Regarding Reactionary Criticism
My little brown book of verse, Spring in New Hampshire, appeared in the midst of the radical troubles in the fall of 1920. I had not neglected the feeling of poetry, even while I was listening to Marxian expositions at the International Club and had become involved in radical activities. A little action was a nice stimulant for another lyric.
C.K. Ogden, the author of Basic English and The Foundation of Esthetics, besides steering me round the picture galleries and being otherwise kind, had published a set of my verses in his Cambridge Magazine. Later he got me a publisher.
But I was so anxious about leaving London for America that I hardly felt the excitement I should about the first book I had done since I left Jamaica. The Pankhurst group had been disrupted by the police raids. Many of the members were acquainted with Comrade Vie, but unaware of his real identity. His unexpected arrest and the disclosures of the police that he was a Bolshevik agent had started lots of rubberneck gossip. Some asserted that Comrade Vie had been deliberately betrayed. And members accused other members of being spies and traitors. A dissident group, headed by Edgar Whitehead, the secretary of the organization, desired to bring Pankhurst herself to a private trial and I also had to give an accounting of my activities.
One evening, when I visited the International Club the secretary showed me an anonymous letter he had received, accusing me also of being a spy. I declare that I felt sick and was seized with a crazy craving to get quickly out of that atmosphere and far away from London. But I had used up all of my return fare. All I had received from the Dreadnought was payment for my board. The organization was always in need of money.
My little book had brought me no money. I hadn't been banking on it. I had stopped writing for the Negro World because it had not paid for contributions. An English friend, and I.W.W. who had lived in America (I think he had been deported thence), undertook to find a group of friends to put up the fare to get me back there.
While I was hotly preparing my departure, Sylvia Pankhurst was sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Pankhurst was a good agitator and fighter, but she wasn't a leader. She possessed the magnetism to attract people to her organization, but she did not have the power to hold them. I remember a few of them: William Gallacher, Saklatvala (the Indian M.P.), A.J. Cook, who became the secretary of the Miners' Federation, and that very brilliant and talented writing couple, Eden and Cedar Paul. And I was informed that before my time there had been others even more brilliant among the Left literary and artistic set. I remember saying to Springhall that it was a pity the organization was too small for him. It was a one-woman show, not broad-based enough to play a decisive rôle in the labor movement.
At last, when I was safely fixed in my third-class bunk, I had time to read and ponder over the English reviews of my book. If it is difficult to ascertain the real attitude of the common people of any country regarding certain ideas and things, it should be easy enough to find out that of the élite by writing a book. The reviews will reveal more or less the mind of the better classes.
In most of the reviews of my poems there was a flippant note, either open or veiled, at the idea of a Negro writing poetry. After reading them I could understand better why Bernard Shaw had asked me why I did not go in for pugilism instead of poetry. I think I got as much amusement out of reading them from my own angle as the reviewers had in writing from theirs.