Despite his underlying reservations, McKay had some good times in Paris with the cast of Blackbirds, with Countee Cullen, and with a pretty, young black socialite named Anita Thompson, who would eventually follow him to Tangier. During the latter part of his stay in Paris, however, he became nervous, irritable, and depressed. In A Long Way from Home, he maintained that Paris had always had this effect upon him. He could never work there; the city distracted him. In addition, his health was not good.1
All this may have been true, but there was yet another reason for McKay’s unhappiness. To his dismay, he learned that his long-lost wife, residing again in New York, was seeking to “tie up” his royalties in a legal knot that would bind him once again to support her and their child, whom he had never seen. While not averse to aiding his daughter, he wished to do it on his own terms. To forestall legal proceedings, he invited his wife to visit him in Paris. When she arrived, they discussed their situation, and McKay somehow succeeded in averting a costly legal battle. But the emotional price to both was great. His wife left with the accumulated bitterness of many years, intensified by the realization that what little he could give her would not be worth a court fight to get. Even the money he advanced for their daughter Hope’s support and education went to McKay’s relatives in Jamaica. While her mother worked in New York City, Hope remained in Jamaica. Claude’s family saw to it that Hope received a good education, and her maternal family, the Lewars, gave her the warmth and emotional support to overcome the bewildering sense of abandonment she sometimes felt in the absence of both her parents.2
McKay’s traumatic confrontation with his wife left him nervous, distraught, and depressed. He began to drink again, which did not help. One night his old friend Louise Bryant Bullitt found him drunk and depressed in a cafe. She urged him to leave Paris and to go back to work. McKay heeded the advice. Louise’s own deplorable condition probably served as warning enough. Since McKay had last seen her in 1925, Louise had lost her health, her beauty, and her husband and child. McKay was appalled by her decline. Besides drinking too much, she consorted with an unpleasant woman whom McKay detested. Still, Louise remained a friend, and he saw her often during his stay in Paris.3
Late in July he went to Antwerp for a brief vacation, but he returned to Paris, where he lingered until late August. Max Eastman had written earlier from the United States that he planned to arrive in August, and McKay wanted to see him. In the interval, he tried without success to write. The social distractions of Paris combined with chronic health problems—headaches, “sciatica” (in his arm and shoulders), and high blood pressure—defeated again his best efforts to concentrate.
In desperation, he went with a young medical student to Bilbao and then to San Sebastian in northeastern Spain. In Bilbao, he began another novel based on his experiences in Marseilles. It was an imaginative account of the stowaway African, his misfortune, and his return to Marseilles. Central to the story was the African’s tempestuous affair with a spirited North African woman who in the end murders him in a fit of passionate rage. From San Sebastian, McKay went in September to Madrid; there he began to work in earnest on his story.4
Although he preferred Barcelona to the relative bleakness of Madrid, he nevertheless felt at ease in the “quiet lazy-moving existence” of the Spanish capital. As he explained to Bradley, he could work there, “being in harmony with it.” His months in Paris, he found, had only increased his love of Spain. To Bradley he wrote, “It may be that I exaggerate but as soon as I crossed the border I felt as if I had escaped from a swarm of wasps to find myself among a people who can appreciate simple dignity when they meet with it, because dignity is a fundamental of their social life. . . . I am afraid I shall at last grow romantic about some country.”5
In Madrid he read in the Paris edition of the New York Herald that Eastman was in Paris. McKay immediately sent a telegram only to find that he had already left for the United States. Eastman’s letters announcing the dates of his stay in Paris had not caught up with McKay in time to enable him to see his old friend. McKay was bitterly disappointed. He still looked to Eastman for counsel, and he wanted to discuss with him “a thousand things—yourself, Eliena, and our old group, politics, prose, poetry.” McKay had also wanted to talk with Eastman “intimately . . . about myself, my health. I am sure a talk with you would have done me lots and lots of good.” Now, he concluded, “I’ll have to wait until I come ‘home’ next year.” He planned to return to the United States, he explained, “just for a few months to get material for a book on that damned thing called nigger society.” He hastened to add, “I am sure I couldn’t live there again. I saw enough of Americans white and colored this summer in Paris to know that if I have ever mused the thought of living in America again I was a fool. Still, I want to come back to establish right of residence.”6
McKay remained in Spain until June, 1930. During that time he worked conscientiously on his new novel, at first called “The Jungle and the Bottoms.” The Bradleys visited McKay in November, 1929, and again in December after he moved to Barcelona, where he “rested and played through the holidays.” In January, 1930, he resumed work and “kept straight on knuckling down to the job.” In March he allowed himself a weekend in Valencia, and thoroughly enjoyed the trip. “Valencia was lovely,” he wrote Eastman, “with chubby orange trees full of fruit, fields upon fields of them and pickers and carriers and ships trading and sailing and the town has a fluffy creamy color that is very delicious.”7 Back in Barcelona, he soon finished the novel.
“The Jungle and the Bottoms” proved transitional in McKay’s development as a novelist. Like Home to Harlem and Banjo, it dealt with working-class characters in an exotic “low-life” setting that emphasized the marginality of black existence in Western commercial society. Unlike his first two novels, however, “The Jungle and the Bottoms” was more conventionally plotted. It revolved around a character in many ways essentially different from Jake, Banjo, or Ray. Lafala, the handicapped African, was not a character McKay could completely understand. Despite Lafala’s handicap, McKay failed to make him a very sympathetic character. In the end, his girlfriend, Zhima, first overshadows, then literally annihilates him in perhaps the most powerful single scene in all of McKay’s fiction.
Throughout the novel’s composition, McKay remained acutely aware that Lafala was not developing into an engaging character. “It’s the girl Zhima,” he explained to Bradley, “who runs away with the story and after that Malty,” a West Indian character of modest good sense who had previously appeared in Banjo. By March, 1930, he informed Bradley that Lafala was “standing up strong on his own corks” but admitted that “the Arab girl is growing bigger than I ever dreamed and running away with the book and me.”8
Bradley thought McKay should not include too many scenes reminiscent of Banjo. Although McKay initially called the city Dream-port, it clearly remained the Marseilles of Banjo. Bradley also advised McKay that he tended to editorialize too much through the mouth of Malty, who in “The Jungle and the Bottoms” replaced Ray as Claude’s fictional alter ego. Bradley expressed concern that the book might include too much talk of race and race relations, but McKay rejected that notion. He believed all blacks, even “the happy-go-lucky Negro,” often dwelt on racial matters. The topic, he explained, “came naturally” to “the talk and thought of Negroes, like their complexion, giving a peculiar and definite color to the human story.” Such talk, he admitted, sometimes conflicted “with the picaresque story, but if I’m to go on as a writer my characters besides acting must think and talk some sense and if those characters are mainly Negroes, there will certainly be in their thinking and talking ideas peculiar to Negroes.”9
Although he did not know it at the time, “The Jungle and the Bottoms” was to be McKay’s last effort to sustain the picaresque mode he had first developed in Home to Harlem and Banjo. In June, he finished the book and sent it off to Eugene Saxton at Harper. He was not entirely comfortable with either its theme or its development, but he had worked hard to complete it and he hoped to see it succeed at least as well as his two previous novels. The great stock market crash of 1929 had already occurred in the United States the previous fall, but McKay as yet had no inkling of its consequences, either for himself for the world. As the summer of 1930 approached, his main preoccupation remained, as it had for some time, his health. He decided to go to Berlin for a thorough medical examination. McKay knew his headaches, high blood pressure, and chronic pains in his arms were probably related to his old venereal infections and their treatments. From Berlin, he confided to Eastman that in the past he had contracted gonorrhea, as well as syphilis, and that perhaps his physical problems stemmed as much from overtreatment as from the diseases themselves. He had come to Berlin, he explained, because he had been assured by Spanish doctors that the German venereal-disease specialists and their medicines were the world’s best.10
Since 1923, McKay had been haunted by his bout with syphilis and had remained fearful that he still harbored the dreaded spirochete. Because of this understandable fear, he had persisted in treating himself with the mercury-based medicines longer than he should have. In Berlin he placed himself under the care of “two specialists, one... a professor of the university faculty . . . said to be very good.” They proceeded to draw fluid from McKay’s spine and brain in search of a specific cause of his maladies. They found no evidence of syphilis. They concluded that he had indeed been “over-medicined”; his “continued head trouble—dizziness, heaviness and even lightness” was caused by the medicine he had consumed since 1923.11
Their diagnosis did not lead to a cure. McKay would still suffer periodically from alarmingly severe headaches, as well as occasional chest pains, backaches, and immobilizing pains in his arms (a condition he always described as sciatica). Still, in the summer of 1930 the knowledge that he was definitely free from syphilis made him so happy that he took an extended vacation. From Berlin, he traveled first to Luxembourg, where he stayed a month. From there, he proceeded in July and August to tour the Rhineland by boat and train. He visited “Strassburg . . . Baden, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Mayence, Coblenz, Bonn, Treves, [and] Cologne.”12
Finally, toward the end of the summer, he returned once again to Paris, where he talked with Eugene Saxton and Bradley about the status of his latest novel. Both men felt that “The Jungle and the Bottoms” required some rewriting before it would be acceptable for publication. Unlike his two previous works, it was not a picaresque tale, though its characters and setting were in many ways reminiscent of those in Banjo. Saxton apparently questioned the novel’s overall coherence and unity. He may have also wondered if certain themes developed by McKay would be accepted by the American reading public. For in “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” McKay frankly and sympathetically discussed for the first time the plight of homosexuals in Western society. In a fully developed substory inserted into the novel almost as an aside, McKay devoted an entire chapter to portraying the homosexual underworld of the docks in the person of gigantic “Big Blonde” and his effeminate young “page boy” lover. Their attempt to get service in a cheap waterfront cafe ends in a brawl, with Big Blonde pathetically bemoaning the seeming impossibility of people like themselves ever winning any respect. Whatever Saxton and Bradley may have felt about this particular chapter, both concurred that the novel could be set right without major revisions. McKay did not agree.13
In “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” he had tried to create a carefully structured story “very different in style and mood from the preceding ones.” He had intended the character studies of Ashima [also called Zhima] and Lafala in particular to be “more fully realized” than those in his first two novels. Above all, he sought to capture the emotional depth of their conflict. “As the book is a more serious attempt than the others and will set the tone for future work,” he informed Bradley, “I should like to make it as perfect as I can.”14
The more he considered its imperfections, however, the less enthusiastic he became about publishing it. By September, 1930, he had decided to set the book aside. He urged that Saxton accept instead his collection of short stories. As he explained to Max Eastman, “The Jungle and the Bottoms” remained too much after the mode of Home to Harlem and Banjo. He had grown tired of such “pica resque” tales. Because his contract called for a collection of short stories, he insisted upon their publication next, rather than a novel that he, Bradley, and Saxton thought not satisfactory. Despite his brave defenses of Home to Harlem and Banjo, his critics had obviously made some impression upon McKay. To Eastman, he confessed his eagerness to have his short stories published because “they will show that I am a writer of many moods and open the way for any book or any theme I may choose to write instead of my being taken solely as a writer of picaresque stories.“15
Bradley and Saxton had no choice but to go along with McKay, though both warned that collected stories, even in the most prosperous of times, seldom brought their author any profit. Bradley in particular believed that McKay was making a grave mistake in substituting the stories in place of “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” which, as he saw it, needed relatively few alterations to make it acceptable for publication. McKay remained adamant and soon tired of the discussion. Without announcing his destination, he abruptly left Paris in September, 1930, for Morocco. As he explained to Eastman, “I feel sure that the short stories will more than cover what they have already advanced, because they are good stories and I already have enough of a name that will help them sell. . . . I had about written myself dry on the picaresque stuff. . . . The six Harlem stories go much deeper into the life of the Harlem Negroes than Home to Harlem ever did.”16
From Paris, McKay journeyed by way of Marseilles and Oran to Fez, where a Moroccan friend whom he had met during his last trip had promised him a native house where he could live and work. After his arrival, however, the French colonial police informed him that the president of the French Republic would soon be visiting Fez and he would have to leave the city. “They said,” McKay informed Bradley, “they had information from the British authorities that I was a propagandist.” McKay speculated that perhaps his criticism of French civilization in Banjo also “had something to do with it!” He protested that he was no propagandist and “was only interested in the simple native life. Maybe,” he concluded, “that is just what they are against.” The police were polite but firm. McKay got no help from the British consul and in the end he departed Fez, “accompanied by a policeman,” for the international city of Tangier. This experience, together with his previous experiences in Morocco in 1928, caused McKay, as he expressed it, “to see the French cock-eyed through a police veil.” The French police in Morocco, however, were at least courteous, even as they ordered him to leave their colony.17
McKay had no illusions, of course, about the French as colonizers. It was evident in Morocco that they treated their colonial subjects badly. His own deepest resentments, however, remained directed toward the British, who he believed were behind all his French Moroccan troubles. The British had barred him from entering Gibraltar in 1929, and the French police now admitted that their information on his past radical activities had come from British sources. Nothing McKay said or did in protest seemed to alter his status in the eyes of the British intelligence system. His protests to British consular agents in Morocco, his letters to their superiors in the British government, and his personal appeal to George Lansbury to use his influence as a member of Parliament to stop the harassment he experienced both in French Morocco and Tangier—all had no effect. “Technically,” McKay reported to Bradley, “I can travel because my passport is good, but I should like to have the police bar lifted because it is embarrassing.” Throughout his residence in Tangier, McKay’s movements and activities continued to be monitored.18
After seven years of wandering in Europe, McKay decided he must settle in Morocco. Since he could not stay in Fez, Tangier might, after all, be a better place to live and work. Although jointly administered since World War I by several European nations (principally France, Great Britain, and Spain), it remained geographically and historically a part of Morocco, and directly across the Strait of Gibraltar lay Spain, which McKay also loved. Together with its colonized majority of Arabs and Berbers, Tangier had a substantial European community. Spanish, French, Italian, and British subjects—all jealously protected by their respective governments—made Tangier a center of international intrigue in North Africa. They also gave it a cosmopolitan flavor appropriate to an international city.19
McKay, however, chose to live as close as possible to the indigenous North Africans. He had recently turned forty and had begun to feel the need to sink roots in an environment and among people with whom he felt at ease. Although he had no compelling desire to return to Jamaica itself, he recognized among the people of Morocco a basic community existence, rooted in folk tradition, similar in some respects to the kind of environment he had known as a boy. “I need to settle down,” he informed Max Eastman, “and no place has satisfied me since I left home as much as Morocco. There are many things in the life of the natives, their customs and supersititions, reminiscent of Jamaica.” At the same time, he wrote Bradley that his next “’best seller’ will be the Jamaican book—dealing with the religious customs and social life of the peasants. I am ripe for it as I am also feeling very religious now among the Moslems. . . . After my experience here the ‘Jungle’ seems rather thin and cheap. I am right in coming back here to feel that.”20
In “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” McKay had strained for a transition from the essentially rootless existence of vagabondage depicted in his first two novels toward a more substantial depiction of psychological realism. But as it turned out, both of his leading characters in that novel had remained mired in “the Ditch” he had so vividly described in Banjo. In Tangier, McKay succeeded at last in escaping his own sense of roodessness. He successfully completed the transition he sought from purely picaresque fiction to a more psychologically satisfying depiction of black life rooted in the community of his youth.
He planned to include a few Jamaican tales in his volume of short stories, and shortly after settling in Tangier he began work on “The Agricultural Show.” In it he recreated the “naive fresh manner” in which the mountain community of his childhood planned and organized their first agricultural show. The story was almost purely autobiographical, a quiet, evocative re-creation of the wonder and joy he had felt as a child following his older brother as he conceived and orchestrated one of his many community projects. For the critic and scholar Robert Bone, “The Agricultural Show” was “a pure specimen of [Harlem) Renaissance pastoral,” illustrating perfectly one of the many uses that the black writers of the 1920s made of the strengths and virtues of their rapidly vanishing black rural heritage. Bone was right in thinking that for McKay “The Agricultural Show” was “a poetic vision, an expression of an inner need. McKay’s Jamaican pastoral,” he concluded, “with its images of racial harmony and social peace, is an objective correlative of the inner harmony that he so desperately seeks. Split and shredded by his contact with the Western world, he returns in his imagination to Jamaica in order to reconstitute his soul.”21
In Home to Harlem and Banjo, Jake and Lincoln Agrippa Daily wandered far from the rural families and communities that nurtured them. Both novels reflected the fragmented world of the single, black male rural migrant in the cosmopolitan cities of the West. In both novels, the characters exist without the support of families and with only the most tenuous community ties. Both novels accurately reflected McKay’s own spiritual vagabondage since leaving Jamaica. In Morocco, he experienced among the Moors the kind of deep-seated, traditional community self-sufficiency that he had known as a child in the hills of Jamaica. The experience enabled him to deal, finally, with the problems of family, community, and group values that he had not been able to explore fully in his first novels.22
From this perspective, the depression McKay experienced in Paris in 1929, his abandonment of “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” and his flight from Paris in 1930 were understandable and necessary; both personal and artistic necessity impelled him to return to Morocco. The bohemian freedoms of Paris were no longer relevant to his needs. He sought instead a more traditional setting, one governed by ancient, preindustrial patterns and routines that would allow him to remember again the significance of his own black Jamaican heritage.23
After living awhile in Tangier proper, McKay rented a small cottage in January, 1931, “in an Arab village” just outside the city but still well within the Tangier international zone. His house had three rooms and a terrace from which he could view the ocean. After spending most of January fixing the place and settling into it, he began work in earnest on his volume of short stories. By spring the collection was virtually complete. It consisted of six Harlem stories he had begun in the mid-1920s, four more recent stories of Jamaican country life, and two concluding stories, one set in a Mediterranean port similar to Marseilles and the other in an Arab city resembling Tangier.24
Before he had finished the collection, however, McKay had a visitor, one whose presence for a while seemed to promise an end to the solitary existence he had led for so long. In Paris in 1929 he had become acquainted with Anita Thompson, a pretty, young Harlem socialite who had left the United States to enjoy the social freedom of life among the expatriates of Paris. In Paris, she had become involved with a young Dutch painter, Kristians Tonny, whom Gertrude Stein admired and encouraged. After arriving in Tangier, McKay received several letters from Anita. She complained she had grown tired of Paris and of Tonny, and wished to visit McKay in Tangier. She wanted to escape Paris to write an account of her adventures in America and Europe, and she believed that McKay could help her find a publisher. McKay was flattered by the idea, and he encouraged her to come. For about two or three weeks after her arrival, everything seemed idyllic. Anita liked Tangier, and McKay enjoyed introducing her to his friends. Everyone liked her: she was bright, witty, and beautiful—a delightful companion whose presence brightened McKay’s life.25 But trouble soon developed.
Anita sought more than a companion. According to McKay, she wanted a husband. He flatly rejected the idea. He already had a wife. One, he had learned, was more than enough. McKay’s refusal even to entertain the idea of marriage led inevitably to quarrels. Anita should have married Tonny, he said; perhaps she would, she said, for Tonny was on his way to Tangier. Fine, he said. And their brief affair ended, with Anita moving with Tonny to another section of Tangier. McKay greeted this development with mingled pain and relief. He was contemptuous of Tonny, whom he scarcely knew. Anita told his Moroccan friends that McKay hated all whites. They cautiously inquired if it were true. To escape the gossip and settle his nerves, McKay “gave up the little house and went for a few months up in the mountain fastness of Xauen in Spanish Morocco.”26 In Xauen, McKay settled down and finished Gingertown, his volume of short stories.
Everywhere he went in Morocco, McKay quickly made friends and observed with sympathetic eyes the life around him. He loved the rich musical traditions of the country and spent many hours in cafes drinking exotically flavored tea, socializing, and listening to the native music. On the whole, he led a quiet, contemplative life. He tried to live moderately, for despite every precaution, his health remained precarious. He still suffered from all the old, frightening ailments that had plagued him intermittently since his return from the Soviet Union almost a decade before. Life sometimes seemed a succession of headaches, chest pains, nerve disorders of the upper extremities, and odd colds and other annoyances. Through it all, he tried to hew a moderate course that would allow him to continue writing. To W. A. Bradley, McKay wrote, “My illness is something terribly real. And for seven years past I have been living radically different from my old way of existence, almost solitary, so that I could conserve myself for a little creative work. My appearance may deceive, but one doesn’t go shouting one is ill to all one’s acquaintances all the time.”27
Sometime in the early fall of 1931, McKay returned from Xauen to Tangier. He had sent Gingertown to his publisher, and he had already planned his novel of Jamaican hill country life through to the end. Before settling down to its completion, however, he once again had to find a suitable place to live. For the moment, he had sufficient money to invest in a comfortable house. Besides advances from Harper for Gingertown and his next book, he also received a few thousand francs for the French translations of Home to Harlem and Banjo, as well as occasional royalty checks. His income was not large but, for the moment at least, he had enough money to raise himself above the hand-to-mouth existence that he had known before the publication of Home to Harlem in 1928.
In keeping with his desire to live among the Moors, McKay again found a place in the countryside, well outside the European quarters of Tangier. Near the mouth of the Suani River, where it flowed into the Atlantic close to the boundary with Spanish Morocco, McKay found a cottage on over an acre of land, at least half suitable for gardening. Although the house was more than three miles from town and dilapidated, McKay jumped at the chance. The owner agreed that if McKay made it habitable, he could have it for two years for only 600 francs.
Claude set to work, and by December, 1931, he had transformed a leaky “old barn without doors” into a comfortable, if unpretentious, home. On December 1, he wrote Max Eastman
I started repairing it after my return from Xauen and now it is very habitable, but I spent the best part of my assets making it so. However, I have faith in the place and myself. One half of the land is good truck garden soil and I have planted two sacks of potatoes and a little peas and carrots and turnips, so if the international crisis should get worse and the elements are not unfavorable to the garden I might in time be able to feed off my own place. As soon as I can manage I shall get a milking goat. The house is right on a river which divides it from the sea and at high tide when the sea rides up the river the water washes the foundations. It is deep enough for good bathing especially when the sea is high, with a little stretch of sandy beach, and next summer I want to build a runway right into the water. The house is just about the size of yours at Antibes and planned almost the same way. It commands a most lovely view of the sea, the town of Tangier, and Spain on one side and on the other the mountains of the Spanish zone.*
At the time it seemed an ideal investment. After years of vagabondage, he had finally put down roots in a beautiful land that promised refuge from the gathering clouds of international depression.28
McKay had worked hard since 1923 to establish himself as a creative writer, and he sensed that his next book would be his best. He had reason to feel confident. But unfortunately, while he had grown and matured as a novelist, the world that had supported his first efforts had collapsed. As incomes declined in the United States, readers bought fewer books and publishers reduced their lists. In addition, readers’ interests shifted, which meant for McKay more lost readership and a precipitous decline in income. The Negro as the exotic primitive, happy in his poverty, had lost his appeal as white readers suddenly found themselves facing an economic abyss that threatened to plunge them into an acquaintance with poverty much harsher than any they had ever imagined.29
Despite his genuine understanding of world politics and economics, McKay never quite comprehended the impact of the Great Depression on his personal career. He tended to blame himself for the failure of his works to sell. In the fall of 1931, certainly, he simply could not foresee that his hard-won competence would not bring its own rewards in the decade ahead. While waiting for the publication of Gingertown, McKay ensconced himself in his new place and worked hard on his next novel, Banana Bottom. If Gingertown failed, as Saxton and Bradley feared it would, McKay wanted to be ready with a novel that could not fail to make money.30
In the early spring of 1932, Gingertown finally appeared and the reviews in both the black and white press were generally favorable. But as Bradley and Saxton had predicted, it had poor sales and made no money for either Harper or McKay. It could hardly have been published at a worse time. Depression had long since settled upon America; McKay very likely could not have made any money even if Gin gertown had been an outstanding novel.31
Although reviewers still expressed enthusiasm for his work, a few ventured some serious reservations that boded ill for his future as a novelist. Rudolph Fisher spoke perhaps for the younger generation of black writers in New York when he suggested in his Herald Tribune review that McKay seemed out of touch with Harlem as a locale and that “strange West-Indianisms” sometimes issued “from the mouths of American blacks” in the six Harlem stories that formed the first half of the book. Fisher maintained that these stories dealt with real problems, but they were only coincidentally set in Harlem. Although Fisher acknowledged that the stories in Gingertown possessed the same “robust vigor characteristic of all Mr. McKay’s work,” he strongly implied that their author had long ago lost touch with the distinctive characteristics of Harlem and the many changes that had occurred there since 1922.32
An anonymous reviewer for the New York Times had more praise for McKay, but he also intimated that the reading public had grown weary of tales of Harlem life. He condescendingly declared that McKay was “more of a genuine artist than most of the New Negro novelists. . . . Perhaps, however, no one can entirely escape the curse which over-dramatizing has laid upon Harlem as a subject for a serious writer. . . . Stories of the Black Belt always sound a trifle artificial.” The best stories in Gingertown, the reviewer stated, were McKay’s Jamaican stories. “[They] have an authenticity and a quality of acrid poignancy which are not matched in the Harlem stories. . . . In choosing less hackneyed subject matter Mr. McKay seems to cast off restraints. Even his prose, always good, is richer and more supple in the last half of the book.”33 McKay may have found encouragement in such praise, but the overall tone of the review indicated that black artists, particularly those who chose Harlem as their setting, were liable to get short shrift in the New York Times.
After the publication of Gingertown, McKay used his last assets to complete Banana Bottom. After only four years of relative prosperity, he again faced poverty. His future seemed to depend on the success of Banana Bottom, and he poured into its composition all his energy and creative resources. In June, 1932, he sent it to Harper. Saxton and everyone who saw it there liked the story.34 To maintain hope for the future, McKay had to believe that Banana Bottom would sell much better than Gingertown. Still, it would not appear until the early spring of 1933; in the meantime, McKay had to exist in a limbo of nervous anticipation. He had never been patient with economic uncertainty, and he soon bombarded his friends with piteous wails. Fortunately for him, however, during the summer and fall of 1932, he entertained a succession of visitors whose encouragement and friendship helped him keep his anxieties under control. Pierre Vogein and his wife, Fanny Rappaport, now a physician, visited him from Paris. Vogein would continue to write Claude until the German occupation of France disrupted their correspondence. McKay also entertained another French visitor, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who eventually gained international fame as a photographer. Claude had been photographed in Paris in 1924 by the young American photographer Berenice Abbott, and he may well have met Cartier-Bresson there about the same time.35
McKay also welcomed into his home in 1932 several Americans. Some were visitors to Tangier, others lived there. The young American poet Charles Henri Ford for a while lived near McKay and became a frequent visitor. McKay later recalled that Ford caused a stir among his native friends. Some of the younger ones “said he looked wonderfully like the cinema portraits of Marlene Dietrich.” One of the attractions of Tangier for McKay must have been its tolerance of homosexuals, though as usual he remained circumspect. Ford remembered that parties in McKay’s home included native musicians, good food, and hashish. McKay, he recalled, always appeared reserved at such gatherings, older and plumper, more of an observer than a participant in the festivities.36
The writer, composer, and editor Paul Bowles, who eventually settled permanently in Tangier, knew Kristians Tonny and Anita Thompson. When he arrived in Tangier, in 1932, Bowles found the lovers’ triangle far from settled. Anita, it seemed, would visit McKay for days at a time whenever she and Tonny quarreled. After existing alone for a while, Tonny “would swallow his pride and walk out to the house by the river to fetch her.” One day Bowles and a friend, the American literary agent John Trounstine, accompanied a group to visit McKay. “We all went out to see McKay; he was plump and jolly, with a red fez on his head, and he was living exactly like a Moroccan. At one point with a clap of his hands he summoned his Moroccan dancing girl, not yet twelve, and bade her perform for us. Trounstine was displeased by the entire scene. He was not liking Morocco very much, in any case.” The scene was perhaps less sinister than Trounstine imagined. In A Long Way from Home, McKay explained that when he moved into his new home he had “found a little brown native girl to take care of the house. She brought her mother along, so that she could look her own people in the face without flinching. There was also a boy on a bicycle to run errands ... we all cultivated the garden and lived comfortably on twenty-five dollars each month.”37
Whatever Trounstine’s first impressions of McKay, sometime within the year he agreed to become his literary representative in New York. Ever since his disagreement with Bradley over “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” McKay had been anxious to find a new agent. Bradley had represented him well, but McKay had begun to believe that as his agency had grown and prospered Bradley no longer had time for the intimate attention of earlier days. From long habit, McKay expected the kind of patron-client relationship he had known with Walter Jekyll, Frank Harris, and Max Eastman. To Eastman, always his confidant, McKay explained that “the thing is to find such a person as I chanced to find Bradley! . . . Bradley was excellent in his ‘young’ days, but since we knew him he has become quite a business man with a large office and well-staffed and he travels all the time [and] gives less time to individual matters.”38 Agents such as Bradley, McKay eventually discovered, were rare. Although he did not know it at the time, he would never again find his equivalent.
While McKay and Trounstine were establishing a temporary business relationship, Claude’s acquaintance with Bowles took a different turn. Shortly after he met Bowles, McKay’s house was burglarized and his passport stolen. McKay suspected that French or British agents were responsible. He guessed, correctly, that he had again become the object of official harassment. For reasons never entirely clear, he decided that Paul Bowles was responsible for the disappearance of his passport; McKay confronted Bowles. According to Bowles, “One evening he came around to the bedbug-infested Hotel Viena, where I lived, and demanded to see me. Because he was black and wore a fez on his head, and also because he was obviously in a state of great excitement, the Spanish proprietor refused to allow him past the desk in the courtyard. I came out onto the balcony and stood there while he shouted up imprecations and threats in his West Indian English, brandishing his cane at me, at the hotel employees and at the dueno, who forced him out into the street.” Although he may have been mistaken in his conviction that Bowles was responsible for the theft of his passport, McKay had in fact divined the main outlines of the conspiracy against him. According to Bowles, an “opium eater” named Abdeslam ben Hadj Larbi, with whom he had become friendly, had shown an unusual interest in McKay. Larbi and another man, it turned out, had stolen McKay’s passport and denounced him to the police as a Communist. At some point, Bowles’s name had probably entered in their testimony. McKay guessed that, whether deliberately or inadvertently, Bowles had been the instigator of the affair. Bowles did remember in his autobiography that McKay had shown him a letter from Max Eastman announcing his intention to visit Tangier later in the year after first visiting Leon Trotsky on the Turkish island of Prinkipo. Perhaps Bowles had told Larbi of this letter, not realizing the latter’s duplicity. After the burglary, McKay probably decided that he had erred in showing Bowles his Eastman correspondence. As it turned out, McKay eventually received a new passport but not before the chief English consul in Tangier had removed from it his right to travel in the territories of the British Empire.39
That McKay showed Eastman’s letter to Bowles indicated the value he still placed upon his relationship with his old editor and radical colleague. Despite McKay’s readiness to pinpoint weaknesses in Eastman’s various positions on literature, science, and politics, he remained in McKay’s eyes vastly superior to the other literary radicals he had known during his days with the Liberator. And through the summer of 1932, he looked forward to Eastman’s visit with an almost childlike eagerness.40
In part, McKay remained loyal to Eastman simply because he admired Eastman’s magnificent presence and aristocratic bearing. For McKay, Max epitomized the best of old Yankee culture. Also, Eastman continued to share with McKay fundamental intellectual assumptions about literature, politics, and life. Both had an unappeased craving for new experiences, both opposed most modernist trends in literature, and both remained (for the moment, at least) committed to the eventual triumph of socialism in Western society, despite their increasing inability to embrace the emerging Communist orthodoxy. The irony of the relationship was that McKay continued to defer to Eastman as his intellectual superior, even though his criticisms of Eastman’s various positions on the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky, and the question of literature versus science repeatedly revealed that McKay possessed a more subtle, flexible, and penetrating intellectual grasp of men and events. While Eastman often lacked McKay’s subtlety, he dared (however awkwardly at times) to develop broad general positions that McKay fundamentally accepted, despite specific reservations. Whatever their intellectual differences, McKay still looked to Eastman for practical guidance and editorial assistance. He recognized that Eastman was something he was not, a technically proficient philosopher who thought in systematic conceptual patterns. No matter how superior McKay’s occasional insights, he continued to look to Eastman as an intellectual father figure. To the end of his life, McKay continued to defer to Eastman’s judgment in literary matters, though not always in political affairs.41
After a lengthy trip from Prinkipo through the Middle East and southern Europe, the Eastmans finally arrived in Tangier in the early fall of 1932. McKay proudly showed them his new home, and they spent many hours over the next week talking about all that had happened since they had last been together in 1927 on the French Riviera. McKay introduced the Eastmans to his Moroccan friends, showed them around Tangier, and accompanied them on short excursions to Tetouan and Ceuta. All too soon, however, Max and Eliena departed for home, and McKay suddenly found himself alone with his anxieties about the future.
Shortly after they left, he became ill and had to spend several days in bed. The Eastmans had brought over from Spain an old Ford convertible. McKay and Eliena had gone to Tetouan in it and had driven back with the windshield down. The doctor who treated McKay in Tangier speculated that he had become too “chilled . . . riding so much without a windshield.” By now, of course, neither McKay nor his doctor could easily differentiate between some ordinary ailment and the aftereffects of his treatments for venereal disease. As McKay wrote Eastman, “The original sin they say (and scientifically too) is responsible for all sorts of complications.” After McKay recovered from this latest illness, his doctor decided, probably as a precaution, to inject him with “a series of new kind of bismuth” used in the treatment of syphilis. Unless McKay had contracted the disease anew, such treatment could not have done him any good. In fact, it may have only added to his aches because, as he wrote Eastman, “one disquieting symptom was a severe spinal pain right over the small across the hip bones, which began with the first series and remains with me still. Otherwise I am not so bad.” Fortunately, he could not afford to begin the second series of shots. He had likely already absorbed enough mercury, arsenic, and bismuth to have killed the average mortal.42
By the spring of 1933, McKay’s prospects looked dim. Saxton and Trounstine wrote from New York that conditions in publishing remained bleak. McKay nevertheless continued to hope “all the same to make something [with the publication of Banana Bottom]—enough to give me a holiday of which I am badly in need.” He decided to “write some Moorish pot-boilers for Trounstine ... to make ends meet,” and he also began a new novel about the black expatriate caravan abroad. But his funds were rapidly dwindling. By spring he had even pawned his typewriter. Without it, he felt deprived of a primary tool of his trade. He nonetheless continued to write. He had not yet reached rock bottom, but he did not have far to fall, should Banana Bottom fail.43
In April, his spirits lifted when Eastman sent his new three-volume translation of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. McKay thanked him profusely and wrote, “It is hot now. My flowers are gorgeous and I have already started bathing.” It was the last cheerful message he would send Eastman from Tangier.Banana Bottom had been published in March, 1933, and early in May a letter from Trounstine confirmed McKay’s worst fears. Sales were dismal. Like Gingertown before it, Banana Bottom would make no money. McKay had been forewarned, but he still found it hard to accept. “The news from Trounstine,” he confessed to Eastman, “was like a knock-out blow, but I haven’t taken the count.” Although he realized that Banana Bottom had been “published at the very worst time possible,” he blamed himself for failing to deliver what his public wanted. “There must be something lacking,” he complained to Eastman. “Evidently my readers prefer my realism of rough slum life than of rural life. If so I can supply the need.”44
Since January he had been rewriting “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” now retitled “Savage Loving.” He was hoping that Trounstine could place it with another publisher. Harper no longer wanted it and declined to sign McKay to another contract. They had already advanced him a thousand dollars on two financial failures and refused to commit themselves to what they perceived would be further losses. McKay’s hopes now rested on Trounstine’s resourcefulness in New York. At Claude’s behest, Eastman offered Trounstine whatever assistance he could provide. McKay refused to believe all was lost. “I still have assets,” he insisted. But his assets, he realized, were slim: an unpublished novel that everyone agreed had problems, plus a germ of another story about black Americans abroad. For the moment, providentially, he had a little money. The French publisher Reider had just sent him a check for a thousand francs for the rights to the French edition of Banana Bottom. Like everyone else who read it, their editors thought it a fine novel.45
American reviewers agreed unanimously that Banana Bottom was McKay’s best. It told the story of a young black woman’s successful efforts to reintegrate into the peasant culture of her youth. At the age of twelve she had been taken, with her parents’ consent, by a Protestant missionary couple, the Reverend Craig and his wife, and sent to England for a formal education. In her twelfth year, the young heroine, Bita Plant, had been raped by a mentally unstable local musician; the missionary couple sought to prove that, with a proper education and upbringing, her life could be redeemed for the kind of Christian service they were trying to impose upon the semipagan Jamaican hill country peasants.
The novel begins with Bita’s return to Jamaica as an accomplished pianist and highly literate, well-mannered young lady. However, she gradually realizes that she cannot fit herself into the narrow, self-righteous mold of the Craigs. With the help of a sympathetic Englishman, Squire Gensir (the fictional equivalent of Walter Jekyll), she discovers her natural inclination is to embrace again the black folkways of her peasant childhood and to bring into their settled, steady rhythms her own heightened awareness and sensibilities. Instead of marriage to a proper black clergyman, educated to disdain the folk life of the peasants, she chooses to marry her father’s drayman, Jubban, whose strength and reliability are emphasized by his total commitment to traditional farming. Around this plot, McKay created a lovely pastoral image of the Jamaican mountain culture he had known as a child at the turn of the century. It was a society complete within itself and fundamentally alien to the harshly moralistic world of Christian Europe that had, in its modern commercial manifestation, so constricted the lives of his characters in Banjo and Home to Harlem. With the creation of Banana Bottom, McKay’s picaresque search for psychic unity and stability, begun with Home to Harlem, came full circle to rest again in the lost paradise of his pastoral childhood.46
As Robert Bone has pointed out, it was not a unity that could be sustained in the real world. Even as McKay wrote Banana Bottom, the crisis of European and American capitalism was pressing in upon him and upon the island whose memory he revered. In 1933, his brother U’Theo wrote from Jamaica:
At present we are going through a very severe depression the equal of which has not been experienced as far as the memory of living man recalls. Very heavy winds hit us in November followed by a drought that was [as] prolonged as it [was] intense. My earnings as a fruit agent has dropped about 90% and the immediate future shows little or no better prospects. . . . World conditions are not only appalling but very puzzling. It is rather a strange phenomenon that prices should fall so dramatically now, that there should be so much unemployment in spite of the terrible destruction caused by the Great War. And yet the world seems to be more given to sport than ever and life is not held as sacred as heretofore.47
Even as McKay wrote Banana Bottom, all his old ambivalences about Jamaica and the West Indies, in fact, remained with him. In one letter to Eastman he remarked that “those few islands belonging to European nations in the New World are certainly a bastard forsaken lot.”48 The financial failure of Banana Bottom placed McKay in an untenable position. Until his novels began to sell again, he needed to write something that would bring him ready cash. Journalistic essays seemed one obvious possibility. Since 1924, however, he had written only three. One was his discussion of Home to Harlem in McClure’s.49 The other two were written in 1932. One of these, for an anthology edited by Nancy Cunard, the shipping heiress, never appeared in print.
Throughout 1932, he had corresponded extensively with Cunard, whose introduction to black culture via jazz in Venice had resulted in her celebrated affair with an American black musician in defiance of her mother’s outraged protests. In the course of her adventure across the color line, Cunard had published a pamphlet defending her actions entitled Black Man and White Ladyship. McKay later main tained that in it young Miss Cunard had simply seized upon “a Negro stick to beat the Cunard mother.”50 At any rate, during this love affair, Nancy Cunard conceived the idea of compiling a comprehensive anthology of essays describing all aspects of black culture.
She asked McKay if he would contribute. He agreed to submit an article, and when she wrote him of an impending trip to Jamaica, he also put her in touch with his brother U’Theo. She subsequently visited U’Theo in Frankfield and wrote McKay glowing reports of his hospitality. When Claude finally submitted his promised essay, along with a request for payment, the happy exchange came to an abrupt end. Cunard informed him that because of her commitment to black culture, her mother had stopped her generous allowance, and she could not afford to pay any of her contributors.51
McKay was not sympathetic. He replied that he would not write for free and demanded that his article be returned. He also advised U’Theo not to write anything for Miss Cunard. Claude’s correspondence with her ended in acrimony. He wrote, “I have never had the itching vanity to appear in print just because it is a lovely thing, and I have refused many little magazines and Negro newspapers, feeling that my creative work should not be exploited shamelessly as my common labor has been because of the necessity of daily living.” When Miss Cunard’s giant tome finally appeared in 1934, it contained a photograph of U’Theo but nothing by Claude. His difficult personality, Miss Cunard hinted, had made cooperation impossible.52
McKay had written one significant article, “A Negro Writer to His Critics,” for the Herald Tribune Books section in the spring of 1932. It said that the black artist could not be limited by the same constraints as black journalists and racial leaders, who tended to judge all black writing by its probable effect upon the advancement of the black race in the United States. Although such leaders performed absolutely essential functions, McKay believed they should not be the sole arbiters of black art. Their standards of what constituted black art tended to be conservative and censorious of all subject matter they judged might reveal Negroes in a less than favorable light. In his own career, McKay pointed out, his protest poetry had been condemned by a leading black critic as too angry and violent; his novels had been denounced as simply scandalous pandering to depraved white tastes. “Because Aframerican group life is possible only on a neutral and negative level,” McKay observed, “our critics are apparently under the delusion that an Aframerican literature and art may be created out of evasion and insincerity.”53
McKay stated that black artists could avoid neither the bitterness at the heart of black existence in America nor “the animal joy and sin and sorrow and dirt” that existed in the Black Belts of American cities, just “as they did in ghettos, slums, tenderloins and such like places all over the world.” White and black critics should realize, McKay maintained, that “the spirituals and blues were not created out of sweet deceit”:
There is as much sublimated bitterness in them as there is humility, pathos and bewilderment. And if the Negro is a little bitter, the white man should be the last person in the world to accuse him of bitterness. For the feeling of bitterness is a natural part of the black man’s birthright as the feeling of superiority is of the white man’s. It matters not so much that one has had an experience of bitterness, but rather how one has developed out of it. To ask the Negro to render up his bitterness is asking him to part with his soul. For out of his bitterness he has bloomed and created his spirituals and conserved his racial attributes—his humor and ripe laughter and particular rhythm of Me.54
“A Negro Writer to His Critics” was a significant statement of the black writer’s position between the two world wars. But it did nothing to help the sales of Gingertown or Banana Bottom. White America was not listening, and not enough black Americans could afford either McKay’s books or the Sunday Herald Tribune.
After the failure of Banana Bottom, McKay wanted to write more articles, but his confidence had been shaken. He complained to Max Eastman that “I just can’t get the knack of journalese. Unless,” he added significantly, “I had somebody to guide my hand.” This statement clearly signaled that McKay was once again retreating to a familiar position: salvation from stress through a renewal of a client-patron relationship. Fortunately for him, Eastman was in a position to help. For the past several years, his lecture fees had enabled him to make a comfortable living, and he responded positively to McKay’s appeals throughout the summer and fall of 1933.55
By the spring of 1933, Claude had been forced to dismiss his young servant girl and her mother. During one two-week period before the arrival of the thousand francs from Reider, he had lived on spiced tea and the potatoes he had grown in his garden. Life in the country had suddenly become very hard and lonely. He yearned for the liveliness of town. “However,” he wrote Eastman, “when I am finished working I take long walks over the hills. And I have been swimming in the river since last month. . . . I don’t think about my health at all—better not to in my state and so I am physically fit so to speak.”56
Despite such small advantages, he felt increasingly that “I am jammed and damned here and can’t budge.” Among other things, he could no longer afford to maintain his subscriptions to the Nation and other American periodicals. This only increased his sense of isolation. In May, 1933, Eastman finally sent him a bundle of magazines. “I fell on them at once,” McKay exclaimed. “It was like being among a roomful of New York intellectuals, and I didn’t feel so terribly lonely anymore.” If his situation in Tangier did not materially improve, McKay knew he must eventually leave, but “where to,” he complained to Eastman, “with British agents after me. It’s not persecution mania. I’m not that type as you know, but I knew they were following me—probably my house was broken into and my original passport taken by them. . . . Those dogs never come out in the open you know, but set others on to you.”57
To contain his anxieties, McKay worked hard to complete the rewrite of “The Jungle and the Bottoms.” At the end of May he sent it off to Trounstine via an American black woman, a tourist who had visited him as she passed through Tangier. To complete it, he explained to Eastman, “I worked in a fury like a nigger . . . with my head expanding and a fire in it as if it were going to blaze up—but I kept on[,] afraid and yet determined to finish.” McKay admitted that the story was still “awful rough stuff but genuine.” Maybe Trounstine could get a few dollars for it. In the meantime, he hoped Max was “trying to do something” for him. Among other things, McKay was applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship even though as a British subject and nonresident of the United States he doubted his eligibility. He was “groggy with work and anxiety,” he reported to Eastman. He had never expected Banana Bottom to sell like Home to Harlem, “but I never guessed it would be a total failure—after two years steady working.” The woman who had taken his latest version of “The Jungle and the Bottoms” had suggested that McKay deserved a grant because he was among the very few blacks steadily engaged in creative writing. McKay agreed. “If I could only get something to hold on to, some place to anchor,” he exclaimed to Eastman. He wanted to start on a new series of stories and write some poetry, but he needed “some good news first.”58
Good news never arrived. Trounstine could not place “Savage Loving.” (This new title of “The Jungle and the Bottoms” was eventually changed to “Romance in Marseilles.”) Neither could he find a magazine that would accept an article McKay sent him on the influence of the western Sudan on Moroccan history. To make matters worse, Trounstine, according to McKay, lacked Bradley’s promptness and efficiency as a correspondent. Claude soon lost all confidence in Trounstine and began referring to him in his letters to Max as “a very neurotic and fussy sissy Jew,” completely the opposite of “Bradley, [the] shrewd level-headed Yankee.” He thanked Ehena for her praise of Banana Bottom but lamented that “I can’t work up any enthusiasm for a book that cannot bring me in [enough] to buy a loaf of bread and soap to wash my black skin after one year’s hard labor.” Trounstine lacked the patience to deal with McKay and apparently returned barb for barb without any encouraging news. He “writes me the most pathetically discouraging letters,” McKay noted, “that if I didn’t still retain a little faith I’d jump in the river.”59
To fight despair, McKay set to work on a new novel about black tourists and expatriates abroad that he had long been planning to write. He hoped to include in it all his experiences with the black Americans and West Indians he had encountered in France during the prosperous 1920s. He worried, however, that anything he might write would be misconstrued by the black bourgeoisie as insults. “They are all so touchy. And if I go back ‘home’ 111 have to live among them.” He only wanted, he wrote Eastman, “to assemble the facts and get down to the truth. But that is just what these people can’t stand. I don’t mean to libel them for I like them as a group, but all they like is pretty painting.”*
He nevertheless set to work and soon sent a few pages to Eastman for his criticism. After his rebellion against Bradley’s tutelage, he once again voluntarily and with relief placed himself under Eastman’s guidance. In the real solitude of his private life, McKay desperately needed someone he could depend upon to guide him through personal crises. It was the dependence of a child upon a father (or, in McKay’s case, an older brother), but he remained blind to the essential immaturity of this aspect of his character. In fact, he naively believed that the solution to his problems would be to find a reliable partner who could manage the vexing details of his everyday life. To Eastman, he wrote, “I wish I [were] neurotic and didn’t know what was wrong with me. But the trouble is I do know. I ought to be closely attached to somebody, woman or even man, instead of being off at loose ends living lone-wolfishly. But I never can feel a sentimental attachment for the persons that attract me intellectually. And the types that stir up passion in me are no good for intimate attachment. . . . I can’t get my mind and emotions in harmony together and concentrated on someone. That’s my whole tragedy. I need somebody to look after me. But generally I appear so strong to people as if I don’t need looking after.”60
Besides Eastman, McKay also resumed his correspondence with James Weldon Johnson, who discussed with Eastman Claude’s latest dilemma. Both agreed McKay would be better off back in the United States. Johnson suggested that Eastman solicit contributions from “literary friends” for Claude’s return fare. “I feel deeply,” Johnson wrote, “that we should not allow Claude’s genius to be smothered by any conditions that we might be able to remove.”61
McKay dreaded the possibility of returning permanently to the United States. He could no longer live there as an unknown laborer, “like in the old days before the Liberator.” Among black Americans, he had become a famous author. As such, “I’ll have to find myself among the ‘Niggerati’ as I hear they call themselves in Harlem. And I think it would be more losing than finding,” he told Eastman. He would consider, however, a temporary return “at the right moment . . . when the new book is coming out.”62
As the summer of 1933 advanced, however, it became obvious that McKay could not continue to function as a writer in Tangier. No one wanted to publish “Savage Loving,” and Eastman had yet to see his uncompleted novel about black expatriation. McKay simply had no immediate prospects or money. For subsistence, he had to depend increasingly on a thin driblet of dollars from Eastman (and perhaps a few other friends). Under such conditions, he could not complete his novel. A move back to Spain or France would not improve his condition. The only alternative appeared to be a speedy return to the United States, where he had some possibilities for employment as a writer, teacher, or lecturer.63
Still, McKay lingered in Tangier, hoping to hear that Trounstine had found a publisher for “Savage Loving.” “The terrible uncertaintyhe explained to Eastman, “weighs me down and retards the writing of the [new] story.” He would send the first chapter for Eastman’s criticism. “I need something,” he wrote, “a little lifting of the spirit to harden and encourage me to bring my writing up to standard and in tune to the mood of five years ago.” Five years was not such a long time, but across the chasm of the Great Depression it was a great distance. His immediate task was to survive the chaotic terrain of the new reality. In fact, he could not go back “to the mood of five years ago.”64
In August, 1933, McKay’s lease on his riverfront cottage expired. He moved into town and piece by piece slowly sold most of his household furnishings in the native market. Before the move, McKay received from Eastman $144.50. He could have used the money to return to the United States, but he clung to the hope that his luck would turn, and he could go back to the United States on terms more to his liking—with a new book and brighter literary fortunes. To carry on, however, he needed not only money but Eastman’s practical suggestions and close scrutiny of his work in progress. “For the fact is,” he confessed, “that getting down again has shaken my confidence, not in my mental equipment, but in trying to live practically. . . . I won’t be able to carry on with a sure hand until I hear from you or some other good critic that I am on the right track.” Moving into town, “with its movement and noise . . . lifted somewhat” McKay’s spirits, but it also cost him “nearly all” his capital. He longed for “a comeback, to surprise everybody and madden some” but admitted that “the atmosphere of anxiety in which I work is almost paralyzing.”65
For a while, Alfred A. Knopf considered adding McKay to its list of authors, but decided against it. “Savage Loving” seemed crudely thrown together and strangely dated in depression-ridden New Deal America. McKay was too big a risk. By the end of September, he had had enough. The isolation and the tension of living from hand to mouth in Tangier at last made even America seem attractive. In early October, he wrote Eastman that he was again without “a sou.” He had hoped James Weldon Johnson would raise some money for him, as Walter White had once done back in 1924. “But,” McKay wryly commented, “he couldn’t I suppose among Negroes, they love me so much” Work, he observed, remained his only “safeguard,” and he had continued writing his new novel of expatriate life in the hope that it would be complete by the time he arrived in the United States. In the meantime, he pleaded, “Do please write. I feel so lost.”66
James Weldon Johnson may not have sent any money, but he did write that an acquaintance in the U.S. State Department had informed him that McKay could return to the United States without any problems, provided friends vouched for him and that he had a minimal amount of money. “I feel very strongly,” Johnson wrote, “that you ought to come and stay. New York is your market, and the United States is your field. Furthermore, we, the Negro writers, need you here.”67
Armed with Johnson’s reassurances and encouragement, McKay in October, 1933, began the process of getting the necessary visa from the U.S. consul in Tangier. It proved a time-consuming process. Among other things, he had to write to Jamaica for two copies of his birth certificate. They took several weeks to arrive. In the meantime, Eastman once again collected money for his return fare, over one hundred fifty dollars. Among those who contributed were Oswald Garrison Villard, Walter Lippman, and Joel Spingarn.68
Eastman’s evaluation of the opening chapter of McKay’s new novel was not positive, and in late October, Claude informed him that “as soon as I got your letter I stopped writing the new story.” Since 1928, he had published three novels and a volume of short stories. He had also written and rewritten “The Jungle and the Bottoms,” plus a handful of essays and unpublished poems. His early successes with Home to Harlem and Banjo had provided him with the impetus he needed to continue through to the completion of Banana Bottom. After its failure, however, McKay could no longer sustain the pace he had set over the last five years. To Eastman he wrote, “It was too much. To keep on writing like that one book after another! No creative writer can do it and the moment I stopped I felt better as if a great weight was lifted from me. And I feel better all over with the thought of a voyage and going ‘home.’ Oh god, I haven’t been out of this little international wasp’s nest since you took me to Cuenta and it was beginning to get worse than a Black Belt.”69
In late December, 1933, McKay left Tangier for Spain. From there he sailed in late January, 1934, for the United States. After twelve years abroad he was at last going back to Harlem. What exactly he would do there he did not know, but after a lifetime of controversy and struggle, he hoped to find a living that would lift him out of the demoralizing poverty he had experienced over the last two years. He had no assurances of a job or a publisher in New York City. He dreaded a return to the atmosphere of race relations in America.70
In the meantime, while his personal fortunes had declined, his work—particularly his recent novels—had inspired to action a whole new generation of black writers from French West Africa and the West Indies. In 1931, the Nardal sisters began to publish in Paris their Revue du Monde Noir. They reprinted in its first issues poems by McKay and other Afro-Americans. In 1932, another French West Indian, Etienne Léro, also published an important manifesto, Légitime Défense, in which he quoted approvingly from McKay’s Banjo and declared that in French West Indian writings “a stranger vainly searches ... for an original or profound accent, the sensual imagination of the black man, the echo of the grudges or aspirations of an oppressed people.” Léon Damas, Léopold Sedar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire would shortly follow with their own more fully developed doctrine of Negritude, which in significant part, as they themselves acknowledged, could be traced directly to McKay’s example in Banjo.71
As McKay made his midwinter crossing of the North Adantic back to the United States, it remained to be seen if his achievements would ever be as warmly appreciated in his adopted country. After a decade of real achievement, he had come full circle once again. He would, in fact, have to begin anew the long and difficult process of finding for himself a place in the American and Afro-American literary worlds.