Young Mr. Marx
As a student of law in his father’s footsteps, first in Bonn and then in Berlin, the bohemian young Marx was something of a brawler and boozer. He was, however, just about socially respectable enough to marry Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of a distinguished, aristocratic Prussian family. The pairing looked incongruous to some of their friends, with Marx, a hairy, swarthy commoner of suspiciously Semitic provenance, playing the Beast to Jenny’s Teutonic Beauty. He was always rather foolishly proud of his wife’s high-class origins, though Sperber suspects that the Westphalens’ nobility was somewhat specious. That Jenny was four years older was another scandalous feature of the marriage. As Sperber comments, the union “violated accepted norms of masculinity and of relations between the sexes.” Being younger than your wife was thought at the time to be shamefully emasculating, rather like being less educated than your valet. Judging from an enigmatic letter sent by Jenny to Karl, the couple also seem to have engaged in premarital sex, which was common enough then among the rural and urban masses but “virtually inconceivable behavior for the very proper daughter of a high Prussian state official from a straitlaced provincial city.” Nonconformism clearly began at home, as it did with Marx’s later collaborator Friedrich Engels, who took a working-class woman as his mistress. (The fact that she was of Irish origin suggests a marvelously convenient combination of class sympathies and anticolonialist ones.)
The young Marx began his career by securing a post at a radical newspaper in Germany. Journalism was to provide him for the rest of his days with a suitable alternative to academia on the one hand and street-fighting militancy on the other. Still, it took some time for this Young Hegelian to become a fully paid-up Marxist. Five years before he wrote the Communist Manifesto, he could be found “advocating the use of the army to suppress a communist workers’ uprising.” Communist ideas, he wrote, were genuinely dangerous and could “defeat our intelligence, conquer our sentiments.” It is as though Darwin had voiced his belief in Adam and Eve on the very brink of publishing On the Origin of Species. Having become a Marxist, Marx then famously denied that he was one.
For most of Marx’s life, much of his and Jenny’s time was devoted to keeping irate creditors from the door. He once commented that nobody had ever written so much about money while possessing so little. His poverty, to be sure, was of a suitably genteel kind. As Sperber notes, “except on one disastrous occasion, he never proposed that Jenny keep house for him.” Besides, there was always a slatternly servant or two to be hired. The couple could even rustle up the odd governess for their growing brood. But Marx’s knowledge of material scarcity was a good deal more than theoretical. It was a matter of when the butcher was to be paid, not just of the contradictions of capitalism. Three of his children died at birth or in infancy, in tiny apartments and slum neighborhoods. When his daughter Franziska joined this grim company, we are told he “had to spend the day of [her] funeral running around, seeking money to pay the undertaker.” It was capitalism that finally rode to his financial rescue in the shape of Engels, philandering son of a Manchester factory owner, who in the days before registered letters existed would cut banknotes in half and send them to his needy colleague in separate envelopes. During his time in England, Marx was also kept afloat by his articles for the New York Tribune, then the leading newspaper in the United States.
