BOOKS
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Trafalgar Square demonstration seemed to Engels
to
signal the begin–
ning of the socialist revolution in Britain. But with a few years the
"popular front" of revolutionary socialists, democratic socialists, an–
archists, trade unionists, and feminists, broke down in sectarian
squabbles. Aveling dissolved his Legal Eight-Hours League in 1895,
and he and Tussy threw in their lot with the SDF, from which they had
resigned over issues of personality and principle ten years before.
It
is hard to accept Kapp's analysis of the Avelings' bewildering
shifts in party allegiance during these years, though only one British
reviewer, the historian E.P. Thompson, has challenged her account–
perhaps because to most readers it all seems like ancient history. But
Kapp's spirited defense of Eleanor Marx's political acumen reads
suspiciously like special pleading. A 1967 biography of Eleanor Marx
by Chushichi Tsuzuki (covering much the same material) was subtitled
"A Socialist Tragedy," a notion Kapp firmly opposes, urging rather
that Eleanor Marx's life was happy, fulfilled, busy above all, and that
her suicide is to be attributed to her sense that British socialism had
failed to take the correct turning. She had done all she could; her
message had gone unheeded, and so she was ready-at forty-three–
to
die.
But surely her death, if not a socialist tragedy, was a human
tragedy, a pointless waste of ability, energy, love.
It
is hardly a
coincidence that she identified with Ibsen's heroines, trapped by their
circumstances, their marriages, their own passions. Indeed, what comes
across most powerfully from Kapp's day-by-day reconstruction of the
life is not the achievement, but the desperate struggle to keep afloat.
There was ill-paid teaching, hack work at the British Museum (her
chief employer was a "Miss Zimmern," probably the Helen Zimmern
whose name appears on two dozen anthologies, biographies, and
translations published in the eighties and nineties, several of which
Eleanor Marx must have ghosted), and typewriting for more successful
novelist friends like Olive Schreiner. The struggle for work was made
more bitter by Aveling's infidelities, his drinking, his carelessness with
other people's money. Yet she was bound to Aveling by their common
propaganda and organizational work; they were delegates to the same
international conferences, sat on the same executive boards, spoke to
the same workers' clubs.
Did she in fact have an unerring instinct for "true" socialism, as
Kapp argues-or was she simply following her father's dicta, as laid
down by Engels? Conditions in England in the nineties were different
from those Marx documented from Blue Books in the fifties and sixties;
