On the
idealistic, activist, partly un-American and yet profoundly American lives and love
of John Reed and Louise Bryant.
I am, for
I hope obvious reasons, very hesitant to call anyone or anything un-American. The
phrase, after all, has almost always been used as a blatant, and very
destructive, attack, one directly linked to treason (the highest national crime,
as defined by our
Constitution) and a host of other ills. Yet in a way that common usage
represents a significant bit of slippage, since the act of treason is much more
anti- than un-American, an action taken against
the nation rather than simply outside of its definitions or communities. And
if we use the word in the latter, more neutral sense, then it’s certainly fair
to say that the late 1910s
actions of journalists, writers, and lovers John Reed and Louise Bryant—as they
embraced the
Russian Revolution and the resulting
new Soviet government, and indeed in Reed’s case sought formally
to join that government’s
propaganda efforts—were in a definite sense un-American.
Of course it’s
nowhere near that simple, though. For one thing, Reed and Bryant
both wrote complex, autobiographical yet also deeply journalistic books about
their experiences in Russia, works clearly meant for American audiences and conversations;
whatever their individual feelings about the Revolution, that is, they did not
in any way abdicate their roles as journalists and writers in the face of it. And
remembering those books connects us to both writers’ multi-stage
careers as muckraking journalists
and activists, histories that are, to my mind, as “American” (particularly
in their era) as it’s possible to be. Reed’s 1914 experiences
with and article on the Colorado miners’ strike and the resulting Ludlow
massacre, for example, provide a unique and indispensable glimpse into a
significant, under-narrated, and volatile American community; many of Bryant’s
unpublished writings do the same for American artistic communities in the
pre-modernist and modernist eras. In this light, Reed and Bryant’s Russian
efforts represent just another community to which they traveled and out of
which they sought to draw inspiration—one certainly less overtly American, but
no less a part of the world they sought to impact.
Moreover,
Reed’s and Bryant’s passionate and eventually tragic romance provides additional
and not at all irrelevant layers to their American stories. Obviously that
romance is the most universally compelling side to their lives, as Hollywood proved; but
it also connects them to multiple other contemporary stories and identities:
the liberated communal lives of modernist
authors like Eugene O’Neill, with whom both writers lived and Bryant had an
affair; the post-World
War I Lost Generation atmosphere, with its social rebellions, searches for
meaning and companionship, and international influences and identities; and,
perhaps most complexly, the ways in which Bryant’s
radical feminism both connected her to the equally radical Reed and yet was
(at least in part) silenced
as a result of her relationship with him. In all those ways as well, Reed
and Bryant exemplified their America, however much their lives (and
particularly his
life and death) took them away from it.
Next
lovers tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? And two more posts to come—any nominations or suggestions?
6/6 Memory Day nominee: Nathan
Hale, who had but one life to lose for his
country, and in so losing it became one
of America’s first truly mythologized heroes and figures.
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