A LONG WAY FROM HOME
BY CLAUDE McKAY
LEE FURMAN · INC · NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1937,
BY LEE FURMAN, INC.
Permission to reprint poems from "Harlem Shadows"
was kindly granted by Harcourt, Brace and Co.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To my friends everywhere_
CONTENTS
PART ONE
AMERICAN BEGINNING
CHAPTER PAGE
I A GREAT EDITOR 3
II OTHER EDITORS 26
III WHITE FRIENDS 35
IV ANOTHER WHITE FRIEND 45
PART TWO
ENGLISH INNING
V ADVENTURING IN SEARCH OF GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 59
VI PUGILIST VS. POET 66
VII A JOB IN LONDON 73
VIII REGARDING REACTIONARY CRITICISM 86
PART THREE
NEW YORK HORIZON
IX BACK IN HARLEM 95
X A BROWN DOVE COOING 116
XI A LOOK AT H.G. WELLS 121
XII "HE WHO GETS SLAPPED" 130
XIII "HARLEM SHADOWS" 147
PART FOUR
THE MAGIC PILGRIMAGE
XIV THE DOMINANT URGE 153
XV AN INDIVIDUAL TRIUMPH 167
XVI THE PRIDE AND POMP OF PROLETARIAN POWER 172
XVII LITERARY INTEREST 185
XVIII SOCIAL INTEREST 191
XIX A GREAT CELEBRATION 206
XX REGARDING RADICAL CRITICISM 226
PART FIVE
THE CYNICAL CONTINENT
XXI BERLIN AND PARIS 237
XXII FRIENDS IN FRANCE 253
XXIII FRANK HARRIS IN FRANCE 265
XXIV CINEMA STUDIO 272
XXV MARSEILLES MOTLEY 277
PART SIX
THE IDYLLS OF AFRICA
XXVI WHEN A NEGRO GOES NATIVE 295
XXVII THE NEW NEGRO IN PARIS 306
XXVIII HAIL AND FAREWELL TO MOROCCO 324
XXIX ON BELONGING TO A MINORITY GROUP 342
A LONG WAY FROM HOME
PART ONE
AMERICAN BEGINNING
I
A Great Editor
That run was the most exciting I ever made on the railroad. After three
days away from New York, our dining car was returning again, feeding
a morning train out of Philadelphia. A three-days' run was a long one
and our crew was in a happy getting-home mood. In the pantry cooks and
waiters joked mainly about women, as always, wives and sweethearts;
some chanted, "Someone else may be there when I'm gone."
But something more than the mere physical joy of getting back to the
city that was home had uplifted my heart. Like a potful of good stew a
mixed feeling of happiness, hope and eagerness was bubbling inside of
me. For in my pocket there was a letter from a great editor and critic
advising me that I should pay him a visit as soon as it was possible.
The letter had been delivered just as I was leaving on that three-days'
trip and there had been time only to telephone and make an appointment
for this day of our return.
Was ever a waiter more impatient for a run to end? And yet for all my
impatience it was my happiest railroad itinerary. For I had made it
buoyant with the hope that at last I was about to make my appearance
before an American audience. A first appearance on the American
stage--one important point of the vast stage of life upon which all of
us must appear, some to play in a big scene, some in a little scene,
and each preoccupied with the acting of his own particular part.
I was intent on my own rôle--I a waiter--waiting for recognition as
a poet. It was seven years since I had arrived in the States from
Jamaica, leaving behind me a local reputation as a poet. I came to
complete my education. But after a few years of study at the Kansas
State College I was gripped by the lust to wander and wonder. The
spirit of the vagabond, the daemon of some poets, had got hold of me.
I quit college. I had no desire to return home. What I had previously
done was done. But I still cherished the urge to creative expression. I
desired to achieve something new, something in the spirit and accent of
America. Against its mighty throbbing force, its grand energy and power
and bigness, its bitterness burning in my black body, I would raise my
voice to make a canticle of my reaction.
And so I became a vagabond--but a vagabond with a purpose. I was
determined to find expression in writing. But a vagabond without money
must live. And as I was not just a hard-boiled bum, it was necessary
to work. So I looked for the work that was easy to my hand while my
head was thinking hard: porter, fireman, waiter, bar-boy, houseman. I
waded through the muck and the scum with the one objective dominating
my mind. I took my menial tasks like a student who is working his way
through a university. My leisure was divided between the experiment of
daily living and the experiment of essays in writing. If I would not
graduate as a bachelor of arts or science, I would graduate as a poet.
So the years had sped by--five of them--like a rivulet flowing to feed
a river. I had accumulated much, and from the fulness of my heart I
poured myself out with passion of love and hate, of sorrow and joy,
writing out of myself, waiting for an audience. At last my chance had
come. My ambition was about to be realized.
The editor had written enthusiastically: "Come in to see me and let us
know one another...."
Wonderful day! Marvelous riding! Everybody happy, going home, but I
was the happiest. Steward and men commented on my exuberant spirit and
joked about the possible cause. But I kept it a sweet secret. None of
them knew that I was a scribbler. If they did, instead of my being just
one of them, "pal" and "buddy," they might have dubbed me "professor."
Roar louder and louder, rushing train and whistle, beautiful engine
whistle, carry me along, for I myself am a whistle timed to the wind
that is blowing through me a song of triumph....
Pennsylvania Station! It was early in the morning. Our steward
telephoned to the commissary for our next itinerary. We were ordered to
double out again that afternoon. Another diner had been switched from
its regular course, and ours was put in its place.
That was an extraordinary order, after a long and tiring trip. But in
those days of 1918, life was universally extraordinary and we railroad
men were having our share of it. The government was operating the
railroads, and Mr. McAdoo was Director-General. The lines were taxed
to their capacity and the trains were running in a different way.
Coaches and dining cars of one line were hitched up indiscriminately
to the engines of another. Even we waiters were all mixed up on the
same level! Seniority didn't count any more; efficiency was enough.
There were no special crews for the crack trains; new men replaced
the old-timers, expertly swinging trays to the rocking of the train
and feeding lawmakers to the amazement of the old élite of the crews.
The regular schedules were obsolete, for the dining cars were always
getting out of line, there were so many special assignments. One day
our dining car would be detailed to serve a group of Allied officers
going on a secret rendezvous. Another day it had to cater to a foreign
mission traveling to Washington. And other days there was the feeding
of detachment upon detachment of hungry soldiers.
"Why should a doubling-out be wished on us?" one waiter growled. "Ask
Mr. McAdoo, it's his business," another hilariously replied. In my
disappointment (for now I had no time to see the editor) I cursed my
luck and wished we were again working under the old régime. But that
was merely a momentary reaction, for under the new system we were
getting better wages and pay for overtime.
I telephoned the editor that I was obliged to work and could not keep
the appointment. He answered graciously: "Whenever you are free,
telephone me, and I'll see that we get together." And he gave me his
private telephone number and address.
That night our crew slept in Harrisburg. The next afternoon we were
in Pittsburgh, and free until the following morning. We went to the
sleeping quarters in Wylie Avenue and checked in for our beds, after
which the crew split up. A good distance from Wylie Avenue the colored
folk had managed to maintain a café and cabaret on the edge of a
section of the white district downtown. I decided to go there.
I wish I were one of those persons who have a sense of premonition, so
that I might have stuck to quarters that afternoon. But I had a desire
to be away from my fellows and off by myself, even if it were in a
crowd. My mind was full of the rendezvous with that editor in New York.
And as I couldn't talk to any of the fellows about it, it was better
to find elsewhere excitement that would keep me from thinking too much.
I found the café in a hectic state. The police had just combed it,
rounding up draft dodgers and vagrants. I learned that there was a
police net thrown around Pittsburgh that day, and many men who were not
slackers at all, but who had left their papers at home, had been picked
up. I had no papers, for I had lost my registration card, so I decided
to get back right away to the cover and protection of the crew's
quarters.
I hurried off, but two blocks away from the café a black man and a
white came across the street and straight at me. Bulls! Immediately I
was aware. As I had no papers, the detectives arrested me and started
for the jail. My protest that I was importantly employed on the
railroad was of no avail. The detectives wrote down my name, appearing
very wise and knowing, and I wondered if I had been listed as a draft
dodger. I had moved from the address from which I had registered and
had never received any notification.
At the jail I tried to get permission to telephone to the steward of
our dining car. But the perplexed officials had no time to give to the
personal requests of the host of prisoners. The police had corralled
more than they could handle. The jails were overcrowded, with more men
being brought in every minute and no place to accommodate them. Some of
the local prisoners had their papers at home. Relatives, learning of
their plight, brought them the papers and they were discharged. But all
the non-residents were held. Three of us, two colored, one white, were
put into a cell which was actually a water closet with an old-fashioned
fetid hole. It was stinking, suffocating. I tried to overcome the
stench by breathing through my mind all the fragrant verse I could
find in the range of my memory.
At last dawn came, bringing some relief. At nine o'clock we were
marched to the court, a motley gang of men, bums, vagrants, pimps,
and honest fellows, all caught in the same net. The judge handed out
five- and ten-day sentences like souvenirs. When my turn came, I told
the judge that my registration card was mislaid somewhere in New York,
but that I was working on the railroad, had arrived in Pittsburgh only
the day before, and should be working at that hour. I said that nearly
every day I was serving soldiers and that my being absent from the
dining car that morning would cripple the service, because I was the
chief waiter and we were running short of a full crew.
To my surprise, as soon as I had finished, the judge asked me if I were
born in Jamaica. I said, "Yes, Sir," and he commented: "Nice place.
I was there a couple of seasons ago." And, ignoring my case and the
audience, the judge began telling me of his trip to Jamaica and how he
enjoyed it, the climate, the landscape, and the natives. He mentioned
some of the beauty spots and I named those I knew. "I wish I were there
instead of here," he said. "I wish I were there too," I echoed him. I
could quite understand how he felt, for who would not like to escape
from a winter in steely, smoky, stone-faced Pittsburgh!
Turning to my case again, the judge declared that I was doing
indispensable work on the railroad and he reprimanded the black
detective who had pressed the charge and said the police should be more
discriminate in making arrests and endeavor to ascertain the facts
about their victims. My case was dismissed. I seized the opportunity
to tell the judge that, my dining car having already left, the local
railroad officials would have to send me back to New York, and asked
for a paper to show that I had been wrongfully detained by the police.
Very willingly the judge obliged me and dictated a statement to a
clerk, which he signed. As he handed me the slip, he smiled and said:
"You see, I could place you by your accent." I flashed back a smile
of thanks at him and resolved henceforth to cultivate more my native
accent. So excellent was the paper the judge gave me, I was able
to use it for the duration of the war without worrying about a new
registration card.
Hurrying to the railroad station, I found that my dining car was
already gone. I reported to the commissary department. Later in the
afternoon they put me on another dining car going to Harrisburg. The
next day I arrived in New York, and as soon as I got off the train
telephoned to the editor at his office. He invited me to his house that
evening.
* * * * *
Frank Harris's friendly letter, warm with enthusiasm for my poetry, and
inviting me to visit him, was the kind of thing that might turn the
head of a young writer bitten by the bug of ambition, and sweep him off
his feet. But when a fellow is intoxicated with poetry and is yet able
to keep a sober head and steady feet to swing a tray among impatient
crowds of passengers in a rocking train, he ought to be able to hold
himself in under any other excitement.
Frank Harris appeared to me then as the embodiment of my idea of a
romantic luminary of the writing world. He stirred me sometimes like
Byron and Heine, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud. I had read his writings
avidly ever since he returned to America during the World War and
stamped his personality upon the pages of _Pearson's Magazine_. His
pronunciamento when he took over the editorship was impressed on my
memory. He had said that the purpose of _Pearson's_ was to reach and
discover the obscure talents of America who were perhaps discouraged,
engaged in uncongenial labor when they might be doing creative work. I
took his moving message personally, for I was one of those talents.
It was nine o'clock when I got to Frank Harris's house in Waverly
Place. Opening the door for me himself he said the butler had gone
home. I was surprised by his littleness. I knew that he was small of
stature, but did not expect him to be as diminutive as he was. But his
voice was great and growling like a friendly lion's with strength and
dignity and seemingly made him larger than he actually was. "You are
the poet," his voice rolled as he gripped my hand. He stepped back
and scrutinized me before indicating a seat. He explained that he was
speculating whether I reminded him of any special African type, for he
had traveled in South Africa, West Africa, East Africa and the Soudan.
The door opened and a woman, wearing a rich-looking rose-colored opera
cloak, stood poised on the threshold like a picture. I stood up and
Frank Harris said: "This is the Negro poet." She nodded slightly and
vanished.
"My wife is going to the opera," Harris explained. "She adores it but I
don't care a rap about the opera. Of all the arts of the theater it is
the tinseliest. A spectacle mainly for women." I said I liked the opera
rather well, such of it as I had seen, especially the chorus and the
dancing. Frank Harris said he was surprised that I should, because the
art of the opera was the most highly artificial of the civilized arts.
He excused himself to go downstairs for wine. He returned with two
bottles and glasses. It was my first taste of Rhenish wine and I
enjoyed the pleasure of sampling it even more than the actual taste.
Frank Harris glowed in praise of the wine. He was concerned about his
diminishing stock and said that because of the war, Rhine wine was
becoming difficult to get and more costly. Seeing that I was ignorant
of the qualities of Rhine wine, he proceeded to enlighten me, saying
that the grapes from which the wine was made could not be duplicated
elsewhere because of the original nature of the soil in which they
grew, and that even in the Rhine country the grapes grown in one
district produced a different brand from that of the grapes grown in
another, and that this was very important to the local viticulturists.
He recalled the pleasure he had experienced when traveling through the
Rhineland tasting the peculiar sourish grapes and testing the wine.
"Pour me a glass of any real Rhine wine," he said, "and I can tell
exactly from where it came without seeing the label."
As he filled the glasses again he said: "You are a real poet, my lad."
He sifted the group of poems I had sent to him and said: "You have some
excellent pieces here." He picked out "The Park in Spring" and "Harlem
Shadows." "These are excellent," he said. "You have the classical
feeling and a modern way of expressing it. But where did you get it?"
He strode over to me and pressed his fingers upon my forehead, as if
to take the measure of what was there: "Tell me, how did you begin
writing? What was your early influence?"
Briefly, I told the story of my West Indian background. My peasant
childhood in a mountain country of a few hundred villages widely
scattered over the hills. The missionary who built the first mission--a
Mr. Hathaway who claimed kinship to the Shakespeare Hathaways, and who
started my school-teacher brother (the eldest) on the road to college
and gave him his first complete set of Shakespeare. My boyhood spent
in various villages with that brother, spanned by the years between
the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and her death: the indelible
years of my first reading of anything that was thrilling just for the
thrill--the Waverly novels; Dickens in small sardine-packed words,
bound in thin blue covers; the tomes of Mrs. Henry Wood, Charlotte M.
Braeme, Miss Braddon, Mrs. Southworth, Marie Corelli.... And suddenly
like a comet the discovery of the romance of science in Huxley's _Man's
Place in Nature_ and Haeckel's _The Riddle of the Universe_.
Frank Harris was a little surprised at my coming by free-thought at
such an early age--before I was fourteen. So I explained that my
brother was a free-thinker (although at the same time a denominational
school-teacher and lay preacher), and that when he became aware of my
omnivorous reading he put his free-thought literature in my way. Thus I
grew up without religious instruction at home, I told him. Also, I was
not free-thinking alone. In one high mountain village there were ten
of us boys in a free-thought band, and most of them were heathen from
their own primitive thinking, without benefit of books. Frank Harris
thought that that was a remarkable thing to happen in a remote and
backward colony.
"But when did you actually begin writing verses?" he asked. "When I was
ten, as I remember," I said, "the first was a rhymed acrostic for our
school gala."
After a while I made a gesture of going, for I was apprehensive of
trespassing upon the man's time and kindness. I felt it to be such a
genuine human kindness. That loud roar rising out of him seemed to
proclaim: My body may be little and insignificant, but my heart is
great and sincere.
Frank Harris laughed at my worrying about his time. He said that since
there had been so much difficulty about our getting together, we should
make the most of it now. He had a lot to say yet, he said. But first he
wanted to know how I got beyond the jingle-rhyme stage of verse-making.
He remarked upon the fact that though I began verse-writing early, I
had not been attracted by poetry in my early reading. It was the story
in the plays that had carried me through Shakespeare.
And I related to him the story of my adolescence: my meeting with
one Mr. Jekyll, an English gentleman who became my intellectual and
literary mentor and encouraged me to continue writing verses in the
Negro dialect. I told him something of this man who had gone among the
peasants and collected their field-and-yard songs (words and music)
and African folk tales and published them in a book called _Jamaica
Song and Story_; of how he became interested when he first saw my
verses--enthusiastic really--and said that they sounded like the
articulate consciousness of the peasants. I had corresponded with and
visited him over a period of five years and written many songs. His
interest in me was general at first. I was merely a literate phenomenon
among the illiterate peasants whose songs and tales he was writing.
Then in time there was a subtle change from a general to an individual
interest and he became keen about my intellectual development and also
in my verse as real poetry.
I told Harris how, with this man's excellent library at my disposal, I
read poetry: _Childe Harold_, _The Dunciad_, _Essay on Man_, _Paradise
Lost_, the Elizabethan lyrics, _Leaves of Grass_, the lyrics of Shelley
and Keats and of the late Victorian poets, and how he translated and
we read together pieces out of Dante, Leopardi, and Goethe, Villon
and Baudelaire. During those years also Mr. Jekyll was translating
Schopenhauer and I read a lot from his translation. Then he suggested
Spinoza's _Ethics_, which I read, skipping the mathematical hypotheses,
and for a time considered myself a pantheist. Also at that time the
Rationalist Press of London was publishing six-penny reprints of
Herbert Spencer's works, which I devoured greedily as they appeared.
I related to Frank Harris how I experienced a specially piquant human
interest in reading Herbert Spencer and also George Eliot, because Mr.
Jekyll had told me that he had seen them both, and that George Eliot
lived near the Jekyll country place. He or his people (I am not sure
which) made overtures to get acquainted with her. But she rejected
them, saying she preferred not to make any new friends.
Mr. Jekyll had also shown me a letter from Herbert Spencer, which he
regarded as a rare treasure. He (Mr. Jekyll) had discovered a mistake
in computation, which he considered important, in one of Spencer's
books and had written to him pointing it out. Herbert Spencer,
replying, acknowledged the mistake, but said that, since it was already
published, he did not think it was important enough to change. I am not
even sure if that was the exact nature of the reply. I was so immature
that I did not even grasp the significance of the matter, nor what
exactly it was about. What amazed me then was that a great philosopher
had permitted an error, which had been brought to his notice, to
remain--that he had not corrected it. For in those burgeoning days I
was a zealot for the truth as something absolute. But Mr. Jekyll had
smiled at my reaction. He was satisfied that Herbert Spencer had sent
him a private and courteous acknowledgment.
At this point Frank Harris exploded so hard that he frightened me.
"Exactly like Herbert Spencer," he cried. "I knew him well. You may
not know it, but the letter you mention is a key to his character. I
wish I had it in my hands. He was a narrow, bigoted, self-opinionated
and typical John-Bullish unscientific Englishman. Fancy his
acknowledging an error in his book and yet refusing to correct it!
Putting his personal vanity above scientific fact. A purely Anglo-Saxon
disregard for logic. No French intellectual would be capable of such a
thing!"
Frank Harris said that he had written, or was writing, a portrait of
Herbert Spencer. "And I wish I had that letter," he cried. "It would
illuminate my portrait and prove my point that he was an old humbug. He
was the philosopher of British Philistinism--self-righteous and smug.
I told him once that I thought that certain of his deductions were
untenable and he said he could not stand contradiction. Think of that!
He refused to listen. He did not want to be contradicted, not even by
the truth."
I mentioned Mr. Jekyll's joking about the matter and remarking that
it was better that the mistakes of the great should remain, so that
the world could see and know that the great are not infallible and are
subject to error like anybody else. How also he had pointed out Byron's
famous grammatical error in _Childe Harold_ as an example. Frank Harris
said the comparison was far-fetched, but he could not forbear to seize
the moment to make his own: "Byron was a great poet and a rebel to
boot, like myself, and he was hated and hunted by English society. But
they accepted a little man like Herbert Spencer as a great philosopher,
because he made a virtue of their lowest predatory instincts. The
survival of the fittest: a smug, mediocre, comfortable, middle-class
interpretation of Darwin's great theory, making it pleasant for the
Imperialist grabbers and the conscienceless British shopkeepers.
Survival of the fittest indeed! What would become of the better-class
litter if they were not sheltered and protected from birth? What if
they had to fend for themselves like the children of the have-nots?"
Becoming less violently emphatic, Frank Harris wondered if Mr. Jekyll
would be willing to furnish a copy of the Herbert Spencer letter. I
said I had no idea whether he would, but that I was willing to sound
him. And I pointed out again that at the time when Mr. Jekyll showed me
the letter he really thought more of Herbert Spencer's sending him a
private and courteous reply than of the importance of the mistake that
he had discovered.
"Just like an Englishman," said Frank Harris, "putting nice manners and
all its bloody ritual above veracity and logic." [Later I wrote to Mr.
Jekyll, stating Frank Harris's request and sending him some copies of
_Pearson's_. But he gave a flat refusal and said that although Frank
Harris's writings were "very clever," I should beware of him because he
was insincere and pro-German!]
I finished telling all I could about my reading and writing, and then
got my portfolio and showed Harris the little volume of my _Songs
of Jamaica_ that was published in 1912; also a bulky scrapbook full
of reviews from London and Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin and Cardiff,
Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland, Sierra Leone, Lagos, and even
Capetown--from all over the English-language world, excepting America.
Frank Harris opened the book and read the dedication, which was for
Governor Olivier of Jamaica [now Lord Olivier], and exclaimed: "Sydney
Olivier! Oh yes, he did become governor of some colony. I knew him
quite well--one of the most brilliant and practical of the Fabians.
Was he interested in you?" I said that Governor Olivier had become
interested in my verse through Mr. Jekyll, and had accepted the
dedication.
My scrapbook interested Frank Harris. It was crowded with the souvenirs
of adolescence: pictures of famous literati cut from English and
American magazines, unusual newspaper items, letters from Mr. Jekyll
about my verse.... He came upon a cutting from _T.P.'s Weekly_ with
a prize poem of mine. This prompted him to say that he was well
acquainted with T.P. O'Connor, whom he described as a successful
Irishman whom the English liked because he never possessed an idea.
There was also a letter from Lord Stamfordham, the private secretary
of King George, to Mr. Jekyll about my book. Mr. Jekyll and Lord
Stamfordham had been friends from their youth and Mr. Jekyll had told
me that he was trying to get a copy of _Songs of Jamaica_ on the
King's table. He said that even though the book was not read, if it
were mentioned in a London drawing-room of consequence and reviewed by
society, it might have a sale as a curiosity!
With his thumb on Lord Stamfordham's letter, Frank Harris said: "That's
big."
"What's big?" I asked.
"Bigge," said Frank Harris, spelling the name. "That's Stamfordham's
family name. I knew him quite well when he was just Bigge and secretary
to Queen Victoria. I suppose he was not smart enough for King Edward,
but he came back with King George, naturally. And did he do anything
for your book?" I said that I didn't think so. "I am sure it would not
have done you any good even if your poems had been put on the King's
table," said Frank Harris. "A literary talent is not like that of a
prima donna. Yet that Mr. Jekyll friend of yours is a remarkable person
in a way. A man that it must have been a great experience to know. I
can trace his influence in your poetry. Good, but you must go beyond
that, my lad. I should have liked to match my intellect against his.
I had also a great teacher-friend in Byron Smith." And Frank Harris's
noble roar was modulated by a fine note of tenderness as he spoke a
little about the teacher of his American university days. It interested
him that I also had gone to school in Kansas.
And now he began to talk of his beginnings in Kansas, monologuing,
launching out like a perfect little boat riding the great waves.
Frank Harris thundered and roared and boomed and trumpeted, striding
across the floor and creating action to match the color and vigor of
his outpouring. Like a god laying down the commandments of literature
and life he talked. Like a wizard he evoked the notable contemporary
figures of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century and
paraded them in all their accoutrements, articulate, gesturing and
posturing like the personages of Madame Tussaud's.
When Mrs. Harris returned from the opera and looked in, Frank flung
her a darling phrase and she retired. Interrupted, he noticed that the
wine was finished, and went downstairs for more. And when he returned
he again gave his attention to my dialect verse and the scrapbook. "But
why have you been silent all these six years?" he demanded. "For six
years you were silent in the night, like James Thomson, who wrote _The
City of Dreadful Night_." He quoted from that great poem:
_Because he seemed to walk with an intent
I followed him; who shadow-like and frail,
Unswervingly though slowly onward went,
Regardless, wrapped in thought as in a veil;
Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet
We travelled many a long dim silent street._
And then the sonorous rich refrain like a fugue pouring through the
great pipes of an organ:
_As I came through the desert, thus it was,
As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire
Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;
Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
Plucked at me from the jungle, tried to hold;
But I strode on austere,
No hope could have no fear._
"A great poem; a sad sick poet," said Frank Harris. "I knew him. He was
a hopeless drunkard." His mention of James Thomson and quotation from
_The City of Dreadful Night_ moved me sadly. I remembered it was one of
the first book of poems that Mr. Jekyll presented to me and that for
a long time I was haunted by the spirit of the strange music of the
desert song and the pessimistic feeling of the whole poem, which acted
like a damper on my naturally happy disposition. Yet I did love the
poem, finding it as lyrically rich and totally beautiful even as _Omar
Khayyám_.
"Perhaps you too have a _City of Dreadful Night_ pent up in you as a
result of your six silent years?" Frank Harris asked. I said that I had
not been really silent at all. It had been necessary for me to do some
practical thing to exist. And it had been a big experience, finding
out about America and knowing the commonalty of American Negroes. I
had continued all along to write at intervals and rewrite to make my
writing better, I said.
"You must write prose," Frank Harris said. I demurred. "Yes, you must
and you will," he went on. "Now you must write something about yourself
to preface these poems. I am sure you will write prose some day. Poetry
comes first; prose follows with maturity. And this is an age of prose
and not of poetry. Poetry was the unique literary expression of the
feudal and semi-feudal age: the romantic periods. But this is the great
machine age, inventions upon inventions bringing a thousand new forces
and objectives into life. Language is loosening and breaking up under
the pressure of new ideas and words. It requires the flexibility of
prose to express this age."
"Now, tell me frankly," he said, turning the pages of my scrapbook,
"what was the real underlying urge that forced you to come to America,
after you had achieved a local success in your home? Was it merely
to study?" I admitted that back in my mind there had really been the
dominant desire to find a bigger audience. Jamaica was too small for
high achievement. There, one was isolated, cut off from the great
currents of life.
"I knew that," Frank Harris said triumphantly. "Your ambition was to
break into the larger literary world--a fine ambition. But literature
is the hardest career for a man without any competence. I think that if
I had chosen politics, as I was inclined to at first, I might have done
better. However, you have excellent stuff in you and deserve success.
And you can attain it if you work hard. You will get there. You have a
rare talent. I always pick a winner. I picked Bernard Shaw when he was
unknown and started him in the theater on the way to his great success.
I picked H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad and others. You are an African.
You must accomplish things, for yourself, for your race, for mankind,
for literature. But it must be literature. Now in this sonnet, 'The
Lynching,'[1] you have not given of your best. A sonnet like this,
after reading the report of the St. Louis Massacre, which I published
in _Pearson's_, sounds like an anti-climax. You should have risen to
the heights and stormed heaven like Milton when he wrote 'On the Late
Massacre in Piedmont':
_Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughtered Saints whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold...._
There you have the sublime human cry of anguish and hate against man's
inhumanity to man. Some day you will rip it out of your guts."
It was nearly an all-night séance. We had drunk up the rest of the
wine. Frank Harris's hand had grown shaky as we drank, and he had
spilled some of it as he poured. But it seemed to me that it was more
with memories and words that he was intoxicated; that the wine was a
tonic only to them. At last he permitted me to go with these parting
words: "I think I have taught you more in five hours than your Mr.
Jekyll did in five years, but that was easy, for my experience is so
much greater. I have never retired from life, but have always been in
the thick of it, where it was most exciting. I have made enemies right
and left and they pursue me with hatred, but I have never been afraid,
I defy them as Byron:
_I have not loved the world, nor the world loved me;
I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee...._"
I had no desire for sleep. I was too uplifted by Frank Harris's grand
voice, roaring like a waterfall in my head. I had listened to many
voices that were lovely before, but very often it was the association
of the individual with the speech that made the voice fine to me. With
Frank Harris it was different. It was the voice of itself only, like a
disembodied element.
Oh, what an amazing evening it was! I had gone expecting less than an
hour's interview, merely the formal thing that editors and publishers
consider it their business to grant sometimes. And this man had made
one splendid night of it, talking for the beauty of talking, talking
exquisitely, talking sensibly. Unforgettable experience. And certainly
it was not an attitude on his part, no selfish motive, no desire to
make an impression upon me, for there was really no reason. And the
extraordinary spontaneity and length of our conversation that night
was as surprising to Frank Harris as it was to me. Years later he said
so, after I had traveled abroad and we came together again at a little
party in Nice.
But then, that night, rather that early morning, returning to the
job again, exhilarated, feeling as though I could do the work of all
five waiters, with the stimulant of Frank Harris's voice agitating
me to action, my mind was a rare element (quite dissociated from
the technical work of my hands), savoring the essence of that great
conversation, estimating the personalities that had been evoked for me,
until I thought that it might have been someone like Frank Harris who
inspired Browning to say:
_Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you,
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems and new...._
Some weeks later I saw Frank Harris again at his office in Union
Square. He had inspired me toward a new achievement--the writing of
prose. And I was determined to accomplish it. I had labored through a
personal story that had taken me weeks to do it. It was much easier to
create and scribble a stanza of poetry in the interval between trains
than to write a paragraph of prose.
Frank Harris took me into his sanctum and sat down with me over the
sheets. He impressed me quite differently than he had on the night of
our memorable meeting: there was something boulevardier about his dress
and manner which seemed a little funny. I had no great confidence in
what I had written, and said so. He said that the fact that I was aware
was a good sign. He glanced over the sheets rapidly. His forehead grew
wrinkles and he shook his head. Then he said that what I had written
was like a boat full and sinking with water, but that when it was
baled out it would be sea-worthy enough. With a butt of red pencil he
underscored the essential. It was fascinating to watch him expertly,
quickly, picking out the salient facts.
Suddenly he said something like this: "I am wondering whether your
sensitivity is hereditary or acquired." I said that I didn't know, that
perhaps it was just human. He saw that I was ruffled. I really had a
sensation of spurs sprouting on my heels.
"Don't misunderstand me," he said. "Your sensitivity is the quality
of your work. Your 'The Park in Spring' sonnet is a remarkable
achievement. I read it to a very refined woman and she could not hold
back her tears. It takes me back to the humanists of the eighteenth
century, touching me like Hood or even something of Wordsworth's.
What I mean is, the stock from which you stem--your people--are not
sensitive. I saw them at close range, you know, in West Africa and the
Sudan. They have plenty of the instinct of the senses, much of which
we have lost. But the attitude toward life is different; they are not
sensitive about human life as we are. Life is cheap in Africa...."
I kept silent.
"Now please don't misunderstand me," he said again. "We have great
disparities in Europe also, despite more than a thousand years of
civilization. For example, the attitude toward life in Eastern Europe
is not the same as in Western Europe. And again, the French are by far
more highly cultured than the Teutons and Anglo-Saxons. But the French
have no poetry, so to speak. English and German poetry is infinitely
higher. Yet, the English are barbarians compared to the French. Heine
marveled that Shakespeare was an Englishman and Jesus a Jew. Ah Jesus,
Jesus! Our Lord and Master! That is the secret of the difference
between the peoples of Africa and of Asia and the people of Europe.
Jesus: it is his religion that makes the difference."
And, strangely to me, Frank Harris began preaching Jesus. Which
seemed so incongruous with his boulevardier dress and manner. He
did it beautifully, but unconvincingly. There was something about
the man's personality, so pugnacious (a fine pugnaciousness that I
admired when he expatiated upon his profane experiences and because he
was physically small and rebellious), that made him appear a little
ridiculous preaching the self-denialism of Jesus. When he paused I said
I thought the adoption of the Christ cult by Western civilization was
its curse: it gave modern civilization a hypocritical façade, for its
existence depended on force and positive exploitation, whereas Jesus
was weak and negative. Frank Harris said that there was a great deal
of truth in my point, but nevertheless he preferred Jesus above all
the great teachers, and thought civilization the better because of his
religion.
In his rôle as a Jesus preacher the stature of Frank Harris diminished
perceptibly before my mind; the halo around him that night when he
talked as a rationalist and rebel became less glamorous. Perhaps I
judged him too severely, because my childhood was so singularly free of
the influence of supernatural religion. I suppose that people who are
nurtured in revealed religion, even though they discard their god when
they are intellectually grown up, are prone to attribute more of the
godly qualities to their own deity than to the gods of other peoples.
And Frank Harris was raised an Irish Catholic.
Abruptly he said "Now to work," and called in his secretary. She was
a little blonde from a Western town. He said that she had written
imploring him to let her come to New York to serve "the master" in any
capacity. Every week he received dozens of such letters, which he had
to ignore, he said, but there had been something so original about hers
that he had invited her to come even without requesting her photograph
beforehand. And fortunately he had found in her a perfect disciple.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: This poem was published years later in _Harlem Shadows_.]
II
Other Editors
It was a great moment when my first poems were published in
_Pearson's_, although they were not actually the first to be published
in America. In December of 1917, _Seven Arts_, which was edited by
James Oppenheim and Waldo Frank, published two of my sonnets over
the nom de plume of Eli Edwards. The nom de plume was adapted from
my mother's name. I used it because at the time when the poems were
submitted, I was a waiter in a women's club. The members were students
of the arts. Some were literary aspirants and were always reading and
discussing the new and little magazines. As I was a good enough waiter
I did not care to be discovered as a poet there.
When my poems appeared in _Pearson's_ I received many letters of
encouragement and suggestion. And one of them started an interesting
correspondence which resulted in my traveling to Europe the following
year.
I was particularly excited about appearing in _Pearson's_, because
there was no doubt that Frank Harris was a truly great critic. And
many were my dismal disappointments in rejection slips and letters of
half-hearted praise, until he fortified me with his frank, hearty and
noble voice of encouragement. "The White Fiends," which _Pearson's_
published, had been rejected previously by _The Crisis_, a Negro
magazine.
Some months before, I had sent some poems to William Stanley
Braithwaite, who was highly placed as a critic on the Boston _Evening
Transcript_. Mr. Braithwaite was distinguished for his literary
dialogues in the Literary Supplement of the _Transcript_, in which the
characters were intellectual Bostonians with Greek names and conversed
in lofty accents that were all Greek to me.
In Mr. Braithwaite's writings there was not the slightest indication
of what sort of American he might be. And I was surprised one day to
read in the Negro magazine, _The Crisis_, that he was a colored man.
Mr. Braithwaite was kind enough to write me, a very interesting letter.
He said that my poems were good, but that, barring two, any reader
could tell that the author was a Negro. And because of the almost
insurmountable prejudice against all things Negro, he said, he would
advise me to write and send to the magazines only such poems as did not
betray my racial identity.
There was sincerity in Mr. Braithwaite's letter, a sincerity that
was grim and terrible to me. He was a poet himself, but I was
unacquainted with his poetry. I went in search of him in his poetry
at the Forty-second Street Library. I found a thin volume containing
some purely passionless lyrics, only one line of which I have ever
remembered (I quote from memory):
_I kissed a kiss on a dead man's brow...._
So, I thought, that was what Boston made of a colored intellectual.
But thinking a little deeper, I thought that it was not Boston only.
Mr. Braithwaite perhaps stood for what almost any man of color who
possessed creative talent desired to be at that time. Mr. Braithwaite
is now a professor of literature in Atlanta University, one of the
leading Negro schools. In appreciation of him our foremost Negro
historian has written:
"The most remarkable writer of Negro blood since Dunbar is William
Stanley Braithwaite, who as a writer is not a Negro.... Mr. Braithwaite
has by his literary production and criticism ... his poems, his annual
publication, _The Anthology of Magazine Verse_, demonstrated that the
Negro intellect is capable of the same achievements as that of the
whites...."
Need I say that I did not entertain, not in the least, Mr.
Braithwaite's most excellent advice? I couldn't even if I had felt
certain about that mess of pottage that is such a temptation to all
poor scribblers. My poetic expression was too subjective, personal and
tell-tale. Reading a selection of it, a discerning person would become
immediately aware that I came from a tropical country and that I was
not, either by the grace of God or the desire of man, born white.
I felt more confidence in my own way because, of all the poets I
admire, major and minor, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Burns, Whitman,
Heine, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud and the rest--it seemed to me
that when I read them--in their poetry I could feel their race, their
class, their roots in the soil, growing into plants, spreading and
forming the backgrounds against which they were silhouetted. I could
not feel the reality of them without that. So likewise I could not
realize myself writing without conviction.
* * * * *
Because of my eclectic approach to literature and my unorthodox idea
of life, I developed a preference for the less conservative literary
organs. _The Masses_ was one of the magazines which attracted me
when I came from out West to New York in 1914. I liked its slogans,
its make-up, and above all, its cartoons. There was a difference, a
freshness in its social information. And I felt a special interest in
its sympathetic and iconoclastic items about the Negro. Sometimes the
magazine repelled me. There was one issue particularly which carried
a powerful bloody brutal cover drawing by Robert Minor. The drawing
was of Negroes tortured on crosses deep down in Georgia. I bought the
magazine and tore the cover off, but it haunted me for a long time.
There were other drawings of Negroes by an artist named Stuart Davis.
I thought they were the most superbly sympathetic drawings of Negroes
done by an American. And to me they have never been surpassed.
I remember receiving a couple of "So sorry" rejection slips from _The
Masses_. _The Masses_ was crucified and had been resurrected as _The
Liberator_ before a poem was accepted. I received a note from the
managing editor, Crystal Eastman, inviting me to call at the office.
One afternoon when I was free in New York I telephoned _The Liberator_
and was asked to come down. Crystal Eastman was in conference with the
business manager when I got there, but she suspended it to talk to me.
The moment I saw her and heard her voice I liked Crystal Eastman. I
think she was the most beautiful white woman I ever knew. She was of
the heavy or solid type of female, and her beauty was not so much of
her features, fine as they were, but in her magnificent presence. Her
form was something after the pattern of a splendid draft horse and she
had a way of holding her head like a large bird poised in a listening
attitude.
She said she liked my poems in _Pearson's_ and some of those submitted
to _The Liberator_, but that she was not a poet or critic and therefore
not a good judge. She would arrange for me to meet her brother, Max
Eastman, who was the chief editor and had the final word on all
contributions. She chatted awhile with me. Was it difficult for me to
work on the railroad and write poetry? Did I have any regular time
to write? I told her that sometimes I carried lines in my thoughts
for days, waiting until I found time to write them down. But also it
wasn't always like that. And I related this incident: For many days
I was possessed with an unusually lyrical feeling, which grew and
increased into form of expression until one day, while we were feeding
a carload of people, there was a wild buzzing in my head. The buzzing
was so great that it confused and crowded out all orders, so much so
that my mechanical self could not function. Finally I explained to the
steward that I had an unbearable pain in my belly. He excused me and
volunteered to help the fourth waiter with my two tables. And hurrying
to the lavatory I locked myself in and wrote the stuff out on a scrap
of paper.
"Got rid of your birth pains," Crystal Eastman said, and we both
laughed. She had to resume her conference, but before leaving a
tentative appointment was made for me to get in touch with Max Eastman.
Just as I was going, Floyd Dell, who was assistant editor of _The
Liberator_, came in and we were introduced.