John Passos: 1919

I’m so tired of violets

Take them all away

when the telegram came that she was dying the bellglass cracked in a screech of slate pencils (have you ever never been able to sleep for a week in April?) and He met me in the grey trainshed my eyes were stinging with vermillion bronze and chromegreen inks that oozed from the spinning April hills His moustaches were white the tired droop of an old man’s cheeks She’s gone Jack grief isn’t a uniform and the in the parlor the waxen odor of lilies in the parlor (He and I we must bury the uniform of grief)

then the riversmell the shimmering Potomac reaches the little choppysilver waves at Indian Head there were mockingbirds in the graveyard and the roadsides steamed with spring April enough to shock the world

when the cable came that He was dead I walked through the streets full of fiveoclock Madrid seething with twilight in shivered cubes of aguardiente redwine gaslampgreen sunsetpink tileochre eyes lips red cheeks brown pillar of the throat climbed on the night train at the Norte station without knowing why

I’m so tired of violets

Take them all away

the shattered iridescent bellglass the carefully copied busts the architectural details the grammar of styles

it was the end of that book and I left the Oxford poets in the little noisy room that smelt of stale oliveoil in the Pension Boston Ahora Now Maintenant Vita Nuova but we

who had heard Copey’s beautiful reading voice and read the handsomely bound books and breathed deep (breathe deep one two three four) of the waxwork lilies and the artificial parmaviolet scent under the ethercone and sat breakfasting in the library where the bust was of Octavius

were now dead at the cableoffice

on the rumblebumping wooden bench on the train slamming through midnight climbing up from the steerage to get a whiff of Atlantic on the lunging steamship (the ovalfaced Swiss girl and her husband were my friends) she had slightly popeyes and a little gruff way of saying Zut alors and throwing us a little smile a fish to a sealion that warmed our darkness when the immigration officer came for her passport he couldn’t send her to Ellis Island la grippe espagnole she was dead

washing those windows

K.P.

cleaning the sparkplugs with a pocketknife

A. W. O. L.

grinding the American Beauty roses to dust in that whore’s bed (the foggy night flamed with proclamations of the League of the Rights of Man) the almond smell of high explosives sending singing éclats through the sweetish puking grandiloquence of the rotting dead

tomorrow I hoped would be the first day of the first month of the first year

Jack Reed

was the son of a United States Marshal, a prominent citizen of Portland Oregon.

He was a likely boy

so his folks sent him east to school

and to Harvard.

Harvard stood for the broad a and those contacts so useful in later life and good English prose… if the hedgehog cant be cultured at Harvard the hedgehog cant

at all and the Lowells only speak to the Cabot

and the Cabots and the Oxford Book of Verse.

Reed was a likely youngster, he wasnt a jew or a socialist and he didnt come from Roxbury; he was husky greedy had appetite for everything: a man’s got to like many things in his life.

Reed was a man; he liked men he liked women he liked eating and writing and foggy nights and drinking and foggy nights and swimming and football and rhymed verse and being cheerleader ivy orator making clubs (not the very best clubs, his blood didn’t run thin enough for the very best clubs)

and Copey’s voice reading The Man Who Would Be King , the dying fall Urnburial , good English prose the lamps coming on across the Yard, under the elms in the twilight

dim voices in lecturehalls,

the dying fall the elms the Discobulus the bricks of the old buildings and the commemorative gates and the goodies and the deans and the instructors all crying in thin voices refrain,

refrain; the rusty machinery creaked, the deans quivered under their mortarboards, the cogs turned to Class Day, and Reed was out in the world:

Washington Square!

Conventional turns out to be a cussword;

Villon seeking a lodging for the night in the Italian tenements on Sullivan Street, Bleecker, Carmine;

research proves R.L.S. to have been a great cocksman,

and as for the Elizabethans

to hell with them.

Ship on a cattleboat and see the world have adventures you can tell funny stories about every evening; a man’s got to love… the quickening pulse the feel that today in foggy evenings footsteps taxicabs women’s eyes… many things in his life.

Europe with a dash of horseradish, gulp Paris like an oyster;

but there’s more to it than the Oxford Book of English Verse. Linc Steffens talked the cooperative commonwealth.

revolution in a voice as mellow as Copey’s, Diogenes Steffens with Marx for a lantern going through the west looking for a good man, Socrates Steffens kept asking why not revolution?

Jack Reed wanted to live in a tub and write verses;

but he kept meeting bums workingmen husky guys he liked out of luck out of work why not revolution?

He couldn’t keep his mind on his work with so many people out of luck;

in school hadnt he learned the Declaration of Independence by heart? Reed was a westerner and words meant what they said; when he said something standing with a classmate at the Harvard Club bar, he meant what he said from the soles of his feet to the waves of his untidy hair (his blood didnt run thin enough for the Harvard Club and the Dutch Treat Club and respectable New York freelance Bohemia).

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

not much of that round the silkmills when

in 1913,

he went over to Paterson to write up the strike, textile workers parading beaten up by the cops, the strikers in jail; before he knew it he was a striker parading beaten up by the cops in jail;

he wouldn’t let the editor bail him out, he’d learn more with the strikers in jail.

He learned enough to put on the pageant of the Paterson Strike in Madison Square garden.

He learned the hope of a new society where nobody would be out of luck,

why not revolution?

The Metropolitan Magazine sent him to Mexico

to write up Pancho Villa.

Pancho Villa taught him to write and the skeleton mountains and the tall organ cactus and the armored trains and the bands playing in little plazas full of dark girls in blue scarfs

and the bloody dust and the ping of rifleshots

in the enormous night of the desert, and the brown quietvoiced peons dying starving killing for liberty

for land for water for schools.

Mexico taught him to write.

Reed was a westerner and words meant what they said.

The war was a blast that blew out all the Diogenes lanterns;

the good men began to gang up to call for machineguns. Jack Reed was the last of the great race of warcorrespondents who ducked under censorships and risked their skins for a story.

Jack Reed was the best American writer of his time, if anybody had wanted to know about the war they could have read about it in the articles he wrote

about the German front,

the Serbian retreat,

Saloniki;

behind the lines in the tottering empire of the Czar,

dodging the secret police,

jail in Cholm.

The brasshats wouldnt let him go to France because they said one night in the German trenches kidding with the Boche guncrew he’d pulled the string on a Hun gun pointed at the heart of France… playboy stuff but after all what did it matter who fired the guns or which way they were pointed? Reed was with the boys who were being blown to hell,