ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Miss Agnes de Lima, at whose suggestion this book was
undertaken, and without whose encouragement and advice it would
never have been completed, I am unable adequately to express my
indebtedness. To Miss Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Mrs. W.P. Douglas
(Prudence Winterrowd), Mrs. B. Macmahon, Professor Arthur Macmahon,
Mr. Karl Robinson, and Mr. Edward Murray I am beholden for their
generosity in risking original letters across the ocean, and for
allowing me to quote freely from them. Mrs. Laurence Fenninger
(Randolph Bourne's elder sister) also entrusted to me copies of
an early diary of his with his letters to his mother.

Professor Macmahon, Mr. Read Lewis, Mr. Carl Zigrosser, and
Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana have all given me
valuable assistance, and Dr. Louis Filler placed at my disposal
copies of much of the material he gathered in his own wide researches.

That there are still young people in the colleges who honour
the name of Randolph Bourne has been one of my happiest discoveries,
and I have had the opportunity of reading a thesis by a young
graduate of Princeton University, Vincent Lyons Broderick, that
bears testimony to how much his essential message retains its
relevancy for the youth of to-day.

Dr. Filler's biography of Randolph Bourne I have found of
the greatest assistance. That our objectives have been somewhat
different will result, I hope, in our books proving complementary,
one to the other. Dr. Filler, as an authority on the social sciences,
has sought to "place" Bourne in relation to his age, whereas I
seek rather to make him live again as his friends knew him, and

2

to evoke, in some small measure, the tone of those vanished
hours. For the most part I have let him speak for himself
through his letters.

I have derived *social* profit from essays on Randolph
Bourne contained in Alfred Kazin's *On Native Grounds* (Cape, 1943);
Max Lerner's *Randolph Bourne and Two Generations* (Vol. V - VI
*Twice a Year*); *Do These Bones Live* by Edward Dahlberg (Harcourt,
Brace, 1941); The New America by Lillian Symes and Travers Cle-
ment (Harpers, 1934); *Homecoming* by Floyd Dell (Farrar & Rinehart,
1933); *Literature since 1890* by Carl and Mark Van Doren -- Dr
Carl Van Doren was one of the first critics to recognize the
promise in Randolph Bourne's writing when he was an undergrad-
uate student at Columbia; *Critics and Crusaders by Charles A.
Madison* (Holt, 1949) an invaluable essay to the student of Bourne;
The Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (Macmillan 1930) an article
on R.B. by Van Wyck Brooks; *Port of New York* by Paul Rosenfeld
(Harcourt Brace, 1924); Van Wyck Brook's essay on Randolph
Bourne conveys eloquently what he meant to his friends and his
own generation. The bibliography in Vincent Frederick's thesis
on Randolph Bourne I have found of the utmost aid.
*This image does not contain any text. It is a drawing of a book.*
*the author is unknown and some parts may be confidential.*
*This image does not contain any text. It is a drawing of a book.*
*the author is unknown and some parts may be confidential.*
*This image does not contain any text. It is a drawing of a book.*
*the author is unknown and some parts may be confidential.*

To the *New Republic*, Mr. B.W. Huebsch, the *Atlantic Monthly*,
and Houghton, Mifflin & Co., I tender my thanks for having
kindly allowed me to quote freely from publications of theirs.

## INTRODUCTION

The name of Randolph Bourne is fast becoming a legendary one. Of his contemporaries -- he lived up to the end of the first world war -- the ranks are rapidly thinning out, and although there has been a revival of interest in him recently, especially among young people in the universities, he has hardly been afforded the finalxxix niche in American literary and social history that his remarkable gifts would seem to warrant. The multi-fariousness of his interests, his belief in permanent literary values, his striking graces of style, the daring originality of his ideas, and a prophetic fervour, which he combined with an extraordinary force, precision, and clarity of thought separate him from most of the writers of his day. His prophecies have proved amazingly acute and his wit has not lost its edge.

It would be my present desire to life Randolph Bourne's reputation out of factions and categories where it has been for too long buried, and to place him with those rare spirits of all time who have fortified and emboldened the hearts of others in their moments of uncertainty. The ideals of one generation are the disillusionments of the following one, the age of Progress is, in its turn, the Renaissance of Fatalism -- everything has its date. There is an attitude of mind, however, that holds its own against every backthrust of destiny. Randolph Bourne was only thirty-two when he died, and although he had seen all that he had fought for with so intransigent a fervour swept away in brutish war, he retained to the end his lucid intellect and his noble vision.

Fantastically differing impressions of him have been published.

2

One refers to his small, pinched face, another to his massive countenance; one to his hardly audible voice, another to his raucous laugh. Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, whose first encounter with him was in a fashionable New York club, received a "violent shock", whereas Dr. Alvin Johnson found him at once "charming".

My own acquaintance with Randolph Bourne grew out of my having read an essay of his on friendship in the *Atlantic Monthly*. Like so many young people living in provincial towns, I had been driven in on my own intensities and had come gradually to make of my jealous-ly guarded solitude an end in itself. "A man with few friends is only half developed", this essay proclaimed. "There are whole sides of his nature which are locked up and have never been expressed. He cannot unlock them himself, he cannot even discover them; friends alone can stimulate him and open them. Such a man is in prison; his soul is in penal servitude". It was the words "penal servitude" that settled like a dart in my most tender sensibilities. As if this were not enough, the essay went on to disparage the friend-ships of women in contrast to those of men. I determined to write Randolph Bourne a letter defending both solitude and the friendships of women. I can recall the feeling of excitement, mingled with misgiving, with which, all surreptitiously, I dropped my letter into the box. I had never written to a stranger before and it seemed a daring and dubious act.

Days passed and I was on the point of joining a woman suffrage campaign in my home state of Connecticut when I received his reply: "I should like to hear more about your ideas of people. I am interested in nothing else, and all my studies are valueless except as they throw light on people's souls and personalities. I want

3

to know more about these moods, about people's attractions for each other, about a hundred things that come up in friendship and arouse curiosity. You, I feel, could tell me much if you would. I wish that you might."

We arranged a meeting in the rooms of my magnanimous friend Henrietta Rodman, famous for her hospitality and for her championship of gay, subversive causes. I can recall my first sight of him and the shock that it caused me -- his large head from which one ear obtruded strangely, his small, humped figure -- I had been unprepared to find him a hunchback. Together we went to the old Liberal Club on MacDougal Street. I remember the quizzical amusement with which he gazed round at the odd assortment of people gathered there, ostensibly to hear him speak.

I had to hurry off to catch my train, but all through my three hour's journey back to my headquarters in Hartford I was building up out of the ruins a new relationship, untinged with romantic imaginings, telling myself how miraculous it was to have made such a friend, for I had no doubt we were destined to be friends.

It would be impossible to convey what his letters came little by little to mean to me. They were like a golden key that could open a door to another life. They were my assurance of the world of imagination and intellect. Amidst the noise and agitation of my frenzied days, the shuffling crowds, the vast factory populations that came jostling and blinking out of their evil cages into the dazzling noon hour, when my "message" seemed so

4

often to lose its fervour and efficacy, the mere sight of
his hand writing -- and I am passionately susceptible to hand
writing -- could revive my wilting spirits.

Our friendship lasted up to that date when, in the winter
of 1918, I received over the telephone the news of his death,
and with this death a whole little society, dependent upon
him for its main inspiration, became gradually dispersed.

Chapter I
Your Deafening Paroxysm

"Childhood is incorrigibly poetical", Randolph Bourne wrote in an early essay, "and youth is vulnerable at all points." How much more was this the case for a boy singled out from all others by some sad freak of fate. During his fourth year he had developed tuberculosis of the spine which had resulted in his becoming a hunchback. To add to this most cruel handicap, the doctor who had brought him into the world had bungled the birth, with the result that one of his ears was conspicuously malformed. "Queer" was the word that attached itself to him, "queer" outwardly and "queer" inwardly.

He was born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, on May 30, 1886. To a young correspondent, when he was a student at Columbia University, he wrote: "If you see the *Atlantic Monthly* for this month you will find a very bumptious analysis of the town where I was born and "raised" . . . I owe most of my poetical, social, and psychological education to that town. The only things I find to write about in essays are sort of generalized autobiographical data of my youthful life there. Its church, its social classes, prejudices, conservatism, moral codes, personalities --- all furnish the background against which I throw all my experience, and in terms of which I still see life and suppose I always shall. If you want to do something of permanent value, you will sit down one day and write up the kind of world that you were brought up to believe in, the moral and social codes, and in general, the social philosophy your circle and family believed in."

Bloomfield, then numbering about seven thousand inhabitants, was typical of the American small town of that time. The factory workers, most of them illiterate immigrants knowing little or no

2

English, inhabited squalid hovels on unpaved streets amidst filth and ashes, while the reigning hereditary class, descendants of early settlers, and owners of most of the land, were luxuriously housed. They were the arbiters of the town's improvement, as well as of its standard of morality. Between these two peaks of subservience and privilege was the numerous middle class, the indispensable bulwark of all bourgeois societies.

Randolph Bourne's ancestors had, for the most part, belonged to the professional classes. On his mother's side he was descended from lawyers and on his father's from preachers. His father's father -- "a white-haired, white-bearded old man, very solemn"-- had been pastor of the church of Sleepy Hollow, made famous by Washington Irving. Randolph grew up in "a tall white house" owned by his grandmother, where, at the age of six, he had been taken with his baby brother and sisters. This new home, with its flowers and its trees, its fruit orchard and smooth green lawn, its delicious scents and hidden corners to be explored, was a delightful change from the back street where he had been born and had passed his first childish years.

With his sister Natalie, two years his junior, he was sent by their mother to a small private school. This sister was always fiercely protective of him and was enraged when the children mocked him for his crooked back and peculiar ear, and would mock them in turn.

Randolph had learned to read by himself, and Natalie has conserved a scrap of paper with some of the long words and names he had spelled out when he was little more than four years old. At school he aroused the jealousy of his companions by the ease with which he conquered his lessons, with almost as little effort,

3

apparently, as a fish swims, or a swallow flies. He was both "docile and bright."

Because of his inventiveness in thinking up games he was a leader among the children, who used to flock to his home where there was space to run about on the wide lawn. He skated, bicycled, climbed trees, and played tennis, though we know from his essay on the philosophy of handicap the strain he was all the time under.

During his most impressionable years it was his grandmother who exerted upon him the strongest influence. This old lady, who raised a large family and lived to the age of seventy-nine, retained to the end of her days her deep serenity and her lively mind. Both Randolph and Natalie adored her, and he loved nothing better than to steal unnoticed to her room, where he was sure of finding new and thrilling excitements, combined with a delicious sense of security. Of medium height, with an ample figure, shining black hair parted in the middle and brushed smoothly to form a puff over each ear, light merry eyes, generous lips, and a gentle voice -- "wise and jolly and good" -- she created about him an atmosphere in which his intelligence could expand and his affections find a confident outlet.

Next to his grandmother it was to his Aunt Fan, his mother's sister, that he owed most, for it was she who took him to concerts and recitals and inspired in him a love for the works of the great composers which was to prove to him so lasting a solace, and to his friends so inestimable a delight. This aunt died in Saranac when Randolph was in his eighteenth year, a serious loss to him, for there had been a deep attachment between them.

When he was a student at the Bloomfield High School, Ran-

4

dolph began to keep a journal, and a few selections may help to
reveal some of his interests at that time:

## New Year's Resolutions

To be systematic in practising and studying.

To learn one Bible verse each day and read a few.

To be more cordial.

Jan. 8, 1901. Mr. Loos wants me to sit clear up in German period.
Of all things I hate the worst it is sitting in front
of the room. I like to see what goes on in front of me.
I asked why, and he said the best reason was because he
wanted me to. No love is wasted between us.

I practised 45 min. Mrs. G. has given me some chords
to play arpeggiolly; with three touches, f., staccato,
and pp.

Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1901. . . . I really must be a little more
honest in my conscience. I'm afraid I'm not. Yester-
day when Miss Draper asked all those who knew they could
not recite a theorem and three corollaries correctly
to raise their hands, I did not and it was lucky I was
not called on to recite for this morning I found I did
not know them at all. I hope I made up for it when I
told her about it.

Wednesday, Jan. 16, 1901. . . . Babies are cute. I saw Mrs.
Hinkle's this afternoon. . . Her head is the size of
a small rose bowl and her eyes are like little marbles,
and I don't think I've ever seen such a pretty baby.

Wednesday, Feb. 5, 1901. I am beginning to learn David Webster's speech, "Liberty and Union" to speak at school. It is very eloquent and the nicest combination of words I have ever seen.

Wednesday, Feb. 13, 1901. I sent off my valentines for to-morrow, my finest to Grace Wade, a little card in the shape of an apple blossom; with the inscription: "To my sweet-heart". Also four uncancelled Domenican Republic stamps which I think she will like. Next to Vanessa Furman, in Clifton, who, I think, is a very nice girl . . . I sent one to Edna Jones for friendship and one to Peggy for the same reason. Two for love and two for friendship.

Saturday, Feb. 16, 1901. I got some more books from Houghton;
Fisher's "War of Independence", Lowell's poems, etc.
It is very good that I have discovered this cheap
series, for now I can get the really good books and own
them, with the money just that I earn from the milk
and the club-books. It will mean a great deal to me
I think.

5

Monday, March 25, 1901. The "musurgia" of New York gave the last Guild entertainment. There were sixty men and they had to have their supper ☞ out here. Mamma was on the refreshment committee. . . I don't think there is anything more grand and wonderful than a large chorus of men's voices singing in unison a stately hymn. They sang a Dutch hymn like this. O, it was sublime . . .

Friday, March 29, 1901. I went in at 4:45 to see Lohengrin in the evening . . . We had front seats in the balcony. I had imagined what the first scene would be like, but was not prepared for such gorgeousness. It was one of the finest pictures I had seen in my life. The noblemen all had shields and wonderful colored clothes. The King had a large crown and beautiful ☞ robes. The scenery was wonderful. It looked exactly like a real forest. The four trumpeters of the herald were magnificent . . . The whole thing was glorious, glorious. I have never enjoyed anything that I have been to yet more.

Thursday, April 25, 1901. I received from MacMillan's the copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield", which I sent for on Monday. It is certainly the cheapest, prettiest edition that I could get, beautifully bound in red leather and very well edited. The sketch of Goldsmith is a gem, beautiful English, by H.W. Boynton. The notes are fine, too. The book is perfect.

Friday, April 26, 1901. I took a walk in the woods. Things are coming along. I saw a little grey bird with a tufted head and a sharp beak which I think was a woodpecker.

It can be gathered from these random jottings that Randolph was not a morbid boy. His love of music, his attempts at candid self-analysis, his response to nature, his delight in small children are all foreshadowed here.

At his High School he was President of his class and editor of the *School Echo*. His marks were invariably high, but lessons were to him something entirely irrelevant to life.

His graduation exercises were duly celebrated in the First Presbyterean Church on June 28th, 1903, and he had chosen for his oration Washington's Campaign in New Jersey. He was seventeen at the time. "Imagined geographical wanderings", he was to write, "the disentangling of some verses of Virgil, certain neat algebraic solutions are all of "learning" that excited my inter-

est or enthusiasm. Nine years seems an unconscionable time to
spend learning these simple things". Henry Adams reckoned his
own school years, from ten to sixteen, as time thrown away.

His ambition was to go to a University and he passed the entrance examinations to Princeton with high marks. The project had, however, to be abandoned for lack of funds. In the matter of funds his father had left his wife and children, apparently, in difficulties, and had been banished from the family circle by his stern brothers-in-law in a cloud of mystery and disgrace. Randolph always retained an attitude of lenience towards his father, and referred to him with pity, and even with affection. It was perhaps all part of his sympathy with the "failures" of life. "It irritates me as if I had been spoken of contemptuously myself to hear people called "common" or "ordinary", he wrote in one of his essays. "It makes me wince to hear a man spoken of as a 'failure' or to have it said of one that 'he doesn't amount to much'". Indeed it was one of the fortunes of misfortune -- perhaps the greatest of all -- that he discovered how much more interesting were "the unpresentable and the unemployable, the incompetent and the ugly, the queer and the crotchety" than were most of these people -- who attained a worldly success."

If a university was out of the question he was determined
to find work that would help towards the support of his family,

a resolve that was countered by his uncles with derision. "Who
would want anyone like you about?" was the encouraging comment
of one of them. For two years he slaved intermittently with some
meanly paid secretarial work in Morristown, New Jersey, for one
of his uncles; and then his pertinacity was rewarded, and he was
engaged by a musician who had invented a clever machine for cut-
ting perforated rolls for player pianos. This highly ingenious
man received fifteen cents a roll from the manufacturer with whom
he had his contract, and paid Randolph at the rate of five cents
a roll for doing all the work -- a nine and a half hour day --
while he pleasured himself composing symphonies in an adjoining
room. When Randolph's increasing skill brought the figure of his
earnings above what his employer considered fitting for one in
his position, he reduced the rate at which he paid him,
a transaction that could hardly be allowed to pass unchallenged.
When, however, Randolph ventured to give expression to his dis-
satisfaction, his employer, with folded and arms and a haughty
stare, informed him that the door was wide open if he wished to
quit, and that his place would be filled overnight by a whole army
of young men all crying out for it. This experience had a pro-
found and lasting influence on Randolph Bourne's later thought.
It was his first illuminating lesson into the workings of industry,
the strategical advantage of the employer, and the powerlessness
of the worker to better his position.

It was characteristic of him that his final conversion to
socialism, after the ground had been well plowed in advance by
his ardent studies of Henry George, the single tax advocate, whom

He considered an artist as well as a thinker, should have been brought about by a chance discussion with a legless cripple wheeling himself in the public library. The voice of his new and stimulating acquaintance became at last so loud that they were requested to continue their animated polemics out of ear shot of the other readers. What a singularly moving episode in the life of this brave champion of the dauntless life whose motto was -- "Dare and you will achieve!"

It was this openness to experience, this eagerness to grasp the significance of each small incident of his daily life, that was Randolph Bourne's strongest characteristic. "Though he may have treasures of charm", he wrote "the doors of the handicapped man are always locked and the key is on the outside". It was through a combination of detachment and impassioned appeal perception that he transformed his disability to strength. Humility was the magic key, but a humility untainted with renunciation: "I never feel so degraded as when I have renounced" -- nor did resignation appeal to him any more. In Mr. John Cowper Powys' ennobling autobiography he has told us that he devours experience -- "devours and forgets". Randolph Bourne absorbed and remembered. He was like a gladiator in the arena of life that keeps his eye on every opponent of the free and adventurous spirit.

Undoubtedly the two most unhappy years of his were the ones following the failure of his lively musician employer, when he was thrown once more on his own resources. He was peculiarly ill-equipped to make his way in the commercial world. His best abilities lay in the direction of the arts and he was already an

91

accomplished pianist. His mother, after his death, referred to
his music as the ruling passion of his childhood, and saw in it
a God-given talent" to compensate him for the pleasures denied him.
His facility in reading was prodigious, his memory phenomenal.
He could play through whole scores without once consulting the
notes. At Columbia his friends used to steal in to listen to him
playing in the lobby of Hamilton Hall. Mr. Read Lewis recalls
with what "verve and ease" he compassed the difficulties of Grieg's
"Wedding Day at Troldhaugen", and Mr. Carl Zigrosser in an appreciation
of Randolph distinguished for its literary style writes:
"What memories, too, of musical evenings, Wagner, Schumann, Debussy,
occasional tastes of the Russian Moussorgsky, Scriabine, the noble
violin sonata of Cesar Franck, the three of Brahms, Bach suites
and Swedish folk songs! It was his good fortune, in music as in
writing and talking, to perform easily and without effort. He
was an extraordinarily quick reader of music, and his execution
was in no sense amateurish. . . He never practised yet he was
always in good form. His playing was always correct and musicianly
in spirit. . . " Perhaps the most touching tribute to the pleasure
his playing gave is contained in a letter from an English friend
(Miss Mabel Robinson) whose home he visited during his stay in
London: "Do you know that the first time you came to this house
your music seemed to me to transfigure everyone in the room? I
have never had such an experience in my life before, and I have
often meant to tell you of it, but haven't liked to. You roused
some far away feeling in us all, belonging, probably, to early
childhood, which brought a look of youth and beauty into my mother's

10

and sister's faces that I have never seen there before."

In a letter to Prudence Winterrowd Randolph makes his only written reference to his own musical appreciations: "It is strange that, although you told me you played, that we have never touched upon music. Somehow I was never able to write about music, never able to mix it up with words; it seems so entirely apart from the world of ordinary speech and action, an entirely untranslatable language, which ordinarily words quite ludicrously fail even so much as to describe. Music is a real inner sanctuary to which one retires alone, I think; certainly I have never felt that it was very communicable, perhaps because I have been always with unmusical people, or people that I knew were not getting it in the way I was. This winter, however, I have had a most appreciative friend to whom I often played on the grand piano in the dormitories. He is the first and only person with whom I have felt absolute musical sympathy, that is, felt that we were hearing the same thing and he was appreciating in just the key and to just the quality that I was . . . and although I don't think "the happy hearty college boy" who frequented the lobby always liked the deluge of 'classical' music which I poured out, my friend and I and such others who strolled in with us had evenings which I shall find it hard to forget. There was a sort of rapture about being so thoroughly musically understood and it would give me at times a feeling that the material keys had dissolved away and one was evoking pure spirit without effort and simply by the movement of one's appreciative will . . ."

While giving a few KISSING LESSONS, Randolph which brought

13

him in a bare subsistence, Randolph continued to follow up every
clue in New York that held out the slightest promise of employ-
ment. Dr. Edith Sitwell, in her eloquent defence of Pope, re-
fers to "the anguish he felt as a very young man, on being
forced to realize the fact that his deformity was the subject of
mocking laughter, of cruel sneers, and even of coarser pityx",
but Pope was not poor, and he did not have to enter a world of
ruthless competition to be jostled about with ribaldry and contempt.

In a letter to Dorothy Teall, then a student at Barnard
College, Randolph writes: "I wasted two good years trying to
justify my existence by trying to get a job -- two years that I
might have spent in learning something and growing. Instead I
wore myself thin against an immovable wall, got into habits of
despair and futility that are riveting me still, and all to no
purpose. Nothing that I planned and made for did I get, but
gradually my own seemed to find me out. My labor to settle myself
in the world was really worse than wasted. If I had merely sat
down calmly and read and written and thought as best I could,
and made the most of what was lying around me, I would be infinitely
better off now in the work that finally found me. In spite of
all my desperate efforts to renounce college, to be content with
my poverty, to get a good routine position, to work hard and sup-
port myself and help my family, to give up all thought of writing
or ambition, I now find myself exactly where a few years ago I
should have considered it quixotic even to pose as an ideal. I
really believe your destiny pursues you, and you can't evade it."

II

12

OPENING HORIZONS

The destiny that had pursued Randolph was a university education. It was while he was convalescing from an attack of typhoid fever in the summer of 1909 that someone suggested to him the possibility of applying for a scholarship at Columbia University. This he lost no time in doing and was admitted with advanced standing at the age of twenty-three.

Columbia, which at this time had been only fifteen years on its present site, and possessed among the largest resources of any American university, was a centre of attraction for young scholars from all parts of the world, and offered an ideal environment for student life. "One can breathe here", Randolph wrote to a friend "and the external beauty of the place grows on the spirit and makes one happy to live among the buildings and along the quadrangle."

It was to his friends that Randolph owed most of his liberation of spirit. "I don't know really what I should have done if I had not come to college . . ." he writes to Prudence Winterrowd. "At college I met for the first time, not only one person but many that thought as I did, and formed an interesting social group in which the members continually stimulated each other. Most of my education has come thus from talk and argument here, with brilliant, interested young people . . . I am assuming that all my friends are highly endowed, interesting, and charming, and that outside my circle, such creatures don't exist. You will forgive my delusion that my dozen or more intimate friends are the cream of the students here, and that the rest fall without the pale of interest . . . . I think you would find I not

13

exaggerated their charm."

Mr. Read Lewis, one of these "intimate friends", recalls the "warm creative quality of Randolph's mind", his interest in the smallest incident of their college days, his readiness to argue at any moment the eccentricities of human nature or the latest turn in the contemporary scene, and the lively parties that took place in his (Randolph's) room, where a group formed themselves into a club called the Academy. Some of their atmosphere is reflected in one of the earliest of Randolph's essays to appear in the _Columbia Monthly_ (January 1910). Like Mme. de Stael, the wittiest conversationalist of her day in the wittiest country in the world, he points out the perils of wit in serious discussion. "Discussion has no greater enemy than those who can catch an idea and touch it off with a puff of smoke. Wit should salt a discussion but not explode it."

Randolph's mind was often to turn back with regret to those days, with their "free, inexhaustible, spendthrift atmosphere", when he and his friends would lie about on the campus until two or three in the morning oblivious of everything but the pleasures of good talk and sympathetic companionship.

It had been his intention, when he entered college, to make literature and art his major studies, but his courses began to shift gradually to history, philosophy, politics, economics, and the social sciences. The reason for this change of heart is revealed in a letter to Dorothy Teall: "Columbia appeals to me especially because the teachers are, few of them the cloistered kind that one finds in some of the older country colleges, but rather men and women of affairs to whom philosophy and science

13

exaggerated their charm."

14

are not mere games, but real aids in understanding the world and living a worthy part in it. . . I hope you don't get too immersed in literary studies. Nothing seems to me more deadening than the University study of literature for its own sake, and the "scholarly" research which consists in pouring over Chaucer or digging up some obscure point of fact that the world does not need at all. I find most of the teachers of literature curiously narrow and childish in their philosophy of life and outlook on the world, and much more so than any other department, and so I have always kept away from them. I do believe in courses of composition, for they can teach you effective and beautiful writing, if you have any sensitiveness to style and ideas, and one should have a general knowledge of English literary history, but any more academic study than that I consider wasted. It's because, I suppose, I find most of the literature which seems vital to me not to be included on college literary courses at all, that I am prejudiced against such courses. . . I am all for philosophy, history, and sociology as the true nourishment of the soul."

In his essay -- *The History of a Literary Radical* -- he describes a visit to his home during his college years when he attended a lecture at the Lyceum Club, where Professor William Lyons Phelps discussed the modern novel, "and tossed Hardy, Trollope, Turgenev, Meredith, even Trollope into the minds of the charmed audience with such effect that the firgin shelves of the library were ravished for days to come by the eager minds upon which these great names dawned for the first time. . . It was as if some devout and restless saint had suddenly been introduced to the Apocrypha. A new world was suddenly opened to Miro that

16

was neither "classic" or "popular". He returned to college 'a cultural revolutionist' ... Irony, humor, tragedy, sensuality appeared to him as literary qualities in forms he could understand."

It was not long before Randolph Bourne became a dominating influence in the university. His essays, that appeared more or less regularly in the *Columbia Monthly*, were written with a per-suasiveness, point, and charm that drew the attention of Professors, as well as of students, to his work. He was finally added to the editorial staff of the *Monthly*, and in May 1911, he became the editor-in-chief. "I love people of quick roving intelligence, who carry their learning lightly, and use it as weapons to fight with and as fuel to warm them into a sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men", he wrote to Prudence Winterrowd. "The reason I can carry my own so lightly is because I have so little, but I don't object to people having little so long as it is all being put to use. Columbia, too, overflows into the city, and it is easy to meet interesting, unacademic people who make up for the heavy-laden people here."

It was this "quick roving intelligence" that he turned in all directions. He belonged to the Boar's Head Literary Society, at which he read a paper on Stoicism before a large audience in Hamilton Hall, and was active in the Inter-Collegiate Socialist Society. He was asked to join the Philolexian Society (the oldest debating society in the college) and was a Phi Beta Kappa man. His essay on *The Doctrine of the Rights of Man* as formulated by Thomas Paine was chosen in the *Caroline Phelps Stokes Price competition*

If Randolph's friends gave him the warm response he had always so craved, his professors were not slow in discovering opportunities for him to develop his remarkable talent: "The

16

greatest comfort of all comes from finding most of the Professors
more or less in sympathy with you so that you find yourself no
longer an alien, but one in thought with the people who are doing
the thinking in the world. It has all quite revolutionized my
life." The Professorsto whom he gave his greatest allegiance
were Professors Robinson, Woodbridge, Dewey, Shotwell, Beard, and
Gibbings.

Professor Woodbridge, in whose philosophy class Randolph
was a student, recognized with the first paper he handed in -- it
was on Plato, and was entitled Irony as a Philosophical Method --
what an exceptional young man he was, a judgement borne out by
the one that followed on Greek and Christian virtues. Finally,
when he wrote an essay on The Rising Generation, his "delighted"
professor posted it off to the Atlantic Monthly. This was the
beginning of Randolph's long association with Mr. Ellery Sedgwick,
whose warm encouragement and helpful advice did so much to fortify
his confidence and stimulate his invention. I have had an op-
portunity of reading Mr. Sedgwick's correspondence with Randolph
Bourne, and an uncle could hardly have concerned himself more
with the future of a favourite nephew.

The young people of Randolph Bourne's generation who were
sensitive to the inequalities of society, were peculiarly so.
The squalor of the poor, the oppression of the industrial workers,
the frivolity and arrogance of the rich, the torpor of the vast
majority of the citizens, their indifference to all that had to
do with the intellect, poetry, art; their unctuous sentimentality
that served as a cover for an underlying apathy and cynicism --
all came as a direct personal challenge. "All that is needed to
make an ideal world is enough good-will intelligently directed",

["18", "Wells had written", "Walkers and writers", and they were willing to believe it. It was this spirit of revolt that Randolph Bourne focussed and made articulate in the essays that began to appear with more or less regularity in the *Atlantic Monthly*. The germ of his message, for message it was in the truest sense of the word, was contained in the first one. \"We (of theyounger generation) have an eagerness to understand the world in which we live that amounts almost to a passion. . . We are determined to find a faith and our spiritual centre is rapidly shifting from the personal to the social in religion. . . We feel social injustice as our fathers felt spiritual sin.\" He received letters from young people in all parts of the country. \"Your article has come with the moral force of an army with banners\", one of them wrote; and another -- \"I often wonder if authors of articles such as yours realize how their printed words reach the depths of some soul in crying need\".", "It is not, however, the proselytizing spirit of Randolph Bourne that is most to be remarked, but the continual play of a mind intense, speculative, and imaginative over every region of thought. In *Seeing We See not*, published first in the *Columbia Monthly*, he writes: \"Must our short life pass away without knowledge or vision of the majestic processes which are unfolding themselves under our very eyes while we have wasted our administration and distorted our purpose by striving to interpret the ephemeral that is gone as we?\" And this sentence from his essay on youth might be taken as the key for an approach to his work. \"That strange melancholy when things seem to lose their substance and the world becomes an empty shell, is the reverse shield of the elation of youth. To face and overcome it is a real test"]

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of the courage of youth. The dash and audacity, the daring and self-confidence of youth are less fine than this simple courage of optimism."

In every subject he approaches there is a touch of grace, delicate and at the same time prophetic. It is extraordinary how fresh and even how apposite to our time some of these early utterances of Randolph Bourne's are. They have upon them both the dew of the morning and the darkness of the descending night.

Behind all the dash and bravado, the sparkling effrontery of his attacks on the institutions of his day Randolph Bourne was hardly the confident young man that he has been portrayed. "If I only had some confidence in my ability to persuade by writing" he communicates to Prudence Winterrowd, "but I lack that; after I have written something, suddenly all the other points of view come trooping before me to jeer at my puny, exaggerated, one-sided ideas until I turn almost sick within me. So that some of my theories which sound so bold are really written with the most shame-faced timorousness, and sent off to the editor with a forced and desperate bravado. Now this is no attitude for a man with a message, who wants to be a preacher and even a prophet. But how is one going to change it? I feel particularly badly because I have just finished the first draft of an article on which I have been thinking for some time; I was quite pleased with it as long as I kept in my room, but when I stepped out in the street, the rushing life there made all ideas turn suddenly hollow and stale, and I shudder now to think of typing it and sending it away to a scornful editor." Randolph Bourne, like Andre Gide, was frequently to complain that he no sooner came out on

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one side of a question than the other side rose up to confound
him. -- "Truth", as Emerson observed, "is a comprehension of
opposites."

In the *College Daily*, he launched an attack on the low
wages paid to scrub women employed by the university that set
off the wits of students and Faculty alike in a veritable pyro-
technical competition that spread finally to the metropolitan press,
and brought down upon his head surprised head a volley of satirical
and wounded protests.

"I am a little vexed with Columbia just now", he writes
to Prudence Winterrowd". . . and am in trouble over some impassioned
letters I wrote to the *College Daily* protesting against the poor
treatment of the scrub women, and the low wages of the children
employed around the campus. With all its sweetness and light,
Columbia, like other universities too, I suppose, does not hesitate
to teach Social Ethics in the class room and exploit its
labour force on the side. Anyone who points out the inconsistency
is denounced as a sentimental idealist and a crank. I
feel pretty certain that I have destroyed my chances for preference
here, and will have to go out and earn an honest living at
the end of this college year. This worries me a good deal too,
because I do not forget my ineffectual struggle to get a place
in the world before I came to college. And if I alienate my
powerful friends by being radical and a crank there is nothing
for me, I'm afraid, but the bread line".

What a transformation in how short a time, from the most sin-
gularly unfortunate hunchback to the brilliant young man sur-
rounded by appreciative friends, emboldened to speak out his
views, praised and encouraged by his professors, and beginning

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to be known by the most intelligent of the reading public! Professor Arthur Macmahon recalls Bourne being singled out with whom he met other students to meet George Santayana in the up-stairs lounge of the old Faculty Club to hear him read an as yet unpublished essay on Shelley; and when Arnold Bennett visited Columbia in 1911 it was to Randolph Bourne that Dean Keppel took most care to introduce him.

One particularly delightful incident of his college years was a friendship he formed with the old naturalist, John Burroughs, to whose home -- Woodchuck Lodge in Ulster County -- he paid several visits. "I am so glad you like John Burroughs", he wrote to Prudence Winterrowd, "I had the great pleasure of spending a few days with him last summer up at his old birthplace in Roxbury, and also took him to some of the Bergson lectures here in February, with a never to be forgotten little supper at the Copper Kettle. He was so delighted with Bergson, and it was great to see them together at the University tea to which I smuggled him and got him introduced to the great philosopher. He is a noble old man, very simple and modest, likes simple, childish people best . . . He looks at the world with the eye of the artist, and uses his science to illumine his artistic insight, which I believe is the eternally right way and attitude of the intellectual life."

Randolph managed, all during his student years, to eke out his slender income by doing accompaniments for a singer at Carnegie Hall. He would have been glad to look forward to some teaching position after leaving College that would have him a steady livelihood. Mr. Sedgwick was sanguine that this could

20

be accomplished, and, with his usual enterprise and resource, went to work to make inquiries. "The impression of a Harvard professor who has had large classes", he wrote to Randolph, "was that your bodily handicap might well interfere with your lecturing to large classes of Freshmen and Sophomores. It was his opinion that with advanced work and smaller classes this difficulty would disappear."

At the same time he quotes from a letter of President Lowell of Harvard, to whom he had written as well. "I do not think the mere fact of being a hunchback would interfere seriously with Bourne's success as a teacher. . . . The mere fact of deformity I do not think at the present day would interfere with the respect with which students treat the instructor and that seems to me the only thing of any great importance so far as his handicap is concerned. Much more serious is the sensitiveness on his own part that is liable to accompany his trouble. If his temperament is such that that will not trouble him I think his prospects would be quite as good -- probably better -- at teaching than anything else."

Randolph, in an unusually revealing letter to Prudence Winterrowd, has expressed what his feelings were at that time about speaking in public: "I spoke many places in school and have made speeches since with hardly a tremor or even a look at the audience. And in writing I am much more courageous if I think I am going to have a public. I have never, until last week, shown anything I have written to a friend, and I used to hate to have my Professor read my English themes. I cannot bear to think of the individual, personal disapproval, while on the other hand I rather thrive under public abuse. This may come from having participated in a long debate on Socialism conducted in the columns of the Bloomfield Citizen several years ago, in

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which my radical views got soundly trounced by my fellow citizens'
sturdy pens. Private praise I always deeply suspect as insincere
but public comment makes me feel elated. Newspaper praise of an
article sets me up. On the other hand, I cannot talk to more than
two or three in conversation and I never could bring myself to
speak in class-room, so as you see I am quite inconsistently devel-
oped. I fear my own self-criticism most of all. My own contempt
for the work which I feel unable or too lazy to improve, is the
bitterest pill I have to swallow in writing. I don't know quite
what to call it except my over-critical sense, my "perfectionist"
standpoint, turned inwards upon myself. This last essay The Life
of Irony, I hurried off to the publisher without reading over,
and slunk around for a day or two, feeling what a fool and incapable
I was, and sure that it would be summarily rejected, and with such
scorn that I should never get even another hearing. And now as I
read it over it quite charms me and I wonder how I could ever have
expressed so completely the apotheosis of a whole side of me which
makes my talk and comment on friends such a sparkling joy to me.
The fact is, each of my essays has expressed an aspect of me,
horridly idealized I must admit. . . But all together. . . they
sound like many different personalities, or like many insincere
aspects of one personality. I would have great difficulty in
convincing anybody that they were all thoroughly and almost uncan-
nily autobiographical. . . I do watch the appearance of the book
with a good deal of foreboding. I don't mind abuse, but I don't
want to be laughed at, and some of the naive confessions of my
heart, I am afraid, will sound awfully silly to the academic
people up here. I am afraid both of that, and that some of it
sounds like the preaching of a prig."

Chapter III

OFF ACROSS THE WATER

On his graduation from Columbia, Randolph had been awarded the Gilder Fellowship which enabled him to spend a year abroad for the purpose of studying social and political conditions in European countries, a crowning tribute to the confidence felt in his powers by his professors. He had been looking forward to this trip with a combination of exhilaration and foreboding. He sailed on the Rochambeau on July 5, 1913. "Now I am off across the water," he wrote to Prudence Winterrowd. "Fortunately I have a companion who will travel with me this summer and then settle at the Sorbonne for the winter to study history. He is a Columbia graduate in my class. One of those mixtures of shyness and childishness and old thoughts and precociousness that I always have a soft spot in my heart for. The terms of the Fellowship are delightfully free and easy -- indeed the whole attitude towards me is quite amazing, one would think I were receiving a pension instead of a commission of useful intellectual labor -- and so this gives me a soft spot to land on if I get so immersed in the whirl of impressions, or so daunted by the foreign atmosphere that I fritter away my time and accomplish nothing."

He had hardly been a day on shipboard before his dreads began to leave him. There was a grand piano in the salon, and as soon as it was discovered that he could play he was in continual demand. The company was a cosmopolitan one and put him at once at his ease. His letters to his mother reveal a touching pride in the conquests he made, and to his friend, Arthur M. Mahon, he wrote: "I hardly had a dull moment on board and would have been glad to have the voyage twice as long. There was such a charming atmosphere of congeniality and kindness. . . . There were some wonderful afternoons of sparkling blue water with white caps and a glorious surge. . . ."

47

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It was during his European trip that most of the letters of Randolph Bourne that have been preserved were written, and for the time being, I will consider them as written without any letters written by Americans abroad with which to compare them. Henry James's early letters to his family have all the beguiling charm we have come to associate with his genius, and no one was ever more sensitive to the subtle differences in national characteristics, but his attention was not directed to the same extent toward social and political institutions. In fact, Henry Adams, if we were to judge by his letters, was constitutionally incapable of appreciating the French character and civilization which so seduced Randolph Bourne. I should quote freely from these letters, not only because of the insight they give into Randolph Bourne's character, but because of the light they throw on the Europe that was even then poised on the edge of the abyss, a now almost legendary Europe.

"My first sight of Europe", he writes to Carl Zigrosser, "was the white roads, and walled gardens, and thatched farm houses and peaceful Seine Valley and square towers of Normandy, a land of such picturesque beauty that it seemed almost like a dream, perfect and a land of such seeming prosperity, which became a/riot of smart little colored houses perched dizzily on hillsides, as the train swept past their garden walls with fruit-trees trained along them and all glowing in the sun".

His intention was to make a rapid tour of the main European cities before settling down in some of the chief capitals. Paris,