Karl Marx: the drinking years

It’s certainly an unconventional perspective on Marx, but does it bear any relation to the facts? Well, yes, actually. Like many students before and since, Marx spent his first year at university (in Bonn, in 1835) soused in alcohol. At this stage still an aspiring poet, Marx joined both the Tavern Club and the university Poetry Club, of which he became president.

He grew a beard, wore his curly hair long, and took up smoking. At various points that year, he was cautioned and nearly arrested for brandishing a pistol, kept overnight in the cells for drunken rowdiness, and got himself mixed up in sabre duels against rival clubs.

We can still read the irregular letters that he sent home to his devoted lawyer father, chiefly confined to appeals for more cash, dispatched when he’d yet again overspent his allowance. In the event, he only lasted two eventful terms: after he was injured above the eye in a drunken duel, his exasperated parents pulled him out of Bonn, and sent him to the more serious University of Berlin, where he joined a posse of young Hegelians in the “Doctor’s Club”.

This bohemian band of brainboxes worked hard to make a dialectic of Marx’s two favourite pursuits: philosophical debate, and drinking. After concluding his university studies with a doctorate from the University of Jena in 1841, Marx went to England, the last country that would grant him asylum – and took his drinking habits with him. Shortly after his arrival, the Metropolitan Police pursued him through the streets of London, somewhat worse for wear following a particularly exuberant pub crawl.

Old habits die hard. In 1842, Marx and Friedrich Engels met, briefly, for the first time – and neither was particularly impressed by the other. Yet when they renewed their acquaintance two years later, on a now legendary evening in Paris in August 1844, their conversation lasted for 10 intense, red-wine-fuelled days and nights, during which they forged one of history’s most memorable friendships.

Although inseparable, they had their differences: Engels led a healthier lifestyle and was better able to hold his drink. Marx would pass out on the sofa and fail to write for several days while he recovered. In the 1860s, Marx’s daughters would make their father play the Victorian parlour game “Confessions”. To the question, “What is your idea of happiness?” he answered, “to fight.”

While he was adept at wielding a pen as a weapon of struggle, he also meant it more literally: in London, the young Marx made quite a name for himself as a bar-room brawler. He smoked more than a Manchester factory chimney, fell out regularly with his friends – invariably over politics – and mismanaged his money. Until Engels put him on a regular annual retainer to enable him to write Das Kapital, he lived far beyond his means, lavishing money on such unnecessary extravagances as an utterly incompetent private secretary, and ploughing headlong into debt.

To avoid his creditors, he would construct elaborate ruses, once sending his son to the front door to act the innocent and pretend that his dad was away. On one particularly mortifying occasion, Marx was arrested while trying to pawn his wife’s family silver. The police, suspecting the hirsute, dishevelled immigrant of having stolen the heirlooms, locked him in a cell for the night before his wife was able to vouch for him and her candlesticks. The Marxes were soon on such familiar terms with the local Soho pawnbroker that Mrs Marx referred to him as “Uncle”.

With the drinking and the fighting came the womanising. For Engels, this was of no consequence, as he was unmarried and open about his unconventional free-love experiments. But Marx, who had been head over breeches in love with (and secretly betrothed to) the clever and lovely heiress Jenny von Westphalen since he was 17, was now married to her.

And, while she remained his long-suffering wife and one true love until the end, she had to demonstrate extreme forbearance. First came Marx’s flirtations at university and in the earlier years of their marriage: while studying in Berlin, Marx became infatuated with Bettina von Arnim, a well-known poet who was old enough to be his mother, and with bruising insensitivity took her back to Trier to meet his fiancée.

Later, he went further, fathering a child with his wife’s closest friend, Helen Demuth. Known to all as Lenchen, Helen had joined the kindly, liberal von Westphalen family as a maidservant when a little girl. She and Jenny became close companions and when Jenny married Marx, Lenchen went with her. In 1850, Jenny visited family in Holland. She wrote to her husband: “Oh, if you knew how much I am longing for you and the little ones. I know that you and Lenchen will take care of them. Without Lenchen, I would not have peace of mind here.” Nine months later, in June 1851, Lenchen gave birth to a baby boy, named Frederick.

Eleanor Marx, the sixth child of Karl and Jenny, knew Lenchen’s son Freddy Demuth well, and believed him to be Engel’s child, as well as his namesake. This was a common misconception, with which Engels reluctantly played along to protect his friend. She had always felt upset that the man she called her “second father” had apparently allowed Freddy to be cast off, fostered to strangers, and given little education or financial assistance. 

There are others who were similarly disturbed: when David Riazanov, director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, told Joseph Stalin that he had found letters proving that Marx was the father of the family housekeeper’s illegitimate son, Stalin ordered them to be “buried deep in the archives”.

Charmingly, there are still a few Western scholars who hotly deny Freddy Demuth’s paternity, and claim the story is a slur invented by enemies of Marxism. But we are surely a little more grown-up now. Historical airbrushing is as bad for progressive movements as is falsely traducing them. Later in his own lifetime, suffering from poor health – carbuncles, depression and acute procrastination – Marx became more preoccupied with conquering his literary muse than tumbling her fleshly incarnations into bed.

The joys of carousing and lamp-post swinging were replaced by more time with his family.   After his death, supposed friends and foes created the fictional saint or sinner we all think we know. Young Marx strips away all that humourless and puritanical, great-man-great-leader claptrap and restores to Marx that quality that has long been denied him: a sense of fun.

Young Marx is at the Bridge Theatre, London SE1 (bridgetheatre.co.uk) from October 26.
Rachel Holmes is the author of Eleanor Marx: A Life