Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

having missed out on university, he had invaluable firsthand knowledge of the machinery of capitalism. But the ‘complete agreement in all theoretical fields’ didn’t extend to their respective habits and styles. One might almost say that the two characters were Thesis and Antithesis incarnate. Marx wrote in a cramped scrawl, with countless deletions and emendations as blotchy testimony to the effort it cost him; Engels’s script was neat, businesslike, elegant. Marx was squat and swarthy, a Jew tormented by self-loathing; Engels was tall and fair, with more than a hint of Aryan swagger. Marx lived in chaos and penury; Engels was a briskly efficient worker who held down a full-time job at the family firm while maintaining a formidable output of books, letters and journalism – and often ghost-writing articles for Marx as well. Yet he always found the time to enjoy the comforts of high bourgeois life: horses in his stables, plenty of wine in his cellar and mistresses in the bedroom. During the long years when Marx was almost drowning in squalor, fending off creditors and struggling to keep his family alive, the childless Engels pursued the carefree pleasures of a prosperous bachelor.

      In spite of the obvious disparity of advantage, Engels knew that he would never be the dominant partner. He deferred to Marx from the outset, accepting that it was his historic duty to support and subsidise the indigent sage without complaint or jealousy – even, come to that, without much gratitude. ‘I simply cannot understand,’ he wrote in 1881, nearly forty years after that first meeting, ‘how anyone can be envious of genius; it’s something so very special that we who have not got it know it to be unattainable right from the start; but to be envious of anything like that one must have to be frightfully small-minded.’ Marx’s friendship, and the triumphant culmination of his work, would be reward enough.

      They had no secrets from each other, no taboos: if Marx found a huge boil on his penis he didn’t hesitate to supply a full description. Their voluminous correspondence is a gamey stew of history and gossip, political economy and schoolboy smut, high ideals and low intimacies. In a letter to Engels on 23 March 1853, to take a more or less random example, Marx discusses the rapid increase in British exports to the Turkish dominions, Disraeli’s position in the Conservative Party, the passage of the Canadian Clergy Reserves Bill through the House of Commons, the harassment of refugees by the British police, the activities of German communists in New York, an attempt by Marx’s publisher to swindle him, the condition of Hungary – and the alleged flatulence of the Empress Eugénie: ‘That angel suffers, it seems, from a most indelicate complaint. She is passionately addicted to farting and is incapable, even in company, of suppressing it. At one time she resorted to horse-riding as a remedy. But this having now been forbidden her by Bonaparte, she “vents” herself. It’s only a noise, a little murmur, a nothing, but then you know that the French are sensitive to the slightest puff of wind.’

      As stateless cosmopolitans they even evolved their own private language, a weird Anglo-Franco-Latino-German mumbo-jumbo. All other quotations in this book have been translated to spare readers the anguish of puzzling over the Marxian code, but one brief sentence will give an idea of its expressive if incomprehensible syntax: ‘Diese excessive technicality of ancient law zeigt Jurisprudenz as feather of the same bird, als d. religiösen Formalitäten z. B. Auguris etc. od. d.. Hokus Pokus des medicine man der savages.’ Engels learned to understand this gibberish with ease; more impressively still, he was able to read Marx’s handwriting, as was Jenny. Apart from those two close collaborators, however, few have managed the task without tearing their hair out. After Marx’s death, Engels had to give a lengthy course of instruction in paleography to the German Social Democrats who wished to organise the great man’s unpublished papers.

      Engels served Marx as a kind of substitute mother – sending him pocket money, fussing over his health and continually reminding him not to neglect his studies. In the earliest surviving letter, written in October 1844, he was already chivvying Marx to finish his political and economic manuscripts: ‘See to it that the material you’ve collected is soon launched into the world. It’s high time, heaven knows!’ And again on 20 January 1845: ‘Do try and finish your political economy book, even if there’s much in it that you yourself are dissatisfied with, it doesn’t really matter; minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron’s hot … So try and finish before April, do as I do, set yourself a date by which you will definitely have finished, and make sure it gets into print quickly.’

      Fat chance. Marx was led astray by Engels himself, who made the mistake of proposing that they collaborate on a pamphlet demolishing Bruno Bauer and his troupe of clowns, under the working title Critique of Critical Criticism. He emphasised that it should be no more than forty pages long, since ‘I find all this theoretical twaddle daily more tedious and am irritated by every word that has to be expended on the subject of “man”, by every line that has to be read or written against theology and abstraction …’

      Engels dashed off his portion of twenty pages while still at the flat in the Rue Vanneau, and then returned home to the Rhineland. He was ‘not a little surprised’, several months later, to hear that the pamphlet was now a swollen monstrosity of more than 300 pages and had been renamed The Holy Family. ‘If you have retained my name on the title page it will look rather odd,’ he pointed out. ‘I contributed practically nothing to it.’ But this was not the only reason for wanting his name removed. ‘The Critical Criticism has still not arrived!’ he told Marx in February 1845. ‘Its new title, The Holy Family, will probably get me into hot water with my pious and already highly incensed parent, though you, of course, could not have known that.’ The angry parent was, of course, his bigoted and despotic father, who had begun to fear for the boy’s Christian soul. ‘If I get a letter, it’s sniffed all over before it reaches me,’ he grumbled. ‘I can’t eat, drink, sleep, let out a fart, without being confronted by the same accursed lamb-of-God expression.’ One day, when Engels staggered home at two in the morning, the suspicious patriarch asked if he had been arrested. Not at all, Engels replied reassuringly: he had simply been discussing communism with Moses Hess. ‘With Hess!’ his father spluttered. ‘Great heavens! What company you keep!’

      He didn’t know the half of it. ‘Now all my old man has to do is to discover the existence of the Critical Criticism and he will be quite capable of flinging me out of the house. And on top of it all there’s the constant irritation of seeing that nothing can be done with these people, that they positively want to flay and torture themselves with their infernal fantasies, and that one can’t even teach them the most platitudinous principles of justice.’

      The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Consorts was published in Frankfurt in the spring of 1845. Rereading the book more than twenty years later, Marx was ‘pleasantly surprised to find that we have no need to feel ashamed of the piece, although the Feuerbach cult now makes a most comical impression on one’. Few other readers have shared his satisfaction. By the time Marx started writing this scornful epic, the brothers Bruno, Edgar and Egbert Bauer – the holy family of the title – had already slipped from militant atheism and communism into mere buffoonery, rather like the Dadaists or Futurists of the 1930s. All they deserved or needed was a quick slap, not a full-scale bombardment. Who shoots a housefly with a blunderbuss?

      Marx’s scattergun hit other targets who were no more worthy of his attentions. There were several chapters of invective against Eugène Sue, an author of popular sentimental novels, whose only offence was to have been praised in Bruno Bauer’s Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. Though Sue may well have been every bit as dire as Marx suggested, the punishment was absurdly disproportionate to the crime: try to imagine, by way of a modern equivalent, a magnum opus by Professor George Steiner attacking The Bridges of Madison County. Even Engels had to admit that Marx was wasting his sourness on the desert air. ‘The thing’s too long,’ he wrote. ‘The supreme contempt we two evince towards the Literatur-Zeitung is in glaring contrast to the twenty-two sheets [352 pages] we devote to it. In addition most of the criticism of speculation and