Karl Marx: A Life
- Book Review,
by Francis Wheen
Amazon.com
Karl Marx, whose influence on modern times has been compared to that of Jesus Christ, spent most of his lifetime in obscurity. Penniless, exiled in London, estranged from relations, and on the run from most of the police forces of Europe, his ambitions as a revolutionary were frequently thwarted, and his major writings on politics and economics remained unpublished (in some cases until after the Second World War). He has not lacked biographers, but even the most distinguished have been more interested in the evolution of his ideas than any other aspect of his life. Francis Wheen's fresh, lively, and moving biography of Marx considers the whole man--brain, beard, and the rest of his body. Unencumbered by ideological point scoring, this is a very readable, humorous, and sympathetic account. Wheen has an ear for juicy gossip and an eye for original detail. Marx comes across as a hell-raising bohemian, an intellectual bully, and a perceptive critic of capitalist chaos, but also a family man of Victorian conformity (personally vetting his daughters' suitors), Victorian ailments (carbuncles above all), and Victorian weaknesses (notably alcohol, tobacco, and, on occasion, his housekeeper). But there is great pathos, too, as Marx witnessed the deaths of four of his six children. For those readers who feel Marxism has given Marx a bad name, this is a rewarding and enlightening book. --Miles Taylor, Amazon.co.uk
From Publishers Weekly
"It is time to strip away the mythology," writes Wheen, "and try to rediscover Karl Marx the man." In the first major biography of Marx since the end of the Cold War, Wheen does just that as he looks for the man lurking behind the myths of both enemies and disciples, the misinterpretations and the academic jargon. What he finds is somebody who will suit nobody's purposes--Marx, Wheen argues, lived his life messily. He was neither a clearheaded revolutionary nor an unrepentant hypocrite, but he wasn't the anti-Christ either. More or less incapable of holding down a steady, salaried job, he mooched off of his selfless wife, Jenny (an aristocrat fallen on hard times), and his well-to-do ideological partner, Friedrich Engels, and spent his time obsessively writing unreadable, unmarketable economics tracts. He also spent a good deal of time preaching the imminent revolution of the masses (with whom he appears to have had little affinity). Following Marx from his childhood in Trier, Germany, through his exile in London, Wheen, a columnist for the British Guardian, takes readers from hovel to grand house, from the International Working Man's Association to Capital, from obscurity to notoriety and back again. (Only 11 mourners attended Marx's funeral.) The narrative veers unsteadily from scorn to admiration for the bearded philosopher. Wheen begins by jeering at Marx's cantakerousness and ends by lauding him as a prophet and a brave survivor of poverty and exile. In the end, Wheen's breezy, colorful portrayal is as eccentric as its subject. 16 pages of illustrations not seen by PW. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Little about Marx was left undiscovered by David McLellan's highly regarded Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (LJ 3/1/74), but left-leaning British journalist Wheen attempts to add some new understanding. Wheen does correct a small error that McLellan advanced about Charles Darwin's nonrelationship with Marx, but otherwise his book is notable less for the quality of the scholarshipDwhich is solid enoughDthan for his deft portraiture. Wheen's Marx is often charming and likableDand just as often not. An earlier generation of biographers depicted an impoverished Marx dependent upon the generosity of collaborator Frederick Engels, but Wheen demonstrates that Marx actually led a bourgeois lifestyle beyond his meansDmostly for the sake of his daughters, whom he adored. Engels seemed to regard Marx almost as a fortunate younger sibling would a brilliant but unlucky older brother. Wheen's book is engagingly written, but his editors have done him a disservice by retaining an overabundance of British colloquialisms that simply do not travel well across the pond. Still, Wheen's compelling depiction of the truly historic Marx-Engels friendship combines with a bold prose style to commend his book to serious academic and public libraries.DScott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Sylvia Nasar
While he hasn't dug up many new facts, Wheen has engagingly reinterpreted Marx's exhaustively annotated life.... Wheen's portrait of Marx's life is artfully shaped and makes delectable reading.
Ben Pimlott, The Independent
'The history of the twentieth century is Marx's legacy.' So Francis Wheen opens his stunning new biography. . . . Whatever the future may hold, there is certainly a need to get the life into common-sense perspective. It is Wheen's achievement to have done precisely that in a witty, subtle and beautifully written study that neither idolizes the old seer nor dismisses him. . . . Wheen's Karl is a warm, rambunctious, impulsive, irresponsible, bumbling giant.
Paul Foot, The Guardian
This is a marvellous book which combines years of voracious reading with the stylish writing and polemical wit which Francis Wheen regularly showers on readers of The Guardian. His object, triumphantly achieved, is to rescue Marx from those interminable haters and calumniators. One by one, he dispatches the myths.
Terry Eagleton, The Observer
This richly entertaining biography manages to humanise the founder of historical materialism without trivialising him, and offers a spirited defense of its grotesquely travestied subject. . . . Wheen wears his considerable learning about Marx's career with the lapidary lightness of a fine columnist, and can be as witty and quotable as his subject. It is a boldly unfashionable book, but a delightful one.
New York Times
Wheen's portrait of Marx's life is artfully shaped and makes delectable reading.
From Booklist
Now that the global collapse of communism has discredited Marxism as an ideology, perhaps we can at last see its originator as a man. And it is a man--not a godlike thinker or a demonic plotter--that Wheen delivers. To be sure, Wheen cares deeply about Marx's ideas, probing their origin and testing their coherence. But fortunately, Wheen resists tunnel vision, showing his readers the unruly passions of a life hardly scripted to illustrate the precepts of dialectical materialism: Marx was acting on no political theory when as a young man he boozed and brawled his way into German jails, nor when years later he impregnated a family servant. But in important ways, Marx's analytical concepts and his wild emotions did fuse: Das Capital could not have kindled a global conflagration had its author not poured tempestuous feelings as well as rigorous reasoning into its pages. And although Marx's combativeness cost him many friendships, Wheen plausibly attributes much of his posthumous influence to his fierce indomitability, which inspired undying loyalty among the few who carried his message to the world. A sympathetic biographer will naturally exculpate Marx for the atrocities eventually committed by his disciples, seeing in their purges, mass executions, and repression an ironic betrayal of the master's political vision. Not all readers will let him off so easily. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews
Superb life of the thinker who, for better or worse, molded the 20th century.Marx once proclaimed, famously, that he was not a Marxist. If pressed, British journalist Wheen would probably claim Marxist credentials—if of a distinctly irreverent stripe. (For example, his extraordinarily well-conceived biography of communism’s guiding light is probably the first to press the comedy troupe Monty Python into exegetical service.) Wheen’s satirical edge does not, however, make his study any less serious; it is as well-documented as Isaiah Berlin’s 1963 biography—and certainly more interesting to read. Marx, Wheen allows, was a paradoxical sort: a Jew who disavowed Judaism; an ardent moralist who fathered an illegitimate child by a servant; a communist firebrand who lived well beyond his means and aggressively mooched off well-to-do acquaintances (especially his forbearing colleague Friedrich Engels). But Marx was also fearless, unafraid of a good fight, and accustomed to a life in which “grubby police spies from Prussia lurked all too conspicuously outside, keeping note of the comings and goings, while irate butchers and bakers and bailiffs hammered on the door.” Wheen makes a number of useful revisions to the historical record; whereas many biographers paint Marx’s relationship with the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin as a bitter and hateful rivalry, Wheen documents that the two were friendly in person and borrowed liberally from one another’s store of ideas. Engels emerges from the record, too, with his reputation restored: in Wheen’s pages he is not the toady of other biographies, but a critical and thoughtful—if sometimes beery—participant in the shaping of Marx’s thought. Wheen takes vigorous issue with those “countless wiseacres” who, on one hand declare that Marx’s thought leads directly to the Gulag and, on the other, hold that Marx’s ideas are irrelevant to the modern, post–Cold War world. Neither view, Wheen holds, is correct—and neither is useful to reckoning the extent of Marx’s role in making the world in which we live.Respectful yet non-hagiographic, Wheen’s life of Marx deserves a wide readership. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
John Banville, Irish Times
Behind the veneer of stylishness, wit and light-heartedness, Karl Marx is a formidable piece of work. Wheen has read not only widely but deeply in the great man's works, something which not many commentators have done, and his account of Capital, that most daunting of doorstoppers, is nothing short of masterful. . . . It is hard to think of anyone since Isaiah Berlin who has written so persuasively and compellingly on Marx...The common reader, if such a creature still exists, will find cause here to rejoice.
A. N. Wilson, author of God's Funeral
Francis Wheen's biography of Karl Marx is elegant, sympathetic and richly comic. As well as being a magnificent portrait of Marx and a vivid exposition of his philosophy, it is also a superb evocation of that cast of eccentrics who comprise the international revolutionary movement in the last century. Bravo!
Neal Ascherson, Glasgow Herald
There have been plenty of books about Karl Marx, but never one like this. The biography presents to us Marx the Comic. Not the Clown-not quite one of the Brothers -but an outraged imaginative genius like Swift. . . . What comes over more powerfully than anything from Wheen's book is the sense that in those days, in nineteenth-century Europe, there were giants. . . . Wheen will leave readers feeling that they know Karl Marx, carbuncles and all. More important, they will realise that he wrote also for the 21st century.
Asa Briggs, The Times) [London]
This brightly written, highly readable, in places comic, in places provocative life of Marx focuses on the man behind the beard. . . . It brings Marx back to life. . . . As he skillfully chronicles both arguments and vendettas-often the same thing--Wheen demonstrates the vitality of historical imagination.
Kiernan Ryan, Independent on Sunday
Sweeping aside both the half-baked pieties of the hagiographers and the abject ignorance of the demonisers, Wheen sets out to resurrect the human being entombed in the icon. . . . Because Wheen's undisguised admiration for Marx does not blind him to the fact that Karl could be as big a pain in the arse as his own carbuncles, his reassessment of the works and the unfashionable case he makes for their increasing relevance are all the more persuasive. Wheen has the enviable knack of bringing books as uninviting as The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy vividly to life, as he does their author, by dramatising afresh-with exemplary clarity and concision-the crucial issues at stake in them. His contention that Das Kapital, that towering testament to 'the deranged logic of capitalism,' is best read as an ironic shaggy-dog story in the tradition of Tristram Shandy--which Marx loved--and Swift's A Modest Proposal is brilliantly sustained and genuinely illuminating.
Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph
Francis Wheen has a sharp eye and a witty, allusive turn of phrase; he has achieved that rare thing, a life of a Great Thinker that really sparkles on the page.
Niall Ferguson, Mail on Sunday
Francis Wheen has written a very funny book about Marx. No, not Groucho: Karl. And if you always thought the grim, bearded prophet of the collapse of capitalism was a figure far beyond any kind of joke, then think again. . . . The overwhelming majority of books about Marx, whether pro or anti, are much more concerned with the 'ism' he spawned than with the man himself. Wheen, who writes an acerbic column for the Guardian, has set out to put this right. The result is a more or less unmitigated delight.
Tariq Ali, New Statesman
What, then, do they know of Marx who only Marxism know? Not very much is the assumption of this new biography, which comes as a pleasant and timely surprise. Francis Wheen's Marx is a thinker of deep and genuine passion.
Richard Overy, Literary Review
In this enjoyably affectionate portrait of the man who self-consciously set out to change the world, Francis Wheen shows that he did not just talk philosophy. . . . Wheen's Marx is noisy, coarse, rambunctious, egotistical, argumentative-in short, demonstrably human.
Ben Rogers, Financial Times
Marx did of course turn the world upside down, which explains, perhaps, why he has remained so elusive a subject: for as long as Marxism threatened to tear the world apart it seemed almost frivolous to write about Marx the man. But if the time is now more favourable to Marx biography, we had no right to expect one as vivid and enjoyable as this. . . . A triumph.
Book Description
Paradox and passion were the animating spirits of Karl Marx's life, which often reads like a novel by Laurence Sterne or George Eliot. "Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, and Hegel fused into one person," said a contemporary, "and you have Dr. Marx." In this stunning book, the first major biography of Marx since the end of the Cold War, Francis Wheen gives us not a socialist ogre but a fascinating, ultimately humane man. Marx's marriage to Jenny von Westphalen, whose devotion was tested by decades of poverty and exile, is as affecting a love story offered by history, while his friendship with Friedrich Engels is by turns hilarious and inspiring. Wheen does not, however, shy away from Marx's work. Was he, as his detractors have claimed, a self-hating Jew? What did Marx really mean by his famous line, "Religion is the opiate of the masses"? Is Capital deserving of the ridicule with which modern-day economists have dismissed it? Marx lived both at the center and on the fringes of his age. He also changed the world. With Karl Marx, Francis Wheen has written a hugely entertaining biography of one of history's most unforgettable players.
About the Author
Francis Wheen is an award-winning columnist for The Guardian in London, and the deputy editor of Private Eye. He lives in East Anglia.
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