When Mrs. Harris returned from the opera and looked in, Frank flung her a darling phrase and she retired. Interrupted, he noticed that the wine was finished, and went downstairs for more. And when he returned he again gave his attention to my dialect verse and the scrapbook. "But why have you been silent all these six years?" he demanded. "For six years you were silent in the night, like James Thomson, who wrote The City of Dreadful Night." He quoted from that great poem:
Because he seemed to walk with an intent
I followed him; who shadow-like and frail,
Unswervingly though slowly onward went,
Regardless, wrapped in thought as in a veil;
Thus step for step with lonely sounding feet
We travelled many a long dim silent street.
And then the sonorous rich refrain like a fugue pouring through the great pipes of an organ:
As I came through the desert, thus it was,
As I came through the desert: Eyes of fire
Glared at me throbbing with a starved desire;
The hoarse and heavy and carnivorous breath
Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;
Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
Plucked at me from the jungle, tried to hold;
But I strode on austere,
No hope could have no fear.
"A great poem; a sad sick poet," said Frank Harris. "I knew him. He was a hopeless drunkard." His mention of James Thomson and quotation from The City of Dreadful Night moved me sadly. I remembered it was one of the first book of poems that Mr. Jekyll presented to me and that for a long time I was haunted by the spirit of the strange music of the desert song and the pessimistic feeling of the whole poem, which acted like a damper on my naturally happy disposition. Yet I did love the poem, finding it as lyrically rich and totally beautiful even as Omar Khayyám.
"Perhaps you too have a City of Dreadful Night pent up in you as a result of your six silent years?" Frank Harris asked. I said that I had not been really silent at all. It had been necessary for me to do some practical thing to exist. And it had been a big experience, finding out about America and knowing the commonalty of American Negroes. I had continued all along to write at intervals and rewrite to make my writing better, I said.
"You must write prose," Frank Harris said. I demurred. "Yes, you must and you will," he went on. "Now you must write something about yourself to preface these poems. I am sure you will write prose some day. Poetry comes first; prose follows with maturity. And this is an age of prose and not of poetry. Poetry was the unique literary expression of the feudal and semi-feudal age: the romantic periods. But this is the great machine age, inventions upon inventions bringing a thousand new forces and objectives into life. Language is loosening and breaking up under the pressure of new ideas and words. It requires the flexibility of prose to express this age."
"Now, tell me frankly," he said, turning the pages of my scrapbook, "what was the real underlying urge that forced you to come to America, after you had achieved a local success in your home? Was it merely to study?" I admitted that back in my mind there had really been the dominant desire to find a bigger audience. Jamaica was too small for high achievement. There, one was isolated, cut off from the great currents of life.
"I knew that," Frank Harris said triumphantly. "Your ambition was to break into the larger literary world—a fine ambition. But literature is the hardest career for a man without any competence. I think that if I had chosen politics, as I was inclined to at first, I might have done better. However, you have excellent stuff in you and deserve success. And you can attain it if you work hard. You will get there. You have a rare talent. I always pick a winner. I picked Bernard Shaw when he was unknown and started him in the theater on the way to his great success. I picked H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad and others. You are an African. You must accomplish things, for yourself, for your race, for mankind, for literature. But it must be literature. Now in this sonnet, 'The Lynching,'[1] you have not given of your best. A sonnet like this, after reading the report of the St. Louis Massacre, which I published in Pearson's, sounds like an anti-climax. You should have risen to the heights and stormed heaven like Milton when he wrote 'On the Late Massacre in Piedmont':
Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughtered Saints whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold....