_Liberator_ collaborators--especially for the ladies, to whom Wells is
exceptionally attractive. They asked him many questions about the war
and the peace and the aftermath, about Russia and Europe, Japan and
America and universal peace. Mr. Wells smilingly and slickly disposed
of all problems to the satisfaction of all.
William Gropper, the artist, and I had concocted a plan to ask some
impish questions. But everybody was very pleasant. It was a nice party.
So we said nothing. I was standing, leaning against the mantelpiece,
and Mr. Wells approached me in a sly way as if he desired a close-up
scrutiny of me without my knowing it. I seized the opportunity to take
a good quick look at Mr. Wells's eyes. Journalists always write about
the jolly twinkle in Mr. Wells's eyes. I didn't like them. They made me
think of a fox.
Some years later, after my trip to Russia and returning to France, I
met Frank Harris in Nice. I was in the company of a brilliant American
writer who was meeting Frank Harris for the first time. We went to the
Taverne Alsacienne for our drinks. Mr. Wells had recently published his
William Clissold, which we had all read and were discussing.
Frank Harris said that what amazed him about H.G. Wells was the fact
that the more he tried consciously to expand his writings on a world
scale, the more provincial they became. I said, "The higher a monkey
climbs, the more he shows his tail." Frank Harris roared. Then he said
that perhaps Wells himself was not aware that his early novels of
fantasy and sentiment were his most universal things.
The American writer, said that an English gentleman had remarked to
him in London that Wells as a writer was a cockney. I didn't like the
reference to class, especially as I had at least two very dear cockney
friends. Harris said that Wells wasn't a cockney as a writer; that
he was a fifth-form public school boy, the same as Kipling. I said I
always thought of Kipling as the bugler of the British Empire, and that
perhaps Wells was the sub-officer.
It was interesting, after another little lot of years had passed along,
to read what Wells had to say about Harris in his _Experiment in
Autobiography_. Wells's first encounter with Frank Harris interested
me, especially because of the fact that my own meeting with Harris was
one of the high spots of my life. But it appears as if Wells could
not forgive Harris for once being a big and successful editor and
discovering him a poor and unknown writer. He writes of Harris's roar
receding with the years until it sounded something like a bark. But
a lion may lose its voice through age and worry. Wells mentions one
interesting fact, which must be one of the reasons why Harris was such
a great editor. The first story he sent to Harris was excellent; the
second, Wells admits, was bad. And Harris summoned and gave him a loud
talking to over the bad one. Yet when Harris became editor of another
magazine, he remembered only the good story and wrote to Wells asking
him to become one of his special contributors. And that gave Wells his
real start. The point is that many editors wouldn't remember at all, or
if they did, they would remember only that the second contribution was
bad.
The American writer left us for Cannes, and Harris invited me to drink
champagne with him. We went to the terrace of a café on the Promenade.
Harris was not a steady free drinker as he was when I had known him
seven years before in New York. His skilful hands trembled under the
weight and accumulated cares of three-score years. His hair was dyed,
and from the heat of the Midi and of alcohol some of the color had
dissolved and mixed with the perspiration oozing from the deep lines of
his face, which resembled an antique many-grooved panel with some of
the paint peeled off.
Again Frank Harris talked reminiscently and interestingly as always of
his acumen in perceiving greatness in Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells and
getting them to write for him when they were unknown. "But I am prouder
of Shaw," he said. "Shaw is really a great genius. I don't always agree
with what he says, and he went wrong about the War, but his 'Common
Sense' was a great piece of polemic. Shaw has intellectual integrity.
But I don't think Wells understands what intellectual integrity means.
He is too full of vanity to be a serious intellect. He is a modernistic
fiction writer who is discontented with his talent and wants to be a
social philosopher. But he is impossible because he has never learned
to think."
I said I thought it was a marvelous thing, something like second-sight,
for a man to pick a genius by his first inadequate efforts. Harris
said that it took a genius like himself to discover geniuses, and that
as an editor, he never played favorites. When he found good stuff he
accepted it. But he didn't go back-slapping and printing bad verses
by pretty women. He had had great temptations, but he never let his
desires interfere with his intellectual judgment.
His manner was boastful but not offensively so, for I think Frank
Harris had something to boast about. After all, he was Gaelic, and I
preferred his manner to the hypocritical English way of boasting by
studied understatement. And when he spoke of the enormous financial as
well as artistic success of Shaw and Wells, there was no envy, but I
could detect a shade of personal defeat and frustration in his voice.
Frank Harris's phrase, "intellectual integrity," kept agitating my
thoughts like a large blue-bottle against a window pane. For a long
long time I had carried something on my mind which I had hesitated to
get off. But now, with the champagne working in my head and a warm and
mellow feeling suffusing me, and with Frank Harris's features softening
a little, I was emboldened to let go.
During my second year as assistant editor on _The Liberator_ a woman
called to see me one day bringing a little book of poems. She offered
me ten dollars if I would review it in _The Liberator_. I said that
_The Liberator_ did not accept money for printing reviews, but if her
poems seemed worth while, we would review them. She said that she had
paid Frank Harris a thousand dollars to get the book printed, yet he
hadn't even reviewed it in _Pearson's_. And afterward, she said, she
had seen a literary agent who informed her that the cost of printing
was about two hundred dollars. She thought that Frank Harris had
swindled her. I did not review the verses, because to my mind, they
were not worth while.
Also, I had heard stories of Frank Harris posing as an art connoisseur
and palming off fake pictures as old masters, and of his getting
material for his magazine from writers who thought they would be paid
and then not paying them--tales of petty racketeering that were more
funny than vicious. And so, being champagne drunk with Harris on a café
terrace looking out on the calm blue Mediterranean, and feeling elastic
and free, I, who admired the extraordinary ways of Frank Harris more
than any other intellectual of my acquaintance, was interested to hear
from himself the truth. I told him the story of that woman who had
visited _The Liberator_ and complained about him.
Frank Harris was wonderful to look at under the influence of the
champagne, his lion-roaring, his face like a pirate's, yet with a
sublime gleam of genuine kindliness in his eyes! What I said he did
not affirm or deny. He just exploded with a mighty sermon about
the artist and intellectual integrity. He said that the way of the
artist was hard, for if he had a talent that appealed to popular
imagination, everybody desired to use him--women and men, politicians,
philanthropists, reformers, revolutionists, organizations, governments.
Many artists won success by sacrificing their intellectual integrity.
He himself had had large success. But whenever he felt the urge and the
bounden duty to declare his opinion, he could not restrain himself,
and so he had not remained successful. He had not been a puritan about
life. Perhaps he had done things that Jesus would not have done. But he
had not given his soul entirely to Mammon. Perhaps he had taken gifts
from persons who thought they had been swindled and who were better off
perhaps, if they were. But whatever he did he had reserved intact his
intellectual integrity.
It was a great sermon and I felt that Frank Harris was greater because
of it. He was no hypocrite. He had no social pretensions, although he
delighted in the company of smart and fashionable people. He was aware,
that there was plenty of dross inseparable from the gold of life, and
he embraced the whole. Nobody could deny that he was indeed a follower
of the Jesus who dominated his mind, that he sincerely believed in sin
and redemption.
XII
"He Who Gets Slapped"
My radical days on _The Liberator_ were sometimes rosy with romance.
Friends vied with friends in giving me invitations to their homes for
parties and car rides and in offering tickets for plays and concerts.
And even more. I remember I had a pressing debt of honor to settle.
And one day a staunch friend of _The Liberator_, Elizabeth Sage Hare,
handed me a check for five hundred dollars. She also invited me to tea
at her house in Park Avenue or Fifth, I don't quite remember, but it
was somewhere in the exclusive Faubourg Bourgeoisie.
_Liberator_ friends introduced me to a few of those Greenwich Village
tearooms and gin mills which were not crazy with colorphobia. And I
reciprocated by inviting some of them up to the cabarets and cozy flats
of Harlem. I did not invite my friends to the nice homes of the Negro
élite, simply because I did not have an entrée.
Once Sanina condescended to entertain I think four friends--all men.
When we arrived we found Sanina set in a circle of dark-brown girls,
all cunningly arranged to heighten her quadroon queenliness. It was an
exciting tableau, with a couple of sweetmen decorating the background.
But Sanina knew that I held a genteel position, sitting in an editor's
chair among the whites downtown. (She was a faithful reader of _True
Stories_.) So more than ever that night Sanina invested her unique
position in Harlem with majesty. She was the antithesis of the Little
Brown Jug of Charlie Chaplin's party. She brought out a bottle of rum
for the glory of Jamaica, and holding it like a scepter, she poured
royally. I believe my friends were thinking that they also would have
to pay royally. But the evening was Sanina's affair. She provided
everything free and formally and with the air of a colored queen of
respectability and virtue. Meanwhile her shrewd brown eyes seemed to be
saying: "I'll show you white folks!" She was a different Sanina to me.
Indeed, she was a creature of two races that night, with the blood of
both warring in her veins.
Our editor-in-chief possessed none of the vulgar taste for cellar
cabarets. Yet one evening Max Eastman said he would like to go on a
cabaret party to Harlem. He was accompanied by another friend. We
were welcomed at Barron's, where white people were always welcome and
profitable business. Barron was a big man in Tammany politics. But
I wanted particularly to go with my white friends to Ned's Place on
Fifth Avenue. Ned and I had been friends when I had run a restaurant
in Brooklyn some years previously. He was living in Brooklyn and often
dropped in at my place to eat. Then my business went bankrupt and we
lost sight of each other. A few years later, when I was waitering on
the railroad, I discovered Ned operating a cabaret on Fifth Avenue in
Harlem. I introduced all of my railroad friends to the place. Our crew
used to rendezvous there and unload ourselves of our tips.
Ned's Place was a precious beehive of rare native talent and customers.
A big black girl from Brooklyn with a mellow flutelike voice was the
high feature. And there was an equivocal tantalizing boy-and-girl
dancing team that I celebrated in _Home to Harlem_. When that boy and
girl started to shake together they gave everybody the sweet shivers.
The place was small and Ned was his own master of ceremonies. With a
few snappy flashes he could start everybody swaying together in a merry
mood, like a revival leader warming up his crowd.
Ned's was one place of amusement in Harlem in which white people were
not allowed. It was a fixed rule with him, and often he turned away
white slummers. This wasn't entirely from pride-of-race feeling,
but because of the white unwritten law which prohibits free social
intercourse between colored and white. The big shots of the amusement
business in Harlem, such as Barron, got by the law, for they were
Tammany men. But even they were surprised and messed up sometimes
by the vice squads. Ned said he preferred to run a "small and clean
business" rather than to start treading in the quicksands of bribes.
However, I had become so familiar with Max Eastman, and his ideas
and ways were so radically opposed to the general social set-up of
white-without-black, that it was impossible to feel about him as a
black does about a white alien. And I was such a good and regular
customer of Ned's that I thought he would waive his rule for me. But I
thought wrong that time.
We arrived at the door of the cabaret, from where Max Eastman could
get a glimpse inside. He was highly excited by the scene, and eager
to enter. But the doorman blocked the way. I beckoned to Ned, but his
jovial black face turned ugly as an aard-vark's and he acted as if I
was his worst enemy. He waved his fist in my face and roared: "Ride
back! Ride back, or I'll sick mah bouncers on you-all!"
Max Eastman and his friend and I made a quick retreat. Eastman didn't
mind. He said he was happy that there was one place in Harlem that
had the guts to keep white people out. There are no such places left
today. Harlem is an all-white picnic ground and with no apparent gain
to the blacks. The competition of white-owned cabarets has driven the
colored out of business, and blacks are barred from the best of them in
Harlem now.
* * * * *
Always I was inflamed by the vision of New York as an eye-dazzling
picture. Fascinated, I explored all points in my leisure moments, by
day and by night. I rode all the ferries. I took long trips, from the
Battery to the Bowery, from Broadway through Harlem to the Bronx. I
liked to walk under the elevated tracks with the trains clashing and
clanging overhead. There was excitement when the sudden roaring of the
train abruptly blotted out conversation. Even the clothes suspended in
the canyon tenements appeared endowed with a strange life of their own.
In the stampeding hours of morning, noon, and evening, when the crowds
assumed epic proportions, I was so exalted by their monster movement
that I forgot that they were white.
I particularly remember some nocturnal wanderings with Adolf Dehn,
the artist, spanning blocks upon blocks along the East River, and the
vast space-filling feeling of the gigantic gas tanks. One loves in New
York its baroque difference from the classic cities, the blind chaotic
surging of bigness of expression. I remember how, when I worked in the
West Eighties and spent my rest time loitering along Riverside Drive,
the black giants of the New York Central, belching flame and smoke and
dust along the façades of the fine palaces, created a picture like a
caravan of modern pirates coming home in a rolling cloud of glory. The
grim pioneer urge of the great pragmatic metropolis was a ferment in my
feeling.
Often I was possessed with the desire to see New York as when I first
saw it from the boat--one solid massive mammoth mass of spiring steel
and stone. And I remember one week-end when Eugen Boissevain offered
a ride over to Jersey, whence one could see New York in that way. Max
Eastman was with us. We drove up to a summit commanding a grand view
of the city. We stood there a long time drinking in the glory of the
pyramids. Afterward we drove aimlessly around the country. Finally we
became hungry. We stopped at several hotels and restaurants, but none
would serve the three of us together. At last one place offered to
serve us in the kitchen. So, being hungry, all three of us went into
the kitchen. The cooks were frying and roasting at the stove. Kitchen
help were peeling potatoes, washing dishes, cleaning up garbage. We sat
down at the servants' table, where a waiter served us.
It was one of the most miserable meals I ever ate. I felt not only my
own humiliation, but more keenly the humiliation that my presence had
forced upon my friends. The discomfort of the hot bustling kitchen, the
uncongenial surroundings--their splendid gesture, but God! it was too
much. I did not want friends to make such sacrifices for me. If I had
to suffer in hell, I did not want to make others suffer there too. The
physical and sensual pleasures of life are precious, rare, elusive. I
have never desired to restrict the enjoyment of others. I am a pagan; I
am not a Christian. I am not white steel and stone.
On many occasions when I was invited out by white friends I refused.
Sometimes they resented my attitude. For I did not always choose to
give the reason. I did not always like to intrude the fact of my
being a black problem among whites. For, being born and reared in
the atmosphere of white privilege, my friends were for the most part
unconscious of black barriers. In their happy ignorance they would
lead one into the traps of insult. I think the persons who invented
discrimination in public places to ostracize people of a different race
or nation or color or religion are the direct descendants of medieval
torturers. It is the most powerful instrument in the world that may
be employed to prevent _rapproachement_ and understanding between
different groups of people. It is a cancer in the universal human body
and poison to the individual soul. It saps the sentiment upon which
friendliness and love are built. Ultimately it can destroy even the
most devoted friendship. Only super-souls among the whites can maintain
intimate association with colored people against the insults and
insinuations of the general white public and even the colored public.
Yet no white person, however sympathetic, can feel fully the corroding
bitterness of color discrimination. Only the black victim can.
It was at this time that I wrote a series of sonnets expressing my
bitterness, hate and love. Some of them were quoted out of their
context to prove that I hate America. Mr. Lothrop Stoddard was the
chief offender in his _The Rising Tide of Color_.
Here are the sonnets:
_BAPTISM_
_Into the furnace let me go alone;
Stay you without in terror of the heat.
I will go naked in--for thus 'tis sweet--
Into the weird depths of the hottest zone.
I will not quiver in the frailest bone,
You will not note a flicker of defeat;
My heart shall tremble not its fate to meet,
My mouth give utterance to any moan.
The yawning oven spits forth fiery spears;
Red aspish tongues shout wordlessly my name.
Desire destroys, consumes my mortal fears,
Transforming me into a shape of flame.
I will come out, back to your world of tears,
A stronger soul within a finer frame._
_THE WHITE CITY_
_I will not toy with it nor bend an inch.
Deep in the secret chambers of my heart
I brood upon my hate, and without flinch
I bear it nobly as I live my part.
My being would be a skeleton a shell,
If this dark Passion that fills my every mood,
And makes my heaven in the white world's hell,
Did not forever feed me vital blood.
I see the mighty city through a mist--
The strident trains that speed the goaded mass,
The fortressed port through which the great ships pass,
The tides, the wharves, the dens I contemplate,
Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate._
_THE WHITE HOUSE_
_Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
A chafing savage down the decent street,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
Oh I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,
And find in it the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of your law!
Oh I must keep my heart inviolate,
Against the poison of your deadly hate!_
_AMERICA_
_Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand._
* * * * *
_The Liberator_ was gaining strength in its stride. We were always
receiving praiseful letters and faithful promises of support. And we
were preparing to celebrate our struggling through to a happy New Year.
But suddenly the magazine was knocked off its feet. Our bookkeeper,
Mylius, disappeared, and with him went the four thousand dollars left
from _The Liberator's_ government bonds. Unfortunately Mylius had been
intrusted with the key to the bank's vault in which they were kept. I
always felt that I could have trusted my friend, Michael, the gangster,
with my life, while I wouldn't have trusted Mylius with my shadow.
Max Eastman was discouraged. Always worried about the raising of money
to run the magazine, he had never had the necessary leisure for his
own creative writing. Most of the money he raised came from liberal
_rentiers_. And now that the magazine editorially had taken a stand
for Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik revolution, it was less easy
to obtain money from these _rentiers_, whose class had been ruthlessly
expropriated in Russia.
Max Eastman wanted to relinquish the editorship and go abroad to live
and write as he desired. We called a meeting of _Liberator_ artists
and writers and sympathizers. All of us wanted to carry on with the
magazine. But money mocked at us. None of us had Eastman's combination
of talents for the money-raising job. That had been no picnic for
him, either, in spite of his fine platform personality and attractive
presence.
The only person at that meeting who felt that _The Liberator_ could
carry on without Max Eastman was Michael Gold. Gold was always
critical about the way in which the magazine was run. He thought that
Eastman was too much of an esthete, too Baudelaire-like in his poetic
expression. He maintained that _The Liberator_ should express more of
the punch and the raw stuff of life and labor. Max Eastman had made up
his mind to get out from under. We decided that all the collaborators
should endeavor to keep the magazine going as a collective enterprise.
And upon Eastman's suggestion, Michael Gold and myself were appointed
executive editors. There could have been no worse combination, because
personally and intellectually and from the first time we met, Michael
Gold and I were opposed to each other.
Michael Gold's idea of _The Liberator_ was that it should become a
popular proletarian magazine, printing doggerels from lumberjacks
and stevedores and true revelations from chambermaids. I contended
that while it was most excellent to get material out of the forgotten
members of the working class, it should be good stuff that could
compare with any other writing.
I knew that it was much easier to talk about real proletarians
writing masterpieces than to find such masterpieces. As a peasant and
proletarian aspirant to literary writing I had come in contact with
reams of stuff, pathetic attempts of working people toward adequate
literary expression. My sympathy was with them, but my attitude was not
mawkish. Because I was also an ordinary worker, without benefit of a
classic education. And I had had the experience of the hard struggle
and intellectual discipline and purposefulness that were necessary to
make a fine stanza of verse or a paragraph of prose. And Michael Gold
also knew. He was still intellectually battling up from the depths
of proletarian starvation and misery. And like myself he was getting
hard criticism and kind encouragement from Max Eastman. But Michael
Gold preferred sentimentality above intellectuality in estimating
proletarian writing and writers.