XXIII Frank Harris in France
Late in the autumn I went south again to Nice. I needed a job and found one as valet to an American.
Paul Robeson and I met on the Promenade des Anglais. He read one of my stories and said he liked it. I said I would like to do a play for him to act in. Paul asked me if I knew Gertrude Stein. I said I didn’t, that I hadn’t gone to her place. Paul said he had visited Gertrude Stein and that she was all right. I shouldn’t neglect such an opportunity, as she knew all the literary people who counted, he told me. I told Paul that although I couldn’t abide cliques, I wasn’t averse to contact, but from my estimation of Gertrude Stein I felt that she had nothing to offer.
I lived in a spacious room with a French-Italian family. It gave on the old port of Nice, and was cheap. Paul Robeson was staying in Villefranche in the same hotel in which Glenway Westcott lived. I wrote to Paul asking if he could come to Nice on a certain evening, when Max Eastman and his wife would be visiting me. The reply came from Mrs. Robeson. She wrote that she and Paul were coming together, because they just couldn’t breathe without each other. Paul Robeson came late with his formidable wife and the more formidable Frank Harris. Robeson and his wife had had either lunch or dinner with Frank Harris at Cimiez and had mentioned that they were coming to see me afterward. Frank Harris hadn’t seen me in years, didn’t know I was in Nice, and insisted on coming along with the Robesons.
Max Eastman and his wife were already there when the Robesons and Frank Harris arrived. It was a most piquant scene, for I had never seen Max Eastman and Frank Harris together, and I knew how they detested each other. If Frank Harris’s dislike was boisterously aggressive, Max Eastman’s dislike of him was none the less real because it was veiled and soft.
Frank Harris greeted me with a loud: “You rascal, catting your way through Europe and not letting me know you were in Nice! I knew you would come back to Europe after that first trip. Now give an account of yourself.” But before I could get in a word of any account about myself Frank Harris was teasing Max Eastman about his book, Since Lenin Died. He said he hoped that Eastman would realize now that politicians are politicians whether they are red or white, that there were certain types of men who were successful politicians and always would be forever and forever. He, Frank Harris, was one of the first to hail the Russian Revolution and he still believed in it. But he had never regarded Lenin and Trotsky or any Bolshevik as a god, but as men with the faults of men. Max Eastman could not reply because Frank Harris did not give him a chance.
I had a case of dry Graves under my bed. (I had accompanied a casual acquaintance one day to a big shop in Nice, and in an excess of feeling for my poetry or personality he offered me the case of Graves and I accepted it right away before his sentiment had time to change.) So I brought out two bottles. Frank Harris said he was not drinking. But when he saw the Graves he examined the bottle and exclaimed: “Oh, it’s an excellent brand. I cannot resist trying it.” And he grabbed the bottle from me and opened it himself. I got the glasses ready and Frank Harris poured the wine. Soon he became mellow, and started to tell stories of life and himself. He told us a story of his traveling from London to Rome by the Paris-Rome express train. There was an Italian couple sitting beside him, he said, and the man knew English and started a conversation. The passenger was cultivated, and they passed the time discussing politics and headline news. But the woman got bored. She could not talk English. And suddenly, tigerishly, she turned on Frank Harris, accusing him of monopolizing her husband’s interest. Harris was sitting next to Paul Robeson and he gave a dramatic interpretation of the incident, now imitating the man, now the woman, beside portraying his own rôle. And while he was interpreting the woman’s part he acted the thing out on Paul Robeson, making him the man. It was all very interesting, but when he had finished, Mrs. Robeson said aside to me: “He was so realistic that I felt afraid for my husband.” Frank Harris was also such a great actor that in his talk he actually became the character he was portraying. And that is why some of the readers of his marvelous biography of Oscar Wilde imagine that there was something more than a platonic friendship between the two men.
The Robesons invited the Eastmans and myself to dinner in Villefranche. Glenway Westcott also was their dinner guest. Mrs. Robeson wore a pretty red frock and Paul sang a couple of spirituals. Now that Frank Harris wasn’t there, the women had their chance to luxuriate in talking. It was the first time Mrs. Eastman had heard the American Negro voice. Mrs. Eastman (nee Eliena Krylenko) was like a reincarnation of Chekhov’s, The Darling. She whispered to me that she was fascinated, and like a happy, eager child she engaged Mrs. Robeson in conversation. Presently Mrs. Robeson exclaimed to Mrs. Eastman, “But Darling, where did you get that accent? Oh, I do adore your way of using our English language. It is just lovely!”
Frank Harris and I met very often in Nice. He lived in Cimiez, but came into Nice almost every day for his mail at the office of the American Express Company. Often we sat in the Taverne Alsacienne to talk. He asked me how my prose was getting along. I told him I thought I had done some good short stories, but failed of my real objective—a novel. I told him my difficulty was devising a plot.
“Don’t worry about a plot,” he said. “Just get a central idea or a person interesting enough and write around that. Make your writing strong and loose and try to get everything in it.”
Once he saw me with a very striking girl at the American Express and he asked me if I would like to bring her to dinner with him. I said, “Very willingly,” and we arranged a rendezvous for a few days later. The dinner was in one of the best restaurants. Harris had published his Life and Loves and was selling it privately. He told us he had received orders from the United States, England, Germany, the Scandinavian countries and France. It was his practice to send the book and collect afterward, he said, and all the buyers had paid promptly excepting the French.
I said, “Our guest is French.” (She spoke perfect English.) Frank Harris was astonished: “Vraiment! vraiment!” he said, “Vous êtes française?” The girl said, “Yes, but that is nothing.” But Frank Harris regretted the faux pas, for English enemies, he informed me, were attacking him and working to get him expelled from France for writing a dirty book. Some French journalists of the Left were defending him. He began telling us of his troubles with the English and that he was banned from visiting England again, ostensibly because of his Life and Loves, but he knew that he was being persecuted actually because he had taken a stand against England during the war.
We had a leisurely dinner: aperitifs and excellent white wine with the fish and red wine with the meat. And topping all, a bottle of champagne. Frank Harris told many Life and Loves stories, as salacious as possible. The last long one was about his first strange affair in Greece. The French girl said, cryptically, “It had to be Greece.”
Outside, while we were walking through the Albert the First Park, Frank Harris declared that although he had passed seventy he was still young and active in every way. To demonstrate this he started to skip and fell down in the first movements. I picked him up. The girl lived about forty minutes down the littoral, and as the last train was due in a few minutes, I said that I had to take her to the station.
Frank Harris said: “Why don’t you take her home in a taxicab?” I said that we couldn’t afford it, but that if he chose to, there was no objection. Immediately he took up the challenge and called a taxicab. I put the girl in and he said to me: “You, too, get in.” I said no, that one escort was enough and we could trust him. And besides, I had to sleep the liquor out of my head to go to work the next morning. So Frank Harris got in beside the girl and they drove off.
I saw him again before I saw her. “Did you have a nice ride?” I asked. An embarrassed look came into his face and he broke out, “You black devil, why didn’t you tell me we were riding to the destination of Lesbos?” “Because I thought any destination was a destination for an eclectic person like you,” I said, and added that we had warned him that he could be trusted.
“I didn’t even have any money left to pay the taxicab,” he said, “and had to give the chauffeur a promissory note.”
One day Frank Harris told me he had been thinking about doing a book of contemporary portraits of Negroes only, and he could not think of any Negroes but Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson and myself. At that time Paul Robeson was aspiring, but had not achieved his greater fame. And without being unduly modest, but with my mind on the bull’s-eye of achievement, I said I thought I would have to do another book first.
Truth to tell, I have always been a little dubious about anthologies of Negro poets and all that kind of stuff. Because there is a tendency to mix up so much bad with the good, that the good is hard to pick out. Of that kind of thing, some critics will say: “Good enough for a Negro,” and there is a feeling among some Negro writers and artists that they should be contented with that sort of criticism. It gives us prestige in Negro society. We have been praised by critics and the critics are all white. If I resent that kind of patronizing criticism, and the fact that Negro artists are satisfied with it, it is because I am inspired with a great hope for the Negro group. And I am certain that it cannot find artistic self-reliance in second-hand achievement. Though because of lack of common facilities and broad cultural contacts a Negro’s work may lack the technical perfection of a white person’s, intrinsically it must be compared with the white man’s achievement and judged by the same standards. I think that that is the only standard of criticism that Negro artists can aim at.
Frank Harris and I went to the Taverne Alsacienne to talk over his project. He said that if he wrote a book of contemporary portraits of Negroes, he would expect it to sell. I said that I hoped it would. I wrote down some names: Marcus Garvey, Florence Mills, Madam Walker of Black Beauty Culture fame, W.C. Handy, composer of the St. Louis Blues. W.E.B. DuBois was the only Negro intellectual who appeared outstanding for that sort of thing. There were quite a few, but none of them glamorous enough for Frank Harris’s style. I mentioned Professor Carver, the Luther Burbank type of scientist who had been my beloved teacher at Tuskegee, but Frank Harris objected. He said that he wanted a Negro scientist of the caliber of Thomas Huxley. He said that Booker Washington was inflated as a philosopher, and he hadn’t found any system of philosophy in his books. He thought it would be interesting if American Negroes could throw up a full-sized philosopher special to their needs and times—a kind of Aframerican Herbert Spencer. Herbert Spencer, he said, didn’t mean anything to him, but meant a lot to the smug English bourgeoisie, and so he had to be reckoned with as an intellectual.
Not long after my conversation with Frank Harris I left Nice for Marseilles. And suddenly bloomed the exotic flower of the Negro renaissance. I never heard what became of Frank Harris’s idea. Perhaps Paul Robeson could tell. Frank Harris said he had talked or was going to talk to Paul Robeson, as he intended him to be the big personality of the book.