glamor of Montparnasse. "The sidewalk cafés of Montmartre" held no
special attraction for me. Attractive as Paris is, I have never stayed
there for a considerable length of time. The longest period was over
three months, when I was in a hospital. Montmartre I visited when I
was invited by generous Americans who had money to treat themselves
and their friends to a hectic time. The Montmartre of the cabarets and
music halls never excited me. It is so obviously a place where the very
formal French allow foreigners who can pay to cut up informally. It has
no character of its own. Paris, away from Montmartre and Montparnasse,
seemed to me to be the perfect city of modern civilization. It was the
only city I knew which provided quiet and comfortable clubs in the form
of cafés for all of its citizens of every class. I appreciated, but was
not specially enamored of Paris, perhaps because I have never had the
leisure necessary to make an excellent clubman. If I had to live in
France, I would prefer life among the fisherfolk of Douarnenez, or in
the city of Strassburg, or in sinister Marseilles, or any of the coast
towns of the department of the Var.
The Communist critic further states that I "had grown fat, and ill, and
indifferent in Paris...." I regret that here I am obliged to become
clinical. But the clinic is an important department of life, and the
fact about it is that I got _well_ instead of _ill_ in Paris.
In 1922 I left America in perfect health and more completely whole than
the day on which I was born. My first accident of illness occurred in
Russia. Sanitary conditions were not ideal in Petrograd and Moscow in
1922. No intelligent person expected them to be after eight years of
unremitting international war, revolution and civil war. I remember
that every time I received my linen from the laundry I invariably
found lice in it. The linen itself was very clean. But the revolution,
sweeping away the privileged classes, also had carried along most of
their servants. And of the peasants fresh from the country who replaced
them, many were neither competent nor clean.
It was very near the end of my visit that I experienced a sort of
deadness in my left side and once my face gradually became puffed
up like an enormous chocolate soufflé. I have photographs in my
possession, taken in Moscow, which authenticate my condition at the
time. There was also an American acquaintance who was unable to turn
his head; it was cocked stiff to one side like a macabre caricature,
as if it were skewered to his shoulder. I consulted a doctor. He
thought the climate had affected me and advised me to get heavy
woolen underwear. Later, in Petrograd, I became quite ill and had a
tooth extracted for the first time in my life, under the most painful
conditions.
I arrived in Germany in the early summer of 1923. Three months spent
there were an interval of intermittent fevers and headaches. It was
hard labor to concentrate upon a series of articles about Russia for
a Negro magazine. In the late fall I arrived in Paris. I consulted a
French specialist, who advised me to enter a hospital immediately.
While I was convalescing in the hospital I wrote this poem, "The
Desolate City." The poem was largely symbolic: a composite evocation of
the clinic, my environment, condition and mood.
_THE DESOLATE CITY_
_My spirit is a pestilential city,
With misery triumphant everywhere,
Glutted with baffled hopes and human pity.
Strange agonies make quiet lodgement there:
Its sewers bursting ooze up from below
And spread their loathsome substance through its lanes,
Flooding all areas with their evil flow
And blocking all the motions of its veins:
Its life is sealed to love or hope or pity,
My spirit is a pestilential city._
_Above its walls the air is heavy-wet,
Brooding in fever mood and hanging thick
Round empty tower and broken minaret,
Settling upon the tree tops stricken sick
And withered under its contagious breath.
Their leaves are shrivelled silver, parched decay,
Like wilting creepers trailing underneath
The chalky yellow of a tropic way.
Round crumbling tower and leaning minaret,
The air hangs fever-filled and heavy-wet._
_And all its many fountains no more spurt;
Within the damned-up tubes they tide and foam,
Around the drifted sludge and silted dirt,
And weep against the soft and liquid loam.
And so the city's ways are washed no more,
All is neglected and decayed within,
Clean waters beat against its high-walled shore
In furious force, but cannot enter in:
The suffocated fountains cannot spurt,
They foam and rage against the silted dirt._
_Beneath the ebon gloom of mounting rocks
The little pools lie poisonously still,
And birds come to the edge in forlorn flocks,
And utter sudden, plaintive notes and shrill,
Pecking at strangely gray-green substances;
But never do they dip their bills and drink.
They twitter, sad beneath the mournful trees,
And fretfully flit to and from the brink,
In little gray-brown, green-and-purple flocks,
Beneath the jet-gloom of the mounting rocks._
_And green-eyed moths of curious design,
With gold-black wings and rarely silver-dotted,
On nests of flowers among those rocks recline,
Bold, burning blossoms, strangely leopard-spotted,
But breathing deadly poison from their lips.
And every lovely moth that wanders by,
And of the blossoms fatal nectar sips,
Is doomed to drooping stupor, there to die;
All green-eyed moths of curious design
That on the fiercely-burning blooms recline._
_Oh cold as death is all the loveliness,
That breathes out of the strangeness of the scene,
And sickening like a skeleton's caress,
Of clammy clinging fingers, long and lean.
Above it float a host of yellow flies,
Circling in changeless motion in their place,
That came down snow-thick from the freighted skies,
Swarming across the gluey floor of space:
Oh cold as death is all the loveliness,
And sickening like a skeleton's caress._
_There was a time, when, happy with the birds,
The little children clapped their hands and laughed;
And midst the clouds the glad winds heard their words
And blew down all the merry ways to waft
The music through the scented fields of flowers.
Oh sweet were children's voices in those days,
Before the fall of pestilential showers,
That drove them forth far from the city's ways:
Now never, nevermore their silver words
Will mingle with the golden of the birds._
_Gone, gone forever the familiar forms
To which the city once so dearly clung,
Blown worlds beyond by the destroying storms
And lost away like lovely songs unsung.
Yet life still lingers, questioningly strange,
Timid and quivering, naked and alone,
Against the cycle of disruptive change,
Though all the fond familiar forms are gone,
Forever gone, the fond familiar forms;
Blown worlds beyond by the destroying storms._
More than three years after "The Desolate City" was written, it was
published for the first time in the Negro magazine, _Opportunity_. But
by then I was a stout black animal, splashing and floating in the blue
Mediterranean. The French specialist had said: "You are young, with
a very wonderful constitution, and you will recover all right if you
will live quietly and carefully away from the temptations of the big
cities." I certainly did follow that good advice.
PART FIVE
THE CYNICAL CONTINENT
XXI
Berlin and Paris
At last the soft breath of spring warmed and conquered the great
harbor of frozen ice and our ship cleaved through. The first of June
we arrived in Hamburg. Nothing here of the fortress-like austerity of
Petrograd. Hamburg was big and full and busy with the business of free
unhampered commerce. Flocks of ships were loading and unloading their
rich cargoes. Sailors reeled through the low-down streets in drunken
irresponsibility, and there were many Negroes showing their white teeth
against all that white wealth.
I spent three days among the docks and the Negroes of different
nationalities and languages and then entrained for Berlin. Startlingly
changed was the spirit of Berlin after an interval of nine months.
In the fall of 1922 a dollar was worth about a thousand marks. There
appeared to be plenty of money in circulation among all classes, and
lots of new and stylish clothes were in evidence. Berlin was by a long
way brisker and brighter than London. I had a comfortable room with a
middle-class family. Said the head to me: "The workers are better off
than we. We have lost three-quarters of our investments and incomes.
But the workers are well paid and can buy new clothes, while we of the
middle class must wear the old. And the workers have money to go to the
theaters; they ride second-class in the trains, and we must ride third."
But now all was changed. Premier Poincaré had seized the Ruhr early
in 1923 and the mark had skyrocketed. I cannot even recall how many
thousands I got for my dollar when I returned to Berlin in the summer
of 1923. For every minute the dollar became dearer and dearer. But
this fact sticks in my skull: From New York, Eugen Boissevain cabled
me twenty-five dollars to Berlin in October, 1922. I was to receive
payment (I don't know why) in marks. But just before the amount
arrived, I was obliged to leave Berlin for Russia. When I returned to
Berlin in June, 1923, my twenty-five dollars was worth only twenty-five
cents.
Speculation in dollars and pounds and francs and other foreign moneys
was mad. The corners of the principal streets were dotted with
money-changing kiosks. Many who possessed foreign money developed a
close-fisted psychosis. They didn't want to change their bills into
marks until obliged to. And when they had to, it was with regret, for
the next minute the dollar would be worth a few marks more. A German
Communist friend told me about a certain Anglo-American comrade who
would delay paying his bills even though long overdue until the dollar
climbed to a new high. By that method he paid about one-half only of
the cost of what he actually owed. Said the German Communist bitterly:
"Even the foreign comrades are exploiting the German people." Nearly
everybody was doing it. I remember a so-called radical publisher who
had worked out a profitable plan of printing American books in Germany,
because labor and material there were so cheap, and exporting them to
sell in America.
My Japanese friend, Sen Katayama, had warned me against returning to
Germany. He thought I would be molested because for a couple of years
the press of Europe and America had been carrying atrocity stories
about the doings of the French black soldiers on the Rhine. But I
said I would go back to Germany. Personally, I had not sensed any
feeling against me as a Negro in the fall of 1923 because of the black
troops on the Rhine. Everywhere I had been treated much better and
with altogether more consideration than in America and England. Often
when I stepped into a café there were friendly greetings--"_Schwartz'
Mohr_"--and free drinks. And now I felt that if Negroes were hated and
mistreated by the Germans because of the black troops on the Rhine, I
wanted to authenticate the changed sentiment for myself. I did not want
to report by hearsay that the Germans were mistreating Negroes. And
that was why I went from the free port of Hamburg to Berlin, instead of
going directly to Paris.
Well, everywhere in hotels, cafés, dancing halls, restaurants and
trains, on the river boats and in the streets, I met with no feeling
of hostility. In spite of the French black troops on the Rhine I was
treated even better in Berlin in 1923 than in 1922. Of course, Berlin
was mightily depressed because of the French occupation of the Ruhr. In
the hotel where I stayed there was posted a sign asking the guests not
to speak the French language. The spirit of depression was expressed
more eloquently in the exchanges than anywhere. The working people were
not as prosperous and happy as in the fall of 1922, because the new
inflation caused by the French occupation had cut down their wages to
the bone. If Poincaré of Lorraine, consumed by an overwhelming fear and
hatred of the Germans, had desired to perpetuate the hatred between the
Germans and the French forever, he could not have devised a better way.
There was something sullen and bitter, hostile and resentful in the
atmosphere of Berlin. And I believe Berlin expressed the resentful
spirit of all of Germany. There were _Wandervögel_ everywhere like a
plague of flies. They had lost their romantic flavor. More imitation
than real _Wandervögel_, with their knapsacks slung over their
shoulders, casually taking to the streets as nature lovers take to the
woods, and they gave one a strange impression of Berlin as a futuristic
forest.
I do not know of anything that has rendered so perfectly the
atmosphere, temper and tempo of the Berlin of that period than George
Grosz's _Ecce Homo_. For me that book of drawings is a rare and
iconoclastic monument of this closing era even as Rabelais is of the
Renaissance. I had the unique and unforgettable honor and pleasure of
knowing George Grosz in Moscow. His photograph and two pages of his
drawings had appeared in the special pictorial section of _Pravda_,
which also carried a photograph of myself. It was the first time I had
seen any of Grosz's drawings. They gripped me. I sought an opportunity
to meet him in the Congress Hall of the Kremlin.
When I returned to Berlin I hunted him up to ask him to sign a copy
of _Ecce Homo_, which I had bought privately. The book was banned by
the government of the Social Democracy. Grosz's remarkable personality
gave not the slightest hint of the artistic type. And in his little
apartment, his pretty and pleasant _frau_ had surrounded him with the
neatest of bourgeois comforts. He fitted respectably into the frame,
and if you did not know he was an artist, you might have taken him for
a responsible bank clerk. Yet there was a charming felicity and harmony
in the _ménage_. It gave the impression that Grosz needed just that
kind of domestic background from which he could swing up and out with
his powerful artistic punches.
Grosz in his appearance seemed the perfect type of a conservative
Prussian. But a careful study of his nervous-boyish and whimsical eyes
revealed the revolutionary artist in him. He was a real inspiration
to other artists. I heard many lyrical appreciations of his work, a
fine tribute to the man, for the breed of artists (judging from my
experience on _The Liberator_ and among the cosmopolites in France)
are hell-hard on their contemporaries. They are liberal and lavish
in praise of the dead only or the great. Writers are perhaps more
generous. Marsden Hartley, whom I happened across in Berlin, was
ecstatic in praise of Grosz's work. But the two artists had never
met, so I introduced them. Physically, Grosz was as impressive as
his amazingly ruthless drawings, and Marsden Hartley was equally as
ecstatic in praise of his person.
I met also Pierre Loving, the writer and critic, who spoke German and
kindly hunted me up a large room, exactly right to live and work in.
He introduced me to Josephine Herbst, who was very kind and helpful in
a practical and also artistic way. Soon after I met again the Baroness
von Freytag-Loringhoven, selling newspapers in the street. Our meeting
surprised both of us. We talked a little, but she had to sell her
newspapers, for she said her rent was overdue. So we made a rendezvous
for the next evening at the Romanisher Café.
It was a sad rendezvous. The Baroness in Greenwich Village, arrayed in
gaudy accoutrements, was a character. Now, in German homespun, she was
just a poor pitiful _frau_. She said she had come to Germany to write
because the cost of living was cheap there. But she complained that she
had been ditched. She didn't make it clear by whom or what. So instead
of writing she was crying news. She wished that she was back in New
York, she said. I was accompanied by an American student lad whom I had
met at the American Express office. He came from one of the western
cities. He professed a liking for me, because of my poetry, he said.
He had plenty of money and was always treating me to more drinks than
were good for me. I told him that the Baroness was a real poet and that
he might give her a couple of dollars. He generously produced five, and
we were all very happy for it.
I had completed my plans to go to Paris when, curiously, I began
meeting a number of the comrades whom I had known in Moscow. One day
in the Unter den Linden I bumped up against the Hindu youth who had
vanished so strangely from the Lux Hotel in Moscow. "I thought you were
dead!" I cried.
"And I thought I was going to die," he said. He related the story of
his arrest by the O.G.P.U. because he had been denounced as a spy by
the head of the Indian delegation in Moscow. He said the O.G.P.U.
endeavored to get him to confess, but he had insisted that he was not a
spy. He had had differences with the head of the Indian delegation and
had thought of giving up revolutionary work and returning to student
life. (His father had sent him to Europe to study.) He was kept in
O.G.P.U. custody for months. Finally he was sent to some place up
Archangel way, and from there he had escaped across the border into
Finland. He had always been a thin enough fellow; now he looked like a
mosquito. I told him I didn't think he had "escaped," as he thought,
but that he had simply been allowed to escape. He asked me why, whether
I had had any inside information. But I merely nodded my head and
looked mysterious. Poor chap! He was so down in spirits, I didn't want
to tell him that I thought the O.G.P.U. were convinced that he was not
a spy, but merely a perfect specimen of a moron.
The next day, again on the Unter den Linden, I met Roy, the leader of
the Indian delegation. Roy was editing a propaganda paper in Berlin,
which was distributed in India. He invited me up to his office and
asked me to contribute an article to his paper about Communism and
the Negro. I consulted an English friend, a Communist sympathizer, and
he advised me to keep away from the Indian movement because it was too
"complicated." The advice was just the kind I was fishing for and I
didn't write the article or see Roy again before I left Berlin.
* * * * *
It was interesting in Paris to mix in among the cosmopolitan
expatriates. The milieu was sympathetic. It was broader than the
radical milieu of Greenwich Village. The environment was novel and
elastic. It was like taking a holiday after living in the atmosphere of
the high pressure propaganda spirit of the new Russia. There in Paris,
radicals, esthetes, painters and writers, pseudo-artists, bohemian
tourists--all mixed tolerantly and congenially enough together.
Frankly to say, I never considered myself identical with the white
expatriates. I was a kind of sympathetic fellow-traveler in the
expatriate caravan. The majority of them were sympathetic toward me.
But their problems were not exactly my problems. They were all-white
with problems in white which were rather different from problems in
black.
There were the expatriates who were lured to Europe because life was
riper, culture mellower, and artistic things considered of higher worth
than in America.
There were those who argued that a florescence of art and literature
was impossible in America: the country was too new.
There were those who were in revolt against the puritan conscience and
the denial of artistic freedom in America; the lack of public respect
for creative art and artists.
There were those who were harassed by complicated problems of sex.
But when I got right down to a ruthless analysis of myself, to
understand the urge that had sent me traveling abroad, I discovered
that it was something very different from that which actuated the white
expatriates.
For I was in love with the large rough unclassical rhythms of
American life. If I were sometimes awed by its brutal bigness, I was
nevertheless fascinated by its titanic strength. I rejoiced in the
lavishness of the engineering exploits and the architectural splendors
of New York.
I never could agree that literature and art could not flourish in
America. That idea was altogether contrary to my historical outlook.
I believed that there would be an American art and culture mainly
derived from Europe and augmented by the arts and cultures of other
countries precisely as there had been a distinct Roman art and culture
mainly derived from Greece, but augmented by the arts and cultures
of the countries that Rome had conquered. For America appeared to me
preeminently a vast outpost of European civilization, being, in its
relation to Europe, what Northern Europe was to Rome under the empire.
When Europeans said to me: "The Americans, they are barbarians," it
stirred up a romantic sensation, and I thought that that was exactly
the manner in which the ancient Romans spoke of the inhabitants of
Iberia and Gaul and Germany and Britain.
Again, I was not oversensitive about the American public taking the
writer and artist like the average person instead of isolating him in
an ivory tower. I am partial to the idea of an artist being of and
among the people, even if incognito. The puritan atmosphere of America
was irritating, but it was not suffocating. I had written some of my
most vigorous poems right through and straight out of the tumult and
turbulence of American life.
And lastly, sex was never much of a problem to me. I played at sex as
a child in a healthy harmless way. When I was seventeen or eighteen
I became aware of the ripe urge of potency and also the strange
manifestations and complications of sex. I grew up in the spacious
peasant country, and although there are problems and strangenesses
of sex also in the country, they are not similar to those of the
city. I never made a problem of sex. As I grew up I was privileged
to read a variety of books in my brother's library and soon I became
intellectually cognizant of sex problems. But physically my problems
were reduced to a minimum. And the more I traveled and grew in age and
experience, the less they became.
What, then, was my main psychological problem? It was the problem of
color. Color-consciousness was the fundamental of my restlessness.
And it was something with which my white fellow-expatriates could
sympathize but which they could not altogether understand. For they
were not black like me. Not being black and unable to see deep into
the profundity of blackness, some even thought that I might have
preferred to be white like them. They couldn't imagine that I had no
desire merely to exchange my black problem for their white problem.
For all their knowledge and sophistication, they couldn't understand
the instinctive and animal and purely physical pride of a black person
resolute in being himself and yet living a simple civilized life like
themselves. Because their education in their white world had trained
them to see a person of color either as an inferior or as an exotic.
I believe that I understood more about the expatriates than they
understood of me, as I went along in the rhythm of their caravan; yet,
although our goal was not the same, I was always overwhelmingly in
sympathy with its purpose. From conventional Americans visiting Europe
I used to hear severe criticisms directed at the expatriate caravan.
The critics thought that the expatriates were wasting their time and
that American creative artists should stay at home and explore American
life. Some of them made an exception of me. They said that because the
social life of the Negro was strictly limited in America, it might
be better for a Negro who is a creative artist to seek more freedom
abroad. But I was not taken in by that specious form of flattery.
As I have indicated before, I was aware that if there were problems
specifically black, also there were problems specifically white.
I liked the spectacle of white American youngsters of both sexes
enjoying the freedom of foreigners with money on the café terraces
of Continental Europe. I liked to watch their feats of unprohibited
drinking and listen to their elastic conversations and see them
casually taking in their stride the cosmopolitan world of people of
different races and colors. Even if they were not all intent upon or
able to create works of art, I did not see them as idlers and wasters,
but as students of life.
My English friend, Mr. Jekyll, had informed me that it was a custom of
the English bourgeoisie and aristocracy to let their sons travel by
themselves abroad for a year or so after they had finished college.
The British Empire must have gained much from that practice. So I felt
that America also could gain something from its youngsters circulating
abroad and mingling with foreigners on their own ground. Certainly,
whatever they were before, they could not be worse Americans after that
experience.
James Joyce's _Ulysses_ was published when I arrived in Paris. And
Ernest Hemingway's first little book of miniature stories _In Our Time_
came out that same year. A good friend gave me a copy of _Ulysses_. A
bad friend swiped it.