Promethean Playboy

JOHN REED--Granville Hicks--Macmillan ($3.50).

Communists do not believe in heaven but they have their saints. John Reed, dead at 33, buried by the Kremlin wall close to the tomb of Russia's god, is already canonized. To such Harvard classmates as Red-fearing Hamilton Fish Jr., Reed was a traitor to his class. But even within the revolutionary sect his sainthood is not unanimously acknowledged. Upton Sinclair called him "the playboy of the social revolution." To sympathetic Biographer Granville Hicks. Reed's life is an ennobling example of how revolutionaries are made. Unbiased readers of John Reed will feel that Sinclair's judgment hits nearest the mark, but that Reed was a Promethean playboy and what he played with was fire.

Jack Reed was born (1887) into the provincial aristocracy of Portland, Ore. At his Episcopalian christening his sponsors gave him the name of John Silas Reed. He grew up to be a gangling, delicate boy, good at swimming, headstrong and difficult in class. "Defiance was not a principle with him; it was an instinct." His family sent him east to school, then to Harvard. Reed soon became a well-known but not a popular member of his class. Fiercely ambitious, fiercely sensitive, he was regarded as pushing and unsound.

Reed wanted to be among the college cake-eaters but could not resist showing that he knew bread was a better diet. By persistence and ability he became an ''activity man," made the Lampoon and the Monthly, was active in many a club.

Classmates Walter Lippmann, Lee Simonson, T. S. Eliot had sounder reputations, but Reed got the prominence he wanted. With Hamilton Fish Jr. leading the football team, Reed pranced before the stands, "the most inspired song-leader Harvard had known."

Because his undergraduate idol, "Copey" (Professor Charles Townsend Copeland) told him he must "see life" if he wanted to write. Reed made his first trip to Europe on a cattle-boat, then discovered that Paris was the greatest place in the world. Back in Manhattan, Lincoln Steffens got him a job on the American Magazine. Soon it began to look like Harvard all over again. He was taken into the Dutch Treat Club, was spoken of as a coming man by many a highly-paid hack. He was taken in by Mabel Dodge, whose Fifth Avenue salon was then running full blast. Her possessiveness eventually became a nuisance, but at her house Reed met the man who changed his life: William ("Big Bill") Haywood, famed I.W.W. leader. When Haywood told him about the Paterson silk-mill strike, Reed went to see it himself, got arrested, spent four days in jail. That was the beginning of his revolutionary education.

Reed gave up his job on the American, became managing editor of the Masses. When Francisco Villa's revolt broke loose in northern Mexico Reed, at 26, got his first job as war correspondent. His graphic articles for the Metropolitan and despatches to the World made his reputation. When his sympathies marched with the facts, Reed was an inspired reporter. "He did not hesitate to alter or even to invent. He might tell as if it had happened to him something that he had learned at secondhand. His deviations from factual accuracy were not, as they might have been with another man, the result of failures of his powers of observation, for his eyes and his memory were almost perfect . . . (but) a determination to give the reader precisely the impression he had received." On the strength of his Mexican articles Reed was hailed as another Richard Harding Davis. When the real War started, the Metropolitan sent him to France. But there the facts and his sympathies were far apart. And there he was guilty of a silly trick whose story often afterwards returned to plague him. On a visit to the German front lines he and a fellow-correspondent each took a shot at the French trenches; his companion's account of it was published. Reed was immediately barred from France.

Back in Portland for a brief visit, Reed fell in love with Louise Bryant, took her back to Manhattan with him. Though by this time he was a champion of "free love," he eventually married her, just before undergoing an operation he thought might be fatal. Reed was not yet a member of any party but he was beginning to be known as a radical, and did everything he could to keep the U. S. from entering the War. When war was finally declared Reed went to Russia to report the Revolution. Before he was allowed to leave the U. S. he had to appear before the draft board, was exempted from service for physical disability (he had had a kidney removed).

In Petrograd Reed went everywhere, saw everyone, piled up a mass of newspapers, leaflets, proclamations -- the documents of history in the making. He not only wanted to report the Revolution but help it, and his activities got him into trouble with the State Department. When he got back to Manhattan -- just too late to stand trial with his fellow-editors of the Masses for sedition -- no paying paper in the country would print a line of his biggest story. In the 18 months before he returned to Russia he was indicted three times, stood trial twice, spoke and wrote about the Revolution, finished his most famed book, Ten Days That Shook the World (its title was suggested by Liberal Lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays), broke off from the U. S. Communists to found the Communist Labor Party.

Though he told some of his friends that what he really wanted to do was to write poetry, Reed was now too deeply committed to the Cause to have time for anything else. Shipping as a stoker, and with a false passport, he got back to Russia for the terrible winter of 1919. He meant this trip to be only a visit, but when he tried to get out, he found there was no way back. On his second attempt, through Finland, he was arrested, imprisoned, finally deported back to Russia. By the time his wife could join him there, his health was nearly burned out. When typhus got him he lasted only a few days. Says Biographer Hicks: he would have approved the hard, impersonal orations the Red leaders made over his coffin:

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