II Other Editors
It was a great moment when my first poems were published in Pearson’s, although they were not actually the first to be published in America. In December of 1917, Seven Arts, which was edited by James Oppenheim and Waldo Frank, published two of my sonnets over the nom de plume of Eli Edwards. The nom de plume was adapted from my mother’s name. I used it because at the time when the poems were submitted, I was a waiter in a women’s club. The members were students of the arts. Some were literary aspirants and were always reading and discussing the new and little magazines. As I was a good enough waiter I did not care to be discovered as a poet there.
When my poems appeared in Pearson’s I received many letters of encouragement and suggestion. And one of them started an interesting correspondence which resulted in my traveling to Europe the following year.
I was particularly excited about appearing in Pearson’s, because there was no doubt that Frank Harris was a truly great critic. And many were my dismal disappointments in rejection slips and letters of half-hearted praise, until he fortified me with his frank, hearty and noble voice of encouragement. “The White Fiends,” which Pearson’s published, had been rejected previously by The Crisis, a Negro magazine.
Some months before, I had sent some poems to William Stanley Braithwaite, who was highly placed as a critic on the Boston Evening Transcript. Mr. Braithwaite was distinguished for his literary dialogues in the Literary Supplement of the Transcript, in which the characters were intellectual Bostonians with Greek names and conversed in lofty accents that were all Greek to me.
In Mr. Braithwaite’s writings there was not the slightest indication of what sort of American he might be. And I was surprised one day to read in the Negro magazine, The Crisis, that he was a colored man. Mr. Braithwaite was kind enough to write me, a very interesting letter. He said that my poems were good, but that, barring two, any reader could tell that the author was a Negro. And because of the almost insurmountable prejudice against all things Negro, he said, he would advise me to write and send to the magazines only such poems as did not betray my racial identity.
There was sincerity in Mr. Braithwaite’s letter, a sincerity that was grim and terrible to me. He was a poet himself, but I was unacquainted with his poetry. I went in search of him in his poetry at the Forty-second Street Library. I found a thin volume containing some purely passionless lyrics, only one line of which I have ever remembered (I quote from memory):
I kissed a kiss on a dead man’s brow....
So, I thought, that was what Boston made of a colored intellectual. But thinking a little deeper, I thought that it was not Boston only. Mr. Braithwaite perhaps stood for what almost any man of color who possessed creative talent desired to be at that time. Mr. Braithwaite is now a professor of literature in Atlanta University, one of the leading Negro schools. In appreciation of him our foremost Negro historian has written:
“The most remarkable writer of Negro blood since Dunbar is William Stanley Braithwaite, who as a writer is not a Negro.... Mr. Braithwaite has by his literary production and criticism... his poems, his annual publication, The Anthology of Magazine Verse, demonstrated that the Negro intellect is capable of the same achievements as that of the whites....”
Need I say that I did not entertain, not in the least, Mr. Braithwaite’s most excellent advice? I couldn’t even if I had felt certain about that mess of pottage that is such a temptation to all poor scribblers. My poetic expression was too subjective, personal and tell-tale. Reading a selection of it, a discerning person would become immediately aware that I came from a tropical country and that I was not, either by the grace of God or the desire of man, born white.
I felt more confidence in my own way because, of all the poets I admire, major and minor, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Burns, Whitman, Heine, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud and the rest—it seemed to me that when I read them—in their poetry I could feel their race, their class, their roots in the soil, growing into plants, spreading and forming the backgrounds against which they were silhouetted. I could not feel the reality of them without that. So likewise I could not realize myself writing without conviction.
Because of my eclectic approach to literature and my unorthodox idea of life, I developed a preference for the less conservative literary organs. The Masses was one of the magazines which attracted me when I came from out West to New York in 1914. I liked its slogans, its make-up, and above all, its cartoons. There was a difference, a freshness in its social information. And I felt a special interest in its sympathetic and iconoclastic items about the Negro. Sometimes the magazine repelled me. There was one issue particularly which carried a powerful bloody brutal cover drawing by Robert Minor. The drawing was of Negroes tortured on crosses deep down in Georgia. I bought the magazine and tore the cover off, but it haunted me for a long time. There were other drawings of Negroes by an artist named Stuart Davis. I thought they were the most superbly sympathetic drawings of Negroes done by an American. And to me they have never been surpassed.
I remember receiving a couple of “So sorry” rejection slips from The Masses. The Masses was crucified and had been resurrected as The Liberator before a poem was accepted. I received a note from the managing editor, Crystal Eastman, inviting me to call at the office. One afternoon when I was free in New York I telephoned The Liberator and was asked to come down. Crystal Eastman was in conference with the business manager when I got there, but she suspended it to talk to me. The moment I saw her and heard her voice I liked Crystal Eastman. I think she was the most beautiful white woman I ever knew. She was of the heavy or solid type of female, and her beauty was not so much of her features, fine as they were, but in her magnificent presence. Her form was something after the pattern of a splendid draft horse and she had a way of holding her head like a large bird poised in a listening attitude.
She said she liked my poems in Pearson’s and some of those submitted to The Liberator, but that she was not a poet or critic and therefore not a good judge. She would arrange for me to meet her brother, Max Eastman, who was the chief editor and had the final word on all contributions. She chatted awhile with me. Was it difficult for me to work on the railroad and write poetry? Did I have any regular time to write? I told her that sometimes I carried lines in my thoughts for days, waiting until I found time to write them down. But also it wasn’t always like that. And I related this incident: For many days I was possessed with an unusually lyrical feeling, which grew and increased into form of expression until one day, while we were feeding a carload of people, there was a wild buzzing in my head. The buzzing was so great that it confused and crowded out all orders, so much so that my mechanical self could not function. Finally I explained to the steward that I had an unbearable pain in my belly. He excused me and volunteered to help the fourth waiter with my two tables. And hurrying to the lavatory I locked myself in and wrote the stuff out on a scrap of paper.
“Got rid of your birth pains,” Crystal Eastman said, and we both laughed. She had to resume her conference, but before leaving a tentative appointment was made for me to get in touch with Max Eastman. Just as I was going, Floyd Dell, who was assistant editor of The Liberator, came in and we were introduced.
The rendezvous with Max Eastman was to be at his study-room, somewhere in or near St. Luke’s Place. I got there first and was about to ring when my attention was arrested by a tall figure approaching with long strides and distinguished by a flaming orange necktie, a mop of white hair and a grayish-brown suit. The figure looked just as I had imagined the composite personality of The Masses and The Liberator might be: colorful, easy of motion, clothes hanging a little loosely or carelessly, but good stuff with an unstylish elegance. As I thought, it was Max Eastman.
We went up into a high room and he lounged lazily on a couch and discussed my poems. I had brought a batch of new ones. Naturally I was impressed at once by the contrast between Max Eastman and Frank Harris. There was nothing of the “I” first person in Max Eastman’s manner. Nor did he question me to any extent about myself, my antecedents, and the conditions under which I lived and wrote at the time. He was the pure intellectual in his conversation and critical opinion.
Among my new poems there was a sonnet entitled “If We Must Die.” It was the most recent of all. Great events had occurred between the time when I had first met Frank Harris and my meeting with Max Eastman. The World War had ended. But its end was a signal for the outbreak of little wars between labor and capital and, like a plague breaking out in sore places, between colored folk and white.
Our Negro newspapers were morbid, full of details of clashes between colored and white, murderous shootings and hangings. Traveling from city to city and unable to gauge the attitude and temper of each one, we Negro railroad men were nervous. We were less light-hearted. We did not separate from one another gaily to spend ourselves in speakeasies and gambling joints. We stuck together, some of us armed, going from the railroad station to our quarters. We stayed in our quarters all through the dreary ominous nights, for we never knew what was going to happen.
It was during those days that the sonnet, “If We Must Die,” exploded out of me. And for it the Negro people unanimously hailed me as a poet. Indeed, that one grand outburst is their sole standard of appraising my poetry. It was the only poem I ever read to the members of my crew. They were agitated. Even the fourth waiter—who was the giddiest and most irresponsible of the lot, with all his motives and gestures colored by a strangely acute form of satyriasis—even he actually cried. One, who was a believer in the Marcus Garvey Back-to-Africa Movement, suggested that I should go to Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the organization, and read the poem. As I was not uplifted with his enthusiasm for the Garvey Movement, yet did not like to say so, I told him truthfully that I had no ambition to harangue a crowd.
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.
At that time Pearson’s Magazine had its office in the same building as The Liberator. Frank Harris had me ushered in as soon as I was announced. “And where have you been and what doing all this time, my lad?” he roared, fixing me with a lowering look. All his high exhibitionism could not conceal the frank friendliness and deep kindliness that were the best of him. “Now what have you done to be called a real poet, to join the ranks of the elect? Have you written a GREAT poem yet?” I produced “If We Must Die.” He read it at once. Then he slapped his thigh and shouted, “Grand! Grand! You have done it. That is a great poem, authentic fire and blood; blood pouring from a bleeding heart. I shall be proud to publish it in Pearson’s.”
I said that I was sorry, but the poem had already been accepted by The Liberator. “What? It belongs to me,” Frank Harris thundered. “The Liberator be damned! I gave you the inspiration to write that sonnet and I want to have the credit of publishing it. In the next number of Pearson’s. I’ll play it up big.”
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.
He informed me then that he had had a fight with The Liberator. He had published in Pearson’s an article about Lenin in which the Russian dictator was portrayed as a cosmopolitan bon vivant. It was a very exaggerated and wrong picture, and The Liberator, which had more accurate information about Lenin’s private life from individuals who knew him, had severely criticized Frank Harris. He was sore about the criticism. He said that he and Max Eastman were both radical editors, and if he had made a mistake, The Liberator might have asked him to correct it in Pearson’s, instead of both editors denouncing each other in public. He said he was so disgusted that he was seeking other premises for his magazine, because he was uncomfortable housed in the same building as The Liberator and all the time meeting its editor, even riding in the same elevator with him.
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.
I had not read the controversial articles then and knew nothing about the quarrel, and so I was very embarrassed, realizing that it was a mistake to show the poem to Frank Harris before it was published in The Liberator. I was keen about that poem appearing in The Liberator, because of that magazine’s high literary and social standard. Although I esteemed Frank Harris as a great critic, Pearson’s was his magazine only, a one-man magazine, smashingly critical, daringly so about social problems, yet having no constructive social program. But The Liberator was a group magazine. The list of contributing editors was almost as exciting to read as the contributions themselves. There was a freeness and a bright new beauty in those contributions, pictorial and literary, that thrilled. And altogether, in their entirety, they were implicit of a penetrating social criticism which did not in the least overshadow their novel and sheer artistry. I rejoiced in the thought of the honor of appearing among that group.
Nevertheless I deferred a little to Frank Harris, and when I mailed the set of poems to Max Eastman a few days later, I kept back the “If We Must Die” sonnet. I figured that if Max Eastman overlooked its absence, I could conscientiously give it to Frank Harris. But Max Eastman sent me a telegram requesting the immediate return of the sonnet. The magazine had already gone to press and he wished to include it in the selection. I sent it in and “If We Must Die” appeared in The Liberator.