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Cooper, Wayne. “A black Briton comes 'home' : Claude McKay in England, 1920” in Race
vol.9 (1967) pp.67-83.
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WAYNE COOPER AND ROBERT C. REINDERS
A Black Briton Comes
'Home': Claude McKay in
England, 1920
'When I wasa lad', recorded Claude McKay in his autobiography,
'I wrote a rhyme about wanting to visit England and my desire to
see the famous streets and places and "factory chimneys pouring
smoke"." But it was not until late 1919, at the age of 30, that this
self-professed 'Black Briton' was able to fulfil his childhood dream.
I
McKay was born in Jamaica, the son of hard working and, for the
area, prosperous peasant landholders. He attended local schools
and like so many young men from the Clarendon Hills he drifted
into Kingston. There he held several jobs including a short stint in
the local constabulary. His early efforts in verse brought him to the
attention of WaIter Jekyll, a moderately wealthy Englishman with a
reputation as an interpreter of Herbert Spencer and as a collector
of West Indian Annancy tales. Under Jekyll's prompting and influence McKay published two volumes of poetry: Constab Ballads and
Songs ofJamaica.
Both volumes reflected the aspirations and disappointments of a
talented adolescent growing to manhood in an island colony that
took as its model of social respectability a second-hand Victorianism.
Inevitably these early efforts mirrored the limits of McKay's provincialism. Above all, they revealed his thoroughly British orientation.
In the poem 'Old England', to cite only one example, he expressed
a desire to visit not Africa, but his true cultural 'homeland', England.
After an imaginative tour of famous national landmarks, he concluded his trip with a visit to 'de lone spot where inpeaceful solitude/
Rest de body of our Missis Queen, Victoria the Good.'
WAYNE COOPER is currently completing a critical study of Claude McKay.
DR. ROBERT C. REINDERS is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham.
Race, IX, 1 (1967
- 68
RACE
Paradoxically only McKay's vigorous identification with the black
peasantry of Jamaica saved his dialect verse from unrelieved sent],
mentality and adolescent self-indulgence. His brief experience in
the constabulary brought him into direct conflict with those who
shared his lowly back country origins. These encounters gave him
an inkling of his ambivalent position as an educated, dark-skinned
colonial. In one poem he lamented that:
Tis grievous to think dat, while toilin' on here
My people won't love me again,
My people, my people, me owna black skin. 2
One can easily find here that first seed of disaffection which eventually
led to a total estrangement from the staid influences of his British
childhood.
Poetry then, as now, was not a road to prosperity; nor did it
open doors in Kingston. McKay was outside the pale to whites and
as a dark Negro was socially unacceptable to the mulatto middle
class. He could have emulated an older brother and become a village
school master or become a farmer after his father. These choices
held little appeal for him, and after the publication of his verse he
emigrated to the United States with the intention of furthering his
education.
In 1912 McKay enrolled at Tuskeegee Institute. Re was, however,
dismayed by the narrow vocational and agricultural training and the
rigid pattern of Alabama segregation. Seeking a less repressive
atmosphere he transferred to Kansas State College. But McKay
found Kansas no more stimulating than Tuskeegee; he left after
two years and moved to New York City. By 1914 McKay was
working in restaurants and railroad dining cars.
Two years in America taught McKay how completely his race was
being exploited. Furthermore the WorId War proved to him the
'real hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride, and most of
the things which one was taught to respect and reverence." In light
of his experience it is not surprising therefore that McKay sought
a literary outlet in more radical American journals. Thus in 1918
he published poems and articles in Pearson's Magazine, then edited
by Frank Harris, and in Seven Arts and The Liberator-these latter
two were the leading avant-garde journals in America. Through
Harris and Max Eastman, editor of The Liberator, McKay participated in the bohemian life of Greenwich Village. He also became
associated with, and influenced by, several West Indian radicals
who combined an interest in socialism with an ardent zeal for Negro
rights. They were not followers of Marcus Garvey-his gospel was
too bourgeois-but they endorsed his black nationalism. McKay
became a regular contributor to the Garveyite Negro World.
A BLACK BRITON COMES HOME
69
Like Garvey, though on another level, McKay proved an innovator. Through his tense, angry sonnets McKay injected a new aggressiveness into Negro American literature. For the first time, the
deepest frustrations and hatreds engendered among Negroes by
white racism found direct literary expression. McKay probably
reached few whites, but alert Negro intellectuals welcomed his
uncompromising spirit. In turn, McKay spoke directly to his people
in a way that jolted them out of their inertia. For instance, he
observed in one poem that the Great War had brought liberation to
many Europeans; 'but', he taunted,
We, the blacks, less than the trampled dust,
Who walk the new ways with the old dim eyes,We to the ancient gods of greed and lust
Must still be offered up as sacrifice!
Oh, we who deign to live but will not dare
The white man's burden must forever bear!'
By 1919 McKay had achieved a limited degree of notoriety-a
notoriety heightened by the publication in The Liberator of one of
his most famous poems, 'If We Must Die'. McKay's works were
read in Bohemian literary circles; he .was well known to American
as well as immigrant Negro leaders, and to a more prosaic group in
the United States Department of Justice. However 1919, with its
Red Scare and bitter race riots, was not a propitious season for
Negro radicals. McKay was fortunate therefore that two admirers
offered him a free trip to Europe. He later identified them only as
'the Greys', a queer, colourless pair, brother and sister, who finally
prevailed upon him to travel as far as England with them. He was,
ironically, going 'home'. 5
In America, McKay had been associated with prominent artistic
and literary figures of the left-Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, William
Gropper, Art Young, and John Reed were among his friends.
However Greenwich Village with its overtones of Freud, syndicalism,
and artistic experimentation, and Harlem-McKay's beats-were
alien to the serious militant left in England. And it would be several
years before love in the Village and jazz in Harlem would become
subject matter for English Sunday newspapers and sermons. Except
for letters from Frank Harris and Crystal Eastman, McKay in
England was simply another West Indian.
McKay's adjustment to his new environment was facilitated by
membership in two London clubs. One was a club for coloured
soldiers housed in a basement in Drury Lane. Here he met West
Indians, Africans, a few Egyptians, American Negroes, and East
Indians. The club undoubtedly enhanced McKay's awareness of the
colour problem as a world-wide phenomenon. In turn he acquainted
club members with the race question as seen by American Negroes,
70
RACE
He brought to the club American Negro publications: and wrote a
. series of articles about the club for the Negro World. The articles
were favourably received by members but not so keenly by the
Englishwoman in charge of the club. McKay quoted some of her
views about managing 'coloured boys' and derided her 'patronizing
white maternal attitude toward her coloured charges'." He was
declared persona non grata.
The International Club dated from 1849. Located in East Road
of Shoreditch, it was by 1919 a hotbed of 'dogmatists and doctrinaires
of radical left ideas. Socialists, Communists, anarchists, syndicalists,
one-big unionists, and trade unionists, soap boxers, poetasters,
scribblers, editors of little radical sheets which flourish in London."
There were Polish, Russian and German Jews and Czech, Italian,
and Irish nationalists; there were also 'rumors of spies' and
occasional police raids.
'For the first time', McKay stated in his autobiography, 'I found
myself in an atmosphere of doctrinaire and dogmatic ideas in which
people devoted themselves entirely to the discussion and analysis of
social events from a radical and Marxian point of view.' Under the
stimulus of the club's intellectual atmosphere, and the revolutionary
Geist of those immediate post-war years, McKay decided to read
Marx-like so many Socialists he had not studied the Master's
words. 'It wasn't entertaining reading', McKay recounted. 'Much
of it was like studying subjects you dislike, which are necessary to
pass examinations.' 'Marx', he concluded, was a man 'imprisoned
by walls upon walls of books . . . he belonged . . . more to the
institutions of learning than to the street corners from which I had
so often heard his gospel preached." McKay remained a Socialist
in spite of Marx, though-and this is conjecture-s-he did not read
Marx again until the 1930s.
At the International Club, McKay met and heard lecture a cross
section of the far left: J. T. Walton Newbold, A. J. Cook, Guy
Aldred (anarchist editor), Arthur MacManus, Willie Gallacher,
George Lansbury, and Sylvia Pankhurst. For his part McKay
'integrated' the club by inviting a West Indian student (Oxford) and
doctor, a mulatto sailor from Limehouse, and several Negro soldiers
and boxers. McKay enjoyed his frequent visits to the Club and he
was fully accepted by all but a few intolerant individuals.
It was probably at the International Club where McKay first met
Sylvia Pankhurst, though in his autobiography he claimed he met
her as a result of the following events. On 10 April 1920 the -Daily
Herald under headlines ('Black Scourge in Europe', 'Sexual Horrors
Let Loose by France on Rhine', 'Disappearance of Young German
Girls') printed an article by E. D. Morel. Morel, the man who had
exposed Leopold's infamous regime in the Congo, _argued that the
A BLACK BRITON COMES HOME
71
French use of 'primitive' African troops in the Rhineland was an
'outrage of womanhood'. 'The African race is the most developed
sexually of any', and, he informed his eager English audience,
'for well-known physiological reasons the raping of a white woman
by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injury and not
infrequently has fatal results.' These black brutes were spreading
syphilis and were responsible for murdering several girls. Today,
he warned, the French, with the connivance of their British ally,
were using black troops against the Germans; tomorrow they
might employ African mercenaries against white working men. In
an editorial aside, the Herald disclaimed any intention of 'encouraging colour prejudice' but their readers must understand that 'nature
has given us all qualities of temperament suitable to the condition
and climate in which we are born." Morel's campaign against
African troops in Germany continued in the Herald and other
English periodicals. At least one public meeting was held to protest
the 'outrage' and in September 1920 the radical-minded Union of
Democratic Control published Morel's statements under the title
The Horror on the Rhine.10
Morel's original article prompted McKay to write an angry
protest letter to George Lansbury, editor of the Herald. Lansbury
would not print the letter but sent a note to McKay saying that he
was not personally prejudiced toward Negroes.l l McKay accepted
the editor's statement but reasoned that it was beside the point.
Someone suggested to McKay that he send the letter to Sylvia
Pankhurst, no friend of the Daily Herald, and it was printed in her
Workers' Dreadnought.
In his letter McKay asked: 'Why all this 0 bscene, maniacal
outburst about the sex vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?'
Rape is rape; the colour of the skin doesn't make it different.
Negroes are no more over-sexed than Caucasians; mulatto children
in the West Indies and America were not exactly the result of
parthogenesis. If Negro troops had syphilis, they contracted it from
the white and yellow races. As for German women, in their economic
plight they were selling themselves to anyone. McKay concluded:
'I do not protest because I happen to be a negro ... I write because
I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further
strife and blood-spilling between whites and the many members of
my race . . . who have been dumped down on the English docks
since the ending of the European war . . . Bourbons of the United
States will thank you, and the proletarian underworld of London
will certainly gloat over the scoop of the Christian-Socialist-pacifist
Daily Herald.'12 (McKay argued 26 years later that the Herald
could 'arouse the notorious moral righteousness of the English in
favour of the Germans and against the French' only by introducing
the race-sex issue. 'Poor black billy goat.')"
72
RACE
In October 1920, McKay again attacked Lansbury after the Daily
Herald 'sneered' at Sylvia Pankhurst for her trip to the Soviet Union
and for her role in a Communist meeting in Manchester. The
Herald 'cannot be fair to other people in the Movement who will not
shelter under its cloak of hypocrisy."! In McKay's judgment,
Lansbury was 'all that was simon-pure, pious and self-righteous in
the British labour movement.'15
The letter to the Herald led Sylvia Pankhurst to invite McKay
to her office. 'I found a plain little Queen Victoria-sized woman
with plenty of long unruly, bronze-like hair ... her eyes were fiery,
even a little fanatic, with a glint of shrewdness.':" She offered him
a job as a reporter and as a reader of overseas English-language
newspapers from which he was to cull pertinent items for the
Dreadnought. McKay would be paid enough to cover his rOOIn and
board. He accepted.
McKay's account may be somewhat awry. The letter to Lansbury
did not appear in the Dreadnought until 24 April 1920. McKay's
name first appears in the newspaper on 10 January.
As a reporter for the Workers' Dreadnought, McKay had an
opportunity to observe and describe the labour and radical scene in
England. Thus in September 1920, he covered the Trades Union
Congress in Portsmouth. McKay was principally attracted to
prominent figures in the Miners' Federation. Frank Hodges, the
General Secretary, he did not like; and McKay approvingly quoted
A. J. Cook's remark to him: 'Hedges was always hunting foxes with
the lords.' Though McKay thought A. J. Cook's 'ideas were an odd
mix-up of liberal sentiment and socialist thought, and sentimental
to an extreme', he praised Cook and his radical delegates from the
Rhondda Valley. McKay's favourite, however, was Robert Smillie,
President of the Miners' Federation. (Crystal Eastman had given
McKay a note for Smillie. McKay fairly adored her, and undoubtedly
the tie between McKay and Smillie was strengthened by their common
admiration of Miss Eastman.) 'Smillie was like a powerful ash which
had forced itself up, coaxing nourishment out of infertile soil . . .
His face and voice were so terribly full of conviction that in comparison the colleagues around him appeared theatrical.' McKay wrote
his article around Smillie and it was printed in the Dreadnought.
However, Pankhurst 'sharply' informed McKay 'it wasn't the policy
of the Dreadnought to praise official labour leaders, but to criticize
them.?"
Miss Pankhurst had no criticism of McKay's article on 'Comrade'
Gilmore, a labour agitator in Bristol and founder of the left-wing
International Union of Ex-Servicemen. McKay met Gilmore when
the latter brought a delegation of workers to a protest meeting in
Trafalgar Square. (One of their demands was the removal of Winston
Churchill from the cabinet 'on account of his militant propensities.')
A BLACK BRITON COMES HOME
73
Gilmore appealed to McKay because he was a 'man of action . . .
he is disconcertingly practical . . . he is neither sentimental nor
emotional.' It was McKay's feeling that Gilmore's movement was
'the nucleus of the British Council of Soviets.v"
In common with many contemporary writers, McKay commented
on the shop steward movement. He pointed out the error of viewing
the shop steward movement as an English version of the Industrial
Workers of the World; the latter were outside of the trade union
structure, the former within it. He clearly discerned the weakness
of the shop steward movement; it could not 'give shop stewards
security and immunity from open and covert victimization that
trade union officials enjoy.""
The West Indian's most significant contributions were articles he
wrote on the race question. In 'Socialism and the Negro', McKay
acquainted his English readers with American aspects of race conflict.
The NAACP, McKay admitted, had done some good for the Negro,
but its directors were white 'liberal capitalists' who were 'ignorant
of the fact that the Negro question is primarily an economic one.'
W. E. B. DuBois, the leading Negro in the NAACP, 'flirted with the
Socialist idea from a narrow opportunist standpoint' but in reality
opposed socialism. There was no help for the Negro from organized
labour; the American Foundation of Labour was a 'reactionary
association'. And education, the traditional American panacea, was
of doubtful value when Negroes were unable to obtain positions
for which they were qualified. The IWW and the Socialist Party had
made some efforts to reach Negroes, but the only effective organization to touch the black masses was Garvey's Universal Negro
Improvement Association. True it was not socialist but McKay
firmly supported it since nationalism in a subject people is a
vestibule to communism. McKay denounced British Communists
who opposed Irish and Indian movements because they were nationalistic. Radicals failed to realize that 'no people who are strong
enough to throw off an imperial yoke will tamely submit to a system
of local capitalism. '20
McKay returned to this theme in an article he wrote for an
Americanjournal, The Liberator. In it he attached special significance
to the Irish struggle for independence. He contended that neither
the British middle class nor British labour (Communists included)
really fathomed the essential nature of the Irish Revolution. But
McKay claimed a special insight. 'I think I understand the Irish.
My belonging to a subject race entitles me to some understanding
of them. And then I was born and reared a peasant; ... the peasant's
passion for the soil possesses me, and it is one of the strongest
passions of the Irish Revolution. '21
Ireland, McKay reasoned, might presage colonial revolts in Africa,
During the WorId War Germans and English had taken the loyalty
74
RACE
of their coloured legionaries for granted. McKay warned that 'the
exploiting classes have not considered the fact that if the blacks have
fought so well for an inglorious cause, they might fight better yet,
when properly led and aroused, for the economic and social rights
of which they are deprived in their native land.'22
McKay was obviously sympathetic toward Communism, but there
is no evidence that he joined Pankhurst's Workers Socialist Federation, and as far as it is known he never joined the Communist Party.
He certainly assumed an independent position in his Dreadnought
articles. He criticised a book by Eden and Cedar Paul though they
were close friends of Sylvia Pankhurst; nor did he spare Edgar
Whitehead who was secretary of the Pankhurst organization and of
the. International Club. He accused Whitehead of advocating
'Syndicalism pure and simple.'23 Maxim Gorki, already in the
Soviet literary pantheon, was 'a mere materialist in the worse sense
of the word . . .': 'Like Kropotkin [whose writings soon appeared
in the Dreadnought] and Emma Goldman, Gorki hungers for the
flesh-pots of Western commercialism.' Gorki 'never understood'
Tolstoy and his comments on him are 'curiously naive and unimaginative.'24 Left wing symbols carried no more weight with
McKay than Gorki's Communist pedigree. In a review of a book
called Proletarian Parodies-with 'flaunting orange covers'-McKay
dryly remarked that the parodies 'are not much worse than "The
Red Flag" and the "Internationale" ...'25
McKay was in no position to lob stones into someone else's
poetic glass house. His own poems in the Dreadnought vary from
bad to awful to unreadable. They appear to be the sort written on
the back of an envelope twenty minutes before a paper goes to press.
Following are examples of McKay's socialist doggerel.
I am downhearted not, although it seems
The new birth is abortive in the West,
And men are turning from long-cherished dreams
Of world-wide freedom to ignoble rest.
Long struggling under the Imperial heel,
Some dared not see the white flame of your star
Dimmed by the loathsome shadow of your Tsar.
But men who clung to sacred dreams could feel
Someday you would put forth your arms of steel
And drag the mannikins from near and far
Before the people's judgment bar
To answer for the ruined commonweal. 26
Working for the Pankhurst organization was not the safest way
of keeping one's name out of police files. McKay was certainly
guilty by association. One of his friends on the Dreadnought was a
'young foreigner with a bare bland innocent face' he called 'Comrade
A BLACK BRITON COMES HOME
75
Vie'. He was a Soviet courier and was caught with letters from
Pankhurst to Lenin and Zinoviev, army manuals, and a letter in
code. He spent six months in jail and was deported to the USSR. 27
On 19 October 1920, a week before Vie's arrest, the Dreadnought
office was raided and Sylvia Pankhurst was charged with a violation
of the Defence of the Realm Regulations. The police claimed that a
Dreadnought article by S.OOO (Gunner) H.M.S. Hunter entitled
'Discontent on the Lower Deck' was likely to cause 'disaffection' in
the Royal Navy." The article was written by a sailor, David
Springhall; his identity was known only to McKay and Miss
Pankhurst. McKay's description of the raid is worth quoting in its
entirety.
A couple of days after the issue appeared, the Dreadnought office was raided
by the police. I was going out, leaving the little room on the top floor where
I always worked, when I met Pankhurst's private secretary coming upstairs.
She whispered that Scotland Yard was downstairs. Immediately I thought of
Springhall's article and I returned to my room, where 1 had the original under a
blotter. Quickly I folded it and stuck it in my sock. Going down, I met a
detective coming up. They had turned Pankhurst's office upside down and
descended to the press-room, without finding what they were looking for.
'And what are you?' the detective asked.•
'Nothing, Sir', I said, with a big black grin.
Chuckling, he let me pass. (I learned afterward that he was the ace of Scotland
Yard). I walked out of that building and into another, and entering a water
closet I tore up the original article, dropped it in, and pulled the chain. When
I got home to the Bow Road that evening I found another detective waiting for
me. He was very polite and I was more so. With alacrity I showed him all my .
papers, but he found nothing but Iyrics."
McKay escaped arrest but his 'big black grin' did not prevent
the Home and/or Foreign Office from preparing a dossier on him.
In 1930 McKay wrote to Max Eastman that the English government
prevented him from visiting Gibraltar (McKay was still a British
subject) and that a French official in Fez told him that the 'British
Secret Service had me listed as a propagandist.' Two years later
McKay was having trouble with the British Consul in Tangiers and
was prevented from entering English territory-including his home
island of Jamaica. And in the following year he complained to
Eastman that 'those dirty British bastards working respectably in
the dark' were blocking his re-entry into the United States." McKay
may have exaggerated the extent to which he was being persecuted
and pursued by the English government, but undoubtedly there was
some truth in his accusations.
II
There were two sides, we might even say two natures, to Claude
McKay. He was a Socialist, a Negro Socialist who felt that the
76
RACE
problems of race should be evaluated and the solution found in
Marxist terms. And McKay was a poet. Indeed for a political
radical he was a conservative poet; his verse forms were traditional
-the sonnet was his favourite-and he actually wrote most of his
poems on the time-honoured subjects of love and nature. McKay
saw noconflict between his two natures. In the war between art and
revolution, McKay, reported one of his friends, 'was aggressively
anti-rational on the principle that art comes exclusively from the
emotions and that he was primarily an artist. '31
It is not surprising therefore that McKay indulged in a literary
career in England which was quite detached from his radical life.
McKay had always been fortunate in his choice of literary preceptors:
Jekyll in Jamaica, Harris and Eastman in New York. In England
it was C. K. Ogden. McKay never recorded where or how he met
Ogden, but undoubtedly they had met before the summer of 1920
when Ogden printed twenty-three of McKay's poems in the Cambridge Magazine. McKay stated that Ogden showed him around
picture galleries and was 'otherwise kind'. Ogden's kindness extended to arranging with the firm of Grant Richards to publish a
forty-page collection of McKay's poems under the title of Spring in
New Hampshire. After George Bernard Shaw declined to write an
introduction to the volume, Ogden persuaded his friend and collaborator, 1. A. Richards, to preface the poems. That Richards undertook the task only as a favour to Ogden is obvious from his
ambiguous introduction.
The writer of these verses was born in the Clarendon Hills of Jamaica in 1889.
In 1911 he published a small volume in the Negro dialect, and later left for the
United States where he worked in various occupations and took courses in
Agriculture and English at the Kansas State College. In the spring of this year
he visited England to arrange for the publication of his poems.
Claude McKay is a pure blooded Negro, and though we have recently been
made aware of some of the more remarkable achievements of African art
typified by the sculpture from Benin, and in music by the 'Spirituals', this is the
first instance of success in poetry with which we in Europe at any rate have
been brought into contact. The reasons for this late development are not far
to seek, and the difficulties presented by modern literary English as an acquired
medium would be sufficient to account for the lacuna; but the poems here
selected may, in the opinion of not a few who have seen them in periodical
form, claim a place besides the best work that the present generation is
producing in this country.
Forty-six years later Richards was less equivocal: 'I never met
McKay and I haven't read his poetry since.'32
In general, Spring in New Hampshire does not represent the
mature efforts of McKay as a poet. Five of the poems he did not
include in Har/em Shadows (1922) and several other poems were
revised and greatly improved. Significantly 'If We Must Die', a
A BLACK BRITON COMES HOME
77
militant sonnet McKay had written during the American race riots
of 1919, was not printed in Spring in New Hampshire; he was 'advised
to keep it out. '33
A selection of the reviews of McKay's book say more about the
reviewers and polite English literary society than they do about the
contents of Spring in New Hampshire. The reviews were short, and
they viewed a Negro poet in the manner of Dr. Johnson's woman
preacher: just plain amazed that a Negro could write. For example,
this from the Spectator:
Spring in New Hampshire is extrinsically as well as intrinsically interesting.
It was written by a pure-blooded Negro ... Perhaps the ordinary reader's
first impulse in realizing that the book is by an American Negro is to inquire
into its good taste. Not until we are satisfied that his work does not overstep
the barriers which a not quite explicable but deep instinct in us is ever alive to
maintain can we judge it with genuine fairness. Mr. Claude McKay never
offends our sensibilities. His love poetry is clear of the hint which would put
our racial instinct against him, whether we would or not. 34
Perhaps a photograph of McKay's handsome and sensitive face
which appeared in the book aroused 'not quite explicable' feelings
in the reviewer. On the other hand the reviewer in the Westminster
Gazette admitted he knew McKay and found him 'an original and
charming personality.' But even to this reviewer it wasn't the poetry,
but McKay as a Negro which was most evocative. 'In him a whole
race-unknown, mysterious-becomes at last articulate . . .'35 Less
mystical was the Athenaeum review by 'E.B.'-most likely Edmund
Blunden.
Mr. McKay is ... a full blooded negro. His quiet and modest poetry is
best when he is dealing with the simplest emotions, and is then really beautiful.
The three stanzas entitled 'Flame Heart' are an achievement, and full of truth.
We like Mr. McKay considerably less when he forces himself to write about
Harlem prostitutes. He has one or two poems, such as the 'Lynching' which
powerfully express the feelings of his race . . .36
George Bernard Shaw was, in McKay's estimation, the leading
literary figure in England. 'I considered Bernard Shaw the wisest
and most penetrating intellectual alive'-a view which Shaw unquestionably shared. Frank Harris had given McKay a letter of
introduction to Shaw and one evening the great man met the West
Indian at his home in Adelphi Terrace. Shaw and McKay talked
about Harris-'a difficult character'-and Lord Sidney Olivier the
Fabian and Governor of Jamaica. Shaw offered a few obiter dicta;
Galsworthy was a good craftsman and playwright; Arnold Bennett
had 'no sense of the theatre.' Shaw told McKay of a Chinaman who
had come half way around the globe to talk to Shaw about Irish
politics. Shaw admitted he couldn't understand why, though to
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McKay the reasons were fairly evident. The playwright asked
McKay why he had become a poet rather than a boxer. 'Poets
remain poor, unless they have an empire to glorify and popularize
like Kipling.' At that point, McKay recalled, 'When Shaw discovered
that I was not particularly interested in Irish or world politics,
because my social outlook was radical, and that I was not expecting
him to say something wise about the coloured people in a whitecontrolled world, he turned to an unexpected subject-cathedrals.'
McKay was entranced, or so he insisted in his autobiography, and
stated that in years after, a visit to a famous church would evoke
'the musical vibrations of Shaw's cathedral sermon."?
At the risk of reading between the lines, it appears as if Shaw
was bored with McKay and that McKay expected a great deal more
from Shaw." In any case Shaw obtained McKay a permit to the
reading room of the British Museum. It was the least he could do
for a Marxist.
By autumn of 1920, McKay was tired of England; even America
began to look good again. And in the charged atmosphere of
London there was real danger; McKay's Uncle Tom grin might not
save him a second time. Springhall, who had already been responsible for sending Sylvia Pankhurst to prison, turned up in McKay's
flat 'bold with youthful zeal and extremely incautious.' 'I begged
him for God's sake to leave at once ... '39 Furthermore the children
of the revolution were devouring each other. Members of the
Pankhurst organization charged fellow members with being spies
and traitors. McKay himself was shown an anonymous letter which
accused him of being a spy. 'I declare that I felt sick and was seized
with a crazy craving to get quickly out of that atmosphere and far
away from London.'40 McKay should not have been so surprised.
In July he had written:
. . . in our ranks
Hard pressed and weak, are fools and fops and knaves."
There were other irritants. McKay seldom took criticism easily
whether it was from a left winger like Sylvia Pankhurst or from a
priggish literary critic. And of course he complained about the
weather. London was 'the only great northern city in which I was
obliged to wear an overcoat all the year round.:" The metropolis,
he wrote later, was
A city without light and without heat,
Whose color was like iron in my breast
And freezing through my body to the bone:
. . . how could I, a tropical African
Find beauty in that chilling atmosphere,
Who claim the sun as my authentic sire ?43
A BLACK BRITON COMES HOME
79
But it wasn't simply the weather. It was also the English; 'as a
whole they were a strangely unsympathetic people, as coldly chilling
as their English fog.'44 But at least the weather and the people
stimulated McKay to write several elegant poems extolling his
tropical homeland. 'No place', McKay declared of his London stay,
'can be altogether a God-forsaken Sahara or swamp in which a man
is able to discipline and compose his emotions into self expression.'45
With the aid of two friends McKay was able to collect enough
money for a third class fare to New York and he sailed early in
1921. Only once more was he to reach England. In the autumn of
1922 he came to London where he hoped to use his contacts in left
wing circles as a means to enter the Soviet Union. For this purpose
he approached Arthur MacManus who was about to travel to Russia
for a Comintern meeting. But MacManus offered no encouragement;
Moscowhe told McKay was not keen on former Pankhurst associates,
and besides, he should have been recommended by the American
Communist Party. McKay, however, discovered that Edgar Whitehead was in Berlin serving as an interpreter for English-speaking
radicals travelling to Russia. McKay promptly took a channel boat
to Ostend; thence to Berlin and the Soviet Union where he was
treated as a celebrity, as, to use Whitehead's introduction, a 'kamarad
und neger dichter.'46
III
There is perhaps only a limited importance to be attached to McKay's
English odyssey. His Dreadnought articles did not materially increase
left wing militancy nor bestir conservative fears; and his Spring in
New Hampshire was hardly a landmark in post-war English poetry.
Nor did McKay offer many original insights into the Great Britain
of 1920. As an employee of the Pankhurst organization he was not
in the most favoured position to intelligently survey Lloyd George's
England. McKay himself admitted that 'the group was . . . more
piquant than important.'47 The Workers Socialist Federation was
however a key element in the formation of the Communist Party of
Great Britain. Unfortunately, McKay was uninterested in politics
as politics. In his contemporary writings and in his autobiography,
he speaks not a word about the issues and manoeuvring which led
to the make-shift alliance that comprised the early Communist
Party. McKay met almost every major figure in the Communist
movement, some on quite personal grounds, but they are usually
only names in his autobiography. An exception was Sylvia Pankhurst.
McKay was fond of her; she was 'picturesque and passionate',
qualities which the West Indian poet valued highly. And he liked
her non-conformity; 'she was always jabbing her hat pin into the
hides of the smug and slack labor leaders. Her weekly might have
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been called the Dread Wasp, And whenever imperialism got drunk
among native peoples, the Pankhurst paper would be on the job.'48
Sylvia Pankhurst and Claude McKay had a common bond in
their interest in the colonial world. McKay's articles on the race
question probably would not have been accepted in any other English
journal. His writings complimented other articles in the Dreadnought
which exposed conditions in South Africa and condemned British
colonial policies. Pankhurst's involvement in Africa, which eventually led her to reside in Ethiopia (1956) was not an act of sudden
conversion. McKay may have contributed to her awareness of
African and Afro-American problems.
McKay deserves a footnote in modern British history as the first
Negro Socialist to write for an English periodical. McKay, 20 years
before Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Kenyatta, argued that Socialism and
black nationalism were inter-dependent. He was, chronologically at
least, a predecessor of what in the 1930s and 1940s was, to use
Professor George Shepperson's expression, the 'Hampstead School
of African Socialism'. McKay does not, however, deserve Richards'
accolade as the first Negro to find 'success in poetry' in Europe.
Antar, the Negro Arab poet, had been translated into English in
1820. Pushkin was a Negro-by Anglo-American classifications at
least. There was at least one American Negro poet in nineteenth
century France, and several Negro poets who had published in the
British Isles before McKay.
If there is a broader significance to McKay's year in England, it
is that it might be considereda case study of the disillusioned colonial.
Even before 1919 the 'factory chimneys' he had imagined in his
youth had become symbols of capitalist oppression, and he had long
questioned certain aspects of British culture; but it is clear that for
McKay Great Britain was in fact a spiritual homeland; he was a
Black Briton who, however sceptically, had returned. He left
England thoroughly disenchanted and not many years after he
could write of Britain:
. . . when shall she be hurled
From her pedestal proud, whence she sways power
Over millions raped of strength and will."
McKay probably expected racial discrimination in England to be
like that found in Jamaica: muted, not harsh, based on class as
much as on colour. Instead, he discovered the English were not much
more tolerant than Americans. In London, McKay's invigorated
Marxism made him conscious of imperialism as a theory and, more
important, his contacts with dark-skinned colonials from over the
world made him aware of imperialism as a reality, as something
A BLACK BRITON COMES HOME
81
personal. Two years later he shared his knowledge of imperialism
and the colour problem with the international Communist hierarchy
-he and Otto Huiswoud were the first Negroes to speak on the race
question at a Comintern meeting. Then too McKay must have been
deeply disillusioned with 'progressive' elements in England. To
have one of his idols inform him that he should have been a boxer
must have been a crushing blow and an indication of the 'place'
assigned immigrants by even the wisest of Englishmen. British
liberals, including some Communists, seemed blind to their own
racism. McKay was able to commune only with a handful of alienated radicals and an odd kindly soul like C. K. Ogden.
After his year in England, McKay became a wanderer; he never
really settled anywhere. And, broadly speaking, one sees in his
later novels and short stories a writer bereft of moorings. Undoubtedly McKay's experiences in Great Britain seriously weakened his
identification with western Caucasian values. At the same time,
one can also see in his later work the beginning of a long and
tortuous search for viable native roots. McKay increasingly fell
back on his faith in the Negro common folk and his memories of a
rural Jamaica idyll.
References
1 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York, L. Furman, 1937), p. 59.
2 McKay, 'Old England', Songs of Jamaica (Kingston, A. W. Garder, 1912), pp.
63-5.
3 McKay, 'A Negro Poet Writes', Pearson's Magazine (September 1918),275-6.
4 McKay, 'Songs and Sonnets', The Liberator, II (July 1919), p. 20.
5 On McKay's career to 1920see Wayne F. Cooper, 'Claude McKay: The Evolution
of a Negro Radical, 1889-1923' (unpublished Masters Thesis, Tulane University,
1965), chs. 1-4.
6 McKay, A Long Way from Home, pp. 67-68.
7 Ibid., p. 68. I am indebted to Mr. Andrew Rothstein, Mr and Mrs Charles Lahr,
and Mr and Mrs Frank Budgen for information on the International Club or, as it
was known in 1920, the East Road Socialist Club. See also Ivan Maisky, Journey into
the Past (London, Hutchinsori, 1962), pp. 35-6.
8 McKay, A Long Way from Home.
.
9 Daily Herald (10 April 1920), copy in Newspaper Cuttings 1919-1921, E. D. Morel
Collection, Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
10 See 'Black Menace to Women', Daily News, n.d.; 'The Employment of Black
Troops in Europe', Nation (27 March 1920); Daily Herald (14, 17 April,1 September
1920); Commonweal (17 April 1920); Daily News (16 February 1921); Freeman (27
April 1921); copies in Newspaper Cuttings 1919-1921, E. D. Morel Collection.
11 Lansbury informed an A. W. Simpson that a Negro (McKay?) had protested at
Morel's article, but that the letter was too long to print. The editor asked the author
to shorten it; the Negro refused. Sidney Dark, in a review of Stephen Graham's
Children ofSlaves also mentioned a Negro writing to Lansbury about the Morel article.
Unmarked, undated newspaper clipping, Newspaper Cuttings, 1919-1921, E. D. Morel
Collection.
12 McKay, 'A Black Man Replies', Workers' Dreadnought. See also, McKay 'Once
More Germans Face Black Troops', Opportunity, XVII (November 1939), p. 327.
In the summer of 1919 there had been violent outbursts between Negroes and whites in
several English port cities. McKay evidently was afraid that the Herald articles would
arouse further antagonisms and contribute to bloodshed: McKay, A Long Way from
Home, p. 75. Racial clashes in London and Cardiff are briefly mentioned in McKay's
novels Home to Harlem(New York, Harper, 1928), p. 7 and Banjo: A Story without a
Plot (New York, Harper, 1929), p. 101.
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13 McKay, A Long Way from Home, pp. 74-5. McKay developed this theme in mOre
detail in 'Once More Germans Face Black Troops', Opportunity, pp. 324--8. He argued
that the 'Black-Troops-on-the-Rhine campaign was the entering wedge of the split
between French and British policy, which carried Europe drifting and floundering
down the years into another war.' In 1923 McKay visited the Rhineland where he was
'treated with perfect courtesy everywhere'; he found relations between German
'common people' and black troops to be 'natural and intimate': ibid., p. 327. See also
McKay, Banjo, p, 146.
14 Hugh Hope [McKay], 'A Sudden Apparition', Workers' Dreadnought (2 October
1920). The Herald had the last word. On 9 June 1948, the paper contained McKay's
obituary. It was patronizing.
15 McKay, A Long Way from Home, p, 78~ McKay discovered that Lansbury em.
ployed strike breakers in a sawmill he owned. Sylvia Pankhurst sadly confessed that she
could not print McKay's information because she owed Lansbury £20 and she had
borrowed newsprint from the Herald: ibid., pp. 78-9.
16 Ibid., p, 76.
17 Ibid., pp. 79-81;
[McKay], 'Official Labour at Portsmouth', Workers' Dreadnought, (18 September 1920). At the TUC meeting McKay became interested in the
activities of the General Union of Workers. The idea behind this union-organization
of poorly paid domestic servants, kitchen help, etc.-appealed to McKay and in the
1930s he proposed the formation of a similar union for Negro workers: McKay,
A Long Way from Home, p. 80; McKay, Har/em: Negro Metropolis (New York,
E. P. Dutton, 1940), pp. 216-17.
18 Hugh .Hope [McKay].
'The Leader of the Bristol Revolutionaries', Workers'
Dreadnought (7 August 1920).
19 C. M. [McKay]. Review of What is the Shop-Steward Movement? by Tom Walsh,
in Workers' Dreadnought (4 September 1920).
20 Ibid. (31 January 1920). See also McKay's discussion of the connection between
Irish and Indian nationalist movements in 'Lest We Forget', Jewish Frontier (January
1940), p. 9. By 1940 McKay was convinced that the situation of the American Negro
was qualitatively different from the conditions of minorities in Europe and in the
English Empire: " . . . the problem of the American Negro minority must be solved
in the American way . . . there is nothing we can learn from Europe . . . We must
find the solution here': ibid., p. 10.
21 McKay, 'How Black Sees Green and Red', The Liberator, IV (June 1921), p. 20.
22 McKay, 'The Capitalist Way', Workers' Dreadnought (7 February 1920).
23 Ibid. There was nothing personal in McKay's criticism. He recorded that Whithead was not a 'fanatic or dogmatist'. 'In the days of our association together in London
we often waxed satirical about Communist orthodoxy and we often discussed the idea of
a neo-radical magazine in which nothing in the universe would be held sacred': McKay,
A Long Way from Home, 156.
24 McKay, 'Reminiscences of Leo Tolstoy', Workers' Dreadnought (21 August 1920).
If McKay had a god it was Tolstoy-he compared the Russian to Jesus. In McKay's
words Tolstoy was his 'ideal of the artist as man and . . . the most wonderful example
of one who balanced his creative work by a life lived out to its full illogical end':
Banjo, pp. 65-6.
25 McKay, untitIed, Workers' Dreadnought (4 September 1920).
26 Ibid., 'Re-Affirmation', (3 July 1920). Ibid., 'To "Holy Russia",' (28 February
1920).
27 'Vie' or 'our Finnish comrade' as the Dreadnought referred to him was arrested
leaving the home of Col. C. J. L'Estrange Malone, M.P. (Leyton East). Malone was
later arrested and jailed: The Times (27 October 1920); Workers' Dreadnought (27
November 1920). Pankhurst's secretary joined Vie in Moscow and they were married.
McKay met them in Russia in 1923. McKay, A Long Way from Home, p. 85.
28 The Times (20, 21, 29 October 1920). The police also listed three other seditious
articles: 'How to Get a Labour Government', 'The Datum Line', and 'The Yellow
Peril and the Dockers'. Sylvia Pankhurst was convicted and spent five months in
prison: ibid. (6 January, 31 May, 1921).
'
29 McKay, A Long Way from Home, pp. 82-3.
30 McKay to Max Eastman (1 December 1930, undated [late 1932 ?], 30 October
1933). Originals in possession of Mr Max Eastman, New York. In 1930 McKay
asked his artist friend Frank Budgen to appeal to George Lansbury, then in Parliament,
for respite from British harassment in Morocco. Lansbury refused: he huffily told
Budgen that Mclcay was probably 'stirring up the Riffs!' Interview with Mr and
Mrs Frank Budgen (18 August 1966).
31 Joseph Freeman, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics
(New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1936), p. 257.
32 Richards to Robert C. Reinders (19 May 1966).
33 McKay, A Long Way from Home, pp. 98-9.
A BLACK BRITON COMES HOME
83
'Poets and Poetry', Spectator (23 October 1920), pp. 539-40.
Advertisement for Grant Richards, Times Literary Supplement (11 November 1920).
36 E. R, 'Poetry Overseas', The Athenaeum (17 December 1920).
37 McKay, A Long Way from Home, pp. 60-5.
38 In 1929 McKay wrote that he 'did not think the blacks would come very happily
under the super-mechanized Anglo-Saxon-controlled world society of Mr. H. G.
Wells. They might shuffle along, but without much happiness in the world of Bernard
Shaw': Banjo, p. 325.
39 McKay, A Long Way from Home, p. 84. Springhall was later dismissed from the
Navy and became a prominent figure in Communist movements in Great Britain.
In 1943 he was arrested and convicted for espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.
Henry Pelling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (London, A. & C.
Black, 1958), pp. 50, 93, 109, 111, 125-6.
40 McKay, A Long Way from Home, p. 87.
41 Hugh Hope [McKay], 'Re-Affirmation', Workers' Dreadnought (3 July 1920).
42 McKay, A Long Way from Home, p. 67.
.
43 'London', Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Yale University Library. 'London' is one of four poems-actually drafts of poems-in a manuscript collection called 'Cities'.
44 McKay, A Long Way from Home, p. 67.
45 Ibid., p. 73.
46 Ibid., p. 154.
47 Ibid., pp. 76-7.
48 Ibid., p. 77.
49 'England', Claude McKay Papers.
McKay's novel Banjo (1929) has several
derogatory remarks about England and Englishmen. As years passed McKay became
even more bitter. Mary Keating, who knew McKay near the end of his life, writes:
'At some point Claude began disliking the British, and this dislike became an almost
psychotic fury before he died . . . The past sins of the British became for Claude the
very present. He bundled slavery and colonization in a 20th century package that
explained to him the attitude and the position of the Negro in the United States':
Mary Keating to Wayne F. Cooper (4 March 19(4).
34
35