Joseph Freeman with an essay on the importance and on the person of John Reed in reviewing The Making of a Revolutionary, Granville Hicks’ classic biography.
‘John Reed’ by Joseph Freeman from New Masses. Vol. 19 No. 12. June 16, 1936.
IN HIS remarkable analysis of the effect which time has upon experience, Proust describes over and over again the alterations in the image we remember of a man or event. A person we have encountered, an event whose impact we have felt may leave the most profound impression upon us; yet a decade later we may discover details which convince us that the person or the event was not precisely what we had remembered. Time may correct the original impression; or time may amplify it, hence by the law whereby quantity passes into quality, alter it. This is all the more striking in the case of one whom we have known only by reputation, as John Reed was known to those of us who came into the revolutionary movement shortly after his death, tragic and heroic, in a far-off country, which, with time, came closer and closer to our hearts.
At the opening of the twenties, new members like myself on the staff of The Liberator (formerly The Masses, later THE NEW MASSES), learned to know Reed only through his own strong writing, through Max Eastman’s magnificent tribute at a memorial meeting, through Louise Bryant’s poignant letter from Moscow describing Jack’s funeral, through anecdotes we heard from Floyd Dell. I remember Dell trying to explain his dead friend’s character to me: “If Shelley had lived to 1905, he would have been Jack London; and if Jack London had lived to 1917, he would have been John Reed.” This was one way of saying that the lyrical temperaments of all three, animated by passionate love of life, truth and justice, sought fulfillment in revolutionary action.
In Greenwich Village, Reed was looked upon as a potentially great artist who had unfortunately gotten mixed up in politics more than was good for any artist; in Communist circles, his bohemian and literary zest was forgiven for the sake of his important services to the cause. It was not until I reached Soviet Russia in 1926 that I realized to what heroic proportions the Reed legend had grown. I remember standing at his grave under the Kremlin wall, as six years earlier in Paris I had stood before Heine’s grave in the Père Lachaise; and I could not help reflecting that there was a unity in socialist revolutionary tradition, and that for my generation the American had replaced the German poet. From Bolsheviks dramatized in Ten Days That Shook the World I heard, too, many legends of the passion and integrity with which Reed had thrown himself into the revolutionary struggle. He came here raw, undisciplined, they said; he died a real revolutionary.
By 1930, the figure of John Reed became a fruitful and activizing symbol for American radical literature. Clubs were named after him all over the United States in which artists and writers gathered to clarify the principles and purposes of revolutionary art and literature, to propagate them, to practise them. We chose him as our patron not so much because he was dead hero as because his work and example were the living expression of a new and vital force in American life. He combined poetry and politics, memorable and transforming words with revolutionary action; he shaped our experience as he had transmitted his own. This integration of creative literary and practical revolutionary energy represented the ideal of those radical writers who in the “sectarian” days were engaged in advancing what used to be called proletarian literature.
Yet all this time, there was no complete story of John Reed’s life. His figure was as fragmentary as it was effective. There were still his books and the dusty files, more and more difficult to obtain, of The Masses and The Liberator; there were still the amazing anecdotes, with truth assuming the glamorous hues of poetry; but no full portrait of the hero himself. For this, distance in time was needed; and a biographer unburdened by too close proximity to the man and his epoch; and a large audience interested in the past of a movement which has swept beyond its original narrow confines across America.
These conditions have now been fulfilled; the lack has been supplied in a biography written by Granville Hicks with the assistance of John Stuart.
It is a narrative that is complete, penetrating and sympathetic, and it has aroused the just admiration of those who knew John Reed in person, those who grew up under the immediate influence of his work and those who have known him only as a dramatic name. This biography is not merely a record of the past. Granville Hicks has grasped and conveyed the general principles of John Reed’s life and of the movement with which his name is identified, so that contemporary problems are illuminated and clarified. Everything is emphasized which is distinctive of John Reed both as a man and as a representative of that group of pre-war American intellectuals who began their important work in the world as romantic revolutionaries. And that is important, for Reed and his colleagues came to the proletariat not out of necessity but out of choice, and they came not to take but to give. And because they were sincere, they received much more than they gave, for the revolutionary movement integrated and enriched them spiritually far beyond their original endowments.
The essential part of the biography, by far the largest section of it, deals with John Reed’s adventures in Mexico where he marched with Villa’s men reporting the revolution against Huerta; with his life and work as a correspondent in the world war; with his participation in the Bolshevik revolution and his reports of it; with his activities in the Socialist Party and in the founding of the Communist Labor Party; and with his final days in Soviet Russia where he died at his post. Here Granville Hicks has done a splendid job of collating and organizing all the available material, so that the development of his hero is beautifully interwoven with the development of the epoch.
But Hicks has also done something else, something more difficult. In the early chapters dealing with Reed’s youth, he gives us the key to that romanticism which was transformed into revolutionary action under the impact of industrial struggle, war and revolution. Reed was born into a position of privilege; his parents were able to give him whatever a rich man’s son in the Portland, Oregon, of that day was likely to have, including the precious gift of self-regard, based on the sense of being well-born, respected, superior to the mass of people. But they also gave him the even more wonderful gift of independence and the feeling that nothing could justify the sacrifice of that independence. By the time John Reed entered Harvard, he already had well-developed within him his outstanding traits of romance and rebellion, as well as that “tremendous explosive energy” for which he became famous. But that energy split itself in many directions. Hicks observes that Reed could have had a literary career; he wanted that but he wanted something more, too. He wanted popularity, acclaim, social success.
There was in him that all-embracing active principle characteristic of the Renaissance man, Castiglione’s courtier who went to war, played politics, loved women and wrote sonnets. Indeed, his contemporaries actually spoke of an American “renaissance”, so ripe were the grandsons of the pioneers to pour their energies into art and “social problems.”
But in Reed the divergent streams of creative action had as yet only one unifying principle, a love of living which was summed up in his characteristic phrase: “Let’s find some excitement.” That passion for all that is fruitful and creative in life, followed without corruption, may lead to more than pranks and the Harvard clubs. In Reed’s case they led, for one thing, to those wonderful friendships which, for that matter, marked all the romantic radicals of that period and persisted for some time after the war even to my own generation which they influenced. There is fine insight in Hicks’ analysis of the effects of those friendships. Reed had the sensibility of the poet but loved power and the exercise of it quite as much as he loved poetry; and he had the fortunate friendship of men like Professor Copeland, Lincoln Steffens and Charles Erskine Scott Wood to help him bridge the needless gap between poetry and the objective world, between sensibility and power.
AMERICA’S entrance into the war was John Reed’s first great discipline. By the time he went to Russia to report the Ten Days That Shook the World, he was already on the way to being a revolutionist. The Bolshevik upheaval, whose vast creative energy he understood even amidst chaos, completed the transformation. “The majority of persons who learn the truth about Russia,” he later wrote, “become convinced Bolsheviki.” This was the case with him, whose search for truth led to Communism. From that time on, there is little hesitation, little division; poetry becomes politics; journalism is creative art in the service of the revolution, as those of us can testify who, as twenty-year-olds, had their lives remoulded by John Reed’s dispatches from Moscow to The Masses.
Here the development reaches its climax in true discipline, for all the surging faculties of life and creation, love and power fuse in high action for the greatest of modern causes, the transformation of society in the interests of the mass of mankind. Reed is active and buoyant and fruitful as always, but all his marvellous talents and energies are centered on one goal, He travels, reports, speaks, is agitator and courier, defendant and fighter, but all toward the one aim. It is significant that now he contributes to the Revolutionary Age and turns from transmitting information about Bolshevism in Russia to organizing Bolshevism in America. He has at last discovered that in the proletarian revolution there is no gulf between word and act, between poetry and politics—and his own word integrated these modes of living and of transforming life.
The Wilsonian Era as a crucial turning point in American history has still to be adequately analyzed; and John Reed, the most romantic of the romantic rebels in his generation, requires a poet to convey the full flavor of his personality, the full social implications of his private conflicts and adjustments. To this difficult task Granville Hicks has brought an intense and sober industry, a persistence in collecting, collating, analyzing and synthesizing documents, a fine understanding of those aspects of Reed’s character which had their roots in the puritan tradition.
Other aspects are stated with a detached justice which does not quite transmit the gusto of Reed’s romantic side. I suspect that Hicks, who has all the virtues of the scholar, is merely tolerant of those who, like John Reed, cannot grasp or transmit experience unless they have savored it directly. The essence of Reed’s story is the transformation, under the impact of the Bolshevik revolution, of a poet who did as he pleased into a revolutionary who did that which had to be done. Hicks understands inordinately well the virtue of subordinating the pleasure principle to the reality principle; his insight in this respect exceeds his sympathy with Reed’s sheer love of living for its own sake, so to speak. We are told that Reed had gusto; we never feel it; there are hints that his conduct, even when most right, was not solely rational, but we do feel that sensibility and emotion have their own values in a case like this.
This puritanical approach sometimes results in curious judgments. There is considerable stress on Reed’s self-interest, his pursuit of success, his ability in the conventional world, his desire to be a hero; and not enough stress on something more important, something essential not only to an understanding of Reed but of his radical milieu—namely, the subordination of success to the revolutionary movement, the extraordinary generosity of The Masses group toward each other and the world. The thing which most struck me about them when I first joined them in the fall of 1921 is that few ever blew their own horns, but everybody respected and gave due credit to his colleagues; and, what is more significant, almost everybody considered the revolutionary movement more important than his personal career or reputation.
A CERTAIN lack of sanguine imagination leads Hicks to miss the point of Reed’s death under the circumstances of intense revolutionary struggle. If we fail to understand his death, we can scarcely understand his life or the effect it has had upon our own generation. I leave it to psychoanalysts to probe the significance of dying at the precise age of thirty-three; but surely a literary man cannot afford to miss the significance of early death upon romantic legend. The whole romantic literary tradition from Pico de la Mirandola to Hart Crane has early death as a crucial component, especially death under tragic circumstances. Moreover, the revolutionary tradition is by no means as icy as Hicks implies. He tells us that the speeches delivered by Bukharin, Radek, Reinstein, Murphy and Rosmer at John Reed’s funeral seemed “hard and impersonal” to the Americans in Moscow. Nothing could be further from the truth. Louise Bryant was so moved by these speeches, by the warm and loving tribute which the Russian Bolsheviks, soldiers and workers paid to her dead husband, that she wrote to the Liberator a letter describing the funeral in terms verging on poetry.
For Bukharin, Radek and the others the death of John Reed was not “only an incident in the struggle for world revolution.” The love which these men felt for their American colleague was so profound that he became a living legend in Soviet Russia even before the full significance of his life and death dawned upon his American comrades. There have been several Soviet operas about John Reed, and before we in America began writing about his life and work, Soviet critics paid tribute to him.
And why stop with the “hard and impersonal” funeral? Did not Reed’s effect upon the world increase then? How is it possible to deal with an important American life without showing its significance in America? The curtain does not fall with the closing of the Kremlin grave. If any man ever found: his life by losing it that man was John Reed. For it was after his death that his example became most potent in American left-wing letters. During the entire decade of the twenties and the first two tumultuous years of the thirties, the handful of young Americans who carried on the revolutionary tradition in arts, letters and journalism were inspired by John Reed and his colleagues on The Masses. One can only omit so important a fact if one believes, as Granville Hicks does, that between John Reed’s death and the arrival of recent recruits to left-wing literature there was a hiatus. This is untrue, and one wishes here for some of the sensibility and generosity which marked John Reed.
In spite of these shortcomings of insight and evaluation, Granville Hicks has made an important contribution to American letters in his biography of John Reed, one which no intelligent reader can afford to miss. For here we have the first documented outline of a life whose general pattern of the evolution of ideas has become the pattern of an increasing number of American men and women. Hicks has succeeded admirably in grasping and conveying after his own fashion the transformation of a man in our revolutionary epoch; he has not only narrated the life of John Reed but has described, as he truly says, “the making of a revolutionary.” And in rendering logical and consistent the movement from Harvard to the Communist Party, from Portland to the grave under the Kremlin wall, Hicks has illuminated one facet of our literary and political heritage. His work will be indispensable to the reader Who wishes to understand radical thought in America, and to those writers who will some day want to amplify and recreate the story of John Reed. For that story will be told more than once, as is natural with a life which symbolizes a turning point in American culture.
The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.
PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1936/v19n12-jun-16-1936-NM.pdf
