Friends in France
I had been posing naked in Paris studios to earn my daily bread and that undermined my health. The studios were badly heated. My body reacted against the lack of warmth after being for many years accustomed to the well-heated houses of America. I came down with pneumonia. My French friend, Pierre Vogein, looked after me. Josephine Bennett brought me fruit and ordered proper food. Louise Bryant sent a doctor. Clive Weed had told her that I was in Paris.
Louise Bryant was aware that I wanted to write above all things. I first saw her when she returned from Russia after the death of John Reed. I think it was at Romany Marie's in Greenwich Village and she was encircled by a group of nice young men, collegiate-like. At that time she was a pretty woman with unforgettably beautiful eyebrows. She had sent The Liberator a pathetic poem about her sorrow, and we had published it. I told her that the poem had moved me more than anything that was written about John Reed's death. For the dead was dead, but I felt that the living who really mourn are the sorriest thing about death.
Louise Bryant and I came together again, I think at Max Eastman's. We talked about John Reed. I asked if she knew that he had invited me to go to Moscow in 1920, when I was in London. She said she didn't know that, but was aware that Reed had become excited about the social problems of the Negro group shortly before he fell ill.
At that time she was doing a brilliant set of articles about Russia for a Hearst newspaper. We talked about writing. I was interested in her opinion of so-called "bourgeois" and so-called "proletarian" literature and art. Externally her tastes were bourgeois enough. She liked luxurious surroundings and elegant and expensive clothes and looked splendid in them. But her fine tastes had not softened her will or weakened her rebel spirit.
Louise Bryant thought, as I did, that there was no bourgeois writing or proletarian writing as such; there was only good writing and bad writing. I told her of my great desire to do some Negro stories, straight and unpolished, but that Max Eastman had discouraged me and said I should write my stories in verse. But my thinking in poetry was so lyric-emotional that I could not feel like writing stories in that vein. She said Max Eastman was too romantic about poetry and that I should write prose. She said she also could never get into her poetry certain things that she got into prose. John Reed had written some early stories about ordinary people with no radical propaganda in them, she said, and suggested that I should do the same about my Negro stories—just write plain tales.
And so now again in Paris, when she was sending me off to southern France for my health, Louise Bryant warned me: "Remember our conversation in New York, and don't try to force your stories with propaganda. If you write a good story, that will be the biggest propaganda." She gave me a check big enough to keep me living simply and working steadily for three months.
I went to Marseilles, and from there visited some of the little towns of the littoral. Finally I chose La Ciotat, a place about midway between Marseilles and Toulon, having some eight thousand folk. Boatmaking and fishing were the two main industries. The bay was fine, and beautiful in the morning sunshine. But on the quay, where the houses and hotels were, the morning sunshine didn't fall. There was no kind of heat, not even fireplaces. My hotel was cold but I contrived to work, wrapping myself from chest to feet in my Russian blanket and leaving only my hands free.
After a month of it I went down to Toulon to hear Carmen by the Opéra Comique Company from Paris. In a bistro after the opera I met a girl who spoke English. She was a little strange, different from the average that one meets in sailor bars. She was friendly to me. I found out that she had once been a little friend of artists and writers in Montmartre and Montparnasse. She was the type of girl that seemed more suitable for friendship with younger officers than with common sailors, but she preferred the sailors. She worked too, in a store. She promised to find me a room with a fireplace in Toulon, which she did, and sent me a note about it the following week. But I had already paid another month's rent in advance in La Ciotat.