1919 (3 page)

then the riversmell the shimmering Potomac reaches the little choppysilver waves at Indian Head      there were mockingbirds in the graveyard and the roadsides steamed with spring      April enough to shock the world

 

when the cable came that He was dead I walked through the streets full of fiveoclock Madrid seething with twilight in shivered cubes      of      aguardiente      redwine      gaslampgreen      sunsetpink tileochre      eyes lips red cheeks brown pillar of the throat climbed on the night train at the Norte station without knowing why

 

I'm so tired of violets

Take them all away

 

the shattered iridescent bellglass the carefully copied busts the architectural details the grammar of styles

it was the end of that book and I left the Oxford poets in the little noisy room that smelt of stale oliveoil in the Pension Boston      Ahora      Now      Maintenant      Vita      Nuova      but we

who had heard Copey's beautiful reading voice and read the handsomely bound books and breathed deep (breathe deep one two three four) of the waxwork lilies and the artificial parmaviolet scent under the ethercone and sat breakfasting in the library where the bust was of Octavius

were now dead at the cableoffice

 

on the rumblebumping wooden bench on the train slamming through midnight climbing up from the steerage to get a whiff of Atlantic on the lunging steamship (the ovalfaced Swiss girl and her husband were my friends) she had slightly popeyes and a little gruff way of saying
Zut alors
and throwing us a little smile a fish to a sealion that warmed our darkness      when the immigration officer came for her passport he couldn't send her to Ellis Island la grippe espagnole she was dead

 

washing those windows

K.P.

cleaning the sparkplugs with a pocketknife

A. W. O. L.

grinding the American Beauty roses to dust in that whore's bed (the foggy night flamed with proclamations of the League of the Rights of Man) the almond smell of high explosives sending singing éclats through the sweetish puking grandiloquence of the rotting dead

 

tomorrow I hoped would be the first day of the first month of the first year

Jack Reed

was the son of a United States Marshal, a prominent citizen of Portland Oregon.

He was a likely boy

so his folks sent him east to school

and to Harvard.

 

Harvard stood for the broad
a
and those contacts so useful in later life and good English prose . . . if the hedgehog cant be cultured at Harvard the hedgehog cant

at all and the Lowells only speak to the Cabot

and the Cabots and the Oxford Book of Verse.

Reed was a likely youngster, he wasnt a jew or a socialist and he didnt come from Roxbury; he was husky greedy had appetite for everything: a man's got to like many things in his life.

Reed was a man; he liked men he liked women he liked eating and writing and foggy nights and drinking and foggy nights and swimming and football and rhymed verse and being cheerleader ivy orator making clubs (not the very best clubs, his blood didn't run thin enough for the very best clubs)

and Copey's voice reading
The Man Who Would Be King
, the dying fall
Urnburial
, good English prose the lamps coming on across the Yard, under the elms in the twilight

dim voices in lecturehalls,

the dying fall the elms the Discobulus the bricks of the old buildings and the commemorative gates and the goodies and the deans and the instructors all crying in thin voices refrain,

refrain; the rusty machinery creaked, the deans quivered under their mortarboards, the cogs turned to Class Day, and Reed was out in the world:

 

Washington Square!

Conventional turns out to be a cussword;

Villon seeking a lodging for the night in the Italian tenements on Sullivan Street, Bleecker, Carmine;

research proves R.L.S. to have been a great cocksman,

and as for the Elizabethans

 

to hell with them.

Ship on a cattleboat and see the world have adventures you can tell funny stories about every evening; a man's got to love . . . the quickening pulse the feel that today in foggy evenings footsteps taxicabs women's eyes . . . many things in his life.

Europe with a dash of horseradish, gulp Paris like an oyster;

but there's more to it than the Oxford Book of English Verse. Linc Steffens talked the cooperative commonwealth.

revolution in a voice as mellow as Copey's, Diogenes Steffens with Marx for a lantern going through the west looking for a good man, Socrates Steffens kept asking why not revolution?

 

Jack Reed wanted to live in a tub and write verses;

but he kept meeting bums workingmen husky guys he liked out of luck out of work why not revolution?

He couldn't keep his mind on his work with so many people out of luck;

in school hadnt he learned the Declaration of Independence by heart? Reed was a westerner and words meant what they said; when he said something standing with a classmate at the Harvard Club bar, he meant what he said from the soles of his feet to the waves of his untidy hair (his blood didnt run thin enough for the Harvard Club and the Dutch Treat Club and respectable New York freelance Bohemia).

 

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

not much of that round the silkmills when

in 1913,

he went over to Paterson to write up the strike, textile workers parading beaten up by the cops, the strikers in jail; before he knew it he was a striker parading beaten up by the cops in jail;

he wouldn't let the editor bail him out, he'd learn more with the strikers in jail.

He learned enough to put on the pageant of the Paterson Strike in Madison Square garden.

He learned the hope of a new society where nobody would be out of luck,

why not revolution?

 

The Metropolitan Magazine sent him to Mexico

to write up Pancho Villa.

Pancho Villa taught him to write and the skeleton mountains and the tall organ cactus and the armored trains and the bands playing in little plazas full of dark girls in blue scarfs

and the bloody dust and the ping of rifleshots

in the enormous night of the desert, and the brown quietvoiced peons dying starving killing for liberty

for land for water for schools.

Mexico taught him to write.

 

Reed was a westerner and words meant what they said.

 

The war was a blast that blew out all the Diogenes lanterns;

the good men began to gang up to call for machineguns. Jack Reed was the last of the great race of warcorrespondents who ducked under censorships and risked their skins for a story.

Jack Reed was the best American writer of his time, if anybody had wanted to know about the war they could have read about it in the articles he wrote

about the German front,

the Serbian retreat,

Saloniki;

behind the lines in the tottering empire of the Czar,

dodging the secret police,

jail in Cholm.

 

The brasshats wouldnt let him go to France because they said one night in the German trenches kidding with the Boche guncrew he'd pulled the string on a Hun gun pointed at the heart of France . . . playboy stuff but after all what did it matter who fired the guns or which way they were pointed? Reed was with the boys who were being blown to hell,

with the Germans the French the Russians the Bulgarians the seven little tailors in the Ghetto in Salonique,

and in 1917

he was with the soldiers and peasants

in Petrograd in October:

Smolny,

Ten Days That Shook the World;

 

no more Villa picturesque Mexico, no more Harvard Club playboy stuff, plans for Greek theatres, rhyming verse, good stories of an oldtime warcorrespondent,

this wasnt fun anymore

this was grim.

 

Delegate,

back in the States indictments, the Masses trial, the Wobbly trial, Wilson cramming the jails,

forged passports, speeches, secret documents, riding the rods across the cordon sanitaire, hiding in the bunkers on steamboats;

jail in Finland all his papers stolen,

no more chance to write verses now, no more warm chats with every guy you met up with, the college boy with the nice smile talking himself out of trouble with the judge;

at the Harvard Club they're all in the Intelligence Service making the world safe for the Morgan-Baker-Stillman combination of banks;

that old tramp sipping his coffee out of a tomatocan's a spy of the General Staff.

 

The world's no fun anymore,

only machinegunfire and arson

starvation lice bedbugs cholera typhus

no lint for bandages no chloroform or ether thousands dead of gangrened wounds cordon sanitaire and everywhere spies.

The windows of Smolny glow whitehot like a bessemer,

no sleep in Smolny,

Smolny the giant rollingmill running twentyfour hours a day rolling out men nations hopes millenniums impulses fears,

rawmaterial

for the foundations

of a new society.

 

A man has to do many things in his life.

Reed was a westerner words meant what they said.

He threw everything he had and himself into Smolny,

dictatorship of the proletariat;

U.S.S.R.

The first workers republic

was established and stands.

Reed wrote; undertook missions (there were spies everywhere), worked till he dropped,

caught typhus and died in Moscow.

Twentyfive days at sea on the steamer
Argyle
, Glasgow, Captain Thompson, loaded with hides, chipping rust, daubing red lead on steel plates that were sizzling hot griddles in the sun, painting the stack from dawn to dark, pitching and rolling in the heavy dirty swell; bedbugs in the bunks in the stinking focastle, slumgullion for grub, with potatoes full of eyes and mouldy beans, cockroaches mashed on the messtable, but a tot of limejuice every day in accordance with the regulations; then sickening rainy heat and Trinidad blue in the mist across the ruddy water.

Going through the Boca it started to rain and the islands heaped with ferny parisgreen foliage went grey under the downpour. By the time they got her warped into the wharf at Port of Spain, everybody was soaked to the skin with rain and sweat. Mr. McGregor, striding up and down in a souwester purple in the face, lost his voice from the heat and had to hiss out his orders in a mean whisper. Then the curtain of the rain lifted, the sun came out and everything steamed. Apart from the heat everybody was sore because there was talk that they were going up to the Pitch Lake to load asphaltum.

Next day nothing happened. The hides in the forward hold stank when they unbattened the hatches. Clothes and bedding, hung out to dry in the torrid glare of sun between showers, was always getting soaked again before they could get it in. While it was raining there was nowhere you could keep dry; the awning over the deck dripped continually.

In the afternoon, Joe's watch got off, though it wasn't much use going ashore because nobody had gotten any pay. Joe found himself sitting under a palm tree on a bench in a sort of a park near the waterfront staring at his feet. It began to rain and he ducked under an awning in front of a bar. There were electric fans in the bar; a cool whiff of limes and rum and whiskey in iced drinks wafted out through the open door. Joe was thirsty for a beer but he didn't have a red cent. The rain hung like a bead curtain at the edge of the awning.

Standing beside him was a youngish man in a white suit and a panama hat, who looked like an American. He glanced at Joe several times, then he caught his eye and smiled, “Are you an Am-m-merican,” he said. He stuttered a little when he talked. “I am that,” said Joe.

There was a pause. Then the man held out his hand. “Welcome to our city,” he said. Joe noticed that he had a slight edge on. The man's palm was soft when he shook his hand. Joe didn't like the way his handshake felt. “You live here?” he asked. The man laughed. He had blue eyes and a round poutlipped face that looked friendly. “Hell no . . . I'm only here for a couple of days on this West India cruise. Much b-b-better have saved my money and stayed home. I wanted to go to Europe but you c-c-can't on account of the war.” “Yare, that's all they talk about on the bloody limejuicer I'm on, the war.”

“Why they brought us to this hole I can't imagine and now there's something the matter with the boat and we can't leave for two days.”

“That must be the
Monterey.
”

“Yes. It's a terrible boat, nothing on board but women. I'm glad to run into a fellow I can talk to. Seems to be nothing but niggers down here.”

“Looks like they had 'em all colors in Trinidad.”

“Say, this rain isn't going to stop for a hell of a time. Come in and have a drink with me.”

Joe looked at him suspiciously. “All right,” he said finally, “but I might as well tell you right now I can't treat you back . . . I'm flat and
those goddam Scotchmen won't advance us any pay.” “You're a sailor, aren't you?” asked the man when they got to the bar. “I work on a boat, if that's what you mean.”

“What'll you have . . . They make a fine Planter's punch here. Ever tried that?” “I'll drink a beer . . . I usually drink beer.” The barkeeper was a broadfaced chink with a heartbroken smile like a very old monkey's. He put the drinks down before them very gently as if afraid of breaking the glasses. The beer was cold and good in its dripping glass. Joe drank it off. “Say, you don't know any baseball scores, do you? Last time I saw a paper looked like the Senators had a chance for the pennant.”