In this biography of Claude McKay I have attempted two things. One is to make clear McKay’s importance as a pioneer in twentieth-century black literature in the West Indies, the United States, and Africa. The second is to portray as accurately as possible the man and the artist from his birth in 1890 to his death in 1948. The first objective was more easily accomplished than the second.
There can be no doubt of McKay’s importance as a pioneering black writer. In 1912 he produced two volumes of Jamaican dialect poetry that have long been recognized as unique and important contributions to a distinctive West Indian literature. Throughout McKay’s career, Jamaica occupied a central, unifying place in his poetry and fiction, and he is today generally recognized as one of the earliest and most important black voices in the new West Indian literature that has developed in this century, largely since World War II.
His place as a forerunner to recent West Indian literature remains secure despite the fact that McKay left Jamaica in 1912 at the age of twenty-two and never returned. Like several other articulate West Indians in this century, he achieved his best work and won his largest audiences in the United States and Europe. During a lifetime of travel and observation, he produced penetrating commentaries on modern colonialism in which he clearly anticipated such later West Indian expatriates as George Pad more, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Derek Walcott, and V. S. Naipaul.
McKay also played an important role in the development of modern black American literature in the United States. In New York City, his militant protest poetry after World War I inaugurated a decade of intense black literary activity known as the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro movement. His forthright declarations of alienation, anger, and rebellion after World War I gave early expression to themes that have since figured prominently in black American writing. And in his novels published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he joined the other black writers of the 1920s who had begun to explore the continued relevance of their folk roots in Africa, the West Indies, and the rural South—a preoccupation that has by no means disappeared from recent black American literature.
McKay’s novels, particularly his second, Banjo, published in 1929, also exerted a profound catalytic influence upon certain young French West Indians and West Africans, notably Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal and Aimé Césaire from Martinique. These two men would later acknowledge McKay’s strong influence in their development of the literary doctrine of Nègritude, which dominated black French writing in the years after World War II.
Finally, it must be said that McKay’s political and social commentary, embodied in his numerous articles over three decades (1918–1948) and in such books as A Long Way from Home (1937), Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), and The Negroes in America (1923), contained often prophetic statements on issues that later became increasingly important to black Americans and to the nation in general. In his articles and essays, McKay dealt at length with crucial black issues: the debate over traditional, civil rights-oriented integration versus strong, black, community-based ethnic development; and the importance of ethnic pluralism in American and world development. In addition, he commented intelligently on a range of historical problems associated with European imperialism, Western democracy, anticolonialism, and the rise of Russian communism.
In his essays, McKay came closest to developing a consistent stylistic excellence; in poetry and fiction he was never a stylistic innovator. But in all his works, he seized intuitively upon those themes of identity, alienation, rebellion, and community development that have dominated black literature—and much of Western literature in general—in this century.
In this study I have concentrated a good deal of attention on McKay’s literary works, because most of his adult life was concerned with their production, and they remain in fact the chief reason for his enduring importance. Nevertheless, this is primarily a biography, not a work of literary analysis; its central focus is McKay’s life, not simply his literature.
As an individual and as a literary artist, McKay was to an extraordinary degree deeply involved in the action and passion of his times. As a young Jamaican colonial, as an immigrant poet and political radical in the United States after World War I, as a doubly expatriated writer in Europe and North Africa from 1922 until 1934, as a politically conscious member of the Federal Writers’ Project in New York City in the 1930s, and finally as a disillusioned secular idealist and world-weary convert to Catholicism in the 1940s, he participated in and wrote about some of the major historical events of this century. At the same time, he maintained a curious detachment and stubborn independence that ultimately left him isolated and lonely.
In many ways, his was a paradoxical personality, characterized always by a deep-seated ambivalence. Yet, despite years of wandering and personal isolation in many lands, he remained always securely anchored to a positive identity as the proud son of Jamaica’s independent black peasantry. This self-confidence in his essential identity existed side by side with his ambivalence and his need for support and reassurance from a succession of patrons. And coloring both was an ever-present ironic awareness that his humanity could never be defined entirely by the simple boundaries of color and race.
Personally he was a complex and often exasperating man, alternately charming and spiteful, noble and petty, wise and self-deceptive. Through all his moods, he tried to the very end of his life to maintain in his political and social criticism a dispassionate objectivity and intellectual honesty that would transcend whatever weaknesses he had as a man. This very attitude, however, often led to profound misunderstandings and bitter conflicts.
On the whole, of course, it must be remembered that writers and artists, especially in the rootless turmoil of recent times, have often had difficult personalities and lonely lives. Judged in relation to such contemporaries as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway (to name only three), McKay’s personality was complex but stable, even engaging in its flexibility.
One contention of this study is that McKay’s personality, as well as the major elements of his creative life and aesthetic tendencies, were already formed by the time he left Jamaica in 1912 at the age of twenty-two. In his adult life he tended to repeat certain fundamental behavioral patterns that had been established during his early years in Jamaica. As he grew older his literary art became more sophisticated and his social perceptions more acute, but on a personal level, his private life remained fixed within a cycle of dependence upon a succession of father figures. All his life, McKay remained trapped within a pattern set early as his mother’s pampered youngest son. He always depended to a remarkable extent upon others to take care of his most elemental human needs. This is not stated to minimize the enormous obstacles McKay had actively to face and overcome as an independent black writer in a largely indifferent, even hostile white environment. In this respect, he displayed throughout his life great integrity and singleness of purpose. But often his genuine achievements were accomplished only after great difficulties because of basic patterns of immaturity that persisted until his death.
The ultimate focus of this work, however, is neither on McKay’s character nor on his literature alone. It is, rather, on his reaction to the great social forces that impinged upon him from birth. Studies of literary figures do not normally come within the purview of the historian; such works are usually the special competence of literary critics. There are, however, individuals whose writings and actions have influenced many of the significant social movements of the age; they not only contribute to the literary scene, but in a larger part they mirror many of the basic trends and conflicts of their time. Claude McKay, black poet and novelist, was one of these people. And it is for this reason, above all, that he deserves the historian’s attention.
For better or worse, this work is the result of many years of effort, during which time I have all too often engaged in other, more mundane work that provided a livelihood. As a consequence, the time required to produce this biography must have often seemed wholly unreasonable to many whose support was essential to its completion. For this reason, I would like to say a hearty thanks to all those who have nevertheless always said yes to this project. They include my family in Mobile, Hope McKay Virtue in California, and Carl Cowl and Frances Witlin in Brooklyn. That does not exhaust the list. Many more are acknowledged by their presence in the notes and the bibliography. At Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, I thank William L. O’Neill, Tilden Edelstein, Seth Scheiner, and Donald Gibson. My thanks also to Professor Gwendolyn Hall, who first encouraged me to enroll in the Afro-American program at Rutgers. Barbara O’Neil Phillips and the other editors at Louisiana State University Press who shaped my manuscript into finished form must certainly be thanked. Finally, I must express my thanks to my wife, Carol Petillo. Her thoughtful analyses of my tendencies toward procrastination often turned what seemed like mountains into mere molehills, and her unfailing companionship, assistance, and example as a scholar in her own right enabled me to see this project through to the end.