In May, 1923, McKay left Petrograd for Hamburg, then went on to Berlin. During his trip to the Soviet Union, conditions in Germany had grown worse. After the Weimar Republic failed to meet the Allied reparations schedule, the French under Prime Minister Poincare had seized the Ruhr Valley. As a result of this military occupation, the German mark had collapsed; rampant inflation threatened to ruin the German middle class and to plunge the nation into anarchy. This desperate situation was felt by McKay personally soon after his arrival in Berlin. After he had left New York in the fall of 1922, Eugen Boissevain had cabled him twenty-five dollars, payable in German marks. When McKay returned to Berlin in the summer of 1923 to collect his money, its dollar value had shrunk to only twenty-five cents.1
Socially, as well as economically, Berlin was more feverish than ever. McKay again made the rounds of the cabarets with Charles Ashleigh, who later remembered that Claude’s bright-checked suits and happy smile made him popular everywhere. McKay was curious to see if the presence of French African colonial troops in the Ruhr had sparked racial prejudices among the Germans. He found no antiblack sentiment, only anger against the French and a heightening of political and class antagonisms among Germans themselves. From both the Right and the Left, extreme conservatives and radicals worked persistently to undermine the authority of the moderate Weimar government. The ground was being sown for the rise to power of Adolf Hider’s National Socialist party a decade later.2
Despite the pervasive economic and political instability, German art and literature thrived. No work captured the period’s decadence and cynicism better than George Grosz’s book of drawings, Ecce Homo, a sustained commentary on the baser qualities of human nature exhibited by the bourgeois establishment of postwar Berlin.3 McKay had first sought Grosz out in Moscow after seeing his drawings in a Communist newspaper and learning that he was at the Fourth Congress. In Berlin, McKay took his personal copy of Ecce Homo to Grosz for autographing. A few weeks later he took the American artist Marsden Hartley to meet Grosz.
Besides Hartley, McKay encountered several other congenial Americans in Berlin, including Pierre Loving, the poet, who found McKay a room “exactly right to live and work in,” and novelist Josephine Herbst, “who was very kind and helpful in a practical and also artistic way.” Claude also met in Berlin for the first time the Afro-American philosopher Alain Locke. Although differences of temperament, taste, and aesthetic judgment would eventually drive them apart, they initially got along well together.4
McKay also happened upon the Indian Communist leader M. N. Roy, who invited him to contribute to his newspaper, which he was then editing in Berlin. McKay declined after a friend advised him not to get involved in the complicated affairs of the Indian Communists, who were in serious conflict with each other and with Moscow.5 It was perhaps just as well he did not pursue his relations with Roy because he had other preoccupations. McKay had arrived in Germany still elated by his successes in Russia and determined to communicate his experiences to his fellow blacks in the United States. Before he left Petrograd, Zinoviev in a formal declaration had forcefully reminded McKay that the revolutionary government of the Soviet Union had acted promptly to solve its own ethnic and national minority problems by securing “to the smallest Republic entering the Union [of Soviet Socialist Republics] ... a full and real equality, not in theory, but in practice.” He charged McKay as an “American Negro guest at the Fourth Congress” to carry back the Comintern’s message of unity with all workers of whatever race or nationality. Zinoviev emphasized the Third International’s determination to foster world revolution and twice urged McKay to communicate its revolutionary message as well as its “fraternal greetings and best wishes to the Negro workers of America.”6
McKay decided that the proper vehicle for his impressions of the Soviet Union was W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crisis magazine. On July 8, 1923, he wrote Walter White at the NAACP from Berlin that he was “back out of Russia, after a great triumphal trip there”; he hoped to publish in the United States the book he had written in the Soviet Union and added, “I will do an article for the Crisis. Ask Du Bois if he wants it. Do they pay anything? You see, I must have money to live on while I am doing my impressions here.” McKay also urged White to send him various NAACP pamphlets for “propaganda work” in Europe. After using them himself, he wished to forward them to Moscow for use by the Comintern.7
McKay also persisted in the hope that H. L. Mencken would either commission an article on Russia for his magazine or would help him place articles in other publications. From Berlin, he wrote the Sage of Baltimore a remarkably detailed six-page, typewritten letter in which he apprised Mencken of his reputation in Soviet literary circles, defended the justice of the Bolshevik Revolution, explained its historical background, surveyed the current Soviet literary scene, and urged Mencken to visit Russia and see for himself the transformations occurring there. After surveying the disintegration of the old order in Russia and the birth of the new, McKay concluded, “The Communist dictatorship in Soviet Russia is a ruthless aristocracy of brains. . . . I don’t think [it] has any intellectual and practical comparison in history, except perhaps the period of the Holy Roman Empire.” And, he continued, “Russia today is the nightmare of the competitive system, because with all her wonderful natural resources, she is beginning to challenge the bourgeois competitive system with a national labour cooperative.” By contrast, he noted, “The American system is efficient . . . and its masters are competent, but as the greatest of the industrial nations, the forces of social disintegration interwoven in the fabric of America is far greater than the present-day problems of crumbling Europe. America has its Plutocracy, its Southern Oligarchy, its Western Farming Interests, its Labour Aristocracy, its Proletarian Mass, a great body of unassimilated foreign-born Labour in its Basic Industries, acute immigration problems, and a great body of Unassimilable Negroes. The outlook for America is certainly not at all Utopian. Its future is rosy as hell-fire.”*
Mencken found McKay’s letter “very interesting.” He acknowledged that the Russian experiment was probably worth the effort, if only because “it keeps the fear of God before the capitalists and gives them bad dreams at night.” He admitted, however, that he was “unable to believe ... in the principles underlying it.” Capitalism, Mencken maintained, was “based on ineradicable human appetites. Every workman with an idea in his head is a secret capitalist.”8
In his reply to Mencken, McKay did not elaborate upon his previous defense of the Bolshevik regime, but instead defined his personal interest in it. In the process, he revealed his own elitism, his ambivalence toward the working classes, and his general idea of revolutionary change.
Historically and imaginatively the collective force of the working class movement (its culture[,] its writers, artists, politicians and financial backers) interest me far more than the wellbeing of the average worker. . . . It seems to me that society always reaches a stage where the class that monopolizes the administrative trust wallows so much in [consumption] and effeteness that the vigorous brains on the outside begin to organize and attack it in its many vulnerable parts and that it must ultimately collapse. Shorn of propaganda and romance the workers individually are not better to me than other people, but it happens that their social status gives reformers and agitators their weapon against opponents—and I suppose it always will.
McKay regretted that Mencken during his own recent trip to Europe had not seen for himself the great changes occurring in Russia. “This reconstruction period,” he wrote, “the flexibility of the people and government in adapting themselves to the lightning changes is a stimulating thing to see. In a couple more years it will have passed altogether away.”9 Despite their exchange of ideas, Mencken refrained from publishing anything by McKay. Nor did he help him place his work elsewhere. In fact, McKay had no luck in placing articles on his Russian experience with any white American publishers. His Russian book likewise remained unpublished in the United States until 1979.
He had better luck with Crisis. Du Bois wanted his articles on Russia and agreed to pay for them, so Claude set to work. Between July and October, he produced a long account of his Russian trip, which appeared in two installments in the December, 1923, and January, 1924, issues, and one shorter article, which followed in September, 1924.10
The sale of these articles hardly sufficed to cover McKay’s expenses while he remained in Berlin. British security agents believed that McKay had brought with him out of Russia a large sum of Comintern money to be used by Communists for propaganda purposes among blacks. They were wrong. In the name of art and necessity, he accepted all handouts offered him. Among the American artists, writers, bohemian expatriates, and literary-conscious tourists and students in Berlin at the time, some knew of McKay’s poetry. A few proved friendly and helpful. McKay fitted naturally into their milieu; when able, they were not averse to loaning him a few dollars or treating him to a meal or drinks. When he had the money, he returned the favor.
One day, to his amazement, he happened upon the formerly flamboyant Greenwich Village model, the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, selling newspapers on a Berlin street corner. After her exotic postwar fling in New York, she had returned to Germany, where her reckless existence soon reduced her to penury. Claude took her to dinner and brought along a wealthy American student, who gave her a few American dollars. There was little else McKay could do. Like his former friend Michael, the petty thief, “poor brave Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven” had become ensnared beyond redemption in her own excesses and the merciless environment of the day.11
Although often angrily frustrated by its too-frequent necessity, McKay had over the years become adept at cajoling funds from friends, acquaintances, and well-wishers. Like many other writers before and since, he justified the practice in the name of necessity. He simply could not advance his literary career if he had no leisure to write. And when freed from menial work, he could produce.
His articles for Crisis, for example, were certainly worth more than the little money he cadged from friends while writing them. In them, he not only provided his Afro-American readers with a detailed account of his adventures in Russia, he also forcefully admonished them that their own struggles for racial justice at home could no longer be divorced from the international changes wrought throughout the world by the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution. With American money now dominant throughout western Europe, McKay believed it vital that blacks project their grievances onto the world stage. If they did not, he feared that American racial attitudes would follow the dollar throughout the world to reinforce the grip of European colonialism in Asia and Africa. On the other hand, if blacks made the effort to educate the average European about the realities of American race relations, they would find a sympathetic audience. “American Negroes,” he observed, “are not as yet deeply permeated with the mass movement spirit and so fail to realize the importance of organized propaganda. It was Marcus Garvey’s greatest contribution to the Negro movement; his pioneer work in that field is a feat that men of broader understanding and sounder ideas who will follow him must continue.”12
Throughout the summer of 1923, money problems continued to bedevil McKay. In late August, he finally wrote Arthur A. Schomburg in New York with several requests: get a dozen copies of Harlem Shadows from Harcourt, Brace, send them to him in Berlin, and also collect any royalty payment due from Harcourt and send it, payable, of course, in American dollars. Also, Schomburg should contact Richard B. Moore, have him remove from storage twelve copies of Spring in New Hampshire, and send them on. McKay had previously written Moore, a fellow radical, but had received no answer. Finally, Schomburg was to send Benjamin Brawley’s book on Negro literature and Carter Woodson’s Negro History, both of which McKay needed as reference works in revising his Russian book.13
These were only the first of many demands he imposed on the long-suffering Schomburg over the next two years. Another letter, soon after, informed Schomburg that he simply had to have “the latest Negro Year Book!. . . even if you have to give your own... it is essential to my work.” McKay acknowledged his demands were “expensive,” but added, “I am working in my small way for the common cause and I hope we shall square up some day.” By late September, he even sent Schomburg an essay and instructed him to place it for him with any paper, “white or colored—whilst the article is not tinkered with. This is a great task I am putting on you. But I am in a tight corner. . . . I can’t go home to America now, for I haven’t the money. Besides I don’t want to—I want to stay abroad and write some things. But I am quite broke—want to go to Italy where it is warm and cannot. Frightfully cold here—and must have some money next month. I am depending on you to help me all you can.”14
Schomburg did the best he could for McKay, whose demands, unfortunately, escalated with every favor granted. Like most Afro-Americans at the time, Schomburg had limited resources and many pressing commitments—to his job, his family, his book collection, his lodge, even his mistresses. “How are all your women and are you still carrying high your book collecting?” McKay inquired in one brief aside.15 Still, Schomburg managed to meet a few of McKay’s requests. He sent copies of Harlem Shadows but had trouble locating the trunk containing Spring in New Hampshire. Like most dedicated bibliophiles, he was loath to give away any of his own books.
In October, McKay finally left Berlin, “driven out,” as he explained to Schomburg, “by the high prices, general disintegration and intolerance since [the] failure of [the German] passive resistance [campaign against the French in the Ruhr].” The intolerance he referred to was not racial prejudice directed against him, but the increasing political intolerance of the German Right against their moderate and radical opponents.16 From Berlin, McKay journeyed to Paris, the mecca of American expatriates in the postwar years. There, despite the political factionalism, a greater measure of social and economic stability prevailed. Although the franc was not outlandishly devalued like the German mark, one could receive in Paris a favorable exchange for American dollars. It only remained for McKay to find the dollars.
By the time he reached Paris, however, he had another worry besides money—he was seriously ill. Until his Russian trip, McKay had never experienced any really serious illnesses. Just before he left Russia, he developed “a sort of deadness” in his left side, “and once,” he explained in A Long Way from Home, “my face gradually became puffed up like an enormous chocolate souffle.” Before he left Petrograd, he continued, “I became quite ill and had a tooth extracted for the first time in my life, under the most painful conditions.” After arriving in Berlin, he still did not feel entirely well, and his summer there was punctuated by a series of “intermittent fevers and headaches.” Eventually, during the first week of October as he prepared to leave Berlin for Paris, white pimples began to appear all over his body. After his arrival in Paris, a French specialist informed him he had syphilis and advised him to enter a hospital immediately; McKay followed the doctor’s orders.17
His sickness embarrassed, dismayed, and depressed him. Fortunately, he had friends in Paris. The Liberator artist John Barber, who had the greatest admiration for McKay, was there. McKay had also become friendly in Moscow with a young French engineer, Pierre Vogein, who served as secretary to the French Communist delegation at the Fourth Congress. Vogein’s fiancee, Fanny Rappaport, was a medical student attached to the hospital where Claude was admitted. Together, she and Pierre saw that McKay was well cared for during his hospitalization.18
He nevertheless fell into depression. After months of intense physical and mental activity in Russia and Germany, his illness jarred him into a recognition of his human vulnerability. The insidious nature of syphilis, its slow, silent destructiveness, especially appalled him. During his hospitalization, he wrote several uncharacteristically gloomy poems that directly reflected his depression. The best of them was entitled “The Desolate City.” He later described it as “largely symbolic: a composite evocation of the clinic, my environment, condition and mood.”
My spirit is a pestilential city,
With misery triumphant everywhere,
Glutted with baffled hopes and human pity.19
McKay had good reason to be depressed. In 1923, syphilis was difficult to cure. Treatment consisted of measured doses of mercury or arsenic, whose side effects, as he would eventually discover, were almost as treacherous as the disease itself. His doctors assured him that his disease was in a relatively early stage and should respond well to treatment, and their optimistic prognosis seemed borne out by his subsequent progress. A year later he wrote Alain Locke, “The treatment in Paris went like magic; the doctors said the disease was only incipient and in six weeks my flesh was sound again. I am strong and look healthier than ever, but I must take treatment at intervals for about a year or two for the germs in the blood.” In the same letter, McKay protested that he had not been careless in Berlin. “Although I went around to all sorts of places I was quite discriminating and had fewer affairs than you imagine! But the best of persons get caught sometimes.”20
In November, 1923, McKay left the hospital with an essentially clean bill of health but with instructions to continue his medication awhile longer. Once again, he had to think about money. This time his friend John Barber came to his rescue and found him a job as a model in the well-known art school of Andre Lhote. For a while, at least, he had an income, though small, and could begin to enjoy Paris.21
“After... the high pressure propaganda spirit of new Russia” and the crisis atmosphere of Berlin, Paris was a relief. For the American artist of whatever race, Paris in the early 1920s possessed on an international scale the same attraction that Chicago and Greenwich Village had held for American provincials in the early decades of the twentieth century. The city had long been hospitable to artists and writers. “There in Paris,” McKay later explained, “radicals, esthetes, painters and writers, pseudo-artists, bohemian tourists—all mixed tolerantly and congenially enough together.” Although he sometimes found the small shopkeepers and waiters impertinent and dishonest, he soon understood that Paris offered artists freedom to pursue their own goals, no matter how unorthodox. Unlike London, it also had a stimulating night life available in separate ways to both the wealthy and the poor. If nothing else, one could, for the price of a few cups of coffee, spend a profitable evening engaged in conversation in one of the city’s many small cafes.22
Claude McKay as he appeared in the frontispiece of Spring in New Hampshire (1920)
Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library
Claude McKay and Max Eastman in Moscow, 1922
Wide World Photos
Carl Cowl, a friend from McKay’s Liberator days, became in the 1940s his last literary agent and literary executor.
Courtesy of Carl Cowl
Arthur A. Schomburg, the famed bibliophile, was one of several friends whose financial and personal assistance enabled McKay to pursue his literary career in the 1920s and 1930s.
Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
The poet Countee Cullen, along with Harold and Ivie Jackman, became good friends with McKay in the 1930s.
Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Eulalie Imelda Lewars McKay, Claude McKay’s wife
Courtesy of Hope McKay Virtue
U’Theo McKay (right), discussing agricultural prices with his neighbors in Clarendon Parish in the 1930s
Photo by Nancy Cunard. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University
Hope McKay Virtue, Claude McKay’s daughter, before the modern secondary school named in his honor. The school is near Sunny Ville, where the McKay family lived.
Photo by Wayne F. Cooper
The road to Sunny Ville, Claude McKay’s birthplace, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica
Photo by Wayne F. Cooper
As an aspiring novelist and short-story writer, McKay had a keen interest in the new works of expatriate American writers in France. He read with admiration young Ernest Hemingway’s recently published group of stories, In Our Time, but he refused to visit Gertrude Stein’s famous salon. He had not been impressed by her treatment of black life in the story “Melanctha,” and he remained unconvinced she had anything to offer him. “I never went,” he explained, “because of my aversion to cults and disciples. I liked meeting people as persons, not as divinities in temples.”23
McKay had more respect for James Joyce and his monumental novel, Ulysses. During McKay’s sojourn in England, Frank Budgen had made him aware of Joyce’s importance, and he admired the Irish writer’s achievement. As he later wrote, “Joyce ... is a seer and Olympian and was able to bring the life of two thousand years into the span of a day. If I were to label James Joyce I would say that he was (in the classic sense of the word) a great Decadent.” As with Stein, however, McKay had no fundamental sense that Joyce spoke directly to him, to his problems, his hopes, or his future. There was, he maintained, “no confusion, no doubt, no inquiry and speculation about the future in James Joyce.”24
Only one great modern writer touched him profoundly, and he was not part of the Paris expatriate scene, though like McKay, he, too, was a restless traveler. That writer was D. H. Lawrence, with whom McKay felt a psychic kinship and for whom he had a profound and lasting admiration. While McKay recognized that Ulysses was “a bigger book than any one of Lawrence’s books,” he nevertheless “preferred Lawrence as a whole. I thought that D. H. Lawrence was more modern than James Joyce. In D. H. Lawrence I found confusion—all of the ferment and torment and turmoil, the hesitation and hate and alarm, the sexual inquietude and the incertitude of this age, and the psychic and romantic groping for a way out. . . . I loved . . . the Law-rentian language, which to me is the ripest and most voluptuous expression of English since Shakespeare.” His friends in Paris thought he preferred Lawrence because he was a rebel, but McKay understood that Lawrence was not a social thinker “like Pushkin, William Morris, Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw.”25 For McKay, Lawrence’s appeal lay instead in his compulsive and impassioned struggle to overcome the psychological traps that threatened to imprison and destroy man’s direct appreciation of life and its mysteries in the modern age. In Lawrence, McKay found a constant personal struggle against the forces of suppression and death. McKay could relate on many levels to such a struggle.
After reading Sons and Lovers, in particular, he must have discovered in Lawrence a man whose fundamental parental loyalties, social background, and young manhood resembled his own. Like McKay, Lawrence had a mother with whom he closely identified, an emotionally distant father with whom he felt little kinship, and a psychological restlessness that drove him steadily toward artistic achievement and away from the marginal existence of his natal community. In his own life, of course, McKay faced the additional complicating factor of race. As he entered the expatriate world of white American artists and writers in the fall of 1923, he was acutely aware that their problems were only partly his own. As he summed it up in A Long Way from Home, the young expatriates he encountered in Europe had a variety of motives for living and working abroad. Some had fled America to enjoy what they considered the richer cultural life of Europe; others “were . . . harassed ... by complicated problems of sex.” In New York, McKay had not experienced their cultural or sexual inhibitions. He had, in fact, been stimulated by the vigorous spirit and the accelerated social pace of the industrial Northeast.26
At the same time, white racism, which poisoned the very well-springs of black life in America, hindered in innumerable ways his life as a man and an artist. The pervasive racial oppressiveness of the American environment caused McKay to dread the thought of returning to the United States. He wanted relief from the racial burdens imposed upon him within America. In comparing his own situation with those of his white fellow expatriates in Europe, McKay concluded:
Color-consciousness was the fundamental of my restlessness. And it was something with which my fellow-expatriates could sympathize but which they could not altogether understand. For they were not black like me. Not being black and unable to see deep into the profundity of blackness, some even thought that I might have preferred to be white like them. They couldn’t imagine that I had no desire merely to exchange my black problem for their white problem. For all their knowledge and sophistication, they couldn’t understand the instinctive and animal and purely physical pride of a black person resolute in being himself and yet living a simple civilized life like themselves. Because their education in their white world had trained them to see a person of color either as an inferior or as an exotic.27
McKay knew he was neither. He was a writer eager to earn his way, and he had arrived in Paris determined to produce fiction that would sell. At the same time, he wished through his fiction to explore seriously his fundamental experiences as a black man in the modern, industrialized, white-dominated world of America and Europe. His arrival in Paris in the fall of 1923 had been noted in the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune by Eugene Jolas, who explained that McKay was intent upon capturing in fiction some of the essence of his rich experience in both Jamaica and America.28
Before he was well recovered from the shock of hospitalization for syphilis, however, he came down with another serious illness. In December, while “posing naked in Paris studios,” McKay fell ill with a severe case of influenza. He spent the 1923 Christmas season in bed fighting desperately to regain his health. All the while he faced the possibility of eviction from his room because his rent was in arrears. Once again, friends rescued him. Louise Bryant, the widow of Jack Reed, had recently married William Bullitt, a wealthy Philadelphian; they were living in Paris. Through a mutual friend, she learned of McKay’s latest illness and sent a doctor to look after him. Pierre Vogein also ministered to him, and an American acquaintance, Mrs. Josephine Bennett of Brookwood Labor College, paid his rent arid brought him fruit during his convalescence.29
Despite such generosity, McKay still had neither a regular income nor any luck in finding a publisher interested in his Russian experience. He remained dependent on the charity of friends and admirers. In his desperation, he sometimes assumed in his letters to them the tone of an aggrieved and quarrelsome child. On January 7, 1924, for instance, he appealed for a second time to an old radical acquaintance in Harlem. To Grace Campbell he wrote:
You are just as bad as all American correspondents. They never answer letters. I had the bummest holiday in my life. I was down with the grippe for 10 days and only forced myself to get up on New Year’s day. I suffer because I am not properly clothed to stand the winter. I am wondering if anything can be done over there to raise a little money to tide me over these bad times. I nearly got turned out of my little room but for Mrs. Bennett. . . . My life here is very unsatisfactory for a propagandist—cadging a meal off people who are not at all sympathetic to my social ideas. There is so much work to be done if I am helped a little.*
On the same day he exclaimed to A. A. Schomburg, who had not replied to his latest requests, “[I] am at a loss to know why you should have ditched a fellow like that. . . . I have been very ill confined to my room during the holidays and I am still unwell. Hoping you will drop a fellow even a post card—if nothing else.”30
Such appeals eventually brought results. Schomburg finally sent McKay copies of Brawley’s and Woodson’s books, as well as clippings from the Afro-American newspapers and periodicals he requested. McKay had asked Grace Campbell in the name of Harlem’s socialists to appeal to Eugen Boissevain or Dudley Field Malone for money. Campbell instead passed McKay’s letter to Walter White, who in turn requested that his fellow workers at the NAACP contribute to McKay’s relief. Joel Spingarn generously gave fifty dollars. By the end of January, White cabled one hundred dollars to McKay in Paris.31
Even before he received this sum, McKay’s fortunes had begun to turn. Louise Bullitt not only supplied him with a doctor during his illness, she also agreed to help him financially. He had previously met her in New York after her return from Russia following Jack Reed’s death. At that time, McKay had sympathized with her loss and told her of Reed’s early invitation to him to visit the Soviet Union. Now, she listened to his hopes, read the few stories he had already written, and urged him to continue in his efforts to produce marketable fiction. More important, she agreed that McKay should leave the cold damp of the Paris winter, and she gave him enough money to live for the next three months on the French Mediterranean coast. Toward the end of January, 1924, McKay left Paris.32
He went first to Marseilles for a brief visit to France’s oldest seaport. Marseilles’s oldest waterfront section, the decaying vieuxport, especially fascinated McKay. There he encountered an ugly yet bewitching melange of foreign sailors, international drifters, prostitutes, criminals, and petit bourgeois merchants—all scrambling frantically for a living in a small area that eventually came to symbolize for him the very condition of modern Western civilization. After a few days in Marseilles, McKay journeyed back up the French coast and visited a number of small towns. He finally setded in La Ciotat, a fishing and boatbuilding center on a fine bay located midway between Toulon and Marseilles. Although the town was picturesque, McKay’s new quarters had no heat, and mornings and evenings were cold. Discomfitted but determined, he regularly attended to his writing, often wrapped from head to foot in the heavy blanket he had purchased during his first days in Moscow.
McKay shortly began to spend many of his spare hours in nearby Toulon, a naval center that lacked the ingrained sordidness of Marseilles’s vieux port. Before long he made friends in Toulon with a sailor he called Lucien in A Long Way from Home but whom he once referred to as Leon in a letter to Alain Locke.33 Lucien (or Leon) had a bohemian girlfriend named Marcelle, and McKay soon began to see the two of them on a regular basis. Through them, he discovered better quarters in Toulon and in April, 1924, he moved there from La Ciotat.
Lucien eventually introduced him to other sailors from his ship, and McKay seldom lacked company, especially on the weekends when Lucien and his friends were free. With Lucien and Marcelle, he explored the rugged Var countryside around Toulon, and in the evenings, he often frequented their favorite bars and dance halls.34
Shortly after his move to Toulon, McKay received word from Anna Davis, secretary of the Garland Fund in New York City, that its board of directors had heard of his plight and had decided to grant him a monthly stipend of fifty dollars so that he could complete his writing project. Freed at last from the prospect of absolute poverty, McKay proceeded to enjoy Toulon, his new friends, and his writing.35
Despite the personal difficulties he had encountered since leaving Russia, McKay had developed a clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish in fiction. He had long felt that black leaders in the United States feared any realistic portrayals of Negro life that did not safely advance the cause of racial justice. As he had said earlier in his Liberator review of Shuffle Along, “The Negro critics can scarcely perceive and recognize true values through the screen of sneering bigotry put between them and life by the dominant race.” As a consequence, only the most solidly respectable efforts received the unreserved approval of “the sensitive and pompous . . . black intelligentsia.” All the while, McKay concluded, the black common folk continued to express themselves “with a zest that is yet to be depicted by a true artist.” At long last, McKay felt sufficiently freed from the demands imposed upon him as an editor and radical activist to attempt a fictional rendering of “the warmth, color and laughter” he had found during his years in the workaday world of black Americans.36
Back in December, 1923, while still ill with “the grippe,” McKay had explained to H. L. Mencken his expectations. “My plans, before I took ill, and they are still not much changed, was [sic] to do a series of prose sketches of my contacts in America, using the most significant things, yet, leaving no subject, however degraded, untouched. Much of the period 1914–1919 was spent in the so-called semi-underworld and should make interesting reading from the point of view I shall write from. I have the whole thing planned in my head and I see the scenes in a finer perspective from here.”*
By the following May, he could report from Toulon to his various correspondents in the United States that he was already over halfway through his first novel. By the end of the summer, he had finished it and had decided to return to Paris, where he hoped to make contacts that would ease the way to its quick publication. His grant enabled him to five rather well for the moment, but it would run out by the year’s end. Without a publisher’s advance, he would again be penniless. This worried him, for despite every effort on his part to five moderately and take care of himself, he still occasionally suffered from headaches and dizziness. For several days in August, just before setting out for Paris, he experienced again, as once before in Russia, what appeared to be some sort of paralytic stroke that left him for a time numb along the left side of his face. These alarming symptoms increased his determination to get a good critical opinion of his novel and push for its earliest publication.37
McKay had every reason to believe he could find a publisher. For one thing, he was already a published author. In addition, Walter White wrote that “many changes” had come in the United States since he had left in 1922. The success of Roland Hayes in music and Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones and All God’s Churchill Got Wings, “coupled with the various novels, poems and other signs of an awakening artistic sense and articulacy on the part of the Negro have caused what seems to be a new day to set in.” Publishers had become more receptive to works by black authors, and White himself had just published a novel, which, he confessed to McKay, he had written in only twelve days from start to finish.38
White and James Weldon Johnson at the NAACP, Alan Locke at Howard and Charles Johnson at the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine, all encouraged the new literary awakening. They were articulate, educated men with numerous contacts in the white social, business, and literary circles of New York City. They saw the interest in black writers as beneficial to blacks in general. It seemed to them a positive step toward the eventual resolution of the country’s racial problems. As James Weldon Johnson wrote in a private memorandum to Walter White, it had been his “long cherished belief. . . that the development of Negro art in the United States will not only mean a great deal to the Negro himself, but will provide the easiest and most effective approach to that whole question called the race question. It is the approach that offers the least friction.” Alain Locke concurred and “confidently” predicted that the “recognition and removal of prejudice can most easily and tactfully be offset by the influence of art.” Locke wrote Walter White from Europe in 1923 or 1924 that he had found great interest in black arts among such notable publishers and theater directors as Paul Guillaume in France and Max Reinhardt in Germany.39
For his part, McKay welcomed the new developments, but he advised White that black writers should be willing “to stand good straight-out criticism and not allow ourselves to be patronized as Negro artists in America.” He also thought that black writers would only be hurt in the long run by “too much undiscriminating praise from Negro journals.”40 He naturally believed he had a positive role to play in these new developments, and he set out for Paris with high expectations.
McKay remained in Paris from late August, 1923, until January, 1924. During these six months he did his share of socializing, though probably no more than most American expatriates in Paris during the 1920s. Many of his experiences were, in fact, almost identical to the oft-told stories of his white counterparts. He visited Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. He encountered Harold St earns, the famous editor of Civilization in America, and witnessed his descent into hopeless alcoholism. And he met, too, a number of friends and acquaintances from New York who happened to be in Paris. Finally, he talked with a few publishers’ representatives and made efforts to find a literary representative in London—all, it seemed, to no avail.41
Like their white counterparts, many black American writers of the period visited Paris. In the fall of 1924, Claude informed Walter White that he had encountered Miss Jessie Fauset, the novelist and literary editor of Crisis, on at least two occasions, but that he had decided to avoid her because she was too proper and schoolmarmish for his tastes. McKay also met Jean Toomer for the first time in Paris and told White that Toomer could accomplish more in fiction if he would not let his tendency toward mysticism interfere with his sense of reality.42
In Paris, McKay also met students and fellow travelers from Africa, the French West Indies, and North Africa. As in New York and London, he exchanged with them ideas and life histories. His first acquaintance with French-speaking blacks in France had, of course, begun during his first stay in Paris in 1923. One of these early encounters had, in fact, resulted in his last article for Crisis, which had appeared in April, 1924. In it, McKay told of meeting a Dahomean prince residing in Paris. His name was Kogo Tovalou Honenou, and his uncle, King Behanzin, had been deposed by the French colonial administration in Dahomey. After a sound French education in linguistics, law, and medicine, Honenou had emerged as a Parisian sophisticate. According to McKay, however, he had not forgotten his first responsibilities. Through the presidency of an association entitled the Amitie Franco-Dahomeenne, he tried to expose French colonial injustices in his native land. He understood little about the tragic absurdities of American race relations, and had once been bewildered when asked to leave a Paris cafe after his presence had been protested by a group of American tourists.43
McKay met other French West Indian and African blacks in the fall and winter of 1924, but he did not discuss them in A Long Way from Home. Even as late as 1937, he probably had little idea of the influence he had exerted upon the development of black French literature. Whether he ever knew it or not, however, some of his acquaintances were figures of primary importance in the establishment of black literature in French in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Because of his personal contact with them and, above all, because of his poetry and future novels, McKay was eventually to be acknowledged by these writers as a catalytic influence in the development of their own works. As early as 1924 or 1925, McKay may have met Paulette Nardal from Martinique. It was she who, with her sister Jane, developed many of the seminal ideas eventually incorporated into the Nigritude movement of the 1930s and 1940s. At their Parisian literary salon in the 1920s, they actively propagated the belief that French-speaking black Africans and West Indians had to rediscover their folk cultures and affirm their intrinsic human values, just as American blacks were attempting to do in the United States. By the early 1930s, their home in Paris had become a regular meeting place for young French African and West Indian intellectuals. There they met visiting members of the new Afro-American literary elite from the United States.44
Claude McKay played a significant role in bringing the Nardal sisters into contact with the leaders of the Negro Renaissance in the 1920s. A brief note he once left for Alain Locke at a Paris hotel makes it plain that McKay was already acquainted with the Nardals. It was dated February 10, but the year, unfortunately, was omitted: it might have been as early as 1923 or as late as 1928. It read: “Mile. Nardal is giving an ‘afternoon’ for her sister just arrived from a visit to Martinique and they are anxious to meet you. It is Sunday afternoon about 3 at Clumart and they told me to get hold of you. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the address at Clumart but if you call me tomorrow before noon I shall give it to you or you can get it at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Rue de l’Odeon.”* Locke subsequendy became an annual guest at the Nardals’ gatherings. In his turn, he introduced them to the younger writers of the New Negro movement, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer. In this way, young African and French West Indian writers such as Leopold Sedar Senghor from Senegal and Aimé Cesaire of Martinique became acquainted with their black American contemporaries and began to read their works.45
In the 1930s, Senghor and Cesaire through their poetry and criticism propounded a theory about black life and art that was to dominate French West African writing for several decades. The rhythm, emotion, and directness of black artistic endeavor, they believed, set it apart from Western art. This complex of black artistic characteristics they called Negritude, and the roots of their movement lay at least in part in the Harlem Renaissance.46
And, as they later acknowledged, Claude McKay’s work in particular had a direct, galvanizing effect on their own development. Thus, even as he struggled to develop his own voice as a novelist, McKay’s very presence in France influenced the direction of black Francophone literature: first through his contact with the Cardinals, and finally with the publication of his second novel in 1929. His impact was of primary importance in the shaping of the Negritude movement.47
In 1924, however, McKay could not have foreseen such a role for himself. His most immediate task was to survive long enough to get his first novel published. Of the writers he met in Paris that year, Sinclair Lewis proved the most helpful. Their meeting was arranged by Walter White, who had enjoyed Lewis’ company in New York just before the famous author left for Europe. White mentioned that McKay was in France, and Lewis expressed a desire to meet him. White, who believed that McKay would surely benefit from Lewis’ advice on the art of fiction, immediately urged McKay to see Lewis.48
They spent two evenings together, from which McKay derived three important benefits. He profited greatly from Lewis’ unsparing criticism of his first novel; he received from Lewis an unspecified amount of money; and he convinced Lewis that he was indeed seriously engaged in the novelist’s craft. Lewis subsequently recommended to the administrators of the Garland Fund that McKay’s grant be extended.49
As his grant neared its expiration, McKay indicated to the fund’s administrators that he needed more time and money to write a second draft of his novel. They were hesitant to give more. For one thing, they had only a vague idea of what McKay was trying to accomplish in Europe. They had, moreover, received reports from other sources that McKay appeared to be doing little work in Paris. McKay never knew for sure just who these sources were, though he suspected Pauline Rose; a Communist sympathizer he had met in Moscow and later encountered in Paris. He had earlier written White and others that Rose, an English Jew, was coming to the United States, and he had advised them that she could give them good firsthand information about conditions in Russia.50
He soon changed his mind about her reliability and informed Arthur Schomburg that she had proved to be “after all only a gossipy little kike” and had taken “back the stupidest and quite untrue stories about me to New York.” Because of her, McKay claimed, his “allowance” was stopped “for three months” at the beginning of 1925.
In fact, by the time he met Lewis, he had already “gone beyond” the expiration date of his original grant. As he matter-of-factly informed White, “I am just now in low water again, but I’ve sent off three frantic begging letters. . . . I am not sure what’s going to happen. I can only hope.”51
Largely on the strength of Sinclair Lewis’ recommendation, the Garland Fund finally agreed at the end of February, 1925, to extend McKay’s aid for another six months through August, 1925. By then he had returned to Toulon and had begun the second draft of his novel, now entitled “Color Scheme.” He worked hard to improve his book. As summer approached he became frantic to finish it and to send the manuscript to New York, where he hoped it would find a publisher before fall.52
While his expectations remained high, his strategy for placing the novel never went beyond an unreasonable reliance upon the well-meaning but inexperienced Arthur A. Schomburg. Walter White, whose personal acquaintance with New York publishers was infinitely greater than Sc homburg’s, informed McKay late in May that a new firm, Viking Press, had expressed great interest in his novel. White strongly advised him to send the manuscript directly to Viking. By the time McKay received this message, however, he had already sent the manuscript to Schomburg, with instructions to submit it initially to Alfred A. Knopf, then to Harcourt, Brace, and, if both failed to take it, to Boni and Liveright. He distrusted White’s advice; he had never heard of Viking, knew nothing of the new firm’s stability or reputation, and assumed it would never be able to distribute or promote his work as well as the firms he already knew.53
For an experienced author, McKay knew surprisingly little about publishing. In the past, he had relied upon well-placed and experienced friends and patrons to find a suitable publisher. Now that he found himself without such support, he turned naturally, if mistakenly, to his most sympathetic and reliable correspondent. Schomburg tried to follow McKay’s instructions, but he was no literary agent. Nor did he possess Walter White’s public relations skill or reputation as a promoter of black talents. McKay advised Schomburg to seek White’s advice and assistance, but at the same time he indicated that White and “that N.A.A.C.P. crowd” might find “Color Scheme” shocking and even immoral. He told Schomburg that his novel was a frank satire in “black and white” that broke through the inhibitions that had constrained earlier Negro writers. “I make my Negro characters yarn and backbite and fuck like people the world over,” he exclaimed.54
McKay’s ambivalence toward White and the NAACP had the effect of reinforcing Schomburg’s own grievances against the organization and made him reluctant to seek Walter White’s help. Before too long, McKay heard from Alain Locke that Schomburg understood he was not to let White know about “Color Scheme.” This prompted from McKay yet another frantic letter to Schomburg in which he advised him that “Walter is really one of my best friends. Certainly you could not have said that to Locke. Did you?” He went on to warn Schomburg against “all backbiting gossip. But you must know,” he concluded, “how the Negro black belts are just rotten-crazy with spiteful, nonsensical malice and if we get mixed up in that sea of shit we shall never be able to do any real revolutionary work along artistic or social lines.”55
After mailing “Color Scheme” to Schomburg, McKay left Toulon and toured Aries and other cities in southern France. Then he went again to Marseilles. From there he decided to visit his sailor friend Lucien, who had been discharged from the navy in the winter of 1925. After his release, Lucien had gone home to St. Pierre, a small town near Brest in the province of Finistére. For some time, he had been urging McKay to visit him. His letters, full of praise for the sea-coast and countryside of his native Brittany, finally persuaded McKay to accept his friend’s invitation.56
As he waited for his train to depart Marseilles, McKay casually glanced out the window and saw Max Eastman sitting opposite him in another train that had just arrived. The two had begun corresponding again, but they had not seen each other since their quarrel in Russia. McKay hastily postponed his trip until the following evening, and they spent the intervening time talking.57 Both were happy to renew their friendship. They had much to discuss. Eastman had remained in Russia much longer than McKay. While there, he had learned Russian and had found a wife, Eliena Krylenko, whom he now introduced to McKay. He had also collected from Leon Trotsky material for a biography. Before leaving the Soviet Union, Max had become aware of Joseph Stalin’s systematic isolation of and triumph over Trotsky within the Communist party. Most important, he had received from Trotsky and others irrefutable evidence that Lenin on his deathbed had denounced Stalin’s aggrandizement and had favored Trotsky as his successor. From Russia, Eastman eventually journeyed to Paris, where he wrote Since Lenin Died. It contained the sensational revelation of Lenin’s “last testament” and provided details of Stalin’s campaign to establish himself as the undisputed head of the Communist government of the Soviet Union.58
McKay had already read the book and had only recently written Eastman to congratulate him. Like Eastman, McKay still considered himself a communist, but Eastman’s book confirmed what he already knew—that the international Communist movement, at least in the West, could only be hurt by submitting to Russian domination. By exposing the ruthless internal struggles within the Russian party, Eastman had, in McKay’s opinion, “done more than anyone can imagine just now for the Proletarian movement—you are helping to lift the clumsy hand of Moscow off it.” Well before most of his erstwhile comrades, including Eastman, McKay had realized the long-range implications that Russian dominance had for Communist movements in other lands. From Aries he had written Eastman that “something will have to be done.”
Personally I think the headquarters of the International should be removed from Russia if it could setuplegally inanother country. I feel about it that Russia has already had her Revolution—and that because so many of the Russian leaders of the International are connected with the Russian government, the International will always consciously or unconsciously be over influenced by Russian governmental politics internal and external—to the detriment of the proletarian movement. Wherever I look in the Communist International I see nothing but dry rot—the little leaders of Western Europe and Americamereventriloquistsvying each withthe other torepeatthe words of Moscow. To me itseems bad for everybody allround and even worse for Russia. Fancy a greatwonderful country likethat using a ventriloquist show to scare the great lords of international capitalism.*
For McKay, submission to Moscow’s will already meant the betrayal of the historic revolutionary struggles going on elsewhere in the world. He had accordingly ceased all active participation within the international Communist movement. He still considered himself a revolutionary, but he saw his dreams suborned, perverted, and destroyed by Stalin, who he perceived would be even more ruthlessly brutal in his drive to power than the czars he had helped topple. In 1925, in an unpublished poem dedicated to Max Eastman, he asked what “we who revolt” hoped to gain by ceaseless efforts to “teach the world’s unthinking how to think . . . / of freer worlds.” With words, they had worked to “forge golden things from mankind’s dim desires,” but clearly their efforts “to clear the jungle growth around man’s mind” had resulted only in “a new tyranny,” whose pretensions, he prophesied, would result in unimaginable horrors.
We shall see prancing tyrants in the place
Of shattered kings, an unctious renegade
Planting his foot on a broken mace,
Posing a smith’s hammer, a peasant’s spade!
And we shall see the thoughts we loved so well
Twisted and torn and mangled into shapes
More hideous than the fancied forms of hell,
To strengthen the old tyranny of new-crowned apes.
Eastman had been the first revolutionary from the West to present an informed explanation of Stalin’s rise and Trotsky’s fall from power; his efforts to expose the wily Georgian’s machinations within the Bolshevik power structure had been widely denounced by many former friends in the Third International. For the moment, he stood almost alone. In his poem, McKay emphatically declared himself in Eastman’s corner, no matter the consequence. There could be no other alternative for the committed revolutionary.
For tyranny eternal must be fought,
Whether he dons a king’s or peasant’s dress.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Revolt with pennants streaming and flags unfurled!*
While eager to fight the new tyranny developing in Russia, McKay, unlike Eastman, placed no faith in Leon Trotsky, whom he considered to be intellectually brilliant but politically inept. In the remorseless winnowing of the Bolshevik political process, Trotsky had been overcome by Stalin, whose cunning seemed to make him better suited to dominate the highly centralized Bolshevik administrative machinery. McKay very early concluded that Trotsky had been ousted by a more able man. While giving Trotsky his due as an intellectual, he never considered joining his political movement.59
After his brief visit with the Eastmans, McKay journeyed first to Bordeaux to visit a West Indian friend. From there, he wrote to Lucien that he would soon see him. The answer he received stunned him: Lucien’s parents wrote that their son had recently died of tuberculosis. They urged him to come anyway because Lucien to the end had talked enthusiastically of his impending visit; they wanted to welcome him in their son’s stead. In all the time McKay had spent with him, Lucien had never complained of ill health. Looking back upon their correspondence, he did remember that in one letter Lucien had mentioned he had fallen ill, but that “it was not serious.” McKay could hardly comprehend what had happened. He had the strange sensation that he had been corresponding with a ghost. “All the time he was regularly writing those healthy letters ... he was actually passing rapidly away.”60
After a second invitation from Lucien’s parents, McKay journeyed to St. Pierre. It was his first visit to a French petit bourgeois home. Lucien’s father was a big, hearty artisan, open and friendly. McKay stayed in nearby Brest, but he often ate with Lucien’s parents. He also met his late friend’s older brother and two married sisters. The visit proved so successful that McKay spent the entire summer of 1925 exploring Finistére and getting to know “the Breton folk,” whom he “liked more than any other of the French.” No doubt his warmth and friendliness and the novelty of his visit provided some comfort for Lucien’s family. And on McKay’s side, the beauty of Refinish, especially the picturesque small seacoast towns, enabled him to better appreciate Lucien’s love of the area and helped to distract him from his underlying anxieties about the fate of his novel and his future as a literary artist.61
At the end of July, McKay learned that Knopf had rejected his novel. Besides concluding that its literary quality was “uneven,” their reader believed that should it ever appear in print its explicit sexual references would almost certainly be judged obscene by the courts. Although disappointed, McKay did not entirely lose hope. He had originally refrained from sending the manuscript to Walter White because he had wanted his work accepted on its intrinsic merits, not merely because it had the endorsement of NAACP officials. Partly for this reason, he had advised Schomburg to seek out H. L. Mencken, whose “standard of judgment,” McKay believed, “would be entirely literary.”62 Schomburg did not contact Mencken. After hearing from Knopf, McKay himself finally wrote Mencken in the hope that “a word from you, if it should take you favorably, may make the route of the manuscript a little easier.” McKay explained that he had tried to restrain his language and to mask certain sexual references in French phrases. At the same time, he had “hewed hard to the line of sincerity” and had perhaps used “certain phrases [which] might still be too raw for the American public. The novel itself is a realistic comedy of life as I saw it among Negroes on the railroad and in Harlem. . . . I know the stuff is uneven . . . but it is a first novel on which I’ve worked hard indeed under unpleasant (to say the least) conditions and I should like to have it published so I may have the chance to continue writing.” As usual, Mencken sent a kind reply but provided no help. By the late fall of 1925, McKay realized he would not get his novel published. After two years of effort, he had returned to where he had started—broke and unpublished as a novelist.63
From the fragmentary summaries of its plot found in his letters, one can only speculate about the overall quality of “Color Scheme.” McKay himself finally concluded that it was not a successful novel and burned the manuscript.64 Although he could not appreciate it at the time, the effort invested in “Color Scheme” had not been totally wasted. Aside from the hastily written short stories he had published in the Soviet Union, “Color Scheme” represented his first sustained attempt to utilize in fiction his American experiences. His Soviet stories had been slight and overtly propagandistic, concentrating directly on the very real problems of lynchings and racial discrimination.65 “Color Scheme” was not so obviously didactic. In it, he focused instead on Harlem and the developing ghettos of the urban Northeast in an attempt to capture something of the essential health and vitality he had found among the black common folk during his years on the railroad and in New York City.
From his American correspondents, he had already learned that the white critic and novelist, Carl Van Vechten, was also hard at work upon a Harlem novel. McKay naturally wanted his to appear first. He feared that Van Vechten would steal his market. McKay believed, too, that as an insider his would be the more authentic portrait.66 In “Color Scheme,” he returned to the use of the salty, uninhibited colloquial language of “the common people.” In his best Jamaican dialect poetry, he had quite early employed such language to good effect. Unfortunately, the literary censorship of the day in the United States inhibited McKay’s natural tendency to use the everyday language of the streets. After “Color Scheme,” he sometimes invented awkward verbal substitutes to replace what would otherwise have been a more Vigorously realistic use of Afro-American language.67
With “Color Scheme,” McKay began a decade-long effort to capture through fiction the fundamental ethos and character of black life as he had experienced it in the United States and the West Indies. Through a clarification of the essential identity of the black common folk and their culture, he sought to define their position in the modern industrialized world and to understand better the meaning of his own life. Although McKay Aimed at a broad definition of black life, his fiction remained largely autobiographical. In this narrower sense, it can be read as progressive efforts to comprehend his individual experiences and to resolve the inner conflicts they had engendered.68