PART FOUR

THE MAGIC PILGRIMAGE

XIV

The Dominant Urge

I went to Russia. Some thought I was invited by the Soviet government; others, that I was sent by the Communist Party. But it was not so easy to have the honor of an invitation or the privilege of being sent. For I was not one of the radicals abroad, important to the Soviet government; and I was not a member of the Communist Party. All I had was the dominant urge to go, and that discovered the way. Millions of ordinary human beings and thousands of writers were stirred by the Russian thunder rolling round the world. And as a social-minded being and a poet, I too was moved.

But money was necessary so that I could go to Russia. I had none. I mentioned my object to James Weldon Johnson, then secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He suggested I might raise some money by selling special copies of my book of poems with signed photographs. And very kindly he placed at my disposal a select list of persons connected with the N.A.A.C.P. In that way a small number of copies of _Harlem Shadows_ was sold. The price asked was five dollars. I remember that about six persons sent checks for ten dollars. One check was signed by Mrs. Henry Villard. Eugen Boissevain sent me one hundred dollars. Crystal Eastman gave me a letter as one of the editors of _The Liberator_, asking any radical who could to facilitate my getting to Russia. Just before I sailed James Weldon Johnson gave me a little farewell party at his residence in Harlem. A few of Harlem's élite came: Dr. DuBois, Walter White, Jessie Fauset, Rosamond Johnson, and from among downtown liberal intellectuals, Heywood Broun and F.P.A. of the New York _World_, John Farrar, who was then editor of _The Bookman_, and Ruth Hale. It was a pleasant evening and the first of the bohemian-élite interracial parties in Harlem which became so popular during the highly propagandized Negro renaissance period.

I signed on as a stoker on a slow freighter going to Liverpool. Just as that time, Crystal Eastman also had booked passage on another boat to go with her children to London to join her husband. We had arranged to have a last meal together on the eve of my sailing. But I waited until near midnight and she didn't appear. So I went out alone in Harlem, visiting the speakeasies and cabarets and drinking a farewell to the illegal bars.

In one joint I met Hubert Harrison and we had together a casual drink. But I did not inform him or any of my few familiars that I was sailing for Europe the next day. Sentimental adieux embarrass me. I took a look in at Sanina's for a brief moment. Late that night, when I got home with just enough liquor to fill me with a mellow mood for my next adventure, I found a tiny scrap of paper thrust into my keyhole:

Claude dear:

I just dashed in to give you a hug and say goodbye--Bon Voyage, dear child!

Crystal

I tucked the little note in a corner of my pocket book and have carried it with me all these years, through many countries, transferring it, when one pocket book was worn out, to another.

Six years later, when I was in Spain, I received a copy of _The Nation_ containing the announcement of beautiful Crystal Eastman's death. It was sudden and shocking to me. I took her farewell note out of my pocket book and read it and cried. Crystal Eastman was a great-hearted woman whose life was big with primitive and exceptional gestures. She never wrote that Book of Woman which was imprinted on her mind. She was poor, and fettered with a family. She had a grand idea for a group of us to go off to write in some quiet corner of the world, where living was cheap and easy. But it couldn't be realized. And so life was cheated of one contribution about women that no other woman could write.

* * * * *

At Liverpool I left the freighter and went straight to London. There was a reunion with a few intimates of the International Socialist Club. Many of the members had left for Russia the year before to live there permanently. Also a number of British Communists were preparing to travel to Russia for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.

Arthur McManus, one of the Left labor men from the Clyde, was one of them. I asked if he could assist me to go to Russia. He was not enthusiastic, especially since I was once connected with the Pankhurst group, which was now out of favor at Moscow. McManus said that I should have been recommended by the American Communist Party. The more difficult it seemed, the more determined I was to make my way to Russia. One evening in a barroom, I heard a group of English comrades facetiously discussing Edgar Whitehead, the former secretary to the Pankhurst Group, saying that he was always landing something good in the movement. I heard them mention that Whitehead was in Berlin. He was liaison agent and interpreter for the English-speaking radicals who were traveling to Russia. Whitehead had studied German in Berlin when he was a schoolmaster. He had been a leader of conscientious objectors during the last war. He was also my friend, and I thought I'd take a chance on his helping.

The next day I took the channel boat to Ostend. Arriving in Berlin, I made inquiries and found Whitehead. He promised to get me through to Russia. That I was not indorsed by any Communist party did not matter to him. He was not a fanatic or dogmatist. In the days of our association together in London we often waxed satirical about Communist orthodoxy and we had often discussed the idea of a neo-radical magazine in which nothing in the universe would be held sacred.

Whitehead started working for me. The intervening time I spent visiting the theaters. Expressionism was setting the pace. I saw the revolving stage for the first time and admired it. Also I visited many of the cabarets, which had sprung up like mushrooms under the Socialist-Republican régime, some of which seemed to express the ultimate in erotomania. The youngsters of both sexes, the hectic pleasure-chasers of the Berlin of that epoch (before Poincaré grabbed the Ruhr), were methodically exploiting the nudist colony indoors, which was perhaps more exciting than the outdoor experiments.

One evening Whitehead announced that all was ready. The next day we drove in a taxicab to a rendezvous. We entered a house and passed into a large room in which there was a group of men. Four of them I identified as Russians. Whitehead introduced me as a _kamarad und neger dichter_. One sitting at a table spoke with a kindly smile. He asked a few questions in effortful English which I promptly answered. I said that I was not a member of the American Communist Party, but that I was in sympathy with the purpose of the great Russian revolution. I said that it was primarily as a writer that I was interested in Soviet Russia and that I intended to write about it for the Negro press.

I received back my passport and Crystal Eastman's recommendation, which I had consigned to Whitehead. A visa for Russia was attached to the passport. I was told to prepare to travel at once. The next day I traveled with an English-speaking German to Stettin. There I slept that night at a hotel. The following morning I was taken to a pier, whence I embarked for Leningrad.

* * * * *

Petrograd! Leningrad! When I think of that great city like a mighty tree shaken to its roots by a hurricane, yet still standing erect, and when I think of the proud equestrian statue of Peter the Great, proclaiming that dictator's mighty achievement, I feel that the world has lost the poetry and the color rising like a rainbow out of a beautiful name since Petrograd was changed to Leningrad.

Lenin is mightier than Peter the Great. But there is no magic in the name of Leningrad. There is magic in the name of Lenin, as there is splendor in the word Moscow. And perhaps Lenin himself, whose life was devoted to the idea of creating a glorious new world, might have, in appreciation of the will of Peter the Great to remake a nation, preferred Petrograd to remain Petrograd. Perhaps the spirit of Lenin might have been more adequately expressed in the erection of a brand-new city, rising out of that system to which he dedicated his life. Lenin without any suffix--like a perfect ball of pure gold--a city called Lenin.

* * * * *

I saw Petrograd! Like a great tree, shaken to its roots by a hurricane and struck by lightning and somehow still standing. Petrograd, half empty of its population and somewhat sad in the autumn. I saw the monuments of czars and nobles tumbled in the dirt by the proletarian masses. But intact and untouched they had left the beautifully proud monument of Peter the Great, a mighty symbol of individual will and majesty.

_MOSCOW_

_Moscow for many loving her was dead ... And yet I saw a bright Byzantine fair, Of jewelled buildings, pillars, domes and spires Of hues prismatic dazzling to the sight; A glory painted on the Eastern air, Of amorous sounding tones like passionate lyres; All colors laughing richly their delight And reigning over all the color red._

_My memory bears engraved the strange Kremlin, Of halls symbolic of the tiger will, Of Czarist instruments of mindless law ... And often now my nerves throb with the thrill When, in that gilded place, I felt and saw The simple voice and presence of Lenin._

I felt almost ashamed in those lean hungry years of 1922, when Russia was just emerging from a great famine, that Moscow should have stirred me in the way I have expressed it in this sonnet. Yes, I will admit that my senses were stirred by the semi-oriental splendor and movement of Moscow even before my intellect was touched by the forces of the revolution.

After the war, the revolution and the famine, one's mind had created a picture of a grim, harsh melancholy atmosphere. But it was all like a miracle, all that Byzantine conglomeration of form and color, shedding down its radiance upon the proletarian masses. It was like an _Arabian Nights_ dream transforming the bleak white face of an Arctic waste.

And the crowds tramping and sleighing through the deep snow spreading over all the land were really happier and friendlier than the crowds of New York and London and Berlin. Yet the people in Moscow were generally so poorly clad. There was so much of that Oriental raggedness that one does not see in New York and London and Berlin--at least not on the surface. The scenes were so unexpected and strange that I even doubted at first whether they were not created by Communist discipline and Bolshevik propaganda. But when I mingled with the people I soon perceived that many did not even comprehend the true nature of Communism. Some of them could understand only that Lenin was in the place of the Czar and that he was a greater Little Father.

I was soon brought down out of the romantic feeling of the atmosphere to face the hard reality of the American Communist delegation. Brazenly and bravely I had journeyed to Russia with some members of the British group. But now the American delegation had arrived with a Negroid delegate, a light mulatto. My presence was resented. The American delegation did not want me there. The delegation represented America, and as I had been passed with other Communists as a visitor to the Fourth Communist Congress, it was necessary that I should be indorsed by the delegation as an unofficial visitor. This the chairman refused to do. Instead, he desired that I should be sent out of Russia, back home.

A fight was raging inside of the American delegation. A minority led by James Cannon wanted a legal American Communist party, to carry on open propaganda among all the American workers. The majority, led by the chairman, was fighting to keep the American party illegal and underground.

Rose Pastor Stokes was the main prop of the chairman. When she arrived in Moscow, still pretty and purring and sly as a puss, she immediately engaged me in conversation and casually asked if I did not think that an illegal Communist party was the best suited for America. I answered no, emphatically. At the time I did not know that the difference in the ranks of the American group was serious. Not being a party member, I was unaware of what was going on inside of the organization.

Rose Pastor Stokes was one of the delegates who had just escaped from Bridgman, Michigan, during the police raid of August, 1922, when the illegal Communist Party held its convention in the open there in a beautiful romantic valley. Some of us of _The Liberator_ thought that the Communists, being tired of staying underground, were feeling so pastoral and poetic that they couldn't do better than hold their secret convention in the open air of the lovely Michigan country.

Rose Pastor Stokes had said to me that it was necessary for Communists to take to the woods in summer to escape the iron heel of the capitalists. She was the wife of a millionaire, and perhaps knew more about the iron heel than poor proletarians. She admired that romantic novel of Jack London's, _The Iron Heel_, and once told me that radicals could use it as a textbook of revolutionary organization in America. She was shocked and hurt that a few of us regarded the convention and the raid in Michigan as something like a comic opera.

I remembered Mrs. Stokes's spy mania, when I was on _The Liberator_. She was doing secret radical work. She used to tell me stories of being followed by detectives, and of how she fooled them by taking refuge in the Hotel Plaza and the Hotel Astor; because the dicks wouldn't imagine that a guest of such places was red. She was also working with a radical Negro group, and thought she was followed by Negro detectives in Harlem. One night I was at the apartment of my friend, Grace Campbell, when Mrs. Stokes came in to attend a meeting. She was breathless, and sank into a chair, exhausted. She asked for water, and Comrade Campbell hurried to get a glassful. Then Mrs. Stokes explained that a colored man had been watching her suspiciously while she was riding up on the subway, and when she got off the train he had attempted to follow her. She had hurried and dodged through the insouciant Harlem crowd and gone round many blocks to evade the spy.

Said Comrade Campbell, "But Comrade Stokes, there aren't any Negroes spying on radicals in Harlem. That colored man, maybe he was attempting--kind of--to get friendly with you."

Mrs. Stokes jumped right up out of her exhaustion: "What, Comrade? You _shock_ me!" In her voice, and her manner, was the most perfect bourgeois expression of the superior person. Comrade Campbell said: "Why Comrade Stokes, I didn't mean to insinuate anything, but any person is likely to be mistaken for something else."

So now in Moscow, before I was fixed in place as an unofficial observer, Rose Pastor Stokes had got it from me that I was opposed to the majority of the American delegation, and that was bad. Mrs. Stokes really believed that we were living through the period of the new Inquisition against radicals in America, and that those who did not believe that were traitors to the cause. She hinted even that there was something suspicious about my use of my real name in Moscow. For all the American delegates had secret names. Mrs. Stokes's own was Sasha. But some of us unorthodox comrade sympathizers preferred to identify her as The Red Red Rose.

Meanwhile, the committee appointed to seat all delegates to the Fourth Congress was sifting credentials. It was headed by a repulsive type of strutting Prussian whose name is now forgotten, lost in the radical scramble for place and the shuffling and cutting of Communist cards--and Leninist purges. Greater Red names than his have gone like the melted snows of yesterday.

I was soon aware that the Prussian person had his severe blue eye fixed on me, as if I had been specially pointed out to him. I pretended that I had not seen that evil eye, but soon I was being bedeviled. I was thrown out of the Lux Hotel and found myself in a dilapidated house in a sinister _pereulok_. My room was bare excepting for an army cot, and cold like the steppes because of a broken window pane through which poured a Siberian draught. My first thought was to protect myself against pneumonia, and so I hurried to a store and purchased two blankets and a pair of the cheap warm and comfortable felt boots that reach to the thighs--the kind the Russian peasants wear.

In the room next to mine there was a Russian couple. The man spoke a little English. I complained about the state of my room and he agreed that the window should be fixed; but, said he, "Thousands of Russians are living in worse places." It was a quiet, gentle, perhaps unintentional, rebuke, but immediately I felt confused and altogether ashamed. I became aware of the implications of my grievance, so petty in the eyes of the "thousands in worse places" who had just come through an eight-year siege of war, revolution, counter-revolution and famine, with fields and farms devastated, factories wrecked, houses in ruins, no time and few funds for repairs.

I remembered breakfasting on the train in Germany a few weeks previously. The countryside, misty brown in the early morning, was peaceful and beautiful; the train ran precisely on time; the coaches and dining car were in elegant shape, the passengers well dressed, the waiters in neat uniform. The breakfast was fine, but the cream that came with the coffee was barely whitened water. I had just come from America, where cream with coffee is a commonplace. And so, without thinking, I asked the waiter for cream. I said I would pay extra for it.

The waiter said: "But Mister, we have no cream at all. They have taken away all our cows from us, and what little milk we have we must give to our babies." Then I remembered that I had read somewhere that under the Treaty of Versailles the Germans had had to give up thousands of heads of cattle to the Allies. But I had never fully grasped the significance of that until I asked for cream with my coffee in Germany. (We are, the majority of us, merely sentimental about the suffering of others. Only when direct experience twists our own guts out of place are we really able to understand. I remember once hearing a nice comfortable bohemian noblewoman ecstatically exclaim: "_J'aime la souffrance! J'aime la souffrance!_" Yes! She loved vicariously the suffering of others.)

" ... Thousands in worse places." A good room was as much of a luxury in Moscow in 1922 as a car is in America. A good room was the chief non-political topic of conversation. People greeted one another and said: "Do you have a good room?" in the same way we say, "How is your health?" One of the tidbits of those times was the joke that Mrs. Trotsky and Mrs. Zinoviev were at odds because one had a better apartment in the Kremlin than the other.

* * * * *

Now my position was precarious. I wanted by all means to stay in Moscow and to attend the meetings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. But would-be delegates and visitors who were unwanted and undesirable were being ruthlessly dealt with. Some were accused as spies and counter-revolutionists. To the Russians, spying was a real menace. It meant sabotage of revolutionary property, attempted assassination of officials, and working to overthrow the Soviets. They could not understand that when an English or an American Communist accused certain persons of being spies, his idea of spying was romantic and akin to eavesdropping.

Aware of the way in which things were going against radical dissidents, I acted quickly. I had a friend high up in Bolshevik circles in the person of Sen Katayama. Sen Katayama was _the_ Japanese revolutionist. He had been a member of the Second International and knew all the big men of the conservative British and continental labor movement. He was an old friend of Lenin, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek, and had gone over to the Third International at its inception.

Sen Katayama had been a student at Fisk University, the southern Negro school. He was small, dark-brown, with intensely purposeful features which were nevertheless kindly. I met him when I was working on _The Liberator_. He dropped in one day and introduced himself. He took me to lunch at a Japanese restaurant, and at another time to a Chinese, and introduced me to the Indian rendezvous restaurant in the theatrical district. His personality was friendly but abounding in curiosity--a sort of minute methodical curiosity. He made me think of a fearless and faithful little hunting dog. When he came up to my office, his little eyes, like brilliant beads, darted rapidly over everything. And like a permanent surprise he invaded my rooms at all hours and talked in his squeaky grandmotherly voice about Negro problems. He demonstrated a vast interest and sympathy for the Negro racialists and their organizations. I liked Sen Katayama immensely. I was fascinated by his friendly ferreting curiosity. I had associated with many Chinese at home in the West Indies and in London, but Sen Katayama was my first Japanese friend. It was exciting to contrast Chinese and Japanese by the types I had known. Sen Katayama was eager and extrovert, almost too much so, while the Chinese, however friendly, seemed aloof and secret.

Sen Katayama was in his glory in Red Russia. He was an honorary colonel of the Red army and always appeared at mass meetings in his uniform. The crowds adored him and applauded frantically. He appeared to me somewhat like a harbinger, a symbol of the far eastern element in the new heart of Russia.

Sen Katayama warmly welcomed me in Moscow and invited me to tea in his nice room in the Lux Hotel. He held an important post in the Eastern Department of the Communist International and because of his extensive traveling and his education and contact with American Negroes he was regarded as an authority on all colored peoples' affairs. He had more real inside and sympathetic knowledge and understanding of American Negroes than many of the white American Communists who were camping in Moscow.

When I explained to Sen Katayama how and why I had come to Russia and of the difficulties I was encountering because of the opposition of the American delegation, he said: "You leave everything to me and we'll see if they can get you out of here and prevent your attending the Congress. I'll talk to the Big Four[2] about you."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek.]

XV

An Individual Triumph

Meanwhile, all the Russian folk unwittingly were doing their part for me. Whenever I appeared in the street I was greeted by all of the people with enthusiasm. At first I thought that this was merely because of the curiosity which any strange and distinctive type creates in any foreign environment, such as I had experienced in Holland and Belgium and Germany. But no! I soon apprehended that this Russian demonstration was a different thing. Just a spontaneous upsurging of folk feeling.

The Bolsheviks had nothing at all to do with it. The public manifestation for me took them unawares. But the Bolsheviks have nerves subtly attuned to the currents of opinion and a sense of propaganda values in which they are matched only by French officialdom. So, as soon as they perceived the trend of the general enthusiasm for me, they decided to use it. And I was not averse to that. Never before had I experienced such an instinctive sentiment of affectionate feeling compelling me to the bosom of any people, white or colored. And I am certain I never will again. My response was as sincere as the mass feeling was spontaneous. That miraculous experience was so extraordinary that I have never been able to understand it.

Even the Russian comrades, who have a perfect pat social-economic explanation for all phenomena, were amazed. The comrade who conducted me around (when I hadn't wandered off by myself, which was often) was as intelligent as a fox and as keen and cold as an icicle. Although a mere youth, he held important positions, open and secret, and today, still young, he holds a most important position in the Soviet government and in the Russian Communist Party. This comrade said: "I don't quite understand. Some of the Indian delegates are darker than you--quite black--yet the people don't carry on about them that way. But there is something very different in your features and that is what the people see."

Never in my life did I feel prouder of being an African, a black, and no mistake about it. Unforgettable that first occasion upon which I was physically uplifted. I had not yet seen it done to anybody, nor did I know that it was a Russian custom. The Moscow streets were filled with eager crowds before the Congress started. As I tried to get through along the Tverskaya I was suddenly surrounded by a crowd, tossed into the air, and caught a number of times and carried a block on their friendly shoulders. The civilians started it The soldiers imitated them. And the sailors followed the soldiers, tossing me higher than ever.

From Moscow to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Moscow I went triumphantly from surprise to surprise, extravagantly fêted on every side. I was carried along on a crest of sweet excitement. I was like a black ikon in the flesh. The famine had ended, the Nep was flourishing, the people were simply happy. I was the first Negro to arrive in Russia since the revolution, and perhaps I was generally regarded as an omen of good luck! Yes, that was exactly what it was. I was like a black ikon.

The attitude of the non-Bolshevist population was even more interesting. I had been told to be careful about going places alone. But bourgeois persons on the street implored me just to enter their homes for a glass of tea. I went. I had no fear of even the "whitest" Russians in Russia, although in Paris and Berlin I would not have trusted them. The only persons that made me afraid in Russia were the American Communists. Curiously, even Russian bourgeois persons trusted me. They knew that I was in sympathy with the Communists--was their guest. Yet some of them told me frankly and naïvely that they did not like the Bolsheviks and didn't think their régime would last. The women chattered like parrots, happy that the shops were opened. They wanted to hear about the shops in New York and London and Berlin. When I visited a college with an interpreter, who was certainly a member of the O.G.P.U., one of the language teachers explained the difficulties of working under the new régime. She said she ought to travel abroad to keep up with the languages she taught, and that was impossible now. She said the proletarian students were dull and kept the brighter bourgeois students back. She said that one of her brightest students was the son of a former governor, and that she would not reveal his identity, for if it were known, he could not stay in the college. She said, "I can't let even you know who he is, for you might tell about him." But before I left she introduced me to the lad, explaining that he had specially asked for an introduction. In Petrograd, Chorny Chukovsky, the popular author, introduced me to a princess and a countess who were his friends, and to the intellectual élite, who were mainly anti-Bolsheviks. But they crowded a hall to hear me read my poems. One of the professors, who had studied in England and France, was so excited that he invited me to the national library the next day. And what did he do? There was a rare Pushkin book with a photograph of him as a boy which clearly showed his Negroid strain. (The Negroid strain is not so evident in the adult pictures of Pushkin.) I coveted the book, and told the Professor so. He said he was sorry that he could not make me a present of the volume. But he actually extracted that photograph of Pushkin and gave it to me. Mark you, that professor was no Bolshevik, contemptuous of bourgeois literature. He was an old classic scholar who worshipped his books and was worried about the future of literature and art under the Bolshevik régime. Yet he committed that sacrilege for me: "To show my appreciation of you as a poet," he said. "Our Pushkin was also a revolutionist." Like Crystal Eastman's farewell note, that photograph of Pushkin is one of the few treasures I have.

* * * * *

Oh, I remember that magnificent cartoon in colors, picturing me sailing on a magic carpet over the African jungles to Moscow. The artist made me a gift of the original. An imp swiped it. It was the perfect interpretation of my adventure in Russia. An _Arabian Nights_ fantasy transformed into reality. I had been the despised brother, unwelcome at the gorgeous fête in the palace of the great. In the lonely night I went to bed in a cold bare room. But I awoke in the morning to find myself the center of pageantry in the grand Byzantine city. The photograph of my black face was everywhere among the most highest Soviet rulers, in the principal streets, adorning the walls of the city. I was whisked out of my unpleasant abode and installed in one of the most comfortable and best-heated hotels in Moscow. I was informed: "You may have wine and anything extra you require, and at no cost to you." But what could I want for, when I needed a thousand extra mouths and bellies for the importunate invitations to feast? Wherever I wanted to go, there was a car at my disposal. Whatever I wanted to do I did. And anything I felt like saying I said. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be a highly privileged personage. And in the Fatherland of Communism!

Didn't I enjoy it! The American comrades were just too funny with envy and chagrin. The mulatto delegate who had previously high-hatted me now began to cultivate my company. It was only by sticking close to me that he could be identified as a Negroid.

I was photographed with the popular leaders of international Communism: Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Clara Zetkin, Sen Katayama, Roy; with officers of the Soviet fleet, the army and the air forces; with the Red cadets and the rank and file; with professors of the academies; with the children of Moscow and of Petrograd; with delegates from Egypt, India, Japan, China, Algeria.

XVI

The Pride and Pomp of Proletarian Power

The Bolshoi Theater in Moscow presented a pageantry of simple proletarian pride and power on the night of the opening of the Congress of the Communist International. The absence of the primitive appeal of gilded pomp made the manifestation even more sublime and awe-inspiring.

I had received a pass to attend the great opening of the Congress. When I succeeded in getting into the vast Bolshoi auditorium, Martin Anderson Nexö, the author of _Pelle, the Conqueror_, waved to me to come and sit beside him. He was seated in the center front of the hall. But an usher grabbed me, and before I could realize where I was going, I was being handed from usher to usher like an object that was consigned to a special place. At first I thought I was going to be conducted to the balcony, but instead I was ushered onto the platform to a seat beside Max Eastman and just behind Zinoviev. It seems as if the curious interest of the crowd focused upon me had prompted Zinoviev to hoist me up there on the platform.

Zinoviev asked me to speak and I refused. Max Eastman pleaded: "Do speak! See how the people are looking at you; they want to hear you." I said that if they had given me notice beforehand I might have prepared a few phrases, although speaking was not my specialty. But I wouldn't stand up before the Bolshevik élite and that vast eager crowd, without having something prepared to say. Eastman said: "Just tell them you bring greetings from the Negro workers of America."

"But," said I, "I have no mandate from any American Negro workers to say that. There is an official mulatto delegate; perhaps he has a message from the Negro workers."

I said to Eastman, "Why don't you speak?" He said he would like to if they would ask him. Certainly the American Communists had in Max Eastman the finest platform personality to present. Unlike me, he was as pure a Marxist as any of them there and had given the best of his intellect to serve the cause of Communism and extoll the Soviets in America. But because of petty jealousy they cold-shouldered Eastman in Moscow. Perhaps if they had been a little diplomatic about him, he probably would be one of them instead of a Trotskyist today.

I told Zinoviev that I came to Russia as a writer and not as an agitator. When his messenger interpreted what I said, Zinoviev's preacher face turned mean. He was most angry. But I did not mind. My personal triumph had made me aware that the Russians wanted a typical Negro at the Congress as much as I wanted to attend the Congress. The mulatto delegate was a washout. He was too yellow. I had mobilized my African features and won the masses of the people. The Bolshevik leaders, to satisfy the desires of the people, were using me for entertainment. So why should I worry about Zinoviev's frown? Even though he was president of the great Third International, I knew that there was no special gift I could get from Zinoviev after the entertainment was over and ended. I could never be a radical agitator. For that I was temperamentally unfit. And I could never be a disciplined member of any Communist party, for I was born to be a poet.

And now I was demanded everywhere. Sometimes I had to participate in three different meetings in one day: factory meetings, meetings of soviets, youth meetings, educational conferences in colleges and schools, the meetings of poets and writers, and theatrical performances. I was introduced to interesting sections of the new social and cultural life of Moscow and Petrograd.

I was always asked to speak, and so I prepared a few phrases. The Russians adore long speeches, which it did not interest me to make. And so they lengthened mine by asking a lot of questions. I had listened to the American delegates deliberately telling lies about conditions in America, and I was disgusted. Not only the Communist delegates, but radical American intellectuals really thought it was right to buoy up the Russians with false pictures of the American situation. All the speeches of the American delegates, the tall rhetoric, the purple phrases, conveyed fundamentally a common message, thus: "Greetings from America. The workers of America are groaning under the capitalist terror. The revolutionary organizations have been driven underground. But the American Communist Party is secretly organizing the masses. In a few years we will overthrow American capitalism and join our forces with the Russian Communists. Long live the Revolution...." I heard the chairman of the American delegation say: "In five years we will have the American revolution."

The Russians from these speeches pictured the workers of America as denied the right to organize and the rights of free assembly and free speech, as denied representation in Congress, as ridden down by American cossacks, banished in droves from their homes to the Siberias of the Far West, with their imprisoned and exiled leaders escaping to Canada and Mexico and working underground to overthrow the capitalist system. Briefly, the American situation, as they understood it, was similar to that of Russia under the Czarist régime just before the revolution.

The police raid on the illegal Communist party meeting in the beautiful woods of Michigan had been spread all over the Russian newspapers. Everything about that funny raid was so Czarist-Russian-like that the Russians really believed that it was typical of American conditions.

Truly, I could not speak such lies. I knew that the American workers in 1922 were generally better off than at the beginning of the World War in 1914. I was aware, of course, that labor organization in this country was far below the standard of labor organization in England, Germany and France, that American labor was not organized as a political weapon, that in some sections of the country and in certain industries labor was even denied the right to organize, and that radicals were always baited. But Leavenworth was not Siberia. And by no stretch of the imagination could the United States be compared to Czarist Russia.

How, then, could I stand before the gigantic achievement of the Russian revolution and lie? What right had I to tell these people, who had gone through a long death struggle to conquer their country for themselves, that the American revolution was also in travail? What could _I_ presume to tell them? I told them that it was a great honor for me to be there to behold the triumph of their great revolution. I told them that I felt very insignificant and dumb before that wonderful thing. I said that I had come to Russia to learn something, to see with my own eyes and try to write a little of what I had seen.

Invariably I was questioned: "And what about the American revolution?" When I replied I think it was a long way off, the audiences did not like me to say that. I must admit that the Russians in those days were eager to be deceived. I remember that I was asked to attend a large and important meeting of Young Communists. When I had finished talking the president got up and said: "Comrade, we appreciate what you feel about our revolution, but we want you to tell us about the American revolution. When will there be the American revolution?"

It was a direct question and I answered directly. I said that I could not prophesy about an American revolution; but that perhaps if the American ruling class started a wholesale suppression of labor organizations, if the people had to read radical literature in secret, if the radicals had to hold all their meetings in secret, if the liberals and radicals who agitated for more civil liberties and the rights of the working class were deported to the Philippines, then possibly in ten or fifteen years America might develop a situation similar to that in Russia in 1905.

The interpreter, a comrade commander in the navy, asked if he should translate me literally. I said "Word for word." And when he had finished there was no sound of applause. That was the first time that I was not applauded when I spoke, but I preferred that.

The young president of the Young Communists took the platform: "Comrade," he said, "you are a defeatist. The American revolution cannot be so far away. But if that is your opinion, we command you at once to do your part and help make the revolution." I said to the interpreter: "Tell the young comrade that I am a poet."

After the meeting my friend Comrade Venko said to me: "You should have told them the American revolution is right around the corner. That's what they want to hear." (He had lived many years in England and had acquired some Anglicisms.) I said, "You know I read somewhere that Lenin said that it is necessary to face facts and tell the truth always."

"Yes, Comrade," said Venko, "but Lenin is Lenin and we are just ordinary mortals."

Yet in spite of my obstinacy I was still everywhere demanded. When the American Negro delegate was invited to attend meetings and my mulatto colleague went, the people asked: "But where is the _chorny_ (the black)?" The mulatto delegate said: "Say, fellow, you're all right for propaganda. It's a pity you'll never make a disciplined party member."

"Bigger shots than you have said the same thing," I replied. Zinoviev had referred to me as a non-partisan. "My destiny is to travel a different road."

We were sitting in on the discussions as to whether there should be an illegal or legal Communist party in America, and on the Negro in American life. I was there not only as a writer, but I was given the privileges of a special delegate. One thing sticks in my memory about that American delegation in Moscow. It had the full support of the Finnish Federation and the Russian Federation of America. The representatives of these organizations voted _en bloc_, rallying to the support of an illegal party. The argument of the Yankee representatives of the legal group was unanswerable, but they were outvoted every time by the foreign federations. The Finnish and the Russian federations were not only the most highly organized units of the American party, but, so I was informed, they contributed more than any other to the party chest. They controlled because they had the proper organization and the cash.

I said to the mulatto delegate: "That's what Negroes need in American politics--a highly organized all-Negro group. When you have that--a Negro group voting together like these Finns and Russians--you will be getting somewhere. We may feel inflated as _individual_ Negroes sitting in on the councils of the whites, but it means very little if our people are not organized. Otherwise the whites will want to tell us what is right for our people even against our better thinking. The Republicans and the Democrats do the same thing. They give a few plum places to leading Negroes as representatives of the race and our people applaud vicariously. But we remain politically unorganized. What we need is our own group, organized and officered entirely by Negroes, something similar to the Finnish Federation. Then when you have your own group, your own voting strength, you can make demands on the whites; they will have more respect for your united strength than for your potential strength. Every other racial group in America is organized as a group, except Negroes. I am not an organizer or an agitator, but I can see what is lacking in the Negro group."

* * * * *

I listened to James Cannon's fighting speeches for a legal Communist party in America. Cannon's manner was different from Bill Haywood's or Foster's. He had all the magnetism, the shrewdness, the punch, the bag of tricks of the typical American politician, but here he used them in a radical way. I wondered about him. If he had entered Democratic or Republican politics, there was no barrier I could see that could stop him from punching his way straight through to the front ranks.

I think Trotsky was the first of the big Russians to be convinced that there should be a legal Communist party in America, then Rakovsky and finally Zinoviev, a little reluctantly. Bukharin was for the illegal group. He said: "Remember what Jack London has told us about the terror and secret organization in America in his _Iron Heel_." That was so rare that I had to smile. While Cannon was informing the Russians about actual conditions in America, Bukharin was visualizing the America of Jack London's _Iron Heel_. Bukharin always did make me think of that line about some men having greatness thrust upon them. I believe that Lenin said of Bukharin, as Frank Harris said of H.G. Wells, that he could not think. Yet Bukharin was the author of the A B C of Communism, which once had a big vogue among the radicals.

At last even I was asked my opinion of an illegal Communist party in America. I tried to get excused, saying that as I was not an official delegate or a politician, but merely a poet, I didn't think my opinion was worth while. But as my colleague the mulatto was for the illegal party, I suppose they needed a foil. So then I said that although I had no experience of the actual conditions of social life in Czarist Russia, I believed there was no comparison between them and American conditions today. There were certain democratic privileges such as a limited freedom of the press and a limited right of free speech that our governing classes had had to concede because they were the necessary ingredients of their own system of society. And American radicals could generally carry on open propaganda under those democratic privileges. Our Upton Sinclairs, Eugene Debs's, Max Eastmans and Mother Jones's might be prosecuted and imprisoned for a specific offense against the law, but they were not banished for their radical ideas to an American Siberia. And I said I thought that the only place where illegal and secret radical propaganda was necessary was among the Negroes of the South.

What I said about the Negroes of the South was more important than I imagined, and precipitated the Negro question. The Negro question came under the division of the Eastern Bureau, of which Sen Katayama was an active official. Because of his American experience and his education among Negroes, Sen Katayama was important as a kind of arbiter between black and white on the Negro question. It was an unforgettable experience to watch Katayama in conference. He was like a little brown bulldog with his jaws clamped on an object that he wouldn't let go. He apparently forgot all about nice human relationships in conference. Sen Katayama had no regard for the feelings of the white American comrades, when the Negro question came up, and boldly told them so. He said that though they called themselves Communists, many of them were unconsciously prejudiced against Negroes because of their background. He told them that really to understand Negroes they needed to be educated about and among Negroes as he had been.

Think not that it was just a revolutionary picnic and love feast in Moscow in the fifth year of Lenin! One of the American delegates was a southerner or of southern extraction. An important Bolshevik facetiously suggested to him that to untangle the Negro problem, black and white should intermarry. "Good God!" said the American, "if Jesus Christ came down from Heaven and said that in the South, he would be lynched." The Bolshevik said: "Jesus Christ wouldn't dare, but Lenin would."

Also I remember Walton Newbold who was the first Communist candidate elected to the British House of Commons. Saklatvala, the Indian Parsee, had announced himself a Communist only after he had been elected as an independent, but Walton Newbold was the first candidate of the British Communist Party. Just after his election to Parliament Newbold came to Moscow, while the Fourth Congress of International Communism was in session. For any reader who might not understand why a Communist member of the British Parliament should go to Moscow, I may explain that by the parallel of a cardinal going to Rome after receiving his hat. It was a big day for the little insignificant delegation of British Communists when Newbold arrived in Moscow. Of that triumphant arrival, one incident sticks more in my memory. I was informed that a member of the Chinese Young Communists, who was attending the Congress, met Newbold in the lobby of the Lux Hotel. He went up to Comrade Newbold to congratulate him and began: "Comrade Newbold--"

"Hello, Chink," Newbold cut in.

"But Comrade Newbold, I am not a Chink."

"Who told you that you weren't?" said Comrade Newbold as he turned away.

In a little while the incident had flashed like an arrow through Communist circles in Moscow. The young Chinese was a member of an old Chinese clan and had been educated in America. At that time Bolshevik eyes were fixed on China. Chinese soldiers made up some of the crack units of the Red army when Great Britain was supporting the White war against the Reds and tightening the blockade against Russia. I remember Radek's saying to me: "We are pinning our hopes on China more than any other country. If we can make China Red, we will conquer the world."

I don't know if that incident of the young Chinese and the first Communist member of the British Parliament ever reached the ears of the big Bolsheviks. I do know, however--I got it from a good source--that the big Bolsheviks gave Newbold a hell of a skating over the Communist ice of Moscow. Newbold returned to the Parliament of British gentlemen and finally drifted over to the capitalist side.

I was asked to write a series of articles on the Negro group for _Izvestia_, the Moscow organ of the Soviets. Thus I came to meet Steklov, the editor-in-chief. Steklov was a huge man with a leonine head, more picturesque than intelligent. He told me that he was interested in Negroes being won over to the cause of Communism because they were a young and fresh people and ought to make splendid soldiers. I didn't relish that remark out of the mouth of a Communist. So many other whites had said the same thing--that Negroes make good cannon fodder when they were properly led--led by whites to the black slaughter. That filled me with resentment. The head of the French General Staff had proclaimed to the world the same thing, that France with its African empire had an army of a hundred millions. When Trotsky, the chief of all the Bolshevik fighting forces talked to me about Negroes he spoke wisely. Trotsky was human and universal in his outlook. He thought of Negroes as people like any other people who were unfortunately behind in the march of civilization.

Karl Radek was one of the Big Five of the Politbureau, which decided Bolshevik policy in those days. He invited me to dinner at his apartment in the Kremlin along with the Negro delegate of the American C.P. Radek wanted to know if I had a practical policy for the organization of American Negroes. I said that I had no policy other than the suggestion of a Negro _Bund_, that I was not an organizer or an agitator and could not undertake or guarantee any practical work of organization.

The Negro delegate said that I was a poet and a romantic. I said I was not as romantic as he and his illegal party with their secret names and their convention in the wilds of Michigan. Radek laughed, and as I looked at his face set in a thick circle of hair I thought how much he resembled a red spider. Radek said that the Communists should adopt a friendly attitude to all writers who were in sympathy with the soviets. For example, Upton Sinclair, he thought, would be a valuable asset to the revolution if the Communists knew how to handle and use him. The mulatto said that Upton Sinclair was a bourgeois Socialist.

"Oh, no, no," said Radek, "I insist that is not the attitude to take. Upton Sinclair is a powerful writer with an enormous influence, and the American Communists should make use of his influence, even though Sinclair is not a Communist. Now with our Gorky--" At this point an infant wailed and Radek said, "My baby comes first." He left the room, to return a few minutes later with the maid, who brought in the baby. Radek and Mrs. Radek kissed and fondled the child. The maid then brought the child to the mulatto, who touched its hand and patted its hair. From the mulatto she brought the child to me, but it shrank away, hid its face, and began to cry. Radek was interested and told the maid to take the child to the mulatto again. The mulatto took the child in his arms and it stopped crying, but when the maid tried me again, the child hid its face and cried. The maid retired with the child, and Radek said: "Now I understand the heart of the difference between white and black in America. It is fear. The Americans are like children, afraid of black complexion, and that is why they lynch and burn the Negro." I told Radek that his deduction was wrong; that in the South, where Negroes were lynched and burned, the black complexion was not a strange thing to the whites, and that the majority of the children of the better classes of the South were nursed from their birth by black women, and that those children were extremely fond of their black foster mothers. Radek said that that was a strange thing.

XVII

Literary Interest

The Congress ended and with a happy relief I turned from political meetings to social and literary affairs. The majority of the delegates had left, but I remained in Moscow writing. I was magnificently paid for poems and articles and became a front-page feature. Sometimes what I received in rubles for an article amounted when I figured it out to fifty American dollars. I had plenty of money to spend for food and cigarettes and even to frequent the cabarets. And besides, I was saving my fare to return to America.

I had no idea that I was being paid as a literary celebrity until one afternoon when I went to a newspaper office to receive my check. There I met an interesting Russian journalist. He was a titled person, a Count Something. After the revolution he had discarded his title, but since the Nep he had resumed it and signed himself Count. He remarked to me facetiously that perhaps his title of the old economic policy might help him to a better place under the New Economic Policy.

When I drew my check he looked at it and said: "Why, if they paid me one-tenth of what they pay you I would be rich. I could go to the casino and gamble and the cabarets to dance and wine."

"Why," I said, "I thought you got as much as I got."

"No," he said, "I couldn't, for you are a guest writer, a big writer--_bolshoi! bolshoi! bolshoi!_" The interpreter who accompanied me was annoyed and he said something to the Count, who immediately clamped up. That, _bolshoi! bolshoi! bolshoi!_ (big! big! big!) was sweet music in my ears and an inspiration. But it also stirred up a hell of discontent within me. Why should I be "big" translated into Russian? It was because I was a special guest of the Soviets, a good subject for propaganda effect, but inflated beyond my actual literary achievement. That was not enough for me. I felt that if I were to be _bolshoi_ as a literary artist in a foreign language, I should first make a signal achievement in my native adopted language, English.

I met some of the notable Russian writers: Chukovsky, Boris Pilnyak, Eugene Zamiatin, Mayakovsky. I was invited to read at literary gatherings. My audiences were always enthusiastic and applauding, and also sometimes critical. "_Tovarish_," I was often told, "your poems are not proletarian." I replied, "My poetry expresses my feelings." I shocked the pure proletarian intellectuals and I was proud that I was a privileged person in Russia, and in a position to shock them. One night I was invited to the Arbat to hear the proletarian poets read and discuss their compositions. Without understanding the language I was able to appreciate certain poems from their swing and movement and the voice of the reciter. And I had a good interpreter who rendered some into English for me. After each poem was delivered there was a general discussion of it. I was particularly pleased with the poem of a slim young man in a coarse peasant smock buttoned up to his chin, and with a worried, unhappy expression in his sensitive features. I knew at once that he was a peasant become proletarian like myself. He gave a charming poem. Even before translation I knew from its communicative color tone and the soft threne running through it like a silver chord that it expressed an individual longing for the life of the country, perhaps the ways that nevermore would be.

As soon as the poet had done I clapped my hands heartily. His poem and personality had unusually excited me, because I rarely applaud. I liked that poet with the intellectual anxiety of his face showing clearly that he was a little bewildered by that world-moving social shake-up. That expression was real, more real to me than the automatic enthusiasm of his fellow poets which seemed to me less sincere. They all jumped on him. "Alexis, you are not a proletarian poet!" And they criticized his subject matter. So I asked my interpreter to let me say a word. I said I thought it was natural for a man who had lived in the country to express his longing for it, whether he was a bourgeois or a proletarian.

Mayakovsky was then the premier proletarian poet. Chukovsky, the popular author of _Crocodile_ and other children's books, did not have the highest opinion of Mayakovsky. He told me that before the revolution Mayakovsky had been a futurist and that he used to wear fantastic clothes and had proclaimed his poems at the court of the Czar. Now Mayakovsky was a thundering proletarian poet. He recited one of his poems for me. It sounded like the prolonged bellow of a bull. He very kindly presented me with a signed copy of his latest book. Also he presented me to his wife, and said that she desired to dance a jazz with me. She was a handsome woman of an Arctic whiteness and appeared as if she had just stepped proudly out of a Dostoyevsky novel. We went to a gypsy cabaret and danced a little, but I am afraid that I did not measure up to the standard of Aframerican choreography. Mayakovsky told me that his great ambition was to visit America. I said I thought he would be a big success there in Russian costume, declaiming his poems in his trumpet voice.

The contemporary Russian poetry of the period which I liked best was that of the peasant poet Yessenin. His intimate friend, Zonov, translated some of his poems, and I was enchanted by their lyric simplicity and profundity. Zonov was always hoping that Yessenin and I would meet, but we never did. Just about the time when I disembarked at Petrograd, Yessenin and Isadora Duncan were landing in New York. And Yessenin did not return to Russia until after I had left in June of 1923.

Zonov held a place either executive or artistic at the Meyerhold Theater, which I visited frequently, for there was a congenial gang there. He often invited me to a private little feast in his den, where he served sweet Caucasian wine and caviar and sometimes champagne. Always with him was a little actress whom he fancied, but who did not seem to love him too much. Zonov looked like a tired professor, and he was always bewailing the absence of Yessenin. He exhibited a snapshot of Yessenin that he carried in his pocket book, and I was startled by its resemblance to the strange dancer I had known in New York. Zonov said unlovely things of Isadora Duncan, because she had married Yessenin and taken him from his friends. He said that Yessenin had proclaimed to them all that he did not love Isadora. But he had married her to get out of Russia, to see Europe and America. I said I did not consider love as always necessary, and that sometimes it might be expedient for a woman to save a man from his male friends. Zonov translated what I said to the actress and she screamed with laughter.

Meyerhold's was the revolutionary constructivist theater, which did the most daring things in dramatic production. There were no curtains. The audience saw clear through to backstage and watched the actors waiting to take their parts and come up to and retire from the front of the stage. The plan was novel. Meyerhold himself was a fanatic crusader in his ardor to make a great revolutionary theater express the revolutionary social system. All the symbols of the machine system were assembled on the stage: dynamos, cranes, scaffolding and turbines, until it resembled a regular workshop. Meyerhold said to me: "We need now great revolutionary plays and playwrights to make my theater the unique dramatic expression of the revolution." I had to talk to Meyerhold through an interpreter, but he impressed me as being more romantic than practical with his idea of making the stage the unique expression of the factory. I felt that after all the worker's life is not limited to the factory and should never be.

I was interested in the Moscow workers' attitude to the Meyerhold Theater. Whole blocks of seats were given to the factories and the barracks, but the theater, which was not very large, was never full. Yet the plays which Meyerhold put on were technically highly interesting. Vastly exciting to me was the presentation of _The Inspector General_, by Gogol. And unforgettable was one realistic scene of another play, in which the Czar was sitting on his chamber pot, with the imperial crown painted big upon it. But the workers and soldiers really preferred the ballet of the Bolshoi theater, the Moscow art theaters, the expressionist theater and the ordinary vulgar theaters. Whenever the workers received free tickets for the above-named theaters they never missed; workers and soldiers always filled them. But the audience of the Meyerhold Theater was of the intelligentsia--students and professional people. While the workers and soldiers showed a distinct preference for the straight familiar entertainment, it was the intelligentsia that was avid of revolutionary drama. The situation made me think of a Frenchman's saying that most of the work of the experimental artists was not intended to enlighten the working class, but to "_épater la bourgeoisie_."

I was invited to dinner by Lunarcharsky, the Commissar of Education and of Arts. He was one of the most flamboyant orators of the Soviet Union and also a talented playwright. I told him a little of the little I knew about education in general in America and Negro education in particular, and I seized the opportunity to mention the Russian theater and the theater of Meyerhold. I remarked that it was interesting that the workers and soldiers seemed to prefer the old ballet to the new experimental theater. Lunarcharsky said that in the early days of the revolution some had desired to suppress the ballet, but he had held out against it. He considered the ballet a great form of art and what he did was to give the workers and peasants and soldiers the chance to enjoy it, which they hadn't had under the old régime. He had conserved and subsidized the best of the classical theaters for the entertainment of the people. But also he had granted subsidies to the experimental theaters to give them their chance to experiment in creating their best. Lunarcharsky was a wise mediator. It is related that when the Moscow masses, excited to high resentment against the Russian Orthodox Church, attempted to destroy the wonderful Cathedral of Vasilly Blazhenny, they were stopped by the intervention of Lunarcharsky. There was not a day of my stay in Moscow that my eyes failed to be glad in contemplation of Ivan the Terrible's super-byzantine burnt offering to humanity. And Lunarcharsky in Moscow appeared like a guardian angel to me because he had made it possible for my eyes to see that glory.

XVIII

Social Interest

My constant companion and interpreter was Venko, a big, strong, gloriously boisterous and comparatively young Russian. He had lived for years in an English Midland town and had left an English wife and children there to come to Russia after the revolution. The only sentimental thing in his mind was his family in England. Sometimes he was perplexed thinking about them. He said he was sure they wouldn't like living in Russia and he had no desire to return to England. He was not sentimental about his substitute Russian wife. He said she had married him only to get good food and a good apartment to live in. He was of peasant origin and she seemed to be from the poor professional class. Their living room constantly reminded me of that of the poor officer in _The Brothers Karamozov_. It was like a seamstress's place, with a sewing machine installed and scraps of cloth lying carelessly about, from which one's clothes picked up bits of thread, and it had a peculiar odor like that of clothes being washed with brown soap. But she was a good wife. Sometimes I stayed at Venko's house, after we had finished at a meeting and resorted to a café to drink vodka. And however late we got there, his wife would get up to serve food.

Venko was an interpreter in the O.G.P.U. He was not connected with the intelligence work. He didn't like office work. He preferred to agitate crowds. He was a marvelously gesticulating, noisy and frothy agitator, but there was not much substance in his phrases. And if you don't give Russians some meat to chew on when you talk to them, they soon tire of you, however brilliant your fireworks may be. If you have something to say they will listen for long hours upon hours, as patient as sheep, even if you are speaking in a strange language. And afterward they will ruminate on it with satisfaction through more long hours of interpreting. Venko was a good enough interpreter. My stay in Moscow was a vacation for him, of which we made a picnic. He was unorthodox about life, whether it was old or new, even as I, and he made the most unguarded and biting criticisms of things and personalities in his profane and boisterous Russian way.

The Moscow Soviet made me an honorary member at one of its meetings. A few days later Venko accompanied me to the office of the Soviet, where I was to receive the little red book that would make me even a more privileged personage than I was. The card was made out by a comrade clerk and my photograph was affixed. Then Venko and I were ushered into the presence of Commissar Kamenev, the president of the Moscow Soviet, for him to affix his signature.

Kamenev was extremely dignified and perfectly attired in black, with white collar and black tie, the best-dressed Bolshevik official (according to the smart European standard) that I had met. He welcomed me with a courteous smile, signed my card, shook my hand, and said he was proud to deliver it to me in the name of the Moscow Soviet. Venko translated. The simplicity of Kamenev's official dignity moved me very much, for in his fine-fitting conventional clothes, I might have mistaken him for a responsible banker, or a Protestant clergyman, or a high-ranking continental diplomat, anything but what Venko startled me by suggesting.

For as we got outside Venko exploded: "Good God, Comrade! I have seen the Czar!"

"What do you mean, the Czar?" I said.

"Kamenev in the place of the Czar. The same clothes, the same manner of wearing his beard! Good God, Comrade, a Jew in the place of the Czar!" Kamenev's features were indeed remarkably like the Czar's.

"Why, don't you like Jews?" I asked in astonishment. It was the first anti-Jewish sentiment I had heard from a Russian Communist.

"No, Comrade, I won't lie to you; I don't like Jews."

"Are you a pogromist?" I asked.

"Good God, Comrade, no. I fought the White-guard pogromists in the Ukraine and was wounded. The White guards started pogroms against the Jews. I fought them and fought the pogroms too, for pogroms are a crime against our Communist party. But I don't like the Jews, Comrade. All the Nep men are Jews."

"All?" I exclaimed.

"Well, if not all, nearly all. And all the money changers of the Black Bourse are Jews."

I record this conversation because it was one of the impressive and unforgettable things I heard from a Communist in Russia. I was particularly impressed because, as a member of a minority group in America that was the victim of blind and bitter prejudice, I was interested to know if the prejudice against the Jews had been automatically swept away with the Czarist régime.

I was interested, because I did not hold to the sentimental idea that the deep-rooted prejudices of a people could be eradicated overnight. What the Bolsheviks had accomplished was to put a stop to the vicious political exploitation of group and race prejudice. I don't think the saintliest human being could ask more. Individual prejudice is one of the most natural sentiments. It is easy enough for an individual prejudice to become a family prejudice, for family ties are real. And it is also easy for such prejudice to spread to a group, for groups exist and the majority of human beings are fundamentally tribal.

I was not at all shocked by Venko's revelation. I was merely enlightened. If he were an intellectual Communist, he could not have spoken to me as he did. I preferred to go around with him, because I could learn more.

One evening Zonov invited me to a party which he did not want Venko to know about, for it was a bourgeois party. The guests were celebrating a holiday of the old régime which had been abolished by the Bolsheviks.

The party of that little remnant of the Russian bourgeoisie was something not to be missed. It was even more Russian, noisy, and elastic than the proletarian parties, for these people did not have to bother about correct Communist conduct. Maybe there was a flickering note of futility, of despair, which made them more reckless, because, unlike the Communists, they had no future. The limited luxury of the Nep for the moment was theirs to enjoy. And they were giving themselves to the moment unforgettably, as you might give yourself to a page of Chekhov.

Russian life seems to blow through space like a big breeze, and this remnant of a bourgeois society was no less a part of that big breeze. How they ate and danced and chattered in loud harmony! Two huge fruit cakes reared themselves like wedding cakes on a sideboard, and there were platters of caviar, sturgeon, salads, cheeses, every delicious food to tickle the palate, and gallons of Caucasian wine and vodka to wash it down.

I was introduced all round as a guest of Russia. They all knew that I was a guest of the Soviets, and if they wanted to make it a guest of Russia instead, I had no objection to the added distinction. One very beautiful and proud-looking young woman got the back of her hand up to my lips with one of those exquisite gestures that only people who are born to them can make, I guess.

I made the best bow that was natural to me for that honor. But the young woman was not satisfied with my bow. She stamped her foot petulantly, though not unkindly, and rubbed my nose with the perfumed back of her hand. I was convinced that something more was expected of me, so I reached up my hand and took hers.

She led me to a seat and said rapidly in a voice that sounded like fine tinkling glass: "Why did you refuse to kiss my hand? Do you think it is degrading for a Communist to kiss a lady's hand?" She spoke lovely English.

"No, _Tovarish_--"

"Please don't call me by that disgusting name," she interrupted. "I am a _barishna_."

"Well, _Barishna_, then, if that is your preference, I did not kiss your hand simply because I don't know how to do it well. Nobody I know kisses hands in America."

The _Barishna_ conceded an indulgent smile. "Tell me," she said, "do you like our Russia--Moscow and Petrograd?" I said that I did.

"As much as London and Paris and Berlin?" she asked.

I said, "More than London and Berlin. But I do not know Paris."

"I believe you," she said. "I know London and Paris and Berlin, but I love Petrograd more. Now there is no Petrograd." "But you have Moscow. Moscow is more beautiful," I said. "Oh, but Petrograd was magnificent before the revolution." I could never imagine Petrograd being more beautiful than Moscow, but so many Russians said it was.

Said the _barishna_, "I tell you, I don't like the foreign Communists. You come here to gaze at us as if we were strange animals in a zoo, to mock at and insult us in our distress. That is hateful."

"_Barishna_," I said, "I don't understand. What do you mean? The foreign Communists come here bringing greetings from the workers abroad to the workers of Russia. They do not come here to mock and insult, but to praise and learn about the revolution."

"Oh, they do mock at us," she insisted. "My young brother works in one of the important departments and he heard a foreign Communist boasting that he had slept all night with a lady of title for ten cents. Now isn't that a mean and despicable thing to say? If a real man could buy a lady of quality for ten cents, shouldn't he be ashamed to mention it?"

"I guess so, _Barishna_," I said. "I don't care anything about the difference between titled and untitled loving."

"But you do think it was an unspeakable thing for a _civilized_ man to say, don't you?" She stressed the word _civilized_ as if I were a savage in her sight and she was eager to hear the opinion of a savage upon a civilized person.

"But, _Barishna_," I said, "the men of your class used to do worse things than that to the women of the class of the man who said he possessed a titled lady for ten cents. They did it to weak and ignorant girls and often didn't even pay the price of ten cents."

"Oh no," said the _barishna_, "no _gentleman_ does that."

"But they do, _Barishna_. Many of your gentlemen still exercise even the medieval _droits de seigneur_ in a different way. That's what Tolstoy's _Resurrection_ is all about."

"So you read our Tolstoy? You like our Russian literature? Oh, I am glad that you do. They have destroyed everything, but they cannot destroy our Russian literature."

I was very embarrassed. Most of the bourgeois people I had met had refrained from saying anything against the Communists, even though they did not praise them. Suddenly the _barishna_ said, "I want to leave Russia; I have friends in England. Would you marry me so that I could leave the country with you--just a formal arrangement?" I hesitated and said that I didn't know that I could.

"But many of the foreigners have married Russian girls and got them through to Berlin," she said.

"Communists too?" I asked.

"Yes, Communists too."

"_Barishna_," I said, "I am sorry. I couldn't shoulder even the formal responsibility. And besides, I am not a Communist. I don't even know yet how I am going to get out of Russia myself."

In my rare contacts with members of the expropriated classes I felt the weirdest sensations, as if pages out of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Dostoyevsky, Artzybashev and Chekhov were suddenly patterned and peopled with actual life.

* * * * *

Many of the people I knew from the International Club in London were in Russia, some as visiting delegates, while others were permanently settled. Arthur McManus was one of the English-speaking delegates whose company I found congenial, and we were often together, although I found it difficult to keep up with his gargantuan boozing, which perhaps finally knocked him out dead. Both of us were guests of the Soviet fleet at Kronstadt and were photographed together. McManus and I had our points of difference, and sometimes when we were vodka-heated, our tongues flew sharply at each other.

McManus was one of the men who had gunned the hardest after Sylvia Pankhurst. He still felt venomous about her. "Intellectually dishonest," was his pet phrase for describing her. I said I thought Sylvia Pankhurst was as honest as any imperial Briton could be. And I really preferred Pankhurst to persons like Lansbury, and perhaps even to McManus himself. McManus shot up like a rabbit (he was a tiny man) and demanded in his remarkably beautiful Glasgow brogue if I meant to "insinuate" (that was the word he used) that he was an imperialist. I said that I had not said "imperialist," but "imperial," and that all Britons were imperial by birth and circumstances because of the nature of the political set-up of Britain. McManus asked if I did not believe that there were really radical Britons. I said that no man can be more radical than his system can stand. McManus said I was a bloody bigoted black nationalist, and his _b_'s had such a wonderful ring (he stammered a little) that it made me laugh and laugh until both of us fell into a prolonged fit of black-and-white laughter. It was a good satisfying feeling to see McManus laugh aloud, for there was a perpetually crucified expression on his countenance that all the Scotch whisky and Russian vodka in the world could not dispel.

McManus did not appear to like my O.G.P.U. friend and companion, Venko. It was well known among us that Venko was an interpreter and translator for the O.G.P.U., but had nothing to do with the department of investigations and arrests. Anyone with a little knowledge of police organization knows that a police clerk has nothing to do with the actual duties of policing. If Venko had been a secret agent of the O.G.P.U. we would never have known that he worked in that department. And I think I can nose out a secret agent whether he is red or white. I spent a year of my early youth in a police department in a position where I was in constant contact with all the branches of the department. For my part I liked to have Venko along whenever I was invited to a carousel among Communists. For Venko could beat anybody carousing and I thought that if any issue were raised about the affair afterward, Venko would be an excellent asset to have. Whenever I went on a drinking bout with comrades I always saw that they got drunker than myself.

It was necessary to do a little thinking while drinking and laughing. For sometimes funny things happened. Some of the foreign comrades seemed to enjoy playing at political intrigue, apparently without fully realizing that political intrigue, to the Russians, was a serious and dangerous thing. For instance, one of the youthful Indian delegates occupied a room next to mine, and we often went down to our meals and also over to the Comintern offices together. One morning when I called for him his room was locked and there was a seal on the door. The O.G.P.U. had arrested him during the night. Months later I met him in Berlin under the most unusual circumstances, which I shall relate in another place. There was also the young Whitechapel Jew whom I used to know slightly at the International Club in London. He had come to Russia as a youth delegate. But he wasn't functioning as anything when I saw him. He told me fretfully that he had been denounced. One evening he and I were on our way to a motion picture when a group of armed police dramatically pounced upon him. They said something in Russian and he must have answered satisfactorily, for they did not take him. But he was scared, and said, "I am always scared." Shortly after that incident he was gone too, and I never saw him again. When I reached Berlin the following spring I met William Gallacher (now Communist Member of Parliament) and asked him what had become of the boy. "He was a spy," Gallacher said, "and he was fixed."

I said angrily, "But what have you in the little British Communist Party for anybody to spy on?"

"More than you think," said Gallacher, with a mysterious nod of his friendly head.

One night in Moscow I was invited to a celebration given by a minor Communist official. The address had been written down for me and I had to take somebody along to find it, as I did not know my way around Moscow. So I asked Venko; but first we had to attend a meeting of women workers at which he interpreted for me and we did not get to the entertainment until very late. The large apartment was full of comrades when we got there. I think the man who was throwing the treat was a Finn and there were many Baltic types there, blonde and heavy of movement and impassive of spirit. There was plenty of hard drinking, but it was a dull atmosphere, nothing of the stimulating renascent effervescence of the _barishna's_ evening. Venko stepped upon the scene with a burst of boisterous enthusiasm, and drinking a big glass of vodka, he took the center of the room and started speechifying, saying there was a time for good comrades to fight, a time to work, and that now was the time to be festive.

Venko was applauded, and from somewhere McManus came swaying like a tipsy little imp, and pointing at Venko cried in a chanting voice: "O.G.P.U.! O.G.P.U.! O.G.P.U.!" Venko laughed, and all of us. For he and the others thought that McManus was merely putting over a joke about his working for the O.G.P.U. But then McManus shouted in English, "Spy! Spy! I am not going to stay here, I am going home. Spy!"

"What do you mean, Comrade?" Venko asked in amazement. "Did I ever spy on you? Do you want to say that I am here spying on my comrades?" Venko said something in Russian and everybody looked serious. But McManus repeated "O.G.P.U. spy! O.G.P.U. spy!" A murderous look took possession of Venko's face. "Comrade," he cried in a terrible voice, "if you don't stop, I'll kill you; you hear? You're not drunk and irresponsible. If you don't stop, I'll hit you, as little as you are." But McManus shouted again: "O.G.P.U. spy! O.G.P.U.--"

Venko knocked McManus down with one blow and kicked him straight across the room, where he lay curled up like a half-dead snake. "You dirty little Englishman!" cried Venko. "Go back home and make your own revolution and don't stay in Russia to insult a real Communist." McManus picked himself up and began shouting: "I am not a Communist, I am an Anarchist! Anarchist! Anarchist!" A comrade clapped his hand over McManus' mouth, and lifting him up like a kid, carried him out of the room.

I couldn't understand the meaning of McManus' outburst, except perhaps that he, like some of the other visiting comrades, was afflicted with spy mania. The company settled down again to drinking and toasting and the singing of revolutionary songs.

The carousel ended with me again uplifted in glory. Venko had shed every vestige of the murderous brutality of a moment before and was acting like a commanding master of ceremonies. With strong exuberant gestures he toasted me to the company. Always a poet in action, he became a poet in words: "Comrade McKay, you must stay in Russia. We want you. All Russia loves you, not we Communists only, but even the damned bourgeoisie. Tell us, Comrade McKay, why is it you have bewitched us? Tell us, Comrade McKay, what is it? Is it the black magic we have heard about? Comrade McKay, we are bewitched, men, women and children. We all love you, we all want you. Oh, do stay with us forever! Comrade McKay, you must leave Moscow and see Russia. We want you everywhere.... Comrade McKay, my heart is bold"--here Venko brutally beat his breast with his enormous fist--"and my back is broad and strong"--Venko bent himself over. "Get up on my back and I will carry you all over Russia: from Moscow to Kazan, from Kazan to Samara and all the way down the Volga we will go until we reach the Caspian Sea...."

With a great shout I was hoisted up into the air. And McManus, awaking from his drunken anarcho-communist nightmare, came zigzagging into the room just as I was being carried out upon the shoulders of that gloriously tipsy crew down the stairs and into the street and put into a _droshky_ and conveyed to my hotel. My mind was too stimulated and excited to go to sleep, with Venko's picturesque phrases burning in my brain and creating a tumult of thought. I also had under consideration an invitation to join a caravan of comrades from different countries who were planning a tour of Russia with the Caucasus as the ultimate destination. Should I go? Although I had been only in Moscow and Petrograd, I had traveled already so extensively from triumph to triumph. Should I go further and risk anti-climax, or should I make my exit in éclat, cherishing always the richness of my golden souvenir? The thought of leaving seemed to be the most logical. I knew myself enough to know that I was not of the stuff of a practical pioneer, who could become a link in that mighty chain of the upbuilding of the great Russian revolution. And also I reflected like a stoic poet that it was best not to be too popular. When I contemplated the overwhelming snow of Russia, it appeared not like snow anywhere else, but like a thing everlasting, petrified like an ocean of ivory. Yet soon even it would disappear when the season changed. And somewhere from far away beyond the cold Russian nights, glorious like fields of white lilies, another season was coming.

Soon after that, Sen Katayama sent me an invitation to visit the Eastern University. I spoke to a group of students, and then proceeded to visit the dormitories. The rooms, in which the students prepared light meals, appeared somewhat like those of Moslem students in the _medersas_ of Morocco. Imagine my surprise, as I was passing through a dormitory, to hear a familiar voice call my name. I looked back and it was Mrs. Slova, reclining on a cot. Mrs. Slova had been charming to me when I was in London, frequently inviting me to her house for high tea. She was a seamstress and she and her three pretty daughters were always smartly dressed. Some of the captious comrades styled her the bourgeois lady. At that time she was wildly enthusiastic about Russia and just biding her time to get there.

"But what are you doing here?" I asked.

"Don't you know? I am a student going to school again," she said. Mrs. Slova had gone to Russia with her daughters immediately following my return to New York from London. She was glad once more to be in the land of her birth, where formerly she was ostracized because she belonged to the Jewish group. But her three daughters, who were born and reared in comparative comfort in London, were frightened of the confusion of the new burgeoning society. Mrs. Slova quickly and expertly arranged a _mariage de convenance_ for each of her daughters with English comrades visiting Russia and sent them back to London. But she remained in Moscow.

I asked if she did not miss her children. "I raised them right, until now they are of age to act for themselves," she said. "They couldn't fit into the new conditions here. Young people are not like us older heads." I said I thought the Communist movement was primarily the movement of youth, and if she in middle age could adapt herself to the changed life, it should have been easier for her daughters.

"Pooh!" Mrs. Slova exclaimed. "Youth is all right when guided and led by older heads. They act more from enthusiasm than from thinking and will rush headlong into anything when they are excited, for youth is the time of excitement. That is why they are preferred as soldiers. But they soon get sulky when there is no more excitement to feed on. All the great statesmen are middle-aged experienced men, even in Red Russia." I was amazed at Mrs. Slova. I never considered her bourgeois because she dressed well, but I always thought that she was oversentimental and romantic. But after all she was a wise person.

She had no desire to return to England. Communally living in a dormitory, sleeping on a cot with her belongings in a locker, she did not hanker after her comfortable middle-class home in London. She was studying languages in the Eastern University, with the intention of entering the eastern diplomatic service. She didn't think any revolution was going to take place in Western Europe for a long time, she said. The Bolshevik leaders would at last wake up to that fact. She believed in the East, the future of Russia in the East, and that was why she had become a student at the Eastern University.

XIX

A Great Celebration

Of all the big Bolshevik leaders, I had desired most to have a personal word from Lenin. I had been amazed in 1920, when I received in London a message from John Reed informing me that Lenin had brought the Negro question before the Communist Congress and inviting me to visit Moscow.

I had not gone to Moscow then because I did not consider myself qualified to do what John Reed had asked, which was to represent the American Negro group. But now that I was there, I was anxious to get Lenin's opinion out of his own mouth. But Lenin apparently had become very ill again after his couple of speeches at the Communist and Soviet Congresses in the late fall of 1922. At one of the sessions of the Communist Congress I was seated directly behind Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, and I was introduced to her by Clara Zetkin (the first woman member of the Reichstag), who was very friendly and affectionate to me. I seized the chance to ask Krupskaya if it were possible to have an interview with Lenin. She said she would see. But nothing came of that. Some time after I visited the office of _Pravda_ with a Communist sympathizer. He was acquainted with Lenin's sister, who held a position on the staff, and he introduced me to her. I told her that I would like to have a word from Lenin himself and she said frankly that it was impossible, for Lenin was very sick.

Krupskaya was an extremely plain woman, really ugly. Max Eastman was so appalled when he saw her that he said, "Lenin would probably get well if he had a pretty girl!" So I said, "Like the Shunamite virgin, who warmed up King David of Israel in his old age, eh?" But we did not think that Lenin was that type of warrior.

I tried to reach some of the other leaders whom I had not yet met. One day as I was passing through the grounds of the Kremlin with Andreyev, one of the young officials of the Foreign Office, he pointed out to me a strikingly big man wearing high black boots. That, he said, was Stalin, who was chairman of the Committee on National Minorities. It was the first time I heard the name of Stalin, and the information was extremely important. I asked Andreyev if I could meet Stalin. Andreyev said that that was difficult, for Stalin was one of the big Bolsheviks and it was not easy to meet him. But he promised to approach Karakhan about it. Perhaps Andreyev was tardy or unsuccessful in his _démarche_; at any rate I heard no more of it, and my request vanished from my thoughts when I came in contact with the magnetic personality of Trotsky.

Trotsky, although apparently so formidable a character, was, with Bukharin, the most approachable of the big Bolsheviks. I was told that any message sent to Trotsky would be certain to receive his personal attention. So I sent in a request to meet the Commissar of War. In a couple of days I got an answer making an appointment and saying that an aide would call to convey me to the Commissary of War.

Exactly at the appointed hour the following day, as I descended the stairs of the hotel, an official automobile drove up with a military aide and I was escorted to the war department. I passed through a guard of Red sentries and was ushered immediately into Trotsky's office. Trotsky was wearing a commander's uniform and he appeared very handsome, genial and gracious sitting at his desk. He said he was learning English and would try to talk to me in that language.

Trotsky asked me some straight and sharp questions about American Negroes, their group organizations, their political position, their schooling, their religion, their grievances and social aspirations and, finally, what kind of sentiment existed between American and African Negroes. I replied with the best knowledge and information at my command. Then Trotsky expressed his own opinion about Negroes, which was more intelligent than that of any of the other Russian leaders. He did not, like Steklov, the editor of _Izvestia_, imagine Negroes as a great army for cannon fodder. And unlike Radek, he was not quick to make deductions about the causes of white prejudice against black. Indeed, he made no conclusions at all, and, happily, expressed no mawkish sentimentality about black-and-white brotherhood. What he said was very practical and might sound reformist in the ears of radical American Negroes.

Trotsky said in effect that the Negro people constituted a backward group, socially, politically and economically, in modern civilization. I remember distinctly that he used the word "backward." And he stressed the point that Negroes should be educated, should receive not merely academic education, but a broad spreading-out education in all phases of modern industrial life to lift themselves up as a group to a level of equality with the whites. I remember again that he used the word "lift" or "uplift." And he urged that Negroes should be educated about the labor movement. Finally, he said he would like to set a practical example in his own department and proposed the training of a group of Negroes as officers in the Red army.

Before I left, Trotsky asked me to make a summary of my ideas, in writing, for him. This I did, and he wrote out a commentary on it and published both either in _Izvestia_ or in _Pravda_. Unfortunately I lost the original article and its English translation among other effects somewhere in France. But the gist of it all is given above.

Also, Trotsky gave me a permit to visit some of the training schools of the Soviet forces. I had not the slightest idea that that meant a passport to a series of inspections and elaborate receptions. I thought I was going to make perhaps a couple of quiet and unobtrusive visits to the military schools. What transpired was amazing, but also embarrassing, for, except for the martial music, I have never been vastly thrilled by military demonstrations.

For about a month I was fêted by the military forces. I was introduced to military and naval officers and experts. I was shown the mechanism of little guns and big guns. I did a little target practice. I passed through reviews, receptions and banquets, a glamorous parade of militant Red from Moscow to Petrograd.

It started in Moscow. First I was taken on a visit to the crack Kremlin military schools; then to an ordinary soldiers' barracks where the men were resting or on fatigue duty, and also to an extraordinary one where everything and everybody was shipshape as if for an inspection by the highest authorities. Next I visited the tactics school, the infantry school, the cavalry school, the artillery school. It was almost three weeks before I got through my Moscow military itinerary. There were intervals of days between the various visits, of course. And there was a continuous big feeding, until I thought my belly would burst. I ate in the soldiers' mess. I ate in the officers' mess. I ate with the military professors. I asked for _kasha_ and was grandly served, with officers and Communist controllers, an elaborate and most appetizing dish comparable to _arroz Valenciana_ or Moroccan _cous-cous_. While I was eating it I remembered a long sentimental poem by Rose Pastor Stokes which we had published in _The Liberator_, in which she sang of her desire to share the Russian peasant's bowl of _kasha_. Yet as I remember, her first picturesque gesture in Moscow was the buying of a marvelous mink coat and cap, and she was the smartest woman in the Congress.... Thus I learned something new about _kasha_: that it wasn't only the peasant's staple food, but a national food, eaten by all kinds of people, and one which, like rice, may be served in many different and appetizing ways.

The experience of my military induction ended in a mighty students' celebration of the anniversary of the Red army. The vast audience flamed to the occasion as if it were charged through and lit up by one great electric current. Many notables appeared before the illuminated demonstration. And at last I was called to the stage. I made a brief martial speech and was applauded for more. But I hadn't the Russian genius for improvising great appropriate phrases. Someone demanded a poem, and I gave, "If We Must Die." I gave it in the same spirit in which I wrote it, I think. I was not acting, trying to repeat the sublime thrill of a supreme experience. I was transformed into a rare instrument and electrified by the great current running through the world, and the poem popped out of me like a ball of light and blazed.

Now, thought I, the amazing military sensation is ended. It was an enjoyable excitement, but it was also a pleasurable relief to be over and done with it. But this audacious adventurer had reckoned without the Red fleet. From Petrograd came an invitation from the Red fleet, which apparently meant to rival the Red army in its reception. And so I entrained for Petrograd, accompanied by a military cadet. That was my third going to Petrograd. And each time the city appeared better, revealing more of its grandeur. For, unlike Moscow, Petrograd does not start immediately with color and mazy movement and life compact with a suggestion of Oriental lavishness rioting and ringing upon the senses like the music of golden bells.

Petrograd is poised and proud, with a hard striking strength like the monument of Peter the Great, and a spaciousness like the Neva. In its somber might it appeared brooding and a little frowning of aspect at first. Many streets were desert stretches, and massive buildings still bore the gaping wounds of the revolution. But when one became a little more acquainted with the city, the great half-empty spaces became impressive with a lonely dignity and beauty. And the Petrograd people were splendid, too, in that setting, outlined more clearly than the Moscow folk. They were like clumps of trees growing together for protection at intervals in a vast plain.

We arrived in Petrograd on the eve of the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Russian Communist Party. That night I went to the Marinsky Theater to see _Prince Igor_ for the first time, and the thumping performance of the ballet stirred me like strokes of lightning with great claps of thunder. It was so much more wildly extravagant than the Eugen Onegin one I saw in Moscow. In New York I had attended two performances of the Pavlova ballet (I think in 1916), and now I compared them with this Petrograd magnificence. The Pavlova ballet was like birds flying with clipped wings, but the Petrograd _Prince Igor_ was like free birds in full flight. Although I did admire immensely the dainty precious Pavlova herself, her company appeared so restrained. I never could work up any enthusiasm for the modernistic contempt of the Russian ballet. The technical excellencies alone thrum on the emotional strings of anyone who has a feeling for geometric patterns.

Isadora Duncan and I argued and disagreed on this subject for a whole evening at her studio in Nice. She said the Russian Revolution should have abolished the ballet and established the free-limbed dance. I said I preferred to see both schools of dancing have the same freedom for expression. Isadora was even more severe on Negro dancing and its imitations and derivations. She had no real appreciation of primitive folk dancing, either from an esthetic or an ethnic point of view. For her every movement of the dance should soar upward. She spoke beautifully about that uplifted upward movement, although it was all wrong. But when she danced for me it was all right. I had never seen her in her great glory and couldn't imagine that she could still be wonderful when she was so fat and flabby. But what she did that night was stupendous. I was the only audience besides the pianist. And she danced from Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Beethoven. Her face was a series of different masks. And her self was the embodiment of Greek tragedy, _un être_ endowed with divinity.

The day following the performance of _Prince Igor_, I paid my respects to the commander of the Baltic fleet. He was a kindly man, and presented me with his photograph. He took me around to the naval preparatory school, the naval gymnasium and the naval academy. The young cadets demanded that I say something. So I told them briefly that I felt singularly honored and happy that my first contact with any fleet should be with the first Red fleet of the world. And that although it was a strange life of which I was entirely ignorant, I thought that, if I had to be a fighter, I would rather enlist in the navy than in the army.

The applause I received was astounding, since what I said was so brief and simple. But quite unwittingly I had stirred the traditional rivalry between army and navy, which may be a little different but no whit less even though they may be Red. But my military escort from Moscow (the only soldier among that fine body of proud and eager young sailors) was not enthusiastic about my quip. I suppose I should have been a little more tactful about the army, since it had first celebrated me as a guest.

That night started the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Russian Communist Party. The opening meeting was held in the Marinsky Theater. Zinoviev presided. The place was packed. As soon as I appeared in the entrance a group of young cadets bore down on me and, hoisting me upon their shoulders, carried me down the length of the aisle and onto the platform, while great waves of cheers rolled down from the jammed balconies and up from the pit. Zinoviev made a great show, greeting me demonstratively on the stage. The Russians are master showmen.

From then on the days of my official visit to Petrograd were a progress of processions and speeches and applause and reviews and banquets. The next day marked my visit to the naval base at Kronstadt. Early in the morning an aviator's fur-lined leather coat and cap and gloves--fit to protect one against the bitterest Siberian blizzard--were brought to my hotel. I breakfasted and togged myself out. Soon afterward a young Red commander called for me in an automobile and we drove to the Petrograd air field. Besides the naval and air officials and photographers, there was quite a crowd gathered to see me take off. I posed for the photographers with some of the officers and sailors, with the pilot, and also with McManus, of the British Communist Party, who had come to Petrograd for the anniversary.

Then I climbed up into the airplane. The man who had once save Lenin's life (so I was informed) fixed me in place, and the plane sped over the vast field of snow and up into the air. A snowstorm was raging, but I was perfectly protected and felt no fear. Only I could not see anything. The pilot missed his bearings and got a little lost in the storm and we had to come down far from our landing place. The pilot and I got out of the plane and started to walk toward the naval base. The blizzard blew hard and we could see nothing. But it was a fine exhilarating tramp, and, warm in my great boots and fur clothes, I enjoyed the sensation of thinking I was doing a little Arctic stunt.

At last an automobile came rolling over the hard snow and took us to our landing place. They had been scouting for us, knowing that something must have happened when we did not arrive. At the landing place I found that a crack squad of sailors, fine handsome fellows, had been waiting for us for hours in the blizzard. They were not rigged out, like myself and the pilot, against the bad weather, and were cold. For the life of me I couldn't understand why a squad of men should have been detailed to await my arrival at the air base, when I was no kind of official. And I had been told that my visit was an informal thing. Right there I remembered my experience in the Pennsylvania railroad service--how often, in the cold steel car out on the track, our crew waited for hours in biting zero weather until the late train arrived and steamed us out. And sometimes we were frost-bitten.

My interpreter said that the sailors were expecting a speech. So I said that although I anticipated with joy my visit among them in Kronstadt, I felt sorry that it had been necessary for them to wait for me all those hours in the cold. All the official routine ceremonials were extremely tiresome to me. Even though they were the expression of the workers' and peasants' united authority and were therefore simplified, they were nevertheless tedious. I can work up no enthusiasm for official ritual, however necessary, whether it be red or pink or black or white. In Russia I was alertly aware that it was something different from anything that ever was, that officially it was the highest privilege I could have in the world, to be shown the inside working of the greatest social experiment in the history of civilization. I was fired and uplifted by the thundering mass movement of the people, their boisterous surging forward, with their heads held high, their arms outstretched in an eager quest for more light, more air, more space, more glory, more nourishment and comfort for the millions of the masses. But the bureaucratic control left me unmoved. Yet I was conscious that it was the axis of the mighty moving energy of the people, that without it their movement would be futile.

So I was actually in Kronstadt, the first fortress fired by the signal of the revolution. The features of the fort were covered up with snow, but the splendid men holding it showed me the inside of battleships and submarines, the loading of big guns, and I saw also the educational classes, Communist meetings, recreation halls with motion pictures and feats of gymnastics and dancing, the new revolutionary spirit animating men and officers alike, the simple dignified discipline of rank and precedence, organization and work.

After a strenuous day, that night I slept soundly on a flagship. The next day I motored back to Petrograd. In the afternoon I went to tea with Korney Chukovsky and his sympathetic wife. Chukovsky was a popular liberal journalist and author of the old régime, and was now an equally popular fellow-traveler with the new. He was a radical liberal in his political opinions, but consistently non-political in his writings. Under the old régime he was a contributor to the Moscow newspaper, _Russky Slovo_, which had a circulation of over a million. He had recently finished a book for children, called _Crocodile_, which became a best-seller. Chukovsky was a member of a Russian intellectual mission to the Allied capitals, in 1916, I think. He exhibited a large souvenir book of interesting autographs of famous personages: Asquith, Lloyd George, Balfour, Churchill, Poincaré, Millerand, Anatole France, Kipling, H.G. Wells, and many more. I added mine. Chukovsky showed me also a couple of letters from Lenin to Gorky, which he prized highly, and some newspaper cuttings of a critical duel between him and Trotsky over the evaluation of the work of the poet Alexander Blok, who wrote the tragic poem, "The Twelve." This poem evoked in me something of the spiritual agony of "The Hound of Heaven." Chukovsky gave me the gist of the controversy between him and Trotsky. Chukovsky had done a fine literary critique of Blok. Trotsky had overemphasized an inoffensive literary reference to the revolution to score a political point. I thought that Chukovsky was right and Trotsky was wrong. Chukovsky went with me to the House of the Intellectuals and introduced me to some of the writers and artists. I remember the names of Metchnikov, son of the scientist and disciple of Pasteur, and the Princess X, who was rich before the revolution, but expropriated now and living with artists whom she had befriended during the salad days of the bourgeoisie.

The next day was fine and clear as crystal. And to make up for what I had missed when we flew to Kronstadt, the aviator came and took me up for an hour's ride over Petrograd and suburbs. I ended that trip to Petrograd with affectionate farewells from the naval schools. One of them elected me an honorary officer. There, too, I talked with a very interesting officer. He was a graduate of an exclusive Czarist academy, young, exceeding handsome, with very sensitive features. We spoke with difficulty in a kind of lingua franca or _petit-negre_, to be more precise. He informed me that he had an American wife and invited me to dinner with them. I said it might be an embarrassing matter to his wife, that he should first ask her. He said she knew all about me and had suggested the invitation.

I wondered about this American wife of the Russian officer. I had been warned to beware of English-speaking bourgeois persons, who might try to pump things out of me. But as I possessed no secrets of any kind and as I desired to experience all the sensations of the new order struggling to extricate itself from the old, I never turned aside from anything or anybody that might possibly add something to the fulness of my exciting adventure.

I had already met some extraordinary people of the old régime. Besides the Russians, I had encountered a most wonderful Englishwoman, who reminded me of a character out of H.G. Wells's _Food of The Gods_. This woman had been an English governess in Russia under the old régime and had married a second-or third-class Russian official. She had a nice apartment in Petrograd. Her beautiful daughter was a clerk in one of the Soviet departments, and sometimes the mother herself was requisitioned as an interpreter. In her sitting room there was a photograph of the late Czar and Czarina, with the Czarina smudged out. It was a bold thing to have the photograph of the Czar in your sitting room in 1922. But she was an Englishwoman first, even though she had been married to a Russian and was now a Soviet citizen. She said to me: "I preserve the photograph of the Czar because he is the cousin of King George. He was a good man, but his wife was a bad German woman." Also she had the picture of King George alongside that of Lenin on another wall. "They are the two big men in the world," she said to me, "and I make my curtsy to them every morning: the ruler of England, my native land, and the ruler of Russia, my adopted country."

She was very proud and pleased with my notorious self because I was born a British subject and had lived in London. She didn't even mind when I said that I did not like the English people as a whole, but admired some individuals. Indeed, she liked it, because that also was her feeling. I spent a long evening in her house and ate very English roast beef and plum pudding. Perhaps too much. For later it was necessary for me to go to the w. c. There I was amazed to see, placed prominently upon the wall, a hand-printed card bearing the motto: "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." When I returned to the sitting room I complimented her on her nice old English calligraphy, but said that I wondered why she had put up the notice in English, when most of her visitors must be Russians, who did not know the English language. She said, "When the Russians don't understand, they will ask, because they are a curious people. I have to have these English hints around to remind them that we are a superior people."

Eliminating my military aide from Moscow and my officer-interpreter of the Baltic fleet, I went alone to the officer's apartment. His American wife turned out to be a Latin-American. She was unmistakably an octoroon. She was pretty, and, if she had been taller, would have been a great beauty. Nevertheless she had had a pretty time under the old régime and had been celebrated as an exotic flower in smart and expensive bohemian circles. When the revolution overwhelmed the Capital, this exotic creature of the smart set married the young officer who had worshipped her in the hectic pre-revolutionary period, and who had decided, when the revolution came, to serve under the Bolsheviks.

She spoke nice English. Also, she had prepared a good dinner, with that Russian pink cold soup that isn't so good to look at, but most excellent to taste, caviar, ham, some sort of boiled meat, and Caucasian wine. She talked a lot about herself and her husband and their son. His son, really, by a first marriage. He was a lad going to high school, and they were worried about him. They said that the boy would never have a chance under the Bolshevik régime. And the officer said that he himself was having only half a chance, that he was absolutely loyal to the Communists, because he was convinced that they were in Russia to stay and that nothing now could take the power away from them. But the Communists did not trust him because he had been a former Czarist officer. They were training the proletarian youths to become officers, and as soon as the proletarian cadets were trained, the old officers would be superseded. I asked him if he were certain that the Czarist officers who had come over wholeheartedly to the revolution would really be kicked out of their positions when the young proletarian officers were trained to take their place. He said that that was positively true, for it was a Communist policy which had been stated publicly. I said that I was going to find out, without quoting him. He said that I might.

However, I did not mention the subject right away to anyone in Petrograd. After ten fleeting days with the glorious Red fleet, seeing and hearing all and believing that all was a dream, I returned to Moscow for the third time. Only when I came back to Petrograd a month later and for the last time, to get a boat for Germany, did I speak about the officer's case to my friend the Red officer, member of the Communist Party and of the Petrograd Soviet. A young man he was, small, quiet, ordinary-looking and so unobtrustive that you wouldn't imagine his importance in the Red navy and in the higher Communist councils unless you could appreciate the power of his clear, cold blue and all-seeing eyes. I was interested in what the officer had said because a high-school teacher in Moscow had said the same thing to me, as had also a lady of the old régime who was acting as interpreter when I visited one of the Petrograd courts during a trial.

I wanted to ascertain whether the members of the defeated bourgeoisie who were working for the Soviets could not be guaranteed the security of their jobs if they were loyal to the Soviets. For it seemed to me that if they felt their positions were insecure and that there was no future for their children under the new régime, they naturally would sabotage the Soviets. The Red officer confirmed the statement of the former Czarist officer: that the bourgeois officers would be superseded as soon as the proletarian cadets could be trained to take their place. I said I thought such a procedure unfair, and that it would make the bourgeois workers enemies of the Soviet system instead of friends, and force them into sabotage. The Red commander said that the Communist controllers were alert to detect any tendency toward sabotage on the part of bourgeois employees of the Soviets, and he accused me of bourgeois sentimentality.

I said that if he had said intellectual sentimentality, he might have been perhaps right, but that I couldn't have the sentiments of a class I was not born into or educated with. I did not think that there was any such thing as intellectual equality, I told him, and that radicals had a sentimental way of confusing social with intellectual equality. I said further, that I did not believe that talent could spring up easily out of a people, like grass under one's feet.

The officer asked who had been talking to me about the matter. I said that nobody in particular, but different persons in Moscow and Petrograd had spoken of it. Which was strictly true. There was a sequel. A year later I was in Paris one afternoon, waiting to cross from the Place de l'Opéra to the Café de la Paix, when I was suddenly touched on the shoulder. I turned and found myself face to face with the officer. We went to the café for a drink. The officer had arrived in France with other officers to recover some Czarist ships which the French government held somewhere down on the North African coast. We reminisced about the splendid Red days we had enjoyed together in Petrograd and Moscow. We talked about our friends of the foreign office and the Comintern. I had already met some of them in Berlin and Paris. And he said, "Do you remember that officer you had dinner with in Petrograd?"

"Yes," I said, "I remember, but I wasn't aware that you knew about my having dinner with him."

"Well, he is sitting in prison now."

"What for?" I asked.

"Sabotage."

When I returned from Petrograd to Moscow I told Sen Katayama that I wanted to go home. It was the beginning of April. Sen Katayama said that, as an unofficial delegate, I would be given my return fare. He was very pleased with my success and the part he had played in making it possible. He said: "I welcome all the Japanese and Chinese who come here. Some are not Communists, but I see that they are treated right, for I want to make them all Communists." He said it had been decided that I should not go back by way of Poland, since some of the delegates had had trouble in passing through. A Japanese had been put in prison and lost all his papers. It was considered better for me to go as I had come, by boat.

I bade my friends goodbye and returned to Petrograd. But the harbor was ice-locked and I had to wait six weeks before a boat could sail. I was put up in the house of the former Grand Duke Alexander, who was a patron of arts. I had the Duke's own bedroom and study, and his valet to wait on me. The valet was a nice old fellow, but he was like a ghost wandering through the palace. He lived entirely in the past and spoke of the sumptuous days in Berlin and Paris with the Grand Duke. He spoke fluently in French and English. He was shocked at the state of my wardrobe. The only thing in it that he thought fitting for a Grand Duke's closet was a fine pair of boots which had been given to me by Eugen Boissevain.

I did not like the palace rooms, especially the study. It reminded me of a cathedral altar. All the walls were rococo, carved and painted in inharmonious brick red. But the cadet who had made himself my orderly thought the rooms very grand. The cadet wanted to do everything, so I dispensed with the valet's services, but tipped him every week.

I got to know Petrograd thoroughly during those weeks. I was shown all the works, among them the great Putilov iron and steel plant and the rubber factory. I liked the visits, but I thought it must have been rather bothersome to the managers of factories who were always pestered by having to take visitors over the plants. I went down into the dungeon of the prison of Sts. Peter and Paul to see the cell in which Prince Kropotkin had been confined. I visited the Department of Nationalities, and Rayeva, the secretary, explained the status of the minority peoples under the Soviets. Also I visited the Department of Woman's Work at the Smolny Institute, where Nicolayeva, the secretary, told me all about the new regulations concerning marriage and divorce and joint individual property, and how the factory workers were cared for during the period of pregnancy and childbirth. She sent me to a meeting of enthusiastic women workers, who passed a resolution asking that a group of colored working girls visit Russia.

May Day in Petrograd was a mighty celebration of workers and soldiers and sailors. Never before or since have I seen such a demonstration. Half-empty Petrograd was filled with the shouting of millions who peopled the streets, marching and singing and holding high their red banners of hope. For hours I stood with Zinoviev and other Petrograd leaders in the reviewing stand in the Uritsky Square. And the demonstration so tremendously swept me along that after attending the People's Theater that night, I could not sleep. I sat down at the table of the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexander, looking out on the Neva, with the gorgeous silver of the beautiful white night of Petrograd shining upon its face, and wrote until dawn. I was happy. Petrograd had pulled a poem out of me.

The poem was published in the Petrograd _Pravda_ and reprinted all over Russia. It was the last thing I wrote in Russia. I was overwhelmed with praise. The praise of the Communists was expected. I was their guest. But I was gratified most by the praise of the Petrograd literati. For they were a proud lot, cold or passive to the revolution. The Russian translator of Walt Whitman said that I had composed a classic. But they had it in translation. I think it should be exhibited here in the original.

_PETROGRAD: MAY DAY, 1923_

_The Neva moves majestically on, The sun-rays playing on her breast at seven, From her blue bosom all winter's snow-slabs gone. Now ripples curl where yesterday lay riven Great silver oblongs chiselled by the hand Of Spring that bellies through Earth's happy womb, To glad and flower the long, long pregnant land! Where yesternight a veil of winter gloom Shrouded the city's splendid face,--today All life rejoices for the First of May._

_The Nevsky glows ablaze with regal Red, Symbolic of the triumph and the rule Of the new Power now lifting high its head Above the place where once a sceptered fool Was mounted by the plunderers of men To awe the victims while they schemed and robbed. The marchers shout again! again!! again!!! The stones, where once the hearts of martyrs sobbed Their blood, are sweet unto their feet today, In celebration of the First of May._

_Cities are symbols of man's upward reach, Man drawing near to man in close commune, And mighty cities mighty lessons teach Of man's decay or progress, late or soon, And many an iron-towered Babylon, Beneath the quiet golden breath of Time Has vanished like the snow under the sun, Leaving no single mark in stone or rhyme To flame the lifted heart of man today, As Petrograd upon the First of May._

_Oh many a thoughtful romance-seeking boy, Slow-fingering the leaves of ancient glory, Is stirred to rapture by the tales of Troy, And each invigorate, vein-tingling story Of Egypt and of Athens and of Rome, Where slaves long toiled for knights and kings reap. But in the years, the wondrous years to come, The heart of youth in every land will leap For Russia that first made national the day--The embattled workers' day--The First of May._

_Jerusalem is fading from men's mind, And sacred cities holding men in thrall, Are crumbling in the new thought of mankind--The pagan day, the holy day for all! Oh, Petrograd, oh proud triumphant city, The gateway to the strange, awakening East, Where warrior-workers wrestled without pity Against the power of magnate, monarch, priest-- World Fort of Struggle, hold from day to day The flaming standards of the First of May!_

XX

Regarding Radical Criticism

Thus ended my adventure in Russia. This detailed account should clear up any "mystery" that is entertained about my going and remaining there. I left Russia with one determination and one objective: to write. I was not received in Russia as a politician, but primarily as a Negro poet. And the tremendous reception was a great inspiration and urge to write more. I often felt in Russia that I was honored as a poet altogether out of proportion to my actual performance. And thus I was fired with the desire to accomplish the utmost.

Excepting for the handicap of lack of money, there was nothing to side-track me from my purpose. I had no radical party affiliations, and there was no reason why I should consider myself under any special obligations to the Communists. I had not committed myself to anything. I had remained a free agent.

But recently in an issue of _The New Masses_, the literary organ of the American Communists, I was singled out for a special attack in an article about Negro novelists. The article, under the guise of a critique, was merely a piece of personal spite and slander.

I take these extracts from that article: (1) I had "written an indignant poem, attacking lynching, wholly lacking in working-class content." (2) I "disappeared mysteriously to the Soviet Union and had retired exhausted to the sidewalk cafés of Montmartre." (3) "The retired radical had grown fat and ill and indifferent in Paris."

Against the Communist attack my poem still remains my strong defense:

_IF WE MUST DIE_

_If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, Oh let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!_

_Oh, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!_

First published in Max Eastman's magazine _The Liberator_, the poem was reprinted in every Negro publication of any consequence. It forced its way into the Negro pulpit (a most interesting phenomenon for this black heretic). Ministers ended their sermons with it, and the congregations responded, Amen. It was repeated in Negro clubs and Negro schools and at Negro mass meetings. To thousands of Negroes who are not trained to appreciate poetry, "If We Must Die" makes me a poet. I myself was amazed at the general sentiment for the poem. For I am so intensely subjective as a poet, that I was not aware, at the moment of writing, that I was transformed into a medium to express a mass sentiment.

The critic also asserted that my novel, _Home to Harlem_, had no "class-conscious action." When Jake in _Home to Harlem_ refused to scab, wasn't that class-conscious? And when he refused to pimp, didn't he demonstrate a high sense of social propriety? Perhaps a higher sense than many of us critical scribblers.

I did not come to the knowing of Negro workers in an academic way, by talking to black crowds at meetings, nor in a bohemian way, by talking about them in cafés. I knew the unskilled Negro worker of the city by working with him as a porter and longshoreman and as waiter on the railroad. I lived in the same quarters and we drank and caroused together in bars and at rent parties. So when I came to write about the low-down Negro, I did not have to compose him from an outside view. Nor did I have to write a pseudo-romantic account, as do bourgeois persons who become working-class for awhile and work in shops and factories to get material for writing dull books about workers, whose inner lives are closed to them.

I created my Negro characters without sandpaper and varnish. If the Communists can create a Negro casual better than Jake in _Home to Harlem_--a man who works, lives and loves lustily and even thinks a little for himself, why in the infernal regions don't they?

Jake leaves Europe for America and Harlem and swings through the Black Belt with a clean manly stride. The Communist critic states that the story of Jake was autobiographical, "dilating upon my own love life." The peeping critic seems to know more about my love life than I do myself. Perhaps it is necessary to inform him that I have not lived without some experience. And I have never wanted to lie about life, like the preaching black prudes wrapped up in the borrowed robes of hypocritical white respectability. I am entirely un-obsessed by sex. I am not an imitator of Anglo-Saxon prudery in writing. I haven't arrived at that high degree of civilized culture where I can make a success of producing writing carefully divorced from reality. Yet I couldn't indulge in such self-flattery as to claim Jake in _Home to Harlem_ as a portrait of myself. My damned white education has robbed me of much of the primitive vitality, the pure stamina, the simple unswaggering strength of the Jakes of the Negro race.

The critic declares that I "disappeared mysteriously to the Soviet Union and had retired exhausted to the sidewalk cafés of Montmartre." The statement is untrue, but perhaps truth is not vital to the new criticism that they say must replace the old.

Perhaps the Communist critic, who may be closer to the sources of information than others, may have some inside knowledge of just what exhausted me in Soviet Russia. Of course, I had a hell-raising good time in Russia. I was constantly occupied in visiting factories and all kinds of institutions, making speeches and writing, besides enjoying the relaxation of cabarets and parties. Perhaps I was fatigued, as any person is likely to be after a passionate spell of any great thing. But as for my being exhausted--hell! It is fifteen years since then, and I am still going strong, if the head-in-the-butt Communist critic doesn't know. Exhausted indeed!

I came out of Russia with my head on my shoulders and my pen in my pocket and determined to write at all costs, so long as I had a piece of bread to bite and a room in which I could think and scribble. And in ten years I wrote five books and many poems. Perhaps too many!

I never thought there was anything worth while for me in the bohemian glamor of Montparnasse. "The sidewalk cafés of Montmartre" held no special attraction for me. Attractive as Paris is, I have never stayed there for a considerable length of time. The longest period was over three months, when I was in a hospital. Montmartre I visited when I was invited by generous Americans who had money to treat themselves and their friends to a hectic time. The Montmartre of the cabarets and music halls never excited me. It is so obviously a place where the very formal French allow foreigners who can pay to cut up informally. It has no character of its own. Paris, away from Montmartre and Montparnasse, seemed to me to be the perfect city of modern civilization. It was the only city I knew which provided quiet and comfortable clubs in the form of cafés for all of its citizens of every class. I appreciated, but was not specially enamored of Paris, perhaps because I have never had the leisure necessary to make an excellent clubman. If I had to live in France, I would prefer life among the fisherfolk of Douarnenez, or in the city of Strassburg, or in sinister Marseilles, or any of the coast towns of the department of the Var.

The Communist critic further states that I "had grown fat, and ill, and indifferent in Paris...." I regret that here I am obliged to become clinical. But the clinic is an important department of life, and the fact about it is that I got _well_ instead of _ill_ in Paris.

In 1922 I left America in perfect health and more completely whole than the day on which I was born. My first accident of illness occurred in Russia. Sanitary conditions were not ideal in Petrograd and Moscow in 1922. No intelligent person expected them to be after eight years of unremitting international war, revolution and civil war. I remember that every time I received my linen from the laundry I invariably found lice in it. The linen itself was very clean. But the revolution, sweeping away the privileged classes, also had carried along most of their servants. And of the peasants fresh from the country who replaced them, many were neither competent nor clean.

It was very near the end of my visit that I experienced a sort of deadness in my left side and once my face gradually became puffed up like an enormous chocolate soufflé. I have photographs in my possession, taken in Moscow, which authenticate my condition at the time. There was also an American acquaintance who was unable to turn his head; it was cocked stiff to one side like a macabre caricature, as if it were skewered to his shoulder. I consulted a doctor. He thought the climate had affected me and advised me to get heavy woolen underwear. Later, in Petrograd, I became quite ill and had a tooth extracted for the first time in my life, under the most painful conditions.

I arrived in Germany in the early summer of 1923. Three months spent there were an interval of intermittent fevers and headaches. It was hard labor to concentrate upon a series of articles about Russia for a Negro magazine. In the late fall I arrived in Paris. I consulted a French specialist, who advised me to enter a hospital immediately. While I was convalescing in the hospital I wrote this poem, "The Desolate City." The poem was largely symbolic: a composite evocation of the clinic, my environment, condition and mood.

_THE DESOLATE CITY_

_My spirit is a pestilential city, With misery triumphant everywhere, Glutted with baffled hopes and human pity. Strange agonies make quiet lodgement there: Its sewers bursting ooze up from below And spread their loathsome substance through its lanes, Flooding all areas with their evil flow And blocking all the motions of its veins: Its life is sealed to love or hope or pity, My spirit is a pestilential city._

_Above its walls the air is heavy-wet, Brooding in fever mood and hanging thick Round empty tower and broken minaret, Settling upon the tree tops stricken sick And withered under its contagious breath. Their leaves are shrivelled silver, parched decay, Like wilting creepers trailing underneath The chalky yellow of a tropic way. Round crumbling tower and leaning minaret, The air hangs fever-filled and heavy-wet._

_And all its many fountains no more spurt; Within the damned-up tubes they tide and foam, Around the drifted sludge and silted dirt, And weep against the soft and liquid loam. And so the city's ways are washed no more, All is neglected and decayed within, Clean waters beat against its high-walled shore In furious force, but cannot enter in: The suffocated fountains cannot spurt, They foam and rage against the silted dirt._

_Beneath the ebon gloom of mounting rocks The little pools lie poisonously still, And birds come to the edge in forlorn flocks, And utter sudden, plaintive notes and shrill, Pecking at strangely gray-green substances; But never do they dip their bills and drink. They twitter, sad beneath the mournful trees, And fretfully flit to and from the brink, In little gray-brown, green-and-purple flocks, Beneath the jet-gloom of the mounting rocks._

_And green-eyed moths of curious design, With gold-black wings and rarely silver-dotted, On nests of flowers among those rocks recline, Bold, burning blossoms, strangely leopard-spotted, But breathing deadly poison from their lips. And every lovely moth that wanders by, And of the blossoms fatal nectar sips, Is doomed to drooping stupor, there to die; All green-eyed moths of curious design That on the fiercely-burning blooms recline._

_Oh cold as death is all the loveliness, That breathes out of the strangeness of the scene, And sickening like a skeleton's caress, Of clammy clinging fingers, long and lean. Above it float a host of yellow flies, Circling in changeless motion in their place, That came down snow-thick from the freighted skies, Swarming across the gluey floor of space: Oh cold as death is all the loveliness, And sickening like a skeleton's caress._

_There was a time, when, happy with the birds, The little children clapped their hands and laughed; And midst the clouds the glad winds heard their words And blew down all the merry ways to waft The music through the scented fields of flowers. Oh sweet were children's voices in those days, Before the fall of pestilential showers, That drove them forth far from the city's ways: Now never, nevermore their silver words Will mingle with the golden of the birds._

_Gone, gone forever the familiar forms To which the city once so dearly clung, Blown worlds beyond by the destroying storms And lost away like lovely songs unsung. Yet life still lingers, questioningly strange, Timid and quivering, naked and alone, Against the cycle of disruptive change, Though all the fond familiar forms are gone, Forever gone, the fond familiar forms; Blown worlds beyond by the destroying storms._

More than three years after "The Desolate City" was written, it was published for the first time in the Negro magazine, _Opportunity_. But by then I was a stout black animal, splashing and floating in the blue Mediterranean. The French specialist had said: "You are young, with a very wonderful constitution, and you will recover all right if you will live quietly and carefully away from the temptations of the big cities." I certainly did follow that good advice.