A troubadour for turbulent times

Poet, novelist, journalist, bohemian free spirit and vital figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay is now perhaps best remembered for his fiery protest poems. The most famous of these, “If We Must Die,” written in 1919 in response to a wave of lynchings and race riots, has since been cited and recited in all kinds of circumstances by all kinds of people, including that other great master of rhetorical, and actual, defiance, Winston Churchill:

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 -- oh 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!

Oh kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;

Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but -- fighting back!

Pouring the white-hot passion of social protest into the intricately demanding, time-honored form of the sonnet, McKay achieved extraordinary effects, here and in poems such as “Enslaved,” “The Lynching,” “The White City,” “The White House” and more. Ironically, because of his preference for traditional form and language, a later generation of academics confronting the poems of this firebrand seemed to find him insufficiently cutting-edge. At a time when Modernists were embracing free verse, McKay held to meter and rhyme; at a time when poets like Langston Hughes were bringing the language of colloquial black speech into their verse, McKay opted for classic poetic diction. But McKay’s guiding spirit was freedom, and for him that included the freedom to explore whatever subject or form caught his fancy.

The political sonnet was only one of the strings in McKay’s lyre. He was also a love poet, a nature poet, a poet of the city, a poet who could be introspective as well as oratorical. McKay called himself a troubadour. As he later wrote:

These poems distilled from my experience,

Exactly tell my feelings of today,

The cruel and the vicious and the tense

Conditions which have hedged my bitter way

Of life ....

But tomorrow I may sing another tune,

No critic, black or white, can tie me down ...

Although McKay has been the subject of several full-length biographical and critical studies and his work is often anthologized and taught in the classroom, quite amazingly, as editor William J. Maxwell observes, there has been no complete collection of his poetry until now. The 323 works in “Complete Poems,” written during the course of McKay’s career, not only demonstrate the range of his subjects and styles but also reflect the vicissitudes of a tempestuous and troubled life.

The youngest of 11 children, McKay was born in a mountain village on the island of Jamaica in 1889. His father, a successful small farmer, was an esteemed member of the rural community. He received an unusually exigent and stimulating education under the guidance of two mentors: his oldest brother, a schoolteacher steeped in Fabian socialism, and later Walter Jekyll, an English-born “gentleman of leisure” interested in local Jamaican folklore. And so the young McKay eagerly immersed himself in literature and philosophy, reading Milton, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Goethe, Baudelaire, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

When McKay, who had been writing poetry since he was 10, showed his verses to Jekyll, the latter, folklorist that he was, encouraged the young man to focus his efforts on writing in the Jamaican dialect. Although McKay was initially somewhat taken aback, this proved a great success, earning him a reputation as the Jamaican Robert Burns. McKay used dialect to convey a variety of moods -- from the boisterously comic to the poignantly elegiac, as in the opening stanzas of “Mother Dear,” which beautifully evoke the voice of a rural woman dying of heart failure:

“Husban’, I am goin’ --

Though de brooklet is a-flowin’,

An’ de coolin’ breeze is blowin’

softly by;

Hark, how strange de cow is mooin’,

An’ our Jennie’s pigeons cooin’,

While I feel de water growin’,

Climbing high.

Akee trees are laden,

But de yellow leaves are fadin’

Like a young an’ bloomin’

maiden

Fallen low;

In de pond de ducks are

wadin’

While my body longs for

Eden,

An’ my weary breat’ is gledin’

‘way from you.”

McKay immigrated to the United States in 1912, planning to study agronomy at the Tuskegee Institute in order to return to Jamaica and put his knowledge to work. But from this point on, his life kept taking one unforeseen turn after another. Agronomy was not really his thing, and, like many an aspiring artist, he gravitated toward New York. There he married his childhood sweetheart and opened a lunchroom. His marriage lasted only a year; so too, his venture into the restaurant business. But the city captured his imagination, particularly the world of the black working class. Not only a champion of black pride and an advocate of Marxism, the bisexual McKay was also an exponent of free love and sexual liberation.

McKay’s political radicalism led to his involvement with left-wing journals (he worked with Max Eastman on the Liberator) and brought him to the attention of the FBI. He spent most of the 1920s and the first four years of the 1930s abroad, in Europe, the Soviet Union and Morocco. These years saw the publication of his influential poetry collection “Harlem Shadows” (1922) and his novels “Home to Harlem” (1928), “Banjo” (1929) and “Banana Bottom” (1933). As Maxwell tells us, McKay’s exile (unlike that of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and company) was not entirely voluntary: FBI orders to block his return to the United States had been sent to customs officials in seaport cities on both coasts. Driven by financial necessity, he was finally able to return to America in 1934, where he found work with the Federal Writers’ Project.

To say that McKay was disillusioned with Communism is an almost comical understatement: Outrage rather than disillusion more accurately characterizes the tone of the verses expressing his view of it. But he did not abandon his commitment to socialist ideals. Even when he surprised many of his friends by converting to Catholicism in the 1940s, his was the left-wing Catholicism of Dorothy Day. The late poems written in this period are not as poetically accomplished as the best of his earlier work, but they exude a poignant sincerity and passionate idealism. He died in 1948 of heart failure, after years of ill health and poverty.

Among the many reasons to be grateful for Maxwell’s complete edition is a previously unpublished sequence of poems called “The Clinic,” based on the poet’s experience as a patient being treated for syphilis at a Paris hospital in 1923. These poems memorably evoke the atmosphere of the clinic and capture the patient’s complex feelings of fear, depression, guilt, resignation, compassion, hope and sorrow. The opening lines of “The Desolate City” transform the poet’s self-disgust into a striking metaphor set forth amid a blaze of rhetorical power:

My spirit is a pestilential

city,

With misery triumphant

everywhere,

Glutted with baffled hopes

and human pity.

Strange agonies make quiet

lodgement there

Maxwell’s introduction offers a fascinating overview of McKay’s life and a spirited defense of his poetry, although in analyzing the workings of the latter, he too often spirals into thickets of academic jargon and syntax. But the great service that this thoughtfully edited, excellently annotated volume provides is that it makes all of these poems available in a scholarly yet accessible form for readers.

To read this book is to come to know, in almost painfully intimate detail, the passions, ideals, aspirations and struggles of a gifted man and restless soul contending with the treacherous crosscurrents of literature, politics and culture in the turbulent first half of the 20th century. *