Claude
McKay
was born in Jamaica
on 15th September, 1890. He began writing poetry as a schoolboy. He
worked as a policeman in Spanish Town and when he was twenty-two had
his first volume of poems, Songs of Jamaica
(1912) published.
In 1912 McKay moved to the United States
where he attended Tuskegee Institute
in Alabama and Kansas State University.
He continued to write poetry and in 1918 his work was praised by both
Frank Harris and Max
Eastman. The following year, his poem, If
We Must Die, was published in Eastman's journal, The
Liberator.
Frank Harris encouraged McKay to obtain
writing experience in England. In 1919 McKay travelled to England
where he met George Bernard Shaw who introduced
him to influential left-wing figures in journalism. This included
Sylvia Pankhurst, who recruited him
to write for her trade union journal, Workers'
Dreadnought. While in London McKay
read the works of Karl Marx and becomes a
committed socialist.
In 1921 McKay returned to New York and became associate editor of
The Liberator. Over the next year
the journal published articles by McKay such as How
Black Sees Green and Red and He
Who Gets Slapped. He also published his best known volume
of verse, Harlem Shadows (1922).
In 1922 McKay went to Third International in Moscow where he represented
the American Workers Party. He stayed in Europe where he wrote Trial
by Lynching: Stories About Negro Life in America (1925)
and Home to Harlem (1928), a novel
about a disillusioned black soldier in the US
Army who returns from the Western Front
to live in a black ghetto. This was followed by other novels such
as Banjo (1928), Gingertown
(1932) and Banana Bottom (1933).
McKay gradually lost faith in communism and returned to the United
States in 1934. Employment was
difficult to find and for a while he worked for the Federal
Writers' Project. McKay's published work during
this period included his autobiography, A
Long Way From Home (1937) and Harlem:
Negro Metropolis (1940).
Unable to make a living from writing, McKay found work in a shipbuilding
yard. In 1943 he suffers a stroke and the following year was baptized
into the Roman Catholic faith. In 1945
his essay, On Becoming
a Roman Catholic, was published. Claude
McKay died in Chicago on 22nd
May, 1948.
(1)
Max Eastman, Claude McKay (1953)
Claude was born in a little
thatched farm house of two rooms in the hilly middle country of Jamaica
in the West Indies. He learned in childhood how a family of his ancestors,
brought over in chains from Madagascar, had kept together by declaring
a death strike on the auction block. Each would kill himself, they
vowed solemnly, if they were sold to separate owners. With the blood
of such rebels in his veins, and their memory to stir it, Claude McKay
grew up proud of his race and with no disposition to apologize for
his colour.
(2) Claude McKay, A Long
Way Home (1937)
The Masses was one
of the magazines which attracted me when I came to New York in 1914.
I liked its slogans, its make-up, and above all, its cartoons. There
was a difference, a freshness in its social information. And I felt
a special interest in its sympathetic and iconoclastic items about
the Negro.
Some times the magazine repelled me. There was one issue particularly
which carried a powerful bloody brutal drawing by Robert Minor. The
drawing was of Negroes tortured on crosses deep down in Georgia. I
bought the magazine and tore the cover off, but it haunted me for
a long time. There were other drawings of Negroes by an artist named
Stuart Davis. I thought they were the most superbly sympathetic drawings
of Negroes done by an American. And to me they have never been surpassed.
(3) Claude
McKay met Max Eastman for the first time
in 1918
The rendezvous with Max Eastman was to be at his study-room, somewhere
in or near St. Luke's Place. I got there first and was about to ring
when my attention was arrested by a tall figure approaching with long
strides and distinguished by a flaming orange necktie, a mop of white
hair and a grayish-brown suit. The figure looked just as I had imagined
the composite personality of The Masses and The Liberator
might be: colourful, easy of motion, clothes hanging a little loosely
or carelessly, but good stuff with an unstylish elegance. As I thought,
it was Max Eastman.
We went up into a high room and he lounged lazily on a couch and discussed
my poems. I had brought a batch of new ones. There was nothing of
the "I" first person in Max Eastman's manner. Nor did he
question me to any extent about myself, my antecedents, and the conditions
under which I lived and wrote at the time. He was the pure intellectual
in his conversation and critical opinion.
(4) In 1918 The
Liberator decided to publish Claude McKay's poem, If We
Must Die.
The Liberator was a
group magazine. The list of contributing editors was almost as exciting
to read as the contributions themselves. There was a freeness and
a bright new beauty in those contributions, pictorial and literary,
that thrilled. And altogether, in their entirety, they were implicit
of a penetrating social criticism which did not in the least overshadow
their novel and sheer artistry. I rejoiced in the thought of the honour
of appearing among the group.
(5)
Claude McKay, If We Must Die (1918)
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men well face the murderous, cowardly pack
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
(6)
In
1920 Claude McKay travelled to England where he met George
Bernard Shaw.
I
forwarded Frank Harris's letter of introduction to Shaw. Soon I received
a reply inviting me to his house. Shaw was acquainted with the old
Masses and also The Liberator, in which my poems had
been featured. Anything he had to say on any subject would be interesting
to me, as it would be to thousands of his admirers everywhere. For
Shaw was a world oracle. And the world then was a vast theatre full
of dramatic events.
Shaw received me one evening alone in his house in Adelphi Terrace.
There was an elegance about his reedlike black-clothed figure that
I had not anticipated, nor had I expected such a colourfully young
face and complexion against the white hair and beard.
(7)
In
1920 Claude McKay found work with the Workers'
Dreadnought, a newspaper edited by Sylvia
Pankhurst.
Sylvia
Pankhurst wrote asking me to call at her printing office in Fleet
Street. I found a plain little Queen Victoria sized woman with plenty
of long unruly bronze-like hair. There was no distinction about her
clothes, and on the whole she was very undistinguished. But her eyes
were fiery, even a little fanatic, with a glint of shrewdness.
She said she wanted me to do some work for the Workers' Dreadnought.
Perhaps I could dig up something along the London docks from the coloured
as well as the white seaman and write from a point of view which would
be fresh and different. Also I was assigned to read the foreign newspapers
from America, India, Australia, and other parts of the British Empire,
and mark the items which might interest Dreadnought readers.
(8)
Claude McKay, The Lynching (1920)
His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate's wild whim)
Hung pitifully o'er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun.
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue.
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
(9)
Max Eastman, Claude McKay (1953)
His last years were passed in sickness; he could not write much; and
he was destitute. He lived in penury, and watched his fame and popularity
gradually disappear from the earth. A few years more and he would
have seen them rise again, for his choice was as correct as it was
courageous, and his place in the world's literature is unique and
is assured.
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