ELEANOR MARX: A LIFE
Rachel Holmes
Bloomsbury
526 pages; Rs 499
It was seven years ago that I discovered the writings of Karl Marx inside a muggy classroom. Owing to a largely useless school syllabus, my mind was more or less a blank slate to the literary world. Marx's works, though, were the most life-changing. As for the rest of the writers and thinkers who followed him, Marx changed the way I looked at the world. He had another distinction in my literary education - while I knew where William Shakespeare was born or how John Keats died, there was very little that was said about Marx's personal life at university. A greater focus on the individual as a state subject rather than one who is driven by his passions and personal history is also perhaps the reason I could never commit to Marxism fully.
Rachel Holmes's biography of Eleanor Marx, the youngest Marx daughter, who was also her father's secretary and biographer, gave me an opportunity to correct this gap in my understanding of Marx. Through Tussy, as Eleanor was called and as Ms Holmes refers to her in the book, one gets an insight into the awe-inspiring Marx household, perpetually struggling with finances and political ideologies. When Tussy is born, Ms Holmes shares a glimpse of her parents' childhood, allowing a rare look into what went behind the making of Marx. As much as it is a story of the father, Tussy's story is filled with beautiful female relationships with her mother, sisters, friends and her nanny. Unlike a clinical university approach to Marx's Das Kapital, where the thinker's evolution is not mapped through his past, Ms Holmes reveals Tussy's feminist ideologies through her personal experiences.
As one of the first champions of women's rights, Tussy's relationship with her father both fed into and undermined her work. While she acquired a nuanced knowledge of social systems through her time as Marx's secretary, his domineering "Lear-like" persona didn't let her to fully develop her own thought processes. Her relationship with Marx was also oddly Oedipal, especially since she chose lovers who were as overbearing as her father. The bits about her imbibing her father's hypochondria are both fascinating and a tad disturbing. Eleanor, the biographer of Marx, the woman who helped translate and preserve most of his works and one of the world's first formal feminists, often fell behind the persona of Tussy, the dutiful daughter and the loyal lover. Her life's story, especially towards its abrupt and sad end, relates well with the lives of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. In fact, her relationship with her husband, Edward Aveling, has eerie similarities with Plath's relationship with her husband Ted Hughes. Both Plath's and Tussy's suicides are ironic and tragic, strong women whose lives and work were overshadowed by the men in their lives.
The book itself is a heavy read, one that requires deep focus, especially because Ms Holmes uses the names that the Marx family used for each other. Written in a personalised narrative, Ms Holmes speaks of Tussy and her family as though she was a part of the Marx household. This reminds me of Anita Raghavan's The Billionaire's Apprentice, where the author, through her reportage, offers a unique glimpse into the minds of the characters. While Ms Raghavan had the opportunity to meet those she wrote about and thus conjecture at what went on inside their minds, it is interesting to read a personalised narrative by Ms Holmes, who could add nuances to each of her characters' personalities without once meeting them.
Ms Holmes's writing style has an almost 19th century visual quality. Much like I can see the fictional Bennet household in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with my eyes closed, I can see the Marxs struggle for space and money, their shelves overflowing with books in every European language and Marx's intimidating study table where he and Friedrich Engels put together The Communist Manifesto. What adds further to this visual narrative is Ms Holmes' blink-and-miss British humour. The tome picks up pace once all the characters are introduced, right down to Tussy's grandparents and their marriages. Despite being an exercise in patience, the book grants greater access to what started the evolution of Marxism as it is today. His daughter's biography is a window into the often-ignored perspective Marx's family that shaped his own outlook and the world view of the many generations that followed.
