NEWS INDEX Archives 2004 June

Anthology traces life of poet who inspired Harlem renaissance writers

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
217-333-2177; andreal@uiuc.edu

6/16/04

In a new anthology of Claude McKay’s poems, editor William J. Maxwell traces the peripatetic life and career of the “canonically bold poet” who against all odds and his own deleterious tendencies came to inspire such Harlem Renaissance writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and James Weldon Johnson.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Despite his roving bohemian soul, his penchant for abandoning people and places, and his radical politics, which kept him one step ahead of intelligence agents, Claude McKay could not outrun one thing: fame.

Almost in spite of himself, the Jamaican-born grandson of a West African slave would produce a unique and avant-garde body of work – ballads, sonnets, stories, novels, memoirs and political commentary – that would establish him as a major inspiration for the Harlem Renaissance – the flowering of African American literature in New York City during the 1920s and ’30s.

Among his credits: a sonnet, “If We Must Die” (1919), which became the anthem for black social resistance and later was used by Winston Churchill as a rallying cry for World War II; a collection of poetry, “Harlem Shadows” (1922), widely considered one of the works that launched the Harlem Renaissance; a controversial novel, “Home to Harlem” (1928), generally regarded as the first best-selling novel by a black man.

In a new anthology of McKay’s poems, editor William J. Maxwell traces the peripatetic life and career of the “canonically bold poet” who against all odds and his own deleterious tendencies came to inspire such Harlem Renaissance writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and James Weldon Johnson.

In fact, the poet otherwise known as the “Bobby Burns of Jamaica” and the “playboy of the New Negro Renaissance” pioneered not one, but two, cultural renaissances: the second being the Caribbean.

“No other writer is as closely linked to the invention of 20th century black literatures across the Atlantic world, from Harlem, to the islands of the English-speaking Caribbean, to Francophone Africa and its New World relations,” Maxwell wrote in his introduction to “The Complete Poems” of Claude McKay (University of Illinois Press).

The extensively annotated book is the first complete collection of the poems of McKay (1889-1948), the last of 11 children born to a day laborer turned affluent commercial farmer who became the personal and literary model for Langston Hughes, but who, as he often lived, died alone and in debt.

The book brings together more than 300 poems, including nearly 100 published for the first time. Maxwell, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, traveled widely for every poem McKay ever wrote, finding, along the way, previously neglected personal letters and a hefty FBI file. What he discovered about the man, among other things, was that he was quixotic and sometimes difficult, “not an easy person to deal with, and he often gave rein to some of his worst emotions.”

McKay immigrated to America in 1912, restlessly roamed the globe – setting up households in Barcelona, London, Moscow, New York and Paris, and several cities in Morocco – and eventually became a U.S. citizen in 1940. The first leading black author to become seriously involved with the world communist movement, and an important figure in that movement as a theorist and a professional revolutionary, McKay also was among the first important literary anti-Stalinists, becoming “an anti-communist in the 1930s just when the heart of literary Harlem was embracing communism,” Maxwell said.

“When people like Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes – the up and comers of black literature – are reading Marx and are getting involved with communist politics, McKay is saying, ‘Don’t go there. The revolution has been betrayed.’ When he returns to Harlem in the mid-’30s, he is politically and socially out of it, and he feels that bitterly.”

McKay rose to fame in his early 20s for his Jamaican “dialect” poetry, and in the early years of his literary career, he benefited greatly from a succession of mentors, including Max Eastman, the editor-in-chief of the socialist monthly, the Liberator.

But McKay bounced from job to job, country to country, never quite eluding the wolf at the door. In the 1940s, his health deteriorated, and to the amazement of friends, he exchanged his entrenched agnosticism for Catholicism. He died in Chicago, his home for the last four years of his life.
McKay was habitually on the move for a host of reasons – not all of them glamorous, not all of them because of his self-described “vagabond soul.”
“McKay was influenced by the idea of the globe-trotting internationalist revolutionary,” Maxwell said. “As such, his early ideal was always to go on to the next front.”

In addition, McKay was intrigued by the “19th century French bohemian archetype,” Maxwell said. “He knew Baudelaire and Rimbaud, he knew what serious bohemians were supposed to do, and so he cultivated a sense of himself as always needing to wander, to travel.”

Maxwell said that there was another pattern with McKay: an inability to maintain serious mature relationships. Add to that his bisexuality and you get “a certain personal/sexual impetus to his running, given the costs of a public gay identity during his time.”

But perhaps the biggest reason for being on the lam: For much of his adult life, McKay was being chased by various intelligence services for his radical politics. The FBI’s McKay file is more than 100 pages long – an “amazing collection,” Maxwell said.

“It seems crazy that this is happening so early, but the FBI even in the 1920s is fascinated and upset by the possibility of a left-leaning black radicalism in the United States. And J. Edgar Hoover, this young prosecutor attached to the FBI, even then is spearheading this effort, and he’s actually reading McKay’s poems.”

Looking at McKay’s FBI file has led Maxwell to his next project: “studying the relationship between modern black writing and the FBI more generally. The FBI read Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin intensely, and produced voluminous literary criticism about them.”

Maxwell concedes that scholars have been interested in the relationship between black radicalism and the FBI for a long time – it didn’t begin with the FBI’s interest in Martin Luther King Jr.

“But the relationship with McKay is much earlier and is significantly literary, and so we have a phenomenon in which the FBI becomes a shaping reader of black literature. Thus, I want to look at the relationship – the surprising intimacy between black writing and the FBI – and trace it out across the century and see what I can learn there.”

Despite his picaresque life and writings, McKay is not as famous today as his literary heirs, Hughes and Hurston. Even so, he is consistently anthologized in standard collections of American literature and taught in higher education. “It’s a rare course on modern black poetry or on the Harlem Renaissance that doesn’t feature some of his sonnets from ‘Harlem Shadows,’ ” Maxwell said.

That collection is famous, he said, “mostly because it’s so good, his best work.” Several poems in it, in particular, “America,” “Baptism” and “The White City,” are “extraordinary, some of the most interesting sonnets to read and teach deeply from any period or author.”

In “America,” McKay wrote: “Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, / And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, / Stealing my breath of life, I will confess / I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! / Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, / Giving me strength erect against her hate, / Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.”

Soon after publishing “Harlem Shadows,” McKay was recognized as a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance, Maxwell said, but what was his reaction to this accolade?

“He splits. He abandons the movement that he’s been declared the pioneer of. He establishes a pattern of never being in the same place that his fame is. He’s always living an ocean away from wherever he’s perceived as an intellectually powerful and commercially successful writer.”

Not only was McKay rarely around to enjoy and pursue his fame, Maxwell said, but he also wasn’t available to mentor the young writers such as Hughes and Hurston.

McKay fascinated the young Hughes, Maxwell said, both as a person and a poet, and the young writer began modeling himself after the older writer “in his traveling, his bohemian sense of himself and even in certain aspects of his ambivalent sexuality.”

But because they were from different cultural worlds, McKay having been born in the Caribbean, Hughes in Missouri, their craft would develop in different ways. Hughes would cultivate “a deeper sense of Afro-American vernacular in his poetry,” Maxwell said, “writing in the idioms and rhythms of black American speech.” McKay, on the other hand, “would stay traditional in his mature verse, and wouldn’t have the rapport that Hughes had with black audiences across the country.”

McKay’s poetry is better likened to that of another poet, “someone we’ve largely forgotten but who was the most famous poetess of her day: Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

The two poets knew each other. They were, in fact, “both touched by the same Greenwich Village milieu.” In their poetry, they both talked about “modern bohemian ideas in extremely traditional vocabulary, and for both of them, the sonnet was both the grandest and the most natural form. Both McKay and Millay – their names even rhyme – combine modern themes and a commitment to outlaw passions with a very formal poetic vocabulary.”

According to Maxwell, McKay’s most important contribution was to the history of black poetry, and his greatest achievement as a poet writing to the black world was “to disassociate black poetry from Victorian poetry in the most aggressive way.”

“There are other people who are doing this too, but McKay offers the definitive break with timid themes and with the kind of black dialect poetry that many progressive ‘New Negroes’ associated with southern excuses for the era of slavery.”

“McKay is a great modernizing force, which is ironic given the fact that he doesn’t use modernistic forms,” Maxwell said. “But that’s why ‘Harlem Shadows’ is as important a book as it is – because people then and now read it as a turning point into a modern black literature that would deal in a forthright way with questions of black anger and black protest, with black desire and black sexuality.”