The next day I motored back to Petrograd. In the afternoon I went to
tea with Korney Chukovsky and his sympathetic wife. Chukovsky was a
popular liberal journalist and author of the old régime, and was now
an equally popular fellow-traveler with the new. He was a radical
liberal in his political opinions, but consistently non-political in
his writings. Under the old régime he was a contributor to the Moscow
newspaper, _Russky Slovo_, which had a circulation of over a million.
He had recently finished a book for children, called _Crocodile_, which
became a best-seller. Chukovsky was a member of a Russian intellectual
mission to the Allied capitals, in 1916, I think. He exhibited a large
souvenir book of interesting autographs of famous personages: Asquith,
Lloyd George, Balfour, Churchill, Poincaré, Millerand, Anatole France,
Kipling, H.G. Wells, and many more. I added mine. Chukovsky showed me
also a couple of letters from Lenin to Gorky, which he prized highly,
and some newspaper cuttings of a critical duel between him and Trotsky
over the evaluation of the work of the poet Alexander Blok, who wrote
the tragic poem, "The Twelve." This poem evoked in me something of the
spiritual agony of "The Hound of Heaven." Chukovsky gave me the gist
of the controversy between him and Trotsky. Chukovsky had done a fine
literary critique of Blok. Trotsky had overemphasized an inoffensive
literary reference to the revolution to score a political point. I
thought that Chukovsky was right and Trotsky was wrong. Chukovsky went
with me to the House of the Intellectuals and introduced me to some of
the writers and artists. I remember the names of Metchnikov, son of the
scientist and disciple of Pasteur, and the Princess X, who was rich
before the revolution, but expropriated now and living with artists
whom she had befriended during the salad days of the bourgeoisie.
The next day was fine and clear as crystal. And to make up for what I
had missed when we flew to Kronstadt, the aviator came and took me up
for an hour's ride over Petrograd and suburbs. I ended that trip to
Petrograd with affectionate farewells from the naval schools. One of
them elected me an honorary officer. There, too, I talked with a very
interesting officer. He was a graduate of an exclusive Czarist academy,
young, exceeding handsome, with very sensitive features. We spoke with
difficulty in a kind of lingua franca or _petit-negre_, to be more
precise. He informed me that he had an American wife and invited me
to dinner with them. I said it might be an embarrassing matter to his
wife, that he should first ask her. He said she knew all about me and
had suggested the invitation.
I wondered about this American wife of the Russian officer. I had been
warned to beware of English-speaking bourgeois persons, who might try
to pump things out of me. But as I possessed no secrets of any kind
and as I desired to experience all the sensations of the new order
struggling to extricate itself from the old, I never turned aside from
anything or anybody that might possibly add something to the fulness of
my exciting adventure.
I had already met some extraordinary people of the old régime. Besides
the Russians, I had encountered a most wonderful Englishwoman, who
reminded me of a character out of H.G. Wells's _Food of The Gods_.
This woman had been an English governess in Russia under the old
régime and had married a second-or third-class Russian official. She
had a nice apartment in Petrograd. Her beautiful daughter was a clerk
in one of the Soviet departments, and sometimes the mother herself
was requisitioned as an interpreter. In her sitting room there was a
photograph of the late Czar and Czarina, with the Czarina smudged out.
It was a bold thing to have the photograph of the Czar in your sitting
room in 1922. But she was an Englishwoman first, even though she had
been married to a Russian and was now a Soviet citizen. She said to me:
"I preserve the photograph of the Czar because he is the cousin of King
George. He was a good man, but his wife was a bad German woman." Also
she had the picture of King George alongside that of Lenin on another
wall. "They are the two big men in the world," she said to me, "and I
make my curtsy to them every morning: the ruler of England, my native
land, and the ruler of Russia, my adopted country."
She was very proud and pleased with my notorious self because I was
born a British subject and had lived in London. She didn't even mind
when I said that I did not like the English people as a whole, but
admired some individuals. Indeed, she liked it, because that also was
her feeling. I spent a long evening in her house and ate very English
roast beef and plum pudding. Perhaps too much. For later it was
necessary for me to go to the w. c. There I was amazed to see, placed
prominently upon the wall, a hand-printed card bearing the motto:
"Cleanliness is next to Godliness." When I returned to the sitting room
I complimented her on her nice old English calligraphy, but said that
I wondered why she had put up the notice in English, when most of her
visitors must be Russians, who did not know the English language. She
said, "When the Russians don't understand, they will ask, because they
are a curious people. I have to have these English hints around to
remind them that we are a superior people."
Eliminating my military aide from Moscow and my officer-interpreter
of the Baltic fleet, I went alone to the officer's apartment. His
American wife turned out to be a Latin-American. She was unmistakably
an octoroon. She was pretty, and, if she had been taller, would have
been a great beauty. Nevertheless she had had a pretty time under
the old régime and had been celebrated as an exotic flower in smart
and expensive bohemian circles. When the revolution overwhelmed the
Capital, this exotic creature of the smart set married the young
officer who had worshipped her in the hectic pre-revolutionary period,
and who had decided, when the revolution came, to serve under the
Bolsheviks.
She spoke nice English. Also, she had prepared a good dinner, with
that Russian pink cold soup that isn't so good to look at, but most
excellent to taste, caviar, ham, some sort of boiled meat, and
Caucasian wine. She talked a lot about herself and her husband and
their son. His son, really, by a first marriage. He was a lad going
to high school, and they were worried about him. They said that the
boy would never have a chance under the Bolshevik régime. And the
officer said that he himself was having only half a chance, that he was
absolutely loyal to the Communists, because he was convinced that they
were in Russia to stay and that nothing now could take the power away
from them. But the Communists did not trust him because he had been a
former Czarist officer. They were training the proletarian youths to
become officers, and as soon as the proletarian cadets were trained,
the old officers would be superseded. I asked him if he were certain
that the Czarist officers who had come over wholeheartedly to the
revolution would really be kicked out of their positions when the young
proletarian officers were trained to take their place. He said that
that was positively true, for it was a Communist policy which had been
stated publicly. I said that I was going to find out, without quoting
him. He said that I might.
However, I did not mention the subject right away to anyone in
Petrograd. After ten fleeting days with the glorious Red fleet, seeing
and hearing all and believing that all was a dream, I returned to
Moscow for the third time. Only when I came back to Petrograd a month
later and for the last time, to get a boat for Germany, did I speak
about the officer's case to my friend the Red officer, member of the
Communist Party and of the Petrograd Soviet. A young man he was, small,
quiet, ordinary-looking and so unobtrustive that you wouldn't imagine
his importance in the Red navy and in the higher Communist councils
unless you could appreciate the power of his clear, cold blue and
all-seeing eyes. I was interested in what the officer had said because
a high-school teacher in Moscow had said the same thing to me, as had
also a lady of the old régime who was acting as interpreter when I
visited one of the Petrograd courts during a trial.
I wanted to ascertain whether the members of the defeated bourgeoisie
who were working for the Soviets could not be guaranteed the security
of their jobs if they were loyal to the Soviets. For it seemed to me
that if they felt their positions were insecure and that there was no
future for their children under the new régime, they naturally would
sabotage the Soviets. The Red officer confirmed the statement of the
former Czarist officer: that the bourgeois officers would be superseded
as soon as the proletarian cadets could be trained to take their place.
I said I thought such a procedure unfair, and that it would make the
bourgeois workers enemies of the Soviet system instead of friends, and
force them into sabotage. The Red commander said that the Communist
controllers were alert to detect any tendency toward sabotage on
the part of bourgeois employees of the Soviets, and he accused me of
bourgeois sentimentality.
I said that if he had said intellectual sentimentality, he might have
been perhaps right, but that I couldn't have the sentiments of a class
I was not born into or educated with. I did not think that there was
any such thing as intellectual equality, I told him, and that radicals
had a sentimental way of confusing social with intellectual equality. I
said further, that I did not believe that talent could spring up easily
out of a people, like grass under one's feet.
The officer asked who had been talking to me about the matter. I
said that nobody in particular, but different persons in Moscow and
Petrograd had spoken of it. Which was strictly true. There was a
sequel. A year later I was in Paris one afternoon, waiting to cross
from the Place de l'Opéra to the Café de la Paix, when I was suddenly
touched on the shoulder. I turned and found myself face to face with
the officer. We went to the café for a drink. The officer had arrived
in France with other officers to recover some Czarist ships which the
French government held somewhere down on the North African coast. We
reminisced about the splendid Red days we had enjoyed together in
Petrograd and Moscow. We talked about our friends of the foreign office
and the Comintern. I had already met some of them in Berlin and Paris.
And he said, "Do you remember that officer you had dinner with in
Petrograd?"
"Yes," I said, "I remember, but I wasn't aware that you knew about my
having dinner with him."
"Well, he is sitting in prison now."
"What for?" I asked.
"Sabotage."
When I returned from Petrograd to Moscow I told Sen Katayama that I
wanted to go home. It was the beginning of April. Sen Katayama said
that, as an unofficial delegate, I would be given my return fare. He
was very pleased with my success and the part he had played in making
it possible. He said: "I welcome all the Japanese and Chinese who come
here. Some are not Communists, but I see that they are treated right,
for I want to make them all Communists." He said it had been decided
that I should not go back by way of Poland, since some of the delegates
had had trouble in passing through. A Japanese had been put in prison
and lost all his papers. It was considered better for me to go as I had
come, by boat.
I bade my friends goodbye and returned to Petrograd. But the harbor
was ice-locked and I had to wait six weeks before a boat could sail. I
was put up in the house of the former Grand Duke Alexander, who was a
patron of arts. I had the Duke's own bedroom and study, and his valet
to wait on me. The valet was a nice old fellow, but he was like a ghost
wandering through the palace. He lived entirely in the past and spoke
of the sumptuous days in Berlin and Paris with the Grand Duke. He
spoke fluently in French and English. He was shocked at the state of
my wardrobe. The only thing in it that he thought fitting for a Grand
Duke's closet was a fine pair of boots which had been given to me by
Eugen Boissevain.
I did not like the palace rooms, especially the study. It reminded me
of a cathedral altar. All the walls were rococo, carved and painted in
inharmonious brick red. But the cadet who had made himself my orderly
thought the rooms very grand. The cadet wanted to do everything, so I
dispensed with the valet's services, but tipped him every week.
I got to know Petrograd thoroughly during those weeks. I was shown
all the works, among them the great Putilov iron and steel plant and
the rubber factory. I liked the visits, but I thought it must have
been rather bothersome to the managers of factories who were always
pestered by having to take visitors over the plants. I went down into
the dungeon of the prison of Sts. Peter and Paul to see the cell in
which Prince Kropotkin had been confined. I visited the Department of
Nationalities, and Rayeva, the secretary, explained the status of the
minority peoples under the Soviets. Also I visited the Department of
Woman's Work at the Smolny Institute, where Nicolayeva, the secretary,
told me all about the new regulations concerning marriage and divorce
and joint individual property, and how the factory workers were cared
for during the period of pregnancy and childbirth. She sent me to a
meeting of enthusiastic women workers, who passed a resolution asking
that a group of colored working girls visit Russia.
May Day in Petrograd was a mighty celebration of workers and soldiers
and sailors. Never before or since have I seen such a demonstration.
Half-empty Petrograd was filled with the shouting of millions who
peopled the streets, marching and singing and holding high their red
banners of hope. For hours I stood with Zinoviev and other Petrograd
leaders in the reviewing stand in the Uritsky Square. And the
demonstration so tremendously swept me along that after attending the
People's Theater that night, I could not sleep. I sat down at the table
of the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexander, looking out on the Neva, with the
gorgeous silver of the beautiful white night of Petrograd shining upon
its face, and wrote until dawn. I was happy. Petrograd had pulled a
poem out of me.
The poem was published in the Petrograd _Pravda_ and reprinted all over
Russia. It was the last thing I wrote in Russia. I was overwhelmed with
praise. The praise of the Communists was expected. I was their guest.
But I was gratified most by the praise of the Petrograd literati. For
they were a proud lot, cold or passive to the revolution. The Russian
translator of Walt Whitman said that I had composed a classic. But
they had it in translation. I think it should be exhibited here in the
original.
_PETROGRAD: MAY DAY, 1923_
_The Neva moves majestically on,
The sun-rays playing on her breast at seven,
From her blue bosom all winter's snow-slabs gone.
Now ripples curl where yesterday lay riven
Great silver oblongs chiselled by the hand
Of Spring that bellies through Earth's happy womb,
To glad and flower the long, long pregnant land!
Where yesternight a veil of winter gloom
Shrouded the city's splendid face,--today
All life rejoices for the First of May._
_The Nevsky glows ablaze with regal Red,
Symbolic of the triumph and the rule
Of the new Power now lifting high its head
Above the place where once a sceptered fool
Was mounted by the plunderers of men
To awe the victims while they schemed and robbed.
The marchers shout again! again!! again!!!
The stones, where once the hearts of martyrs sobbed
Their blood, are sweet unto their feet today,
In celebration of the First of May._
_Cities are symbols of man's upward reach,
Man drawing near to man in close commune,
And mighty cities mighty lessons teach
Of man's decay or progress, late or soon,
And many an iron-towered Babylon,
Beneath the quiet golden breath of Time
Has vanished like the snow under the sun,
Leaving no single mark in stone or rhyme
To flame the lifted heart of man today,
As Petrograd upon the First of May._
_Oh many a thoughtful romance-seeking boy,
Slow-fingering the leaves of ancient glory,
Is stirred to rapture by the tales of Troy,
And each invigorate, vein-tingling story
Of Egypt and of Athens and of Rome,
Where slaves long toiled for knights and kings reap.
But in the years, the wondrous years to come,
The heart of youth in every land will leap
For Russia that first made national the day--The
embattled workers' day--The First of May._
_Jerusalem is fading from men's mind,
And sacred cities holding men in thrall,
Are crumbling in the new thought of mankind--The
pagan day, the holy day for all!
Oh, Petrograd, oh proud triumphant city,
The gateway to the strange, awakening East,
Where warrior-workers wrestled without pity
Against the power of magnate, monarch, priest--
World Fort of Struggle, hold from day to day
The flaming standards of the First of May!_
XX
Regarding Radical Criticism
Thus ended my adventure in Russia. This detailed account should clear
up any "mystery" that is entertained about my going and remaining
there. I left Russia with one determination and one objective: to
write. I was not received in Russia as a politician, but primarily as
a Negro poet. And the tremendous reception was a great inspiration and
urge to write more. I often felt in Russia that I was honored as a poet
altogether out of proportion to my actual performance. And thus I was
fired with the desire to accomplish the utmost.
Excepting for the handicap of lack of money, there was nothing to
side-track me from my purpose. I had no radical party affiliations,
and there was no reason why I should consider myself under any special
obligations to the Communists. I had not committed myself to anything.
I had remained a free agent.
But recently in an issue of _The New Masses_, the literary organ of
the American Communists, I was singled out for a special attack in
an article about Negro novelists. The article, under the guise of a
critique, was merely a piece of personal spite and slander.
I take these extracts from that article: (1) I had "written an
indignant poem, attacking lynching, wholly lacking in working-class
content." (2) I "disappeared mysteriously to the Soviet Union and had
retired exhausted to the sidewalk cafés of Montmartre." (3) "The
retired radical had grown fat and ill and indifferent in Paris."
Against the Communist attack my poem still remains my strong defense:
_IF WE MUST DIE_
_If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, Oh let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!_
_Oh, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!_
First published in Max Eastman's magazine _The Liberator_, the poem was
reprinted in every Negro publication of any consequence. It forced its
way into the Negro pulpit (a most interesting phenomenon for this black
heretic). Ministers ended their sermons with it, and the congregations
responded, Amen. It was repeated in Negro clubs and Negro schools and
at Negro mass meetings. To thousands of Negroes who are not trained
to appreciate poetry, "If We Must Die" makes me a poet. I myself was
amazed at the general sentiment for the poem. For I am so intensely
subjective as a poet, that I was not aware, at the moment of writing,
that I was transformed into a medium to express a mass sentiment.
The critic also asserted that my novel, _Home to Harlem_, had no
"class-conscious action." When Jake in _Home to Harlem_ refused to
scab, wasn't that class-conscious? And when he refused to pimp, didn't
he demonstrate a high sense of social propriety? Perhaps a higher sense
than many of us critical scribblers.
I did not come to the knowing of Negro workers in an academic way, by
talking to black crowds at meetings, nor in a bohemian way, by talking
about them in cafés. I knew the unskilled Negro worker of the city
by working with him as a porter and longshoreman and as waiter on
the railroad. I lived in the same quarters and we drank and caroused
together in bars and at rent parties. So when I came to write about the
low-down Negro, I did not have to compose him from an outside view. Nor
did I have to write a pseudo-romantic account, as do bourgeois persons
who become working-class for awhile and work in shops and factories to
get material for writing dull books about workers, whose inner lives
are closed to them.
I created my Negro characters without sandpaper and varnish. If the
Communists can create a Negro casual better than Jake in _Home to
Harlem_--a man who works, lives and loves lustily and even thinks a
little for himself, why in the infernal regions don't they?
Jake leaves Europe for America and Harlem and swings through the Black
Belt with a clean manly stride. The Communist critic states that the
story of Jake was autobiographical, "dilating upon my own love life."
The peeping critic seems to know more about my love life than I do
myself. Perhaps it is necessary to inform him that I have not lived
without some experience. And I have never wanted to lie about life,
like the preaching black prudes wrapped up in the borrowed robes of
hypocritical white respectability. I am entirely un-obsessed by sex. I
am not an imitator of Anglo-Saxon prudery in writing. I haven't arrived
at that high degree of civilized culture where I can make a success
of producing writing carefully divorced from reality. Yet I couldn't
indulge in such self-flattery as to claim Jake in _Home to Harlem_ as
a portrait of myself. My damned white education has robbed me of much
of the primitive vitality, the pure stamina, the simple unswaggering
strength of the Jakes of the Negro race.
The critic declares that I "disappeared mysteriously to the Soviet
Union and had retired exhausted to the sidewalk cafés of Montmartre."
The statement is untrue, but perhaps truth is not vital to the new
criticism that they say must replace the old.
Perhaps the Communist critic, who may be closer to the sources of
information than others, may have some inside knowledge of just what
exhausted me in Soviet Russia. Of course, I had a hell-raising good
time in Russia. I was constantly occupied in visiting factories and all
kinds of institutions, making speeches and writing, besides enjoying
the relaxation of cabarets and parties. Perhaps I was fatigued, as any
person is likely to be after a passionate spell of any great thing. But
as for my being exhausted--hell! It is fifteen years since then, and I
am still going strong, if the head-in-the-butt Communist critic doesn't
know. Exhausted indeed!
I came out of Russia with my head on my shoulders and my pen in my
pocket and determined to write at all costs, so long as I had a piece
of bread to bite and a room in which I could think and scribble. And in
ten years I wrote five books and many poems. Perhaps too many!