Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

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246 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

is now at its worst pitch.... I sit here and almost weep my eyes out and

can find no help. My head is disintegrating. For a week I have kept my

strength up and now I can no more...

In spite of all their difficulties, their basic sympathy and love for each

other continued. While staying with Engels in Manchester in 1852 , Marx

wrote to her:

Dear Heart,

Your letter delighted me very much. You need never be embarrassed

to tell me everything. If you, poor darling, have to go through the

bitter reality, it is no more than reasonable than I should at least share

the suffering in spirit? I hope you will get another £ 5 this week,

or at latest by Monday.^154

From Manchester again in 1856 he wrote to Jenny (who was in Trier)

a letter remarkable both for its sentiments and language and for its being

one of the very few surviving from Marx to his wife. The letter is long

and the following are some excerpts:

My dearest darling,

... I have the living image of you in front of me, I hold you in my

arms, kiss you from head to foot, fall before you on my knees and sigh

'Madam, I love you'. And I love you in fact more than the Moor of

Venice ever loved. The false and corrupt world conceives of all men's

characters as false and corrupt. Who of my many slanderers and snake-

tonged enemies has ever accused me of having a vocation to play the

principal role of lover in a second-class theatre? And yet it is true. Had

the wretches had enough wit, they would have painted 'the relationships

of production and exchange' on one side and myself at your feet on

the other. 'Look to this picture and to that', they would have written

beneath. But they are stupid wretches and stupid will they remain in

saeculum saeculorum....

But love - not of Feuerbachian man, not of Moleschott's meta-

bolisms, not of the proletariat, but love of one's darling, namely you,

makes a man into a man again. In fact there are many women in the

world, and some of them are beautiful. But where can I find another

face in which every trait, even every wrinkle brings back the greatest

and sweetest memories of my life. Even my infinite sorrows, my irre-

placeable losses I can read on your sweet countenance, and I kiss my

sorrows away when I kiss your sweet face. 'Buried in your arms, awoken

by your kisses' - that is, in your arms and by your kisses, and the

Brahmins and Pythagoreans can keep their doctrine of reincarnation

and Christianity its doctrine of resurrection.^155

For both Marx and Jenny the final and hardest blow that they suffered
in Dean Street was the death, at the age of eight, of their only son in