Chapter IX: Part FIVE: The Cynical Continent (1)

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.

James Joyce incomparably and legitimately was _le maître_ among the moderns. I cannot imagine any modern and earnest student of literary artistry of that period who did not consider it necessary to study James Joyce. I was privileged to have a few acquaintances of radical sympathies among the moderns, and they all advised me to read Joyce before I started to write. So I did. Some of them thought, as I, that _Ulysses_ was even greater as a textbook for modern writers than as a novel for the general public.

Yet after reading _Ulysses_ I said to my friends, as I had previously said to Frank Budgen, one of Joyce's early admirers in London, that D.H. Lawrence was the modern writer I preferred above any. I thought _Ulysses_ a bigger book than any one of Lawrence's books, but I preferred Lawrence as a whole. I thought that D.H. Lawrence was more modern than James Joyce. In D.H. Lawrence I found confusion--all of the ferment and torment and turmoil, the hesitation and hate and alarm, the sexual inquietude and the incertitude of this age, and the psychic and romantic groping for a way out.

But in James Joyce I found the sum of two thousand years, from the ending of the Roman Empire to the ending of the Christian age. Joyce picked up all the ends of the classical threads and wove them into the ultimate pattern in _Ulysses_. There is no confusion, no doubt, no inquiry and speculation about the future in James Joyce. He is a seer and Olympian and was able to bring the life of two thousand years into the span of a day. If I were to label James Joyce I would say that he was (in the classic sense of the word) a great Decadent.

Some of my friends thought I showed a preference for D.H. Lawrence because he was something of a social rebel. But it was impossible for me seriously to think of Lawrence as a social thinker, after having studied the social thinking of creative writers like Ruskin, William Morris, Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, and other social propagandists. In fact, Lawrence's attitude toward his subject matter, his half-suppressed puritanism, often repelled me. What I loved was the Laurentian language, which to me is the ripest and most voluptuous expression of English since Shakespeare.

If Joyce was _le maître_ of the ultra-moderns, Gertrude Stein was the _madame_, and her house was open to all without discrimination. Even Negroes. I cannot remember how often people said to me: "Haven't you been to Gertrude Stein's?" ... "Everybody goes to Gertrude Stein's." ... "I'll take you to Gertrude Stein's." ... "Gertrude Stein does not mind Negroes." ... "Gertrude Stein has written the best story about Negroes, and if you mean to be a modern Negro writer, you should meet her...."

I never went because of my aversion to cults and disciples. I liked meeting people as persons, not as divinities in temples. And when I came to examine "Melanctha," Gertrude Stein's Negro story, I could not see wherein intrinsically it was what it was cracked up to be. In "Melanctha," Gertrude Stein reproduced a number of the common phrases relating to Negroes, such as: "boundless joy of Negroes," "unmorality of black people," "black childish," "big black virile," "joyous Negro," "black and evil," "black heat," "abandoned laughter," "Negro sunshine," all prettily framed in a tricked-out style. But in the telling of the story I found nothing striking and informative about Negro life. Melanctha, the mulattress, might have been a Jewess. And the mulatto, Jeff Campbell--he is not typical of mulattoes I have known anywhere. He reminds me more of a type of white lover described by colored women. "Melanctha" seemed more like a brief American paraphrase of Esther Waters than a story of Negro life. The original Esther Waters is more important to me.

Ernest Hemingway was the most talked-about of young American writers when I arrived in Paris. He was the white hope of the ultra-sophisticates. In the motley atmosphere of Montparnasse, there was no place for the cult of little hero worship. James Joyce was worshipped, but he had won out with a work that took men's eyes like a planet. But in Montparnasse generally writers and artists plunged daggers into one another. That atmosphere in its special way was like a good tonic, if you didn't take too much of it. Good for young creative artists who have a tendency to megalomania. And many of them do. And also it was an antidote for the older ones who have already arrived and are a little haughty, expecting too much homage from the young.

It was therefore exciting that Ernest Hemingway had won the regard and respect of the younger creative artists and even of the older. I remember Nina Hamnett pointing him out to me at the Dôme and remarking ecstatically that Hemingway was a very handsome American and that he had a lovely son. But it was long after that before I met him for a moment through Max Eastman.

_In Our Time_, that thin rare book of miniature short stories, was published, and it was the literary event among the young expatriates. I cherish an unforgettable memory of it and of Montparnasse at that time. A cultivated and distinguished American, liberal of attitude and pocket to unpopular causes, was sitting at the Dôme, reading a copy of _In Our Time_. He invited me to his table and offered a drink. He read aloud Chapter III, and wondered whether there was a _double entendre_ in that last sentence: "It rained all through the evacuation." I said I did not know and did not think it mattered, and I asked the _garçon_ to bring me a double cognac. My friend and host said: "They are talking in a big way about this Hemingway, but I just can't get him. I like the young radical crowd and what they are aiming to do. But this thing here"--he pointed to _In Our Time_--"I don't like it. It is too brutal and bloody."

"But so is life," I ventured to say, and not too aggressively, because I was expecting my host to come across with a gift of money.

"The only thing I admire about this book is the cover," he said. "That sure is in our time all right. If you like it you can have it." My hand trembled to take it. The book was worth something between thirty and fifty francs, which was more than I could afford. I have it still. It became so valuable that I once consigned it for a loan. But I redeemed it and, excepting my typewriter, I hardly ever trouble to redeem the things I pawn.

Yet I would be lying if I should say here that when I read _In Our Time_ in 1924 I thought the author soon would be one of the famous American writers. I liked the style of the book, but I thought more of it as a literary rarity, and that the author would remain one of the best of the little coterie writers.

I must confess to a vast admiration for Ernest Hemingway the writer. Some of my critics thought that I was imitating him. But I also am a critic of myself. And I fail to find any relationship between my loose manner and subjective feeling in writing and Hemingway's objective and carefully stylized form. Any critic who considers it important enough to take the trouble can trace in my stuff a clearly consistent emotional--realist thread, from the time I published my book of dialect verse (_Songs of Jamaica_) in 1912, through the period of my verse and prose in _The Liberator_, until the publication of _Home to Harlem_.

But indeed, yes, I was excited by the meteor apparition of Ernest Hemingway. I cannot imagine any ambitious young writer of that time who was not fascinated in the beginning. In Paris and in the Midi, I met a few fellows of the extreme left school, and also a few of the moderate liberal school and even some of the ancient fossil school--and all mentioned Hemingway with admiration. Many of them felt that they could never go on writing as before after Hemingway.

The irritating pseudo-romantic style of writing about contemporary life--often employed by modernists and futurists, with their punctuation-and-phraseology tricks, as well as by the dead traditionalists--that style so admirably parodied in _Ulysses_; had reached its conventional climax in Michael Arlen's _The Green Hat_. When Hemingway wrote, _The Sun Also Rises_, he shot a fist in the face of the false romantic-realists and said: "You can't fake about life like that."

Apparently Hemingway today is mainly admired by a hard-boiled and unsophisticated public whose mentality in a curious way is rather akin to that of the American who contemptuously gave away Hemingway's first book to me. I don't think that that is any of Hemingway's fault. And what excites and tickles me to disgust is the attitude of the precious coteries toward Hemingway. One is not certain whether they hate Hemingway because of his success or because of his rough handling of some precious idols. The elect of the coteries could not possibly object to the Hemingway style and material. For the Hemingway of _In Our Time_ is the same Hemingway of _The Sun Also Rises_, _A Farewell to Arms_, and the masterpiece of _Death in the Afternoon_. The only difference I see is that whereas Hemingway is a little cryptic in the earlier work, he is clear, unequivocal and forthright in his full-sized books. _In Our Time_ contains the frame, the background, and the substance of all of Hemingway's later work. The hard-boilism--the booze, blood and brutality are all there. The key to _A Farewell to Arms_ may be found in _In Our Time_. The critics whose sensibilities were so shocked over _Death in the Afternoon_ will find its foundation in the six miniature classics of the bull ring in _In Our Time_, developed and enlarged with riper experience in the big book.

I find in Hemingway's works an artistic illumination of a certain quality of American civilization that is not to be found in any other distinguished American writer. And that quality is the hard-boiled contempt for and disgust with sissyness expressed among all classes of Americans. Now this quality is distinctly and definitely American--a conventionalized rough attitude which is altogether un-European. It stands out conspicuously, like the difference between American burlesque shows and European music-hall shows. Mr. Hemingway has taken this characteristic of American life from the streets, the barrooms, the ringsides and lifted it into the realm of real literature. In accomplishing this he did revolutionary work with four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. That to me is a superb achievement. I do not know what Mr. Hemingway's personal attitude may be to the material that he has used, and I care less. All I can say is that in literature he has most excellently quickened and enlarged my experience of social life.

XXII

Friends in France

I had been posing naked in Paris studios to earn my daily bread and that undermined my health. The studios were badly heated. My body reacted against the lack of warmth after being for many years accustomed to the well-heated houses of America. I came down with pneumonia. My French friend, Pierre Vogein, looked after me. Josephine Bennett brought me fruit and ordered proper food. Louise Bryant sent a doctor. Clive Weed had told her that I was in Paris.

Louise Bryant was aware that I wanted to write above all things. I first saw her when she returned from Russia after the death of John Reed. I think it was at Romany Marie's in Greenwich Village and she was encircled by a group of nice young men, collegiate-like. At that time she was a pretty woman with unforgettably beautiful eyebrows. She had sent _The Liberator_ a pathetic poem about her sorrow, and we had published it. I told her that the poem had moved me more than anything that was written about John Reed's death. For the dead was dead, but I felt that the living who really mourn are the sorriest thing about death.

Louise Bryant and I came together again, I think at Max Eastman's. We talked about John Reed. I asked if she knew that he had invited me to go to Moscow in 1920, when I was in London. She said she didn't know that, but was aware that Reed had become excited about the social problems of the Negro group shortly before he fell ill.

At that time she was doing a brilliant set of articles about Russia for a Hearst newspaper. We talked about writing. I was interested in her opinion of so-called "bourgeois" and so-called "proletarian" literature and art. Externally her tastes were bourgeois enough. She liked luxurious surroundings and elegant and expensive clothes and looked splendid in them. But her fine tastes had not softened her will or weakened her rebel spirit.

Louise Bryant thought, as I did, that there was no bourgeois writing or proletarian writing as such; there was only good writing and bad writing. I told her of my great desire to do some Negro stories, straight and unpolished, but that Max Eastman had discouraged me and said I should write my stories in verse. But my thinking in poetry was so lyric-emotional that I could not feel like writing stories in that vein. She said Max Eastman was too romantic about poetry and that I should write prose. She said she also could never get into her poetry certain things that she got into prose. John Reed had written some early stories about ordinary people with no radical propaganda in them, she said, and suggested that I should do the same about my Negro stories--just write plain tales.

And so now again in Paris, when she was sending me off to southern France for my health, Louise Bryant warned me: "Remember our conversation in New York, and don't try to force your stories with propaganda. If you write a good story, that will be the biggest propaganda." She gave me a check big enough to keep me living simply and working steadily for three months.

I went to Marseilles, and from there visited some of the little towns of the littoral. Finally I chose La Ciotat, a place about midway between Marseilles and Toulon, having some eight thousand folk. Boatmaking and fishing were the two main industries. The bay was fine, and beautiful in the morning sunshine. But on the quay, where the houses and hotels were, the morning sunshine didn't fall. There was no kind of heat, not even fireplaces. My hotel was cold but I contrived to work, wrapping myself from chest to feet in my Russian blanket and leaving only my hands free.

After a month of it I went down to Toulon to hear Carmen by the Opéra Comique Company from Paris. In a _bistro_ after the opera I met a girl who spoke English. She was a little strange, different from the average that one meets in sailor bars. She was friendly to me. I found out that she had once been a little friend of artists and writers in Montmartre and Montparnasse. She was the type of girl that seemed more suitable for friendship with younger officers than with common sailors, but she preferred the sailors. She worked too, in a store. She promised to find me a room with a fireplace in Toulon, which she did, and sent me a note about it the following week. But I had already paid another month's rent in advance in La Ciotat.

When that month was ended, I took up residence in Toulon. The girl--her name was Marcelle--had a sailor friend named Lucien, and all three of us became very close friends. Lucien was more than an average sailor. There are many such in the French navy, lads from middle-class and lower middle-class families who choose the navy instead of the army to do their compulsory service. The service is longer in the navy than in the army. Also it is harder, without the privileges offered by the army, in which the educated sons of the better classes can do their compulsory service as cadets.

Lucien had been a cadet, studying to enter the navy as a career, but he had failed his examinations and then decided to do his military service in the navy. He read lots of books, but he wasn't literary. He gave me my first French lessons. He said I should read Anatole France for good French. He said he read everything of Anatole France's because he wrote the purest and clearest French of any contemporary writer. But he didn't get any kick out of the novels as novels. For stories about French life he preferred Zola and Maupassant. I wondered if there were many French readers who felt about Anatole France as Lucien did. He assured me that there were many who liked Anatole France merely because he wrote classical French.

Lucien was on the battleship "Provence." He invited me to go aboard and introduced me to many of his friends. As Lucien had formerly been a cadet, he had a few extra privileges. Very often he slept in town. And he, Marcelle and I were always together. He loved to walk, and together we explored the environs of Toulon. We hiked to La Seyne, Tamaris, Bandol and Ollioules. I love the Var country more than any part of France, excepting Brittany. Lucien was a Breton and he loved those wonderful bare rugged rocks towering to the skies that make the Var so dramatically picturesque. I told Lucien that I loved those rearing rocks because they somewhat suggested the skyscrapers of New York. But Lucien did not like the comparison; he could not imagine anything American resembling anything French.

When his pals got their week-end vacation from the "Provence" we all went bathing out at Cap Negre in the afternoon, and in the evening we got together for a good time in the _bistros_ and _mancebías_. The _mancebías_ of Toulon are like recreation halls for the sailors. Many of the sailors who, like Lucien, had their girls in town, went to the _mancebías_ to dance and meet their friends for a good time. Sometimes they took their girls with them. There are dancing halls in Toulon, but these are frequented mostly by the officers. The sailors find it embarrassing to mix with the officers, so they prefer the _mancebías_, where they are freer. The managers of the _mancebías_ are a pretty good lot. They are friendly and cater to the whims of the sailors, as if they were aware that they were entertaining a mixed group of the best of the country's youth.

Toulon is dominated by the naval aristocracy, and its administration seemed to me the best of any of the French provincial towns I visited. To a casual observer, the civil administration seems subordinate to the maritime administration. The sailors are protected much more than they are aware. In Toulon there is nothing of that rotten civil complaisance in the exploitation of the sailors which is a revolting feature of life in Marseilles.

Soon after I went to reside in Toulon I received a letter from the secretary of the Garland Fund. It informed me that the officers of the Fund had heard that I was unwell and in need and that they desired to help me for a time, while I was writing. Thus assured of fifty dollars a month, I knuckled down to writing. It was grand and romantic to have a grant to write, and I got going on a realistic lot of stuff. I was sure about what I wanted to write, but I wasn't so sure about the form. My head was full of material in short pieces, but I wanted to write a long piece--a novel.

I returned to Paris toward the end of summer with a heavy portfolio. I met a couple of publishers' scouts who didn't discover anything in my lot. Clive Weed introduced me to Harold Stearns. Stearns's strange tired eyes didn't want to look at me. Remembering something, he excused himself, got up and went to the bar, and there forgot all about me. I wondered why Stearns acted so strangely, as if over there in Paris I had reminded him too much of civilization in the United States! Another Yankee said that I should not worry about Harold Stearns for I had nothing to offer him, and he had nothing to offer me but tips on horses and booze. While I remained in Paris I saw Harold Stearns again many times and always at the bar. He was something of an institution in Montparnasse, and often I saw him pointed out to American students who were discovering civilization in Europe as the man who had edited _Civilization in the United States_.

Also in Paris I found Eugen Boissevain, who had previously helped me much with encouraging praise of my poetry and with gifts of money. He had been recently married to Edna St. Vincent Millay. I saw them both together at their hotel and she gave me a book of her poems. There was a happy feeling in his face that I never had seen there before he was married, and I felt happy for it because I was fond of him. Miss Millay I saw for the first time. In Greenwich Village I had often heard praise of her, but we had never met, and when I arrived in Paris she had recently left. In the literary circles of Montparnasse I heard her name on the lips of foreigners and Americans, and all in praise of her--a reverent worshipful praise. It was extraordinary: he-men, mere men, and others--all used identical phrases in praising Miss Millay's elusive personality. The only other white woman I knew who was so unreservedly esteemed by all kinds of men was Isadora Duncan. I was puzzled and skeptical of all that chorus of praise. But when I did set eyes on Miss Millay I understood it. There was something in her personality which was Elizabethan--as I imagine the Elizabethans to have been from Shakespeare and history. And I saw her as a Shakespearean woman deftly adapted to the modern machine age. When I searched for an Anglo-Saxon word to fix her in my mind I could think of "elfin" only.

Sinclair Lewis was in Paris also, and he was very kind. He read some of my stuff. He had been generous to many radically-inclined writers since his first success with _Main Street_, and he hadn't seen any results. But he gave me a sum of money, took me to dinner in a small quiet place, and talked to me a whole long evening. In a shrewd American way (chastising me and making me like it), Sinclair Lewis gave me a few cardinal and practical points about the writing of a book or a novel. Those points were indicative and sharp like newspaper headlines. I did not forget them when I got down to writing _Home to Harlem_. I remembered them so well that some critics saw the influence of Sinclair Lewis in my novel. Scott Fitzgerald, in a note, said that the scenes seemed in the Zola-Lewis line.

I left Paris again for Toulon to see what better I could do. About the time I got back Lucien was just finishing his service and getting ready to leave for Brittany. Marcelle was very sad, and I also. For I had been looking forward to our spending much of our leisure time together as formerly.

On the evening of Lucien's departure a gang of sailors from the "Provence" and some from other boats and a few girls all crowded into my room. Out of their small wages they had eked enough to buy many bottles of ordinary white and red wine. I bought some cognac. My landlady and her husband joined us and we had a great good time.

My friends knew that I was writing, but they knew nothing of my ideas. I never told them that I had been in Soviet Russia. The French friend whom I had met in Moscow had advised me that so long as I was staying in France I should never do or say anything to let the authorities think that I was making political propaganda. If I followed that line, he said, I would never be bothered. I kept that advice, along with Louise Bryant's, in my head and followed the line.

But toward the end of the evening, when we all began kissing one another on both cheeks, Frenchwise, bidding Lucien a last farewell, a sailor started singing the "Internationale." We all joined our voices with his and heartily sang, I singing in English. One sailor jumped up on my writing table and said: "After the world revolution there will be no more white and black and yellow; we shall all be one fraternity of men." My sense of the distinctive in the difference of color was outraged, and I said, "We can still remain a fraternity of men and guard our complexions." One of the girls said: "That's all well! We wouldn't like you to change your color either."

But the next day I had the honor of a visit from two police officers in plain clothes. They were very courteous. They first satisfied themselves that my French was not worth much and one of them spoke to me in English, which was worth just a little more than my French. I told them all they desired to know about me, except the fact that I had visited Soviet Russia. I explained that the sailors had come to my place to give Lucien a farewell party. "And they sang the 'Internationale'!" commented my inquisitor. I am not sure, but I think there is a government ruling which forbids French sailors and soldiers from singing the "Internationale." "They sang the Marseillaise too," I said, "and I prefer the words and music of the Marseillaise to those of the 'Internationale'." The English-speaking inspector smiled and asked me whether I was a Communist. I said that I was a poet and a great admirer of Victor Hugo. He said, "Well, I wouldn't wonder if a Negro-American had advanced ideas." He excluded the Negro-French of course. But I was courteously left alone and for the ensuing months I lived happily and as I pleased in Toulon. In the restaurants and cafés that I frequented I was treated even better than before.

Lucien wrote, asking if I could visit Brittany in the summer, because his parents wanted to know me. I replied in ungrammatical French, telling him that I would if I could. I finished a novel and mailed it to New York. I had a group of short stories, which I forwarded to Louise Bryant. I received an enthusiastic letter from Louise Bryant, who said that Robert McAlmon wanted to use one of the stories.

Lucien and I kept up a regular correspondence. He wrote that he had fallen ill, but that it was not serious. In the early summer I left Toulon for Marseilles. There I met Marcelle. I told her that I was expecting to go to Brest to visit Lucien and his people. She thought that was fine, and I asked her why she didn't come along too. That was impossible, she said, because a girl of her sort could not think of visiting the family of her lover. Girls like her, she said, were outside friends for outside purposes, and had no desire to intrude themselves upon their friends' families.

In the company of a white American artist I spent a couple of weeks in low-down Marseilles; then I decided to go to Bordeaux to visit a British West Indian Negro friend and his French West Indian wife before going on to Brittany. I got my ticket and boarded a night train. And while I was waiting for my train to pull out, another pulled in, and there in the next car right up against mine was Max Eastman and his Russian wife!

I got out and asked the station master to make my ticket good for the next day. Max Eastman had just published his book, _Since Lenin Died_. I had left him in Russia before Lenin's death, and we had plenty to talk about. So we spent the larger split of the night talking, and the next day drove round the Corniche and ate _bouillabaisse_ on the quay. In the evening I entrained for Bordeaux.

I wrote from Bordeaux informing Lucien that I would arrive soon in Brest, and was surprised to find the answering letter addressed in a strange handwriting. It was from Lucien's father, stating that his son had died the week before. Lucien had contracted tuberculosis in the navy, and unaware of his serious illness, had not taken any treatment. In Toulon I had noticed that he was rather frail, and, compared to his comrades, unusually quiet, but I never heard him cough, and his physique showed no strain when we went hiking in the country.

In his letter, Lucien's father invited me still to come to St. Pierre. He said his son had talked about my visit up to the moment of his death, and thought that I would like Brittany more than Provence. For the first time in my life I was shocked with the sensation of what "a living dead" might mean. I had seen persons sicken and die after a long illness. I had seen sudden death. But Lucien's passing was weird, like a ghost story. All the time he was regularly writing those healthy letters about the picturesqueness of the wild Breton coast, of the fields full of larks singing in the summertime, of the quaint costumes which the old people still wore naturally, he was actually wasting rapidly away. They say consumptive persons are like that: always optimistic and hopeful of their health. But I had never had any close contact with one.

I wondered if Marcelle had known of the real state of Lucien's health. When I told him that I had come to the Midi mainly for the effect of the sun on my health, he said: "Why should the young think about health? Just live, and that is health." I lingered on in Bordeaux, hesitating about going to Brittany. But I received another letter, from Lucien's mother, urging me to come, "because Lucien wanted you to be his guest, and now that he is dead we want to receive you for him." I decided to go. I had met many French in cafés, restaurants and other places. And I had been invited to a couple of parlor parties in Montparnasse, but I wasn't sure whether my hosts were really French or what the French call _métèque_. I had never been a guest in a real French family. The French are exclusive in their ideas of family life and seldom invite strangers to their homes.

Lucien's family, which was small, belonged to the prosperous peasant class or the small bourgeoise. It was not a café-or restaurant-owning family. The old father used to be an artisan, of what trade I don't remember. He was a big man, robust, friendly, and loved to play _boule_. The mother was small and compact and resembled a picture of a South European immigrant arriving in New York. There were two daughters and an older son, all married. The son had a clerical position in the maritime service. I noticed that they read _Le Quotidien_, which was a Left liberal paper at that time.

The family possessed a small two-storey stone house in St. Pierre. It was furnished in antique and modern stuff. The father and mother still used the chest-like Breton beds which are now so highly valued by connoisseurs. The dining table also was a large, heavy massive thing, occupying the one large room that served for dining and cooking. But Lucien had modernized his room, so that it was like a room anywhere, even in the Congo, I guess.

I stayed in a hotel in Brest and went often to eat with Lucien's family. After the shock of meeting over Lucien's death, it was a nice visit. I liked the Breton folk more than any other of the French. I spent the summer wandering all over Finistère. I lay in the gray-green fields and watched the brown larks suddenly soar and sing. I knew then why Lucien loved the Breton fields so dearly, and I understood more of what Shakespeare felt when he wrote:

_Hark, hark the lark at Heaven's gate sings...._

Lovely are the fields and charming are the towns of Finistère: Brest, Morlaix, Camarat, Plougastel, Morgat, Quimper, Concarneau, Le Pouldu over to Lorient and back to Douarnenez _le Rouge_ above all! How I loved Douarnenez with its high wall falling sheerly into the green waters and the big shipping boats with their tall masts hung with nets like blue veils against the misted gray-blue sky, and the fishermen in red dungarees and red-hearted.

I loved the quiet green and subdued grays and browns of Brittany, and although it rained a lot I did not miss the grand sun of Provence. Perhaps because I was sad and felt the need of solitude.

XXIII

Frank Harris in France

Late in the autumn I went south again to Nice. I needed a job and found one as valet to an American.

Paul Robeson and I met on the Promenade des Anglais. He read one of my stories and said he liked it. I said I would like to do a play for him to act in. Paul asked me if I knew Gertrude Stein. I said I didn't, that I hadn't gone to her place. Paul said he had visited Gertrude Stein and that she was all right. I shouldn't neglect such an opportunity, as she knew all the literary people who counted, he told me. I told Paul that although I couldn't abide cliques, I wasn't averse to contact, but from my estimation of Gertrude Stein I felt that she had nothing to offer.