Chapter I: Part ONE: American Beginning (1)

I

A Great Editor

That run was the most exciting I ever made on the railroad. After three days away from New York, our dining car was returning again, feeding a morning train out of Philadelphia. A three-days' run was a long one and our crew was in a happy getting-home mood. In the pantry cooks and waiters joked mainly about women, as always, wives and sweethearts; some chanted, "Someone else may be there when I'm gone."

But something more than the mere physical joy of getting back to the city that was home had uplifted my heart. Like a potful of good stew a mixed feeling of happiness, hope and eagerness was bubbling inside of me. For in my pocket there was a letter from a great editor and critic advising me that I should pay him a visit as soon as it was possible. The letter had been delivered just as I was leaving on that three-days' trip and there had been time only to telephone and make an appointment for this day of our return.

Was ever a waiter more impatient for a run to end? And yet for all my impatience it was my happiest railroad itinerary. For I had made it buoyant with the hope that at last I was about to make my appearance before an American audience. A first appearance on the American stage--one important point of the vast stage of life upon which all of us must appear, some to play in a big scene, some in a little scene, and each preoccupied with the acting of his own particular part.

I was intent on my own rôle--I a waiter--waiting for recognition as a poet. It was seven years since I had arrived in the States from Jamaica, leaving behind me a local reputation as a poet. I came to complete my education. But after a few years of study at the Kansas State College I was gripped by the lust to wander and wonder. The spirit of the vagabond, the daemon of some poets, had got hold of me. I quit college. I had no desire to return home. What I had previously done was done. But I still cherished the urge to creative expression. I desired to achieve something new, something in the spirit and accent of America. Against its mighty throbbing force, its grand energy and power and bigness, its bitterness burning in my black body, I would raise my voice to make a canticle of my reaction.

And so I became a vagabond--but a vagabond with a purpose. I was determined to find expression in writing. But a vagabond without money must live. And as I was not just a hard-boiled bum, it was necessary to work. So I looked for the work that was easy to my hand while my head was thinking hard: porter, fireman, waiter, bar-boy, houseman. I waded through the muck and the scum with the one objective dominating my mind. I took my menial tasks like a student who is working his way through a university. My leisure was divided between the experiment of daily living and the experiment of essays in writing. If I would not graduate as a bachelor of arts or science, I would graduate as a poet.

So the years had sped by--five of them--like a rivulet flowing to feed a river. I had accumulated much, and from the fulness of my heart I poured myself out with passion of love and hate, of sorrow and joy, writing out of myself, waiting for an audience. At last my chance had come. My ambition was about to be realized.

The editor had written enthusiastically: "Come in to see me and let us know one another...."

Wonderful day! Marvelous riding! Everybody happy, going home, but I was the happiest. Steward and men commented on my exuberant spirit and joked about the possible cause. But I kept it a sweet secret. None of them knew that I was a scribbler. If they did, instead of my being just one of them, "pal" and "buddy," they might have dubbed me "professor."

Roar louder and louder, rushing train and whistle, beautiful engine whistle, carry me along, for I myself am a whistle timed to the wind that is blowing through me a song of triumph....

Pennsylvania Station! It was early in the morning. Our steward telephoned to the commissary for our next itinerary. We were ordered to double out again that afternoon. Another diner had been switched from its regular course, and ours was put in its place.

That was an extraordinary order, after a long and tiring trip. But in those days of 1918, life was universally extraordinary and we railroad men were having our share of it. The government was operating the railroads, and Mr. McAdoo was Director-General. The lines were taxed to their capacity and the trains were running in a different way. Coaches and dining cars of one line were hitched up indiscriminately to the engines of another. Even we waiters were all mixed up on the same level! Seniority didn't count any more; efficiency was enough. There were no special crews for the crack trains; new men replaced the old-timers, expertly swinging trays to the rocking of the train and feeding lawmakers to the amazement of the old élite of the crews. The regular schedules were obsolete, for the dining cars were always getting out of line, there were so many special assignments. One day our dining car would be detailed to serve a group of Allied officers going on a secret rendezvous. Another day it had to cater to a foreign mission traveling to Washington. And other days there was the feeding of detachment upon detachment of hungry soldiers.

"Why should a doubling-out be wished on us?" one waiter growled. "Ask Mr. McAdoo, it's his business," another hilariously replied. In my disappointment (for now I had no time to see the editor) I cursed my luck and wished we were again working under the old régime. But that was merely a momentary reaction, for under the new system we were getting better wages and pay for overtime.

I telephoned the editor that I was obliged to work and could not keep the appointment. He answered graciously: "Whenever you are free, telephone me, and I'll see that we get together." And he gave me his private telephone number and address.

That night our crew slept in Harrisburg. The next afternoon we were in Pittsburgh, and free until the following morning. We went to the sleeping quarters in Wylie Avenue and checked in for our beds, after which the crew split up. A good distance from Wylie Avenue the colored folk had managed to maintain a café and cabaret on the edge of a section of the white district downtown. I decided to go there.

I wish I were one of those persons who have a sense of premonition, so that I might have stuck to quarters that afternoon. But I had a desire to be away from my fellows and off by myself, even if it were in a crowd. My mind was full of the rendezvous with that editor in New York. And as I couldn't talk to any of the fellows about it, it was better to find elsewhere excitement that would keep me from thinking too much.

I found the café in a hectic state. The police had just combed it, rounding up draft dodgers and vagrants. I learned that there was a police net thrown around Pittsburgh that day, and many men who were not slackers at all, but who had left their papers at home, had been picked up. I had no papers, for I had lost my registration card, so I decided to get back right away to the cover and protection of the crew's quarters.

I hurried off, but two blocks away from the café a black man and a white came across the street and straight at me. Bulls! Immediately I was aware. As I had no papers, the detectives arrested me and started for the jail. My protest that I was importantly employed on the railroad was of no avail. The detectives wrote down my name, appearing very wise and knowing, and I wondered if I had been listed as a draft dodger. I had moved from the address from which I had registered and had never received any notification.

At the jail I tried to get permission to telephone to the steward of our dining car. But the perplexed officials had no time to give to the personal requests of the host of prisoners. The police had corralled more than they could handle. The jails were overcrowded, with more men being brought in every minute and no place to accommodate them. Some of the local prisoners had their papers at home. Relatives, learning of their plight, brought them the papers and they were discharged. But all the non-residents were held. Three of us, two colored, one white, were put into a cell which was actually a water closet with an old-fashioned fetid hole. It was stinking, suffocating. I tried to overcome the stench by breathing through my mind all the fragrant verse I could find in the range of my memory.

At last dawn came, bringing some relief. At nine o'clock we were marched to the court, a motley gang of men, bums, vagrants, pimps, and honest fellows, all caught in the same net. The judge handed out five- and ten-day sentences like souvenirs. When my turn came, I told the judge that my registration card was mislaid somewhere in New York, but that I was working on the railroad, had arrived in Pittsburgh only the day before, and should be working at that hour. I said that nearly every day I was serving soldiers and that my being absent from the dining car that morning would cripple the service, because I was the chief waiter and we were running short of a full crew.

To my surprise, as soon as I had finished, the judge asked me if I were born in Jamaica. I said, "Yes, Sir," and he commented: "Nice place. I was there a couple of seasons ago." And, ignoring my case and the audience, the judge began telling me of his trip to Jamaica and how he enjoyed it, the climate, the landscape, and the natives. He mentioned some of the beauty spots and I named those I knew. "I wish I were there instead of here," he said. "I wish I were there too," I echoed him. I could quite understand how he felt, for who would not like to escape from a winter in steely, smoky, stone-faced Pittsburgh!

Turning to my case again, the judge declared that I was doing indispensable work on the railroad and he reprimanded the black detective who had pressed the charge and said the police should be more discriminate in making arrests and endeavor to ascertain the facts about their victims. My case was dismissed. I seized the opportunity to tell the judge that, my dining car having already left, the local railroad officials would have to send me back to New York, and asked for a paper to show that I had been wrongfully detained by the police. Very willingly the judge obliged me and dictated a statement to a clerk, which he signed. As he handed me the slip, he smiled and said: "You see, I could place you by your accent." I flashed back a smile of thanks at him and resolved henceforth to cultivate more my native accent. So excellent was the paper the judge gave me, I was able to use it for the duration of the war without worrying about a new registration card.

Hurrying to the railroad station, I found that my dining car was already gone. I reported to the commissary department. Later in the afternoon they put me on another dining car going to Harrisburg. The next day I arrived in New York, and as soon as I got off the train telephoned to the editor at his office. He invited me to his house that evening.

* * * * *

Frank Harris's friendly letter, warm with enthusiasm for my poetry, and inviting me to visit him, was the kind of thing that might turn the head of a young writer bitten by the bug of ambition, and sweep him off his feet. But when a fellow is intoxicated with poetry and is yet able to keep a sober head and steady feet to swing a tray among impatient crowds of passengers in a rocking train, he ought to be able to hold himself in under any other excitement.

Frank Harris appeared to me then as the embodiment of my idea of a romantic luminary of the writing world. He stirred me sometimes like Byron and Heine, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud. I had read his writings avidly ever since he returned to America during the World War and stamped his personality upon the pages of _Pearson's Magazine_. His pronunciamento when he took over the editorship was impressed on my memory. He had said that the purpose of _Pearson's_ was to reach and discover the obscure talents of America who were perhaps discouraged, engaged in uncongenial labor when they might be doing creative work. I took his moving message personally, for I was one of those talents.

It was nine o'clock when I got to Frank Harris's house in Waverly Place. Opening the door for me himself he said the butler had gone home. I was surprised by his littleness. I knew that he was small of stature, but did not expect him to be as diminutive as he was. But his voice was great and growling like a friendly lion's with strength and dignity and seemingly made him larger than he actually was. "You are the poet," his voice rolled as he gripped my hand. He stepped back and scrutinized me before indicating a seat. He explained that he was speculating whether I reminded him of any special African type, for he had traveled in South Africa, West Africa, East Africa and the Soudan.

The door opened and a woman, wearing a rich-looking rose-colored opera cloak, stood poised on the threshold like a picture. I stood up and Frank Harris said: "This is the Negro poet." She nodded slightly and vanished.

"My wife is going to the opera," Harris explained. "She adores it but I don't care a rap about the opera. Of all the arts of the theater it is the tinseliest. A spectacle mainly for women." I said I liked the opera rather well, such of it as I had seen, especially the chorus and the dancing. Frank Harris said he was surprised that I should, because the art of the opera was the most highly artificial of the civilized arts.

He excused himself to go downstairs for wine. He returned with two bottles and glasses. It was my first taste of Rhenish wine and I enjoyed the pleasure of sampling it even more than the actual taste. Frank Harris glowed in praise of the wine. He was concerned about his diminishing stock and said that because of the war, Rhine wine was becoming difficult to get and more costly. Seeing that I was ignorant of the qualities of Rhine wine, he proceeded to enlighten me, saying that the grapes from which the wine was made could not be duplicated elsewhere because of the original nature of the soil in which they grew, and that even in the Rhine country the grapes grown in one district produced a different brand from that of the grapes grown in another, and that this was very important to the local viticulturists. He recalled the pleasure he had experienced when traveling through the Rhineland tasting the peculiar sourish grapes and testing the wine. "Pour me a glass of any real Rhine wine," he said, "and I can tell exactly from where it came without seeing the label."

As he filled the glasses again he said: "You are a real poet, my lad." He sifted the group of poems I had sent to him and said: "You have some excellent pieces here." He picked out "The Park in Spring" and "Harlem Shadows." "These are excellent," he said. "You have the classical feeling and a modern way of expressing it. But where did you get it?" He strode over to me and pressed his fingers upon my forehead, as if to take the measure of what was there: "Tell me, how did you begin writing? What was your early influence?"

Briefly, I told the story of my West Indian background. My peasant childhood in a mountain country of a few hundred villages widely scattered over the hills. The missionary who built the first mission--a Mr. Hathaway who claimed kinship to the Shakespeare Hathaways, and who started my school-teacher brother (the eldest) on the road to college and gave him his first complete set of Shakespeare. My boyhood spent in various villages with that brother, spanned by the years between the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and her death: the indelible years of my first reading of anything that was thrilling just for the thrill--the Waverly novels; Dickens in small sardine-packed words, bound in thin blue covers; the tomes of Mrs. Henry Wood, Charlotte M. Braeme, Miss Braddon, Mrs. Southworth, Marie Corelli.... And suddenly like a comet the discovery of the romance of science in Huxley's _Man's Place in Nature_ and Haeckel's _The Riddle of the Universe_.

Frank Harris was a little surprised at my coming by free-thought at such an early age--before I was fourteen. So I explained that my brother was a free-thinker (although at the same time a denominational school-teacher and lay preacher), and that when he became aware of my omnivorous reading he put his free-thought literature in my way. Thus I grew up without religious instruction at home, I told him. Also, I was not free-thinking alone. In one high mountain village there were ten of us boys in a free-thought band, and most of them were heathen from their own primitive thinking, without benefit of books. Frank Harris thought that that was a remarkable thing to happen in a remote and backward colony.

"But when did you actually begin writing verses?" he asked. "When I was ten, as I remember," I said, "the first was a rhymed acrostic for our school gala."

After a while I made a gesture of going, for I was apprehensive of trespassing upon the man's time and kindness. I felt it to be such a genuine human kindness. That loud roar rising out of him seemed to proclaim: My body may be little and insignificant, but my heart is great and sincere.

Frank Harris laughed at my worrying about his time. He said that since there had been so much difficulty about our getting together, we should make the most of it now. He had a lot to say yet, he said. But first he wanted to know how I got beyond the jingle-rhyme stage of verse-making. He remarked upon the fact that though I began verse-writing early, I had not been attracted by poetry in my early reading. It was the story in the plays that had carried me through Shakespeare.

And I related to him the story of my adolescence: my meeting with one Mr. Jekyll, an English gentleman who became my intellectual and literary mentor and encouraged me to continue writing verses in the Negro dialect. I told him something of this man who had gone among the peasants and collected their field-and-yard songs (words and music) and African folk tales and published them in a book called _Jamaica Song and Story_; of how he became interested when he first saw my verses--enthusiastic really--and said that they sounded like the articulate consciousness of the peasants. I had corresponded with and visited him over a period of five years and written many songs. His interest in me was general at first. I was merely a literate phenomenon among the illiterate peasants whose songs and tales he was writing. Then in time there was a subtle change from a general to an individual interest and he became keen about my intellectual development and also in my verse as real poetry.

I told Harris how, with this man's excellent library at my disposal, I read poetry: _Childe Harold_, _The Dunciad_, _Essay on Man_, _Paradise Lost_, the Elizabethan lyrics, _Leaves of Grass_, the lyrics of Shelley and Keats and of the late Victorian poets, and how he translated and we read together pieces out of Dante, Leopardi, and Goethe, Villon and Baudelaire. During those years also Mr. Jekyll was translating Schopenhauer and I read a lot from his translation. Then he suggested Spinoza's _Ethics_, which I read, skipping the mathematical hypotheses, and for a time considered myself a pantheist. Also at that time the Rationalist Press of London was publishing six-penny reprints of Herbert Spencer's works, which I devoured greedily as they appeared.

I related to Frank Harris how I experienced a specially piquant human interest in reading Herbert Spencer and also George Eliot, because Mr. Jekyll had told me that he had seen them both, and that George Eliot lived near the Jekyll country place. He or his people (I am not sure which) made overtures to get acquainted with her. But she rejected them, saying she preferred not to make any new friends.

Mr. Jekyll had also shown me a letter from Herbert Spencer, which he regarded as a rare treasure. He (Mr. Jekyll) had discovered a mistake in computation, which he considered important, in one of Spencer's books and had written to him pointing it out. Herbert Spencer, replying, acknowledged the mistake, but said that, since it was already published, he did not think it was important enough to change. I am not even sure if that was the exact nature of the reply. I was so immature that I did not even grasp the significance of the matter, nor what exactly it was about. What amazed me then was that a great philosopher had permitted an error, which had been brought to his notice, to remain--that he had not corrected it. For in those burgeoning days I was a zealot for the truth as something absolute. But Mr. Jekyll had smiled at my reaction. He was satisfied that Herbert Spencer had sent him a private and courteous acknowledgment.

At this point Frank Harris exploded so hard that he frightened me. "Exactly like Herbert Spencer," he cried. "I knew him well. You may not know it, but the letter you mention is a key to his character. I wish I had it in my hands. He was a narrow, bigoted, self-opinionated and typical John-Bullish unscientific Englishman. Fancy his acknowledging an error in his book and yet refusing to correct it! Putting his personal vanity above scientific fact. A purely Anglo-Saxon disregard for logic. No French intellectual would be capable of such a thing!"

Frank Harris said that he had written, or was writing, a portrait of Herbert Spencer. "And I wish I had that letter," he cried. "It would illuminate my portrait and prove my point that he was an old humbug. He was the philosopher of British Philistinism--self-righteous and smug. I told him once that I thought that certain of his deductions were untenable and he said he could not stand contradiction. Think of that! He refused to listen. He did not want to be contradicted, not even by the truth."

I mentioned Mr. Jekyll's joking about the matter and remarking that it was better that the mistakes of the great should remain, so that the world could see and know that the great are not infallible and are subject to error like anybody else. How also he had pointed out Byron's famous grammatical error in _Childe Harold_ as an example. Frank Harris said the comparison was far-fetched, but he could not forbear to seize the moment to make his own: "Byron was a great poet and a rebel to boot, like myself, and he was hated and hunted by English society. But they accepted a little man like Herbert Spencer as a great philosopher, because he made a virtue of their lowest predatory instincts. The survival of the fittest: a smug, mediocre, comfortable, middle-class interpretation of Darwin's great theory, making it pleasant for the Imperialist grabbers and the conscienceless British shopkeepers. Survival of the fittest indeed! What would become of the better-class litter if they were not sheltered and protected from birth? What if they had to fend for themselves like the children of the have-nots?"

Becoming less violently emphatic, Frank Harris wondered if Mr. Jekyll would be willing to furnish a copy of the Herbert Spencer letter. I said I had no idea whether he would, but that I was willing to sound him. And I pointed out again that at the time when Mr. Jekyll showed me the letter he really thought more of Herbert Spencer's sending him a private and courteous reply than of the importance of the mistake that he had discovered.

"Just like an Englishman," said Frank Harris, "putting nice manners and all its bloody ritual above veracity and logic." [Later I wrote to Mr. Jekyll, stating Frank Harris's request and sending him some copies of _Pearson's_. But he gave a flat refusal and said that although Frank Harris's writings were "very clever," I should beware of him because he was insincere and pro-German!]

I finished telling all I could about my reading and writing, and then got my portfolio and showed Harris the little volume of my _Songs of Jamaica_ that was published in 1912; also a bulky scrapbook full of reviews from London and Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin and Cardiff, Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland, Sierra Leone, Lagos, and even Capetown--from all over the English-language world, excepting America.

Frank Harris opened the book and read the dedication, which was for Governor Olivier of Jamaica [now Lord Olivier], and exclaimed: "Sydney Olivier! Oh yes, he did become governor of some colony. I knew him quite well--one of the most brilliant and practical of the Fabians. Was he interested in you?" I said that Governor Olivier had become interested in my verse through Mr. Jekyll, and had accepted the dedication.

My scrapbook interested Frank Harris. It was crowded with the souvenirs of adolescence: pictures of famous literati cut from English and American magazines, unusual newspaper items, letters from Mr. Jekyll about my verse.... He came upon a cutting from _T.P.'s Weekly_ with a prize poem of mine. This prompted him to say that he was well acquainted with T.P. O'Connor, whom he described as a successful Irishman whom the English liked because he never possessed an idea.

There was also a letter from Lord Stamfordham, the private secretary of King George, to Mr. Jekyll about my book. Mr. Jekyll and Lord Stamfordham had been friends from their youth and Mr. Jekyll had told me that he was trying to get a copy of _Songs of Jamaica_ on the King's table. He said that even though the book was not read, if it were mentioned in a London drawing-room of consequence and reviewed by society, it might have a sale as a curiosity!

With his thumb on Lord Stamfordham's letter, Frank Harris said: "That's big."

"What's big?" I asked.

"Bigge," said Frank Harris, spelling the name. "That's Stamfordham's family name. I knew him quite well when he was just Bigge and secretary to Queen Victoria. I suppose he was not smart enough for King Edward, but he came back with King George, naturally. And did he do anything for your book?" I said that I didn't think so. "I am sure it would not have done you any good even if your poems had been put on the King's table," said Frank Harris. "A literary talent is not like that of a prima donna. Yet that Mr. Jekyll friend of yours is a remarkable person in a way. A man that it must have been a great experience to know. I can trace his influence in your poetry. Good, but you must go beyond that, my lad. I should have liked to match my intellect against his. I had also a great teacher-friend in Byron Smith." And Frank Harris's noble roar was modulated by a fine note of tenderness as he spoke a little about the teacher of his American university days. It interested him that I also had gone to school in Kansas.

And now he began to talk of his beginnings in Kansas, monologuing, launching out like a perfect little boat riding the great waves. Frank Harris thundered and roared and boomed and trumpeted, striding across the floor and creating action to match the color and vigor of his outpouring. Like a god laying down the commandments of literature and life he talked. Like a wizard he evoked the notable contemporary figures of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century and paraded them in all their accoutrements, articulate, gesturing and posturing like the personages of Madame Tussaud's.

When Mrs. Harris returned from the opera and looked in, Frank flung her a darling phrase and she retired. Interrupted, he noticed that the wine was finished, and went downstairs for more. And when he returned he again gave his attention to my dialect verse and the scrapbook. "But why have you been silent all these six years?" he demanded. "For six years you were silent in the night, like James Thomson, who wrote _The City of Dreadful Night_." He quoted from that great poem:

_Because he seemed to walk with an intent I followed him; who shadow-like and frail, Unswervingly though slowly onward went, Regardless, wrapped in thought as in a veil; Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet We travelled many a long dim silent street._

And then the sonorous rich refrain like a fugue pouring through the great pipes of an organ:

_As I came through the desert, thus it was, As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire; The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death; Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold Plucked at me from the jungle, tried to hold; But I strode on austere, No hope could have no fear._

"A great poem; a sad sick poet," said Frank Harris. "I knew him. He was a hopeless drunkard." His mention of James Thomson and quotation from _The City of Dreadful Night_ moved me sadly. I remembered it was one of the first book of poems that Mr. Jekyll presented to me and that for a long time I was haunted by the spirit of the strange music of the desert song and the pessimistic feeling of the whole poem, which acted like a damper on my naturally happy disposition. Yet I did love the poem, finding it as lyrically rich and totally beautiful even as _Omar Khayyám_.

"Perhaps you too have a _City of Dreadful Night_ pent up in you as a result of your six silent years?" Frank Harris asked. I said that I had not been really silent at all. It had been necessary for me to do some practical thing to exist. And it had been a big experience, finding out about America and knowing the commonalty of American Negroes. I had continued all along to write at intervals and rewrite to make my writing better, I said.

"You must write prose," Frank Harris said. I demurred. "Yes, you must and you will," he went on. "Now you must write something about yourself to preface these poems. I am sure you will write prose some day. Poetry comes first; prose follows with maturity. And this is an age of prose and not of poetry. Poetry was the unique literary expression of the feudal and semi-feudal age: the romantic periods. But this is the great machine age, inventions upon inventions bringing a thousand new forces and objectives into life. Language is loosening and breaking up under the pressure of new ideas and words. It requires the flexibility of prose to express this age."

"Now, tell me frankly," he said, turning the pages of my scrapbook, "what was the real underlying urge that forced you to come to America, after you had achieved a local success in your home? Was it merely to study?" I admitted that back in my mind there had really been the dominant desire to find a bigger audience. Jamaica was too small for high achievement. There, one was isolated, cut off from the great currents of life.

"I knew that," Frank Harris said triumphantly. "Your ambition was to break into the larger literary world--a fine ambition. But literature is the hardest career for a man without any competence. I think that if I had chosen politics, as I was inclined to at first, I might have done better. However, you have excellent stuff in you and deserve success. And you can attain it if you work hard. You will get there. You have a rare talent. I always pick a winner. I picked Bernard Shaw when he was unknown and started him in the theater on the way to his great success. I picked H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad and others. You are an African. You must accomplish things, for yourself, for your race, for mankind, for literature. But it must be literature. Now in this sonnet, 'The Lynching,'[1] you have not given of your best. A sonnet like this, after reading the report of the St. Louis Massacre, which I published in _Pearson's_, sounds like an anti-climax. You should have risen to the heights and stormed heaven like Milton when he wrote 'On the Late Massacre in Piedmont':

_Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughtered Saints whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold...._

There you have the sublime human cry of anguish and hate against man's inhumanity to man. Some day you will rip it out of your guts."

It was nearly an all-night séance. We had drunk up the rest of the wine. Frank Harris's hand had grown shaky as we drank, and he had spilled some of it as he poured. But it seemed to me that it was more with memories and words that he was intoxicated; that the wine was a tonic only to them. At last he permitted me to go with these parting words: "I think I have taught you more in five hours than your Mr. Jekyll did in five years, but that was easy, for my experience is so much greater. I have never retired from life, but have always been in the thick of it, where it was most exciting. I have made enemies right and left and they pursue me with hatred, but I have never been afraid, I defy them as Byron:

_I have not loved the world, nor the world loved me; I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bowed To its idolatries a patient knee...._"

I had no desire for sleep. I was too uplifted by Frank Harris's grand voice, roaring like a waterfall in my head. I had listened to many voices that were lovely before, but very often it was the association of the individual with the speech that made the voice fine to me. With Frank Harris it was different. It was the voice of itself only, like a disembodied element.

Oh, what an amazing evening it was! I had gone expecting less than an hour's interview, merely the formal thing that editors and publishers consider it their business to grant sometimes. And this man had made one splendid night of it, talking for the beauty of talking, talking exquisitely, talking sensibly. Unforgettable experience. And certainly it was not an attitude on his part, no selfish motive, no desire to make an impression upon me, for there was really no reason. And the extraordinary spontaneity and length of our conversation that night was as surprising to Frank Harris as it was to me. Years later he said so, after I had traveled abroad and we came together again at a little party in Nice.

But then, that night, rather that early morning, returning to the job again, exhilarated, feeling as though I could do the work of all five waiters, with the stimulant of Frank Harris's voice agitating me to action, my mind was a rare element (quite dissociated from the technical work of my hands), savoring the essence of that great conversation, estimating the personalities that had been evoked for me, until I thought that it might have been someone like Frank Harris who inspired Browning to say:

_Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you, And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems and new...._

Some weeks later I saw Frank Harris again at his office in Union Square. He had inspired me toward a new achievement--the writing of prose. And I was determined to accomplish it. I had labored through a personal story that had taken me weeks to do it. It was much easier to create and scribble a stanza of poetry in the interval between trains than to write a paragraph of prose.

Frank Harris took me into his sanctum and sat down with me over the sheets. He impressed me quite differently than he had on the night of our memorable meeting: there was something boulevardier about his dress and manner which seemed a little funny. I had no great confidence in what I had written, and said so. He said that the fact that I was aware was a good sign. He glanced over the sheets rapidly. His forehead grew wrinkles and he shook his head. Then he said that what I had written was like a boat full and sinking with water, but that when it was baled out it would be sea-worthy enough. With a butt of red pencil he underscored the essential. It was fascinating to watch him expertly, quickly, picking out the salient facts.

Suddenly he said something like this: "I am wondering whether your sensitivity is hereditary or acquired." I said that I didn't know, that perhaps it was just human. He saw that I was ruffled. I really had a sensation of spurs sprouting on my heels.

"Don't misunderstand me," he said. "Your sensitivity is the quality of your work. Your 'The Park in Spring' sonnet is a remarkable achievement. I read it to a very refined woman and she could not hold back her tears. It takes me back to the humanists of the eighteenth century, touching me like Hood or even something of Wordsworth's. What I mean is, the stock from which you stem--your people--are not sensitive. I saw them at close range, you know, in West Africa and the Sudan. They have plenty of the instinct of the senses, much of which we have lost. But the attitude toward life is different; they are not sensitive about human life as we are. Life is cheap in Africa...."

I kept silent.

"Now please don't misunderstand me," he said again. "We have great disparities in Europe also, despite more than a thousand years of civilization. For example, the attitude toward life in Eastern Europe is not the same as in Western Europe. And again, the French are by far more highly cultured than the Teutons and Anglo-Saxons. But the French have no poetry, so to speak. English and German poetry is infinitely higher. Yet, the English are barbarians compared to the French. Heine marveled that Shakespeare was an Englishman and Jesus a Jew. Ah Jesus, Jesus! Our Lord and Master! That is the secret of the difference between the peoples of Africa and of Asia and the people of Europe. Jesus: it is his religion that makes the difference."

And, strangely to me, Frank Harris began preaching Jesus. Which seemed so incongruous with his boulevardier dress and manner. He did it beautifully, but unconvincingly. There was something about the man's personality, so pugnacious (a fine pugnaciousness that I admired when he expatiated upon his profane experiences and because he was physically small and rebellious), that made him appear a little ridiculous preaching the self-denialism of Jesus. When he paused I said I thought the adoption of the Christ cult by Western civilization was its curse: it gave modern civilization a hypocritical façade, for its existence depended on force and positive exploitation, whereas Jesus was weak and negative. Frank Harris said that there was a great deal of truth in my point, but nevertheless he preferred Jesus above all the great teachers, and thought civilization the better because of his religion.

In his rôle as a Jesus preacher the stature of Frank Harris diminished perceptibly before my mind; the halo around him that night when he talked as a rationalist and rebel became less glamorous. Perhaps I judged him too severely, because my childhood was so singularly free of the influence of supernatural religion. I suppose that people who are nurtured in revealed religion, even though they discard their god when they are intellectually grown up, are prone to attribute more of the godly qualities to their own deity than to the gods of other peoples. And Frank Harris was raised an Irish Catholic.

Abruptly he said "Now to work," and called in his secretary. She was a little blonde from a Western town. He said that she had written imploring him to let her come to New York to serve "the master" in any capacity. Every week he received dozens of such letters, which he had to ignore, he said, but there had been something so original about hers that he had invited her to come even without requesting her photograph beforehand. And fortunately he had found in her a perfect disciple.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This poem was published years later in _Harlem Shadows_.]

II

Other Editors

It was a great moment when my first poems were published in _Pearson's_, although they were not actually the first to be published in America. In December of 1917, _Seven Arts_, which was edited by James Oppenheim and Waldo Frank, published two of my sonnets over the nom de plume of Eli Edwards. The nom de plume was adapted from my mother's name. I used it because at the time when the poems were submitted, I was a waiter in a women's club. The members were students of the arts. Some were literary aspirants and were always reading and discussing the new and little magazines. As I was a good enough waiter I did not care to be discovered as a poet there.

When my poems appeared in _Pearson's_ I received many letters of encouragement and suggestion. And one of them started an interesting correspondence which resulted in my traveling to Europe the following year.

I was particularly excited about appearing in _Pearson's_, because there was no doubt that Frank Harris was a truly great critic. And many were my dismal disappointments in rejection slips and letters of half-hearted praise, until he fortified me with his frank, hearty and noble voice of encouragement. "The White Fiends," which _Pearson's_ published, had been rejected previously by _The Crisis_, a Negro magazine.

Some months before, I had sent some poems to William Stanley Braithwaite, who was highly placed as a critic on the Boston _Evening Transcript_. Mr. Braithwaite was distinguished for his literary dialogues in the Literary Supplement of the _Transcript_, in which the characters were intellectual Bostonians with Greek names and conversed in lofty accents that were all Greek to me.

In Mr. Braithwaite's writings there was not the slightest indication of what sort of American he might be. And I was surprised one day to read in the Negro magazine, _The Crisis_, that he was a colored man. Mr. Braithwaite was kind enough to write me, a very interesting letter. He said that my poems were good, but that, barring two, any reader could tell that the author was a Negro. And because of the almost insurmountable prejudice against all things Negro, he said, he would advise me to write and send to the magazines only such poems as did not betray my racial identity.

There was sincerity in Mr. Braithwaite's letter, a sincerity that was grim and terrible to me. He was a poet himself, but I was unacquainted with his poetry. I went in search of him in his poetry at the Forty-second Street Library. I found a thin volume containing some purely passionless lyrics, only one line of which I have ever remembered (I quote from memory):

_I kissed a kiss on a dead man's brow...._

So, I thought, that was what Boston made of a colored intellectual. But thinking a little deeper, I thought that it was not Boston only. Mr. Braithwaite perhaps stood for what almost any man of color who possessed creative talent desired to be at that time. Mr. Braithwaite is now a professor of literature in Atlanta University, one of the leading Negro schools. In appreciation of him our foremost Negro historian has written:

"The most remarkable writer of Negro blood since Dunbar is William Stanley Braithwaite, who as a writer is not a Negro.... Mr. Braithwaite has by his literary production and criticism ... his poems, his annual publication, _The Anthology of Magazine Verse_, demonstrated that the Negro intellect is capable of the same achievements as that of the whites...."

Need I say that I did not entertain, not in the least, Mr. Braithwaite's most excellent advice? I couldn't even if I had felt certain about that mess of pottage that is such a temptation to all poor scribblers. My poetic expression was too subjective, personal and tell-tale. Reading a selection of it, a discerning person would become immediately aware that I came from a tropical country and that I was not, either by the grace of God or the desire of man, born white.

I felt more confidence in my own way because, of all the poets I admire, major and minor, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Burns, Whitman, Heine, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud and the rest--it seemed to me that when I read them--in their poetry I could feel their race, their class, their roots in the soil, growing into plants, spreading and forming the backgrounds against which they were silhouetted. I could not feel the reality of them without that. So likewise I could not realize myself writing without conviction.

* * * * *

Because of my eclectic approach to literature and my unorthodox idea of life, I developed a preference for the less conservative literary organs. _The Masses_ was one of the magazines which attracted me when I came from out West to New York in 1914. I liked its slogans, its make-up, and above all, its cartoons. There was a difference, a freshness in its social information. And I felt a special interest in its sympathetic and iconoclastic items about the Negro. Sometimes the magazine repelled me. There was one issue particularly which carried a powerful bloody brutal cover drawing by Robert Minor. The drawing was of Negroes tortured on crosses deep down in Georgia. I bought the magazine and tore the cover off, but it haunted me for a long time. There were other drawings of Negroes by an artist named Stuart Davis. I thought they were the most superbly sympathetic drawings of Negroes done by an American. And to me they have never been surpassed.

I remember receiving a couple of "So sorry" rejection slips from _The Masses_. _The Masses_ was crucified and had been resurrected as _The Liberator_ before a poem was accepted. I received a note from the managing editor, Crystal Eastman, inviting me to call at the office. One afternoon when I was free in New York I telephoned _The Liberator_ and was asked to come down. Crystal Eastman was in conference with the business manager when I got there, but she suspended it to talk to me. The moment I saw her and heard her voice I liked Crystal Eastman. I think she was the most beautiful white woman I ever knew. She was of the heavy or solid type of female, and her beauty was not so much of her features, fine as they were, but in her magnificent presence. Her form was something after the pattern of a splendid draft horse and she had a way of holding her head like a large bird poised in a listening attitude.

She said she liked my poems in _Pearson's_ and some of those submitted to _The Liberator_, but that she was not a poet or critic and therefore not a good judge. She would arrange for me to meet her brother, Max Eastman, who was the chief editor and had the final word on all contributions. She chatted awhile with me. Was it difficult for me to work on the railroad and write poetry? Did I have any regular time to write? I told her that sometimes I carried lines in my thoughts for days, waiting until I found time to write them down. But also it wasn't always like that. And I related this incident: For many days I was possessed with an unusually lyrical feeling, which grew and increased into form of expression until one day, while we were feeding a carload of people, there was a wild buzzing in my head. The buzzing was so great that it confused and crowded out all orders, so much so that my mechanical self could not function. Finally I explained to the steward that I had an unbearable pain in my belly. He excused me and volunteered to help the fourth waiter with my two tables. And hurrying to the lavatory I locked myself in and wrote the stuff out on a scrap of paper.

"Got rid of your birth pains," Crystal Eastman said, and we both laughed. She had to resume her conference, but before leaving a tentative appointment was made for me to get in touch with Max Eastman. Just as I was going, Floyd Dell, who was assistant editor of _The Liberator_, came in and we were introduced.

The rendezvous with Max Eastman was to be at his study-room, somewhere in or near St. Luke's Place. I got there first and was about to ring when my attention was arrested by a tall figure approaching with long strides and distinguished by a flaming orange necktie, a mop of white hair and a grayish-brown suit. The figure looked just as I had imagined the composite personality of _The Masses_ and _The Liberator_ might be: colorful, easy of motion, clothes hanging a little loosely or carelessly, but good stuff with an unstylish elegance. As I thought, it was Max Eastman.

We went up into a high room and he lounged lazily on a couch and discussed my poems. I had brought a batch of new ones. Naturally I was impressed at once by the contrast between Max Eastman and Frank Harris. There was nothing of the "I" first person in Max Eastman's manner. Nor did he question me to any extent about myself, my antecedents, and the conditions under which I lived and wrote at the time. He was the pure intellectual in his conversation and critical opinion.

Among my new poems there was a sonnet entitled "If We Must Die." It was the most recent of all. Great events had occurred between the time when I had first met Frank Harris and my meeting with Max Eastman. The World War had ended. But its end was a signal for the outbreak of little wars between labor and capital and, like a plague breaking out in sore places, between colored folk and white.

Our Negro newspapers were morbid, full of details of clashes between colored and white, murderous shootings and hangings. Traveling from city to city and unable to gauge the attitude and temper of each one, we Negro railroad men were nervous. We were less light-hearted. We did not separate from one another gaily to spend ourselves in speakeasies and gambling joints. We stuck together, some of us armed, going from the railroad station to our quarters. We stayed in our quarters all through the dreary ominous nights, for we never knew what was going to happen.

It was during those days that the sonnet, "If We Must Die," exploded out of me. And for it the Negro people unanimously hailed me as a poet. Indeed, that one grand outburst is their sole standard of appraising my poetry. It was the only poem I ever read to the members of my crew. They were agitated. Even the fourth waiter--who was the giddiest and most irresponsible of the lot, with all his motives and gestures colored by a strangely acute form of satyriasis--even he actually cried. One, who was a believer in the Marcus Garvey Back-to-Africa Movement, suggested that I should go to Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the organization, and read the poem. As I was not uplifted with his enthusiasm for the Garvey Movement, yet did not like to say so, I told him truthfully that I had no ambition to harangue a crowd.