Read Ebook: A long way from home by McKay Claude

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Ebook has 792 lines and 103076 words, and 16 pages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Just like an Englishman," said Frank Harris, "putting nice manners and all its bloody ritual above veracity and logic."

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

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

"What's big?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I kept silent.

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

Other Editors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That afternoon with Max Eastman was spent in a critical estimation of my verse. He decided to publish a page of it. When I departed I left some of the verses but took with others the "If We Must Die" sonnet. I wanted Frank Harris, whom I had not seen for many months, to see it. I had always remembered his criticism and rejection of "The Lynching," and now I wanted to know if in "If We Must Die" I had "risen to the heights and stormed heaven," as he had said I should.

But I said I couldn't do that; I would have to ask Max Eastman's permission. "No, you won't," roared Frank Harris. "Do you think I am the kind of man to accept a favor from Max Eastman? Why did you bring your poem here, after showing it to him?" Because I wanted him to see what I had done, I said, because I valued his opinion so highly, perhaps more than any other critic's, because his unforgettable words that memorable night of our first meeting were like a fire alive in me, because I so much desired to know if he considered what I had written as an achievement. I was excited and spoke quickly and earnestly. Frank Harris melted a little, for what I said had pleased him. But he was none the less angry.

That incident alone was a revelation of the real Frank Harris under the hard protective shell, and shows that he was not such a natural buccaneer as some of his critics assert. He was so sensitive that he could not stand being in the same building with another editor, because they had quarreled.

White Friends

The phrase "white friend" used by a Negro among Negroes is so significant in color and emotion, in creating a subtle feeling of social snobbery and superiority, that I have sometimes wondered what is the exact effect of "colored friend" when employed by a white among whites. I mean the sophisticated. I know the reactions and their nuances must be very different within the two groups. An experiment carried out in both groups to determine this would be as rarely illuminating as a scientific discovery to this Negro. But alas, what a pity that it is an impossibility, even as it is for a white reader to share with a black reader the magic inhering in "white friend" with all its implications. It may be partially understood only by comparing it with certain social honors and class distinctions which make for prestige, but it cannot be fully realized.

The peasants of Jamaica were always fond and faithful in friendships. Every boy and every man had a best friend, from whom he expected sympathy and understanding even more than from a near relative. Such a friend shared in confidences which were not revealed even to a brother. Early friendships were encouraged by our parents. And sometimes it was the friendship of youngsters that developed a fraternal feeling among the families of both.

There were few white friends in the social life of the peasants. The white colony agglomerated in the towns and the peasants were 80 per cent of a population of a million. And so the phrase "mah white folks" could not have the significance for a Jamaica peasant that it has for a southern Negro. There were a few settlements of poor whites in the land. They were mainly of German descent. Like the natives, they eked out a living as agriculturists and artisans, sharing in the common community life. The blacks were not sycophantic to them because of their pigmentation, nor did they treat them with contempt as "poor white trash."

Those were the social conditions in the country. In our only city they were different. In the city there were subtle social distinctions between white and light-colored and between light-colored and black. These distinctions were based upon real class differences which were fixed by the distribution of positions. Generally the whites were the ruling and upper class, the light-colored were the shop-keeping and clerical class, the blacks were the working class.

A peasant would be proud of a white friend who was influential. But from a social-asset point of view, he would place much more value upon the friendship of a light-colored person of the wealthy and educated class or of a black who had risen up out of the peasantry than he would upon that of an undistinguished "poor white."

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