0114 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYhand observations as a professional businessman; always quick at synthesis,
he could write fast and clearly, and sometimes with a dogmatism foreign
even to Marx. Their life-styles, too, were very different. Engels was
invariably immaculately dressed, his study was invariably tidy, and he
was precise, business-like and responsible in money matters. Marx was
careless about his clothing, had a very disorderly order in his study and
had no notion of how to manage money. Marx was, moreover, very
definitely a family man, however much he might sometimes regret it;
Engels was a great womaniser and although capable of long attachments,
always refused marriage.
During their first ten days together, the two men decided to publicise
their newly agreed viewpoint by means of a pamphlet which finally dis-
posed of Bruno Bauer. Jung particularly urged Marx to enter the lists
against Bauer, and Marx had already announced in the Preface to the
'Paris Manuscripts' his intention of dealing with the 'critical criti-
cism' Bauer was propagating in a newly founded journal, the Allgemeine
Literatur-Zeitung. Engels wrote the fifteen pages or so that he conceived
to be his half of the pamphlet, and departed to propagandise with Hess
in the Rhineland where interest in communism was growing fast. Marx
took until the end of November to draft his contribution and (typically)
soon found that the 'pamphlet' had grown to a book of almost 300 pages
which was published in February 1845 under the ironic title (referring to
the Bauer brothers) of The Holy Family (subtitled 'Critique of Critical
Criticism').^196
The modern reader is likely to share the view of Engels expressed
when he learnt of the scope of the book, namely that 'the sovereign
derision that we accord to the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung is in stark
contrast to the considerable number of pages that we devote to its criti-
cism'.^197 The book was extremely discursive, being a critique of random
articles in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. Much of Marx's attack con-
sisted of hair-splitting and deliberate misrepresentation which distorted
their opponents' articles to the point of absurdity. This sort of approach
had a particular vogue at that time and, more importantly, it was directed
at precisely the kind of esoteric circle able to grasp some of the rather
baroque points. There was little, indeed, of permanent interest. This
was particularly so of the two long sections dealing with the comments
made by Bauer's followers on Eugene Sue's enormous Gothic novel, The
Mysteries of Paris. These comments endeavoured to show, in a Hegelian
manner, that Sue's novel contained the key to the 'mysteries' of modern
society. Marx criticised at great length both this vapourising interpretation
and also the moralising tone of the novelist himself. The three sections