It’s your favorite snarky vocab curmudgeon’s birthday tomorrow — and as a premature gift from my girlfriend last night I got a copy of Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, by Tristram Hunt.

We saw the book in a store in Montreal a few weeks ago and I thought it looked great (I don’t get out much), so I was thrilled to receive it yesterday — but more than that I was bewildered, because it seemed to be an entirely different biography of Engels than the one we’d seen in Canada.

Consider, first of all, the American version now sitting on my desk:

This cover screams “military”, and it screams “soviet”. Look at the typeface; look at the red and gold; look at the stencil portrait of Engels (Che Guevara reference, perhaps?), and look at the giant word “General”, splattered across the cover like the blood of so many innocent capitalists.

Now look at the book as it is sold in every other English-speaking market:

That’s right: outside Amurka the book is sold as The Frock-Coated Communist and rather than a older, weathered Engels-as-general, it shows the foppish Freddy in his formative years, against a backdrop of the cosmopolitan industrial centers of Europe; the design seems to owe more to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society than to old communist propaganda.

So whence (and what of) the difference? I can understand, perhaps, that “frock-coated” is not as familiar an adjective to American audiences as to British ones, and God knows you can’t sell anything with the word “communist” on it over here — but why not at least preserve the spirit of the original? Why not The Dandy Revolutionary? The Gentleman Revolutionary? Why go straight for the war trope? Do the folks down at Henry Holt really think the American reading public won’t pick up anything not presented as an epic battle? Or, worse, is it supposed to be some subtle jab at how (allegedly) destructive an historical force Marxism became?

I’ll spare you a lengthier political rant, but let me leave you with a writerly one: more marketable Marx’s General may be, but beyond the spirit of the title, the American version seems to eclipse just as egregiously the spirit of the text. This isn’t meant to be a book explaining Engels’s lapdoggishness to his more brilliant master: it’s an attempt to rescue him from his obscurity as a “misinterpreted” and “misquoted” second fiddle — an obscurity so profound, Hunt laments, in an engaging opening anecdote, that when pro-capitalist reformers go on the rampage, Engels’s “statue isn’t even pulled down”. It’s an attempt, above all

to unpick [the] passions and desires, [the] personal hatreds and individual whims — as well as the driving forces and historical causes — of a man who made his own history and continues to shape ours.

So why, then, is “Marx”, a name conspicuously absent from the original cover, the biggest word on the American one? Poor show, Henry Holt. Poor show.

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