plays and also two of Galsworthy's and one of Arnold Bennett's. Shaw
said that Galsworthy was a good playwright, a craftsman; but that
Arnold Bennett wasn't, and that he had no sense of the theater. "But,"
said I, "Arnold Bennett's play, _Sacred and Profane Love_, was a big
success." Shaw admitted that it was, but nevertheless it was not
excellent theater, he said, adding that the play was badly constructed.
I thought I understood. I remembered the most sentimental scene as the
most unreal--the one in which the hero plays the piano to the thrilled
woman. The actor could not play the piano, at least not enough for
anyone to consider him a pianist, and one felt that the scene did
not belong on the stage, although it might have been the _pièce de
résistance_ of a novel.
Shaw said that writing a play was much more difficult than writing a
novel, and I agreed, although I had not yet tried my hand at either.
But the technique of the theater seemed naturally harder to me. Shaw
said many writers thought it was easy until they tried to master it.
His friend, Lord Olivier, for example, who compiled excellent Socialist
treatises, once wrote a play and thought it was excellent. He showed it
to Shaw, who read it and said he could not understand what it was all
about. Yet Lord Olivier insisted that _anybody_ could understand it!
When Shaw discovered that I was not particularly interested in Irish or
world politics, because my social outlook was radical, and that I was
not expecting him to say something wise about the colored people in a
white-controlled world, he turned to an unexpected subject--cathedrals.
He spoke of their architectural grandeur, the poetry in their spires
and grand arches, and the prismatic beauty of their great windows. He
said there were fine cathedrals outside of London, structures full of
poetry and music, which I ought to see--Salisbury, Lincoln, Canterbury,
York, Winchester--as interesting in their style as St. Sophia, Rheims
and Cologne, although people did not talk so much about them. And he
informed me that the best way to get at the essential beauty of a
cathedral was to stand in the center and look up.
I was enchanted with this monologue on cathedrals. It was so different
from Shaw's hard direct hammering writing. It was soft, poetic. And
Shaw's voice is like a poem, it is so finely modulated. Once he
mentioned the World War, and let out a whinny which sounded exactly
like a young colt in distress or like an accent from his great drama,
_Heartbreak House_. I felt at once that in spite of his elegant
composed exterior, the World War must have had a shattering effect
on him. Perhaps, prior to 1914 he had thought, as did other Fabian
Socialists, that a wholesale war of slaughter and carnage between
the civilized nations was impossible; that the world was passing
gradually from the cutthroat competitive to a co-operative stage. I
myself, under the influence of the international idealistic thought of
that period, used to think that way. I remember when I was a school
boy in Jamaica that the local militia was disbanded by the Governor,
Lord Olivier, Shaw's friend and the most brilliant statistician of
the Fabian Socialists. The local paper printed his statement that
"such training for citizens is not necessary in an age of established
peace, and anyway the people of the West Indies could not be concerned
in any imaginary war of the future." Seven years later conscription
was declared in Jamaica, the most intensely British of West Indian
colonies, before it became effective in England, and West Indian
contingents served in France, Egypt, and Arabia.
I had read such a lot about Shaw's athletic appearance and his interest
in boxing, and his photographs made him look so strikingly vigorous
that I was surprised by his actual physique. Shaw looked healthy, but
not like the ordinary healthy rugged man. Under his fine white hair,
his complexion was as soft and rosy as a little child's. And there
was something about him that reminded me of an evergreen plant grown
indoors.
As an animal he suggested an antelope to my mind. And his physique
gave an impression of something brittle and frail that one would want
to handle with care, like chinaware. I thought that it was perhaps his
vegetarian diet that gave him that remarkably deceptive appearance.
Some time after my visit with Shaw I went to hear him lecture at
Kingsway Hall, where he unreservedly declared himself a believer in
Lenin. I was present with William Gallacher, now Communist member of
Parliament. At question time Gallacher said that it was all right for
Shaw to come out in theoretical praise of Lenin, but that the workers
needed practical action. Shaw replied that action was all right, but
that he was getting old and so he would have to leave action to younger
men like Gallacher. Yes, indeed, I had a vast admiration for the purely
animal cunning and cleverness that lay underneath that great Shavian
intellect.
Shaw was helpful in recommending me so that I could obtain a reader's
ticket for the British Museum. That may seem easy enough for an
ordinary person to acquire, but try, as a stranger in London, to find
the responsible householder to sponsor you according to the regulations!
Some months later, when I was getting out my little book of poetry,
_Spring in New Hampshire_, my publisher tried to get Shaw to write a
foreword for it. But he refused, saying that my poetry should stand on
its own. I did not mind, even though a short foreword by Shaw might
have helped the selling of the book. But I could never visualize Shaw
as a poet or a subtle appreciator of the nuances of profound poetry.
As a poet, I preferred the prefatory note which was contributed by
Professor I.R. Richards of Cambridge University.
However, that Bernard Shaw discourse on cathedrals was an exceptional
thing. I haven't discovered anything like it in any of his writings.
The only writing of his with which I could compare it is the play,
_Candida_. It is pregnant with poetry. As different from his other
writings as the innumerable caricatures of Shaw are from his real self.
I like to look at a great piling cathedral from the outside. And also I
love the vast spaciousness of the inside when it is empty. During the
many years I spent on the continent of Europe, I never stopped in a
cathedral town without visiting the cathedral. I have spent hours upon
hours meditating about modern movements of life in the sublime grandeur
of cathedral silence. And as I stood in the nave of those concrete
miracles of the medieval movement of belief and faith, transported by
the triumphant arches of Gothic glory, often I felt again the musical
vibrations of Shaw's cathedral sermon.
VI
Pugilist vs. Poet
Had I been a black Diogenes exploring the white world with my African
lamp, I could have proclaimed: I saw Bernard Shaw! Otherwise I did not
get a grand thrill out of London. And I felt entirely out of sympathy
with the English environment. There was the climate, of course, which
nobody likes. In my young poetic exuberance in the clean green high
hills of Jamaica, I had chanted blithely and naïvely of "chimney
factories pouring smoke."
But after working in a factory in New York and getting well acquainted
with the heat and smoke of railroad kitchens and engines, I was no
longer romantic about factory smoke. And London was enveloped in smoke
most of the time. When I was a boy in the tropics I always rejoiced in
the periodic fogs which rose up out of the rivers like grand masses of
fine fleecy clouds coming out of the belly of the earth and ascending
to the sky. But the fog of London was like a heavy suffocating shroud.
It not only wrapped you around but entered into your throat like
a strangling nightmare. Yet the feeling of London was so harshly
unfriendly to me that sometimes I was happy in the embrace of the
enfolding fog. London was the only great northern city in which I was
obliged to wear an overcoat all the year round.
However, it was more than the climate that made London uncongenial. I
lived for months in Brittany and it rained all the time, unceasingly.
Yet I loved the environment, because the Bretons were such a
sympathetic people. Like the quiet brown fields and the rugged coasts,
even like the unending fishermen's nets everywhere, the unceasing rain
was a charming part of the whole harmony of their way of living. But
the English as a whole were a strangely unsympathetic people, as coldly
chilling as their English fog.
I don't think I could have survived the ordeal of more than a year's
residence in London if I had not had the freedom of two clubs. The
membership of both clubs was overwhelmingly foreign. And perhaps that
was why I felt most of the time that I was living on foreign instead of
English soil.
One club was for colored soldiers. It was situated in a basement in
Drury Lane. There was a host of colored soldiers in London, from the
West Indies and Africa, with a few colored Americans, East Indians,
and Egyptians among them. A West Indian student from Oxford introduced
me to the club. I went often and listened to the soldiers telling
tales of their war experiences in France, Egypt, and Arabia. Many were
interested in what American Negroes were thinking and writing. And so I
brought to the club copies of American Negro magazines and newspapers:
_The Crisis_, _The Messenger_, _The Negro World_, the Pittsburgh
_Courier_ and the Chicago _Defender_. A soldier from Jamaica invited me
on a holiday trip to the camp at Winchester.
I wrote a series of articles about the colored soldiers and their club,
which Hubert Harrison featured in the _Negro World_, the organ of the
Garvey Back-to-Africa Movement. In due time the _Negro World_ with
the first article arrived at the Drury Lane club. The Englishwoman
in charge of the club took exception to the article. I think she was
the widow of a sergeant major who had served England in India. She
had given me an interview, telling about her "colored boys" and their
virtues, if white people knew how to manage them. And I had quoted
her and said she had a patronizing white maternal attitude toward her
colored charges. The Englishwoman did not like that. And so, being
_persona non grata_, I transferred most of my attention to the other
club.
The International Club was full of excitement, with its dogmatists and
doctrinaires of radical left ideas: Socialists, Communists, anarchists,
syndicalists, one-big-unionists and trade unionists, soap-boxers,
poetasters, scribblers, editors of little radical sheets which flourish
in London. But foreigners formed the majority of the membership. The
Jewish element was the largest. The Polish Jews and the Russian Jews
were always intellectually at odds. The German Jews were aloof. There
were also Czechs, Italians, and Irish nationalists, and rumors of spies.
For the first time I found myself in an atmosphere of doctrinaire and
dogmatic ideas in which people devoted themselves entirely to the
discussion and analysis of social events from a radical and Marxian
point of view. There was an uncompromising earnestness and seriousness
about those radicals that reminded me of an orthodox group of persons
engaged in the discussion of a theological creed. Only at the
International Club I was not alienated by the radicals as I would have
been by the theologians. The contact stimulated and broadened my social
outlook and plunged me into the reading of Karl Marx.
There was so much emphasis placed upon Marxian intellects and
un-Marxian minds, the Marxian and non-Marxian way of approach to
social organization, that I felt intellectually inadequate and decided
to educate myself. One thing seemed very clear to me: the world was
in the beginning of passing through a great social change, and I was
excited by the possibilities. These people believed that Marx was the
true prophet of the new social order. Suppose they were not wrong! And
if not altogether right, suppose they were nearly right? History had
taught me that the face of the world had been changed before by an
obscure prophet. I had no reason to think that the world I lived in was
permanent, solid and unshakable: the World War had just come to a truce.
So I started reading Marx. But it wasn't entertaining reading. Much of
it was like studying subjects you dislike, which are necessary to pass
an examination. However, I got the essential stuff. And a Marx emerged
from his pages different from my former idea of him as a torch-burning
prophet of social revolution. I saw the picture of a man imprisoned by
walls upon walls of books and passionately studying the history and
philosophy and science of the world, so that he might outline a new
social system for the world. I thought that Marx belonged even more to
the institutions of learning than to the street corners from which I
had so often heard his gospel preached. And I marveled that any modern
system of social education could ignore the man who stood like a great
fixed monument in the way of the world.
If there was no romance for me in London, there was plenty of
radical knowledge. All the outstanding extreme radicals came to the
International Club to lecture and I heard most of them--Walton Newbold,
the first Communist Member of Parliament; Saklatvala, the Indian Parsee
and first unofficial Communist Member of Parliament; A.J. Cook of the
Miners' Federation, who later became its secretary; Guy Aldred, an
anarchist editor; Jack Tanner, a shop steward committee leader; Arthur
McManus and William Gallacher, the agitators from the Clyde; George
Lansbury, the editor of the _Daily Herald_; and Sylvia Pankhurst, who
had deserted the suffragette for the workers' movement.
I was the only African visiting the International Club, but I soon
introduced others: a mulatto sailor from Limehouse, a West Indian
student from Oxford, a young black minister of the Anglican church, who
was ambitious to have a colored congregation in London, a young West
Indian doctor from Dulwich, three soldiers from the Drury Lane club,
and a couple of boxers. The minister and the doctor did not make a
second visit, but the others did.
The club had also its social diversions and there was always dancing.
The manager, desiring to offer something different, asked the boxers to
put on an exhibition match. The boxers were willing and a large crowd
filled the auditorium of the club to see them.
One was a coffee brown, the other bronze; both were strapping
broad-chested fellows. Their bodies gleamed as if they were painted in
oil. The darker one was like a stout bamboo, smooth and hairless. They
put on an entertaining act, showing marvelous foot and muscle work,
dancing and feinting all over the stage.
Some weeks later the black boxer gave me a ticket for his official
fight, which was taking place in Holborn. His opponent was white and
English. I was glad of the opportunity to see my friend in a real
fight. And it was a good fight. Both men were in good form, possessing
powerful punches. And they fully satisfied the crowd with the brutal
pleasure it craved. In the ninth round, I think, the black man won with
a knockout.
Some fellows from the Drury Lane club had come to encourage their
comrade. After the match we grouped around him with congratulations. We
proposed to go to a little colored restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue
to celebrate the event. At that moment, a white man pushed his way
through to the boxer and putting out his hand said: Shake, Darkey, you
did a clean job; it was a fine fight. The boxer shook hands and thanked
his admirer quietly. He was a modest type of fellow. Then he turned to
a little woman almost hidden in the group--a shy, typically nondescript
and dowdy Englishwoman, with her hat set inelegantly back on her
head--and introduced her to his white admirer: "This is my wife." The
woman held out her hand, but the white man, ignoring it, exclaimed:
"You damned nigger!" The boxer hauled back and hit him in the mouth and
he dropped to the pavement.
We hurried away to the restaurant. We sat around, the poor woman among
us, endeavoring to woo the spirit of celebration. But we were all wet.
The boxer said: "I guess they don't want no colored in this damned
white man's country." He dropped his head down on the table and sobbed
like a child. And I thought that that was _his_ knockout.
I thought, too, of Bernard Shaw's asking why I did not choose pugilism
instead of poetry for a profession. He no doubt imagined that it would
be easier for a black man to win success at boxing than at writing
in a white world. But looking at life through an African telescope I
could not see such a great difference in the choice. For, according to
British sporting rules, no Negro boxer can compete for a championship
in the land of cricket, and only Negroes who are British subjects are
given a chance to fight. These regulations have nothing to do with the
science of boxing or the Negro's fitness to participate. They are made
merely to discourage boxers who are black and of African descent.
Perhaps the black poet has more potential scope than the pugilist. The
literary censors of London have not yet decreed that no book by a Negro
should be published in Britain--not yet!
VII
A Job in London
Yet London was not wholly Hell, for it was possible for me to compose
poetry some of the time. No place can be altogether a God-forsaken
Sahara or swamp in which a man is able to discipline and compose his
emotions into self-expression. In London I wrote "Flame-heart."
_So much I have forgotten in ten years,
So much in ten brief years! I have forgot
What time the purple apples come to juice,
And what month brings the shy forget-me-not.
I have forgot the special, startling season
Of the pimento's flowering and fruiting;
What time of year the ground doves brown the fields
And fill the noonday with their curious fluting.
I have forgotten much, but still remember
The poinsettia's red, blood-red in warm December._
_I still recall the honey-fever grass,
But cannot recollect the high days when
We rooted them out of the ping-wing path
To stop the mad bees in the rabbit pen.
I often try to think in what sweet month
The languid painted ladies used to dapple
The yellow by-road mazing from the main,
Sweet with the golden threads of the rose-apple.
I have forgotten--strange--but quite remember
The poinsettia's red, blood-red in warm December._
_What weeks, what months, what time of the mild year
We cheated school to have our fling at tops?
What days our wine-thrilled bodies pulsed with joy
Feasting upon blackberries in the copse?
Oh some I know! I have embalmed the days,
Even the sacred moments when we played,
All innocent of passion, uncorrupt,
At noon and evening in the flame-heart's shade.
We were so happy, happy, I remember,
Beneath the poinsettia's red in warm December._
And then I became acquainted with Sylvia Pankhurst. It happened thus.
The _Daily Herald_, the organ of British organized labor and of the
Christian radicals, had created a national sensation by starting
a campaign against the French employment of black troops in the
subjection of Germany.
The headlines were harrowing:
"Black Scourge in Europe," "Black Peril on the Rhine," "Brutes in
French Uniform," "Sexual Horrors Let Loose by France," "Black Menace of
40,000 Troops," "Appeal to the Women of Europe."
The instigator of the campaign was the muckraker E.D. Morel, whose pen
had been more honorably employed in the exposure of Belgian atrocities
in the Congo. Associated with him was a male "expert" who produced
certain "facts" about the physiological peculiarities of African sex,
which only a prurient-minded white man could find.
Behind the smoke screen of the _Daily Herald_ campaign there were a
few significant facts. There was great labor unrest in the industrial
region of the Rhineland. The Communists had seized important plants.
The junkers were opposing the Communists. The Social-Democratic
government was impotent. The French marched in an army. The horror
of German air raids and submarine warfare was still fresh in the mind
of the British public. And it was not easy to work up and arouse the
notorious moral righteousness of the English in favor of the Germans
and against the French. Searching for a propaganda issue, the Christian
radicals found the colored troops in the Rhineland. Poor black billy
goat.
I wrote a letter to George Lansbury, the editor of the _Daily Herald_,
and pointed out that his black-scourge articles would be effective in
stirring up more prejudice against Negroes. I thought it was the duty
of his paper as a radical organ to enlighten its readers about the
real reasons why the English considered colored troops undesirable
in Europe, instead of appealing indirectly to illogical emotional
prejudices. Lansbury did not print my letter, but sent me a private
note saying that he was not personally prejudiced against Negroes. I
had no reason to think that Lansbury was personally prejudiced. The
previous summer, when colored men were assaulted by organized bands
of whites in the English ports and their bedding and furniture hurled
into the streets and burned, Lansbury had energetically denounced the
action. But I didn't consider the matter a personal issue. It was the
public attitude of the _Daily Herald_ that had aroused me. An English
friend advised me to send the letter to Sylvia Pankhurst, who was very
critical of the policies of the _Daily Herald_. I did, and Sylvia
Pankhurst promptly printed my letter in her weekly, the _Workers'
Dreadnought_.
Maybe I was not civilized enough to understand why the sex of the black
race should be put on exhibition to persuade the English people to
decide which white gang should control the coal and iron of the Ruhr.
However, it is necessary to face the fact that prejudices, however
unreasonable they may be, are real--individual, national and racial
prejudices. My experience of the English convinced me that prejudice
against Negroes had become almost congenital among them. I think the
Anglo-Saxon mind becomes morbid when it turns on the sex life of
colored people. Perhaps a psychologist might be able to explain why.
Sylvia Pankhurst must have liked the style of my letter, for she wrote
asking me to call at her printing office in Fleet Street. I found a
plain little Queen-Victoria sized woman with plenty of long unruly
bronze-like hair. There was no distinction about her clothes, and on
the whole she was very undistinguished. But her eyes were fiery, even a
little fanatic, with a glint of shrewdness.
She said she wanted me to do some work for the _Workers' Dreadnought_.
Perhaps I could dig up something along the London docks from the
colored as well as the white seamen and write from a point of view
which would be fresh and different. Also I was assigned to read the
foreign newspapers from America, India, Australia, and other parts
of the British Empire, and mark the items which might interest
_Dreadnought_ readers. In this work I was assisted by one Comrade Vie.
Comrade Vie read the foreign-language papers, mainly French and German.
The opportunity to practice a little practical journalism was not to be
missed. A little more schooling, a few more lessons--learning something
from everything--keeping the best in my mind for future creative work.
The association with Pankhurst put me in the nest of extreme radicalism
in London. The other male-controlled radical groups were quite hostile
to the Pankhurst group and its rather hysterical militancy. And the
group was perhaps more piquant than important. But Pankhurst herself
had a personality as picturesque and passionate as any radical in
London. She had left the suffragette legion for the working-class
movement, when she discovered that the leading ladies of the legion
were not interested in the condition of working women.
And in the labor movement she was always jabbing her hat pin into the
hides of the smug and slack labor leaders. Her weekly might have been
called the Dread Wasp. And wherever imperialism got drunk and went wild
among native peoples, the Pankhurst paper would be on the job. She was
one of the first leaders in England to stand up for Soviet Russia. And
in 1918 she started the Russian Information Bureau, which remained for
a long time the only source of authentic news from Russia.