The sensible, self-preserving thing to do when the war breaks out is to run away from it, as Bourne and Lippmann do. John Reed, being neither sensible nor self-preserving, runs toward it.
He reaches Paris in September. Twenty miles away, a million French and British troops are making a desperate final stand, trying to stop the German army that has already ravaged Belgium from marching down the Champs-Élysées. His love of action, his brain full of Boy’s Own adventure stories, make him frantic to reach the front lines. Also it’s his job.
Metropolitan magazine has sent him to Europe as a war correspondent, a profession that Reed has rapidly ascended. The previous fall, he had pushed his way into the middle of the Mexican Revolution. He had ingratiated himself with the rebels who followed Pancho Villa—“the Mexican Robin Hood,” Reed called him—even though those peasants had no reason to tolerate a Yankee, let alone befriend one. He had danced with them, drunk with them, sung under the stars with them; he rode into battle by their sides. The stories of their exploits were sensational enough to make Reed famous: A typewriter company began to feature him in its ads.1
But in Paris, none of his Mexico tricks work. He can’t get near the battlefield through any official method or even any unofficial method. Desperate for a story, Reed finally sneaks into the war zone. It had worked when he waded across the Rio Grande. This time, the authorities catch him, arrest him, and, as a condition of his release, make him promise to never do it again.
How do you write about a war you can’t see?
He is stuck in Paris, which he calls “the city of the dead.” Flags hang limp and streets are empty, except for tiny flocks of children wearing black armbands. He writes an article that he knows is no good, and asks his editor not to publish it.2 Jack is blocked, stymied, stewing. He starts drinking and doesn’t stop. He is joined on his debauch by a ragtag bunch of friends: the sculptor Arthur Lee and his German wife, Freddy; the painter Andrew Dasburg; other reporters. They reconstitute a gruesome version of Greenwich Village’s bohemian swirl.
Reed sees battles, but they’re bar fights. He witnesses damage, but it’s the kind he inflicts on himself.
The Allies win the Battle of the Marne. They dig their trenches deeper. Everybody seems to be sinking into the mire.
In New York, Mabel Dodge is stewing, too. She knows that Reed’s trouble runs deeper than writer’s block or lack of a press pass. She doesn’t like it, and she determines to fix it. A year after the torrid start of their romance, she remains besotted with him, in a complicated way. (She was unhappy when Reed dedicated his Mexico book to his mother: “I, myself, obscurely, wanted to be his mother.”)3
From her all-white apartment on Fifth Avenue, she peppers him with one transatlantic letter after another, trying to prop him up, to keep him from settling for merely commercial success, to boost his spirits the way she had during the frantic weeks before the Paterson Strike Pageant.
Sensing that her message isn’t having the desired effect, she calls in reinforcements. Unfortunately, as the war in Europe is even then demonstrating, sometimes alliances make a problem worse.
She asks Walter Lippmann for help in her usual way: imperiously.
“Now can you write him a letter and tell him he’s not to go on being mediocre? He would feel it deeply from you.
“Drive it home.”4
She knows how much it meant to Reed when Lippmann praised his Mexico stories. (“It’s kind of embarrassing to tell a fellow you know that he’s a genius. I want to hug you, Jack,” Lippmann had written. “Incidentally, of course, the stories are literature, but I didn’t realize that till afterwards. They were so much alive with Mexico and with you.”)5 But Lippmann has become a very busy man since then. He is trying to launch a magazine. He has little time for pep talks.
He tries to calm Dodge down.
“You are, I think, unnecessarily worried about Jack,” he writes to her on New Republic stationery. “He is merely feeling the same helplessness that every imaginative person must feel. This war makes us all ridiculously inadequate…and a little humility is the beginning of wisdom.”6
Lippmann may be full of book knowledge, but he has only a sliver of Dodge’s ability to read people. She is right to be alarmed about Reed. Adrift in Paris, he begins to self-destruct.
Soon Reed needs help, too. Guess where he turns to find it.
“My dear Walter,” Reed writes to Lippmann. “Without any preamble whatever, I must tell you that Freddy Lee and I have fallen in love with each other, and that we know that we must have each other for good.”
This brief burst of bizarre news (for Freddy is married to their friend Arthur—all of them are friends) is followed by a barrage of demands pushier than Mabel’s: to comfort the heartbroken Mabel; to reassure Freddy, who is being treated badly by her husband; to intercede with his editor, so that he can have a month off to nurse Freddy through an illness; and to let the magazine know that he would be drawing on them for money but would pay it back when he could.7
Walter has no time for this. But Mabel isn’t done with him, either. She copies him on telegrams to Jack; shares samples of her heartsick, terrible poetry; forwards Reed’s letters for him to scrutinize.8
“You must see in it that either Reed and I are both wrong or both right or one is wrong and the other right,” she asks of one such letter. “Which is it anyway?”9
Lippmann has had enough.
“I have been very much embarrassed by the number of letters and messages you’ve sent me,” he writes to her. “They’ve come at the rate of more than two a day, plus telephones, automobiles, and messengers. I can’t respond to all that, and you’ll have to understand me that I mean to be good friends with you, but that all this is too much for me. It is not pleasant to write this to you.”10
Lippmann has plenty of affection for both of his friends, but the frivolity of Greenwich Village, and the people who play there, seem more and more ridiculous to him, more remote from his life. He has responsibilities; he has work to do; there is a war on. Like Prince Hal, he is ready to turn his back on Falstaff and all his pranks, and turn his gaze to the palace.
Perhaps his efficient brain, so averse to waste, makes a logical connection. If he is supposed to be working for the magazine but is instead mired in Reed’s messy life, then Reed’s messy life should be pressed into service for the magazine.
A few days after his pointed letter to Dodge, Lippmann writes an even more pointed profile of his friend. He calls it “Legendary John Reed.”
Lippmann’s tale begins at Harvard, with Reed’s career as a football cheerleader. It was a “sensational triumph,” Lippmann calls it, in a tone that’s not quite praise. He surveys some of Reed’s later adventures, including his various incarcerations, then addresses himself to Jack’s naïve, shabby politics:
For a few weeks Reed tried to take the Masses’ view of life….He made an effort to believe that the working class is not composed of miners, plumbers, and working men generally, but is a fine, statuesque giant who stands on a high hill facing the sun. He wrote stories about the night court and plays about ladies in kimonos. He talked with intelligent tolerance about dynamite, and thought he saw an intimate connection between the cubists and the I.W.W. He even read a few pages of Bergson.
Lippmann offers a sincere tribute to Jack’s writing from Mexico: “All his second-rate theory and propaganda seemed to fall away, and the public discovered that whatever John Reed could touch or see or smell he could convey.” But he is only setting his friend up for another blow: “He did not judge, he identified himself with the struggle, and gradually what he saw mingled with what he hoped. Wherever his sympathies marched with the facts, Reed was superb.”
Then he really pours it on:
By temperament he is not a professional writer or reporter. He is a person who enjoys himself. Revolution, literature, poetry, they are only things which hold him at times, incidents merely of his living. Now and then he finds adventure by imagining it, oftener he transforms his own experience. He is one of those people who treat as serious possibilities such stock fantasies as shipping before the mast, rescuing women, hunting lions, or trying to fly around the world in an aeroplane. He is the only fellow I know who gets himself pursued by men with revolvers, who is always once more just about to ruin himself.
I can’t think of a form of disaster which John Reed hasn’t tried and enjoyed. He has half-spilled himself into commercialism, had his head turned by flattery, tried to act like a cynical war correspondent, posed as a figure out of Ibsen. But always thus far the laughter in him has turned the scale, his sheer exuberance has carried him to better loves.
There’s affection in those paragraphs—in Lippmann’s finale, too: “In common with a whole regiment of his friends I have been brooding over his soul for years, and often I feel like saying to him what one of them said when Reed was explaining Utopia, ‘If I were establishing it, I’d hang you first, my dear Jack.’ But it would be a lonely Utopia.”11
Still, “Legendary John Reed” remains a mystifying story to write, let alone to publish, about a friend in such distress.
Lippmann knows Reed well enough to describe him vividly: This article is one of the handful of definitive accounts of his personality. But there’s one crucial thing about Reed that Lippmann doesn’t understand. Even Reed doesn’t understand it in 1914. He will need more time, more maturity, and more sobriety to grasp why he failed in the face of the war.
Eventually Jack will realize that all the stories he had covered so brilliantly before reaching Paris—labor battles in places such as Paterson and Ludlow, the Mexican peons fighting for their rights—had the same essential subjects: “drama, change, democracy on the march made visible—a war of the people.”12 But the European war offers none of these things: no ideals, no spontaneity, no clear right and wrong. Both sides, he thinks, are engaged in nothing nobler than the “ruin of the spirit as well as of the body, the real and only death.”13
Though Lippmann mocks Reed for his lack of commitment, the opposite is closer to the truth. Lippmann is the one who has proven so deft at easing away from his socialism, closing the door on his bohemian playmates, and embracing the progressivism of Herbert Croly and Teddy Roosevelt.
“I don’t love any idea sufficiently to worry ten minutes if someone compelled me to abandon it,” he tells Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., one of his more conspicuous admirers.14
Reed, not Lippmann, is the one who will confess, in an unpublished exercise in self-reflection, “The War has been a terrible shatterer of faith in economic and political idealism.”15
In spite of all his struggles that fall, Reed manages to tell a superb story. He doesn’t write it—he lives it. It’s about the confusion, sorrow, and despair that this new kind of war inflicts on any idealist who gets near it. Nobody, not even his closest friends, gets the message.