Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “the girl agitator,” has an even more consistent point of view than Mother Jones, and she has the advantage of being without prejudices. Her face has more subtlety, more interest for the analyst, than Mother Jones’s obvious compressed mouth and quick eyes; but it has little of that stamp of multiple reactions which make Emma Goldman’s face such a fascinating “subject.” There is a touch of Irish poetry in it—something wistful and something stern.
Miss Flynn gave three talks—on Birth Control, on Violence in Relation to the Labor Movement, and on Solidarity: Labor’s Road to Freedom—but I could only hear the last one, which everyone said was the least interesting of the three. There was only a handful of workers there, and she was so informing that the place ought to have been crowded with all the good people who think the I. W. W. is an organization of unintelligent outcasts whose only competence lies in throwing hammers into printing presses, etc., etc. Miss Flynn is more articulate than any I. W. W. I have heard, and she is freer from the stock phrases that give so many of the very earnest young workers in the movement something of pathos. I like these I. W. W. people a lot. They are not only offering an efficient program of labor; they are getting close to a workable philosophy of life. They are even capable of a virtue no working-class organization is supposed to be overburdened with: hardness of thought. As Miss Flynn said: “Don’t pamper yourselves. It’s not a sacrifice to fight for your own freedom!” Of course this group has its camp followers who do it no end of damage; but then the Socialists have their “practical” fanatics who are so awfully practical they always look at the trees instead of the forest, and the Anarchists have their soulful members who yearn for martyrdom and blubber about the duty of suffering for a cause. The best of the Industrial Workers are neither visionless nor sentimental. They have no interest in being martyrs; they are workers. Miss Flynn is of the best of these.
The Poetry Bookshop
(35 Devonshire Street, London)
Amy Lowell
I well remember the first time I went to the Poetry Bookshop. It was in July, 1913. I had read of it in a stray number of The Poetry Review that had drifted my way. The idea attracted me at once, and I determined to have a look at it during the summer. There was something alluringly crazy about anyone’s starting a bookshop for the sale of poetry alone. Poetry is at once my trade and my religion. All decent poets worship their art and slave at it, and I am no exception to the rule. But I have my “afternoons out” with their temptations, and the greatest of these is a bookshop. Here was the combination: a poetry bookshop. I turned to it as inevitably as a magnet to the pole.
It was after a visit to one of those large and flourishing establishments where every sort of book is sold that you do not want to read; where rows and rows of the classics you wish you could read again for the first time flaunt from the shelves in gaudy leather bindings, and a whole counter labours to support the newest and dullest novels, and another is covered with monographs which instruct you minutely as to how to grow fruit-trees, catch salmon, handle golf clubs, or bicycle through the home counties. It was in one of these “emporiums,” after the usual “We can get it for you, Madam,” that I broke into open revolt and started off to The Poetry Bookshop.
I knew it was somewhere near the British Museum. “Off Theobald’s Road,” I told the taxi driver, and settled down to looking out of the window, for London, whether on foot or driving, is a never-ending interest to me. Theobald’s Road is one of those large, busy thoroughfares, which cut across London in all directions, and off it, to the left in my case, we turned into a quiet, rather run-down little street, Devonshire Street. A swinging sign about half-way down it attracted me. It was shaped like a shield and blue, if I remember rightly, and on it were painted three torches. All this was determined as the taxi approached. That must be my place, I thought, and it was.
We drew up at the door of a shop—unmistakably a shop, because it had a big shopwindow. It did not need the name, “The Poetry Bookshop” in excellently designed, big, black letters over the window, to tell me that I had arrived.
I did not go in at once. I like to take my temptations gradually, nibbling at them bit by bit and tasting, before gulping them down as full-fledged crimes. I nibbled at that window. It was broad and high, and the books were displayed in it in the singularly fascinating manner which American booksellers jeer at and call “English window dressing.” All these books were poetry, or about poetry; that is, of course, all the ones that were not plays. There were long strips of ballads hanging down, like 18th century broadsides, each one topped by a crude woodcut in glaring reds, and blues, and yellows. The nibbling was so delightful that I collected quite a crowd of street urchins about me, wondering what the lady was looking so long into the window for, before I had done.