But there was a brief period where his wife, Jenny, went off to Holland to try and get some money out of an uncle, out of one of Marx's uncles. And during this period, amazingly enough, nine months later, the housekeeper gives birth to a boy, Freddie.

WHEEN: This is some--well, I don't know.

WHEEN: Oh, yes, she is. Yes. There's Jenny, yes.

WHEEN: That is the housekeeper.

WHEEN: Yes, that's Helena, the mother of little Freddie. And this boy, Freddie, was given away for adoption to a family in the East End of London. And there was what can only be described as a cover-up. I think I say in the book, `The first--one of the more successful cover-ups organized for the good of the Communist cause.' Marx was aware that his enemies would use this against him if it got out. Engels stepped into the breach and pretended that he was the father and the baby was then given away for adoption anyway, and lived for the rest of his life--he didn't die until 1929, this illegitimate son--unaware that his real father was the man who--by the--by then, by 1929, was, you know, notorious all over the world. So there was this extra child, Freddie, who had--I mean, it's not Marx's finest hour and there are many moments that you could say are not his finest hour. But certainly the business of impregnating Helena Demuth and then giving the child away, I don't think reflect very well.

On the other hand, it's hard to see how they could have accommodated anymore children. They had quite enough trouble with their own children. Three children died in infancy. And then of the others, there were the three surviving daughters. I mean, there were six all together, three of them died as small children and the three others, Jenny, Laura and Eleanor--Jenny died before her father, Jenny Chen, the junior Jenny. And the two children who outlived him, Laura and Eleanor, both committed suicide. So it is...

WHEEN: That's Jenny the daughter, yes. It's rather confusing. They're all called Jenny in that family. Even one of the grandchildren was called Jenery--Jenny.

WHEEN: Laura and Eleanor, the only two children who outlived Marx.

WHEEN: Yes.

WHEEN: Well, it's hard to say. They basically--she and her husband, I mean, they were in their 60s when they did it. They'd had three children in quick succession when they married; all three died almost immediately. And they then had rather gloomy lives, I suppose you could say, full of frustration. They were all s--I mean, frankly, sponges. When Marx died, he'd been subsidized for most of his life by Engels. And Laura just assumed that this would be inherited, the subsidy. And so she was forever writing to Engels and her husband, Paul, would write to Engels saying, `Could you send us 10 pounds, please?' So he found he had to support the next generation as well because they were too indigent to look after themselves. But I think they reached a point where they both--well, as far as one could tell, they both just decided that they were in their 60s, life had nothing more to offer them. They were weary and they decided to end it all in a suicide pact. And at their funeral in France, there was a visiting speaker who gave an oration from the Russian Communist Party, a man called Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, oddly enough, which is the--the only sort of direct lineage one can trace between Marx himself and the Soviet Communists. And s...

WHEEN: Well, representing the Russian Communists, because this was the funeral of the daughter of Karl Marx. The Russian Communist Party wanted to send a representative to the funeral to make a little speech. And Lenin was the man who got it.

WHEEN: Eleanor was a--a much sadder tale, much, much sadder tale. Eleanor, as you can see from the picture, very attractive, bright, lively girl, but had a lot of troubles, partly Marx's fault, yet again, you have to say because Marx had two French sons-in-law. His daughters Jenny and Laura both married French Socialists. Marx, on the whole, not very well disposed towards French Socialists. He was always arguing with them and quarreling because he thought they were anarchists.

And then Eleanor fell in love with a man called Lester Gary, another dashing French revolutionary. And Marx put his foot down and he said, you know, `I'm not going to have three of my daughters married to French Socialists. I can't stand them.' So he more or less forbad this union. He wouldn't let Eleanor see her lover and she was ordered to break it off. And she never really recovered from this and she--she was ill for a long time. She had a kind of anorexic stage where she wouldn't eat for long periods.

And then she took up with the most unsuitable and ghastly man called Edward Aveling, who was tremendously ugly, but very successful with women. He used to say, `If I have a half-hour's head start, I could have any woman in London.' And he somehow obviously had some sort of magnetic appeal, though certainly a lot of people who knew him found him not only physically disgusting, but disgusting in character. He was a vile person who treated Eleanor terribly. He got secretly married while supposedly living with Eleanor. They lived together unmarried. But as most of their friends were Bohemians, this was sort of acceptable. And she then discovered that he had secretly, a year earlier, got married to somebody else without telling her. And he'd been maintaining these two households, a wife on the side. It was kind of reversed of the usual thing where you have the mistress on the side. In this case, he was living with a mistress, but also kept a secret wife tucked away.

Eleanor was distraught. And he then agreed that he had behaved very badly and he said, `Well, look, let's end it all. Let's have a suicide pact.' So they got some prosic acid, and the idea was that they were going to die together tragically. And then he failed to keep his part of the bargain. Eleanor took the prosic acid and died and he didn't. He just left the house and carried on as if nothing had happened. I think he was very lucky not to be charged with manslaughter, quite frankly, since he had clearly killed her, in any meaningful sense of the phrase. But that was the end of poor Eleanor. It's a terrible tragic tale, especially because she had so much to offer. She was a very bright, talented actress, translator, writer, had lots of friends. Bernard Shaw was a great friend of hers. She met him in the British museum and she was a--a good speaker. She was politically very active in the East End of London and places. But died of a broken heart essentially.

WHEEN: Well, a few miles, yes. Marx lived in London; Darwin lived down in Kent. It's more than a couple miles, but not very far away. And it is quite striking that I suppose--you'd have to say, the two most--the two 19th century thinkers who were most influential in the 20th century probably were Marx and Darwin, in their different ways. And there they were living quite near each other. And so there has been a temptation to try and link them in some way. And there is one slight thing, which is that Marx sent Darwin a copy of "Das Kapital," and Darwin sent him back a polite thank you letter saying, `Dear Dr. Marx, thank you so much for your fascinating book.' And Marx was quite excited and thought that Darwin really had read it and had admired it. And if you go, you can still find it today. If you go to Darwin's house at Down and Kent, there on the bookshelves is the copy that Marx sent him. And you open it and only about the first 100 pages have actually been cut out of the 800 pages. It's clear that Darwin just cut the first few pages and glanced at them--his German wasn't that good anyway--and sent the polite letter. So I don't think he was a great fan of Marx's.

WHEEN: 1848.

WHEEN: Beginning of 1848, February, 1848.

WHEEN: He was--well, at that stage, he was in Belgium when he wrote "The Communist Manifesto"--in Brussels. But he was on the mo--he was about to be on the move again, because 1848 was, of course, one of the big years of revolution. That's when most of Europe had revolutions of one kind or another, with the exception of Britain. I mean, France, Italy, Germany, there were revolutions all over the place. They didn't last. They were--they were followed immediately by counterrevolutions. But for a brief period, there were these uprisings. It was one of those historic years. And so, Marx wanted to be in the thick of it. So he moved on. He spent a large part of 1848 in Germany because that was where he wanted to be, in Cologne, running a newspaper, fomenting revolution. He also spent quite a bit of time in France. He was invited back to France by the provisional government, the revolutionary provisional government. But then, of course, after the counterrevolution, he was kicked out again. So he spent 1848 and '49 shuttling between Brussels and Paris and Cologne, being expelled from each, one after the other, and eventually was kicked out of France for the last time and had to go to London.

WHEEN: Just before the revolution started. Pure coincidence. I don't think they started because of that.

WHEEN: Hah. Well, I suppose you could reasonably say it had something to do with it in the sense that the key figures in the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin and the rest of them, obviously had read it. I mean, they'd grown up on it. So, yes, I mean, the--the Russian Communist Party was founded and led by people who certainly had read "The Communist Manifesto" and had read "Kapital" and had read quite a few of the other books. The argument is whether they had read it correctly or, indeed, whether they had missed something or whether they had willfully misread parts of it.

WHEEN: Well, he was writing it for most of his life. He--I mean, it finally--the first volume came out in German in 1867. But he's...

WHEEN: But he was working on it off and on for most of those 20 years. I mean, that--even at--even before the Communist Manifesto, in the mid-1840s, when he first met Engels. Engels came to Paris and stopped off where Marx was living at the time, met Marx, and they had a drink in a cafe and it turned into several drinks. And then they went back to Marx's apartment and stayed there for 10 days, talking...

WHEEN: They met in Paris, and as I say, they had this conversation that ended up lasting for 10 days, what was meant to be a drink in a cafe, and at the end of that--it's very frustrating. They n--they--you ne--there was never much of a detailed account of this, after all, rather important meeting. And the only thing Engels ever wrote about it was, `When I met Marx in Paris, we talked for 10 days. At the end of that, it became clear that we were pretty much in complete agreement on most things and we would work together from then on.' That's all he said. I mean, no account of what went on in these 10 days, just that at the end of it, they decided they got along so well and they were in such agreement that they would be collaborators, which they were.

WHEEN: He was from a place called Wuppertal. He was from a...

WHEEN: In Germany. Oh, yeah, they were both German. He was the son of a fairly wealthy textile man. His father, Engels Sr., owned cotton factories in Lancashire and--well, he started in Germany, but he then expanded into Lancashire, which was, at the time, the center of the cotton trade. So he ran a textile firm in Germany, but also had this outpost in Manchester with his partners, a German family called Erman. And Engels Jr., Friedrich Engels, Marx's friend, when Marx ended up in England in exile, he summoned Engels to join him, which he did. Then it became clear that Marx couldn't survive. He had no money. Engels then volunteered to go to Manchester and join the family firm because his father had been very keen of--for him to work in this. So the father was very pleased. `Oh, my boy, following in my example. Great. You go to Manchester and run the factory there,' which Engels did for 20 years.

But his only reason for doing that was to make enough money to subsidize Marx. I mean, not that he didn't enjoy it. He had quite a good time in Manchester. He behaved like a local captain of industry. He kept several horses and went out fox hunting and had a large wine cellar and so on. But nevertheless, it was all for a rather different cause, which certainly his business associates wouldn't have known that he was busily corresponding every day with Marx, sending him money but also sending him ideas, arguing about ideas, even ghostwriting for him. I mean, quite often, if Marx was too ill or too distracted to write some bit of journalism he had to do, particularly when he was writing his columns in the New York Tribune, the Dade Tribune, Engels would just act as ghostwriter. If the Tribune got in touch and said to Marx, right--`We want a piece on military strategy or something or other,' Marx wasn't very good on that whereas Engels was mad on military matters. So he would write it and Marx would send it in under his name.

WHEEN: So much so--so much so that the--that the editors in New York thought, `This man, Marx, he's a s--genius.' There are generals who have sent us fan letters saying, `Your correspondent in England is brilliant on the matters of military strategy,' little guessing that it was old Engels all along.

WHEEN: You can't get a definite, exact total because some letters have gone missing and also there may well have been occasions where Engels was handing over money in person and no record was kept. But certainly for some periods, you can go through their correspondence, and in the letter, Engels will say, `I enclosed five pounds. I enclosed one pounds--one pound.' And it was usually well--well over 100 pounds a year, which was quite a decent sum in those days. And then when Engels--in--in the late 1860s, about 1869, '70, Engels sold his stake in the family business and retired down to London at long last, after 20 years in Manchester, to be nearer Marx. And he set Marx up with a kind of pension of 350 pounds a year which was a very decent salary in those days. I mean, that was, you know, what a comfortably off, middle class family would live on--very comfortably off. And Marx was--then got this annuity, thanks to Engels, of 350 pounds a year for the rest of his life. Very nice, too.

WHEEN: Why did Engels do it?

WHEEN: Well, because he believed in Marx and he--well, he would sometimes say and write, that when you meet genius, you have to acknowledge it. And he clearly believed Marx was some kind of genius. Although Engels himself, a very intelligent man, in many ways better than Marx; certainly more proficient at writing and more efficient as well. He actually could meet his deadlines and--and get his pieces finished on time, even though he was running a business as well, full-time, whereas Marx was a great procrastinator. This is why "Kapital" took so many years to write, because he would get on with it and then by the time he got near what he thought was the end, he would decide that the beginning was no good, and he would just start all over again. So he would discard the first half of the manuscript. By the time he'd read on that from scratch, the second half would be no good.

And so--I mean, he would never have finished it all if Engels hadn't kept bullying him, saying, `Look, you've just got to break off and send it to the printers and be done with it.' So Engels was--I mean, he complimented Marx very well, I think, in terms of organization, but also as a great intellectual partner of his. And Engels, although very bright and quite interesting, nevertheless, realized that he was always going to be second fiddle because he though--he detected in march--in Marx, a genuinely original mind which must be encouraged and nurtured, and he obviously decided it was his life's duty to subsidize this man. But also, act as a kind of intellectual companion for him because Marx was rather lonely intellectually for long periods because he fell out with so many of his comrades, that Engels was almost the only person who consistently could argue through ideas with him.

WHEEN: Not a pretty sight.

WHEEN: Not a pretty sight.

WHEEN: A lot.

WHEEN: He was a pretty ill man, one way or another. He was prey to all sorts of things, and a lot of it was just to do with his way of life. He had an incredibly bad diet and an unhealthy lifestyle. I mean, he drank heavily. He chain-smoked really foul, cheap cigars. He would sit up half the night working and then lie down in the morning and doze for a couple of hours on a sofa and then return to work. He--I mean, partly, he didn't have any money, so he couldn't afford to live that well, but even when he did have money, I mean, he tended to not bother much about his diet.

And, of course, you know, in general terms of hygiene, he scarcely ever washed, as I suppose a lot of people didn't in those days. I mean, in--when they were living in their rooms in Soho, their upstairs rooms, if they wanted to get any water to wash with, you would have to go all the way down to the basement with a bucket, fill it up and go back upstairs. So on the whole, not exactly much in the way of bathing and showering went on. And that, combined with perhaps some sort of predisposition to illness anyway, but mainly, I think, the conditions of his life meant that he had boils, he got chest pains, he had pleurisy at one time or another. He--he would get all sorts of things, endless colds and coughs, really bad, bronchial troubles.

And especially these wretched boils were the bane of his life. Just as he got rid of one lot, they would reappear somewhere else on his body. I mean, when he was finishing "Capital," the last few pages of the manuscript, he had to write it standing up 'cause it was too painful to sit down. And he stood there writing these last few pages and then wrote a letter to Engels. He somehow held the bourgeoisie personally responsible for his boils, and he says, `Those bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles for the rest of their life. What swine they are! But my book will guarantee that they remem--they never forget my boils.'

I don't know quite why he thought it was their fault as--except that they kept him in this condition of poverty; therefore, he couldn't afford to eat properly. I don't know why he blamed them for his general unhealthiness, though, since a lot of it was more to do with his smoking and drinking habits, I think.

WHEEN: I wouldn't have liked to live with him, I must say. I would very much liked to have had a drink with him--or two, in his case. I think he--Well, how could one not? I mean, especially if I've ch--having written his biography, of course I would love to meet him, and I would certainly like to go out on--perhaps go out on a pub crawl with him, which he did tend to go in for, sometimes drinking a pint of beer in every pub in one stretch of road. And since there were 18 pubs, by the time he got to the end, he tended to be a bit boisterous and start throwing stones at the lampposts and things. Maybe that would have been the point at which I made my excuses and left. And I certainly wouldn't have wanted to live with him. His domestic arrangements were just a nightmare.

And I suspect I would have fallen out with him because most people did. Even people who had been quite close collaborators, sooner or later, tended to fall afoul of him because of some perceived shortcomings in them or because he felt that they had taken a wrong turning. And he was pretty brutal in argument and in his assessments of his fellow Socialists. I mean, it's a long tradition in the left-wing movement that people on the left are far more vicious towards their supposed comrades than they are towards the supposed common enemy, then, as now. The whole history of the left is a history of splits and splinter movements and internecine warfare of every possible kind, and Marx certainly went in for a lot of that because there were so many different varieties of Socialists, and all in one way or another failed to come up to what he regarded as his standards.

WHEEN: Well, I suppose the synonym usually is middle class, but more specifically when he writes about the bourgeoisie, and especially in "The Communist Manifesto" there, he is writing about it as a revolutionary force. "The Communist Manifesto"--one thing that sometimes surprises people is how complimentary he is about the bourgeoisie. He pays tremendous tribute to them. It's got a lyrical hymn in parts to the achievements of the bourgeoisie and the industrial revolution, the industrial class, if you like--the industrializing class because the bourgeoisie had, basically, toppled the old feudal aristocratic order; therefore, he regarded them--and he says in "The Communist Manifesto" that they played a tremendously progressive role in the 19th century in bringing about a bourgeois democracy, as well as bourgeois capitalism and this is a vast improvement on the old landed feudal system.

But, of course, in the Marxian view, although he pays them this great tribute and says--I mean, he s--genuinely says, and means it, that their technological innovations are marvels and miracles and worthy of great admiration, but this is merely the transitional stage before the next class down. I mean, the argument he has is that, throughout history, the--the supreme class is then threatened by the class immediately below it. And as that class gains more economic power, so it takes over political power, as has been shown, you know, bit by bit over the years with kings and aristocrats and clergy and feudal nobles and ultimately by the bourgeoisie.

And so he then extrapolates from that to say, `Well, the next thing that will happen is that the rising proletariat, as it becomes more economically important, will naturally carry out the same sort of function towards the bourgeoisie as the bourgeoisie did towards the aristocracy in the previous ruling class.' That was where, I think, you could reasonably say he failed to spot--well, there are two points--mostly the enduring resilience of the bourgeoisie and just how well-established it could become by colonizing other classes in a way that perhaps hadn't happened before; that you would have--I mean, Engels somewhere does write that in Britain, which drove them mad, Britain, because it was the rock on which all these revolutionary waves broke in vain 'cause Britain was so utterly unrevolutionary.

He says, `In Britain, they have not only a--a bourgeois--bourgeoisie, but they have a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat now. The whole country is just becoming bourgeois,' which is true. I mean, we now even have a bourgeois monarchy in England, where you have Prince Charles and--well, Prince William and Harry going around in baseball caps and spending their holidays at EuroDisney and going to eat at McDonald's. So we do, I'm afraid--ha--we have borne out what Engels suggested might well happen. We did...

WHEEN: Well, the proletariat, certainly in Marxist terms, was the industrial proletariat. It was the new class created by the industrial revolution. And Marx's point about the proletariat was that before the industrial revolution, you know, you had all sorts of disparate people over the country, who were working in one way or another on the land or whatever, but were isolated.

And the industrial revolution, by creating--by bringing people into the cities and creating these large factories and so forth, had brought together these people, and so, according to his account of it, the bourgeoisie, who created this industrial revolution, had actually dug its own grave because it had facilitated the means whereby the proletariat could actually organize collectively because there were all these people now working together in large factories and industries. And it was notable that they would then combine and start asserting their power. So that was his line on the proletariat.

WHEEN: I should think he does, yes. He certainly would call himself a worker, yes, as he is.

WHEEN: Not that I know of, no.

WHEEN: Possibly.

WHEEN: Not even in China, I don't think, no.

WHEEN: Well, that actually, to a certain degree, has come to pass in lots of places, so--where you have a state transport system.

WHEEN: Industrial armies, perhaps not.

WHEEN: This--well, this--yes. I mean, I think...

WHEEN: Well, I think one thing that you do have to say is that that is, as it says in the title, a manifesto. It is a--a pamphlet, a manifesto written very quickly at a specific point in history at the beginning of 1848, when he thought upheavals were coming. He dashed it off in a few days and wrote it as a manifesto. And, I mean, I think you don't expect manifestos necessarily to hold up in--indefinitely. I mean, I--I think it's amazing it's still in print after 150 years. Most manifestos are forgotten about a year after they're published, certainly--and certainly not obeyed by the people who were elected on those manifestos.

So I think you have to look at this as--I mean, he didn't write it as a kind of--a message for all time, and he changed his ideas and developed his ideas a lot after that. He--this was something he dashed off at that time, and this was his immediate 10-point plan. He adapted that in many, many ways over subsequent years. So there were endless arguments about the precise nature of central banks, for example, and what should be done with agricultural rents and the nationalization of the land. And, also, there was far more in his later work also about democratization and about the democratic nature of this thing.

And, actually, if you look, for example, at some of his later documents which set out lists of demands--I mean, rather like the English Chartists, which was the socialist movement in England that Marx got quite involved with--a lot of the demands there and in--the plans or manifestos that Marx subsequently issued are now common practice among social democratic governments and even not very social democratic governments, like universal franchise for--well, in th--in fact, in his case, for men over the age of 21, whereas some--I don't think they ri--even thought about women getting the vote--and paying parliamentarians, elected politicians, a salary so that working-class people wouldn't be excluded from it 'cause they didn't have the money. Of course, he hadn't quite anticipated how much it would cost to run an American presidential campaign, though the president may get a salary. But it doesn't mean that any old person with no money can stand and be elected. But, nevertheless, you know, it was in his view a progressive thing to aim for: to have paid politicians so that you--you wouldn't need a private income to do it.

And there were all sor--you know, very moderate demands, suggesting that there should be some sort of state education service, state welfare benefits for people who have fallen through the net and are unable to live otherwise or unable to work. And an awful lot of these th--things are, you know--would now hardly seem very revolutionary. They've been adopted in the 20th century by an awful lot of governments that certainly wouldn't call themselves Marxist in any shape or form, including in Britain and France and Germany and elsewhere.

WHEEN: Oh, yes, yes, except this week. I'm not there to do it. But...

WHEEN: Pretty well everything. It's mostly politics, but by no means all politics. Anything that occurs to me, really. It's sort of half muckraking and crusading and half amusing, I hope. It's--I mean, it's not just pure punditry. I mean, I do actually try to give some information as well. I mean, I regard journalism as being the--the informing of the reader. So it's not just one of those holding forth-type columns, saying, `Well, isn't it disgraceful,' such and such. I do also try to find things out and report them, but I try to do it in a vaguely entertaining way.

WHEEN: Well, that's what Marx thought of the countryside, yes.

WHEEN: I assume not, no.

WHEEN: Well, the `rural idiocy' bit was just a joke because Marx was pretty rude about the countryside; regarded it as a place where primitives lived. He was very much a metropolitan man; had the metropolitan prejudice against the countryside, which I believe persists to this day, possibly even in Washington--some parts of Washington, DC, let alone New York. And--and I suppo--because I do live in the countryside in East Anglia, whenever I go to London, some of my friends, who are devoted Londoners, will poke fun at me and say, you know, `What would Marx make of you living out in the sticks there with your pig and your chickens and your ducks? You know, you call yourself a sophisticate. Look at you, you're a yokel.' So I just put that in because Marx would have regarded it as rural idiocy.

And the business about the lover and the children is just true. I mean, I'm--it's one of those problems of terminology. Since we're not married, I can't really call her my wife, but partner makes it sound as if she might be the business partner of some kind. So...

WHEEN: Very good question. Since the beginning of 1993, so seven, eight years.

WHEEN: Well--well, we have five children living with us altogether. She has three older children, which she brought up single-handedly by a previous marriage. I mean, her previous husband left her when the youngest was one year old, so she brought them up alone. And they're now very big; they're now 21 and 19 and 17. And then we have two more children, who are five and three, Bertie and Archie. And so we have quite a houseful, three teen-agers and two toddlers.

WHEEN: That is, yeah.

WHEEN: Julia Jones.

WHEEN: Well, in the very early '70s, I think about 1971, was the last one, which was David McLellan, and there was one in about 1969 by Michael Grovert Payne. Those are the only other two--ones that I'm aware of in, say, the last 40 years or 50 years, really. I mean, there--there've been remarkably few and, as I say, none really since 1971, since the McLellan book. And it seemed to me that, from the vantage point of--of now, it was perhaps easier to--to see what was worth retrieving from Marx and to strip away an awful lot of the 20th century layers with which he'd become--he or his reputation had become encrusted.

And also, I very much wanted to write a life of Marx aimed at, if you like, the intelligent general reader 'cause most books on Marx tend to be written by academics or zealots or both for an audience of academics or zealots or both. So they assume a great deal of know--prior knowledge. They write it mostly in jargon. And also, they're not that interested in the man and the life. They want to skip through that as quickly as possible so they can have 500 pages on arguments about the labor theory of value or something really sexy like that. And I want--I had a feeling that there were lots of people who might surprise themselves by actually becoming quite interested if they were given an accessible and readable life of Marx, which didn't assume any previous knowledge. Just as--I mean, people read biographies of other Victorian sages of various kinds, whether it's Dickens or Carlyle or whoever, without necessarily being great experts on the work. And I thought, `Well, maybe they could give Marx a try.' I--I...

WHEEN: Well, luckily, not that many. My task was made a lot easier by the fact that most of Marx's papers are in Amsterdam, which is an accident of history. When Marx died, they passed to Engels. When he died, Marx's daughter Eleanor and this dreadful Aveling, her lover, took over, and they started sorting them out. But then, when they died, the papers were given to the German Social Democratic Party, which in those days was a much more left-wing party than it's--than it is now. But then in the 1930s, when the Nazis came to power, the German Social Democrats panicked and thought, `We've got to get these out of the country, or the Nazis will only burn them all.' So they packed them off to Amsterdam to an institute there called the Institute for Social History, where they remain to this day. The Germans never asked for them back.

So--and they had--they're rather sweet. They had this idea that, of course, the Dutch would be safe because the Nazis would never invade Holland. Needless to say, the Nazis did invade Holland, but apparently didn't notice or didn't care that some more Marxist manuscripts and letters were hidden away there. So there they are to this day, so it makes life very easy if you're researching Marx. An awful lot of it can be done in Amsterdam. Go to the Institute for Social History, and you fill in your slip and there come up all these wonderful files. You know, you can actually get his old laundry lists, practically, or scraps of paper on which he wrote little messages to himself. He kept everything. I mean, given the chaos of his domestic arrangements, it's quite surprising and impressive that so much survived. But I think it's partly because he was incapable of throwing anything away.

WHEEN: Well, that was what Jenny, Marx's future wife, called him when they were first engaged. She wrote him these love letters when he was away in Bonn and Cologne and places, and she tended to refer to him as `my little wild boar.'

WHEEN: Well, that's to do with a story that Heinrich Heine told as a kind of warning to Marx. Heine, the great German poet, was a friend of Marx, but was rather wary of Marx's politics and told this sort of parable of a king who ended up reducing himself to the level of cattle and eating grass.

WHEEN: That was a book that Marx wrote called "The German Ideology." And when he had finished it, he couldn't find a publisher. And so, as he said, he put it away in--in the attic and consigned it to the gnawing criticism of the mice. And if you look at the manuscript today, it does actually have little nibbles around the edges, as if it really was nibbled, eaten by the mice.

WHEEN: Well, that's "The Communist Manifesto." I mean, the first line of "The Communist Manifesto," which is quite famous, is, `A specter is stalking Europe, a specter of communism.' But the very first thing this translation, in 1850, which appeared in a newspaper called The Red Republican done by a nice Chartist woman, started, `A frightful hobgoblin is stalking Europe.' But it never caught on, unfortunately, `the frightful hobgoblin.'

WHEEN: The Megalosaurus (pronounced megaLOsaurus), yes.

WHEEN: Well, that's a line from Dickens'...

WHEEN: ...novel "Bleak House," the very opening scene there. He has this wonderful picture of London in the fog and the mud and the wet and everything, and he says, you know, `So much fog and there's so much appearing that it would not be a wonder if a megalosaurus were seen walking along Hobin Hill because it seemed almost primeval, the swamplike nature of London.' And this is the London to which Marx moved in 1849, the London of Dickens and the London of pea soup of fogs and mud and chaos and in which you might find a megalosaurus.

WHEEN: Well, those are his creditors. As I say, he was always short of money, and the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker would say, `We're not going to supply you with any more until you pay our bills.' And bailiffs were banging at his door. Sometimes the bailiffs would come around and say, `You're three months behind with your rent. We've got to see your husband, Mrs. Marx.' And she'd say, `Oh, no, I'm afraid he's gone away on business for a few days,' and, in fact, he would be upstairs hiding under his desk until the bailiffs had gone. And he referred to the--his creditors as the hungry wolves.

WHEEN: Well, that's Marx's appro--Marx's attitude to people like Lassalle, Ferdinand Lassalle, the German socialist who regarded himself as the hero who would lead the German masses into revolution. And Marx is very against this: the great man view of history, the idea that you needed a Napoleonic figure to lead the--the workers to their salvation. He said, `No, the workers must lead themselves to their salvation. If you put your trust in heroes on horseback or princes, even socialist princes, then you're--you're lost.

WHEEN: That is a very obscure reference. The bulldogs are John Bull, the British bulldog. And the hyena is an Austrian monster called General Hinow, a torturer who came to London on holiday and was attacked by the English workers and chased through London ...(unintelligible). And this caused great amazement because it wasn't thought that the English workers had any sense of international solidarity or internationalism.

WHEEN: That's "Das Kapital." That's my reading of "Das Kapital," which is, I suggest, not a straight economic treatise, but a shaggy dog story, almost more like a novel in the tradition of ...(unintelligible) or a satire, like "Gulliver's Travels," and that if you read it a--as that, a lot of the oddities in it become much clearer 'cause you realize they're entirely deliberate.

WHEEN: That is Bakunin, the enormous Russian anarchist with whom Marx had this great showdown, and he was often referred to as an elephant just because of his great size, `the Russian elephant.'

WHEEN: Bakunin?

WHEEN: Well, he--his main impact on Karl Marx was to annoy him intensely and provoke this great fight, which basically brought about the end of the International Workingmen's Association. Bakunin and Marx, although they had been friendly early on, then had this duel to the death, and Marx won, but at the price of killing off the International, which he had helped to create.

WHEEN: Well, that's Marx himself a year before he died. In his last couple of years, he was pretty ill all the time and went around to spa towns and resorts in search of ozone and cures and things. And one of these trips a year before he died was to Algiers, and from there--that photo you have there is the very last picture taken of him...

WHEEN: ...look--looking rather sort of genial and Father Christmasy. The very day after he took that photo in Algiers, he went to a barbershop, had his beard and hair shaved off, sent a letter home saying, `I have sacrificed my mane on the altar of--or my fleece on the altar of an Algerian barber.' And it was almost a sort of Sampsonlike symbolic gesture of renouncing his powers and admitting that he had really abandoned any hope of doing any more work. So he came home clean-shaven and bald, but he made sure that no one ever saw him like that or remembered him like that, rather, because he had had this last picture taken, which is the one you showed there. So we never saw Marx clean-shaven and bald. Quite...

WHEEN: There's another one, very shaggy-looking f--figure. I mean, he--he would lose a lot of his sort of iconic resonance, I think, I mean, at that grave stone at Highgate Cemetery, if he didn't have the beard and the hair, he would have a very different effect on people. I think he knew the impact it had. He certainly used it. He played up to being a sort of Old Testament prophet or Greek godlike figure. He--he actually thought he looked like Jupiter because a friend had a bust of Jupiter and said, `Oh, it looks just like you, that beard.' And he was very proud of this. He would stand next to it and say, `Oh, do you think we look alike?'

WHEEN: Goodness gracious. Well, it was full of surprises in a way. Just the little incidental, human details of Marx. Certainly to those who'd been brought up--up on him as this grim, forbidding figure, a constant surprise--though, I mean, to me, they became less of a surprise because I knew more about him, I suppose, but just, you know, all the business of his going off and getting drunk and playing chess--sitting up all night playing chess because he was so determined to beat his opponent, Liebknecht, and kept trying to work out new systems which would allow him to win at chess.

And his--just his--his sense of fun actually and the family man going--walking up to Hampstead Heath in North London on Sundays for a picnic lunch every week and taking the children, sitting there, having picnic lunch and then playing games on the Heath and walking back reciting Shakespeare to the children and singing Negro spirituals or old German folk songs or goodness knows what. I mean, I think it's a side of Marx that perhaps hasn't been much noticed.

WHEEN: Well, that was a parlor game they--that was very popular at the time called Confessions, which is a bit like the British Questionnaire, where you have to answer various questions. You know, what is your favorite virtue? What's your favorite author? What's your favorite color? That sort of thing. And this is one that his--his children forced him to fill in. And his motto in there, I think, was: (German spoken), `everything must be doubted.'

WHEEN: It's been a pleasure.