McKay, Claude

McKAY, CLAUDE (1890–1948). A decisive personal link between the Harlem Renaissance, the West Indies, and the Left, Claude McKay had published two volumes of poetry in Jamaica before arriving in the United States in 1912. Like his literary aspirations, McKay’s political tendencies had already developed early in Jamaica, where he came into contact with Fabian socialists through his brother’s interest in the ideas of Sir Sidney Oliver and through his own love of the works of George Bernard Shaw.

McKay’s first year in America occurred at a moment when socialist thought and action were widely felt. The zeal and unwavering idealism of the Industrial Workers of the World appealed most to him, and by 1919 he had joined their ranks. During this phase, he met and became close friends with Hubert H. Harrison, dynamic Harlem street-corner orator, black socialist, and prolific essayist. When McKay’s books later failed to get proper recognition in the black press, Harrison took up the cudgels, extolling McKay as “the greatest living poet of Negro blood in America today.”

The Masses also deeply influenced McKay with its stirring (if sometimes inconsistent) antiracism. He joined his friend Max Eastman on the board of the Liberator, created in 1917 to succeed the repressed Masses, and remained an editor into the early 1920s. The Liberator in 1919 published his famous poem “If We Must Die,” a stirring call to arms against aggressive capitalism. Not yet thirty, McKay was fully committed to the struggle—and to a literary career.

McKay soon joined such Harlem radical figures as Harrison, Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and Harry Haywood in the African Blood Brotherhood, a small but vital political group that merged with the Communist Party. But he continued to function as a maverick, refusing to submit to Party discipline, determined not to allow his ambitions and ideas to be controlled or subordinated. Meanwhile, he remained a tireless poet, journalist, and black radical. From 1919 to 1923 he traveled to Russia, Germany, and other parts of Europe, making a dramatic appearance at the Comintern and acquiring an international reputation among radical intellectuals. He remained unimpressed by political accolades and attention (possibly, as he suggested in his autobiography, because he could not take the American Communist movement as seriously as it took itself). He achieved the wide literary recognition he had sought with the publication of his poetry volume Literary Shadows (1923).

Ironically, the three novels destined to bring McKay lasting fame and notoriety—Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom—were all written and published during a twelve-year hiatus in Europe. He had portrayed black life, in the United States and elsewhere, in many aspects; he had written deeply about the dilemmas of blacks in Western civilization, and about the pleasures of ordinary mass life. But he felt an alienation or melancholy, mirrored in his inability to gain the proper remuneration or royalties from these works. McKay returned to the United States in 1934 a lonely and destitute literary figure, disenchanted with communism.

The remainder of his life would be anticlimactic. Although he continued to write, his creative impulse withered along with his failing health. In 1938 he formed a friendship with Ellen Tarry, a black Catholic writer of children’s books. Through her influence, he converted to Roman Catholicism less than four years before his death.

Baker, Houston. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5953995.html

Bontemps, Arna. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972.

Cooper, Wayne. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. https://lsupress.org/books/detail/claude-mckay-rebel-sojourner-in-the-harlem-renaissance/

Harlem Shadows (1922) An Electronic Edition
http://www.harlemshadows.org