XXII Friends in France
I had been posing naked in Paris studios to earn my daily bread and that undermined my health. The studios were badly heated. My body reacted against the lack of warmth after being for many years accustomed to the well-heated houses of America. I came down with pneumonia. My French friend, Pierre Vogein, looked after me. Josephine Bennett brought me fruit and ordered proper food. Louise Bryant sent a doctor. Clive Weed had told her that I was in Paris.
Louise Bryant was aware that I wanted to write above all things. I first saw her when she returned from Russia after the death of John Reed. I think it was at Romany Marie’s in Greenwich Village and she was encircled by a group of nice young men, collegiate-like. At that time she was a pretty woman with unforgettably beautiful eyebrows. She had sent The Liberator a pathetic poem about her sorrow, and we had published it. I told her that the poem had moved me more than anything that was written about John Reed’s death. For the dead was dead, but I felt that the living who really mourn are the sorriest thing about death.
Louise Bryant and I came together again, I think at Max Eastman’s. We talked about John Reed. I asked if she knew that he had invited me to go to Moscow in 1920, when I was in London. She said she didn’t know that, but was aware that Reed had become excited about the social problems of the Negro group shortly before he fell ill.
At that time she was doing a brilliant set of articles about Russia for a Hearst newspaper. We talked about writing. I was interested in her opinion of so-called “bourgeois” and so-called “proletarian” literature and art. Externally her tastes were bourgeois enough. She liked luxurious surroundings and elegant and expensive clothes and looked splendid in them. But her fine tastes had not softened her will or weakened her rebel spirit.
Louise Bryant thought, as I did, that there was no bourgeois writing or proletarian writing as such; there was only good writing and bad writing. I told her of my great desire to do some Negro stories, straight and unpolished, but that Max Eastman had discouraged me and said I should write my stories in verse. But my thinking in poetry was so lyric-emotional that I could not feel like writing stories in that vein. She said Max Eastman was too romantic about poetry and that I should write prose. She said she also could never get into her poetry certain things that she got into prose. John Reed had written some early stories about ordinary people with no radical propaganda in them, she said, and suggested that I should do the same about my Negro stories—just write plain tales.
And so now again in Paris, when she was sending me off to southern France for my health, Louise Bryant warned me: “Remember our conversation in New York, and don’t try to force your stories with propaganda. If you write a good story, that will be the biggest propaganda.” She gave me a check big enough to keep me living simply and working steadily for three months.
I went to Marseilles, and from there visited some of the little towns of the littoral. Finally I chose La Ciotat, a place about midway between Marseilles and Toulon, having some eight thousand folk. Boatmaking and fishing were the two main industries. The bay was fine, and beautiful in the morning sunshine. But on the quay, where the houses and hotels were, the morning sunshine didn’t fall. There was no kind of heat, not even fireplaces. My hotel was cold but I contrived to work, wrapping myself from chest to feet in my Russian blanket and leaving only my hands free.
After a month of it I went down to Toulon to hear Carmen by the Opéra Comique Company from Paris. In a bistro after the opera I met a girl who spoke English. She was a little strange, different from the average that one meets in sailor bars. She was friendly to me. I found out that she had once been a little friend of artists and writers in Montmartre and Montparnasse. She was the type of girl that seemed more suitable for friendship with younger officers than with common sailors, but she preferred the sailors. She worked too, in a store. She promised to find me a room with a fireplace in Toulon, which she did, and sent me a note about it the following week. But I had already paid another month’s rent in advance in La Ciotat.
When that month was ended, I took up residence in Toulon. The girl—her name was Marcelle—had a sailor friend named Lucien, and all three of us became very close friends. Lucien was more than an average sailor. There are many such in the French navy, lads from middle-class and lower middle-class families who choose the navy instead of the army to do their compulsory service. The service is longer in the navy than in the army. Also it is harder, without the privileges offered by the army, in which the educated sons of the better classes can do their compulsory service as cadets.
Lucien had been a cadet, studying to enter the navy as a career, but he had failed his examinations and then decided to do his military service in the navy. He read lots of books, but he wasn’t literary. He gave me my first French lessons. He said I should read Anatole France for good French. He said he read everything of Anatole France’s because he wrote the purest and clearest French of any contemporary writer. But he didn’t get any kick out of the novels as novels. For stories about French life he preferred Zola and Maupassant. I wondered if there were many French readers who felt about Anatole France as Lucien did. He assured me that there were many who liked Anatole France merely because he wrote classical French.
Lucien was on the battleship “Provence.” He invited me to go aboard and introduced me to many of his friends. As Lucien had formerly been a cadet, he had a few extra privileges. Very often he slept in town. And he, Marcelle and I were always together. He loved to walk, and together we explored the environs of Toulon. We hiked to La Seyne, Tamaris, Bandol and Ollioules. I love the Var country more than any part of France, excepting Brittany. Lucien was a Breton and he loved those wonderful bare rugged rocks towering to the skies that make the Var so dramatically picturesque. I told Lucien that I loved those rearing rocks because they somewhat suggested the skyscrapers of New York. But Lucien did not like the comparison; he could not imagine anything American resembling anything French.
When his pals got their week-end vacation from the “Provence” we all went bathing out at Cap Negre in the afternoon, and in the evening we got together for a good time in the bistros and mancebías. The mancebías of Toulon are like recreation halls for the sailors. Many of the sailors who, like Lucien, had their girls in town, went to the mancebías to dance and meet their friends for a good time. Sometimes they took their girls with them. There are dancing halls in Toulon, but these are frequented mostly by the officers. The sailors find it embarrassing to mix with the officers, so they prefer the mancebías, where they are freer. The managers of the mancebías are a pretty good lot. They are friendly and cater to the whims of the sailors, as if they were aware that they were entertaining a mixed group of the best of the country’s youth.
Toulon is dominated by the naval aristocracy, and its administration seemed to me the best of any of the French provincial towns I visited. To a casual observer, the civil administration seems subordinate to the maritime administration. The sailors are protected much more than they are aware. In Toulon there is nothing of that rotten civil complaisance in the exploitation of the sailors which is a revolting feature of life in Marseilles.
Soon after I went to reside in Toulon I received a letter from the secretary of the Garland Fund. It informed me that the officers of the Fund had heard that I was unwell and in need and that they desired to help me for a time, while I was writing. Thus assured of fifty dollars a month, I knuckled down to writing. It was grand and romantic to have a grant to write, and I got going on a realistic lot of stuff. I was sure about what I wanted to write, but I wasn’t so sure about the form. My head was full of material in short pieces, but I wanted to write a long piece—a novel.
I returned to Paris toward the end of summer with a heavy portfolio. I met a couple of publishers’ scouts who didn’t discover anything in my lot. Clive Weed introduced me to Harold Stearns. Stearns’s strange tired eyes didn’t want to look at me. Remembering something, he excused himself, got up and went to the bar, and there forgot all about me. I wondered why Stearns acted so strangely, as if over there in Paris I had reminded him too much of civilization in the United States! Another Yankee said that I should not worry about Harold Stearns for I had nothing to offer him, and he had nothing to offer me but tips on horses and booze. While I remained in Paris I saw Harold Stearns again many times and always at the bar. He was something of an institution in Montparnasse, and often I saw him pointed out to American students who were discovering civilization in Europe as the man who had edited Civilization in the United States.
Also in Paris I found Eugen Boissevain, who had previously helped me much with encouraging praise of my poetry and with gifts of money. He had been recently married to Edna St. Vincent Millay. I saw them both together at their hotel and she gave me a book of her poems. There was a happy feeling in his face that I never had seen there before he was married, and I felt happy for it because I was fond of him. Miss Millay I saw for the first time. In Greenwich Village I had often heard praise of her, but we had never met, and when I arrived in Paris she had recently left. In the literary circles of Montparnasse I heard her name on the lips of foreigners and Americans, and all in praise of her—a reverent worshipful praise. It was extraordinary: he-men, mere men, and others—all used identical phrases in praising Miss Millay’s elusive personality. The only other white woman I knew who was so unreservedly esteemed by all kinds of men was Isadora Duncan. I was puzzled and skeptical of all that chorus of praise. But when I did set eyes on Miss Millay I understood it. There was something in her personality which was Elizabethan—as I imagine the Elizabethans to have been from Shakespeare and history. And I saw her as a Shakespearean woman deftly adapted to the modern machine age. When I searched for an Anglo-Saxon word to fix her in my mind I could think of “elfin” only.
Sinclair Lewis was in Paris also, and he was very kind. He read some of my stuff. He had been generous to many radically-inclined writers since his first success with Main Street, and he hadn’t seen any results. But he gave me a sum of money, took me to dinner in a small quiet place, and talked to me a whole long evening. In a shrewd American way (chastising me and making me like it), Sinclair Lewis gave me a few cardinal and practical points about the writing of a book or a novel. Those points were indicative and sharp like newspaper headlines. I did not forget them when I got down to writing Home to Harlem. I remembered them so well that some critics saw the influence of Sinclair Lewis in my novel. Scott Fitzgerald, in a note, said that the scenes seemed in the Zola-Lewis line.
I left Paris again for Toulon to see what better I could do. About the time I got back Lucien was just finishing his service and getting ready to leave for Brittany. Marcelle was very sad, and I also. For I had been looking forward to our spending much of our leisure time together as formerly.
On the evening of Lucien’s departure a gang of sailors from the “Provence” and some from other boats and a few girls all crowded into my room. Out of their small wages they had eked enough to buy many bottles of ordinary white and red wine. I bought some cognac. My landlady and her husband joined us and we had a great good time.
My friends knew that I was writing, but they knew nothing of my ideas. I never told them that I had been in Soviet Russia. The French friend whom I had met in Moscow had advised me that so long as I was staying in France I should never do or say anything to let the authorities think that I was making political propaganda. If I followed that line, he said, I would never be bothered. I kept that advice, along with Louise Bryant’s, in my head and followed the line.
But toward the end of the evening, when we all began kissing one another on both cheeks, Frenchwise, bidding Lucien a last farewell, a sailor started singing the “Internationale.” We all joined our voices with his and heartily sang, I singing in English. One sailor jumped up on my writing table and said: “After the world revolution there will be no more white and black and yellow; we shall all be one fraternity of men.” My sense of the distinctive in the difference of color was outraged, and I said, “We can still remain a fraternity of men and guard our complexions.” One of the girls said: “That’s all well! We wouldn’t like you to change your color either.”
But the next day I had the honor of a visit from two police officers in plain clothes. They were very courteous. They first satisfied themselves that my French was not worth much and one of them spoke to me in English, which was worth just a little more than my French. I told them all they desired to know about me, except the fact that I had visited Soviet Russia. I explained that the sailors had come to my place to give Lucien a farewell party. “And they sang the ‘Internationale’!” commented my inquisitor. I am not sure, but I think there is a government ruling which forbids French sailors and soldiers from singing the “Internationale.” “They sang the Marseillaise too,” I said, “and I prefer the words and music of the Marseillaise to those of the ‘Internationale’.” The English-speaking inspector smiled and asked me whether I was a Communist. I said that I was a poet and a great admirer of Victor Hugo. He said, “Well, I wouldn’t wonder if a Negro-American had advanced ideas.” He excluded the Negro-French of course. But I was courteously left alone and for the ensuing months I lived happily and as I pleased in Toulon. In the restaurants and cafés that I frequented I was treated even better than before.
Lucien wrote, asking if I could visit Brittany in the summer, because his parents wanted to know me. I replied in ungrammatical French, telling him that I would if I could. I finished a novel and mailed it to New York. I had a group of short stories, which I forwarded to Louise Bryant. I received an enthusiastic letter from Louise Bryant, who said that Robert McAlmon wanted to use one of the stories.
Lucien and I kept up a regular correspondence. He wrote that he had fallen ill, but that it was not serious. In the early summer I left Toulon for Marseilles. There I met Marcelle. I told her that I was expecting to go to Brest to visit Lucien and his people. She thought that was fine, and I asked her why she didn’t come along too. That was impossible, she said, because a girl of her sort could not think of visiting the family of her lover. Girls like her, she said, were outside friends for outside purposes, and had no desire to intrude themselves upon their friends’ families.
In the company of a white American artist I spent a couple of weeks in low-down Marseilles; then I decided to go to Bordeaux to visit a British West Indian Negro friend and his French West Indian wife before going on to Brittany. I got my ticket and boarded a night train. And while I was waiting for my train to pull out, another pulled in, and there in the next car right up against mine was Max Eastman and his Russian wife!
I got out and asked the station master to make my ticket good for the next day. Max Eastman had just published his book, Since Lenin Died. I had left him in Russia before Lenin’s death, and we had plenty to talk about. So we spent the larger split of the night talking, and the next day drove round the Corniche and ate bouillabaisse on the quay. In the evening I entrained for Bordeaux.
I wrote from Bordeaux informing Lucien that I would arrive soon in Brest, and was surprised to find the answering letter addressed in a strange handwriting. It was from Lucien’s father, stating that his son had died the week before. Lucien had contracted tuberculosis in the navy, and unaware of his serious illness, had not taken any treatment. In Toulon I had noticed that he was rather frail, and, compared to his comrades, unusually quiet, but I never heard him cough, and his physique showed no strain when we went hiking in the country.
In his letter, Lucien’s father invited me still to come to St. Pierre. He said his son had talked about my visit up to the moment of his death, and thought that I would like Brittany more than Provence. For the first time in my life I was shocked with the sensation of what “a living dead” might mean. I had seen persons sicken and die after a long illness. I had seen sudden death. But Lucien’s passing was weird, like a ghost story. All the time he was regularly writing those healthy letters about the picturesqueness of the wild Breton coast, of the fields full of larks singing in the summertime, of the quaint costumes which the old people still wore naturally, he was actually wasting rapidly away. They say consumptive persons are like that: always optimistic and hopeful of their health. But I had never had any close contact with one.
I wondered if Marcelle had known of the real state of Lucien’s health. When I told him that I had come to the Midi mainly for the effect of the sun on my health, he said: “Why should the young think about health? Just live, and that is health.” I lingered on in Bordeaux, hesitating about going to Brittany. But I received another letter, from Lucien’s mother, urging me to come, “because Lucien wanted you to be his guest, and now that he is dead we want to receive you for him.” I decided to go. I had met many French in cafés, restaurants and other places. And I had been invited to a couple of parlor parties in Montparnasse, but I wasn’t sure whether my hosts were really French or what the French call métèque. I had never been a guest in a real French family. The French are exclusive in their ideas of family life and seldom invite strangers to their homes.
Lucien’s family, which was small, belonged to the prosperous peasant class or the small bourgeoise. It was not a café-or restaurant-owning family. The old father used to be an artisan, of what trade I don’t remember. He was a big man, robust, friendly, and loved to play boule. The mother was small and compact and resembled a picture of a South European immigrant arriving in New York. There were two daughters and an older son, all married. The son had a clerical position in the maritime service. I noticed that they read Le Quotidien, which was a Left liberal paper at that time.
The family possessed a small two-storey stone house in St. Pierre. It was furnished in antique and modern stuff. The father and mother still used the chest-like Breton beds which are now so highly valued by connoisseurs. The dining table also was a large, heavy massive thing, occupying the one large room that served for dining and cooking. But Lucien had modernized his room, so that it was like a room anywhere, even in the Congo, I guess.
I stayed in a hotel in Brest and went often to eat with Lucien’s family. After the shock of meeting over Lucien’s death, it was a nice visit. I liked the Breton folk more than any other of the French. I spent the summer wandering all over Finistère. I lay in the gray-green fields and watched the brown larks suddenly soar and sing. I knew then why Lucien loved the Breton fields so dearly, and I understood more of what Shakespeare felt when he wrote:
Hark, hark the lark at Heaven’s gate sings....
Lovely are the fields and charming are the towns of Finistère: Brest, Morlaix, Camarat, Plougastel, Morgat, Quimper, Concarneau, Le Pouldu over to Lorient and back to Douarnenez le Rouge above all! How I loved Douarnenez with its high wall falling sheerly into the green waters and the big shipping boats with their tall masts hung with nets like blue veils against the misted gray-blue sky, and the fishermen in red dungarees and red-hearted.
I loved the quiet green and subdued grays and browns of Brittany, and although it rained a lot I did not miss the grand sun of Provence. Perhaps because I was sad and felt the need of solitude.