On Friday, February 1, 1934, Claude McKay returned to New York City on the SS Magallenes from Spain. From dockside, he went to Harlem and checked in at the YMCA on 135th Street. There young Henry Lee Moon interviewed him for the New York Amsterdam News and reported that “ten years of exile . . . have done something to the author of. . .Home to Harlem. A slightly corpulent, reserved individual with a cynical twinkle in his eye has replaced the young firebrand who once helped edit the Liberator. . . more than a decade ago.” McKay had little to tell Moon about his plans for the future. He refused to comment “at all” on politics. When asked why he had returned, however, a “cynical twinkle” appeared in his eyes, and Moon recorded the following remark: “Well, the Negro intellectuals have been boasting for years that I could not come back. So maybe I . . . came back just to prove them wrong—as usual.”1 It was not a statement calculated to win friends, and Moon pointedly observed that McKay immediately left Harlem to spend the weekend with Max Eastman at Croton-on-Hudson.
Moon’s article touched on almost all the central problems that faced McKay upon his return to the United States: his future livelihood, his relationship to Afro-American leaders, and his political stance in depression America. All these problems, as he would shortly discover, were interrelated, and they were to consume almost all his energies for the remainder of the decade.
Neither in his politics nor in his relationship to American Negro leaders was McKay in step with the times. As a consequence, he would receive little help from either the black elite or the various political groups inside and outside Harlem who could have used their influence to further his career. Not all McKay’s difficulties, of course, involved politics or questions of racial strategy. There was the equally serious problem of convincing potential friends in high places that he was something more than an incorrigibly difficult personality. Although he was usually friendly and charming, his frankness, his occasional moodiness, and his tendency to lash out at friends when angry kept many potential allies at arm’s length. As he well knew, this often hindered him in achieving his larger aims. But it was an ingrained habit, not easily broken, and as his interview with Moon suggested, he had returned to America with that aspect of his character honed to a fine edge. As he once remarked in a letter to Walter WTiite, “You’re lucky in making friends. You’re so altogether charming and fine. I’m a son of a bitch. I like really well so few people, that those I can like, I prize dearly and I always feel happy when I can possibly like some new freak of God.”2
In fairness to McKay, however, he had taken seriously James Weldon Johnson’s insistence that his presence in the United States would strengthen the Afro-American literary community. He arrived determined to help revive the sagging fortunes of black writers in any way he could. Just where he would fit into the structure of Harlem life nevertheless remained a difficult question.
Harlem and America had changed radically from the hectic but relatively prosperous days McKay had known during World War I and in the early 1920s. The Great Depression had crippled the American business structure and had left the nation close to economic ruin. Roosevelt’s New Deal, barely two years old, had begun to restore a measure of hope for the future, but full recovery remained a dream. During McKay’s years abroad, black Harlem had expanded northward and to the east and west above 110th Street. But the old optimism of the postwar years, which had nurtured hopes of a great black metropolis in Manhattan, had been destroyed by the new realities. Harlem was desperately poor. As always, blacks, who had known little prosperity to begin with, suffered disproportionately more unemployment than whites and had much farther to go along the road to recovery.3
For the black writer, the depression had meant an end to the Negro Vogue. Fewer whites trekked uptown to spend their money for black entertainment. White patrons and downtown publishers no longer sought out black writers. And the black community itself had precious few resources to share with unemployed writers. The NAACP and the National Urban League could no longer afford the luxury of promoting new black writing with their old vigor. As their budgets declined, Crisis and Opportunity devoted less space to literary and artistic concerns. To many, it now seemed that the Negro Renaissance had been too intertwined with ephemeral white interests that had little to do with the realities of Afro-American life. By 1934, novels such as Home to Harlem and Banjo, which had celebrated the black man’s primitive vitality in an increasingly mechanistic world, seemed dated and irrelevant.4
Like many of their white counterparts, black writers were increasingly attracted by revolutionary solutions to the harsh social conditions created by the collapse of capitalism. Even in more prosperous times, blacks could expect little from a system that considered them only inert pawns on its economic chessboard. The New Deal promised some relief but no solutions, beyond the salvaging and restoration of an economic system that had already proven itself inimical to black advancement.5
By the time McKay arrived in Harlem, the American Communist party had already begun to attract many young black intellectuals. It promised revolutionary action and the replacement of capitalism with a government patterned after the Union pf Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a system promised blacks a nation of their own within the southern portion of the United States, a nation that would exist as an equal with other socialist republics in a new American union freed from all past discriminations based on race and class differences. The depression had given the American Communist party a new opportunity to build a mass party, and it had eagerly seized the chance to build a strong black contingent in Harlem and other northern Black Belts. While the party argued for the development of a black nation in the South, in the North it stressed the total assimilation of blacks and whites and the complete integration of all party activities both within and without the black ghettos of the urban North. No political group had ever embraced the black cause with such unabashed fervor and total commitment. Many intelligent young blacks were responding positively to the party’s efforts to assist in innumerable community projects and self-help campaigns.6
To McKay, the new Communist influence in Harlem seemed even more cynically exploitive than the Republican domination of black voters after the Civil War. Republicans had at least wielded actual political power within the American social system. During the Civil War they had presided over the emancipation of blacks from slavery and had afterward attempted for a while to grant blacks political equality in the South. By contrast, McKay argued, the American Communist party had nothing to offer blacks that they could not provide for themselves through effective self-organization. Communists had some potential, but little actual, political power within the American social system. To make matters worse, the American Communist party took orders from Moscow. In fact, it could not be said to have any effective existence independent of Comintern direction. To McKay, this placed black Communists in double jeopardy within the American system. Not only were they subject to racist attacks, they could also be viewed as agents of a foreign power. For blacks to ally themselves wholeheartedly with any political party, much less a foreign-directed party, was, in McKay’s view, next to insanity. Their long devotion to the Republican party had only resulted in its cynical abandonment of black interests. How much worse would it be, McKay reasoned, to offer similar devotion to a party that existed, he was convinced, solely to further the interests of the new Soviet state? Finally, McKay rejected as unrealistic the party’s emphasis in the North on complete social assimilation in all areas of life. Blacks, he insisted, could never be wholly assimilated as individuals into every aspect of white American life. He detested forced segregation but argued that even if all legal barriers to integration fell, blacks would (and should) still exist as a distinct racial and ethnic group in America. They should, therefore, do all they could to achieve material wealth, political power, and truly meaningful equality as a powerful ethnic group within the American nation.7
McKay developed his position while ironically aware that the Communist Party of America, in strenuously wooing and unreservedly accepting blacks as equal partners in revolution, had at last adopted the very position he himself had so vigorously promoted during his visit to the Soviet Union in 1922–1923.8 Since then, however, McKay, the Soviet Union, and the course of international communism had changed. As he saw it, the Soviet Union under Stalin was now building another great nation-state, and international communism under Russian direction had become “a stuffed carcass” devoid of any life of its own. With its demise as a coalition of independent parties, McKay had given up on international communism. He still believed that socialism must eventually prevail in the world, but he abhorred the dictatorship that had emerged under Stalin. McKay no longer placed his faith in the inevitability of Marxist revolution. As the decade advanced and he became more familiar with the influence of the Communist party in Harlem, his criticism would grow.
At the same time, his persistent criticism of the integrationist orientation of the NAACP won him few friends among the noncom-munist black elite in Harlem. McKay’s position regarding the response of black Americans to their situation within the United States stopped short of any espousal of black nationalism; he argued instead that black leaders should pay more attention to strengthening the black community and less to integration. He firmly believed that integration would benefit only the few whose education, ability, or circumstances would allow merger into the larger society. Exclusive concentration on the injustices they suffered under American racism, McKay believed, had created among blacks, especially black civil rights leaders, a near paralysis of community action for self-improvement because they feared that such action would only encourage the forces of segregation. As a consequence, blacks in large urban ghettos such as Harlem suffered unnecessarily from a lack of many essential community services. They allowed the continuous deterioration of their neighborhoods to occur because they had never developed a true spirit of communal self-help that characterized all other ethnic groups with whom he was familiar—his own family experiences in Jamaica and his later observation of Moslems, Christians, and Jews in North Africa. His beliefs on this subject eventually led him to defend the largely discredited program of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute.9
McKay’s peculiar background as a child of the independent Jamaican peasantry, as a disillusioned veteran of early Communist agitation in the United States and England, and as an essentially independent poet and novelist in a decade devoted to group organization and action even among artists, brought him sharp conflict, severe poverty, and eventual isolation even as he attempted to carve a place for himself within the Afro-American community in Harlem.
Despite the undertones of hostility in Moon’s article, prospects looked relatively bright for McKay during his first weeks back in the United States. He spoke before various local groups about his experiences abroad and reestablished contact or met for the first time such Harlem Renaissance personalities as Carl Van Vechten, Coun-tee Cullen, Harold Jackman, and Bruce Nugent. Jackman, a local Harlem schoolteacher, wrote nothing himself, but he socialized with all the principals of the Negro Renaissance. They valued his company. He was tall, handsome, affable, well read, and supportive of all his literary friends. Throughout the 1920s, he and McKay had corresponded, and they were to remain friends in the years ahead.10
Bruce Nugent was a young painter who also wrote, acted, danced, and enjoyed an active social life. He frankly admitted that he was a dilettante in all the arts save painting and that he enjoyed the role. Along with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman he had helped edit Fire, the short-lived literary magazine created for the younger members of the Harlem Renaissance. Its first and only number in 1926 had been largely consumed by a real fire in the Harlem basement where it had been stored. Nugent came from a distinguished light-colored family in Washington, D.C, and he won McKay’s acceptance by one day remarking to him that the capital’s famous “high yellow” society had copied white society with “tragic fidelity.”11
McKay also mingled with many others in the Harlem community who had no literary or scholarly credentials. He enjoyed, for example, the company of Darrell Campbell, “the ‘exalted ruler’” of the local Elks Club, as well as a number of women whom he chanced upon. One came from McKay’s boyhood home in upper Clarendon. They had grown up together, and their fathers had been close friends and “church officers.” She had traveled a long way from those bucolic days to become “pretty well fixed as a policy manipulator” in Harlem. Fortunately for McKay, she remained “very sentimental about the old association” and did her best to help him get settled. She was probably the same woman he described in A Long Way from Home as the operator of an intimate speakeasy in 1922. Other women acquaintances also welcomed him back to Harlem. Most were simply friends whom he saw occasionally. But romance sometimes resulted. As McKay wrote Eastman in the spring of 1934, “Except for the old head trouble I am all right. . . . I am all excited about a girl pal who has the most perfect back.”12
He had dreaded returning to the constant strain of interracial relations in America, but Harlem, he discovered, still possessed the old ability to beguile and quicken his senses, even under the most distressing circumstances.
Rich is the flavor of this Harlem street;
The dusk over the dark-warm scene is tender,
The murmuring of fruit-ripe throats is sweet
And gladly to the tumult I surrender.13
While in Morocco he had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he hoped after his return to get one. Others active in the Harlem Renaissance had already enjoyed a Guggenheim, but McKay’s application for a grant to write a study of the black African impact on Moroccan life and history did not sufftciendy impress the jury, and his request was refused. His prospects for other assistance, however, at first appeared good. Someone—perhaps President Hope at Atlanta University or James Weldon Johnson, who had connections with Fisk—assured him that he could spend at least a year as a college professor, provided a foundation could be persuaded to underwrite his salary. After weeks of waiting, that proposal, too, came to nothing.14 In the meantime, McKay had moved out of the Harlem YMCA and into a small efficiency apartment at 168 West 135th Street. He had no money other than what little he could scrounge from friends such as Eastman, Schomburg, and Darrell Campbell of the Elks. Their help proved insufficient to pay his rent, and in May, 1934, his landlord politely but firmly insisted he pay or leave. Faced with eviction, McKay had no choice but to find other quarters. For weeks, he lived precariously in rented rooms or with friends. In August he even accepted from an aged Negro gentleman a free room with a kitchenette. In return, McKay agreed to help the old man, a “Professor” Siefert, until noon each day to “shape up and write his researches” on ancient African history.15 At the same time, he was himself trying to find a reliable literary agent. Upon his return, McKay had engaged Maxim Lieber as his agent, apparently on Eastman’s recommendation. It soon became apparent to Claude that he could not work with Lieber, who did not seem to be promoting his work and work proposals with publishers and who was blundy critical of McKay’s style in Home to Harlem and Banjo. In exasperation, he dropped Lieber and in May, 1934, wrote to Harcourt, Brace and Company directly, asking if they would consider publishing a new, expanded edition of Harlem Shadows, which would contain a series of poems on cities and historic sites he had visited while abroad. Donald Brace himself replied that he was interested. He asked to see McKay’s new poems in order to arrive at some final estimate of what contract terms they might be able to offer. As in the past, McKay hated the prospect of having to negotiate a contract himself. From May to August he repeatedly beseeched Eastman to recommend him to an agent more congenial than Lieber. McKay desperately needed someone who would get him as good a contract as Bradley, the trustworthy “Yankee,” had done in the 1920s. Meanwhile, he continued to experience great difficulty in finding enough money for regular meals, much less the other necessities of daily life. As a result, he could never quite manage to collect, revise, and type his poems for submission to Harcourt, Brace. That opportunity for publication thus gradually slipped away.16
Although he was once again proving inept in the management of his own affairs (admittedly under the most trying of circumstances), McKay had been correct to conclude that Maxim Lieber lacked the proper empathy to represent him. Lieber was not only a member of the Communist party of the United States, he also served in 1934 as an integral part of a Soviet espionage ring in New York. McKay may have known of Lieber’s party membership. In 1934, while making no secret of his disillusionment with communism, McKay had not yet developed that obsessive aversion to party members that eventually came with the conviction that they would use their influence to hinder or even sabotage the careers of those on the Left who disagreed with them politically. But he certainly had no knowledge of Lieber’s employment as a Soviet agent. Lieber’s role as a spy would later figure prominendy in the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss affair.17
Did Lieber purposely sabotage McKay’s efforts to find a publisher in 1934? The circumstantial evidence contained in McKay’s letters to Eastman suggests that Lieber disliked McKay’s early novels, procrastinated in his search for a publisher, and generally discouraged his first attempts to find one after his return in 1934. This, at least, is what McKay concluded. While there is no evidence that Lieber deliberately subverted McKay’s efforts to find a publisher, he clearly did not convince McKay that he was working hard in his behalf. McKay reported to Eastman that “Lieber told me that [Eugene] Saxton [at Harper] remarked to him that he thought the American public was not interested in Negro authors enough to justify publication [of either the poetry or “Romance in Marseilles”] and he thought the successes of the nineteen twenties were the result of a fad only! Lieber didn’t want to tell me but finally did.”18
In fairness to Lieber, it must be remembered that publishers were reluctant in 1934 to commit themselves to black authors, especially to someone such as McKay whose last two books had sold very poorly. Lieber may have simply concluded that McKay’s was a hopeless case. But given his deep involvement in Comintern affairs, he may have also concluded that McKay’s current political orientation made him doubly hopeless.
McKay, of course, refused to accept either judgment. Even as he labored to move his own career forward, he began in the spring and summer of 1934 to meet with other black authors in New York to discuss their common dilemma: how to revive and advance black writing, with or without white support. He had only contempt for those who believed that black writers had to depend solely on the pleasure of white publishers and a fickle white reading public. In his opinion, black writers, like all others, would inevitably continue to express themselves and to illuminate the life around them. They should not, therefore, throw their hands up in despair at the temporary loss of a portion of their readership. They had a larger duty to themselves, their ethnic group, and to the universal functions of literature, and should not despair at the abandonment of erstwhile allies and patrons.19
By midsummer, McKay and a small circle of his friends in Harlem had decided to establish a black literary magazine devoted to publishing the best Afro-American writing from whatever political or aesthetic perspective. Because of his prior experience, McKay seemed a logical choice to edit such a journal. He had, after all, conceived the idea. As he saw it, the new magazine would be a black version of the old Masses and Liberator, open to all who had something significant to say and who said it well. Like the Liberator, it would be a cooperative venture of its editors and contributors, but McKay wished to establish himself as the controlling force who, like Eastman on the Lib-erator, “could not be maneuvered out in case of a difference or a schism.”20
McKay wrote a clear statement of his objectives in a circular letter entitled “For a Negro Magazine,” which he mailed to prospective supporters and contributors in July and August, 1934. In the letter, he noted that many considered the Negro Renaissance to have been only part of a passing fad, “a mushroom growth” that had failed to send any “roots down in the soil of Negro life. But we believe,” he wrote,
that any genuine artistic expression can transcend a fad; that the Negro’s contribution to literature and art should have a permanent place in American life; that American life would be richer by such contribution; and that it should find an oudet and a receptive audience.
Therefore, our aim is to found a magazine to give expression to the literary and artistic aspirations of the Negro; to make such a magazine of national significance as an esthetic interpretation of Negro life, exploiting the Negro’s racial background and his racial gifts and accomplishments.
We want to encourage Negroes to create artistically as an ethnological group irrespective of class and creed. We want to help the Negro as a writer and artist to free his mind of the shackles imposed upon it from outside as well as within his own racial group.
We mean to go forward in the vanguard of ideas, trends, thoughts and movements. But we are not demanding that the creative Negro should falsely accept nostrums and faiths that he does not understand.21
This was a clear statement of opposition to the currendy fashionable insistence upon class consciousness in creative writing, and it was directed in particular against the Communist party’s dictum that the writer’s ultimate duty was to help advance through his writings class consciousness and proletarian revolution. Instead of such narrow political requirements, the letter put forth the following general standards, “to which,” it stated, “we will hold our contributors”:
SINCERITY OF PURPOSE
FRESHNESS AND KEENNESS OF PERCEPTION
ADEQUATE FORM OF EXPRESSION22
“For a Negro Magazine” clearly stated McKay’s faith in the future of black literature. But circumstances made it impossible for him ever to realize his dream of founding the kind of magazine he envisioned. He simply had no money and no effective means of raising any. Even if money had been forthcoming, McKay lacked the administrative capacity to launch such a venture. As usual, he turned to Eastman for information about the proper way to install himself securely as editor. He even asked Eastman to provide precise information about the costs of producing such a magazine. In reality, neither McKay nor his associates had the money, time, or practical experience necessary to launch a magazine in the midst of the worst depression in the nation’s history.23
For a while, however, McKay pursued the idea. He planned to name the magazine Bambara, after a large tribe of the western Sudan, famous for its fine masks and other objets d’art. And he supervised in early September at least one fund-raising affair that netted twenty-five dollars. More could have been realized, but Harold Jackman, who was supposed to have collected money at the door, “got tight and deserted his post at that late hour, when bohemian-minded people prefer to drop in at a party—and many just walked in.”24
Before the event, Eastman gave McKay enough money to buy new clothes. He had in August written Max a letter that had clearly revealed his utter poverty. “I have so much work to do, trying to get my verses together and worrying about the magazine and hardly anybody helping me. I am desperately hungry most of the time, lacking even pennies to mail letters and go to the library where I am looking through old magazines for some poems.” To make matters worse, having a place to stay depended on his “doing part time work writing history to prove that African Blacks were the founders of Civilization, for an eccentric old Negro who titles himself professor.” As McKay explained to Eastman, he “wouldn’t mind it so much if the old fool was not always butting in on me with senile talk about ancient African glory.”25
It was a pathetic situation. Under such circumstances McKay could not hope to start a magazine or even prepare his poems for consideration by Harcourt, Brace. “I thought,” he told Eastman late in August, “I could get all the poems together and in their hands by September, but I can’t even find time to type them, much less to overhaul them.”26
The social success of the fund-raiser in September briefly encouraged McKay, but it did not materially improve either his situation or his plans for a magazine. He soon gave up the scheme as impractical (at least for the present) and began to search for a job—any kind of job—that would enable him to escape the harrowing uncertainties of his daily existence. He could not continue his ill-matched collaboration with the old “professor” and soon left for other quarters. Although he managed to dress decently and otherwise maintained a brave front, his only money came in driblets from friends. Eastman helped, as did Joel Spingarn, but neither they nor anyone else could provide McKay with a regular income.
It is difficult to imagine a white writer, even in the depths of the depression, with past accomplishments equal to McKay’s and with similar ambitions, ability, and drive, who could not have found a publisher or, as a last resort, some kind of job on which he could have lived. Vast areas of employment and opportunity were effectively closed to McKay merely because he was a black male. When, for example, he went to a labor bureau for an unskilled job, he found they had openings only for black female domestic workers. Among the black establishment, he could find no help. His outspoken criticisms of Afro-American society now came back to haunt him. “Any of those colored places could have found me a place, even to address envelopes. But I have no pull, and I guess they are afraid of me,” he concluded in one letter to Eastman.27
In desperation, he considered going on relief, but he had entered the country on the stipulation that he would not become a public charge. He refused the chance to apply under an alias. Late in October, 1934, he instead made arrangements to enter a work camp run by the city in upstate New York, sixty miles from Harlem. Camp Greycourt, as it was called, was located “upon a hill above the village of Greycourt between Monroe and Chester.” It had formerly been a women’s prison and consisted of a collection of stone buildings that had been converted the previous May to a place of rehabilitation for the down-and-out of the city’s municipal lodging houses.28
The city official who recommended the place to McKay did so with the idea that he could work in the camp’s administrative offices, help edit its newsletter, and in his spare time resume his writing. The idea appealed to McKay. Anything was better, he reasoned, than a continuation of the haphazard existence he had been leading in Harlem. To implement the plan, the official wrote to the commander of the camp and explained McKay’s dilemma; McKay then went to a municipal lodging house and signed up with other down-and-outs as a day laborer. His pay and theirs would be a dollar a day with fifty cents deducted each day for room and board. After less than a year back in America, he had hit rock bottom. But at least he had something to do, a job of sorts, and that, he concluded, was a step in the right direction.29
Camp Greycourt, he quickly discovered, was more than a way station for the unemployed. It also served as a rehabilitation center for alcoholics. In fact, a majority of the seven hundred men there were alcoholics who had lost all ambition save the desire to drink. The place was, moreover, crowded. Even the director, Commander Clarke, had to share a room with someone. Many newcomers lived barracks-style. McKay’s tiny cell consisted of two cots and a chair. Under such conditions, he was ashamed to ask for special privileges. The office where he worked was equally cramped.30
At first, McKay tried to make the best of it. He worked on the weekly newsletter for a while but soon decided he would have more free time if he transferred to the dining hall and served behind the counter with the breakfast crew. There he practiced once again some of the skills he had acquired on the railroad during World War I. Despite his efforts to adjust, his new environment depressed him and he began to bombard Eastman with long descriptions of the hopelessness of the place. He could find no solitude for creative work. The commander kept telling him that he, too, was a writer but had no time for creative work. This made McKay even more reluctant to discuss his own situation. “He dabbles in poetry,” McKay wrote Eastman, “and prose too, bad stuff. One has to be wary with people who have the writing bug and can’t get it off. They are the most capricious and cutting in the world.” The commander also had “a vast contempt for Communists,” whom he confused “with socialists, anarchists, and what not.” He firmly believed, mistakenly in McKay’s opinion, that the Communists had sent paid agitators to his camp. To make matters worse, McKay added, he “and ninety percent of the crew here are Irish, as moody and chameleon-like as Moors.”31
At the camp, McKay here and there found a kindred soul, including a supervisor, a former globetrotter who had known in Europe some of the same people McKay had associated with in Paris. But in general, as McKay complained to Eastman, “this dreary camp Grey-court” was populated by hopeless alcoholics, “even the best ones—the clerks, college men—bum drinkers, and the downfall of most of them is drinking ... so the place is a kind of sanitarium.” They were, moreover, “jealous of the slightest favor shown to one of their number ... no working class pride here—no hope for a better life for workers.” With few exceptions, they were, he reiterated, “the worst bums of the Bowery and municipal lodging house, chronic criminal dead souls. The railroad, freight boats, and Marseille were heavens in comparison.”32
By December, he was frantic to leave. He had decided that his next project should be a memoir about his experiences abroad, and he righdy felt that for him Camp Greycourt was “such a waste of energy—nothing to gain by [the] experience. . . . I feel more and more like a caged wild animal.”33 His stay at the camp would make great material for a story, he admitted to Eastman, but not for him to write. He disliked suffering in both life and literature and had no urge to write about his stay there.
Through it all he never doubted that given the chance he could produce another book and find for it both a publisher and readers. As in the past, he had to find help, and he hammered Eastman incessantly with appeals that he find a way to assure him enough money for food and a place to stay in New York. McKay insisted that he was willing to work, even as a doorman, and he urged that Eastman ask Joel Spingarn to use his influence to find for him any position that would ensure him enough money to survive. McKay insisted that his creative urge was as strong as ever; he needed only the opportunity to produce. As he expressed it in one letter to Eastman: “I know what’s wrong with me is birth pains—too many abortions, the lusty child is crying to be born—but needs the right doctor.”34 It was an apt metaphor. Someone had always been present with timely aid to resolve his practical problems, and he needed such assistance now more than ever.
Eastman wrote Spingarn, who answered that he was willing to assist, but he pointed out that he had over the years found McKay a difficult person to help. He remembered, too, that McKay had once dismissed him as a bourgeois philanthropist even as he was finding for him a publisher for Harlem Shadows. In reply, Eastman admitted that Claude’s abrasive personality did make him a difficult person. But he said that something had to be done, nonetheless, to help McKay through his latest impasse.
Eastman inadvertendy revealed Spingarn’s misgivings to McKay, who immediately protested to both men that their opinions about him were wrong. He admitted to Eastman that he was “no angel” and that he did find it difficult to work as a part of a group. He was, he confessed, an introvert whom social-minded people had difficulty understanding. But McKay reminded Eastman that he had worked successfully on the Liberator and that he remained the only member of its staff who understood and supported Eastman’s criticisms of contemporary Marxism. Above all, McKay pointed out that when given the opportunity he had always been a productive worker. His basic problem, he insisted, was not his personality (difficult though it may be) but his poverty. “People are not satisfied unless they can get you by the very guts and make you puke up your soul.”35 If he was to continue as a writer, he had to have the assistance of people in a position to support his efforts.
To Spingarn he wrote a more restrained and formal letter of apology for having offended him “back in 1921.” He explained that “I had forgotten all about calling you any names.” And he assured Spingarn that he had never intentionally been personally disrespectful to any man because he had different social and intellectual ideas and belonged to a different social class and practiced philanthropy “according to his lights.” McKay explained that if he had known how Spingarn felt about his remark, “I should long ago have apologised to you—as I always do readily if I have done, as I am likely to do, something impulsive and wrong. And now at this long distance and late date I want to apologize. And I wish I had known before how you felt about it, when I was materially better off and could have said simply and frankly I was sorry and you might have found more grace in it than now when I am in such trouble.” He went on to explain that what he needed was a job that would give him the means to find permanent lodgings, “a place, where my mind would be relieved of pressing harassment instead of this hectic confusion out of which nothing can take permanent form.” When he agreed to go to Camp Greycourt he had not realized that it would be a place “planned intolerably to make the individual drink to the dregs the fact of his being a down-and-out ward—everything operated to deprive him of all feelings of individual decency and manhood. . . . It is altogether peonage—a trap.”36
With Eastman’s help, Claude left Camp Greycourt just before Christmas and spent the holidays with friends in Harlem. While he was there, Spingarn sent him enough money to get his typewriter out of hock and to live on while he continued to search for a more permanent solution to his troubles. Despite McKay’s insistence that he would take any kind of work, neither Spingarn nor anyone else could help him find a job. As a world-famous author, he was in peculiarly difficult circumstances. Many people assumed he wanted an administrative position in publishing and would not be interested in menial work. McKay himself feared that black newspapers would splash his name across their front pages if they discovered him accepting any kind of welfare or work relief. And if he should accept a menial position, that, too, could be turned into unpleasant publicity.37
As 1934 ended and a new year began, McKay’s problems were far from over. But he had at least escaped Camp Greycourt. As the new year advanced, his situation gradually improved. His friends never completely deserted him, and he had made some new ones since his return who also proved steadfast. Chief among the latter in 1935 was Selma Burke, a former nurse and currently an artist’s model and art student, who had become friends with McKay soon after his return from abroad. After his return to Harlem from Camp Greycourt, their friendship rapidly deepened into a love affair that continued intermit-tendy for the remainder of Claude’s life.
With Selma, McKay almost met his match. Like him, she possessed great vigor, determination, and purpose, and one of her objectives in 1935 was to provide McKay a decent place to live. She herself had only a small income. Claude had none, and he had decided he could not ask Eastman for more favors. Wfaen Spingarn’s gift began to run low, he refused to approach Max for more money. Eastman, however, knew that McKay had not found a permanent income, and he decided to give Selma enough money each month to help her pay for an apartment to share with Claude. McKay may have suspected she was receiving assistance from Eastman, but she never told him. Sometime in the late winter or early spring of 1935, they set up housekeeping together at 214 West Sixty-third Street in the old Hell’s Kitchen area where Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts now stands.
Selma valued her new relationship. She respected McKay’s accomplishments and his wide knowledge of European art and artists. She was herself studying to become a sculptor, and she learned much from McKay’s intimate knowledge of European and African arts. His criticism of her work was sometimes unsparingly harsh. He would even occasionally destroy her clay models because he felt that they showed no distinction. Such actions might have unhinged a lesser being, but Selma possessed as much self-confidence as McKay did. She persisted in her work and eventually became an accomplished sculptor. After World War II, her head of Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the model for the profile on the new “Roosevelt” dime.38
On his side, McKay loved Selma and hoped their relationship would last, but he soon grew restless and dissatisfied with their new intimacy. At base, he probably feared and resented Selma’s strong personality and tremendous energy. As he once explained to Max Eastman, he possessed a quality of “unattachedness,” a reserve that no one could break through. It made close relations difficult over any length of time. Claude demanded freedom from the ordinary tensions and routines that inevitably arose when two people shared a life. His attitude baffled Selma, despite her best efforts to understand him. Before too many weeks together, tensions appeared that led eventually to their separation in July, 1935.39 The approximately six months they spent together, however, gave McKay the stability he needed to find an income, begin a new work, and to store up the energy to see it through to completion.
In the spring of 1935, at the suggestion of James Weldon Johnson, McKay had applied to the Julius Rosenwald Fund in Chicago for a grant to begin a memoir of his years abroad. While at Camp Grey-court, he had become convinced that an autobiographical work that concentrated on those years would be attractive to publishers. At the same time, it would also give him a chance to clarify his social, political, and artistic evolution and current convictions as a black writer. In Harlem, many believed that McKay had gone to Russia in 1922 with the American Communist delegation as a party member in good standing, only to quit the movement afterward for an undisciplined and irresponsible bohemian life in Paris and North Africa. Others thought he had become a follower of Leon Trotsky. Both views were wrong, and McKay was anxious to set the record straight. He hoped that by relating in detail the story of his years abroad, he could both produce an interesting narrative and clarify his real concerns as a man and a writer.
McKay had returned to the United States convinced that American blacks had much to learn from studying, as he had done, the lives of minority groups in Europe and North Africa, many of whom had survived and even flourished under conditions almost as bad as those that blacks had to endure in America. In his opinion, international communism had failed, and blacks should concentrate on strengthening their collective group life and promoting democratic government at home in order to be in a position to meet all eventualities. Whether they knew it or not, change was pressing in upon all Americans from both the extreme Left and the extreme Right. In Europe, Soviet-style communism and German and Italian fascism threatened to tear asunder all pretense at democracy. It was a dangerous world, and McKay feared that blacks lagged behind in comprehending the international forces that threatened them. He believed that socialist reform must eventually come and that blacks should prepare themselves for a vanguard role as an ethnic group within American society, or risk falling even further behind white America in all aspects of their collective existence. In McKay’s view, collective group solidarity meant much more than the pursuit of integration by civil rights organizations. In his memoir, he wished to illustrate how he arrived at his convictions by relating in detail what he had learned during his years in Europe and North Africa.40
In late April and early May, 1935, McKay wrote Edwin R. Embree, the director of the Rosenwald Fund, two letters in which he set forth his objectives. McKay stated he had originally planned a fictional version of his years abroad but had discarded the idea because “certain items,” namely, his relationship to international communism, required “direct and unveiled treatment. . . . There is an impression among intellectuals of the left,” he explained, “that I was officially invited to Russia and later went back on my principles. In fact,” he maintained, “I went into Russia with an independent spirit. . . and came out the same.”41
In his book, he proposed to use his own experiences to illustrate what the American Negro could learn “from travelling, how he may use his experiences in perspective to see and understand more clearly and broadly the social and cultural position of the American Negro and also in adjusting himself to American life.” At the core of the book, he planned to “place special emphasis on cultural and group relations.”
Because, what made the greatest impression upon me in Europe and in Africa was the importance of and the interest taken in group culture and group life. I noticed that whether it was in backward Brittany or Spain or advanced Germany or colonial Africa, that those people who had a strong sense of group consciousness possessed an unusual quality of dignity and assurance of living, even when they were terribly up against extreme exploitation and repression, and that that sense of group consciousness, whether it was regional or religious or working class was the raison d’etre of their social objectives.
I want to use the foregoing as a theme in writing about the group spirit of the American Negro, to show how it could be given greater expression from within, if certain old problems were approached from a new attitude, such as Segregation, for example. However, this angle would be incidental to the whole. The book will not be an outline of a programme for the Negro. It will be primarily an impressionistic record of my observations.*
McKay’s application, assisted by strong letters of recommendation from James Weldon Johnson and Richard Moe, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation (he had been favorably impressed by McKay’s Guggenheim application the previous year), persuaded Em-bree to approve a five-hundred-dollar Rosenwald grant for McKay in five monthly installments, starting June 26 and continuing until November, 1935. Embree admired McKay’s past work, and in approving the grant, he departed from a firmly established practice of limiting such awards to students of unusual promise for advanced training in the professions. He expressed the hope that the five hundred dollars would allow McKay enough time to begin his new work and to find a publisher willing to advance him enough to complete it.42
McKay wasted no time getting started. His career seemed at last to be reviving. While searching for a permanent position and funds, he had also begun to write articles, and since February, 1935, two had been published in the Nation. In its editor, Freda Kirchwey, McKay found another friend. Her interest in him as a writer went back to the 1920s, and she would consistendy encourage and support him throughout the 1930s and 1940s.43
In early February she published a short article by McKay entitled “There Goes God! The Story of Father Divine and His Angels,” in which McKay briefly described Father Divine’s cooperative movement. This slighdy built, wizened little brown man from Sayville, Long Island, had captured the imagination of many in Harlem with his immodest claims to divinity and with his ability to provide his followers with relief from all their worldly troubles. Through his network of lodging houses, restaurants, and other cooperative ventures, he promised complete relief from sexual, family, and economic burdens. All his followers need do was abandon their old lives and devote themselves to him. He would provide clean, sexually segregated lodging, abundant food, and plenty of opportunity for emotional relief in the joyful worship of the Godhead embodied in his Divine Self. It was an audacious movement whose initial success, McKay believed, indicated both the desperation and the organizational potential inherent in Harlem’s black masses. That such an incredible movement could make headway in Harlem only illustrated for McKay how little traditional black leaders were doing to meet the most basic communal needs of its population.44
Father Divine’s movement was only the most successful of many cults and street-corner movements that engaged McKay’s sympathetic attention. Almost from the moment he arrived in Harlem from North Africa, he had begun to study the numerous cults, occultists, and street-corner orators of Harlem. He was convinced they commanded more urgently than either the black elite or the Communists the attention of Harlem’s largely unemployed poor black majority.45
McKay’s second article for the Nation on April 3, 1935, dealt largely with another untutored but bold grass-roots leader who had since 1933 been stirring the Harlem population to action against the white, mostly Jewish merchants of 125th Street, the area’s traditional retail shopping center. This article, “Harlem Runs Wild,” described the rioting and looting of stores along 125th Street by Harlem residents on the night of March 19, 1935. McKay witnessed the rioting and in his article emphasized that it could not properly be called a race riot. The objects of the crowd’s wrath were the stores and not white people as such, who “singly and in groups, walked the streets of Harlem without being molested.” The explosion had been sparked by a rumor that a black child, caught shoplifting “a trifle,” had been beaten by department store guards. The report proved false, but resentment against white merchants along 125th Street had been growing for the past two years, and the alleged incident sparked a night-long rampage. McKay praised the restraint of the police during the episode as “commendable in the highest degree-. . . . In extreme cases, when they fired, it was into the air. Their restraint saved Harlem from becoming a shambles.”46
In assessing the underlying causes of the riot, McKay discounted the influence of Communist agitation and emphasized instead the recent efforts by the Harlem community to force the larger merchants along 125th Street to hire black clerks. This movement, McKay pointed out, had not been initiated by either the Communists or by traditional black leadership; it had been started by a strange, turbaned black man “in gorgeous robes” who claimed Egyptian origin and called himself Sufi Abdul Hamid. In 1933, he had organized a Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance that had begun to picket and boycott the large department stores on 125th Street, demanding clerical jobs for Harlem’s unemployed blacks. Prior to the Sufi’s appearance, blacks, amazingly enough, held no clerical positions in the stores there. From the beginning, his oudandish appearance and strong-arm tendencies led the black press and the established community leadership to denounce him as a labor racketeer, but he did succeed in persuading some of the smaller establishments along 125th Street to hire a few black clerks.
Finally, in the spring of 1934, the young Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the pastor of Harlem’s largest congregation, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, joined the Sufi on the picket line, and a new communitywide organization, the Citizens’ League for Fair Play, was organized. For the first time, the black press also began to support the protesters. Soon larger stores capitulated and began to hire a few black clerks.
McKay emphasized, however, that the net gain for the community had been small. The Sufi was accused of anti-Semitism in the Jewish press and was charged in court with disorderly conduct and anti-Jewish invective. The charges were eventually dismissed, but the Sufi’s organization was kicked out of the Citizens’ League and his influence in Harlem was effectively curbed. These events, however, had not strengthened the movement. More dissension within the Citizens’ League soon followed. According to McKay, internal quarrels over such questions as “whether the clerks employed should be light-skinned or dark-skinned” diminished its effectiveness at a time when the merchants themselves were growing stronger through organization and intrigue, in which charges of anti-Semitism continued to be leveled against various participants in the Citizens’ League. Finally, in November, 1934, a unique court injunction had forbidden further boycotting by the league because it “was not a labor organization.” As a result, even the small gains that had been made were gradually reversed as the merchants laid off most of the new clerks. The merchants maintained that business had suffered and the clerks were not needed. Thus, McKay argued, the movement had failed because of merchant solidarity, internal league disunity, and lack of real labor organization. As a consequence, McKay concluded, “the masses of Harlem remain disunited and helpless, while their would-be leaders wrangle and scheme and denounce one another to the whites. Each one is ambitious to wear the piebald mande of Marcus Garvey. On Tuesday the crowds went crazy like the remnants of a defeated, abandoned, and hungry army. Their rioting was the gesture of despair of a bewildered, baffled, and disillusioned people.”47
McKay’s article on Father Divine was slight in comparison to his report on the Harlem riot and its background. But both articles helped to set the tone for many others, in which McKay proved himself a close, perceptive, and always controversial commentator upon many of the people and issues that agitated Harlem, New York, and the world in the 1930s.
In July, 1935, shortly after receiving the first of his five monthly Rosenwald installments, McKay left the apartment he shared with Selma and moved into a new one farther uptown on Seventh Avenue. He also found a new girlfriend and tried to isolate himself from the distractions of the past several months. On the weekends, he and Selma had frequently visited the Eastmans at Croton-on-Hudson but that, too, stopped when McKay moved into his new place. He had a new agent named Laurence Roberts, he informed Eastman, and a friend (Pierre Vogein) had just arrived from Paris with two trunks loaded with his books, documents, and other personal effects. He was glad to be away from the Sixty-third Street area. He had already begun his new book. For the moment he did not need anyone. He was on his feet again.48
Through the summer and fall of 1935, McKay worked hard on his new manuscript. He also thought ahead to the day when his funds would be exhausted and began in the fall of 1935 to take steps to get on the payroll of the newly created Federal Writers’ Project in New York City. At first, his efforts to join the FWP were delayed because he had not officially qualified for relief. By the time his grant expired in November, however, he had enough written to submit his manuscript to a publisher, Lee Furman, who thought well enough of the work to sign him to a contract and to advance him three hundred dollars in monthly installments. By the end of April, 1936, McKay had written his story through to the end of his Russian trip, but as he explained in a letter to Edwin Embree, he had so much material that he had not been able to finish the work before his advance expired. Furman had limited resources and could not give McKay another advance. Claude told Embree that he had completed all but “the French-Spanish section and the African section” of his memoir; he asked if the Rosenwald Fund could give him “another small grant” to finish the book. He explained that he had acquired “a small part time job,” which prevented him from writing in the mornings when he worked best. “I find that my day is all broken up and returning home in the afternoon, it is rather difficult to get right into the regular rhythm of my creative writing.”49 Embree replied that he wished McKay every success but the Rosenwald Fund, he regretted, could not advance him any more money.
McKay may not have been entirely candid about his “small part time job.” Since October he had been trying to join the Federal Writers’ Project; by late April (certainly by the summer of 1936), he had qualified for the program and had been hired. For McKay, as for many other writers in the 1930s, the FWP became a refuge from destitution. For Claude in particular, it meant much more than mere relief; he could finish his autobiography and delve more deeply into the community life of Harlem than he would have ever been able to do as a solitary author existing upon the sufferance of friends, foundations, and publishers. Although it never paid him more than twenty-three dollars per week, his FWP salary enabled him to live and work in relative security for the next three years. During that time, he found enough leisure to complete a study of Harlem that had actually begun to take shape with his first articles on Father Divine and Sufi Abdul Hamid in 1935. During his years with the FWP, he also wrote several articles in which he clearly stated his position on a variety of interrelated contemporary issues ranging from communism and the Popular Front to the present and future of blacks within American society.50
In the summer and fall of 1936, however, McKay devoted himself to completing his autobiography. As he indicated in his letter to Em-bree, his new job required him to report daily to the FWP offices in the Port of New York Authority building on lower Eighth Avenue. This daily task eventually proved less onerous than McKay had first thought it would. After he signed in, his workday often consisted of briefly discussing his assignments with his administrative superiors and then returning home to work on his book. His supervisors had early decided that McKay had enough self-discipline and experience to choose for himself the specific topics he should research and develop. Like most blacks on the project, he concentrated on the contemporary history of New York’s black population. Over the next three years, they collected a vast amount of material on Harlem, including dozens of biographical sketches on notable Harlemites from Sufi Abdul Hamid to Arthur Schomburg. McKay wrote a significant number of these sketches, which eventually wound up in the Schomburg Collection of Negro History and Literature on 135th Street in Harlem. By the middle of the summer, McKay had adjusted to his daily trip downtown. His FWP duties, he found, provided an interesting diversion from the isolation and concentration necessary to complete his primary task. By the summer, he was dividing his time almost exclusively between FWP duties and his autobiography.51
Not all his friends understood McKay’s need for isolation, and their tendency to drop in unannounced or to send to his door strangers eager to meet a famous author led to misunderstandings and ill will. McKay sometimes tolerated such interruptions, but when his patience was gone he would castigate even his closest friends. Arthur Schomburg one day found himself on the receiving end of such a tirade. Embarrassed, hurt, and angered, Schomburg decided to have nothing further to do with him. Claude’s animosity, of course, soon passed, and when he heard that Schomburg had declared their friendship at an end he hastened to write him an apology. “If I did offend you,” he wrote, “I want to apologize before everybody, because I didn’t mean to; you are a friend of mine who has really befriended me and also I really like you yourself.” McKay reminded Schomburg that no one knew better than he “the tight fix” he had been in since returning to the United States. Now that he had “a little chance” to recover lost ground, McKay explained, “I am working all day every day,” both at home and “at the big library digging things up.” Working hard while “existing on a shoe string with all my essential needs curtailed,” he exclaimed, “makes me irritable enough. And I become more so when people crash in on me during my working hours, upsetting me and breaking the rhythm of my thought and arresting my writing—sometimes for hours.” Even in his letter of apology McKay felt compelled, once he had brought the subject up, to expand upon his general grievance. “The people who callously intrude on creative workers certainly cannot have any appreciation of the difficulty of creative work. Evidently they think that because one provides humor and writes about the common people that he could do it standing on his head in the street with a crowd around. . . . For all their pretending they fundamentally think very little of the artist.” Finally (in case, perhaps, Schomburg had begun to wonder about such an apology), McKay concluded by stating, “I want to come to see you and talk this over, but I won’t if you remain angry. I may be crazy, but I bear no malice.”* The two remained friends, but such incidents must have placed limits upon how far Schomburg could trust McKay’s friendship.
Despite such difficulties, McKay persevered and by early September he had his manuscript ready to submit to his publisher. On September 11, 1936, he wrote Orrick Johns, the director of the New York City FWP, that he had completed his “new book, A Long Way from Home” and had “turned it in to the publisher.” McKay had written Johns to request his next “creative work assignment.” But he added that he would prefer “to continue under the old plan” until the government made clear whether a writer’s creative work would belong “to himself or the government.” Under the old assignment plan, McKay explained, he had sufficient time to complete his own work. He had concluded that it was “good” for a creative writer to “perform some kind of routine work,” though he admitted that “the greatest difficulty for me was signing in [in] the morning, because I work better in the early morning and by signing in I lost the first half of the day.” Since that inconvenience would continue under the new, proposed creative writing assignment, it would be just as well for him to remain on routine assignments. “I like that research work,” McKay concluded, “and I have been privileged to suggest the items I like to work on.”52
Whatever McKay’s initial misgivings about the new creative writing assignment proposed to him by Johns, he soon accepted it and became one of only a few writers on the New York project who were allowed to stay home and work on their own material.53 This soon proved a boon because Lee Furman rushed McKay’s manuscript through to the printer. By November, he had sent McKay the initial galleys for him to proofread. Over the next few weeks he worked closely with Furman to prepare the final proofs. By the end of the year, A Long Way from Home was ready for press.
In early January, McKay sat down to catch up on his correspondence. To James Ivy, he wrote that he had neglected answering his last letter because he had been busy with A Long Way from Home. He told Ivy that Lee Furman, his publisher, was the president of the Macauley Company but added that “he publishes the better kind of books under his own name.” Both he and McKay had high hopes that A Long Way from Home would be a success. McKay also informed Ivy that while writing the book he had virtually curtailed his social life. “The necessity of working was greater than the desire to fool around.”54
Despite his self-enforced isolation, McKay never lacked friends in Harlem, and after completing A Long Way from Home, he began to be more actively involved in the social and intellectual life of the Harlem community. In February his reemergence received a big boost with the appearance of A Long Way from Home. On May 4, 1937, Lee Furman hosted a reception and dinner for McKay at Sar-di’s for which invitations were extended to many of McKay’s friends and acquaintances in Harlem and New York literary circles. After all he had experienced since his return to the United States, his dinner at Sardi’s must have been for McKay a sweet triumph. He had dedicated A Long Way from Home “To All My Friends Everywhere,” and truly, despite his occasional outbursts of ill temper and spite, he did appreciate them. They had, he realized, made it possible for him to continue his literary career.55
His friends were delighted to read his memoirs, but almost all found something to criticize. Max Eastman, for example, thought A Long Way from Home “in many places very noble and large spirited.” He especially liked McKay’s accounts of Frank Harris, his trip to Russia, and his Liberator experiences. Eastman also appreciated Claude’s “tribute to Crystal, which,” he emphasized, “I mean to quote in my own autobiography.” He labeled as false, however, McKay’s assumptions that Eastman had been snubbed by Comintern officials and American Communist party delegates in 1922 even though, as McKay stated it, Eastman had been “as pure a Marxist as any of them.” He had not been snubbed, Eastman asserted, and he was not then, nor had he ever been, an orthodox Marxist. Eastman went on to deny, too, McKay’s further assumption that his alleged ill-treatment in 1922 had anything to do with his becoming a Trotsky-ist. Finally, Eastman also thought it callous of McKay to repeat the conversation they had had in Moscow about Lenin’s exceedingly plain wife. He had remarked to McKay that Lenin, gravely ill at the time, might “get well if he had a pretty girl.” Despite the embarrassment this printed remark now caused him, Eastman held no grudge against McKay. “It is no news to me,” he told McKay, “that you are impish on occasion. . . . Friends are pretty scarce around my diggings these days and you have always been a precious one.”56
Walter White was angrier about McKay’s treatment of him. Although McKay made plain his admiration of White, he asserted that the fair-skinned White was “Negroid simply because he closely identifies with the Negro group—just as a Teuton becomes Moslem if he embraces Islam. White is whiter than many Europeans—even biologically.” McKay devoted a page to the irony of White’s complexion and the questions it raised about race definition. By contrast, he spent only a couple of paragraphs discussing White’s dedicated service to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. To White, such treatment only revealed once more McKay’s West Indian prejudice against mulattoes.57
Sylvia Pankhurst was another who resented her portrait. From England, she informed McKay that she considered his account of her relationship with the socialist editor and publisher George Lansbury libelous. McKay had written that in 1920 she had refused to print an article of his critical of Lansbury because she owed Lansbury twenty pounds and had borrowed paper from him on which to print the Workers’ Dreadnought.58
Closer to home, Joel Spingarn wrote McKay a warm letter of appreciation. He had thoroughly enjoyed A Long Way from Home, he wrote, “and I owe you thanks for the hour or two of real enjoyment that this book has given me.” Like others, however, Spingarn believed that McKay had erred in his specific remembrance of him. As he remembered it, he and McKay had differed about the NAACP, not about Spingarn’s preference for McKay’s racial poems over his non-racial ones, as McKay had stated in A Long Way from Home. “I am glad to see,” Spingarn observed, “that the supreme contempt you felt for the Association then has been tempered by time.”59
Spingarn’s note prompted a warm letter of thanks from McKay in which, quite unintentionally, he once again managed to offend the aging and sensitive man. McKay wrote that he was “certain” he had not discussed the NAACP with Spingarn back in 1921–1922. They had instead differed over McKay’s poetry. Spingarn had admired McKay’s poems about the racial issue but had dismissed his other poems as at best “magazine verse.” Spingarn had told him that in his opinion they were dominated by poetic clichés and vastly inferior to his poems of racial protest. As for the NAACP, McKay maintained, he had more respect for it while on the Liberator than he did currently. He and other black radicals, he assured Spingarn, had appreciated its indispensable role as a legal defender of black rights, even while criticizing its middle-class orientation. McKay told Spingarn that he only brought the matter up again because “I am trying to be intellectually honest with myself. Of course I am very proud to admit that from my experience I have changed some of my ideas. Three years of living in Africa were like three generations of experience. But that doesn’t mean that I have arrived at the point of having faith in the old rotting bourgeois society. It means I am visualizing the new era of Labor and the Cooperative world as a progressive whole and not from a narrow and extreme radical point of view.”60
McKay’s letter was an honest statement of conviction. For Spingarn, however, it reopened old wounds. He had of late been ill and had no patience with what he mistakenly perceived as a veiled attack upon him. He replied that he remembered, among other things, that McKay had come asking his help “with arrogant manners.” McKay quickly replied. “I feel very badly,” he wrote, “that we should so completely misunderstand each other.” He had sometimes, he admitted, been “impulsive and angry but never arrogant” in his relations with anyone. On the contrary, McKay protested, he was so “sensitive about correct and decent personal intercourse . . . that... I have been told I was too polite. For that reason people have often mistook [sic] my gende ways for softness, thinking they could walk all over me.” McKay added that he had already apologized once to Spingarn, and in A Long Way from Home, he had “made the utmost gesture of a public apology” by showing “that in spite of my rudeness, you found me a publisher.” He had, moreover, never considered Spingarn a bourgeois person “in the French sense of Philistine, but in the radical sense of your being a man of wealth and naturally influenced by your position.” And, he continued,
Praise God I have never yet hated anyone merely for belonging to a different class or race. And I have real respect for the bourgeois who is honesdy fighting to maintain the standards of his class, because he thinks they are the best for society as a whole, even though I am opposed to him. I am far and away removed from any blind radical hate and have no use for radical bigots; that is why I find myself in disagreement with Trotsky and against any form ojf dictatorship and am intellectually very lonely because I am not sincerely in sympathy with any of the radical factions. . . .
I should like to feel that there was no unfriendliness between us. I rather think that in your contacts with Negroes you have met many who were insincere sycophants, just because they thought they could obtain a free mess of pottage by being sycophantic. Surely it should interest you that there is one who under the harshest circumstances has managed to maintain his individuality and integrity.*
There was a note of desperation in McKay’s letter to Spingarn. He had written A Long Way from Home expressly to clear up the many misapprehensions that existed among both blacks and whites, radical and conservative, about his literary career and political beliefs. He had expected enmity from those who differed with him politically and artistically, but it hurt to find he had also antagonized his friends.61
In A Long Way from Home, McKay projected a very definite picture of himself as first and foremost a literary artist in the romantic mold. His first objective had always been to experience life directly in order to communicate the truth of his experience in his art. This urge for new experiences as nourishment for his creative expression is a theme sustained throughout A Long Way from Home. Whatever stifled man’s potential to experience fully nature’s free gifts, McKay rejected.
By defining himself simply as an independent, free-spirited poet, McKay avoided almost entirely any close examination of those deep inner motivations that had moved him to choose the particular paths he had taken from Jamaica to New York, to Moscow, to Paris, and to Tangier. By becoming simply The Poet, he avoided, above all, any real discussion of how deeply involved he had truly been, both emotionally and intellectually, with communism between 1919 and 1923. As a consequence, A Long Way from Home became, as McKay intended it should be, a pleasandy impressionistic book, a seemingly effortless account of his travels and his encounters with the great and near-great of international communism and the literary world of Europe and America. Through it all, he portrayed himself as a black man intent upon remaining true to himself, yet accepting, too, the inescapable obligation to write truthfully about those qualities within himself and his race that both set blacks apart as unique and made them one with the rest of mankind. It was not a dishonest or ignoble goal; McKay had never been an introspective writer. But A Long Way from Home failed to convey the complexity of his life.
From a historical point of view, McKay’s discussions of his early years in New York with the Liberator, his English experience, and his trip to Russia are full of interesting details and insights into the men and women he knew and the events he witnessed. But he actually revealed very little about his personal life in A Long Way from Home. The details of his early childhood and youth, his intimate personal relationships as an adult, his initial attraction to radicalism, his chronic health problems, and his reasons for turning away from communism after 1923—all are shrouded in hints, vague generalizations, and outright denials. His insistence that he was never a member of the Communist party was less than the whole truth, as was his assertion that his health problems after 1923 had been temporary. There was almost no discussion of his political thought after 1923, because as a free spirit he had remained essentially consistent in his political outlook. International communism had betrayed itself by becoming intolerantly sectarian and dogmatic. In responding to a recent attack on him in the New Masses for the alleged lack of class consciousness and class action in his poetry and novels, McKay asserted that his poems remained their own best defense against his critics and that in his novels he had, unlike most communists, written of the black proletariat from an intimate knowledge of their “inner lives.” In Home to Harlem, Jake had in fact demonstrated class consciousness when he “refused to scab,” and he had revealed an even higher sense of social propriety when he refused to pimp. “Perhaps,” McKay mischievously concluded, “a higher sense than many of us critical scribblers.”62
In A Long Way from Home, McKay had very largely achieved the kind of informal, direct, impressionistic book he had originally outlined in his letters to Edwin Embree in 1935. And Embree, for one, thought McKay had succeeded admirably. “The thing I liked best,” Embree wrote, “was your cozy, companionable style. Amazingly you created the feeling not that you as a single individual were talking or writing, but that a group of us were having a free exchange—all discussing and telling tales and philosophizing together with a lot of give and take.” He also liked McKay’s “freedom from pathological infection” by either communism or color and race consciousness. McKay’s “eclectic attitude” appealed to Embree. He believed that in A Long Way from Home, McKay resembled “both in style and attitude” his old friend Clarence Day. Embree explained that “Day used to like ideas while they were forming, but he seldom liked people’s books. He said he liked eggs but couldn’t stand roast chicken. He would have liked A Long Way from Home; it has so much egginess and so little of the formality and stolidness of a roast.”63
In the midst of a decade in which fierce debates raged about the proper function of writers and artists in a world beset by perilous chaos and change, McKay in A Long Way from Home took what appeared to many a simple-minded and thoroughly outmoded position. To him, it was necessary for the poet to remain above the fray in order to hold fast to his immemorial function as an interpreter of reality to mortal men. Thus, he could assert that some sort of socialism must eventually triumph over the old capitalist system and that blacks had to develop a stronger group spirit in order to overcome their disadvantages, while at the same time disavowing any political role for himself either as a socialist or a black. He might dream of “a great modern Negro leader” who would guide blacks out of their confusion and inertia, but all he could give such a leader would be “a monument in verse.”64
Such a position left McKay vulnerable to attack, and it soon came. In a review of A Long Way from Home in the New Challenge, a black quarterly with a decided leftist bent, Alain Locke hoisted McKay on one of his own petards by characterizing him as a “spiritual truant” and insincere and disloyal to every group with whom he had ever associated himself. Although an undoubted talent and a writer of great potential, by his unwillingness to avow loyalty to any racial leadership, political party, or even his expatriate friends in Europe, McKay had, in fact, revealed himself as the only “unabashed, Tlayboy of the Negro Renaissance.’” At the same time, McKay insisted that blacks should seek greater unity. Locke maintained:
Even a fascinating style and the naivest egotism cannot cloak such inconsistency or condone such lack of common loyalty. . . . For a genius maturing in a decade of racial self-expression and enjoying the fruits of it all and living into a decade of social issues and conflict and aware of that, to have repudiated all possible loyalties amounts to a self-imposed apostasy. McKay is after all the dark-skinned psychological twin of that same Frank Harris, whom he so cleverly portrays and caricatures; a versatile genius caught in the egocentric predicament of aesthetic vanity and exhibitionism. And so, he stands to date, the enfant terrible of the Negro Renaissance, where with a little loyalty and consistency he might have been at least its Villon and perhaps its Voltaire.65
Locke’s incisive indictment would have been more honest and effective had he anywhere acknowledged in his review that McKay had singled him out for special criticism in A Long Way from Home. McKay had never forgiven Locke his editorial sins, and he described the fastidious Locke as “a perfect symbol of the Aframerican rococo in his personality,” whose academic and pedestrian conception of art, together with his editorial arrogance, made him totally unfit to serve as a spokesman for the black arts in America.66 Locke’s failure in his review to acknowledge and answer directly this highly personal attack must have confirmed Claude’s already low opinion of him, though for once Locke was direct and to the point in his criticism.
Taking up where Locke left off, the young black poet M. B. Tolson, in a well-written review of A Long Way from Home, diagnosed McKay’s trouble from a leftist perspective. For Tolson, McKay’s problem lay in his inability to understand “that Marxism can remove racial antagonisms. Therein lies the tragedy of McKay. . . . [He] failed to discover Marx’s economic interpretation of racial prejudice.” The political lessons McKay thought he had learned during World War I were being learned anew by a new generation of black writers. Most, including Tolson, were destined to follow essentially the same intellectual route McKay had taken. The greatest of these, Richard Wright, had already made his debut, and Tolson contrasted the disillusionment and “never-ending spiritual odyssey” of McKay with the confident self-assertiveness of young Richard Wright. “The essential difference between the unshakable loyalty of Richard Wright and the spiritual truancy of Claude McKay lies in [the] dramatic Marxist vision of Richard Wright.”67
George Streator, another left-leaning black reviewer, took a different view. In the New York Herald Tribune Books, he called McKay a revolutionary poet and thinker but thought him highly prejudiced against mulattoes. He also accused McKay of dodging the draft during World War I by working on the railroad and insinuated that when racial rioting had broken out in 1919, McKay had gone to England for his safety. James Weldon Johnson had a ready explanation for Streator’s curious review. In a letter of congratulations and praise for A Long Way from Home, Johnson wrote, “Probably you . . . have divined that [Streator’s] attitude is in no small measure due to the realistic and common sense views that you express on Soviet Russia and Communism. You may confidently look forward to having all Marxian Negro brain-trusters coming down on you like a pile of bricks. These Negro near-Marxists are often quite amusing, if not ridiculous. You, of course, know many times more about Russia and Communism than all of them put together.”68
Not all black critics panned A Long Way from Home. Henry Lee Moon, for example, gave it a polite, though by no means enthusiastic, review in the New Republic. The white press generally conceded that McKay wrote well and that his latest book was interesting, but A Long Way from Home generated few raves. It was simply a pleasant book, as easily forgotten as read. Some critics were troubled that McKay did not really delve deeply enough into the problem of blacks, especially black intellectuals and writers. As J. S. Balch of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch expressed it, “One might wish for less emphasis on the old conception of the poet as apart from other men. But who would quarrel with a book that runs as smoothly and absorbingly as good conversation over a glass of beer?”69 Simple communication, McKay was discovering, did not necessarily lead to either understanding or reconciliation with one’s fellow man.