My American Diary. Clare Sheridan
it back from me, from everyone, that what he gives out he gets back, it is a sort of circle. He was so vibrant that I found my heart thumping with excitement as though I had drunk champagne, which I hadn’t! He talks a lot but talks well, is never dull. …
In England one hesitates to accept to dine out unless one is very sure who is going to be there. Here one can go at random, it may be strange, it may be incomprehensible, but never is it dull! I wonder if it is simply the novelty of the first weeks in America, or is it the interest of continually exploring new people—?
Monday, February 7, 1921. 13 East 55th Street.
Mr. Wiley sent his secretary and his car to convey me to the Times office. There in the building we lunched, and I was the only woman with seven men, all of them interesting. (An improvement on Fifth Avenue with seven women!) Mr. Miller, Mr. Ochs, Mr. Ogden, and so on, it was rather alarming, but they gave me orchids. I was asked a good many questions about Russia, some of them economic, which I longed to be able to answer, and cursed my mind for not working on those lines. I was told that Russia had nothing to trade with, a limited supply of gold; furs that were motheaten, grain that was rotten, aluminium that was full of alloy. I could not dispute these assertions, knowing nothing about it, but I had to laugh, it seemed to end the argument! After lunch I was shown the machinery which is too marvelous and complicated for words. I don’t see how a newspaper ever gets printed in a day. Upstairs in the illustrating part, I caught sight of myself on a copper plate. I had not expected this. They printed one for me, and it came out all folded and still hot at the other end. Too marvelous!
I dined at a big dinner given for me at the Coffee House Club by Mr. Crowninshield and Mr. Condé Nast. I sat next to Paul Manship, whose work I have known for some time. Mr. Bullitt and Mrs. Whitney, the sculptor, sat opposite. Maxine Eliott was at my table, and Mr. Harrison Rhodes, the writer, who has been described to me as “precieux” but I like him. He is more European than anyone I have met. We were four big tables full, and there were speeches after. Mr. Crowninshield in an even quiet voice was very funny.
Lopokova, the exquisite little Russian dancer whom London adores, spoke in Russian. She said she believed in Russia and believed in me! After dinner they played charades. Mr. Crowninshield and I did Trotzky. It was to be in three acts. First, I was to be a trotting horse, and he driving me. Second, we were to ski, and fall down. Third, he was to harangue the Red Army and I was to throw my arms round his neck and passionately embrace him, but Maxine guessed it at the second act, so Mr. Crowninshield was done out of his Trotzky kiss.
Tuesday, February 8, 1921.
Paul Manship called for me and took me to his studio which is near Washington Square in a side alley that used to contain stables. The moment one turned into that side alley one had left New York! He has a beautiful studio and house, and his work is modern and archaic and has a great sense of design. It interested me to discover how he gets his surfaces and the feeling of the thing being carved; this is done by working on the plaster. He is going to have an exhibition in London at the Leicester Galleries in the spring. I shall be very interested to know the result. I am sorry for the artist who goes from here to London, instead of from London here.
I dined with Mr. Archer Huntington in the most lovely house. A real man’s house, no knickknacks. There were some Goya’s that arrested one’s attention.
We were a small party, or else the house was so big, and we all seemed rather English and talked low and there was a calm that was unlike New York. I found my host treated me rather like Lenin did, smilingly and lightly, as if I were not very serious. But he takes me seriously evidently, for he is arranging an exhibition for me at the Museum of the American Numesmatic Society.
Wednesday, February 9, 1921.
I spent a quiet day, as it was my lecture afternoon. I suffer so beforehand that I am almost exhausted.
My audience, it being the afternoon, was of a different type. There were more women and fewer Radicals. They were less light in hand and more serious. I find I take my mood from my audience, and the psychology of an audience seems to vary. Mr. Edwin Markham, the poet who wrote “The Man With the Hoe,” introduced me and sat by my side on the stage during the lecture. He has a head rather like Longfellow.
Afterwards some of the audience came down to the reception room, Lopokova who was there told me I had done well, and embraced me quite emotionally. I was glad to get that opinion from her. People came and asked me all kinds of questions and one, a formidable looking woman in a leather coat, asked if I was in favor of the same methods prevailing here as in Moscow. I was very indignant and said she had no right to ask me such a direct political question, that it was unjustifiable. She apologized and melted away. Travers Jerome and his mother then rescued me and took me somewhere quickly to tea.
It is a curious thing how people without imagination can waylay one both on one’s way in and on one’s way out from lecturing, trying to fix some social engagement. On the way in one is absorbed by the thought of what one is going to say. On the way out one is too weary to exert one’s mind in such a direction.
Yet people are very kind. I don’t know if they love me or are interested in Russia. I should think neither.
Mr. Liveright, my publisher, fetched me and took me to the Ritz where we dined with Mr. Pulitzer, Mr. and Mrs. Swope, and Mr. B. M. Baruch. Mr. Pulitzer looks much too young to be the owner of The World and has the face of a well bred Englishman. Mr. Baruch (whose name I mistook for Brooke) has white hair, fine features and stands 6 ft. 4. I gathered from the general conversation that I was talking to someone whom I should have heard of, and as I could think of no distinguished Brooke but Rupert Brooke the poet, I asked if he was related. And then Mr. Baruch rather reprovingly spelt his name for me. Instantly by a faint glimmer of memory “Wall Street” came to my mind, and I seemed to have heard in London that he was a friend of Winston. He was interesting and unprejudiced. Most of these brilliant men are unprejudiced about Russia when one talks to them individually. It is the same in England.
They took me to the first night of the Midnight Frolic. This seemed to be in a theatre that never stops. It was with some difficulty disgorging the people who had just witnessed the evening performance and struggling to let in the people who were arriving for the midnight show. It was a strange place, a sort of dancing supper restaurant, where a stage rolled out and the artists walked about and danced and sang “familiar”-like among the people. I suppose it appeals awfully to the mankind. Such an arrangement would be a huge success in London. The actresses were pretty, well dressed, and show after show succeeded one another in rapid procession, leaving one bewildered and almost breathless. We stayed far into the night, but it was still going strong when we went away. I wonder if that is where the busy American business man goes when his day’s work is done. If so, he reminds me of Tchicherin’s proposed secretary, who “works during the day, so he is free at night …”
Thursday, February 10, 1921.
Lunched with Mr. and Mrs. Whigham. He is the editor of Town and Country and is a Scotchman. It was one of the nicest parties I’ve been to, absolutely after my own heart. I sat next to Jo Davidson, whom I’d wanted to meet, Mrs. Whitney was there, and McEvoy and Mr. Harrison Rhodes and Guardiabassé, the singer and painter. All were people who do things.
Mr. Davidson astonished me. I had expected someone very American, but he looks like a black-bearded Bolshevik, speaks French like a Frenchman, and speaks it preferably, and has lived for years in Moscow. He is just a typical international. He has a keen sense of humor, cosmopolitan manners, and the American quick grasp of things. I found myself talking to him as if we had known each other all our lives. He said laughingly that he had read my diary in the Times and had hated me from that moment. Hated me for having done this thing! He said of course he would have done it if the chance had come his way, but we agreed that it was a woman’s chance. Trotzky never would have been good with anyone but me! We think we’ll go back there together, hand in hand.
I went away with McEvoy, and on the way down in the lift he said, “What a nice party that was, quite like England!” I agreed, and the half suppressed giggle of the lift boy roused me to add for his benefit that we meant it as a compliment. I wonder if the lift