Overview, Part Four
A 1930 “divorce” exposé found in the William Bullitt archives reveals the reasons Bullitt had for demanding a divorce from Louise Bryant. Louise was thought to have had a love affair with a French, woman artist Gwen Le Gallienne. Bullitt, depicted as homophobic by some biographers was known to be vindictive towards and intolerant of lesbians. His “divorce plea” was a sixteen page document depicting the truth of his wrath and intolerance, calling both Bryant and La Gallienne “bitches”--an actual quote. Over the following six years , until her death, Louise would be trying to defy the misogyny Bullitt displayed. And. From the onset of Bullitt’s cagey filing for divorce, Louise insisted on seeing Anne. But their daughter Anne was told a different story. That Louise had left them. This was neither true nor close to the actual circumstances which occurred. But the truth about Louise Bryant’s last six years of life have been as difficult for history and biographers as they were for Anne. Bullitt never released Louise’s writings to the public, never told their daughter the truth of his intentions and actions. Louise’s story, thus elusive.
Bill Bullit with Louise Bryant’s daughter Anne, circa 1955.
Late in her life, at age 58 in 1982 Anne “granted” her only public interview about Louise to an Irish Reporter . At that time Anne still believed that Louise had left them in January of 1930 while she was on an overseas trek to write a piece in Algiers; she was told Louise “was ill and decided she could not live with us”. In fact, Bill Bullitt had filed for divorce just days after Louise left on the agreed upon journey. Anne was only six when the eerie set of events began. Yet through her adult life she was admittedly ill-informed, sadly a victim of her father’s lies. She knew little of her mother. Even with access to the same cables and letters written by Louise as are found here, Anne was not able to grasp the depths of her father’s animosity, his ability to withhold the truth and deny Anne her mother.
In her interview Anne innocently, unknowingly reveals the depths of Bullitt’s deceptiveness: Anne explains that she didn’t know her parents were divorced until 1967, after her father’s death. When she found the paperwork. Her story revealing, heart-breaking and believable. Bullitt cloaked his chilling distance from Louise by framing himself as the “good guy”. Anne explains further to the Dublin, Ireland reporter that she was told her mother had “bouts of rage” which put the child in jeopardy and reluctantly Bullitt agreed to keep Anne from Louise, according to Bullitt, “at her mother’s request”. Apparently Anne, understandably, was never quite able to unravel the truth from the lies. She was devoted to her father, never quite knew her mother. One wishes Anne could read this part of her mother’s story:
At the end of only six years marriage, William Bullitt would file divorce papers while Bryant was on her way to a correspondent “job” in Algiers, riding a steamer while courts in Philadelphia, Pa. were readying paperwork to disavow her marriage and motherhood. Bullitt would try repeatedly to have Louise banished from the U.S. via the divorce he filed while she was on her way to Algiers to work on a project there. The Bullitts had been “legally separated” not long before Bryant left for her trip, but Bullitt had already prepared paperwork to file for a divorce—early November, 1929. Leading Louise to believe he was amicable to the separation. That was not true. Bullitt filed for divorce as soon as she left the country: the paperwork had been prepared even before she boarded ship. No airplanes, no fast transport, the move was calculated to keep Louise from an honest defense. In the end even her friend and loyal “nanny” Horteuse, would testify on Bullitt’s behalf, against Louise. She had been close to Horteuse. Louise’s letter regarding this betrayal are the harshest words found in her archives: she lost her daughter because of that testimony. It “proved” Bullitt’s claims as truth. One can imagine the loss of a job was threat enough to have her claim in court that Louise was “unfit as a mother”. In fact, it was not Louise’s mothering that was in question, but her sexuality and Bullitt’s feeling of being “jilted” by a Bohemian, a lesbian. This is clear in the stories he wrote for the court, per their divorce. And the lies he told their daughter.
Though originally promising in his legal communiqués that Anne would live with both of them-- per Louise’s demands-- Bullitt kept Anne from her mother nonetheless, telling the child Louise had “abandoned them” and simultaneously moving/travelling with Anne, rarely notifying Louise as to where her daughter was.
Despite Louise’s attempts at gaining custody, the struggle for mother and daughter to be together was never resolved: Bullitt’s money and power challenged Louise’s freelance efforts to continue to mother her daughter.
These classic, tragic, series of events were unexpected and reprehensible to Louise Bryant. The fact that she had “had an affair with a woman” weighed heavily against Louise at each juncture in her fight to know her daughter. Yet she was neither apologetic nor remorseful, vindictive nor vanquished. Louise fought with a velvet glove, via her lawyer Arthur Hays, repeatedly, for access to Anne, who was six years old when her father took her. Louise persisted, but to no avail. The right to be a mother eluded her legally, and was scoffed at, made a mockery of, by Bullitt.
But why such vindictiveness? It is clear that Louise wondered at this, after Bullitt’s “dear Child” gentle courtship. She was still lovers with Bullitt, bi-sexual and devoted to trying to make the marriage work. What had happened?
Within some cables and communiqués to Arthur Hays and inside the archives of Jack Carney , who was a lover to Louise in the 1930’s-- many of his letters kept by Louise-- there lie perhaps a partial answer to her concerns. Carney’s Papers reveal some clue as to what might have been happening: six pages of Military Intelligence Department (MID, an early incarnation of the FBI) files about Louise Bryant and undercover operants. The Carney find confirms Louise was “under surveillance”. And the Freedom of Information Act in the 1970’s released her FBI files, exhibiting the extent to which she was considered a threat, and “followed”. Her cables expressed concern, if not fear, Carney’s archives make surveillance of Bryant undeniable. And her query to Bullitt in Jan. 1930 from Algiers is clear: “there are five men here who say you hired them to follow me” (LBP: cable Jan. 1930). In Louise’s 1930 cable regarding Bullitt’s plan to divorce her, she pleas to her lawyer, Arthur Hays: “ Ask Bill please recall four persons claiming they are his detectives watching me for nearly eight weeks New York, boat, Paris here working me” . Searches through both of their archives (Bullitt and Bryant) reveal many such pleas by Bryant but only one response from Bullitt, saying her notion was “ridiculous, there are no such men”.
Certainly it is possible these were the gestures of a jealous, angry husband.
But Bullitt had already filed for divorce and had his terms “indignities to the person” accepted by the court via his sixteen page description of Louise’s “behaviour”. Why would she be followed by men Bullitt hired? That was her question. A clear answer from Bullitt never came. He insisted the men were liars. Yet. Louise’s concerns were warranted. Louise felt she was being “followed” and had generated an understandable paranoia about her own, personal safety. Was he complicit in a more sinister scheme to undermine Louise’s writing and personal life? She had times of deep doubt.
Whether Bullitt knew or was a part of surveillance, aware of undercover agents monitoring Louise Bryant is unknown. What is clear, however, is the fact that Bullitt repeatedly insisted Louise “not reside in the U.S.” as part of the “divorce settlement”. She rarely complied. Yet tried to endlessly to be civil. And Louise had reason to be suspicious of “spies”. In the 1920’s journalist were being followed, recruited and participating in spy activity for the United States.
Mrs. Harrison is a perfect example. She was married to a Thomas Bullitt Harrison (unclear if he was a William Bullitt relation) and soon after his death she began working as a spy for the U.S. , in Russia. A journalist turned “undercover agent”. Thus, Louise was used to being followed, under surveillance and/or implicated in being “anti American”. Harrison herself would mock Bryant in a 1930’s book she wrote about Russia.
At the time of Reed’s death and for years after, the “red scare” was taking hold. And the fact that Louise Bryant herself was under investigation by the MID weighed heavy on her. Bullitt had begun “pursuing” her just months after Reed died in Moscow. Mutual friends including Louise’s fellow reporter Jack Kelley were among those being harassed. Undercover operations were common at the time. When Bullitt began courting Louise he had just left a junket with the Dept. of State. He had met Reed two or three years earlier, perhaps helping intervene in having confiscated papers returned. And Bullitt was active in Treaty of Versailles protocol. But Bullitt “left” these government positions rather suddenly, around 1920, under unclear circumstances. Her questions to Arthur Hays about surveillance persisted.
The certainty of wild speculations about William C. Bullitt’s role in Intelligence activity may never be known. But his vindictive, misogynist vendettas are fact. Keeping Louise from her daughter was his enacted wrath. Lying to their daughter Anne about the circumstances of those years are the proof that his intentions were meant to harm. Deceitful, passive, aggression.
Louise continued writing to Anne though received no communiqués from her daughter arrived—one lone postcard from 1932 the exception. The Bullitt Papers at Yale are full of Anne’s writings, letters to her husbands, letters to her father beginning at age 8 and communiqués as a grown women to varied biographers. This plethora of letters depict her attention to detail and Anne—and her father’s-- desire to “archive” her writings. One lone postcard to Louise, from Anne, is, quite honestly, out of character. Why were there not Anne letters “to Muds”?
Did Anne receive her mother’s letters and never reply?
In fact, Anne, it appears, did perhaps write to her mother. But the letters she wrote to her mother, as a young girl, were never mailed to Louise Bryant. Or so the story goes. According to Ashfield “lore” and an anonymous source , William Bullitt, Anne’s father kept her letters to Louise, unposted, never mailed. They were found in a bundle in the Conway, Mass. Bullitt home. Soon before Anne died in 2007. The house had been empty for years and was finally being renovated by local folks under the “supervision” of the Bullitt Estate. Anne’s unmailed letters to her mother were found by a local “William Bullitt friend”, the story shared with me by a member of the Ashfield Historical Society: “They were letters from Anne to her mother. They had never been mailed.”. Those letters, though I have tried repeatedly to have access to them, have not been released to either Bullitt or Bryant’s archives. I did send a request to both the Ashfield Historical Society and the Bullitt estate for information. No reply ever arrived. Letters from Anne were something Louise often sought. The quest appears ancient. The propensity for Bullitt to banish, undeniable.
Despite the callous arrangements William Bullitt had demanded, Louise, in all her letters I located at Yale, did not waver in her belief that Bullitt would find a generous resolve. She did not resort to slandering him or retaliating, in kind, with threats. In fact, she often expressed her compassion for his struggling with his own personal “demons”.
This is no more evident than in a statement Bryant wrote, in 1933, to her old news service people when they questioned Bullitt’s intent with Russia. And her correspondence about the events to Bullitt. She was on all fronts, a loyal lover of family. Her efforts to continue to help the Bryant’s--her family out West-- persisted despite her financial situation being precarious.
By the 1930’s the atmosphere of the “red scare” had certainly settled in and very few people wanted to “take a risk” with Bryant due to her history of Socialism/Bolshevik ties in the past. She couldn’t find a job, but kept on writing. Bryant also continued an active interest in Tom Mooney’s plight (as indicated in her correspondences with Jack Carney) and continued writing. Despite working to maintain her health per Dercum’s Disease and being emotionally strained by the Bullitt dynamic and loss of contact with her daughter, Bryant continued attempts to contact former employers and newspaper editors and was working on at least two book projects during the final six years of her life: the Biography of Jack Reed and a book about Irish activism and Resistance.
Neither was found in her archives, not a reference or page of annotated notes. Mention in one of her cables regarding “stolen manuscripts” from her hotel in Paris might be the reason. Though, through a serious of synchronicities I was able to locate at least part of her “Reed work”, which is included in Part Five. According to Wambly Bald, a reporter for the Paris newspaper who interviewed Louise last, it seems, her Reed project was “under contract with Harrison Smith”. Smith was a big name in publishing in her era. Unlike her unfair legacy, as perpetuated by associates of hers/Jack Reed, in the years after Reed died Louise Bryant did not decline, was not a drunkard forgetting her art in her last years of life. Emma Goldman spitefully began the longstanding slanderous sentiments against Louise Bryant in a letter to Alexander Berkman:
"The last time I saw her was at the Select when two drunker Corsican soldiers carried out of the café. What a horrible end. More and more I come to think it is criminal for young Middle-class American or English girls to enter radical ranks. They go to pieces. And even when they do not reach the gutter, as Louise did, their lives are empty...of course Lincoln Steffens was right when he said about Louise {that] she was never a communist, she only slept with a Communist”
Lincoln Steffens was never fond of Louise Bryant, and she not his fan, either. But why Goldman chose to think so little of Louise, neither mentioning nor cognizant of her ailment nor continued writings/work, is only speculation.
No matter. For that wrongful Bryant legacy is now, finally dispelled.
Jack Carney’s letters and love represent those last Louise years well: his words to Louise, always playfully, nudging her into resilience, as a mutual friend of Jack Reed, even calling her “honey” as Reed did...to be certain she kept on with her work. And she did. Her “lost work” on Reed—in Part Five—were being written during these tumultuous times of separation from her daughter and are testament to her resilience and claim of being her own woman, not a mere sex object nor “lost cause” who fell to pieces. Quite the contrary. Louise Bryant died fighting for her beliefs: to preserve her work and that of Jack Reed, to regain custody of her daughter and live life on her own “terms”, just as she had done from the time she left the dusty towns of Nevada in search of freedom from the tethers of ancestry and oppression.
this project is partially funded by an Oregon Literary Arts (Portland, Or)
fellowship awarded to antoinette nora claypoole
Please note: primary source for this project/article is: Louise Bryant Papers (MS 1840). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
Also...this is a work in progress and for art sake, varied versions of the Introduction are posted here...final draft is in process, for now, enjoy the varied reads and feel free to weigh in/send me comments about the work...thanks for reading! antoinette.
Introduction "Flowers of Bronze: The Auto/Biography of Louise Bryant (1885-1936)
“...I am but a messenger who lays his notes before you, attempting to give you a picture of what I saw and what you would have seen if you had been with me.
--Louise Bryant, circa 1918
Sterling Library, Yale University. Summer 2010. Letters from a young daughter, still "gone missing". Divorce rants by a vindictive husband.
Remembering Autumn 2007. Opening an envelope. Slivers of clipped hair, dark brown locks fall. Preserved in a parchment envelope. 10 large boxes of letters, 34 oversized and standard cartons, cables and lengthy discussions, research notes on Mussolini, d’Annunzio and a letter from Trotsky. Little white dove funny frog postcards, poems written to a daughter from Baden-Baden sanitarium and talk of a “lost or stolen” manuscript 18 months before death. In Paris.
Remembering Autumn 2007. Opening an envelope. Slivers of clipped hair, dark brown locks fall. Preserved in a parchment envelope. 10 large boxes of letters, 34 oversized and standard cartons, cables and lengthy discussions, research notes on Mussolini, d’Annunzio and a letter from Trotsky. Little white dove funny frog postcards, poems written to a daughter from Baden-Baden sanitarium and talk of a “lost or stolen” manuscript 18 months before death. In Paris.
The story is complex and plagued by lies which history and time have designed. Despite a thwarted legacy, new truths emerge. Unearthed gems. Flowers of Bronze intends to revive and correct Louise Bryant's place in her/his story via her own articulate archives and personal writings...hitherto unseen.
Defying Obscurity
Louise Bryant's true legacy was, in part, placed into obscurity by a vindictive husband who did not allow historians access to her archives, papers/writings which were neatly organized by her own hand, before her death in 1936. These personal histories housed at Yale's Sterling Library were recovered from a basement in Dublin, Ireland after 75 years of banishment. (see "History of Project" for details). Bryant's archives reveal that she continued on as a Socialist and Suffragette long after her Socialist/Communist husband Jack Reed died: she interviewed various international "figures" and lived to challenge a woman's right to raise a child as a working mother, "despite" her writing life. Defying misogyny was her mission --consciously or organically emerging from Mother Love--and comprehending her diagnosis of "Dercum's Disease" her affliction. In the end, the deepest truth of Bryant's stamina and committment to feminist and social justice reside in her resistance to becoming property, owned. Despite the efforts doctors, husbands and assylums placed upon her spirit after Jack Reed's death.
Flowers of Bronze portrays Louise Bryant as the woman she became, the woman she was, in her own words. Popular, controversial lore and previous biographers telling only a partial, biased story (access to current source material witheld from them by the Bullitt estate/family) here we find Bryant as she was: fighting for those rights women now can only vaguely fathom as non existent.
The truth is, after the death of her second husband, Jack Reed, Louise Bryant did not "marry to aristocracy" and desert her Socialist years, as many biographers and anarchist critics dictate/d. Rather, she continued to write for the International News Service, had a baby and continued to work and travel per book/speaking engagements, never losing her beliefs which reached as far back as her Senior thesis at the University of Oregon (the Indian Wars: mistreatment by the U.S. Government of Klamath-Modocs in S. Oregon--printed in it's entirety in the Appendix of this collection).
Bryant was poignantly remembered as a champion for rights in a rare interview with her daughter, Anne. To an Irish newspaper in 1982 after the release of Warren Beatty's movie REDS, Anne made her first and apparently ONLY public statements about her mother. They included some oddly construed "facts" but resonated emotively with her memory of how Louise was "an inveterate collector of strays...always bringing home some impecunious student or artist down on his luck and looking after them" (Anne Moen Bullitt, 1982).
Louise Bryant married William C. Bullitt, a wealthy man of questionable motives three months before her baby daughter was born on Feb. 24, 1924. A "convenience" to some, yet others would say a way to allow her girl a chance to survive-- we still didn't have the vote then, women couldn't own property and the baby would be labelled "illegitimate". Children needed "male" protection, in the eyes of that world, and so most mothers complied . Louise Bryant had hopes for Bullitt and she: he had known Reed, was interested in Russia and knew she was a renowned writer. Yet as found in her many personal letters/legal efforts, Bryant was fooled by Bullitt's personna and fought literally, until her death, for the right to know her child. Bullitt taking custody in a vile collection of accusations against Bryant. Bullitt's lies and court proceedings denied Bryant access to her young daughter and she spent the last 10 years of her life trying to defy a system who would say she could not see her daughter because she was a bi sexual. A system that refused her work saing that her writings as a Socialist meant nothing to America.
She persisted, nonetheless, as is evident in Part Four of this collection. Fighting for custody of her daughter and publishing/interviews right up to the untimely end of her life in 1936.
She persisted, nonetheless, as is evident in Part Four of this collection. Fighting for custody of her daughter and publishing/interviews right up to the untimely end of her life in 1936.
A simple cable to the News Service, an interview with Walter Waters, is the last piece of News Service writing to be found in Bryant's archives: it exhibits her committment to bravado, a tireless interest in Labor Union/fair worker rights movement right up to the end of her life.
Having been rendered a "socialist's prostitute" (newsclip/review of the movie REDS) for decades, Bryant's time to achieve her rightful place in literary/women's history has come.
This became apparent to me, while with a sense of the sacred, I sorted through the political/literary writings and belongings of Louise Bryant (1885-1936), that Louise Bryant had a strong desire for us to know the eccentric, delicate and bravado body of her life and work. With two published books (Six Red Months in Russia, Mirrors of Moscow) during her lifetime, there appears, also, much work that has never been in print before. And a legacy as the first Woman Journalist to walk into the fires of war, surviving "all man has done".
The Jack Reed Years
As witness to the Russian Revolution in 1917, Louise Bryant was a suffragette, a Socialist, journalist and prolific writer. Her books were eyewitness accounts, interviews and commentaries about R
ussia’s new found government. With her husband, Jack (John) Reed (10 Days that Shook the World) she became part of a history which reflects the roots of today’s political landscape, a journey as relevant now as when together they trekked the long road to Petrograd.
ussia’s new found government. With her husband, Jack (John) Reed (10 Days that Shook the World) she became part of a history which reflects the roots of today’s political landscape, a journey as relevant now as when together they trekked the long road to Petrograd. With an uncanny irony, as Russia continues again to command center stage in the world theater of power, Louise Bryant’s newly found personal documents and polished, political essays emerge like the dead sea scrolls of political history. To a public who has had to wait 70 years to review them, the texture of Louise Bryant’s political sojourns and eyewitness accounts arrive surprisingly unfrayed.
She left us much. Diaries of story ideas, unpublished manuscripts, notes about her interviews. And essay upon essay about the Bolsheviks, revolutionary Russia, (some never before published) and her time in the Middle East (the 1920’s).
Louise Bryant’s first two books, Six Red Months in Russia and Mirrors of Moscow were published in 1918, 1923, consecutively and did contain some of these accounts. Her writings for the International News Service and Hearst Corporation as an overseas correspondent were widely circulated in newspapers throughout the United States. During the early 20’s she covered events of the Middle East. Turkey. Latvia. She was, as one of her editors explained “ the most influential correspondent of her time”.
Though Louise Bryant’s voice was virtually silenced for 75 years, it resonates a harmonics of bravado, an avant-garde feminist choir of “Internationale” refrains. A literary non-fiction heroine before the genre was named, a troubadour of free verse love rants before the beats and sixties arrived, Louise Bryant, socialist, witness to the Russian Revolution, carried her roots in Suffrage to the cadence of her writings. And was quite obviously, ahead of and beyond her time. These works can assure you of the universal echo she becomes. Speaking as woman of history, of activism as woman, as writer for continual, collective visions.
In the Yale collection calling cards with handwritten Islamic names reflect her exploits.
 |
| photo "Women Soldiers" by Louise Bryant |
The messages, her voice, are both intelligent and intuitive, clearly professional and political, standing strong inside the test of time. Transmitting an integrity of truth about governments as she found them, world leaders and revolutionaries as she knew them Louise Bryant’s writings reflect neither an identification with her topic nor a personal bias. The art and politics, craft and passion of Louise Bryant are evident in her files upon files of essays regarding Russian leaders—including Lenin, Trotsky and Kerensky--Women soldiers and European figures of her day. Louise Bryant’s collected work—some of it never in print before-- is a window into time reflecting back upon our current world affairs.
Louise Bryant, in an unconventional perspective writes of Lenin in Mirrors of Moscow :
“Every normal man is pushed forward or back to some degree by women. It is my theory that Lenin's amazing stability was substantially strengthened by the women who meant most to him. Those women were: his mother, his wife, his sister and his lifelong friend ...Fotvia.”
In a world where the feminine has nearly been absorbed by the male paradigm, where celebration of matters of the heart are passé and deemed “weakening”, Louise Bryant reaches through time to speak of how Lenin, how Russia had a love of woman which fueled his vision, one which infused that of Louise Bryant so heatedly that she toured the West Coast, on her return from Russia’s “October” Revolution (1917), to help organize American Women to claim the vote. She spoke to workers, loggers and suffragettes encouraging all to look at the Soviets as a model of freedom, that workers everywhere could plan their escape.
Clara Wold, suffragette and fellow activist speaks of Louise Bryant in an exclusive interview included here in this volume. From “Aims of Bolsheviki” 1919:
“She has been an eye-witness of all the history-making events in Russia in the past few months, and has full faith in the ability of the Russians to achieve their aspirations.”
During her United States, West Coast tour in 1919, Louise encouraged loggers in Washington State to demand fair wages while inspiring women to claim a voice. A Suffragette, an activist proud to be a woman yet not subservient to the mandated roles of women of her era, she continues to give us eyewitness revolution in it’s most earnest form.
Yet, in 1919 halls in her homeland of the still wild West of the United States were skeptical. At best. One venue, for instance, in Spokane, Wa. threatened to cancel her talks. And Portland, Oregon was reluctant, as well. Her letter to Portland City Council -- included in this collection--is full of shoot from the hip rhetoric explaining the reasons their apprehensions should be dropped. The City Council was refusing her access to speak. Once her hometown and her literary birthplace---Louise Bryant was first published in the Spectator there, in the early 1900’s---Portland hoped she would not bother to rally her Soviet values in the city of roses, perhaps hoping to thwart her “radical” views.
To no avail. The talks went forward.
Louise Bryant’s West Coast tour became a cornerstone for activism and her first book, Six Red Months in Russia gleaned national attention. Sinclair Lewis in Pasadena, Ca. supported her efforts and women up and down the coast believed that courage of the feminine, if prevailing in Russia, was certainly able to make a curtain call here.
But her popularity and stamina would not prevail.
Soon after her return from travels, Jack Reed—her husband and comrade—returned to Russia. His trek marked a series of agonizing months of separation for the couple, culminating in Louise’s finding him in Russia, one month before he died of typhus, October 1920. Louise Bryant’s chronicles of that time-- entitled “Last Days with Jack Reed” --depict the ceremonial tribute given the only American buried at the Kremlin and explain with poetic fervor the nature of her husband, even in his dying hours...“He would tell me that the water he drank was full of little songs”.
Following the untimely death of her husband, “lover and comrade” Louise dove into her work. She wrote a series of news stories about European leaders which were read throughout the U.S. and stand as some of her most powerfully influential writings. Included in these projects were interviews with Mussolini and travels to Constantinople.
Mothering/Legal Battle Years
In the midst of this work for International News Service Louise Bryant was pursued by a man who had known she and Jack back in the United States. In 1923, three months before the birth of her daughter, Anne Moen Bullitt (1924-2007), Louise married William C. Bullitt, the man who had followed her around Europe and pushed to kindle a connection. Bullitt would later become U.S. Ambassador to Russia and subsequent ambassador to France, as well as estranged from his wife. For ultimately the politics of Louise Bryant did not resonate with her new husband’s pursuits.
"Louise with daughter Anne, circa 1926"
"Louise with daughter Anne, circa 1926"
Thought to have had an affair with artist Gwen Le Gallienne during her separation from Bullitt, Louise Bryant continued her Socialist politics and suffragette values. Subsequently divorced by Bullitt for the very values which drew him to her, Louise Bryant spent her last years of life fighting for custody/visitation of their daughter, Anne, who was vindictively kept from her mother by the actions of Bullitt (a 16 page "divorce rant" written by Bullitt is testament to his rage, and is included in this volume). While waging this custody battle, Louise Bryant was also dealing with health issues and by the early 1930’s had lost access to her publishing venues as well as her daughter.
Writing as a livelihood became difficult to maintain as the bizarre terms of her divorce (1930) insisted she “not reside in the United States”. She did not always abide by these “unheard of conditions” and continued writing essays for U.S. audiences. Nonetheless, the venues for Socialist writings had waned.
Yet. The theater of her life persists. Louise Bryant tells us now, via her meticulously kept personal and political archives--from which this book is compiled--that courage and love can undo what all others fear lost.
Raison d'etre
But. WHY Louise Bryant, now such an “old” piece of history?
Because, her writings as found here, suggest that she embodies the courage and foresight, the fortitude and strident voice required of women and writers, no matter the era. As humans trying to survive a dominator-culture/workplace, the story and Socialists writings of Louise Bryant provide insight into how to create alternatives to mainstream paradigms via political writing. Her pieces on Lenin, for instance, help the reader learn how to challenge the status quo while listening to unpopular concepts. Simply stated, she has a way of pulling you into her world. Most importantly Louise Bryant provides a window into how the universal voice of dissent resonates throughout any era. In these writings, so long silenced, she challenges a society which maintains an addiction to war, sexism and elitism as prevalent in her day as it is in ours.
Flowers of Bronze: the Auto/Biography of Louise Bryant then, revives a legacy exempt from and simultaneously fused with history, a woman and her politics, ready to enter history. That is, Louise Bryant’s was a prolific career and has at long last come into view. Clearly. However sexism and/or fear attempted to banish a woman, cast a Socialist activist as “undone” and “disintegrated without dignity” (as indicated in an ominous, mysterious note found in her archives), Louise Bryant never lost sight of writing as an art, a gesture which stretches beyond and through the personal to a universal, human landscape.
Consider her piece about Gabrielle d’Annunzio: Cloister of Silence (her early working title). Written at a time in her life, a time in the world, where mustard gas and the “great war” was rampant reality, infusing the planet with a sense of unfathomable loss (when doesn’t war do this?). The piece itself is a tribute to how art revives what the senses, the intellect and science would deny, a testament of Louise Bryant’s efforts, her genius and literary contribution as relevant today as the time within which she wrote.
Or review, carefully, her previously unpublished essay “Emma Goldman”, from which the following is quoted:
“...in justice to Miss Goldman.... she is not the sort of Anarchist who believes in violence. She is a pacifist, a philosophical anarchist. It will be remembered that she served a term in America for speaking against conscription . And it is true that she has turned a deaf ear to any proposals by extremists in Russia for plots against the soviets or against individuals.”
Emma Goldman” is thus a poignant commentary about the fabric of revolution and the stamina of it’s leaders."
It is difficult to name any other woman (or human) whose courage and talent, vision and politics reach into the psyche of humankind from the streets of life and war with such rigour and accomplishment. Who do we name? Who could accomplish this? Without cell phones, internet and the cut and paste miracle of word programs? Without the right to vote and human rights to see our children? With passports withheld—and travel despite this “red” tape--by a “red scare” State Department?
Clara Wold, again, about Louise Bryant:
“To Austin Lewis
Here is Louise Bryant…..
I gave great faith in her power to change people’s convictions after hearing her talk to the Senate investigating committee…”
(Louise Bryant’s letter regarding her testimony to that committee is included in Part One of this collection and reveals a viable voice for change apropos today as much as when it was written).
So.
I bring to you that which I found while living inside the 37 oversized boxes, the 21 years, of Louise Bryant housed in Sterling Library, Yale University as placed and donated by the efforts of Gordon Lewis, guardian of her daughter Anne Moen Bullitt and Robert Pennoyer all of whom dealt with the “one ton of papers” shipped from Ireland to New Haven, Connecticut.
What you find here, then, are pieces which Louise Bryant left behind in her Paris apartment on January 6, 1936, the day she died. Suffering from Dercum’s disease (diagnosed in 1928), her last years being ridden with loss and pain, apparently did not keep Louise Bryant from organizing her writings, cataloging her ideas and even creating an extensive collection of work for a biography she was writing about her life with Jack Reed, papers she would send to Harvard shortly before her death.
These words, these pages, then, are near exclusively of/by Louise Bryant. As found in her private collection and original manuscripts for her two published books They represent what she intended for us to read, know and explore. That is, all of the words are hers, as found in her hand. Some typed flawlessly. By her, on onion skin paper. Or. Penciled on old Hotel stationary. Some in a language lesson composition books, interspersed with French...”je suis Louise ....entendez-vous”. Others neatly clipped from newspapers, tidy, intact, no frayed crumpled creases.
Thus. As you read, please note Louis Bryant’s work is presented here as though she is speaking to you. Which of course she is. And finally, she is revived. In her own, clear, intelligent and intuitive voice.
A cedar wind carrying her from a lost Nevada loneliest road in the U.S. West—-her childhood places (read, in the appendix, her “Autobiography of an Idle Woman” for a fictional taste of this)-- into the thorough fare of a world longing for direction. A new generation of activists and artists will find her words and vision more useful than any googled earthly satellite. For she carries a universal insight.
....alors. Ici. Louise the Sister, as Italian poet d’Annuzio lovingly, once, defined her. A literary archetype, an imprint on the collective politico artistic psyche of any generation of humans searching for a way to transmute fear. As the ever odd Mayan mantra of 2012 prevails. A requiem emerges. Louise Bryant. At last.
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copyright antoinette nora claypoole 2010
all rights reserved
all of Louise Bryant writings/images are in Public Domain
published freely w/credit to:
Sterling Library
Yale University
New Haven, Conn.
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watersongs@gmail.com for permissions to reprint info
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