McKay’s July, 1919, appearance in the Liberator signaled the beginning of his life as a professional writer. Although he would sometimes find it necessary to seek other work, by and large he would spend the rest of his life as a writer—poet, journalist, novelist, and essayist. Approaching his thirtieth birthday, he had finally arrived at his life’s work as a man of letters. The years immediately ahead would be fruitful, exciting, and often joyous. They would also be a time during which McKay’s literary development and political commitments would mature together in a tense, unstable conjunction.
A warm editorial endorsement by Max Eastman accompanied McKay’s explosive midsummer appearance in the Liberator. Eastman wrote that “his attitude toward life is like Shelley’s, free and yet strenuously idealistic. . . . I wish he would write more poems as mettlesome and perfectly chiselled throughout as some of his stanzas are. And I think he will, for he is young and has arrived at the degree of power and skill revealed in these poems practically without encouragement or critical help. To me they show a fine clear flame of life . . . not to be forgotten.”1
In the long Red Summer of 1919, McKay also evoked favorable responses in the nation’s black newspapers. “If We Must Die,” in particular, was widely reprinted. It provided yet another indication that black Americans had begun to pass beyond the reach of white terror into a new age of self-assertive independence and ideological innovation. In New York, the Jamaican journalist and radical W. A. Domingo perhaps best summarized the mood of many American blacks. “New Negroes are determined to make their dying a costly investment for all concerned. If they must die, they are determined that they shall not travel the valley of the shadow of death alone, but that some of their oppressors shall be their companions. . . . [Their] creed is admirably summed up in the poem of Claude McKay.”2
Although segregation and racial exploitation still remained throughout the American South, many black Americans nevertheless saw hope for the future. They were encouraged by the consequences of the Great War, by the black man’s continued northward migration, by the aggressive civil rights militancy of the NAACP, and by the collective possibilities opening to them as a result of all these changes. As Alain Locke wrote in 1925, “The mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. . . . The multitude perhaps feels as yet only a strange relief and a new vague urge, but the thinking few know that in the reaction the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken.”3
Appearing during a month of major riots in Washington and Chicago, McKay’s poems in the July Liberator articulated this determination of black Americans to be free in the fullest sense, even in the face of terror. Although his voice came from a new and unexpected quarter, most American blacks welcomed its message as their own. Afro-Americans were growing used to diversity. Booker T. Washington’s behind-the-scenes attempts to corral all black leaders had never succeeded. By 1919, the NAACP had clearly taken the lead among black organizations, but other groups and viewpoints contested its leadership. While the NAACP pushed insistently for fair play and equal rights as the constitutional guarantees of all American citizens, other blacks were already rejecting its legalistic, middle-class, integrationist goals for more extreme solutions to the injustices confronting them.
Since 1918, the African Zionism of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League had been attracting increasing numbers, both in the United States and abroad. Like Claude McKay, Garvey was a Jamaican immigrant who had been attracted to the United States by Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee program. Garvey had dreamed of emulating Washington and leading Jamaicans out of their poverty. Once he was in the United States, his dreams of black redemption grew to encompass all blacks everywhere. Garvey’s ambitions were limitless. He planned to lead a triumphant return of his people to Africa and there resurrect the glory of black civilization. But blacks in the New World, he believed, had first to be awakened, organized, and led toward the ultimate goal of Pan-African nationhood. In New York during World War I, Garvey had begun his great crusade. A squat, powerful figure, he communicated his message with eloquence and passion. He preached racial pride and a positive assertion of black initiative to free the race from its subservience to white standards and goals. He soon created an organizational apparatus of pageantry and power to complement his demagogic talents. Among unsettled blacks throughout the nation, especially those in racially tense cities North and South, he recruited many devoted followers and an even larger number of sympathizers. Garvey had a ready answer to the white racist reaction of the postwar period: blacks would create their own nation and leave white America to its own devices.4
McKay early recognized the impractical, dangerously Utopian nature of Garvey’s goals, even as he envied his fellow Jamaican’s ability to stir the masses. When McKay had read “If We Must Die” to his fellow railroad men, one had immediately suggested that he recite the poem in Liberty Hall, Garvey’s headquarters in New York. The suggestion had made McKay uncomfortable. “As I was not uplifted with his enthusiasm for the Garvey Movement,” McKay remembered, “yet did not like to say so, I told him truthfully that I had no ambition to harangue a crowd.”5
McKay belonged neither to the middle-class protest tradition of the NAACP nor to the grass-roots black nationalist camp of Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. He was ideologically closest to a small but articulate group of black intellectuals, then only just emerging in Harlem, who were convinced that black interests would be best served in the kind of world advocated by international socialism.
In 1919, the only member of this group McKay knew well was Hubert Harrison, who had lately turned to Garvey in an effort to steer him closer to his own broadly socialistic ideas. Harrison was the eldest of Harlem’s black socialists, the most experienced, and the most eclectic. He had already tried life in the American Socialist party and the IWW, and had concluded that blacks needed to organize themselves more effectively if they were to exert any influence on modern reform. He therefore sought to use his ability and experiences within Garvey’s UNIA to steer blacks toward more effective participation in the socialistic and nationalistic struggles for self-determination that agitated peoples around the globe in the years after World War I.6
There were younger intellectuals, however, who, like McKay, were only just emerging as left-wing essayists, editors, and political activists in Harlem. Chief among them were A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. Their new monthly magazine, the Messenger, presented to the black community in 1919 a socialist alternative to the reformism of the NAACP. Randolph and Owen were so articulate that many thought them better read than, in fact, they were. Some even mistakenly believed Randolph to be a Harvard graduate. Under their leadership, the Messenger quickly emerged as an exciting black monthly. Randolph and Owen were American blacks, and Randolph in particular brought to their joint endeavors the magnificent presence and self-possession of the southern black religious orator.7
Several other young men in Harlem were also struggling in 1919 to organize politically and to articulate their positions in other new magazines. These included Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and W. A. Domingo, all West Indians. Briggs came originally from Nevis and, until 1918, had been an editor of the New York Amsterdam News, the Negro weekly. He had started his own monthly, the Crusader, and an independent Crusader News Service, which supplied news items to black newspapers across the country.8
Like Garvey, Briggs believed in black self-determination and in the eventual establishment of a black nation in the American West or elsewhere. Unlike Garvey, Briggs was a socialist. He recognized that Garvey’s extreme black nationalism placed him on the same footing with the most extreme white racists, and he also knew that the UNIA’s Back to Africa program was mostly fantasy. In 1919, Briggs founded a semisecret revolutionary organization, the African Blood Brotherhood, which dedicated itself to “a liberated race; absolute race equality—political, economic, social; the fostering of race pride; organized and uncompromising opposition to Ku Kluxism; rapprochement and fellowship within the darker masses and with the class conscious revolutionary workers; industrial development; higher wages for Negro labor, lower rents; a united Negro front.”9
Briggs was a capable polemicist and organizer, despite a severe stutter, which limited his effectiveness as a speaker. A sprinkling of thoughtful young blacks in the urban North joined his brotherhood. Among them was Richard B. Moore from Barbados, who shared leadership responsibilities with Briggs. Moore developed into an orator of electrifying passion and clarity. Others who joined the brotherhood included Claude McKay, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, Otto Hall, and his younger brother Harry Haywood in Chicago. Within two years the African Blood Brotherhood would merge with the Communist party to form the first sizable group of black American Communists.10
Another notable West Indian radical in New York was W. A. Domingo. Domingo had been the first editor of Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World, but he had soon found it impossible to deal with Garvey’s egomania. In 1919, he wrote for the Messenger, and in 1920 established his own short-lived magazine, the Emancipator. Domingo eventually established a successful import business in New York City. In the 1930s he would emerge as a spokesman for Jamaican nationalism.11
McKay shared many of the political ideas of this new generation of black intellectuals and political activists, but as a literary artist he had succeeded in gaining publication in a revolutionary magazine that addressed itself to the widest possible American audience.12 Although no less race conscious, McKay moved aggressively onto the center stage of American literary radicalism. Although alert to racial slights and slurs, he assumed his rights as a literary artist to move among his equals and to present through his writings a black perspective on contemporary life.13
McKay had only just established his new association with the Liberator when an unexpected opportunity arose for him to visit England. Like the money that had enabled him to leave Kansas, the offer of a free trip to Europe came from wealthy admirers of his Jamaican dialect poems. In A Long Way from Home, McKay identified his patrons as “the Grays,” a brother and sister of uncertain European origin whom he never otherwise explicitly described. They were Utopian idealists. Before 1912, the brother had corresponded from Singapore with Walter Jekyll about the possibility of establishing in the Far East “an international Utopian colony for intellectuals and creative talents.” When Songs of Jamaica appeared in 1912, McKay had received a letter of congratulations from Gray. Six years later in 1918, after his poems appeared in Pearson’s, McKay again heard from him. Gray announced that he and his sister would be coming through New York on their way from Japan to Europe and would like to meet McKay. After the outbreak of World War I, their international colony had been broken up by the host government. Its members, unable to resolve their differences over the war, had gone their separate ways.
McKay found the Grays nice but colorless. Mr. Gray in particular surprised him. He appeared “lank and limp and strangely gray-eyed and there was a grayness in his personality like the sensation of a dry sponge.” His sister was stronger and more prepossessing. McKay thought Gray’s vanity must have been “vastly greater than his intelligence” for him ever to have imagined “himself capable of being the inspirer of an international colony of happy humanity.” He nevertheless showed the two around Harlem, introduced them to Frank Harris, and generally tried to be a gracious host. Much to his surprise, they responded by offering him the opportunity to live with them in Spain. After much soul-searching, McKay said that although he appreciated their offer and wanted very much to visit Europe, he did not think it would be possible for him to live with them for any extended period of time. Although they were surprised by McKay’s refusal, they appreciated his candor. As an alternative, they offered him a vacation abroad. McKay accepted and arranged a trip to England.14
It seemed time for a change. He had already left his railroad job. He had no personal commitments that tied him to New York, and, perhaps most important, he wanted some respite, however brief, from the pressure-cooker tensions of living black in white America. McKay left for England in the early fall of 1919. In the past, he had capitalized upon the publication of his dialect poetry to escape from Jamaica to the United States. Later he had used money from Walter Jekyll to flee Kansas State for New York City. Now, having just gained fresh notoriety as a militant black poet in New York, he was once again, with the help of admirers, leaving for new adventures. Armed at last with revolutionary hope and zeal, the idealistic “black Briton” of former days was finally going home.15
When he arrived, he found a drabness in the land and the people, a remoteness of spirit, along with unconscious assumptions of superiority on the part of Britons toward their colonial subjects that altogether destroyed whatever vestiges still remained of his schoolboy love of England. He even had a hard time finding a room. He wanted to live near the British Museum but found that blacks were considered unsuitable tenants. After much searching, he finally found temporary quarters in the home of a French family residing in London. This experience left him embittered and wary.16
McKay’s British “vacation” nevertheless turned into a lengthy sojourn. He was abroad for over a year and a half. And except for brief visits across the Channel to Holland and Belgium, he remained in England, settling in London. Like any visitor, he saw the sights, went to lectures, museums, and theaters, and tried during his first weeks in London to orient himself in his new environment. It proved difficult. He disliked its dampness and air pollution, not to mention its citizenry, whom as a rule he found to be “a strangely unsympathetic people, as coldly chilling as their English fog.”17
Despite his adverse reactions to London and Londoners, he did find friends and soon began to divide his time among several diverse groups. One consisted of black West Indians and Africans, a varied lot of soldiers, sailors, students, struggling professionals, and athletes, most of whom did not share McKay’s enthusiasm for international communism. Within Britain itself they had discovered among all classes a general ignorance and indifference (even hostility) toward colonial peoples and their problems, which tended to draw them together. In fact, peoples of Africa, the West Indies, the Middle East, and Asia who met in Great Britian after World War I discovered that they shared many problems.18
A West Indian student from Oxford introduced McKay to a club for colored soldiers in London, located in a basement on Drury Lane. McKay became a regular visitor. There he met many Africans, West Indians, and “a few colored Americans, East Indians, and Egyptians.” He listened with interest to their accounts of personal “war experiences in France, Egypt, and Arabia.” They in turn were curious about black life in the United States; McKay hastened to acquaint them with black American newspapers and magazines. “I brought to the club copies of. . .The Crisis, The Messenger, The Negro World, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender” McKay enjoyed the camaraderie of the soldiers’ club and the friends he met there. One Jamaican soldier took him on “a holiday trip” to an army camp in Winchester, and there he undoubtedly met others with whom he could share memories of home. In the larger perspective, of course, this was a seed time for the anticolonial revolts and independence movements that would come to fruition in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean after World War II. During the 1920s and 1930s, many future leaders from these areas would live and study in the great metropolitan capitals of Europe. During McKay’s residence in London, for example, the future Chinese Communist leader and diplomat, Chou En-lai, arrived in Paris as a student. There over the next four years, he met other future Chinese Communist leaders, as well as Ho Chi Minh, the future leader of the Vietnamese Communist party.19
Before McKay left New York, Hubert Harrison, the new editor of Garvey’s Negro World, had asked him to submit articles from England. He now obliged by writing a series on the colored soldiers’ club. Only random copies of the Negro World from the 1919–1920 period have survived, and none includes McKay’s articles. In A Long Way from Home, however, McKay noted that when they appeared, the white matron who managed the soldiers’ club had been offended by his description of her “patronizing white maternal attitude toward her colored charges.”20 After this, McKay appeared less often at the club. But he had already gained there a circle of friends and acquaintances, some of whom he introduced to another club he frequented.
This was the International Socialist Club, an old establishment that dated from 1849. Located in East End, Shoreditch, it had become by 1919 a hotbed of “dogmatists and doctrinaires of radical left ideas: Socialists, Communists, anarchists, syndicalists, one-big-unionists, and trade unionists, soap-boxers, poetasters, scribblers, editors of little radical sheets which flourish in London.”21 There, McKay met Jewish intellectuals from Russia, Poland, and Germany and left-wing nationalists from Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Ireland. The International Club lacked the irreverent bohemianism of Greenwich Village and the romantic lyricism of the Masses and the Liberator. McKay instead discovered there men and women totally absorbed in revolutionary theory and politics. “There was an uncompromising earnestness and seriousness about those radicals that reminded me of an orthodox group of persons engaged in the discussion of a theological creed.” At this point, McKay’s own commitment to revolutionary socialism was firm. Marxists predominated at the International Club, and their debates soon revealed to McKay how little he actually knew about socialist theory.
To hold his own in such serious company, he had no recourse but to read Karl Marx, the great theoretician of communist revolution. After his long absorption in English literary traditions, he found Marx difficult. As he later remembered, “Much of it was like studying subjects you dislike, which are necessary to pass an examination. However, I got the essential stuff. And a Marx emerged from his pages different from my former idea of him as a torch-burning prophet of social revolution. . . . I marveled that any modern system of social education could ignore the man who stood like a great fixed monument in the way of the world.” McKay perceived that Marx had outlined “a new social system for the world”; he accepted this system, even rejoiced in its possibility.22 But McKay never really substituted Marxist analysis for his own highly romantic, intuitive grasp of the necessity for socialism. Intellectually, his roots remained in Victorian and Edwardian England, and he would later assert that John Stuart Mill had been a greater economist than Marx. One suspects he actually learned more from the wit of George Bernard Shaw and the flaming intensity of his new socialist companions than from Marx’s writings.23
At the International Socialist Club, McKay heard “most” of England’s “outstanding extreme radicals.” They included “Walton New-bold, the first Communist Member of Parliament; Saklatvala, the Indian Parsee and first unofficial Communist Member of Parliament; A. J. Cook of the Miner’s Federation . . . ; Guy Aldred, an anarchist editor; Jack Tanner, a shop steward committee leader; Arthur Mc-Manus and William Gallacher, the agitators from the Clyde; [and] George Lansbury, the editor of the Daily Herald” As the only black visitor to the club, McKay added to its international atmosphere by bringing along some of his West Indian and African friends, including “three soldiers from the Drury Lane Club, and a couple of boxers.” In due course, the boxers even staged an exhibition at the club, much to the wonderment of its members. The International Club also offered other social activities, mainly dances, that provided McKay with opportunities to become well acquainted with many of its regulars.24
The club gave McKay an entree into the passionate, frustrating world of England’s extreme political Left, which stood in 1919 in embattled opposition to the dominant Labour party. For some time, there had existed in Britain an extremely vocal, though very small, number of Marxist socialists who considered parliamentary democracy a sham and the traditional Labour party leaders servants of the establishment. They were convinced that a revolutionary proletariat was necessary if capitalism was ever to be replaced by a socialist system.25
The end of the Great War once again meant confrontation between capital and labor on the home front, and with the example of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia before them, the Marxist Left in England, though miniscule, stood poised to seize its chance. The Marxists did not, however, present a united front. Although their total numbers probably never exceeded ten thousand, they had never united in one party. Aside from those independent souls who existed in lonely isolation within the Labour party and among rank-and-file unionists, revolutionary Marxists were in 1919 split into three rival organizations. The largest of these was the British Socialist Party (BSP), an outgrowth of the original Social Democratic Federation. Over the years it had grown less militant and more electoral-minded. By 1919, it had even affiliated with the Labour party and had become the least revolutionary of the three major Marxist groups.26
Unlike the BSP, the rival Socialist Labour Party (SLP), originally inspired by Daniel De Leon’s party in the United States, had not compromised with existing electoral politics. Like the Bolsheviks in Russia, it had instead sought to maintain a hard core of strictly disciplinedrevolutionists dedicated to preparing the masses through propaganda and industrial organization for the coming struggle for power. Being elitist and austerely ideological, it had never attracted as many members as the more fraternal BSP.27
The third notable Marxist faction in Great Britain in 1919 was the Workers’ Socialist Federation. Its guiding spirit was Sylvia Pankhurst of the suffragist Pankhurst family. Before the war, Sylvia, her two sisters, Adela and Christabel, and their mother, Emmeline, had led an army of militant British suffragettes in a determined quest for the right to vote. Sylvia had also been concerned with the plight of the poor and the broader questions of social justice. Even before World War I, she had begun to train and organize women in London’s slum-ridden East End for participation in both the suffragette and socialist movements. During the war, women’s suffrage was at last accepted as inevitable, but the larger injustices within the social system remained. Sylvia, therefore, transferred all her passion and energy to the cause of social revolution. Her weekly, the Women’s Dreadnought, became the Workers’ Dreadnought and her East London Federation of Suffragettes was transformed into the Workers’ Socialist Federation (WSF). A “self-giving fury” had joined the thin, scattered ranks of Britain’s Marxist revolutionaries. Sylvia Pankhurst’s commitment to the socialist cause was total and unsparing, and her tiny band of suffragettes and revolutionary idealists soon added Claude McKay to its numbers.28
McKay almost certainly had heard of Sylvia Pankhurst before he left the United States. The Pankhurst family’s militancy in the cause of social justice for women was legendary, and Sylvia’s adherence to revolutionary socialism was also well known. Whether McKay was familiar with her activities or not, she knew of him. In mid-September, 1919, the Workers’ Dreadnought reprinted a column of McKay’s poems from the July Liberator, along with an explanation that they were written by “a negro [sic] of Jamaica, who, when he wrote them, was a waiter in an American dining car.”29 Once he arrived in London, McKay soon became more intimately acquainted with the activities of Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation. The organization was active at the International Socialist Club. WSF members, including Pankhurst, spoke before it; they also held some of their organizational meetings and social fund-raisers there. It was probably at the International Club that McKay first met members of the Workers’ Dreadnought staff, who invited him to contribute to their weekly.30
In his memoirs, McKay stated that he heard Pankhurst speak at the club but that he did not meet her until April, 1920. At that time she published a letter that McKay had originally written to George Lansbury, editor of the Daily Herald, London’s only socialist daily. The Herald had been engaged in a propaganda campaign to stop French occupation of the Ruhr Valley in Germany. The Herald feared the French action might topple the shaky Weimar Republic and pave the way for a return to power of German reactionaries and extreme nationalists. Hoping to arouse public opinion against the French, the Daily Herald played upon the racial fears of its readers by publishing a front-page article on April 10, 1920, entitled “Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on Rhine.” The piece contained numerous tales of sexual atrocities committed by French African troops in Germany. By its unfounded insinuations of black hypersexuality and gross sexual anatomy, the article slandered the black race in general with racist smears of the worst kind. Written by E. D. Morel, a left-liberal champion of blacks in Africa who had earlier exposed King Leopold II’s infamous regime in the Congo, the article touched off international protests against French intervention, which Morel nourished for more than a year with further racist charges. The Herald’s editor, George Lansbury, a prominent socialist and Labour politician, declined to print McKay’s letter of protest. The letter subsequently appeared in the Workers’ Dreadnought on April 24, 1920, the only substantial reply to Morel’s racial allegations from the British radical press.31
In his letter, McKay rejected Lansbury’s editorial explanation that he was not seeking to encourage racial prejudice by printing Morel’s article. In fact, McKay maintained, the false statements about black sexual anatomy and ungovernable lust contained in Morel’s article would do incalculable harm to the cause of racial understanding that Lansbury professed to champion. McKay confessed himself “quite ignorant of the well-known physiological reasons that make the raping of a white woman by a negro resultful of serious and fatal injury.” Violent rape, he reminded Lansbury, often entailed injury or death, no matter the perpetrator’s race. “Why all this obscene, maniacal outburst about the sex vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?” Certainly blacks were no more lustful than those European colonials abroad who had produced the countless “mulattoes, octoroons, and eurasians disowned of the Caucasian race.” The charge that blacks were “sexually unrestrainable” he dismissed as “palpably false. I, a full-blooded Negro, can control my sexual proclivities when I care to, and I am endowed with my full share of the primitive passion.” McKay went on to say that the substantial issues involving French exploitation of Germany and the true facts of French conscription of black African troops were “clearly” matters “upon which the French Socialists should take united action. But not as you have done. I write,” McKay concluded, “because I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further strife and blood-spilling between the whites and the many members of my race, boycotted economically and socially, who have been dumped down on the English docks since the ending of the European war. . . . The Negro-baiting Bourbons of the United States will thank you, and the proletarian underworld of London will certainly gloat over the scoop of the Christian-Socialist-pacifist Daily Herald.”32
In A Long Way from Home, McKay stated it was only after Pankhurst received this letter that she invited him to her office and offered him steady employment as a member of the Dreadnought staff. McKay also left the impression in his autobiography that his letter to the Herald was his first contribution to the Dreadnought.33 Such was not the case. As early as January 10, 1920, the Dreadnought published two poems by McKay; other poems and articles followed throughout January, February, and April. Despite this discrepancy, McKay may have been correct about his first meeting with Pankhurst. During the fall and early winter of 1919, she had been abroad in Italy and Germany, and did not return to England until January, 1920.34 By then McKay had almost certainly met other members of the Dreadnought staff at the International Socialist Club. They probably passed on McKay’s initial Dreadnought contributions to Pankhurst, who accepted them without having actually met their author. If this supposition is correct, his fiery letter to Lansbury, often the target of Dreadnought barbs, may well have prompted Pankhurst to meet McKay and offer him employment.35
Regardless of how McKay first met Pankhurst and her followers, his involvement in their newspaper and party activities placed him squarely in the middle of Britain’s revolutionary Left. From its inception in October, 1917, Pankhurst had actively defended the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Like other revolutionary idealists, she had hoped working-class reaction against the war would soon bring similar revolutions to western Europe and Great Britain. She had given up on British parliamentary democracy. Despite labor representation, Parliament remained firmly in the hands of the ruling class. Time after time, official labor leaders and politicians had proved willing to compromise when they should have militantly pressed for fundamental changes in class relations.36
In July, 1918, Sylvia had founded the Russian People’s Information Bureau to disseminate the truth about the course of the Russian Revolution and to help combat the reactionary forces arrayed against it in Britain. In September, 1919, she attended the Italian Socialist Party Congress in Bologna. From there, she traveled to a sectional meeting of the newly formed Third Communist International (Comintern) held in Amsterdam and then went to Germany, where she met with leaders of Spartacus, revolutionary German Communists whose dynamic leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, had been murdered early in 1919. Pankhurst returned to England in January, 1920, fully aware of the renewed strength of conservative reaction throughout western Europe. In England, she redoubled her efforts to prevent the shipments of munitions to Polish and other anti-Bolshevik forces in eastern Europe. The WSF daily picketed the gates and harangued the workers on the East India Docks, urging them to refuse to load ships with arms bound for Poland.37
The WSF’s other major concern in 1920 revolved around the Third International’s order that Great Britain’s divided revolutionary socialists unite into a single Communist party capable of collaborating with the Labour party. The Pankhurst organization had early declared its allegiance to the Third International, but had balked at the idea of participating with the Labour party in electoral politics.38
When in early January, 1920, Claude McKay cast his lot with Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation, all the groups involved in the controversy about the nature and direction of the future Communist party of Great Britain were claiming allegiance to the Comintern and all felt that their policies would eventually receive its vindication and blessings. In A Long Way from Home, McKay gave no indication of how deeply he became involved in these complicated proceedings, although he did discuss some of the reasons he joined the WSF and the Workers’ Dreadnought staff. Foremost among them was his admiration for Sylvia Pankhurst, whom he remembered as “a personality as picturesque and passionate as any radical in London.” Here was a woman who lived her socialist convictions and expected others to do the same. McKay recalled that she was “a plain little Queen-Victoria sized woman with plenty of long unruly bronze-like hair. There was no distinction about her clothes, and on the whole she was very undistinguished. But her eyes were fiery, even a little fanatic, with a glint of shrewdness. . . . And in the labor movement she was always jabbing her hat pin into the hides of the smug and slack labor leaders. . . . And wherever imperialism got drunk and went wild among native peoples, the Pankhurst paper would be on the job.” In April, when Pankhurst offered him enough money for room and board in exchange for “some work for the Workers’ Dreadnought,” he jumped at the chance. No doubt he needed the money—the Grays’ generosity could not have supported McKay for long—and besides, “the opportunity to practice a little practical journalism was not to be missed.”39
By April, he had in fact already contributed five poems and three articles to the Dreadnought. In these early pieces, McKay proclaimed his allegiance to international communism, attempted to explain the American racial situation to British readers, and declared his abiding conviction that “socialism should step in to bridge the gulf that has been created between the white and coloured workers by Capitalism and its servant, Christianity.”40 For McKay, communism provided a secular faith to which he could devote himself and a practical program of revolutionary action that blacks could follow to free themselves from racial oppression and place themselves in a position of true equality with white Europeans. McKay expressed both his ardent faith and his deep longing for black self-assertion and independence in his initial contributions to the Workers’ Dreadnought, two poems entitled “Travail” and “Samson,” which appeared January 10, 1920. In “Travail,” he revealed the truly religious intensity with which he (and many others of his generation) embraced the new Communist internationalism that had emerged out of World War I and the Russian Revolution. For him, as for many others, international communism quite simply represented “the grandest purpose, noblest path of life / There—where high passion swells is my heart’s desire.”41 At the same time, in “Samson,” McKay spoke in purely biblical and racial terms while addressing his fellow blacks:
O sable Samsons, in white prisons bound,
Wounded and blinded, in your hidden strength
Put forth your swarthy hands; the pillars found,
Strain mightily at them until at length
The accursed walls, reared of your blood and tears,
Come crashing, sounding freedom in your ears.42
The high tension displayed in these two poems between hopes for international brotherhood and a more narrow but equally fervent racial loyalty remained characteristic of McKay. In numerous poems and articles during his Communist years, he freely expressed both sentiments.
After January 10, other poems and articles by McKay quickly followed. For a number of reasons many of his Dreadnought contributions appeared under pseudonyms. McKay had first used his pseudonym Rhonda Hope back in 1916 when he wrote to the critic William Stanley Braithwaite.43 His reasons then were probably shyness and fear of rebuff. Now he had more serious reasons for wishing to hide his identity. Pankhurst’s group and her newspaper were under constant police scrutiny. One member of the WSF had already been sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for inciting rebellion in the army. Pankhurst’s right to travel abroad had long been denied; her fall trip through western Europe had been made illegally. Given the legal uncertainties and tensions that surrounded each issue of the Dreadnought, many of its contributors understandably chose to remain anonymous or to use pseudonyms.44
While all this was in the time-honored tradition of European radicals, McKay may also have had additional reasons for signing many of his Dreadnought poems with a pseudonym. While his Dreadnought verses were obviously expressions of deep emotions and firm convictions, many could only be characterized as proletariat doggerel. Because they were clearly inferior to his best efforts and overdy propagandistic, McKay was very likely relieved to acknowledge only a few as his own. After he became regularly involved in the weekly production of the Dreadnought in the summer and fall of 1920, he began to use pseudonyms for almost all his contributions; the only exceptions were a few book reviews. By contrast, the first three articles he wrote in January and February, 1920, had all been signed “Claude McKay,” an indication that his involvement with the Dreadnought was at first casual. McKay’s pseudonyms for his later articles were Hugh Hope, E. Edwards, C. E. Edwards, Ness Edwards, and Leon Lopez. All these “contributors” disappeared from the Dreadnought, never to reappear, after McKay left England at the end of 1920.45
McKay’s first Dreadnought article, “Socialism and the Negro,” appeared at the end of January, 1920. In it, he summarized the racial situation in the United States and surveyed from a radical perspective the diverse efforts of reformers, socialists, and Garveyites to resolve the racial problems besetting the country. Most significantly, he revealed that “although an international Socialist, I am supporting the [Garvey] movement, for I believe that for subject people, at least, Nationalism is the open door to Communism.” McKay then chided those English Communists who turned their backs on the Irish and Indian independence movements simply because they were nationalistic. In his opinion, their position was myopic, perhaps even self-serving.46
By reminding British revolutionaries of their anti-imperialist duties, McKay aided Pankhurst in twisting the tails of laggard British revolutionary lions. In 1920, McKay wanted revolution and was impatient with anything less. In “Song of the New Soldier and Worker,” he concluded a description of “the hungry, hideous huge machine” of capitalism by exclaiming:
O pull the thing to pieces! O, wreck it all
and smash
With the power and the will that only holy hate
can give;
Even though our broken bodies may be caught in
the crash—
Even so—that children yet unborn may live.47
This poem appeared in the Dreadnought in early April under the pseudonym Hugh Hope. After his letter to George Lansbury on April 24, however, McKay published nothing more in the Dreadnought until July 3.
This break occurred because during this period he became involved in preparing a large group of his poems for publication in another journal. C. K. Ogden, the critic and editor of the prestigious Cambridge Magazine, had decided to publish a generous sampling of McKay’s best lyrics. McKay never explained how his friendship with Ogden had begun; he only stated in A Long Way from Home that Ogden had steered him “round the picture galleries” and had been generally kind.48 McKay had very likely submitted his poems for Ogden’s consideration, along with letters of introduction from the United States, for Ogden said in Cambridge Magazine that McKay “came to England with introductions from three of the leading editors in America, and a collection of unpublished manuscripts.”49
Ogden, whose reputation as a literary theorist grew enormously in the 1920s and 1930s, had, during World War I, been a consistent advocate of peace and international understanding. Toward these ends, he had instituted in Cambridge Magazine a monthly digest of news gleaned from the press of all the belligerent countries. As an advocate of international understanding and justice, he was not at all intimidated by McKay’s Bolshevism. He certainly liked McKay’s poetry. In fact, Ogden stated that with “the exception of Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Base Details,’” he had “seen nothing of equal literary interest from a young poet since Rupert Brooke sent us his essay on Tchekov.”50 In Ogden, McKay had once again found an influential and effective ally, who eagerly set about winning for McKay the widest possible audience.
In June, 1920, Ogden included in the summer issue of Cambridge Magazine twenty-three of McKay’s sonnets and other short lyrics. Although none was propagandists verse from the Dreadnought, a few did contain bitterly ironic commentaries on the racial problem, the stress of working-class life, and the spiritual emptiness experienced by many in New York and other large cities of the capitalist world. These themes would always be present in McKay’s work, and he combined them in Cambridge Magazine with two of his other basic poetic concerns—the inevitability of love and its disillusionment, and a pervasive nostalgia for the Jamaica of his childhood.51
These were all subjects McKay had first developed in his Jamaican dialect poetry, and he now expressed them in the conventional, even anachronistic style of late-nineteenth-century Victorian neoromanticism. Despite his political radicalism, McKay in his poetry remained firmly attached to the poetic forms, if not always the themes, accepted by the literate elite of late-nineteenth-century Jamaica. He had far surpassed the expectations of his Jamaican critics, but to a greater extent than he ever acknowledged, their stylistic tastes in poetry had, in the process, become his own.52
Since his first letters to William Stanley Braithwaite back in 1916, McKay had been seeking a publisher for the poems he had written since leaving Jamaica. In Ogden, he had found an influential friend who aided him in his search. By the time McKay’s verses appeared in Cambridge Magazine, Ogden was already helping arrange the fall publication of his poetry by the London firm of Grant Richards. A long-standing ambition had at last been achieved.
In July, McKay once again turned his full attention to the Workers’ Dreadnought and to Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation. The Pankhurst group continued to resist the directive of the Comintern that all of Great Britain’s Marxist parties and factions unite into a single Communist party willing to affiliate with the Labour party. On June 19, 1920, the WSF met in convention with a few like-minded allies, principally the tiny South Wales Socialist Society. Together, the two groups unilaterally transformed themselves into the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) [CP (BSTI)].53 Pankhurst immediately set out for Moscow to present her case in person before the Second World Congress of the Third Communist International scheduled to begin in July.54
During Pankhurst’s absence, McKay resumed writing for the Dreadnought and began in earnest his duties as a regular member of its staff. Pankhurst expected him not only to contribute poems and book reviews but also to report on developments in the London dock area and elsewhere that were of particular interest to him as a black colonial. Finally, he was to cull regularly from the foreign press those items he deemed of interest to Dreadnought readers. In this latter activity, McKay worked with a young Finn named Erkki Veltheim. Veltheim also used the cover name of Andersen, but to McKay and those who worked with him on the Dreadnought, he was Comrade Vie. Pankhurst’s secretary hinted to McKay that, although he was only twenty-two, Comrade Vie had an important role to play in the international Communist movement. In A Long Way from Home, McKay stated that they divided the task of surveying the world’s press between them. McKay “read foreign newspapers from America, India, Australia, and other parts of the British Empire . . .”; “Comrade Vie read the foreign-language papers, mainly French and German.” They also collaborated as writers. McKay corrected his English and Comrade Vie “criticized” McKay’s articles in an effort to make them “more effectively radical.”55
The Dreadnought continued to pursue an aggressively revolutionary course. It kept up its “Hands Off Russia” campaign, supported the Irish rebellion, reported upon revolutionary events in Russia and elsewhere, and argued against any compromise with Britain’s parliamentary establishment. Its pages were filled with the wrongs suffered by the poor of England and the colonies.56
From July through November, McKay contributed his full share to the Workers’ Dreadnought. During this five-month span, he wrote a total of twenty-four articles, poems, and reviews, in addition to performing his editorial duties. In his articles, McKay tried to apply his growing knowledge of Marxist theory to the political problems that confronted the Pankhurst organization and the working class in general. Although not always profoundly original, these articles revealed the extent of McKay’s involvement in revolutionary Marxism in 1920, and they also provide some insight into the reasons for his eventual retreat from it.57
Like his contemporary Ezra Pound, though from a radically different perspective, McKay was fascinated by the monetary problems of the postwar period. In several articles, he reviewed the efforts of the Allied powers to piece together an international monetary system that would best allow the dominant classes in their respective societies to reconstruct and maintain their old privileges. As McKay saw it, they had a difficult task that could only be accomplished at the expense of the defeated nations and the workers of all countries. And in the process new rivalries were emerging among Great Britain, Japan, and the United States. New York now supplanted London as the financial center of the capitalist world, a fact that clearly signaled an approaching end to British imperial dominance around the world.58 Besides his reviews and articles on international finance and Marxist strategy and tactics, McKay also wrote other articles of topical interest. He attended the Communist Unity Conference held on July 31 and August 1, 1920, which established the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It had won the backing of Lenin and the Third International and put Pankhurst’s CP (BSTI) in the uncomfortable position of minority opposition. For this reason, perhaps, McKay cynically reported in the Dreadnought that “what impressed me most as I followed the dreary and strict parliamentary routine of the Unity Conference was how so many of the speakers delighted in dialectical oratory and how others seemed enamoured with the melody of their own voices.”59
In the remainder of his article, he summarized the views of Tom Watkins, a radical Welsh miner, on Robert Smillie, the leader of the Miners’ Federation. In 1918, Smillie had achieved great prominence because of his skillful representation of the miners’ case for public ownership and workers’ control of the coal mining industry on the Sankey Commission, which had, in fact, recommended the nationalization of mining. The government had not acted on this recommendation, and many on the Left felt that Smillie had been duped into accepting far less than the commission had recommended. As Tom Watkins told McKay, “Smillie was fooled and now his obsession is to redeem himself.”60
Aging, thoroughly upright and honest, a labor leader from the days of Keir Hardie’s prime, Smillie was a self-made man who, despite his ideological conservatism, tried to remain faithful to the best interests of the miners. Smillie fascinated McKay, perhaps initially because of Crystal Eastman’s interest in him, and later because of the charisma of the man himself. In September, McKay traveled to Portsmouth, where he reported the deliberations of the official Trade Union Congress. Although generally very critical of the rank-and-file trade union apathy displayed there and of the skillful suppression of meaningful debate by the labor officials who dominated the proceedings, McKay once again singled out Smillie as the honorable exception. He later wrote that “Smillie was like a powerful ash which had forced itself up, coaxing nourishment out of infertile soil, and towering over saplings and shrubs. . . . When he stood forth to speak the audience was shot through with excitement, and subdued. . . . Iremember his passionate speech for real democracy in the Congress. . . . You felt Smillie had convinced the delegates, but when the vote was taken it went against him.” At the congress, McKay sought out the radical Welsh delegates from the Rhondda Valley in south Wales. They received him warmly, and one of their leaders, A. J. Cook, talked at length about the British labor movement. Smillie, McKay later wrote, also “said a few wise words to me about the necessity of colored labor being organized, especially in the vast European colonies, for the betterment of its own living standard and to protect that of white organized labor.” McKay returned to London highly pleased with his visit to Portsmouth, but when Pankhurst came back from Russia she “sharply reproved” him for praising Smillie, who, after all, was an official labor leader.61
McKay smarted at the rebuff; he was especially resentful because Pankhurst had earlier suppressed an article he had written about a large lumber mill near the Dreadnought offices. The workers at the mill had struck for better pay, and in the ensuing struggle, as McKay learned from the strikers, William Lansbury, the owner, had employed nonunion workers. Writing with Comrade Vie, McKay had exposed this practice, emphasizing William Lansbury’s family connections with the editor of the socialist Daily Herald.
Pankhurst had declined to print the expose. Years before, as a militant suffragist and social reformer, she had twice avoided arrest because William Lansbury had smuggled her out of town hidden beneath bundles of wood on the floor of his lumber wagon. Besides, she owed his relative, George Lansbury, twenty pounds, not to mention money she had borrowed from the Daily Herald in order to print the Dreadnought. McKay ruefully concluded that “after all,. . . there are items which the capitalist press does not consider fit to print for capitalist reasons and items which the radical press does not consider fit to print for radical reasons.”62
McKay learned more about the strange twists and turns of human loyalties from Pankhurst’s trip to Russia. She had gone determined to press upon Lenin and the Comintern the correctness of her position concerning the future direction of British communism. Once in Russia, however, her fierce resolve gave way before the skillful persuasion of Lenin and the spectacle of the new Bolshevik government’s heroic struggle for survival. The best interests of international communism, she decided, dictated the British Communists should follow the course laid down by the Comintern. She consequendy returned to England and persuaded her group to prepare to unify with the CPGB. For a time, at least, Sylvia Pankhurst had subordinated her quixotic zeal for truth to Lenin’s policy of Communist realpolitik.63 This process had hardly begun when a new storm descended upon Pankhurst, the Dreadnought, and her embattled group. And McKay found himself at its center.
Despite Pankhurst’s occasional vetoes and criticisms of his articles, McKay remained alert for items and events of unusual interest and significance. In early September he discovered a story of unrest and disaffection in the Royal Navy, which Pankhurst eagerly seized upon and developed into a series of articles whose repercussions resulted in her imprisonment and the eventual breakup of her party.
Before McKay left for the Trade Union Congress in Portsmouth, he had made the acquaintance of a young sailor named David Spring-hall, whose youthful enthusiasm for communism made him eager to contribute to the Dreadnought. At the time, there was restlessness in the navy over low pay and lack of dependents’ benefits. Springhall told McKay he would send him some articles on these and other topics. The Dreadnought subsequently published three articles, all presumably by Springhall. The first appeared under the fictitious name of R.000 (Stoker), HMS Reliance; the second was signed S.000 (Gunner), HMS Lucie; and the third, S.000 (Gunner), HMS Hunter. Only McKay and Pankhurst knew the identity of the author. The first two (on September 4 and 25, respectively) were autobiographical, relating Springhall’s experiences with the British navy in Russian waters during World War I. On October 16, however, the Dreadnought featured the third article, “Discontent on the Lower Deck.” It contained a detailed list of enlisted men’s grievances and a ringing call for all sailors to stand by the working class in its struggles against the ruling establishment. Along with a magnificent center picture of Karl Marx taken from the czarist archives in Moscow, the article covered the entire front page.64
Using the wartime Defence of the Realm Act, still in effect, the British government responded to the article by arresting Sylvia Pankhurst, charging her with publishing articles “calculated and likely to cause sedition amongst His Majesty’s forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population.”65 To bolster its case, the government cited three other such articles in the Dreadnought of October 16: “How to Get a Labour Government” by H. Rubenstein, “The Datum Line” by Pankhurst herself, and “The Yellow Peril and the Dockers” by Leon Lopez.
Lopez was very likely another pseudonym for Claude McKay, who had been asked by Pankhurst when he originally accepted his Dreadnought job to “dig up something along the London docks from the colored as well as the white seamen and write from a point of view that would be fresh and different.”66 In “The Yellow Peril and the Dockers,” as in the other articles cited, militant calls had been made for working-class solidarity in the war against capitalism and the established government. H. Rubenstein had quoted William Morris to the effect that Parliament after the revolution could possibly be used as a manure dump, and Leon Lopez had ended his article (on the prejudices shown by the East End dockers toward the Chinese in the area) by declaring that “the dockers, instead of being unduly concerned about the presence of their coloured fellow-men, who like themselves, are the victims of capitalism and civilizaton, should turn their attention to the huge stores of wealth along the water-front. The country’s riches are not in the West End, in the palatial houses of the suburbs; they are stored in the East End, and the jobless should lead the attack on the bastilles, the bonded warehouses along the docks to solve the question of unemployment.”67 This, indeed, was goading the imperial lion in a most sensitive area.
Besides arresting Pankhurst, the government raided the Dreadnought offices on Fleet Street. McKay happened to be descending from the small office he occupied on the top floor when he encountered Pankhurst’s secretary coming upstairs.
She whispered that Scotland Yard was downstairs. Immediately I thought of Springhall’s article and I returned to my rooms, where I had the original under a blotter. Quickly I folded it and stuck it in my sock. Going down, Imet a detective coming up. They had turned Pankhurst’s office upside down and descended to the press-room, without finding what they were looking for.
“And what are you?” the detective asked.
“Nothing, Sir,” Isaid, with a big black grin. Chuckling, he let me pass.(Ilearned afterward that he was the ace of Scodand Yard.)Iwalked out of that building and into another, and entering a water closet I tore up the original article, dropped it in, and pulled the chain.
Springhall’s identity remained hidden, but Scodand Yard had not been entirely satisfied with McKay’s “big black grin.” That night when he returned to his quarters on Bow Road, he found another detective waiting for him. McKay had no incriminating evidence in his room, only poems. As he later wrote, the detective “was very polite and I was more so. With alacrity I showed him all my papers, but he found nothing but lyrics.”68
Even so, the beleaguered little group around Pankhurst now found itself subjected to intolerable strains. A week after Pankhurst’s arrest, the police arrested Comrade Vie as he was leaving the home of a radical member of Parliament. They discovered in his possession letters from Pankhurst to Lenin and other Bolshevik officials, ciphered messages to the Comintern, and information about British industrial centers, armed forces, and Ireland. He even had “a manual for the officers of the future British Red Army and statements about the distribution of money” by the Comintern to the CP(BSTI) and other Communist groups and sympathizers in Great Britain. Comrade Vie was revealed as a Bolshevik courier who had entered England illegally. He had been preparing to leave the country when the police arrested him. The British historian Walter Kendall has suggested that Veltheim may have influenced the CP(BSTI) in its attempts to propagandize among the enlisted men of the British armed services.69
His arrest threw the Pankhurst organization into turmoil. Edgar Whitehead, secretary of the CP(BSTI), was convinced that Veltheim had been betrayed by a spy within the party ranks. Everyone, even Pankhurst, became a suspect. McKay had to give an account of himself.70 Whitehead’s suspicions that Veltheim had been betrayed were correct, but the police agent eventually revealed himself to be Jacob Nositvitsky, not a member of Pankhurst’s group but a Russian-American Communist in London.
Considering the evidence presented at his trial, Veltheim was given a remarkably light sentence—six months’ imprisonment for alien nonregistration. At the end of his term, he was deported.71 Early in November, Sylvia Pankhurst also was convicted of the charges against her and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment—but not before using her trial for a full exposition of her communist beliefs. As in the old suffrage campaigns, Sylvia once again stood undaunted before the British bar to defend the justice of her cause. Among other things, she declared that
although I have been a socialist all my life, I have tried to palliate this capitalist system. . . . I saved £400 and went to work in the East End, just before the war. At the beginning of the war, there were no separation allowances for the women. Many and many a time they have brought their children dying to me. I started four clinics for dying children, and I have set up night after night with the little ones who were brought to me. I also set up a day nursery, but all my experience showed it was useless trying to palliate an impossible system. This is a wrong system and has got to be smashed. I would give my life to smash it. You cannot frighten me with any sentence you may impose. . . . I have just returned from Soviet Russia. There the children are not left to starve.72
In the middle of all these trials and party troubles, McKay’s first book of verse since 1912 was published. Although Spring in New Hampshire was only a slim volume of forty pages, it represented for McKay proof of his growth as a poet. He had left his Jamaican dialect verse behind and could now be judged within the larger traditions of English poetry. His publisher asked George Bernard Shaw to write an introduction to his poems, but Shaw declined. He stated that McKay’s poetry “should stand on its own.” An introduction by Shaw might have boosted sales, but McKay decided that, after all, Shaw was not a poet or even “a subtle appreciator of the nuances of profound poetry.”73 He turned instead to C. K. Ogden, who persuaded his friend and collaborator I. A. Richards to write a short introduction to Spring in New Hampshire.
Richards would shortly gain a reputation as one of England’s most innovative and influential literary critics; his introduction to Spring in New Hampshire may have given McKay the assurance he needed that he had at last proved himself as a poet. But in fact, Richards wrote his preface only at Ogden’s behest. In it, he stated that “the poems here selected may, in the opinion of not a few who have seen them in periodical form, claim a place beside the best work that the present generation is producing in this country.” Forty-six years later Richards was less equivocal: “I never met McKay and I haven’t read his poetry since.”74 His endorsement nevertheless gave McKay satisfaction and probably helped win the book a wider audience among reviewers.
In the fall of 1920, however, McKay had become so upset by the troubles of the CP(BSTI) that he scarcely followed the book’s reception. After Veltheim’s arrest, the air had become thick with accusations of police spying. One evening at the International Socialist Club, Whitehead showed him an anonymous letter that accused McKay of being a spy. “I declare,” McKay later remembered, “that I felt sick and was seized with a crazy craving to get quickly out of that atmosphere and away from London.”75 He had no money. He had long ago used the little provided by the Grays for his trip abroad. Pankhurst’s organization provided him with just enough to cover his room and board. He had to depend upon friends in England to raise enough money for a return voyage to New York.
Early in 1921, he sailed for the United States, disillusioned with England and the English.76 McKay had also found racism interwoven with England’s postwar conservatism. Even British socialists, he discovered, often displayed a gross insensitivity to the nuances of race relations that sometimes matched the verbal blunderings of the most blatant imperialists. This blindness in matters of race and national prejudices alternately bemused and angered him. The Daily Herald’s campaign against the use of African troops on the Rhine was only the most flagrant example of racism on the British Left. Of equal concern to him were the resentments displayed by English dockers and others along the London waterfront toward blacks and Asians who had to compete with them for scarce jobs. Only the Dreadnought, it seemed to him, fought consistently against the spread of such working-class prejudices.77
Others on the Left, such as his old idol, George Bernard Shaw, exhibited sympathy for the problems that confronted blacks in English society, but from McKay’s point of view the great satirist had a shallow understanding of the world’s racial problems; he did not seem to see how fully blacks and Asians the world over were awakening to the challenge presented by European domination.
Some weeks after his arrival in England, McKay had, on the strength of Frank Harris’ letter of introduction, spent an evening with Shaw at his home in Adelphi Terrace. Everything about Shaw intrigued McKay. He had often studied Shaw’s photographs and admired the “elegant” appearance and youthful face beneath his fine white beard and hair. He had also been impressed by Shaw’s athletic appearance and had heard of his interest in boxing. Face to face, however, McKay found that “Shaw looked healthy, but not like the ordinary healthy rugged man. Under his fine white hair, his complexion was as soft and rosy as a little child’s. And there was something about him that reminded me of an evergreen plant grown indoors. As an animal he suggested an antelope to my mind. And his physique gave an impression of something brittle and frail that one would want to handle with care, like chinaware. I thought that perhaps it was his vegetarian diet that gave him that remarkably deceptive appearance.” Over the course of the evening, they discussed (among other things) Frank Harris, the current London stage, and Shaw’s trip to Jamaica back in 1912 during Lord Olivier’s governorship. For both McKay and Shaw, those days must have reminded them of an innocence forever lost. “Once,” McKay recalled, “[Shaw] mentioned the World War, and let out a whinny which sounded exactly like a young colt in distress or like an accent from his great drama, Heartbreak House. I felt at once,” McKay continued, “that in spite of his elegant composed exterior, the World War must have had a shattering effect on him. Perhaps, prior to 1914 he had thought, as did other Fabian Socialists, that a wholesale war of slaughter and carnage between civilized nations was impossible; that the world was passing gradually from the cutthroat competitive to a co-operative stage. I myself, under the influence of the international idealistic thought of that period, used to think that way.” For all his admiration for the man and his accomplishments in the theater, McKay sensed Shaw’s limitations as a student of contemporary world politics. Once Shaw said, laughing, that “a Chinese intellectual. . . had come all the way from China to visit him, and wanted to talk only about Irish politics.” McKay shared Shaw’s amusement, even while resenting his obtuseness. Shaw also told McKay about an Indian who had brought him an interesting play, which Shaw had judged good but not adaptable to the modern theater. He then observed that “it must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to be a poet. Why didn’t you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession?”78
Several weeks later McKay had occasion to remember Shaw’s remarks. He went to see one of the West Indian boxers he had introduced to the International Socialist Club fight an Englishman in Holborn. It was a tough, evenly matched bout, which McKay’s friend won by a knockout in a late round. Afterward, the boxer’s friends from the colored soldiers’ club gathered around him in congratulation. To celebrate, they suggested he accompany them to a “colored restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue.” At that moment an Englishman pushed through the little group and also congratulated the boxer, praising him lavishly for his skills. The boxer, “a modest type of fellow,” shook the man’s hand and then turned to introduce him to his wife, who happened to be a white woman. Much to everyone’s surprise, the Englishman ignored the woman’s proffered hand and turned on the boxer, exclaiming in outrage, “You damned nigger.” The boxer dropped the man with a single blow, and they all hurried away to dinner. “We sat around, the poor woman among us, endeavoring to woo the spirit of celebration. But we were all wet. The boxer said: ‘I guess they don’t want no colored in this damned white man’s country.’ He dropped his head on the table and sobbed like a child. And I thought that that was his knockout.” McKay then remembered Shaw’s remark to him about choosing pugilism for a profession. “He no doubt imagined that it would be easier for a black man to win success at boxing than at writing in a white world. But looking at life through an African telescope, I could not see such a great difference in the choice.”79
In England, McKay saw the white racist’s obsessive fear of black sexuality displayed in the most unlikely places—in George Lansbury’s socialist Daily Herald, among the dockers of the East End, and even in a review of his new book of poems. The critic of the London Spectator, an upper-class organ of impeccable English taste, wrote that “Spring in New Hampshire is extrinsically as well as intrinsically interesting. It is written by a man who is a pure-blooded Negro. . . . Perhaps the ordinary reader’s first impulse in realizing that the book is by an American Negro is to inquire into its good taste. Not until we are satisfied that his work does not overstep the barriers which a not quite explicable but deep instinct in us is ever alive to maintain can we judge it with genuine fairness. Mr. Claude McKay never offends our sensibilities. His love poetry is clear of the hint which would put our racial instinct against him, whether we would or not.”80
The white man’s fear of black male sexuality, cropping up repeatedly in just those places within white society where McKay most consistendy sought support, made him recoil into himself, to remember with startling clarity his own difference, his blackness. It reminded him of the psychological gulf that he bridged each time he made a white friend or responded positively to white achievements. In the midst of all the racially integrated activities of his year in England, a part of him remained black and alone.
By and large, it was just this aspect of his English experience he chose to emphasize in the mid-1980s when he wrote A Long Way from Home. By then, McKay had abandoned international communism and was instead stressing that blacks should concentrate upon organizing themselves as a more cohesive ethnic group for self-protection and the promotion of their own best interests within the American nation.81 While he told of his involvement with Sylvia Pankhurst’s organization, he did not bother to explain in detail the context and the extent of his own commitment to communist revolutionary activity in 1920. In the 1930s, he had other points he wished to make, and a full exposition of his association with the WSF, Pankhurst, and the other members of Britain’s revolutionary Left would have meant a different emphasis. In reality, McKay in England lived more intensely and learned more than he conveyed seventeen years later in A Long Way from Home.
As a member of Pankhurst’s small Communist sect, McKay experienced firsthand the realities of international Communist politics at a critical time when the newly formed Comintern and Lenin himself were bringing pressure to bear on the CP(BSTI) to merge with other groups into a single Communist party of Great Britain whose tenets conformed strictly to Comintern policy. Because of this experience, McKay very early began to doubt the wisdom of an international Communist movement based so firmly upon a Russian leadership whose interests could not always be identical with those of Communists in other countries.
From his work on the Dreadnought, McKay gained practical experience as a working journalist. Altogether, from September, 1919 (when Pankhurst first reprinted his poetry from the Liberator), to November, 1920, McKay published in the Dreadnought sixteen poems, twenty articles and letters, and five book reviews. In addition, he brought to Sylvia Pankhurst’s attention the series of articles on the navy by the sailor David Springhall. If McKay had allowed Springhall’s manuscript to fall into the hands of Scotland Yard, Springhall (and McKay himself) would probably have also been arrested. As it turned out, Springhall was soon discharged without penalties and subsequently played an active role in the CPGB.82
Besides Pankhurst, McKay also met many of the prominent British Communists and left-wing labor leaders active in 1920, some of whom he counted among his friends while in England. Two of these were Frank Budgen and his future wife, Francine, whom he met at the International Socialist Club. Besides being active in the Socialist Labour Party, Frank Budgen was also an artist. His friendship with James Joyce eventually led him to write a major study of Joyce and the writing of Ulysses.83
There survives from 1920 a very revealing letter from McKay to Francine Budgen in which he discussed his British experience and his relationship to his radical compatriots at the club. The letter substantiates that McKay did, in fact, encounter much overt racism in England. It also reveals that despite his commitment to communism in 1920, he viewed himself as first a writer and artist and felt that he was in a class apart from his purely political comrades.
In response to a letter from Francine in which she obviously had expressed discouragement about an article, perhaps written by a socialist, which did not reflect well upon the movement, McKay wrote
You’re a brave girl, but you mustn’t be downhearted. . . . I am not a bit downhearted. I am merely doing my bit of propaganda to offset that of the anti-Negro Americans, the colonial whites, and prejudiced Englishmen. I can afford to ignore them at the International Socialist Club. I go when I want for relaxation. I’ve always been on my guard for I know white men only too well. . . . But I never had much to do with the lower orders until I went to America. In spite of the prejudices they are much finer in the North than the horrid Cockney type like Field that I met at the Club. . . . Will you come tomorrow (Wednesday)? I shall have to meet Field in Committee about the charges I have made against him for trying to stir up race prejudice in the club.
Yes: I agree with you. Too much time should not be wasted at the club. It is nice to drop in for an hour or more once or twice a week but hardly oftener. I go merely because I haven’t money to go to good concerts, plays, etc. if you didn’t live so far out we could go out once in a while, but it is too far to take you back and my district is rough and dangerous. One must not deliberately invite trouble. It doesn’t help any cause. Then I find it so difficult to get rooms on account of my colour! It’s rather funny.
McKay turned again to the subject of the International Club and observed that many there were mere “hangers on to the movement,” not serious revolutionaries. “They have no idea of what constitutes practical socialism. They talk, but never try to live. I have no doubt you could teach some of them much as you say. I approach the whole crowd from the critical artistic standpoint—only to measure and weigh and discount them.”*
Forty-six years later, the Budgens could not remember the article McKay referred to in the letter or if any action had been taken against Billy Field at the club for stirring up racial prejudices. But they did retain a vivid memory of McKay—handsome, somewhat dandified, quaint of speech, and nondogmatic in his politics. Budgen, who painted McKay’s portrait, remembered his face was “illuminated by real intelligence.” He also knew how to make fine cocktails (a skill learned during his railroad days). Both remembered McKay was openly homosexual but not at all effeminate. To the Budgens, McKay was outgoing and pleasant. They did not consider him particularly anti-British or bitterly antiwhite. The Budgens had not been a part of the Pankhurst group. They remembered little about his work with Pankhurst except that he eventually grew somewhat waspish and cynical in his remarks about her movement. Neither felt that McKay knew much about Marxism. They instead remembered his wit, intelligence, and friendly, outgoing personality.84
Although McKay left England thoroughly disillusioned with the British in general, he left behind good friends and carried with him many positive experiences. While he understood Sylvia Pankhurst’s limitations as a revolutionary leader, he respected her personal integrity, her dedication to the cause of social justice, and her passionate willingness to act upon her conviction, “to live” and not just “talk” revolutionary Marxism. Pankhurst’s group, he later concluded, “was perhaps more piquant than important.” And although “Pankhurst was a good agitator and fighter,. . . she wasn’t a leader. She possessed the magnetism to attract people to her organization, but she did not have the power to hold them. . . . It was a one-woman show, not broad-based enough to play a decisive role in the labor movement.”85 Not long after her release from prison, she broke with her own Communist movement when it demanded control of her newspaper. Pankhurst remained on the Left but she rejected dominance by the Comintern and became critical of Soviet Russia. As the 1920s progressed, the antifascist crusade claimed most of her energy.86 When McKay himself visited Russia in 1922, the example of Pankhurst’s disappointment with Comintern policy in England must have constantly reminded him that wholehearted acceptance of international communism would entail a real loss of freedom to think, plan, and act independently as an artist and individual.
Finally, because of another unusual Englishman, C. K. Ogden, McKay found a publisher for the best poetry he had written since leaving Jamaica.Spring in New Hampshire represented an expansion and maturation of the central themes first developed in his dialect poetry. Verses of love, lost innocence, and nostalgia for Jamaica alternated with poems in which McKay expressed anger, alienation, and rebellion against the racial oppression he had faced since leaving Jamaica. The heightened poetic creativity that had begun in 1919 continued during his year in England and would culminate within two years in Harlem Shadows, his most important collection of verse.
McKay’s visit to England only reinforced his conviction that the world that had shaped his youth, the prewar world of his pastoral childhood, as well as the rational, progressive world envisioned by his late Victorian intellectual mentors, had been irrevocably shattered by the Great War. From it, there had emerged the great struggle between world capitalism and Communist revolution.
In part, perhaps, because the England he saw after World War I differed so radically from the one he had envisioned during his youth, McKay experienced there an especially intense nostalgia for Jamaica. The England he had once hoped to see had been the idealized, faraway kingdom of his lost tropical childhood. Now, only the childhood itself remained inviolate, deep within the recesses of memory:
... I have embalmed the days,
Even the sacred moments when we played,
All innocent of passion, uncorrupt,
At noon and evening in the flame-heart’s shade.
We were so happy, happy, I remember,
Beneath the poinsettia’s red in warm December.87
It was in England that McKay composed “Flame-Heart,” and it was there, too, that he first published “Exhortation,” his fervent call for black men to seize the opportunities presented by the death of the old order in Europe and the birth of the new in Russia. In such poems, and in his numerous articles, reviews, and letters, McKay during his visit to England was among the first to signal the beginnings of a black colonial revolt against British imperialism that would peak after World War II. Other disillusioned colonials would follow. But McKay must be reckoned the first black socialist to write for an English periodical. He was, chronologically at least, a predecessor of what in the 1930s and 1940s became, to use George Shepperson’s expression, the “Hampstead School of African Socialism.” Thus, McKay, twenty years before Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Jomo Kenyatta, argued that socialism and black nationalism were interdependent.88
But McKay claimed no following in Jamaica, much less in Africa. He was a literary artist, not a political leader. By the end of 1920, he was eager to return once more to New York, to Harlem, and to the literary and political ferment of Greenwich Village and the Liberator.