East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  Once every month the saints had a fast, to put the pinch on the flesh. A fast is all right, if you are used to it, a little, day by day. But not when you have been living on turkey and duck and turtle soup at Elder Bonheure’s private table. Oh, how I suffered on those fast days! And how I hated them! Nobody was given anything to eat all day long, not even the guest in the house. I would debate with myself about running around the corner and buying a chicken sandwich at the drugstore, but I knew it wouldn’t look right, and I couldn’t bear to disappoint the saints. They must have felt it even more, for all were hearty eaters, and keeping up hard work besides. On fast day evenings, they met and jumped, too, higher than ever, all on the empty stomach. At twelve o’clock midnight, fast was broken. A big supper was served, with everything better than usual. Oh, how full they were then, and how good they felt and how happy!

  Bonheure was certainly a man with ideas. Being a dictator, he had to keep his followers excited all the time. And besides the revival, he was training all the true saints to take part in an orchestra. He had hired a German music teacher whom he paid from the church funds. And he bought all kinds of instruments for them, cornets, drums, trombones, fiddles, banjos. I played the cymbals. I reminded Bonheure about my school. But he remained very vague as to that. Once he suggested that he and I might go to France sometime soon, and hold a revival there. That man had cosmopolitan ideas, all right! I kept wondering what was the truth about him. Was he interested in the glory and money-making, or was he interested in the welfare of the Negro race?

  But one of the most eloquent sermons I ever heard him preach was on the subject of that new Pierce Arrow car he had set his heart upon. The revival was going very well. Every night that church, that had been a movie-house, was packed. Of course, Bonheure had all the saints’ money anyhow, but most of that was tied up. He needed two or three hundred more, for that new Pierce Arrow car he had already picked out. It had to come from the audience and from new converts. I saw Bonheure, by his passionate and persuading words, make almost everybody there as interested as he in seeing Elder Bonheure of the Temple of Saints whirl down upon Atlantic Beach in that great shiny new car, like a chariot of fire. That car, before he got through, had personality, it had a soul, it almost grew wings, and you could see it had to belong to the Saints and to Elder Bonheure, as a symbol of sanctified glory. “United is heaven, divided is hell,” he preached to those Virginia Negroes, who all their lives had watched and washed and driven only white people’s cars for white people. “This way we rise up and climb the spiral way to the golden gates of new Jerusalem. Saint Brown, he digs the ditch, Saint Jones, he drives the truck. Saint Lee, he scrubs the floor, and Saint Green, he’s the chauffeur to drive your pastor on errands of God’s work, all round, saving and sanctifying for the glory of this colored man’s Church of the Lord.”

  As soon as he got the money for the first payment, we rushed up to Baltimore to see a well-known Negro lawyer there, from whom Bonheure wanted to borrow enough to pay cash for the car. This lawyer was a Methodist . . . and Bonheure’s doctrine was that all Methodists go to hell. But this lawyer was nice to Bonheure and only kidded him along a little.

  “You know why I’m going to help you, Elder? So you’ll help me when I go to heaven. I’m only a Methodist.”

  BOOK FOUR

  1

  A LARGE PORTION of America I now knew rather well. I had not seen New Orleans and Texas—or Colorado, California and the West. West and South I had not much explored. But a big slice of America from as far west as Chicago, running from Virginia as far north as Labrador—this was hitchhike and hunting ground for my two wandering years. I was not at all bored, and not very much despairing. It was the thought of Trip that comforted and contented me throughout this loneliness. Somewhere she existed. Sometime I meant to see her again. And the study I had undertaken, partly in libraries, partly in weaving a pattern of hitchhiking over the face of the land, appealed to my nature. In my way I was repeating the life of my grandfather, the geomancer, in another existence, a roving life of ever new contacts and scenes.

  I was a very successful hitchhiker. I don’t remember ever being refused a ride, with conversation thrown in, for I was an expert in spotting the man who would welcome a traveling companion and the man who would not. My racial oddity, inspiring curiosity, no doubt helped, securing me many a lift from a bored and lonely driver. Traveling salesmen especially were always glad to see me. And my! how many kinds of men sped over American highways! One day I would be picked up by a big fat swearing man, who would relate his experiences seducing women. Next, by the earnest iron-jawed kind, with a moving tale of how he got converted to Christianity. Many were strange specimens, with no more shape of soul nor purpose of life than amebas. Once in remotest Maine, I found myself with a stout black-haired young man with a flat oily nose and ingrained habits of swearing. However, he was very polite. At least he was to me. He immediately took a flask from the pocket of his car, took off the cup, carefully wiped it out with his handkerchief, and handed it to me saying, “You go first. That cup ain’t been used yet.”

  I learned from him that his grandmother had been a Japanese and his grandfather a Jew. He had no Oriental features, except that his nose was not very high. He was very candid with me. He said he wasn’t educated and he wasn’t good for any damned thing but making money, but Goddam, he boasted, he certainly could make the money. His business was buying and selling antique furniture. He went usually through the northern part of New England getting an option on furniture in some old farmhouse, which he would buy and sell again without removing. Where he learned all this, heaven knows! But by this trick, he made lots of money.

  Very polite in drinking, in smoking he was not so careful. He was not careful how he spit, especially when he began to talk about making money. But he took his handkerchief and smeared off the car window. He said he saw I was young. He had a piece of advice to give me. “Never get married.”

  “Why?”

  “The best life is the free life. And a hotel’s nice, ain’t it? Why get settled so you can’t move about? That would kill me. This way you can sleep late in the morning, go anywhere you want, talk to anybody you feel like, and there’s a girl always waiting in the next town. So never get married. Oh, well, when you’re forty-five or fifty—and your digestion ain’t what it used to be. Yep, then’s the time to be married. But not before. Not while you’re young and life looks good.”

  We came to the first good-sized town and he said he would have to drop me here, because he knew a whole lot of beautiful girls waiting for him, and he was going to see them. He brought out $500 in bills.

  “Made that wad all on one sale. Pays to know your business. Now I go spend it, see?”

  Traveling salesmen—though cordial—had their disadvantages, if you wanted to get somewhere. Often you had to wait for them while they made a sale, and after that, like this man, they had to stop and spend some of the money before they could go on.

  Once I was walking along somewhere in Ohio, with my little bag containing mostly books. That time I was picked up by a keen-faced man in a small, shabby roadster. “Well, what are you selling?” he asked, when we were comfortably settled together on the front seat. “This is a good chance to sell me something. Go ahead.”

  I told him I could only sell him myself, and that I was on my way East from Chicago. He asked me if I had been educated in the university there. I said no, in Boston. Then he got much excited. He said he had graduated twice from Harvard, and was ashamed of it. That damned committee who executed Sacco and Vanzetti! I thought he was going to throw me out of his car for having been to Massachusetts at all. But finally he subsided and became gloomy.

  “This,” he said, “is a rotten world. America is rotten. No good. Not a decent writer anywhere. Upton Sinclair used to be good, but he hasn’t much blood now. There’s some younger fellows coming along, but as yet they can’t do much. What we need in Americ
a is more social-mindedness.”

  I became very much interested in this new sort of man and asked him what he was doing for a business.

  He stopped his car, and pulled out a magazine on which was written in big letters the title, Justice. He was the editor of it, he said. He opened the magazine and pointed out to me editorial names. European editor, Frank Harris. American editor, Glenn Bates. Assistant editor, Mrs. Glenn Bates. “I’m Glenn Bates.”

  After that, he went on to kick New England a good bit.

  “Devils! Hypocrites! Rotten souls!”

  He began to examine me on what I had learned while in Boston. He asked me if I had read The Brass Check. I hadn’t. Oil? But I hadn’t read that one either. “You ought to have,” said the American editor of Justice, frowning. “Look here, I’ll send you a copy of those. What’s your address?”

  He seemed much struck with my wandering free-lancing life, and my study of Orientalia, as I told him about that. Then he went on to examine me on the subject of Frank Harris, the European editor of this magazine. And again Mr. Glenn Bates was horrified. “What! You never read anything by Frank Harris? The greatest biographer who ever lived?”

  I liked Glenn Bates very much, he was so bristling and straightforward. He seemed to like me, too, in spite of my not coming out well on his examination. He was very enthusiastic about his magazine and asked me how I liked the enterprise. I said I liked it fine, all except the title. That sounded to me too ethical and dogmatic.

  “You mean you think it sounds too much like a missionary’s product? But I have no use for Christianity. Neither has my wife. Neither has my daughter. Neither has this magazine.”

  After we had talked on a little farther, Glenn Bates suddenly looked at me as if an idea had struck him. “Look here. What references have you got? Whom do you know?”

  I was puzzled.

  “Well, we’re in need of an Asiatic editor for this magazine. Who knows? You may be the man?”

  I gave him some names in Boston and Cambridge, and in spite of his hostility for Boston, some names seemed much to his liking.

  “Good. Then it’s settled. I’m sure I’ll receive a good letter about you.”

  So we talked some more on the project and my part in it, until again he held up a copy of Justice. “But this magazine doesn’t sell. Can you believe that?”

  And he explained that his real reason for being on the road was to canvass for subscribers in order to keep the magazine going. Besides being an editor, I must canvass, too, he said. “And I don’t see how—until we get better established—you can get paid. But neither does Frank Harris get paid. And neither does Glenn Bates nor Mrs. Glenn Bates. But I will make this proposition: any money you get from subscriptions will be yours to pay for your editorial duties. And some day we hope to pay more than Mencken.”

  Yes, he was planning to compete with The American Mercury, he said. “The time of destroying is almost over. Don’t you think things are pretty well destroyed—to all truth-seeking individuals? Boston—oh, Boston is practically dead and gone. America needs a new intellectual center.”

  I suggested that New York appeared to be that.

  “Oh, yes, for the past decade or so, that is true. But New York is getting hard and Europeanized. And it always has been dollarized. New York is not strictly American. There should be a new intellectual center of America. Do you see any reason why some place in Ohio shouldn’t be that?” suggested Glenn Bates.

  “No.”

  “Youngstown, Ohio. Let’s make it there. That’s where I publish this magazine.”

  This was how I gained my first editorial job. My early lecturing was of an equally desultory character. Once I was in Pittsburgh all alone. I remembered I had a college acquaintance living in Pittsburgh, Harry Gordon, a friend of Edwin Parker. I looked him up and found him well established in a big office. He gave me most cordial welcome and insisted I should come home with him to meet his family. “Mother will be delighted!” he exclaimed.

  I was somewhat surprised in Mrs. Gordon, for she turned out to be so much more intellectual than Harry. At least Harry never had any use for anything deeper than Bruce Barton. But Harry’s mother was an ardent reader of Mencken and Broun, and a subscriber to several monthly book clubs. Naturally she did all the talking in that house on literary things. Harry appeared quite intimidated, while admiring her very much. She and I talked, and she said I must speak before a certain ladies’ club called the Echo Club, of which she was the president. Bertrand Russell had been the speaker the week before. Here in this club after they had sent their husbands to work, ladies met to discuss all the latest best-selling books and new cultural ideas. So now I became the honorary guest. And all the ladies were enthusiastic and very friendly and liberal. They offered me cigarettes and gave me a special kind of spiced tea and chicken sandwiches. I was the only man there, for Harry seemed to feel uneasy at the mere notion of bearing me company. But my experience in preaching for Bonheure helped me a lot. I thought Harry was very funny to object to going so much. The ladies paid me twenty-five dollars for that lecture, the best pay I had yet received. And I thought, that was twenty dollars more than Emerson used to get when he lectured on the Orient! Business was improving.

  Of all the places to choose a good riding companion, a frontier is the best. I had been up to Labrador, because some boys I had known in college, and met, told me it was the new Utopia. But it wasn’t so much to my mind. I was again coming back, and heading toward New York to be there when the fall season opened, when all things speeded up and became sensationally thrilling. At Calais (not of France, but of Maine), custom officials examine baggage for a long time. That suited me, for I wanted plenty of time to pick out my car, intending to make a long jump, straight into Manhattan. I soon spotted it. A long, low, big, rich-looking car, open to the skies, except for its twinkling windshield. At the wheel was a tall, very good-looking, clean-faced man of forty-six or so with a healthy glowing tan and shining glasses. All the customs men were dodging in, to see if they could find whisky in this car, and the gentleman was saying blandly, “Well, well, you won’t find what you’re looking for on me, my man.”

  “Right, sir, pass on.”

  Then I, who was standing near, spoke up, and asked him if he were going in the direction of New York. He gave me a quick, shrewd look. “Japanese?” he asked in a kindly fashion.

  “No, indeed, sir! I’m Korean.”

  “Get in, then. Koreans. Good God, I’ll do all I can to help them.”

  I got in and we proceeded into the United States of America, talking on politics as we drove. My driver proved to be a strong Wilson man. Wilson, he spoke passionately, was America’s greatest President. Washington, Lincoln—these according to him were just opportunists, but Woodrow Wilson . . . ah, there was the greatest brain the White House ever had! If principles of the Versailles Treaty had been carried out everywhere as Wilson first planned, Korea would be independent today! So he said.

  After this promising opening we somehow got started on Shakespeare, and I found my driver knew all about Shakespeare and had read everything Shakespeare had written—but he had come to the conclusion that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare at all.

  “Who did, then? Bacon, you think?”

  “Bacon? The man who wrote his most important works in dead Latin, the man who had no faith in the future of the English? No, Shakespeare was more than Bacon. He said some Bacon, but Bacon never said any Shakespeare. ‘Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man,’ . . . sounds like a college professor’s lecture, doesn’t it? That’s Bacon for you. No, I’ll tell you who wrote Shakespeare. Christopher Marlowe.”

  Then he quoted:

  If all the pens that ever poets held

  Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,

  And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,


  Their minds, and muses on admired themes;

  If all the heavenly quintessence they still

  From their immortal flowers of poesy,

  Wherein, as a mirror, we perceive

  The highest reaches of a human wit;

  If these had made one poem’s period,

  And all combined in beauty’s worthiness,

  Yet should these hover in their restless head

  One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,

  Which into words no virtue can digest.

  “There! Can you tell the difference between that and Shakespeare? And these two lived at exactly the same time.”

  Shakespeare at least must have been greatly influenced by Marlowe, I suggested.

  “Influenced! Why, man, Shakespeare’s plays are more Marlowe than Shakespeare! All the scope and daring of youth. What a young giant he was!”

  Then my driver warned me that we had to pick up his lawyer. “My lawyer’s a little odd,” he told me. “An old bachelor, you know. (Not much Marlowe about him.) He’s a little bit fussy about his beds and breakfasts, his coffee, etc., so we’ll just let him decide everything. He won’t be with us long, and afterwards you and I can do as we please.”

  Just as he said, this lawyer turned out to be a narrow, dried-up, fidgety little man, who was somewhat nonplussed to see me. He addressed my driver as “Senator Kirby,” so that was the first time I knew I had been riding with a senator. Neither of them knew Boston very well, but I directed them to just the right hotel and of course I knew all the streets, and right turnings. The next night we were out in the country, and the lawyer had a better chance to finick. We examined farmhouses. But the lawyer found fault with every one. “This corner is awful,” and the next place, “There ought to be another window in this room”; the barn was too near in another, and so on. Each time the lawyer was out examining the toilet arrangements, Senator Kirby would wink at me. “He’s just a little odd, you see,” he’d say.