KARL MARX

9
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 snaketonged
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 metabolisms,
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 irreplaceable
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