I spent the afternoon at Knoedlers, who have very generously taken on
my exhibition from the Numesmatic Society for two weeks. My things
look well in their big room, and it is comic to see the Soviet leaders
daring to show their faces in Fifth Avenue! No one looks at Winston or
Asquith, they go straight to the Russians, as though fascinated with
horror!
Crystal Eastman and her husband took me to dinner at the Hill Club,
where I had to speak. I sat between Mr. Boardman Robinson and Dr.
Parker. Boardman Robinson is the author of the cartoon in the
LIBERATOR, “Capitalism Looks Itself Over,” a horrible and
terrible and wonderful conception. Mr. Robinson has red hair and beard.
He looks like the pictures of Judas Iscariot or maybe it’s St. Peter he
reminds me of. In which case small chance of Heaven for the rich! He’d
unlock the gates to all the radicals.
Dr. Parker is a psycho-analycist, bearded and bespectacled. Alarming at
first--one is inevitably ill at ease with a psycho-analycist. It is
not vanity to say that one instantly becomes self-conscious, as if the
deep-eyed man were already analysing one, and looking down into a heart
that perhaps does not bear looking into! Finally I discussed the thing
with him openly. I told him that I knew nothing of psycho-analysis
and didn’t want to--that I thought it encouraged people to become
even more concentrated upon themselves than they were already! Then,
the ice being broken, we talked openly and simply about anything and
everything. He took his glasses off and became quite unserious. It was
due partly to him that when I stood up to speak I was in a flippant
mood. Either the party took its mood from me, or I from it. I rather
incline to the latter. At all events, I said all I wanted to say,
uncompromisingly, about Russia. I put forth all the best that I had
seen. I risked the label of Bolshevik and propagandist. Indeed, as I
pointed out to them--Bolshevism is over ... the New York papers have
it in headlines--! England has signed the trade agreement, Lenin has
ceased to be Red and Bolshevism is over! Therefore I am free at last to
say what I like. And the people who listen have no longer the cause for
panic! I went on lightly and humorously and they laughed, laughed even
when I didn’t expect them to.