"Life is Real and Life is Earnest": Mike Gold, Claude McKay, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Abstract

In the fall of 1921, after nine years as editor of The Masses and then The Liberator, Max Eastman decided to join the steady stream of American writers, artists, and intellectuals cross ing the Atlantic for Europe. After considerable internal squabbling among The Liberator staff, control of the magazine was passed to Mike Gold and Claude McKay, who became Executive Editors beginning with the January 1922 number. Eastman suggests that he nominated Gold and McKay as counter-balances to each other: Although I trusted Claude's political intelligence as well as his literary taste, I had no more faith in his ability to manage people than I had in Mike Gold's. They were both richly endowed with complexes, and moreover Claude looked upon Mike's tobacco-stained teeth, and his idea of 'printing doggerels from lumberjacks and stevedores and true revela tions from chambermaids' as the opposite of a poised loyalty to art and the proletariat. It was indeed as a foil to Mike's emotional extremism that I had suggested Claude as co-editor. Their colleagueship did not last long.1 Seven months, as it turned out, and during that time, tensions at The Liberator had become impossible to ignore. Fractious arguments, sometimes bordering on physical violence, were common in the maga zine's offices, and the overly aggressive Gold became a recurrent target in the pages of The Liberator for the taunts and barbs of his colleagues, who charged him with being boorish and doctrinaire. Gold responded to his detractors by characterizing them?particularly McKay?as ef fete aesthetes who valued art over the needs of the proletariat. Such tensions at The Liberator were clearly difficult for McKay and Gold to live through, but their contentiousness ultimately benefited the maga zine, because together they published some of its most exciting issues.