Part Five — The Cynical Continent
XXI Berlin and Paris
At last the soft breath of spring warmed and conquered the great harbor of frozen ice and our ship cleaved through. The first of June we arrived in Hamburg. Nothing here of the fortress-like austerity of Petrograd. Hamburg was big and full and busy with the business of free unhampered commerce. Flocks of ships were loading and unloading their rich cargoes. Sailors reeled through the low-down streets in drunken irresponsibility, and there were many Negroes showing their white teeth against all that white wealth.
I spent three days among the docks and the Negroes of different nationalities and languages and then entrained for Berlin. Startlingly changed was the spirit of Berlin after an interval of nine months. In the fall of 1922 a dollar was worth about a thousand marks. There appeared to be plenty of money in circulation among all classes, and lots of new and stylish clothes were in evidence. Berlin was by a long way brisker and brighter than London. I had a comfortable room with a middle-class family. Said the head to me: “The workers are better off than we. We have lost three-quarters of our investments and incomes. But the workers are well paid and can buy new clothes, while we of the middle class must wear the old. And the workers have money to go to the theaters; they ride second-class in the trains, and we must ride third.”
But now all was changed. Premier Poincaré had seized the Ruhr early in 1923 and the mark had skyrocketed. I cannot even recall how many thousands I got for my dollar when I returned to Berlin in the summer of 1923. For every minute the dollar became dearer and dearer. But this fact sticks in my skull: From New York, Eugen Boissevain cabled me twenty-five dollars to Berlin in October, 1922. I was to receive payment (I don’t know why) in marks. But just before the amount arrived, I was obliged to leave Berlin for Russia. When I returned to Berlin in June, 1923, my twenty-five dollars was worth only twenty-five cents.
Speculation in dollars and pounds and francs and other foreign moneys was mad. The corners of the principal streets were dotted with money-changing kiosks. Many who possessed foreign money developed a close-fisted psychosis. They didn’t want to change their bills into marks until obliged to. And when they had to, it was with regret, for the next minute the dollar would be worth a few marks more. A German Communist friend told me about a certain Anglo-American comrade who would delay paying his bills even though long overdue until the dollar climbed to a new high. By that method he paid about one-half only of the cost of what he actually owed. Said the German Communist bitterly: “Even the foreign comrades are exploiting the German people.” Nearly everybody was doing it. I remember a so-called radical publisher who had worked out a profitable plan of printing American books in Germany, because labor and material there were so cheap, and exporting them to sell in America.
My Japanese friend, Sen Katayama, had warned me against returning to Germany. He thought I would be molested because for a couple of years the press of Europe and America had been carrying atrocity stories about the doings of the French black soldiers on the Rhine. But I said I would go back to Germany. Personally, I had not sensed any feeling against me as a Negro in the fall of 1923 because of the black troops on the Rhine. Everywhere I had been treated much better and with altogether more consideration than in America and England. Often when I stepped into a café there were friendly greetings—“Schwartz’ Mohr”—and free drinks. And now I felt that if Negroes were hated and mistreated by the Germans because of the black troops on the Rhine, I wanted to authenticate the changed sentiment for myself. I did not want to report by hearsay that the Germans were mistreating Negroes. And that was why I went from the free port of Hamburg to Berlin, instead of going directly to Paris.
Well, everywhere in hotels, cafés, dancing halls, restaurants and trains, on the river boats and in the streets, I met with no feeling of hostility. In spite of the French black troops on the Rhine I was treated even better in Berlin in 1923 than in 1922. Of course, Berlin was mightily depressed because of the French occupation of the Ruhr. In the hotel where I stayed there was posted a sign asking the guests not to speak the French language. The spirit of depression was expressed more eloquently in the exchanges than anywhere. The working people were not as prosperous and happy as in the fall of 1922, because the new inflation caused by the French occupation had cut down their wages to the bone. If Poincaré of Lorraine, consumed by an overwhelming fear and hatred of the Germans, had desired to perpetuate the hatred between the Germans and the French forever, he could not have devised a better way.
There was something sullen and bitter, hostile and resentful in the atmosphere of Berlin. And I believe Berlin expressed the resentful spirit of all of Germany. There were Wandervögel everywhere like a plague of flies. They had lost their romantic flavor. More imitation than real Wandervögel, with their knapsacks slung over their shoulders, casually taking to the streets as nature lovers take to the woods, and they gave one a strange impression of Berlin as a futuristic forest.
I do not know of anything that has rendered so perfectly the atmosphere, temper and tempo of the Berlin of that period than George Grosz’s Ecce Homo. For me that book of drawings is a rare and iconoclastic monument of this closing era even as Rabelais is of the Renaissance. I had the unique and unforgettable honor and pleasure of knowing George Grosz in Moscow. His photograph and two pages of his drawings had appeared in the special pictorial section of Pravda, which also carried a photograph of myself. It was the first time I had seen any of Grosz’s drawings. They gripped me. I sought an opportunity to meet him in the Congress Hall of the Kremlin.
When I returned to Berlin I hunted him up to ask him to sign a copy of Ecce Homo, which I had bought privately. The book was banned by the government of the Social Democracy. Grosz’s remarkable personality gave not the slightest hint of the artistic type. And in his little apartment, his pretty and pleasant frau had surrounded him with the neatest of bourgeois comforts. He fitted respectably into the frame, and if you did not know he was an artist, you might have taken him for a responsible bank clerk. Yet there was a charming felicity and harmony in the ménage. It gave the impression that Grosz needed just that kind of domestic background from which he could swing up and out with his powerful artistic punches.
Grosz in his appearance seemed the perfect type of a conservative Prussian. But a careful study of his nervous-boyish and whimsical eyes revealed the revolutionary artist in him. He was a real inspiration to other artists. I heard many lyrical appreciations of his work, a fine tribute to the man, for the breed of artists (judging from my experience on The Liberator and among the cosmopolites in France) are hell-hard on their contemporaries. They are liberal and lavish in praise of the dead only or the great. Writers are perhaps more generous. Marsden Hartley, whom I happened across in Berlin, was ecstatic in praise of Grosz’s work. But the two artists had never met, so I introduced them. Physically, Grosz was as impressive as his amazingly ruthless drawings, and Marsden Hartley was equally as ecstatic in praise of his person.
I met also Pierre Loving, the writer and critic, who spoke German and kindly hunted me up a large room, exactly right to live and work in. He introduced me to Josephine Herbst, who was very kind and helpful in a practical and also artistic way. Soon after I met again the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, selling newspapers in the street. Our meeting surprised both of us. We talked a little, but she had to sell her newspapers, for she said her rent was overdue. So we made a rendezvous for the next evening at the Romanisher Café.
It was a sad rendezvous. The Baroness in Greenwich Village, arrayed in gaudy accoutrements, was a character. Now, in German homespun, she was just a poor pitiful frau. She said she had come to Germany to write because the cost of living was cheap there. But she complained that she had been ditched. She didn’t make it clear by whom or what. So instead of writing she was crying news. She wished that she was back in New York, she said. I was accompanied by an American student lad whom I had met at the American Express office. He came from one of the western cities. He professed a liking for me, because of my poetry, he said. He had plenty of money and was always treating me to more drinks than were good for me. I told him that the Baroness was a real poet and that he might give her a couple of dollars. He generously produced five, and we were all very happy for it.
I had completed my plans to go to Paris when, curiously, I began meeting a number of the comrades whom I had known in Moscow. One day in the Unter den Linden I bumped up against the Hindu youth who had vanished so strangely from the Lux Hotel in Moscow. “I thought you were dead!” I cried.
“And I thought I was going to die,” he said. He related the story of his arrest by the O.G.P.U. because he had been denounced as a spy by the head of the Indian delegation in Moscow. He said the O.G.P.U. endeavored to get him to confess, but he had insisted that he was not a spy. He had had differences with the head of the Indian delegation and had thought of giving up revolutionary work and returning to student life. (His father had sent him to Europe to study.) He was kept in O.G.P.U. custody for months. Finally he was sent to some place up Archangel way, and from there he had escaped across the border into Finland. He had always been a thin enough fellow; now he looked like a mosquito. I told him I didn’t think he had “escaped,” as he thought, but that he had simply been allowed to escape. He asked me why, whether I had had any inside information. But I merely nodded my head and looked mysterious. Poor chap! He was so down in spirits, I didn’t want to tell him that I thought the O.G.P.U. were convinced that he was not a spy, but merely a perfect specimen of a moron.
The next day, again on the Unter den Linden, I met Roy, the leader of the Indian delegation. Roy was editing a propaganda paper in Berlin, which was distributed in India. He invited me up to his office and asked me to contribute an article to his paper about Communism and the Negro. I consulted an English friend, a Communist sympathizer, and he advised me to keep away from the Indian movement because it was too “complicated.” The advice was just the kind I was fishing for and I didn’t write the article or see Roy again before I left Berlin.
It was interesting in Paris to mix in among the cosmopolitan expatriates. The milieu was sympathetic. It was broader than the radical milieu of Greenwich Village. The environment was novel and elastic. It was like taking a holiday after living in the atmosphere of the high pressure propaganda spirit of the new Russia. There in Paris, radicals, esthetes, painters and writers, pseudo-artists, bohemian tourists—all mixed tolerantly and congenially enough together.
Frankly to say, I never considered myself identical with the white expatriates. I was a kind of sympathetic fellow-traveler in the expatriate caravan. The majority of them were sympathetic toward me. But their problems were not exactly my problems. They were all-white with problems in white which were rather different from problems in black.
There were the expatriates who were lured to Europe because life was riper, culture mellower, and artistic things considered of higher worth than in America.
There were those who argued that a florescence of art and literature was impossible in America: the country was too new.
There were those who were in revolt against the puritan conscience and the denial of artistic freedom in America; the lack of public respect for creative art and artists.
There were those who were harassed by complicated problems of sex.
But when I got right down to a ruthless analysis of myself, to understand the urge that had sent me traveling abroad, I discovered that it was something very different from that which actuated the white expatriates.
For I was in love with the large rough unclassical rhythms of American life. If I were sometimes awed by its brutal bigness, I was nevertheless fascinated by its titanic strength. I rejoiced in the lavishness of the engineering exploits and the architectural splendors of New York.
I never could agree that literature and art could not flourish in America. That idea was altogether contrary to my historical outlook. I believed that there would be an American art and culture mainly derived from Europe and augmented by the arts and cultures of other countries precisely as there had been a distinct Roman art and culture mainly derived from Greece, but augmented by the arts and cultures of the countries that Rome had conquered. For America appeared to me preeminently a vast outpost of European civilization, being, in its relation to Europe, what Northern Europe was to Rome under the empire. When Europeans said to me: “The Americans, they are barbarians,” it stirred up a romantic sensation, and I thought that that was exactly the manner in which the ancient Romans spoke of the inhabitants of Iberia and Gaul and Germany and Britain.
Again, I was not oversensitive about the American public taking the writer and artist like the average person instead of isolating him in an ivory tower. I am partial to the idea of an artist being of and among the people, even if incognito. The puritan atmosphere of America was irritating, but it was not suffocating. I had written some of my most vigorous poems right through and straight out of the tumult and turbulence of American life.
And lastly, sex was never much of a problem to me. I played at sex as a child in a healthy harmless way. When I was seventeen or eighteen I became aware of the ripe urge of potency and also the strange manifestations and complications of sex. I grew up in the spacious peasant country, and although there are problems and strangenesses of sex also in the country, they are not similar to those of the city. I never made a problem of sex. As I grew up I was privileged to read a variety of books in my brother’s library and soon I became intellectually cognizant of sex problems. But physically my problems were reduced to a minimum. And the more I traveled and grew in age and experience, the less they became.
What, then, was my main psychological problem? It was the problem of color. Color-consciousness was the fundamental of my restlessness. And it was something with which my white fellow-expatriates could sympathize but which they could not altogether understand. For they were not black like me. Not being black and unable to see deep into the profundity of blackness, some even thought that I might have preferred to be white like them. They couldn’t imagine that I had no desire merely to exchange my black problem for their white problem. For all their knowledge and sophistication, they couldn’t understand the instinctive and animal and purely physical pride of a black person resolute in being himself and yet living a simple civilized life like themselves. Because their education in their white world had trained them to see a person of color either as an inferior or as an exotic.
I believe that I understood more about the expatriates than they understood of me, as I went along in the rhythm of their caravan; yet, although our goal was not the same, I was always overwhelmingly in sympathy with its purpose. From conventional Americans visiting Europe I used to hear severe criticisms directed at the expatriate caravan. The critics thought that the expatriates were wasting their time and that American creative artists should stay at home and explore American life. Some of them made an exception of me. They said that because the social life of the Negro was strictly limited in America, it might be better for a Negro who is a creative artist to seek more freedom abroad. But I was not taken in by that specious form of flattery. As I have indicated before, I was aware that if there were problems specifically black, also there were problems specifically white.
I liked the spectacle of white American youngsters of both sexes enjoying the freedom of foreigners with money on the café terraces of Continental Europe. I liked to watch their feats of unprohibited drinking and listen to their elastic conversations and see them casually taking in their stride the cosmopolitan world of people of different races and colors. Even if they were not all intent upon or able to create works of art, I did not see them as idlers and wasters, but as students of life.
My English friend, Mr. Jekyll, had informed me that it was a custom of the English bourgeoisie and aristocracy to let their sons travel by themselves abroad for a year or so after they had finished college. The British Empire must have gained much from that practice. So I felt that America also could gain something from its youngsters circulating abroad and mingling with foreigners on their own ground. Certainly, whatever they were before, they could not be worse Americans after that experience.
James Joyce’s Ulysses was published when I arrived in Paris. And Ernest Hemingway’s first little book of miniature stories In Our Time came out that same year. A good friend gave me a copy of Ulysses. A bad friend swiped it.
James Joyce incomparably and legitimately was le maître among the moderns. I cannot imagine any modern and earnest student of literary artistry of that period who did not consider it necessary to study James Joyce. I was privileged to have a few acquaintances of radical sympathies among the moderns, and they all advised me to read Joyce before I started to write. So I did. Some of them thought, as I, that Ulysses was even greater as a textbook for modern writers than as a novel for the general public.
Yet after reading Ulysses I said to my friends, as I had previously said to Frank Budgen, one of Joyce’s early admirers in London, that D.H. Lawrence was the modern writer I preferred above any. I thought Ulysses a bigger book than any one of Lawrence’s books, but I preferred Lawrence as a whole. I thought that D.H. Lawrence was more modern than James Joyce. In D.H. Lawrence I found confusion—all of the ferment and torment and turmoil, the hesitation and hate and alarm, the sexual inquietude and the incertitude of this age, and the psychic and romantic groping for a way out.
But in James Joyce I found the sum of two thousand years, from the ending of the Roman Empire to the ending of the Christian age. Joyce picked up all the ends of the classical threads and wove them into the ultimate pattern in Ulysses. There is no confusion, no doubt, no inquiry and speculation about the future in James Joyce. He is a seer and Olympian and was able to bring the life of two thousand years into the span of a day. If I were to label James Joyce I would say that he was (in the classic sense of the word) a great Decadent.
Some of my friends thought I showed a preference for D.H. Lawrence because he was something of a social rebel. But it was impossible for me seriously to think of Lawrence as a social thinker, after having studied the social thinking of creative writers like Ruskin, William Morris, Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, and other social propagandists. In fact, Lawrence’s attitude toward his subject matter, his half-suppressed puritanism, often repelled me. What I loved was the Laurentian language, which to me is the ripest and most voluptuous expression of English since Shakespeare.
If Joyce was le maître of the ultra-moderns, Gertrude Stein was the madame, and her house was open to all without discrimination. Even Negroes. I cannot remember how often people said to me: “Haven’t you been to Gertrude Stein’s?”... “Everybody goes to Gertrude Stein’s.”... “I’ll take you to Gertrude Stein’s.”... “Gertrude Stein does not mind Negroes.”... “Gertrude Stein has written the best story about Negroes, and if you mean to be a modern Negro writer, you should meet her....”
I never went because of my aversion to cults and disciples. I liked meeting people as persons, not as divinities in temples. And when I came to examine “Melanctha,” Gertrude Stein’s Negro story, I could not see wherein intrinsically it was what it was cracked up to be. In “Melanctha,” Gertrude Stein reproduced a number of the common phrases relating to Negroes, such as: “boundless joy of Negroes,” “unmorality of black people,” “black childish,” “big black virile,” “joyous Negro,” “black and evil,” “black heat,” “abandoned laughter,” “Negro sunshine,” all prettily framed in a tricked-out style. But in the telling of the story I found nothing striking and informative about Negro life. Melanctha, the mulattress, might have been a Jewess. And the mulatto, Jeff Campbell—he is not typical of mulattoes I have known anywhere. He reminds me more of a type of white lover described by colored women. “Melanctha” seemed more like a brief American paraphrase of Esther Waters than a story of Negro life. The original Esther Waters is more important to me.
Ernest Hemingway was the most talked-about of young American writers when I arrived in Paris. He was the white hope of the ultra-sophisticates. In the motley atmosphere of Montparnasse, there was no place for the cult of little hero worship. James Joyce was worshipped, but he had won out with a work that took men’s eyes like a planet. But in Montparnasse generally writers and artists plunged daggers into one another. That atmosphere in its special way was like a good tonic, if you didn’t take too much of it. Good for young creative artists who have a tendency to megalomania. And many of them do. And also it was an antidote for the older ones who have already arrived and are a little haughty, expecting too much homage from the young.
It was therefore exciting that Ernest Hemingway had won the regard and respect of the younger creative artists and even of the older. I remember Nina Hamnett pointing him out to me at the Dôme and remarking ecstatically that Hemingway was a very handsome American and that he had a lovely son. But it was long after that before I met him for a moment through Max Eastman.
In Our Time, that thin rare book of miniature short stories, was published, and it was the literary event among the young expatriates. I cherish an unforgettable memory of it and of Montparnasse at that time. A cultivated and distinguished American, liberal of attitude and pocket to unpopular causes, was sitting at the Dôme, reading a copy of In Our Time. He invited me to his table and offered a drink. He read aloud Chapter III, and wondered whether there was a double entendre in that last sentence: “It rained all through the evacuation.” I said I did not know and did not think it mattered, and I asked the garçon to bring me a double cognac. My friend and host said: “They are talking in a big way about this Hemingway, but I just can’t get him. I like the young radical crowd and what they are aiming to do. But this thing here”—he pointed to In Our Time—“I don’t like it. It is too brutal and bloody.”
“But so is life,” I ventured to say, and not too aggressively, because I was expecting my host to come across with a gift of money.
“The only thing I admire about this book is the cover,” he said. “That sure is in our time all right. If you like it you can have it.” My hand trembled to take it. The book was worth something between thirty and fifty francs, which was more than I could afford. I have it still. It became so valuable that I once consigned it for a loan. But I redeemed it and, excepting my typewriter, I hardly ever trouble to redeem the things I pawn.
Yet I would be lying if I should say here that when I read In Our Time in 1924 I thought the author soon would be one of the famous American writers. I liked the style of the book, but I thought more of it as a literary rarity, and that the author would remain one of the best of the little coterie writers.
I must confess to a vast admiration for Ernest Hemingway the writer. Some of my critics thought that I was imitating him. But I also am a critic of myself. And I fail to find any relationship between my loose manner and subjective feeling in writing and Hemingway’s objective and carefully stylized form. Any critic who considers it important enough to take the trouble can trace in my stuff a clearly consistent emotional—realist thread, from the time I published my book of dialect verse (Songs of Jamaica) in 1912, through the period of my verse and prose in The Liberator, until the publication of Home to Harlem.
But indeed, yes, I was excited by the meteor apparition of Ernest Hemingway. I cannot imagine any ambitious young writer of that time who was not fascinated in the beginning. In Paris and in the Midi, I met a few fellows of the extreme left school, and also a few of the moderate liberal school and even some of the ancient fossil school—and all mentioned Hemingway with admiration. Many of them felt that they could never go on writing as before after Hemingway.
The irritating pseudo-romantic style of writing about contemporary life—often employed by modernists and futurists, with their punctuation-and-phraseology tricks, as well as by the dead traditionalists—that style so admirably parodied in Ulysses; had reached its conventional climax in Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat. When Hemingway wrote, The Sun Also Rises, he shot a fist in the face of the false romantic-realists and said: “You can’t fake about life like that.”
Apparently Hemingway today is mainly admired by a hard-boiled and unsophisticated public whose mentality in a curious way is rather akin to that of the American who contemptuously gave away Hemingway’s first book to me. I don’t think that that is any of Hemingway’s fault. And what excites and tickles me to disgust is the attitude of the precious coteries toward Hemingway. One is not certain whether they hate Hemingway because of his success or because of his rough handling of some precious idols. The elect of the coteries could not possibly object to the Hemingway style and material. For the Hemingway of In Our Time is the same Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and the masterpiece of Death in the Afternoon. The only difference I see is that whereas Hemingway is a little cryptic in the earlier work, he is clear, unequivocal and forthright in his full-sized books. In Our Time contains the frame, the background, and the substance of all of Hemingway’s later work. The hard-boilism—the booze, blood and brutality are all there. The key to A Farewell to Arms may be found in In Our Time. The critics whose sensibilities were so shocked over Death in the Afternoon will find its foundation in the six miniature classics of the bull ring in In Our Time, developed and enlarged with riper experience in the big book.
I find in Hemingway’s works an artistic illumination of a certain quality of American civilization that is not to be found in any other distinguished American writer. And that quality is the hard-boiled contempt for and disgust with sissyness expressed among all classes of Americans. Now this quality is distinctly and definitely American—a conventionalized rough attitude which is altogether un-European. It stands out conspicuously, like the difference between American burlesque shows and European music-hall shows. Mr. Hemingway has taken this characteristic of American life from the streets, the barrooms, the ringsides and lifted it into the realm of real literature. In accomplishing this he did revolutionary work with four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. That to me is a superb achievement. I do not know what Mr. Hemingway’s personal attitude may be to the material that he has used, and I care less. All I can say is that in literature he has most excellently quickened and enlarged my experience of social life.