12

Right Turn to Catholicism, 1940–1948

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen.

—Hebrews 11:1

For almost four years after the publication of Harlem: Negro Metropolis, McKay remained in New York City. He continued to write an occasional article, and he tried also to publish at least one more book-length manuscript. In the years since 1937, he had tinkered off and on with another novel, which he called “Harlem Glory.” Like much of McKay’s fiction, “Harlem Glory” consisted largely of thinly disguised autobiography. It related the fortunes of one Buster South, a black bon vivant who, like McKay, returned to Harlem and the Great Depression after a long European expatriation. Upon Buster’s return, he became involved in two quite different movements that were agitating the common people of Harlem. One was led by a self-proclaimed god, who called himself Glory Savior, McKay’s fictional prototype of Father Divine. The other was directed by a gaudily attired Moslem of Afro-American origin known as Omar. Omar represented Sufi Abdul Hamid, whose boycott in the early 1930s eventually forced Harlem merchants to hire black clerks. In “Harlem Glory,” the fictional Omar formed an organization called the Yeomen of Labor and began a similar campaign.¹

In essence, “Harlem Glory” covered in fictional form much the same ground that McKay surveyed so thoroughly in Harlem: Negro Metropolis. For that reason, perhaps, all his efforts to find a publisher after 1940 came to nothing, and he apparently never finished the story. In general, it represented no improvement over his factual survey in Harlem, but like all his fiction it had its moments of power and genuine insight. McKay observed, for instance, that the black intelligentsia tended to consider Omar and Glory Savior simply theatrical and unrealistic in their efforts to lead the Harlem masses. But for McKay there were profound lessons to be learned in the unfolding of their dramas. “The two movements of Glory Soul [sic] and of Omar respectively were like a two-faced mirror reflecting the strange un-fathomed mind of the colored minority. Expressed in those movements were all its hidden confused reactions, its hopes and fetish fears, its Uncle Tom traditions, its desires, appetites, aspirations, its latent strength and obvious weakness.” And in the person of Buster South, McKay also gave expression to the loneliness, frustration, shame, and anger he had experienced upon returning to Harlem, broke, after so many years abroad. “Buster felt . . . that everybody and everything in Harlem were against him. It was as if there were a conspiracy against him. The old crowd [was] mocking him. He felt it in their attitude, even though they were not all. . . offensive. . . . ‘I guess they resented me all the time. . . and now I am out of luck they have a chance to show it. We Negroes are a lot of crabs in a barrel, pulling down anyone what’s trying to climb out.’”²

In “Harlem Glory,” Buster even left Harlem for a while and went, as McKay had, to a camp for the destitute in upstate New York. Like McKay, he left no stone unturned in trying to find a place for himself in depression-ridden New York. Buster even joined the local Elks Club in his restless search for a new start in America. Like all his other novels, “Harlem Glory,” though unfinished, recorded McKay’s efforts to reconcile himself with his black kinsmen, while at the same time portraying them, with all their shrewdness and confusion, in vivid, sweeping colors.

Despite all his best efforts, McKay had failed to establish himself securely in Harlem, and on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, he remained as essentially broke and adrift as he had been upon his return to the United States in 1934. On November 5, 1941, the black poet Arna Bontemps wrote to his friend Langston Hughes that he had recently “met McKay and took him to dinner.” Bontemps explained that McKay had been “all charm—the gende, wistful poet.” He noted that this had deprived him of seeing McKay’s more outspoken side, though “he did . . . blast Stalin.” Bontemps also described McKay’s apartment “at 33 West 125th Street on the top floor” above an old storefront. “He has what looks like a typical Greenwich Village artist’s roost of the more musty variety. Across the hall young [Romare] Bearden has a studio. There is a genuine bohemian note up there—like the old days. Even the international note of the Latin Quarter is struck. Claude has a Japanese friend who hangs around— a gray-haired oriental who wears corduroy slacks and talks ‘art’ very fluently. The place is warmed by an oil heater that smokes a bit. Claude looks well-fed and reasonably well-clothed, but he says he is terribly broke.”³

About the time he was meeting Arna Bontemps, McKay published in the New Leader an article about black popular opinion on World War II and America’s approaching involvement in it. He expressed the strong ambivalence and irony with which all blacks viewed the war against Nazi racism and Japanese imperialism. McKay pointed out that although black soapbox orators on Harlem street corners had no love for Hitler, who thought even less of them than he did the Jews, they were not eager to defend the British Empire. Their main concern remained their own abysmal situation in the United States, where in the South the majority of blacks still lived under state regimes that subjected them to a racist oppression that seemed to differ little from Hitler’s national subjugation of German Jews.⁴

In his letters, McKay continued to express his concern that the Soviet Union represented a greater threat to civilization than did Hitler’s Germany, which he never considered had much chance for victory. The Soviet Union, he reiterated, masked a refurbished Oriental despotism in the guise of a modern workers’ state that divided and confused progressive forces in the West in a way that Hitler could never do.⁵

McKay recognized the injustices suffered by Jews under Hitler, but he continued to believe, rightly or wrongly, that blacks should concentrate on their own problems and not deliver their support unreservedly to American Jews in their fight against nazism unless they could see benefits for themselves at home. He would have been more sympathetic to the Jews’ plight in Europe if he had had any idea of the unimaginable slaughter that awaited them (and many others) in Hitler’s extermination camps.⁶

Early in 1942, McKay applied again for a Rosenwald Fund grant, this time to do a study of West Indian immigrants in New York City. “My purpose,” he explained, “is to write a book about them, which is to be entitled, The Tropics in New York.’” Natives of the Caribbean, he estimated, constituted about one-third of Harlem’s population and numbered about 100,000. He wished to explain their “native backgrounds” and “the customs and activities of the various island groups” in order to understand better “their contributions to the social, political and religious life of Harlem, showing them in their churches and clubs and in business. Also their particular forms of amusement, marriage customs and distinctive style of cuisine.” McKay also planned to give some attention to the small groups from various parts of Africa who had settled in Harlem and other parts of New York. They would, he emphasized, all be studied as individual groups “(instead of persons) in their relationship and associations with the native American group of Negroes.”⁷

It was a sound plan, and McKay seemed uniquely qualified to write such a study. He asked for fifteen hundred dollars. His dossier included good recommendations from Judge James S. Watson of the New York Municipal Court and librarian Ernestine Rose of the Schomburg Collection. Both felt, as Watson put it, that McKay was “highly qualified” to do the study. Other strong recommendations came from John Dewey, Louis Adamic, and Eugene Lyons. Dewey’s letter was typical. “From both personal acquaintance and a knowledge of his published writings, I have no hesitation in recommending Mr. McKay highly. . . . I should want... to emphasize his fairness and independence of judgment as well as his power of work, of gathering and organizing information, and his very definite ability in literary presentation.”⁸

These five recommendations were significandy qualified by a querulous evaluation of McKay made by Arna Bontemps, who had met McKay only briefly the previous October in New York. Their only other contact had been earlier in the summer of 1941 when Bontemps had offered McKay ten dollars for permission to reprint seven of his poems in an anthology for Harper. McKay had protested that Harper was a rich firm and could surely pay at least five dollars for each poem.⁹ This incident, perhaps, combined with McKay’s reputation for contentiousness, gave Bontemps the excuses he needed to kill McKay’s chances of securing a second Rosenwald fellowship. Bontemps, himself a recent recipient of such a grant, wrote in an informal, initialed evaluation that

Claude is an exasperating individual, a) he is sour and cantankerous; b) he never seems to do the writing of which he is capable.

I doubt that the fellowship will help him, but one must admit a) that he is a gifted writer, at his best, b) that his references are of the best, c) that he projects a fascinating book, and d) that his talents are perfectly suited for this work.

But Claude has recently done a poor job on his book, “Harlem,” failed in a re-write job on “They Knew Lincoln,” and I doubt that he’s putting much heart in his work. I hope I’m wrong. Maybe a fellowship will revive him. God knows he needs the money.¹⁰

It was an opinionated and spiteful attack, and it had its intended effect. In a brief sheet summarizing the judges’ opinions of McKay’s candidacy were the following remarks: “too old[;] we’ve helped this man once[;] He is a good writer but we have no further call[;] Bon-temps says he is good but a fellowship wouldn’t help him now.”¹¹

It was a callous dismissal and a sad commentary on the Rosenwald selection process. His opponents never understood or appreciated the nature of McKay’s cantankerousness. He attacked directly, never in-directly; publicly, never obliquely behind one’s back. And there were limits to how far he would go in his attacks upon his enemies. When, for instance, Benjamin Mandel had written in September, 1939, apparently to suggest that if McKay volunteered to testify against the Communists before the Dies Committee in Washington, he would get free publicity for his latest book and speed his citizenship process, McKay replied that he had nothing to tell that he had not already printed. He added that he could never do as Mandel had suggested for personal gain. “I am sure,” he wrote, “that the real America would not think I was contributing anything to good citizenship by being a son-of-a-bitch.” The following spring, on April 13, 1940, McKay received his final U.S. citizenship certificate without testifying before any committee.¹²

The Rosenwald Fund evaluation sheet had listed McKay as a freelance writer “and porter.”¹³ With no fellowship aid forthcoming, his literary prospects looked dim. He desperately needed a good job, but before he could find one, early in 1942, his health finally collapsed. Influenza, high blood pressure, heart disease, and poverty all threatened to kill him. Although he still had friends, black and white, he had grown weary of seeking their help, and he was too sick to look for work or other aid. Ellen Tarry, the young writer with whom he had worked on the FWP and the Negro Authors’ Guild, found him extremely ill and alone in a wretched Harlem basement apartment.

Tarry happened to be a Catholic, and she sought for Claude the assistance of the young men and women at Friendship House, a Catholic lay organization on 135th Street in Harlem. They saw to it that he received medical aid and nursed him back onto his feet through the spring of 1942. McKay was grateful for the help, and he was especially impressed that they had extended their assistance without asking him to accept their religion.¹⁴

By 1942, McKay had grown disillusioned with what he liked to call all the modern “isms”—communism, socialism, liberalism, and conservatism. All political ideologies, it seemed to him, with their high-minded rhetoric, masked selfish, opportunistic motives. A romantic rebel from an early age, he had responded intuitively to those movements that seemed to promise a better, freer life for mankind. All had disappointed him. At the outbreak of World War I, the European agnostics and rationalists whom he had idolized in Jamaica all suddenly became rabid nationalists. And after the death of Lenin, it had become evident to him that a monstrous and overbearing dictatorship in the name of the proletariat—ruthless, efficient, and aggressively tyrannical—had imposed itself upon the Russian population in place of the decayed czarist regime that had been swept away during World War I.

Later, in Spain and in Morocco, he saw for the first time peoples whose religions still permeated deeply the fabric of their everyday lives. He had been impressed in Spain, above all, with the unassuming dignity Spaniards seemed to accord every man without regard to his station in life. In Spain and Morocco, he had felt strongly for the first time the need to become a part of a community of believers. While in England in 1920, George Bernard Shaw had lectured him upon the spiritual grandeur and beauty of Europe’s cathedrals, and he had ever since made a point of visiting them during his travels. And even earlier, Frank Harris had preached to him the significance of Jesus’ example. But only in Spain had he felt for the first time the full significance of Catholicism as a way of life and bedrock for an entire civilization.¹⁵

Finally, after failing miserably to find any secure place for himself with the American Negro community, McKay was more than ready for the helping hand extended to him by the young Catholic idealists of Friendship House. If he could find no refuge in the human community, he soon determined to seek it within the community of God.

Friendship House had been founded in Harlem in 1938 by Catherine de Hueck, a white Russian emigree whose family had suffered severely during the Russian Revolution. After World War I, she lived first in Great Britain and then, from the early 1920s onward, in the United States and Canada. In Toronto in the early 1930s, she established in one of its poorest neighborhoods her first Friendship House. It provided a variety of “study Clubs and recreational facilities” for the youth in the vicinity. After she proved herself there, the church invited her to establish another Friendship House in Ottawa. And in 1938, “three eminent priests” in New York City, alarmed by “the evergrowing influence of Communism” in Harlem, invited her to establish there her first interracial Friendship House. As one who had herself endured considerable poverty and suffering, “the Baroness,” as her devoted followers called her, believed that lay “Catholic Action” was absolutely necessary to counter the insidious spread of atheistic communism. She defined her “Catholic Action” movement as pne with many aspects, “but all converge on one goal—to lead souls to God.” And she explained, “It can do this by getting to the rock bottom of our ills, which are fundamentally neither political nor economic, but ethical and moral, by checking the greed and selfishness which are at the root of the trouble, and by establishing a society really based on Christian principles.” She endorsed cooperative “back-to-the-land movements,. . . credit unions. . . family life. . . youth [and] labor [action]. . . and marriage.” Above all, Catholics must seize the lead in alleviating human misery. For at the base of Catherine de Hueck’s activism was a determined anticommunism. Communism meant militant atheism, and “no matter what form of Catholic Action is undertaken combatting atheism on all its main points must be included in the program.” Before founding her first Friendship House, de Hueck had been asked by Archbishop Neil McNeil of Toronto “to . . . make a survey of the Communists’ propaganda in Toronto and New York, whence Toronto took orders.” As a consequence, “for a year, she lived with the Communists of Toronto, participating in all their activities as an observer, and often traveling to the U.S.A. to check some information or development.” After submitting her report, she decided to launch on her own a Catholic Action movement and founded in Toronto the first Friendship House. She began it without official church funding, as an act of faith and Christian zeal, certain that financing would “come by praying and begging for it. Have not many movements in the Church started on Faith and prayer in past centuries! Why not ours?” Claude McKay could relate to such a movement.¹⁶

As soon as he was able, he began to visit Friendship House regularly. He particularly enjoyed the young people there, and he took seriously the Baroness’ insistence that mankind’s basic spirituality should not be allowed to succumb to either dialectical materialism or the rampant greed that lay at the heart of Western capitalism. As far as McKay was concerned, Protestantism had long ago sold its soul to Mammon. In a world beset by raging wars and empty rhetoric, the Roman Catholic church still stood as a bulwark against all the aggressive forces at loose in the world, forces that everywhere threatened “man’s divinity” and the supreme “mystery” at the heart of human existence.¹⁷

All McKay’s attempts at political and social moderation in the 1930s had only resulted in conflict, confusion, and further isolation. He had not found the community he sought in the world. By 1942, he began to wonder if he had not all along been seeking it in the wrong places.¹⁸

McKay never recovered from the illness that he first experienced in such acute form in 1942. His heart was irreparably diseased and the high blood pressure that had afflicted him for so long only complicated his problems. As in the past, he often suffered severe headaches and dizziness, now complicated by shortness of breath and extreme fatigue.¹⁹

Still, he had to make a living, and in the summer of 1942 he decided he should try to get a job with Elmer Davis’ Office of War Information, a governmental agency devoted to explaining America’s war efforts to the world. As he explained to Max Eastman in July, he was especially qualified to write and report upon North Africa and the Caribbean, and his wide travels would be a benefit on any project he might undertake. Eastman agreed that McKay was well qualified for such a job, but he took the occasion to point out to McKay that the “only reason” he did not have a responsible position already was that “you don’t like people well enough to handle them and get along with them skillfully, as any kind of administrator must.” Eastman went on to add that anyone could see that that was his basic problem.²⁰

McKay disagreed and scolded Eastman, as he said, for lecturing “me like an old country parson preaching against liquor, while holding a flask on his hip. You should be aware that the chief reason why I have not had a job equal to my intellectual attainments is simply because I have no close academic associates nor college degree, and also I am a Negro. My racial group is even more than the white, narrow and hidebound about college qualifications. I know many persons in it who are not very capable, but have had good jobs because they were graduates of Harvard and Yale and Columbia. . . . I feel bitter, because your statement proves that after 23 years, you know very little about me; your impression is wrong.”*

Eastman was surely right about McKay’s basic impatience with people. Nonetheless, he apologized for criticizing him, and he sent Claude a strong letter of recommendation. “I knew that I had a disposition to give you semi-parental advice,” Max confessed, “but it had not got through my head that it was distasteful to you. I will never do it again.”²¹

For the next two months, McKay concentrated on getting the position he wanted with the Office of War Information. He was still sick much of the time and always broke. Friends gave him money from time to time, and he took an occasional temporary job. But he turned down a publisher’s offer of a sizable advance for a book outline. To Harold Jackman’s sister I vie, a consistent friend during the 1940s, McKay explained, “I haven’t been able to concentrate on a plot It’s quite impossible when one’s mind is distracted. People can’t realize the state of one’s mind under such conditions, and the few I meet make me angry by telling me how happy I look. I suppose because I don’t go around with a doleful face.” He continued to see close friends, such as Ivie and Harold Jackman and Countee Cullen and his wife Ida. Besides enjoying their companionship, he depended upon them for loans and, above all, for solid letters of recommendation. Early in September, he reminded Ivie that “I sent your name as a sponsor on one of my applications and so if you are approached, please ballyhoo for me.”²²

His persistence paid off. On September 23, 1942, McKay was informed he had a job with the Office of War Information in New York City. He was relieved and happy. But he warned Ivie not to mention it to the others, “for I have only a temporary trial for a month,” and he still had to be investigated by the FBI. Others like himself, he wrote, had been “fired after investigation.” At first, everything seemed to go well, but suddenly, on February 16, 1943, he informed Ivie in another note that he had missed a theater engagement with her and other friends because “I had just lost my job and felt extremely down—no good for gay society.” He had worked a little over three months, mostly (to judge from the available evidence) on radio scripts about American military actions and commanders in North Africa.²³

McKay never explained just why he was fired, but he indicated that his superiors were constandy intriguing to hire their friends. He may well have been bumped to make way for someone’s current favorite. Whatever the reason, it meant that he had to start another nerve-racking job search. In May he was still looking, while handicapped by a persistent cold. To Ivie Jackman he wrote on May 11, 1943, that his illness made him “a very miserable person, especially as I cannot stay in bed as I have so many things to attend to. So I am in the position of begging all my friends for help again. You remember I predicted it. One gratifying fact in the situation is that the Federal authorities have been busily investigating and Houseman and de Groot (the two responsible for getting me out) have been kicked out!” McKay tried hard to get another government position, “for which,” he explained to Countee Cullen, “I am qualified and feel I could be honest to myself in doing.”²⁴

Another writing position never materialized, however, and in early June, McKay accepted a job as a riveter at the federal shipyard in Port Newark, across the river from New York City. For some reason, no physical examination was required, even though the work was laborious and the hours long. In no way was he physically able to bear the strain the job imposed on him, but he tried to make the best of it. He was tired of begging.²⁵ In mid-June he wrote to Mary Keating, one of his Catholic friends from Friendship House, and explained the situation.

At present I am working in a war plant, long hours and monotonous and uncongenial work, but the pay is very good and I can purchase the necessary material things which I need. So I don’t do any writing but I have wonderful stuff working in my head. And they’ll blaze a trail when I finally get to writing and publishing them. However my health isn’t the best. I never did quite get over that pleurisy following the influenza attack last year and I suffer from shortness of breath. This is not so helpful, for the work I do is strenuous.”*

Friends had warned him against taking the position; their forebodings proved all too accurate. On June 25, 1943, he suffered a disabling stroke while on the job in Port Newark. Shortly afterward, a Harlem friend, Miss Vereda Pearson, a staff musician at the Harlem Recreation Center, described Claude’s condition in a letter to Mary Keating. He had been “knocked off his feet on the job and the next day was partially blind.” The stroke had affected the left side of his face. It also affected his gait when he walked. He was soon back on his feet, but Miss Pearson stressed that his physical appearance was deceiving. He looked fairly good. “But,” Pearson wrote, “I want to impress on you the fact that Claude is really very ill. . . . Now if you notice carefully, you see that he does not walk normally, the left side of his face is dead, he can savor food only on the right side of his mouth and his eyes dance, so that he cannot read the newspaper.” He did not immediately notify his closest black friends of his condition. To Countee Cullen, he later explained that he had not wanted to scare them. Freda Kirchwey and Max Eastman were soon told of McKay’s condition, and they both helped. Kirchwey wired Edwin Embree of the Rosenwald Fund, who generously responded with two hundred dollars to aid Claude during his recuperation. Eastman gave another fifty, and Mary and her husband, Tom Keating, offered McKay the use of their country cottage near New Milford, Connecticut, for the rest of the summer, or as soon as his doctors felt he could safely leave their care in New York City.²⁶

At the end of July, McKay was allowed to leave for New Milford, and he stayed at the Keatings’ place until the end of October. To Tom Keating, he confessed that the stroke had frightened him. “But,” he added, “I couldn’t blame the thing on Commies or anybody, it was God himself!”²⁷

Even before his stroke, McKay had written to Mary Keating that “I wouldn’t mind doing some work for the Roman Catholic setup. I have no sympathy with the Radicals, I feel estranged even from the Left Liberals, because they give me a sense of frustration and confusion. And as I think I wrote to you last year and said to the Baroness and as I have said to many people, I believe that the Catholic Church has a tremendously important role to play in the ending of this war and the reorganization of the world.” In the same letter, written ten days before his stroke, McKay indicated that he might join the Catholic church and stated quite clearly what his reasons would be for taking such a step.

I am quite aware that my act would be of more social than of religious meaning, if you can differentiate between both. I know for example, that the Communists are fighting me, that their influence is considerable among the colored intellectuals and that they go to great lengths to keep me out of their councils. Not that the colored intellectuals are against me! But they feel they cannot offend any powerful group of whites who claim to be friends of colored people! And so I would like to have the means and the weapons to fight back. While I was working for the government, and had to be investigated by the F.B.I, and the Civil Service Commission, I discovered that the Commies and their fellow travelers had done much to smear my character. In spite of that my reputation check was good. But it is not merely from personal but more from the broader social aspect that I feel I must fight the Communists. If I were drawn to the Church it would be as T. S. Eliot, who became an Anglo-Catholic from purely intellectual and social reasons.²⁸

McKay, of course, never did anything for “purely intellectual and social reasons,” and his conversion to Catholicism was not as calculating and deliberate as this passage might suggest. It reflected, nevertheless, the objective conditions, as he saw them, that impelled him toward the church.

Tom and Mary Keating had moved to Chicago since Claude had first met them at Friendship House in the winter of 1942. And after his stroke, Vereda Pearson wrote Mary Keating urging her to do all she could to help Claude obtain the kind of responsible and intellectually challenging position he deserved. She added that “I know that Claude has a much larger following than he imagines—especially among his own people.”²⁹

In Chicago, the Keatings were associated with Bishop Bernard J. Sheil. His social activism and work among the youth of Chicago had made him well known among social reformers. The Keatings participated in many programs at his Catholic Youth Center, which Bishop Sheil had nourished into a thriving center of Catholic social, educational, and religious activities. They also worked with the Friendship House that Catherine de Hueck had recently established in Chicago.³⁰

Pearson’s letter led Mary Keating to speak to Bishop Sheil about Claude, who in August, 1943, while in Connecticut, indicated to her that he wanted to work in Chicago. At the end of October, he left Connecticut and returned to New York City, where he continued his correspondence with the Keatings. By then, he had already decided to join the church. He wanted first, however, to secure a job in Chicago. From Connecticut, he had sent Mary Keating biographical information to pass on to Bishop Sheil, but months dragged by before any definite word came from Chicago. ³¹

In the interval, McKay battled to regain his health and fought off boredom by continuing a long cycle of sonnets he had begun to write while in Connecticut. They were much different from his previous poetry, less lyrical and more like satiric prose summaries of all the controversies he had had during the last decade. To Mary, he explained that he was glad to be writing them because “when I become a Catholic I’ll bring along something and critics won’t be able to say that I was finished when I joined.”³²

His “Cycle Manuscript” contained few really good poems, but they do provide a detailed summary of the disillusionment, bitterness, and ironic cynicism he felt toward Communists, liberals, black intellectuals, and the nation’s myopic approach to black America. The first poem of the cycle well expressed his intent and may be the best, in stricdy artistic terms, of the entire group.³³

These poems distilled from my experience,
Exacdy tell my feelings of today,
The cruel and the vicious and the tense
Conditions which have hedged my bitter way
Of life. But though I suffered much I bore
My cross and lived to put my trouble in song
I stripped down harshly to the naked core
Of hatred based on the essential wrong!

But tomorrow, I may sing another tune,
No critic, white or black, can tie me down,
Maybe a fantasy of a fairy moon,
Or the thorns the soldiers weaved for Jesus’ crown,
For I, a poet, can soar with unclipped wings,
From earth to heaven, while chanting of all things.*

After returning to New York from Connecticut in November, 1943, McKay spent the remainder of the year in and out of the hospital. Once again, friends contributed money for his support. On November 16, Freda Kirchwey wrote Edwin Embree to ask if he knew of any organization that might help McKay. Claude’s prospects for recovery, she explained, were not good. “Max Eastman tells me that he will almost certainly not be able to work again. Both his heart and kidneys are affected and his blood pressure is very high. While the doctor believes he may survive for a good while, he seems to have little hope for actual recovery. This is all terribly sad and the situation is made worse by the fact that Claude has absolutely no source of income.”³⁴

When not in the hospital, McKay stayed at the 135th Street YMCA in Harlem and waited impatiently for word of a job in Chicago. For him, it was a “lonely . . . transitional period”; he missed the bright young Catholics he had met in 1942 and yearned “to talk to somebody” intelligent who had already gone through a religious conversion experience. To Mary Keating he wrote, “If I had had some friend like that, I’d have been a Catholic long ago.”³⁵

Finally, in early April, Bishop Sheil offered McKay a job as an advisor on Russian and Negro affairs. With much relief, McKay accepted it. By the middle of April, he was ready to leave for Chicago. To Mary Keating he wrote, “Now I am looking forward to seeing you and Tom and I hope it will be a happy meeting. New York has been so heaped upon me like a pyramid, I am happy to get away and from under.” He was excited about the trip. “It is something,” he wrote Keating, “I have wanted to do for a long time.” Yet, it was “a leap of faith,” and McKay had his fears. He well knew that with the world in upheaval few things remained certain. As he expressed it to Keating, “Everything in the world is changing so rapidly and ideas [are] so fluid that one can hardly hold on to them. And one doesn’t know how much people are really interested in fixed principles today, because even those are being uprooted.” Whatever his doubts and reservations, Claude had committed himself and there was no turning back. On April 15, 1944, he left for Chicago and a new life within the Roman Catholic church.³⁶

Once in Chicago, McKay did not immediately enter the church, though he did begin to take instruction and to consult with a number of priests. In addition, he wrote Max Eastman several letters in which he revealed his spiritual travails, doubts, and hesitations. On June 1, 1944, he informed Eastman that he was “settling down” to his work, “doing a lot of reading and research, especially on Catholic work among Negroes, and I am also researching myself to discover how I can be a Catholic. Because if and when I take the step I want to be intellectually honest and sincere about it. From the social angle I am quite clear and determined. I know the Catholic Church is the one great organization which can check the Communists and probably lick them. But there is also the religious angle.” McKay went on to call Eastman’s attention to one other person close to the Liberator in the 1920s who had become a Catholic activist. She was Dorothy Day, editor of the socialist-pacifist Catholic Worker.³⁷

Max would have none of it. Both his parents had been ministers. He remained a firm nonbeliever and considered the Catholic church a form of religious totalitarianism hardly distinguishable in its essence from the Bolshevik brand. He pleaded with McKay to stand fast in his agnosticism. “All these years, at such cost and with such heroism, you resisted the temptation to warp your mind and morals in order to join the Stalin church. Why warp it the other way now for the Catholics? Why not die firm, free and intelligent as you have lived? To see you go the way of Heywood Broun—so sick a finish, disproving, so far as you can, everything you’ve stood for—handing the Stalinists just what they want. Can nobody stand fast for the truth?”³⁸

McKay loved Max, but he would not be deterred. There is a mystery to life, he reminded him, that grew the more one learned of life. Everyone felt it, and the common people, above all, accepted the reality of it and believed in God. McKay protested that he had always had, at bottom, a religious impulse, and it had grown stronger in Europe and Morocco. “By becoming a Catholic,” he wrote, “I would merely be giving Religion the proper place it had in my nature and in man’s nature. The Communists solve this problem by making a religion of Communism, or by becoming hypocrites.”³⁹

Later in the summer, McKay returned to the subject. He admitted that had he remained in Morocco he would have become a Moslem, or if he had resided in India or Japan he would have accepted other religions. But he was a child of the West, and he would become a Catholic as “an act of faith.” As far as he was concerned, there was simply nowhere else to go. “I no longer think it is smart or enlightened to be a rationalist or an agnostic. I don’t believe in Communism or National Socialism or Democracy as a solution to man’s problems here on earth. The Catholic Church does not pretend to have any solution either, but it does provide an outlet for my mystical feelings and I do believe in the mystery of the symbol of the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, through which all of humanity may be united in brotherly love.”⁴⁰

Two months later, McKay solemnly announced to Eastman that “on October 11, The Feast of the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I was baptised into the Catholic (Roman) Faith.” Ironically, in the same letter he raised again all his old intellectual doubts and hesitations and concluded that “’truth and mental integrity’” were simply “relative human things.” Perhaps, he said, even the Marxists were right in concluding that “every human thought, emotion and action is determined by dialectical materialism.” As for himself, he wrote, “I prefer the Catholic Church and its symbolic interpretation of the reality of Christ Crucified.” For him, he confessed, it was “a new experience and, I suppose, the final stage of my hectic life. I am not the less a fighter.”⁴¹

While taking his final steps toward church membership, McKay had also been integrating himself into the working life of the Catholic Youth Organization and the Sheil School, its education arm. Early in June, however, he had first to be admitted to a hospital for two weeks. While there, doctors discovered he had a greatly enlarged heart. It was, McKay wrote to Ivie Jackman, “as big as a balloon.”⁴² He congratulated her on hospitalizing a sick relative. “Christ knows, I am always glad to go into a hospital, where I can be taken care of,” he added. McKay responded satisfactorily to his treatment and in July began to teach a night course on Negro literature at the Sheil School. When he came to the modern period and the Negro Renaissance, he started with Carl Van Vechten and “finished up with Richard Wright.” McKay tried hard to minimize Wright’s importance, but he could hardly avoid Native Son, Wright’s hair-raising novel of the completely alienated and dehumanized black slum killer in Chicago named Bigger Thomas. “I pointed out,” he explained to Ivie Jackman, “that Wright was an excellent writer of horror stories of the Edgar Allan Poe or King Kong order, but the white critics were practically destroying him when they tried to hoist him up as a Negro leader and say that Bigger Thomas was a symbol of the Negro race.” He felt that Bigger was no more a symbol of the race than “the Negro characters created by Thomas Dixon ... in the Clansman or the Leopard’s Spots.”⁴³

It was ironic and sad that McKay, whose critics had compared him to Thomas Dixon after Home to Harlem and Banjo, should now link Wright’s creation to the same white racist novelist of earlier decades. But he could not forgive Wright his association with the Communist party. In the fall, he had occasion to speak on trends in Negro literature before a black church group in Chicago and was asked his opinion of Native Son. McKay conceded that Wright “was a very powerful writer,” but again like his own critics in the 1920s, he argued that he “did not think [Wright’s] book would help any a people struggling forward for a better life.” Much to his surprise, his audience applauded his remarks. Wright was popular in Chicago, and McKay had expected a different reaction.⁴⁴

Wright’s subject matter and approach in Native Son were alien to McKay, who had always presented lower-class blacks in a positive light as exemplars of health and vitality. If he had not remembered Wright’s role as a Communist spokesman on the FWP, however, he would almost certainly have been less critical of him. As it was, old memories were stronger than critical sympathies. To Ivie Jackman he wrote:

Did I tell you that I met [Wright] near the “Y” just before I left for Chicago and he wanted me to “have a bowl of soup” as he put it, but I declined. All I remember about him was that he was very rude, when he was an active Communist. You know, we were together on the Federal Writers Project and ... he knew from which side his bread was buttered. I remember when Dorothy West was in a dither about changing her magazine and invited myself, Moon, Richard Wright and others down to her place. . . . Moon and I could scarcely get in a word for Richard Wright, according to the Communist formula was always talking. So the Communists got the magazine [New Challenge], as you may remember, and after publishing one number, killed it. For, of course, they couldn’t make a Communist out of Dorothy*

McKay’s first year in Chicago was his happiest. In the fall, he lectured on Negro culture at the Sheil School and accepted numerous invitations to speak in Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest. West Indians were not as common there as in the New York area, and audiences were charmed by McKay’s Jamaican accent and gende manners. He made a new set of friends at the Sheil School and at the CYO and the Chicago Friendship House. He also talked at length with Bishop Sheil about Russian communism, American race relations, and world affairs, and regularly prepared for him summaries of current articles in the popular press on radical politics, world affairs, and Negro problems.⁴⁵

Some things did not change. He was, for example, still overly dependent upon friends for some of his most elemental needs. When he departed New York, he left his overcoat with the desk clerk at the Harlem “Y” and throughout the fall of 1944 he pestered Ivie Jackman to pick it up and mail it to him. Finally, on December 20, he wrote to her a frantic two-line note: “Have you heard nothing about my overcoat? I am freezing to death!” And in Chicago, he quickly became friends with a young Friendship House woman, Betty Britton, whom he called upon for countless errands and favors.⁴⁶

In early December, 1944, he spoke at Marquette University in Milwaukee, and at the end of the month, he journeyed to Easton, Pennsylvania, for a retreat on Dorothy Day’s nearby farm. From there he went to Morgan town to lecture at West Virginia University and then spent a few days in New York City before returning to Chicago. It was all too much. By the spring of 1945, he was ill again and had to spend a month in bed.⁴⁷

For the rest of his life he was never long out of the hospital. He spent about half the summer of 1945 either in the hospital or recuperating at Catholic retreats such as St. Meinrad’s Abbey in St. Meinrad, Indiana, near the Kentucky border. On August 30, he commented in a letter to Ivie Jackman that “I hardly ever see anybody of the Negro group, I am so buried among the Catholics.” He worked at the CYO through the remainder of 1945 but he was so ill in the winter and spring of 1946 that it was decided he should leave for a warmer climate. In May, 1946, he left for Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he stayed until the fall. Like his mother before him, McKay now suffered severely from dropsy, a condition arising as a consequence of his heart disease and high blood pressure. It was characterized by excessive retention of body fluids around the heart, and it caused his abdomen to swell abnormally and to pressure his heart and other vital organs. Periodically his doctors would drain off the excess fluid, but it always returned. They could do nothing to alleviate the underlying causes. In August, 1946, he wrote Max Eastman that “the doctor thought I would be dead by now, but I am still alive.”⁴⁸

He was not only alive but busily at work on a new manuscript. He had never ceased trying to get the new poems of his “Cycle Manuscript” published, and since joining the church he had also written several new poems for Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker.⁴⁹ Once in Albuquerque, he completed a short memoir of his Jamaican childhood. It was his last sustained piece of work. He called it My Green Hills of Jamaica, and in it he returned one last time to the quiet, pastoral Eden of childhood memories.

The project had been suggested to him by Cedric Dover, an Anglo-Indian author and admirer in London. McKay had met Dover in the late 1930s in New York, and after the war they had begun corresponding. Dover had grown up in colonial India, and he and McKay so enjoyed sharing their memories of British colonial childhood that Dover eventually urged McKay to collaborate with him on a book. Each would simply write a memoir of his separate experiences in Jamaica and India and then would publish them together in one volume to be entitled “East Indian-West Indian.”⁵⁰ In Albuquerque, McKay set to work and soon finished his memoir. To Max Eastman, he explained, “My new book is about my childhood in Jamaica which is a source of rich and inexhaustible material. I have such a rich field to write about that I don’t have to mess myself up about contemporary personalities and events. I have had a hard time but I have also had some superb moments and in spite of my chronic illness I don’t want to go sour on humanity, even after living in this awful land of the U.S.A. I still like to think of people with wonder and love as I did as a boy in Jamaica and the Catholic Church with its discipline and traditions and understanding of human nature is helping me a lot.”⁵¹ After McKay finished the text, a publisher suggested that he add a chapter to bring the reader up to date on his life.

What resulted was a long justification by McKay of his conversion to Catholicism. It never became a part of My Green Hills. Except for a short excerpt edited and published as an article by Cedric Dover after McKay’s death, My Green Hills remained unpublished until 1981. The additional chapter, entitled “Right Turn to Catholicism,” was really an elaboration of a prior statement by McKay, “On Becoming a Roman Catholic,” which had appeared in the Catholic Epistle in the spring of 1945. It was not in any way an organic part of My Green Hills, but the two, when read together, nevertheless suggest that the seed of McKay’s “right turn to Catholicism” lay in his troubled relationship with his father.⁵²

In one episode of My Green Hills, the young Claude had acquired from an older brother, who was then teaching at a distant Catholic school, a colorful picture of some aspect of church life—perhaps it was a portrait of a saint or the Virgin Mary. At any rate, he liked its rich colors and put the picture on his bedroom wall, all the while quite unaware of its religious significance. When his father, the fiercely proper Baptist deacon, saw the picture, he ripped it off the wall and gave the bewildered youth a stern lecture on the evils of Catholic idolatry. Almost fifty years later, in “Right Turn to Catholicism,” McKay made a point of declaring that all the evils of the modern world had their origins in the Protestant Reformation. “Agnosticism, Atheism, Modernism, Capitalism, State Socialism and State Communism were all children of the Pandora Box of Protestantism.”⁵³ To some degree, at least, McKay’s conversion to Catholicism can be considered a last act of rebellion against his sternly self-righteous father.

During his last year, McKay also collected his “Selected Poems,” but he could not find a publisher for them. In searching for a suitable person to write an introduction to his poems, he did not choose either a Catholic or an American black. He chose instead the great philosopher of American pragmatism, John Dewey. Claude never considered a Catholic for the job and he adamantly declared that he wanted no American black to touch his poetry because none was “fit.” Dewey, he knew, was an honorable man who would do him justice as a poet. To his literary agent, Carl Cowl, he wrote, “The last time I Saw Dr. Dewey was at a dinner for [Angelica] Balabanov and he and I and Carlo Tresca drank a bottle of wine together. And we talked about Trotsky who was in Mexico then.”⁵⁴

McKay stayed in Albuquerque until September, 1946. From there he traveled to San Diego, where at CYO expense he passed the winter and received almost constant medical care. In July, 1947, after months of treatment had succeeded in stabilizing (though not curing) his condition, he returned to Chicago to resume work with Bishop Shell’s CYO.⁵⁵

His last year there was fraught with anxiety and ill health. He wanted desperately to find a publisher for My Green Hills and for his “Selected Poems,” but Carl Cowl, his agent in New York, despite heroic efforts, could not find him a publisher. McKay blamed his old enemies, and he even grew suspicious that he had new ones within the Catholic church. To Cowl, he wrote, “You must understand that there is much opposition to my getting published! From Communists, . . . from literary cut-throats who were in high places in the New Deal. . . Negro leaders of the NAACP... the Urban League and . . . even certain groups of Catholics.” Certain people within the CYO, he declared in all sincerity, were even opening his mail, and he urged Cowl to be sure and seal all his letters. McKay had long been convinced that behind-the-scenes Communist influence had been used to wreck his chances for success in the 1930s, and he came to distrust those black and white liberals whom he considered soft on communism almost as much as he distrusted the Communists themselves. His distrust at times seemed to verge on paranoia.⁵⁶

McKay had never been able to exist anywhere for long without making enemies, and as time passed he frankly expressed his dislike of certain individuals on the CYO and Friendship House staffs in Chicago. Although he hated gossip and personal spite, his outspokenness invited both, and when they came, his suspicion and distrust of those around him increased. He never lost the respect and trust of Bishop Sheil and most of those on the CYO staff, but he believed that in their eyes his prestige had slipped, at least in part because of his publishing difficulties. He felt he had become a burden, and when his doctor in the fall of 1947 suggested that he should leave again for a warmer climate, he rejected the notion. He could not ask the CYO to foot his bills another year. And so he stayed on in Chicago and worked as best he could.⁵⁷

McKay’s personality was so difficult a mixture of gendeness and impatience, of empathy and alienation, of sweetness and anger, that even his closest friends within the Catholic community soon recognized he caused problems for himself and others. His friend Mary Keating summed him up best, perhaps, when she wrote

Claude came to Friendship House and my first impression was that he was a shy amiable man. (He really wasn’t. He was formidable in his opinions [and] incredibly cutting with people whose mind he did not respect. He was intellectual, opinionated and enormously blunt in an argument.) For some reason, Claude and I always got along ... we never quarreled. We were never unkind to each other. I don’t know why, either. He quarreled with most of his friends. I think he was a driven, unhappy genius, not at home in his times, nor in the world, and I sensed this, I guess.⁵⁸

McKay felt no more at home in the postwar world than he had earlier in the 1930s and 1940s. With the death of Roosevelt, the Truman presidency, and the end of World War II, he looked upon the extension of American power around the world as almost as great a calamity as the spread of Communist power in Eastern Europe. He had no faith in the rhetoric of American democracy and was constantly reminding whoever would listen that “democracy was what you make it and not what you say it is.”⁵⁹

To Max Eastman, he declared that “I try to see things from the standpoint of right and wrong and when Soviet Russia is wrong I will say so. When the U.S. and Great Britain are wrong I will say so too, and the two latter in my mind are more often wrong than the Soviet nation. I am certainly never going to carry the torch for British colonialism or American imperialism abroad.”⁶⁰ To McKay, the church appeared as a last refuge in an increasingly dehumanized world. Unlike many left-wing critics of communism, McKay in the final analysis refused to become an apologist for capitalist imperialism. Although he had become an American citizen in 1940, he could see no evidence after World War II that the United States had learned anything from the collapse of European colonialism. He feared American world dominance after World War II. In Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, he wrote

Europe and Africa and Asia wait
The touted New Deal of the New World’s hand!
New systems will be built on race and hate,
The Eagle and the Dollar will command.
Oh Lord! My body, and my heart too, break—
The tiger in his strength his thirst must slake!⁶¹

To Max Eastman, who accused him of mouthing Stalinist slogans, McKay angrily retorted,

Equality of white and brown people: bosh! You all ought to try to bring that about in America before going abroad to Asia, and even Africa, to try your experiments. . . . I have always thought that every Englishman and American is a dyed-in-the-wool hypocrite when it comes to seeing and facing other people’s problems. In all my life I have never been a reactionary and I won’t be one now, mouthing occasional pieces for the capitalist press, because I know one thing, the capitalists don’t want me and I don’t want anything of them. . . . I do not fear the Russian system will ever conquer America, but I do not care if it conquers the people of Asia or Africa. I do not think that mouthing goodwill the democracies have anything to offer such people. I should say to the so-called democracies of the United States and Great Britain: set your own house in order and try not to scare up a war against Soviet Russia.

McKay was not through. He went on to declare that he would rather his name “stand in history” beside Henry Wallace’s as an opponent of the rapidly developing Cold War than with “the neo-reactionaries of the New Leader” Still, Eastman should not think him “a partisan of Communism.” He was a Catholic precisely because the church was “the foe of Communism,” but he reminded Max that within the church, there was “a formidable left wing . . . because it can accommodate all, even you.”⁶²

In April of 1948, McKay’s letters to his friends became less frantic. They assumed a quiet tone. He had no more accounts to settle. In a final letter to his literary agent and friend, Carl Cowl, who had endured from Claude several blistering attacks upon his competency, McKay wrote on April 9, 1948, to express thanks for all he had tried to do for him over the past year. And to Ellen Tarry on April 27, 1948, he concluded, “Now I think I have covered everything. Goodbye Tarry, till I hear from you again and God bless you.”⁶³

Not many people knew it, but McKay’s daughter, Hope, had been in New York City for the past two years attending Columbia Teachers’ College. Over the years, they had maintained a correspondence. He had always wanted to do more for her, but he seldom had any money. After she arrived in New York, he had asked Cowl to look out for her. In April, Claude and Hope were making plans to meet for the first time, but it never happened. In May he was hospitalized again, and on May 22, 1948, at the age of fifty-seven, Claude McKay died of congestive heart failure in the Alexian Brothers Hospital in Chicago. Death could not have come as a surprise, and surely he was ready. For had he not in the end truly become one with that company who had “all died in the faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and [who] were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth”?⁶⁴

There have been many who have questioned the authenticity and sincerity of McKay’s conversion. And certainly, in his letters to Keating, Eastman, and others, McKay indicated on various occasions that he was more convinced of the practical and political wisdom of his move to Catholicism than he was of his own spiritual conversion. In any event, however, he convinced himself and insisted to others that he had in fact become a Christian and a Catholic. All the while, of course, he never lost sight of the fact that for both himself and for the church, his conversion had practical benefits. Within the church, he found a job, medical care, and acceptance as an individual. In its turn, the church could hope that its significant new convert would influence through his example and his future writings other blacks and other intellectuals to take the same course. As McKay bluntly wrote to Carl Cowl in 1947, “It was a good thing I hooked up with the Catholics, intuitive, I guess, for they have certainly taken good care of me. You see they all want me to live, because they expect me to write more, which will redound to their credit.”⁶⁵

There was in this statement no deliberate deceit but considerable self-delusion. McKay had always needed someone who would “take care” of him, or at least the really practical monetary details of his life. In a real sense, the Roman Catholic church became the last and greatest of his patrons. In its bosom he found the means not only to live awhile longer but to die with some solace, dignity, and assurance that he had not labored wholly in vain. It is perhaps too easy for the nonbeliever to scorn such an end, but McKay accepted it as his culminating act of faith and affirmation. As difficult, tortured, and ambivalent as it was, he viewed his conversion as genuine, and that perhaps was what mattered most.