Frank Harris took me into his sanctum and sat down with me over the sheets. He impressed me quite differently than he had on the night of our memorable meeting: there was something boulevardier about his dress and manner which seemed a little funny. I had no great confidence in what I had written, and said so. He said that the fact that I was aware was a good sign. He glanced over the sheets rapidly. His forehead grew wrinkles and he shook his head. Then he said that what I had written was like a boat full and sinking with water, but that when it was baled out it would be sea-worthy enough. With a butt of red pencil he underscored the essential. It was fascinating to watch him expertly, quickly, picking out the salient facts.
Suddenly he said something like this: "I am wondering whether your sensitivity is hereditary or acquired." I said that I didn't know, that perhaps it was just human. He saw that I was ruffled. I really had a sensation of spurs sprouting on my heels.
"Don't misunderstand me," he said. "Your sensitivity is the quality of your work. Your 'The Park in Spring' sonnet is a remarkable achievement. I read it to a very refined woman and she could not hold back her tears. It takes me back to the humanists of the eighteenth century, touching me like Hood or even something of Wordsworth's. What I mean is, the stock from which you stem—your people—are not sensitive. I saw them at close range, you know, in West Africa and the Sudan. They have plenty of the instinct of the senses, much of which we have lost. But the attitude toward life is different; they are not sensitive about human life as we are. Life is cheap in Africa...."
I kept silent.
"Now please don't misunderstand me," he said again. "We have great disparities in Europe also, despite more than a thousand years of civilization. For example, the attitude toward life in Eastern Europe is not the same as in Western Europe. And again, the French are by far more highly cultured than the Teutons and Anglo-Saxons. But the French have no poetry, so to speak. English and German poetry is infinitely higher. Yet, the English are barbarians compared to the French. Heine marveled that Shakespeare was an Englishman and Jesus a Jew. Ah Jesus, Jesus! Our Lord and Master! That is the secret of the difference between the peoples of Africa and of Asia and the people of Europe. Jesus: it is his religion that makes the difference."
And, strangely to me, Frank Harris began preaching Jesus. Which seemed so incongruous with his boulevardier dress and manner. He did it beautifully, but unconvincingly. There was something about the man's personality, so pugnacious (a fine pugnaciousness that I admired when he expatiated upon his profane experiences and because he was physically small and rebellious), that made him appear a little ridiculous preaching the self-denialism of Jesus. When he paused I said I thought the adoption of the Christ cult by Western civilization was its curse: it gave modern civilization a hypocritical façade, for its existence depended on force and positive exploitation, whereas Jesus was weak and negative. Frank Harris said that there was a great deal of truth in my point, but nevertheless he preferred Jesus above all the great teachers, and thought civilization the better because of his religion.
In his rôle as a Jesus preacher the stature of Frank Harris diminished perceptibly before my mind; the halo around him that night when he talked as a rationalist and rebel became less glamorous. Perhaps I judged him too severely, because my childhood was so singularly free of the influence of supernatural religion. I suppose that people who are nurtured in revealed religion, even though they discard their god when they are intellectually grown up, are prone to attribute more of the godly qualities to their own deity than to the gods of other peoples. And Frank Harris was raised an Irish Catholic.
Abruptly he said "Now to work," and called in his secretary. She was a little blonde from a Western town. He said that she had written imploring him to let her come to New York to serve "the master" in any capacity. Every week he received dozens of such letters, which he had to ignore, he said, but there had been something so original about hers that he had invited her to come even without requesting her photograph beforehand. And fortunately he had found in her a perfect disciple.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This poem was published years later in Harlem Shadows.