Reporting the Chinese Revolution: The Letters of Rayna Prohme

Reporting the Chinese Revolution The Letters of Rayna Prohme Baruch Hirson and Arthur J. Knodel Edited and with an int...

Author: Baruch Hirson | Arthur J. Knodel | Gregor Benton

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Reporting the Chinese Revolution The Letters of Rayna Prohme

Baruch Hirson and Arthur J. Knodel Edited and with an introduction by Gregor Benton

Pluto

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Press

LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

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First published 2007 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © the Estates of Baruch Hirson and Arthur J. Knodel 2007 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13 ISBN-10

978 0 7453 2642 9 0 7453 2642 0

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin 10

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed and bound in India

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Contents Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration Dramatis Personae Introduction by Gregor Benton

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1. Rayna Prohme: A Retrospect

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2. The Road to China

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3. Peking and Canton

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4. Hankow

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5. Shanghai

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6. Vladivostok to Moscow

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7. Moscow

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8. Afterword

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Appendices Notes Bibliography Illustrations Index

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168 178 183 185 190

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Acknowledgments Baruch Hirson and Arthur J. Knodel wish to thank: Alexander Buchman, without whose assistance the documents used in this book would have remained incomplete. It was also due to Alex’s persistence that the two authors were brought together and were able to assemble this work. Finally, it is thanks to Alex that we have been able to include many of the photographs printed in this book. And Marian Parry, who so generously gave Rayna’s letters to Helen Freeland to AJK. It was this collection that made it possible to commence work on the life of Rayna Prohme. Marian did not live to see the publication of this work, but it will stand as a tribute to her love of Rayna. Among those that provided assistance when writing was under way was Professor Tom Grunfeld, SUNY/Empire State College, New York who sent BH a copy of the draft manuscript on American Friends of the Chinese Revolution. This work provided details that were not otherwise available.

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Note on Transliteration Gregor Benton

Today, most writers use Pinyin to transliterate Chinese names. Pinyin, developed in the 1950s, has official standing in China and the merits of simplicity and consistency – it lacks the apostrophes, hyphens, and diacritics that clutter up WadeGiles spelling. This latter system, devised in the nineteenth century, was used worldwide until recently (including by Rayna). However, it lacks Pinyin’s consistency – some Chinese romanized their names idiosyncratically and place-names followed non-systematic forms used by the Chinese Post Office. Many users of Wade-Giles, including Rayna, did not wholly master its conventions and sometimes misspelt words (Rayna’s misspellings have been corrected without indication). Non-Pinyin transcriptions are therefore a liability, yet I have used Wade-Giles and Post Office spelling in the introduction and footnotes so as not to create a disparity with Rayna’s letters. Readers more familiar with Pinyin can consult the following list of conversions. Wade-Giles or Post Office spelling Canton Changchow Chang Tso-lin Chang Tsung-chang Chengchow Chiang Kai-shek Chi-li Ch’ing Chungking

Pinyin Guangzhou Changzhou Zhang Zuolin Zhang Zongchang Zhengzhou Jiang Jieshi Zhili Qing Chongqing

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NOTE ON TRANSLI T E R AT I O N

Wade-Giles or Post Office spelling Chu Teh Feng Yü-hsiang Hankow Hu Han-min Kinhan Kiukiang Kuling Kuominchün Kuomintang Kwangsi Kwangtung [Kuangtung] Liao Chung-kai Li Hung-chang Mao Tse-tung Nanking Paotingfu Peking Shameen Soong Ch’ing-ling Soong E-ling Soong May-ling Sun Yat-sen Teng Yen-ta Tientsin Ts’ao K’un Wang Ching-wei Wang Fan-hsi Whampoa Woosung Yangtze Yenching Yüan Shih-k’ai

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Pinyin Zhu De Feng Yuxiang Hankou Hu Hanmin Jinghan Jiujiang Guling Guominjun Guomindang Guangxi Guangdong Liao Zhongkai Li Hongzhang Mao Zedong Nanjing Baoding Beijing Shamian Song Qingling Song Ailing Song Meiling Sun Zhongshan Deng Yanda Tianjin Cao Kun Wang Jingwei Wang Fanxi Huangpu Wusong Chang Jiang Yanjing Yuan Shikai

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Dramatis Personae Gregor Benton

In this biographical list, Chinese names are given first in Wade-Giles or a related transcription and then, in brackets, in Pinyin. Borodin, Mikhail Markovich (1884–1951), was a Soviet diplomat sent to China in 1923 to help Sun Yat-sen reorganize the Kuomintang. He was the architect of the First United Front between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (1923–27). He was forced to return to Russia in July 1927, after the communists were thrown out of the Kuomintang. Chang Tsung-chang (Zhang Zongchang) (1881–1932), nicknamed the ‘Dogmeat General’, was a Shantung warlord, defeated by the Kuomintang in 1928. Chen, Eugene (1878–1944), was a Trinidad-born Chinese who became China’s Foreign Minister in the 1920s. He moved in his mid thirties to London, where he was at the center of a circle of Chinese nationalists and radical students from Africa and the Americas. In 1912, he went to China. He became Sun’s close associate and represented him at the Paris Peace Conference in 1918. Chen, Jack (1908–1996), an artist and son of Eugene Chen, grew up in Trinidad; published Inside the Cultural Revolution in 1975. He lived and worked in the People’s Republic from 1950 to 1971. x

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Chen, Percy (1901–1986), son of Eugene Chen, grew up in Trinidad; published his memoirs China Called Me: My Life Inside the Chinese Revolution in 1979. Feng Yü-hsiang (Feng Yuxiang) (1882–1948), the so-called ‘Christian General’, took control of Peking in 1924 and proposed an alliance with Sun Yat-sen. In 1925 he went to Moscow. Later he entered into an alliance with Chiang Kaishek, while preserving his independence. Fischer, Louis (1896–1970), was an American journalist who worked for The Nation and wrote a biography of Mahatma Gandhi. He later taught about the Soviet Union at Princeton University. Joffe, Adolf A. (1883–1927), was the Comintern representative sent to China in 1922 to negotiate with Sun Yat-sen on the cooperation between the Soviet Union, the Kuomintang, and the CCP. The Joffe–Sun Agreement, announced in January 1923, accepted that China was not yet ready for a Soviet government and relinquished Russian rights and privileges in China. A Trotskyist, Joffe committed suicide in 1927. Ku Meng-yü (Gu Mengyu) (1888–1972), Director of the Kuomintang’s Central Department of Propaganda, joined an oppositionist faction inside the Kuomintang in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Li Ta-chao (L Dazhao) (1889–1927), a founder of the CCP, who died for the cause. Reed, John (1887–1920), was a radical American reporter who was in Russia in 1917. He wrote about his experiences in Ten Days That Shook the World. He helped found the American Communist Party, and later died of typhus in Russia.

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REPO RT I N G T H E C H I N ES E R EVO L U T I O N

Sheean, Vincent (‘Jimmy’) (1899–1975), was an American foreign correspondent and writer. He covered the revolution in China in 1927 and the Spanish Civil War. Soong Ch’ing-ling (Madam Sun Yat-sen) (Song Qingling) (1892–1981) was a member of the State Council of the Wuhan government. She continued to favor collaboration with the CCP even after the left wing of the Kuomintang split with the communists. She was a sister of T. V. Soong. Soong E-ling (Song Ailing) (1890–1973), sister of T. V. Soong, married the industrialist and politician H. H. Kung (Kong Xiangxi) (1881–1967), a close associate of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. Soong May-ling (Song Meiling) (1897–2003) was the wife of Chiang Kai-shek and the younger sister of Soong Ch’ing-ling and Soong E-ling. Soong, T. V. (Song Ziwen) (1894–1971), was a Harvardeducated financier and politician who helped underwrite Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition and became Finance Minister in the Kuomintang government in Nanking. Strong, Anna Louise (1885-1970), was an American communist journalist best known for her support for communist movements in Russia and China. Sun Ch’uan-fang (Sun Chuanfang) (1885–1935) was a warlord of the Chih-li Clique. T’ang Sheng-chih (Tang Shengzhi) (1889–1970) was a Kuomintang general in the left Kuomintang in Wuhan who backed the suppression of the communist rising in Changsha in May 1927. He commanded the Nanking garrison on the eve of the Japanese attack in December 1937.

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Teng Yen-ta (Deng Yanda) (1895–1931) was dean of the Whampoa (Huangpu) Military College under Chiang Kaishek and a Kuomintang leftist subsequently executed in Shanghai. Ts’ao K’un (Cao Kun) (1862–1938) was a warlord of the Chih-li Clique. Tuan Chi-jui (Duan Qirui) (1865–1936) rose to prominence in the early Republic under its President, Yüan Shih-k’ai (Yuan Shikai). He became increasingly dependent on the Japanese and helped plunge China into warlordism. Wu Pei-fu (Wu Peifu) (1874–1939), a military leader under Yüan Shih-k’ai, became a warlord after Yüan’s death in 1916.

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Introduction Gregor Benton

This book covers a critical and formative period in Chinese history in the mid 1920s, between the death of Sun Yat-sen in March 1925 and the assumption of power in Nanking in 1927 by the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party, which Sun had organized in 1919 on the basis of earlier revolutionary parties and associations. The events are seen through the eyes of Rayna Simons Prohme, a young American woman who lived through them. Two sets of Rayna’s letters, one to her best friend and the other to her husband, form the book’s core. During the two years covered by the letters, several key developments set China’s course for the next ten years, up to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. They form not only the backdrop to the book but its main political content. A description of them is therefore essential to facilitate non-specialist readers’ understanding of the letters. In the period up to 1926, China’s nationalist movement, which had previously lacked power and resources, strengthened its position in Kwangtung in the south and became more radical. However, the problems facing it were daunting, both within China and along the littoral. First, there was the catastrophe of warlordism. Ever since the death in 1916 of President Yüan Shih-k’ai, conservative lynchpin of the early Republic, military commanders of various origins in control of armies of protean allegiance had been dividing China into separate sectors, some huge, some tiny, which they terrorized and bled white. Each ruled his territory by a mixture of naked force, corruption, 1

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and wielding personal ties. Among themselves, the warlords formed constantly shifting alliances. Control of Peking was the goal of the bigger warlords and warlord factions, yet whenever any one leader seemed ready to establish a stable national government, the rest would gang up to unsettle or defeat him. The other main challenge to the nationalists was the mortal threat posed to China’s national integrity by intrusions and invasions. Imperialist aggressors – Western, Russian, and Japanese – had repeatedly destabilized and humiliated China ever since the First Opium War of 1839–42. Although they never succeeded in fully partitioning China, as at one point seemed their intention, they used military force to exact treaties that gave them commercial and diplomatic privileges and control of the so-called Treaty Ports, of which there were no fewer than 92 by 1917. This is why Mao Tse-tung and the Marxists called China before 1949 a semi-colony, colonized along just parts of the coast and some big rivers, rather than a full colony like India. The Treaty Ports were a running sore on China and its body politic, but they were also nurseries of social and political change and, when necessary, bolt-holes for the revolutionaries. The foreigners who controlled them would have preferred to deal with a unitary Chinese authority, but they were also capable of playing on China’s fragmentation and were well placed to corrupt and manipulate individual warlords. In the revolution of 1911, insurgents loyal to Sun Yat-sen had overthrown the Ch’ing Dynasty (1644–1911) and declared the Republic. Aware of his own military weakness, Sun had agreed almost immediately to cede the presidency to Yüan Shih-k’ai, the army strongman of the late Ch’ing era, who promised constitutional government but actually turned the Republic into a dictatorship. After a bloody clash with Yüan in 1913, Sun fled and eventually set up an alternative government in Canton, the capital of Kwangtung province. The Republic kept up a largely fictional existence in the warlord years after 1916, with its nominal seat still in Peking. Sun’s regime in Canton was in

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reality just one territory among many vying for power in the warlord years. In some ways, Sun was unlike the warlords. He favored a legitimate government and was motivated by political idealism. In other ways, however, the distinction between him and them was not always apparent. He pursued fruitless military conspiracies and aspired to use Kwangtung as a base from which to reunify China by force of arms. His regime was weak, paralyzed by internal rivalries and external pressures and lacking in a coherent ideology or a strong social base. He was eventually rescued from his impotence by the Soviet Union, with which he allied in 1923. He agreed to the alliance only after lowering his expectations of the Powers and giving up, at least for the while, on his hopes for their assistance. Moscow’s agents – one of whom, Mikhail Borodin, shows up frequently in Rayna’s correspondence – energized Sun’s Kuomintang, reformulated its goals along more radical lines, furnished it with a modern-sounding ideology, introduced it to the idea of social mobilization, taught it the value of newspapers and schools, linked the problem of China’s warlords to the crisis of national sovereignty, and gave it arms and money. As part of the deal with Moscow, Sun was persuaded to allow members of the fledgling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in Shanghai in July 1921, to join the Kuomintang as individuals, in what became known as the First United Front (1923–27). The tactic was unpopular with Chinese communists, who saw the Kuomintang as yesterday’s people and would have preferred to raise an independent banner, that of proletariansocialist revolution. After briefly resisting, they finally agreed to join, but only after the Soviet emissary Hendricus Sneevliet (alias Maring) had brandished the authority of the Moscowbased Communist International (or Comintern) at them. Up to then, Sun’s anti-imperialism had been vague and erratic. In practice, he had made embarrassing deals with foreign powers. However, the Moscow connection gave him greater leeway in his foreign relations and strengthened his efforts to raise

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China’s standing in the world. As for the Russians, they hoped for a movement radiating out of Canton that would overthrow warlordism everywhere in China and expel the imperialists. But their hopes were only partly realized. The Northern Expedition (1926–28) is another event at the heart of the period covered by Rayna’s letters. After Sun Yat-sen’s death (from cancer) in March 1925, Chiang Kaishek began his rise to power in the Kuomintang, from his base in the Whampoa Military Academy (the Kuomintang’s officer-training school, set up near Canton in 1924 with Soviet help). He seemed at first to be a man of the left (he sometimes wore a red tie to show it) or at least of the political center, but he soon revealed his true colors, which were of the right. His main rivals for Sun’s mantle were Hu Han-min and Wang Ching-wei, whom he eventually worsted. His hand was greatly strengthened in 1926 by his party’s agreement to launch the Northern Expedition from Canton to destroy warlordism and reunify China, for his main constituency was in the Kuomintang’s National Revolutionary Army. Before marching north, he struck a pre-emptive blow at his communist allies in Canton in March 1926, in a bloodless coup designed to rein them in, make clear the political limits beyond which they should not move, and establish his own ascendancy. Most communists would sooner have quit the alliance and concentrated on a further mobilization of the labor movement rather than on waging military campaigns like the Northern Expedition. Originally a mere handful of scholars and intellectuals with scant influence in society and little or no experience of the labor movement, the CCP had surged as a consequence of the May Thirtieth movement of 1925. This movement, a potent mixture of strikes, anti-foreign boycotts, and student demonstrations, had rocked China, radicalized Chinese politics, and massively boosted the trade unions. However, the communists stayed in the United Front on the orders of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who short-

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sightedly valued his alliance with the Kuomintang above the interests of his Chinese comrades. The communists promoted the Northern Expedition by preparing workers and peasants to rise up in its support in towns and villages along its projected line of march. The Expedition’s victorious advance towards the Yangtze river drew strength from these advance mobilizations and left new social and nationalist ferment behind it. In January 1927, workers in Hankow (part of the Wuhan tri-city where Rayna stayed) and in downstream Kiukiang seized back the British Concessions. In the spring, workers led by the CCP captured Shanghai in the third of three armed risings and general strikes and cleared the city of its warlord occupiers in advance of the arrival of the Northern Expeditionaries. Two weeks later, on April 12, in an act of treachery etched forever onto the CCP’s collective memory, Chiang’s associates in the Green Gang (a mainstay of the criminal underworld and the Shanghai economy) and his own Nationalist forces attacked and disarmed the Shanghai workers’ pickets and massacred or jailed thousands in a well organized and executed purge, thus ending Chiang’s cooperation with the communists. Thereafter, public CCP activity ceased in areas under Chiang’s rule, which he exercised from his new capital in nearby Nanking. Not everyone in the Kuomintang backed Chiang’s purge. Left-wing nationalist leaders in Wuhan, hundreds of miles up the Yangtze from Shanghai, initially resisted Chiang’s new government and persevered with maintaining their own regime and the United Front. This Wuhan government had been formed in October 1926 under the Kuomintang leftist Wang Ching-wei, seen by many as Sun Yat-sen’s anointed heir. In Moscow, the Comintern backed the view of its representative in China, M. N. Roy, that the leadership of China’s national revolution had now passed to this left-wing government in Wuhan. The CCP leaders severely doubted Roy’s analysis but fell into line with it, again out of loyalty to Moscow. Then, in July 1927, Wang Ching-wei followed Chiang Kai-shek’s lead by

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turning on the communists and ejecting them from his administration. The trigger was Roy, who unwisely showed Wang a directive from Stalin ordering the CCP to form a workers’ and peasants’ army and put the reactionary Kuomintang leaders in the dock. But sooner or later the split would have happened anyway, even without Roy’s indiscretion. More or less at the same time as Wang Ching-wei struck against the CCP and the Soviet advisors in Wuhan, the Comintern in Moscow ordered the Chinese communists ‘openly to fight against the opportunism of the [Wuhan] Central Committee’ – at the precise moment when their organization was being cut to shreds. Most CCP leaders fled Wuhan, as did the Moscow emissaries. On August 1, a group of pro-communist military leaders staged a rising in Nanchang (later taken to mark the birth of the Chinese Red Army, and mentioned in passing in a Prohme letter). However, the rising collapsed in days. The communists were largely powerless to prevent further butchery of their supporters, this time by Wang Ching-wei’s men. It was not long before the two nationalist governments, in Nanking and Wuhan, exchanged compliments and came to terms in Nanking, under Chiang’s leadership. The events in China were a key factor in the political struggle between Stalin and Leon Trotsky in Moscow. According to Stalin, the national revolution in China would succeed under the leadership of the Kuomintang. In 1920, at the Second Comintern Congress in Moscow, Lenin had called on communists in colonized countries to resist the efforts of the bourgeoisie to control the movement of workers and peasants. To square their belief in the Kuomintang with Lenin’s strictures, Stalin and his supporters said it was not exclusively bourgeois but also represented the workers, peasants, and petty bourgeois. Trotsky, on the other hand, loyal to the socialist and internationalist tradition of Bolshevism, insisted that the Kuomintang was a bourgeois party and that the Chinese communists should quit it and act independently. He denounced Stalin’s refusal

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to admit that the Chinese revolution had been defeated in the spring of 1927 and his switch of support to the Wuhan Kuomintang. But the ‘revolutionary center’ in Wuhan came to nothing, and soon the CCP was on the run everywhere. Stalin continued to deny that his policy had failed, though with ever diminishing credibility. The defeat had proved Trotsky right, but its effect was to boost Stalin’s rule, by driving Russia deeper into isolation and disillusionment with the internationalist dream. Within months, Trotsky was exiled to Central Asia, followed in 1929 by his banishment from the Soviet Union, while his supporters were arrested and later ‘liquidated’. In presenting Rayna’s letters, Hirson and Knodel wonder how far she and the foreign communists in Wuhan were aware of the growing intensity of the Stalin–Trotsky conflict and the centrality of its Chinese dimension. Not much, to judge by the evidence available. However, Rayna’s sister Grace later joined the Trotskyists, and it is not unlikely that Rayna would also have been drawn to the opposition, for she was by nature an out-and-out rebel and opponent of privilege and conformity, and she had witnessed at first hand Moscow’s role in China. The collapse of the United Front, first with Chiang Kai-shek and then with Wang Ching-wei, led to the Chinese communists’ expulsion from the cities (the few who remained were captured, killed, or driven underground) and to the consolidation of nationalist power. Some communist leaders, like Mao Tsetung and Chu Teh, climbed the mountains, where they set up soviets among the peasants and waged guerrilla war against the nationalists and local powerholders. Other radicals, like Rayna and several hundred Chinese communists, went to the Soviet Union – Rayna to accompany Soong Ch’ing-ling into exile, the communists to get military or political training in the Comintern’s Moscow schools. In 1928, Chiang’s army marched on Peking, in league with two big northern warlords, to conclude the Northern Expedition. So warlordism was not yet completely eradicated

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even at the conclusion of the Expedition, and Chiang was prepared to accommodate individual warlords as long as they cooperated with him. For the rest of the so-called Nanking Decade, from 1927 to 1937, Chiang’s central government took the form of a brutal dictatorship without strong ties to any sector of the population. It grew steadily more powerful, but mainly in the towns and cities and along China’s chief arteries of communication. It failed to uproot the communists, who re-established themselves in remote rural and mountainous areas. By the mid 1930s, it was beginning to look as if Chiang might finally succeed in defeating the Chinese Red Army, which in 1934 abandoned the southern rural bases it had formed after 1927 and fled first west and then north, on what later became known as the Long March. In July 1937, fullscale war broke out between China and Japan during which Chiang’s economic, political, and military advantages over the communists crumbled and the conditions were laid for the communists to win power in the ensuing Civil War of 1946–49. But these developments postdate the life and letters of Rayne Prohme and need not concern us further. In this book, Baruch Hirson and Arthur J. Knodel explain their personal interest in Rayna Prohme and her letters and their own connections to surviving members of her circle. My own relationship to the collection is less intimate but not entirely impersonal. By the time Pluto Press had begun to prepare Rayna’s letters for publication, Baruch and Arthur were sadly dead. When Pluto’s editors decided that the volume required a brief introduction to put the letters into context, they turned to me, a China scholar and Baruch’s acquaintance and admirer. I had got to know Baruch as a result of my friendship with the Chinese Trotskyist leader Wang Fan-hsi (1907–2002), who lived with me in Leeds after his involuntary exiling from Macao in 1975. Baruch and Wang were comrades and saw each other fairly often. One common interest was

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the life and work of Frank Glass, a South African Trotskyist (like Baruch) who had worked as a revolutionary in China (alongside Wang) and who was the husband of Rayna’s sister Grace. (Baruch’s study on Frank Glass, titled Frank Glass, the Restless Revolutionary, was published in London in 2003 by Porcupine Press, with my introduction.) A more tenuous tie was Rayna, for although Wang did not know her, he sailed out of Shanghai to Vladivostok in 1927 on the same boat as her and Soong Ch’ing-ling (though in a lower class). As the translator of Wang’s memoirs, which tell the story of Frank Glass’s China days and the Soong–Prohme–Wang sea passage to the Soviet Union, I had been struck and moved by Wang’s description of the start of the journey in 1927: As soon as the ship had sailed out of the Huangpu River, we crawled out from the hold and onto the deck. It was like being born again. The early autumn sun lifted our spirits, and we began to dance for joy and to sing the Internationale. We sailed further and further out to sea, gradually losing sight of the shores of the motherland. The water was like glass and our mood changed to one of meditation. We leant against the railings and gazed pensively into the distance, while thoughts flooded in. As individuals we were each beginning a new chapter in our lives, and it seemed to us as if the Chinese Revolution was also beginning a new chapter in which each word and each letter would be written in bullets and blood ... Seen in this light, the defeats, the terror, and the humiliation suffered over the last few months seemed to dwindle away completely.*

Did Rayna join in the singing and the dancing? I don’t know. Perhaps she decided she ought to keep herself and her important companion incommunicado. According to her diary, ‘The dawn came; we did not sleep until passing the Woosung forts.’ However, given her spontaneity and love of fun, it would not be surprising to learn that she sang and danced with the others – and that in translating the passage from Wang’s book I vicariously experienced her swelling emotions at the start of her final journey even before ever hearing of her. *

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Wang Fan-hsi, Chinese Revolutionary, Memoirs, 1919–1949, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 43.

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1 Rayna Prohme: A Retrospect

The Wuhan interlude of 1927 was one of the earlier major crises of the Chinese revolution which had begun in 1911 with Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s establishment of the Kuomintang, that is, the National People’s Party. Rayna Simons Prohme was a young American woman who became intimately involved in that crisis, and the letters that she wrote immediately before, during, and immediately after the Wuhan interlude make up the body of this book. The letters fall into two groups, the first of which is a series that Rayna wrote to her closest friend, Helen Freeland, of Berkeley, California. The second is made up largely of the letters Rayna wrote to her husband, William (‘Bill’) Prohme, immediately following their forced separation in Shanghai in August 1927. The two sets of letters came to light quite independently and from entirely different sources – but not only do they dovetail perfectly, they complete each other in a dramatic way. Taken together they form a telling historical document, since Rayna came to be intimately connected with the three principal figures in the Wuhan drama: Mikhail Borodin, Madame Sun Yat-sen, and Eugene Chen. Borodin was Stalin’s chief official advisor to the Kuomintang. Rayna met him for the first time in Canton late in October 1926. Madame Sun Yat-sen was the widow of the founder of the Kuomintang, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Rayna met her shortly after she met Borodin, but in Hankow (the largest of the three 10

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Wuhan cities*), not Canton. Eugene Chen was the first of the ‘Big Three’ Rayna met. She went to work for Chen shortly after she and her husband had arrived in Peking in the summer of 1925. Chen was a London-trained lawyer and secretary to Dr. Sun destined to become the Foreign Minister of the short-lived Wuhan government. Rayna’s own story is fascinating, though heartbreakingly brief, for she died aged 33 while a refugee in Moscow. It was there on a bleak day late in November 1927 that her funeral cortege of some hundred mourners slowly made its way under intermittently falling snow from the Medical College of the First Moscow University to the State Crematorium some three miles distant.1 Of the Wuhan ‘Big Three’, two were among the chief mourners. One was Madame Sun. At that date she was a frail lady in her thirties who had just risen from a ten-day illness. The Soviet authorities put a limousine at her disposal for the occasion, but she refused to ride in it. Instead, she walked, shivering, while the limousine followed at a respectful distance. She wore a navy-blue cape that she tried to wrap around her, but it was scant protection against the cold. The second ‘Wuhanite’ present was Eugene Chen, who had joined the procession with his two daughters. But the main Wuhanite, Mikhail Borodin, was conspicuous by his absence,2 though his wife, Fania, walked in the procession. There were other Chinese mourners besides Madame Sun and Eugene Chen, including several important Chinese labor leaders and a number of Chinese students from Moscow’s newly established Sun Yat-sen University,** most of them refugees. * [GB] The two other cities that form the Wuhan tri-city are Wuchang and Hanyang. ** [GB] Sun Yat-sen University was set up in Moscow in 1925, a product of the collaboration between the Kuomintang and the communists in China. It admitted not only Chinese communists but children of high-ranking Kuomintang officials. Its forerunner was the Communist University for the Toilers of the East (KUTV), which first took in members of ‘eastern’ nationalities on Soviet territory but later expanded its intake to students from colonial or dependent countries, including China.

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Finally, there were several Americans who formed a more varied group. These included labor delegates who had come to Moscow for the tenth anniversary of the Russian revolution, but also a number of American journalists, among them Louis Fischer and, especially, Vincent (‘Jimmy’) Sheean. Sheean was the most grief-stricken of the mourners and walked next to Madame Sun, trying to persuade her to ride in the limousine. On his other side was Dorothy Thompson, soon to become the wife of Sinclair Lewis. She wore a navy-blue cape and shivered with cold much as Madame Sun did. Nearby was still another American journalist, Anna Louise Strong, of communist leanings, also a refugee from Wuhan. The mourners walked slowly behind the bier, set atop an open horse-drawn hearse.3 It was covered with red cloth and heaped high with asters, chrysanthemums, and other flowers, mostly gold-and-rust-hued, Rayna’s favorite colors. The splash of color hardly shone in the November gloom, and Sheean later recorded that it was ‘almost barbarously lugubrious’. The cortege reached the new Moscow crematorium which, with its all-white interior and high vaulted ceiling, looked, according to Louis Fischer, ‘like a stream-lined cathedral’.4 There the casket was set on a raised platform that rose from a space in the floor. The flowers were placed all around. Four orations were delivered, the two most interesting being those by Anna Louise Strong and a young Chinese named Chang Ke. Rayna had befriended Chang Ke in Peking in the fall of 1926 and he later found his way to Hankow. Now here he was in Moscow as the chosen spokesman of the Chinese students. In his eulogy Chang Ke quoted Li Ta-chao, who had been executed by the murderous Chang Tso-lin only six months earlier: That part of her work for the Chinese revolution which was performed in Peking may be summarized in the words of Li Ta-chao expressed to us after Rayna Prohme and her husband had left for Canton, in October, 1926. ‘Chang Ke’, he said to me, ‘look at the good example of Rayna

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Prohme. See how devoted she is to our cause. She worked for us here for a considerable time, but never once did she express one word of complaint, even under all sorts of difficulties which we had to face at that time.’

Chang Ke went on to say: May we Chinese feel that she is buried, not in the earth nor in any one place, but at the heart of every revolutionary Chinese. May her spirit grow with the rising tide of the Chinese revolution, until China’s millions are freed from their present yoke.

This was probably the greatest tribute paid to Rayna, coming, as it did, from those who knew of her work in China so intimately. But it was Anna Louise Strong who spoke first: We of America may well be glad that we still produce some pioneers who stand at the forefront of earth’s battles, that having given John Reed to the Russian Revolution, we gave Rayna Prohme to China. Her work in that revolution was deeper and more important than even the work done by John Reed for Russia, though because it was anonymous and because it came not at the crest of success, it may not be much spoken of.5

The comparison was inevitable, since both John Reed and Rayna had been American journalists who, of their own accord, became involved in social and political upheavals far from home. Both died prematurely at the age 33, and both were given state funerals by the Soviets. These parallels are so striking that they tend to obscure the very different character of the two personalities. By the time John Reed reached Russia in 1917 he had already been active in labor agitation in the United States and had published Insurgent Mexico (1911), a highly readable but not very accurate report on the revolution in Mexico. Rayna’s pre-China credentials were more modest, both as radical and journalist. Even after she had lived through the Wuhan experience, she never wrote anything comparable to Reed’s well-known account of the Bolshevik seizure of power, Ten Days that Shook the World (1919). Once in Moscow,

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Rayna was supposed to collaborate with Borodin in writing an account of the Chinese experience, but she died before she could get started. The crisis she witnessed in the spring and summer of 1927 at Wuhan, in which Borodin was a principal actor, marked the collapse of a major phase of the Chinese revolution, whereas the events chronicled in Ten Days were, in Strong’s phrase, ‘the crest of success’. Yet Rayna’s accomplishments were not to remain as anonymous as Anna Louise Strong thought. In 1934, less than seven years after Rayna’s death, Vincent Sheean published a best-selling memoir, Personal History, in which he gives a moving account of Rayna’s activities in China and, especially, of her last tragic weeks in Moscow. The success of Sheean’s book was such that Rayna’s name became familiar to a wide reading public. He had managed to communicate, especially to younger readers, some of the fascination that the young redhead from Chicago had exerted on him. One of the coauthors of these pages (Knodel) came to be a Rayna enthusiast in 1940. That was a bit late, for by that time World War II was engulfing the world, and interest in Rayna waned. But then, with the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Chinese revolution picked up where it had left off. Chiang Kai-shek was temporarily triumphant; but the communists bided their time, succeeded in becoming a major military and political force, and by 1949 drove Chiang from the mainland. Western historians were forced to take stock of what was happening in China. Ever since, memoirs and studies having to do with the Chinese revolution have proliferated – so that, sooner or later, Rayna Prohme was bound to be ‘rediscovered’. References to her abound in books by journalists and others who spent time in China from the 1920s on. She has come to appear as the first in a succession of American women who, at some point in their lives joined the Chinese revolution – a succession that includes Anna Louise Strong, Milly Bennett, Agnes Smedley, Helen Foster Snow, and Barbara Stephens, among others. Their story

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makes up a good portion of the recent book by Peter Rand, China Hands (1995). It is appropriate that the first chapter should be devoted to Rayna and titled ‘Crown of Fire’. Rand’s presentation starts, as it almost had to, by citing Sheean’s Personal History. Sheean furnishes a sort of framework for the chapter, but Rand goes on to fill it by quoting from a number of published sources and a considerable number of unpublished documents, chiefly letters that Rayna wrote. (The complete text of all those letters makes up the body of this work.) Among published sources other than Sheean’s, Rand leans most heavily on a memoir written in 1938–39 by Milly Bennett but not published until 1993, under the title On Her Own, edited and annotated by A. Tom Grunfeld. When Milly started writing her autobiography in 1938, Sheean’s Personal History was still popular. Perhaps Milly thought another book in which Rayna Prohme figures prominently would find a ready publisher, but she had no such luck. The autobiography was abandoned, and the manuscript (a sizable parcel!) ended up, along with other of Milly’s papers, in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Grunfeld tracked it down more than half a century later. As a source of information about Rayna the book cannot be casually dismissed. Milly Bennet, née Mildred Bremley, was born in San Francisco in 1897, making her some three years younger than Rayna. Like Rayna, she took to journalism at a fairly early age. The two first met during Rayna’s visit to the West Coast in 1919 with her then husband Samson Raphaelson. They saw each other again some years later in Honolulu where Rayna and her second husband, William Prohme, were doing freelance journalism. Milly had married a journalist named Mike Mitchell, and to the Prohmes she remained Milly Mitchell, even though Milly divorced Mike. In the summer of 1925 the Prohmes went on to China, settling in Peking, where they went to work for the Kuomintang. By fall

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of that year Milly also reached China, and in early October she joined the Prohmes in Peking. Rayna and Bill were preparing to leave for the ‘southern capital’ of the Kuomintang, Canton. They turned over what was left of their journalistic enterprise to their collaborator Jim Dolsen, and to Milly. But the Prohmes did not stay long in Canton. They moved on to Hankow. Milly soon joined them in Hankow, where she stayed on till the bitter end of the Wuhan interlude. She was one of the last to join the general exodus, arriving in Shanghai on August 6, 1927. The authorities there lost no time in declaring her persona non grata, and ten days later Milly sailed for Japan and then on to Honolulu and her native San Francisco. On Her Own is the story of her life up to that date. The book is written in a breezy journalistic style, replete with anecdotes and vignettes. Milly comes across as an enterprising and spunky young woman. It is not hard to understand why Grunfeld was so enthralled when he discovered the forgotten manuscript, but his enthusiasm sometimes makes him uncritically indulgent. In his introduction to Milly’s own story he writes: ‘Specific to her years in China, I have tried to corroborate events to the extent possible. When the evidence contradicts Milly’s account, I have so noted. So much of Milly’s account, however, is corroborated by other sources that my tendency is to trust her narrative.’6 Grunfeld notes a number of Milly’s obvious and not-so-obvious errors, but for the most part he takes her at her word. Peter Rand in his book points out still more of her inaccuracies and dubious assertions. But both Grunfeld and Rand seem to accept Milly’s transcriptions of conversations – and there are pages and pages of them in On Her Own – as if they were verbatim. More caution seems in order. After all, Milly was writing about events that had taken place ten or more years earlier. She undoubtedly had numerous notes, letters, and clippings to draw on and refresh her memory. But what about the authenticity of the conversations so copiously set down?

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The gist of them may be true in a general and approximate way. But accurate transcriptions? Hardly. On Her Own cannot be taken at anywhere near face value, informative and amusing as it may be. That is especially true of the conversations with Rayna, some of which can be shown to have taken place, if at all, at places and dates at variance with what Milly reports.7 Fortunately, Rayna left her own record of many of the events and encounters that figure in Milly’s and Sheean’s books, in the letters transcribed and presented here. We have tried to let Rayna tell her own story. We supplied collateral information, but only to make Rayna’s own words clear to the reader. Over 70 years have passed since the events recorded in the letters. Much background material had to be sketched in. But the aim throughout is to make Rayna’s own voice clearly audible. It is worth listening to.

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2 The Road to China

Rayna was the oldest of five children – two daughters, three sons – of Joseph and Carrie de Costa Simons. Joseph Simons was a well-to-do Jewish broker of British origins, owner of a grain-brokerage firm, prominent in the Chicago business-community of the World War I years and the 1920s, and one-time Vice President of the Chicago Board of Trade. He was intimidatingly authoritarian, but also scrupulously honest in his business dealings. Very much the pater familias, he lorded it over his wife, who demanded of her children the kind of intense family loyalty that became a cliché in novels of the 1950s and 1960s which portray American Jewish families. Rayna attended McKinley High School in Chicago, where she showed herself to be an independent free spirit of a particularly outgoing sort. At school she came to know a lively adolescent named Samson Raphaelson (or ‘Raph’), from a lower-middle-class Jewish family based in New York. It was a typical high-school friendship that was carried over from high school into college. Rayna’s first engagement was Milton Alger, a young man of her own class, who was to become a noted songwriter. Only after she had decided to break with Alger did Raph take over. It seemed the thing to do; there was nothing very dramatic about it except for the opposition of Rayna’s parents. Raph first enrolled at a working-class college in Chicago, and Rayna started out at the University of Chicago; but both were soon enrolled at the University of Illinois at 18

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Urbana. There Raph edited the campus humor magazine, while Rayna became women’s editor of the campus daily. Both were enthralled by Paul Douglas, a young instructor in economics of markedly socialist leanings who was to become, much later, the New Deal senator from Illinois.8 By the time Raph started college he had firmly decided that he wanted to be a writer. He wrote stories at a great rate – and received rejection-slips at just about the same rate. Raph joined the collegiate writers’ club at Urbana, where he became acquainted with Dorothy Day, who had come to his attention by a story she had written about the experience of going hungry. Day was a girl of lower-middle-class Irish ancestry whom Rayna knew from high school. Long after Rayna’s death, Day became the great champion of the Catholic Worker movement, but in her college days she was not yet a convert to Catholicism and was interested in various left-wing activities. In her autobiography The Long Loneliness (1952), Day writes about her friendship with Rayna. She tells how ‘a new love came into my life, a new love of friendship that was also as clear as a bell, crystal clear, with no stain of self-seeking, a give-and-take friendship that meant companionship and sharing’. Day continues: [Rayna] had bright red curly hair. It was loose enough about her face to form an aureole, a flaming aureole, with sun and brightness in it. Her eyes were large, reddish brown and warm, with interest and laughter in them … Her mouth was full and childlike and there were dimples in her cheeks. I can remember her face clearly. I remember one Sunday afternoon out on the prairie when she and [Raph] the boy to whom she was engaged and I were having a picnic. We brought with us a phonograph and records and our books. I can see Rayna lying on her side in a dull green dress, her cheek cupped in her hand, her eyes on the book she was reading, her mouth half open in her intent interest. Whatever she did she did with her whole heart. If she read, she read. If she was with you, all her attention was for you. She was single-minded, one of the pure of heart, and her interest in life was as intense as her interest in books.9

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This love for Rayna was to be expressed through the years by a host of admirers, both female and male. Meanwhile Raph persisted, trying to place his stories and returning on occasion to his home-city, New York, in quest of a publisher. In 1917, just as he was finishing his undergraduate years at the University of Illinois, he sold his first story – to Hearst’s Cosmopolitan – for $250. At the same time he returned to Chicago with an advance of $1,600 on four advertisements he was to write. Fabulous sums for those days, and on the strength of them he and Rayna were married on New Year’s Eve, right after their graduation and in spite – or perhaps because – of her family’s opposition. Shortly before, Rayna (who was finishing her junior year at Urbana) had visited New York on the invitation of Dorothy Day, who had moved there with her family. Day had become a freelance journalist in New York and met with the heteroclite radical group associated with The Masses – the ‘old’ Masses edited by Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Merrill Rogers, and others. It was a time of high spirits and high hopes. Day writes: Max Eastman was away on a speaking trip. Merrill Rogers was business manager and there was a delightful summer in New York when I had their apartment on MacDougal Street to myself, and the job of editor to play with. It was during that time that Rayna visited me and we walked the streets of New York with Mike Gold and Maurice Becker, sat on the ends of piers singing revolutionary songs into the starlit night, dallied on park benches, never wanting to go home to sleep but only to continue to savor our youth and its struggles and joys … In our radical ardor we made friends with the world; many a time, coming home late at night, we picked up men from the park benches and gave them whatever bed was empty in the place, ourselves sitting up all night, continuing to talk. Rayna wrote back such glowing accounts of our adventures that Raph took the next train from Chicago and arrived to find us having a dinner party at which the main guests were Donn Byrne and Hi Moderwell, writer and journalist. Raph shipped Rayna back home and stayed to work for Donn Byrne as his secretary, and to make himself a New York success in advertising and later in writing.10

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It was probably during this early trip to New York that Rayna met a young woman who was staying in Greenwich Village but whose home was Berkeley, California. This was Helen Freeland, with whom Rayna became a fast friend. What Helen’s connections with the Masses group were is not known; but so far as Rayna is concerned Day also said of Rayna, ‘She thought my interest in radicalism purely emotional and I thought her approach to life too intellectual.’11 Yet, while Rayna was certainly not a radical activist, what she encountered in New York was to reinforce the liberal, left-wing orientation that she and Raph had found so congenial in the classes of Paul Douglas. For a time the newlyweds lived in Chicago right across from the Simons family, with Raph writing constantly and doing journalistic odd-jobs, while Rayna read endlessly and wrote brochures for an electric company. During this period Raph wrote a short story, ‘Day of Atonement’, later retitled ‘The Jazz Singer’, and subsequently turned into a play that became a Broadway hit with George Jessel in the title role. The movie version that Raph made of it many years later was to be the first ‘talkie’, with Al Jolson in the title role. Rayna and Raph had also been impressed in the Urbana days by a teacher of English, Stuart Sherman, an important figure in the now forgotten New Humanism of which Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More were the leading lights. Through Sherman, Raph got a job as instructor at Urbana, and for part of the time Rayna was with him. She accompanied Raph on his trips to New York, where he felt at home but she did not, and to the West Coast. Rayna had already been to the Far West, perhaps by invitation from Helen Freeland. In any event, she and Raph were drawn to the San Francisco area in the early 1920s, if not earlier. Raph was attracted to ‘The City’, by its two high-circulation dailies and its well-established Bohemia, while Rayna gravitated to Berkeley where Helen Freeland lived not far from the University of California campus. Rayna fell in

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love with Berkeley, moved there, and enrolled on a graduate program in economics. Raph, ever restless, returned to his job in Urbana and continued writing. During the stay in California strains had developed in Raph and Rayna’s marriage, and Raph’s return to Urbana marked the end of the marriage, even though the final divorce decree was not obtained until 1925. The separation, however, was amicable. Raph and Rayna remained good friends and corresponded right on through Rayna’s sojourn in China. Though Rayna had enrolled at the University of California as an economics major, she continued to pursue her varied interests in literature, philosophy, comparative religion, and anthropology. She was fortunate in being introduced by Helen Freeland to an already well-established intellectual group whose central figure was Alfred L. Kroeber. Kroeber and his friend and associate, T. T. Waterman, were already well known, even beyond purely professional circles, chiefly because of their work in rescuing the last surviving Yahi Indian in northern California. They named him Ishi – the Yahi word for ‘man’ – and befriended him, looking after him until his untimely death in 1916. The story of Ishi’s life, written much later by Kroeber’s widow, is an anthropological classic.12 Others connected with the circle and who became friends of Rayna included Robert Lowie and Paul Radin, both notable for their work on Native Americans, and the psychologist of Jungian leanings, Andrew (Dan) Gibb, who was soon to become the husband of Helen Freeland, while Helen’s sister Nancy married another member of the circle, the tempestuous Jaime de Angulo. On the fringe of the group were Max Radin (Paul’s brother, later Dean of the University of California Law School), and Milman Parry, the brilliant classical scholar, and his wife Marian.13 While the Kroeber group was known as ‘advanced’ and intellectually very curious and varied in its interests, there is little indication that any of them were, at that stage, political activists. Nor do we

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have any evidence that China and its culture were of special interest to any of them. Before returning to his job at Urbana, Raph – thirsty for some literary-journalistic give-and-take – had visited the offices of the San Francisco Examiner and struck up a casual friendship with one of the paper’s editorial writers, William Prohme, son of a German immigrant of Lutheran faith. It was not long before Raph introduced his new friend to Rayna. In May 1920, after Raph had returned to Urbana, Bill Prohme was already writing to him about ‘that wonderful wife who wears a Phi Beta Kappa key and also dances and cooks’,14 but it was not until a year or so later that Bill Prohme, estranged from his wife, fell in love with Rayna. By June 1923, his dependence on her had become so great that her departure for China that year hit him hard. How Rayna became so interested in China still remains a conundrum. Before moving to the West Coast she had no special interest in things Chinese. Once there, her association with the Kroeber circle whetted an already lively curiosity about all cultures, near and remote, and stimulated her interest in comparative religion. At the time of her first trip to China, in 1923, she told her friends that she wanted to go because of an interest in Chinese philosophy, but no one seems to have taken the assertion seriously. During her brief stays in New York she had at least a taste of the excitement that the Russian revolution had provoked among the young intellectuals of Masses. But the initial upheaval of the revolution was over by the early 1920s. By that time the theater of great changes was China and Rayna may have wished to be a first-hand witness. Yet it is doubtful whether Rayna had any extensive knowledge of what had been happening in China or even knew the names of its more prominent political figures. Could it be that Bill Prohme, who had already been to China and was a journalist in the city that contained the country’s largest Chinatown, had aroused Rayna’s interest in China? However that may be, by

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June 1923 Rayna had booked a passage and by mid July was in Japan, a stopover on the road to her ultimate goal, Peking. 1923 was an important year in the Chinese revolution. Shortly before Rayna set sail, Sun Yat-sen, having given up hope of receiving any real help from the Western powers or Japan, had turned to the Soviet Union, expressing esteem for Lenin. The upshot was that the Comintern sent Adolf A. Joffe, a top-ranking diplomat, to confer with Dr. Sun in August 1922. The Joffe–Sun conversations culminated in the famous joint declaration on January 26, 1923, announcing cooperation between the Kuomintang and Soviet Russia. By March the Soviet government had decided to give 2 million ‘Mexican dollars’ of financial aid to Sun Yat-sen and to meet his request for a group of civilian and military advisors to aid in the reorganization and strengthening of the Kuomintang. Sun sent one of his most promising young generals, Chiang Kai-shek, to Moscow to study the military tactics used in the Russian Civil War. Chiang stayed in Moscow from September 2 to November 29, 1923. The Russians’ chief civilian advisor to China, Mikhail Borodin, arrived in Peking with his party in September 1923. As we know, Borodin was eventually to play a major role in Rayna’s life, but it is unlikely that she was even aware of his existence when she first set off for China on June 10, 1923, aboard the Japanese steamer, Tenyo Maru. Precise details and dates about this first trip to China are hard to come by, but thanks to an article Rayna wrote while en route but not published until almost a year later in The American Review, we know that she arrived in Japan on July 17, 1923. Just how long she remained in Japan and when she arrived in China is not known, but the article does tell us a great deal about Rayna’s state of mind and intentions. She reports that on the voyage out she had become acquainted with her fellow-passengers in the second-class section of the Tenyo Maru. Among them was Mr. Yuan, a Chinese student who had studied in America and was on his way home. Mr. Yuan very

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much wanted reforms in his homeland, but in spite of being ‘Westernized’ and a Christian, he saw much good in certain age-old Chinese ways, and he freely expressed his hopes and fears regarding change in China. He was, Rayna tells us, aware of the dangers of precipitate changes that might sweep away valuable things in his Chinese heritage. The article concludes with a declaration by Rayna: I am going to stay five years in China. I want to see for myself what happens to a people when their friendly familiar world suddenly becomes strange and bewildering. When their age-old social customs are being overthrown, when their religions are being challenged, their houses, their cities, their language, their clothes, their very thoughts are being transformed. I want to see what happens to them – and help, if I can, in the task of keeping the new forces under control, of preventing the changes from coming too fast.15

Such sentiments scarcely betray any very radical orientation. Rayna seems receptive, rather than reactive. A similar state of ‘receptivity’ is apparent in the one letter from this first stay in China that has so far come to light – a letter to her younger sister, Grace, which, alas, bears no explicit place-and-date indication. The main parts of the onepage typed letter read as follows: Gracie dear, I’ve a little time which is rare. I am busier than in New York or Berkeley. Many little cut-up jobs and tasks to do each day. I write scratchy letters or none at all. I’ve tried to write a few things but haven’t attempted much … I’m in China. There are strange noises and strange speech and strange things going on down in the streets and strange clothes and strange things to eat, and I watch it all in a rather detached way and haven’t yet come out of the stage of wondering what the devil it is all about. For the last two weeks I’ve thought of nothing but Berkeley. Before that I thought of nothing but Japan. If God manages any more disasters, I’ll never have time to think of China. Bill Prohme cabled that my part of Berkeley is the unfortunate part. I’m sick at heart. I haven’t thought of much else since. The only spot in America that I’d ever want to come back to has been destroyed. Just my luck! I’m worried about Helen and Dan Gibb who were very much

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involved in building houses. As I say, I can’t think of China. But I can’t avoid hearing it and smelling it. I’m doing the second right now. I’m near the street and there is strange food engendering just outside. Good food, I think it must be. One can never know for Chinese food in China is poison to the foreigner. It really is dangerous. As unsanitary a country as can be imagined. But I like it even so. It is dirty, too. And many people are sick. But no one seems to be rushed, except me and I like the lazy way people have of being poor and being sick and even dying. Why can’t we be leisurely, too? I can’t. Wish I could …

This letter was written in Peking, where Rayna was already quite busy and sufficiently well-established to have a mailing address. But she certainly has not yet ‘got her bearings’ – as the reiterated ‘strange’ clearly shows. The mood is still predominantly receptive. That the letter belongs to the first China visit is confirmed by the reference to the great Berkeley fire of September 18 and 19, 1923, news of which Bill Prohme had cabled to Rayna. The fire had ravaged the section of Berkeley north of the campus – ‘my part of Berkeley’ – where Helen’s sister Nancy had a house that was one of the gathering places of the ‘Kroeber Circle’. That house burned down. Shortly after the fire, however, Helen and Dan Gibb were to build separate but nearby houses in the same area along Shasta Road. That it was Bill Prohme who cabled news of the fire to Rayna is also of interest, because Bill and another Berkeley friend, Marian Parry, had been at the dock when Rayna boarded the Tenyo Maru in June. It was a tearful leave-taking, for both Bill and Marian felt – wrongly, as it turned out – that there was something final about Rayna’s going off alone to China. Bill Prohme was particularly unhappy. He was so affected that, soon after (perhaps shortly after sending the cable about the Berkeley fire) he disappeared from the Bay Area without notifying his friends, who were doubly uneasy because of his chronic tuberculosis. He did eventually ‘resurface’, but in an alarming physical and psychological state. Rayna was notified, and it was not long before she was back in Berkeley

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looking after him.16 But we cannot be sure that Bill was the only reason for Rayna’s return. There may have been family reasons as well. The fact remains that it was not long before Rayna became Bill’s permanent companion, though there is some doubt as to whether they ever legally married. Shortly after Rayna’s return, she and Bill went to consult a friend of theirs, Dr. Max Pinner, and his wife Berna (‘Rudovic’), who had moved to Los Angeles. As Bill’s health improved, the couple drifted back to the San Francisco area, and China beckoned to both of them more strongly than ever. Rayna even proposed that their friend, Marian Parry, should come along with them. But Marian’s husband was one of very few men who violently disapproved of Rayna – a feeling that was mutual. So Marian stayed in Berkeley and never saw either Bill or Rayna. As was usual in those days, the voyage first took Rayna and Bill to Honolulu. They stayed there for six months as freelance journalists. Rayna summed up the ‘Hawaiian experience’ in a letter written to Raph from Tokyo on June 6, 1925. As for me – Honolulu was interesting – intensely so. I had a good job, difficult people but fascinating material. I messed about with old Hawaiians, queer, bigoted historians, descendants of missionaries, a conglomerate body of students – and some newspaper people who in Honolulu treat life as essentially sunshine. I gathered some interesting poetic old myths,17 visited temple ruins, rowed with tourist-focused businessmen and left the town with a satisfying quota of bitter, resentful enemies and friendly, indulgent friends. On the whole a happy six months. And the setting is so beautiful. I could manufacture a delightful mythology myself in the presence of so much beauty. Anyone could.

Bill and Rayna were to have left Honolulu early in May and had already booked double passage to Japan when Rayna received urgent appeals from Chicago imploring her to return to her ailing mother. Rayna was skeptical but returned immediately while Bill sailed alone to Tokyo. She explained the situation to Raph in the letter quoted above:

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The thing that brought me home was mother’s health. Reports of her complete collapse became more and more calamitous. But just as I expected, she’s not sick in body, only in mind. A typical case of the psychologically sick Jewish parent, using the appeal of pathos and weakness to keep her family with her. Understandable but damnable, of course.

Rayna was never very comfortable with her family, and she did not linger long in Chicago. But during the visit, arrangements were made for her younger sister Grace to join her and Bill once they were installed in China. By June 1, Rayna had joined Bill in Tokyo and by the end of the summer they had departed for Peking, where Rayna had been engaged to do work on an English weekly published by Grover Clarke, and where Bill took over as manager of the Nationalist (that is, Kuomintang) News Agency.*

* [GB] Also known in English as the Kuo Min News Agency.

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3 Peking and Canton

By the time Bill and Rayna had settled down in Peking in the summer of 1925 they had already established close ties with the Kuomintang, as Bill’s job at its News Agency attests. Nor was Rayna any longer passively receptive in the way she had been in 1923. She was now taking an active interest in Chinese politics and moving steadily to the left. A further leftward step was taken in the early autumn of 1925 when Rayna read that Eugene Chen, formerly Sun Yat-sen’s English secretary and then owner of an English-language newspaper the Peking People’s Tribune (subtitled ‘An Organ of Chinese National Opinion’) would be in town. She invited him to tea. The meeting was a success as it was not long before Rayna and Bill were working for Eugene Chen’s journal, but with an arrangement that allowed Bill to retain his job as manager of the News Agency. It was natural that Rayna and Bill should find a niche as English-language journalists in China. Britain was the most important European power with extensive extraterritorial rights in China and controlled the ‘crown colony’ of Hong Kong. English had become the lingua franca in many of the foreign concessions, and the Kuomintang had to communicate as directly as possible with the English-speaking population in China and abroad. Many prominent figures in the Kuomintang were fluent English-speakers. Dr. Sun himself was Americaneducated, as were the members of the Soong family with 29

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whom Dr. Sun became so intimately associated. The four Soong children made up a veritable ‘alumni association’ in the American manner. The son, T.V. Soong, went to Harvard, while the three daughters, E-ling, Ch’ing-ling, and Mayling, graduated one after the other from Wesleyan College in Georgia.18 As for Eugene Chen, who was born in the British West Indies island of Trinidad, his critics complained that he never really learned Chinese properly. Borodin, who had spent several years in the United States, communicated with the Chinese in English. Bill and Rayna never seem to have learnt Chinese but were well qualified to help in any English-language venture. This they did by taking over Chen’s Peking People’s Tribune and then, after it had been closed down, moving on to its successors, the Canton Gazette and, most important of all, the Hankow People’s Tribune. By the time Rayna and Bill had settled down in Peking in 1925, Sun Yat-sen was dead – he died in March 1925. Shortly before that, Lenin had died in Russia, and Leon Trotsky’s conflict with the new leadership had already commenced. A close friend and collaborator of Trotsky’s was Adolf Joffe, Dr. Sun’s interlocutor. On his return to Moscow after those conversations, Joffe occupied the post of rector of the Sun Yat-sen University, but he committed suicide in 1927 – one of the earlier victims of Stalin’s anti-Trotsky offensive.19 Immediately after Dr. Sun’s death, the tensions inside the Kuomintang heightened, and by late 1926 the polarization between its right and left wings was all but complete. The right wing eventually found its leader in Chiang Kai-shek and its administrative center in Nanking. The left, with Eugene Chen, Borodin, and Madame Sun Yat-sen in the lead, established its government in Hankow late in 1926. This Wuhan government lasted scarcely eight months, and in the summer of 1927 some of its leaders, including Madame Sun, Eugene Chen, and Borodin, fled China under pressure from Chiang and his allies. Rayna and Bill Prohme followed suit.

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*

*

*

Rayna’s letters to Helen Freeland extend from September 1926 to October 1927. The earliest that has come to light was written from Peking on September 8, 1926, when Bill and Rayna had been there for a year. Rayna had probably written to Helen before then. The question she asks near the beginning of the September 8 letter, ‘So how do you like our new paper [i.e. letterhead stationery]?’, implies that Helen had received letters on the ‘old’ stationery. But any earlier letters to Helen have been lost or destroyed. By September 1926 Rayna had been working for Eugene Chen for several months. Her sister Grace had joined her and Bill in Peking soon after they arrived there and was still with them. Bill had suffered more setbacks in his losing battle with tuberculosis, and Rayna had to take on much of his work. But since both were officially working for Chen, and since he was to be in spectacular, albeit brief, authority in Hankow when the Prohmes reached there, background information about this curious – and curiously enduring – man is in order. Eugene Chen had managed to leave Trinidad to move to England, where he became a lawyer. As early as 1912 he went to China and became associated with the new nationalist movement. He joined the Chinese delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 and, at a later date, joined Sun Yatsen’s personal entourage as an English-speaking secretary. Vincent Sheean’s comments on Chen in articles and especially in Personal History are particularly vivid. He notes that Chen ‘was all of a piece, a small, clever, venomous, faintly reptilian man, adroit and slippery in the movements of his mind, combative in temper, with a kind of lethal elegance in appearance, voice and gesture’.20 Arthur Ransome, a reporter for the Manchester Guardian who was to turn up in Hankow when the Prohmes and Chen

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were there, had already met Eugene Chen in England and his impressions were different from Sheean’s: I never heard a single word against his [Chen’s] character. The only accusation made against him was that he had had the misfortune to be born in Trinidad, and was consequently very ignorant of the Chinese language. He knows English, if anything, too well. After my first meeting with him, which lasted for four and a half hours, I left him with the sort of feeling a man might have if he had spent that time with his head under Niagara. He had talked for the whole of that time with a flow of words, of argument, of controlled passion that left me breathless and numb.

And further on: He is a man of forty-nine, small and slight in build, with longish dark hair, a small black moustache, spectacles, and a quick, rather nervous manner. In talk his foreign origin is betrayed only by a slight eccentricity in the emphasis of syllables and perhaps by too great a liking for English words of Latin origin.21

Chen had married a Trinidadian of mixed ethnicity and had four children by her, two sons and two daughters, all four of whom turned up in Moscow during Rayna’s final days. But all that was still far off when Rayna wrote her first letter to Helen Freeland. Peking People’s Tribune September 8 [1926] Dear Helen, I have a solid hour and a half in the middle of a morning of a working day with no errands or jobs. It is a miracle. So how do you like our new paper? I’ll give you one sheet of it and husband the rest. We are on edge here. Sunday evening – it is Wednesday – a wire came from Canton, asking what is the earliest date we could come down there. We wired back and expected an answer by this time. Maybe one will come today. It will be difficult in some ways, getting away, with all the jobs and a lease and no one to turn the paper over to, and all; but we will manage somehow. In fact, we wired that if the need is urgent, Bill will leave this week and

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I will follow at the end of the month. Of course, it may fizzle even now, but golly we are hoping. I wonder how much, if anything, this war and political muddle which seems the whole world and the heavens above to us here means in America? Absolutely nothing, I’m sure, for we see the American papers and also remember how unimportant changes in China seemed to us a few years ago. But, Helen, it is exciting here now. I’ll try to tell you something about it, now that I have a little time. It is meaning so much to us right now that I couldn’t talk about anything much else. In the first place, you know that the nationalist group has control in southern China. The party, the Kuomintang, has had a devil of a struggle for the past several years and just this month seems to be making headway. That is, for the past year and a half, they have been consolidating and cleaning things up in Kwangtung, the province Canton is in, and Kwangsi, the next-door province. For years, ever since the failure of the first nationalist revolution [1911], there has been talk of an expedition against the northern reactionary militarists who gummed up the works when the republic was established and have been playing ball with the country ever since. There was a lot of trouble for years even within the city of Canton, fostered, according to all evidence, by the British, who have a big stake in Hong Kong, just a few hours away down the river. Up here in the north, things have been going from bad to worse for months. When we first came over from Japan, it wasn’t so bad, because the Kuominchün* (the national army, which until just this week had no definite affiliation with the national party), was more or less in control, having military authority but with a nitwit Chang Tso-lin man, by the name of Tuan Chi-jui (pronounced for some outlandish reason Twan Jer Ray), in the top job as Chief Executive. But since then the Kuominchün have evacuated the city, and the reaction has been on full tilt. How this paper has escaped, I don’t know. The only reason we can see is that, although it is really a Chinese enterprise and makes no pretence at American protection, yet the Chinese believe so in signs that they wouldn’t touch it just because an American edits it and they think that somehow or other there would be trouble. But everything else in sight has been attacked. One editor was shot a few months ago for saying something one of the generals didn’t like, and a few weeks ago another was bumped off. Several have been arrested and their families have been quaking in their shoes. Meanwhile papers have been suppressed one after another. The combination news * The Kuominchün, or People’s Army, was a powerful force under the warlord Feng Yü-hsiang.

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service and paper which Bill works for and which was formerly the voice of the Kuominchün had a nasty time last week. The gendarmes came in one night and sealed up the place, newspaper, Chinese news service, English service and all. It looked for a few days as if Bill were out of a job, but finally they opened up the English service. The Chinese part of it is still sealed, having been opened only once so that the police could loot the place and confiscate the press. All this is indicative of how bad things have been here. In addition, of course, there has been almost inconceivable suffering. This war has been a real affair in western style. There have been many wounded, many deaths, and the troops have been undisciplined and have looted, raped and destroyed crops all over the countryside. There will be a famine sure this year. But meanwhile down south, there were preparations going on for the anti-north expedition which has been in the wind for several years. They have talked so much about it and never done anything, so that no one took it seriously any more. But they did start it, and to the amazement of everyone they have come right up out of the south of China over a territory that must approximate some five hundred miles, marched straight across one huge province to the Yangtze River and just yesterday took the most strategical point in central China. The last week has been a terrific strain, for the battle was on, the fiercest battle, perhaps, in all Chinese history, and there were all sorts of reports, and counter-reports. Several days ago we went crazy over a report that the important towns, Wuchang and Hanyang [in Wuhan], where there is a big arsenal on a hill along the river, were taken. Everyone believed it and the nationalists here were rejoicing when later reports showed that it wasn’t so. After that, we believed nothing at all although the news flooded in. Some afternoons we had a pile of news dispatches on the battle that took over an hour to sort out for the paper. But yesterday a trustworthy report from neutral foreign sources came that the arsenal is taken. That probably means that Canton is in control of the whole central situation, because this arsenal, the largest in the country, is in the fork of a river and on high ground. Across the Yangtze to the south is the city of Wuchang, an old walled city, which has been the scene of a battle that sounds like the Middle Ages. Actually, Helen, they sent troops up over the walls on ladders with the enemy waiting to fire on them from the top. And so on. To the north, across the River is Hankow, where the high mogul of the reactionary forces, Wu Pei-fu is stationed. Now he will probably have to take to his heels, for Hankow can scarcely be held with the arsenal gone. Both Hankow and Wuchang are on low ground.

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It really looks now as if Wu is wiped out of the picture. There is something immense about it, for he has been one of the two or three big figures in China for so many years. He is the last of the old style militarists who were scholars as well. Some of his orders and manifestos, when translated literally, are incomprehensible, because packed with classical allusions – and also romantic as James Branch Cabell [American novelist, author of ‘Poictesme’ series] in the early, romantic days. There is something appealing about the man, too, although he has done frightful things to China. He has the old Confucian ideal of loyalty to his patron so deep in him that he supported the old fuddy-duddy Tsao Kun, who gave him his first boost, right into the presidential chair, for which position no one in the world could have been less fitted. Tsao did all sorts of things which must have given Wu the jum-jams, but he never went back on him. In fact, when Tsao Kun was released from a palace recently, where he had been confined when the Kuominchün–Tuan Chi-jui combine took charge of the central government, and went down to Paotingfu, a little to the south of here where Wu had his headquarters, there were stories of the way Wu called upon the old man and bowed before him and did homage just as if he were a humble student at the feet of a master. Anything might happen this week, but whatever does [happen] will be of great importance. If Canton really succeeds in dominating the central part of the country, it will be a great victory. There are many forces working against it, which I do my best to minimize because I want it to happen, but which Bill throws into my teeth morning, noon and night. Bill believes in keeping his feet on the ground – and I hate the ground. But I know all about them, too, and I have many little reservations and warnings inside me. Really, I don’t need Bill to hold me back. In the first place, the foreign powers, except Russia, won’t like this state of affairs at all, and it is true that at this very moment, the French minister and some British envoys are up in the northwest, seeing Chang Tso-lin, Wu’s newly sworn brother (previously his sworn enemy), who is his twin as a bandit and has never gotten over it. Wu is a scholar, and has a streak of decency, which doesn’t extend to warfare, it is true, but nevertheless is there. What all the talking is about up with Chang, no one can know, but everyone is suspicious. Then, too, the British are doing all sorts of provocative things down south, with innocent looking gunboats along the ocean and up on the Yangtze. They are eagerly awaiting to be attacked, from all indications; get themselves as nearly as possible in direct line of fire. In addition, there is another militarist [Sun Ch’uan-fang] who controls [sic] five provinces along the seacoast between Canton and Shanghai, who is sitting mysteriously on the sidelines and can cause a devil amount of trouble if he gets nasty. He

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has his troops lined up along the border of one of his island provinces, unfortunately one that is necessary for Canton from a military point of view and reiterates that unless he is attacked, he will remain neutral. He seems to be a potential anti-nationalist in many ways and gets out – or is alleged to get out; it is almost impossible to separate the true from the false manifestos in quite the best Chinese style, talking a lot about routing the ‘red’ menace from China. No one seems to be sure what is meant by red here, but it is a term of opprobrium which has been losing some of its force recently since the anti-reds have made themselves so unpopular by their outrages. China is now in the stage where even a movement for a wider suffrage would be bolshevik. As for us personally, nothing much happens. Peking becomes more of a desert constantly, as the migration to the south goes on among the progressive Chinese. A few still of our Chinese friends are here, notably two, one who spends every night in a different place and wears disguises (he really gets a monstrous kick out of it) and the other who is in hiding in the Russian Embassy (he happens to be a communist as well as a nationalist and they have taken him in).* He is the man who is our superior on the paper. I visit him almost every day to get news, etc., etc. He is a fine middle-aged man, with the most beautiful hands I have ever seen. And a patience that puts me to shame. Bill at the moment is suffering from a bad cold. He went on a party last week with some foreigners and became riotous. Bill had a slight cold when he went and it settled him. That was the first big party we had been on since he is well. He swears he will never go on another. But I don’t believe it. You have to drink if you play at all with the foreigners here, for there are so few diversions. They never talk – or rather chatter over and over again about the faults and virtues of China, basing most of it this year on a book that has recently been issued called What’s Wrong with China22 and which has simply been a lifesaver to the foreign community. Or else they play bridge. Or else drink. Gracie [Rayna’s younger sister] is still here, but may go the end of the month whether we leave or not. I will be two ways about it. I’ve enjoyed her, and again I have not. * [GB] On April 6, 1927, the foreign diplomatic corps in Peking allowed the local police to raid the Soviet embassy. Among the Kuomintang members seized was the communist Li Ta-chao, along with 35 others. Li was executed with 19 others on April 25, thus becoming an early martyr of Chinese communism.

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Elizabeth [Green, the early suffragist who had been active in Californian politics and whom Rayna had met in Greenwich Village] left about three weeks ago, but writes that she had another bad attack on the boat and was rescued by friends in Yokohama who are trying to get her fit again, so that she can take the next lap on to Honolulu where she will meet her mother. The doctors here still insist that it is entirely mental, and I suppose it may be so. But it certainly is a terribly physical sort of mental trouble. However, of course, there is my mother – and, too, hasn’t Dorothea Radin [wife of Max Radin] got mental heart disease? I tried to talk it all out with Elizabeth. She even admits that it might be mental, which should be a step toward recovery, shouldn’t it? but it evidently is not enough. I don’t know how she will make out and am considerably worried. Bill’s antipathy to her never lessened. It was really a difficult job trying to juggle the two of them here. I was glad when she left, which seemed a mean emotion. There are other things I thought I’d get around to in this letter, but there is no more time. I’ll try to find another hour or so some day soon. Meanwhile, remember that the days your letter comes the sun shines, if it is cloudy, or it becomes cooler when the thermometer is above 90. My best love to you and Dan [Andrew Gibb]. Some day, I tell myself a few times every week there will come time to write to both of you, but this seems to be the best I’ve managed yet. Tell me about Kroebe’s marriage. I got it from NY from Ernestine Evans [the feminist journalist]. Rayna

The departure from Peking took place in mid October. Eugene Chen had already gone south. Later, in Moscow, Rayna was to recall Chen’s farewell in Peking. As Sheean writes, Chen ‘had said at the door of her office, just as he was about to take wing for Canton: “The Revolution is grateful”, and then, magnificently: “The Kuomintang never forgets.” We [Rayna and Sheean] both laughed helplessly at this reminiscence.’23 Rayna and Bill left for Canton shortly after Chen’s theatrical exit. The route to Canton, for purposes of safety, was by train to Shanghai and then by boat to Canton – as the land route was controlled by the warlord Sun Ch’uan-fang, an enemy of the Kuomintang. Rayna says in the next extant letter that ‘I meant to write you on the train, as I said in my letter …’ but she was exhausted and finally wrote to Helen on a boat sailing to Canton.

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Dollar Steamship Line Orient and round the world on board SS President Monroe October 22 [1926] Dear Helen, We’re just out of Shanghai on our way down. We had a cold but enormously interesting few days in Shanghai, meeting some of the nationalist leaders who are lurking about – the settlement’s in the heart of the enemy and safe only because of the same insane lack of consistency that made the paper [the Peking People’s Tribune] safe in our compound in Peking. Among the people we met – met under cover – was the 2nd in command at the Yokohama Specie Bank, a Japanese we knew up in Peking – one Viscount Kano who is of the old aristocracy but refuses to use his title. He took us to his home – and so did a young high-born Chinese youth whose articles we had read in one of the Shanghai papers – a brilliant young man educated at Harvard who half the time brags of his success as a man about town and the other half writes nationalist articles which he succeeds occasionally in getting into a conservative American paper, much to the amazement I imagine, of his enormously wealthy father who supplies money, autos, servants, etc. in such amount that the son’s journalistic earnings are the merest pocket money. In both these houses I met women, one the wife of the Japanese, the other the sister of the brilliant rake, who were beautiful beyond anything I have ever before beheld, either here or in America. They had all the oriental beauty that you read about but, up to now – for me – never see. Heavens, Helen, you never saw such women. The thorough sophisticate, even in the young girl who could not have been more than twenty. Sophisticated, that is, in appearance – with sleek hair, face, powdered, rouged, pencilled, perfectly manicured slender hands, silk oriental dress of heavy brocade, jade earrings and hair ornaments (this the Chinese girl; the Japanese woman, much older, was in just as sophisticated western clothes). But underneath, both of the women were wide-eyed and naïve. The Japanese woman reminded me of you. She lived some time in England and some time in NY. She was talking about the greater ease she feels with American people and said that in NY, when she’d ask her American friends please to show her their kitchens because she wanted to see how they kept house, no one refused her, but in England she was quite unable to find out how the English people live because no one would show her the kitchen. When she asked, she said, the people thought she was rude and became very distant. They would take her to the living room, the dining room and sometimes to the bedrooms – but

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you never can learn much until you go into the kitchen. Immediately there came into my mind you asking the man in Greenwich Village how much he’d paid for his dinner. These women impressed me far more than politics in Shanghai – although it was foolish of me, I suppose, because we heard many interesting things. One old man was interesting. I had met him once before in Peking before hunt and flight was on. He’s about 70, I should think, one of the old revolutionaries who is both scholar and revolutionist. He has one of the sweetest faces I have ever seen, white hair, round face with very bright but sad and old eyes, gentle smile and soft voice – not at all the mask face which so often puzzles. Chinese tell us that he is one of the most famous living scholars; the young Harvard youth opened his eyes wide when we mentioned him and did not dismiss him with a gesture. His name is Wu Vee Chi. You will be interested, I know, in his methods. He has charge of civil affairs for the nationalists in Shanghai, directs policies, activities, etc., but most of his day he spends teaching a small group of children – we saw a few of them, seven to ten years old, I’d guess – for he believes that a new type of leader must be trained, one who has not only revolutionary training in the western way, but also some comprehension of Chinese genius. He is the only man I know who is doing any practical work at the welding of cultures. I am told that all his life he has done this, no matter how much actual work he has been doing or how hectic the times. It was strange in his home, sitting around a table with three or four very sober, mature men, discussing policies and events, then suddenly to hear a school bell and see some youngsters go trooping through the room. Strange, too, isn’t it, that only this one very old man here seems to be tackling the problem from the point of view held by the younger progressive educationalists in the west. I meant to write you on the train, as I said in my letter, but the last days were too exhausting. I sat dumbly and let my body rest. Then in Shanghai there was too much to do. It’s a mad city, Helen, rushing, noisy, gay with night life and lights – cabarets, cafes, motor cars, a street of shops that rivals New York and scores of side shopping streets, all very narrow and most of them with Chinese banners above very western expensive window displays. The first day I went drunk on the sight of ‘things’ – dresses, coats, hats, jewelry shops, candy shops, department stores, silk stores, automobile show rooms – a condensed American city. At night the buildings are lighted up more than even in America, in addition to huge signs and lighted windows, they have the buildings outlined in lights. Some of them are

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quite high, with turrets and towers and a few have Chinese curving roofs. It makes a stupendous splash against the sky. Then there are the – literally – miles of western homes – absolutely American residential districts, even to the apartment houses. No wonder the Chinese get mad, even while they use the district to save their skins. The Chinese city is a crowded, dirty, vile hole. To make the contrast more complete, this week, there are several battleships on the river, headed by the newly arrived British ship with the aggressive name, Vindictive. Everyone agrees in Shanghai that there is trouble brewing. The nationalists may get the province and the city. As a matter of fact, they don’t want it. They’ve taken too much already. So they tell us. In a way, I was glad to leave Peking. Interesting as it was, we were not happy there. What the factors were, I can’t quite figure out. Two important ones, I know, were Bill’s sickness which gave him an inferiority feeling about the place, and Gracie. I doubt if we can ever be happy in Peking now, in spite of the fact that we still have the house there, the furniture – and the lease – everything all ready to go back to, even the servants staying on for [James H.] Dolsen, [an American who worked with Bill Prohme at the Nationalist News Agency] – damn his unshaved, unwashed hide! Bill changed so there. I can understand it though, of course, that doesn’t help much, particularly with me who has so little control. You see, when he recovered, he began working on jobs I had picked up. He felt a subordinate and it seemed impossible to rid him of that feeling. Maybe I should have slipped into the background more than I did. Quite possibly. But you see while he was sick the servants all began to bring everything to me, to refer to the house as Madame Prohme’s house when people phoned, and so on. All quite natural for there was Bill either in bed or on a couch in the yard and orders never to disturb him or call him or let visitors in. The servants formed habits and Chinese habits are almost unbreakable. Also it never occurred to me how these small things preyed on him until one day he burst out with it – in anger. Then to have initiated a change would have been too obvious – no good. So that the result was that even though he was doing more than half the work on some of the jobs in the end – and his own Agency job entirely alone – he continued to have the lackey, kept feeling. This is true, I know, for he told me about it. There are other factors, too, of course, which are really nobody’s fault – just the difficulty of two people trying to live in too close a harmony. Suddenly you find there is only closeness and no harmony. Then the closeness becomes a horror almost at times. It’s aggravated by my too

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young impulses – the streak of frivolity – and Bill’s undoubted maturity. That is always deepened by illness, I suppose. I do want to dance and Bill’s afraid to. I can’t blame him and am a pig to be impatient – but there it is. I am. Also my impulse to many human contacts fits badly into his life – with the disastrous Elizabeth [Green] episode and several others not so extended. All in all not a pleasant year for the two of us, I’m afraid. Bill’s hurt me a lot – and I’ve hurt him probably even more. What will come of it, I don’t know. It doesn’t vanish with change of locality. I see that. I’m worried. No one knows but you. Bill suspects. Gracie, too, was a bad factor. We agree you and I on the inadvisability of doing that sort of thing. I’ll never do it again. As a matter of fact, she bothered Bill less than she did me and I’m rather ashamed of myself for feelings which I don’t believe I betrayed to her. I hope I didn’t. I don’t know if I wrote to you about it or not but I’ve come to believe that it’s bad for two sisters who resemble each other as much as Gracie and I do to try to live together. I don’t believe Gracie felt it as much as I did and I can’t quite figure it out. Part of it is this. I hate seeing myself – and Gracie is very much like me in many ways – training ways, tricks of speech, gesture, habits of thought, all howling to the high heavens of the home habits which I abhor. I see them in Gracie and recognize them echoing in myself. Can you understand that? I can only half-way. It’s a reminder of things I’d like to kill in myself but which I see exist. Also you lose a sense of personality in being with a person who resembles you. Another hatred of being mirrored. Golly, how I’d hate to be a twin! It’s cheap emotion, I suppose, but, Helen, I’ll confess that I don’t like having another red haired, dark-eyed person who wears yellows and browns to advantage around me all the time. I scorn myself for such pettiness – but again, there it is. Worst of all, meanest of all is to have this resistance when I like her so much. That, however, is easy to understand. Family psychology. You and Jaime [de Angulo] too, perhaps. Much of this will answer much that was in your letter. It would have been better if I had gone down to Canton alone for a while but it didn’t shape that way. Nor would I have gone. Bill slumps so; gets so downhearted when I’m away – even though I’m annoying him so much. In Canton I’m going to insist on more independence – both in living and in work. That may help. About being Rayna Raphaelson. Didn’t I really ever answer that, Helen? I can scarcely believe it because I’ve had it in mind so many times when I’ve started to write. In Peking for the most part I was Madame Prohme. Peking

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couldn’t believe anything else and there was too much work to bother much about it. My mail always came in my own name and a number of people kept on calling me Raphaelson but the servants always referred to me as Madame Prohme – or rather Peng Tai-tai, which is its Chinese version. In Canton I’m going to revert. There it will be possible again – not so many conventionally minded Oriental foreigners and the Chinese themselves usually don’t change their names. I really don’t think you would have any trouble keeping your own name. Mail offers no difficulty. Only, of course, if Dan goes, you’ll have to be Madame on passports and hotel registers. The more I think about it, the less I care what they call me – but it’s different with you, I know. Raphaelson means nothing to me; I dislike Prohme; Simons is unthinkable. I have no feeling of identity with anything but Rayna. I never think of myself as any of the three. When people ask my name, I have no instinctive response any more. I figure it out – as I do when they ask me where I come from. I’m slowly diminishing – through additions. Ink’s out – and so is my hand. My love, Rayna

In Peking, because of Bill’s chronic health problem, the editing of the Peking People’s Tribune had become almost exclusively Rayna’s job. But Bill clung doggedly to his post as head of the Nationalist News Agency – a position he was to continue to occupy in Canton and then Hankow. Grace had left Peking at about the same time Bill and Rayna did. She was to return to Chicago, but by the long route – that is continued around the world from east to west. Neither Bill nor Rayna ever returned to Peking, and the next letter to Helen – it seems unlikely that any other intervened between it and the one just quoted – was written only a week later, from Canton. Address – c/o Canton Gazette, Canton Canton, Oct. 29 [1926] Helen dear, I don’t know whether you’d like this city or hate it – or if I do. It’s the dirtiest I’ve ever seen, and absolutely airless and flat – but I’ve never seen any place where there are so many things to look at and watch. All the streets except the several wide thoroughfares built in the last five or six years are narrow beyond belief – actually too narrow for a

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rickshaw and in some places for narrow chairs. Many streets can be easily spanned by outspread arms – and the buildings along them are not built on an even line but jut in and out so that the whole picture is futuristic and bizarre. The buildings are three and four stories high so that the streets are like jagged crevices. Way up at the top are queer inadequate squares of matting to guard against sun in hot weather. They are wide-woven and you can see the sky through. The first floor of the buildings is level with the ground and the front room, whether home, shop or factory is open to the street, or, at most, guarded by a horizontally carved doorway. The shops and restaurants are miraculous – there is no other word – with two story ceilings, dark, cool, with black corners and much elaborate carving. Furniture stiff, heavy, Chinese chairs, many with a large round stone and jade inlay at the back – some with intricate pearl inlay all over – the kind they have in some chop suey houses in America. Everything is open to the eye. Women fixing dinners in the streets, peddlers cutting fish, butchers, fruit merchants, weaving, a thousand kinds of shops, long pieces of cloth being dyed, washing clothes, and of course all the eating, nursing and latrine operations that are always open in China. It’s hard to decide between withdrawal from the dirt and going on and on through fascination. The wide streets are cleaner – purely because wider and the dirt is farther spread – but hideous. When we got here, we feared the reaction of the people we are working with if we went in the small foreign concession, which was boycotted for fifteen months – boycott lifted only a week or so ago. So we came to the very-much advertised Asia Hotel, which heralds itself as the largest hotel in South China, with all modern conveniences – and what not. Helen, you should see it. It, too, we are told, has been allowed to run down because of labor difficulties. The unions have the upper hand here – more highly organized than in America, and amazingly aware of their power. The room, which is fantastic, has been cleaned only once – and that haphazard – in four days. The bed has every kind of dirt, barring bugs, dirty-looking sheets, a mosquito net that is positively gray, and a blanket that now is all one color, cemented by dirt. There are indications that once it was a gay, gaudy, beflowered affair. Across the middle of the ceiling runs a water pipe – and it leaks. The bathroom hasn’t had a real cleaning in months, I’m sure. Ineradicable stripes indicate some dozens of former baths. The whole place is vile. We are frantically searching for a place to live in. All the officials agree that foreigners – or they themselves – can’t live on either the wide

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or narrow streets of the main city. Left is the shameen (the concession)* where we’d prefer not going, and two missionary centers at the edge of the city, both built in distressing American suburb style. But it seems to be the choice. We decide today which we choose. The city is on a river and the river is as crowded as the streets. There is an estimate that some half million people live on the river in junks, sampans, power boats – some of them very elaborate with fine wood, intricate cabinets, all inlaid with pearl, and gigantic lanterns. There are even shops and restaurants, very gay, reached by planks from the shore. Other boats of course, are dirty and shabby. They are packed in so close that along the sides of the river for perhaps fifty yards or so you can’t see the water. Oh, it’s going to be great fun prowling – if there is time. There seems to be a pile of work outlined for us – all of it unorganized. The English paper here has been a dirty howling propaganda rag, mainly because of lack of organization and vision. Now they want it organized into a real paper – 8 pages to start and larger later. Also there is work to be done in helping with foreign cables, mail stories and so on. Everyone we meet has a new idea of something we can do. The whole place is electric with vitality – but confused and uncorrelated, as is inevitable, I suppose, when a small group within a little over a year find itself in control, first of a city, then of a very active province and now of half a nation. There are just too many things to be done. There are very few foreigners in Canton – less than 200, I think – 2,000,000 people in the city! They are all consuls or representatives of business houses or missionaries – most of them missionaries. Bill is calling for me to come out of this hellhole of noise. The worst part of the hotel is that it’s on the waterfront and the noise is deafening – ship whistles, sirens, street-hawkers with flutes and horns and a thousand voices. My love, Rayna Write me c/o Canton Gazette

The ‘small foreign concession’ had been boycotted for 15 months because of Shanghai’s May Thirtieth Incident in 1925. That clash between British marines and the Chinese * Canton’s foreign concessions were in Shameen. On June 23, 1925, shortly after Shanghai’s May Thirtieth Incident, in which police of the International Settlement killed a number of Chinese demonstrators, scores of Chinese protestors had been gunned down from the British and French side while marching along the bund opposite Shameen.

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populace had been particularly bloody on the Chinese side and provoked a wave of anti-foreign strikes along the south China coast, immobilizing the British colony of Hong Kong for many weeks.* This general strike forms the background of André Malraux’s first Chinese novel, Les Conquerants. The hotel – ‘this hellhole of noise’ – was soon abandoned for quarters in an annex of the Foreign Office building where Mikhail Borodin was housed at the time. This marks the Prohmes’ first contact with the Soviet advisor who would come to play such a big role in both their lives, especially Rayna’s. Borodin, however, did not stay on long in Canton. He soon departed for Hankow. Bill Prohme followed him shortly thereafter. Bill and Rayna were still together in Canton, and Rayna dispatched a letter to Helen that reads very much like a continuation of the previous one. Canton Gazette, Canton Nov. 29, 1926 Dear Helen, We haven’t been here long enough to feel at home in the place – only long enough for Bill to hate it and me to be curious about it – and now we seem to be about to move again, along with the entire government and the party headquarters. The whole lot is to go to the Yangtze, where a new government will be established either in Hankow or in Wuchang, across the river. Some will trek overland; others will go by sea. I am hoping Bill will get a chance to trek as it would be a marvellous story and a fine opportunity to become intimately acquainted with many people. There is no through railway between here and Hankow, and the sea and river line is long, and, what is more to the point, includes Shanghai and the surrounding country, which is in the hands of ‘the enemy’. It is positively dangerous for some of the men to go that way; but, of course, not for us. The railway here has been talked of for perhaps the last fifty years, but there is still a 200 mile gap between the line that feels its way down from Hankow, and the one that feels its way up from here – 200 miles through rather rough mountain country. Not so good, but interesting. * [GB] The Canton–Hong Kong strike and boycott began on June 21, 1925, in the British concession on Shameen and in Hong Kong, and lasted for 16 months. It ended in October 1926, after the start of the Northern Expedition.

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If Bill goes that way, I’ll stay down here and get out this paper, until the second group goes. It will probably be within a matter of three or four weeks, in either case. After we go, this paper will draw in its neck and become a provincial paper; God knows we’ve not been able to do much in extending the neck, but what has been done must be tucked in again. Then, if there is any way of convincing anybody that it is worth it, we will spread our wings for a real paper in Hankow. We have had disillusioning experiences with difficult finance, so that we are not going in high spirits. After all, as we’ve discovered, wars do cost money, and military chiefs think first of food for their troops; what is left can go to other things, among them, English newspapers. I think I’ve told you of our bizarre way of living, in a very delegation-looking annex of the Foreign Office, a place of such high ceilings that you feel a midget, and of such long rooms that you expect a conference. It was never meant for living, but we live in it after a fashion – a queer fashion. It is the sort of place which you don’t even attempt to make livable, because it is a patently impossible task. Write me here; letters will be forwarded, and I don’t know what the next address will be. This was going to be a sizable letter but work just came in. My love, Rayna

Two weeks later another letter was sent off to Helen, and by that time Rayna was already alone in Canton. Bill had taken off for Hankow, but by way of Shanghai – not overland, as Rayna had hoped. Canton Gazette December 12 [1926] Helen darling, Bill has gone up to Hankow to see if he can urge the ‘authorities’ who have moved up there with the vague thing, the government, to start the newspaper. I am staying down in Canton alone, and not having a bad time of it, although it is, I admit, about the worst city for any joy in the world. It is interesting, highly colorful in its narrow streets, but depressing. There is less laughter in this town than any place I’ve ever seen. There are no concealing walls like those that line the hutungs [alleys] in Peking. So everything is open, along the few widened streets, and much of Chinese hour by hour life is not beautiful. No Spitting Allowed, promulgated and enforced, would help a little. But no one would think of such a thing.

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Companions here consist solely of Chinese in official circles, and a few people I’ve met at the Canton Christian College – all pious – not the officials, of course, who are at the moment disgruntled. All the ones who are recognized as important have gone north. There are left only the high-placed seconds, and they don’t much relish the evidence of it. A few are amusing and here and there a really fine person. In fact, I think the finest will always be among the seconds. For instance there is Lee Choi, the man who ran the Gazette alone before we came and will continue after I leave. He is as fine a person as I’ve ever met, and in a subordinate position because he refused to cool his heels in outer offices. He comes in and spends long hours giving me rambling and exceedingly circumstantial accounts of inside workings of the Chinese Revolution for the past fifteen years. I am getting much lowdown. On the whole it is not discouraging because there is evident through all of it the tremendous force, and in a few high places faith, that has driven the movement on. But in a hundred specific places, it is rather devastating. People topple. Fortunately I know few of them, so it isn’t a personal loss. I am going out to see if any drug store in this town is sufficiently advanced in English and women’s needs to sell me Kotex. Also to meet a lady who is going to take me to a shop where I can buy some Canton dishes, which are genuinely beautiful; I am planning to send you a specimen. There will be more to this letter in a later envelope. I’ll mail this scrap or it will get shoved aside as twice scraps to you did last week. I love you, Rayna

The informative Lee Choy [or Choi], we learn from Percy Chen’s memoirs, was a long-time associate of Eugene Chen – in Percy’s words, ‘my father’s factotum and assistant in newspaper affairs’.24 It was the same Lee Choy who is quoted by Percy Chen as saying to him, ‘But your father was a bit of a Micawber in the matter of cash … He always felt that something would turn up.’25 The continuation of the ‘scrap-letter’ just quoted was typed two days before Christmas. The Canton Gazette Canton December [1926] Helen dear, It’s too cold to go into the office where the typewriter is – in spite of the fact that we’re in the tropics. I hug the small, smoky, very ugly fireplace and have

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a woollen dress and sweater. This is the sort of room that nothing short of a conflagration would heat. And I have a cold and am very grumpy. I’m probably, as Eugene Chen says, witnessing history – but, in Canton, it dribbles through on the wires in such scattered bits that it’s incoherent. Daily I face the job of patching together these little bits, clipping other little bits from other papers and dishing them up in such a fashion that ‘our readers’ – damn few of them, there are, thank God, – think they’re getting first-hand, hot-off-the-griddle, authoritative news of the big events that are taking place. I struggle terribly to present something that will seem to have temporal and geographic continuity. I’m a faker. No one knows less what’s going on in China than I do. Really, Helen, I’m doing an awful thing. I’m ashamed, but there’s no way out without giving the party a dirty deal. But much as I hate to, I have to get on with the job of doing it. Bill’s still in the north and so far only one small wire. Even he sends no news. I’m puzzled. Maybe there’s been a counter-revolution or something. Practically my only companions are the rats. And the dog, Dan, who has become as important to me as Rudovic’s [Madame Max Pinner] and Nancy’s dogs to them. You’d hate it, I know. But if you had absolutely nothing else in a big room, cold and rat-infested, you’d clutch at even one of those abortions of Hagedorn’s, I’m sure of it.* Merry Christmas Ho! Ho! My love, Rayna

The next letter is a New Year’s Eve letter – a ‘Western’ New Year’s Eve letter, but quite by chance, as Rayna explains. It is actually only a brief note that is an introduction to the real New Year’s letter that Rayna typed on January 4, 1927. The prefatory note reads: Dec. 31 [1926] Helen darling, No work today. The printers haven’t the nerve to knock off for foreign New Year in this period when foreign anything is banned – but they’ve fixed up a way – it’s the celebration of an event in Nanking fifteen years ago, when Sun Yat-sen became provisional president of Nanking! I don’t care what it is. I don’t have to work. * Hagedorn, a Dutchman, was connected with the University of California’s Anthropology Department; he had a pet wolf.

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I have errands which I’ll do this morning when my guide comes. I’ll start this and finish, maybe considerately by typewriter, when I get back. Bill’s still north. Everything up there is at a standstill, so far as I can make out, so I haven’t any idea how long it will be before I can go up, too. It’s annoying, being stranded down here when the big show is going on up there. Otherwise I don’t mind it. In fact, between us, I’ve been needing it, as you know. I’ve been so little alone in the past three years – never entirely so, I think, except on trains and boats, which doesn’t count. I’m feeling much less jumpy than I’ve been for a long time and although the job is hard and I get tired, it’s just that – tired. I can relax immediately, when I’m through. Helen, it’s an insane system, this marriage. People were never intended for constant adjustment to anyone. How wise and fortunate you and Dan are, in your own homes, so that you can be comfortably alone without the faintest touch of being traitors. I must make a stab at least for a room of my own. So far we’ve been either cramped in small quarters, or else with deficient furniture (Japan) or else with too many people (Peking). The result has been that there’s been no place where I know people will not be coming in at any minute – and actually coming in every minute. Here, between jobs, I can come in and sit down, read if I want to, write if I want to, or just sit, and no one will come in to say something or ask something. It’s a human’s right. That’s what. But Hankow will be a hotel, I fear, or a tiny cramped place. Swarms of people have gone up from here and the place will probably be congested with rents soaring. I’ve had no word from you for so long, I’m wondering if you’ve hopped off to Europe. Helen, even if you do go now, will you keep in the back of your mind some such plan as this – in four or five years, when we’ve saved enough money, will you meet us – you and Dan – in Europe, and tramp and bum for many months? Please say yes. I’m off for the errands now. Finish later.

This note seems to have been sent off along with the follow-up report, which is mostly about ‘r s’s – that is, returned students, or, more precisely, Chinese who were educated abroad, chiefly in the United States, and who had returned to their homeland. Once back in China, they obviously constituted a rather elite ‘alumni association’.

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It is four days later: I’ve been alternating between dissipation and exhaustion ever since. The night of the 31st I went to the first party, or even small gathering, since I’ve been in Canton. It was the big affair of the year for the returned students and it was extremely interesting. I had not expected such a grand and terrible party. It was grand because of the dresses of the ladies – all of them are ladies who marry r s – wore. Such silks and brocades as you never saw. I’ve seen them on the shelves often, and occasionally on the streets, but never in great swarms as I did the other night. They looked magnificent, in a very sophisticated way, with sleeked hair – many of them bobbed – and considerable make-up of the obvious kind that makes no pretence at being natural. They are strange mixtures, these wives of r s, many of them r s themselves. A mixture between what they were born into and what they absorbed in America. Some of them have absorbed the most incongruous things. One thing that was interesting was that there was an unrestraint about it that I have never seen at a post-college dinner. You know how dull and shame-faced and artificially boisterous they usually are. Well, this one wasn’t. The young men, and some middle aged ones, gave college yells with their hearts in them, just as if the team were striking for a touchdown. I have a theory about it. I have seen these same students – or like them – in America (most of them were American r s, only a sprinkling of Japanese, English, French and German). There they are diffident and almost apologetic about entering into the college life. They want to like the very devil – as the other night showed – but have the feeling of outsiders, being on sufferance, disliked, looked down upon, and so on. They never feel really one of the boys. And it is all pent up inside of them, the glamor of it (as it seemed to them) and the longing. So here, among Chinese, many of them never having been abroad, these ex-students can give college yells and be boisterous and undergraduate to their heart’s content, without anyone to make them feel small and unimportant. I’m sure that was the explanation of it all. For the large part, Chinese students in America – I’ve seen lots of them at the Cosmopolitan Club at Illinois, where my brothers lived and later Raph – are reserved, aloof, all in the Confucian manner. But they didn’t want to be. It was pride, hurt. Here they drop all semblance of aloofness and become the westernized interpreter of the spirit of America, for their less traveled countrymen. There were other evidences of it. There was a program, deadly long and for the most part dull, all in what purported to be the western manner. There it became ghastly. College yells anyone can do, if he gets into the mood of it, but quartets, solos, comedian stuff, etc. is harder. They did it

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badly with a sophomoric – high school – badness, flat jokes, stale, off-key music, schoolboy embarrassment. One girl was very interesting – Miss Louise Bow, an impossible Chinese name such as could only be found in a foreign-born Chinese. She was born in S[an] F[rancisco] and came here only a few years ago. She is doing the Carol Kennicott [the heroine of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street] stunt in Canton. She feels infinitely superior to these native-born Chinese, quite the smart, sophisticated woman of the world, and she shows these people a thing or two. New Year’s Eve she showed them three or four or more, I should say. She came on the platform, with sheik hair, all sleeked like patent leather, a swagger, a strut, the manner that is never seen off the cheap vaudeville stage – dressed in a western man’s suit and singing a vulgar ten-twenty-thirty stage song. The women there looked at her surprised and not displeased. They thought she was dreadfully smart and ‘different’. She was. Later she did a Spanish dance – badly – with another, but gentler western-trained – not born – Chinese girl. In that she was squatting on the ground in a Hawaiian costume which purported to be Spanish, playing a ukulele. The natives looked with wide eyes. The r s nodded knowingly as if to say, oh yes, all this is familiar stuff to us. The following night I went to a Chinese theater to see again an actor I’m rather crazy about, and got an interview with him and learned all about his theater. He is trying to merge the old theater and the elements of westernism that have come into China and present them in play form – with the result that you have such bizarre things as old symbolic dancing in Mandarin robes with a modern Canton backdrop, showing an asphalted street on which are rickshaws and motorcars. Also in one scene the other night, they had a woman in a forest, burning incense to the Goddess of Mercy and drawing an idol with the blood from her hand. In the next you had two high officials, in old costumes, standing on undisguised tables, facing each other, in the way that means a war on the old stage, and the savior coming in with a pasteboard cannon of the most approved modern type. It is the same theater in which – I think I told you – a few weeks ago I saw them interrupt a play which was a muddle of old and new but all in Chinese costumes, half-modern Chinese, half-Mandarin, to put on a ballroom scene and a foxtrot, danced rather well, in western dress. To my utter amazement I learned Sunday night that the play they were attempting was a Chinese version of The Thief of Baghdad! Since then – all Chinese entertainments last until early morning – I’ve been exhausted. The theater retains the deafening cymbals which make Chinese plays an ordeal no matter how interesting. The actor told me they had tried at first to eliminate or subordinate the cymbals – but, says he

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naïvely, how could the audience know when the hero came? They didn’t like it either when they tried to put the orchestra into the pit; it was considered dull and confusing by the audience. Also, he told me when I asked why he didn’t keep his coolies off the stage if he was trying to modernize and westernize a little, that they had tried but it was so hard because the stage hands wanted to see, too, and then, of course, they did have to bring tea to the actors and cushions and things. You see he has difficulties. Since I started this letter, last Saturday, I’ve had two cables from Bill and, although it is not at all sure yet, I may go north soon. I’m waiting for another cable. Things seem to be very exciting up there and I am keen to go. Did I write you that Elizabeth Green couldn’t go beyond Honolulu? Her mother met her there and the doctors decided that she really is in a very bad way, that it will take months for her to recover, and there is more than a hint that she may not recover at all. I am very much concerned and puzzled. Do you suppose it could possibly be all mental? Up in Peking the doctors are sure of it – and they are not poor doctors. Her horror of China seems to hang on. Her mother, who has written me a few times since they reached Hawaii, begs me to flee this terrible place before I, too, am sick. She says, ‘For God’s sake come away, come to Honolulu where you can have clean air and food and the people are clean.’ You can see how the unsavory elements of China have affected Elizabeth. There has been no word in any letter, either from her mother or in the few scrawls E[lizabeth] has sent, about the boy, Kuo. Bill is a little ashamed of himself about the whole incident but still insists that it is mental, and that it is Kuo, not dirt that is at the bottom of it. He may be right. I wish Dan could talk to her. I’d give a lot to hear what the two of you could make of it. She has had some curious dreams, all about Chinese food, that she told me, that I’d like to have the two of you probe. I do wish she would get back to S[an] F[rancisco], but there is little hope of it for some months, it seems. Well, old dear, I, too, would give a lot for some evenings at 86 Shasta Road with the sweep of Berkeley and the Bay out of the window and the clean sky above. I wish I weren’t so interested in China. I miss you and Berkeley terribly. My love always, Rayna

Shasta Road today is a long serpentine street in north Berkeley that winds steeply up the hills. Houses line it all the way, submerged in lush vegetation and overhung by tall conifers and

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eucalyptus trees. In the 1920s, however, dwellings and trees were sparse on the north Berkeley hills. The ‘twin’ houses of Helen and Dan, along with a third even older one, still stand, halfway up Shasta Road, all but invisible from the street. The view from the spot looking westwards across San Francisco Bay is, if anything, more spectacular than ever. Rayna’s mention of Helen’s ‘eyrie’ strikes an unusually nostalgic note, amplified, so to speak, by the circumstances of her imminent departure for Hankow, the most sensitive nerve-center of the Chinese revolution at that moment. As for the boy Kuo – who he was and how he was involved with Elizabeth Green remains unclear. Two days later Rayna wrote a letter to her sister Grace. The first sentence, ‘You are a brat. You never even sent a picture postcard all the way around the world’, indicates that Grace had finally reached Chicago. In addition, Rayna speaks of a ‘year of having you in the next, or same, room’, clearly indicating that Grace had stayed with Rayna and Bill in Peking almost from the time of their arrival there in October 1925. Further on in the same letter is this graphic description of the Canton ‘Foreign Office’ where Rayna was housed: Bill is in Hankow, and I am living a weird sort of life here in the Foreign Office Annex, which is a bare barn, inhabited by rats. Scattered about in a room big enough for the King’s reception, are three wicker chairs, five or six stiff Chinese blackwood and stone atrocities – you know, the stiff formal chairs and settees – a typical group of a square table with four chairs set about it, and a rococo marble-top table with the victrola set on it. Else nothing but wide spaces. In the next room is a conference table, on which we do the editorial work – some twice or more longer than the one in Peking – some stiff back chairs, and more space. The space between the floors and ceilings is incredible.

A little further on, Rayna continues: Life is a million times more interesting than in Peking. I consider it bad luck in a way that you came just the year that you did. It was a drab year. There was no beacon light, in events or personalities in Peking, and I was in a down mood most of the year, tired, disgruntled, battered by the

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Elizabeth incident and Bill’s illness and other things. Too bad. But I think you had a less bad time of the year than I did.

Rayna stayed in Canton until the end of January. On January 12, she typed another letter to Helen. Helen darling, I have just come from the post office where I had neatly sewn into a package for you a padded robe which I feel sure will be your joy and treasure. I had one made for me some days ago and am wondering how in the world I have lived so long without one. I had a hard time with yours. I traveled through shops, honestly, in search of that particular shade of blue-green which delights you and gives me the shivers. They showed me none that set my teeth sufficiently on edge to be a guarantee that you would like it. Really I searched, Helen. The particular color I have sent I rather like myself, and so am worried. They have many blues in Chinese silks, but most of them are variations on that gray-blue, which I recall you don’t like – you know the tones that in the Rooseveltian period were called Alice blue and later, I remember, in the months when I recommended it highly as the season’s latest to the mail-order butterflies of Livingston’s, became powder blue. They have all varieties of it. But no green blues. Ah well, you’ll like the lining. I am sitting on the edge of my chair waiting for the papers and for news from Bill. Something big happened in Hankow, on the third, I believe. At least all the wire reports make it appear so. We have had no direct word and are in the dark down here. We know there is a considerable naval concentration taking place on the Yangtze, that American destroyers are under orders to be ready to leave in 12 hours from the Philippines, and that the French, Italian, Japanese boats are watching off Shanghai. Britain has boldly ordered her boats up the river, we hear, to add to the already sizable fleet at Hankow. We are wondering if it could possibly mean war. It seems incredible. And for China it would, I believe, be fatal. But it is hard to untangle it all and see why this was done and that said. I’d give my eye teeth to be there. Damn it. Damn it. At this distance, I have considerable sympathy for the British resentment of the episode. But it is impossible to tell. We have had no reports except those that are obviously colored, both our side and Reuter’s. Bill evidently hasn’t been able to get any messages through. The cables he has sent up by the landline – the one under Chinese control – are coming in ten days or more late. The others go through Hong Kong. We haven’t had a word either way.

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It blots out everything else. I’ll let you know more about it in a day or two. Evidently there was a rather truculent demonstration just outside the British Concession, which I can well judge there might as I’ve seen some of the passionate stuff that has been said up there. I hope you are not in Europe. You wouldn’t have gone off that way without telling me, would you. Please say no. Give Dan a kiss for me. My love, Rayna [And then a hastily handwritten postscript:] Am I not stupid! One of the main reasons for this letter was to tell you that I’ve had trouble lately with packages. If the pkg doesn’t reach you in, say, a month – by Feb. 21, write me. I’ll trace it.

‘Something big’ had happened in Hankow. The transfer of the nationalist government to that city became official during the first days of 1927 and was ushered in by a series of celebrations, with the usual fireworks. On the evening of January 3 the last of the inaugural celebrations was held, again with fireworks, not far from the British Concession. The crowd was so huge that it spilled over into the Concession, and the inevitable ‘incident’ occurred. The Kuomintang Central Committee was in session at the time and was immediately alerted. Its leaders rushed to the scene and restrained the crowd, but anti-British feeling ran high and continued through the following days while Rayna’s former boss, Eugene Chen – now Foreign Minister of the Wuhan government – opened discussions with the British that resulted in the famous Chen–O’Malley Agreement stipulating withdrawal of the British marines to their ships anchored in the Yangtze and the eventual abandonment of the whole Concession by the British. It was a small but highly symbolic victory in the fight against extraterritoriality. The British officially relinquished control of their Hankow Concession just about the time that Rayna was arriving. The trip took her by boat to Shanghai, and then up the Yangtze to Wuhan. The boat trip from Shanghai to Hankow took ten days!

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*

*

*

The next letter is dated January 31, 1926 – a New Year’s slip for 1927. It was written on board the SS Tuckwo, which was carrying Rayna to Hankow. SS Tuckwo Jan. 31, 1926 [1927] Helen dear, I get to Hankow tomorrow. The last week in Canton was terrific. I worked and ate Chinese banquets. Worked too hard and ate so much that I’ve done nothing but sleep all the way up. In Shanghai there is every evidence of imminent war. It seems fantastic. Yet there are troops pouring into the city and a terrific concentration of gunboats, with more coming. There is talk that is identical with 1917, substituting Chinese for German. The land must be cleared of the ‘reds’. On this boat, a British boat, I am the only one on the other side, and I say nothing. No use. I am the only woman on board and couldn’t get a ticket until the company had direct word from the British Consul. I had to go to see him. After asking if I were the wife of William Prohme, and looking disapproving, he admitted that, as I am not a British subject, he could not forbid my going. What he thinks of me was deadly apparent. But I sat there, looking my most naïve and petting the dog. It was a most ridiculous interview. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Sometimes it is fun having my particular kind of immature face. It puzzles some people as much as it does me, when I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t look a bit like I am, do I, Helen – or am I kidding myself? I talked to many people in Shanghai – in fact did nothing else for two long days, with the exception of a little drinking and dancing. Everyone seemed agreed that something must be done – and there is little doubt, from the thrilled looks on their faces as the British troops march by, about what they are hoping. Most of them say it is the Russians who must go, but many say the whole Nationalist Party must go, too. If the British continue their truculence and use enough gunboats, they probably can do it – and Bill and I will leave China. I’ve been given all sorts of cryptic messages from some of the lovers of intrigue. One man said to me earnestly, ‘Tell TV Soong (he’s the Minister of Finance) that all he need do is to send for me; I’ll come and get him out. Just say that. He’ll understand.’ I nodded solemnly, and giggled inside. Many other similar messages. For every official in Hankow, there is someone down in Shanghai who is eager for the adventure (and

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more especially, the ability to tell eager listeners about it later) of rescuing him from the hands of the British, or the mob, or the Russians, or what not. No one yet has offered to rescue me. I wouldn’t make such a good story, I suppose, as Eugene Chen or TV Soong. I haven’t figured out what I think of it and am not trying to until I reach Hankow and hear the other side. This much I know: the whole incident that brought the ships and troops and fomented this hostility has been greatly exaggerated. I’ll write you about it when I have more to say. Write me c/o Nationalist News Agency. Terminus Hotel, Hankow. My God! I wonder if you are in Europe – and why I never get letters from you. Damn. I’m taking the dog [Dan] with me. She’s a terrible bother. On this ship, the captain, who hates me for what I am, has banished her to a dirty hole in the hold. I have to go down there and sit on ropes and bags and hold her paw to quiet her down. It’s beastly cold and gray up here, after Canton. I’m discovering it wasn’t cold there at all, although I complained. Love, Rayna

In declaring that there was ‘every evidence of imminent war’ in Shanghai, Rayna was correct, though probably not quite in the way she meant. As it turned out, there was no massive foreign intervention, but instead an internecine Chinese struggle. Less than two months after Rayna wrote her letter, Chiang Kai-shek took over the Chinese sections of Shanghai and suppressed the workers’ revolt there. (This takeover is the subject of André Malraux’s second, more famous, Chinese novel, La Condition Humaine – Man’s Fate in the American translation, Man’s Estate in the British. At one point in the story the Eurasian hero, Kyo Gisors, goes up-river to Hankow in the company of a Chinese terrorist-friend to solicit support from the Wuhan government, and in particular from its chief Russian advisor Borodin. In the novel, as in reality, the assistance was not forthcoming, apparently in accord with direct orders from Stalin).

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Since the Prohmes were so closely associated with Borodin almost as soon as they arrived in Hankow, this seems the right place to sketch in the Soviet advisor’s background and activities. Judgments on him vary widely, not so much because of his own decisions as because of his role in trying to implement Stalin’s increasingly disastrous China policy. On one point, though, there is widespread agreement: the man had ‘presence’ and inspired those who worked with him, or simply frequented him, with admiration and even awe. They included Arthur Ransome of the Manchester Guardian and Henry Misselwitz of the New York Times. Ransome, who arrived in Hankow about the same time that Rayna did, wrote: Borodin is a stoutly built man of forty, with a good deal of humor, an excellent knowledge of English (the language through which he communicates with the Chinese), a downright manner of talking, and, when he talks of the Chinese, very much the attitude of mixed admiration, laughter, and annoyance which in the course of years seems to become that of most foreigners who have much to do with them.26

Another journalist who appeared in Hankow shortly after the Prohmes, Vincent Sheean, said of Borodin ‘a more impressive personality I have never encountered’ and came to regard him with something approaching veneration.27 Borodin, whose true family name was Grusenberg, was born in the old province of Vitebsk in 1884 of poor Jewish parents. He attended school in Latvia, and at the age of about 16 he 58

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became actively interested in revolutionary movements and came to know Lenin. In the reaction that followed the abortive 1905 revolution, he was imprisoned and then took refuge abroad, ending up in the United States in 1906. Around that time he seems to have adopted the name Borodin, but in the United States he used the name Berg – short for Grusenberg. He enrolled at Valparaiso University in Indiana where he met another émigré, Fania Semenovna Arluk (or Orluk), whom he married. The couple, who had mastered English, set up the Berg Progressive Preparatory School in Chicago. The ‘Bergs’ were active in radical movements in the United States until 1917, when Borodin returned to Russia to participate in the revolution.28 In mid 1919 Borodin was dispatched to Mexico to seek official diplomatic recognition for the new Soviet government, and in 1922 he went to England to help organize the British Communist Party – which earned him a jail sentence in Glasgow and then deportation. Back in Moscow he was appointed chief civilian member of the group of some 40 Soviet advisors sent to China, as a result of the Joffe–Sun Yat-sen conversations of 1922–23, to help reorganize the Kuomintang. Borodin went openly as a representative of the Russian state and a guest of the Kuomintang, but he tried to coordinate his activities with those of the official Soviet diplomatic corps, so far as the chaotic situation in China and the contradictory orders from Moscow would allow. He was able to counter attempts by members of the Kuomintang to exclude members of the Chinese Communist Party and he succeeded in obtaining substantial financial help for the Kuomintang. George F. Kennan – no blind enthusiast – has written: Under Borodin’s direction, the loose political movement called the Kuomintang was whipped into a fairly tight militant organization, patterned structurally on the Russian Communist Party but having, as Moscow clearly recognized, a different ideological inspiration and political significance.29

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Borodin urged that the Whampoa Military Academy be established to train an officer corps and improve the capability of the nationalist army. It was from here that Chiang Kai-shek was ultimately to rise to power. After Sun’s death in 1925 Borodin’s position became increasingly difficult, both because the Kuomintang was polarizing into pro-Soviet and pro-Chiang factions and because Stalin’s China policy was increasingly muddled. Within the Kuomintang the complicated jockeying was already in full swing when the Prohmes arrived in China in the late summer of 1925. There is no evidence that Rayna ever wrote any of the biography of Borodin that she had intended to send to Helen Freeland piecemeal for safekeeping, but there can be no doubt that she had impressed Borodin sufficiently to be admitted almost immediately into his ‘inner circle’ once she arrived in Hankow. Henry Misselwitz, who was in Hankow the same time Sheean was, later wrote in his book, The Dragon Stirs (1941): Naturally I wanted to see him [Borodin] in Hankow. The appointment was arranged by Rayna Prohme, a dynamic young woman from Chicago, then editing The People’s Tribune, organ of the Red rule. She was the wife of William Prohme, another journalist of rare intelligence who at that time was head of the nationalist News Agency – a propaganda organization in Shanghai. Both are now dead. Rayna (as everyone came to know this quite amazing girl with her shock of flaming red hair) died some years ago in Moscow of overwork and brain fever; Bill died in 1935 in Honolulu, after suffering for years from a pulmonary illness. Despite political differences, all who met Rayna and Bill were influenced by their personalities and their clarity of vision. In Hankow, Rayna was very much alive and arranged my entrée to the great man’s sanctum that week in late April [1927] with no apparent trouble. She said: ‘You want to see Borodin? Okay, I’ll see what can be done’. I got a note the third day I was in Hankow, telling me that the meeting had been arranged.30

In Hankow, Rayna was to become much more than just an appointment secretary. Foreign correspondents kept making

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their way there, among them Ransome and Misselwitz. But the one who left the most memorable report was Vincent Sheean, who also played the most important role in Rayna’s tragic last weeks. Sheean had gained a reputation as a top-notch reporter by being among the first European and American journalists to get behind the Rif lines in Morocco to interview the famed rebel chieftain, Abd-el-Krim. On the basis of that feat, the North American Newspaper Alliance sent Sheean to report on the turmoil in China, where he arrived in April 1927. After a brief stop in Shanghai he proceeded to ‘where the action was’, in Hankow. He was introduced to Rayna and promptly fell in love with her. The effect she had on him was something like that of a Beatrice or a Laura, and his canzoniere is the second half of Personal History. Published in 1934, it was dedicated ‘To RP’, under which appears an epigraph taken from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 109. Neuer beleeue though in my nature raign’d, All frailties that besiege all kindes of blood, That it could so preposterouslie be stain’d, To leaue for nothing all thy summe of good.

Sheean had previously published, in 1930, a rather awkward little novel, Gog and Magog, in which he himself appears as ‘Johnny’ and Rayna Prohme as ‘Sheila Rudd’, but the novel had satisfied neither himself nor the critics. By 1934, Sheean probably felt – quite incorrectly, as it turned out – that he could tell the story of his love for Rayna without recourse to fictional disguises, and in Personal History he tells how a fellow journalist – none other than Henry Misselwitz – introduced him to the ‘wild Bolshevik’ Rayna Prohme: we walked down the street with her. She was on her way home to dinner, and it was neither the time nor the place for any kind of serious conversation. She was slight, not very tall, with short red-gold hair and a frivolous turned-up nose. Her eyes were of the kind the anthropologists call ‘mixed’, and could actually change color with the changes of light, or even with changes of mood. Her voice, fresh, cool and very American,

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sounded as if it had secret rivulets of laughter running underneath it all the time, ready to come to the surface without warning. All in all, she was most unlike my idea of a ‘wild Bolshevik’, and I told her so. She laughed. I had never heard anybody laugh as she did – it was the gayest, most unselfconscious sound in the world. You might have thought that it did not come from a person at all, but from some impulse of gaiety in the air.31

By the time that ‘strange and fatal interview’ took place, Rayna was writing the first letters from Hankow that we possess. She had obviously been integrated into the Wuhan hierarchy and was regularly consulted by the stream of journalists and miscellaneous agents that came through the city. All this is clearly reflected in the first ‘Hankow letter’ that has come to light – a long letter to Grace dated February 16 (1927). Dear Brat, The Prohmes, both William and Rayna, are now in Hankow. God knows where the Simons, Gracie, is for we have heard nothing, except a brief vicarious mention through Randall [Gould], since the Red Sea. Randall said you were in Paris and apparently having a good time of it. Mother had written me that there was $200 cabled you for Genoa, and Milly [Mitchell] had sent money, I know, although I don’t know if it arrived before you left (Milly and I had an amusing time for a few weeks in which she was cabling me about your money and I was answering her about her salary; it was as unintelligible as how long is a piece of string, and cost us both mightily before we discovered we were talking about different things.), and I presume Donald [unidentified] send [sic] some; so I have had visions of you disporting yourself gaily through European capitals and pleasure haunts, while mother waited with anxious face in Chicago. But then she has had an anxious face and has waited many times before. I got here something like two weeks ago, and find myself plunged into the tensions of an ‘international situation’. It is certainly international. Our friend, Eugene Chen, no longer comes at the bidding of stray strangers to teas. He is now the man of the hour, with newspaper men hanging around hungrily for small moments of his time. Others have come up in the world, too. For instance, one of the three musketeers who took us to dinner at the Pei Hai the night before their hopeful departure for Canton, the one whose name is TC Woo (you probably won’t remember him any better than I did when we met in Canton) is now Chen’s private secretary

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and holds a number of concurrent posts. Woo is the taller of the two who weren’t Tung. Tung is now in Peking being, I suspect, Li Ta-chao’s alter ego within bounds. Then there are the Borodins, who down in Canton had barnlike quarters in a former barracks. Now they have the entire third floor of a big building, with thick carpets, deep chairs and, strangely, Reuben’s [sic] Madonna – also September Morn – on the walls. September Morn, I assure you, is discarded and sits with her face to the wall. But Mary and Jesus smile down on all comers. Chang Ke is here, calling on his own despite all our efforts to make him finish at Yenching [University].* He came away, telling them that he must see his sick mother – and I thought Chang Ke more original than that – and Porter, Stuart and others must still be watching the horizon for the return of their prize pupil. Chang Ke is a secretary now in the Foreign Office, but is going to Russia sometime in the next months. He is determined to spurn office and honours and spend his life organizing in factories. He is a most surprising youth. Already he has people pegged – and he stops at nothing or no one – and he is analytical and critical about all and sundry. He has his own ideas, which I trust he keeps concealed with other people more than he does with Bill and me. In addition there are scores and scores of the great and the near-great whom we did not know in Peking. It is all enormously interesting. The foreign group is strange and stimulating. There is much good discussion of the kind we so missed in Peking. Bill has thrived under it. It is as if his year of shadow had not been at all. He is his old San Francisco self, a much more satisfactory self than the person he displayed in Peking. I was surprised and pleased when I arrived. The feeling of getting his stride again in some work which he respects has transformed him entirely. He is still, however, extremely forthright in his reactions to people, and so damned selective that I am constantly hovering about to make sure that he doesn’t snub people who might be useful. I am becoming the tactful, diplomatic fixer. Think of it! There are many newspapermen here and, unfortunately, Bill doesn’t like many of them. Timp [Reuter’s correspondent] is here and that is difficult, because we must keep on the right side of Reuter, and you know Timp and Bill. Then there is a young snip, picked up out of the garbage can by mail, for UP [United Press]. Bill had an antipathy to him in advance because of his die-hard attitude towards the Chinese. He is a seasoned Hankower, * [GB] Yenching University was founded in the late 1910s through the union of four Christian colleges in Peking. It was famous for journalism and sociology.

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which is many steps worse than a seasoned Pekinger. Bill bristles at the sight of Frost, and I smile sweetly to take off the sting. And there are others. But on the whole it is good to see him in his stride again, let me say, the quips fall where they may. The work piles up. Bill has started a news agency and is sending out a lot of stuff. Then the paper is to start next week, after much delay and I have been slated to teach publicity methods and something about women’s movements (God help me; I scarcely know anything) in the new women’s institute which Madame Sun Yat-sen has started. The Tribune has closed in Peking and a letter from Dolsen this morning says he may close the house but will use the furniture. Damn kind of him, isn’t it? We are planning now to pick up the Tribune on its last serial number and start the new paper under the old name. I would get something of a thrill out of that. This personal stuff aside, there is a tension here that I have never seen since 1914. Not really so much here, except among the visiting newspaper men, as in Shanghai. Shanghai was sitting on the end of its chair, eager for war, and there is a strain in the air all over the country while the negotiations between Chen and O’Malley go on. I am becoming extremely nervous over it all. There is so much calamitous talk coming up from Shanghai, and I was in the damned town for two days and heard nothing but. By the way – how history and gossip mix! – I saw Tommy Thompson in Shanghai, went out dancing with Babb, who according to form kissed me in the taxi; I wonder if there was ever a girl he didn’t; visited the Carlton with OJ Todd, God help me, talked of sweetness and light with the Daileys (learned that ‘God smiled upon’ the sale of curios in America), and so on. I had to see the British Consul-General for permission to come up on a British boat to Hankow. He told me that no British woman would be permitted to do it, but that he couldn’t stop me – hinted that I was taking my life in my hands. So far, although I have had my nose keen on the scent of danger, I have been able to get no slightest thrill. Hankow is quiet as a tomb and the rickshaw men smile a bit more readily, if anything, than in Peking. They exact, and get, higher pay, which I think accounts for the smile. But it is still so damned low it makes one blush. On the boat, there was nothing but British men ‘refugees’, returning to Hankow, and a few missionary souls bound bravely for their posts. Oh yes, and OJ Todd, who trailed me all the way from Canton. I keep thinking of Jimmy Butts who said that when he and Todd were on a trip together one time on the Yangtze, it was only the fact that it was a three day rather than a four day trip that saved Todd’s life. And I had ten days of it! The British business men scorned me. The captain took out his antipathy

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on Dan whom he consigned to the hold with the warning that if he saw the dog on deck, he’d throw her overboard and me after her; it was an explosion which sounded quite like father, tone, pitch, profanity and all. He said it at, not to, me; otherwise I would have told him that he made me feel quite at home. Here there is less of war talk, although people are shaking their heads and warning of disaster just ahead. Chen is play[ing] an audacious hand and doing it in noble fashion. Yesterday was a nervous day, and the day before. The ‘conversations’ go on and Monday it was expected the document settling the future status of the British Concession would be signed. But it wasn’t, and there were more rumblings of woe from the pessimists. Bill is in touch with all the negotiations and everything from the Chinese side goes through the news agency. He says that Chen is assured, unworried. But I wish the next few days were over. I go to sleep at night and dream of the flotillas of gunboats that are on their way. In my dreams they form a long, black line all the way from Gibraltar. Gunboats are grey, of course, but not in my dreams. God, what a fleet I create for England when my mind goes on unchecked. Arthur Ransome is here and I had a thrill meeting him. I had wanted to for so many years. He came up to expectations. Although he is one of those who shake their head darkly about the situation in China. He is a splendid sort of man, very, very much like Dan [Gibb]. The same structure in mind, body and speech. So far, we have been able to have him only for one afternoon, for tea, but he stayed on till quite late, talking. I am hoping for another visit before he goes. It may not happen. He is staying only a very short time, not, he says, because the situation doesn’t merit more time and study, but because he must get back to his trout fishing! If mother is reading the papers she is probably throwing fits. You know the things to say to calm her. Say them. I wonder what your own plans are. Selfishly I wish you could manage to stay in Chicago to hold mother’s hand until the China problem resolves itself. But on the other hand, she may be paying very little attention to China. After all it took her a long time to get help to the fact that there was a war going on in Europe. She has one quality we should be grateful for. She is so completely unpoliticallyminded. I am expecting sometime during the year a long letter, telling me of Europe, what you did, if it was a glorious experience. And the gossip of people and fun along the road. Please clip for me all the Chicago papers, everything printed on China, Nationalist or not. Send it weekly. So far, we haven’t been able to get an

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appropriation, for clipping services, and are working, as before, completely in the dark. Many people have sent you regards but I forget who they were. Dan [the dog] thrives. Ikkey and Mickey, Colsen writes, are cats now. My love (signed) Rayna [Handwritten postscript:] What’s Dorothy like? I understand she is doing her propagating … [remainder missing, ‘Dorothy’ unidentified]

Three days later Rayna sent off the following letter to Helen Freeland: February 19 [1927] 48 Huan Pei Road Helen darling, Where are you? I feel cut adrift, not having had a line from you for, I imagine, over two months. I am becoming worried. Here we are in Hankow, in a most exciting world, and a most exacting one. There are a half a dozen things started and everything at sixes and sevens. I find that, as usual, my main difficulty is not with work but with people. I am always slow at pegging people, make dreadful mistakes, and, of course, it is so much harder with Chinese who, at best, talk your language imperfectly – with a few startling exceptions that talk better than I do, much – and who have backgrounds and habits of thought which a foreigner, I suppose, can never completely comprehend. It is particularly hard right now because we are meeting all the leaders of the Nationalist group and I am in a constant fog, trying to figure out where each and every one of them stands and how best to get on with them. I make terrible blunders, Bill tells me, but I think he makes dreadful blunders, too. So we are quits on that. The most interesting people here are Eugene Chen and Madame Sun Yat-sen. It seems a year, looking back upon it, that could never happen in real life. It wasn’t much more than a year ago that I wrote a letter to Eugene Chen, who had just got out of jail in Tientsin and was in retirement in Peking. His paper had been closed up some months before, as I probably told you at the time, and he then was looking forward to going to Canton. He hinted at becoming Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Nationalist Government, but it didn’t seem sure, and at that time, such a job was more nerve than honor. No one was taking the Nationalist Government seriously, except its scattered adherents, and in Peking circles, there

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was raucous laughter at the guts of the Cantonese, calling themselves a ‘government’. And now, here we are in Hankow, with a government which everyone in the world seems to be taking with deadly seriousness, and Eugene Chen the man of the hour, with newspapermen coveting a few minutes of his time, letters coming from all over the world, asking statements from him on this, that and the other thing, diplomats coming at his bidding and his name and picture spread all over the world’s morning papers. One would no more think of dropping Eugene Chen a note asking him to come to tea because you were interested in him than one would think of inviting Coolidge. I have more than a hunch that Chen, himself, expects to wake up any minute and find it was all a dream. I’m afraid I can’t adjust quickly enough, for I can’t possibly treat him with what seems to be the proper dignity. Heavens, I saw him some few hours before he left Peking, going out quietly to escape being caught; after that, one never, I imagine, can feel proper awe due a great position. Or is it great? Often I think that I’m so buried in Chinese events that I have the perspective of an ostrich. At any rate, he is a great man. There are hundreds of people in China who are watching him with astonishment and not a few who watch him with consternation. Many are saying that he is going altogether too far and that he’ll never get away with it. I wonder. It is a queer feeling, this, watching this calm, confident man and knowing that a whole trail of British gunboats are on their way and that troops are being landed in Shanghai. I find it exciting, but a bit terrifying. Days have been packed full since I arrived. Bill’s agency takes up some time. He is cabling nationalist news far and wide and his name has come to be linked, usually very uncomplimentarily, with ‘nationalist propaganda’. Then there is the paper which is to start next week, according to much delayed plans. The preliminaries of that have taken much time. And in addition, I’ve let myself be dragged into the giving of a course on publicity and women’s movements in a new political training institute for women, started by Madame Sun Yat-sen. Yes gasp! I’m gasping, too. I’m appalled at what I’ve let myself in for, particularly since I seem to have become the unofficial foreign press agent of the entire Chinese women’s movement on the side. Of course, I can’t do it all. What will happen will be this. I’ll write out some lectures, giving fundamental principles of publicity, and, after some books I’ve cabled for to New York arrive, I’ll give some lectures on the history of women’s movements, all taken from the books. That will mean I’ll be preparing lectures about six hours a week and giving them three. Then every afternoon I’ll work on the paper. The paper probably

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will fall heaviest on me, for Bill is cluttered up with the news agency. And in between and round and about I’ll write stories for Bill’s agency which will be mainly about the women’s movement, and which will be about all I can do as press agent. In a way, I’m glad to be caught up in the women’s work here, for it means that I’m meeting many interesting women – and women here are even more interesting than men, because they have come out so spectacularly in so few years from an almost incredible seclusion. Madame Sun is a marvellous person. I, as everyone, have lost my heart to her. She is beautiful, with a dignity that is upsetting to me who am so often ill at ease. Helen, they are wonderful, some of these Chinese women, perfectly finished creatures with no rough corners. We live in as ugly a place as could be imagined. Hankow is a small edition of Chicago, completely western in its architecture, with very ugly houses, built one next to the other, usually each house having three flats. It is a completely flat city, with nothing to look at but the apartment houses. There is a river, but the Yangtze here is not beautiful, just a wide, yellow stream. The only touch of beauty is the lines of some of the old junks on the river. They have high poops, with marvellously curved ribs, like old pirate ships. Across the street from us is a square hospital with a sign, ‘Keep to the Left’ and another ‘No dogs allowed’. There is one sad looking tree. That is all. The apartment Bill had rented before I came – I never should have rented it – is furnished in a combination of fussy French and Sears Roebuck. We have – or did have – whatnots in the way of French ballet dolls and strangely curved glass vases all over the two mantelpieces, which in themselves are strange to look at – all white wood and tile frames, with little shelves for ornaments. There is a bathroom with fixtures that do not work. And a kitchen off in the hinterland, unconnected with the apartment, a pet Chinese arrangement which serves two purposes: your servants have a place to themselves and meals are cold. I wish I’d get a letter from you, old dear. Arthur Ransome was here; he is just like Dan. So much so, in fact, that I began to chatter away with perfect freedom and quite upset his dignity; he apparently is not so indulgent of American exuberance; I was counting on his resemblance. He is silent like Dan, though the silences seem less friendly, and he holds his pipe in the same way. My love always, Rayna

Since the Prohmes had known Eugene Chen from the early days in Peking, it is easy to understand why Rayna had difficulty treating Chen ‘with what seems to be the proper dignity’.

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What is more striking, especially in the letter to Helen, is the almost instant friendship that sprang up between Rayna and Madame Sun Yat-sen – a friendship that came to be one of the most important – if not the most important – factors in the remaining months of Rayna’s life. The widowed second wife of Sun Yat-sen was born Soong Ch’ing-ling. She had two sisters, each of whom was to became almost as famous as Ch’ing-ling. E-ling became the wife of the financier, H. H. Kung; while May-ling was to become Madame Chiang Kai-shek. When the three sisters were young girls, they were sent to the McTyeire School in Shanghai, which had been for decades the most important foreign-style school for well-to-do Chinese girls. It had been established by Southern Methodists – the Protestant sect to which the Soong family belonged. Thus, all three Soongs had learnt English before they were sent off one by one to the United States to attend the Wesleyan College for Women near Macon, Georgia. The Soong family had established ties with Sun Yat-sen at an early date and followed him at times into voluntary and involuntary exile. While the Soongs were with Sun in Japan, where Sun had taken refuge, Ch’ing-ling fell in love with him and, much to the consternation of her family, became his second wife in 1914. She was not only a devoted wife but her husband’s English and even French secretary and was constantly at his side until his death in 1925.32 When Rayna met Madame Sun for the first time, she was, like most other people, captivated. It was not long before she became Madame Sun’s secretary. Beyond this instinctive liking for one another, a bond grew up between the two women, partly as a result of the feminism Rayna discusses in the letter to Helen. Madame Sun helped pioneer the improvement of the status of Chinese women who for centuries had played a servile and painful role in Chinese society. Rayna was not long in joining Madame Sun’s campaign. In the obituary ‘round-robin’

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letter Bill Prohme sent out when he reached Moscow shortly after Rayna’s death, he speaks of that collaboration: I remember her [Rayna] speaking at the opening of Madame Sun’s Political School for Women at Hankow last March. All the nationalist ministers were on the platform. I sat beside TV Soong, the finance minister [and brother of Madame Sun], the only one not on the platform. I remember his enthusiasm about her, and TV (an honest reactionist, the only one of the crowd I respect) does not get enthusiastic for politesse. He’s the only thoroughly Americanized Chinese I ever saw, who had got beyond Chinese politesse and insincere courtesies. Her speech was interpreted, in sections, by little Chang Ke, a lad we had helped along in the most nefarious activities in Peking under the very noses of his university people, a lad now here [in Moscow], the chap who spoke for the Chinese at Rayna’s funeral services at the crematorium. And I remember the alive interest of a small minority of the flock of girls who were to be students at this political school.33

The Hankow People’s Tribune reflected Madame Sun’s influence. The editorial in its inaugural first issue on March 12, 1927, professed anti-imperialism but said it was not antiforeign. It was ‘for the improvement of labor conditions’ and would help ‘foster the feminist movement in China’. The paper, which Rayna edited, promised that in the unfolding revolution it would be ‘an uncompromising battler for the Nationalist Chinese viewpoint’. Helen Freeland, meanwhile, had taken off for Zurich for analysis with C. G. Jung. With both correspondents on the move, communications became difficult. Things were rapidly coming to a head in Hankow, and also in Shanghai and Nanking. A turning-point in the revolution had been reached. But finally one of Helen’s letters did reach Rayna, around March 12. It elicited a long and revealing reply. P O Box 7, Hankow, March 19 [1927] Helen dear, Your letter which came about a week ago bumped me terribly. Evidently several never reached me for this was the first hint I had had that Dan

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had been sick – this letter was the one, forwarded from Canton, saying that he was up again, spending the days on your porch. It is maddening to have letters go astray this way. It seems that the most important ones don’t come – that one about your marriage and now this, or these, about Dan’s being sick. In the same letter you set a date for going away, tentatively, and tell me to keep on writing till I hear you’ve gone. Probably more letters will go astray, and I’ll not know what or when or where. Damn. Damn. I’m so in turmoil about a lot of things and, this is the most damnable selfish feeling, the thought of you being off in Europe somewhere and my not knowing, gives me a terribly adrift feeling, almost the last straw. This month, or more, has been the most frenzied yet. To make it quite mad, Bill got the flu and there was some bad days of worry about him, plus the handling of his job in addition to my own, which has been piling up terribly since the first week I got here. It was a bad flu case, with a high fever – Bill never told me until afterward (I’m sorry about that because now I will never know when he is concealing; he never did that before – that I know of) – but one day it was 104.8. If I had known that, I probably would have had him in a hospital, where he should have been, and maybe he wouldn’t be such a pale ghost as he is now. He lost weight, some fifteen pounds I should think, and is weak and wobbly. Nevertheless back on the job, for there seemed nothing else to do. I simply couldn’t carry the work. I’d give anything if he could, or would, go away again for a few months, but he absolutely won’t. He is discouraged, naturally. As yet there has been no TB test made, since the flu, and it is going to be hard forcing him to have it. He’ll resist, but it must be done. We have a doctor who would win our confidence if he wasn’t so strong on drugs. While Bill was in bed, he had as many as four different bottles and pills and powders lined up on the table. I don’t believe in that sort of thing. Do you? Especially since he scoffed at Max’s [presumably Max Pinner, MD] method of bringing down fever – wrapping him up in wet clothes and blankets – said it was dangerous with TB history. The result was that the fever went on, not so high but persistently, for almost three weeks. We left the place we were living in, on the doctor’s advice. It was a bad hole – never any sun, dark, damp, drafty, no heat but fireplaces, and this a town that calls for central heating, or at least adequate stoves. We are now in the most comfortably padded and upholstered German hausfrau apartment on the second floor of the Lutheran Mission Building, with hymns sung downstairs every evening and a generally yearning unliberated atmosphere all over the place. It is a huge building, with a sort of mission hotel occupying most of it. There is an elevator and the

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most unsatisfied looking women go up and down in it. The building is the last word in western solid comfort, central heating, electric lights, white enamelled bathrooms with shower bath and everything. We have the kind of an apartment I never expected to see again, just like my mother’s with a somewhat more German heaviness and thoroughness about the appointments. We have German lithographs, some of them rather fine, on the walls. There are many, many pictures and there were curtains in every possible place – including two pair in the doorway between the dining and living room. A heavy pair of velvet hangings on the living room side and a pair of parted lace curtains on the dining room side. Then all the windows were completely covered with a little apron up on top. But it is all overstuffed upholstered, as to chairs, and we have slumped down gratefully after the harsh hole we left. The price of this place makes us tremble, but there was no choice. Hankow is notoriously the worst climate in China, ghastly long stretches of heat – over 100 and not a breath of air, they say – through the summer, cold, bitter cold and wet, in the winter. We decided that if we stayed at all we must have all the bodily comfort possible. I feel very much a visitor in the place – we only moved in day before yesterday – and I think I will always feel so. Just like mother’s home. I don’t think I felt that I belonged in it even on the day I was born. I can’t lay my finger on exactly what it is that makes me feel so hypocritical, but there is something about it. I have an impulse to say to everyone who comes in, ‘Of course, this is just rented. I don’t own all these things.’ Like evening clothes a little, I think. That feeling that I can’t live up to the implications. Round and about the moving, I’ve started another paper [the Hankow People’s Tribune], this time the hardest of all. It is the most exacting because it is at the new government and there are many critics to be satisfied, many conflicting views to be synthesized in some way, much careful manipulation and skirting. To make it worse, the paper opened on the day of Sun Yat-sen’s death anniversary, involving a special edition, and the Central Executive Committee of the Party began its session two days later. We were only half organized – it was only last week but seems a year ago – and there was a tense situation with a threatening split between the military and rightist wings and the more genuinely revolutionary wing. Bill was in bed for the first frantic days and there was only a handful of incompetent assistants both on the paper and on his agency. I’m a wreck. One man has saved me and that is the biggest man in China today, the high advisor, Borodin. Some day I must write you at long length about him – and when I do I want you to keep it for me. He has impressed me more than any person I have met in a long time, as a mind, a personality, a social force. I have

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been seeing him every evening to talk over the organization difficulties, get advice, information, and it has given me for the first time a feeling of something dependable to refer to. There are others I admire and respect, but B[orodin] is the only person I have felt who grasps the significance of forces, personalities, who sees the whole movement here in big historic terms. He has the power of throwing on his search light and making things stand out in bold relief, so the irrelevant disappears. Bill thinks I am utterly dominated by him. I imagine I am. At the moment, he is in a nasty position personally. His wife is in the hands of the northern militarists – the worst of them, Chang Tsung-chang, a man who has a harem that is positively medieval, all Chinese, both upper-class and prostitutes, and white Russians. He puts out his paw – he is a huge, piggish man, illiterate, ex-bandit, absolutely ruthless – and grabs attractive women where he sees them. He didn’t take Mrs. Borodin for her attraction – she is stout, middle-aged, motherly Jewish delicatessen (according to Bill, and it is a good characterization, except that she has brains, tons of them) – but as a valuable hostage who might be put to death with telling effect. Fortunately, the fortunes of war at the moment are against Chang and he is faced with the probability of a complete surrender within the year. He realizes – such is the crumb of encouragement hereabout – that the execution of Mrs. B and the three Russian couriers who were with her when the boat [the Pamyat Lenina] was held up might be held against him later. But it is a nasty situation, intensified by the fact that [Chang] Tsung-chang’s army is largely officered by white Russians who would be exultant at an opportunity to execute the soviet prizes. It is rather an awful situation. And you are probably in Europe. I’m going to make a confession. You know I have a feeling that great and, for me, unpleasant changes may come from this trip of yours. It is silly, I know, but here is George Blodgett [a friend of Helen’s connected with the Kroeber group] going off and being a sculptor and Paul Louis* upon liberation, becoming an artist and shedding his former companions for a new, freer association. Suppose you are psyched and take on a new personality, new interests, become completely changed from the woman I love more than any woman in the world. Then Cary is there in Switzerland and Cary, to me, is such a tremendous, sure, strong-minded person. Helen, please, please, please don’t let them change you. If only for kindness sake. Cary’s so big; I’m little. If you go off and get liberated and start a new career and a new personality, I’d go floating off on this sea of uncertainty without a raft. * [GB] Paul Louis Faye was a Frenchman connected with the Kroeber group who learned the Navajo language.

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Also if you enter on a new phase, I’d have to follow, in desperation, and I could never afford to come all the way to those seats of resurrection where they make people over at such tremendous sums an hour, nor could I sustain the new individual after I’d been made into her. Then, too, I never could manage it, with Bill and all. Tell me, do all people take on a new self when they go to Zurich? Well, there it is. My background seems to be as awry as my present. Here are mother and father going trotting off to Europe, on a grand tourist scale. I was surprised when mother told me that they were going east, instead of coming west. You know, all these years mother has wailed at my hard-heartedness, saying that of course she could never come to see me because she couldn’t cross an ocean and therefore it was cruel and undaughterly for me to leave America. Also she has been writing for years now, telling me how she never sleeps at night, or eats, through worry about me and how she’d give anything, literally anything, if she could see me. Then she ups and goes to Europe instead of coming to Asia. I’m amused and relieved. I never really believed her and now I will never feel obliged to. Still she keeps up the wail, of course, how she wants so much to see me and but for the heat in the summertime in India and father having to get back for his fall trip – and other useful excuses – she would have come, but, and but. So I’m making another adjustment. I’ll never, never, never spend valuable money to chase back across the Pacific to hold her hand again. I’ll send this to Berkeley, on the assumption you’ve gone but Dan will forward. I am eager for letters, telling me details, but not expectant. I suppose it is our moving about so much, but I do think there is a jinn involved because I lose out on such key letters. If Shanghai is taken, there is a possibility that the government will move again, perhaps to Nanking, possibly – but not likely – to Peking. It seems divided, half boosting for Nanking (a few Peking) and the other half for sticking here at Hankow. I’m hoping they’ll stick. I’m tired of moving. My love always, Rayna Write me Prohme. I think fewer of the Prohme letters are being lost than the Raphaelson ones. Please don’t tell Cary what I said, and don’t think me too much of a crybaby.

This letter, in which Borodin and his wife are discussed for the first time, is presumably the last one that Rayna sent Helen

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from Hankow. The increasing political and military tension was affecting Rayna’s personal outlook. There is a faintly desperate note in the way she clings to the ‘pre-psychoanalyzed’ Helen and refers to other members of the old Berkeley group, such as ‘Cary’, who was Cary Fink de Angulo, first wife of the tempestuous Jaime de Angulo, who later became Helen’s brother-in-law by marrying her sister Nancy.34 Both of the Freeland sisters had been Cary’s close friends when she lived with Jaime in Carmel and the San Francisco area before 1921, when Cary went to Zurich to study with Jung. (She went on to translate the German version of the I Ching into English and married the British Jungian psychiatrist, H. G. Baynes.) It was small wonder that Rayna had moments of nostalgic longing for the carefree Berkeley days, because the situation of the Wuhan government was rapidly moving towards its disastrous climax. The ‘triumph’ of the Chen–O’Malley conversations was obscured by anxiety over Chiang Kai-shek’s sharp turn to the right. Nor did the confusing signals from Moscow help. Disillusionment was everywhere. The exodus from Hankow had already begun. The journalists left in quick succession. Sheean stayed longer than most, probably because of Rayna. On July 5, he too left, headed for Peking, where he arrived three weeks later. While there he participated in negotiations that eventually resulted in the release of Borodin’s wife, Fania, from the clutches of Chang Tsung-chang. Sheean then went on to Tientsin, Mukden, and Harbin, where he boarded the Trans-Siberian train to Moscow. There, he found that Rayna and his ‘Hankow friends’ had arrived some eleven days previously. The flight of the Wuhan group was the disastrous climax of the ‘1927 spring of the Kuomintang’. Chiang Kai-shek entered Shanghai unopposed on March 22 and liquidated the leaders of the workers’ uprising that had made his entrance possible. With Shanghai in his pocket, Chiang’s Northern Expeditionary Force went on to conquer Nanking, which

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became his capital, as opposed to the capital at Wuhan. Chiang eliminated the proletarian party in areas under his control, while still professing friendship with Moscow. Stalin had given Borodin and the others contradictory signals and forbade them to oppose Chiang.35 In his memoirs, Percy Chen speaks about his father’s interview with Stalin in 1927 in Moscow. Eugene Chen told his son: ‘He [Stalin] sat all during the evening puffing at his pipe. He did not speak much. But when he spoke what he said did not please me. He thought that I should return to China and cooperate with Chiang Kai-shek.’36 When Chiang moved against the popular movement, the Wuhan government ‘dismissed’ him as commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army. But it was too late, for Chiang was by now calling the shots. The ‘Christian General’ Feng Yü-hsiang, on whom Borodin had counted for support, went over to Chiang and suggested prolonged vacations abroad for the Wuhan government’s overworked Russian advisors. The exodus from Hankow accelerated and Rayna recorded it in her letters and in a fragmentary diary. She started the diary on her last day in Hankow but did not type it up until she was on shipboard headed for Vladivostok, three weeks after leaving Hankow. Bill Prohme found the small typed pages among Rayna’s effects when he went to Moscow after her death. Years later in his ‘transmittal’ letter to Grace,37 Bill mentions ‘the few pages of a diary she started but did not carry on’. It is an important document. Its first entry stated: July 31 – Rickshaw strike on. Went down to Waichiaopu* in advance of Bill and I learned that Ku Meng-yü came to see Chen last night, two and a half hours late, and talked to him about the paper, which, he said, was not following government and party policy. He made two suggestions, either the paper remain under his department and be reorganized with us out, or Chen take over paper. Decided second plan bad because Chen would be held responsible for every word in the paper. Decided on first * [GB] Foreign Office.

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plan. Tried twice to see Ku, but he wouldn’t see us; so wrote him a letter, saying we had been informed, etc., would consider connection severed from today, etc., and that we regretted necessity but could not in honesty follow present changed policy. Cleaned out all our own things and left.

Rayna, as will become apparent, had much more to say about Ku Meng-yü in a letter she wrote a week later from Shanghai to her sister Grace. The next entry in the diary backtracks by at least a day, for it tells us, ‘Dined with Bishop Roots and his cheery Christian wife; then took boat to Hankow. Little Sun from the Waichiaopu come down to the boat, bringing a friend from Peking, who had come down to the revolutionary mecca to find it the seat of reaction.’ Rayna had spent six days in the resort-town of Kuling, not far southeast of Hankow. In Kuling, she had conferred at length with Borodin, who had gone there in what appears to have been a sort of strategic retreat. It must have been at the end of her stay in Kuling that she dined with the Roots, since she then ‘took boat to Hankow’. We know from Shanghai police records that this boat was the launch that took Borodin’s party, including Rayna, back to Hankow, where ‘little Sun’ – maybe Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s son by his first wife – met them. The situation was now so desperate that neither Borodin nor Rayna lingered in Hankow. With a party that included Anna Louise Strong and Percy Chen, Borodin left almost immediately by train for Shensi. His party continued the journey by car in a gruelling trek across Mongolia and the Gobi, eventually reaching Siberia. Rayna left the next day for Siberia on the SS Suiwo. She joined Madame Sun, who had taken refuge two weeks previously in a house she owned on rue Molière in Shanghai’s French Concession. Eugene Chen and Bill stayed on in Hankow for the time being. Police records show Bill did not reach Shanghai until August 16. Rayna’s next diary entry speaks of her trip on the Suiwo:

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Purser, Englishman, greeted us with some crack about the celebrated Madame Prohme. But I went along to bed. The four days down-river were made a bit unpleasant because TV Soong, with his wife, Tommy Tong and TV’s in-laws, two of them – all under false names – got on at Kiukiang, and they – and I – were not pleased to be boat-mates. TV and his wife stayed in their cabin almost the entire time. He did not introduce me to his wife, although there was an opportunity, and in fact did not speak to me at all except to nod and to ask me just as we were docking in Shanghai where I was stopping. I had told Tommy I was going to a hotel. I told TV I would see Burton first thing.

Burton was Wilbur Burton, the American journalist who had worked for the Prohmes in Peking, along with Milly Mitchell. Burton would become the first husband of Rayna’s sister Grace. As for T. V. Soong, he turned out to be a fair-weather friend, contrary to what Bill Prohme might have expected. Actually, Rayna did not stay at a hotel, as the diary tells us: I was met at the dock by Cook, the CID [Criminal Investigation Department] man who trails people. Took a taxi and drove out to Madame Sun’s – not directly, because the taxi-man didn’t know where the place was. Reached there about 7.30. She expected me and seemed glad to see me. Her nerves were in a badly shattered state. She told me something of her difficulties, people bothering her, detectives watching at either side of the house, asking questions of her house-boys. She was not going out at all. I told her Chen’s suggested plans and she said she could not consider going direct to Russia, because of the interpretation that would be put on it by people in China. She spoke also of worry about funds and the amount that would be needed if she went by way of America. No decision that night – or until Chen himself came down several days later. Finally, as a result of what arguments I do not know, she decided to go direct to Russia, but unofficially: he going in his capacity of foreign minister – to what I do not know.

Thus began Rayna’s last ‘Shanghai interlude’.

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5 Shanghai

For Rayna, Shanghai had always been a temporary stopover on the way to other places: Peking, Canton, Hankow. This time was no exception, though the ultimate destination was much further away. This last stopover in Shanghai was also to be the most dramatic. The grotesque game of hide-and-seek had already begun before Rayna ‘settled in’ with Madame Sun on rue Molière. The diary continues: The next two weeks were taken up with comic opera detective stuff, Chen coming back and forth under a Japanese name, I going to see him, by circuitous routes, Bill coming down [from Hankow] but not being allowed to come to see me. Milly [Mitchell] being sent away, [Wilbur] Burton also,38 and then, when no one was available but Bill, the unpleasant decision that someone must stay in Shanghai, so that we had to go separately. Chen promises that it will be only a two month arrangement. There was talk of deporting me, how much danger of it actually, I do not know. And some small bits in the papers which worried Mrs. Sun and would merely have amused me, but for her nervous state.

There was, in fact, plenty of ‘detective stuff’, some of it comic to the point of buffoonery, and some far less amusing. We are quite well informed about what happened, thanks to two letters Rayna sent from Shanghai, items in the Shanghai press, and secret background-and-surveillance reports by the Shanghai Municipal Police. These latter documents were removed to the U.S. and are now in the National Archives. 79

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Rayna’s letters deserve to be quoted in full. The first was written from rue Molière only three days after Rayna got there. It is addressed to Helen Freeland and dated August 6. The next day Rayna sent off an even longer letter, this time to Grace. Shanghai August 6, 1927 Helen darling, Your letter reporting your suspended analysis and your departure for Paris and England came just now, sent by Bill down river. Join you next summer? Maybe sooner, old dear. I’m as planless as a monkey. I have no notion where the revolution was when I wrote you last, but today it certainly seems to have collapsed. It came with maddening hesitations, so that half the time, Bill was fretting for ‘action, action’, but on the whole it came quickly. It is just six months ago that I went to Hankow, to the heart of a revolution that was simply blazing. I’ve just left Hankow, and there was no more revolution in the town than there is in Chicago. They keep mouthing the terms – some of them – and making some of the gestures of revolution, but at heart it has completely exploded. The defeat is due to the militarists and the almost incredible weakness of most of the leaders. It began, I suppose, with the split in the party last March, when Chiang Kai-shek decided to sit pretty with the Shanghai fleshpots cornered, bucked party discipline and started his ‘anti-red’ campaign. He shot up labor and peasant leaders at lightning speed. At the time, Hankow was indignant, denouncing him as a feudal warlord, a reactionary, a traitor, and whatnot. Today Hankow is sitting quietly while its own pet warlord, T’ang Sheng-chih, is as thoroughly shooting up all ‘radicals’ as Chiang Kai-shek could ever hope to. The province of Hunan has been a scene of terror, the new people’s organizations, which had been at the fore of the revolution, completely crushed and the leaders cut up, burned in oil, riddled with knives, buried alive, strangled slowly by wires, and so on. It is a tale that scarcely bears telling. All the labor leaders have fled or are in hiding. The party leaders are talking in weak-livered fashion of necessity of control, direction, because of the ‘excesses’ – not, mind you, ‘excesses’ of the military, but of the masses. I haven’t the heart to tell you in any detail of it all. I only know that I am smothered and stifled with such disillusion as I never before have known. The three I know best and liked most are among the very few that are standing out against reaction. Borodin stayed as long as there seemed

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any hope at all, in spite of the outcry against him. First the military, then the party men began the bellow against the communists and particularly against Borodin who was pictured not as the man who labored with them, planned with them, supplied them with the brains for the revolution, but as a man who was plotting to usurp the Kuomintang control and replace it by communists. He has come to be the arch villain. An incident, interesting to you but trifling here, is that I am known as one of his small group of faithful, paid tools and the stories that are circulating about me can scarcely be paralleled by those circulating about him. They vary, this week, from a report in one of the Shanghai papers about a drinking party he and I had in Kuling, at which the two of us drank up in the course of an evening two bottles of champagne, two bottles of medoc and one of white wine – to the whispered, standard stock tales of a love affair, with hints at pregnancy, etc., etc., etc. Nothing is left out. To tell the truth, they do not trouble me at all. Our paper in Hankow was ‘reorganized’ last Sunday – the day I left Hankow. We were told, indirectly through Eugene Chen, that we were not following party policy – they were quite right about it – and – with the usual face-saving modifications – we were asked to resign, which we did in a neat little letter, stating that we could not in honesty change from the policy of the party of last February to the policy of the party today. So that is that. Borodin has gone overland to Moscow. One report has him detained in Changchow by one of the faithless. [Probably a reference to the ‘Christian General’, Feng Yü-hsiang.] But I’m inclined to doubt the tale. I am in Shanghai with Madame Sun Yat-sen. She issued a statement on July 14, just before she left Hankow, in which she stated that she could not participate in the present drift of policy and therefore withdrew. What is to be done by the few leaders who are standing for honest revolution and against militarist control, I don’t know. Maybe we will be associated with them in whatever they do, and geographically that may mean almost any place on the globe. Then again, maybe we won’t, and if so, we will be adrift, with little money. We have vague plans, nothing definite enough to talk about. I’ll keep you informed. I’m sick with knowledge of the capacity in the human race for treachery and rottenness. Mrs. Sun, you can imagine, is sicker; she knows more details. It is a sorry house. Out of it, I get this – faith in two people, maybe three, admiration beyond anything I have felt for Borodin, a sense of being a thousand years older and completely changed from a self which seems now ridiculously

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trusting and naïve. Maybe this will pass, this personal mood, I mean. The other will endure. Some day – maybe soon – I’ll tell you about it in all detail. It will take weeks. If I should want to join you in Europe – say in October, tell me where. Write me American Express, England. Yes, it is true Bill and I are wickedly fagged, but there is rest ahead now. My love, Rayna

When Rayna wrote the foregoing letter she knew more than ever that she had been witnessing history and helping to make it, for she managed to publish Madame Sun’s farewell statement, made on July 14, in the last issue of the Hankow People’s Tribune. Every effort was made to suppress the declaration, since pronouncements by the widow of Sun Yat-sen carried great weight. It received the sketchiest notice, if any, in the rest of the Chinese press and the China-based foreign press, but was reproduced in the United States in the September 21, 1927, issue of The Nation. The statement signalled Madame Sun’s definitive break with Chiang Kai-shek and the whole Nanking government.39 Ten years later she rallied temporarily to Chiang’s banner so China could present a united front against Japan. That temporary rapprochement was dramatized by Madame Sun’s reunion with her sisters in Chungking in 1940. But after Japan’s defeat, she returned to her old stance, adopted in her farewell pronouncement in Hankow in 1927. The letter Rayna wrote to Grace the day after the one to Helen does not mention Madame Sun’s statement, but it gives more details about the closing down of the Tribune and of the role played by the Propaganda Director, Ku Meng-yü. Shanghai August 7, [1927] Dear Gracie, Letters from you, surely deserving answers, were put all in a drawer, with other letters that demanded answers – and afterward I never came nearer

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than frequent guilty thoughts. The past six months have surely been the most exacting, stupendous and maturing months I have ever lived. All normal living and interests have been sidetracked. I’ve worked more – Peking seems child’s play – and thought more than in the past thirtythree years. I’ve seen a big historic movement, closely from the inside and have become intimately associated with it, probably for a lifetime. At the moment, as the papers will tell you, there is a collapse of the revolution in China. We are ‘out’, Bill and I. But there will be a recovery. What we will do or where we will go in the interim, I do not know. The paper was ‘reorganized’ just a week ago, and the same night I left for Shanghai. My departure had been planned before. I’m down here now with Mrs. Sun Yat-sen. Eugene Chen may join us here. Next? God knows. Life is all hazardous and circumscribed, because movements are watched and mails frequently opened. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll be in some place where I can write more freely. There are reasons why we should and why we should not go to Russia, to Japan, to Germany, to America. I’m in suspension, with a new passport ready tomorrow on which is a picture of me, taking [sic] yesterday, proving that the recent months have taken any suggestion of unworldly trustingness away from me. Borodin has gone – overland. I believe in him implicitly and in the recent weeks came to know him much more closely. In Kuling, where I spent six days, I had several talks with him at a length that was impossible in Canton or Hankow. His going was one of the most dramatic and affecting incidents I have ever seen. This government, which he built up and whose brains he had been, has weakly followed the new militarists – same as the old, only they call themselves nationalists – into a passionate and cowardly ‘anti-communist’ policy. There has been no intelligence and no courage. They are hanging themselves but haven’t yet discovered it. The situation became so hopeless that a complete withdrawal of every truly revolutionary element, communist or not, was necessary. Borodin decided in Kuling that it was hopeless. He went back by launch to Hankow (I was with the party), and a few days later started out for Moscow, overland, through Shensi, Mongolia, the Gobi, Urga, etc., a dreadful trek in which I wanted to join but he would not let me. At the station, the afternoon [sic] he took the Kinhan train north to Chengchow, he loomed head and shoulders, actually and figuratively, above all the government ‘leaders’ who in typical Chinese fashion came to see him off. Only one in the group on the platform had remained faithful and he could not act openly because he had not yet – nor has – broken with the group. There were no others at the station, no mass leaders (all fled in the past weeks), no union representatives, none of his personal associates – except the small group in

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his party. As the train pulled out, he was standing at the car door and the officials were lined up on the train platform. B[orodin] had been leaning against the car wall. He straightened up, bowed his head to each of the officials, turned and went inside the car. The group was shamefaced for once. I came as near crying as I have in many months. On the paper which had been following the old bold policy in spite of warnings, we received inside tips of the coming ‘reorganization’. That was Friday afternoon. We immediately got out a fine swan song, using some material we had hesitated to use before. Saturday nothing happened so we swan-ed again. Sunday the polite little farce was pulled off, ending in Bill and me sending a gracious note of resignation to Ku Meng-yü, in which we managed to circumvent Chinese etiquette to the extent of stating that the only reason for our action, which gave us pain as we had enjoyed our association with the revolution, was that we could not honestly follow the present tendencies which seemed to us to defeat the revolutionary cause. There was something almost humorously apt about it because four months ago we were pleading with Ku Meng-yü not to make an ass of himself by being idiotically communist in the terminology of manifestos, statements and so on. At that time, he looked upon us with scorn – and at that time it was only Borodin’s support of our stand that made it possible for us to follow the policy our intelligence dictated. Yes I have learnt much about people and things. My mind has been so absorbed with matters of this sort that it has been impossible for me to consider the personal matters you put up to me in your letters. Even now, it is difficult. Yesterday I had evidence of the fact that you must be truly very upset for I discovered quite by accident in conversation with [Wilbur] Burton that you had apparently written him something or other which gave him an opportunity to suggest that your true vocation would be to marry a stock-broker. That appalled me a little, not because of the suggestion but because I hated your having written anything personal at all to Burton, who is a coarse, utterly insensitive conceited young puppy, imagining himself a veritable Don Juan, plucking the flowers of sensation and tossing them aside with a worldly manner. I was surprised when I met him from Milly’s description of him – and your remark in Hongkong that he reminded you of Raph – led me to expect charm. But he hasn’t a bit – only the butcher’s kind of sex appeal which he tries, I think unsuccessfully, to cloak with sophisticated language. He told me yesterday that he had just had a letter from you. Heavens, Gracie, why do you write to such a coarse man? He is so terribly soiled by such a succession of unsavory contacts. And he is so unspeakably callow.

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Well it is only incidental. You need more than anything else in the world some sort of emotional experience that is not incidental. I know that. You are sex-starved. I don’t really suppose you are sex-ignorant. I wonder if you know the fundamentals of contraception. I suppose so, but maybe not. It is simple. Only one way if the man is not concerned – that is a tablespoon of lysol in a douche. If the man is concerned, there is no need for such crass mechanics, He can easily use a sheath, if he will. Decent men will. Casual men probably won’t. I can’t say from experience, mine being limited to two men, both decent. If I were you, Gracie, I’d seriously avoid experience that offers glamor and nothing more. You have been frustrated so long that probably glamor lures terrifically. Well Raph was glamor – although he was more than that, too. And it grows hollow. I wonder if I will sound staid to you. I scarcely expect you to pay much attention to what I say. But this I feel is necessary; don’t take glamor unless you can get it with fineness and gentleness. Try also to get enough money to live on (the other is rasping: I know). I wonder where you will go. I hope you’ll stick to the family for a few months at least. They’d be so permanently offended if you didn’t and, after all, according to their standards, they have given you the finest thing in the world in this trip. Of course, you needn’t bristle. I know what it has been like, or can imagine. But nevertheless, it’s a bit in the nature of a bargain, I think. Mother, I know, is hurt and offended at your suggestion that you leave immediately for New York and honestly, I don’t think I’d do it immediately, if I were you. Try to stick a few months anyway. I have an idea, by the way, that Tray [Tracy Samuels] knows some people who might make it livable for a while. I had a letter from her this week in which she surprisingly says that after a rainbow visit to New York, she found that Chicago, with the people she knows, quickly silenced the urge she had felt for greater freedom and fewer ties. I’d like to know the people she knows. She has written about them several times. They sound possible. This probably sounds impudent to you – my writing this way when I haven’t shared the burden for years. You are right. It is. But I know that if the family had trotted me around Europe to the tune of thousands of dollars, I’d feel that a ‘situation’ had been created which demanded something of me no matter how reluctant I was about giving it. God, enough moralizing. I’m feeling an ass, writing this way. Forgive me. Don’t dislike me for it. I probably shouldn’t have written in this vein – for my mind is a mess of politics – but that your letters have invited an expression of opinion on your personal problems. That gland business sounds like a nightmare. What fool was it frightened you so? I can well realize some of your panic, for Dr. Schram, the idiot,

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gave me a similar fright when I was in college – over a nerve rash on my back on [and?] hands. I’ve never forgiven him for it – and Raph has always felt a fiendish hate for him. Write me American Express, Shanghai. My love, [signed] Rayna

This letter, besides the graphic information about the last days in Hankow, reveals much about the relationship between Rayna and her younger sister. Grace regarded Rayna as a sophisticated, worldly-wise older sister to whom she could appeal for advice, but at the same time, and one also senses a certain distrust – or at least resistance – on Grace’s part. One wonders what she must have thought on reading Rayna’s merciless put-down of the journalist Wilbur Burton, who within a few years became Grace’s first husband. Scarcely two weeks after Rayna sent off her letters to Helen and Grace she accompanied Madame Sun on her escape from Shanghai – an escape dictated in large measure by the farewell statement Rayna had managed to publish. Madame Sun was looking for a way to underline her break with Nanking by making a decisive gesture that the press could neither misrepresent nor hush up. As Sheean explains in Personal History, It had been Borodin’s idea (and Rayna’s as well) that this could be accomplished best by a public visit to Moscow, and after a week or ten days in Shanghai Madame Sun came to share that opinion. But her movements were so circumscribed, so carefully watched, that the journey had to be prepared with the secrecy of flight.40

Borodin, who had first suggested the trip to Moscow, was by this time cast by the China-based English-language press as arch-villain of the Chinese revolution. The newspaper items Rayna mentions in her letter to Helen and that so worried Madame Sun are, in retrospect, faintly amusing. Shanghai’s North China Daily News (the city’s leading English-language paper) referred to Borodin as ‘Comrade Borodin’ or, more

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often, as ‘Mike’. One report in the paper dated June 29, 1927, bears the triple headline: MIKE MEANDERS AGAIN Train for Loyang Plentifully Provisioned and Ready for a Long Journey Fresh Face-Saving Appointment

Four days later a ‘juicy’ story with a by-line bears a similar headline: WHEN BORODIN WAS IN KULING Living on the Fat of the Land, but Suspicious of All and Well Guarded

The story tells of the goings-on at the Fairy Glen Hotel – a hostelry owned and run by a missionary family named Duff – where the Borodin party was housed: The party lived on the fat of the land. The champagne flowed merrily. One evening Borodin and Mrs. Prohme (the editress of the Hankow People’s Tribune) alone after dinner, while sitting at a small table and chatting, consumed two bottles of champagne, two bottles of medoc and one of white wine.

In her letter, Rayna quoted her sources accurately. This is mendacious tabloid stuff, but the secret reports of the Shanghai Municipal Police – all deadly serious – are often by that fact even more amusing than the newspaper gossip.

The CID had put Madame Sun under surveillance as soon as she had arrived at rue Molière. This surveillance was extended to her house guest, Rayna, and shortly thereafter to Bill, but Bill stayed at the Burlington Hotel. He had been on the CID’s suspect list at least since early November 1926, and on April 23, 1927, a CID agent filed a fairly accurate page-and-a-half vita of Bill. The Shanghai Municipal Police was largely a British enterprise, so they tried to keep a weather-eye out for anything that might disturb any part of Britain’s far flung empire, of which the crown jewel was India. These early reports on the Prohmes chiefly concern their ‘Indian connection’, which was tenuous at best and never came to anything.41 But when Bill

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and Rayna turned up in the Borodin–Madame Sun entourage, the alarm sounded. J. A. Cook, the man Rayna identifies in her diary entry ‘as the CID man who trails people’ and who met her at the dock, reported on August 4: ‘Mrs. Rayna Prohme arrived from Hankow on August 3 on board the Suiwo and proceeded to 29 rue Molière, Frenchtown. Arrangements have been made to keep her movements under observation.’ And so they were – until long after she had left Shanghai. Madame Sun, Rayna, and Bill knew they were under watch. The surveillance was utterly inept. The CID agents shadowed Madame Sun, Rayna, and Bill daily, usually from about 10 am to 8.30 pm – a curious arrangement that allowed Madame Sun and Rayna to escape undetected at 3.30 am on August 22. (One agent reported seeing Rayna in the company of a ‘foreign lady and gentleman’ at 10 am on September 11, by which time she was in Moscow.) The surveillance report on August 13 ends with this note: In spite of the fact that Mrs. Rayna Prohme has not been seen to leave the premises since the afternoon of August 8, it is reported from a reliable source that she is still residing in the premises. From information received from some of the servants of the adjoining houses it appears that she is cognisant of the fact that her movements are being watched (the French Police have three agents standing like sentries at a barrack outside the house) and has decided to remain indoors for fear of being accused or questioned of being a Communist. It is also reported that she was joined by her husband Mr. William Prohme about two days ago [on August 10].

The inaccuracy of the last sentence was corrected four days later by J. A. Cook, who noted that Mr. William Prohme ‘ar[rived] Shanghai on August 16 by the SS Luenho, and that he had proceeded to the Burlington Hotel’. Mr. Cook seems to have become quite ‘friendly’ with Bill, for he reports on several conversations with this wild American in which he openly asked him about such matters as printing facilities in

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Hankow and Madame Sun’s and Rayna’s whereabouts. On September 2 Bill told him he did not know where Madame Sun was. Four days later Cook reported: In a conversation with Mr. Prohme yesterday, September 5, regarding the whereabouts of his wife and Madame Sun Yat-sen, he stated that on account of the conspicuous watch that was maintained over them they feared bodily injury and consequently removed to other territory, but he refused to divulge their whereabouts. He admitted having seen his wife since the last time I saw him, September 2 [Rayna and Madame Sun had fled on August 22] and repeats that he has not seen Madame Sun Yat-sen for some considerable time.

On September 22, one month after Rayna’s and Madame Sun’s departure from Shanghai, another CID report said: Despite the fact that Mrs Rayna Prohme has not been seen to leave the Missionary Home at 38 Quinsan Road [where she had been sighted!] since September 11, there is no reason to believe that she has left Shanghai.

Bill stayed on in Shanghai until October 18, when the CID man reported his departure for Manila on the SS Coblenz. But the next day he filed a report on two final conversations with Bill in which the British agent reverts to questions about the ‘Indian connection’. Bill is said to have told him: The only hope of the Left Kuomintang is in Madame Sun Yat-sen who, backed by Moscow, intends to form a people’s party composed of the labourers and peasants. Eugene Chen will assist her. If she does not receive sufficient encouragement in Moscow she proposes to go onto Paris and after a short time to the U.S.A.

Madame Sun and Rayna’s flight from Shanghai is noted in Rayna’s diary: The plan was formed to leave early on the 22nd of August, before dawn. Much manoeuvring of baggage and tension and considerable evasiveness on the part of everyone. We got away. The details of it are so clearly in my mind that it is needless to record them. Cars came at 3.30 as planned; we hurried through parts of Shanghai unknown to me, and then by sampan to the waiting

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boat. The others [including Eugene Chen and his daughters] had come on board the night before. The dawn came; we did not sleep until passing the Woosung forts. Then, the day of the 22nd, everyone relaxed; there was much sleeping and some seasickness.

The boat was a Soviet freighter, destination Vladivostok.

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6 Vladivostok to Moscow

The last entry in Rayna’s diary reads as if it records events going on at the time of writing: On board are Fang (now Reubens), Pavlov, the military advisor of the 6th army, and some others from Hankow whom I only know by sight or not at all, Vasilliev from Shanghai, and some seventy students, including two girls, on their way, without passports from Moscow. Life on board uneventful. Madame Sun has had several talks with Reubens, which I gather are on the nature of revolution and the personalities in Moscow. I have withdrawn from these, feeling sure Reubens would prefer it so. He is secretive as ever, a bit sardonic, condescending, would make one feel an awful ass if one were not inclined to think that he was one, himself. Everyone else on board is a bit under the weather. Plans seem unsettled. There is talk of Paris, London, Norway, Berlin – and of an immediate trip to south Russia for Madame Sun’s health. On the surface it has the appearance of an unchartered pleasure tour.

So ends the diary; but once again Rayna’s letters fill in the picture. A pleasure tour it was not; and yet Rayna bounces back in a letter to Grace typed on board ship and posted in Vladivostok. August 24 Dear Gracie, You’re the only one of the family who’ll know – or care much – about the what and why of going to Moscow. I know you’ll be interested. I’m interested, by the way, in the family reactions – if father really storms and rages. The truth of it is that for the time the revolution has slumped into a cat and dog fight between various militarists. Practically all of the civil 91

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leaders turned pale at the scratch, knuckled under and, either through greed or fear, followed the militarists’ lead and instituted a grand slaughter of all mass leaders and dissenters generally. Out of the murder and the wreck there is salvaged a few leaders and an underground organization as strong as ever – but much more bitter. It promises well for the next drive, which is already mobilizing, for idealism remains but it’s become less visionary, more realistic. In a way, it’s sickening. Some of the men I knew well have shown up very badly. And on the whole it has been the most completely disillusioning experience I have ever had. More experienced fellow-workers, however, shrug their shoulders and begin plans over again. Maybe next time I’ll be able to string with them. Not yet. They say I’m still too young – but grant me maturity enough to include me in their new plans – which is important for me. The immediate steps of the new plans are so exciting that it almost compensates for the disappointments. I’m to go to Moscow with Eugene Chen and Madame Sun Yat-sen. There we meet and confer with Borodin and others before the rest of the plans are made. I am, of course, tremendously excited by going – particularly this fall – the tenth anniversary which promises to be a spectacular affair. I’ve been longing to go. I don’t know what will be done after Moscow. I may be detailed to go on a tour with Madame Sun (she wants me to) which would mean Europe, some meetings but little regular work. The other possibility is to stay in Moscow – or some other Russian city and help with the propaganda with which China is to be flooded. There will presumably be a gathering of the faithful of the Chinese. Many have escaped execution and are now in Russia, Japan or Germany. I think I prefer the second plan although it is hard to choose. At any event, I’ll probably not be consulted but told off to my duty. That second lures me because it would mean that I would continue to work under Borodin, which has been one of the big experiences of my life. We reach Vladivostok today (Wednesday today). And because of the nature of the party, all the rigamarole of examinations, etc., etc., which make people avoid the Trans-Siberian will be eliminated. A queer deformed revolutionist [Fang/Reubens] who is on the boat with us – a strange man whom B[orodin] left in his place when he left Hankow and whom he recommended with the cryptic remark that he is a man with a double set of brains – tells me sardonically that I am coming as a member of the Soviet privileged class. Well, it would appear to have an advantage or two.

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We’re in one of the small merchant vessels which Russia runs between Shanghai and Vladivostok – rather awful ships. There has been considerable of an exodus so that the ship is fairly stuffed with people who sleep all over the decks. Chen’s two daughters are with us and TC Woo whom you may remember – he’s the tallest of the three musketeers who gave us a large but as I remember not very palatable dinner in Central Park on the eve of their departure for Canton something like a year ago. What a year! That is all of our personal party. Bill stays in Shanghai as liaison man – will join us in two months. Chen and Madame Sun are with us, of course. I’m properly excited at getting into Russia under auspices that will make it possible to stay and work there. Write me General Delivery, Moscow. I want to know what you will be doing and should like a summary of reactions of the young woman who has seen the world. My Love, Rayna

Since Rayna was part of Madame Sun’s party, the arrangements on the Trans-Siberian were relatively luxurious, and the trainride across a vast new territory was bound to provide Rayna with some exhilaration; but the enforced nearness, day after day, to some of her acquaintances from Hankow and Shanghai was beginning to raise doubts in Rayna’s mind. She had been rudely separated from Bill by the decision of Eugene Chen, egged on by Fang/Reubens, that Bill should stay on in Shanghai as ‘liaison man’. Neither Rayna nor Bill was happy; and not long after their separation, Bill became convinced that they had been ruthlessly duped by Chen and Reubens. Rayna, as she crossed Siberia with Chen’s two daughters, did not yet know what to think. Fortunately for us, a series of letters that she wrote to Bill on the train and after her arrival in Moscow has been preserved. Bill gave them to Grace shortly before his own death in 1935, and they were found intact more than 50 years later in Grace Simons Glass’s papers. The first of these letters to Bill was, like the one Rayna wrote to Grace at the same date, typed on board ship and posted in Vladivostok.

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Letter mailed from Vladivostok Thursday [August 25, 1927] Beanie Darling, I miss you. That is the chief thought in my mind much of the time. I feel such a damned appendage on this party, something that doesn’t quite belong. Not so much with Madame Sun, who is, I think, rather glad to have me with them, but very much so with the rest. I don’t like it. We got away in the middle of the night 3.30 the cars called for us. It was rather a weird ride through the city. We ended up at a far jetty which I did not know, after what seemed miles of streets, and took sampans to the boat. The rest had apparently come on the night before. The party includes Fang, Pavlov, the tall blonde military adviser of the 6th army, Vasilliev and other Russians, including two girls who used to be with B[orodin]. There are also on board seventy students – two of them girls. I am curious about them and would like to talk to them, but no one on the upper deck shares my curiosity or interest; so it passes unnoticed. There are three social strata, we who occupy the captain’s quarters and eat on the upper deck – Chen, the girls [Chen’s two daughters], Wu [T. C. Woo?], Madame Sun, Fang and myself, forming what might be called first class; then the group of Russians, perhaps ten or twelve of them, who sleep in a closed off place on the deck, and then the students. There is as little mixing as among 1st, 2nd and 3rd on an ocean liner. The sleeping arrangements are rather community. The first night – rather morning – a man showed me a vile hole, way back between engine room and kitchen, obviously just cleared out of crew for there was crew in the next cabins and told me that I was to have that place with another woman. The other woman’s clothes were there, but she very pointedly wasn’t and I decided I’d not be either. Madame Sun had already told me I could sleep on the couch in her quarters if those downstairs were bad. She has the captain’s sleeping room. Chen and Fang have cots in the captain’s sitting room. The girls have a regular passenger cabin, fairly clean and well ventilated; Wu shares a similar cabin with another man; so I felt justified in assuming that other arrangements would be made for me. They were. The first night I slept on the couch in the captain’s sitting room and the last two nights on the couch in Madame Sun’s room. No one, of course, but myself, took any initiative in this change of arrangements. Madame Sun is a darling. The girls are friendly, casual. Chen, himself, seasick. Fang as lurky a personality as ever, with his mind on the job to the point of rudeness in turning his back on me and addressing himself entirely to Madame Sun, when she is on deck. My feeling is mixed, a warm

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glow for her, some resentment for Fang, amusement at the girls, coldness towards Chen. We reach port tomorrow or Saturday. It does not seem sure. The plans beyond there seem in doubt. I think they are being discussed between Feng [Yü-hsiang, the ‘Christian General’] and Madame Sun at this minute. Maybe they’ll tell me what they are, and why; maybe night [sic]; more likely not. There seems difficulty because of a cavalry escort which Fang has given B[orodin] and which will delay his journey. I’ve done nothing on board ship, as I have no quarters. If we stay in Vladivostok, I’ll get busy sorting the papers, etc. I have started the diary,42 but, of course, there has been very little so far to put in it. I’m not in a mood for writing. By the way did you see the article in the [China Weekly] Review – I used my old name, as you will notice. Will you please get a clipping of it for the scrap book. There is a copy on board but it does not belong to me. The article, by the way, attracted the attention of the Russians, who were wondering who the unknown left Kuomintang man might be.43 Fang told me. He, incidentally, sports a new name, Reubens. Somehow I’m not in a mood to be amused by it, or by anything much. Golly, I wish you were here. I need you badly. Oh Beanie, it is a rum life. I suppose I’m awfully worse than rum to tell you about it, but I know you suspected it in advance – as did I. Well, we’ll stick around a little anyway and see what we will see. Perhaps I’m too sensitive a human for the rough and tumble of things. And perhaps – this likely – there will be a change in the outlook of the world when we meet with the chief [Borodin]. Meanwhile, darling, I love you [What follows was written in ink:] Friday evening Just read it over. I’m feeling different today and the world not so hostile. After all, these aspects of the world are more than half subjective, I believe. We arrive tomorrow morning between 4 and 6. We leave in the afternoon on the express for M[oscow]. The present plan is for Madame Sun and I – maybe the Chen ménage also – go direct to the Caucasus, there to wait till word comes from B[orodin] in Moscow. This is not sure. I’ll wire you from V[ladivostok] and M[oscow]. I love you darling, Rayna

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In the margins of this letter, Bill Prohme wrote a note for Grace dated June 6, 1935. It reads ‘here are some letters missing. God knows where or how they were lost or mislaid.’ The date is the same as that on Bill’s ‘transmittal letter’ to Grace.44 Three weeks later – on June 28 – Bill sent off a thank you letter to Grace, who had paid him a visit in Honolulu. But the letter is much more than a thank-you note. Bill goes on to say: ‘What occurs to me is that I really should write you a glossary to accompany those letters that I sent you some weeks ago by registered mail.’ Not only does Bill’s ‘glossary’ facilitate comprehension of Rayna’s letters to him, it also fills in the picture of Eugene Chen and Fang/Reubens in a devastating way. The relevant passages are: ‘Uncle’ and ‘Auntie’ mean – perhaps obviously – Chen and Madame S[un]. Chambers is Borodin. These were just a code arranged between Rayna and me because we feared interference with our letters – a fear which I am quite sure was justified, because I know she did not receive all my letters, and I am equally sure I did not receive all of hers sent during those last tragic months. Fang, whose name appears again and again, is really the nasty villain of the piece. It is he, I am quite sure, who arranged definitely that I be left behind, and devised the job of sending reports to Chen and broadcasting Rayna’s news telegrams to me, merely as a trick. Fang as a matter of fact was a Russian. For some reason that I can’t understand, he was called, from the very beginning of his time with Borodin, by the Chinese name of Fang. He was actually called, in full, ‘Fang Shen-shen’. I don’t know why. I remember vividly the first time Borodin introduced me to him. B[orodin] was himself quite ill, lying on a day-bed on one of the upper galleries of the building in Hankow. He said, ‘If you need any advice or help, come to Fang Shen-shen. He has a double brain.’ I hated him from the beginning. He had a devious look in his eye, which suggested the natural-born conspirator, or crook, or something malevolent. I remember visiting him in his room several times and always being overcome there with a curious odor, which I finally associated with a hospital experience of several years before. It was, beyond any question, the odor of morphine. I am convinced he was an addict. Just what he was, or represented, I don’t know, but I always suspected he was a GPU [Soviet Secret Police] man. He had lived in America and spoke in

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American English, and he was a bitter and sardonic person all about, but would have been very amusing to know, if one had not had the necessity to have dealings with him. I remember quite vividly the day after Borodin and his crowd had left Hankow that Fang telephoned me at the apartment and said (while Rayna listened on an extension), ‘I am not tickled to death with what you wrote about Borodin’s going away.’ To which I replied, with complete impertinence, ‘Oh, but of course I had no such intention, Fang Shenshen’, which he was shrewd enough to understand to mean that I had no intention of tickling him to death, however much I would have had satisfaction in causing such an event to come to pass. I remember that Rayna was in a blue funk about this for many hours, because at bottom she was afraid of this man, and he really was a fearsome sort of creature. But it passed. His subsequent rudeness on this trip, and her subsequent adoption of the same type of impertinence towards him and his ideas are made very clear in what Rayna writes. Lozovsky is of course the head of the Red International of Labour Unions, whom we had known for a brief time in Hankow.45 All the other names I think you will probably recognize. The girls’ names are those of Chen’s two negroid daughters, Sylvia and Yolande. Percy and Jack are the two Chen boys – Percy a rather useless waster, but Jack a really superior creature whose praises Rayna sung, as you will notice in one of the letters … I think that the reading of those letters at one sitting has a distinctly depressing effect, because […] they leave so clearly a feeling that Rayna was miserable during those final few months in Moscow. I confess that rereading them a few weeks ago re-created in me most powerfully a hatred of Chen which has never been eliminated during all these years, but has subsided as I thought about him and his unwarranted interference with the fabric of Rayna’s and my life together. He and Fang together were responsible, it was Chen who was the spokesman. Oh, yes, one other thing in the letters which it is necessary to know in order to understand them, is the reference to the so-called ‘understanding’ Chen had had about me with certain Shanghai authorities. These were, of course, the people at the Russian consulate. When I told them of this so-called understanding and showed them Chen’s final note to me, they threw up their hands and said they had never heard a word of it. Which, of course, left me high and dry.

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On the train, second day, Aug. 30 [1927] Beanie darling, We stayed only the day in Vladivostok, leaving the same night. On the train are Pete,46 that tall blond 6th army advisor, Niki, Pavlov and others whose faces but not names I know. Many of them had been held up in Vladivostok many days because of the flood. This train is the first to go through and is full up. We have a special car and are quite comfortable. Vladivostok is a quaint city, not at all bad. It is on a very lovely bay with low wooded hills surrounding, and the town goes very much up and down. Strange to come suddenly into a new alphabet and broad blueeyed peasant faces. The architecture is peculiarly ugly, at the same time bare and rococo. Roofs have stilted wooden fringes on them and there are fringed cupolas. People poorly but not necessarily shabbily dressed. They look stolid rather than elated. The country we are going through is for the most part flat and uncultivated. The first day was almost bare, like the less desert parts of Arizona. Last night we came into fine hill country, wooded. Today there are small shrub trees, pines and white birches (it is the only country I’ve ever seen with white birch natural forests; I adore white birches, they look like frail ghosts at twilight). Almost no signs of life for long stretches – reminding of flat sections in Minnesota – where, I forgot to put in this exception above, there are also birches and pines and this feel of great open untouched spaces. The houses in the villages all seem newly built in this section. A little nearer the sea they seemed ages old. Fang becomes more upstage than ever in his own land. He is slavishly almost fawningly attentive to Madame Sun, insultingly rude to me. He does such things as help her up car steps, follow her and leave me to get up as best I can, and is nastily sarcastic in response to any question. Really a most disagreeable person. I am told by some of the Russians on board that he is cordially hated by everyone who has ever worked with him, particularly his subordinates. Few have been able to survive contact without nasty rows. I may survive, maybe not; my temper is wearing thin. The others are nice. Curiously, I come to like the youngsters more and more. They are so frankly themselves, in many ways the only authentic individuals on board. Others sparring, playing a game, something or other. I am amused much of the time. The lady of course plays no game. As a matter of fact, I think she is more confused than anything else. I haven’t yet been able to determine what the revolution really means

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to her, if it is blind loyalty to her husband, or some active driving force in herself. If the latter, there will be much to overcome, an instinctive withdrawal from contacts, an almost pathological distaste for anything that is not scrupulously clean, both in things and people, and an impulse to be surrounded always by nice things. Uncle finds himself confronted at platform meetings by workers’ delegates in search of the real lowdown on things in China, what actually the workers are doing, the peasants, their organization, the strength of the C[ommunist] P[arty] tie, etc., etc. The obvious questions under the circumstances. I am sorry for him because he probably no more than we has been given the facts that would make answers to these questions possible. In a way the furtive secrecy of the gang in China is going to be a handicap now. These people ought to know everything about the mass organization; as a matter of fact they know just about as much as we do – and I imagine, it is as little their fault. But it has its amusing sides. Chen giving phrases in answer to questions when the questioner is not a sophisticated correspondent but a grimy handed worker with a desperately serious air is considerable of a sight. His surface seems very surface indeed. [Using the other side of the page she says:] I save paper, having foolishly put mine into the bottom drawer of my trunk and having very little in my cabin. I’ll get some at Chita [just east of Baikal]. A game goes on. Fang is trying, I think, to put something over before B[orodin] arrives. He talks in low terms [tones?] with Madame Sun, as seductively as if he were an evil-intending lover. Whatever it is, I think he is going to fail. Her uncertainty is such, I think, that she will be guided only by a familiar lead. She distrusts him, I think. Personally, as you can surmise, I am interested but not altogether happy. I miss terribly the frankness of genuine contacts. God, how I wish you were here, although you would have told Fang long ago to go to hell. I talk on every occasion of your joining us in two months, so that the arrangement will not be allowed to lapse. It will come true. Physically I am well. Very much rested – even restive. I am homesick, very, but that really is not illness. I am going to lure Helen to Moscow this fall by hook or crook. Then my dream is to be away from the world, you and I and Helen, for some weeks, tramping some place or other, talking, weighing things, getting [?] the sanity that comes from contact with her direct mind.

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I have almost learned the Russian alphabet and know some few words. It is a hell of a language, but I intend to conquer it or bust. Beanie, I love you. Rayna [Rayna added a note:] Letter’s ragged because it has been stuffed in my pocket. Letter from Irkutsk September 2, 1927 Beanie darling, We get into Irkutsk, or however you spell it, in a few minutes. I’d been told we got there this evening, and so had planned writing a long letter this afternoon. I’m sorry. The journey becomes amusing, with intermittent annoyances. What the plans are, I do not know as no one takes me into his or her confidence. At first it annoyed me. Now it rather amuses me. On the whole it is rather nice. Scenery is miraculous. We are today going along the Baikal, which is indeed beautiful. Oh, Beanie dear, they are beginning the preliminaries to getting in. I’ll have to stop almost before beginning. Word came at Verkne Udinsk, which we reached at 3 this morning, that B[orodin] is in Mongolia which means he will follow close after. I have a hunch that Fang is not over pleased because I think he is trying to take unto himself credit for the expedition and also to put over some tricks. He has been urging insidiously that there would be no need of waiting until B came, if, as he reported, B was delayed indefinitely. Seldom have I disliked a man so. Pete tells me it is a universal reaction that the people who have worked with him have despised him. I am coming more and more to see that the world, with few exceptions is made up of people whose theory is each man for himself. Uncle is a queer bit, a reflector of audiences. I wish you were here – oh very, very. I love you, Rayna

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On train, September 6, 1927 Beanie darling, We’re in Europe and it doesn’t look a bit different, not pink grass or anything. I might venture a pun at this safe distance and say Europe is a frost, for it certainly is cold. But so were the last three days of Asia. I seem to shiver more than anyone else and oh, how I have missed my water-bottle at night. Beanie! I am looking out, by the way, at the most beautiful rainbow I have seen since Honolulu. I can see a whole forest of pine trees through it. It is just over there, near enough to touch. The country has really been beautiful, such forests as I never imagined. Beanie, it is a double rainbow! Tomorrow morning we reach Moscow, and thank God. It is a long, long journey and nerves wear thin. Much, amusement, however, if one is philosophic. I have made an enemy, I think, in friend Fang, who thinks I might cause trouble and is therefore manoeuvring to make me unimportant. He will probably succeed. There are politics involved, I suspect, between him and Chambers [Borodin] and he suspects me of being too loyal to Chambers. He has tried to create an atmosphere in which it would seem quite in the course of things for me to do nothing without consulting him. But I blithely ignore him and when he wants to see what I’ve been working on, he must ask me, which he doesn’t like. One day, discussing a story I was going to write, he shook his head with finality and said, ‘But I think it had best not be written’, to which I replied innocently, ‘Oh do you, I don’t agree; I think it’s good stuff.’ And that was that. He condescends insultingly and but for the fact that it is just this sort of a gathering I should long since have told him to go to hell. As it is, I’m rather proud of having gone no further than to tell him one day that he is ridiculous. What the plans ahead are God knows. I am concerned for fear things will be pushed through before B[orodin] arrives. I intuit forces working in that direction. After that, a shrug. If the Nanchang men* have been successful, or are successful, there will probably be a great to-do about a * [GB] In late July 1927, after their split with the left Kuomintang in Wuhan, the Chinese communist leaders made plans for an uprising in four provinces. The rising started on August 1 (considered the date of the founding of the Chinese Red Army). The insurrectionaries captured Nanchang and set up a ‘Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee’, but they lacked policies and strategies and were soon defeated. Some remnants fled to the mountains to join Mao Tse-tung’s guerrillas.


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new government and so on. At any rate, there will be an organization and the NNA [Nationalist News Agency] is going to be its news machinery. Chen mentioned today a conference in Europe somewhere where we’ll all gather. Meanwhile my position is officially correspondent. That’s all. Fear too much criticism if there is a foreign secretary – too many foreigners, I take it. That is one clue to our present unhappy situation. Oh Beanie, I do miss you. I feel lost and little out on this half-mad venture alone. People are crafty and I, I’m afraid, am simple. Pete has been a relief. He is honest-to-God, no frills, no tricks, and is the only such here – except the youngsters who really and truly are darlings. I like them more and more. Sylvia47 comes in for a lot of whispered criticism but doggone, she is a thoroughly authentic and not at all a bonehead child. She has brains, personality, independence and the happiest nature in the world. I am for her strong. I’ve worked out a statement to be issued in Moscow, fixed answers to long strings of questions, some of them twisters, put by Moscow Pravda and Leningrad Pravda correspondents on the train, have done a 14 page biography of the lady and a five page one of Chen, have written greetings to workers, women and youth – and so on. There is more to do, but it is hard on the train. I’m working to get an interpreter of my own in Moscow and a typist. I must pack my things. So many get out when you’re on a train ten days. Beanie dear, be sure [to] bring many, many warm things. By the way, buy me a woolly dressing-gown and bring about eight yards of Chinese silk the color of my hair – to line my Japanese kimono. It’s falling into shreds. Also bring kolynos and tooth brushes and soap. I don’t like the Russian brands. And bring me, if you can get them, another pair of shoes just like those I bought at the American shop – I think they are 6° A or B – better get B to make sure. The pair of shoes I bought at the Chinese shop shed a heel the other day. I’ve bought you a nice wooden thing which I’ll mail tomorrow. I love you. Rayna


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7 Moscow

Rayna’s first letter, handwritten, from Moscow was sent off promptly upon her arrival there September 7, 1927 Beanie darling, darling, I’m in Moscow and under the most amazing conditions – but although the Kremlin spires, which are outside my window, are magnificent beyond words, and although the whole situation is as rare a combination of high drama, historical significance and comic opera as anyone could imagine, I’m aware keenly of only one big emotion, homesickness for you. You probably cannot believe, for I could not have believed, just the way I’m feeling I had not anticipated it. After all we have been separated before and, although a bit hard, it hasn’t really floored me – or you, I think. But this time it does. I’m all one ache inside. I think I know the main why of it – it’s because this is a real experience – and I’ve grown to feel that the big experiences we should have together. If you were here, we could look out of the window at the Kremlin, it would be as magnificent as I see, objectively, it is. Now it’s just so much recognized beauty; my mind registers, not my emotions. Emotionally, I’m dull, with no lift, only an ache. I’m neither elated or happy. It’s interesting, of course. Somehow I have the feeling that its a bit like a fairy-tale that must be told by an unemotion[al], rather prosaic person, who knows there are no fairies, but knows that the story will make the children thrill – or better, like an aviator, who is jaded, taking up into the air, a girl like Milly who is flying for the first time. An experience that can register for some people but not for me.

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Here is the material of it. We got in this morning at about 11.30. The station was thronged. I’ve never seen so many cameramen. The Sun Yatsen University students were lined up on the platform under banners which Woo says read ‘Down with Wang Ching-wei,’48 and ‘cooperation between the Kuomintang and the CP’. There were many, many delegates of many different bodies. I was jammed behind a table in the car when the crowd poured in. Among them were Karakhan, Bitner and Joe.* Many others. We oozed through the mass on the platform with camera men taking pictures from the top of cars, from fences, the fenders of automobiles and what not. Upton Close grabbed Chen by the arm and clamoured for an interview as he was leaving today at 4 for Germany – and others. Madame Sun was ahead of us with Fang. Chen, the girls and I, protected by a foreign office interpreter, got through somehow. Fang took Madame Sun into a car and she was wheeled away. Then the F[oreign] O[ffice] man rushed us into another car and took us to the Hotel Metropole. Next morning – 7th There to Chen’s not very well concealed disgust, there had been some slipup, carelessness, in arrangements – and the rooms were not at all prepared in advance. But there was much talk in Russian and we were taken up to a rococo suite, which was to be Chen’s own rooms – Woo’s, mine, the girls – to be found later. Chen and I were worried about Madame Sun who is still in a terribly rocky state, shaking from meeting people – and who was in a particularly bad condition yesterday. We’d thought we’d all be together – but the FO man didn’t even know where she had been taken. He went away to find out – in ten minutes – and came back in an hour, when he took us to this palace opposite the Kremlin, where I am now. It looks as if it must be at least a grand duke’s but was really a sugar palace,** I’m told – a movie hallway with a staircase built for [?], doors many inches thick, everything panelled, high magnificent ceilings, mosaic wooden flowers, furniture built specially of curly maple (in our rooms), the most miraculously grained *

[GB] Lev M. Karakhan, the Soviet Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, was Moscow’s envoy plenipotentiary to China, and promulgator of the Karakhan Manifesto (July 25, 1919) that ostensibly renounced all former Tsarist rights and privileges in China; Bitner was a former counsellor at the Soviet embassy in Peking; Joe Mussin had been the chief Tass correspondent in Peking. ** Before the 1917 revolution it was the residence of a Russian sugar magnate, hence ‘sugar palace’.


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wood and fine patterns, mirror that reach to the ceiling, many expensive lamps, candlesticks, etc. – of the funny 18th century patterns that are all marble and cupids and gold vines with little cupolas and crowns on top. There are beds that make you feel exclusive – not queenly for that would need a canopy, but like an important princess – fine wood, rolled head and foot boards, mattresses such as I have not slept on in my life – and so on – a most elaborate display. There are 2 reception rooms on this, the second and top floor which remind of those in the Peking embassy where we saw Karakhan – Only much, much more so. And the bath! Beanie! It is Roman, no less. You enter it by a panelled door, fit for a ballroom, and find yourself in a short panelled hallway, leading to a small, luxurious sitting room deep carpeted with a single enormous plate glass window looking out on the Kremlin. That’s the place where supposedly you lounge after the bath. The bath itself is to the right, curtained off. The tub is marble with shower, built in; the walls are blue and white tile, the floor is tile, the washstand is of wood – the same fine-grained, highly polished curly maple with a marble top. It’s a bath for loitering. Oh Beanie. Madame Sun’s room is even more elaborate and somewhat more formal than mine. Last night we dined there together, off a spotless cloth on a large table, centered with flowers – fine dishes, fine food – felt an ass. The situation entertains me more than anything I’ve ever experienced. The leaders of the masses of China come to confer with the leaders of proletarian Russia and are housed in a way that rivals Buckingham Palace. I lolled in that bath yesterday – and chuckled. I happen to be here this way. Chen decided that I, at least, should be with her. So when the man finally came, we came here together. She had also asked to have me stay with her (which was nice). And there were arrangements being made. Karakhan and [Maxim] Litvinoff [future Commissar of Foreign Affairs] live here. (It sounds important – and is probably – but not for me, for I’ll probably see no more of them, nor on any more intimate terms than if I were the governess of their children; I really am a person who is summoned more or less like a super-servant, you know; I discover that my back is up by it occasionally and I’m reminded of Becky’s tales [in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair] of being put with the governess when she visited Mrs. Havemeyer.) I went back to the hotel, saw Upton Close and the INS man, who’s nice, gave them a sort of vicarious interview in which I tried to say nothing and apparently succeeded for they both were dissatisfied – obviously so, but not unpolitely. Close is a decent sort, a bit arty-looking, blond blowy hair, aquiline features, open color, anglo-saxon – wears no hat. The INS man is a pattern of the dark haired, darked [sic] eyed arrow collar youth – not


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much in his bean, I’m thinking. I hear Louis Fischer is here. Close told me to phone him, which I will. Then I took a taxi and went to Tass to send wires – no arrangements had been made for any otherwise. There I tried frantically to find Mussin but met floods of every language but English. Finally did find a man who spoke English and he knew who I was and phoned someone else who authorized the sending of the wires and then asked me to come to another Tass office today – which I’ll do. They became comradely and formal, a queer un-news papery combination. When I got back here, I took a lolling bath and rested – the first real rest that I’ve had since I left. Today there will be flowers laid on Lenin’s tomb, which is less impressive than I’d expected, by the Chinese delegation. Today also I get an office at the hotel. My programme is uncertain except that at 10, I go to Madame Sun’s room and an interpreter translates papers for us – and also that I’m going to get a teacher for 8 o’clock. Beanie, please start studying immediately. Get a teacher. You know I’ve got one date on my calender – marked. The 6th of October which is the day I discuss with Chen about your coming. I put it at that because of the time for letters (altho’ it’ll probably be done by wires). Oh, Beanie, Beanie, it’ll be different when you’re here. I miss you so. I feel so damned little, alone and lost. I suppose we’re making history – but I find it rather casual. I’m more thrilled by the thought that the city will be beautiful when you’re here than by the rather pompous, rather bored maneuverings that are going on. I love you, Rayna. Please keep my letters. I’m only doing a sketchy diary and may want fuller impressions which I’ll send to you.

*

*

* Moscow, September 12, 1927

Beanie darling, Your wire came and I’m sick about it. Apparently you were right and I wrong in Shanghai; but it is so damned, damned hard to grow accustomed to distrusting people. I find I just about can’t. I’ve immediately taken it up with uncle who says he can’t possibly understand, that it was definitely arranged and so on. And then I’ve taken


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it up with Fang who says he can’t possibly understand, that he never considered paying the old bills, etc., that he had no authority to do so, and so on, and so on. Madame Sun says I should confront the two of them with it together and I’ll try that. With what effect, I don’t know. Meanwhile, there seems nothing I can do but that. Things here are not encouraging. That is why I have not written the last few days. I haven’t had much heart to do so. Interesting here but personally so disappointing that I haven’t wanted to pass it on, and couldn’t blithely lie, as it is too important; it would be so unfair. The fact of Bee’s [Borodin’s] non-arrival – they seem not to know when he will come and the earlier word received on the train seems cock-eyed – makes things still more uncertain. I have the feeling that much will be cleared up when he comes, although I think you are right there, too; he will have troubles aplenty of his own; there are wheels within wheels and I gather that he will be in the way of some of them. Our party seems in midair. I am here with the lady, but she is not happy. I can see that, although she has not told me specifically the causes for her unhappiness. Plans are not progressing. When I try to talk definitely, there is evasion, less from her than from uncle, but still considerable. They are seeing the important people, but not under the smooth circumstances they expected, I gather. And it becomes apparent – very much so – that the fund question is not so simple a one as Shanghai gestures would have led one to believe. What it will mean for us I do not know but am prepared for the worst. I have a hunch there will be some significant wires back and forth before you get this. Hells bells! Of the place and people, if my mind and heart were calm. I’d be fascinated. There is much that is miraculous about the town – the cathedrals, the streets, the people on them – everything interests me and much of it thrills me. It is rotten not to have anyone to thrill with and, just as in China the first time [1923], I don’t respond so very much, because I seem to be postponing the thrill until there is a partner in it. I’ve met very few people and for the most part waste my time doing futile running back and forth for people. But Louis Fischer came into the ‘office’ I’ve set up in the Metropole and I’ve met the head of the foreign Tass service, who, by the way, is talking about you going to Nanking. I told him it was extremely unlikely that you would do it. Fischer is quiet, posedly so, impressive, intentionally so, but really nice. He would drive me to drink if I saw him often but for a morning of talk in which he elaborated politics and launched forth confidently into the Chinese situation (he is condescending towards me) was stimulating. The Tass man [Mussin?]


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is remarkable – a very responsible job and he can’t be more than 25 or 26. Speaks English and every other language in the world, I take it. I haven’t seen Joe since the train. Nor Pete [Joe and Pete unidentified]. I’m distracted. I’ll write more coherently later. I love you and am unhappy, Rayna

The Comintern no longer had confidence in the Chinese revolution, although its publications kept referring to the ‘coming revolution’. Rayna was one of the first to receive information on the ‘end of the affair’ when informed, almost casually, that there was no more money. It is not certain that she drew all the inferences from the cessation of funds but, whatever her understanding, she was now left to fend for herself and there was no mention of bringing Bill to Moscow. The Comintern, via Fang, knew no subtlety when its agents (or assistants) were to be cut off. Moscow, September 16, 1927 Billium, The last few days have been a madhouse. Plans have progressed – and are heading toward a débâcle for the two of us, I believe, and there has been a jam of people. First the plans. I’ve had some blunt talking. F[ang] tells me that foreign publicity is largely the bunk and that anyway there isn’t any money. On the first we could have a lively argument, if I thought it worth while; on the second, of course, I can’t argue at all. It came about – the clarifying – through continued discussion of your position in Shanghai. He insists uncle did not make it clear and that the expected arrangement is impossible – says he does not speak officially but is sure that he represents the general opinion here and that no arrival of anyone will affect it. He suggests that you accept the Tass proposition, which is still somewhat indefinite. The head man, Oumanski, told me the other day that the idea is for a man, preferably an American and they like your work, to be a sort of travelling correspondent, going to the place where the news is hottest. It is the nicest sort of assignment, if we weren’t separated this way; as it is, it doesn’t seem so nice. Also it isn’t quite definite. The superintendent, manager, commissar, treasurer, whatnot who is to decide if the thing is financially


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feasible came back from somewhere or other yesterday and they were to talk it over. Of the present arrangement, uncle seems concerned but not floored. He says with a gesture that Shanghai will have to be liquidated. He makes no suggestion about ways for you to get the money to pay the bill, but feels that, under the circumstances, the office must be closed. I’m waiting to wire you anything until the Tass proposition is made definite. Even then I wouldn’t believe we had the lowdown on the situation for I see chances of the whole situation changing when Bee [Borodin] arrives. Still no word, however. The party is going off for a rest in the mountains – without me. And William darling, I am going to be out beginning the first of the month. It has mounted up, the lady not concurring, wholly resentful for me, but apparently helpless. There were hints first from the two of the men involved [Fang and Chen] of the comparative lack of work for me here, and then when I put it bluntly – hating the position I was being put in – F[ang] shrugged and said words to the effect of ‘told you so’ and uncle dodged a little and talked of my being able, of course, to make other connections easily and my apparent intention of coming here anyway, whether they had or not, and so on. You can reconstruct the conversation from your experience; I won’t repeat it. And do you know that instead of feeling wholly sore I feel sympathetic; he apparently is in a bad fix here with all sorts of responsibilities and nowhere to turn. My plan is this: to get a room next Monday (I have a line on one), try to collect salary up to October first, and then wait developments, meanwhile writing as much as I can and familiarizing myself with places and people. Damn! I have an appointment with Lozovsky in half an hour and it is that far away. I’ll finish this later in the day – or better, mail it and write another; which is safest. There is much more to tell of many things, including bumping into Herbie Elliston [of the Manchester Guardian] and having some very pleasant time with him before he dashed away to Berlin, and so to London the next day, and last night having Jimmie Sheean, who was trying to reach Chen by phone, reach me by mistake, and going down to meet him in the lobby of the hotel to find him pipped to the gills with vodka, embarrassingly enthusiastic about seeing me (you remember his affectionate streak when he is tight) and to the point of telling a translator from Tass who was dictating some articles to me in my room all about his devotion. He insisted upon taking me over to the opera where he fell asleep immediately and we stayed only fifteen minutes. If he had been


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awake, he would have joined the chorus; I was glad to get out. I’ll write about it after the interview with Alexander.49 My love, Rayna

Vincent Sheean, who had left Hankow on July 5, shortly before the Grand Exodus, also found his way to Moscow, where he arrived on September 15. He stayed there less than a week, departing for London on the day Rayna next wrote to Bill. Sheean did not return to Moscow until mid November, by which time Rayna’s situation had become critical – not that it was exactly cheery when she sent off her letter to Bill. *

*

* Moscow, September 21, 1927

Beanie darling, Things have been and continue to be black as night. I am drifting along in a daze without initiative to do anything; it seems too much to do to write a letter; I feel lost, little, miserable, helpless. What goes on in inner councils I haven’t any notion. They have never let me know anything about them. And hints, suggestions, etc., of how little work there is for me here culminated finally in a talk with Chen, after your letter arrived, in which he was gestury but forgetful about past protestations. Bluntly put, the situation is this, as I am wiring tonight. There is no chance of getting the delegated ones at Shanghai to do much in the way of funds; that is made very clear by F[ang]. And there is apparently trouble about funds at this end. So we are to ‘liquidate’ Shanghai, and I, I am told magnanimously, will, of course, continue work until the first of the month. So that is that. We are high and dry. I still have the small sum I left with intact and shall collect for August and Sept. – I’ve done so partially for August, 300 roubles – and then I’m sure I don’t know what. Tass was talking a few days ago about having you stay on in China, as sort of peripatetic correspondent – as I wrote you. Ever since, I’ve been waiting to hear from the head of the office [Oumanski] but have had no word. Tonight I’m dropping him a chit, asking him about it. I’m wiring you also tonight and will wire tomorrow, if I can find anything out.


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I’ve had your first letter, no more. I feel adrift. A strange dullness has taken hold of me; I can’t rouse myself to anything. My mind wanders about; I think I’m not quite cerebrating at times. Of course, fundamentally involved is deep hurt, very very deep. I look back upon the past two years, the grand words of the Kuomintang never forgetting and so on and so on, and feel devastated. Of course the big boss [Borodin] is not here and it may be different when he arrives, but maybe not. I’m not hopeful. I’ve fought depression in the most idiotic way, by going on bats with Jimmie Sheean, who came close on the heels of Herbie Elliston. Jimmie is a blithe companion, but not really concerned about you (his companion); only interested, gay, having a good time. I have a compulsion to go to Berlin and get Helen to come there from Zurich. I may even do it. I don’t know what I’ll do. I feel the need of talking it all out with someone and the only familiar face in town is Jimmie’s with whom, of course, one doesn’t talk very much. Another thing promises. Friend Alexander says Earl [Browder] is coming back to Shanghai to carry on by hook or by crook the secretariat, and that perhaps we could work with him. That would be heartening in one way; no dodging of issues; no fence riding. I told him we are very much interested. I feel an awful pig. Days have slipped by without my writing to you, but somehow I haven’t been able to do anything but live gestures and go to bed. Moscow is in a fog for me. It would be fascinating, if things were different, but they’re not. I think I’ll snap out of it, maybe. I’ll try tomorrow. For the past four days I’ve shelved all thinking, just batted around in droskeys [drozhkys], or however you spell them, to theaters and whatnot, going through the motions of living. Before this reaches you, there will be some clarifying of the situation. There must be. After all we are alive and need to eat. As usual, when faced by the big world alone, I lose confidence and become frightened inside. I am. I admit it. [Typing in the dark, Rayna inadvertently moved her left hand one key to the right, thus ‘coding’ the preceding ten words or so.] What I am actually doing – as soon as Chen and Madame Sun leave for the south, which will be in a few days now, I think, I shall take a room by myself and start writing. Jimmie is going to write some letters to Asia [the journal] and I’ll do some articles and see if I can sell them. And I’ll try some other things, for what or whom I’m sure I don’t know. At any event, the stake I have should last six months and my idea is to use it up on the


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conviction that something will turn up or that we will be selling enough stuff to get along somehow. I scarcely know what to advise about you, whether it would be wisest to stay for Tass or come here and the two of us sink or swim together. Or what? These things must be cleared up by cable. This six weeks between question and answer is no good at all. It is that knowledge that takes the heart out of writing when things are rocky. One can’t put problems up to the other fellow, when problems demand immediate solutions and the suggestions can’t come for weeks. It is one hell of a mess all around. I do wish Berlin wasn’t so far away. It grows a bit colder here. I am wearing a heavy dress and my winter coat. I don’t think I’ll venture a fur coat. They cost 300 roubles and I can’t go that now. I’ll try to get a felt-lined leather one. They look warm enough. Maybe, I wonder, we’d better ditch it all and go off to NY. But that seems such ignominious defeat. I can’t face it. Oh Beanie, it is rotten treatment, this. The one big light is the knowledge that B[orodin] is coming. Why the devil he isn’t here by this time, I can’t figure out. Something must happen when he comes, but he is two weeks overdue now by his own reckoning. In any event, I think we should maintain the status quo until he arrives. Don’t you? By the way if this is not readable, it is not strange. I’m working in the dark. It was twilight when I started, but it is almost black here now. The light in the room is naked and jabs my eyes. Sylvia and Yolande will stay here and go to school. I’ve met both the B children, Norman and Fred. Fred is a larger, older edition of Norman. He is a simple, unpretentious person, rather likable but seems to lack the high qualities of his father. I’ve been sitting thinking and don’t know if I finished the last sentence. There is a sort of ramble about this way of communication which I like. I’ve met most of the newspaper men here. There aren’t many, an INS man who is an old college friend of Randall’s [Randall Gould] the UP [United Press] man doesn’t seem to be much, Fischer, who is a posedly blasé young man but mighty intelligent. Jimmie says Fischer has been ruined by female admiration, for he is handsome in a dark, virile, vulgar sort of way, much s.a [sex appeal]. Just the sort of chap that makes me mad, although I know you’d insist I am attracted by him. [Walter] Duranty is not here now, on a vacation, and so that is just about all the men who are here now. They seem an agreeable lot although I scarcely ever see any of them. Love, Rayna


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[A marginal handwritten comment, arrowed to the bottom of the letter:] Cut short by interruption. Moscow, September 22, 1927 Beanie, I tried to send you a wire last night – gave it to the man at the hotel desk, who promised to send it for me. But this morning he told me he hadn’t done so, because he couldn’t read my writing, and all this blessed day I’ve been trotting errands for the ‘delegation’ and haven’t been able to get to the telegraph office. Most of the day it has been pouring. I’ll send the wire in the morning, sure. Jimmie Sheean got away last night, dashing on the Leningrad express as it was pulling out, and I and a porter throwing his stuff at him as we ran along the station platform. I feel very much like Herbie Elliston who said he had to flee Moscow quickly, because if Jimmie got here before he left, it was all up. Jimmie is really the most disorganizing person I have ever met – barring Raph. In Hankow it was all right. There was the rigidity of the job. Here, where things can be put off, they are put off, when Jimmie is around. He is positively contagious, of course. The past few days have been panoramic. I’m grateful for them because I have been in a black mood from an overdose of evasions, uncertainties and gestures. What we have done, I can scarcely relate. I didn’t drink, of course, except in my usual manner, but there seems to have been a bewildering succession of people and taxicabs and one thing and another, so jumbled that I might well have been drunk. But now he has gone. He has left several tag ends to be straightened out. He is very much like Raph, you know, only without a single complex. Such a relief from diplomats and state affairs! Chen and the lady go off for a vacation this week-end. I’m going to a room, if a young boy Herbie picked up who is obligingly seeking one for me is successful. If not, I don’t know what to do. The Tass business for you still hangs fire; I expect to get a definite answer on it by tomorrow. There is no use writing about plans for there just aren’t any. Whether the arrival [of Borodin] will affect matters, I don’t know, or when it will happen, either. Meanwhile, there is nothing to do but wait for things to develop. You will certainly know by wire before you get this. I’ve had only one letter from you, which seems strange, and one wire. A mail comes tomorrow and there may be something on it. I begin to feel thousands of miles away. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.


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I feel no stability in anything and am distracted and in a stupor by turns. I’m really in a strange mood which puzzles me greatly. There is something feverish about it – although no physical fever. I’m trying to understand it, but without success. I am affected in some ways as I am in New York. The world whirls around me and I feel utterly lost. As usual, I adjust to a new place very slowly. I still can’t find my way about and feel an utter stranger. In the jumble of impressions, two are clear, one that I feel relieved at being away from China for a while and the other that I feel lost here. Oh well, it will adjust. It must adjust. One can’t go on in this upset way forever. Beanie, I love you, Rayna

Rayna had to leave the Sugar Palace on September 24. The next day she again wrote to Bill. Moscow, September 25, 1927 Beanie darling, I’m confronting the housing problem of Moscow, and it is just about as bad as reputed – not quite. The lady and Lee [Eugene Chen?] leave for the south, perhaps tomorrow and I moved out of the grand palace yesterday. With relief, although into what is problematic. The strain of it was pretty awful. I was never accepted there as a legitimate member of the group from China, but as a sort of super-menial, something that the cat dragged in. It irked me terribly. In fact, I do not remember ever having been quite so miserable in a place as I was in the grand palace; I think rather highly of myself on the whole and can’t stand being put in a menial role. I have some feelings, too, about having been put so, because it is obvious that it could have been otherwise if a different attitude to me had been indicated by the people I was with – but it wasn’t. But I am thanking God for Jimmie Sheean, who inadvertently solved the impossible problem of a place to go to for me. He introduced me to a woman, Mrs. Kantorovich, the wife of one of the Peking embassy men, a man whom Jimmie apparently drank and talked with to both of their satisfactions. Jimmie is rather crazy about the man and brought letters from him to both his present and former wife. The present wife is really a fascinating creature, all life, all kindness, all responses to everything – and she has calmly taken me in to her one room which she shares with her baby and her maid. It is only temporary, of course. I have a line on a


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room – or rather two rooms, through Knapf the U[nited] P[ress] man here who is leaving next week. He has the rooms, which are small and rather unattractive but which are rated high in Moscow and everyone seems to consider me fortunate even to have a chance at them. The rent is high – 150 roubles, but I’ll rent out one of the rooms. There is a possible alternative of a room with a girl, named Lloyd, who is the Moscow correspondent for the Daily Herald. She is now at Geneva but will return in a few weeks. She, it seems, has a room with the daughter-in-law of Tolstoy, whose family is being treated with extra consideration and so has an unusually fine apartment – so it is said; I haven’t seen it yet. There is a youth here that Herbie Elliston picked up, named White, who is trying to get me smuggled into the girl’s room while she is absent. I don’t much like the idea, although White says she is eager for a room-mate and thinks we could manage it together. I won’t decide definitely on the Knapf place until I know more definitely about the Tolstoy one. If I take the Knapf place, I’ll rent out one of the two rooms. Jimmie may want it; he is planning on being back for the celebration. If you come, one room will be enough for the two of us, I think. It is small – but expensive. Our plans seem so adrift. I am collecting salaries for August and September, and am to have a session with Chen tomorrow at which, presumably, things will be finally talked out. I am waiting and waiting for Tass to decide whether they want to make an offer for you to stay in China. If they decide that they would like you, I’ll wire you to find out how you feel about it. It is, of course, most unsatisfactory, but the alternative seems to be the two of us adrift here without salaries. I think it would be a bad idea. The trouble really seems to be finances. And it may be straightened out, of course, when the chief comes, although it doesn’t seem at all sure. He apparently looms more in our field than at the home base. I am interested as well as concerned about the events after his arrival. They may come any day now. I am still devoted to the lady and am much inclined to follow her through regardless of everything, money included. I might be able to manage it – by tall borrowing and could collect when the movement is more prosperous. She seems to want very much to have me go with her, if she goes to Europe and America, and although I am never myself in the relationship and so am ill-adjusted and more or less unhappy, still it is one of the big things of life and I rather hate to turn my back on it. Also, she is fine and a bit helpless and I am tempted to stick with her. But it is all on the cards, and the way it is pawing at our own lives is something to be concerned about. I am concerned. I know also that you are.


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Moscow still is to me a place which might be interesting, if —. I find myself more exhausted than I was ever in China. The tension and uncertainty of the situation, the new climate, the strangeness of the place and the language. I feel quite helpless and totally unadventurous. I’m afraid I’m not very successful alone. No decision of any kind can be made until the chief comes and I can talk with him, until Tass makes up its mind and until I have further talks with Alexander. In fact it is all as precarious and fluid as might be. This week has been theaterless, after the orgy with Herbie and Jimmie. But my hostess and I will do some theatering this week. What, I don’t know. It is strange but true that my mind tells me that I should be participating in the theatrical life here, seeing plays, also hearing concerts and in general being alive to all the interest. But to be cold-blooded honest of it, I am in a stupor and unstimulated. It will pass, I suppose. I have never really felt my age before; now I feel at least that, and really much more. I had a letter from Milly [Mitchell], who is clamoring for a revolution for our flag. I think I am clamoring more for complete withdrawal. I think with longing of quiet places and purposeless lives. Beanie, what do you make of the world, anyway? I say, not much. My love, Rayna

Three days later Rayna wrote to Helen, by this time in Zurich. It is her last letter to Helen, as far as we know. Rayna must have made some sort of appeal to Helen, as the first sentence seems to indicate. Moscow, September 28 [1927] Helen Darling: I waited and waited for an answer to my wire and just now it comes by letter from England. I’m so very disappointed that I won’t see you, at least until Christmas and maybe not then. But I know how you must [be] feeling – or imagine. I suppose the analysis is not a thing that can be broken into lightly. Heaven knows where I’ll be by Christmas. My plans were never more in the air. The Chinese movement is vague, tenuous, and here we may or may not be useful; it looks at the moment that we will not, in which case we will again be adrift, jobless. And as the years go by, I lose a little of the blitheness about it.


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All movements, I suppose, on the ground-grade are disillusioning, and this present venture has more than its share of nasty realism about people and things. I feel terribly battered. At present, I am waiting for one man to arrive and two others to make up their minds. Waiting is a thing I do badly. Bill is waiting in even less happy circumstances. He has been left in Shanghai, presumably to do a certain piece of work, but when he came to the actual discharging of it, he found that the necessary arrangements had not been made. So that he is in common parlance, left high and dry, planless and almost broke. I’m worried about him as well as about events in general, and the future. It is all too involved and I’m too wearied by it to go into it in any detail – or at all. I do wish I could see you, although I realize that the problems involved are ones I’ll have to solve myself. Not the least of them is the personal problem of Bill and me and how we are ever to make an adjustment that doesn’t drive either one or the other of us mad. I get very much discouraged at times, hopeless, and have a feeling of defeat that has its familiar reverberations. I do seem to have messed things very badly – and many times. At the moment, I’m longing to be absolutely adrift, unattached, but with a job, for long months. Yet Bill, of course, wants that the very last thing in all the world. If he comes here, and we are without definite jobs and bank accounts low, he will fret and fume and be pettish about things and people. If alone, I could quite calmly go ahead and spend the little money I have the while staying here and studying the things I’m interested in. With Bill, that is impossible. Sometimes I think of you and Dan as a parallel but, of course, it’s not so at all; there is no parallel there. Neither you nor Dan is helpless without the other. In fact, in many ways you are happier alone. Bill is different from the three of us – he can not conceive of satisfactory life except in terms of being with me, week in and week out. I don’t know what I’ll do about it, really. It is the one thing I most wanted to talk with you about. Do you know, I think I’m almost involved enough in my psychology to need to be analyzed myself – but I won’t be, of course. I’ll plunge into work instead – and it is a good enough substitute, I suppose. These past two years, I’ve been so overwhelmed by work that there’s been little time to think about human adjustments. Now they swarm in upon me again. I’ll just scout and get me another job. If only things were all neatly ended, I’d do it immediately. But there’s this damned waiting, which is hard. A city, even as western as Moscow, has a queer feeling after China. I gape at people who complain that the city is dirty; it looks almost spic and span to me – and so surging with vitality. I am just coming to realize how medievally dirty and sluggish China really is. I was talking about it


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with a friend here yesterday – a youth who’s here on a fellowship, studying modern Russian history – and comparing impressions. I happened to use the phrase selective vision which impressed him (I don’t see yet why; it’s rather obvious). We decided about [after?] some talk that in countries like these, China and Russia, one is always setting up subconscious barriers against complete functioning of the senses of sight, sound and smell. It is interesting though, that he, coming direct from America, has a feeling of withdrawal from unpleasant sense aspects while I have a feeling of expansion, relaxation. My eyes are wider open, I feel, and I breathe less nervously. Much as I like China, I can realize the cramping effect it has on one. That’s the trouble with Bill, of course. He’s aware of withdrawal, distaste – without liking it. And he’s there, while I’m here. It’s all wrong. I’m in the process of moving. Finding quarters in Moscow is a shattering experience. People are huddled, many to a room, and it’s not a matter of taste. There literally are no rooms to be had – and the hotels are impossibly expensive. Write me Poste Restante. I’ve left the hotel and am staying with an extravagantly kind woman [Mrs. Kantorovich] I just met last week. She has a baby and a maid and the four of us are living in one room. I’m frantically searching a new place – in fact must leave this minute to trail one I’ve heard of. Budapest seems terribly off the track. Haven’t you any Berlin or Vienna curiosity? But I will come any place where you say, if I’m not working – and have the fare. I, too, have cut America – you are the only one I write to – and you know how often that is. America seems incredible to me now. I couldn’t feel any identity with it again. I’m afraid – although I can’t feel identity with any other place now, I also fear. My love Rayna

In Personal History Sheean writes: ‘Towards the end of September I left Moscow for London, on the understanding that I was to return in about two weeks.’ As we know, Sheean had left for England by the time Rayna wrote to Helen. But that still does not throw much light on the sentence ‘At present, I am waiting for one man to arrive and two others to make up their minds.’ The three men were probably Borodin, Bill Prohme, and Vincent Sheean. The other two, who had not made up


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their minds, were probably Oumanski, at Tass headquarters, and the problematical Alexander. One cannot be sure. Notes of strain, indecision, and weariness are clearly audible, even though somewhat more muted than in the letter to Bill. Helen must have spoken, and then written, at length about her interest in Jungian psychology and her upcoming analysis with Jung, yet this last letter is the only one from Rayna that seems to consider, even jokingly, the possibility of following Helen’s example. Four days later there was another letter to Bill. Moscow, Sunday, October 2, 1927 Beanie darling, I don’t know when life has been so bewildering. I simply, simply can’t write about it, partly because the situation is such it can’t be written and partly because I have little heart for it. I do nothing that has purpose. There are people here – unconnected with work and China – whom I see in idiotic fashion and say words and all the time my mind goes round and round, poking about in the awful muddle of things. I wired you yesterday, following receipt of your wire, asking a repeat of mine of the 28th. I didn’t repeat it for the situation had changed. When I wired first, there seemed a chance that Tass would want you to stay in China and I wanted to know about it and inform you. But yesterday, the man said they had decided not to do it; and that’s that. There is a chance, vague, that Alexander will bring Earl [Browder] to Sha[ngha]i and the magazine will start there; if so, I think they want either you or me, or maybe both of us, on it. Probably both of us; A said something that would indicate that. Also the chief is not here yet and that may change everything. Uncle has smoothly glided out from under, on everything, the Shai bill, the arrangements for you there, which he insists were clinched in a letter he wrote before leaving, and now me. All along there have been hints about my virtual uselessness just now and a definite shunting of me out of the way. The first was when he insisted that it would create a bad impression among Chinese if I were her secretary (too much foreigner), and that I should just be NNA [National News Agency], then when it was plain to me that NNA was shelved in Shanghai, he talked to me (on my seeking it) in terms of logical liquidation at both ends. It was a neat


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piece of scuttling and I, too, am bitter. The lady proceeds her own way without more than a few words of kind concern about me. They left a few days ago for the south, not even giving me the address. And so the lefts have left us. It means, of course, that I’m on my own. There apparently aren’t any jobs at all here. If you get this letter when you are still sitting pretty in Shanghai as I am in Moscow, consider this as a fact that must be faced. On the other hand, expenses are scandalous. I’m searching a room, which is a shattering experience, and will probably have to pay at least 75 roubles [for] a vile hole. Then other expenses pile up. Everything is terrific. Yet, until there is some reason for going somewhere else, I don’t see any point in leaving, any more than I can see any point in your coming here. We would simply be flat broke here in less than no time if the two of us had to eat and sleep without an income. The nearest approach to an idea that I have is for me to stay on for a few months and pick up some material which might sell (this assuming neither the chief nor Alexander change the situation) and you going back to America, or Honolulu, or some place where it is possible to get a job. I’m sick at heart, darling. I can’t write much about it. I am trying not to be floored by the situation and truly I’m worried more about you than about me. I mustn’t be floored or discouraged before the chief [Borodin] comes – for there isn’t anyone to turn to. This alone comforts. Leaders are not a movement. And thank God. I’m in a mood of complete negativism. But I love you, Rayna

*

*

* Moscow, October 7, 1927

Beanie darling, I, too am convinced mail is not being delivered, at either end. There are gaps in your letter numbers. I’ve been awfully stupid, too, I see, because just yesterday it occurred to me I should be using the PO Box instead of the hotel. Sorry. Sorry. The situation is unchanged, but the chief arrives this noon. The whole thing has been so disappointing that I’m really not hopeful. It has been a complete shelving of us – nothing could be clearer than that. Of course there are reasons. I imagine the moneybags are slim and not much promise of ready filling. And we are unnecessary expense. Yet the manner of it has


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been so shabby. I feel terribly dumped. I have been put so completely, abruptly on my own, without introductions that might help or a single wire pulled that might make less difficult this change of status. Uncle has been most disappointing, but auntie considerably so too. It became so apparent that they really aren’t interested in what happens to us that you have that used, discarded feeling which might go well for a gown but hurts for a person. Even though the chief changes the situation somewhat, it can’t fix things up inside me. Whether he can or not, or is interested in doing so or not, is another matter. I no longer take such things for granted. But I’ll know more about it tonight. For the past several days I’ve been frantically searching a room. When I left the place where the lady was staying – both she and the people there made me feel so very, very unnecessary and obligated – I went to Mrs. Kantorovich’s. Jimmie did one good thing, introducing me to her; she has been very kind. But there was the maid, Mrs. K, the baby and I all in one room; it seemed too much; I felt even more in the way. Then someone got it fixed up for me to come to the Quaker’s for two weeks while I searched for a room. I came the next morning, to find that that plan had all been changed, too, and ever since I’ve been a doubtfully welcome camper in Mrs. Chamberlain’s room – another baby complication, heightened by a cranky, complaining, nurse. Day before yesterday I met the Veps [Dr. Sergei Veprentzev and his wife Sonia, whom the Prohmes had come to know in Hankow] – and they, now, insist that I come in with them (he is at his sister’s; I shall stay with her) until I find something. They have their present place for a month. I feel rottenly about it, but I’m going to go. In the present situation, the hotels are unthinkable – six roubles a day the cheapest and that without tax or service or meals. I’d be broke in two months if, as seems probable, there is no income. The room problem is simply terrible. They are the most awful, foul holes anyway – and there are almost none. Only two possibilities have appeared, one Knapf’s room – which would be 175 roubles for just me, room, alcove and breakfast, and one which I haven’t yet investigated, to share a room with a girl, who just returned from Geneva yesterday; I haven’t yet met her, and feel that I just can’t do it. I’m in too rotten a mood to have a young girl, all eager and frivolous, I imagine, in my room all the time. I want a cave to recover my spirits in. I am a pig to hand it on to you, who are in just as bad a fix, and that is the principle [sic] reason why I haven’t sent more letters. I’m in Moscow, true, but I’m completely insulated from interest as if I were in Shanghai. I simply can’t rouse myself to any ‘objectivity’. Days pass, for the most


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part with people in them – Mrs. Chamberlain [wife of William Henry Chamberlain, the Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor] who tells me all her baby, room and nurse troubles, Ala Kantorovich who would be a perfect comrade in less worried days, the various newspaper people here – Fischer, apache type of Jew, ruined by the ladies, treats em rough, summons them with a finger or a wave of his knife, Dense, as monotonous a man as I’ve ever met, terribly dull with a wife who is pretentious on the basis of an international point of view gleaned from a year in Berlin and four months here, Knapf (just left, who is nice in a colorless way, Kuh [unidentified], who has arrived from Berlin, and turns out to be a small moustached, dapper person with a worldly manner, Duranty, also just arrived, who is a bit precise and English but intelligent and friendly – the nicest of the lot so far. Then there is the youth White, whom Herbie E[lliston] picked up and who was a faithful servitor for a few days but I think I shocked him, as I haven’t seen him for days. And the Veps. And the Chen girls (they remain at the hotel). And Bitner, whom I meet occasionally on the street and who seems now connected with the Gosbank [Soviet National Bank] and not the F[oreign] O[ffice]. Fang has gone south with the lady and gent. The thought of him gives me chills. What in the world we should do if the chief does not straighten things out, I’m sure I don’t know. This is sure: there are no jobs for us here unless they are specially created for us. I might be able to get the chief or Alexander to give me expenses at a minimum while I studied for six months or so – but that would mean separation, and God knows where you would go. I’ve given up any idea of the two of us together here, without definite work; it is quite impossible financially. There is a chance, too, that Alexander might want you to help Earl on the magazine. That, too, is uncertain; and I rather wish it would happen for I think it would be interesting and nothing else seems either interesting or economically possible. God, what a letter. I’ll send another close after, as a chaser. This is Rayna at her worst, yes? Never mind, old dear. I get over defeat psychology quickly. There is always Honolulu. Maybe you will winter there. Maybe both of us will. Maybe. Maybe. What about going to New York? Would you go on ahead and get something for us? I have absolute suicide feelings at the thought of the two of us in the rush of it. You haven’t the associations that I have – and probably wouldn’t be so devastated. Ain’t it a mess? My love, Rayna


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Borodin, ‘the chief’, finally arrived, along with Anna Louise Strong and Eugene Chen’s two sons, Percy and Jack. Rayna was quick to tell Bill. Moscow, October 8, 1927 Billiam darling, This probably will never reach you for surely the plans will be switched and changed before it can arrive – although the only definite bit I can get so far about Sha[ngha]i is that there is no point in your coming here. The one thing that seems even ten percent definite is the chance of Earl’s operating there and you working with him. That awaits further clarification. Well the chief is here. I missed meeting his train, which makes me mad. I went down with Sylvia and Yolande who were all excited about the coming of the brothers. We were accompanied by a vague-minded, fluttering female from the FO [Foreign Office]. We got down there by one o’clock, the time the train was reported due. There the idiot inquired endlessly and was told the train wouldn’t come till 2.10. So we wandered off, to do this and that and by the time we got through with the that and back, – 2 o’clock – the train had come. We found Jack [Chen] at the station but that was all. The chief had gone on. Only the two of them came, the rest of the party to come by the next train. J and B[orodin] came by plane part of the way. And, Beanie, Beanie, there was an accident in the desert and darling Karanova was killed! But the important thing for us – us. I saw the chief but only for a while and with the crowd of family, B and uncle’s pattering. I made an appointment with him for the next morning, yesterday. There was one ironic moment when he expressed his surprise at my being here, why hadn’t I gone south with the outfit? In the presence of the nice family of C[hen], I said carelessly, ‘Oh, I thought I’d wait.’ The chief didn’t press it, sensed something, I think and hope. In the morning I came but he was all tied up with Russian correspondents, giving an interview. He told me to come back at 4 – which I did, and talked to him under strained conditions – with the interruption of one man with an interview to be checked, a newspaper photographer and the presence of the children, both broods, the other side of a curtained alcove, so that talk was low and even then uncertain. All in all, unsatisfactory. Then too, I was tongue-tied, more or less; I’ve been feeling so – discouragement about the ‘leaders’, hurt, defeat a little, I’m afraid, hopelessness. I found I could do nothing but a dry summary of the peak events. He was attentive, interested, I think,


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decent as always. He asked me what my plans were and I told him I had none. He asked me what they [Madame Sun and Chen] had said to me when they left; I said, ‘Goodbye’. It was really brief and lifeless. I told him I’d like to stay here a while if I could, but there was the difficult Shanghai situation for you, the very apparent hopelessness of supporting ourselves here under the circumstances and the hopelessness, even, of my living here for a brief while on the money I had. He asked me what I’d do, if I stayed, to which I had no adequate answer, except, which is true, that I’d like to study their propaganda system, see what had worked, what had failed and so on. The results are this. He said he could give no definite answer on anything for a few days and asked me not to worry for a while. I told him that was impossible because of your situation in Shanghai. But he said he couldn’t give any word at present, so there it was. He said that so far as he can see, there is nothing the two of us could do here – nor did he give any hint that there is anything useful I can do. He threw one question at me – did I know German; damn, why weren’t you here, instead. In the end, he said that if he could arrange it in any way, he would try to fix up something so I can stay and study for a while; then, I think, he envisages a return and work picked up; he seems sure something will clarify. I suggested I might be useful teaching perhaps, but he said it would be better to be learning than teaching, with which I heartily agree. I told him of Alexander’s idea, asked him if he thought it feasible to issue the thing there, and he seemed to feel it might be. That seems the most hopeful thing at your end. I wonder if you would like it. I rather think you would. You would be getting the contacts that are worth while, the only ones that are, and be working with E[Earl Browder?], who is very much of a man. I’ll try to see A[lexander] about it Monday. If the chief can fix it up, I can’t think of anything that would argue against staying, except the beastly separation, and although it is pleasanter to be adrift together, it is more expensive. Probably, if the E thing materializes, it would pay almost nothing, certainly not enough for the two of us, and the field there is impossible for normal jobs. There seem few alternatives. We really are a bad pair in one way – always being on the edge of finances and in precarious jobs, it is bad to duplicate each other as we do. I’m wiring you today to let you know he has arrived and that it is being taken care of, to the extent it can be. I’m still roomless. Did I tell you that I’ve been taken in in most kindly fashion by Vep and his wife. Well, I have been, and here I sit in Sonia’s room – (Vep is staying with his sister; I simply couldn’t dissuade them)


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– which is as big as our bathroom in Hankow, with a desk, a wardrobe, a table, a couch, a washstand in it. With suitcases piled everywhere. Really, it is awful, living in this city. That is one other thing, the chief said he might be able to do – solve my room problem. It seems a small thing but it is driving me mad. I haven’t been alone since I’ve been here, with my things unpacked. There always seems someone around whom I should be talking to or who might talk to me at any minute. In my present mood – moods rather – it is hell. I think in a few days I’ll simply gamble away and go to a hotel. I can’t stand this much longer. I’ve advertised for a room but so far have had no answers. It is literally true that I haven’t relaxed ten minutes since I left Shanghai, – and, as you know, there was damned little relaxation possible in the weeks I was there. Dear, I’m tired. Apprehensive, too, of the cold weather that is coming with a bang in two weeks, I understand. Sheean has promised to buy me woollens in London and bring them back, if he comes in November, or else send them by someone who will come. A number of people are coming, I understand. Jimmie seems to be touring Europe, inviting people at every booze party he attends – and he seems to have international genius at finding them – and being successfully persuasive. Duranty – whom I’ve met and like (the only really likable correspondent here; he is comfortable, intelligent, easy to talk to; you would like him immensely), – had a letter from him, which he showed me, in which he tells about it. He is trying to get Sinclair Lewis to come; it seems to depend on a passport visa for one Dorothy Thompson, for whom, Jimmie writes in his usual gossipy manner, there will be a speedy divorce in the Lewis household. I’m going to detach myself from the whirl, even if I’m invited in, which is not at all sure. I’m certainly not in the mood for it. If I can get our affairs straightened out and a minimum allowance for food and room to permit me to study for six months, I’m going to dig in and not waste time on parties and play. My mood, I think, could best be described as a combination of doggedness and despair. And so. I wonder what you would do if the A thing does not turn up. Have you any ideas, notions? Would you hate Honolulu for the winter? The chief seems so sure we can be back within a year, but god, we can’t live on air for the intervening time. One thing you might do – get to South America or Mexico, get material on the movements there, which you could correlate with the China material, do articles – make connections if you can – and try to get enough for a book. So many others do it, Beanie, with less background than you have now. Why not try? Then, if I could get what there is to get here and you could put in the months getting material that fits into the picture, also, we might build on the past two years instead of


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scrapping them and starting on something new. It is the scrapping of the only activity I’ve ever really been interested in that appals me. Well, I must go off; my appointment is broken for the morning, just now, by telephone, and I shall try to see Alexander. My love Rayna

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Moscow, [Bill’s note: ‘about Oct 11th or 12th’] 1927 Dear Beanie, I’ve been waiting and waiting for word from B[orodin] that he has decided and I’m to have an answer this afternoon – or, at least, I have an appointment with him, presumably to talk it over. I’ve seen him a few times in the past few days but never alone. He took the Chen children and me to theater two evenings – once to see Czar Feodor and once to see Twelfth Night. Both really were fine. There is much that is fine here, if only the mood were right. As it is, I continue deep dumped. The surface of my mind is taken up with the search for rooms, which continues day after day. Sometime, when I’m in a mood to see the humor of it, I’ll write it up. At present it is too serious a proposition. I am bumming around in this place and that because I simply can’t decide to go to a hotel and pay the prices. I’ve lived in the past two weeks with Mrs. Kantorovich, at the Quakers (till Mrs. Chamberlain decided she must have my room, which was reserved for Chamberlain when he returned; he got back Monday), with the Veps, in a room so microscopic that we could scarcely move in it – and Vep had to move out. Now I’m in Louis Fischer’s room. He has gone down to the Caucasus for a month and offered me his room. I came here yesterday, transferring my luggage for the nth time, very weary, and five minutes after I had dumped my things on his floor, his landlady came in and said nothing doing – something about the difficulty of changed registration of her lodger. Fischer argued with her but she wouldn’t be budged. She said grudgingly I could stay three days. That was yesterday. Today, unless Mrs. Vep has something to offer (she is investigating a room-mate proposition with a girl who is broke), I’m going to pay three months in advance (can’t get it any other way) [in an arrowed marginal note Rayna wrote ‘can always sublet’] for a room half the size of our Hankow bathroom, without any place to put my clothes except a few hooks on the wall, for eighty roubles a month. In the room are a bed,


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a table, two straight back chairs, and there is scarcely enough room left to dress in, I’m afraid. Where I’ll put my trunks I do not know. Also the woman is reluctant about letting me take a bath in the house. Beanie, I literally haven’t had a real bath in five days; not one of these places would dream of letting you have daily baths, and the bathrooms are simply unspeakable, and used by a few dozen people. Oh dear. I really have thought seriously about very little else than rooms. It is impossible to do anything when you are scattered all over the town, in people’s way (and they in yours), chasing after keys to get in or to hand on, etc., etc., etc. This is to let you know that the decision may come this afternoon. I have no real hopes of anything. In China, unless Alexander wants you to stay, nothing I’m afraid – and I haven’t heard from A[lexander] in days. Went to see him, but he was just going out. Here, absolutely nothing in the way of work that I can see. The chief may arrange to let me stay a few months and study on the chance that there will be something then; but everything financial seems hard with strict economy everywhere, and I haven’t much hope. Barring that, the two of us are footloose. I’ll wire and we’ll try to figure it out. Financially – and for jobs – the last place in the world is Moscow. Where’ll we go? Damn. Damn. My love, Rayna I’ve sent two unanswered wires to you – and most of my letters, judging from yours, seem not to arrive. I feel hopeless about that, too.

The following letter was written one week later, the day Bill left Shanghai for Manila. Moscow, October 18, 1927 Dear Beanie, I feel at last that we are going to communicate freely. You see, your things to uncle never came, not one of them, and some of my letters, I know, have not reached you, because there were things that would have had cabled answers. So I have become more and more wary about writing, for I know that your mail has been stopped in Shanghai and did not want to put things in it that would do harm, either here or there. So I have been cagey. Now – although not at this writing – I am going to put the whole thing down for you. It is quite a tale. At the moment I cannot write it for I am waiting, in the chief’s [Borodin’s] room, for the crowd to gather to go to theater. I am included usually, now that the chief and Jack and Percy have come. They treat me as a person.


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Formerly I was treated pretty much as a thing – and a thing that had served its purpose. Your wires about Manila have come. Today the one telling about the Tass and the Alexander possibilities came. Strangely, in the envelope with it, sent over from Tass to the hotel, was the wire Rover [Vladimir Rover, Tass agent in Shanghai] sent Tass. I think it is a mistake. Rover’s first word is ‘Prohme’ and I think they didn’t read it, just sent it on to me, thinking it is for me. I am sending it over to them in the morning, it was too late today. Also in the morning, I will see H[arrison] G[eorge]50 (EB’s [Earl Browder’s] playmate) about the Alexander thing. HG, you remember, went down there [Shanghai] and did the organizing for it. He went on from there to Australia and sort of rounded up the whole job. I think it will be best to see him before I see Alexander. He has more of a line – and it is personally easier. I have a half of a room. A room-mate has the other half. It sounds rather worse than it is. In fact, it is decidedly all right because the room-mate is a darling – a joyous, half-sisterly person of about 35 or so, resourceful, protective, terribly interested in seeing that I get enough to eat and am comfortable. She is as delightful a person as I’ve met in a long time [Liuba Michaelovna Zacher, a teacher of languages]. She speaks no English, only German and Russian. Darling, we communicate in German! She teaches languages and is teaching me German which is a mad notion when I should be learning Russian. But she likes German better and I simply can’t understand Russian, not even a little bit, not yet. The chief says I must learn and Vep has been assigned the job of teaching me. But I am not hopeful about it. It is such a godam language. It never sounds really like words, whereas German really does. So does French. Even Chinese sounds words. But not Russian. I must go. Tomorrow there will be a long circumstantial letter which will tell you all the things I have been piling up this last month, a good bit of it not so good, but some of it, on the other hand, not so bad. Good night, Rayna

The following letter mentions the project proposed by Borodin of writing an analysis of what had happened in China in 1925–27. Rayna did start on some of the writing but the document she worked on seems to have been lost or destroyed. October 19, 1927 There will scarcely be a decent letter today either. Again I am waiting for the chief [Borodin] – this time to keep one of those maddeningly postponed


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work appointments. They really are pretty terrible. Postponement follows postponement. He has started me presumably, on a long report of the past two years, in which he is, presumably, to help me. But although I’ve given him an outline and come on time several times to appointments, it halts there, and there seems nothing to be done about it. I can’t make up my mind whether it is confusion or intent or simply indifference. I’m considerably unhappy in the whole situation, increasingly so, I think, as time goes on. Yet there is some interest and I may stick. But it is not easy. Disorganization – and, probably, the worst of it, the intrusive Anna Louise [Strong] always coming in. She ferrets out tasks for herself and is amazingly successful at browbeating people, even the chief, into giving her stuff. Your letter came this morning about the FO [Foreign Office] business in Hankow. I read it to uncle who seemed not too interested. I don’t think he gives much of a hang about what happens, not even to his own people – perhaps especially to his own people. That would seem to be indicated by his treatment of us, surely, which is incredibly shabby. He is, at the moment, seething with anger at Sheean for the article, ‘Some People from Canton’ in the October number of Asia. He pitches into Chen in great style, making him appear an opportunist windbag. It has elicited a violent reaction. Chen returned here two days ago from the south and last night he asked me if I had seen the thing Jimmie did in Asia. I said yes. He sputtered about these half-educated American journalists, saying he was tempted never to see a journalist ever again. Then when I told him Duranty wanted to see him, he said maybe he’d see him, asked me if Duranty wasn’t an Englishman. He apparently didn’t think or didn’t care about the slur involved. But I am insulated against anything he can do by this time. There was great hurt a few weeks ago. Few things I think could hurt me now – and there are few things I’ll ever be naïve about again. Well, it is a tale that must be told from the beginning. The chief is at present eating with a man giving a report in Russian at the table. I type in the corner. It is not an atmosphere conducive to confidences. I wonder what you will be doing in Manila. It is cold here already and I shiver. The devil of it is that I foolishly trusted Sheean, who arrived here without a lot of money. I let him take some and he was to pay it back by buying me some warm things in Berlin or London. And, of course, he will. But I hadn’t figured that it would be cold so soon. Also Jimmie is a selfish beast. I asked him to send things in with the first person who came through and Huston [unidentified] is here, telling me he saw Jimmie in Berlin and Jimmie said he had things to send to me, that he would bring them over to Huston – and never did. A thoroughly irresponsible person, thoughtless. He is so much like Raph, in his faults, that I find myself angry


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at him in an almost historical way. Curiously, he sensed this when he was here. The first night, when he arrived very tight and insisted that I go to a cafe when he had promised to take me home, he looked at me suddenly and with a touch of sobriety (we were in a droske) asked me why I had that ‘long-suffering’ look on my face. Even the comment was reminiscent – and the look, I imagine, was well described. I am angry, because my ankles are cold. Yes, old dear, you need not worry about my covering myself amply. I am all set for it. I have bought a new coat, by the way very ugly – for 110 roubles, and am going to buy big Russian felt boots. My plan for warmth is adequate – most people think excessive. The coat is made out of material that is as rough as an army blanket, and the same color – I think it is an army blanket, really. It has fake seal collars and cuffs and is padded about an inch thick all over so that I look very tubby in it – particularly as it is double breasted. We saw Romeo and Juliet last night. I have seen considerable theater and find that interest in technique is not enough to overcome the irritation at not being able to understand the words. So I’m going to concentrate on music. But already I am surfeited. I’d like warmth and a fireplace and friends. Which I may get at Christmas time, if I accept Helen’s suggestion of coming to Zurich for the vacation (warmth, because I’ll not go outside of her pension, if I go, just sleep and read and talk). She offers to pay my fare if I’ll come, and unless the work seems more urgent than it does at the matter [moment?], I’ll surely go. It would be wonderful to be perfectly at liberty to be expansive again, just talk simply, naturally, honestly. It is something I miss terribly, terribly. I think I’m a damned rotten person for politics or intrigue or competition of any kind. Percy is uncertain what he will do, as the whole family seems to be. Percy most. His family is in London and the poor man is regretting keenly his wife and progeny, particularly progeny, I’m sure. Jack is going to enter an art school here, I think. Sylvia is in a dancing school and seems not too impressed by Moscow’s offerings in training. Strangely enough, she finds it difficult to discover a place where she can learn typically Russian dancing, the kind they have in Chauve Seuri [Chauve Souris, a popular variety show], or however that is spelled. Chen hangs desperately to his ministerial manner and would be pathetic, if I felt in a pitying mood. He is obviously not happy. Madame Sun is still in the south. I reserve judgment on her for a while, although I’m not glowing any more – not at all. In fact I’m glowing about nothing in the world just now. My impulse, as I say is to quit and come and join you in the contented stupor of the tropics. But it would be a bad move, I know, fatal to my disposition when I’d become restive again. You will no doubt have


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work there. I think there is possibility of both the T[ass] and Alexander thing developing. I haven’t heart for work now. Really it seemed to us in Shanghai that I was the one to be envied. Beanie, it is not so. Except for this, I’d be wishing you had come – you would have stood things less philosophically even than I have. You would have fretted, fussed, fumed and probably been sick. Whereas I’ve just gone sort of dumb [numb?] inside and lived on with all senses contracted so that I was experiencing nothing intensely. It is a protective capacity people have: I’ve never used it so consistently before. They are still talking. I don’t think I’ll wait. Damn it. Sit under a palm tree and bask for me. My love, darling, Rayna

Anna Louise Strong’s desire to take over the writing of the history of events in China – a move that so annoyed Rayna – was probably a consequence of her discussions with Borodin during their escape from China. Borodin had spoken about the disaster that had overtaken the Communist Party in 1927. In China’s Millions Strong quotes him as saying: The big bourgeoisie can never unify China because they are not really against the imperialists; they are allied with them and profit by them. The small bourgeoisie cannot unify China because they vacillate between the workers and peasants on the one hand and the big bourgeoisie on the other and, in the end, go over to the latter. The workers and peasants did not unify China because they trusted too much to the small bourgeoisie.

Borodin never repeated such a statement publicly after reaching Moscow. If there was any accounting to be done, it was Borodin, as Stalin’s representative, who was to blame for the collapse of the Communist Party and its destruction. The tragedy had left a legacy of despair and opened China to the rapacious rule of the Kuomintang and its armies. There had been no ‘fundamental change in society … merely a change of government’, and for this the Chinese people paid dearly. *


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The next letter, written one week later, contains the first explicit mention of the symptoms of what was to be a terminal illness. 7 Bolchia Demetrivka, Apt 29 October 26, 1927 Beanie darling, For days now I’ve been nearly crazy with the same sort of neuralgic headache that laid me low in Hankow. It came to me Monday – this is Thursday – and I’ve been almost mad since. Incessant pound, pound, pound. Day before yesterday I went to a doctor, who sent me to a masseur, who tried to do what Wendt did – and failed badly. All that day and yesterday it kept up even worse than it had been before. But as the masseur said it would be so, I stood it till this morning, when I went to B[orodin], who sent me to another man, who gave me what I wanted – some drug to kill the pain. And now, comparatively painless, I am waiting for the masseur to come for the second treatment. They both say it will all be over in a day or two and now that I have something to stop the pounding, I really do not care. It has delayed a long time, however, the long letter I’ve been storing up – and also getting in touch with HG [Harrison George]. That I’ll do tomorrow, if the pain is still dormant. I’ve tried to get him on the phone, without success, and simply haven’t had the heart to go over to his place – by tramway and whatnot, a fairly long distance. I simply won’t go out when I’m almost blind with pain. But the letter. That is another thing and here it is. An indication of the present state of things might be the casual meeting I had with E[ugene] C[hen] in the hotel corridor this morning. He came along with Yolande who came up naturally and a bit cordially to greet me. C[hen] nodded vaguely as if I were someone in his acquaintance but that was about all. And to tell the truth, I’m too cynical about it now to mind very much. I remember an evening vividly in Peking, just before he left for the south. I was getting out the paper in that first office – the house Ray Marshall used to live in (did you ever see it, I wonder). EC had come in and we had chatted, about me probably joining him later, etc., etc. There was a sort of a comradeship, glow about it that warmed me greatly. And as he left the room, he turned around in quiet but dramatic manner and said, ‘The K[uomintang] never forgets.’51 I remembered that little bit of acting today when I met him in the hotel corridor in Moscow, where he has brought me and washed his hands of me. He hasn’t as much as asked where or how I


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am living, since his return from the Caucasus, nor if I am broke, nor what you are doing. Not the slightest indication that he is interested – and, of course, he is not concerned. For that matter the lady is not either. That is an even harder bump. There was so much protestation in her manner to me, so warm, almost sisterly. The last time I saw her, she was quite lovely. She expected to leave that evening. She had my address, which she said she would surely use and let me know where she was, how I could reach her by letter, and what she was doing. She also, incidentally, had my telephone number, where I was living then with Mrs. Kantorovich, after being eased out not too nicely from the place where the lady was living – hints, you know, about their needing the room and they had heard I was leaving, and was I? The lady herself made these hints. Well, after I had said goodbye to her, on the assumption that she was leaving that day, she did not go (I found out later by accident), nor did she go for two days after. But I did not hear from her, nor have I had a line from her since she has been away. When C[hen] returned, after the chief [Borodin] had arrived, I saw him and supplied the information, unasked, of your whereabouts. He said absently ‘ah yes’ in his usual tone. That was all. I would go into the long details of it for you, were I feeling better. But I can’t. Particularly since between the above paragraph and this one, I’ve had a most unsavory row with as shrewish a landlady as ever lived, in the course of which I lost my temper violently and toppled out of the halting German in which we communicate to the most plain-spoken English, the words of which passed over her but the meaning of which was so unmistakable that she told me I must remember I was an American and must not forget that I am in Russia, to which I neatly replied that she had better remember a little that she is a representative of this Russia to the world. It was a neat exchange, in which she did not understand any of my apt retorts, so that they were not of much use after all. It is terribly complicated, all to do with this everlasting problem of living conditions. You see, I got a room, a tiny hole, with a room-mate to boot. I have utterly no complaints to make about the room-mate who is very much of an angel. But the room is so small that the two of us can scarcely get into it, much less could I do any work in it. Well, as you know Sheean left me with a commission to find him a room for November, a commission I didn’t take too seriously. However, when I discovered that my little hole was next door to the rather decently sized room at rent excessive for me but not so much for Jimmie which I had looked at some weeks before, I rented them for Jimmie, figuring that I’d work in them till he came – which would give me two weeks in which to find some other place to work in. But a few days afterward, B asked me where I was working and I told


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him I’d rented rooms for Sheean and was using them until he came. B instructed me immediately to take the rooms for him and find something else for Jimmy, said he couldn’t do a thing in the hotel because of too many interruptions. He is threatening to start with me – if he ever does; I have little faith – a full account of the last four years, as he has seen it. He said these rooms might be ideal to work in. He came over immediately to see them, liked them, and then muffed things badly by telling the shrewish French landlady that he would take the rooms, not Sheean. He did this sort of in the Hankow manner which assumed he could do what he wished. The shrew didn’t much care for it, but there was the power of a name; it holds here, too; and she didn’t too much object. So the arrangement which we finally made, just the two of us, as B has been very busy and unable to come since, was that these would be work-rooms, for which the robber is charging 175 roubles a month – the same that she charged Knauth [unidentified] for the free use of the rooms, bath, etc. Well, it went well, with much grumbling by the madam until this evening when I had a masseuse come in to see if she could route the damned headache. The shrew came in here, screeched, stormed, scolded, said she had rented the rooms for work, not massage, that she wouldn’t let me have a massage in them and all in all screamed so that she nearly drove me mad; my head began spinning and I ordered her in my most unmistakenly angry tones out of the room. We had considerable altercation which on her part lasted on and on and on, the while I was having a massage which naturally did me damned little good. She tells me I must get out in the morning and I tell her I’ll get out if she returns half the month’s rent. What will happen in the morning I don’t know, but it has been such a sharp encounter that it has driven everything except the thumping out of my head. God, Moscow is a great place. It really is pretty awful. The job that I might do with B is the only fairly bright thing on the horizon. And that has little kick, for AL [Anna Louise] is constantly hovering about trying to get a corner on all work connected with China. She is the world’s best go-getter and I have neither the ability nor the heart to compete with her. Somehow or other, she makes all contacts with B or anyone else seem a cheap affair, because she fawns and maneuvers so for them. I can’t participate in such maneuvering and the very thought that I might in any way be considered similar makes me shy clear of any possible similarity. I am tempted sorely to flee to Zurich and the peace of Helen, and may do it. Helen writes, offering me a Christmas present of the fare. I could do it, you see, and then afterwards take my 750 stake, which is still mine and come direct to Manila, or wherever you are. And


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this I shall do, unless the work with B materializes. I’m going to have a showdown with him in the morning; either we start or I quit. Oh, Beanie, dear, what a letter and what a life! The thought that you are still in the world is the only thing that keeps me going. Truly. My love, Rayna

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7 Bolchia Demetrivka, Apartment 69, October 30, 1927 Beanie darling, The headache is almost all gone and it leaves me as exhausted as I’ve ever been in all my life. I am simply played out. I want to sleep and do it in the most unexpected places. Last night B[orodin] had a theater box party. God, you would have loved it. A most magnificent performance of Carmen – such stage settings! I have little anterooms with sofas in them. I was so groggy with headache and dope the doctor had given me that I dropped on the sofa and went sound asleep. I was sorry, too. It seemed a good party – Scott Nearing [an American socialist], Larry Sears (do you remember him from Peking, a YMCA man, slightly lame?), Anna Louise, a man who seems well-known to most people, and whom, I suppose I should be able to place – Dana [unidentified] here from NY, and the children, Sylvia and Yolande. After the second act I went home. I slept the whole night – the first night in five. And today am almost alive. Today I went to see Harrison George. I gave him the word that you are in Manila, which he will pass on to Alexander. I am worried about you. What are you doing, why? Your wires puzzle me. Why are you sending them through Tass? It makes it very embarrassing for us, because of the job situation. You see, I asked them about the Shanghai proposition – the roving commission business, which didn’t materialize. And later they informed me that they were sorry, that they didn’t see how they could use you just now. So when this Manila thing came up, I didn’t want to go to them myself, because it would seem like job-begging. So, as I told you, I sent them [Vladimir] Rover’s wire, which had come to me by mistake. That was entirely clear. Rover said in it you were available in Manila, and that he could reach you, if they wanted him to. I had nothing to add to that, except a personal repetition, which would not have been good, in view of the previous negotiation. So I have said nothing about it. But your wire, which Anna Louise, damn her,


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held up in her room for three days – has puzzled me. How, why are you wiring through Tass? And what, pray tell, is your cable address? It can’t be general delivery. One doesn’t wire to general delivery, I shall go to Tass tomorrow to see if they have an address for you; then I shall wire. Meanwhile I fret. I hope you are not just twiddling thumbs in Manila. That is awful. I’ve done so much twiddling myself since leaving Hankow. It is maddening – and the salary is on a par with the twiddling, it seems. Although, I suppose I’ll get expenses somewhere, somehow. In fact I am sure of it. Nothing really new happens here that can be reported – not for our crowd. People are coming for the celebration, I hear. Sinclair Lewis will be here, I understand, among others. I have met no one particularly exciting yet, however – and in all have met very few people. It is growing cold. I think of Manila. Really, I am in a semi-tropical mood and would adore lying on a beach. I wonder if you will get any of that, in connection with enough work so you won’t be eternally fretting. My dear, I don’t like this, not at all, not at all. I think life is very bad to us on the whole. We really have little time together that is calm, happy, undisturbed time. What is it all about? Oh dear, what moods I get in. I really think it is the hangover of the headache. Else what? God knows the place is interesting enough – if only I were interested instead of sapped. My love, Beanie, Beanie, always, Rayna

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*

7 Bolchia Demetrivka, Apt 69, Moscow, November 2, 1927 Billiam, Your letter of Oct 9th – of course 8th Shanghai – has just come. I’m sending you a wire tomorrow. [A marginal note: ‘It just occurred to me today that I can wire you T Randall; I’ve been puzzled, not knowing how to reach you’]. After holding up your wire 3 days, Anna Louise [Strong] to whom it had been delivered by mistake at the Metropole, gave it to me 2 days ago. It troubles me greatly because I do not know what to do at this end. I’ve explained it in my last letter. I can’t very well go myself to Tass; it would be no use. They know all about it from Rover, as I know, because the wire he sent to Tass was sent to me by mistake. I sent it back to them. You see, when they were considering the roving commission idea, I asked


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them point blank about it. But this time the suggestion comes from China, not from them – and to press the matter at all would be equivalent to announcing to them that you’re in need of a job. They know you’re in Manila, that you would be glad to work for them, and can be reached through Rover. There’s nothing I can add that would help; on the other hand it might [?]. Similarly, with Alexander. The same thing has happened there. When I found out you were let out in S’[hang]hai and A[lexander] had mentioned that he had thought you could [words illegible] followed that through – and in the end got a message from A through Hans [unidentified] that there was nothing doing at present. So I don’t want to go to him again and ask point blank on another suggestion – this time from us. I’ve seen Hg [Harrison George] – three days ago and explained to him that you are in Manila and, of course, will gladly do anything A wants you to do. I asked him to tell A – and he probably will do so quickly. He himself seemed very much interested. But now there is nothing to do but wait until they say something. I’m going to keep in touch with HG because I want to go with the visiting Am[erican] delegation to the celebrations – and HG is guiding them about. He’ll certainly mention it if A mentions it to him. B[orodin]’s wife’s [Fania] here – came yesterday – a little thinner (not enough) her hair cut entirely short (I understand she came through as a man), a very important manner. She reminds me more and more of a powder [sic] pigeon, all puffed up and strutting. She was nice to me in a slightly superior, off hand way. I’m infinitely glad she’s here. He needs her desperately to take charge of his meals, to see that he sleeps, etc., etc. She pretends to a greater usefulness, which I doubt that she has. But her role is a particularly necessary one for a man like B – he’s so much an at sixes and sevens man about his own life. Tragically so, really. I find that even now, with your move, I’m restricted about letters. Damned difficult. Of work – I’m working directly with B who’s trying to do an analysis of the last two years. What it will mean in salary, I don’t know but no doubt enough to live on. So far this month, I have only 80 roubles to report – made that on an article in the Pioneers – I’ve done also a long piece (not finished yet) on White Terror – and that may mean more, I assume there will be something also of a regular salary – but haven’t been told so in as many words. I’m in such a queer half-alive, half-cerebrating state – living in the middle distance. Do you remember the first day of the paper in Hankow when I came home rather frantic because my


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mind was playing tricks on me – I remember suddenly not being able to remember things and people. Pete was one of the people. He came in – and for the life of me I couldn’t locate him. Mark [unidentified] also. I was doing something – but I couldn’t quite figure what. It had no immediate past or future – just a present. I’ve been in that mental state a great deal since I reached here. Once was when Sheean was here and I met him and – curiously enough this same William White whom you mention in your letter today. (He is a bit disappointing.) I was at the Sugar Palace then and came down to the Metropole to keep my date (I knew I was to go to the Metropole and meet them, but what we were going to do was foggy). I did meet them and had to beg headache much of the afternoon to hide a real confusion of mind. Since then, this sort of thing has happened every once in a while. It doesn’t bother me much, really, for I get into a frame of mind in which nothing is much defined – but it is puzzling and I know what it is, of course – weariness, strain. It’ll probably pass as I get a bit rested and work becomes regularized. And I always seem to know the immediate present – so won’t go wandering off like an inebriate or an idiot. To tell the truth, I suspect it is more or less hysterical (in its medical sense; not emotional hysteria, of course). There are so many things in the immediate past that I do not like – and the future is so uncertain. I think my mind, all by its own little self, puts itself in a vacuum where these things do not exist. It’s a likely explanation at all events, isn’t it? Kenneth Durant [New York correspondent for the Russian News Agency] is here – but not EE [E. S. Elliston of the Central News Agency]. He left a card for me last night and I went over to see him today. EE was held up by some work at the last minute. KD looks ghastly, very thin, haggard. But I like him. This evening I had dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain. They’re very unexciting, I can’t really like them – although she’s better than he is – much. As a matter of fact, I think I could like her, if she weren’t so absorbed with a baby. I scarcely feel that one gets through to her at all. She, by the way, seems disproportionately fond of me. He’s just too limp. Oh, Beanie, Beanie, I wish, I wish, I wish you were here. I’m going to kick over the traces, if we don’t arrange it before too many months go by. Curiously, you know, my latest experiences with the lady and uncle make me feel uninterested, in fact a slight aversion, to returning. What can one tie to. Of course the answer is simple. One can tie to the only elements which amount to anything in this movement – the elements we never really knew. But the particular pegs upon which we pinned faith


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enthusiasm and loyalty, can’t hold up anything any more, can they? Only one, maybe TyT,* and even there, I wonder. My room-mate has gathered a gang in here – and I am so tired; I want to go to bed. At the end of the month I’m going to get me a room alone – despite the price. So that’s that. I wonder what – if anything – you are doing in Manila. I wonder if you went down on this slim Tass hope. I hope not. I think it’s mighty slim. And the A hope even slimmer, I’m afraid. If there is work, it probably will be very interesting but never give you eating, sleeping and clothing. I’m sure of that. Maybe there are other things in the P[hilippine] I[slands]. I wonder. I hope. If there is, I’ll probably join you, as [soon] as this present job is over – and I go somewhere for a peek at Helen. The rest – nichevo. I love you Rayna

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* 7 Bolchia Demetrivka, Moscow, November 9, 1927

Beanie darling, I have seen a demonstration in the Red Square and I can’t say I have ever seen anything more impressive, and yet crowds and crowds and crowds overwhelm me and I am more stunned than impressed. The big day was Monday. Since then there have been many things, but since the chief is the man who should have arranged for me to see these things and he is not particularly interested in meetings, etc, for me, I have seen just about absolutely nothing else of the things that are going on. To be perfectly truthful I haven’t made a great deal of effort to do so, as I’ve * [GB] TyT was probably Teng Yen-ta, who left China in Madame Sun’s entourage. A communist sympathizer, he had been an organizer of the Huangpu Military Academy, its dean, and a director of its training department before associating himself with the Left Kuomintang. He was the first to dissociate himself from the Wuhan government (of which he was a member) after it adopted an open anti-communist line. He returned to China in 1930 to launch the Third Party that favored socialism but not the dictatorship of the proletariat or the class struggle. The Third Party opposed the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. Teng was executed by Chiang in 1931.


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been recovering from the two weeks of headache and also as I’ve been worried about you. It has distressed me and is a steady undercurrent. I haven’t had a single word from you since the cable saying you had arrived. I don’t know what you are doing. I sent a cable to you but got no answer. I do not understand and am fretting about it so much that everything else merges into the background. You will want news and there is damned little to give. Madame Sun is back. I had been harboring hurts because I had not had a line from her, but she tells me she has written and from what I know of the mails, I can well believe it; so the hurt is gone. That happened just this morning and it has had a startling effect on my disposition. I suppose I had been brooding a bit. I am doing very little work, but things are falling into place a little bit. It has been so completely disorganized so far and I have been laboring under this wretched cloud of headache and foggy mind. My mind is queer, Beanie, sometimes I think actually not right. Do you suppose I could be getting dementia precox or some other mental disease? Else why should I have these maddening lapses of memory? I can’t make it out. My mind goes wandering off into the most irrelevant fancies and I don’t seem to be able to check it – nothing worth thinking, just repetitive stuff, a thought over and over, or two thoughts, disconnected. I really am not functioning normally half the time. Scott Nearing is here but I have scarcely seen him. Many other people are here, too but they all belong to particular delegations and I am in none of them. Things go on – and I read about the Taiping rebellion, for the chief. He is going to do a good piece of work, I think, if he ever gets down to it. When that will be, God knows. I wonder about you just about a third of the day. What are you doing in Manila? If I don’t hear in a day or two, I shall wire again. I find it hard to go on this way, uncertain, not knowing, without plans or reason. I am studying in the times between but with a very hazy mind. By two people, one of them the chief and the other a very anti, I’ve been told in the last two weeks that I am in desperate need of background. When I examine my mind, I have to agree with them. I must study, but seem out of the rut of it. It comes hard. But there is a desperation shoving me – very like that I had after I was emerging from the cloud of New York and unhappiness there. The last two years have been so full of things. In so many ways, I feel growth; in so many others, utter stagnation. Do you have that feeling, too? I wonder. I am getting books and in spare minutes I am going to try to make the mind work again. Whether it will or not, I don’t know. I feel that it is ageing – on the downgrade. You will think


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that foolish of me, but really Beanie, I am not as young as I once was, in looks, brain, spirit, anything. I have a feeling of definite age when I am with very young people – 20 and 21, or even more. It comes on me all of a sudden. I never felt that before. I never used to feel that these people in the twenties were babies. I do now. Do you suppose that in a few years, say ten or twelve, all people under forty will seem children and we’ll be calling people who are uncles and aunts, the girls and the boys? There are bald spots on many of the men who seem to me mere youths now – and the women have wrinkles. I have a few myself. I shall move as soon as a few of the delegates leave the hotels. I simply cannot stand rooming-houses any longer. The problem of getting a bath, of food, of community rooms of every kind, of having a room-mate around and whole rafts of people in the rooms next door rather staggers me. I’m worn out. I must have a room – and a quiet one – all alone. I can’t stand it otherwise. Chang Ke is helping on the job. We are all friends again, and I do believe he feels me perhaps the best friend he has. He is a queer youth, groping his way, rather rebelliously to God knows where. I really do not see where he is coming out. He is considerable of an individualist. The person I see most of just now is Kenneth Durant who is an intelligent, calming man to have around. Complete peace with him. I can understand why EE [E. S. Elliston] likes him so much. I see him usually at breakfast hour. I have been going over there every few days for breakfast – at 9.30 and we sit around and talk. I learn a lot from him – and also from Albert Rhys Williams [an American journalist who had known John Reed], another mature, intelligent, calm man. I like them that way – it describes you, too, Beanie. As you know. Sheean, on the other hand, canters about in typically Raph manner. I see him a lot, but never seriously. He is a philanderer, but not with me. He has been in London where he has had a heavy flirtation about which he does not hesitate to talk. In many ways, Jimmie is Raph plus; in others, very decidedly Raph minus. There is one thing he does not have – Raph’s really soft streak, which is one of the things that makes him a good memory. Jimmie is kind, but hard. He knows what he wants and is very sure he will get it. Raph never really knows what he wants for more than a minute at a time and has broad streaks of humility which are absent in Sheean. I never can help but think of the two of them together. They are so much alike in so many ways. I can’t decide which has the better mind. Sheean’s is ever so much better furnished, but it hasn’t the capacity for depths of feeling – which is Jewish, I suppose. He is sophisticated beyond words. I can’t imagine him weeping at anything. Whereas Raph can weep at many things. This, by the way, is very silly talk. I am writing this letter


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lickitysplit, putting down whatever fool idea bumps into my head. I am going out for dinner, which is a bit of an occasion. Durant is having a party – only a few people, I understand, but I’ve put on the Paris suit and the top of the Japanese pyjamas we bought in Shanghai – it makes a stunning blouse – and my goldstone beads and have done interesting things with rouge. If you were here, you would certainly kiss me and I should have to stop writing. But if you were here I wouldn’t have to write my kisses on the typewriter, so there wouldn’t be anything to interrupt. No, I made a mistake. The nicest male in town is not KD [Kenneth Durant]. It is Jack [Chen]. He is in art school now, and is doing good work, I think. I grow more and more fond of him. He has a graciousness I have seen in few human beings and it is possible to talk with him and to a very young person but without bending down to him. I say again – I wish he were my son. But he isn’t. No one is. Beanie, I have to quit and beat it. I send you a long row of kisses, to be taken before and after dinner. My love, Rayna [Marginal note by Bill: ‘Recvd March 1st [sic], at Paris, forwarded from Manila by R Gould’].

This heartbreaking letter below did not catch up with Bill until three months after Rayna died. But it is not yet the last word. There is an unfinished handwritten note on the back of which Bill wrote: ‘Found in pocket of coat – undated. Probable date early in November before 14th.’ Dear Beanie, I’ll start my letter to you on this, for I have nothing else. I’m very little – so little. For five days my head’s been pounding with that same kind of neuralgic headache I had in Hankow. I’m nearly mad with pain and all the difficulties of Moscow are exaggerated. I’m all upset. But I think it is mainly pain. I’ve adjusted in a way to living conditions. It is all very much involved. I found that there is absolutely no hope of getting quarters such as you’d take for granted in other places. My standards went lower and lower. I still resisted the hotel – which is 180 roubles a month minimum. Now I’m almost wishing I hadn’t altho I think it will be all right – and even perhaps a bit better than that – when it’s straightened out. I live in a microscopic room with a room-mate who is a darling but hard to speak to in German.


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I have still learned no Russian – and am beginning to wonder about what I now recognize as a decided resistance to the language.

This is the last piece of writing by Rayna that has so far come to light. The headaches and memory lapses she mentions repeatedly in her last letters were actually symptoms of a very serious organic disorder – symptoms that, before the Moscow days, had occurred at widely separated intervals. But there had been signs of something radically amiss at least as far back as the Berkeley days, when she had periodically suffered devastating headaches. The physical strain and psychological tensions of the last months in Moscow aggravated the disorder to the point of no return. Rayna died before the month was out. The most complete firsthand chronicle of Rayna’s last weeks and death was supplied by Vincent Sheean. There are four (even five, if one counts a few passages in Dorothy and Red) separate accounts by Sheean that form a poignant composite picture, rich in detail. Three appeared in print, the earliest of which is the lyrical piece published in the February 1928 issue of The Matrix (to which may be added a number of shorter obituary notices). The second, a day-by-day report, appears, thinly disguised, in Sheean’s novel Gog and Magog. The following pages draw extensively on the fullest printed version, in Personal History. A fourth account, earlier and more immediate than any of the published ones, is contained in two private letters that Sheean sent to Helen Freeland, while she was still in Zurich. The first was written on the day of Rayna’s death; the second was sent off some six weeks later, from Paris. Moscow, November 21, 1927 Dear Miss Freeland, I know that you must be waiting anxiously for word about Rayna’s death. If any of us had known how very serious her trouble was, we should have telegraphed you several days ago to come (in spite of Rayna’s prohibition). But as a matter of fact nobody even suspected the extent and seriousness of the trouble until Saturday (the day before yesterday).


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Rayna was here, as you know, with Madame Sun Yat-sen, Mr. Borodin, Mr. Eugene Chen, and the other leaders of the Nationalist movement in China. She arrived September 8, or thereabouts, with Madame Sun, from Shanghai. She was apparently in perfect health and very good spirits about a week later, when I arrived from China. I am a newspaper correspondent and knew Rayna in Hankow. I left Moscow for London, was gone about five weeks, and returned on November 7 – two weeks ago today. During the first of these two weeks Rayna seemed, for the most part, all right, although she gave signs of exhaustion and some nervousness. On Friday, November 11, she fainted for the first time, in the room of a friend (Miss Dorothy Thompson, special correspondent of the NY Evening Post) but recovered in an hour or an hour and a half, and was able to attend a meeting that night. On the next afternoon she collapsed completely, while she was talking to the leaders of the Chinese Labor delegation here. She was removed to the room of Anna Louise Strong, the American writer of whom you have no doubt heard, who is a friend of hers from China. Rayna passed a bad night, but was much better the next afternoon and asked me to countermand the cable she had wished sent to you. I did so, and have been sorry for it. However, Rayna improved during the week. On Friday (three days ago) she was particularly sprightly and happy. At no time has she left her bed except for the journey to her bathroom, a few feet away; but at the same time we all thought she was suffering from a simple nervous collapse which could be remedied by time and rest. The doctor in charge of the case was Dr. Link, the German Ambassador’s physician, who is considered the best foreign doctor in Moscow, and who had the additional advantage of being able to talk English to Rayna. He, as we now learn, had the strongest suspicions of the true nature of the disease all along. He did not wish to make a positive statement, however, under [until?] Rayna was in condition to be subjected to an examination by the brain and nerve specialists. At first a stomach disorder (of the nature of ptomaine or autointoxication) impaired the possibilities for the doctors; they were unable to tell exactly how the brain was affected, and how far. The stomach disorder disappeared by about Friday, but on Saturday the brain disorder became more marked; Rayna began (in the evening) to lose control of her senses. Yesterday (Sunday) morning she was a good deal better again; but in the afternoon (at about 2:15, I should say – I was there) she sank into a sleep from which she did not again wake. Towards nine in the evening she spoke again, but it was not possible to tell what she was saying. This morning at about ten minutes to eight she died.


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A qualified medical nurse was in attendance, and we have arranged for an autopsy which will be performed tomorrow at the University clinic. It had been arranged (after we saw yesterday afternoon that Rayna’s illness was not nervous, but organic) that today she was to be removed to the Kremlin Hospital, one of the best in Europe. In the Kremlin she was to have had, at noon, a consultation of the very best specialists. However, we learn now that nothing would have done any good. It appears that Rayna suffered from an abscess on the brain. The autopsy will show whether it was really an abscess or a tumor or a cancer. The doctors believe it was the abscess. It must date from many months ago; death came when it ate through to the medulla oblongata, they tell me, to the nerve centers which control the heart. This seems very probable as until a few minutes (ten or twelve minutes) before her death her heart was quite normal. Miss Anna Louise Strong, Hotel Metropole, Moscow, is taking charge of arrangements for Rayna. I sent cables today to you and to Raph because Anna Louise was busy with the registration formalities. If there is anything else you wish to know either I or Anna Louise would be very willing to tell you. One thing I wish you to know is that Rayna did die among friends – among people who were fond of her, who knew her and loved her and did everything they could do for her. Madame Sun Yat-sen, Mr. Borodin, and everybody else here – all of us, in fact – feel her death as keenly as if we were very old friends, like yourself. We hope you will know that we have done everything we could for her. Very sincerely yours, Vincent Sheean By the way, Anna Louise telegraphed Bill today through Randall Gould, a friend of all of us, who is in Manila. Bill is supposed to be in Manila too. We are somewhat worried as to Bill’s state, but the best we could do was to telegraph to Randall. Randall can break it to Bill far better than any cablegram could do. I hope you won’t mind my writing this on the typewriter. I am more used to the machine than to writing ordinarily.

A footnote contains the official signed autopsy report of November 28: ‘Hyperaemia and clotted blood infiltration in the Pia Mater and Dura Mater cerebri (meningo-encephalitis non-purulenta) and also the softening in the brain substance in the Ponte Varolii.’


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The meeting Sheean refers to in the second paragraph was a session of the Congress of Friends of the Soviet Union, organized to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution. The session is described in Gog and Magog and Personal History.52 During that late night session Sheean, after losing sight of Rayna in the crowd, found her again ‘deep in conversation with Comrade Roy, the head of the Far Eastern section of the Comintern’ – that is, M. N. Roy, the Indian communist Borodin had met in Mexico and with whom he had to work later in China.53 What Sheean did not have the courage to tell Helen is that between the time Rayna had fainted in Dorothy Thompson’s room and the time she and he had gone off to the Congress, Rayna had consented to a ‘bourgeois evening’ – a night on the town of dining and dancing; but Sheean made up for the omission by describing the ‘bourgeois evening’ at length in both his novel and Personal History. In both those books, and in his memoir Dorothy and Red (that is, Dorothy Thompson and the red haired Sinclair Lewis), he describes the funeral that took place three days after Rayna’s death and how he went to pieces afterwards, fleeing Moscow as quickly as he could.54 Sheean’s second letter to Helen, written some six weeks after the first, gives an even more moving description of the funeral and of Sheean’s subsequent flight. January 3, 1928 Dear Miss Freeland, I arrived in Paris today from Italy and received your two letters (one of November 21 and one of November 23) addressed to me at the Hotel Savoy in Moscow. The letter of November 23 contained a check for two pounds, which I shall cash tomorrow. I had already ordered flowers for you when I received your telegram in Moscow, and by a strange coincidence I had ordered the exact amount you wanted. They were very large yellow asters in an enormous basket, and they stood at Rayna’s feet. I have frequently thought – particularly during the past two or three weeks, when I have been more or less myself – what a low skunk I have been not to write to you. I intended to write, indeed I did. But you probably do not know exactly how, to what degree, in what way, Rayna’s death


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affected me. You were her best friend – she loved you more than she did any other person on earth, without exception – and no doubt you have had a pretty hard time about it all. But you were not there. I was, and it knocked me out completely. I was in a more or less quiet state the day Rayna died (that was the day, unless I am mistaken, when I wrote to you) but the day following that I went all to pieces, off the head more or less. I was unable to write any more to anybody, and to this day I have not been able to bring myself to write to Bill. I stayed in Moscow until Rayna was cremated and then I took the first train out, although I had intended to remain all winter. I went to Berlin and stayed awhile, and then I went to Italy for a month. I am now more or less normal again. I tell you this not as a piece of exhibition, but simply to excuse myself for not having written to you. I couldn’t; I wasn’t in a fit state to write on that particular subject to anybody. I adored Rayna. I have quite despaired of making anybody understand just how, or in what way. I am afraid Bill Prohme (who must have arrived in Moscow a few days ago, from Manila) will receive a false impression about this, as almost everybody else there did. I knew her in China and was (like many another person) subjugated completely. I met her again in Moscow in September, when I was on my way back from China to Europe, and I was with her most of the time while I was in Moscow. I went to London for a month, and then returned to Moscow on November 11 [a slip for November 7]. Rayna was then rather worried, depressed, and subject to headaches. I spent practically all of my time with her. She lived across the hall from me. We were very good friends. That was, of course, all; but Moscow probably thinks differently. I speak of this only because I don’t know (or know only too well) what the people who were in Moscow at that time will say or have already said about this matter. Bill Prohme remained in Shanghai when Rayna came to Moscow with Madame Sun Yat-sen. He then went to Manila, where he was when Rayna died. I believe I wrote to you exactly how she died. I probably did not tell you that I was with her all the time. I sent you both those telegrams, at Rayna’s dictation: one telling you to come, and one telling you not to come. I also sent telegrams to Raph. [Pencilled in the margin: ‘Do not tell Bill this. He would be very hurt, I think.’] Rayna told me a great deal about all of her life during her last week. We used to talk for hours on end. I know all about Berkeley, and how kind you were to her, and how much she loved you. She also spoke much of Dan, who had, she said, the best mind that she had ever known. She talked very much more about that period of her life – before she went to China, I mean, than of any other. On the Friday before she died she was in high spirits, and I stayed in her


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room, talking, until half past two in the morning. That evening she told me an immense amount (and generally funny things, too – dear Rayna) about Berkeley and you. Stories, you know. About how the weather was very bad at a certain place in California where you had gone for a holiday, and how you enquired if something could not be done about it. That sort of thing. All of the people she spoke about during that last week – her father, her mother, her younger brother [Lewis], Raph, you, Dan, and others – are as real to me as if I had known them. I wish I could see you some time to tell you anything you want to know. I do not know exactly what you want to hear. I am a newspaper and magazine writer of sorts, and travel a good deal. If I am ever in or near Zurich I shall come to see you and we may talk. Again and again during the last few days Rayna spoke of going to Zurich. I was going to take her out to you as soon as she could travel. That was our final arrangement. We had hoped to leave Russia in a week or ten days. But she died so very suddenly. You have no doubt seen the newspapers, which gave details. The autopsy showed that she died of inflammation of the brain, a condition which had been chronic for at least six months and was quite incurable, as it was complicated by a hardening of the arteries of the brain. The whole case, according to the Russian specialists, was extremely rare and curious and quite incurable. A part of the brain was kept at the second Moscow University for study. The funeral took place on November 24. The procession formed at the clinic and marched clear across the city to the crematorium, with the military band playing the revolutionary funeral march. Madame Sun Yat-sen (who had been ill herself for ten days) walked every step of the way, with her motor car following the procession. She is a wonderful woman, and was devoted to Rayna. Madame Borodin, Eugene Chen, the Chen children, the Chinese students in Moscow, American correspondents, American labor delegates, and Chinese labor delegates, as well as many Russians, also marched. It was a distance of more than three miles, through snow, and almost barbarously lugubrious. I went away from Moscow as soon as the cremation was over, and know nothing further about it. Bill was to start from Manila immediately, and I suppose he is in Moscow now. I have received no news from him or from Anna Louise Strong, the American woman correspondent who took charge of everything. My permanent address is the Equitable Trust Company, 23 rue de la Paix, Paris. Do you ever come here? I should like to see you. Sincerely yours, Vincent Sheean


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Not long after Sheean had sent off this second letter his piece appeared in The Matrix.55 In it he reverts to the comparison with John Reed that Anna Louise Strong had already developed in her speech at Rayna’s funeral. Sheean seems to echo Strong, saying that Rayna’s contribution to the Chinese revolution was greater and more direct than that of her prototype, John Reed, to the Russian revolution. Then, speaking of the Nationalist News Agency, which Bill Prohme had directed in Peking, Canton, Hankow, and finally Shanghai, Sheean pulls out all the stops. Historically the work of the Nationalist News Agency, which the Prohme’s directed, must be considered to be of great importance. At the time of the Nanking incident56 the agency was very effective upon American public opinion, and it would be no exaggeration to say that it did more than any other one factor to stave off intervention in China. Mr. and Mrs. Prohme were loyal collaborators in this work as in their lives. Her life was like a flame, like a star. This was, probably, the rarest and finest of her gifts – she animated and aroused all those who came near her. The late Li Ta-chao, founder of the Chinese Communist Party, who was strangled in Peking last April, used to admonish his disciples to ‘take example by our comrade, Rayna Prohme’, to learn from her how to be brave, to be steadfast. Merely to see her in a Hankow street – valiant slip of a girl with her blazing head held high – was to be aware of the existence of gay courage in the stream of experience. Most impressive to many who knew her was the fact that no economic pressure, no personal experience of social pressure, no consideration of personal advantage, drove her into a revolutionary career; she was impelled into it by conviction, and she gave it all she had, demanding nothing, holding back nothing. If she had lived she would have become a member of the Communist Party, one can scarcely doubt. After a long discussion of this step, a few days before her collapse, she ended by saying: ‘It seems to me the only real choice we have left in the world as now organized is this – what do we want to die for? If you are willing to die in the effort to maintain what exists, and what is obviously wrong, that is one thing; but you may choose instead to die in the effort to create a slightly better world.’ Well, she made her choice. And a little of all of us was burned with her; a little of all the brave joy of the world is gone with her to dust and ashes. Yet it is quite true that such a life can never utterly perish.


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In the rice-fields of Hunan, in the textile mills of Shanghai, in Peking and Moscow and New York, there are no doubt people who will dare to live more courageously because of Rayna Prohme. In this we can give back (dim, tarnished mirrors!) some flicker of the light once given to her – some shimmer of our Rayna, flame and star.

Clearly, death in no way dampened the passion that was ignited on the day of that ‘first strange and fatal interview’ seven months previous in the streets of Hankow. Meanwhile, Bill Prohme was preparing his eulogy of Rayna. He had gone from Manila to Moscow as quickly as available transportation allowed, and as soon as he reached there on December 19 he set about visiting all the people who had been with Rayna, most of whom he had himself known in China.* Fortunately, Sheean was no longer there; but most of the others, including the Borodins and Anna Louise Strong, were. Bill visited all the places where Rayna had stayed and worked in Moscow, and he too wrote to Helen, whom he had known in the Berkeley days. His letter to Helen was written at almost the same time as Sheean’s from Paris, so Helen must have received both letters in Zurich, one right after the other. Bill’s letter, even though incomplete in its present state, is very long. It is an almost embarrassingly insistent paean to the * [GB] In a personal communication, Professor Tom Grunfeld explains the circumstances under which Bill Prohme travelled to Moscow after Rayna’s death: ‘[He was able to do so] only because he asked Rayna’s father (a man he had never met) for a loan of US$1100. Bill also wrote a 40,000 word novel about Rayna – undoubtedly to counter Sheean’s book – in 1929 while in a sanatorium in Arizona. He then destroyed the manuscript. Bill didn’t just commit suicide, he did so on the anniversary of Rayna’s death after writing his obituary the night before and sending it to his editor entitled, “Obit for William Prohme – Hold for Release.” His ashes were sent, as to his wishes, to be buried alongside Rayna’s ashes in Chicago. The source for [this information about] the money is a series of cables between Bill Prohme and Joseph Simons, including a receipt for the money, which are in the Rayna Prohme Papers held by her family. [See] Carolyn Marx, “Book Mark for Today,” Honolulu Advertiser, undated clip in the William Prohme Papers held by his family and in Randall Gould, China in the Sun, p. 21.’


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post-1924 Rayna. He writes to Helen: It came to me, the other day re-reading your letter of 28 Dec, that you are constantly thinking in terms of the Rayna of 1924, when you last saw her … Helen, really the Rayna of 1926 and 1927 was a different, a much more wonderful Rayna than the girl we all knew in Berkeley. She was an enormously expanded personality, much more matured, yet miraculously retaining that youthfulness of manner, that altogether wonderful charm, that certain arresting quality in her glance, that twinkle that indicated the sense of humor behind all her seriousness, which has always been hers.

Bill goes on to document his claim that Rayna had turned into the perfect ‘revolutionary instrument’, far outstripping him in dedication and effectiveness. Yet the sources suggest that Bill had become tyrannically dependent on Rayna, and that he was a hopelessly incomplete person without her: ‘I did, I do see perfection in her. She filled a world for me.’ But Bill had not, any more than Sheean, said his last word about Rayna. He set about composing a ‘round-robin’ letter headed: ‘RAYNA SIMONS PROHME / A report of the last months of her life / by William Prohme’. It opens thus: ‘The following is set down for friends of Rayna in various parts of the world. Its aim is to give in outline the picture of the last months of her life, which ended at Moscow, 21 November, 1927.’ Naturally, Helen was a recipient of this report, which sets out a succinct – and revealing – summary of the events leading up to the dispersal of the Kuomintang’s Hankow contingent. Rayna and I had been working with the Nationalist movement in China since the fall of 1925. We had been in Peking, in Canton and finally in Hankow, editing papers for the Nationalist (Kuomintang) Party and handling the telegraphic press correspondence for it. When the reaction started in Hankow, in June and July, 1927, it was planned that Madame Sun Yat-sen, Eugene Chen, Rayna and I should go to Moscow together to await events in China which would make our return possible. One by one we left Hankow. We had joined forces again at Shanghai by mid-August. The departure for Vladivostok, en route to Moscow,


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was set for August 22. A few days before that date it was decided that I should have to remain at Shanghai in order to keep Madame Sun and Chen informed of political developments in their rear, and to disseminate cables Rayna would send regarding their activities, speeches, statements. The decision was a profound shock to us. We debated the matter for many hours, fearing that the uncertainties in the situation might mean an indefinite separation. Our association with these two leaders had been very close. We had always seen the general situation eye to eye. We had been their friends, they ours. To get out now might seem like ‘quitting’ in the midst of difficulties. There were many reasons why Madame Sun, especially, wished Rayna to be with her. So we finally bowed to the decision, despite its harsh personal significance to us. Thus it came about. Rayna left with the party early in the morning of August 22, by ship for Vladivostok, where the Trans-Siberian Express was boarded for Moscow. This was reached September 7. Within a fortnight after reaching Moscow, Rayna was informed by Chen (and cabled the information to me) that all work would cease at the end of September, due to lack of funds. Rayna had sufficient money to carry her for six months, so she decided to remain in Moscow temporarily to work out, for Borodin (who had been Russian High Advisor to the Kuomintang Party, and had quit China July 27), a report on the previous two years of the revolution in China, in relation to its proletarian phases. Since living expenses in Moscow were high, and since it seemed unlikely to her that we should both be able to get any income-paying job there, we decided by cable exchanges that I should seek a job somewhere in the Orient and, at the end of her six months in Moscow to go on to Europe and, thence, back to America; or be close at hand in case the Chinese situation changed in such a way as to make the resumption of our work possible. This latter possibility was ever present in our minds. Accordingly in mid-October I went to Manila and there got a job. Manila is less that three days from the China coast. Its accessibility to China was the point for choosing it. There, on the night of 21 November, I received the cable from Anna Louise Strong which told of Rayna’s sudden death. I left on the first available boat and reached Moscow 19 December. There I went to all the places Rayna had lived in, saw the people with whom she had become acquainted, the doctors, etc., etc. What follows is an attempt at reconstructing the picture of those last months of her life.


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Bill goes on to give much the same information as Sheean’s published account and Sheean’s two letters to Helen. Bill’s round-robin letter says arrangements for Rayna’s funeral were made ‘by Anna Louise Strong, a Russian named Voloshin of Borodin’s personal staff, and Vincent Sheean, steadfast and loyal friend’. How much was Bill Prohme aware of the depth of Sheean’s feeling for Rayna? Overwhelmed by grief, he probably did not pay much attention to the Moscow gossip that must surely have reached his ears. Nor is there any evidence that Bill reacted strongly when, scarcely two years later, Sheean published Gog and Magog. Bill would have had no trouble recognizing that ‘Sheila Rudd’ was Rayna. But in Gog and Magog Sheean caricatures himself in all but name as a kind of wistful gigolo satisfying the needs of a highly-sexed imaginary Russian diva named Terschelling, while Sheila Rudd exists in a realm apart and is removed from the scene by death. The novel seems not to have attracted much attention, for Sheean himself recognized – in Personal History – it was a bad novel. But when Personal History appeared – a straightforward, unfictionalized narrative giving the real names of all the dramatis personae – everything changed, especially since it became a best-seller. Bill Prohme could not have ignored it even if he had wanted to. He vented his wrath in letters, one of which reached Sheean in the same mail-delivery that brought him a letter from Helen Freeland. He sent Helen the following reply. Naples – or near Naples: Santa Maria la Bruna to be exact above Torre del Greco September 24th [1935] Dear Helen, I think it must be all right to call you that; I did for a long time, anyhow, without knowing you. I want to thank you very earnestly for your letter. I needed it for a lot of reasons, one of which was that this very day, with your letter, came one from Bill Prohme. Bill has written to me several times this year, and


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each letter seems more anxious to destroy me than the one before. I quite understand how hopeless any attempt to write about RP would seem to him, but just the same the things he rakes up, the things he says, give me nervous prostration for days on end. If your letter had not come today as an antidote to his, I am sure I could have done no work at all, all day long, and probably none tomorrow either. He has the knack of paralyzing me, for of course he knows exactly what to say to do so. He says I have made a tawdry, melodramatic picture of RP, that I’d have done far better to tear up the book, that such a vulgar exhibition must have been written under the influence of drink, that it is a disgrace to Rayna, that I have made her the victim, etc., etc. He may have said the same or similar things to you, so I won’t amplify. But as you can readily imagine, a letter as friendly and cool and thoughtful as yours – and coming, above all, from you – made all the difference today. Bill’s violence usually has an extreme effect on me (especially since his illness makes it impossible for me to reply in kind) but today it missed. For which I thank you. What you say about what might have taken place if Rayna had recovered and gone to Zurich has often made me wonder, too. You know that I wanted her to go to Zurich; I had been harping on that subject for days; it was only after she was already very ill that she consented to do so; but neither of us knew how ill she was, and it all seemed quite possible. I thought of you in those days as a kind of solution to all problems, an ally, a haven, a source of strength, a place, a person, everything; your letter (the one in which you said something about how lonely it must be ‘out there in the midst of all those damned forces’ – remember? Or am I misquoting?) made me think so, as well as all the things Rayna told me about you. She talked an immense amount about you and Dan in her last week. I think she too would have felt safe if she could have got to you. Fact, I know it. About Anna Louise (and this is strictly between us): she is a fine woman, but overpowering isn’t the word for it. Nervous energy, physical strength, etc., etc., and a quite unbridled enthusiasm for every Communist fact or fancy. She nearly drove Rayna to distraction during that last week. This in spite of the fact that Anna Louise was overwhelmingly kind, efficient, and good. It was something Rayna couldn’t help. She used to say to me: ‘For God’s sake get Anna Louise out and keep her out; I cannot bear having her in the room’. I did so as much as possible, but of course AL was very much there most of the time, or large parts of the time. For God’s sake don’t repeat this; I’ve told nobody but Bill about it; it seems rather hard on AL, who really meant so well and did so much; but the unfortunate woman has such a blustery character that one can’t bear being with her much. I


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shared to the full Rayna’s feeling about her, and was ashamed of feeling that way (as was R). But there you are. AL’s persecution mania (if that’s what it was) was hardest of all to bear. Perhaps she has changed. In those days she thought everybody was in a conspiracy to make life difficult for her. She was terribly nervous and over-wrought, and broke into hysterics at any moment (long before we knew R’s illness was so serious, so it had nothing to do with that – it was only self-pity and a kind of morbid fixation on Borodin). I somehow don’t think you’d get on very well with Anna Louise. Aside from all these other things, she has a remarkably superficial mind, given to statistical information of all sorts, surface materials, and incapable, usually, of going half an inch deep, except perhaps in things regarding herself. I distrust her reasoning and her conclusions, because I am familiar with the clerk-like statistical skimming of her mind. She once wrote a book in thirteen days – her book about the Chinese revolution [China’s Millions, which tells the story of Anna Louise Strong’s escape from China with Borodin]. That shows you what I mean, perhaps. I hear her last book is very good [I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American, a kind of political autobiography published in 1935], but haven’t read it – or, in fact, anything else much, this year; I’ve been working so hard on my own new book [Sheean’s novel, Sanfelice]. Is Jean Lamont, or Dell [unidentified] as I suppose I ought to learn to call her, out in California now? If you see her give her my best. I am married now – since a month – and living here on the flank of Vesuvius, working on my new book. My wife read your letter and was very pleased that it came today. She also gets rather upset over Bill’s missives and knows that they absolutely destroy me for work or anything else. Funny thing, isn’t it? The effect Bill has, I mean. He is not a particularly intelligent man, and I know all about his relationship with Rayna – all about it; a fact which I would never dream of telling him – and I know that he knew and understood nothing of her last phase. Yet a violent, angry, vituperative, childish letter from this rather stupid man, who is very ill and obviously not quite himself, has the power to paralyze me for good chunks of time. What I have always respected in Bill is his sincerity, his all-of-a-pieceness, and as a part of that – the greatest part – his love for Rayna. That is perhaps why what he says affects me so much, even though I know why he says the things and realize just what they are worth. Hours I’ve spent writing to him, trying to diminish his bitterness somehow; but of course it can’t be done. It’s a hopeless task. If he were well I could make short work of him; but he is ill, and I have to take everything he says and turn the other cheek. What I can say in justification or excuse makes no difference to him. If I could write really fully, all out, and tell him the exact mathematical truth of


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what I think and believe, the argument would soon end; but that I can’t and won’t do, of course, to a man who is said to be dying of tuberculosis. Is he really as far gone as he says? I suppose so; it has been such a long time; and I hate to think of him dying with such horrible bitterness upon him. You know, I thought he was quite cured; until the book came out and he wrote to me, I had no idea he had had a relapse. When he last wrote to me before that (two or three years ago) he said he was finally cured. I suppose ‘finally cured’ can never be said of anybody with that disease. Anyhow I’m sorry for all this so far as he is concerned; if I had foreseen it I could have held up the book [Personal History], but some day or other it would have had to be written, anyhow. Thanks again for writing. A good word from you and Dan means a great deal. If or when I come to California I certainly shall come to see you. We have a lot to talk about. Sincerely and gratefully, Vincent Sheean [Handwritten in the margin of the first page:] My address is the American Express Company, Naples. I told Bill today that I’d had a letter from you. I didn’t say what was in it except that you didn’t seem to have exactly his point of view …

Sheean had married Diana Forbes Robertson on August 24, 1935 – one month to the day before the date he wrote the letter to Helen. The Sheeans settled in Italy for a while. Sheean came to love Italy more and more and spent his last years there. As for Bill Prohme, more than two months before Sheean’s letter to Helen, he had dictated a short letter to her from Honolulu. It fills in the picture rather ruefully, and one can only conclude that he was even sicker when he wrote the devastating letter to Sheean that arrived in Naples with Helen’s. Bill Prohme committed suicide later that same year. Leahi Hospital Honolulu, Hawaii 12-VII-’35 Dear Helen, I was astonished to have a letter from you sometime back. As you probably heard through Berna, I have been messing around in TB sanatoria practically all the time since I started in Switzerland in


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1930. There have been two intervals of being on my feet and about, but they were not intervals of what you would call normality. I have been particularly ill since shortly after returning to Honolulu and resuming work on a very small three-hours-a-day schedule. I threw a great many haemorrhages and had some extraordinary heart attacks (racing pulses), but managed to remain on this side of the Styx. I have been in the hospital here now for a little over seventeen months, and it’s beginning to be rather monotonous. The only thing I do is read and digest my food. I have done a very small amount of book-reviewing, and, when I first broke down, editorial writing, but otherwise my hospital stay has been practically non-productive. I should be greatly interested to hear what you and Dan are doing these days. How is life in the double barracks on the hill coming along? Do you still worry about each other’s complexes? Or have you outgrown that sort of infantilism and begun to be interested in the social and economic realities of the world? I was visited yesterday, very briefly, by a Chicago psychiatrist who knew Rayna in high school and at college, and knew the family in Chicago very well. He is connected, I believe, with the medical school at either Chicago or Northwestern. A nice sort of egg he seems, but probably full of psychological jargon. I am looking forward to some further talks with him, not about his specialty, but about his knowledge of Rayna at school. He was here on holiday. You have probably heard that TT Waterman is down here, and even participating mildly in politics to the extent of taking a political job. As I said, it would be nice to hear from you again. Salud

The letter is typed, with the heading and illegible closing and signature pencilled in. There is no clue as to who the typist, ‘eh’, was.


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8 Afterword

All Rayna’s immediate associates in China and the U.S.S.R. outlived her – in some instances by many years. Bill Prohme was the first to follow Rayna in death, though even he outlived her by eight years. But as early as November 1931, when Bill wrote the following poem, he knew his time was up. death day the symphony was over the magic of significant sound came to that longest interval which is the end grey emptiness is the silence like a mid-sea fog and living now means waiting for death

After his melancholy pilgrimage to Moscow, Bill tried repeatedly to resume his journalistic work, but each time he was interrupted by a tubercular relapse. After briefly knocking about in Europe following the Moscow interlude, he ended up in a Swiss sanatorium. Then it was back to the United States, with the same pattern of brief reprieve followed by longer and longer relapses. The last stop was Honolulu, where he and Rayna had spent much happier days. In the Honolulu hospital the haemorrhaging became so violent that no one could doubt that the end was near. Medicaments sent to him by his faithful friend Dr. Max Pinner helped Bill to shorten 158


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the final throes. He committed suicide in November 1935, but not before sending Grace the ‘Trans-Siberian letters’ he had received from Rayna. Grace survived her older sister by more than 50 years. Though she never saw Rayna again after leaving Peking in October 1926, the two sisters continued to correspond, though somewhat irregularly. There can be no doubt that her year in Peking had a big effect on her subsequent behavior. Her political awareness was aroused by Bill and Rayna, but the impact made by Wilbur Burton, Bill’s assistant at the Nationalist News Agency, may have been even more decisive. Grace left Peking to continue round the world, eventually returning to her native Chicago. Less than a year after Rayna’s death, Grace married Wilbur Burton, whom Rayna had so cordially disliked. Burton had followed Bill to Hankow and, like Bill, fled to Shanghai when the Wuhan government collapsed. In Shanghai, he was hounded by the Municipal Police and forced to leave China on August 23, 1927. He returned to the United States by way of Japan, looked up Grace, and married her in Atlanta, Georgia. But the lure of China was so strong that they returned to Shanghai as soon as they deemed it safe to do so. Burton did journalistic odd jobs. Grace had trouble finding work. After a brief spell as an employee in the Shanghai bank, Grace was taken on at the offices of the Agence Havas, thanks to the good offices of another American, Alexander Buchman. Buchman had made contact with Frank Glass, a Trotskyist from South Africa, and sympathized with the Trotskyist cause. In the meantime Grace’s marriage to Burton was on the point of collapse when she met Glass, and they became lovers. Grace returned to the United States in 1937, for health reasons, maintaining her contact with Glass. They married in 1940 – in a hasty visit by Glass to the United States to secure an immigration visa for himself. One week before Pearl Harbor Glass secured a berth in the last ship to leave Shanghai. He joined Grace in Los Angeles where they spent the rest of their


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lives. Grace died in 1985, Frank Glass in 1988, both in their eighties. Of the other associates of Rayna and Bill, Vincent Sheean, as we have seen, came to play a very special role. After his flight from Moscow, Sheean went on to pursue a very active journalistic and literary career for almost half a century. During World War II he served in the United States Air Force in Southeast Asia – an assignment that briefly took him back to China. After many more adventures, including witnessing the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi at The Birla House in Delhi in 1948, Sheean settled down in the United States. Shaken by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, he and his wife moved to his beloved Italy, to Arola, where Sheean died in 1975 aged 75. Eugene Chen proved to be a real survivor. He continued championing anti-imperialism vociferously, serving as advisor on foreign affairs to various Kuomintang re-groupings off and on through the years. He predicted the war between Japan and the United States and was among the first leftists to denounce the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. His last years were spent in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong and Shanghai. Ostensibly outspoken to the end, he died in Shanghai in 1944 aged 66.57 Mikhail Borodin never recovered politically after his return from China. He had known Stalin in the early days and had never been sympathetic to Trotsky’s position; so Stalin did not immediately persecute him but kept him in reserve as a convenient scapegoat for the failure of the China policy for which Stalin was chiefly responsible. If Strong’s quotation of Borodin (in Chapter 7) is accurate, it would seem that he came to view the class forces in China in similar terms to Leon Trotsky. It would also reinforce the impression that Borodin had sized up his own dilemma with ironic lucidity. There is no record that he ever repeated this analysis once he was back in Moscow. Borodin’s biographer


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says that his failure to attend Rayna’s funeral was on orders from above. Shortly after Rayna’s death, Borodin collaborated for a time with Anna Louise Strong on an English-language newspaper, the Moscow Daily News. Louis Fischer, who knew Borodin well, has left a sad vignette of him during that period: I was present once in Borodin’s office in the Moscow Daily News when an American radical, a lad of twenty-three who worked on the paper, came in. Borodin scolded him for falling down on a story. The American argued. Borodin became angry. The American yelled, ‘You can’t talk to me that way’. Borodin yelled back. They both waxed hot. Borodin finally threw his hands above his head and shouted, ‘Get out of here. You’re fired’. The great statesman who had ruled millions at war and moulded big Chinese minds to his will could not manage a cub reporter.58

From 1934 to 1939 Borodin was chief editor of the Soviet Information Bureau, but with no real power. Most of his collaborators from the China days died in the Stalin purges of 1937–39 or even earlier. Then came World War II, when Stalin had more pressing matters to think about. Events finally caught up with Borodin in 1949, when he was arrested. He died in detention in 1951. According to Philip Jaffe, his imprisonment was the direct result of his association with Anna Louise Strong and the enduring pro-Chinese, anti-Chiang Kai-shek sympathies he shared with her.59 Others assert that he was simply caught up in the anti-Jewish campaign of Stalin’s later years.60 Anna Louise’s own fate was perhaps the most extraordinary of all. Although she tried, in the most quixotic ways, to remain a faithful Stalinist to the bitter end, she was briefly incarcerated on spy charges, in 1949 – the year of Borodin’s arrest – in the infamous Lubianka prison, and then deported. She traveled about for a time and then, in the fifties, made her way back to China and became an ardent Maoist. She was accepted in the inner circles and was one of the few foreigners to accompany the Red Chinese forces to Lhasa when they took


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over Tibet.* She remained in China until her death in 1970 aged 84, when she was given an official burial in Peking.61 As for Madame Sun Yat-sen, after World War II she returned to her anti-Chiang position, and in 1949 she was elected to the honorific post of Vice-President of the People’s Republic of China. She was virtually untouchable, weathering even the Cultural Revolution. She died in 1981 in Peking, where she was honored with a full-dress state funeral. At the other end of the line, Helen Freeland died in 1956, followed seven years later by her husband, Dan Gibb. These close associates of Rayna over the years are a motley group, but almost all of them fell under her spell in one way or another. Her great attraction seems to have been an unusually disarming openness and spontaneity. The most completely captivated were Bill Prohme and Vincent Sheean. Both viewed Rayna as a model revolutionary, while finding her irresistible as a human being. Bill came to view her as the perfect ‘revolutionary instrument’ that he would like to have been but felt he never could be. For Sheean, the purity of her dedication to the revolutionary cause took on tragic coloring, for in spite of his admiration for that purity he felt that total commitment to the communist cause would destroy Rayna. Her letters to Helen, Bill, and Grace are so undoctrinaire that it is difficult to imagine Rayna in the role of a committed Party member. Even when she is depressed, a fundamental human spontaneity comes through, and there is almost always at least a residue of blitheness, to use her own word. Blitheness is a quality that is hard to imagine in a ‘perfect revolutionist’ in Lenin’s – and Bill Prohme’s – sense. Yet it was probably this same blitheness that led her to join the Chinese revolution in the first place. In the statement she made in the article she wrote on her way to China in 1923, in which she spoke of * In a personal communication, Professor Tom Grunfeld points out that Anna Louise Strong was not with the red forces when they took over Tibet. Instead, she was in a group of Beijing-based journalists that visited Tibet on an official tour after the fighting was over.


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a five-year stay in China to help bring about orderly change, there is an immense buoyancy and an equal naïveté: qualities that made her flame burn so pure and bright. The flame comparison seems to have occurred to all who knew Rayna well. For Sheean, the comparison almost became obsessive, beginning in the Matrix article and culminating in the unforgettable account of that last ‘bourgeois evening’ – the night on the town at the Bolshaya Moskovskaya Hotel, prior to going on to the Congress, less than a week before she died. She was only a thin girl, with no particular stature or figure or conventional beauty, but her appearance was at all times lighted up by her expressive eyes and the glory of her hair. The red-brown-gold of her short curls gave her the look of a lighted candle when she wore the gold dress from China. It was cut severe and straight, Manchu style, with a collar, and was made of very plain silk the color of dull gold.62

It seems a most appropriate final image: Rayna’s coppered hair flaming at the top of a dull gold Chinese sheath; for, no matter what she might have become later, had she lived on, death immobilized her in the posture of one who had given herself unreservedly to the Chinese revolution. In a letter written by the indefatigable Anna Louise Strong to Rayna’s mother immediately after Rayna died, Strong tells Mrs. Simons why it is impossible to grant her request that Rayna’s remains be shipped to Chicago. (Her ashes did eventually find their way there.) Strong’s implication is that Rayna’s remains really belonged in Moscow, because it was felt here that Rayna died for the Chinese Revolution (the strain thereof probably hastening her death, even though the cause was organic). The students of the Sun Yat-sen University [in Moscow] are demanding a procession in her honour; and the Chinese delegation which came to the Tenth Anniversary of the Russian Revolution were the last people to talk with her except for those immediately attending her.

As we know, the Chinese students’ demand was met and Chang Ke, who had special reason to express their feelings, spoke for them at the funeral.


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That the Chinese students had to make such a demand says something about the atmosphere in Moscow in the autumn of 1927. Less than two months after Rayna’s death Stalin exiled Trotsky to Alma Ata. To what extent were the ‘Wuhanites’ aware of the growing impact of the Stalin–Trotsky conflict? It is hard to say, but it is reasonable to assume that Reubens/Fang, for instance, was aware of it. On his return to Moscow, Borodin could not have been long in sensing the extent to which he had been downgraded and blamed for a failed policy he had tried to implement. But making him a scapegoat may have been a reason to keep him in the dark about major developments inside the Kremlin. And what about Chen and Madame Sun? Both were outsiders: and once in Moscow, they were shunted off to the Crimea. Madame Sun’s fragile health was a convenient excuse. But why did Chen have to go along? As a watch dog? And was correspondence between Madame Sun and Rayna purposely not delivered? It was all very murky. In a telling phrase she may well have used, Rayna was given a royal run-around. Her depression over the Wuhan fiasco was shared by almost all the refugees. There was little understanding of what had gone wrong, and some refused to see it as more than a temporary setback. Nonetheless the hurried departure from China disillusioned Rayna. Even more deceptions were to follow on the train to Moscow. Here Rayna saw people under new conditions – people once in authority but now seemingly unable to explain their position to crowds that had assembled to meet the ‘heroes’ from China at railway stations along the track. Rayna’s feeling of bewilderment and even despair deepened in Moscow. Financial support was progressively withdrawn; Eugene Chen was unsupportive, and even Madame Sun seemed to turn her back on Rayna. At every level she felt deserted, and her hopes that at least Bill would get a post in China turned to dust. To make things worse, the housing


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situation in Moscow was hopeless. Rayna never found proper lodgings, and all the while she suffered more and more from an unexplained illness. The trek from building to building in a city that seemed to turn its back on her was hardly bearable. These were circumstances in which Rayna had a desperate need for people she could rely on. Vincent Sheean was at hand, at least part of the time; and though Bill subsequently criticized him for sapping Rayna’s strength by arguing with her into the early hours of the morning, the fact remains that Sheean – who realized the seriousness of Rayna’s illness no more than anyone else – stayed by her side to the last. There remains the question of Rayna’s relationship with Bill. The letters to Helen are revealing. The earlier ones – those from Peking and, especially, Canton – speak at length about marriage and her relationship with Bill. She complains about a propinquity she found stifling. Part of this can be explained by the crowded quarters in which she and Bill and Grace lived in Peking, with Bill frequently bedridden and people coming and going. The physical arrangements in Hankow were more satisfactory, and Rayna’s comments on Bill and her relationship with him become more up-beat. Their dependence on each other seems to have increased with the mounting pressure of the crisis that developed in Hankow. By the time they had to flee to Shanghai, it is clear they wanted to stay together, and deeply resented the Fang–Chen maneuver that separated them. Rayna’s subsequent letters to Bill have the ring of complete sincerity. She needed him, and she said so. But as her health deteriorated and the job-and-housing situation became ever more desperate, Rayna began to have doubts about everything including her future life with Bill – misgivings she voiced in her last letter to Helen. But the subsequent letters to Bill leave no doubt that, there and then, she needed him very much. Bill needed her even more, and it is perhaps his overwhelming dependence on her that made Rayna fearful. Would they have worked things out? No one can say. But during the China


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years, no matter how great the strain at times, they needed and complemented each other. Sheean in one of his letters to Helen says that he knew ‘all about [Bill’s] relationship with Rayna – all about it’. Just how much did Rayna disclose to Sheean? We can never know, but surely it would be unwise to take the word of a man so headover-heels in love. He wanted Rayna’s affection and, since he himself had become profoundly disillusioned in the U.S.S.R. and its propaganda, he wanted to keep this woman he loved from becoming a professional revolutionary. He sensed the desperation Rayna felt in having to make a choice. She had been told by her one-time hero, Borodin, to write an account of what had happened in China. How much of that account, if any, was written? It would make fascinating reading … But Rayna had to satisfy Borodin, who had to satisfy Stalin. Borodin told Rayna that she had not properly understood the situation because she lacked a sufficient background in political theory. Sheean also thought Rayna needed more background, but for the opposite reason – so she could be more critical of the official line she was being fed. Borodin’s criticism was particularly ironic, since he himself had been trapped into being the agent who implemented the failed China policy. The episode was tragically absurd, though Rayna had no means of knowing how absurd. Anna Louise Strong, still smitten with Borodin, wanted to take over the chronicling job from Rayna so as to further impress her idol. She had turned a political-historical project into a battle for personal preferment. Rayna had no weapons against such a maneuver, especially in her deteriorating state. In Moscow Rayna was plunged into the midst of political turmoil. The Soviet leadership knew it had hopelessly mishandled the Chinese situation. The top echelons needed scapegoats, but not scapegoats who knew too much. In China, Rayna had been privy to fateful and disastrous decisions. It was probably imperative to control the damage as quickly and


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prudently as possible. Increasing the pressure on Rayna to leave Moscow was probably the simplest solution the authorities could apply, and they did just that. But any embarrassment that might have resulted was spared them by Rayna’s death. The expense of a state funeral was a small price to pay. Shortly before his death Bill Prohme sent the letters he had received from Rayna – which he had carefully preserved – to her sister Grace. Yet Grace made no attempt to publicize them, despite her later adherence to Trotskyism. We can only assume that Grace found the matter too personal and did not wish to reopen an old sore. That is only a surmise, but it seems the most probable answer, because Grace never disclosed the existence of the letters to people who visited her to learn more about events in China in the 1920s. Grace’s reluctance was probably reinforced when one of the present authors (Arthur J. Knodel) showed Grace copies of Rayna’s letters to Helen Freeland. Grace said pointedly that she was hurt by the references in them to her stay with Rayna and Bill in Peking. There is the added suspicion that Grace had never realized how close Rayna had been to Helen – a closeness that Grace could not help resenting. Whatever the truth, Grace and her husband Frank Glass remained uncommunicative. The authors can only regret this silence, as both Grace and Frank were in possession of information that they alone could have supplied. Now it is irretrievable. Rayna’s letters to Helen and Bill and even a few to Grace have been preserved and make up to some extent for the loss. They form a valuable record of a crucial moment in the history of modern China. Beyond that, they bring to life in a most engaging – and heartbreaking – way the person who wrote them: Rayna Simons Raphaelson Prohme, the girl from Chicago with the flaming red hair who espoused the cause of China’s downtrodden masses with selflessness and magnanimity.


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Appendices

APPENDIX A: MADAME SUN’S STATEMENT

The text of Madame Sun Yat-sen’s declaration is here reprinted just as it appeared on July 30, 1927, in the China Weekly Review. It is preceded by the headline ‘Madam Sun Withdraws from Politics’ and the sentence ‘The following statement was made by Madam Sun Yat-sen (Sun Soong Ch’ing-ling) at Hankow, July 14, three days before her complete withdrawal from active political work in the Kuomintang.’ The statement was reproduced in the United States on September 21, 1927, in The Nation. I feel that it is necessary at this time to explain as a member of the Central Committee of the Kuomintang that we have reached the point where definition is necessary and where some members of the party executive are so defining the principles and policies of Dr. Sun Yat-sen that they seem to me to do violence to Dr. Sun’s ideas and ideals. Feeling that I must disassociate myself from active participation in the carrying out of these new policies of the party. Today we face a crisis and we must probe searchingly into fundamental questions for fundamental answers. We must answer the question of the nature of the revolution in general, of the Chinese revolution in particular, whether it is to be a mere political or a social revolution, and what changes are involved. In the last analysis, all revolution must be social revolution, based upon fundamental changes in society; otherwise it is not a revolution, but merely a change of government. To guide us in the Chinese revolution, Dr. Sun has given us his Three Principles and his Three Policies. It is the Third Principle, that of the livelihood of the people, that is at stake at the present time, 168


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the principle that answers the question of fundamental social change in China. The Third Principle was held by Dr. Sun to be basic in our revolution. In this principle we find his analysis of social values and the place of the labor and peasant classes defined. These classes become the basis of our strength in our struggle to overthrow imperialism, and cancel the unequal treaties that enslave us, and effectively unify the country. They are the new pillars for the building of a new, free China. Without their support, the Kuomintang, as a revolutionary party, becomes weak, chaotic and illogical in its social platform; without their support, political issues are vague. If we adopt any policy that weakens these supports, we shake the very foundations of our party, betray the masses, and are falsely loyal to our leader. Today there is much talk of policy. Dr. Sun defined Three Policies, which he decided were the only means by which his Three Principles could be carried out. But today it is being said that policies must be changed to fit the needs of the time. There is some truth in this statement, but change of policy must never be carried to the point where it becomes a reversal, so that a revolutionary party ceases to be revolutionary and becomes merely an organ, operating under the banner of revolution, but actually working in support of the social structure which the party was founded to alter. At the moment we face critical issues. Theoretical and practical differences have arisen between various elements of the party. Drastic solutions are suggested. It is because I feel that the carrying out of some of these suggested solutions would destroy the strength of the party and delay the success of the revolution, that I must speak. These solutions seem to me a part of a policy which would alienate and suppress the classes upon which our strength largely depends and for which the revolution must be fought. Such a policy, I feel, is doomed to failure. This new policy is proposed as a corrective to mistakes that have been made. But the corrective seems to me more serious than the mistakes. It is time for honesty and courage. There have been mistakes, but the fact that some of us are unwilling to face is that we are at least as responsible for as many of these mistakes as those whom we would now hold completely at fault. If we look back honestly at the past six months in Wuhan, examine our words and decisions unflinchingly, we cannot evade this responsibility. Speeches, statements are recorded


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in the history of the party. But now we would shirk the responsibility, shift it to other shoulders. Yes. There have been mistakes, but we must face the fact that they are not only others’ mistakes; they are our own as well. We have helped to make them; we must correct them. Moreover, for revolutionary mistakes, revolutionary solutions must be found. We must not betray the people. We have built up in them a great hope. They have placed in us a great faith. To that faith, we owe our final allegiance. Dr. Sun came from the people. He has told me a great deal about his early days. He came from the peasantry. His father was a farmer and the people in his district were farmers. Dr. Sun was poor. Not until he was fifteen years old, did he have shoes for his feet, and he lived in a hilly region where it is not easy to be a barefoot boy. His family, until he and his brothers were grown, lived almost from hand to mouth, in a hut. As a child he ate the cheapest food – not rice, for rice was too dear. His main nourishment was sweet potatoes. Many times Dr. Sun has told me that it was in those early days, as a poor son of a poor peasant family, that he became a revolutionary. He was determined that the lot of the Chinese peasant should not continue to be wretched, that little boys in China should have shoes to wear and rice to eat. For this ideal he gave forty years of his life. Yet today the lot of the Chinese peasant is even more wretched than in those days when Dr. Sun was driven by his great sense of human wrongs into a life of revolution. And today men, who profess to follow his banner, talk of classes, and think in terms of ‘revolution’ that would virtually disregard the sufferings of those millions of poverty-stricken peasants of China. Today also we hear condemnation of the peasant and labor movement as a recent, alien product. This is false. Twenty, thirty years ago, Dr. Sun was thinking and talking in terms of a revolution that would change the status of the Chinese peasant. In his early twenties, he wrote to Li Hung-chang petitioning for social and economic reforms. In 1911, he wrote an article on the agrarian question in China, printed in Geneva in The Socialist, in which he said that the basis of social and economic transformation in China is an agrarian revolution. All his life, this was one of the big goals he had in mind. Everything he planned he saw as means to the betterment of the life of the Chinese masses. In 1915, when we were in Japan, he urged Liao Chung-kai to study more deeply into the peasant and labor problems.


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It is only in the past few years, after four decades of struggle, that these plans for revolution of the people have begun to bear fruit. I remember clearly the first All-Kwangtung Peasants Conference, in Canton, in July 1924. Then for the first time, we saw the people of China, who must be her new strength, coming to participate in the revolution. From all the districts of Kwangtung, the peasants came, many of them walking miles and miles, barefooted to Canton. They were ragged, tattered. Some carried baskets and poles. I remember I was deeply moved. Dr. Sun was moved also. When we reached home, he said to me: ‘This is the beginning of the success of the revolution’, and he told me again the part the oppressed people of China must play in their own salvation. All these years his purpose was clear. But today we talk of recent foreign influence. Was Sun Yat-sen – the leader who was voicing the agrarian revolution for China when Russia was still under the heel of the Czar – was he the tool of foreign scheming? Dr. Sun’s policies are clear. If certain leaders of the party do not carry them out consistently, then they are no longer Dr. Sun’s true followers, and the party is no longer a revolutionary party, but merely a tool in the hands of this or that militarist. It will have ceased to be a living force working for the future welfare of the Chinese people, and will have become a machine, the agent of repression, a parasite fattening on the present enslaving system. We face a serious crisis. But it is more of a crisis for us as individuals than for China as a country. Whether the present Kuomintang at this moment rises to the height of its ideals and courageously finds a revolutionary corrective for its mistakes, or whether it slumps into the shamefulness of reaction and compromise, the Three Principles of Dr. Sun Yat-sen will conquer in the end. Revolution in China is inevitable. At the moment I feel that we are turning aside from the Tsungli’s policy of leading and strengthening the people. Therefore I must withdraw until wiser policies prevail. There is no despair in my heart for the revolution. My disheartenment is only for the path into which some of those who had been leading the revolution have strayed. Signed: Sun Soong Ch’ing-ling July 14, 1927


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APPENDIX B

Written by Arthur J. Knodel The 13 original letters from Rayna Prohme to Helen Freeland, along with other documents here listed, were given to me by Mrs. Marian Parry and are still in my possession. All the 13 letters except the last were written and sent from China. The last was written and sent from Moscow. Some of the letters are handwritten, even more of them are typed, and a few combine handwriting and typing. Envelopes of some of the letters have been preserved, though the quality of the stationery of both the envelopes and the letters is, in most instances, so inferior that they are falling to pieces. The text of the letters is faithfully reproduced in the appropriate sector of the present work. In addition to Rayna’s letters, there are several others, the most interesting of which are three long typewritten ones from Vincent Sheean to Helen Freeland, sent off shortly after Rayna’s death. These three letters are likewise transcribed faithfully in their entirety. Besides the letters from Rayna and from Vincent Sheean, there are three other personal letters: two from William Prohme to Helen Freeland and one from Anna Louise Strong to Rayna’s mother, Mrs. Carrie de Costa Simons. The two letters from Bill Prohme were written shortly before his death in 1935. The earlier of the two is incomplete but, even so, runs to three single-spaced typewritten pages, legal size. The second of Bill Prohme’s letters is brief and reproduced in its entirety. Appropriate excerpts from the earlier letter are also quoted. The letter from Anna Louise Strong to Rayna’s mother was written immediately after Rayna’s funeral. One excerpt from the letter is quoted in the present work. In addition to the personal letters, there are two ‘circular’ letters – we might today call them ‘round-robins’: one by Anna Louise Strong, the other by Bill Prohme. Strong’s is a typewritten carbon-copy on three very long sheets of onionskin


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paper, headed ‘Rayna Prohme’s Funeral’. In it, Strong quotes her funeral tribute to Rayna ‘practically as it was, though perhaps a trifle shortened’. A typed postscript itemizes Strong’s expenditures towards the funeral, ‘since this statement goes only to relatives’. The document must, therefore, have been written shortly after Rayna’s funeral, that is, in late November or early December 1927. Appropriate excerpts from it are quoted in the present work. The second circular letter is Bill Prohme’s account of Rayna’s last months, ‘set down for friends of Rayna in various parts of the world’. It consists of 20 mimeographed pages (recto only) and is undated. Bill Prohme must have completed it in the summer of 1928, or perhaps even somewhat later, since he refers on the last page of the document to a letter he had ‘received in the Spring of 1928, while in Paris’. Lengthy excerpts from this document are quoted in the present book. Along with all the above there are also a dozen almost disintegrated issues of the Peking People’s Tribune from the year 1926. All the documents listed were contained in an old shoe box that was given to me by Mrs. Parry when I visited her in Berkeley in 1975. Marian Parry received the documents from Nancy Freeland shortly after her sister’s death in 1956. Nancy Freeland explained that she felt Marian Parry should have them, as Marian was the only close friend of Rayna’s with whom Nancy Freeland was still in touch. Marian Parry had considered giving the documents to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace (‘The Hoover Library’) at Stanford University but decided that there was not enough material of political interest in them to warrant the Hoover Library’s accepting them. I had been curious about Rayna Prohme ever since I had read Vincent Sheean’s Personal History in 1940, when I was a graduate student in Berkeley. It was on the strength of that enduring interest that Marian


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Parry, when she saw me eyeing the shoe-box, handed me the box of documents, saying simply, ‘They’re yours.’ Mrs. Parry told me that she knew for a fact that at least one letter from Rayna had been destroyed by Helen Freeland for personal reasons. Others may have been lost in transit from China, where the chaotic conditions made postal service very unreliable. From the moment I indicated to Mrs. Parry that I thought the letters from Rayna to Helen Freeland should be published, she took an ongoing interest in the project. She stipulated from the outset, however, that the letters should be published in toto and not be made available for piecemeal quotation or research purposes prior to their publication. I think she would have been satisfied with the present arrangement. Marian Parry died at age 86 in August 1986, in Berkeley, where she had first met Rayna in the early 1920s. *

*

*

APPENDIX C

Written by Baruch Hirson There was a second set of letters written by Rayna to Bill, as she traveled overland to Moscow, and then after she had arrived in Russia. They started as a diary but were transformed into letters that were to be posted to Bill who had stayed on in Shanghai and then moved to Manila. Most of the letters reached Bill after Rayna’s death and it was from these that he drew up the report that was sent to members of the family and friends. Bill’s report excluded Rayna’s comments on her fellow travelers to Moscow and also left out some of the harrowing details of her last weeks. The details might never have been known because Bill, to whom the letters were directed, decided to destroy all his papers before he committed suicide in 1935. He relented in


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only one detail: he decided to give Grace the letters Rayna had sent him – as he explained in the letter printed below. I read these letters when I first looked at the documents while researching the life of Frank Glass (or Li Furen as he was known in China). Although these letters were significant for their description of the end of the Left Kuomintang and the Comintern’s direct involvement in China, they were seemingly not publishable by themselves. Two years later a box of papers, previously mislaid, was found, and copies were sent to me by Alex Buchman – a friend of Frank Glass and the person holding the papers before sending them to the Hoover Institution. Among these was a section of the manuscript edited by Professor Knodel with the letters written to Helen Freeland. Alex Buchman was able to locate Professor Knodel, now in retirement, and in writing to him I suggested that we cooperate to produce a fuller manuscript containing the letters written by Rayna to Helen, Bill, Grace, and others. It seemed that the letters needed explanation for the contemporary reader, and that Rayna’s unique position in China should be used to illustrate aspects of work inside the Chinese nationalist movement – the Kuomintang. That is, without trying to trace the full course of events in China, with the added complication of Comintern involvement, we had to provide a brief account of the development of Chinese politics that ended so precipitously for Rayna and Bill when Chiang Kai-shek turned his army loose on the workers’ organizations in 1927 and scattered the leadership of the government in Wuhan. In that way the letters of Rayna, sometimes naïve and at other times remarkably revealing, would act as a guide to the events of 1925–27. We have retained much of the background information and endnoting prepared by Professor Knodel and added further explanations from writers not utilized in that first manuscript.


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In so doing we have tried to let the letters speak for themselves, adding notes only to explain specific references. Finally, we have added letters or documents written by some of the main characters quoted in the letters or in our explanations. They add considerably to our knowledge of events of the time and provide further insight into the life of that remarkable woman who moved from a position of ‘do-goodism’ to a potentially revolutionary stance in her understanding of the events in China in 1927. Rayna Raphaelson/Prohme died before she could become a revolutionary activist, and, in the light of developments in Russia, that was probably fortunate. Such persons would not have been allowed to survive inside the U.S.S.R. if they followed the logic of their thoughts – as revolutionaries, or as feminists – and Rayna was both. *

*

*

Letter from Bill Prohme to Grace Simons: June 6, 1935 Dear Gracie, I’m having all my papers, letters, pictures, etc. burned. I want to be ‘sunk without a trace’ when I crack. But these final letters of Rayna’s, on that final separation, you should have, I thought, so I send them. Also the few pages of a diary she started but did not carry on. The letters, if read all at once, give the terrifying picture of her awful (in the real sense) state of mind those last weeks. It is all too tragic. Re-reading them caused to rise again the hatred I felt for Chen, for it was he who was responsible for the ‘plan’ to keep me behind in Shanghai as reporter to him and Madame S[un] and as disseminator of their statements (in Moscow) to the Chinese press. You will see hints in Rayna’s letters that in the long debate we had as to whether we would accept the plan, even on a 2-month understanding, I had expressed a lack of trust in Chen’s sincerity. The fact is I distrusted him in advance. And Rayna distractedly writes, ‘but I can’t distrust people’. When she wrote that, she had reluctantly come to see my advance judgment had been right. There is infinite tragedy in that letter which tells of her encounter with him in the hotel corridor. It can make me furious even at this distance, in time. I’m damned glad I never encountered


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him, all the while I lived two floors below him in the Met[ropole] hotel. He never looked me up. I can hardly believe he thought I would look him up. But Jack, his son, (of whom Rayna writes so glowingly) did. A grand boy. (‘She was the only one who talked to me about my drawing, and took my work seriously,’ he told me, with tears in his eyes.) His political cartoons appear regularly in Moscow News and other places. The only place Sheean’s book Personal History offends me personally is in his failure to make any word of explanation of why I remained behind in China and later was in Manila. And he knew; Rayna must have told him; AL S[trong] knew it and wrote it in letters to your mother and others. But he gives the impression almost (not quite) that I was somehow afraid to venture into Russia and even to remain in China. It is, to me, highly offensive and so easily open to real misunderstanding. So I was glad to find Rayna’s own references to the matter. The other stuff is that report I sent out and which you say you did not see. And the translation of the autopsy report. I made a will the other day. I have a paragraph asking that my ashes be sent to your mother to be placed in same crypt with those of Rayna. It just occurs to me this perhaps could not be done except at some expense. In that case I’ll just have them dumped here. Could you find out? How are you being addressed? Is my addressing on the envelope incorrect? Love – Bill


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Notes

1. There are at least three eye-witness accounts of Rayna’s funeral, by Vincent Sheean, Anna Louise Strong, and Louis Fischer. The most impassioned is Sheean’s, in his books Personal History (New York, 1936) and Dorothy and Red (Boston, 1963) and, above all, in a letter to Helen Freeland. Strong’s account, in her circular letter ‘Rayna Prohme’s Funeral’ (see Appendix B) is also moving, as is Fischer’s, in his Men and Politics (New York, 1941). William Prohme did not reach Moscow until three weeks after Rayna’s death. He took great pains to consult everyone still in Moscow who had been associated with Rayna and then compiled a report that he had mimeographed and sent to several of Rayna’s many friends (see Appendix B). 2. Rayna Prohme revered Mikhail Borodin. His absence from her funeral has been variously explained. Sheean writes in Personal History that the night after Rayna’s funeral Borodin came to see him. ‘He looked colossal in my narrow room as he walked slowly up and down, speaking … He had come to say good-bye, he said, and to explain why he had not gone to the funeral. On principle he never went to funerals. The mind must be kept resolutely on its purposes’. But this explanation is not entirely convincing. The funeral arrangements, according to Bill Prohme, had been organized by Anna Louise Strong and Vincent Sheean together with ‘Voloshon [with an “l”] of Borodin’s staff’ (p. 13 of Bill’s circular letter), and Percy Chen in his China Called Me (Boston, 1979) refers to ‘Voroshin, Borodin’s bodyguard’ (p. 13). Dan N. Jacobs, in Borodin: Stalin’s Man in China, refers to the chief arranger as ‘Borodin’s secretary’ (p. 303), without naming the secretary or citing his source. Jacobs goes on to say: ‘Borodin had not gone to the funeral because he was under order to keep his distance from the Wuhanites’ (p. 304). No specific source is given for this assertion, but it does seem plausible in the light of what is known about the situation in Moscow and Borodin’s fate. 3. Sheean makes no mention of a horse (or horses) drawing the hearse. Strong says ‘It was a revolutionary funeral, in that the casket, wagon, and decorations on the horses [note plural] were of red’. Fischer writes, ‘The coffin, covered with a red cloth, was placed on a cart 178


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NOTES

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.


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drawn by a horse’ (Men and Politics, p. 157). Bill Prohme, not an eye-witness, later wrote, ‘The casket, covered with red, was borne on an open white hearse, drawn by six horses.’ Fischer, Men and Politics, p. 157. This extract and the preceding one from Chang Ke’s speech are quoted in Anna Louise Strong’s circular letter. Bill Prohme reproduced large portions of both speeches in his circular letter. Milly Bennett, On Her Own (New York, 1993), ‘Editor’s Introduction’, p. xvi. A glaring example is Milly’s melodramatic account of the joint departure of Rayna and Madame Sun from Hankow. Milly takes tearful leave of Rayna on the deck of the river boat while Madame Sun lies prostrate on a bunk in a sweltering cabin (Bennett, On Her Own, pp. 286–9). But Madame Sun and Rayna left separately for Shanghai and on different dates, as Rayna’s diary and letters and various collateral documents prove. (See Chapter 5, ‘Shanghai’, this volume.) Most of the details on this period of Rayna’s life were compiled by the late Samson Raphaelson in conversation with AJK. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (New York, 1952), pp. 47, 48. Ibid., pp. 69, 70. Ibid., p. 70. Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds (Berkeley, 1961). Information for these paragraphs was provided by Marian Parry, Samson Raphaelson, Berna Pinner, and Tracy Samuels in conversation with AJK. For more details on the Kroeber circle see Gui de Angulo, The Old Coyote of Big Sur: The Life of Jaime de Angulo (Berkeley, 1995). Quoted from an unpublished letter shown to AJK by Samson Raphaelson. Rayna Raphaelson, ‘We Meet at Sea’, The American Review, May 1924. Details on Bill Prohme’s fugue after Rayna’s first departure to East Asia were supplied by Marian Parry and Berna Pinner in conversation with AJK. Rayna collected several Hawaiian myths in a 59-page booklet, The Kamehameha Highway (Honolulu, 1925), published by Percy M. Pond, illustrated with ornaments and sketches by J. M. Fraser. For the Soong family, see Emily Hahn, The Soong Sisters (New York, 1942). For an account of Joffe’s suicide, see Fischer, Men and Politics, pp. 92–3. Sheean, Personal History, p. 205.

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180

N O T ES

21. Arthur Ransome, The Chinese Puzzle (Boston, 1927), p. 87. 22. Rodney Gilbert’s What’s Wrong with China? (New York, 1926) is a thumping white-man’s-burden opus explaining the rights – inalienable and inevitable – of extraterritoriality, especially British, in China, and the need for military intervention by the foreign powers to stop the forces unleashed by the late Sun Yat-sen, who had established ‘his cruel and ruthless dictatorship in Kuangtung’ and then became ‘China’s most influential tool and the high priest of rampant antiforeignism’ (p. 300). In short, the book is a breviary of everything Rayna was fighting against. 23. Sheean, Personal History, p. 205. 24. Chen, China Called Me, p. 44. 25. Ibid., p. 25. 26. Ransome, Chinese Puzzle, p. 87. 27. Sheean, Personal History, pp. 205–25 and passim. 28. A copious bibliography of Borodin material is to be found in Jacobs, Borodin, but even that is incomplete. Much of the information in this and following paragraphs is drawn from Jacobs. Borodin’s activities before and after his departure from the United States and before he took on the China assignment were multiple. Not without interest for American readers is his meeting with the poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg. See Helga Sandburg, A Great and Glorious Romance (New York, 1978), pp. 248ff. 29. George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (Boston, 1960), pp. 267–8. 30. Henry Misselwitz, The Dragon Stirs (New York, 1941), p. 97. 31. Sheean, Personal History, p. 214. 32. Information in these paragraphs is taken largely from Hahn, The Soong Sisters. 33. When Bill Prohme wrote these sentences about T. V. Soong he had obviously not yet read Rayna’s diary-entry concerning T. V. 34. See de Angulo, The Old Coyote, for details of Nancy [Lucy] Freeland and Jaime de Angulo, both of whom Rayna had known well in Berkeley. 35. On the failure of Stalin’s China policy see Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (London, 1938), Conrad Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), and Dan Jacobs, Borodin (especially chapters 16–18). 36. Chen, China Called Me, p. 44. 37. For the full text of Bill Prohme’s ‘transmittal letter’, see the end of Appendix C. 38. Milly Mitchell left Shanghai on August 15, Wilbur Burton on August 23. 39. See Appendix A for the full text of Madame Sun’s statement.


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NOTES

181

40. Sheean, Personal History, pp. 264–5. 41. For details of the Roy–Borodin ‘Indian Connection’ see Jacobs, Borodin, pp. 67ff. 42. This is the fragmentary diary quoted in this volume. 43. This article, written for the Oriental Engineer of June 1926 with the by-line ‘R Raphaelson’, is titled ‘Is China Becoming Effective in Modern War?’ It was reprinted almost immediately in the more widely circulated China Weekly Review of June 19, 1926. The article is in two parts. The first is an explanation of the foreign origins of the Chinese armaments industry and an inventory of Chinese arms factories and arsenals. The second is a sketchy historical summary of warfare in China from the earliest times to the twentieth century. 44. See end of Appendix C. 45. A. Lozovsky, born Solomon Abromovich Drizdo, is an ambiguous figure. The Prohmes met him at the so-called Pan-Pacific Trade Union Conference, held in Hankow in late May 1927. (Milly Mitchell is particularly scathing about him in On Her Own, pp. 251–8.) After taking a violently anti-Borodin stand at the conference, Lozovsky stormed off, only to resurface in Moscow when the Hankow refugees arrived. Had he been sent to Hankow to spy on Borodin and Galen? See especially George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism: The Coming Struggle for Africa (London, 1956), which reports on Lozovsky’s role at the Comintern’s China desk. It is interesting to note that the only explicit use of the name ‘Lozovsky’ by Rayna occurs in her letter to Bill of September 16, 1927: ‘Damn! I have an appointment with Lozovsky …’. At the end of the letter she says, ‘I’ll write … after the interview with Alexander.’ Could Alexander be Lozovsky’s code-name? See note 66 below. 46. Peter Chuan, a Kuomintang journalist, had been close to the Prohmes in Peking. 47. Sylvia Chen and Rayna were, in fact, good friends. For Sylvia Chen’s account of the Wuhan group and her friendship with Rayna, see Si-lan [Sylvia] Chen Leyda, Footnote to History (New York, 1984), pp. 67–109. 48. Wang Ching-wei had been an early associate of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and something of a hero. The Prohmes knew him in Hankow. With the fall of the Wuhan government, Wang went over to Chiang Kai-shek – hence the denunciation. 49. ‘Alexander’, who figures so prominently in Rayna’s subsequent letters to Bill, has thus far eluded identification. See, however, note 50, below. 50. ‘EB’s playmate’, Harrison George, was an American communist closely associated with Earl Browder, who later became head of the American Communist Party. The Prohmes had known both George


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182

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

N O T ES

and Browder in Hankow, where the two men had been sent as official American delegates to the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Congress (see note 45). It seems that Harrison George was already in Moscow when Rayna arrived there with Madame Sun’s party. George, since he had an entrée to ‘Alexander’, was important to Rayna. He may have been an official Comintern agent, in which case his friend ‘Alexander’ was probably an important person in the Comintern hierarchy. Since Lozovsky (see note 45) had figured prominently at the Trade Union Conference, both George and Browder would have known him in Hankow – a circumstance that increases the suspicion that ‘Alexander’ and Lozovsky may have been one and the same person. Since the ‘Alexander thing’ was to have been the editing and publishing, in Shanghai, of a magazine – presumably a Comintern propaganda organ – by the Prohmes in collaboration with George’s friend Browder, one can understand Rayna’s preoccupation with ‘HG’ (or ‘Hg’). Rayna’s death intervened, and nothing came of the ‘Alexander thing’; but it is most unlikely that, even had she lived, anything would have come of it. The same incident is reported by Sheean in Personal History, p. 298. Sheean, Gog and Magog (New York, 1930), pp. 294–7, and Personal History, pp. 293–4. Manabendra Nath Roy, the roving Indian Communist who had worked with Borodin in Mexico and elsewhere. See note 41. Sheean, Gog and Magog, pp. 332–9, Personal History, pp. 300–01 and Dorothy and Red, pp. 76–7. Vincent Sheean, ‘Rayna Prohme’ in the Matrix, February 1928. The ‘Nanking incident’ of March 24, 1927, involved an attack by Kuomintang troops on some foreign nationals in that city, which had just been taken back from a northern warlord. Several foreigners were killed, and it looked as if there might again be a massive foreign intervention. Chiang Kai-shek immediately distanced himself from the ‘outrage’. See Percy Chen, China Called Me, p. 362. Fischer, Men and Politics, pp. 527–8. See Philip Jaffe, ‘The Strange Case of Anna Louise Strong,’ in Survey, October 1964, p. 138. See R. Edward Glatfelter on Borodin in The Modern Encyclopaedia of Russian and Soviet History, Vol. 5, p. 145. See Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews and When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet. Sheean, Personal History, p. 292.


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Bibliography

Bennett, Milly (1993), On Her Own, M. E. Sharpe, New York. Brandt, Conrad (1958), Stalin’s Failure in China, 1924–1927, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Chen, Leyda (Sylvia) (1984), Footnote to History, Dance Horizons, New York. Chen, Percy (1979), China Called Me: My Life Inside the Chinese Revolution, Little, Brown, Boston. Day, Dorothy (1952), The Long Loneliness, Harper and Row, New York. De Angulo, Gui (1995), The Old Coyote of Big Sur: The Life of Jaime de Angulo, Stonegarden Press, Berkeley. Fischer, Louis (1941), Men and Politics: An Autobiography, Duell, Sloane and Pierce, New York. Gilbert, Rodney (1926), What’s Wrong with China? John Murray, New York. Glatfelter, R. Edward (1976–93), ‘Borodin’, in The Modern Encyclopaedia of Russian and Soviet History, Vol. 5, Academic Press, Gulf Breeze, Florida. Grunfeld, A. Tom (n.d.), ‘American Friends of the Chinese Revolution, 1925–1939’, typescript. Hahn, Emily (1942), The Soong Sisters, Doubleday, New York. Isaacs, Harold (1938), Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, first edition, Secker and Warburg, London. Jacobs, Dan N. (1981), Borodin: Stalin’s Man in China, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Jaffe, Philip (1964), ‘The Strange Case of Anna Louise Strong’, in Survey: A Journal of Soviet and East European Studies, October. Kennan, George F. (1960), Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, Little, Brown, Boston. Kroeber, Theodora (1961), Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America, University of California Press, Berkeley. Malraux, André (1934), Man’s Fate, Modern Library, New York. Misselwitz, Henry (1941), The Dragon Stirs: An Intimate Sketch-book of China’s Kuomintang Revolution, 1927–1929, Harbinger, New York. 183


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184

BI BLI O G R A P H Y

Padmore, George (1956), Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa, Dennis Dobson, London. Prohme, Rayna, see Raphaelson. Rand, Peter (1995), China Hands, Simon and Schuster, New York. Ransome, Arthur (1927), The Chinese Puzzle, Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Raphaelson, Rayna (1924), ‘We Meet at Sea’, The American Review, May. —— (1925), The Kamehameha Highway: Eighty Miles of Romance, Percy Pond, Honolulu. Reed, John (1911), Insurgent Mexico, D. Appleton and Co., New York. —— (1919), Ten Days that Shook the World, Boni and Liveright, New York. Samuels, Tracy (1928), ‘What a Girl She Was’, The Matrix, February. Sandburg, Helga (1978), A Great and Glorious Romance, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York. Serge, Victor (1927/1994), ‘Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution’, Revolutionary History, Vol. 5, No. 3, Fall. Sheean, Vincent (1927), ‘Some People from Canton’, Asia, October. —— (1928), ‘Rayna Prohme’, The Matrix, February. —— (1930), Gog and Magog, Harcourt, Brace, New York. —— (1934), Personal History, Doubleday, Doran, New York. —— (1963), Dorothy and Red, Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Strong, Anna Louise (1928), China’s Millions, Coward-McCann Inc., New York. —— (1959), Tibetan Interviews, New World Press, Peking. —— (1960), When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet, New World Press, Peking. Trotsky, Leon (1967/1932), Problems of the Chinese Revolution, Ann Arbor, New York. Wilbur, C. Martin (1983), The Nationalist Revolution in China, 1923–1928, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.


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1.

The Simons sisters: Rayna Prohme (right) and Grace Simons

185

Hirson 02a plates 185

14/6/07 19:46:00

2.

Rayna Prohme with her dog, Dan, July 1927 (Alexander Buchman)

186


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3.

Bill Prohme (Alexander Buchman)

4. Staff of the People’s Tribune. Hankow, 1927. From left to right: [unknown], [unknown], Chuan-hua (Gersham Lowe), Milly Bennett, Rayna Prohme, Bill Prohme, Jack Chen, Pao Ching, [unknown] (Alexander Buchman) 187


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5. Madame Sun Yat-sen (top left) (Alexander Buchman) 6. Dr. and Madame Sun Yat-sen (top right) Early 1920s 7. Eugene Chen: Foreign Minister in the Wuhan government, 1926–27 (right) (Alexander Buchman)

188


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8. Mikhail Borodin and Yu Yu-jen (an aide). Hankow, 1927 (Alexander Buchman)

189


14/6/07 19:46:02

Index Compiled by Sue Carlton

Page references in bold indicate photographs Alexander (possibly Lozovsky) 110, 111, 116, 119, 122, 124, 127, 128, 131, 135, 137 Alger, Milton 18 All-Kwangtung Peasants Conference 171 Arluk, Fania Semenova (Mrs Borodin) 59, 73, 75, 137, 148 Babbitt, Irving 21 Baynes, H.G. 75 Bennett, Millie 14, 15–17, 187 Berg Progressive Preparatory School, Chicago 59 Berkeley 21–2, 25–6, 52–3, 75 Bitner 104, 122 Blodgett, George 73 Borodin, Mikhail Markovich x, 3, 10, 24, 45, 57, 58–60, 72–3, 76, 189 absence from Rayna’s funeral 11, 161 and collapse of Communist Party 131, 160–1 death of 161 escape from China 30, 77, 80–1, 83–4, 97, 100, 155 and Fang 96, 101 in Moscow 123–4, 126, 127, 164 non-arrival in Moscow 107, 109, 111, 113, 120 press reports about 81, 86–7 and Rayna’s death 145

and report on events in China (1925–27) 14, 128–9, 134–5, 137, 152, 166 scapegoated 160, 164 taking over Sheean’s rooms 133–4 Bow, Louise 51 Browder, Earl 111, 119, 122, 123, 124, 128 Buchman, Alexander 159, 175 Burton, Wilbur 78, 79, 84, 86, 159 Canton 2–3, 4, 15, 33, 35–6, 37, 42–55 anti-foreign strikes 42, 44–5 Canton Gazette 30, 47 Chamberlain family 121, 122, 126, 138 Chang Ke 12–13, 63, 70, 141, 163 Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin) 12, 34, 35 Chang Tsung-chang (Zhang Zongchang) x, 73, 75 Chen, Eugene x, 11, 29, 31–2, 68, 79, 83, 99, 102, 129, 130, 160, 188 arrival in Moscow 104 at Rayna’s funeral 11, 148 Bill’s hatred of 97, 176 and decision to leave Bill in Shanghai 79, 93, 96, 97, 165 escape from China 30, 90, 92, 93, 151–2

190

Hirson 03 index 190

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INDEX

Chen, Eugene continued in Hankow 62, 66–7, 77 interview with Stalin 76 journey to Vladivostok 94 and lack of work for Rayna 109, 110 leaving Peking 37 and reorganization of Hankow People’s Tribune 76, 81 talks with British 55, 64, 65, 75 unfriendliness towards Rayna 132–3 vacation with Madame Sun 111, 113, 114, 164 Chen, Jack x, 123, 130, 142, 177, 187 Chen, Percy xi, 47, 76, 77, 123, 130 Chen, Sylvia 97, 102, 112, 122, 123, 130, 135 Chen, Yolande 97, 112, 122, 123, 132, 135 Chen–O’Malley negotiations 55, 64, 65, 75 Chiang Kai-shek 4, 5, 7–8, 14, 24, 30, 57, 60, 75–6, 80, 82, 175 China, 1911 Revolution 2, 33 China Hands (Rand) 15 China’s Millions (Strong) 131, 155 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 3, 4, 5–6, 7–8, 59 collapse of 131, 160–1 uprisings (1927) 101 Chinese Red Army 6, 8, 101 Ch’ing Dynasty (1644–1911) 2 Chu Te 7 Chuan, Pete 98, 100, 102 Chuan-hia (Gersham Lowe) 187 Civil War (1946–49) 8 Close, Upton 104, 105–6 Coblenz, SS 89 Communist International (Comintern) 3, 5, 107

Hirson 03 index 191

191

Congress of Friends of the Soviet Union 146 Cook, J.A. 88–9 Day, Dorothy 19, 20 de Angulo, Cary Fink 75 de Angulo, Jaime 22, 41, 75 Dell, Floyd 20 Dense (INS man) 122 Dolsen, James H. 16, 40 Dorothy and Red (Sheean) 143, 146 Douglas, Paul 19, 21 The Dragon Stirs (Misselwitz) 60 Durant, Kenneth 138, 141, 142 Duranty, Walter 112, 122, 125, 129 Eastman, Max 20 Elliston, E.S. 138, 141 Elliston, Herbie 109, 111, 113, 115, 122 Fang Shen-shen (later Reubens) 91, 92, 96–7, 100, 164 arrival in Moscow 104 and decision to leave Bill in Shanghai 93, 96, 97 and end of support for agents 107, 108 and lack of work for Rayna 109 Rayna’s dislike of 94–5, 98, 99, 101, 122 Faye, Paul Louis 73 feminism/women’s movement 64, 67–8, 69, 70, 176 Feng Yü-hsiang (Feng Yuxiang) xi, 33, 76, 81, 95 First Opium War (1839–42) 2 First United Front (1923–27) 3, 5, 7 Fischer, Louis xi, 12, 107, 112, 122, 126, 161

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192


Freeland, Helen 10, 21, 22, 25–6, 53, 75, 99, 111 death of 162 inviting Rayna to Zurich 130, 134 letters from Bill 150–1, 156–7, 172 letters from Rayna 31, 32–52, 54–7, 66–8, 70–4, 80–2, 116–18, 165, 167, 172, 174 letters from Sheean 143–8, 153–6, 166, 172 and psychoanalysis 70, 116, 119 Freeland, Nancy 22, 26, 75, 173 George, Harrison 128, 132, 135, 137 Gibb, Andrew (Dan) 22, 25, 26, 71, 147, 162 Glass, Frank 9, 159–60, 167, 175 Gog and Magog (Sheean) 61, 143, 146, 153 Green, Elizabeth 37, 52, 53, 54 Green Gang 5 Grover Clarke 28 Grunfeld, Tom A. 15, 16, 150, 161 Hankow 5, 10, 15, 30, 34, 45–6, 54–5, 60–75 exodus from 75, 76, 77, 151–2, 165 Rayna’s journey to 56–7 transfer of Nationalist government to 55 Hankow People’s Tribune 30, 60, 70, 71, 81, 82, 84 Hanyang 11, 34 Hong Kong 29, 33, 45, 160 Honolulu 15, 27, 52, 60, 96, 156, 158 Hu Han-min 4 Hunan 80

Hirson 03 index 192

I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American (Strong) 155 Insurgent Mexico (Reed) 13 Jaffe, Philip 161 Japan 8, 14, 24, 27, 69, 82, 159, 160 ‘The Jazz Singer’ (Raphaelson) 21 Joffe, Adolf A. xi, 24, 30, 59 Jung, C.G. 70, 75, 119 Kantorovich, Mrs 114–15, 118, 121, 122, 126, 133 Karakhan, Lev M. 104, 105 Kennan, George F. 59 Kiukiang 5 Knapf (United Press man) 115, 122 Knodel, Arthur J. 167 Kroeber, Alfred L. 22 Kroeber circle 22–3, 26, 73 Ku Meng-yü (Gu Mengyu) xi, 76, 77, 84 Kuling 77, 81, 83, 87 Kuo 52, 53, 77 Kuominchün 33–4, 35 Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) 1, 4–7, 15–16, 29–30, 33, 55, 75, 81, 131 Borodin as advisor 3, 10, 59–60, 81, 152 and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 3, 101, 104 and Dr. Sun’s policies 169–70, 171 polarization 30, 60 and Soviet Union 24 Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee 101 Kwangsi 33 Kwangtung 1, 2–3, 33 Lee Choi 47 Lenin, V.I. 6, 24, 30, 59

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INDEX

Lewis, Sinclair 12, 125, 136, 146 Li Hung-chang (Li Hongzhang) 170 Li Ta-chao (Li Dazhao) 12, 36, 63 Liao Chung-kai (Liao Zhongkai) 170 Link, Dr. 144 Litvinoff, M.M. 105 The Long Loneliness (Day) 19 Long March (1934–35) 8 Lowie, Robert 22 Lozovzky, A. 97, 109 see also Alexander Lubianka prison 161 Luenho, SS 88 McTyeire School (Shanghai) 69 Malraux, André 45, 57 Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) 2, 7, 63, 101 The Masses 20, 23 The Matrix 143, 149, 163 May Thirtieth Incident (1925) 44–5 May Thirtieth movement 4 Misselwitz, Henry 58, 60, 61 Mitchell, Mike 15 Mitchell, Milly 78, 79, 116 More, Paul Elmer 21 Moscow 86, 103–46, 164–5, 166–7 Moscow Daily News 161 Mussin, Joe 104, 106 Nanchang 6, 101 Nanking 6, 30, 74, 75–6 Nanking Decade (1927–37) 8 The Nation 82, 168 National Revolutionary Army 4, 76 Nationalist (Kuo Min) News Agency 28, 29, 40, 42, 60, 102, 119, 149, 159 in Hankow 64, 65, 68

Hirson 03 index 193

193

Nearing, Scott 135, 140 newspapers, suppression of 33–4 North American Newspaper Alliance 61 North China Daily News 86–7 Northern Expedition (1926–28) 4–8, 34, 75 On Her Own (Bennett) 15, 16–17 Oumanski, (from Tass headquarters) 108, 110, 119 Pao Ching 187 Paotingfu 35 Parry, Marian 22, 26, 27, 172, 173–4 Parry, Milman 22 Pavlov (military advisor) 91, 94, 98 Peking 2, 7, 12, 15, 26, 29–37, 40–2, 159, 165 Peking People’s Tribune 29, 30, 38, 42, 64, 173, 187 Personal History (Sheean) 15, 31, 61–2, 86, 118, 143, 146, 153, 156, 173 Pinner, Dr. Max 27, 71, 158 Political School for Women (Hankow) 64, 67, 70 Prohme, Rayna Simons 185, 186, 187 accommodation problems in Moscow 114–15, 118, 120, 121, 124–5, 126–7, 133–4, 141, 142–3, 164–5 arrival in Moscow 103–4 autopsy report 145, 148 in California 21–2 in Canton 42–55 collaboration with Borodin on report 14, 128–9, 134–5, 137, 152, 166 commitment to communist cause 162–3

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194


death of 142–8, 152 diary 76–8, 79, 88–9, 91, 95, 174 early life 18–19 end of first marriage 22 escape from Shanghai 86, 88–9 first trip to China 23–6 funeral of 11–13, 70, 148, 153, 161, 162 in Hankow 60–75 headaches 132, 134, 135, 136, 140, 142, 143, 147 journey to Hankow 55–7 journey to Vladivostok 91–7, 151–2 and lack of funds 108, 110, 111–12, 115, 120–1, 124, 152, 164 leaving Hankow 75, 76, 77, 151–2, 165 leaving Peking 37–41 marriage to Raph 20 memory lapses 137–8, 140, 143 in Moscow 7, 103–42, 166–7 in Peking 29–37, 40–2 relationship with Bill 49, 165–6 relationship with Grace 84–6 relationship with mother 27–8, 74 second trip to China (1925) 15–16, 27–8 in Shanghai 38–40, 78, 79–90 sources of information about 14–16 on Trans-Siberian 93, 98–102, 152, 164 under surveillance 87–9 visit to New York 20–1 visits to theater in Moscow 116, 126, 127, 130, 135 Prohme, William (Bill) 23, 26–7, 35, 150–7, 162, 187

Hirson 03 index 194

in Canton 16, 45 in Hankow 46, 49, 54, 60, 63–4, 68, 71 hatred for Chen 97, 176 in Honolulu 158–9 illness 26, 31, 36, 40, 41, 42, 54, 60, 71, 72, 156, 158–9, 165 leaving Hankow 77, 165 left behind in Shanghai 79, 93, 96, 97, 117, 147, 152, 165, 176, 177 letters from Rayna 10, 94–102, 103–16, 119–42, 174–5 letters to Grace 96–7, 176–7 letters to Helen 150–1, 156–7, 172 in Manila 89, 128, 135–6, 137, 139, 140, 145, 147, 152 and Nationalist News Agency 28, 29, 40, 42, 60, 64, 68, 149 obituary round robin 69–70, 151 offended by Personal History 153–4, 156, 177 in Peking 29–37, 40–2 suicide 156, 159 and Tass proposition 107, 108–9, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 128, 131, 136–7, 139 under surveillance 88–9 psychoanalysis 70, 117, 119 Radin, Dorothea 37 Radin, Max 22 Radin, Paul 22 Rand, Peter 15, 16 Ransome, Arthur 31–2, 58, 61, 65, 68 Raphaelson, Samson 15, 18–20, 21–2, 23 letter from Rayna 27

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INDEX

Reed, John xi, 13, 149 returned students 49–51 Reuter 54, 63 revolution collapse of 13, 80–1, 83, 91–2 see also Northern Expedition Robertson, Diana Forbes 156 Rogers, Merrill 20 Roots, Bishop 77 Rover, Vladimir 128, 135, 136 Roy, M.N. 5–6, 146 Sanfelice (Sheean) 155 Sears, Larry 135 Shanghai 5, 38–40, 56, 74, 75, 78, 79–90 and evidence of imminent war 56–7, 64 and surveillance 79, 87–9 Shanghai Municipal Police 87–9 Sheean, Vincent (‘Jimmy’) xii, 37, 61, 125, 129, 141, 160, 165 at Rayna’s funeral 12 and Borodin 58, 60 and death of Rayna 143–8, 152 in Hankow 75 leaving Moscow 113, 118 letters to Helen 143–8, 153–6, 166, 172 marriage 155, 156 Matrix article 149, 163 in Moscow 109–10, 111, 114 on Rayna’s commitment to revolution 149–50, 162–3 see also Dorothy and Red; Gog and Magog; Personal History Sherman, Stuart 21 Simons, Carrie de Costa 18 letters from Anna Louise Strong 163, 172, 177 Simons, Grace 7, 9, 28, 31, 36, 41, 42, 78, 96, 158–60, 185 letters from Bill Prohme 96–7, 176–7

Hirson 03 index 195

195

letters from Rayna 25–6, 53, 62–6, 82–6, 91–3 and Rayna’s letters 167, 176–7 Simons, Joseph 18 Sino-Japanese War (1937) 1 Smedley, Agnes 14 Sneevliet, Hendricus (‘Maring’) 3 Snow, Helen Foster 14 Soong Ch’ing-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen) (Song Qingling) xii, 7, 10, 30, 68, 69–70, 98–9, 162, 188 arrival in Moscow 103–4 at Rayna’s funeral 11–12, 148 escape from Shanghai 77, 86, 88–9 farewell statement 81, 82, 168–71 journey to Vladivostok 91, 92, 94–5 and Political School for Women (Hankow) 64, 67, 70 return to Moscow 140 sent to Crimea 164 in Shanghai 79, 81 surveillance 87–8 unfriendliness towards Rayna 133 vacation in South 111, 113, 114, 130, 164 Soong E-ling (Song Ailing) xii, 30, 69 Soong May-ling (Song Meiling) xii, 30, 69 Soong, T. V. (Song Ziwen) xii, 30, 70, 78 Soviet Union 3–4, 7, 24 Stalin, Joseph 4–5, 6–7, 57, 60, 76, 160, 161, 163–4 Stephens, Barbara 14 Strong, Anna Louise xii, 14, 135–6, 144, 154–5, 161–2, 177

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196


arrival in Moscow 123 and Borodin’s report on events in China 129, 131, 134, 166 cable to Bill on Rayna’s death 152 escape from Shanghai 77 letters to Rayna’s mother 163, 172, 177 obituary round robin 172–3 quoting Borodin 131, 160 and Rayna’s funeral 12, 13, 145, 148, 149, 173 Suiwo, SS 77–8, 88 Sun Ch’uan-fang (Sun Chuanfang) xii, 35–6, 37 Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) 1–2, 2–4, 10, 24, 29–30, 48, 59, 69, 188 death of 30, 60 principles and policies 168–9, 170–1 Sun Yat-sen University 11, 30, 104, 163 T’ang Sheng-chih (Tang Shengzhi) xii, 80 Tass 106 proposition for Bill 107, 108–9, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 128, 131, 136–7, 139 Ten Days that Shook the World (Reed) 13–14 Teng Yen-ta (Deng Yanda) xiii, 139 Tenyo Maru 24, 26 Third Party 139 Thompson, Dorothy 12, 125, 144, 146 Tong, Tommy 78 Treaty Ports 2 Trotsky, Leon 6–7, 30, 160, 164 Ts’ao K’un (Cao Kun) xiii, 35

Hirson 03 index 196

Tuan Chi-jui (Duan Qirui) xiii, 33, 35 Tuckwo, SS 56 United Press (UP) 63 Vasilliev, 91, 94 Veprentzev, Dr. Sergei 121, 122, 124, 126 Vladivostok 98 journey to 9, 91–7, 151–2 Wang Ching-wei (Wang Jingwei) 4, 5–6, 7, 104 Wang Fan-hsi (Wang Fanxi) 8–9 warlordism 1–2, 3, 4, 7–8 Waterman, T.T. 22, 157 Wesleyan College for Women, Georgia 69 Whampoa Military Academy 4, 60 What’s Wrong with China (Gilbert) 36 White, William 138 Williams, Albert Rhys 141 Woo, T.C. 62–3, 93, 94, 104 World War II 161 Wu Pei-fu (Wu Peifu) xiii, 34–5 Wu Vee Chi 39 Wuchang 11, 34, 45 Wuhan 5–6, 7, 10–11, 76, 164 Yu Yu-jen 189 Yuan, Mr. 24–5 Yüan Shih-k’ai (Yuan Shikai) 1, 2 Zacher, Liuba Michaelovna 128

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Reporting the Chinese Revolution: The Letters of Rayna Prohme

Mao and the Chinese Revolution

Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution

A history of the Chinese cultural revolution

Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

The third revolution in the Chinese countryside

The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien

The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien

The Garland of Letters

The Letters of Cicero

The Letters

Reporting for the Media

Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future

Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press from the American Revolution to the War on Terrorism

The Letters

Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future

Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future

The Letters

Daughters of the Revolution

The Psychology Of Revolution

Daughters of the Revolution

Angel of the Revolution

Daughters of the Revolution

Story of the Chinese Zodiac: English Chinese

The Future of Southern Letters

The Letters of Rachel Henning

The Journal of Curious Letters

The Journal of Curious Letters

Decision Of The Central Committee Of The Chinese Communist Party Concerning The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

The letters of Marsilio Ficino

The Oxford Book Of Letters

Reporting the Chinese Revolution: The Letters of Rayna Prohme

Mao and the Chinese Revolution

Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution

A history of the Chinese cultural revolution

Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

The third revolution in the Chinese countryside

The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien

The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien

The Garland of Letters

The Letters of Cicero

The Letters

Reporting for the Media

Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future

Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press from the American Revolution to the War on Terrorism

The Letters

Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future

Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future

The Letters

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