Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American poet, journalist, essayist, fiction writer , who was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Background
Ethnicity:
Thomas McKay's father was of Ashanti descent, and mother was of Malagasy ancestry.
McKay was born on September 15, 1889 in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, British West Indies. He was the youngest of eleven children of Ann Elizabeth (Edwards) McKay and Thomas Francis McKay, a peasant sufficiently prosperous to own his land. In his early years, McKay was exposed to diverse educational and religious influences. His father was an Anglican deacon who later withdrew from the church.
Education
McKay was educated by an older brother who was an agnostic, despite his positions as a schoolteacher and a lay preacher for the Anglican church. At sixteen, he was further molded by Walter Jekyll, an agnostic English folklorist, who guided his reading and encouraged him to continue writing poetry in Jamaican dialect. Receiving a Government Trade Scholarship at seventeen, McKay apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker but quit after two years and joined the island constabulary.
Career
For the next few years, after failing as a restaurant owner, McKay supported himself by work as a longshoreman, a porter, a bartender, and a waiter. It is known that the marriage was short-lived, but no date of separation or divorce is available. Through these years, McKay continued writing poetry, published in Seven Arts (under the pseudonym "Eli Edwards"); Pearson's, edited by Frank Harris, who became McKay's mentor; and The Liberator (formerly The Masses), edited by Max Eastman. In 1919, his expenses paid by a benefactor and armed with a letter of introduction to George Bernard Shaw, McKay traveled to England. Shaw helped him in obtaining a reader's ticket for the British Museum; he also expressed his surprise that McKay had decided on a career in poetry rather than in prizefighting. McKay became interested in the ideas of Karl Marx and took a job as writer for a Communist publication, The Worker's Dreadnought. He also published a volume of non-dialect poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920). After police arrested the editor of Dreadnought, McKay returned to the United States and took a position with The Liberator as associate editor (in his autobiography, McKay identifies his position as assistant editor). In 1922, he realized his dream of a volume of poems published in America. Harlem Shadows was the first major publication during the 1920's by a black in the United States. He became coeditor of The Liberator in 1922, but conflicts with his fellow editor Michael Gold caused him to resign in June. He traveled to Russia, where he was lionized and named unofficial delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. After the congress ended, McKay remained in Russia for several months before wanderlust took him, in 1923, to Germany and then to France.
McKay remained in France for six years, supporting himself with work as a male model (which resulted in pneumonia), as research assistant to Rex Ingram, and freelance writer. Turning to fiction, he completed an unpublished novel, "Color Scheme, " in 1925 and a volume of stories accepted for publication in 1926; advised that novels brought greater rewards, he reworked one story into Home to Harlem (1928), a novel about the adventures of Jake, a black American who returns to the United States after deserting from the army, and Ray, a Haitian seeking an education in America. McKay's second novel, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929), is a sequel that describes Ray's adventures in Marseilles. Both his novels received favorable reviews, and Home to Harlem was a financial success. While continuing his wanderings in Spain and Morocco, McKay completed Ginger town (1932), a collection of the early stories about Harlem and new ones about Jamaica. Experiencing health problems, McKay returned to the United States in the early 1930's but did not end his traveling until the middle of the 1940's. His final books all published in the United States-were Banana Bottom (1933), a novel about Jamaica (McKay had suffered a breakdown while working on the book in Morocco); A Long Way from Home (1937), his autobiography; and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), a sociological study of the black community of New York City. Influenced by the writer Ellen Terry, whom he met in 1938, McKay became interested in Catholicism, and in 1944 joined the Roman Catholic church. Through the final eight years of life, he suffered increasingly from hypertension and dropsy. He died of heart failure in Chicago. After a funeral in Chicago sponsored by the Catholic Youth Organization, for which McKay had worked, his body was transported to Harlem for a second funeral. McKay was buried in Queens, New York.
Toward the end of McKay's life, McKay embraced Catholicism, retreating from Communism entirely. His sudden conversion into Catholicism puzzled many for over half a century. When McKay converted into Catholicism in his final years, he was perceived to be suffering from poverty, health problems, and political and social exclusion by his own beloved Harlem. Before his actual conversion, he wrote to long-time friend and mentor, Max Eastman, about "doing a lot of reading and research, especially on Catholic work among Negroes Because if and when I take the step I want to be intellectually honest and sincere about it". Five months later, when McKay was baptized into the Holy Roman Catholic Church, he wrote to Eastman to assure him that "I am not less the fighter" for doing so.
Politics
McKay was attracted to communism in his early life, but he was never a member of the Communist Party.
Views
More nearly unanimous praise is accorded to McKay's poetry. In poems on racial themes, McKay frequently using the sonnet form bitterly denounced oppression by whites, revealed ambivalent admiration for the Western world, and compassionately delineated black Americans. Other characteristic themes are love; nostalgia for Jamaica; and, later, devotion to Catholicism. His best known poem is "If We Must Die, " which was written in 1919 to encourage black Americans to defy racial massacres. According to McKay, the poem was read during World War II by a BBC announcer. Other sources state that Winston Churchill read it to the British Parliament or read it to the United States Congress.
Quotations:
"If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything. "
"I know the dark delight of being strange, The penalty of difference in the crowd, The loneliness of wisdom among fools. "
"Human dignity is more precious than prestige. "
"If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, If we must die, O let us nobly die. "
"We are like trees. We wear all colors naturally. "
"Nations, like plants and human beings, grow. And if the development is thwarted they are dwarfed and overshadowed. "
"It's when you are down that you learn about your faults. "
"Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism. "
"If we must die, O let us nobly die. "
"Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, Linking each flat, but to each indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines. "
"Deep in the secret chambers of my heart I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch I bear it nobly as I live my part. "
"The shivering birds beneath the eaves Have sheltered for the night. "
"I have forgotten much, but still remember The poinsiana's red, blood-red in warm December. "
Personality
McKay's fiction frequently provoked controversy: some Afro-American critics accused him of imitating Carl van Vechten by exploiting base elements of black life to please white readers.
It is widely assumed that McKay was bisexual, as he pursued relationships with both men and women throughout his life. He particularly enjoyed the simultaneous secrecy of New York City; he never officially “came out” nor explicitly stated his sexual preference, but he was able to enter the “clandestine” homosexual communities of New York and find acceptance within them. Despite never having confirmed his sexuality, homosexual sentiments are clear in several of his poems. In others, the gender of the speaker is not identified, which leaves to interpretation the nature of the relationships presented in said works.
Some key evidence that could support the idea of Claude Mckay being bisexual could be his relationship with Walter Jekyll. Some say that it may have been a homosexual relationship between a younger man seduced by an older man. According to Josephine Herbst, she claims that he was bisexual and that she could personally attest that she received syphilis from him during their relationship. However, in his works, nothing provides key evidence to support this idea. During his life, Mckay was attracted to several men like Max Eastman from the Liberator, Frank Harris, who was an editor for Pearson’s Magazine, and Bishop Henry Sheil who worked for the Catholic Church. Walter Jekyll’s influence on Mckay resulted in a combination of social implications.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Thomas Huxley, Ernest Haekel, Herbert Spencer
Politicians
Marx
Connections
Claude McKay was married to Eulalie Imelda Edward, they had one child, Ruth Hope.