One winter night in 1918, Randolph Bourne meets a friend for dinner—a friend who is distressed by what she sees.
Bourne has always been a neat, fastidious dresser. His fellow Greenwich Villagers have grown used to seeing him in a hat pulled low and a long student cape. They don’t mask his deformed features, but they confer what this friend calls “an awkward sort of dignity.” But now Bourne looks worn—a little shabby, even. And he has grown terribly sad.
“The door was opening onto promise,” he tells her. Great advances in thought, in politics, in ways of communicating had been so close. Radio. Airplanes. “Now comes this irrelevance of war. The monster has slammed the door. It will be a thousand years before it opens again.”1
Bourne is in mourning. He has lost the ideal that he thought held great promise for the nation’s life—and for his own. A year earlier, his essay on trans-national America had won him an invitation to speak at Harvard: “I was introduced in the most cosmic terms; never have I ever conceived myself such an international figure,” he marveled at the time.2 But by going to war, America had surrendered its special ability to serve as a neutral meeting ground for different nationalities. It would be absurd to talk about America being “trans-national” while orchestras refused to play Beethoven, and German shopkeepers were being tarred and feathered.
Bourne is too much a realist to deny the painful truth. The road that might have led to the creation of a Beloved Community, where people would reach across their differences and work together to fulfill their individual potential, has been blocked. The phrase “trans-national America” drops out of his lexicon.
Bourne’s friend Beulah Amidon leaves dinner that night to resume her work securing political rights for women: She is one of Alice Paul’s most reliable lieutenants. Bourne wants to see them win their fight, but politics holds little interest for him now. The rapid expansion of the wartime government—all those bright boys dining at the House of Truth—has led to an unhealthy inflation of the political sphere. He thinks it has become a “cult.” Politics means compromise, and after watching his mentor John Dewey make peace with a grotesque war, Bourne has seen enough of compromise. He seeks a new ideal to replace the one he lost, a new star to steer by.
Since his college days, Bourne has worked out his philosophy one long essay at a time: “Youth,” “The Experimental Life,” “Trans-National America,” “Twilight of Idols.” Nobody wants to publish such essays now, not by a writer known to be so antagonistic to flag and country. He makes his living by reviewing books, mostly novels. Some of these still run in The New Republic, but most appear in The Dial, a general-interest magazine in Chicago. The would-be prophet has come a long way down.
But in these novels, he finds clues to what he has been seeking. In wartime, when everybody’s choices are compelled, and thought itself is conscripted, artists have a chance to remain free. Literature, he thinks, could incubate “an idealism which is not full of compromises, which is more concerned with American civilization than with American politics, which is more desirous for American life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than for a model constitution and a watertight political-democratic system.” He has good reason for putting his faith in novels as a source of ideals: his own youth. In the uptight world of Bloomfield, his reading of adventurous modern fiction prepared his mind for radical thought.
In spring, his prospects seem a little less forlorn. The Dial’s proprietor, Martyn Johnson, announces that the magazine will grow. A rich young man named Scofield Thayer admires Bourne’s writing, and the prospect of Bourne’s playing a larger role in the revamped publication leads him to invest $25,000. In the fall, the magazine will move to Greenwich Village, where it will find Randolph Bourne waiting for it.
Bourne knows that if he is to do the work he has set for himself, and help find the new creative ideals that will aid in the reconstruction, he needs to keep the war at a distance. He is blessed and cursed with an acute sensitivity to the world around him. He knows how the keys should feel under his fingers when playing Brahms. He knows, from seeing the heartening sights of Paris or Berlin or Basel, that civic beauty is not the accidental by-product of good planning, but its ultimate goal. He knows, from a lifetime of belittling experiences, what it means when somebody looks away from him an instant too soon—or, worse, stares an instant too long.
It’s not easy for such a person to stay sane in what he calls “a mad and half-destroyed world.” But it can be done. Bourne offers a mantra for the dreamer in a menacing world, a passage as consoling as anything he ever wrote:
Let us compel the war to break in on us, if it must, not go hospitably to meet it. Let us force it perceptibly to batter in our spiritual walls. This attitude need not be a fatuous hiding in the sand, denying realities. When we are broken in on, we can yield to the inexorable. Those who are conscripted will have been broken in on. If they do not want to be martyrs, they will have to be victims. They are entitled to whatever alleviations are possible in an inexorable world. But the others can certainly resist the attitude that blackens the whole conscious sky with war. They can resist the poison which makes art and all the desires for more impassioned living seem idle and even shameful. For many of us, resentment against the war has meant a vivider consciousness of what we are seeking in American life.3
In 1918, in a country losing its mind, even a literary critic who spends his days amid the sheltering streets of Greenwich Village is going to be broken in on.
In summer, she returns. The beautiful, mercurial, much-loved Esther Cornell drifts back into Bourne’s life as unexpectedly as she’d drifted out. With a few months until his new editorial duties begin—when “the gates of Martyn Johnson close about my soul,” as he puts it—they decide to take a trip.4 With their friend Agnes de Lima, they take a two-week walking tour up the coast to Massachusetts. Sometimes they ride trolleys; usually they stay in little inns along the coast.
This is when Bourne’s real trouble begins.
One evening, walking along the beach, Esther decides to demonstrate the “rhythmic dancing” that she has learned. She jumps onto some rocks and begins to sway.
“Don’t do that,” says Randolph. He can see a gunboat offshore. There has been a submarine scare recently. “They’ll think you’re signaling the enemy.”
Esther thinks this is funny. She keeps doing it.
The gunboat swings around. It begins tracking them.
The three of them flee back to their inn.
On Martha’s Vineyard, Randolph and Esther say goodbye to Agnes, who needs to return to New York. They are out for a walk when a man wearing a naval uniform confronts them. He demands to know their business.
Randolph flusters. He can’t say much. He is afraid of exposing Esther to opprobrium—a single woman, alone with a single man, very far from home.
Esther, keeping cool, explains they have come from New York on a trip.
“There were three of you when you arrived here,” the officer says.
“Yes,” says Esther. “My friend had to go back to her job.”
He wants to see Randolph’s notebook, the figures he has been scribbling. Randolph, meticulous as ever, has been tabulating their expenses. He hands it over.
“Would you be willing to have all documents in your possession examined?” he asks.
“Documents? What documents?”
“The mail you received this morning, for example,” he says. For they had received letters.
“Certainly,” says Esther, still staying calm, which means she is giving the performance of a lifetime.
When they leave the Vineyard the next morning, the officer is on their ferry. When they reach the mainland, he sits behind them on the train. When they reach South Station in Boston, he orders them to wait while he telephones for instructions. When he can’t locate his superiors, he refuses to let them leave.
This is excruciating. Randolph can’t bear the thought of prisons.5
Esther once again fills the breach. She invites the man to join them for lunch. Once seated at a counter, she turns on her very powerful charm, trying to disarm him.
“Tell me how come you are able to get two girls to walk with you,” the officer says to Bourne. “I can’t even get one!”
He lets them go.
They return to New York deeply shaken, but the news there is even more unnerving. While Bourne was away, government officials had come to the offices of The New Republic, asking about him.6
To the paranoid mind—and wartime hysteria has taught radicals the value of paranoia, knowing you are being followed, wondering if someone at the next table is listening—certain incidents in Bourne’s life begin to suggest a pattern. A few months earlier, he had gone to visit his friend Van Wyck Brooks, and a trunk full of his letters had gone missing. Has it been taken by government officials, maybe the same ones who asked about him at The New Republic? Why was that naval officer so interested in him? Is his name on a list somewhere?7
A few years earlier, Bourne had roused his contemporaries with the limitless possibilities of the modern world. Now he refers to “this ever-frightening military-industrial era.” It gets more frightening all the time.8
Bourne must feel a sense of déjà vu. Four years after climbing the steps to the handsome townhouse of The New Republic for the first time, he does the same at the new offices of The Dial. They are only eight blocks apart.
Martyn Johnson is well aware of how crowded the magazine field has grown. To improve the odds for his revamped publication, he recruits high-profile contributors, stars that will bring instant cachet. And who could bring more cachet than the country’s foremost philosopher, John Dewey?
Johnson approaches Dewey and finds him agreeable—with one exception. Being a business-minded publisher, a practical sort of man, Johnson dispatches the problem quickly enough. He does what Dewey asks.
Johnson summons Bourne and informs him that The Dial won’t need his editorial services after all.
Scofield Thayer is furious. He reminds Johnson that his investment in the magazine had been contingent on Bourne playing a major role. His fury may be the only thing that keeps Bourne involved in even a writing capacity.
Bourne writes his mother a letter. He assures her that though he has been relieved of his editorial duties, he is still to receive a salary. “I prefer it this way as it leaves me much freer.”9
That is hard to believe. There may be a truer record of his feelings in an essay he wrote around this time, one that suggests that as much as he struggled to stay “below the battle,” the war had broken him: The last trace of RANDOLPH BOURNE, the bold young idealistic hero of the Youth and Life essays, might be gone.
In “Old Tyrannies,” he disavows virtually everything he once proclaimed. He now argues that trying to change society is foolish, considering people can’t control their own base impulses: fear, anger, hate, love. Individuals have no agency in society, because society controls them at every turn. The men and women who try to live as individuals anyway end up jailed or killed.
Why this pretense of individuality in the first place?
“We all enter as individuals into an organized herd-whole in which we are as significant as a drop of water in the ocean, and against which we can about as much prevail,” he writes. “Whether we shall act in the interests of ourselves or of society is, therefore, an entirely academic question.”10
Tacitly rejecting the optimism of William James (he has been reading a lot of Nietzsche), he argues that no one changes anything in this world. By the time a young person marshals his or her “puny strength” to make a so-called difference, it’s too late. “You are now a part of that very flaming rampart against which new youth advances….So you have never overtaken the given. Actually you have fallen farther and farther behind.”
“You have not affected the world you live in; you have been molded and shaped by it yourself.”
“While you thought you were making headway, you were really being devoured.”
On and on it goes, angry and despairing.
Friends note that Bourne seems bitter in the fall of 1918.11 If he is still playing the piano, none of them mention it.