The street is very short and one can walk up and down it in ten minutes. It is no more than four hundred yards long and runs between Oxford Street and Shaftesbury Avenue. It seems like any other street in Soho, the frivolous night-life district of London: full of restaurants, clubs, bars, food shops, narrow side streets, stands selling newspapers, postcards and erotic books, brothels where rudimentary cards appear on the doors at night advertising ‘rooms by the hour’ and ‘artistic models’, small clubs where profligate and bored passers-by can see a striptease act or pornographic film for ten shillings. Exotic names flash in the windows and on the illuminated signs, advertising food from Hungary, Italy and Ceylon; the bars to some extent imitate the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and one of them is called Les Enfants Terribles. Dean Street does not have that popular, nineteenth-century, picaresque feel that other Soho streets have, with their fruit, flower and vegetable stalls, their strong smells and their noisy, semi-domestic, semi-noctambular clientele. There is no market in Dean Street; its pleasures are manufactured and industrial.
Although only one or two buildings in Dean Street seem recent and all the other houses – three or four storeys high, packed tightly together, their bricks blackened by the grime of time – could easily be one hundred years old, the physical appearance of the street must have changed a great deal in these one hundred years, since it no longer seems squalid or poor. It is difficult to imagine that in 1853 (according to a police report of the time), Dean Street was ‘the worst, the cheapest, street in London’, and it is also difficult to guess how it must have looked in 1850, when the Marx family, trapped by poverty, came to live here, in two inhospitable rooms, where they would spend the most difficult and, in some ways, the most important years of their lives. No plaque marks the house they lived in and because the street numbering that appears in the biographies is the original and has since been changed, inquisitive people or fetishists have to go to the Marx Memorial Library to locate in this quiet house flanked by side streets, the two small windows of the room that served as the living
room/dining room/study/bedroom for Marx’s children (the inner room was the parent’s bedroom).
Winter has begun and if one stays too long outside, one’s nose and ears freeze and the hands seize up, so I’ve plunged into a small, smoky, crowded bar where they don’t serve coffee. I’ve had to ask for a glass of warm British beer, but then again I’m lucky because I’ve found a seat free next to the radiator, from where I can see, in front of me, the two small windows. What the hell am I doing in Dean Street? I haven’t brought with me the two books I’ve been reading just now, which is a pity, since I would have liked to have taken another look at the pages which refer to the life that Marx led in Dean Street, to rekindle my surprise and fascinated admiration. The biography by Franz Mehring has apparently been superseded by contemporary historians and the essay by Edmund Wilson on the origins of socialism is doubtless debatable from many points of view, but the portrait that both books paint of that crucial period in Marx’s life, the six splendid and terrible years in Dean Street, could hardly be bettered. Both give an image of epic proportions, a further demonstration of the victory of the rebel hero in his solitary battle against society or against evil, which appears in so many classic poems and narratives. I feel frustrated; I’ve come here quickly, anxiously, to find some remnants, some trace of that memorable battle, only to discover that the place where it was fought is an artificial area, an elegant place where the local bourgeoisie and tourists with money come to enjoy exotic food, to drink and to buy sex. It is disturbing, paradoxical, that this district, this street in which, in a certain way, the most angry and effective opponent of the bourgeoisie was born, is now the most affected and decadent pleasure spot for the bourgeoisie in London. In Marx’s day, without doubt, a bourgeois never set foot in Dean Street.
All manner of misfortunes had befallen the Marx family in the months that preceded their move to London. Expelled from Germany, they had taken refuge in a working-class suburb in Brussels and one day, Marx was captured by the police and exiled to France. When she went to look for him, Jenny Marx was detained in the street by the gendarmes, accused of vagrancy, locked up in a cell and forced to share a bed with a prostitute. In Paris, despite living under a false name, the Marx family was discovered by the police and sent to England. But they still had some money left and for the first few months in London, they lived in some comfort, renting a furnished flat
in Camberwell. In 1850, the money was spent and the landlord evicted them. It was then that they moved here and things got very much worse. Since they could not pay their food bills in local shops, all the family belongings – including the beds and the children’s toys – were impounded and sold. The youngest male child, who was a few months old and had been born in the middle of these persecutions and exiles, fell ill; he could not be looked after or fed properly and died. For many months, the only food the Marx family ate was bread and potatoes, and in the first winter, the parents and children caught flu. The youngest girl had no resistance to it and died soon after. Almost at the same time, there was an epidemic of cholera in Soho and most of the residents left the neighbourhood, but the Marxes had to stay through lack of money. The following year, their few remaining items were impounded, including their clothes (the children’s shoes and Marx’s overcoat were sold). One night, the police came to the house and Marx was locked up, accused of theft: a neighbour in Dean Street had supposed that the glass ornament that sparkled in one of the Marxes’ rooms (the only family memento that Jenny had tried to preserve) was stolen. In 1855, the surviving male child also died and, among all the innumerable blows suffered in those six years, this seems to have been the one that affected Marx most deeply. ‘I have suffered all manner of adversity,’ he wrote to Engels, ‘but now, for the first time, I know what misfortune means.’ It was when the Marxes had been reduced – here, in Dean Street – to the most extreme poverty that Engels decided, heroically, to return to Manchester, to the hated family industrial centre, so that he could support his friend economically. He agreed to write, under Marx’s name, the articles that Marx sent to New York, to The New York Times and the New York Tribune, so that these commitments, that kept the family fed, would not distract Marx from his study of economics. It was here, in Dean Street, that the policeman came to investigate Marx’s living conditions and his report, written in 1853, is a precious document:
There is not one clean or decent piece of furniture in either room, but everything is broken, tattered and torn, with a thick dust over everything … manuscripts, books and newspapers, besides the children’s toys, bits and pieces from his wife’s sewing basket, and cups with broken rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps, an ink-pot, tumbler, some Dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash, all in a pile … . On
entering Marx’s room, smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water to such an extent that … you seem to be groping about in a cavern … sitting down is quite a dangerous business. Here is a chair with only three legs, there another, which happens to be whole, on which the children are playing at cooking.
And the same scrupulous policeman informs us that, ‘As a husband and father, in spite of his restless and wild character [Marx] is the gentlest and mildest of men.’
Here in Dean Street, Marx’s political activity diminished considerably, but his intellectual and creative work acquired superhuman force and virulence. Here, despite the hardships, the family tragedies and illnesses, he imposed on himself, and kept implacably to, a timetable of eight hours of daily study in the British Museum. It isn’t difficult to imagine his journey each day, leaving at nine in the morning and returning at seven thirty at night, followed by a further three or four hours (which sometimes became five or more) of private study in his room, there, behind the small windows. It was here, in the year of the epidemic, that he completed his admirable essay, The Class Struggle in France, and wrote his book, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the following year, while his children, brandishing a whip, played at horse riding, whinnying and snorting around the table. Here he wrote his first books of notes for Das Capital and discussed, in long daily letters to his friend Engels, his economic interpretation of history and the situation of the European working classes. Here, in these six years, he learned languages, composed books, devoured whole sections of libraries, wrote hundreds of articles and found the time to invent a story for his children about an imaginary character called Hans Rockle, ‘who had a magic shop but always went around without a penny in his pocket’.
How and from where did he summon up the will and sufficient energy to carry out such a lofty and ambitious undertaking in such difficult circumstances? In the book by Edmund Wilson, there is a quotation from Marx that struck me deeply. It is a text that he wrote when he was still a quarrelsome student, terribly sarcastic and brilliant, at a time when he was reading Hegel with passion and sending Jenny ardent romantic poems. ‘The writer’, he says, ‘can make money in order to be able to live and write, but in no circumstances should he live and write in order to make money. In no circumstances should the
writer consider his work to be a means. For him, his work is an end in itself; and it is so definitely not a means for him that, if necessary, the writer is prepared to sacrifice his existence for his work. To a certain extent, as the priest does with religion, the writer embraces this principle: “Obey God before men”, when dealing with the human beings among whom he is confined by his desires and human needs.’
I have reread this paragraph several times and now, in this bar, which is overrun by young people with long, curly hair, tailored suits, blue and pink shirts, flowery ties and cloaks – what is happening in Puritan London is something that might be termed ‘the revenge of Oscar Wilde’ – I have it once again very much in mind. Could not Flaubert have signed the same text, without changing a comma? Did not the titanic and painstaking Flaubert, the solitary man from Croisset, set down his definition of the creator and his work in very similar terms?
It has now grown dark in Dean Street and, because it is Saturday, a dense crowd is walking up and down the pavement, slowly and inquisitively, looking at the windows of the exotic restaurants, the pornographic book stands, the disguised brothels and the cinemas and striptease joints. I have stopped in front of the twin windows and immediately three or four passers-by also stop and stare anxiously: what terrible images would they like to see? But the shutters of the house are closed and they move away, disappointed. I also leave and I now no longer think it regrettable that no one has thought to put up a plaque commemorating Marx’s stay in Dean Street.
London, November 1966