Frank Harris's friendly letter, warm with enthusiasm for my poetry, and inviting me to visit him, was the kind of thing that might turn the head of a young writer bitten by the bug of ambition, and sweep him off his feet. But when a fellow is intoxicated with poetry and is yet able to keep a sober head and steady feet to swing a tray among impatient crowds of passengers in a rocking train, he ought to be able to hold himself in under any other excitement.
Frank Harris appeared to me then as the embodiment of my idea of a romantic luminary of the writing world. He stirred me sometimes like Byron and Heine, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud. I had read his writings avidly ever since he returned to America during the World War and stamped his personality upon the pages of Pearson's Magazine. His pronunciamento when he took over the editorship was impressed on my memory. He had said that the purpose of Pearson's was to reach and discover the obscure talents of America who were perhaps discouraged, engaged in uncongenial labor when they might be doing creative work. I took his moving message personally, for I was one of those talents.
It was nine o'clock when I got to Frank Harris's house in Waverly Place. Opening the door for me himself he said the butler had gone home. I was surprised by his littleness. I knew that he was small of stature, but did not expect him to be as diminutive as he was. But his voice was great and growling like a friendly lion's with strength and dignity and seemingly made him larger than he actually was. "You are the poet," his voice rolled as he gripped my hand. He stepped back and scrutinized me before indicating a seat. He explained that he was speculating whether I reminded him of any special African type, for he had traveled in South Africa, West Africa, East Africa and the Soudan.
The door opened and a woman, wearing a rich-looking rose-colored opera cloak, stood poised on the threshold like a picture. I stood up and Frank Harris said: "This is the Negro poet." She nodded slightly and vanished.
"My wife is going to the opera," Harris explained. "She adores it but I don't care a rap about the opera. Of all the arts of the theater it is the tinseliest. A spectacle mainly for women." I said I liked the opera rather well, such of it as I had seen, especially the chorus and the dancing. Frank Harris said he was surprised that I should, because the art of the opera was the most highly artificial of the civilized arts.
He excused himself to go downstairs for wine. He returned with two bottles and glasses. It was my first taste of Rhenish wine and I enjoyed the pleasure of sampling it even more than the actual taste. Frank Harris glowed in praise of the wine. He was concerned about his diminishing stock and said that because of the war, Rhine wine was becoming difficult to get and more costly. Seeing that I was ignorant of the qualities of Rhine wine, he proceeded to enlighten me, saying that the grapes from which the wine was made could not be duplicated elsewhere because of the original nature of the soil in which they grew, and that even in the Rhine country the grapes grown in one district produced a different brand from that of the grapes grown in another, and that this was very important to the local viticulturists. He recalled the pleasure he had experienced when traveling through the Rhineland tasting the peculiar sourish grapes and testing the wine. "Pour me a glass of any real Rhine wine," he said, "and I can tell exactly from where it came without seeing the label."
As he filled the glasses again he said: "You are a real poet, my lad." He sifted the group of poems I had sent to him and said: "You have some excellent pieces here." He picked out "The Park in Spring" and "Harlem Shadows." "These are excellent," he said. "You have the classical feeling and a modern way of expressing it. But where did you get it?" He strode over to me and pressed his fingers upon my forehead, as if to take the measure of what was there: "Tell me, how did you begin writing? What was your early influence?"
Briefly, I told the story of my West Indian background. My peasant childhood in a mountain country of a few hundred villages widely scattered over the hills. The missionary who built the first mission—a Mr. Hathaway who claimed kinship to the Shakespeare Hathaways, and who started my school-teacher brother (the eldest) on the road to college and gave him his first complete set of Shakespeare. My boyhood spent in various villages with that brother, spanned by the years between the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and her death: the indelible years of my first reading of anything that was thrilling just for the thrill—the Waverly novels; Dickens in small sardine-packed words, bound in thin blue covers; the tomes of Mrs. Henry Wood, Charlotte M. Braeme, Miss Braddon, Mrs. Southworth, Marie Corelli.... And suddenly like a comet the discovery of the romance of science in Huxley's Man's Place in Nature and Haeckel's The Riddle of the Universe.
Frank Harris was a little surprised at my coming by free-thought at such an early age—before I was fourteen. So I explained that my brother was a free-thinker (although at the same time a denominational school-teacher and lay preacher), and that when he became aware of my omnivorous reading he put his free-thought literature in my way. Thus I grew up without religious instruction at home, I told him. Also, I was not free-thinking alone. In one high mountain village there were ten of us boys in a free-thought band, and most of them were heathen from their own primitive thinking, without benefit of books. Frank Harris thought that that was a remarkable thing to happen in a remote and backward colony.