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.