written while working on Louise Bryant project
right down the road from where she began her mothering years...
"Louise Bryant with Daughter Anne" Ashfield, Ma. 1926









“New Englandy”* Renderings
by antoinette nora claypoole

 for Louise Bryant & Richard Wilbur after hearing him read  in Ashfield, Mass. 10.10.10
             
...”They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember...”
                                    --Richard Wilbur
                  from “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”


one.
Poetry seizes me      
    and I am not a poet
I am not held in cryptic
translation of the soul
I am the undeciphered       
     craving verse.


two.
She arrives at their lake
like acres of  believing
in geese. She hears nightly
it is not. An Owl. Howling
in forests of her Dickinson
chamber. the desired desk
reaches not. Hot.  Window
as Slumber resents darkness
harnessed table is crowding
the Echo.  Splashes.  Over
quartzite hilltowns  Richard
Wilbur reads their seasons
conjuring Emily, a houdini
a séance he is.  her Antony.
naming her Cleopatra  yet
childless  she is  butterflies
are  like  swimmers  who  do
not  ever splash 
translating
he is. Dashing. quietly-hear-


three.
here the leeks harvested today
 will be from the last garden
I ever see.  Bitterwseet You.
know butterflies  differently.
Now. 
There is Isis in this.
Resurrecting of  soulflight.
Like a snow shovelling fiddler
There is twilight in lost days
The way histories are, he is
 playing us autumn, his bliss.


four.
The geese
retreat.  The lady
the seer the lake
       too deep.



* “new englandy” is an Emily Dickinson signature phrase



 
WALTER W. WATERS
by Louise Bryant, 1932

transcribed/research/collected by antoinette nora claypoole
footnotes at the END of this piece...


WALTER W. WATERS
from a cable[i] , an interview with Walter W. Waters, 1932
NOTED WOMAN WAR CORRESPONDENT”

Washington, D.C., July 7. –“Commander-in-Chief” Walter W. Waters of the B. E. F. said he would be late and it was after 10 P.M when he finally arrived at the hotel lobby.
     I went over and shook hands.  He didn’t say anything but only smiled.  We went into a little writing room in silence.
     In spite of his youthful look and his obvious good health, the general of the Bonus Army[ii] looked dead tired.  When we sat down he leaned over the table supporting his head  in his hands.
     “You’re tired,” I said, “Can I get you something?”
     “Yes,”  he replied, “I’d like some coffee.”
     He spoke with a pleasant voice, low and soft like Southerners.  He was wearing a Khaki Shirt and trousers.
     He was bareheaded.  He was very tanned and his blond hair was burned by the sun.  His blue eyes looked at one frankly, I could understand how he could keep men in order.
     “Well,” he said, pouring out his coffee, “What are you going to write about me?”
     I said, “Something to make you seem human, you are already getting to be legendary.”
     “Alright, go ahead.  I don’t feel legendary.  Sorry I was late but I’ve got a parade tomorrow and there is only food for breakfast.”
     “Will you break up the camp if you can’t get food?”
     “No,” he replied.  “Put that down and get it straight.  We are not going, we are staying here whatever happens.  We can’t go.  If we go we are licked, beaten.  We are going to stay until some action is taken on the Bonus.”
     “Well supposing your Senators and Congressmen go home and leave you flat:”
     “Let them do it,” he said in his even, quiet voice “We will stay right here.  If we are here a year from now we will be 200,00 strong and every town in America will have a little army of it’s own.”
     “Some people  say you are fascists but that’s not true is it?:
     “Of course not,” he explained, “The fascists took over the government and Mussolini became the dictator.  We are not trying to do that.  We believe in this form of government but we don’t believe in the men who run it.”
     “Are you for Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt for president?”
      “I don’t know.  How can I now until I know what stand he is taking on the Bonus.  I want to talk to him and find out.”
     “How did you get into this movement?”  I asked.
     “It was simple enough.  I didn’t have a job.  I couldn’t get one.  Not any kind of a job.  I’ve got a wife and two children.  I can’t let them starve.  All the veterans were talking it over.
      We all knew that when the bankers want to settle anything or the big corporations they just send somebody down to Washington to lobby for them or they go themselves.  So we came right to headquarters ourselves.
     “We didn’t come the way they do, in a Pullman, with good meals and maybe, a bottle on their hips.  We walked or road the freights.  And it was pretty tough on the men.  When they started they were already in Bad condition.  They are rested now and what food they have is well cooked.”
     “Who cooks for them?”
     “Army cooks.  They have worked night and day and they have done marvelous work.  There are only three main cooks, six second cooks and a lot of helpers.  The cook two meals a day for those thousands of men.”
     “You haven’t had much sickness?”
     “No, we’ve been lucky.  Most of the men arrived in bad condition, feet on the ground and physically ill from beating the rails.” “I didn’t see a single policeman in camp today,” I told him.
     “Oh, they’re not needed” he said, “our own M. P.’s (military police) keep it in order but there’s not much trouble anyhow.”
     Don’t you have trouble from the communists and the more radical groups?”
     “Not exactly,” he said, “I’m not against those fellows.  I’m not against anybody.  I have sympathy for anybody that can’t find work and can’t make a living in this country.
     People can tell lies about me but I haven’t got any personal ambition.
     If these boys could get their bonus I’d just like to fade out of the picture and take my wife and children and for a little rest.”
     “But doesn’t it occur to you that even if you get the Bonus that will not settle things?  There will still be unemployment and conditions might get worse.  What if things go to pieces pretty generally in this country?”  I asked.
     Now that’s different,” he said very seriously, “I know that this Bonus Expeditionary Force is a sort of wedge that will start other things going It has brought men together and mad them think
     “They will stop wasting their votes and make votes stand for something.”
     “Do you think they’ll send the Marines or the regular Army Troops against you if your army doesn’t leave Washington?”
     “No,” he said, “I don’t think they’ll do that.  I don’t think the soldiers would fire on us.[iii]  We are all soldiers, too.  The police don’t want to fire on us.  We are all friends.  If the Government could only understand anything they would know that all this makes our movement a very serious one.”
     “Would you talk help from the Russians?”  I ask him.
     He smiled and answered quickly:
     “If I were a Russian I’d offer help to this Army just as a gesture and if we ever get an offer like that we would refuse it however hungry we were.  But it might make our government a little bit ashamed.”
     He put his hand wearily on his forehead and I poured him some more coffee.
     He turned back to me and went on:
     “I’m in this Army with all my heart and soul.  And I’m going to see it trough.”
     I told him he had better go home and take a rest.  It was nearly Midnight.  He rose to go.
     “I don’t know whether I did much for you,” he said.  “You see I’m a little tired, don’t sleep very well, too much to worry about.”
     He told me that he was born in Burns, Oregon, is thirty-five and was “educated in the University of Hard Knocks.”  Before losing his job, he was superintendent of a canning factory at Portland, Ore.
     He speaks a clear, excellent English, never using slang or making grammatical errors.  One would be sure to think, if he didn’t tell you, that he had graduated from Yale or Harvard.
     We walked to the door and I was saying that I had two brothers in the war and that one was blind.
     He shook my hand in a firm soldier’s grasp.
     “We’ll all stick together,” he said.

     Then hatless, he walked away into the night.
















ENDNOTES


[i] this is transcribed from an original copy of a cable sent by Louise Bryant.  She used ALL CAPS in the transmission.  The only thing that has been changed in the transcription here is a conversion to lower case, for the purpose of easy reading.  from The Louise Bryant Papers, Yale. 

[ii] the Bonus Army was a worker response to poverty/unemployment in America.  Veterans of WWI had been promised a bonus for serving, but payment would not come due until 1945.  The veterans were requesting payment earlier and organized a campaign with those demands. "The Bonus Army" EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2000). Also,   Bartlett, John Henry, The Bonus March and the New Deal (1937); Daniels, Roger, The Bonus March; an Episode of the Great Depression (1971).
[iii] in fact, the U.S. Government did send in police to fire on and kill people in the Bonus Army Camp.  Many were murdered by police and the camp was burned to the ground. ibid.
Letter to “Literature of the Revolution” Magazine n/d
transcribed/research/collected by antoinette nora claypoole


Letter to “Literature of the Revolution” Magazine



Dear Friend

I have just been reading your article in number 4 of the Literature of the Revolution Magazine entitled “The Literary Method of John Reed”. An extremely interesting critique whether one agrees with it or not. Curiously enough Rudyard Kipling called Reed’s stories from Mexico the best reporting in the English language.
You have a sentence towards the end of your article which reads: “We know that this hero had a wife, Louise Bryant that there were all sorts of

2.
troubles and difficulties, but all the same Reed did not allow himself to be depleted by them from his description of the revolutionary movement.” Isn’t this a bit confusing? One might imagine the difficulty was with me. On the contrary I shared all of Jack’s revolutionary activities going through the fighting lines and reaching Moscow a month before he died, I stayed in the typhus hospital with him and I worked in the Foreign Office for nearly a year after that.
I was with him through all the famous Ten Days and have the first pass(sp) issued by the Military Revolutionary Committee.
The first edition of “ten Days that Shook the World" did not carry the Lenin introduction. I brought it back with me to America after Jack’s death and




3.

got in a Famine Edition. The book cost $100 -- $50 went to costs for publication and 50$ to the Russian Famine Relief.
During the time that Jack was actually at work on this I was out speaking from one end of America to the other against Military Intervention by the Allies. All money taken at these lectures went for Famine Relief. The lectures brought from $1000 to $10,000 a night. I spoke for nearly two months starting in Washington
All proceeds of John Reed books I turned over to Russian orphanages. If these funds have been used otherwise it is not to my knowledge.
John Reed and I were comrades








4.
and friends as well as lovers we never quarrelled and were deeply fond of each other after a life time of friendship. When he died I sent you two poems of Reeds written to me to give you a more intimate impression.
I would be pleased if in some manner you can clear up the expression of your words in this article.


Sincerely

L. B.

(below the intials, a handwritten, full name signature “Louise Bryant” )

source:
Louise Bryant Papers (MS 1840). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
from upcoming book: Flowers of Bronze: the Auto/Biography of Louise Bryant (1885-1936)