From My Life as a Rebel, Angelica Balabanoff, 1938

Jack and his wife, Louise Bryant, and I became close friends during the weeks they spent in Scandinavia. Louise was a beautiful and radiant girl at this time. She too had gone to Russia as a correspondent shortly after the first Revolution, and her enthusiasm for the Soviets matched that of Jack. I was to know Louise in three different phases of her life—as Jack's courageous and adventurous comrade, fascinated by the Russian Revolution; as the broken-hearted woman of 1920, after Jack's tragic death, the reasons for which she fully understood; as the sick and shattered woman, without either the will or strength to fight her own weakness, during her last years in Paris. In Stockholm, we had no intimation of the tragedy which our relation to the Russian Revolution would bring to all three of us within the next two or three years.

Reed had to wait for a short time in Christiana, after Louise had left, before he took a boat back to the United States. I, too, was in Norway at this time, on some errand of the Soviet embassies in Scandinavia. We spent our evenings together, reading or talking, and on one occasion Jack induced me to go with him to the cinema to see a Charlie Chaplin picture. It was my first introduction to Chaplin and I enjoyed it immensely. It was also during one of these evenings that Jack tried to persuade me that I must write my memoirs.

( page 178 )

 

A day or two after the close of the second Congress, John Reed asked me to come and see him.

"I have a little wood," he said, "and do you know what—I still have some potatoes I brought back from my last trip. I shall bake them for you."

He looked ill and depressed and it seemed to me that he had aged ten years in the past few weeks. I understood what a blow the Congress had been to him.

"And now comes the farce of Baku," he said. "Zinoviev has ordered me to leave tomorrow. I will not go. I will tell Zinoviev I can't do it."

Louise was on her way to Russia, but he had no idea of when she would arrive or how. But I understood that this was not the reason why he did not want to go to Baku. Baku would be a repetition, on a smaller scale, of the Moscow Congress, and he had already made up his mind that he had nothing in common with the Comintern. Nevertheless, I heard the next day that he had gone. He knew that Zinoviev and Radek would stop at nothing to discredit him, and he would not give them the excuse of attacking him on the basis of indiscipline.

Two days after he had left, Louise arrived. She had had to make her way across Finland, which was then at war with Russia, disguised as a sailor. From Stockholm she had written Jack in care of Zinoviev's office the probable date of her arrival, but he had never received the message. We saw each other nearly every day after she arrived.

( pages 281-2 )

 

Towards the end of the month John Reed returned to Moscow and he and Louise came to see me. Both of them looked unhappy and tired, and we made no effort to hide from each other what was in our minds. Jack spoke bitterly of the demagogy and display which had characterized the Baku Congress and the manner in which the native population and the Far Eastern delegates had been treated. A few days later I heard that Jack was ill and had been taken to a hospital. I was told that he had expressed an urgent wish to see me. To my everlasting regret, I postponed my visit, not realizing how ill he was. On the very morning that I was preparing to go to the hospital I received the news of his death.

I did not go to the funeral because I knew that I could not bear to listen to the speeches that would be made over his coffin. Any speech I might make which did not allude to the tragedy of the last months of his life would be a lie and a profanation. I knew that Louise understood my absence. Poor girl! She had to stand for hours in the rain and snow while interminable speeches were made in Russian, French, German, and English. Even after she had finally fainted from exhaustion and grief, no attempt was made to take her away. The speeches went on over her unconscious body. Clare Sheridan, who was present at the funeral, later remarked at the callous indifference of this performance.

After the funeral, Louise spent much of her time with me while she regained her strength. I was probably the only person with whom she talked freely and bitterly of Jack's experiences in Russia and his disillusion. She was convinced that this disillusion had robbed him of that will to live which might have saved his life.

( pages 291-2 )

 

In Paris, Henry Alsberg . . . called on me an and told me that Louise Bryant had been in a sanatorium but that her health had not improved and that there seemed to be little hope for her. As soon as she returned to Paris she got in touch with me. I scarcely recognized her. She was now separated from her second husband, William Bullitt, and had been ill for more than a year. I would not have believed that any one could change so, not only in appearance, but in her manner of speaking, her voice and tone. Only at intervals when I continued to see her was she the old Louise I had known with Jack. Whenever we met, she spoke of him with deep sadness, of his disappointment in Russia, his illness and death.

"Oh, Angelica," she would say in these moments of lucidity and confidence, "don't leave me, I feel so lonely. Why did I have to lose Jack? Why did we both have to lose our faith?"

Shortly after this I heard of her death.

( pages 310-11 )

New York and London : Harper & Brothers, 1938, page 224.