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Washington Square!

Conventional turns out to be a cussword;

Vil on seeking a lodging for the night in the

Italian tenements on Sul ivan Street, Bleecker, Car-mine; research proves R.L.S. to have been a great cocks-man, and as for the Elizabethans

to hel with them.

Ship on a cattleboat and see the world have ad-ventures you can tel 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.

-13-revolution in a voice as mel ow as Copey's, Diog-enes 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 couldnt keep his mind on his work with so

many people out of luck;

in school hadnt he learned the Declaration of In-dependence 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 re-spectable New York freelance Bohemia). Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

not much of that round the silkmil s 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 parad-ing 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 no-body would be out of luck, why not revolution?

The Metropolitan Magazine sent him to Mexico

to write up Pancho Vil a.

Pancho Vil a taught him to write and the skeleton

-14-mountains and the tal organ cactus and the armored trains and the bands playing in little plazas ful 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 kil ing 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 al the Diogenes

lanterns;

the good men began to gang up to cal for ma-chineguns. 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 be-cause they said one night in the German trenches kid-ding with the Boche guncrew he'd pul ed the string on a Hun gun pointed at the heart of France . . . playboy stuff but after al what did it matter who fired the guns or which way they were pointed? Reed was with the

boys who were being blown to hel ,

with the Germans the French the Russians the

-15-Bulgarians the seven little tailors in the Ghetto in Salonique,

and in 1917

he was with the soldiers and peasants

in Petrograd in October:

Smolny,

Ten Days That Shook the World;

no more Vil a picturesque Mexico, no more Harv-ard Club playboy stuff, plans for Greek theatres, rhym-ing verse, good stories of an oldtime warcorrespondent, this wasnt fun anymore

this was grim.

Delegate,

back in the States indictments, the Masses trial,

the