First Papers (35 page)

“You don’t mean it? Capablanca?”

The old man said to a passing waiter, “He doesn’t believe that a world champion like Capablanca gives Ivarin only pawn and move.”

The waiter snorted. “Lasker, too,” he said, casting an appraising glance down at the nearly emptied board, holding his tray aloft above the violinist’s head.

Suddenly Ivarin sat back in his chair. He lifted his glass and tossed off the cold final inch of tea from it. Lemon pits slipped into his mouth and unceremoniously he popped them back into the glass.

Absentee preface indeed. He would not wait around one more day for them to send it; he would travel
to
the preface. He would go uptown himself in the morning, directly to Berkman or Emma Goldman or Johann Most in their Mother Earth Publishing offices, and read the preface there. Prolixity was not a characteristic of Jack London, and his much heralded preface surely could be read through in a measurable time.

Measurable time, Stefan Ivarin thought, is precisely what is at my command to finish off this business. He felt better than he had all evening. What had been needed all along, to borrow their lingo, was a little Direct Action.

“Check,” his opponent said.

He looked back at the chessboard. Feifel had said “check” in a mild voice. Too mild. A disagreeable sensation rose inside Ivarin; he was not what was called “a good loser,” and doubted that anybody else was. He examined the new positions, waiting only long enough to be sure. “Check?” he said. “I beg to differ. It’s checkmate.”

“No, no,” the spectator in the black skullcap protested. “You have many moves, Mr. Ivarin, to get out of check.”

“Useless moves, all of them,” Ivarin said, and laid his king on its’ side to signal “I resign.” Again he felt better. Reality was good, always. Waiting tactics, futile moves to stave off the inevitable—pah. That was for children.

The thick letter alarmed Alexandra. She had grown increasingly worried about Joan’s condition in these final days of waiting for the new baby, and calling Eli and Joan for news only convinced her that they were hiding something, “not to upset her.” Yesterday she had called Stefan to ask the truth. He had been busy and brusque. He had heard nothing. She should know that all confinements need not go as quickly and smoothly as Joan’s first one.

She had hung up resentfully. Premature labor pains had sent Joan to the hospital twice already; twice she had been sent home the following day and told not to worry; but compared with the simple time she had had with Webby, it was inevitable that such a difference should worry them all.

Now Alexandra took the heavy letter from the postman and said, “I hope everything is all right.”

“Don’t you worry,” the postman said. “It’s a nice big love-letter from your husband.”

She ignored his witticism. It was of course from Stefan; his angular handwriting on the envelope was unmistakable even upside down. But his letters were never more than single pages, usually to ask some question about a bill that he was sure was an error since it was too large.

This heavy a letter was not about bills. In a flash she visualized it filled with words of pain and grief, descriptions of disaster and ambulances—

She ripped the envelope open and at Stiva’s opening salutation, her worries departed.

ASSASSINATE A PREFACE?

He had printed it like a headline but right underneath it, he reverted to ordinary letter style.

Dear Alexandra,

It is too good to be true! I have chortled—

She closed her eyes in relief and thought, Thank goodness it’s not about Eli. Immediately she corrected this to “not about Joan,” thoroughly ashamed of herself, and returned to the letter. She was still standing beside the mailbox at the rear of their tent, and the wind whipping at the sheaf of pages in her hand made a pleasing chitter-chatter. She decided to stay outside in the sun and enjoy Stiva’s chortling together with the heart-lifting August day.

Dear Alexandra,

It is too good to be true! I have chortled for three days now, and if that barbarian tent where you immure yourself had a telephone as per solemn promise each year, I would have called you when I finally untangled the brave shenanigans of our friends, Berkman, Goldman, Johann—that special group of screamers about the Free Speech they are denied in America.

They have denied a bit of Free Speech themselves. To Jack London no less! Because he dared to say—but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. You’ll discover his crime in the enclosed.

The comedy is too great for me to write in a letter—if you were at home, we could enjoy it properly over a good glass of tea. But I want you to know of it and relish it even off there in Thoreau’s palace, so I am sending you my editorial, which will run the same day as my review of Berkman’s book. I may put the editorial on Page One.

So here it is;
do not lose it;
I did not wait to have a copy made at the office, because then Sunday would interfere and you could not see it until next week.

Please return it as soon as you have read it. Don’t forget to put your return address on it. Even though I know most of it by heart, it would be a nuisance to lose it. And do not read it aloud even to one of those hordes you describe as my admirers out there by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea.

Alexandra smiled. He would never realize how much he had revealed to her in this impatience to have her read his editorial, in this willingness to send it without having a copy made, he who would raise the roof looking for a misplaced page of anything he had written.

Difficult, unreasonable, hurtful, moody—but he was the most glorious husband and friend and comrade and sharer of her life.

She read his letter once more, but deliberately put off the editorial itself, the longer to savor its promise of pleasure. She went around to the front of the tent and settled comfortably into one of the brightly striped canvas camp chairs that were a new luxury for their summer life this year.

It was a gleaming day, cooler than it had been, with the air promising September and then October. Her spirits sparkled like the points of mica that seemed to be strewn all over the white sand, and her heart rose and leaped like the blue box kite some boys were flying at the edge of the surf.

For a moment she watched the kite, smiling at it, and then she could wait no longer before turning to Stefan’s piece.

ASSASSINATE A PREFACE?

Alexander Berkman, author of
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist,
denouncer of all American publishers as crass suppressors of freedom for writers whose ideas run counter to theirs, has just indulged in a little crass suppression of his own.

He has suppressed the work of a great writer, work done at Berkman’s invitation, at his urgent and repeated request, a preface for his book.

The great man is Jack London, whose work is known and welcomed on the printing presses of the world.

Nearly a year ago, this editorial page contained a piece that raised a large question. It was called, “Assassinate a Book?”

“To assassinate a book,” that piece said, if it is pardonable to quote from it, “we need only refuse it print … In a free country, all writing and speaking and thinking must remain free, even that which we detest, despise or fear.”

It was for that principle, and standing on that platform, that this newspaper then campaigned for contributions from its readers to get Berkman’s book privately printed.

The campaign succeeded, as did other efforts of people elsewhere, many of whom had other motives. The book escaped the death of suppression; it appears today; it is today reviewed by a member of the staff of this paper who, it appears, does detest and despise it, though “fear” is as yet not evident to the human eye.

Not evident either is Jack London’s preface.

For the author of this rescued book, living by the nasty code of extremists everywhere, is quite willing to assassinate the writings of others. The preface in his book is
not
the long and thoughtful piece written by Jack London. It is by one Hutchins Hapgood, whose wisdom surely rests on something other than his willingness to substitute his talents for Jack London’s.

Bombed, destroyed, assassinated: one preface.

Killed because in it, the illustrious Jack London used his inalienable American right of free speech for his own beliefs as well as Berkman’s. He upheld Berkman’s right to speak, to write and to publish, but he did not uphold Berkman’s anarchism. And he explained why not, inevitably expounding his own moderate principles as a socialist while doing so.

Which obviously, by official ukase, put him beyond the pale.

Free Speech yes.

Free Speech always.

Free Speech, however, says Alexander Berkman by this singular piece of hypocrisy and hilarity, “only for me.”

To assassinate a preface, we have only to refuse it print.

Alexandra said aloud, “It’s simply wonderful,” and looked around for the girls. She could translate bits of it for them, tell them enough about it to make them see how splendid it was, how forthright and uncompromising, yet how ironic. Lethal but funny.

Berkman would be the laughingstock of every real believer in freedom. It would be a delicious jest that would be talked of far beyond the readership of the
Jewish News.
Sooner or later all of Stefan’s best things became the talk of the socialist and labor movement, wherever Yiddish or Russian was read and spoken, and since Evan’s list of papers for the vigilante series, the name of Stefan Ivarin was known far beyond those linguistic limits. This editorial on killing Jack London’s words would be a sensation anywhere it appeared and surely Evan’s Free Speech League would want it in every paper on their special list.

It was lovely to feel so much a part of a future success, and Alexandra read his pages again, more slowly this time, pausing over each phrase Stiva had scratched out, comparing it with the one he had written in its place, testing each in her mind to see if his choice was always right. Invariably it was.

Again she looked up and down the beach. The girls were nowhere in sight. It was annoying to be so full of pride in their father’s latest work and be unable to tell them about it. He had made a big point about not reading it to a soul, but surely that prohibition didn’t extend to his own children.

She put the folded pages into the envelope, counting them first to be certain they were all there, as he always counted his chess pieces before putting them away in their box. Then she started toward the curling edge of the sea. She would enjoy a walk anyway, and when she spotted the girls she would say not a word about the editorial if they were with friends. She curved the bulky letter into the circle of her hand and it felt like a chunky white club. Just like the what-you-call-it, she thought, in those relay races in ancient Greece. Cheerfully she swung the cylinder of the letter against her thigh as she walked. Baton, she remembered. Like a conductor’s at a concert. Like music to move one’s soul.

Except for these last days of worry about Joan, it was being a lovely summer once more, with Fran at sixteen an absolute belle, imperiously snubbing nearly all the boys who were ready to worship and dance attendance on her day and night. And little Fee, suddenly twelve, was losing some of her tomboy wildness and maturing in subtle ways, though the poor child still went purple with jealousy whenever one of her contemporaries confided to her about the start of menstruation. Despite her sympathy for Fee’s despair, Alexandra had to laugh at the boastful girls, every one pretending it was so awful, such pain, and every one ruthlessly lording it over Fee or any other girl who had not yet arrived at the moment of womanhood.

Apart from the children and her own extraordinary peacefulness at the sea, happy with her swimming, her dancing, with the feeling of wet hair on her neck and salt drying on her body, happy each day as a child is happy, for no good reason—

Aside from all this, there was again this summer, as if it had been lying dormant under the winter waiting for her, the same unparalleled discovery that the beach women came to her for guidance, about how to become American women instead of remaining immigrant women from the steerage of a hundred ships coming from a hundred cities and villages in Europe.

Again their turning to her was an experience like wine, like the moment of love, like the discovery of music. Anna Godleberg was still her star pupil, her devoted propagandist, indeed her circus barker advertising to one and all the thrills and delights awaiting them inside Mrs. Ivarin’s tent.

It was easy to smile at Anna Godleberg but just as easy to cry over her. Longfellow’s poem, whose opening line was all anybody seemed to know, always came to her mind, somewhat embarrassingly, whenever she had a pupil like Anna Godleberg, so eager to learn, to change, to grow.

And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days;

Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,

And over it softly her warm ear lays;

Whether we look, or whether we listen,

We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;

Every clod feels a stir of might,

An instinct within it that reaches and towers,

And, groping blindly above it for light,

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; …

Anna Godleberg with her Morris and Louis and baby Reba would never stop groping now, and to be the one who had helped that groping, fostered it, made it less blind—there was a sweetness in that which must be kin to the sweetness of prayer.

This year twelve women came on “Mrs. Ivarin’s evenings,” and only two were repeaters from the summer before. Since rentals were usually short-term affairs “until the money was gone,” the group constantly shifted and changed and remained fluid, yet there was an astonishing consistency about the women in each new group.

“You must write a book, Mrs. Ivarin,” one of them would always say.

“You should give lectures in a big hall, Mrs. Ivarin—every mother would come to hear you.”