Notes

Chapter 1

1. Claude McKay, “How Black Sees Green and Red,” Liberator, IV (June, 1921), 17, 20–21, reprinted in PCM, 59, 61.

2. MGH, 23.

3. D. T. Edwards, “Small Farming in Jamaica: A Social Scientist’s View,” in David Lowenthal and Lambros Comitas (eds.), Work and Family Life: West Indian Perspectives (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 27–28; Sidney W. Mintz and Douglas Hall, “The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System,” in Sidney W. Mintz (ed.), Papers in Caribbean Anthropology (New Haven, 1960), 3–26, numbers 57–64 in Yale University Publications in Anthropology. Mintz and others in Caribbean anthropology do not define West Indian subsistence farmers as peasants in any historical European sense but as “a class (or classes) of rural landowners producing a large part of the products they consume, but also selling to (and buying from) wider markets, and dependent in various ways upon wider political and economic spheres of control. Caribbean peasantries are, in this view reconstituted peasantries, having begun other than as peasants—in slavery, as deserters or runaways, as plantation laborers, or whatever—and becoming peasants in some kind of resistant response to an externally imposed regime” (Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations [Chicago, 1974], 132 [emphasis in original]).

4. The secondary material on the history of Jamaica from 1865 to 1938 makes it clear that the great poverty of the masses, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, cultural pluralism, and racism have been and remain persistent problems in Jamaica. Among others, see Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of he Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London, 1967); Katrin Norris, Jamaica: The Search for Identity (London, 1962), 1–18; Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith F. Hurwitz, Jamaica: A Historical Portrait (New York, 1971), 121–92; and M. G. Smith, “The Plural Framework of Jamaican Society,” in Lambros Comitas and David Lowenthal (eds), Slaves, Freemen, Citizens: West Indian Perspectives (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 174–93. On the importation of Indian and Chinese laborers, see Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar (2 vols.; London, 1949–50), II, 388–401. The core of the Jewish population in Jamaica was of Sephardic origin. See W. Adolphe Roberts, Jamaica: The Portrait of an Island (New York, 1955), 153; Edward Braithwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (London, 1971), 136–37; and Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865 (New York, 1970), 49–50. The Syrians in Jamaica and those elsewhere in the West Indies are of Lebanese origin. See Nellie Ammar, “They Come from the Middle East,” Jamaica Journal, IV (March, 1970), 2–6; and David Lowenthal, West Indian Societies (New York, 1972), 208–10. For a succinct statement on the rebel tradition in Jamaican history, see Richard Price (ed.), Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 227–92. Finally, it should be noted that a most basic example of the diverging interests of the free colored and blacks in Jamaica concerned emancipation itself, which the slave owners among the free colored opposed. Free blacks, free colored, and the island’s Jewish population all won political equality with the white population in 1830. In the short run, granting equality to blacks had little meaning; very few possessed enough property to qualify as voters or officeholders in the island’s system of political representation. See M. C. Campbell, The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society: A Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloreds of Jamaica, 1800–1865 (Rutherford, N.J., 1976), 140–43.

5. Bernard Semmel, Democracy vs. Empire: The Jamaica Riots of 1865 and the Governor Eyre Controversy (Garden City, N.Y., 1969), 11–189. The Jamaican assembly voluntarily voted itself out of existence, in part because its white majority recognized that it would have been only a matter of time before their control over island affairs would pass to a new black and colored majority. They thus acceded to crown-colony rule because they felt that such a government would best protect their interests. The foundation for the reforms that occurred after 1866 is described by Vincent Marsala’s Sir John Peter Grant, Governor of Jamaica, 1866–1874: An Administrative History (Kingston, 1972).

6. Max Eastman, “Introduction,” in HS, xi-xii.

7. MGH, 10, 48–51, 61. McKay identified the Woolsey home as “Somerset House, a vast rambling barn of a place to which many additions had been made.” Old “Mother Woolsey,” about ninety in McKay’s boyhood, had taught his mother her letters.

8. Ibid., 59–60.

9. Interviews with M. E. McKay, Claude McKay’s niece, September 1, 1978, at the McKay family home, Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, and with Hope McKay Virtue, Claude McKay’s daughter, August 30, 1978, in Kingston, Jamaica. Unless otherwise noted, all interviews are by the author.

10. MGH, 12, 32–34, 41–42, 59–61.

11. Curtin, Two Jamaicas, 23–41, 158–77. For the persistence in Jamaican religion of African religious elements, see Martha W. Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (Rpr. New York, 1969), 88–112. See also Leonard Tucker, “Glorious Liberty”: The Story of a Hundred Years’ Work of the Jamaica Baptist Mission (London, 1914), 85.

12. MGH, 12, 32–34, 41–42, 59–61.

13. Ibid., 25. Interviews with M. E. McKay, September 1, 1978; Hope McKay Virtue, August 30, 1978; and Edna McKay, Claude McKay’s niece, September 2, 1978, in Kingston, Jamaica. See also the Reverend William Ellwood to the author, July 26, 1978, in possession of the recipient. Mr. Ellwood is a Jamaican Presbyterian minister with access to and familiarity with Presbyterian church records in Jamaica. Edward Bean Underhill toured upper Clarendon for the Baptist Missionary Society of England in 1861 and visited both Mt. Zion (the site of the future McKay family church) and Staceyville. At Mt. Zion, he found a “chapel... in a very unfinished state” and a small congregation, but at Staceyville he met a native minister presiding over a flourishing congregation in a substantial church. He also noted that “the nearer the sugar estates approached, the more emphatic were the complaints of the low morals of the population, and their degraded condition” (The West Indies: Their Social and Religious Condition [London, 1862], 445–49). Finally, see ALWFH, 36.

14. Philip Wright, Knibb “The Notorious”: Slaves’ Missionary, 1803–1845 (London, 1973), 76–111, 167–68; Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 211–15; Curtin, Two Jamaieas, 86–89; James Watson and C. A. Woodkey (eds.), Jamaica Congregational Churches: A History and a Memorial (Guildford, England, 1901), 77–78.

15. The Reverend Gillet Chambers quoted in the Reverend R. A. L. Knight (ed.), Liberty and Progress: A Short History of the Baptists in Jamaica (Kingston, 1938), 82.

16. MGH, 48–49, 59–60. Here Claude stated that his mother died at the age of fifty-three. The inscription on her tombstone at Sunny Ville records only that she died in 1909. If Claude’s statement is correct, she was born in 1856.

17. Ibid., 60.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 58–61; Claude McKay to the editor of the Nation, May 23, 1947, in MMP; L. A. Thoywell-Henry (ed.), Who’s Who 1941–1946, Jamaica, British West Indies: An Illustrated Biographical Record of Outstanding Jamaicans and Others Connected with the Island (Kingston, 1945), 444; M. E. McKay to Wayne Cooper, February 10, 1979, in possession of the recipient. McKay claimed September 15, 1889, as his birthday until 1920, when his sister, Rachel, wrote to remind him that he had actually been born on September 15, 1890. His family had apparently set his birthday back a year at some point so he would be eligible a year earlier than was legally permissible to become a student teaching assistant in his brother U’Theo’s school. The clearest statement of the correct date of Claude McKay’s birth is in McKay to Alain Locke, June 4, 1927, in ALP.

20. See the distinctions made by Douglas Hall between “peasants and rural labourers” and “small farmers” in Free Jamaica, 1838–1865: An Economic History (New Haven, 1959). The peasants and free laborers grew food for subsistence, the small farmers for export. On the varieties of contemporary Jamaican marriage patterns, see Edith Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Family in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica (2nd ed.; London, 1966). For an excellent survey of the literature and scholarly debates on West Indian family patterns, see M. G. Smith’s “Introduction” to Clarke’s book (i-xliv). On McKay’s prejudice against mulattoes, see Jean Wagner, Les Poetes Nfyres des Etats-Unis: Le Sentiment Racial et Religieux dans la Poesie de P. L. Dunbar à L. Hughes (1890–1940) (Paris, 1963), 232. Wagner’s book has been translated into English as Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, trans. Kenneth Douglas (Urbana, 1973).

21. ALWFH, 11, 36–37. Hathaway is listed as among those Baptist missionary preachers who arrived in Jamaica in 1875 (Tucker, “Glorious Liberty,” 164).

22. MGH, 60;ALWFH, 36.

23. MGH, 60–61. On such practices as “informal. . . adjudication” and cooperative labor practices among peasants in Jamaica, see Smith, “The Plural Framework of Jamaican Society,” in Comitas and Lowenthal (eds.), Slaves, Freemen, Citizens, 182–83.

24. SJ, 118; see also the poem “My Mountain Home,” in SJ, 125. MGH, 58–59, 64. The major sources for insight into Claude McKay’s childhood and youth are his own writings; all contain strong autobiographical elements. In several works, he deals almost exclusively with the world of his youth. Besides the two works cited above, these include his other volume of dialect poems (CB), several of his short stories (in G), and his last novel (BB). He also dealt with his early years in his autobiography (ALWFH). Many of his poems written after he left Jamaica are also essential for an understanding of his attitude toward his childhood. Finally, other references to these years can be found in his numerous articles and letters. What follows has been largely drawn from all these writings. The details in McKay’s own accounts of his childhood and youth have been checked for discrepancies, and, wherever possible, they have also been compared to other contemporary Jamaican sources.

25. “BJ,” 141; McKay’s article “Boyhood in Jamaica” was excerpted from the then-unpublished manuscript of MGH by the Anglo-Indian scholar Cedric Dover and published in Phylon five years after McKay’s death. Some of the passages in the article differ slighdy from the corresponding passages in the manuscript copy of MGH cur-rendy in my possession. Dover may have used another copy of MGH, or he may have altered the text slighdy while editing it. He and McKay both wrote memoirs of their respective childhoods in Jamaica and India and planned to publish them together in a book entitled East Indian-West Indian. Although both finished their respective halves, neither Dover nor McKay’s literary executor could find an interested publisher. See also MGH, 12, 22.

26. MGH, 22.

27. BB, 7.

28. MGH, 61. In a translator’s note to a book McKay wrote while in Russia in 1922–23, it is his mother, not his father, who is recalled as having been a splendid teller of “Negro folk tales.” See the English version of “Original Translator’s Note” by P. Okhrimenko in NA, xvi-xviii. The original English-language manuscript version by McKay has been lost.

29. MGH, 5, 10.

30. Ibid., 5.

31. Claude McKay, “North & South,” in SP, 20.

32. “ANP”; Okhrimenko, “Original Translator’s Note,” in NA, xv;MGH, 13, 20–22;ALWFH, 12.

33. MGH, 13. See also Thoywell-Henry (ed.), Who’s Who 1941–1946, Jamaica, British West Indies, 444; and Mico College: 125th Anniversary, 1836–1961 (Kingston, 1961), 7–22.

34. Madeline Kerr, Personality and Conflict in Jamaica (London, 1952), 74–84, 114–36.

35. Thoywell-Henry (ed.), Who’s Who 1941–1946, Jamaica, British West Indies, 444. See also U’Theo McKay’s obituary in the Kingston Daily Gleaner, June 17, 1949, p. 1.

36. MGH, 13, 20–22. In 1923, Okhrimenko’s “Original Translator’s Note” (in NA, xv) stated McKay returned after four years with U’Theo, who had taken “a position as a teacher in his native village.” U’Theo’s biographical sketches in the various editions of Who’s Who in Jamaica do not mention that he ever taught in Sunny Ville or at Mt. Zion, but one entry does list several nearby communities where he served as a teacher (L. A. Thoywell-Henry [ed.], Who’s Who and Why in Jamaica, 1939–1940 [Kingston, 1940], 137). Finally, McKay stated he spent his boyhood “in various villages with U’Theo” (ALWFH, 12).

37. MGH, 13–15.

38. Ibid., 17–18; Kerr, Personality and Conflict in Jamaica, 42–46. See also McKay’s early poem (1912), “Strokes of a Tamarind Switch,” in SJ, 111 —13. Agnes had a sorry end. She died young in a Kingston brothel. McKay memorialized her in one of his first published poems, “Agnes O’ De Village Lane,” in the Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 7, 1911, p. 6.

39. MGH, 15–16;ALWFH, 12.

40. Claude McKay, “On Becoming a Roman Catholic,” quoted in Wagner, Les Poetes Negres des Etats-Unis, 213.

41. ALWFH, 11–12.

42. MGH, 21–22. For an excellent history of the debate, see William Irvine, Apes, Angels and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley and Evolution (New York, 1955).

43. MGH, 19, 35–36.

44. Ibid., 19.

45. William Gladstone on Mrs. Humphry Ward’s novel, Robert Elsmere, quoted in Irvine, Apes, Angels and Victorians, 320. Mrs. Humphry Ward, Matthew Arnold’s niece, was a Darwinist; she was among the novelists McKay read in Jamaica.

46. ALWFH, 11–12;MGH, 19.

47. U’Theo McKay to Claude McKay, March 1, 1929, in CMP.

48. U’Theo McKay to Claude McKay, April 26, 1929, in CMP.

49. MGH, 14–15.

50. ALWFH, 12.

51. Claude McKay, “Author’s Word,” in HS, xx.

52. “BJ,” 137.

53. MGH, 18–19.

54. “ANP,” 275–76.

55. MGH, 21–22.

56. Ibid., 22–23.

57. Ibid., 32–35. After Claude’s return, his father engaged in a long bitter controversy with an English missionary pastor whom he had found to be a hypocrite. The elder McKay left Mt. Zion Church and took most of the congregation with him, and the preacher was finally forced out by other white Baptist pastors who feared he would bring discredit to them all. Afterward, McKay’s father refused to shake the hand of the departing clergyman. Claude obviously admired his father’s stance in the dispute. In Banana Bottom, his father’s actions are ironically mirrored in the actions of an English mission preacher, Angus Craig, who in a similar dispute with a fellow pastor “never veiled his animosity by hypocrisy. . . . Friends . . . tried to bring about a reconciliation. But Angus Craig refused to stoop to a dirty reconciliation when his heart held a clean hatred” (BB, 25).

58. MGH, 22, 40–41.

59. Ibid., 22–30, 62. See also McKay to Alain Locke, June 4, 1927, in ALP.

60. MGH, 44–45.

61. Ibid.

62. Claude McKay, “Old England,” in SJ, 63.

63. MGH, 12.

64. Ibid.

65. Claude McKay, “Personal Notes on the History of Jamaica,” in MMP.

66. Claude McKay, “The Agricultural Show,” in G, 162–91. Robert Bone considers “The Agricultural Show” one of the most complete expressions of McKay’s pastoral vision of Jamaica and “a pure specimen of [Harlem] Renaissance pastoral” (Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginning to the End of the Harlem Renaissance [New York, 1975], 167). Agricultural shows and choral singing were common occurrences throughout Jamaica in McKay’s day, and both were fre-quendy noted in the Kingston newspapers. For example, see Kingston Daily Gleaner throughout January, 1905.

67. See Kingston Daily Gleaner, January 24, 1905, p. 11, January 18, 1905, p. 10, February 17, 1905, p. 10, February 18, 1905, p. 6, February 22, 1905, p. 6, November 18, 1905, p. 6. What had begun in January as a call for moral regeneration in Jamaica ended by November in expressions of alarm when it was reported that Port Antonio on Jamaica’s north coast was besieged with “street preachers.” The revival spirit threatened to get out of hand.

68. MGH, 43.

69. ALWFH, 12. See also MGH, 43.

70. MGH, 43.

71. Ibid., 51–52. See also “ANP,” 275–76; Okhrimenko, “Original Translator’s Note,” in NA, xv; Walter Jekyll’s “Preface,” in SJ, 9; and Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 7, 1911, p. 6.

72. MGH, 53–58.

73. Ibid., 55.

74. Ibid., 57. In a feature story on McKay, his employer in Brown’s Town was identified as a “Mr. Campbell.” See Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 7, 1911, p. 6. In MGH, McKay referred to him only as “old Brenga.”

75. MGH, 57.

76. Ibid., 57–58.

77. Herbert Jekyll to Frank Cundall, March 16, 1929, in Frank Cundall Papers, West India Reference Library, Jamaica Institute, Kingston. Included in this letter was a brief account of Jekyll’s life, which Cundall, the director of the Jamaica Institute, used in writing a retrospective appreciation of Walter Jekyll that appeared in the Kingston Daily Gleaner, August 19, 1929, n.p. See also the Jekyll obituary in Frank Cundall (ed.), The Handbook of Jamaica for 1930 (Kingston, 1930), 557. Upon his death on March 22, 1876, Walter Jekyll’s father left an estate valued at £140, 000. To Walter was left “£300 per annum during the life or widowhood of [his] mother.” At his mother’s death or remarriage, he was to receive a total of £20,000 from his father’s estate. See the Times (London), May 19, 1876, p. 10. Walter’s brother, Sir Herbert, was a colonel in the Royal Engineers and a distinguished civil servant. See his obituary in the Times (London), September 30, 1932, p. 7. He left an estate valued at over £30,000. See the Times (London), January 24, 1933, p. 13. Walter Jekyll also had a distinguished older sister, Gertrude, one of England’s leading landscape gardeners. She wrote over fourteen volumes on gardening and other subjects. See her obituary and an account of her funeral in the Times (London), December 10, 1932, p. 12, December 13, 1932, p. 17. See also Betty Massingham, Miss Jekyll: Portrait of a Great Gardener (London, 1966). See also Francesco Lamperti, The Art of Singing According to Ancient Tradition and Personal Experiences, trans. Walter Jekyll (London, 1884).

78. See Herbert Jekyll to Frank Cundall, March 16, 1929, in Cundall Papers. I have found no reference to Jekyll’s friendship with Stevenson in any Stevenson biography.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid. See also Herbert Jekyll to Frank Cundall, May 9, 1929, in Cundall Papers. After the outbreak of war in 1914, Boyle “rejoined his old regiment, the Honorable Artillery Company and he was killed in action on Feb. 7, 1917.” See the notice of his memorial service in the Times (London), February 22, 1917, p. 9.

81. Walter Jekyll, The Bible Untrustworthy: A Critical Comparison of Contradictory Passages in the Bible (London, 1904; rpr. New York, 1966). Walter Jekyll also wrote Guide to Hope Gardens (Kingston, 1003).

82. Walter Jekyll, Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes (London, 1907; rpr. New York, 1966). As youngsters he and Gertrude had grown to love the country folk of Surrey, in a way perhaps not unlike the southern country gendemen of the United States in the same period sometimes grew fond of their black agricultural laborers. Gertrude eventually wrote a valuable, detailed (though somewhat romanticized) account of Surrey country folk and their old ways of life. See Gertrude Jekyll, Old West Surrey: Some Notes and Memoirs (London, 1904; rpr. East Ardsley, Wakefield, Yorkshire, England, 1971). For McKay’s account of Jekyll’s interests, see MGH, 66–72, 76–79, 82.

83. This description of Jekyll is based on a number of partial descriptions. See MGH, 65–72; and BB, 71. McKay dedicated Banana Bottom to Jekyll’s memory and in the “Author’s Note” stated that “all the characters... are imaginary, excepting perhaps Squire Gensir,” the fictional prototype of Jekyll (BB, frontispiece). It is reasonable to assume that his physical description of “Squire Gensir” did not deviate far from Jekyll’s actual appearance. In connection with Jekyll’s aristocratic bearing, see also Logan Pearsall Smith, Reperusals and Re-Collections (London, 1936), 60.

84. ALWFH, 13.

85. MGH, 58. McKay did not give up his apprenticeship immediately when he left Brown’s Town. Arrangements were made for him to continue under a “Mr. Saunders” in Chapelton, but he did not work for him very long before giving up his apprenticeship permanently. See Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 7, 1911, p. 6.

86. MGH, 62–63. Gravestone inscription, Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica.

87. Claude McKay, “Mother Dear,” in SJ, 77–78.

88. Claude McKay, “Heritage,” in SP, 29.

89. These poems were “The Harlem Dancer” and “Invocation,” in Seven Arts, II (October, 1917), 741–42.

90. Claude McKay, “My Mother,” in SP, 22. In Banana Bottom, the heroine’s father, Jordan Plant, one of five brothers, after his own father’s death, had returned alone “with his mother to the village of Banana Bottom, where she was born and where she had a lot of land. That lot he began cultivating and adding to until he became the most prosperous peasant of the village” (BB, 27). Thus, in McKay’s fiction the son supplanted the father in real life.

91. SP, 22.

92. MGH, 66. In all likelihood, the poem was “Cotch Donkey,” in CB, 46–47.

93. MGH, 67.

94. Interview with Louise Bennett, September 9, 1978, in her home at Gordon Town, Jamaica.

95. McKay’s retention of his pronounced Jamaican accent was in large part deliberate. He had once found it useful during World War I and had decided then to make sure he retained and cultivated it in the United States. See ALWFH, 8–9.

96. MGH, 67.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid. See also Okhrimenko’s “Original Translator’s Note,” in NA, xv.

99. MGH, 67–68; Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 7, 1911, p. 6. In MGH, he stated that he joined with a friend whose company he enjoyed.

100. Marsala, Sir John Peter Grant, 42–43, 58–59.

101. Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 7, 1911, p. 6.

102. “ANP,” 275–76.

103. Ibid.

104. Okhrimenko, “Original Translator’s Note,” in NA, xv;ALWFH, 14. For a recent account of the Rationalist Press Association, see Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief Atheists and Agnostics in English Society, 1850–1960 (London, 1977), 124–287.

105. MGH, 70. Like his earlier book on the Bible, Jekyll’s translation of Schopenhauer had been published by Watts of the Rationalist Press Association. The Wisdom of Schopenhauer as Revealed in Some of His Writings, trans. Walter Jekyll (London, 1911).

106. ALWFH, 13.

107. MGH, 69.

108. MGH, 71–72.

109. Jekyll, Jamaican Song and Story (1966), 6.

110. The complicated question of parental influences upon the development of homosexual and heterosexual orientations in individuals has been reviewed by Marvin Siegelman in “Parental Background of Male Homosexuals and Heterosexuals,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, HI (1974), 3–18. He suspects that “disturbed parental relations are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for homosexuality to emerge” (16). The question, however, is still much open to debate.

111. “ANP,” 275–76. Edward Carpenter, Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society (Manchester, 1894), Love’s Coming of Age: A Series of Papers on the Relations of the Sexes (Manchester, 1896), and Days with Walt Whitman, with Some Notes on His Life and Work (London, 1906). See also Noel I. Garde, From Jonathan to Gide: The Homosexual in History (New York, 1964), 654–62, 671–73, 608–13; H. Montgomery Hyde, The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A Candid History of Homosexuality in Britain (Boston, 1970), 90–170; and A. L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History: A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts (New York, 1977), 158–60, 288–96.

112. U’Theo McKay to Claude McKay, April 26, 1929, in CMP Information about Johnny Lyons came from an interview with Louise Bennett, September 9, 1978. Lyons died in 1976. Louise Bennett remembered quite clearly that Lyons always insisted that Walter Jekyll was the man whose name Robert Louis Stevenson used in his famous story.

113. Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London, 1976), 135–47.

114. MGH, 71.

115. Ibid., 70.

116. Irvine, Apes, Angels and Victorians, 1–30; Raymond Williams, Society and Culture, 1780–1950 (New York, 1958), 3–199, and The Country and the City (New York, 1973).

117. Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 135–47.

118. BB, 310.

119. Claude McKay, “Free,” CB, 78. For McKay’s account of Jekyll’s role in securing his discharge from the constabulary, see MGH, 78–79.

120. MGH, 72.

121. Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 7, 1911, p. 6.

122. MGH, 78.

123. Max Eastman, “Biographical Note,” in SP, 110.

124. MGH, 79, 82.

Chapter 2

1. Claude McKay also had a third publication in 1912. Appended to SJ were six of the volume’s love lyrics set to music. Late in the year these six arrangements were published separately as Songs from Jamaica (London, 1912).

2. Lloyd W. Brown, West Indian Poetry (New York, 1978), 19–62. In 1759, Francis Williams, a free black Jamaican (1700–1770), published in Latin “Ode to Governor Haldane.” It was the first poem published by a black West Indian. Other predecessors to McKay in the West Indies discussed by Brown include the Guyanese poets Henry G. Dalton and Egbert Martin (“Leo”), who wrote in the last half of the nineteenth century. Among McKay’s Jamaican contemporaries, the most notable poet was Jamaica Times editor Thomas MacDermot, whose gifts as a poet were limited. Brown has concluded that Claude McKay’s “achievements place him well above everyone else” in the long span between 1760 and 1940.

3. MGH, 65–87; “BJ,” 137, 142; Wagner, Les Poetes Negres des Etats-Unis, 218–40; Brown, West Indian Poetry, 39–62; Ralph Glasgow Johnson, “The Poetry of Dunbar and McKay: A Study” (MA. thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1950); and Wayne Cooper, “Preface to the 1972 Edition,” Claude McKay, The Dialect Poetry of Claude McKay: “Songs of Jamaica” and “Constab Ballads” (Rpr. 2 vols, in 1; Plainview, N.Y., 1972). McKay’s dialect poetry served as one important source for Frederic G. Cassidy’s Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica (2nd ed.; London, 1971).

4. For example, SJ contained several poems that reflected McKay’s experience in the constabulary.

5. Brown, West Indian Poetry, 41–52.

6. SJ, 63–65.

7. SJ, 63. See also Brown, West Indian Poetry, 42–43.

8. SJ, 55–58.

9. “My Native Land, My Home,” in SJ, 84.

10. SJ, 13.

11. SJ, 13–14.

12. “King Banana,” in SJ, 30–31. On the importance of bananas to small farmers in McKay’s day, see Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith F. Hurwitz, Jamaica: A Historical Portrait (New York, 1971), 165.

13. From “King Banana,” in SJ, 30.

14. SJ, 30, 31.

15. From “Two-an’-Six,” in SJ, 90–91.

16. SJ, 53–54.

17. Hurwitz and Hurwitz, Jamaica, 159, 161–62.

18. Ibid., 160–61.

19. CB, 13.

20. SJ, 74–76.

21. H. G. DeLisser, In Jamaica and Cuba (Kingston, 1910), 86, 113. DeLisser pointed out that while the average peasant resented the government when in Jamaica, once he migrated to Central America or to the Canal Zone he took great pride in being a British subject.

22. For example, see “Quashie to Buccra,” “Fetchin’ Water,” and “My Native Land, My Home,” all in SJ, 13–14, 42–44, 84–85.

23. CB, 57–58.

24. CB, 7.

25. See “The Bobby to the Sneering Lady” and “A Labourer’s Life Give Me,” both in CB, 67, 71–72.

26. From “The Heart of a Constab,” in CB, 63.

27. The quoted phrase is from “Fetchin’ Water,” in SJ, 42.

28. From “The Heart of a Constab,” in CB, 63.

29. See “Papine Corner,” “Pay-Day,” and “Knutsford Park Races,” all in CB, 40–42, 52–56, 59–61. On Louise Bennett, see Rex Netdeford’s “Introduction” in Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish (Kingston, 1966), 9–24; and Brown, West Indian Poetry, 100–17.

30. Jekyll’s publisher was the founder of the Rationalist Press Association, Charles A. Watts. For many years after 1899, Watts and Company published Rationalist Press Association materials. Jekyll’s Wisdom of Schopenhauer was a superbly edited book, complete with a simply written introduction by Jekyll in which he clearly defined Schopenhauer’s major philosophical terms and phrases. In addition, he also provided useful footnotes throughout the volume.

31. For a clear and concise discussion of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, see Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Baltimore, 1967), 11–32, 124–86.

32. For a perceptive discussion of Schopenhauer’s appeal to the young, see V. J. McGill, Schopenhauer, Pessimist and Pagan (Rpr. New York, 1971), 12–13.

33. CB, 76–77.

34. McGill, Schopenhauer, 29.

35. From “De Days Dat Are Gone,” in SJ, 60.

36. From “A Labourer’s Life Give Me,” in CB, 71.

37. SJ, 97.

38. MGH, 86–87; the Westminister Review, quoted in Kingston Daily Gleaner, December 12, 1912, p. 6.

39. From “A Dream,” in SJ, 98.

40. From “Strokes of the Tamarind Switch,” in SJ, 111.

41. CB, 16. “Bennie’s Departure” is the longest poem in either Songs of Jamaica or Constab Ballads. There is a shorter poem, “To Bennie,” in SJ, 127. Aside from these two poems, nothing is known about McKay’s companion or their relationship.

42. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973), 200, 206–207, 209.

43. MGH, 78–79.

44. From Claude McKay, “Christmas in de Air,” in Jamaica Times, December 16, 1911, p. 27.

45. See “The People’s Parliament,” in Jamaica Times, November 18, December 2, December 9, 1911, February 3 and March 9, 1912. Eventually the Gleaner also began to refer to its letters column as “The People’s Parliament” but it was never on the front page.

46. Jamaica Times, April 1, 1911, p. 2.

47. Ibid., July 20, 1912, p. 22.

48. M. E. McKay to Wayne Cooper, November 10, 1978, in possession of the recipient. Claude McKay noted that U’Theo had liked Olivier’s book (MGH, 23).

49. Jamaica Times, January 13, 1912, p. 12.

50. Ibid.

51. See Kingston Daily Gleaner, January 8, 1912, p. 3. The Gleaner also summarized other reviews from abroad. Among the reviews thus noted was one from the Literary Guide of the Rationalist Press Association for January 1, 1912. The Guide proudly noted that McKay was a member of the RPA. Other journals whose reviews were quoted by the Gleaner included Christian Commonwealth, Garden, and Gardening Illustrated. The latter two reviews undoubtedly appeared because Gertrude Jekyll, Walter’s eldest sister, was connected with them. In fact she may have written both reviews. Both ingenuously cataloged all the Jamaican flowers and plants McKay included in his poetry. The Christian Commonwealth reviewer, the Reverend W. Marwick, generously praised McKay, but deplored his anti-Christian stance. “It is to be hoped,” Marwick wrote, “that he will be able to correct his rather crude views of the teaching of the City Temple pulpit, and of the value of Rationalism, with increased knowledge and experience of the real relation of Faith and Reason.” See Daily Gleaner, January 13, 1912, p. 17, January 16, 1912, p. 13, February 19, 1912, p. 10, March 20, 1912, p. 14, April 30, 1912, p. 4. The Gleaner also reprinted excerpts from the English reviews of Constab Ballads. These included quotes from the Southampton Times, Justice, the National Newsagent, the Erith Times, and the Westminister Review. With the exception of the Westminister Review, which declined to recognize any genuine poetry in the volume, all these journals greeted Constab Ballads as an interesting curiosity of some poetic merit. See Kingston Daily Gleaner, November 20, 1912, p. 10, December 10, 1912, p. 6.

52. Claude McKay, “Peasants’ Way O’ Thinkin’,” in Kingston Daily Gleaner, January 27, 1912, p. 8.

53. Ibid.

54. Jamaica Times, March 2, 1912, pp. 5, 10, 18.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid. See also Kingston Daily Gleaner, February 24, 1912, pp. 1, 13, February 26, 1912, pp. 1, 14, February 28, 1912, pp. 1, 6, and February 29, 1912, p. 1.

57. Claude McKay, “Passive Resistance,” in Kingston Daily Gleaner, April 6, 1912, n.p.

58. Claude McKay, “Gordon to the Oppressed Natives,” in Kingston Daily Gleaner, May 3, 1912, p. 13. See the same poem in Jamaica Times, May 4, 1912, p. 20.

59. Jekyll’s letter was apparently never published in the Gleaner. I could find no reference to this controversy in either the Gleaner or the Jamaica Times.

60. Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 21, 1911, p. 17.

61. Jamaica Times, March 9, 1912, p. 11.

62. Kingston Daily Gleaner, March 6, 1912.

63. Jamaica Times, March 30, 1912, p. 11.

64. Ibid.

65. Kingston Daily Gleaner, May 4, 1912, p. 6.

66. Jamaica Times, December 14, 1912, p. 49.

67. Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 13, 1911, p. 13.

68. Jamaica Times, February 13, 1912, p. 1, April 13, 1912, p. 11.

69. MGH, 79–82, 84–85; Kingston Daily Gleaner, April 11, 1912, p. 6, April 12, 1912, p. 6. The Tuskegee Conference was held April 17–19. Jamaica sent three delegates: J. R. Williams, Jamaica’s Director of Education, who was white; the mulatto principal of Titchfield School; and the black master of Old Harbour Elementary School, S. C. Thompson. See Kingston Daily Gleaner, May 1, 1912, p. 4.

70. MGH, 86.

71. MGH, 82, 85.

72. Ibid., 84–85.

73. Jamaica Times, June 15, 1912, p. 11.

74. Ibid.; see also MGH, 45.

75. Interview with Louise Bennett, September 9, 1978.

76. MGH, 86–87.

77. ALWFH, 20;BE, 8.

78. MGH, 82–87;Jamaica Times, August 10, 1912, p. 23.

79. Hope McKay Virtue to Wayne Cooper, June 7, 1964, in possession of the recipient. Claude and Eulalie Imelda Lewars were married in 1914. Mrs. Virtue, their only child, now lives in California.

80. MGH, 83–84;EE, 73–86. On West Indian tea meetings, see Roger Abrahams, “The West Indian Tea Meeting. An Essay in Civilization,” in Ann M. Pescatello (ed.), Old Roots in New Lands: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on Black Experiences in the Americas (Westport, Conn., 1977), 173–208.

81. MGH, 84.

82. Ibid., 85–86.

83. Ibid., 87.

84. Jamaica Times, August 17, 1912, p. 1.

85. Kingston Daily Gleaner, August 5, 1912, p. 3.

86. From “De Days Dat Are Gone,” in SJ, 60.

87. Jamaica Times, August 10, 1912, p. 23.

Chapter 3

1. J. H. Parry and Philip Sherlock, A Short History of the West Indies (3rd ed.; New York, 1971), 155–58. See also the following articles on race and class in Jamaica and the West Indies: Marcus Garvey, “The Race Question in Jamaica (1916)”; C. V. D. Hadley, “Personality Patterns, Social Class, and Aggression in the British West Indies”; and Rex Nettleford, “National Identity and Attitudes to Race in Jamaica,” all in David Lowenthal and Lambros Comitas (eds.), Consequences of Class and Color: West Indian Perspectives (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 4–12, 13–34, 35–56.

2. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (2nd rev. ed.; New York, 1966), 3–95; Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir (New York, 1954). On the castelike aspects of black-white relations in the United States, see Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (4th ed.; New York, 1944), 667–88.

3. For a relevant general description of lower-middle-class British West Indian personality patterns and their historical and social psychological determinants, see Hadley, “Personality Patterns, Social Class, and Aggression in the British West Indies,” in Lowenthal and Comitas (eds), Consequences of Class and Color, 13–34.

4. The varied black American opposition to Booker T Washington’s racial leadership has been discussed by a number of scholars. See August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, 1963), 161–278; and Louis Harlan, Booker T Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York, 1972), 304–24.

5. “ANP,” 275–76.

6. Ibid.

7. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 272–81.

8. Claude McKay, “In Memoriam: Booker T. Washington,” was first printed in PCM, 116. As late as the 1930s, McKay would still cite Washington’s work at Tuskegee as an example of what could be accomplished by black group effort. See Claude McKay, “For Group Survival,” Jewish Frontier, IV (October, 1937), 19–26, reprinted in PCM, 234–39.

9. My thanks to Louis R. Harlan for this letter.

10. Student transcripts of Claude McKay from Kansas State, 1912–1914. My thanks to the Kansas State Registrar’s Office and to Professor James C. Carey of the History Department of Kansas State for providing me with the complete transcripts.

11. “RHH.” See also Claude McKay, “A Negro Writer to His Critics,” New York Herald Tribune Books, March 6, 1932, reprinted in PCM, 132–39.

12. P. Okhrimenko, “Original Translator’s Note,” in NA.

13. Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York, 1957), 41–44.

14. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903);ALWFH, 109–10.

15. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 3–4.

16. Langston Hughes, The Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP (New York, 1962), 203.

17. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York, 1933), 203.

18. “RHH.”

19. Student transcripts of Claude McKay.

20. ALWFH, 4.

21. Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, March 10, 1928, in CMP.

22. Countee Cullen (ed.), Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Negro Poetry (New York, 1927), 82. McKay’s daughter wrote that she had always understood that McKay received a $1,000 award from Kansas State upon his graduation in 1914 (Hope McKay Virtue to Wayne Cooper, June 7, 1964, in possession of the recipient). McKay, however, stated that he “quit college” (ALWFH, 4).

23. “ANP,” 275–76.

24. Marriage license of Claude McKay and Eulalie I. Lewars, in CMP.

25. “RHH.”

26. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem, The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (2nd ed.; New York, 1971), 110–11. For a historical survey of black neighborhoods in New York since 1865, see Seth Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920 (New York, 1965), 15–44. For a view of Harlem and Negro New York that reflects the hopefulness of Harlem residents around World War I, see James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York, 1930).

27. For a detailed account of the early years of the NAACP, see Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909–1920) (Baltimore, 1967).

28. Nancy Weiss, The National Urban League, 1910–1940 (New York, 1974), 3–107.

29. James Weldon Johnson, “Brief Biography of Claude McKay” (Two-page statement, in Claude McKay file, HFP).

30. Ibid. In a letter to Johnson, McKay denied his restaurant venture had been on West Fifty-third Street (March 10, 1928, in JWJP). See McKay’s statement about the restaurant he “managed” in Brooklyn, in ALWFH, 54.

31. HH, 35, 40.

32. ALWFH, 54.

33. “RHH.”

34. “ANP,” 275–76.

35. Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, March 10, 1928, Johnson to McKay, April 12, 1928, both in JWJP.

36. Hope McKay Virtue to Wayne Cooper, June 7, 1964, in possession of the recipient.

37. See “Truant;’ in G, 157–62.

38. This information regarding McKay’s personal life was revealed to the author in conversations by several individuals who knew McKay after World War I. They included Carl Cowl, James Ivy, Dr. Fanny Rappaport-Vogein, and Charles Ashleigh. In addition, see Adolf Dehn to Wayne Cooper, January 14, 1964, in possession of the recipient.

39. HH, 57; for other examples, see “Romance,” “The Snow Fairy,” “Tormented,” and “One Year After,” all in HS, 73–74, 76–77, 82, 84–85.

40. “RM.”

41. From “Truant,” in G, 154.

42. “ANP,” 275–76.

43. ALWFH, 4.

44. Henry May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (Chicago, 1964), vii-xii, 3–120.

45. Ibid., 219–329.

46. Ibid.

47. Clearly, black writers in general confronted in their developing literature during and after World War I problems much deeper and more complex than credited to them in Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971).

48. ALWFH, 4–5, 26–27.

49. For a good overview of Braithwaite’s lengthy and unusual career, see Philip Butcher (ed.), The William Stanley Braithwaite Reader (Ann Arbor, 1972).

50. Claude McKay [Rhonda Hope] to William Braithwaite, January 11, 1916, in WSBP.

51. Claude McKay to William Stanley Braithwaite, September 29, 1918, ibid.

52. McKay [Rhonda Hope] to Braithwaite, January 11, 1916, ibid.

53. Claude McKay [Rhonda Hope] to William Braithwaite, February 15, 1916, ibid.

54. “Remorse,” “My Ethiopian Maid,” and “My Werther Days,” all in WSBP.

55. “In Memoriam. Booker T. Washington” and “To the White Fiends,” both ibid.

56. In 1937, McKay remembered only that Braithwaite had advised him “to write and send to the magazines only such poems as did not betray my racial identity.” In fairness to Braithwaite, McKay might have remembered that he had initially voiced to Braithwaite his own concern that his poems on nonracial themes had elicited no interest among publishers and that he had shared at the time Braithwaite’s concern that blacks not be judged solely on the basis of their race and racial concerns. ALWFH, 26–28.

57. Ibid., 28.

58. Kellogg, NAACP, 4–64.

59. McKay to Braithwaite, September 29, 1918, in WSBP. See also Claude McKay, “Socialism and the Negro,” WD, January 31, 1920.

60. Joel Spingarn, Creative Criticism (New York, 1917). See also Kellogg, NAACP, 61–283; Robert E. Spiller (ed.), Literary History of the United States (Rev. ed.; New York, 1957), 1154–56; and B. Joyce Ross, J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911–1939 (New York, 1972).

61. ALWFH, 147.

62. From a Seven Arts editorial, written by Joel Oppenheim and quoted in May, The End of American Innocence, 325–26.

63. ALWFH, 26.

64. From Claude McKay, “Invocation,” in Seven Arts, II (October, 1917), 741.

65. Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York, 1945), 45; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York, 1952); James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York, 1961).

66. From Claude McKay, “The Harlem Dancer,” in Seven Arts, II (October, 1917), 741.

67. May, The End of American Innocence, 392.

68. Bertrand Russell, “Is Nationalism Moribund?” Seven Arts, II (October, 1917), 687.

69. This poem obviously referred to the period immediately after the institution of Prohibition, but it was inspired by McKay’s World War I railroad experiences. Untitled poem from Claude McKay’s short story “Truant,” in G, 159.

70. HH, 140.

71. From “Truant,” in G, 144–45.

72. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, July 30, 1942, in PCM, 301–302.

73. ALWFH, 45–52.

74. Ibid., 45, 50–52.

75. Ibid., 49.

76. McKay, “A Negro Writer to His Critics,” in PCM, 136–37.

77. Charles King to Claude McKay, April 5, 1928, in CMP.

78. HH, 79–80. In the chapter entitled “Myrtle Avenue,” there also occurs a discussion about cocaine and its easy availability before World War I (HH, 35).

79. ALWFH, 30.

80. Ibid., 3, 5–10. For an authoritative study of Harris, see Philippa Pullar, Frank Harris: A Biography (New York, 1976).

81. ALWFH, 9–10.

82. Ibid., 18.

83. Ibid., 21–22.

84. “ANP,” 276.

85. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, October 16, 1944, in PCM, 305.

86. Okhrimenko, “Original Translator’s Note,” in NA. McKay reprinted in full a statement on the revolutionary aims of the IWW given to him in Moscow by William (“Big Bill”) Haywood, the former IWW leader who had fled the United States in 1921 rather than accept a long jail sentence imposed upon him and other IWW leaders by a federal court in Chicago (NA, 29–33). Useful histories of the IWW include Melvyn Dubofsky’s We Shall Be All: A History of the I.WW. (Chicago, 1969); and Patrick Ren-shaw’s The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (Garden City, N.Y., 1967).

87. Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, Conn., 1977), 207–18.

88. ALWFH, 41–42.

89. Henry Miller, Plexus (New York, 1965), 560–61.

90. See Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York, 1961), 18; William L. O’Neill, Echoes of Revolt: “The Masses” 1911–1917 (Chicago, 1966), 17–24, and The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (New York, 1979), 30–53; and May, The End of American Innocence, 314–17.

91. Quoted in Aaron, Writers on the Left, 21.

92. Ibid., 41–113; O’Neill, The Last Romantic, 65–67, 72–81.

93. ALWFH, 28–29.

94. O’Neill, The Last Romantic, 37–38.

95. Claude McKay, “The Dominant White,” in L, II (April, 1919), 20;ALWFH, 28–29, 39; O’Neill, The Last Romantic, 73.

96. See the biographical sketch of Crystal Eastman in Blanche Wiesen Cook (ed.), Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (New York, 1978), 1–38.

97. ALWFH, 29–30.

98. Ibid., 30.

99. O’Neill, The Last Romantic, 3–81.

100. ALWFH, 30–31;PCM, v, 300–16.

101. Max Eastman in the Masses and Joseph Freeman, quoted in Aaron, Writers on the Left, 23. Freeman’s autobiography provides many interesting parallels and contrasts to McKay’s A Long Way from Home. Freeman, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, grew up in New York City and attended Columbia University, but he shared with McKay many of the same formative cultural influences, and their paths to communism were in many ways similar. Both had been indelibly influenced by English literature and shared the same literary tastes. Both fell under the spell of the Masses and Max Eastman, and both eventually shared the same disillusionment with communism, though Freeman remained in the party as a functionary until the late 1930s. See Joseph Freeman, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (New York, 1936).

102. O’Neill, The Last Romantic, 68–99. Max Eastman also very ably told his own story of these years in Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch (New York, 1964), 3–166.

103. Max Eastman, quoted in Aaron, Writers on the Left, 42. On Eastman’s early years, see Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living (New York, 1948); and O’Neill, The Last Romantic, 3–53.

104. See McKay’s letters to Eastman in PCM, 150–55, 307.

105. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, July 29, 1919, in PCM, 11.

106. O’Neill, The Last Romantic, 3–29. For the story of Max Eastman’s second marriage, see his own Love and Revolution, 644–51.

107. Throughout his life, Eastman consistently expressed admiration and respect for McKay, whose friendship he valued. For examples, see Eastman’s “Introduction” to HS, ix-xviii; and Eastman, Love and Revolution, 72, 222–23, 467–68, 495. On Eastman’s own doubts concerning his gift for poetry and his insistence upon McKay’s vocation as poet, see respectively O’Neill, The Last Romantic, 246–48, 280–81, 296; and PCM, 302. Finally, I would like to thank Carl Cowl, Claude McKay’s literary executor, for allowing me to hear the tape in his possession of Max Eastman’s speech on Claude McKay, delivered in 1952 at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center in Harlem. I also learned much about Eastman’s loyalty to McKay’s memory during the several conversations I had with Eastman before his death in 1969. Eastman, who was so frank about his own sexual life, remembered nothing about McKay’s sexual preferences, even after an incredulous Carl Cowl (also present during this particular conversation) blundy told Eastman he must have known of McKay’s homosexuality.

108. A good summary of the unstable international climate in 1919 and its unbalancing effect in the United States can be found in William M. Tutde, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1970), 1–50. See also Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis, 1955); and William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).

109. Murray, Red Scare.

110. Tutde, Race Riot, 3–31, 208–67.

111. Ibid., 74–207.

112. Ibid., 208–41.

113. HH, 140–41.

114. ALWFH, 31.

115. Tutde, Race Riot, 208–41.

116. HH, 140.

117. Max Eastman, quoted in O’Neill, The Last Romantic, 37.

118. Claude McKay, “A Roman Holiday,” in L, II (July, 1919), 21.

119. Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” ibid.

120. ALWFH, 21.

121. Ibid., 31–32.

122. Ibid., 31.

123. Time, September 27, 1971.

124. Claude McKay, “The Capitalist at Dinner,” in L, II (July, 1919), 21.

125. Claude McKay, “The Little Peoples,” ibid., 20.

Chapter 4

1. Max Eastman, “Claude McKay,” L, II (July, 1919), 7.

2. W. A. Domingo in Messenger, September, 1919, quoted in Investigative Activities of the Department of Justice, Exhibit No. 10, “Radicalism and Sedition Among Negroes, As Reflected in Their Publications,” Senate Executive Documents, 66th Cong., 1st Sess., No. 153, pp. 161–87, hereafter cited as U.S. Dept. of Justice, “Radicalism and Sedition Among Negroes.”

3. Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro (1925; rpr. New York, 1968), 4.

4. Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison, Wis., 1955). See also Amy Jacques Garvey (ed.), The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Or Africa for the Africans (2 vols.; rpr. New York, 1969); and John Henrik Clarke (ed.), Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York, 1974).

5. ALWFH, 32.

6. Ibid., 41–42, 55, 113; Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War U (Westport, Conn., 1977), 207–18, 266, 324. Several authors have devoted brief attention to black radicals in postwar New York. See especially James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York, 1930), 246–51; and Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (New York, 1960), 315–35. For an important, detailed autobiography of one black American radical who came of age during and after World War I, see Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: The Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago, 1978). Two indispensable primary sources are government publications that resulted from the Red Scare of 1919: U.S. Dept. of Justice, “Radicalism and Sedition Among Negroes,” 161–87; and New York (State) Legislature Joint Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics, with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required to Curb It, Being the Report of the Joint Legislative Committees Investigating Seditious Activities, Filed April 24, 1920 in the Senate of the State of New York (4 vols.; Albany, N.Y., 1920), II, 1476–1520, hereafter cited as New York Legislature, Revolutionary Radicalism.

7. Jervis A. Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York, 1972); Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and “The Messenger,” 1917–1928 (Westport, Conn., 1975); Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans, 265–311.

8. Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 322–26.

9. Ibid., 325.

10. Ibid., 326–53.

11. On W. A. Domingo, see PCM, 343–44. For information on Domingo, as well as the other Harlem socialists discussed here, I am indebted to Ben Waknin of New York City, whose work-in-progress contains a minutely detailed analysis of their individual personalities and thought. See also Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair, 3–104.

12. See Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 322–53; Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 68–150; Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair, 3–104; and PCM, 336, 343–44. For an extremely partisan, negative assessment of these early Harlem radicals, see Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual from Its Origin to the Present Day (New York, 1967).

13. By the mid-1930s, Afro-American charges that he had abandoned Harlem and black American efforts for racial advancement during the 1920s led McKay to defend his right to white as well as black friendships and impelled him to explain the reasons for his lengthy European expatriation after 1922. See ALWFH, 35–44, 237–354.

14. Ibid., 39–42.

15. See “Old England,” in SJ, 63;ALWFH, 60, 80; and C. K. Ogden, “Recent Verse,” Cambridge Magazine, X (January-March, 1921), 115–17.

16. ALWFH, 66–72. See also Wayne Cooper and Robert C. Reinders, “A Black Briton Comes Home: Claude McKay in England, 1920,” Race, IX (1967), 67–83.

17. ALWFH, 67.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.; Donald W. Klein and Anne B. Clark (eds.), The Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), I, 204–19; Sidney Taylor (ed.), The New Africans: A Guide to the Contemporary History of Emergent Africa and Its Leaders (London, 1967), 370–73, 215–17.

20. ALWFH, 67–69.

21. Ibid., 68. In ALWFH, McKay referred to it as “the International Club.” Considering his disenchantment with international socialism in the 1930s, his omission of the word Socialist is understandable.

22. Ibid., 68–69.

23. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, September 16, 1946, in PCM, 312. See the poem “Travail,” in WD, January 10, 1920.

24. ALWFH, 69–70. Advertisements for the club’s social activities appeared regularly in Sylvia Pankhurst’s WD.

25. The literature on the British Labour party is large. For a compact summary of the party’s evolution, see Henry Pelling, A Short History of the Labour Party (4th ed.; London, 1972). See Raymond Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism (London, 1977); Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900–1921: The Origins of British Communism (London, 1969). See also Stanley Pierson, British Socialists: The Journey from Fantasy to Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 1–42, 253–350.

26. Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism, 160–66, 237–40, 195–283; Pierson, British Socialists, 270–91.

27. Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism, 87–215. Challinor, a Trotskyite, writes from a perspective sympathetic to the Socialist Labour Party.

28. The best portrait of Pankhurst and her organization is contained in David J. Mitchell’s The Fighting Pankhursts: A Study in Tenacity (New York, 1967), 19–50, 80–110, 177–88, 239–63, 308–40. For other views on Sylvia Pankhurst and the Workers’ Socialist Federation, see Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism, 168–69, 176, 220, 241; and Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 206–37.

29. WD, September 11, 1920.

30. Interview by Robert C. Reinders with Frank and Francine Budgen, August 18, 1966, in London. The artist, literary critic, and former revolutionary socialist, Frank Budgen, and his wife, Francine, both knew McKay well in 1920; they believed he first became acquainted with members of Pankhurst’s organization at the International Socialist Club.

31. Claude McKay, “A Black Man Replies,” WD, April 24, 1920. For the full story of Morel’s campaign against the French and their use of black troops on the Rhine, see Robert C. Reinders, “Racialism on the Left: E. D. Morel and the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” International Review of Social History, CIII (First quarter, 1968), 1–28.

32. All the quotations are from Claude McKay, “A Black Man Replies.” Before McKay’s arrival in England, the WD had spoken out against outbreaks of white violence against blacks in London and had urged working-class tolerance of blacks in Great Britain. See especially the editorial commentary, “Stabbing Negroes in the London Dock Area,” WD, June 7, 1919.

33. ALWFH, 74–76.

34. Between January and April 17, 1920, the following poems by Claude McKay appeared in WD: “Travail” and “Samson,” January 10, 1920; “Song of the New Soldier and Worker,” April 3, 1920; “Joy in the Woods,” April 10, 1920; [pseud. Hugh Hope], “A Hero of the Wars,” April 17, 1920. During the same period, the following articles also appeared in the WD: “Socialism and the Negro,” January 31, 1920; “The Capitalist Way. Lettow-Vorbeck,” February 7, 1920; “An International Money Crisis,” February 14, 1920. On Sylvia Pankhurst’s travels in the months prior to January, 1920, see Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts, 86–87.

35. See Reinders’ interview with Frank and Francine Budgen. The Budgens believed that McKay had been introduced to the International Socialist Club by “Lillian Thring, a suffragette and friend of Sylvia Pankhurst.” Crystal Eastman had preceded McKay in London the year before, and she may have suggested to him before he left New York that he look up Pankhurst and her group.

36. ALWFH, 76–77; Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts, 80–101.

37. Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts, 80–101.

38. Ibid.; see also Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism, 168–69, 150–256; and Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 187–257. Kendall wrote from a nonrevolutionary perspective. His account of the Russian role in the foundation of the Communist Party of Great Britain should be compared to Challinor’s account, written from a critical socialist revolutionary perspective. Both Kendall and Challinor should be compared to more orthodox Communist party histories. In particular, see L. J. Mac-Farlane, The British Communist Party: Its Origins and Development until 1929 (London, 1966), 30–126; and James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Vol. I, Formation and Early Years, 1919–1924 (London, 1968).

39. ALWFH, 76–77.

40. McKay, “The Capitalist Way.”

41. McKay, “Travail,” in WD.

42. McKay, “Samson,” ibid.

43. Claude McKay [Rhonda Hope] to William Stanley Braithwaite, January 11, February 15, 1916, both in WSBP.

44. Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts, 80–87.

45. Mitchell, in The Fighting Pankhursts, has a good deal to say about the use of pseudonyms by other writers on the WD.

46. McKay, “Socialism and the Negro.” See Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism, 40–41, 158–59, 267–68, and passim. Harold Cruse believes the influence of black socialists on the Garvey movement was extremely pernicious, as they distracted blacks from greater concentration on primary community development (The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 44–63, 115–46). Ironically, McKay came close to advancing the same argument in the 1930s, at a time when the young Harold Cruse, just corning to maturity, looked to the American Communist party for leadership.

47. McKay, “Song of the New Soldier and Worker,” in WD.

48. ALWFH, 86.

49. Ogden, “Recent Verse,” 116–17.

50. Ibid., 117. On Ogden’s World War I coverage of the international press in Cambridge Magazine, see Margaret Cole’s comments in the Times (London), March 29, 1957, p. 13. See also P. Sargent Florence and J. R. L. Anderson (eds.), C. K. Ogden: A Collective Memoir (London, 1977), 13–55, 56–81.

51. See “Poems: Claude McKay,” Cambridge Magazine, X (Summer, 1920), 55–58.

52. Brown, West Indian Poetry, 19–62.

53. Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 196–219; Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts, 94–95; Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism, 252–53. The Workers’ Dreadnought reported upon the formation and aims of the Communist Party (BSTI) in its issues of June 26 and July 3, 1920.

54. Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts, 88–93. Lenin and the Third Communist International were endeavoring to bring antiparliamentarians in Germany and Italy, as well as in Great Britain, into line with the Third International’s new policy of left-wing European unity under Russian leadership. To this end, Lenin in his famous pamphlet, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Sickness, attacked Sylvia Pankhurst and another British Communist, William Gallacher, as romantic, unscientific, and ineffectual participants in the new Communist internationalism. McKay counted Gallacher, as well as Pankhurst, a friend. See ALWFH, 64.

55. ALWFH, 76. For more on Comrade Vie, see Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 243, 246–49.

56. See Claude McKay [Hugh Hope], “Re-Affirmation,” in WD, July 3, 1920. For a good survey of revolutionary events in Europe during 1919, see David J. Mitchell, 1919: Red Mirage (New York, 1970). The following list of articles gives some idea of the range of topics discussed in the WD: Shapurji Saklatvala, “Coal and Iron,” February 14, 1920; Louis C. Fraina, “The American White Terror and the Communist Party,” February 28, 1920; [Editorial], “An African Protests,” June 21, 1919; [Editorial], “The Colour Bar,” January 10, 1920; and Herman Gorter, “Ireland: The Achilles Heel of England,” May 8, 1920.

57. Claude McKay [Ness Edwards], “Some Thoughts on Tactics,” WD, July 24, 1920. This was McKay’s first use of the pseudonym Ness Edwards. He did not use it again until October 28, 1920, when in “Revolutionary Mass Action,” he argued that the increased use of labor-saving technology in industry actually meant less profit for the capitalist in the long run because machinery in itself could not compensate for the actual “surplus value” of the human labor displaced by technology. This argument was challenged and Ness Edwards responded (November 18, 1920) with a short recapitulation of his views, entitled “A Debate.” McKay used the pseudonym C. E. Edwards more frequently in the WD. My suspicion is that he reserved Ness Edwards for his few ventures into the realm of pure Marxist theory. It is also possible that Ness Edwards may have been a joint effort by McKay and Comrade Vie, Erkki Veltheim. These articles have the imprint of McKay’s style, but they are much more theoretical than most of his work. Another possibility, of course, remains: the short editorial criticisms that appear after Ness Edwards first two articles could have been written by Veltheim as a part of his efforts to help McKay be “more effectively radical.” See also “Editorial Afterword,” WD, July 24, 1920; and Claude McKay [Hugh Hope], “Communism and the Local Councils of Action,” WD, September 25, 1920.

58. Claude McKay [C. E. Edwards], “The Revolution in Currency,” WD, October 2, 1920.

59. See Claude McKay [Hugh Hope], “Review of First Principles of Working Class Education by James Clunie,” WD, September 11, 1920; Claude McKay [Hugh Hope], “The Leader of the Bristol Revolutionaries,” WD, August 7, 1920. On the Unity Conference, see Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 207–209, 211–12.

60. Claude McKay [Hugh Hope], “The Leader of the Bristol Revolutionaries.” For a good brief summary of the way the British government dealt with labor’s demands after World War I, see Charles Loch Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940 (Chicago, 1955), 17–46. Mowat’s retrospective views on the British government’s reactionary stance toward labor after World War I generally accords with the criticism of the British Left at the time, though Mowat states his views in less extreme language.

61. Claude McKay [Our Special Correspondent], “Official Labor at Portsmouth,” WD, September 18, 1920. McKay later discussed this article at length in ALWFH, 79–82.

62. ALWFH, 79. McKay did note the conclusion of the lumberyard strike in WD. See Claude McKay [C. E. Edwards], “End of Strike in Saw-Mills,” WD, September 11, 1920. On Pankhurst’s relation to William Lansbury, the lumber merchant, see Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts, 44, 109.

63. Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts, 89–95; Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 212, 232, 237.

64. David Springhall [R.000 (Stoker) HMS Reliance], “From the Lower Deck,” WD, September 4, 1920; David Springhall [S.000 (Gunner) HMS Lucie], “With the Red Navy in the Baltic,” WD, September 25, 1920; David Springhall [S.000 (Gunner) HMS Hunter], “Discontent on the Lower Deck,” WD, October 16, 1920.

65. [Editorial], “A Communist on Trial,” WD, November 6, 1920.

66. ALWFH, 76. The historian Walter Kendall, who examined Sylvia Pankhurst’s papers at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam for his Revolutionary Movement in Britain, stated that he suspected “an article [by Claude McKay] helped send Sylvia Pankhurst to jail in 1920” (Walter Kendall to Robert C. Reinders, June 3, 1966, in my possession).

67. Claude McKay [Leon Lopez], “The Yellow Peril and the Dockers,” WD, October 16, 1920.

68. ALWFH, 82–83.

69. Ibid., 83–84. McKay’s account has been confirmed and expanded upon by Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 246–58. Veltheim, who was born in Hollola, Finland, was only twenty-two years old at the time of his arrest.

70. ALWFH, 86.

71. Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 248–49.

72. From “A Communist on Trial.”

73. ALWFH, 64–65.

74. I. A. Richards’ “Preface” to SNH; I. A. Richards to Robert C. Reinders, May 19, 1966, in my possession.

75. ALWFH, 86–87.

76. McKay was characteristically vague about just who raised the money for his return to the United States. “An English friend,” he wrote, “an I.W.W. who lived in America (I think he had been deported thence), undertook to find a group of friends to put up the fare to get me back there” (ALWFH, 87). The “English friend” was never further identified.

77. See also Charles Loch Mowat’s interpretation of post-World War I England in his critical history, Britain Between the Wars, 1–142.

78. ALWFH, 61–64.

79. Ibid., 71.

80. “Poets and Poetry,” Spectator, CXXV (October 23, 1920), 539–40, quoted in ALWFH, 88. In his notice of SNH in the January-March, 1921, issue of Cambridge Magazine, C. K. Ogden confirmed that, with a single exception, “only one of the score or more journals on which the public depends for literary information has done more than briefly indicate that a ‘nigger minstrel’ or ‘an overseas nigger’ has issued some verses.” The one exception, Ogden noted, was the Westminster Review, which gave McKay’s verse its warm endorsement. See Ogden, “Recent Verse,” 117.

81. See also PCM, 193–293.

82. Cooper and Reinders, “A Black Briton Comes Home,” 83. See also Henry Pel-ling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (London, 1958), 50, 93, 109, 111, 125–26.

83. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Rpr. Bloomington, 1960).

84. Interview by Reinders with Frank and Francine Budgen.

85. ALWFH, 87.

86. Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts, 323, see also 102–10, 239–66, 308–40.

87. From “Flame-Heart,” in SNH, 30.

88. “Exhortation” first appeared as “To Ethiopia,” in L, III (February, 1920), 7. On the Hampstead School of African Socialism, see Cooper and Reinders, “A Black Briton Comes Home,” 80.

Chapter 5

1. Interview by Robert C. Reinders with Frank and Francine Budgen, August 18, 1966, in London. The Budgens remembered that McKay had seemed especially fond of Max and Crystal Eastman. During his sojourn in England, McKay contributed the following poems to the L. “To Ethiopia” and “Home Thoughts,” III (February, 1920), 7, 19; “Mother,” III (March, 1920), 24; and “The Tropics in New York,” III (May, 1920), 48.

2. ALWFH, 96.

3. MGH, 48–50.

4. ALWFH, 97.

5. Max Eastman, “Editorials,” L, IV (March, 1921), 1. See also Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch (New York, 1964), 220–25; and ALWFH, 97.

6. Eastman, Love and Revolution, 225.

7. ALWFH, 97. See also Claude McKay to Max Eastman, April 3, 1923, in PCM, 83–84.

8. ALWFH, 99.

9. The Liberator published many firsthand accounts of Russian affairs, including those by John Reed, who unfortunately died shortly before McKay joined the magazine’s editorial staff. See John Reed, “Soviet Russia Now,” L, III (December, 1920), 9–11, and IV (January, 1921), 14–17; Boris Reinstein, “On Duty in Russia: A Letter from Boris Reinstein,” L, IV (February, 1921), 16–17. For an authoritative discussion of the Liberator’s new revolutionary seriousness and the tensions it produced, see Aaron, Writers on the Left, 91–95. On Eastman’s politics between 1918 and 1922, see William L. O’Neill, The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (New York, 1979), 82–99.

10. Eastman, Love and Revolution, 216–17, 224–25. See also Eastman, “To John Reed,” Boardman Robinson, “A Memory,” and John Reed, “The Dead and the Living: From a Letter Written by John Reed,” all in L, IV (February, 1921), 15, 17, 20. See also Louise Bryant, “In Memory,” L, IV (July, 1921), 24. For more on John Reed, see Granville Hicks, John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary (New York, 1936); Richard O’Connor and Dale L. Walker, The Lost Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York, 1967); and Robert A. Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York, 1975).

11. ALWFH, 130–31; Eastman, “Editorials.”

12. ALWFH, 99–102, 104.

13. Clare Sheridan, My American Diary (New York, 1922).

14. ALWFH, 103–104. For example, see E. E. Cummings, “Maison,” and “Libation,” both in L, IV (July, 1921), 17, 24. See also Eastman, Loi^e and Revolution, 139–40.

15. Max Eastman discusses his relationship with Deshon in detail in Love and Revolution, 7–11, and passim.

16. Charlie Chaplin, My Trip Abroad (New York, 1922), 31–33, and My Autobiography (New York, 1964), 285.

17. ALWFH, 117–19.

18. The importance of interracial contact in launching and promoting the Harlem Renaissance has been discussed by Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (Chapel Hill, 1948), 106–11.

19. Claude McKay to William Stanley Braithwaite, December 15, 1920, in WSBP.

20. ALWFH, 147–48, 98.

21. Ibid., 108–15, 147–48. See also Claude McKay to Arthur A. Schomburg, July 17, 1925, in PCM, 141–42.

22. ALWFH, 111–12. McKay dedicated his last book to the memory of Johnson. See H.

23. Claude McKay, “Letter to the Editors,” Crisis, XXV (July, 1921), 102. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York, 1940), 234–35, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life From the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York, 1968), 289, and “Editorial [Reply to Claude McKay],” Crisis, XXV (July, 1921), 102–104.

24. ALWFH, 108–15, 147–48. See also Charles F. Cooney, “Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance,” Journal of Negro History, LVII (July, 1972), 231–40.

25. See ALWFH, 64–65, 110–11, 113–14. See also Claude McKay to Arthur A. Schomburg, July 17, 1925, and [undated, 1925], both in PCM, 141–43. McKay’s deepseated antipathy to light-complexioned, middle-class Negroes has been discussed by Ellen Tarry in The Third Door: An Autobiography of an American Negro Woman (New York, 1955), 129; and in Wagner, Black Poets in the United States, 216. This topic was also brought up by Carl Cowl, James Ivy, and Bruce Nugent—all former friends of McKay’s—in conversations with me over an extended period in the 1960s and 1970s. For more on the life of Walter White, see A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (New York, 1948); and Poppy Cannon, A Gentle Knight: My Husband, Walter White (New York, 1956). See also James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York, 1933), 64–65.

26. PCM, 193–299.

27. See especially James Weldon Johnson, “What the Negro Is Doing for Himself,” L, I (March, 1918), 32–33; and Mary White Ovington, “Bogalusa,” L, III (January, 1920), 31–33.

28. ALWFH, 109.

29. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, May 18, 1923, in PCM, 89. McKay did not mention Eastman’s concern in ALWFH but remembered that when he found the group in the Liberator office, he had jokingly remarked, “Ah, you conspirators” (ALWFH, 109).

30. Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and “The Messenger” 1917–1928 (Westport, Conn., 1975), 3–41; Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 322–26.

31. ALWFH, 153. Earlier statements in other publications contradict McKay’s contention in ALWFH that “I was not a member of the Communist Party.” In particular, see NA, ix, xviii, 88–90.

32. ALWFH, 114–15;PCM, 234–63. For a view of West Indian-Afro-American relations during this period, see Ira DeA. Reid, The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics, and Social Adjustments, 1899–1937 (New York, 1939).

33. ALWFH, 113–14. See also Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War 11 (Westport, Conn., 1977), 208–19.

34. See also Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, February 3, 1922, in JWJP, NAACP. Identical copies of this letter and the one to Harrison were also sent to Walter White.

35. ALWFH, 130–35.

36. Eastman, Love and Revolution, 222.

37. Alfred Tiala to Wayne Cooper, February 7, 1964, in possession of the recipient.

38. John Barber to Wayne Cooper, May 18, 1964, in possession of the recipient.

39. Maurice Becker to Wayne Cooper, May 14, 1964, in possession of the recipient.

40. All the quotations are taken from William Gropper to Wayne Cooper, January 14, 1964, in possession of the recipient.

41. ALWFH, 103–109.

42. Ibid., 133.

43. Adolf Dehn to Wayne Cooper, January 14, 1964, in possession of the recipient.

44. ALWFH, 109. See also H, 139–42.

45. Interview with Charles Ashleigh, October 22, 1972, in Brighton, England. Ashleigh was living in retirement there and had recounted his experiences in a long unpublished autobiography. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was frequently consulted by young radical students from the nearby University of Sussex. They found in him a living link to early British Communists and the American Industrial Workers of the World. Ashleigh remained in the Communist party through the entire Stalinist period, working mainly as a journalist in Paris for English Communist periodicals.

46. James W. Ivy, “Claude McKay’s Remarkable Career,” Pittsburgh Courier, Illustrated Feature Section, February 2, 1929, p. 7.

47. SP, 39–41.

48. From an unpublished poem by Claude McKay, first quoted in Wagner, Black Poets of the United States, 231. The quotation is from the first poem in McKay’s “Cycle Manuscript,” a collection of fifty sonnets in CMP.

49. From “The White City,” in SP, 7.

50. From “American,” ibid., 59.

51. From “Mulatto,” in PCM, 126.

52. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, January 26, March 21, 1945, both in PCM, 307, 309.

53. See Claude McKay, “How Black Sees Green and Red,” L, IV (June, 1921), 17, 20–21, “Birthright,” L, V (August, 1922), 15–16, “A Negro Extravaganza [A review of Shuffle Along, a musical by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake],” L, IV (December, 1921), 24–26. For a listing of McKay’s Liberator articles and reviews, see PCM, 353.

54. McKay, “How Black Sees Green and Red,” reprinted in PCM, 59–62; Claude McKay, “Garvey as a Negro Moses,” L, V (April, 1922), 9, reprinted in PCM, 65–69.

55. Garvey quoted in Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison, Wis., 1955), 152; McKay, “Garvey as a Negro Moses,” in PCM, 67–69.

56. McKay, “A Negro Extravaganza,” reprinted in PCM, 62–63;ALWFH, 142; see also Helen Armstead Johnson, “Shuffle Along: Keynote of the Harlem Renaissance,” in Errol Hill (ed.), The Theatre of Black Americans, Vol. I, Roots and Rituals/The Image Makers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1980), 126–35.

57. Claude McKay, “He Who Gets Slapped,” L, V (May, 1922), 24–25, reprinted in PCM, 69–73. See also Claude McKay, “A Black Star [Review of O’Neill’s Emperor Jones]” L, IV (August, 1921), 25, and “What Is Lacking in the Theatre? [Review of Chauve Souris]” L, V (March, 1922), 20–21.

58. William Gropper to Wayne Cooper, January 14, 1964, in possession of the recipient. See also PCM, 69–73. McKay, “He Who Gets Slapped,” in PCM, 70–72.

59. McKay, “Birthright,” reprinted in PCM, 73–76. See also Robert C. Reinders, “Racialism on the Left: E. D. Morel and the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” International Review of Social History, CIII (First quarter, 1968), 1–28.

60. For the details of this story, see L, IV (December, 1921), 7; Eastman, Love and Revolution, 262–65; and ALWFH, 137–38.

61. Eastman, Love and Revolution, 268–69.

62. Ibid., 266–67. See also the editorial note, “To Our Friends,” in L, IV (February, 1921), 14, in which it was announced that “Michael Gold, formerly a contributor and lately made a Contributing Editor of the Liberator, has suffered a serious nervous breakdown. Those interested in contributing to his recovery can send money to the Liberator” For McKay’s account of his appointment as co-editor with Gold, see ALWFH, 138–39.

63. Eastman, Love and Revolution, 269.

64. Aaron, Writers on the Left, 25.

65. “Liberator News,” L, V (March, 1922), n.p. On the financial condition of the Liberator and the various efforts that had been initiated to save the magazine, see “To Our Friends,” L, V (February, 1922), n.p.

66. Claude McKay to H. L. Mencken, March 31, June 1, 1922, both in HLMP. See Douglas C. Stenerson, H. L. Mencken: Iconoclast From Baltimore (Chicago, 1971); and Charles A. Fecher, Mencken: A Study of His Thought (New York, 1978).

67. Claude McKay to Jean Toomer, June 27, 1922, in JTP; Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (Rev. ed.; New Haven, 1965), 80–89, and Down Home, 204–38. See also Darwin Turner, In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity (Carbondale, 111., 1971), 1–59.

68. Claude McKay to Jean Toomer, December 6, 1921, June 27, 1922, both in JTP.

69. McKay to Toomer, July 11, 1922, ibid. Toomer’s Liberator contributions for September, 1922, were the story “Carma” and the poem “Georgia Dusk.” On the same page as “Georgia Dusk” there also appeared another poem, “To My Mother” by Louis Ginsberg, the father of Allen Ginsberg, the premier poet of the Beat Generation. Toomer’s story “Becky” appeared in L, V (October, 1922), 30.

70. Michael Gold, “Toward Proletarian Art,” L, IV (February, 1921), 20–24.

71. Joseph Freeman, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (New York, 1936), 256. Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (New York, 1930) is the story of his childhood.

72. ALWFH, 140–41.

73. ALWFH, 138–41; Max Eastman to Claude McKay, [spring, 1923], in PCM, 78–79.

74. Eastman to McKay, [spring, 1923], in PCM, 78–79.

75. PCM, 20–21, 78–90.

76. Ibid.

77. Eastman to McKay, [spring, 1923], McKay to Eastman, April 3, 1923, both ibid., 78–82, 82–83.

78. Eastman to McKay, [spring, 1923], McKay to Eastman, April 3, 1923, both ibid., 79, 84.

79. “Review of Harlem Shadows,” New York Times Book Review, May 14, 1922, p. 17.

80. Robert Littel, “Review of Harlem Shadows and James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Book of American Negro Poetry” New Republic, XXVI (July 12, 1922), 196.

81. Walter White, “Review of Harlem Shadows and The Book of American Negro Poetry,” Bookman, V (July, 1922), 531; James Weldon Johnson in the New York Age (May 20, 1922), quoted in Ralph Glasgow Johnson, “The Poetry of Dunbar and McKay: A Study” (M.A. thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1950), 29.

82. Hubert Harrison, “The Poetry of Claude McKay,” [Negro World], n.d., and “Review of Harlem Shadows,” New York World, n.d., both clippings found among the papers of Hodge Kirnon, private possession.

83. Hodge Kirnon, “Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows: An Appreciation,” Negro World, May 26, 1922, n.p., clipping, and Claude McKay to Hodge Kirnon, June 7, [1922], both ibid.

84. Clement Wood, “A Man’s Song: Review of Harlem Shadows,” New York Evening Post, October 25, 1922, n.p., clipping in the McKay Folder in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

85. McKay, “He Who Gets Slapped,” 25.

86. The historiography of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance period is large, varied, complex, and controversial. For a variety of statements concerning its importance and meaning, see Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction; Arna Bontemps (ed.), The Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays Edited With a Memoir (New York, 1972); Abraham Chapman, “The Harlem Renaissance in Literary History,” CLA Journal, II (September, 1967), 38–58; S. P. Fullinwider, The Mind and Mood of Black America: 20th Century Thought (Homewood, 111., 1969); Charles I. Glicksberg, “The Negro Cult of the Primitive,” Antioch Review, IV (March, 1946), 50; Bone, Down Home, 170–272; and Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971).

87. See especially Cooney, “Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance,” 231–40; Eugene Levy, James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (Chicago, 1973), 310–11; and Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction, 101–15.

88. Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro (1925; rpr. New York, 1968).

89. “Liberator News,” L, V (July, 1922), 27; Claude McKay, “Petrograd: May Day, 1923,” L, VI (August, 1923), 10.

90. [Editorial] “We Haven’t Cracked Under the Strain,” L, V (November-December, 1922), n.p.; Eastman, Love and Revolution, 271.

91. Aaron, Writers on the Left, 95.

92. Freeman, An American Testament, 257.

93. ALWFH, 150, 206.

94. Ibid., 149–50.

95. Ibid., 150–54.

96. Claude McKay to H. L. Mencken, July 3, 1922, August 2, [1922], both in HLMP

97. James Weldon Johnson to Claude McKay, August 21, 1930, in CMP.

98. ALWFH, 154.

99. From “Mulatto,” in Bookman, LXXII (September, 1925), 67, reprinted in PCM, 126.

Chapter 6

1. HH, 1;ALWFH, 154; Claude McKay to Jean Toomer, September 12, 1922, in JTP.

2. ALWFH, 155–56.

3. Ibid., 156–57. Interview with Charles Ashleigh, October 22, 1972, in Brighton, England.

4. Interview with Charles Ashleigh, October 22, 1972;ALWFH, 156–57.

5. ALWFH, 157; Draper, The Roots of American Communism, 382. The Roots of American Communism is still the best analysis of the early history of the Communist party in the United States. See also Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia.

6. ALWFH, 156–57; Draper, The Roots of American Communism, 327–95. On the legal persecution of American leftists, see William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).

7. ALWFH, 160–62.

8. Ibid., 162, 164.

9. Ibid., 164–66. On Katayama’s life, see Hyman Kublin, Asian Revolutionary: The Life of Sen Katayama (Princeton, N.J., 1964), 1–112, and passim. Although Kublin discounts Katayama as any kind of expert on American blacks or American race relations, McKay’s testimony in ALWFH clearly suggests a keener awareness of and interest in American blacks than Kublin concedes.

10. ALWFH, 164–66.

11. Ibid., 167–68. McKay told this story in “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” Crisis, XXVII (December, 1923-January, 1924), 61–65, 114–18, reprinted in PCM, 95–106.

12. ALWFH, 159; Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch (New York, 1964), 318.

13. ALWFH, 172–84; Draper, Roots of American Communism, 387; Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 78, 321, 327, 335, 340.

14. Draper discusses Huiswoud in Roots of American Communism, 387, and more fully in American Communism and Soviet Russia, 313, 320, 322, 326–27, 350, 353, 404, 425–26. McKay had very little to say about Huiswoud in ALWFH, where he identified him only as “the mulatto delegate, who had previously high-hatted me” (ALWFH, 71). Huiswoud’s party name in Moscow was “Billings.”

15. Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 319–22;ALWFH, 253.

16. Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 322–32.

17. P. Okhrimenko, “Original Translator’s Note,” in NA, xviii; Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 320. Shortly before his death, Cyril Briggs, the founder of the African Blood Brotherhood, exchanged letters with me. I also interviewed Briggs during a visit to New York in early July, 1965. In a letter to me, June 29, 1965, Briggs states that he and McKay “were very good friends and saw each other quite often.” In person, Briggs told me that he remembered McKay had been a member of his African Blood Brotherhood and had become a party member, along with himself and others in the group.

18. ALWFH, 172.

19. This summary of Huiswoud’s speech was taken from Protokoll des Vierten Kongresses der Kommunistischen International (Hamburg, 1923), 692–97.

20. Claude McKay, “Speech to the Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International,” in PCM, 91–95.

21. Claude McKay, “Report on the Negro Question,” International Press Correspondence, III (January 5, 1923), 16–17. Huiswoud’s speech also appeared in this Comintern publication. Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 327.

22. McKay, “Speech to the Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International,” in PCM, 95.

23. Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 327; “Resolutions on the Negro Question,” Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (London, 1923), 84–85.

24. Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 328–29.

25. NA, 6–10. See also ALWFH, 207–10.

26. ALWFH, 180.

27. On Du Bois, the Pan-African Congress, and the Pan-African idea, see Colin Legum, Pan-Africanism: A Short Political Guide (New York, 1962).

28. ALWFH, 168.

29. Ibid., 213–16.

30. McKay, “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” in PCM, 102;ALWFH, 188. On Yes-enin’s life, see Frances DeGraaf, Sergej Esenin: A Biographical Sketch (The Hague, 1966); Gordon McVay, Esenin: A Life (London, 1976); and Constantin V. Ponomareff, Sergej Esenin (Boston, 1978).

31. ALWFH, 188; Walter Duranty, I Write As I Please (New York, 1935), 238; Gordon McVay, Isadora and Esenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980), 59–103.

32. McVay, Esenin, 307.

33. Claude McKay to H. L. Mencken, July 17, 1923, in HLMP.

34. McKay, “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” in PCM, 102;ALWFH, 106. On these early Soviet literary figures, see Marc Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917–1977 (2nd rev. ed.; New York, 1977); and Gleb Struve, Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin, 1917–1953 (Norman, Okla., 1971).

35. ALWFH, 159, 173, 177. See also Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York, 1968), 231–33, 449–51; and Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Rpr. New York, 1957), 215–27. Trotsky wrote this book in 1924.

36. ALWFH, 170–71, 185–205, 209–17.

37. Ibid., 186; NA, 3. All citations in this chapter from McKay’s NA are from the 1979 English-language edition, translated by Robert J. Winter and edited by Alan L. McLeod (Port Washington, N.Y., 1979). See also their English-language edition of Claude McKay’s Sudom Lincha (Moscow, 1925), which is entitled in translation Trial by Lynching: Stories About Negro Life in North America (Mysore, India, 1977). This volume consists of several short stories McKay wrote while in Russia and published in the Soviet press.

38. ALWFH, 168–71; McKay, “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” in PCM, 105; Claude McKay to Walter White, July 8, 1923, in WWP, NAACP.

39. Okhrimenko, “Original Translator’s Note,” in NA, xviii; Ludwig E. Katterfield [G. Carr] to editor of the Bolshevik, December 2, 1922, reprinted in NA, 88.

40. Claude McKay to editor of the Bolshevik, December 3, 1922, reprinted in NA, 89–90.

41. NA, 29–33, 33–36, 44.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 18.

44. Ibid., 61, 63.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 75, 79, 81.

47. Ibid., 10–11.

48. Max Eastman to Claude McKay, [spring, 1923], in PCM, 80.

49. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, April 3, 1923, ibid., 82–85.

50. Max Eastman to Claude McKay, April 12, 1923, McKay to Eastman, May 18, 1923, and [May, 1923], all ibid., 88, 89, 90.

51. ALWFH, 222–25.

52. Ibid., 223, 225.

Chapter 7

1. ALWFH, 237–38.

2. Interview with Charles Ashleigh, October 22, 1972, in Brighton, England;ALWFH, 237–40; see also Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (New York, 1972), 112–60.

3. George Grosz, Ecce Homo (Berlin, 1923; rpr. New York, 1966). The American edition has an introduction by Henry Miller. On Grosz’s social and historical significance, see Friedrich, Before the Deluge, 167–69; and Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Madison, Wis., 1971). George Grosz left Germany for New York during the Nazi era. See George Grosz, A Little Yes and a Big No: The Autobiography of George Grosz, trans. Lola Sachs Dorin (New York, 1946).

4. ALWFH, 240–41, 312. By the time McKay published ALWFH, he had grown critical of Locke; his first impressions had been more favorable. See Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, August 20, 1923, in AASP

5. ALWFH, 242–43.

6. All the quotations are from Zinoviev’s farewell letter to McKay, May 8, 1923, in WWP, NAACP.

7. Claude McKay to Walter White, July 8, 1923, ibid.

8. H. L. Mencken to Claude McKay, August 3, 1923, copy in MEP.

9. Claude McKay to H. L. Mencken, September 5, 1923, in HLMP.

10. See respectively Claude McKay, “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” Crisis, XXVII (December, 1923-January, 1924), 61–65, 114–18, and “A Moscow Lady,” Crisis, XXVIII (September, 1924), 225–28.

11. ALWFH, 241–42.

12. McKay, “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” reprinted in PCM, 96, 98.

13. McKay to Schomburg, August 20, 1923, in AASP.

14. Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, [summer, 1923], September 25, 1923, both ibid.

15. McKay to Schomburg, August 20, 1923, ibid.

16. Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, [October] 7, [1923], ibid.; ALWFH, 239. McKay denied that he encountered any intolerance based on race in Germany.

17. ALWFH, 231. McKay did not reveal the nature of his illness in ALWFH, but he spoke more frankly in letters to friends. See Claude McKay to Alain Locke, May 1, 1924, in ALP; and Claude McKay to Max Eastman, December 1, 1930, in MEP. More detailed information about McKay’s hospitalization was obtained in conversations with Dr. Fanny Rappaport-Vogein in Paris in the fall of 1972, and in a June 19, 1965, interview in Merion Station, Pa., with Liberator artist John Barber, who was in Paris in the fall of 1923 and helped McKay during his hospitalization.

18. Interview with Fanny Rappaport-Vogein, October, 1972.

19. ALWFH, 231.

20. McKay to Locke, May 1, 1924, in ALP.

21. Interview with John Barber, June 19, 1965; John Barber to Wayne Cooper, June 21, 1965, in possession of the recipient. See also ALWFH, 253.

22. ALWFH, 243. See also McKay to Schomburg, [October] 7, [1923], in AASP; and Claude McKay to H. L. Mencken, May 1, 1924, in HLMP. The importance of Paris in the development of modern art and literature is ably described by Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885–1918 (Garden City, N.Y., 1961). American expatriates in Paris created a large literature of reminiscences that, in its turn, has inspired several histories. See, for example, Howard Greenfeld, They Came to Paris (New York, 1975); and George Wickes, Americans in Paris (Garden City, N.Y., 1969). One of the better memoirs is Samuel Putnam’s Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost and Found Generation (New York, 1947).

23. ALWFH, 248. See Gertrude Stein, “Melanctha: Each One as She May,” in Carl Van Vechten (ed.), Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York, 1962), 337–458.

24. ALWFH, 247–48.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 243; D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (New York, 1958). Sons and Lovers first appeared in 1913. For the great variety of critical approaches over the years, see Ernest Warnock Tedlock (ed.), D. H. Lawrence and “Sons and Lovers”: Sources and Criticism (New York, 1965). There are several general scholarly works on the American expatriate experience, but none is wholly satisfactory. See Harold T. McCarthy, The Expatriate Perspective: American Novelists and the Idea of America (Rutherford, N.J., 1974); Ishbel Ross, The Expatriates (New York, 1970); and Ernest Penney Earnest, Expatriates and Patriots: American Artists, Scholars, and Writers in Europe (Durham, N.C., 1968).

27. ALWFH, 245.

28. Ibid., 226; Hugh D. Ford (ed.), The Left Bank Revisited: Selections from the Paris “Tribune,” 1917–1934 (University Park, Pa., 1972), 100.

29. ALWFH, 253–54.

30. Ibid.; Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, January 7, 1924, in AASP.

31. Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, May 20, 19[24], in AASP; Walter White to Claude McKay, January 25, 1924, in WWP, NAACP.

32. Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, [undated fragment, ca. February, 1924], in AASP. See also ALWFH, 253–54.

33. ALWFH, 254–56; McKay to Locke, May 1, 1924, in ALP.

34. ALWFH, 255–56.

35. Ibid., 257. The Garland Fund, also known as the American Fund for Personal Service, was established after World War I by Charles Garland, a young Harvard graduate. According to Joseph Freeman, Garland “celebrated his majority by dedicating his paternal inheritance to the service of the radical cause” (Freeman quoted in Aaron, Writers on the Left, 100). McKay’s grant came out of the Garland “Personal Service Fund,” which was described on its stationery as “for individuals working creatively for society along radical lines.” Its list of officers included Roger Baldwin, Anna N. Davis, Charles Garland, and A. J. Muste. Its correspondence with McKay survives, at least in part, in CMP.

36. NA, 61–64; “A Negro Extravaganza,” in PCM, 63.

37. Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, February 4, June 16, and August 14, 1924, all in AASP. See also Claude McKay to Walter White, December 4, 1924, White to McKay, September 12, 1923, both in WWP, NAACP; Claude McKay to Max Eastman, September 3, 1943, in PCM, 303–304; and Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, July 29, 1930, in JWJP; and ALWFH, 257.

38. Walter White to Claude McKay, August 15, 1924, in WWP, NAACP. White’s novel was The Fire in the Flint (New York, 1924).

39. James Weldon Johnson to Walter White, April 13, 1923, Alain Locke to Walter White [ca. December, 1923-January, 1924], both in WWP, NAACP.

40. Claude McKay to Walter White, December 4, 1924, ibid.

41. ALWFH, 257–59.

42. Claude McKay to Walter White, December 15, 4, 1924, both in WWP, NAACP.

43. Claude McKay, “What Is and What Isn’t,” Crisis, XVIII (April, 1924), 257–62. See also the biographical sketch of Kojo Tovalou Honenou by Eslanda Goode Robeson, the wife of Paul Robeson, in “Black Paris,” Challenge, I (January, 1936), 12–18. Her article, written over a decade later, confirms and elaborates the facts first noted by McKay in his Crisis article of April, 1924.

44. On the importance of the Nardal sisters in the development of modern French African and West Indian literature, see Jacques Louis Hymans, Leopold Sedar Senghor. An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh, 1971), 23–24, 36–44, 274–78. See also the biographical sketch of Paulette Nardal by Robeson in “Black Paris,” Challenge, I (June, 1936), 9–12.

45. Hymans, Leopold Sedar Senghor, 23–24, 54. See also Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (Philadelphia, 1974), 56–57.

46. Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, 56–74; Hymans, Leopold Sedar Senghor, 53–59.

47. Hymans, Leopold Sedar Senghor, 54; Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, 72–73.

48. See Walter White to Sinclair Lewis, October 15, 1924, Lewis to White, November 12, 1924, and Walter White to Claude McKay, November 6, 1924, all in WWP, NAACP. See also Charles F. Cooney, “Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance,” Journal of Negro History, LVII (July, 1972), 231–40; David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York, 1981), 140–41; and ALWFH, 259.

49. ALWFH, 59. See also Sinclair Lewis to Roger Baldwin, January 19, 1925, in CMP.

50. Roger Baldwin to Claude McKay, February 21, 1925, in CMP; Claude McKay to Walter White, January 8, 1925, in WWP, NAACP. See also undated note from Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, in AASP.

51. Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, April 28, 1925, in AASP; McKay to White, December 4, 1924, in WWP, NAACP.

52. Personal Service Fund [Anna Davis] to Claude McKay, February 24, 1925, Personal Service Fund [Roger Baldwin] to Sinclair Lewis, \ca. January, 1925], and Sinclair Lewis to Roger Baldwin, January 19, 1925, all in CMP.

53. Walter White to Claude McKay, May 20, 1925, in WWP, NAACP; Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, April 28, June 3, and July 22, 1925, all in AASP. See also McKay to White, June 15, 1925, White to McKay, July 8, 1925, both in WWP, NAACP. Viking was definitely interested in seeing McKay’s manuscript. See George Oppen-heimer to Walter White, May 25, 1925, in WWP, NAACP. See also Walter White to A. A. Schomburg, July 23, 1925, in AASP.

54. Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, [summer, 1925], July 17, April 28, 1925, all in AASP.

55. Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, [undated, 1925]. This letter and others to Schomburg have been reprinted in PCM, 139–43.

56. ALWFH, 260–62.

57. Ibid. See also Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch(New York, 1964), 467–68.

58. Eastman, Love and Revolution, 336–43, 408–15, 419–27, 442–55. See also William L. O’Neill, The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (New York, 1979), 106–109. Finally, see Max Eastman, Since Lenin Died (1925; rpr. Westport, Conn., 1973).

59. The poem is dated “Paris, 1925.” On the criticism and isolation of Eastman following the publication of Since Lenin Died, see Eastman, Love and Revolution, 442–56; and O’Neill, The Last Romantic, 106–13. McKay to Eastman [undated, 1925], June 27, 1930, May 9, 1934, all in MEP

60. ALWFH, 261–64.

61. Ibid.

62. See Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, August 3, 1925, in AASP; Claude McKay to H. L. Mencken, August 2, 1925, in HLMP; and Claude McKay to Walter White, \ca. August, 1925], August 4, September 7, 1925, all in WWP, NAACP. See also McKay to Schomburg, [spring or summer, 1925], August 3, 1925, both in AASP.

63. McKay to Mencken, August 2, 1925, in HLMP; Claude McKay to Walter White, September 7, [1925], September 25, October 15, 1925, all WWP, NAACP. See also Claude McKay to Alain Locke, October 7, 1924, in ALP; and Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, October 15, 1925, in AASP.

64. Claude McKay to William Aspen wall Bradley, April 15, 1927, in WABP

65. See A. L. McLeod’s introduction to Robert Winter’s retranslation into English of these three early stories in Claude McKay, Trial by Lynching: Stories About Negro Life in North America (Mysore, India, 1977), iii-viii.

66. McKay to White, August 4, 1925, in WWP, NAACP

67. Claude McKay to William Aspenwall Bradley, May 23, 1927, in WABP.

68. On the importance of an autobiographical element in black fiction in general, see Roger Rosenblatt, Black Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).

Chapter 8

1. Claude McKay to Walter White, September 7, [1925], October 15, November 25, 1925, all in WWP, NAACP. See also Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, September 9, [1925], October 15, 1925, both in AASP.

2. Claude McKay to Walter White, June 15, August 4, 1925, August 25, [1925], September 7, [1925], all in WWP, NAACP. See also McKay to Schomburg, October 15, 1925, in AASP.

3. Claude McKay to Walter White, September 25, October 15, 1925, both in WWP, NAACP.

4. ALWFH, 265. Claude McKay to Alain Locke, May 1, 1926, in ALP; Claude McKay to Louise Bryant, June 24, 1926, in CMP.

5. Claude McKay to Alain Locke, January 2, May 1, 1926, both in ALP. See also Claude McKay to Walter White, November 25, 1925, in WWP, NAACP; and John Farrar [editor of Bookman] to Claude McKay, January 28, 1928, in CMP.

6. Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro (1925; rpr. New York, 1968), 133–35, 214–15; Alain Locke, (ed.), “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” Survey Graphic, VI (March, 1925), 621–724. See also Claude McKay to Alain Locke, August 1, 1926, in PCM, 143–44.

7. Claude McKay to Alain Locke, [undated, 1925], January 2, May 1, 1926, all in ALP. After the publication of The New Negro, Walter White informed Locke that Arthur Spingarn had found “170 mistakes” in the bibliography “alone. He stated further,” White added, “that there was hardly a page that did not have five to ten errors in it.” White advised Locke to correct the errors in future editions. Walter White to Alain Locke, February 26, 1926, in WWP, NAACP.

8. McKay to Locke, May 1, 1926, in ALP. See also ALWFH, 272, 274.

9. ALWFH, 272; see also Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch(New York, 1964), 470.

10. Eastman, Love and Revolution, 470.

11. ALWFH, 272–76.

12. Interview with Charles Ashleigh, October 22, 1972, in Brighton, England; McKay to White, November 25, 1925, in WWP, NAACP;ALWFH, 265–68, 212, 288–91. My thanks to Professor Andrew Buni of Boston College for information on Essie Robeson’s reaction to Claude McKay.

13. Philippa Pullar, Frank Harris: A Biography (New York, 1976), 369–413;ALWFH, 124–29, 265–71.

14. ALWFH, 128–29.

15. Ibid., 211 278–91. See also McKay’s fictional portrait of Marseilles, in B.

16. Claude McKay to Walter White, December 4, 1924, in WWP, NAACP.

17. See, for example, Louise Bryant Bullitt to Claude McKay, February 14, [1926], in the Miscellaneous McKay Correspondence in the Schomburg Center. See also Bullitt to McKay, September 23, October 8, 1926, both in CMP.

18. There is a great need for a more thorough and precise description of Louise Bryant’s last years. See Barbara Gelb, So Short a Time: A Biography of John Reed and Louise Bryant (1973; rpr. New York, 1981), 231–36.

19. ALWFH, 281–82.

20. Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, August 1, 1926, in AASP.

21. Ibid.; Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, August 26, 28, 1926, both in AASP.

22. ALWFH, 282. See also Bullitt to McKay, October 8, December 18, 26, 1926, [January?, 1927], January 8, 1927, all in CMP. There is no doubt that Louise Bryant’s assistance at this point was crucial to McKay’s success. When HH finally appeared in the spring of 1928, McKay dedicated it “To My Friend Louise Bryant.”

23. For an authoritative biographical sketch of Bradley, see Karen L. Rood, “William Aspenwall Bradley (8 February 1878–10 January 1939),” in Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, 1980), IV, 56–58.

24. ALWFH, 282.

25. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, February 7, 1927, in WABP.

26. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, April 15, 1927, in WABP

27. Bradley’s letters to McKay in CMP fully reveal the dispassionate, thoroughly competent manner in which Bradley managed McKay’s affairs. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, December 1, 1930, in MEP.

28. Claude McKay to Alain Locke, August 1, 1926, in ALP, also in PCM, 143–44.

29. Claude McKay to W. E. B. Du Bois, June 18, 1928, in PCM, 149–50.

30. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, May 23, 1929, in WABP.

31. W. E. B. Du Bois to Claude McKay, March 16, 1927, in CMP; Walter White to Pauline Rose, [February, 1924], Walter White to A. A. Schomburg, August 27, 1925, Walter White to Langston Hughes, December 18, 1926, and McKay to White, November 25, 1925, all in WWP, NAACP; see also Claude McKay to Alain Locke, July 27, 1926, in ALP. For an example of McKay’s aspersions on NAACP officials during this period, see Claude McKay to A. A. Schomburg, July 17, 1925, in PCM, 141–42.

32. McKay to Bradley, April 15, May 23, 1927, both in WABP.

33. McKay to Bradley, June 4, May 23, April 15, 1927, all ibid.

34. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, March 11, 1927, ibid.

35. McKay to Bradley, April 15, [April 24], May 14, 23, October 1, 1927, all ibid. McKay’s social relations during this period and throughout most of his adult life, of course, often led him to bars, and he probably often drank more than someone with his health problems should have. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that McKay was ever an alcoholic or drank more than the average literary expatriate of the period for whom the consumption of alcohol seemed to be a necessity.

36. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, November 25, 1927, in WABP.

37. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, July 3, October 24, November 3, 25, December 3, 19, 31, 1927, January 18, February 10, 1928, all ibid.

38. McKay to Bradley, May 23, December 12, 1927, [February, 1928], all ibid.

39. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, April 12, 1928, ibid. See also Walter White to Claude McKay, July 14, 1927, Walter White to Eugene Saxton, July 14, 1927, Anonymous [James Weldon Johnson?] to Walter White, February 25, March 5, 1928, all in WWP, NAACP.

40. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, February 10, 1928, in WABP. See also Claude McKay to the director of the Fabre Company shipping line in Marseilles, January 13, 1928, in CMP. The company apparently dropped the charges after the African, whom McKay identified as Nelson Simeon Dede, agreed to pay his fare. See also Claude McKay to James Ivy, September 20, 1929, in PCM, 147–48; and B, 256–79.

41. McKay to Bradley, May 14, 25, 1928, both in WABP.

42. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, August 24, 1928, ibid.; ALWFH, 154–55.

43. Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (New York, 1926), and Fine Clothes To the Jew (New York, 1927); Rudolph Fisher, The Walls of Jericho (New York, 1928); Nella Larsen, Quicksand (New York, 1928); and Jessie R. Fauset, Plum Bun (New York, 1928). On Hughes’s poetry, see Wagner, Black Poets of the United States, 385–474; on the black short stories of the period, see Bone, Down Home, 107–58, 204–35.

44. Bone, The Negro Novel in America, 51–108, and Down Home, 107–38. Langston Hughes discussed the older generation’s reaction to his early poetry in his autobiography, The Big Sea (New York, 1940), 265–72. A leading spirit in this new primi-tivism was, of course, Carl Van Vechten, whose novel, Nigger Heaven, precipitated a lively debate in the black press. For a conservative, scholarly black assessment of this white Negro Vogue, see Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (Chapel Hill, 1948), 104–10, 157–71. See also Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (New York, 1926).

45. See Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (New York, 1966). See also Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885–1918 (Garden City, N.Y., 1961), 47–79, and passim.

46. See James Weldon Johnson’s review of Nigger Heaven, “Romance and Tragedy in Harlem,” Opportunity, IV (October, 1926), 316–17, 330; and Hughes, The Big Sea, 268–72. For a summary of Afro-American critical reactions to Nigger Heaven, see Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction, 157–63.

47. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation, CXXII (June, 1926), 692–94; Edward Lueders, Carl Van Vechten (New York, 1965), 34–35, 95–106. See also Leon D. Coleman, “The Contributions of Carl Van Vechten to the Negro Renaissance, 1920–1930” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1969); and Bruce Kellner, Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades (Norman, Okla., 1968).

48. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction, 157–72.

49. Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971), 12–51.

50. The relation of the picaresque to the pastoral themes of Harlem Renaissance writers is discussed by Robert Bone in Down Home, 118–24; McKay’s HH and B both support this view, as does his essay “A Negro Writer to His Critics,” in PCM, 132–39. McKay’s conviction that black common folk generally had a positive view of themselves has recently been reasserted by the black anthropologist John Langston Gwalt-ney in Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (New York, 1980).

51. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction, 163–70.

52. Some did not appreciate Jake’s good fortune and natural grace. At the end of HH, for instance, Jake and his girl are forced to leave Harlem for Chicago after Jake’s friend Zeddy, in a fit of jealous anger, loudly proclaims in a bar that Jake had deserted the American army in France (HH, 172–73).

53. Ibid., 119–21, 139–45.

54. Langston Hughes to Claude McKay, July 25, 1925, March 5, 1928, [April 21, 1928], all in CMP.

55. Eugene Levy, James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (Chicago, 1973), 75–98, 297–322.

56. James Weldon Johnson to Claude McKay, January 26, April 12, 1928, both in CMP.

57. W E. B. Du Bois, “The Browsing Reader: Review of Home to Harlem,” Crisis, XXXV (June, 1928), 202;ALWFH, 109, 110.

58. Claude McKay to W. E. B. Du Bois, June 18, 1928, in PCM, 150.

59. “Book Chat,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 17, 1928; William H. Ferris, “Ferris Scores Obscenity in Our Literature,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 21, 1928; and Dewey R. Jones, “The Bookshelf: More ‘Nigger Heaven’ [Review of Home to Harlem]” Chicago Defender, March 17, 1928.

60. George W. Jacobs, “New Yorker Flays McKay’s Book, Home to Harlem,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 7, 1928; E. C. Williams, “Nigger Heaven; Home to Harlem—Authors, Greedy Filth Mongerers, Declares Howard Librarian,” New York News, May 19, 1928; Thomas W. Young, “Harlem’s Prodigal Son [Review of Home to Harlem]” Norfolk Journal and Guide, April 21, 1928.

61. John R. Chamberlain, “When Spring Comes to Harlem: Claude McKay’s Novel Gives a Glowing Picture of the Negro Quarter [Review of Home to Harlem]” New York Times Book Review, March 11, 1928.

62. Louis Sherwin, ‘The African in Harlem [Review of Home to Harlem]” New York Sun, March 24, 1928.

63. Carl Van Doren, “Review of Home to Harlem” Nation, CXXVI (March 28, 1928), 35; Burton Rascoe, “The Seamy Side [Review of Home to Harlem]” Bookman, LXVII (April, 1928), 183.

64. Eastman, Love and Revolution, 468; F. Scott Fitzgerald to Claude McKay, May 25, 1928, in CMP; Dorothy Parker, “Review of Home to Harlem” in The Portable Dorothy Parker (New York, 1973), 352.

65. Claude McKay to James Ivy, May 20, 1928, in PCM, 145–46.

66. “RHH”; J. A. Rogers, “Ahead of Its Time: McKay Defends Book, Home to Harlem,” AN, April 10, 1929.

67. McKay to Locke, May 1, 1926, in ALP.

68. Walter White to George E. Haynes, September 20, 1928, in Box 25, HFP.

69. See the Judges’ Ranking and James Weldon Johnson’s summary of McKay’s life and the award program in Box 27, HFP.

70. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, September 7, 1928, in WABP.

71. ALWFH, 295, 396. See also Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, October 1, 1928, in WABP.

72. McKay to Bradley, September 7, October 1, November 2, 21, 1928, all in WABP.

73. McKay to Bradley, September 7, October 1, November 2, 21, 1928, all ibid.; ALWFH, 297–98, 398; Claude McKay to James Ivy, September 20, 1929, in PCM, 147–48.

74. McKay to Bradley, October 1, 1928, in WABP.

75. ALWFH, 296–97; McKay to Bradley, October 1, 1928, in WABP.

76. ALWFH, 89–91, 298.

77. Ibid., 298; Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, March 25, 1929, in WABP.

78. McKay to Bradley, November 2, 1928, in WABP.

79. Ibid.; ALWFH, 299.

80. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, January 1, 1929, in WABP.

81. ALWFH, 342–54;PCM, 234–39, 289–94.

82. ALWFH, 260–61, 300–305.

83. McKay to Bradley, March 25, 1929, December 10, 14, 1930, all in WABP; McKay to Eastman, December 30, 1930, in MEP. See also ALWFH, 308.

84. McKay to Bradley, January 30, 1929, in WABP.

85. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, March 18, 1930, ibid.; B, 320–24.

86. For a recent book that suggests that Marseilles may have changed little since McKay’s sojourn there (despite the great physical damage wrought upon the waterfront by World War II), see M. F. K. Fisher, A Considerable Town (New York, 1978).

87. B, 65, 68, 114–32, 188–98, 256–68, 301–26.

88. Rex Ingram to Claude McKay, [ca. 1929], in CMP; Pierre Guerre, Marseille, photographs by J. P. Trosset (Paris, 1962), 11.

89. The story line and quotations are from B, 33, 83–92, 177–78, 235–43, 259, 301–26.

90. See McKay, “A Negro Writer to His Critics,” in PCM, 132–39.

91. B, 116–17, 201, 315, 320–24.

92. Ibid., 14, 304–305.

93. Freda Kirchwey, Review of Banjo, in Nation, CXXVII (May 22, 1929), 614, 619; Review of Banjo, in New York Times Book Review, May 12, 1929, p. 8; Walter White, Review of Banjo, in New York World, June 9, 1929; Aubrey Bowser, Review of Banjo, in AN, May 8, 1929.

94. B, 200–201.

95. Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, 72–73.

96. Hymans, Leopold Sedar Senghor, 54.

97. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, March 14, 25, 1929, both in WABP. See also ALWFH, 307–309.

98. ALWFH, 306–307.

99. Ibid., 306–23. Johnson had actually been working since 1928 to persuade McKay to return and had even contacted a friend in the U.S. Department of State to find out the precise steps needed to facilitate his reentry into the United States. See James Weldon Johnson to Claude McKay, January 26, February 27, April 12, May 19, 1929, all in CMP. See also McKay to Johnson, March 10, 1928, April 30, February 1, September 1, 1929, all in CMP.

100. ALWFH, 311–12. See also Claude McKay to James Ivy, September 20, 1929, in PCM, 147–48.

101. ALWFH, 312–15. The anecdote about McKay’s later conversation with Cullen was told to me by Cullen’s widow, Ida Cullen Cooper.

102. Claude McKay to Alain Locke, June 4, April 18, 1927, both in ALP;ALWFH, 312. See also Locke to McKay, [spring, 1927], carbon copy in ALP, in which he said he was as “dumb-struck” by McKay’s attitude “as you seem to be by mine.” Locke bided his time and in 1937 wrote a sweeping condemnation of McKay on the occasion of the publication of ALWFH. See Alain Locke, “Spiritual Truant” [Review of A Long Way from Home]:’ New Challenge, II (Fall, 1937), 81–85.

103. ALWFH, 312, 318–20.

104. See Rogers, “Ahead of Its Time.” In ALWFH, McKay devoted three pages to Rogers but identified him only as “a prominent Afro-American journalist” (ALWFH, 315–18).

105. ALWFH, 311–23.

Chapter 9

1. ALWFH, 230, 235, 311–12, 314–15, 324, 328–31; Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, July 25, 1929, in WABP; Claude McKay to James Ivy, September 20, 1929, in PCM, 147; Paul Bowles, Without Stopping: An Autobiography (New York, 1972), 129–30, 147–49. In ALWFH, McKay did not identify Anita Thompson but instead called her Carmina. In a marginal note in his personal copy of ALWFH, James Ivy identified Carmina as “Anita Thompson, a gorgeous brown if there ever was one!” See also Claude McKay to Max Eastman, December 7, 1929, December 1, 1930, July 19, 1931, all in MEP. In one letter to W. A. Bradley, McKay himself specified that Anita Thompson had joined him in Tangier (May 15, 1931, in WABP).

2. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, June 17, 1929, Bradley to McKay, June 25, 1929, both in WABP; interview with Hope McKay Virtue, August 30, 1978, in Kingston, Jamaica.

3. ALWFH, 309–11, 324–25; Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, July 5, October 2, 1929, both in WABP.

4. McKay to Eastman, December 7, 1929, in MEP. A manuscript copy of “Romance in Marseilles,” which was never published, is in the Schomburg Center.

5. McKay to Bradley, October 2, 1929, in WABP.

6. All the quotations are from McKay to Eastman, December 7, 1929, in MEP.

7. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, June 27, 1930, ibid.

8. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, December 21, 1929, March 18, 1930, both in WABP.

9. McKay to Bradley, December 21, 1929, ibid.

10. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, June 25, 1930, ibid.; McKay to Eastman, June 27, 1930, in MEP; Claude McKay to James Ivy, February 21, August 1, 1930, both in JIP.

11. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, July 4, 1930, in WABP; McKay to Eastman, December 1, 1930, in MEP.

12. McKay to Eastman, December 1, 1930, in MEP.

13. Ibid. See also Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, August 28, December 25, 1930, both in WABP.

14. McKay to Bradley, August 28, 1930, in WABP.

15. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, September 18, 19, 29, 1930, all ibid.; see also McKay to Eastman, December 1, 1930, in MEP.

16. W. A. Bradley to Claude McKay, December 25, 1930, in WABP; Claude McKay to Max Eastman, July 19, 1931, in MEP.

17. Claude McKay to W A. Bradley, December 10, 1930, in WABP.

18. Claude McKay to James Ivy, September 20, 1929, in PCM, 147–48; McKay to Bradley, December 10, 14, 25, 1930, D. Postgate to Claude McKay, December 18, 1930, all in WABP.

19. McKay to Bradley, December 10, 1930, in WABP. See also McKay to Eastman, December 1, 1930, in MEP. On Tangier between the wars, see Lawdom Vaidon, Tangier: A Different View (Metuchen, N.J., 1977), 192–229; and Aleko E. Lilius, Turbulent Tangier (London, 1956). Vaidon’s book is an informal but detailed social history that emphasizes the changing relationships of the city’s different ethnic and national communities over the years. Both Vaidon and Lilius also point out that Tangier was especially attractive to homosexuals from the 1920s onward.

20. McKay to Eastman, December 1, 1930, in MEP; Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, January 25, 1931, in WABP.

21. McKay to Bradley, December 14, 1930, in WABP. See also “The Agricultural Show,” in G, 163–91. Bone, Down Home, 167–68.

22. HH, 139–45; B, 301–26; McKay to Eastman, December 1, 1930, in MEP; McKay to Bradley, January 25, 1931, in WABP.

23. McKay to Eastman, December 1, 1930, in MEP; McKay to Bradley, January 25, 1931, in WABP; see also Bone, Down Home, 167–70.

24. McKay to Bradley, January 25, 1931, in WABP;G, passim.

25. ALWFH, 324–32; Bowles, Without Stopping, 129–37, and passim; Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, May 15, July 14, 1931, both in WABP; Claude McKay to Max Eastman, July 19, 1931, in MEP;ALWFH, 328–30.

26. ALWFH, 329–31. See also McKay to Bradley, May 15, 1931, in WABP; and McKay to Eastman, July 19, 1931, in MEP. ALWFH, 331–32.

27. ALWFH, 331–32; McKay to Bradley, May 15, 1931, in WABP.

28. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, February 16, 1931, in WABP. See also ALWFH, 331–33; and Bowles, Without Stopping, 147–48.

29. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, January 25, 1931, in WABP; Cass Canfield, Up and Down and Around: A Publisher Recollects the Time of His Life (New York, 1971), 109–10.

30. McKay to Eastman, December 1, 1930, July 19, December 1, 1931, June 6, 1932, May 24, April 21, 1933, [May, 1933), all in MEP. See also McKay to Bradley, January 25, 1931, in WABP.

31. In ALWFH, McKay wrote almost nothing about his hopes and expectations regarding G or BB. He scarcely mentioned the impact of the Great Depression upon his own fortunes. See ALWFH, 324–39.

32. Rudolph Fisher, “White, High Yellow, Black [Review of Gingertown]” New York Herald Tribune Books, March 27, 1932, p. 3.

33. “Negro Life [Review of Gingertown]” New York Times, April 3, 1932, p. 7.

34. McKay to Eastman, [May, 1933], in MEP.

35. ALWFH, 334. See also Pierre Vogein’s letters to Claude McKay in CMP. ALWFH, 335–36. There is a photograph of McKay by Berenice Abbott in PCM.

36. ALWFH, 338; interview with Charles Henri Ford, June 5, 1972, in New York City.

37. Bowles, Without Stopping, 147–48;ALWFH, 331.

38. McKay to Eastman, July 19, 1931, January 27, 1933, both in MEP.

39. Bowles, Without Stopping, 148–49; McKay to Eastman, [May, 1933], in MEP.

40. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, April 25, 1932, in PCM, 152. See also McKay to Eastman, July 19, December 1, 1931, both in MEP.

41. See Claude McKay to Max Eastman, January 26, February 3, March 21, 1945, September 16, 1946, all in PCM, 307–14.

42. ALWFH, 334; Claude McKay to Max Eastman, January 27, 1933, in MEP.

43. McKay to Eastman, January 27, April 21, June 18, 28, 1933, all in MEP. McKay started the novel on black expatriates, but there is no evidence that he wrote any Moroccan potboilers.

44. McKay to Eastman, April 21, 1933, [May, 1933], both ibid.

45. McKay to Eastman, [May, 1933]. See also McKay to Eastman, July 19, 1931, January 27, April 21, May 24, 1933, all ibid.

46. BB, 1–13, 312–13; Richard Priebe, “The Search for Community in the Novels of Claude McKay,” Studies in Black Literature, III (Summer, 1972), 22–30; Kenneth Ramchand, “The Road to Banana Bottom,” in M. G. Cook (ed.), Modern Black Novelists: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 188–209; Mervyn Morris, “Contending Values: The Prose Fiction of Claude McKay,” Jamaica Journal, IX, Nos. 2, 3 (1975), 36–42, 52.

47. Bone, Down Home, 170; U’Theo McKay to Claude McKay, May 23, 1933, in CMP.

48. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, June 18, 1932, in MEP.

49. “RHH.” This piece, it will be recalled, appeared in June, 1928, after the publication of HH.

50. ALWFH, 344. On Cunard’s affair, see Ernest B. Speck, “Henry Crowder: Nancy Cunard’s Tree,’” Lost Generation Journal, VI (Summer, 1979), 6–8. See also Hugh Ford (ed.), Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel, 1896–1965 (Philadelphia, 1968); and Anne Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, A Biography (New York, 1979).

51. Nancy Cunard to Claude McKay, June 17, 1933, in CMP. There are about a dozen letters from Cunard to McKay in CMP.

52. Claude McKay to Nancy Cunard, January 25, 1933, in CMP; Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro Anthology (London, 1934).

53. Claude McKay, “A Negro Writer to His Critics,” in PCM, 134–35.

54. Ibid.

55. McKay to Eastman, [May, 1933], in MEP; Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch(New York, 1964), 611.

56. McKay to Eastman, [May, 1933], in MEP.

57. Ibid.

58. McKay to Eastman, May 24, 1933, ibid.

59. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, July 5, September 7, June 20, June 21, [1933], June 28, 1933, all ibid.

60. McKay to Eastman, June 28, 1933, ibid.

61. James Weldon Johnson to Max Eastman, June 3, 1933, in JWJP.

62. McKay to Eastman, June 28, 1933, in MEP.

63. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, July 15, 23, August 19, September 7, 21, October 5, 20, 1933, all ibid.

64. McKay to Eastman, July 5, 1933, ibid.

65. McKay to Eastman, July 23, September 7, 1933, both ibid.

66. Alfred A. Knopf to Carl Van Vechten, quoted in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York, 1981), 296. Part of McKay’s problem at this juncture was the fact that “Savage Loving” was poorly written. See John Trounstine to Max Eastman, July 27, 1933, in MEP. McKay to Eastman, October 5, 1933, in MEP.

67. James Weldon Johnson to Claude McKay, September 30, 1933, in CMP.

68. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, October 30, 1933, in MEP. Letters containing contributions from Oswald Garrison Villard’s secretary and Walter Lippman’s family are in MEP. McKay in a letter to Joel Spingarn thanked him for his contribution (April 12, 1934, in JSP).

69. McKay to Eastman, October 20, 1933, in MEP.

70. Henry Lee Moon, “Claude McKay Comes Home to Harlem After Spending Ten-Year Exile on 2 Continents,” AN, February 7, 1934; Claude McKay, “Note of Harlem,” Modem Monthly, VIII (July, 1934), 368.

71. Hymans, Leopold Sedar Senghor, 35, 54, 275. See also Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, 56, 66–74, 304–305.

Chapter 10

1. Henry Lee Moon, “Claude McKay Comes Home to Harlem After Spending Ten-Year Exile on 2 Continents,” AN, February 7, 1934.

2. Claude McKay to Walter White, December 4, 1924, in WWP, NAACP.

3. For a compilation of articles on various aspects of Afro-American life during the New Deal years, see Bernard Sternsher (ed.), The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945 (Chicago, 1969).

4. James O. Young, Black Writers of the Thirties (Baton Rouge, 1973).

5. Barton J. Bernstein, “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform,” in Barton J. Bernstein (ed.), Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York, 1968).

6. See Mark D. Naison, “The Communist Party in Harlem, 1928–1936” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1976), “Historical Notes on Blacks and American Communism: The Harlem Experience,” Science and Society, XLII (Fall, 1978), 324–43, and “Communism and Black Nationalism in the Depression: The Case of Harlem,” Journal of Ethnic Studies, II (Summer, 1974), 27–33.

7. PCM, 193–300.

8. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, December 19, 1934, ibid., 213.

9. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, May 9, 1934, ibid., 198; see also PCM, 232–49, 300–14; and ALWFH, 342–54.

10. See especially Harold Jackman to Claude McKay June 3, 1927, in CMP. Jack-man tells McKay something of his life.

11. Interviews with Bruce Nugent at various dates between 1968 and 1978, in New York City. See also Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York, 1940), 235–36.

12. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, May 15, September 11, 1934, both in MEP; McKay to Eastman, November 10, 1934, in PCM, 207.

13. Claude McKay, “Note of Harlem,” reprinted in Wagner, Les Poetes Negres des Etats-Unis, 582–83.

14. James Weldon Johnson to Claude McKay, January 9, April 16, 1934, both in CMP; Claude McKay to Max Eastman, June 20, 1933, May 9, 1934, both in MEP; Claude McKay to Joel Spingarn, April 12, May 30, June 8, 1934, all in JSP.

15. See Claude McKay to Max Eastman, August 24, October 25, 1934, both in PCM, 199, 203–204; John W. Walker to Claude McKay, May 10, 1934, in CMP; and McKay to Eastman, August 12, 1934, in MEP.

16. Donald C. Brace to Claude McKay, July 12, 1934, Claude McKay to Max Eastman, August 12, 24, 25, 1934, [November, 1934], all in MEP. Several of these letters are included in PCM, 197–208.

17. Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York, 1978), 113, 127–30, 148–49, 157n, 316–17, 322–24, 404, 525, and passim. For McKay’s dissatisfaction with Lieber, see McKay to Eastman, May 9, July 11, August 12, 24, 1934, all in MEP

18. McKay to Eastman, November 10, 1934, in PCM, 206–208.

19. Claude McKay, “For a Negro Magazine,” [summer, 1934], in PCM, 201.

20. McKay to Eastman, July 11, 1934, in PCM, 198–99.

21. McKay, “For a Negro Magazine,” in PCM, 201–203.

22. Ibid.; on the Communist party’s literary activities in the 1930s, see Aaron, Writers on the Left, 161–268.

23. McKay to Eastman, July 11, 1934, in PCM, 198–99.

24. McKay to Eastman, September 11, 1934, ibid., 200–201.

25. McKay to Eastman, August 24, 1934, ibid., 199.

26. McKay to Eastman, August 25, 1934, in MEP

27. McKay to Eastman, October 25, November 3, 1934, both in PCM, 203–205.

28. McKay to Eastman, October 25, November 10, 1934, both ibid., 203–204, 206–208.

29. McKay to Eastman, October 25, December 19, 1934, both ibid., 203–204, 213.

30. McKay to Eastman, October 25, November 3, 1934, both ibid., 203–206.

31. McKay to Eastman, October 25, November 3, and December 3, 1934, all ibid., 204–205, 209–11.

32. McKay to Eastman, October 25, November 3, and December 3, 1934, all ibid., 204–205, 210.

33. McKay to Eastman, November 10, 1934, ibid., 206.

34. McKay to Eastman, November 3, December 3, 1934, both ibid., 206, 209–11.

35. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, December 19, 1934, ibid., 212–14. For McKay’s past criticisms of Spingarn, see PCM, 141–42; and ALWFH, 147.

36. Claude McKay to Joel Spingarn, December 18, 1934, in JSP

37. Claude McKay to Joel Spingarn, December 24, 31, 1934, both ibid.; McKay to Eastman, October 25, 1934, in PCM, 203.

38. The information in the preceding paragraphs is based on interviews with Selma Burke, 1966, in New Hope, Pa.; Carl Cowl, 1965–1980, in New York City; and Hope McKay Virtue, August 30, 1978, in Kingston, Jamaica.

39. McKay to Eastman, December 19, 1934, in PCM, 213; McKay to Eastman, April 30, July 1, 1935, both in MEP.

40. McKay to Eastman, October 25, 1934, in PCM, 204; James Weldon Johnson to Claude McKay, April 20, 1935, in CMP; Claude McKay to Edwin R. Embree, April 30, 1935, in JRFA.

41. Claude McKay to Edwin R. Embree, May 10, 1935, in JRFA.

42. James Weldon Johnson to Edwin R. Embree, May 11, 1935, Edwin R. Embree to Claude McKay, May 7, June 18, and July 18, 1935, Dorothy A. Elridge to Claude McKay, June 26, 1935, all in JRFA. Elridge was an employee of the Julius Rosenwald Fund.

43. Freda Kirchwey had a distinguished career as an editor and journalist at the Nation and other journals.

44. Claude McKay, “There Goes God! The Story of Father Divine and His Angels,” Nation, CXL (February 6, 1935), 151–53.

45. H, 32–85.

46. Claude McKay, “Harlem Runs Wild,” Nation, CXL (April 3, 1935), 382–83, reprinted in PCM, 239–43.

47. Ibid.

48. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, [1935], in MEP.

49. Claude McKay to Edwin R. Embree, March 31, 1936, in JRFA.

50. Henry G. Alsberg to Claude McKay, October 25, 1935, in CMP. Alsberg was the head of the New York City branch of the Federal Writers’ Project. A fair number of letters to and from Claude McKay and various FWP officials survive in CMP. For more on the FWP, see Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers Project (Boston, 1972); and PCM, 226–99, 352–55.

51. See the letters from the various officials of the New York FWP to Claude McKay, November 13, 1935, July 7, September 11, December 21, 1936, January 5, March 13, 1937, all in CMP See also Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 155–90, 260–63; the FWP materials on microfilm at the Arthur A. Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library; and Claude McKay to Orrick Johns, September 11, 1936, in MMP. Johns at the time was director of the New York City FWP.

52. Claude McKay to Orrick Johns, September 11, 1936, in MMP.

53. Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 245.

54. Claude McKay to James Ivy, January 4, 1937, in J IP.

55. See James W. Watson to David Frederick McCord, May 12, 1937, in CMP.

56. Max Eastman to Claude McKay, April 27, 1937, copy in MMP.

57. ALWFH, 110–11. White’s anger was later reported by McKay to Max Eastman in a letter dated August 28, 1946, in PCM, 311.

58. Laurence Roberts to Claude McKay, June 4, 1937, in CMP. See also ALWFH, 78–79.

59. Joel Spingarn to Claude McKay, February 24, 1937, in CMP.

60. Claude McKay to Joel Spingarn, March 7, 1937, in JSP.

61. Claude McKay to Joel Spingarn, March 12, 1937, in JSP; see also Claude McKay to Max Eastman, August 28, 1946, in PCM, 311.

62. ALWFH, 226, 228.

63. Edwin R. Embree to Claude McKay, March 8, 1937, in CMP.

64. ALWFH, 354.

65. Alain Locke, “Spiritual Truant [Review of A Long Way from Home],” New Challenge, II (Fall, 1937), 81, 83–84.

66. ALWFH, 312–14.

67. M. B. Tolson, “Caviar and Cabbage: Claude McKay, Black Ulysses [Review of A Long Way from Home]” [undated clipping, 1937], in Claude McKay Clippings Folder, Trevor-Arnett Library, Adanta University, Adanta.

68. James Weldon Johnson to Claude McKay, March 26, 1937, in CMP. See George Streator, “Revolutionary in Color [Review of A Long Way from Home]” New York Herald Tribune Books, March 14, 1937.

69. Henry Lee Moon, “Review of A Long Way from Home,” New Republic, XC (April 28, 1937), 364–65; J. S. Balch, “Review of A Long Way from Home,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 21, 1937, n.p., in Clippings Folder, CMP.

Chapter 11

1. In his general history of the FWP, Jerre Mangione has devoted a long chapter entitled “Manhattan Hotbed” to the New York division. See The Dream and the Deal, 155–90.

2. “Writers Fail to Agree on Membership,” AN, July 24, 1937. On the practice of Communist integration in the 1930s, see Naison, “Historical Notes on Blacks and American Communism,” 325.

3. Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, January 9, August 22, 1937, both in JWJP.

4. “Writers Fail to Agree on Membership,” AN.

5. Claude McKay to Helen Boardman, July 17, 1937, in CMP.

6. Helen Boardman to Claude McKay, [July, 1937], McKay to Boardman, July 27, 1937, Boardman to McKay, September 4, 1937, all ibid.

7. Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, April 15, 1935, in JWJP.

8. James Weldon Johnson to Claude McKay, May 27, 1935, in CMP. The articles in question have all been reprinted in Julius Lester (ed.), The Thought and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois: The Seventh Son (2 vols.; New York, 1971), II, 231–57.

9. James Weldon Johnson, Negro Americans, What Now? (New York, 1934).

10. Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, May 16, 1935, in JWJP.

11. Johnson to McKay, May 27, 1935, in CMP.

12. McKay to Johnson, August 22, November 28, 1937, both in JWJP.

13. McKay to Johnson, November 28, 1937, in JWJP. See also Naison, “Historical Notes on Blacks and American Communism,” 339.

14. Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, February 5, 1938, in JWJP.

15. Claude McKay, [circular letter for the creation of a Negro Writers’ Guild], October 23, 1937, in PCM, 232–34; Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, August 10, 22, September 18, 26, November 28, 1937, February 21, 1938, all in JWJP. See also Claude McKay to Countee Cullen, August 12, September 9, 13, November 8, 1937, all in CCP.

16. Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, April 2, 1938, in JWJP.

17. See the McKay-Cullen correspondence in CCP.

18. Perhaps because it fell outside the usual political categories of Right and Left in the 1930s and because its existence was brief, the African has received almost no attention from students of recent Harlem history.

19. See Claude McKay to Alain Locke, May 14, 1938, in ALP; and Countee Cullen to Claude McKay, July 24, 1938, in CMP.

20. Claude McKay, “An Open Letter to James Rorty,” Socialist Call, July 17, 1937, p. 8, “For Group Survival,” Jewish Frontier, IV (October, 1937), 19–26, and “Labor Steps Out in Harlem,” Nation, CXLV (October 16, 1937), 399–402, all reprinted in PCM, 226–28, 234–39, 243–49.

21. The literature on the Popular Front is extensive. For the purposes of this study, Daniel Aaron’s account of its implementation on the cultural-literary front in the United States is central. See his Writers on the Left, 280–92, 356–60. See also John T. Marcus, French Socialism in the Crisis Years, 1933–1936;Fascism and the French Left (New York, 1958).

22. Aaron, Writers on the Left, 280–308, 359–443; Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York, 1977), 522–23.

23. McKay, “An Open Letter to James Rorty,” in PCM, 226–28.

24. Douglas Blaufarb, “Communist Party Members Ordered to Drive Trotskyists off WPA,” NL, July 23, 1938. In the 1930s, the NL was a weekly newspaper. It later became a monthly magazine. In the process, it followed a classic path from a socialist journal in opposition to the Communist party on the Left to a fervid supporter of all Cold War measures taken by the U.S. government after World War II to contain Soviet power.

25. Claude McKay, “Negro Author Sees Disaster If the Communist Party Gains Control of Negro Workers,” NL, September 10, 1938, p. 5, reprinted as “Communism and the Negro,” in PCM, 228–29.

26. See Hugh T Murray, “The NAACP Versus the Communist Party: The Scotts-boro Rape Cases, 1931–1932,” in Bernard Sternsher (ed.), The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945 (Chicago, 1969), 267–81. The standard treatment of the Scottsboro case is Dan T. Carter’s Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge, 1969). When McKay criticized James Weldon Johnson for not adequately discussing the Communist threat of domination over American blacks in Negro Americans, What Now?, Johnson simply replied that he did not think the United States would become communistic but he did believe that blacks should support all movements for a planned economy. See McKay to Johnson, May 16, 1935, in JWJP; and Johnson to McKay, May 27, 1935, in CMP.

27. Claude McKay, “Dynamite in Africa: Are the ‘Popular Fronts’ Suppressing Colonial Independence?” Common Sense, VII (March, 1938), 11.

28. Claude McKay, “Native Liberation Might Have Stopped the Franco Revolt,” NL, February 18, 1939, reprinted as “North Africa and the Spanish Civil War,” in PCM, 285–89.

29. Claude McKay to W. A. Bradley, May 15, 1931, in WABP. On the Spanish Civil War, see Thomas’ exhaustive treatment, The Spanish Civil War.

30. Claude McKay, “Pact Exploded Communist Propaganda Among Negroes,” NL, September 23, 1939, pp. 4–7. This article was an important summation of McKay’s social views in the 1930s.

31. PCM, 238, 258, 278–80, 295.

32. Claude McKay, “Everybody’s Doing It: Anti-Semitic Propaganda Fails to Attract Negroes; Harlemites Face Problems of All Other Slum Dwellers,” NL, May 20, 1939, pp. 5–6, reprinted as “Anti-Semitism and the Negro,” in PCM, 257–61.

33. All the quotations from both the Jewish Frontier article and McKay’s response to it are in Claude McKay, “Claude McKay Tells of Jews,” AN, December 24, 1938, clipping in Claude McKay Clippings Folder, Trevor-Arnett Library, Adanta University, Atlanta. The situation McKay describes, of course, was more true of New York City than elsewhere in the United States, where Jews generally constituted a tiny minority, even among businessmen.

34. McKay, “For Group Survival,” in PCM, 234–39. McKay debated Schuyler in the spring of 1937 on radio station WEVD in New York City.

35. Ibid.; see also H, 89, 183–84, and passim.

36. McKay, “For Group Survival,” in PCM, 234–39; see also PCM, 251–52.

37. McKay, “For Group Survival,” in PCM, 236–39.

38. McKay, “Labor Steps Out in Harlem,” in PCM, 243–49.

39. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., “Soapbox,” AN, October 30, 1937, p. 13; Schuyler quoted in Claude McKay, “Negro Extinction or Survival: A Reply to George S. Schuyler,” in PCM, 253. Schuyler had a regular column in the Pittsburgh Courier, which was syndicated in other black newspapers across the country.

40. Claude McKay, “Claude McKay vs. Powell,” AN, November 6, 1937, p. 4, reprinted as “On Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: A Response,” in PCM, 250–52.

41. Claude McKay, “McKay Says Schuyler Is Writing Nonsense,” AN, November 20, 1937, p. 12, reprinted as “Negro Extinction or Survival,” in PCM, 253–57 (quotation on p. 256).

42. McKay, “On Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.,” in PCM, 252.

43. James Weldon Johnson to Claude McKay, November 15, 1937, in CMP; McKay to Johnson, January 9, 1937, in JWJP An account of Johnson’s fatal accident, in which his wife was seriously injured, can be found in Eugene Levy, James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (Chicago, 1973). See also Max Eastman to Claude McKay, July 5, 1938, in CMP. In his grief, McKay had apparently tried frantically to contact Eastman to insist that he attend Johnson’s funeral services in New York. But Eastman was in the American Southwest at the time, and he wrote to express his regrets and to tell McKay why he had missed the funeral.

44. A fairly extensive McKay correspondence exists with all these people except Earl Brown, who once explained in a telephone interview with me that he had great respect for McKay in the 1930s. Besides accepting his work for publication in the AN, he several times invited McKay to dinner with his family. Also see Ellen Tarry, The Third Door: An Autobiography of an American Negro Woman (New York, 1955), 187.

45. PCM, 228. On Wright and Ellison’s association with the FWP, see Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 245–56.

46. Claude McKay, “Honeymoon,” Challenge, I (January, 1936), 18, and New Challenge, II (Fall, 1937), 53–65, 81–85.

47. Claude McKay to Claire Lennard, January 31, 1947, in CMP; Claude McKay to Edwin R. Embree, August 15, 1937, March 23, 1938, both in JRFA.

48. Claude McKay to Edwin R. Embree, August 15, 1937, in JRFA. Letters regarding recommendations for a Guggenheim are in CMP. See also the penciled outline of Gannett’s answer to McKay’s request on the margin of Claude McKay to Lewis Gannett, October 2, 1937, in Lewis Gannett Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

49. H. L. Lederer [Authors’ Club, Carnegie Fund] to Claude McKay, October 15, 1937, in CMP; Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, December 17, 1937, in JWJP; Carlisle Smith to Claude McKay, May 1, 25, 27, July 8, September 11, 1940, all in CMP. Four “Looking Forward” columns appeared in AN: on May 13, 20, 27, and April 22, 1939.

50. Claude McKay to Edwin R. Embree, November 10, 1940, in JRFA. In December, 1940, the Book-of-the-Month Club newsletter contained a review of H by Dorothy Canfield and listed it as an alternate selection for the month. Claude McKay to Howard C. Anderson, December 3, 1940, in CMP. The last days of the FWP are chronicled by Mangione in The Dream and the Deal, 329–48.

51. H, 32–85, 89, 101–16, 218–62, and passim.

52. ALWFH, 245.

53. H, 28–116, 143–80, 183–84, 260–61.

54. Claude McKay to Catherine Latimer, July 3, 1940, in MMP.

55. For a helpful discussion of black ideologies, see August Meier, Elliott Rudwick, and Francis L. Broderick (eds.), Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis, 1971); and August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963).

56. Claude McKay to W. E. B. Du Bois, June 18, 1928, in W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

57. Catherine Latimer in Library Journal, quoted in an E. P. Dutton press release, in CMP.

58. H, 99, 233–34.

59. McKay to Embree, November 10, 1940, in JRFA. See also Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 1–10, and passim.

60. Ted Poston, “Review of Harlem: Negro Metropolis,” New Republic, CIII (November 25, 1940), 732.

61. Roi Otdey, “Review of Harlem: Negro Metropolis,” New York Times Book Review, November 24, 1940, p. 5.

62. Zora Neale Hurston, “Review of Harlem: Negro Metropolis,” Common Ground, I (Winter, 1941), 95–96.

63. A. Philip Randolph to Claude McKay, April 4, 1941, June 4, 1940, both in CMP.

64. Benjamin Stolberg to Claude McKay, December 17, 1940, in CMP.

65. On “black power,” see Martin Duberman, “Black Power in America,” Partisan Review, XXXV (Winter, 1968), 34–68; and Meier, Rudwick, and Broderick (eds.), Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, liii, 469–629.

66. Like McKay, Orwell in the 1930s tried to view the course of Communist politics from a sympathetic left-wing perspective, but he became increasingly disillusioned as the decade advanced. See George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London, 1937), and Homage to Catalonia (London, 1938).

Chapter 12

1. There is a copy of “HG” in MMP. See the excerpt from “HG” in PCM, 187–90.

2. “HG,” in MMP.

3. Arna Bontemps to Langston Hughes, November 5, 1941, in Charles H. Nichols (ed.), Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967 (New York, 1980), 94.

4. Claude McKay, “Negroes Are Anti-Nazi, but Fight Anglo-U.S. Discrimination. Soap-Boxers in Harlem Typify Negro Resentments,” NL, October 25, 1941, p. 4, reprinted as “Nazism vs. Democracy: Some Harlem Soapbox Opinions,” in PCM, 277–80.

5. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, July 28, 1941, July 17, 1944, both in MEP.

6. Claude McKay, “Author Assails Negro Congress for Message Sent to Washington on Jews,” NL, November 25, 1938, p. 11; Claude McKay to Max Eastman, May 4, 1944, in MEP.

7. From Claude McKay’s grant proposal, which he included in a letter to William C. Haygood, January 3, 1942, in JRFA. Haygood was a Rosenwald Fund executive.

8. James S. Watson to William C. Haygood, February 16, 1942, Ernestine Rose to Haygood, February 10, 1942, John Dewey to Haygood, February 3, 1942, all in JRFA. John Dewey had met McKay through Max Eastman, and had high praise for H. See Dewey to McKay, November 29, 1940, in CMP.

9. Claude McKay to Arna Bontemps, July 18, 1941, in JP.

10. Initialed note from Arna Bontemps (“A.B.”) to [JRFA grant committee], [1942], in JRFA.

11. Grant committee, Claude McKay evaluation sheet (anonymous comments), in JRFA.

12. Claude McKay to Benjamin Mandel, September 28, 1939, and U.S. Citizenship Certification, both in CMP. See also the summary of the FBI interview with Claude McKay, September 11, 1947, a copy of which was given to me by Ben Waknin of New York City. In the interview, McKay recapitulated much of the information he had already published in ALWFH, and he directed the FBI only to well-known anti-Communists, who he believed might be willing to talk with the FBI. As for himself, the report stated that “McKay was somewhat reluctant to discuss his past activities and stated that he had no desire to discuss individual Communists as he did not care to get anyone in trouble.” In the interview, McKay stated that he never joined the Communist party but did join the IWW in 1919. My thanks to Ben Waknin for passing this interview on.

13. Grant committee evaluation sheet (anonymous comments), in JRFA.

14. Ellen Tarry, The Third Door: An Autobiography of an American Negro Woman (New York, 1955), 187; interview with Ellen Tarry in the mid-1960s. See also Claude McKay to Max Eastman, August 13, 1942, in PCM, 301.

15. Claude McKay, “Right Turn to Catholicism” (Typescript, in MMP);ALWFH, 24–25, 62–63, 65.

16. Most of the information in the above paragraphs and in the discussion of Catherine de Hueck and Friendship House is taken from a pamphlet by Catherine de Hueck, The Story of Friendship House [New York, ca. 1939], in FHP

17. See the poem, “St. Isaacs Church, Petrograd,” in SP, 84; see also Claude McKay to Max Eastman, June 30, 1944, in MEP; and McKay, “Right Turn to Catholicism,” in MMP.

18. Claude McKay to Tom Keating, June 29, 1942, and Claude McKay to Mary Keating, June 14, 1943, both in KP.

19. McKay to Tom Keating, June 29, 1942, McKay to Mary Keating, June 14, 1943, both in KP; see also Ivie Jackman to Claude McKay, November 17, 1942, in JP.

20. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, July 30, 1942, in PCM, 300; Eastman to McKay, August 6, 1942, in CMP.

21. Max Eastman to Claude McKay, August 21, 1942, in MEP. See also Max Eastman to Elmer Davis, August 5, 1942, in CMP.

22. Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, September 11, 1942, in JP.

23. Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, September 24, 1942, February 16, 1943, both ibid. In JP, there is a radio script by Claude McKay on Rear Admiral Henry K. Hewitt, USN, done for the Office of War Information. Hewitt was the commander of U.S. naval forces in the Mediterranean during the North African campaign.

24. Claude McKay to Mary Keating, March 25, 1944, in KP; Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, May 11, 1943, in JP; Claude McKay to Countee Cullen, April 14, [1943], in CCP.

25. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, September 3, 1943, in MEP.

26. Vereda Pearson to Mary Keating, [summer, 1943], in KP; Claude McKay to Countee Cullen, July 25, 1943, in CCP; telegram from Freda Kirchwey to Edwin R. Embree, July 7, [1943], telegram from Embree to Kirchwey, July 8, 1943, both in JRFA. See also Claude McKay to Max Eastman, September 3, 1943, in PCM, 303.

27. Claude McKay to Tom Keating, August 8, 1943, in KP.

28. Claude McKay to Mary Keating, June 14, 1943, ibid.

29. Vereda Pearson to Mary Keating, July 1, 1943, ibid.

30. Roger L. Treat, Bishop Sheil and the CYO (New York, 1951); Mary Keating to Wayne Cooper, March 4, 1964, in possession of the recipient; interview with Tom and Mary Keating, October 14, 1976, in Chicago.

31. Claude McKay to Tom and Mary Keating, August 8, McKay to Mary Keating, September 16, October 11, 1943, all in KP.

32. McKay to Mary Keating, September 16, 1943, in KP.

33. This group of sonnets, known as the “Cycle Manuscript,” consists of approximately fifty-five poems. Few ever appeared in print. Various drafts and carbons are in CMP.

34. Freda Kirchwey to Edwin R. Embree, November 16, 1943, in JRFA.

35. Claude McKay to Mary Keating, March 25, 1944, in KP.

36. Telegrams from Mary Keating to Claude McKay, March 30, April 12, 1944, Claude McKay to Bishop Bernard J. Sheil, April 6, 1944, Claude McKay to Mary Keating, [April, 1944], April 11, 1944, all in KP. In an earlier letter to her, Claude wrote that “most of the people I know here try to discourage me [from going to Chicago]. But they don’t understand; I’ll be having my hands and mind on something there, which I haven’t here” (Claude McKay to Mary Keating, April 6, 1944, ibid.). See also Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, April 14, 1944, in JP.

37. See Claude McKay to Father Daniel Michael Cantwell, in DMCP. See also Claude McKay to Max Eastman, June 1, 1944, in MEP.

38. Max Eastman to Claude McKay, June 7, 1944, in MEP.

39. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, June 30, 1944, ibid.

40. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, August 16, 1944, ibid.

41. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, October 16, 1944, in PCM, 304–305.

42. Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, June 23, 1944, in JP.

43. Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, July 15, 1944, ibid.

44. Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, October 27, 1944, ibid.

45. Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, September 12, 1944, ibid.; see also Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, November 21, 1944, Claude McKay to Harold Jackman, May 9, 1944, both ibid.; and Claude McKay to Max Eastman, May 4, June 1, both in MEP. There are a few “Reports to [Bishop] Bernard J. Sheil” from McKay in CMP. They consist mosdy of newspaper clippings and summaries and contain almost no analysis by McKay. He did, however, give his opinion to Sheil in personal conversations.

46. Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, April 14, October 27, November 21, December 6, 20, 1944, all in JP. See also BBP. Through conversation, correspondence, and by providing leads and introductions to others who knew McKay in Chicago, Betty Brit-ton has supplied much information about McKay’s life in Chicago and his association with the CYO. Her collection of letters from Claude McKay to her from 1944 to 1948 give additional insight into his Chicago experience. My thanks to her.

47. Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, December 6, 1944, January 4, May 1, 1945, all in JP.

48. Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, August 30, 1945, June 3, 1946, both ibid. See also Claude McKay to Max Eastman, August 7, 1946, in PCM, 309–10.

49. Claude McKay to Mary Keating, March 25, 1944, in KP; Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, October 27, 1944, in JP; Claude McKay to Max Eastman, November 28, 1944, in PCM, 306; Claude McKay to Betty Britton, September 1, 1946, in BBP. Between January, 1945, and July, 1947, McKay published twelve poems in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker. Dorothy Day (1897–1980) was the cofounder with Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement and editor of the Catholic Worker. McKay had first met her in Greenwich Village during the Liberator period before she had converted to Catholicism. Her movement and paper have been consistendy Christian, socialist, and pacifist. On Dorothy Day, see Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography (New York, 1981); and William Miller, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (New York, 1973), and Dorothy Day: A Biography (New York, 1981).

50. The idea of a joint publication entitled “East Indian-West Indian” continued after McKay’s death when Dover, having completed his autobiographical piece, joined with Carl Cowl, McKay’s last literary agent and his literary executor, in an attempt to find a publisher for the proposed volumes. They never succeeded. See correspondence between Cedric Dover and Carl Cowl, copies in my possession.

51. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, August 28, 1946, in PCM, 311.

52. Claude McKay to Carl Cowl, February 20, April 9, June 10, July 21, 28, 1947, all in CMP; Claude McKay, “On Becoming a Roman Catholic,” Epistle, II (Spring, 1945), 43–45. In MGH, Claude’s attitude toward his father had softened, but he still differentiated sharply between his parents’ personalities; he still identified with his mother.

53. See MGH, 41–42; McKay, “Right Turn to Catholicism,” in MMP.

54. Claude McKay to Carl Cowl, February 12, March 11, July 9, 21, 28, 1947, all in CMP.

55. Claude McKay to Ivie Jackman, November 29, 1947, in JP.

56. Claude McKay to Carl Cowl, February 13, 1948, in CMP; Mary Keating to Wayne Cooper, March 4, 1964, in possession of the recipient.

57. Mary Keating to Wayne Cooper, March 4, 1964, in possession of the recipient. See also Claude McKay to Betty Britton, November 29, 1945, May 8, 1947, both in BBP; and Claude McKay to Carl Cowl, September 30, November 1, 1947, both in CMP

58. Mary Keating to Wayne Cooper, March 4, 1964, in possession of the recipient.

59. McKay, “Right Turn to Catholicism,” in MMP.

60. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, August 28, 1946, in PCM, 311.

61. Claude McKay, “Tiger,” Catholic Worker, XII (January, 1946), 3, reprinted in SP, 47.

62. Claude McKay to Max Eastman, September 16, 1946, in PCM, 313.

63. Claude McKay to Carl Cowl, April 9, 1948, Claude McKay to Ellen Tarry, April 27, 1948, both in CMP.

64. Hebrews 11:13; Claude McKay to Carl Cowl, March 1, 1947, in CMP; obituary, New York Herald Tribune, May 24, 1948.

65. Claude McKay to Carl Cowl, March 11, 1947, in CMP. Two retrospective views of McKay during his final years as a Catholic come to almost totally opposite conclusions regarding the sincerity of his religious convictions. See Ammon Hennacy to Wayne Cooper, April 19, 1969, in possession of the recipient; and Reverend Samuel J. Mathews, S.S.J., “Tribute to Claude McKay,” Colored Harvest, XXXVI (July-August, 1948), 14–15.